yeah, that's cool... how do you get the internet? I don't subscribe to cable TV, but I get my internet connection from the cable company, because there isn't any FiOS in my area and DSL is crap, so its either cable or buy a fractional DS3, but why bother when cable internet connection is just as fast, if not faster, and cheaper?
The company I work for builds our custom software environment for specialty networking hardware on top of FreeBSD specifically so we can avoid crap like this. We also employ people to make contributions back to the FreeBSD project as well, so we're not mooches, but seriously... this is why so many companies don't want to get involved with Linux or GPL solutions.
Without a sense of smell, you hardly taste anything... including if something is or might be poisonous, either because of its nature, or because its spoiled. You can't smell smoke, which is an early indicator of fire, and you can't smell a gas leak. Smell is pretty friggin' important to actual survival, so I'm not sure I'd classify it as minor.
How is this different from the model used for NPR pledge drives? Its just another thing you can get for free, but that if you feel has value to you, you can/should help fund so it doesn't go away... and you get prizes at various levels of contribution. It's been working since the 70s for NPR, it should work here, too, assuming the people involved in using the software aren't the same people who don't contribute to their local NPR/PBS station.
Because what primary source material you get directed to has a lot to do with what secondary or tertiary sources you go through to get to them... and the internet is full of second, third, and fourth-hand sources with agendas who selectively filter information. If you don't already know how to think before you come to the internet, you're pretty much doomed.
These days, a person can spend their whole life on the internet and never have to come across information that they don't want to accept. The ability to pop up and expand the echo chamber is limitless, and a lot of people want that, which is the problem.
Sure, the internet can help get straight information directly to people, but they still have to know where to look and know why they want to go there. But even if people got info directly from LOC, National Archives, and the NSF, there's still going to be "people" who think it's doctored info from the government trying to scam us. And, who knows? From time to time, they may be right. The problem as I see it is that there really aren't any pure sources of straight facts, and that truth in a philosophical and practical sense isn't and can't be the sum of the facts. Peer-reviewed textbooks that have a bit of curatorship from experts are supposed to be trusted sources of information. Then the politicians get into it, and they ruin everything.
I have no real ideas on how to fix it though. I'm not sure it can be fixed, just made differently broken. I suppose we have to aim for 'good enough,' but one thing is for sure, screw Texas.
No, they need trucker hats for that. Cowboy hats mean they're doing it ignorantly. The difference is subtle yet profound, like the ripples from a leaf on a pond, disturbed by the jumping of fish with friggin' laser beams on their heads.
I went to an expensive private school, ended up getting a degree in English, and ended up working in IT despite every fiber in my body telling me I didn't want to do it after I got out of high school. I could have saved myself a few years and my parents a lot of money if I thought I was going to end up back in a spot I was "qualified" for when I was 17 years old, but I'm pretty sure that I got a lot more out of school than just the degree. Maybe I'm just not quite as pragmatic as the average nerd... and my mom has a Princeton AB in Romance Languages and an MA in Spanish, and teaches public high school, so I know what you're talking about with the "why bother" on the Ivy degrees. She was on the swim team with Meg Whitman (the eBay chick), and they still talk from time to time, but it's really all about the paths you choose.
I suppose it depends a lot on what you intend to do with your life. A lot of the value in the Ivys isn't necessarily in the "education" you get in class, but in the connections you make while there. Foe people going into business, politics, etc, that's a lot more important than for people in hard sciences or computers, where the definition of "proficient" and "excellent" are much more easily measured... the value of proficient in business or politics really is measured in how many people's rich dads' business cards you have on file.
Does it make a difference whether you go to Harvard or BC to get your CS degree if you know all you want to do is be a programmer? No, not really, and a cheaper school you leave with less debt is an advantage. If you have bigger dreams beyond the cubicle, then you're missing out. A bit of extra up-front debt is negligible when you put yourself in the path for a $1,000,000+ per year job that largely involves going to cocktail parties and helping your freshman roommate's dad get more rich people to let him invest their money.
Chances are, no, most native English speakers couldn't really explain it, at least not accurately. I'm a native English speaker, and I have a degree in Literature. I didn't really learn grammar in school until I took Latin and Spanish in high school, and more Latin and Japanese in college. I spoke and wrote well before the foreign languages, but largely because I have educated parents and grandparents and just sort of internalized it early on; it wasn't really taught to me. Like in 'My Fair Lady,' oh, why can't the English teach their children how to speak? The French they learn their French, the Greek they learn their Greek.
Of course, countries such as France and Spain have "official" linguistic standards academies which are responsible for determining what "grammatically correct" French and Spanish are. Do the English still recognize RP and "the Queen's English" as official, or is that no longer politically correct? At any rate, its not as if Americans would go for it anyway... we can't even apparently settle between MLA, Chicago and AP style guidelines... and then the American Psychiatric Society has their own rules as well. A fat lot of b.s is what it is.
