Re:Why do we count in base 10 instead of binary...
on
Why Do We Use x86 CPUs?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Binary, hex, and base 12 aren't "natural" since we have 10 fingers to count.
That being said, if our ancesters don't use thumbs or used them as carry bits or used them to extend our counting range to 32 we would all be using octal.
Book stores have a huge inventory and a huge number of surplus books that need to be sold at cut-rate prices. There's a lot of waste in the system. Worse than that, despite all the inventory, book stores don't always have the books you need (they have a limited property size). Even worse than that, because storing books or printing them on demand at the big IBIS places is so expensive, books go out of print if they're not popular enough and if you happen to want/need one of these rare gems, tough bananas.
These machines may be slow and they may not be as cost effective as the IBIS books, but they get rid of a whole lot of waste and they allow for a near infinite selection of books. And is waiting 1 minute really that bad? If you're in a book store during the rush hour, it could easily take 10 times that to go through the line and pay for your books.
It's a trade off that works out well for bookstores (at least until someone comes us with a cheap laser printer that does book bindings and covers at comparable speeds or someone comes up with an electronic book reader that is cheap, light, readable, and has all the tangible qualities of hard bound books).
It's not much different between the FPGA versus ASIC trade off in chip design. FPGAs are expensive per unit and slow and take up a lot of space, but they can be reprogrammed quickly and cheaply using cheap tools. ASICs are cheap per unit and fast and compact, but they require a huge cost and time overhead to reprogram and require expensive equipment to do it. So FPGAs are fanatic for one-offs and experimenting, while ASICs are fantastic for bulk production that rarely changes. This is one reason, many manufactures initially ship using FPGAs (even though they cost more and take up more space) and ship to ASICs once they know they have a winner.
Once you can get your head around ultrafilters, it's really a cool system and, like complex numbers, can allow you to arrive at conclusions that you would have a hard time arrive at without them. But like complex numbers, they don't "really exist". They're just a useful model that helps us solve and understand real-life problems.
Same here. I've been using my Timex
Sinclair for just as long. Same problems
with column widths, but I'm okay with
it. One downside that does bother me
though is that running Linux on it
requires that you swap to tape *a lot*
and you have to constantly press "play"
and change tapes. XFCE takes *forever* to
start up. I've been considering
upgrading my memory but at one dollar
a kilobyte, I just can't afford it.
Do you know of any good suppliers?
I think the key problem with climate change reporting is that it's portrayed as a "you're with us or with them" point of view and if you don't believe the popular dogma, you're one of "them". The problem is, there isn't only one question. Besides the "is it real?" and "are we responsible?" questions, there's also:
* If it is real, is it permanent and not just an earth/solar cycle?
* If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)
* If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done? (Even if the cause is greenhouse gases, it may make more sense to grow the necessary number of forests to absorb the gas as our gas output increases or find some other way to solidify/trap greenhouse gases.)
* If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).
Unfortunately, the issue has become so politicized that these other more important questions are being drowned out or viewed as "avoiding the real issue" by the dogmatists.
> In algorithm kicks out the belief that you must be a terrorist, > and anytime you go anywhere it's gonna beep and you get cold hands and lube once again.
Basically, if the courts don't challenge it and the laws are taken to their natural conclusion, the US will become Brazil (the movie, not the country): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)
What if this conversation were taking place in person or by phone instead of email?
I understand the intent of the law, but it's so easy to bypass because most decisions and discussions are made outside the computer in most businesses. And if a decision is going to have legal reprocussions, you can be sure that it won't have a paper trail. I don't see how this law can be enforced, unless you record all voice conversation made by all employees (inside and outside the office) and ensure that employees can't turn off the recorder.
Depending on the building and number of employees in the company, it may be easier than that. At the last place I worked, you needed a card reader to get into the office areas (on different floors), but the stairwell was shared with other companies in the building. If you wanted to "break in", all you needed to do was carry some large boxes and fumble for the "access card" in your pocket. Without fail, someone would always open the door (to be nice) within a few minutes and not ask further questions as long as you say "thank you" (after all, you're carrying a load and since you were looking for an access card, you must have one. Right?).
A problem with this approach is that many problems can't be solved in a day (unless you've experienced the same problem before), but they can be solved in a week or a month. Giving a 20 year patent for something that can be independently invented in a week doesn't make sense.
