Did it appear to anyone else that we may have temporarily slahdotted wiki? This may be the first time that that anyone's ever actually had to click the links to find out whats going on, so it seems plausible. At least its working again now.
I'm not sure 'Team America: World Police' technically qualifies as South Park. Having written a paper on South Park and Team America as compared to Gulliver's Travels and and the Beggar's Opera in my Jr. year of undergrad (damn was that like 4 years ago already?) for my Restoration and 18th Century Literature class (my contention being the so-called "golden age of satire" is a misnomer), I'm somewhat sensitive to the subtle differences in the projects.
(and frankly, that was probably the nerdiest under grad English paper that wasn't about Jules Verne ever written).
I'm sure people have the right to demand whatever they want. It's whether or not Nintendo has to comply with said demands that actually matters though. I don't really see where he's getting that from either, however it's admittedly been quite some time since I actually read the GPL. It can't possibly actually apply to Nintendo in this matter as far as I can tell though.
I graduated high school in 2002, and I didn't even have school pride until...well... i graduated college in '06, and I never got any school spirit. The 90s were great.
We could just as easily say the common threat to the US and China is India, or that the US is the common threat to China and India. How does off-loading this onto China change the facts at all? For the majority of cases, India does suck and Americans are dumb, not just in comp sci or it. India probably needs us more than we need them, though. We don't/need/ to pay less for stuff, we just want to. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of design work or innovatinve/inventive thinking going on in India these days, just where the grunt work goes because they're the ones asking for it, because they need the jobs.
I'd hardly call myself a "foss head," However, if I'm going to spend time on a project for no money or anything the like in return, then the project is going to do what I want it to do, and if you like it fine, if not, too bad. That is all.
I rushed Phi Delta Theta, but had many friends in Kappa Sigma, which was the frat were most of the comp sci majors joined (we had most of the physics and maths majors, and various others). Since Phi Delt is a dry-house by national rules, we'd go to Kappa Sig often, so I kept a stash of Guinness there, and various other libations, and would tote some nice wines for special occasions and for bribing the women folk.
However, the brothers that lived in the house had a tendency to keep some quite nice single malts and other things which were for sharing, but only if they liked you.
Yes, but/why/ are these projects "consumer desktops", or supposed be? Back in the day, they were just doing their thing. KDE started because people thought it might be nice to have a desktop system for Linux, and CDE was expensive. GNOME started because KDE wasn't technically "free software" due to Qt licensing issues.
RedHat jumped on the Gnome bandwagon, started paying devs, and sort of took the lead. A similar situation occurred with KDE, iirc. The way I see it, the community projects got hijacked by the corporate Linux pushers, and then people are complaining about the stuff that hobby hackers are putting into projects.
If having some "consumer" desktop that gives warm fuzzies to people when they're looking at computers in Best Buy is so damned important, than maybe RedHat, Novel and others ought to just pull an Open Group and write said desktop, rather than attempting to exercise overbearing authority over projects that were started without them.
But I am not now, nor have I ever been an influential figure in f/oss, and my contributions have mostly been fairly insignificant and flown under the radar unless you were specifically looking for them. However, if I ever get around to releasing something intereting that's worth being hijacked by IBM, who for some reason leaves relatively in charge rather than forcing a coupe, makes the project and international sensation and then puts me in a position where people I've never heard of are making demands that I add features to support their "mission critical" b.s. or design it to look the way/they/ want, I'll tell you right now -- I'm going to be kind of pissed off.
To clarify, 'beast' is the slang term for Milwaukee's Best, which is a particularly nasty so-called beer, which costs about $7USD for a 24-pack of cans, which at most schools, at least mine and any other where I ever went to a party, the fraternity houses stock up on to provide for guests at parties who are not special enough to be entitled to the good stuff, or smart enough to know they should bring their own anyway.
When I think of Free Software, I generally think of the community were the developers are the users are the developers. "Open Source" still smacks of the buzzwordism of the late-90s, getting corps. to invest in opening code under the assumption that they'll be able to get free work out of some sort of "community" while lowering their development costs.
