Nice, but it's definitely geared to someone who's never written more than a couple dozen lines. This seems to be true of programming languages in general--no decent language overview available unless you're *really* starting from scratch... I learned Scheme and Java this way, and that was fine, but a few languages later now, it's getting old... I want more than a language reference but less than a thousand-page primer.
Benjamin: Wayne! Listen, we need to have a talk about Vanderhoff.
The fact is he's the sponsor and you signed a contract
guaranteeing him certain concessions, one of them being
a spot on the show. Wayne [holding a Pizza Hut box]: Well that's where I see things just
a little differently. Contract or no, I will not bow to
any sponsor. Benjamin: I'm sorry you feel that way, but basically it's the nature
of the beast. Wayne [holding a bag of Doritos]: Maybe I'm wrong on this one, but
for me, the beast doesn't include selling out. Garth, you
know what I'm talking about, right? Garth [wearing head-to-toe Reebok wardrobe]: It's like people only do
these things because they can get paid. And that's just
really sad. Wayne: I can't talk about it anymore; it's giving me a headache. Garth [Dumps two Nuprin pills into Wayne's hand]: Here, take two of these! Wayne: Ah, Nuprin. Little. Yellow. Different. Benjamin: Look, you can stay here in the big leagues and play by the
rules, or you can go back to the farm club in Aurora. It's
your choice. Wayne: [holding a can of Pepsi] Yes, and it's the choice of a new generation.
Actually, I think it would be an interesting move if they went with someone who's *not* in this young-hip demographic--it could actually work well for them. Someone that looks like Joe Internet User could draw people who are concerned about these IE security issues they keep hearing about, won't have IE7 as an option (aren't like 90% of people still running Win98 or 2k--okay, maybe not 90%, but it's significant; I'm on 2k myself), and just in general want a friendlier UI. A friendly, intelligent-but-not-overly-computer-savvy-looking man or woman of about forty-something. Yeah, probably still white and pleasant-looking... I don't know much about marketing, but I could see Opera trying to push a more down-to-earth image rather than the typical "teh new hotness".
1. Why are articles like this accepted? 2. Why are articles like this submitted in the first place?
If either the editor or the submitter had read the "article", and had used minimal brainpower to analyze it critically, he or she would have seen that it's utterly devoid of content, and it wouldn't be sitting here on the front page. Any random page off teh intrawebs would have made a better article.
I've listened to 1 director's comments. It was for the bourne identity. At one part he said he wanted more swears, but the pg13 rating only allowed 3 swears, and eventually he only ended up using 1.
Yeah, self-censorship to achieve a certain rating is an interesting thing, in terms of the hoops you have to jump through. In "Be Cool", the main character references this when he says that if you want to avoid an R rating, you can only use the f-word once in the movie. He comments on this policy by saying "Fuck that!", and indeed, the movie is PG-13 (and there's no more swearing).
Ok, good point, but how large does the average project need to be? Besides an office suite, I think only serious audio/video editing applications, and possibly special purpose scientific/engineering/mathematical software, even have the potential to get "very" big (using a semi-arbitrary threshold for "very"). And games, maybe, but for games, a lot of this is content (as opposed to code), although there are other reasons open source gaming is not (and probably will not ever be) as successful as proprietary gaming. He's arguing that open source projects have limitations, but he's arguing it by looking at an open source project facing possibly the biggest challenges. Most open source projects will never hit issues like this. Some of his criticism still applies, but it's *not* a fair look at open source development in general.
Like PDF? Or are there honestly conferences requiring.docs? I'm honestly curious--my first real introduction to LaTeX was just a couple of days ago (I've been familiar with it and had seen its output for years, but had never actually wintessed it in action), and I was very impressed. Using a word processor to do something similar, even with an equation editor, seems pretty clumsy, and I wonder why conferences might require something like this...
But that's the thing--it doesn't represent all "programs intended for use by the non-programming public". If I were to contribute to an existing open source project, I'd look at just about everything else before looking at OO. OO is scary. It's a bajillion megs big, it encompasses a full office suite, and it's a single project. Sure, you probably don't need to know that much about Calc if you're working on Writer, but they're still tied together. I can't think of any other open source project that's quite as monolithic. I'd much rather work on something twenty times smaller.
And there are plenty of projects that are "intended for use by the non-programming public" that are twenty times smaller. Heck, the open source poster child Firefox is twenty times smaller (assuming binary size roughly correlates with size of code base, which should be fair). Brown raises some interesting points, but I think many of OpenOffice's problems really are unique to OpenOffice.