So, I use Wikipedia on a daily basis for quick reference and as a jumping point to the sources. However, as a community/culture, I think its really just sort of gotten out of hand. Arguing for pages and pages about something which is really sort of inconsequential? Who do they think they are, Slashdot? (but seriously...). I first realized a few years ago that there was no point in trying to actually participate when I watched a revision war/flame fest between some random Swedish guy and an exchange student friend of mine who was from Georgia (the country), over stuff in the Georgia article. J. Random Swede decided that being born in a country, growing up there, and having had 20+ years of first-hand experience wasn't good enough to contribue some relatively minor points to the article, iirc. It turned into quite the little bru-ha-ha between Soso (my friend) and that guy, who wasn't exactly a Slavic languages and culture scholar himself, either. There is some value in wikipedia, but not enough to justify a bunch of bored, pissed-off nerds thumping around like some stiff-collar Britannica editors at the East India Club.
Anyone with a first-year computer science background should be able to tell you deleting doesn't mean its gone, just hiding. Of course, these students will probably now not learn the difference.
No, Google did a really crappy job of ripping off Wolfram Alpha. I did a side-by-side comparison of the example search. Google pretty much did what I would typically do for such a search on Google "wiki ", only it bolds the more-or-less relevant information. The answer was still cut off, though. Wolfram gave me a pretty no-nonsense answer, and none of the rest of the crap results. It did give me some rather precise, yet largely unrelated, astronomical facts about the date in question, though.
My first instinct is to go with a one-liner xor "butterfly swap", but I'm not sure... then again, I mostly live in Perl and similar languages these days.
But Africa was Italy's spoils, as per the Tripartide pact -- Italy wanting to move into former Roman territory, and Africa being sort of completely worthless to Germany. But, perhaps if the US/UK/France/etc hadn't remained mostly neutral during the Spanish Civil War and come in on the side of the Republic, then it wouldn't have been an issue. Or, if, you know... the Treaty of Versailles not been a total screw job, pissing off all of Germany and giving the NSDAP something legitimate to gripe about as a foot up on their regular agenda. But, who's counting?
We all know the real party responsible for Germany's defeat is Italy. If they had held the front in North Africa, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to North Africa. Had that front held, Sicily wouldn't have been invaded. Had Sicily not been invaded, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to Sicily. Had Italy not screwed up in the Balkans, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to Macedonia and Greece, and Operation Barbarossa would have gone ahead as scheduled, before Winter would have caught them off guard. In fact, Italian incompetence causing Germany to have to split forces and support multiple fronts over and over again is really what did them in. There wouldn't have been an Eastern Front by the time Overlord happened had Mussolini not tried to be Caesar but only managed being Sulla. Hell, Claudius even conquered Britain, and he was inbred and possibly retarded.
and less hoops for INTERPOL, German Federal police, etc. Also, there is then no protection, even in theory, from NSA or CIA operations as that becomes "over-seas" and thus fertile ground. I guess it all depends on who you're trying to slightly inconvenience, though.
I'm not sure how I'd like this in action, but I'm glad that they're at least trying a somewhat new direction with the 'Unity' interface, rather than the typical scenario of playing catchup with Windows and OS X that the open-source desktops seem to usually do. Even if it doesn't work out, at least it should hopefully encourage further innovation and something to actually set Linux, or specifically Ubuntu, apart from the crowd. The whole "free alternative to..." approach really hasn't been a selling point since the battle for the server room against the commercial Unix vendors 10+ years ago.
There is somewhat of a problem with the whole AT&T being pretty much the only GSM carrier in the US. I think T-Mobile might also be GSM, but I'm not sure. T-Mobile is a totally ghetto carrier, and I'd go back to having a land line before switching to them. Everything else is on CDMA. I've heard rumblings that the 3GS is supposed to be dual-band CDMA/GSM, but whether or not its actually usable is another story. But, basically, for an unlocked iPhone to be of any use, it'd have to support 3G CDMA, like BlackBerry or Droid on Verizon
yeah, but I'm not switching to AT&T just to get an iPhone. No one I know but the two people with iPhones has AT&T, the coverage sucks most of the places I am most of the time, etc. Is the iPhone cool? Sure. Is it switch to AT&T cool? Hell no.
I, for one, am shocked, that many products from several sources on various carriers have collectively outsold a single product available on a single carrier that doesn't even have the most market share. Utterly amazing, isn't it?/sarcasm
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, that's cool... how do you get the internet? I don't subscribe to cable TV, but I get my internet connection from the cable company, because there isn't any FiOS in my area and DSL is crap, so its either cable or buy a fractional DS3, but why bother when cable internet connection is just as fast, if not faster, and cheaper?