Another key problem is that if there are 6 obvious ways of solving the problem and you hire 5 experts, you'll let one slip.
Another problem is that how do you know you've hired the right experts? Some problems are dead obvious to anyone who knows graph theory, but opaque to someone that knows cryptography. If the problem is presented as a cryptographic problem, you'll hire the wrong experts and the experts will agree that it's not obvious.
Another problem is that it doesn't capture the case of patenting file formats since there are an infinite number of ways of encoding them but only one way to interoperate with them (the patent pending way).
Another problem is patenting standard business methods. Something nonobvious (because of regulations) was done "in the real world" but it gets patented because it's done in a computer.
The key problem with patents is the basic assumption. If they can be reinvented independently, then the patent added no value to society and adds a cost to society, so the patent should be invalidated. If it's required for interoperability or for legal regulations or common business practices, it adds no value and adds a cost to society, so the patent should be invalidated.
I used to work in an office that had one cubicle per person. It was extremely noisy -- not from sales or tech support since they were far from us -- but from other developers. The problem with cubicles is that people automatically assume that just because any neighbours that they aren't there, so they talk louder. When the walls come down, you see your neighbours, so you tend to talk in a quieter voice. This is precisely what happened when the walls came down. The whole development area was *a lot* more quiet and it was a lot easier to concentrate.
Worse than that. The US already has an alarmingly high incident of childhood obesity.
Playing tag and other active games is a good way to get children to exercise. especially in this age of "why should I bother doing the hard work of tag/soccer/tennis/football/... when my Nintendo has tag/soccer/tennis/football/... installed on it"? Besides that, it's one of the few things that are fun for children that is actually good for them.
Sure you'd get hurt playing these "risky" games, but if you don't exercise, you'll more more liable to injury from nonrisky games (i.e. you don't learn to fall properly or recover your balance) and more likely to get heart issues or diabetes in later life.
I'm on the fence on the GPL3 issue, but the comment "I think that the GPL should not used to fight this. Let the Marketplace fight this." is easy to dismiss. The market was mostly open source back in the 1970s and it *did* decide the issue -- it wanted proprietary software. In the mid 80s (when the GPL was created) there was virtually no free software available for the PC. I have some computer magazines from the time which interview Stallman on the GNU manifesto and the GPL. They portray him as an a idealistic windmill chaser who was doomed to fail since "free software doesn't work in the real world". Thankfully, they were wrong and systems such as Linux are thriving.
At the moment, I don't think that the DRM will be the threat that Stallman thinks it will be. But if DMCA laws become stricter and people are willing to swallow those restrictions since they think that have no other choice (as they did in the mid 1980s), then it will be a serious threat to Linux that needs to be guarded against. After all, what's the point of being able to see the code for Linux if you can't run it anywhere without contacting a company for a new "time limitted" key that authorizes you to update the kernel?
There is actually a simple compromise within the GPL 3 itself that could satisfy both of you. The GPL 3 has a clause that says something to the effect that if you write a GPLed app that provides the source code of the program through a webservice, then anyone who uses your code can't take out that feature. This closes the "ASP hole" for application developers who care about it, and leaves the "ASP hole" open for the rest of us who don't care if you customize your application and don't make your changes public.
Suppose the GPL3 contained a similar clause wrt to DRM? If your original application allows private keys to be kept *without providing a key generator with the source* (I'm not sure the best way of specifying it) then DRM to lock out your source is okay. Otherwise, the pro-keygen clause kicks in.
The trick is to make the GPL3 virtually idential to the GPL2 so as to make adoption a no brainer, but provide additional features that allow you the flexibility to provide more protection for your code if you desire.
> Pair programming can be seen as a kind of code review, but with the reviewer in equal position with the programmer.
It depends on the personalities. It likely works well if you have a uniform team, but it you have a diverse team (which is a good thing since your weeknesses are compensated by someone else's strengths), it can be very suboptimal. For instance, if you put a reflexive analytical introvert with a shoot from the hip intuitive extrovert, the extrovert will more than likely steamroll over most of the input of the introvert and feel validated because the shoot from the hip extovert thinks that the code has the approval of the reflexive analytical programmer.
In the case of a code review, the reflexive analytical introvert gets to do things the way he/she wanted to do and gets input during the review from the extrovert if there are alternate ways of doing things. More than likely, it's also learning experience for the shoot from the hip programmer to program more safely. In the reverse case, the shoot from the hip intuitive extrovert gets to do things the way he/she wants and gets validation that that code is safe and handles all conditions. It's also likely a learning experience for the reflexive introvert to see that "crazy new techniques" can actually be better.
