But he was at one of those white-collar resort prisons. That's why he was able to escape.
Actually this is why:
Spam King: "Hi. Excuse me. Um, I'm actually supposed to be getting out of prison today, sir. Yeah." Prison Guard #1: "You're in the wrong line, dumb ass. Over there." Spam King: "I'm sorry. I am being a big dumb ass. Sorry." Prison Guard #1: "Hey, uh, let this dumb ass through."
Is ANYBODY running megawatt sterling engines (or megawatt arrays of sterling engines)? I can't find any reference to a practical deployment of sterling engines in Israel. Can you provide a link?
I said sterling engines or steam turbines... looks like my memory failed on the Israel one, it seems to be photovoltaic cells.
But there are heat solar generators all over. Google "wikipedia solar thermal energy". Just for the 'trough' design:
US: 9 plants for 350 MW (largest system, boiler or not). 64 MW plant in Nevada. 553 MW plant proposed for Calif.
Spain: 50 MW plant (stores heat for day+night generation)
Heat solar is very clean and is essentially free after construction. Just imagine if we had spent 3 trillion covering just a tiny fraction of a southwestern state instead of pissing it away.
The problem with all of your listed sources is that they all have limited applications and many problems that need overcoming.
Nuclear also has problems to overcome, such as waste disposal (yucca anyone?) and distribution. For instance given a plant in Juno how is that power going to get to all the rural(er) place in alaska?
The problem with all of your listed sources is that they all have limited applications and many problems that need overcoming.
Most of your objectsion are based on pessimistic assumptions and are not accurate. Solar plants can use mirrors and sterling engines or steam turbines. In fact many of the largest plants do this (like that one in Israel). Solar cells could also be made of non-polluting materials with some research and investment. And for example there is a lake in western virginia where the water level is raised daily to store energy for use during peak hours as clean hydro power.
The problems with non-nuclear are solvable, it's just that one single source won't satisfy all of our needs any more than just using nuclear will. We just need to put the effort in.
Of course, the only answer that makes any sense is nuclear, but it seems like we're never going to get another nuclear plant in the U.S.
Relying on nuclear power is a small number of points of failure, requires the grid, and is not open for competition (unless you are a mega-corp with govt officials in your pocket). How is that so awesomely good ?!
Wouldn't it be better to make wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro, and other sources efficient and cheap enough that villages in alaska, and farms, and your vacation cabin can power themselves? Even in the event of a world catastrophe like an asteroid or pandemic or government/market collapse? Seems to me like the benefits of efficient and cheap power from renewable sources that scale (ie, everything else) would be far better overall than nuclear.
The tab character has a well-defined semantic meaning. It means 'indent this line / paragraph by one tabulator.' If you are indenting anything there is only one character you should be using - tab.
I would argue that it is the tab key on a typewriter or keyboard that has a well-defined semantic meaning. The tab character as in 0x9 has never been well defined.
In fact, the characters below 0x20 are not even intended to be part of a body of text... they are control characters for manipulating the input/output device. For instance, you don't see people clammoring to use 0x1 "start of heading" to replace the <head> tag, or for that matter there is the confusion over ctrl-j and ctrl-m. The tab key, ctrl-i, should be regarded like enter or escape that performs a function, in this case the function of advancing to the next tabstop, and not as a character that does this -- enter might insert an 0xA, a 0xAD, or a 0xDA depending on the OS. In other words, having the tab cause spaces to be inserted into the document is entirely consistent with it's ASCII value as a control code.
It does not, however, have a fixed width, and should therefore never be used anywhere other than the start of a line or for aligning two lines.
I don't think anybody really disagrees with that in theory, using tabs at the left to indent then switching over to spaces for aligning. The problem is entirely a practical one of mixing two invisible characters.
I've seen way too many instances of "[tab][space][tab]" for a two-level indent, or other freakish combinations for me to be able to support tab characters in any form -- even though I agree with you and Linus that using them at the beginning makes sense. Except in something like the kernel where there is necessarily a lot of discipline I just haven't ever seen it work.
The hardware is low-end (and low power, which is good).
Are you sure about the power? I got their new atom board with Intel graphics and everything minus processor and peripherals draws about 25 watts. I'm assuming their graphics is drawing most of this power. If not, Intel have some pretty inefficient other chips on there.
With a 4w processor I didn't expect 30w just to turn it on with no drives or peripherals.