So I don't know anything about these crazy RSS directories the kids have these days. Do they point to actual RSS feeds or do they copy the contents of the feeds periodically onto their sites (that is, are the listings by value or by reference?). 'Cause if the listings are by reference (and really, this makes more sense), then the guy could write a dozen-line server-side script to resolve this issue:
1. Have a private, unpublished name for the podcast MP3 itself. 2. On each request for the RSS feed URL
a) Generate a random name
b) Create a symlink with this random name to the actual file
(or heck, just rename the real file to this--just make
sure to consider concurrency issues, possibly with
multiple actual source copies)
c) Dynamically create the RSS feed to reflect the new name 3.... 4. Profit!
Resorting to this might be a pain in the butt, but if the guy's got fifteen hundred listeners, it's not a critical resource strain. And now, if someone tries to parse his feed to fish out the actual file name, they'll get something already useless (the file can be renamed or the symlink can be deleted as soon as the MP3 is transferred).
This does not get around the problem of rogue submitters adding different feeds to directories, but if they can't track your content, you should have a lot more bargaining power with the directories (assuming you can get them to care at all) when Joe Hotlinker's podcast is empty.
Actually, come to think of it, couldn't you handle this with rejecting referer headers to requests for the MP3 not from yourself (i.e., not coming directly from your RSS feed)? I don't know much about referer headers either, but I know that image hotlinkers are often dealt with in this way by some sites (sometimes by being served some disturbing images)...
A lot of people are saying, "Of course they disabled your access: security issues." But if someone leaving a company were truly intending to go on a h4x0ring spree, wouldn't he or she do this *before* giving the two weeks' notice? Just sayin'...
While I enjoy freely available and searchable lyrics, I must admit 9 out of 10 times I regretted having looked up the lyrics, it kinda ruins my feeling once I understand every single word and can sing-a-long. Am I the only one having this kind of 'empty-yet-lyric-filled' feeling?
<burn karma, burn>Maybe you should listen to songs with less stupid lyrics?</burn karma, burn>
I only partially agree. Open Source software does have problems. On the other hand, hardware compatibility is hardly a fair target. It's an important issue, but OSS people are reverse-engineering drivers in many cases, instead of having these handed to them by the hardware manufacturer. Actual level of hardware support aside, you can argue, "Oh, Linux is not ready for Joe Consumer because of limited hardware support from manufacturers," but it's just plain ignorant to argue "Oh, Linux is not ready for Joe Consumer because Open Source programmers are teh suck".
And to the editors, please don't post any more articles fromt this guy. This barely contained anything about OSS (certainly nothing intelligent), and he's not nearly as funny and clever as he seems to think he is.
Re:Question for all the coders out there..
on
How to Write Comments
·
· Score: 2, Informative
With 1280x1024 being a relatively common display resolution used by developers these days I don't think it is such a big deal to have an extra line for the braces
<disgruntled 1024x768 coder> How big a deal it is depends a lot on the kind of code you're writing. If you've got lots of small ifs, tight loops, and small functions, the braces *do* take up a significant chunk of screen real estate. </disgruntled 1024x768 coder>
Slashdot Mirror
Nice, but it's definitely geared to someone who's never written more than a couple dozen lines. This seems to be true of programming languages in general--no decent language overview available unless you're *really* starting from scratch... I learned Scheme and Java this way, and that was fine, but a few languages later now, it's getting old... I want more than a language reference but less than a thousand-page primer.
The sad thing is that in twenty years we will see scenes exactly like it only they won't be parodies.
Actually, I think it would be an interesting move if they went with someone who's *not* in this young-hip demographic--it could actually work well for them. Someone that looks like Joe Internet User could draw people who are concerned about these IE security issues they keep hearing about, won't have IE7 as an option (aren't like 90% of people still running Win98 or 2k--okay, maybe not 90%, but it's significant; I'm on 2k myself), and just in general want a friendlier UI. A friendly, intelligent-but-not-overly-computer-savvy-looking man or woman of about forty-something. Yeah, probably still white and pleasant-looking... I don't know much about marketing, but I could see Opera trying to push a more down-to-earth image rather than the typical "teh new hotness".
Oh for the love of Pete! If you're gonna be enough of a douche to put accents on your foreign words, at least use the right accents: it's 'très'.
It's not any different, but that's the point:
1. Why are articles like this accepted?
2. Why are articles like this submitted in the first place?
If either the editor or the submitter had read the "article", and had used minimal brainpower to analyze it critically, he or she would have seen that it's utterly devoid of content, and it wouldn't be sitting here on the front page. Any random page off teh intrawebs would have made a better article.
