Of course I know that touché isn't spelled "too-SHAY." I'm indicating my virtual pronunciation. Please pardon my lack of virtual French accent. Now, a-DEW.
> It's hard to believe that only 1/3 of computers engage in copyright infringement. Perhaps most of those 2/3 belong to business or education, but I > would be hard-pressed to find someone that hasn't borrowed a copy of MS Office or copied a song from a friend.
The headline is ridiculously bad, of course. The editors apparently can't form a mental Venn Diagram before publishing.
...but most of it isn't worth archiving anyway. Keeping everything because it might be culturally enlightening someday is "hoarding." It's a mental disorder. Seriously: make your money on it, get your screen credit, release it on DVD, and then just stow it somewhere. If the original footage of Waterboy doesn't last 100 years, my great grandchildren will be none the worse off. The good stuff will stand the test of time due to continual reformatting as time goes by. We're not obligated to make things easier on future anthropologists.
When I was in middle school back in the mid-80s, my school had a new computer lab. It consisted of a dozen Commodore PETs with tape drives. I wrote a little machine language program that redirected the IRQ vector to a little timing routine, and after a half hour of seemingly normal operation would fill the screen with boxes and lock the machine up. Before class one day, I loaded this routine into each PET, then went around the room executing the routine on each machine, waiting about five seconds between each one.
Predictably, halfway through the class, the semicircle of PETs started crashing in a semicircle around the room, with my classmates losing all their half-typed BASIC programs.
The computer instructor really got a kick out of it. I got high-fives instead of detention. He was excited for me to explain how it worked.
> What I mean is something like this: 100 seconds in 1 minute | 100 minutes in 1 hour | > 100 hours in a day etc
I can see the benefit to powers of ten with respect linear distance or volume, because it's common to need to add a bunch of values together. But with daily time, you're usually just adding hours. The math is already easy, so what's the benefit?
> 'We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix,'
Therefore humans are not being used as living batteries for a race of mad robots. Come on, isn't that what they REALLY wanted to learn from the study?
Re:A more interesting question
on
Can Time Slow Down?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> What would be the problem with metric time for example?
You don't say what you mean by "metric" time, but my guess is that you're asking about using a temporal analog of the current systems of linear distance, weight, volume, etc.
If that's what you mean, the problem with that is that our current time system doesn't just measure one thing. It tries to measure the rotation of the earth in one day, and then it tries to measure the time it takes to make a trip around the sun. Even if we throw out the half-assed attempt to cram the lunar cycle into the mix, we still have two values whose quotient is not an integer. That means that any metric time system is going to need to go through the same periodic adjustments that our current system goes through.
> In the last two years, there's been a heated debate over whether Wikipedia is as trustworthy as > Encyclopedia Britannica.
Less than two years ago I wrote an article on Wikipedia about a people that actually existed and have at least a minor degree of historical relevance. That article was intentionally full of (1) plagiarized material (2) intermingled with altered facts (3) peppered with untrue things that I just made up.
As long as that article is still on Wikipedia (and presumably well afterwards), it couldn't possibly be as trustworthy as Britannica. After all, Britannica is written entirely by British people, and they always sound much more clever than those of us from the southeastern US.
Definitely a good book to have around, but if you've got to have a pretty solid grasp of object-oriented techniques already for it to make much sense. It looks like the original poster needs something more fundamental.
> What a disaster... but not because of Vista, but instead because of all the pre-loaded junk.
Lenovo must be buckling under some sort of pressure. I bought an R60 (with XP Home) a little more than a year ago, and I was impressed by how much restraint they showed with the pre-loads. There was practically nothing. I did need to remove the stupid battery icon that you mentioned, and I actually started to LIKE to ThinkVantage stuff. But there were no free AOL trials, no irrelevant media players.
> The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem
No, the really sad thing is that it doesn't just merely take up space; it has a massive footprint in the web ecosystem.
My five-year-old son broke my heart the other day. I helped him get online and started up Firefox. And he said, "I want to use Internet Explorer. It's better than Firefox." Why does he think this? It sure as hell isn't because I'm a bad parent; it's because a lot of websites for kids have areas that only work for IE. When you try to use Firefox, you're told that you need to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer. That's the damn word they use--"upgrade."