Incidentally, that mobo (BOXD945GCLF) is really poor compared to any of the many AMD systems I've made, built from cheapest mobos even. It draws an excessive amount of power, the bios is slow and buggy, has flaky rgb output, etc. Hoping AMD gets its act together again...
But it's nicer in a test grid that you can see what kernels were not tested by what numbers were skipped. If versions are 8.1, 8.5, 8.11... was there an 8.8 maybe? You don't know without checking a complete list of all the major kernel version.
And if somebody is creating a fork with other patches, but it takes them an extra month to release is their kernel 8.1-nn if it was loosely based on 8.1 kernel or 8.2-nn since it was released in feb? And what if it comes out beforehand, should they just guess when the linus kernel will actually end up being released?
It seems like a lot of downsides for a benefit of just not having a large number...
Re:Kernel debugger considered harmful by Linus
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Linux 2.6.26 Out
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· Score: 2, Informative
On the other hand, even good programmers can get stuck and benefit from a debugger every once and then. I guess this argument finally won the day.
Actually after programming in C the past five years I find a debugger completely worthless. Pretty much all problems boil down to:
1) memory / pointer errors 2) usage errors (bad casts, unset variables) 3) code too complicated to follow by reading
The first is covered by valgrind, or if your system doesn't have valgrind then first writing for x86 then porting. The second is covered well by gcc warnings. The third is covered better by logging than a debugger, or better yet just not writing complicated software in the first place.
Before that, in Java the first problem just did not exist, the second was covered by compiler warnings (and no such thing as unset variables), and the third was the same, logging.
So except the kernel, where there's no valgrind, what do you actually use a debugger for?
A vote for a losing candidate can still affect policy in the long-term.
Oh I agree... by giving 8 years to the party you most despise to corrupt the process, installing political appointees and sympathizers to rig the media, elections, courts, funding, etc to favor their causes. It just isn't the wishful-thinking effect you hope for.
The whole lesser of two evils argument is more evil than both evils combined.
Are you calling game theory evil?
If the results are:
evil: 50 million votes lesser evil: 49 million votes bob barr: 1 million votes
Then your libertarian vote ended up having (1m/49m) the effect on determining the winner as a vote for Lesser. So, yes, your libertarian vote is far less significant.
In our election the only thing that matters is who wins (no partial representation and whatnot). You aren't voting for who you want to win, you're voting for who you want that can win.
I've left the Democratic Party and I won't vote for Obama any longer.
Obama was a consitutional law professor, is a 'learner', can speak contemporaneously, and the entire rest of the world likes him. Which is frankly head and shoulders better than the other choices of McCain, Barr, or a write-in such as Cthulhu. So not voting for him is just stupid.
But after this immunity vote the EFF is getting what I had previously allocated for Obama. How can you forgive something when you don't know what was done? Truth & reconcilliation, Catholic confessions, etc all require you to admit what happened. Obama is not on the int committee, he doesn't know what the telecomms did, and the law only requires them to say in secret that the prez told them to "do it witchy".
We have the opportunity to vote for the lesser evil and it costs us nothing to do so. If the ACLU or EFF were somehow on the ballot we could vote for them, but they aren't. But when it comes to donating time or effort, we do have the choice of ACLU or EFF or many others. That's why I am still voting for Obama, but supporting EFF.
... now you have pretty much exactly the same message definition as protocol buffers, but in pure JSON. It could also use some convention like "@WORK" for labels/classes so that a normal JSON parser can parse the message definitions. You can write a code generator to make access classes for messages just by walking the json and looking at the types. I don't see that 'required' and 'optional' keywords help much... imo defaults are generally better (even if they are nil). But this could easily be expressed in a json message definition.
It's easy to make a binary JSON format that is fast and also small, so there is little advantage to protocol buffers there. It's also easy and ridiculously fast to compress JSON text using say character-based lzo (Oberhumer).
Maybe somebody can explain, but it doesn't seem like protocol buffers really have much advantages over JSON. It sounds like it is effectively just a binary format for JSON-like data (name-value pairs they say) along with a code generator to access it. The code generator is nice, but this is like a day's work max. Maybe I'm not understanding google's problems, but I'll stick with JSON since it actually is a cross-platform, language neutral data format... and you can always optimize it if actually needed.
Re:C# isn't a language...
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Head First C#
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· Score: 3, Interesting
MS don't deserve *too* much credit for this, since (unlike Sun) they were able to benefit from five or six years of someone else's experience when creating their language, but with the ability to start with a clean slate and no backwards-compatibility baggage.