I'm not saying it's not fair, I'm saying it misses the point to discuss limitations that most projects will never see...
Yeah, self-censorship to achieve a certain rating is an interesting thing, in terms of the hoops you have to jump through. In "Be Cool", the main character references this when he says that if you want to avoid an R rating, you can only use the f-word once in the movie. He comments on this policy by saying "Fuck that!", and indeed, the movie is PG-13 (and there's no more swearing).
Ok, good point, but how large does the average project need to be? Besides an office suite, I think only serious audio/video editing applications, and possibly special purpose scientific/engineering/mathematical software, even have the potential to get "very" big (using a semi-arbitrary threshold for "very"). And games, maybe, but for games, a lot of this is content (as opposed to code), although there are other reasons open source gaming is not (and probably will not ever be) as successful as proprietary gaming. He's arguing that open source projects have limitations, but he's arguing it by looking at an open source project facing possibly the biggest challenges. Most open source projects will never hit issues like this. Some of his criticism still applies, but it's *not* a fair look at open source development in general.
Like PDF? Or are there honestly conferences requiring .docs? I'm honestly curious--my first real introduction to LaTeX was just a couple of days ago (I've been familiar with it and had seen its output for years, but had never actually wintessed it in action), and I was very impressed. Using a word processor to do something similar, even with an equation editor, seems pretty clumsy, and I wonder why conferences might require something like this...
But that's the thing--it doesn't represent all "programs intended for use by the non-programming public". If I were to contribute to an existing open source project, I'd look at just about everything else before looking at OO. OO is scary. It's a bajillion megs big, it encompasses a full office suite, and it's a single project. Sure, you probably don't need to know that much about Calc if you're working on Writer, but they're still tied together. I can't think of any other open source project that's quite as monolithic. I'd much rather work on something twenty times smaller.
And there are plenty of projects that are "intended for use by the non-programming public" that are twenty times smaller. Heck, the open source poster child Firefox is twenty times smaller (assuming binary size roughly correlates with size of code base, which should be fair). Brown raises some interesting points, but I think many of OpenOffice's problems really are unique to OpenOffice.
They might be able to do drives that read both even if they were different sizes--look at business card CDs...
This does not get around the problem of rogue submitters adding different feeds to directories, but if they can't track your content, you should have a lot more bargaining power with the directories (assuming you can get them to care at all) when Joe Hotlinker's podcast is empty.
Actually, come to think of it, couldn't you handle this with rejecting referer headers to requests for the MP3 not from yourself (i.e., not coming directly from your RSS feed)? I don't know much about referer headers either, but I know that image hotlinkers are often dealt with in this way by some sites (sometimes by being served some disturbing images)...
That and the seizure-inducing mouseover behavior on the main paragraphs (at least in Firefox)...
A lot of people are saying, "Of course they disabled your access: security issues." But if someone leaving a company were truly intending to go on a h4x0ring spree, wouldn't he or she do this *before* giving the two weeks' notice? Just sayin'...
A dupe?
<burn karma, burn>Maybe you should listen to songs with less stupid lyrics?</burn karma, burn>
Kidding.
You know, it's dangerous to assume your memory is zero-initialized...
Mod parent up. Come on, do it. And hell, I'll even post non-AC in support.
And they dress poorly.
It's the number one dupe of the year.
Misinformation! It's only 63%!
Well, I was kidding, but you do have a point. But don't you have RAID0 and RAID1 backwards? RAID0 provides no redundancy. RAID1 does.
I only partially agree. Open Source software does have problems. On the other hand, hardware compatibility is hardly a fair target. It's an important issue, but OSS people are reverse-engineering drivers in many cases, instead of having these handed to them by the hardware manufacturer. Actual level of hardware support aside, you can argue, "Oh, Linux is not ready for Joe Consumer because of limited hardware support from manufacturers," but it's just plain ignorant to argue "Oh, Linux is not ready for Joe Consumer because Open Source programmers are teh suck".
And to the editors, please don't post any more articles fromt this guy. This barely contained anything about OSS (certainly nothing intelligent), and he's not nearly as funny and clever as he seems to think he is.
<disgruntled 1024x768 coder>
How big a deal it is depends a lot on the kind of code you're writing. If you've got lots of small ifs, tight loops, and small functions, the braces *do* take up a significant chunk of screen real estate.
</disgruntled 1024x768 coder>