Okay, so how do you explain to a Kindergartener that Firefox is better even though he can't see Blues Clues or whatever? Probably the same way you explain it to an adult who can't use Firefox to watch movies on Netflix.
Perhaps the original author should post the code in question to this forum so that we can ascertain whether it's re-implementing quicksort or a brilliant 200-line self-aware neural net factory. I don't think we can be any help at all without seeing the code. Give us a link to the forum, anyway.
Okay, I'm putting myself in your position here. Looking around, find a couple hundred lines of code that were "written" by my boss, but aren't really. I don't wanna make trouble for my boss. I also don't wanna be blamed if it later turns out that somebody really cares about this.
So here's what I'd do. Find something wrong with the code. Something tiny. Find a minor flaw, or a way to slightly optimize it. Whatever, doesn't matter. Then comment your change, wording it in such a way as to indicate that this code existed before you found the "problem" and fixed it.
That way, if nobody cares, nobody needs to say anything. On the other hand, if the whatever hits the fan, your comment will indicate that you made a change to the "work" of somebody else.
> Can't we just find something that divides nicely between the time it takes light to travel between the sun & earth and the amount of time it takes for > the earth to circle the sun once?
We actually can't. The time it takes light to travel between the sun and earth is never the same from second* to second because the earth's orbit is elliptical. And the time it takes the earth to circle the sun is likewise always changing a little at a time.
No, we can't base our time system on the movement of things in the solar system and expect any long-term accuracy. The problem is, we're stuck between needing to know when to sow the grain, which requires a solar measurement system, and needing to synchronize various kinds of electronic communication, which requires a totally different kind of exactitude, based on the rate of decay of radioactive things.
Slashdot Mirror
...finally wrote a rootkit for the universe
> It's "Touché" actually....
Of course I know that touché isn't spelled "too-SHAY." I'm indicating my virtual pronunciation. Please pardon my lack of virtual French accent. Now, a-DEW.
> Theft? Crimes? Does Slashdot now think, an idea can be "property" and/or "stolen"?
Too-SHAY.
> It's hard to believe that only 1/3 of computers engage in copyright infringement. Perhaps most of those 2/3 belong to business or education, but I
> would be hard-pressed to find someone that hasn't borrowed a copy of MS Office or copied a song from a friend.
The headline is ridiculously bad, of course. The editors apparently can't form a mental Venn Diagram before publishing.
> So does it run Linux?
Yes, and I CAN imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.
...but most of it isn't worth archiving anyway. Keeping everything because it might be culturally enlightening someday is "hoarding." It's a mental disorder. Seriously: make your money on it, get your screen credit, release it on DVD, and then just stow it somewhere. If the original footage of Waterboy doesn't last 100 years, my great grandchildren will be none the worse off. The good stuff will stand the test of time due to continual reformatting as time goes by. We're not obligated to make things easier on future anthropologists.
> Now why did I have to parse this as "ORALSE"?
The answer to that question lies deep within your black soul.
It's all syntactic sugar! Just don't take my ternary operator away from me...
> that has the ORELSE operator?
This is Perl we're talking about here. It would be "orels"
...my brother-in-law knows a guy who heard someone say that she thought that Vista wasn't that bad.
When I was in middle school back in the mid-80s, my school had a new computer lab. It consisted of a dozen Commodore PETs with tape drives. I wrote a little machine language program that redirected the IRQ vector to a little timing routine, and after a half hour of seemingly normal operation would fill the screen with boxes and lock the machine up. Before class one day, I loaded this routine into each PET, then went around the room executing the routine on each machine, waiting about five seconds between each one.
Predictably, halfway through the class, the semicircle of PETs started crashing in a semicircle around the room, with my classmates losing all their half-typed BASIC programs.
The computer instructor really got a kick out of it. I got high-fives instead of detention. He was excited for me to explain how it worked.
> What I mean is something like this: 100 seconds in 1 minute | 100 minutes in 1 hour |
> 100 hours in a day etc
I can see the benefit to powers of ten with respect linear distance or volume, because it's common to need to add a bunch of values together. But with daily time, you're usually just adding hours. The math is already easy, so what's the benefit?
> 'We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix,'
Therefore humans are not being used as living batteries for a race of mad robots. Come on, isn't that what they REALLY wanted to learn from the study?
> What would be the problem with metric time for example?