... were able to, but didn't. The difference between C# vs Java was like C++ vs C. C++ and C# basically just add a lot of syntactix mumbo-jumbo onto a plain, reliable, usable language.
Mandatory generics, iterator yield, implicitly typed variables, 'object initializers', extension methods, embedding C++ and SQL directly into the code, operator overloading, implicit conversions, conditional compilation, etc -- none of those C# features actually helps you write better programs, and a lot of the so-called improvements in C# just make it a complicated mess.
The main problem in C++ and C# is that just looking at a statement you can never be sure what it does without poking around a lot of places (in Java a statement always says exactly what it does). A simple statement like "x.y = a[b]" can involve at least 6 different method calls. In Java is always means assign array element to a field.
Like C++, there are some people who will claim more features are better no matter how much more complicated (and generally the 'never enough features' crowd lives in Redmond). But at the rate C# is gaining kitchen sinks I think it will only be a few years until people switch back to Java because it doesn't have all that baggage.
They're boned as far as operating systems go. They can't break backwards compatibility, but that same backwards compatibility is killing them as they try to improve the system.
Microsoft is boned because their developers have really bad habits and style, and have been exposed to really arcane code. It's not bad code exactly in that it works, but developing with it every day kind of just sucks all the talent out of developers.
That's the real problem for Microsoft -- their developer culture. They could create a new OS from scratch and as long as it runs Win32 programs at least marginally and somewhat seamlessly in addition to new ones then they can just force OEMs to install the new OS... that's not a problem really. What's a problem is that if they did this the new OS would suck only slightly less than Windows.
Just look at.NET... it should have been a complete break, a chance for a fresh start. But instead it is has WM_* messages and tons api showing Win32 just because they were lazy and needed some api without thinking about how it could be done better. Not to mention all the other culture-inspired junk in.NET like say conditional compilation.
Couldn't they just take away the body of the violin so it is just strings, record that using a very fast sample rate, then simulate different factors like varnish, density, shape, etc.... then they would know what makes the stradivarius special.
Columns 0-80: fg color on bg color Columns 80+: fg color on [darker,lighter] bg color
This lets you know when your code has gone past 80 columns without being harsh, and it just looks nice. To do this make an image at least the width of the monitor and maybe a hundred or so pixels high. Make the left side all bg color 1 and the right side after 80 columns all bg color 2 (take a screenshot of a x80 window to find out how many pixels for 80 columns). Then set it as the tiling background image. Since it's only a strip it uses little memory.
Also, hack your vim highlighting so that the tab character is always bright red (and flashing on/off if your term supports it). This lets you know when somebody put an evil tab into your code. Or if you subscribe to the linux compromise, use gray and it makes a nice 'indentation wall'.
Getting a CS degree from a reputable instiution shows that he is capable of programming, but not being skilled or seeking jobs actually programming shows that he is not interested in programming.
So the question is, what would be interesting that uses the same capabilities needed for programming? For instance, what professions need the ability to think logically and rationally, form a complete solution from lots of component parts or facts, choose one solution from many possible ones, form a complete argument using a certain language/grammar, etc.
I think professions such as writing for a newspaper, technical writing, detective/csi, genetic counseling, political consultant, and so on use many of the same skills as programming but may be more interesting to some people.
You can't feel skilled at something you don't like doing... you can even be much better at it than most people, but never live up to your potential. Either you are ok with feeling mediocre or you find something interesting to you that you are able to do. Start by looking at careers that aren't programming but use the abilities needed for it.
I would actually love to do QA and am really good at it. I'm the only one of a small team of programmers that has ever written an automated test suite for any of our code.
But the problem with QA is all the CS rejects that are programmers. When you set up a set of tests and every single one of the inputs not in the few documented examples fails there's not much point in doing testing at all, and it totally demoralizes the testers. It's not fun or rewarding to find bugs that are trivial, and anybody that actually cares about quality leaves.
So to have a good QA people you have to have even better coders, and better code. Remember next time you complain about QA... unless your code is awesome then you are part of the problem.
1. Pretend the climate is not changing 2. Pretend we are not causing it 3. Pretend it is a good thing 4. Pretend we can't do anything about it, so 'oh well' 5. ??? 6. Blame democrats for not preventing it.
It's pretty obvious what the final step will be -- after all, we knew about it the whole time so why didn't we do anything about it sooner?! Nevermind their vetos and filibusters and spin machines.