What's wrong with the developers working on what the developers are interested in? If I (the royal 'I' here), am not being paid for my time or more code, then "users" should just be glad that 'I' have decided to make the fruits of my labor available to them, too. Perhaps I just don't get this mentality that it's some sort of competition between 'Linux' and Microsoft and Apple, and that we have to compete for desktop marketshare for some stupid ass reason. I just don't really see it as that big of a deal. Maybe for a company like RedHat, it is, but that's not me.
The concept that the developers are 'innovating too much' and 'alienating the user base' just seems akin to someone crashing a frat party and then complaining that all they're allowed to drink is the Beast.
It makes changes too easy, makes hiding what was there before too easy, and it makes telling what's an actual, factual authority and what is lies and deception too easy. I mean, come on -- if the guy actually believes what he wrote in F. 451, then how does this NOT make sense for him to believe? But then again, the Internet's ability to edit information for forge reality has been a major boon for the population of African elephants...
The same way as most everyone else that does -- rich parents set them up with it. Like that Bill Gates guy. Walking into a multi-million dollar trust fund is the sort of thing that enables one to drop out of Harvard and do weird things. Even if he "failed," he wasn't going to end up on the street or flipping burgers.
That or you work for someone else for a while, save diligently, and gather as much knowledge and experience as you can before striking out on your own with some street cred under your belt. I hear that's worked for a few people, too.
I hate the term "phone phreaking" -- it just fills my mind with images of Woz wiping out the Blue Box to make crank calls which inevitably involve the phrase, "so, what are you wearing?" while doing horrible things to himself without any hot grits in site.....ewww....
I make no bones about the fact that I'm a liberal arts grad, in English Lit and Classical History. I thought that I wanted to be a Comp Sci and Bio major, but wasn't really happy at it. However, I was a general nerd in jr high and high school.
I taught myself QBASIC in 8th grade, and then got a book on C. I got into Unix, with a FreeBSD 2.2.8 shell account from my dial-up ISP, and later a copy of RH 4.1 from my uncle, because I needed it for GCC. In 10th grade, I found a copy of an F77 manual in my high school library, took a look at it seemed just like BASIC, only less dumb, so I checked it out and followed the examples, did some exercises, and even implemented some of my maths homework in it from time to time, though I usually would just use C.
These days I work at a web hosting company as a systems admin, and hardly ever program in anything other than Perl, though my first job out of high school was working at a physics lab programming IC and spotsize detection in C. Then I went to college and ended up ditching to the English faculty for a number of personal reasons, which had nothing to do with grades or whatnot.. largely, Java killed my interest and I felt like there was more out there than chilling in the air conditioning and never seeing the sun (not to be confused with starting at a Sun workstation).
The point is, if you think that everything in school is supposed to teach you how to do some function in society, then, maybe teaching Java or whatever makes sense. Then again, that's not what my studies were for, and as the chairman of my Classics department, under whom I studied Latin, once said "a liberal arts degree prepares you to fully enjoy the life you'll probably never be able to afford." If you take education as an opportunity to help you grok all, then details of implementation can fade into the background of the theoretical concept. And the OP is talking about engineers, physicists, chemists, etc -- not c.s. majors who are going to become php code monkeys writing shopping cart plugins, but people who actually have data to manipulate which is generated through their other, primary activities. How many of them are trying to be "marketable" as programmers? I'd wager not too many.
Does it really matter what language they're taught in? They should be learning the concepts of programming, not just a language. However, FORTRAN has the benefit of already having a large existing code base and deployment in the field in which students in those particular disciplines are studying. There's no reason for them NOT to learn it, and if they feel like learning Python later, then then may. Python isn't the solution for every god damned thing in the world, even if it can do it.
Well, Gnome screens are Gnome screens are Gnome screens. However, that particular pages contains screenshots of Sugar as well, which I believe was for the OLPC or some such. But, I've never seen it before to realize just what a hideous, obnoxious mess thing it really is. Thus, for me, it was worth following the link.