You don't say what you mean by "metric" time, but my guess is that you're asking about using a temporal analog of the current systems of linear distance, weight, volume, etc.
If that's what you mean, the problem with that is that our current time system doesn't just measure one thing. It tries to measure the rotation of the earth in one day, and then it tries to measure the time it takes to make a trip around the sun. Even if we throw out the half-assed attempt to cram the lunar cycle into the mix, we still have two values whose quotient is not an integer. That means that any metric time system is going to need to go through the same periodic adjustments that our current system goes through.
> In the last two years, there's been a heated debate over whether Wikipedia is as trustworthy as
> Encyclopedia Britannica.
Less than two years ago I wrote an article on Wikipedia about a people that actually existed and have at least a minor degree of historical relevance. That article was intentionally full of (1) plagiarized material (2) intermingled with altered facts (3) peppered with untrue things that I just made up.
As long as that article is still on Wikipedia (and presumably well afterwards), it couldn't possibly be as trustworthy as Britannica. After all, Britannica is written entirely by British people, and they always sound much more clever than those of us from the southeastern US.
> There is an old quote in the PERL world: there is more than one right way to do it.
Actually, it's "There is more than one way to do it." I don't think anyone can guarantee that there's more than one RIGHT way to do it.
Definitely a good book to have around, but if you've got to have a pretty solid grasp of object-oriented techniques already for it to make much sense. It looks like the original poster needs something more fundamental.
...The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.
> What a disaster... but not because of Vista, but instead because of all the pre-loaded junk.
Lenovo must be buckling under some sort of pressure. I bought an R60 (with XP Home) a little more than a year ago, and I was impressed by how much restraint they showed with the pre-loads. There was practically nothing. I did need to remove the stupid battery icon that you mentioned, and I actually started to LIKE to ThinkVantage stuff. But there were no free AOL trials, no irrelevant media players.
Somebody must've got to them...
> The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem
No, the really sad thing is that it doesn't just merely take up space; it has a massive footprint in the web ecosystem.
My five-year-old son broke my heart the other day. I helped him get online and started up Firefox. And he said, "I want to use Internet Explorer. It's better than Firefox." Why does he think this? It sure as hell isn't because I'm a bad parent; it's because a lot of websites for kids have areas that only work for IE. When you try to use Firefox, you're told that you need to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer. That's the damn word they use--"upgrade."
Okay, so how do you explain to a Kindergartener that Firefox is better even though he can't see Blues Clues or whatever? Probably the same way you explain it to an adult who can't use Firefox to watch movies on Netflix.
Perhaps the original author should post the code in question to this forum so that we can ascertain whether it's re-implementing quicksort or a brilliant 200-line self-aware neural net factory. I don't think we can be any help at all without seeing the code. Give us a link to the forum, anyway.
Okay, I'm putting myself in your position here. Looking around, find a couple hundred lines of code that were "written" by my boss, but aren't really. I don't wanna make trouble for my boss. I also don't wanna be blamed if it later turns out that somebody really cares about this.
So here's what I'd do. Find something wrong with the code. Something tiny. Find a minor flaw, or a way to slightly optimize it. Whatever, doesn't matter. Then comment your change, wording it in such a way as to indicate that this code existed before you found the "problem" and fixed it.
That way, if nobody cares, nobody needs to say anything. On the other hand, if the whatever hits the fan, your comment will indicate that you made a change to the "work" of somebody else.
> I'd like to know everyone's opinion about which presidential candidate seems most likely to preserve Internet privacy.
"Preserve?"
Bwa ha ha ha!
> Can't we just find something that divides nicely between the time it takes light to travel between the sun & earth and the amount of time it takes for
> the earth to circle the sun once?
We actually can't. The time it takes light to travel between the sun and earth is never the same from second* to second because the earth's orbit is elliptical. And the time it takes the earth to circle the sun is likewise always changing a little at a time.
No, we can't base our time system on the movement of things in the solar system and expect any long-term accuracy. The problem is, we're stuck between needing to know when to sow the grain, which requires a solar measurement system, and needing to synchronize various kinds of electronic communication, which requires a totally different kind of exactitude, based on the rate of decay of radioactive things.
The leap second seemed like a good compromise.
> Duh. (Score:2, Troll)
Oh, come on! That just isn't fair.