This is the same pattern the right wing uses for everything... they feign (to be charitable) stupidity then blame everybody else for letting them screw it up.
The day the Stormtroopers come knocking at your door, you'll wish you had a gun.
That's what's so dumbass about the gun debate... I would want to have an 'IED' planted under my porch and other places. And I certainly wouldn't want a gun because that's why they would be on my door in the first place.
A 'sniper' rifle or a machine gun, maybe. But a freaking handgun? You've got to be kidding me. Have you actually thought through this scenario or do you just use it as a bogey-man? "Oh my god, my right to own an arm that is absolutely worthless for fighting off the g-men shall not be infringed". All guns are pretty much worthless for fighting off a govt gone rogue, handguns especially.
I'm actually in favor of this ruling, because it just means strict laws will be passed regulating the sale and registration of these guns. And when your gun gets stolen and used in a crime, guess who's prints will be corroded into the metal? And when it is used in a crime since you owned it at one point (and could have 'stolen' it from yourself) you'll be suspect #1. Criminals steal guns. Why would you want to be the 'go to' suspect for crimes they commit with them?
... but their hands are tied thanks to those who whined to the DOJ.
It is not whining to involve the government when you are being blackmailed or extorted ('drop OS/2 or else'), or slandered ('DRDOS detected, print bogus warning'), or any of the other illegal things Microsoft did that the DOJ convicted them of doing. It's doing your duty to contribute to a civil and orderly society.
It's a sad state of affairs when people think that premeditated breaking the law is 'cool' and people that don't like it are called 'whiners' or 'liberals'. I would turn the tables and call parent poster an 'apologist' or 'conservative' -- but they probably think those are compliments.
The trick is to strike a balance between legacy technologies (also known as "stuff proven to work") and new ideas. The legacy technologies have been proven not to work. Since they can be hacked and made to do whatever they are capable of (ie anything POSIX, Win32) the only solution is to apply heavy restrictions to what they can do, so they cannot write new programs, etc. But these fail since the malware can run within the hacked program without user approval, so really they need to be run with far more restrictions -- like the failure of SELinux, this is not practical to do.
For instance, you say "let's write everything in Java, as well as the kernel".... that's describing an epic journey in a sentence! Microsoft has already got an R&D program that does exactly what you suggest, Singularity, but nobody is suggesting it'll be on end-user desktops anytime soon. It's too radical a departure. Yes, I know and more to the point is Sun's JavaOS which was not simply an idle research project like Singularity, but was an actual product. It is not so much an epic journey as it is lacking a motivator. People only care about the appearance of security, not actual security. That's why it doesn't get done, not due to some massive hurdles. In fact most software development is done in Java,.Net, or Javascript -- none of which care about POSIX for instance and run with minor changes on any kernel (well, ok, not.Net).
You also say "don't allow programs to write other programs". How are you going to enforce that exactly? For instance, how would you run a compiler on such a system?... Web browsers routinely download and run programs [in the form of javascript] Users don't run compilers. For adding programs to the system, Web browsers can download installers or use an API that registers the program (so it can be removed) and asks the user if they want to install it. JavaScript is a typesafe language, so it can't modify the browser, unless the browser allows it to.
How can you ensure that the debugger is allowed to do these dangerous things (ie, poke/modify state of other programs arbitrarily) but malware isn't? Developers can use special exceptions for their compilers and debuggers. Normal users do not need to use compilers or debuggers.
It's really pretty simple, isn't it? All it really takes is for people to demand it.
Don't allow programs to write other programs. Don't allow programs to read or change the settings of other programs. Don't allow programs to be hacked.
These three things are completely doable and would eliminate pretty much all malware. Even malware that the user chose to install would not be able to do many of the destructive things they do now, such as reading your stored passwords other program settings, etc. Even if they deleted or modified your files, you could just go back to a ZFS snapshot and get them back again.
You can't prevent people from doing stupid things like leaving their bank info in a.txt file. But you can make it safe to install screensavers, emiticon packs, etc for everybody else.
The simplest and most effective way to prevent programs from being hacked is to write them in Java (or other type-safe language). Most of the operating system kernel should also be written in a type-safe language as well (except for a tiny amount of asm mostly for drivers). This would have a number of other benefits in addition to preventing 'root exploits'.
If it ended with the robot seeing his other selves, realizing he wasn't a beautiful and unique snowflake, and kervorking into the ocean -- THE END -- it would have been a really pretty good movie. Dark, but with a Western message that it is our individualism and uniqueness that make life worth living.