I just bought an EeePC last Thursday because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and because I determined that there was a niche to fill between my Toshiba (which is always hooked up to an external monitor, speakers, mouse, graphics tablet and all sorts of other things), and my BlackBerry Storm.I got it at best buy, and so of course all I really had for an option was Windows XP, and I'm not sure how it'd really do with Linux (I suppose if they've been selling Linux versions the hardware should all be compatible, but I spend enough time fussing with Linux on the servers at work to really want to do Linux of FreeBSD for a hobby anymore). I'm actually typing this on it now.
I have yet to really play with Android, even though one of my coworkers has a G1, I just haven't really felt the urge to take it for a spin. The idea of having a "phone" OS on a "computer" seems a tad bit odd to me, but I suppose its just the opposite of the deal with the stripped-down OSX on the iPhone, which I have messed with a bit (I just don't feel like switching to AT&T or I'd probably pick one up... the only thing my Storm really has going for it is the tactile feedback to the depressible touch screen).
Is there anything particularly special about Android over any other Linux distribution, other than the Google name, that makes it well suited for this type of application? From what I've read, it seems to be just a Linux kernel combined with Java phone crap and not really anything particularly special, though as I must admit, I've not really been following it too closely.
Actually, I'll "only" be 25 next month, so I don't really remember being promised flying cars and all that jazz. I remember being promised the internet, and we got that. The future actually seems a little mundane, at least any future I'm likely to live to see. Star Trek, maybe, in another 200 years, but we're not going to get the Jetsons.
At least no one told me I'd be getting all my meals in pill form, although that's probably fairly close to reality in a "Flintsones (chewables) Meet the Jetsons" sort of way.
Slashdot Mirror
Did it appear to anyone else that we may have temporarily slahdotted wiki? This may be the first time that that anyone's ever actually had to click the links to find out whats going on, so it seems plausible. At least its working again now.
Think how much more time you just sacrificed validating the article's existence with a response?! Fascinating...
I'm not sure 'Team America: World Police' technically qualifies as South Park. Having written a paper on South Park and Team America as compared to Gulliver's Travels and and the Beggar's Opera in my Jr. year of undergrad (damn was that like 4 years ago already?) for my Restoration and 18th Century Literature class (my contention being the so-called "golden age of satire" is a misnomer), I'm somewhat sensitive to the subtle differences in the projects.
(and frankly, that was probably the nerdiest under grad English paper that wasn't about Jules Verne ever written).
I'm sure people have the right to demand whatever they want. It's whether or not Nintendo has to comply with said demands that actually matters though. I don't really see where he's getting that from either, however it's admittedly been quite some time since I actually read the GPL. It can't possibly actually apply to Nintendo in this matter as far as I can tell though.
I graduated high school in 2002, and I didn't even have school pride until...well... i graduated college in '06, and I never got any school spirit. The 90s were great.
Yeah, but nerds dig symmetry... don't we?
We could just as easily say the common threat to the US and China is India, or that the US is the common threat to China and India. How does off-loading this onto China change the facts at all? For the majority of cases, India does suck and Americans are dumb, not just in comp sci or it. India probably needs us more than we need them, though. We don't /need/ to pay less for stuff, we just want to. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of design work or innovatinve/inventive thinking going on in India these days, just where the grunt work goes because they're the ones asking for it, because they need the jobs.
I'd hardly call myself a "foss head," However, if I'm going to spend time on a project for no money or anything the like in return, then the project is going to do what I want it to do, and if you like it fine, if not, too bad. That is all.
I rushed Phi Delta Theta, but had many friends in Kappa Sigma, which was the frat were most of the comp sci majors joined (we had most of the physics and maths majors, and various others). Since Phi Delt is a dry-house by national rules, we'd go to Kappa Sig often, so I kept a stash of Guinness there, and various other libations, and would tote some nice wines for special occasions and for bribing the women folk.
However, the brothers that lived in the house had a tendency to keep some quite nice single malts and other things which were for sharing, but only if they liked you.