I think you're missing the important thing about open source. Because you have the source, you can hire any number of companies to maintain the source if you don't like one vendor. You can even hire two or three companies to maintain at the same time to provide extra redundancy and provide assurances that no one company is able to push you around.
How about closed source? Take the VISTA situation, for instance. If the source code was closed and the company lost interest or went out of business. It would be stuck holding the bags for a product that they didn't have the source code for. Is it better to be stuck with no solution or have the chance to recover and fix things? Is it better to be trapped to the whims of a single company or have the choice of picking the company that treats you best?
Even if (closed source) VISTA where under code escrow agreements, there would be no guarentee that the code was immediately compilable or documented on how to set it up in the government's computers or that the code could be gotten without legal battles. It's a huge headaches and delay in being able to make customizations and fix security issues and the end result is that you're have a limitted form of open source where only you have the write to change the software.
> I started programming when I was ten, and I did it by hand-converting Z80 assembly > language
I doubt that's when you *first* tried programming. Since you're old school, I'm willing to bet that you started programming the way most programmers did, by typing the following program:
10 print "Hello World" 20 goto 10
The barrier to entry was trivial and you likely got excited that you were able to get the computer to do something and *slowly* advanced from there to more advanced programs that did something useful.
On Linux, it's just as easy as the old days (no apt-gets required). Pull up a command prompt and type:
while [ -z "" ] ; do
echo 'Hello World' done
That's the equivalent program to the old "Goto 10" program. The main problem isn't that languages aren't available, it's that expectations have increased and the belief that you have to get it perfect the first time or you're not cut out for it.
Newbies are no long satisfied with useless programs that teach you the foundations or finding flaws in their work, so they get frustrated when they see the source code of things like the Linux kernel and realize that they have no idea what it's doing. So programming seems out of reach. Unfortunately, those "useless" fundamentals are needed in much the same way as learning the scales is needed if you want to play an instrument.
Any ERP worth its salt has a Unix port and Linux is easy to port from Unix, so this shouldn't be a problem. Since 2000, most ERPs have moved towards web based solutions, so this should be even less of a problem on the client side. WINE is just a wrong-headed approach. It's nothing more than a stop-gap for a reverse engineered moving target that changes at Microsoft's whims and for Microsoft's convenience. Win32 is also becoming less and less relevant in the MS world as.NET starts exerting its influence. I'd have a hard time justifying Linux for enterprise-wide deployment if I had to rely on WINE as an argument. If your ERP is deep in bed with Microsoft and you don't plan on changing, there it's likely that your vendor is also deeply int.NET. If that's the case, then its your job to petition that your vendor to fully support Mono 1.x or Mono 2.x on a non-Microsoft platform. It's not perfect, but it will buy you freedom and security. If they don't do that, then I strongly suggest on finding a vendor that isn't so shortsighed and ignores its customers and migrate towards that vendor. Ultimately, you'd be better off.
For the record, this privacy law definitely makes writing inhouse programs for the enterprise interesting since you can't automatically assume that just because you have information available for use in the company, that you reuse it for another use within the company, even if the typical employee would expect such reuse to happen. You have to be explicit when you collect it or go back to people and get their permission after the fact about the new use. If they balk, you can't use that info. Period.
In the case of the business cards, if you place "please refer me " on your cards, your contacts could likely get away with putting it on jigsaw without issues. But if it's a plain card given with the explicit purpose of you being contacted by this other person, your contact and jigsaw would be out of luck.
Unfortunately, you have bigger things to worry about than jigsaw. Apparently another company has published far more personal information about you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Comics
Re:Here's another problem with Gnome branding
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's absolutely necessary.
Think about it. If you run GNOME on a distro that uses the default GNOME applications, you'll see this on your menu item:
Epiphany Web Browser
but if you run Ubuntu, you'll see:
Firefox Web Browser
These are *different* apps with different features and limitations so they should not be given the same name (i.e. GNOME Web Browser) even if the naming convention is consistent within a distribution. By force-fitting the branding, you're eliminating the possibility that GNOME can change its mind about web browsers and you're making it difficult to support GNOME. And it confuses novices who buy "GNOME for dummies" books and expect one thing to work and has a different result because they're getting another app.