I think Kubrick must have written everything except the ending. He didn't know how to add some inspiring, lifting message to a movie that can't have one.
This entire no DRM stand is basically saying that I can't have the option to purchase something or enter into some agreement with a company in a fair and free society. Oh you have the right to purchase something that uses DRM or enter into an agreement with a company that uses DRM in their products. Also, the company has the right to reimplement every open source code they would have used in the product, and you have the right to pay the cost of that.
The changes in GPLv3 to fight DRM are entirely about the free market: either DRM adds enough benefit that companies implement their own codes or it doesn't and they use open source codes. It's up to the market to decide whether open source or DRM can coexist or if one dies. As open source developers, we write code for free and give it away under some license. If licenses with anti-DRM in them out-compete the others like say BSD then that is the market deciding that collaboration and spirit is more valuable than DRM.
When companies complain 'how can we compete with andriod when most of the cost was donated free by open source developers?' they are just whining. If they can't figure out how to compete then they need to drop DRM or die in the market -- that is a free market in action.
Slashdot Mirror
But he was at one of those white-collar resort prisons. That's why he was able to escape.
Actually this is why:
Spam King: "Hi. Excuse me. Um, I'm actually supposed to be getting out of prison today, sir. Yeah."
Prison Guard #1: "You're in the wrong line, dumb ass. Over there."
Spam King: "I'm sorry. I am being a big dumb ass. Sorry."
Prison Guard #1: "Hey, uh, let this dumb ass through."
Is ANYBODY running megawatt sterling engines (or megawatt arrays of sterling engines)? I can't find any reference to a practical deployment of sterling engines in Israel. Can you provide a link?
I said sterling engines or steam turbines... looks like my memory failed on the Israel one, it seems to be photovoltaic cells.
But there are heat solar generators all over. Google "wikipedia solar thermal energy". Just for the 'trough' design:
US: 9 plants for 350 MW (largest system, boiler or not). 64 MW plant in Nevada. 553 MW plant proposed for Calif.
Spain: 50 MW plant (stores heat for day+night generation)
Heat solar is very clean and is essentially free after construction. Just imagine if we had spent 3 trillion covering just a tiny fraction of a southwestern state instead of pissing it away.
The problem with all of your listed sources is that they all have limited applications and many problems that need overcoming.
Nuclear also has problems to overcome, such as waste disposal (yucca anyone?) and distribution. For instance given a plant in Juno how is that power going to get to all the rural(er) place in alaska?
The problem with all of your listed sources is that they all have limited applications and many problems that need overcoming.
Most of your objectsion are based on pessimistic assumptions and are not accurate. Solar plants can use mirrors and sterling engines or steam turbines. In fact many of the largest plants do this (like that one in Israel). Solar cells could also be made of non-polluting materials with some research and investment. And for example there is a lake in western virginia where the water level is raised daily to store energy for use during peak hours as clean hydro power.
The problems with non-nuclear are solvable, it's just that one single source won't satisfy all of our needs any more than just using nuclear will. We just need to put the effort in.
Of course, the only answer that makes any sense is nuclear, but it seems like we're never going to get another nuclear plant in the U.S.
Relying on nuclear power is a small number of points of failure, requires the grid, and is not open for competition (unless you are a mega-corp with govt officials in your pocket). How is that so awesomely good ?!
Wouldn't it be better to make wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro, and other sources efficient and cheap enough that villages in alaska, and farms, and your vacation cabin can power themselves? Even in the event of a world catastrophe like an asteroid or pandemic or government/market collapse? Seems to me like the benefits of efficient and cheap power from renewable sources that scale (ie, everything else) would be far better overall than nuclear.
The tab character has a well-defined semantic meaning. It means 'indent this line / paragraph by one tabulator.' If you are indenting anything there is only one character you should be using - tab.
I would argue that it is the tab key on a typewriter or keyboard that has a well-defined semantic meaning. The tab character as in 0x9 has never been well defined.
In fact, the characters below 0x20 are not even intended to be part of a body of text... they are control characters for manipulating the input/output device. For instance, you don't see people clammoring to use 0x1 "start of heading" to replace the <head> tag, or for that matter there is the confusion over ctrl-j and ctrl-m. The tab key, ctrl-i, should be regarded like enter or escape that performs a function, in this case the function of advancing to the next tabstop, and not as a character that does this -- enter might insert an 0xA, a 0xAD, or a 0xDA depending on the OS. In other words, having the tab cause spaces to be inserted into the document is entirely consistent with it's ASCII value as a control code.