Yes, but /why/ are these projects "consumer desktops", or supposed be? Back in the day, they were just doing their thing. KDE started because people thought it might be nice to have a desktop system for Linux, and CDE was expensive. GNOME started because KDE wasn't technically "free software" due to Qt licensing issues.
/they/ want, I'll tell you right now -- I'm going to be kind of pissed off.
RedHat jumped on the Gnome bandwagon, started paying devs, and sort of took the lead. A similar situation occurred with KDE, iirc. The way I see it, the community projects got hijacked by the corporate Linux pushers, and then people are complaining about the stuff that hobby hackers are putting into projects.
If having some "consumer" desktop that gives warm fuzzies to people when they're looking at computers in Best Buy is so damned important, than maybe RedHat, Novel and others ought to just pull an Open Group and write said desktop, rather than attempting to exercise overbearing authority over projects that were started without them.
But I am not now, nor have I ever been an influential figure in f/oss, and my contributions have mostly been fairly insignificant and flown under the radar unless you were specifically looking for them. However, if I ever get around to releasing something intereting that's worth being hijacked by IBM, who for some reason leaves relatively in charge rather than forcing a coupe, makes the project and international sensation and then puts me in a position where people I've never heard of are making demands that I add features to support their "mission critical" b.s. or design it to look the way
To clarify, 'beast' is the slang term for Milwaukee's Best, which is a particularly nasty so-called beer, which costs about $7USD for a 24-pack of cans, which at most schools, at least mine and any other where I ever went to a party, the fraternity houses stock up on to provide for guests at parties who are not special enough to be entitled to the good stuff, or smart enough to know they should bring their own anyway.
When I think of Free Software, I generally think of the community were the developers are the users are the developers. "Open Source" still smacks of the buzzwordism of the late-90s, getting corps. to invest in opening code under the assumption that they'll be able to get free work out of some sort of "community" while lowering their development costs.
What's wrong with the developers working on what the developers are interested in? If I (the royal 'I' here), am not being paid for my time or more code, then "users" should just be glad that 'I' have decided to make the fruits of my labor available to them, too. Perhaps I just don't get this mentality that it's some sort of competition between 'Linux' and Microsoft and Apple, and that we have to compete for desktop marketshare for some stupid ass reason. I just don't really see it as that big of a deal. Maybe for a company like RedHat, it is, but that's not me.
The concept that the developers are 'innovating too much' and 'alienating the user base' just seems akin to someone crashing a frat party and then complaining that all they're allowed to drink is the Beast.
It makes changes too easy, makes hiding what was there before too easy, and it makes telling what's an actual, factual authority and what is lies and deception too easy. I mean, come on -- if the guy actually believes what he wrote in F. 451, then how does this NOT make sense for him to believe? But then again, the Internet's ability to edit information for forge reality has been a major boon for the population of African elephants...
It's no the in vitro that bothers him -- it's the wanking into the cup to get the material that does.
The same way as most everyone else that does -- rich parents set them up with it. Like that Bill Gates guy. Walking into a multi-million dollar trust fund is the sort of thing that enables one to drop out of Harvard and do weird things. Even if he "failed," he wasn't going to end up on the street or flipping burgers.
That or you work for someone else for a while, save diligently, and gather as much knowledge and experience as you can before striking out on your own with some street cred under your belt. I hear that's worked for a few people, too.
If an emo kid slits is wrists, and no one is around to cover My Chemical Romance at his funeral, did the world win or lose?
I hate the term "phone phreaking" -- it just fills my mind with images of Woz wiping out the Blue Box to make crank calls which inevitably involve the phrase, "so, what are you wearing?" while doing horrible things to himself without any hot grits in site.....ewww....
I make no bones about the fact that I'm a liberal arts grad, in English Lit and Classical History. I thought that I wanted to be a Comp Sci and Bio major, but wasn't really happy at it. However, I was a general nerd in jr high and high school.