The company I work for builds our custom software environment for specialty networking hardware on top of FreeBSD specifically so we can avoid crap like this. We also employ people to make contributions back to the FreeBSD project as well, so we're not mooches, but seriously... this is why so many companies don't want to get involved with Linux or GPL solutions.
Without a sense of smell, you hardly taste anything... including if something is or might be poisonous, either because of its nature, or because its spoiled. You can't smell smoke, which is an early indicator of fire, and you can't smell a gas leak. Smell is pretty friggin' important to actual survival, so I'm not sure I'd classify it as minor.
But can they do it without resorting to outsourcing to India? Maybe they can trade Kashmir for a domestic pressure-release valve?
I meant we as in Slashdot as a whole, as opposed to Digg. But, yeah, whatever else is good, too.
Me and my 5-digit ID say "I'm pretty sure we were here first..." does anyone use digg but xbox junkies and script kiddies (usually the same people)?
How is this different from the model used for NPR pledge drives? Its just another thing you can get for free, but that if you feel has value to you, you can/should help fund so it doesn't go away... and you get prizes at various levels of contribution. It's been working since the 70s for NPR, it should work here, too, assuming the people involved in using the software aren't the same people who don't contribute to their local NPR/PBS station.
Because what primary source material you get directed to has a lot to do with what secondary or tertiary sources you go through to get to them... and the internet is full of second, third, and fourth-hand sources with agendas who selectively filter information. If you don't already know how to think before you come to the internet, you're pretty much doomed.
These days, a person can spend their whole life on the internet and never have to come across information that they don't want to accept. The ability to pop up and expand the echo chamber is limitless, and a lot of people want that, which is the problem.
Sure, the internet can help get straight information directly to people, but they still have to know where to look and know why they want to go there. But even if people got info directly from LOC, National Archives, and the NSF, there's still going to be "people" who think it's doctored info from the government trying to scam us. And, who knows? From time to time, they may be right. The problem as I see it is that there really aren't any pure sources of straight facts, and that truth in a philosophical and practical sense isn't and can't be the sum of the facts. Peer-reviewed textbooks that have a bit of curatorship from experts are supposed to be trusted sources of information. Then the politicians get into it, and they ruin everything.
I have no real ideas on how to fix it though. I'm not sure it can be fixed, just made differently broken. I suppose we have to aim for 'good enough,' but one thing is for sure, screw Texas.
No, they need trucker hats for that. Cowboy hats mean they're doing it ignorantly. The difference is subtle yet profound, like the ripples from a leaf on a pond, disturbed by the jumping of fish with friggin' laser beams on their heads.
I went to an expensive private school, ended up getting a degree in English, and ended up working in IT despite every fiber in my body telling me I didn't want to do it after I got out of high school. I could have saved myself a few years and my parents a lot of money if I thought I was going to end up back in a spot I was "qualified" for when I was 17 years old, but I'm pretty sure that I got a lot more out of school than just the degree. Maybe I'm just not quite as pragmatic as the average nerd... and my mom has a Princeton AB in Romance Languages and an MA in Spanish, and teaches public high school, so I know what you're talking about with the "why bother" on the Ivy degrees. She was on the swim team with Meg Whitman (the eBay chick), and they still talk from time to time, but it's really all about the paths you choose.
I suppose it depends a lot on what you intend to do with your life. A lot of the value in the Ivys isn't necessarily in the "education" you get in class, but in the connections you make while there. Foe people going into business, politics, etc, that's a lot more important than for people in hard sciences or computers, where the definition of "proficient" and "excellent" are much more easily measured... the value of proficient in business or politics really is measured in how many people's rich dads' business cards you have on file.
Does it make a difference whether you go to Harvard or BC to get your CS degree if you know all you want to do is be a programmer? No, not really, and a cheaper school you leave with less debt is an advantage. If you have bigger dreams beyond the cubicle, then you're missing out. A bit of extra up-front debt is negligible when you put yourself in the path for a $1,000,000+ per year job that largely involves going to cocktail parties and helping your freshman roommate's dad get more rich people to let him invest their money.
Chances are, no, most native English speakers couldn't really explain it, at least not accurately. I'm a native English speaker, and I have a degree in Literature. I didn't really learn grammar in school until I took Latin and Spanish in high school, and more Latin and Japanese in college. I spoke and wrote well before the foreign languages, but largely because I have educated parents and grandparents and just sort of internalized it early on; it wasn't really taught to me. Like in 'My Fair Lady,' oh, why can't the English teach their children how to speak? The French they learn their French, the Greek they learn their Greek.