It does not, however, have a fixed width, and should therefore never be used anywhere other than the start of a line or for aligning two lines.
I don't think anybody really disagrees with that in theory, using tabs at the left to indent then switching over to spaces for aligning. The problem is entirely a practical one of mixing two invisible characters.
I've seen way too many instances of "[tab][space][tab]" for a two-level indent, or other freakish combinations for me to be able to support tab characters in any form -- even though I agree with you and Linus that using them at the beginning makes sense. Except in something like the kernel where there is necessarily a lot of discipline I just haven't ever seen it work.
The hardware is low-end (and low power, which is good).
Are you sure about the power? I got their new atom board with Intel graphics and everything minus processor and peripherals draws about 25 watts. I'm assuming their graphics is drawing most of this power. If not, Intel have some pretty inefficient other chips on there.
With a 4w processor I didn't expect 30w just to turn it on with no drives or peripherals.
Incidentally, that mobo (BOXD945GCLF) is really poor compared to any of the many AMD systems I've made, built from cheapest mobos even. It draws an excessive amount of power, the bios is slow and buggy, has flaky rgb output, etc. Hoping AMD gets its act together again...
But it's nicer in a test grid that you can see what kernels were not tested by what numbers were skipped. If versions are 8.1, 8.5, 8.11... was there an 8.8 maybe? You don't know without checking a complete list of all the major kernel version.
And if somebody is creating a fork with other patches, but it takes them an extra month to release is their kernel 8.1-nn if it was loosely based on 8.1 kernel or 8.2-nn since it was released in feb? And what if it comes out beforehand, should they just guess when the linus kernel will actually end up being released?
It seems like a lot of downsides for a benefit of just not having a large number...
On the other hand, even good programmers can get stuck and benefit from a debugger every once and then. I guess this argument finally won the day.
Actually after programming in C the past five years I find a debugger completely worthless. Pretty much all problems boil down to:
1) memory / pointer errors
2) usage errors (bad casts, unset variables)
3) code too complicated to follow by reading
The first is covered by valgrind, or if your system doesn't have valgrind then first writing for x86 then porting. The second is covered well by gcc warnings. The third is covered better by logging than a debugger, or better yet just not writing complicated software in the first place.
Before that, in Java the first problem just did not exist, the second was covered by compiler warnings (and no such thing as unset variables), and the third was the same, logging.
So except the kernel, where there's no valgrind, what do you actually use a debugger for?
A vote for a losing candidate can still affect policy in the long-term.
Oh I agree... by giving 8 years to the party you most despise to corrupt the process, installing political appointees and sympathizers to rig the media, elections, courts, funding, etc to favor their causes. It just isn't the wishful-thinking effect you hope for.
The whole lesser of two evils argument is more evil than both evils combined.
Are you calling game theory evil?
If the results are:
evil: 50 million votes
lesser evil: 49 million votes
bob barr: 1 million votes
Then your libertarian vote ended up having (1m/49m) the effect on determining the winner as a vote for Lesser. So, yes, your libertarian vote is far less significant.
In our election the only thing that matters is who wins (no partial representation and whatnot). You aren't voting for who you want to win, you're voting for who you want that can win.
I've left the Democratic Party and I won't vote for Obama any longer.
Obama was a consitutional law professor, is a 'learner', can speak contemporaneously, and the entire rest of the world likes him. Which is frankly head and shoulders better than the other choices of McCain, Barr, or a write-in such as Cthulhu. So not voting for him is just stupid.
But after this immunity vote the EFF is getting what I had previously allocated for Obama. How can you forgive something when you don't know what was done? Truth & reconcilliation, Catholic confessions, etc all require you to admit what happened. Obama is not on the int committee, he doesn't know what the telecomms did, and the law only requires them to say in secret that the prez told them to "do it witchy".
We have the opportunity to vote for the lesser evil and it costs us nothing to do so. If the ACLU or EFF were somehow on the ballot we could vote for them, but they aren't. But when it comes to donating time or effort, we do have the choice of ACLU or EFF or many others. That's why I am still voting for Obama, but supporting EFF.