I taught myself QBASIC in 8th grade, and then got a book on C. I got into Unix, with a FreeBSD 2.2.8 shell account from my dial-up ISP, and later a copy of RH 4.1 from my uncle, because I needed it for GCC. In 10th grade, I found a copy of an F77 manual in my high school library, took a look at it seemed just like BASIC, only less dumb, so I checked it out and followed the examples, did some exercises, and even implemented some of my maths homework in it from time to time, though I usually would just use C.
These days I work at a web hosting company as a systems admin, and hardly ever program in anything other than Perl, though my first job out of high school was working at a physics lab programming IC and spotsize detection in C. Then I went to college and ended up ditching to the English faculty for a number of personal reasons, which had nothing to do with grades or whatnot.. largely, Java killed my interest and I felt like there was more out there than chilling in the air conditioning and never seeing the sun (not to be confused with starting at a Sun workstation).
The point is, if you think that everything in school is supposed to teach you how to do some function in society, then, maybe teaching Java or whatever makes sense. Then again, that's not what my studies were for, and as the chairman of my Classics department, under whom I studied Latin, once said "a liberal arts degree prepares you to fully enjoy the life you'll probably never be able to afford." If you take education as an opportunity to help you grok all, then details of implementation can fade into the background of the theoretical concept. And the OP is talking about engineers, physicists, chemists, etc -- not c.s. majors who are going to become php code monkeys writing shopping cart plugins, but people who actually have data to manipulate which is generated through their other, primary activities. How many of them are trying to be "marketable" as programmers? I'd wager not too many.
Does it really matter what language they're taught in? They should be learning the concepts of programming, not just a language. However, FORTRAN has the benefit of already having a large existing code base and deployment in the field in which students in those particular disciplines are studying. There's no reason for them NOT to learn it, and if they feel like learning Python later, then then may. Python isn't the solution for every god damned thing in the world, even if it can do it.
Cause Von Braun wasn't an SS officer or anything...
Well, Gnome screens are Gnome screens are Gnome screens. However, that particular pages contains screenshots of Sugar as well, which I believe was for the OLPC or some such. But, I've never seen it before to realize just what a hideous, obnoxious mess thing it really is. Thus, for me, it was worth following the link.
I just bought an EeePC last Thursday because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and because I determined that there was a niche to fill between my Toshiba (which is always hooked up to an external monitor, speakers, mouse, graphics tablet and all sorts of other things), and my BlackBerry Storm.I got it at best buy, and so of course all I really had for an option was Windows XP, and I'm not sure how it'd really do with Linux (I suppose if they've been selling Linux versions the hardware should all be compatible, but I spend enough time fussing with Linux on the servers at work to really want to do Linux of FreeBSD for a hobby anymore). I'm actually typing this on it now.
I have yet to really play with Android, even though one of my coworkers has a G1, I just haven't really felt the urge to take it for a spin. The idea of having a "phone" OS on a "computer" seems a tad bit odd to me, but I suppose its just the opposite of the deal with the stripped-down OSX on the iPhone, which I have messed with a bit (I just don't feel like switching to AT&T or I'd probably pick one up... the only thing my Storm really has going for it is the tactile feedback to the depressible touch screen).
Is there anything particularly special about Android over any other Linux distribution, other than the Google name, that makes it well suited for this type of application? From what I've read, it seems to be just a Linux kernel combined with Java phone crap and not really anything particularly special, though as I must admit, I've not really been following it too closely.
I know, right! Without VB, how would we ever trace an IP address?
I want my flying car, damn it!!
Actually, I'll "only" be 25 next month, so I don't really remember being promised flying cars and all that jazz. I remember being promised the internet, and we got that. The future actually seems a little mundane, at least any future I'm likely to live to see. Star Trek, maybe, in another 200 years, but we're not going to get the Jetsons.
At least no one told me I'd be getting all my meals in pill form, although that's probably fairly close to reality in a "Flintsones (chewables) Meet the Jetsons" sort of way.
I don't know, but that sounds like a fairly apt description of most Royalty itself. Good enough for the King and all that...