Of course, countries such as France and Spain have "official" linguistic standards academies which are responsible for determining what "grammatically correct" French and Spanish are. Do the English still recognize RP and "the Queen's English" as official, or is that no longer politically correct? At any rate, its not as if Americans would go for it anyway... we can't even apparently settle between MLA, Chicago and AP style guidelines... and then the American Psychiatric Society has their own rules as well. A fat lot of b.s is what it is.
cash is for old people and terrorists
So, I use Wikipedia on a daily basis for quick reference and as a jumping point to the sources. However, as a community/culture, I think its really just sort of gotten out of hand. Arguing for pages and pages about something which is really sort of inconsequential? Who do they think they are, Slashdot? (but seriously...). I first realized a few years ago that there was no point in trying to actually participate when I watched a revision war/flame fest between some random Swedish guy and an exchange student friend of mine who was from Georgia (the country), over stuff in the Georgia article. J. Random Swede decided that being born in a country, growing up there, and having had 20+ years of first-hand experience wasn't good enough to contribue some relatively minor points to the article, iirc. It turned into quite the little bru-ha-ha between Soso (my friend) and that guy, who wasn't exactly a Slavic languages and culture scholar himself, either. There is some value in wikipedia, but not enough to justify a bunch of bored, pissed-off nerds thumping around like some stiff-collar Britannica editors at the East India Club.
Anyone with a first-year computer science background should be able to tell you deleting doesn't mean its gone, just hiding. Of course, these students will probably now not learn the difference.
No, Google did a really crappy job of ripping off Wolfram Alpha. I did a side-by-side comparison of the example search. Google pretty much did what I would typically do for such a search on Google "wiki ", only it bolds the more-or-less relevant information. The answer was still cut off, though. Wolfram gave me a pretty no-nonsense answer, and none of the rest of the crap results. It did give me some rather precise, yet largely unrelated, astronomical facts about the date in question, though.
My first instinct is to go with a one-liner xor "butterfly swap", but I'm not sure... then again, I mostly live in Perl and similar languages these days.
All the ones who get chicks. duh.
But Africa was Italy's spoils, as per the Tripartide pact -- Italy wanting to move into former Roman territory, and Africa being sort of completely worthless to Germany. But, perhaps if the US/UK/France/etc hadn't remained mostly neutral during the Spanish Civil War and come in on the side of the Republic, then it wouldn't have been an issue. Or, if, you know... the Treaty of Versailles not been a total screw job, pissing off all of Germany and giving the NSDAP something legitimate to gripe about as a foot up on their regular agenda. But, who's counting?
We all know the real party responsible for Germany's defeat is Italy. If they had held the front in North Africa, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to North Africa. Had that front held, Sicily wouldn't have been invaded. Had Sicily not been invaded, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to Sicily. Had Italy not screwed up in the Balkans, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to Macedonia and Greece, and Operation Barbarossa would have gone ahead as scheduled, before Winter would have caught them off guard. In fact, Italian incompetence causing Germany to have to split forces and support multiple fronts over and over again is really what did them in. There wouldn't have been an Eastern Front by the time Overlord happened had Mussolini not tried to be Caesar but only managed being Sulla. Hell, Claudius even conquered Britain, and he was inbred and possibly retarded.
and less hoops for INTERPOL, German Federal police, etc. Also, there is then no protection, even in theory, from NSA or CIA operations as that becomes "over-seas" and thus fertile ground. I guess it all depends on who you're trying to slightly inconvenience, though.
I'm not sure how I'd like this in action, but I'm glad that they're at least trying a somewhat new direction with the 'Unity' interface, rather than the typical scenario of playing catchup with Windows and OS X that the open-source desktops seem to usually do. Even if it doesn't work out, at least it should hopefully encourage further innovation and something to actually set Linux, or specifically Ubuntu, apart from the crowd. The whole "free alternative to..." approach really hasn't been a selling point since the battle for the server room against the commercial Unix vendors 10+ years ago.
There is somewhat of a problem with the whole AT&T being pretty much the only GSM carrier in the US. I think T-Mobile might also be GSM, but I'm not sure. T-Mobile is a totally ghetto carrier, and I'd go back to having a land line before switching to them. Everything else is on CDMA. I've heard rumblings that the 3GS is supposed to be dual-band CDMA/GSM, but whether or not its actually usable is another story. But, basically, for an unlocked iPhone to be of any use, it'd have to support 3G CDMA, like BlackBerry or Droid on Verizon
yeah, but I'm not switching to AT&T just to get an iPhone. No one I know but the two people with iPhones has AT&T, the coverage sucks most of the places I am most of the time, etc. Is the iPhone cool? Sure. Is it switch to AT&T cool? Hell no.
I, for one, am shocked, that many products from several sources on various carriers have collectively outsold a single product available on a single carrier that doesn't even have the most market share. Utterly amazing, isn't it? /sarcasm