Modify JSON so unquoted attributes are 'type labels' and define the type of an attribute by giving a label or a default value. For instance:
... now you have pretty much exactly the same message definition as protocol buffers, but in pure JSON. It could also use some convention like "@WORK" for labels/classes so that a normal JSON parser can parse the message definitions. You can write a code generator to make access classes for messages just by walking the json and looking at the types. I don't see that 'required' and 'optional' keywords help much... imo defaults are generally better (even if they are nil). But this could easily be expressed in a json message definition.
It's easy to make a binary JSON format that is fast and also small, so there is little advantage to protocol buffers there. It's also easy and ridiculously fast to compress JSON text using say character-based lzo (Oberhumer).
Maybe somebody can explain, but it doesn't seem like protocol buffers really have much advantages over JSON. It sounds like it is effectively just a binary format for JSON-like data (name-value pairs they say) along with a code generator to access it. The code generator is nice, but this is like a day's work max. Maybe I'm not understanding google's problems, but I'll stick with JSON since it actually is a cross-platform, language neutral data format... and you can always optimize it if actually needed.
MS don't deserve *too* much credit for this, since (unlike Sun) they were able to benefit from five or six years of someone else's experience when creating their language, but with the ability to start with a clean slate and no backwards-compatibility baggage.
... were able to, but didn't. The difference between C# vs Java was like C++ vs C. C++ and C# basically just add a lot of syntactix mumbo-jumbo onto a plain, reliable, usable language.
Mandatory generics, iterator yield, implicitly typed variables, 'object initializers', extension methods, embedding C++ and SQL directly into the code, operator overloading, implicit conversions, conditional compilation, etc -- none of those C# features actually helps you write better programs, and a lot of the so-called improvements in C# just make it a complicated mess.
The main problem in C++ and C# is that just looking at a statement you can never be sure what it does without poking around a lot of places (in Java a statement always says exactly what it does). A simple statement like "x.y = a[b]" can involve at least 6 different method calls. In Java is always means assign array element to a field.
Like C++, there are some people who will claim more features are better no matter how much more complicated (and generally the 'never enough features' crowd lives in Redmond). But at the rate C# is gaining kitchen sinks I think it will only be a few years until people switch back to Java because it doesn't have all that baggage.
They're boned as far as operating systems go. They can't break backwards compatibility, but that same backwards compatibility is killing them as they try to improve the system.
Microsoft is boned because their developers have really bad habits and style, and have been exposed to really arcane code. It's not bad code exactly in that it works, but developing with it every day kind of just sucks all the talent out of developers.
That's the real problem for Microsoft -- their developer culture. They could create a new OS from scratch and as long as it runs Win32 programs at least marginally and somewhat seamlessly in addition to new ones then they can just force OEMs to install the new OS... that's not a problem really. What's a problem is that if they did this the new OS would suck only slightly less than Windows.
Just look at .NET... it should have been a complete break, a chance for a fresh start. But instead it is has WM_* messages and tons api showing Win32 just because they were lazy and needed some api without thinking about how it could be done better. Not to mention all the other culture-inspired junk in .NET like say conditional compilation.
Couldn't they just take away the body of the violin so it is just strings, record that using a very fast sample rate, then simulate different factors like varnish, density, shape, etc. ... then they would know what makes the stradivarius special.
For programming the absolute best color scheme:
Columns 0-80: fg color on bg color
Columns 80+: fg color on [darker,lighter] bg color
This lets you know when your code has gone past 80 columns without being harsh, and it just looks nice. To do this make an image at least the width of the monitor and maybe a hundred or so pixels high. Make the left side all bg color 1 and the right side after 80 columns all bg color 2 (take a screenshot of a x80 window to find out how many pixels for 80 columns). Then set it as the tiling background image. Since it's only a strip it uses little memory.
Also, hack your vim highlighting so that the tab character is always bright red (and flashing on/off if your term supports it). This lets you know when somebody put an evil tab into your code. Or if you subscribe to the linux compromise, use gray and it makes a nice 'indentation wall'.
Getting a CS degree from a reputable instiution shows that he is capable of programming, but not being skilled or seeking jobs actually programming shows that he is not interested in programming.
So the question is, what would be interesting that uses the same capabilities needed for programming? For instance, what professions need the ability to think logically and rationally, form a complete solution from lots of component parts or facts, choose one solution from many possible ones, form a complete argument using a certain language/grammar, etc.
I think professions such as writing for a newspaper, technical writing, detective/csi, genetic counseling, political consultant, and so on use many of the same skills as programming but may be more interesting to some people.
You can't feel skilled at something you don't like doing... you can even be much better at it than most people, but never live up to your potential. Either you are ok with feeling mediocre or you find something interesting to you that you are able to do. Start by looking at careers that aren't programming but use the abilities needed for it.
I would actually love to do QA and am really good at it. I'm the only one of a small team of programmers that has ever written an automated test suite for any of our code.
But the problem with QA is all the CS rejects that are programmers. When you set up a set of tests and every single one of the inputs not in the few documented examples fails there's not much point in doing testing at all, and it totally demoralizes the testers. It's not fun or rewarding to find bugs that are trivial, and anybody that actually cares about quality leaves.
So to have a good QA people you have to have even better coders, and better code. Remember next time you complain about QA... unless your code is awesome then you are part of the problem.
Conservative Agenda:
1. Pretend the climate is not changing
2. Pretend we are not causing it
3. Pretend it is a good thing
4. Pretend we can't do anything about it, so 'oh well'
5. ???
6. Blame democrats for not preventing it.
It's pretty obvious what the final step will be -- after all, we knew about it the whole time so why didn't we do anything about it sooner?! Nevermind their vetos and filibusters and spin machines.
This is the same pattern the right wing uses for everything... they feign (to be charitable) stupidity then blame everybody else for letting them screw it up.
That's what's so dumbass about the gun debate... I would want to have an 'IED' planted under my porch and other places. And I certainly wouldn't want a gun because that's why they would be on my door in the first place.
A 'sniper' rifle or a machine gun, maybe. But a freaking handgun? You've got to be kidding me. Have you actually thought through this scenario or do you just use it as a bogey-man? "Oh my god, my right to own an arm that is absolutely worthless for fighting off the g-men shall not be infringed". All guns are pretty much worthless for fighting off a govt gone rogue, handguns especially.
I'm actually in favor of this ruling, because it just means strict laws will be passed regulating the sale and registration of these guns. And when your gun gets stolen and used in a crime, guess who's prints will be corroded into the metal? And when it is used in a crime since you owned it at one point (and could have 'stolen' it from yourself) you'll be suspect #1. Criminals steal guns. Why would you want to be the 'go to' suspect for crimes they commit with them?
... but their hands are tied thanks to those who whined to the DOJ.It is not whining to involve the government when you are being blackmailed or extorted ('drop OS/2 or else'), or slandered ('DRDOS detected, print bogus warning'), or any of the other illegal things Microsoft did that the DOJ convicted them of doing. It's doing your duty to contribute to a civil and orderly society.
It's a sad state of affairs when people think that premeditated breaking the law is 'cool' and people that don't like it are called 'whiners' or 'liberals'. I would turn the tables and call parent poster an 'apologist' or 'conservative' -- but they probably think those are compliments.
It's really pretty simple, isn't it? All it really takes is for people to demand it.
Don't allow programs to write other programs.
Don't allow programs to read or change the settings of other programs.
Don't allow programs to be hacked.
These three things are completely doable and would eliminate pretty much all malware. Even malware that the user chose to install would not be able to do many of the destructive things they do now, such as reading your stored passwords other program settings, etc. Even if they deleted or modified your files, you could just go back to a ZFS snapshot and get them back again.
You can't prevent people from doing stupid things like leaving their bank info in a .txt file. But you can make it safe to install screensavers, emiticon packs, etc for everybody else.
The simplest and most effective way to prevent programs from being hacked is to write them in Java (or other type-safe language). Most of the operating system kernel should also be written in a type-safe language as well (except for a tiny amount of asm mostly for drivers). This would have a number of other benefits in addition to preventing 'root exploits'.
If it ended with the robot seeing his other selves, realizing he wasn't a beautiful and unique snowflake, and kervorking into the ocean -- THE END -- it would have been a really pretty good movie. Dark, but with a Western message that it is our individualism and uniqueness that make life worth living.
I think Kubrick must have written everything except the ending. He didn't know how to add some inspiring, lifting message to a movie that can't have one.
The changes in GPLv3 to fight DRM are entirely about the free market: either DRM adds enough benefit that companies implement their own codes or it doesn't and they use open source codes. It's up to the market to decide whether open source or DRM can coexist or if one dies. As open source developers, we write code for free and give it away under some license. If licenses with anti-DRM in them out-compete the others like say BSD then that is the market deciding that collaboration and spirit is more valuable than DRM.
When companies complain 'how can we compete with andriod when most of the cost was donated free by open source developers?' they are just whining. If they can't figure out how to compete then they need to drop DRM or die in the market -- that is a free market in action.