Let's extend this a bit further. Suppose I want to run Firefox, Epiphany, Opera, and Konqueror. My menu would look like:
Epiphany Web Browser Firefox Web Browser Opera Web Browser Konqueror Web Browser
All these options are available and even a new user on my machine that only knew one of these browsers would see that they are all web browsers.
What's wrong with unique names anyway? Is Excel any more descriptive than iLife or OpenOffice? None make sense, but all are well known. People like unique names since they're easy to remember. And for people who don't know what these apps mean, the old "OpenOffice Word Processor"/"OpenOffice Spreadsheet"/... menu items should give them all the information they need to know.
The key thing is, any language that has poetry and metaphor, is ambigious by its very nature because these things tend to create multiple meanings for a single noun or verb or phases. Any language with slang like "so hot it's cool" or "so bad it's good" (i.e. most languages) is also ambigious.
Since most popular languages have flaws and no-one wants to use unpopular unambigious languanges, it makes most sense to settle on the most popular language (which tends to absorb concepts from all languages) and work with that (even if it means rewriting contracts every 100 years as different languages go into fashion).
As a side note, the GPL has several official translations.
Slashdot Mirror
Binary, hex, and base 12 aren't "natural" since we have 10 fingers to count.
That being said, if our ancesters don't use thumbs or used them as carry bits or used them to extend our counting range to 32 we would all be using octal.
I think you're missing the point.
Book stores have a huge inventory and a huge number of surplus books that need to be sold at cut-rate prices. There's a lot of waste in the system. Worse than that, despite all the inventory, book stores don't always have the books you need (they have a limited property size). Even worse than that, because storing books or printing them on demand at the big IBIS places is so expensive, books go out of print if they're not popular enough and if you happen to want/need one of these rare gems, tough bananas.
These machines may be slow and they may not be as cost effective as the IBIS books, but they get rid of a whole lot of waste and they allow for a near infinite selection of books. And is waiting 1 minute really that bad? If you're in a book store during the rush hour, it could easily take 10 times that to go through the line and pay for your books.
It's a trade off that works out well for bookstores (at least until someone comes us with a cheap laser printer that does book bindings and covers at comparable speeds or someone comes up with an electronic book reader that is cheap, light, readable, and has all the tangible qualities of hard bound books).
It's not much different between the FPGA versus ASIC trade off in chip design. FPGAs are expensive per unit and slow and take up a lot of space, but they can be reprogrammed quickly and cheaply using cheap tools. ASICs are cheap per unit and fast and compact, but they require a huge cost and time overhead to reprogram and require expensive equipment to do it. So FPGAs are fanatic for one-offs and experimenting, while ASICs are fantastic for bulk production that rarely changes. This is one reason, many manufactures initially ship using FPGAs (even though they cost more and take up more space) and ship to ASICs once they know they have a winner.
Absolutely. It's also possible to extend the real number system to support something else physicists use all the time, infinitesimals and infinites:s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_analysi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_numbers
Once you can get your head around ultrafilters, it's really a cool system and, like complex numbers, can allow you to arrive at conclusions that you would have a hard time arrive at without them. But like complex numbers, they don't "really exist". They're just a useful model that helps us solve and understand real-life problems.
Same here. I've been using my Timex
Sinclair for just as long. Same problems
with column widths, but I'm okay with
it. One downside that does bother me
though is that running Linux on it
requires that you swap to tape *a lot*
and you have to constantly press "play"
and change tapes. XFCE takes *forever* to
start up. I've been considering
upgrading my memory but at one dollar
a kilobyte, I just can't afford it.
Do you know of any good suppliers?
I think the key problem with climate change reporting is that it's portrayed as a "you're with us or with them" point of view and if you don't believe the popular dogma, you're one of "them". The problem is, there isn't only one question. Besides the "is it real?" and "are we responsible?" questions, there's also:
* If it is real, is it permanent and not just an earth/solar cycle?
* If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)
* If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done? (Even if the cause is greenhouse gases, it may make more sense to grow the necessary number of forests to absorb the gas as our gas output increases or find some other way to solidify/trap greenhouse gases.)
* If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).
Unfortunately, the issue has become so politicized that these other more important questions are being drowned out or viewed as "avoiding the real issue" by the dogmatists.
> In algorithm kicks out the belief that you must be a terrorist,
> and anytime you go anywhere it's gonna beep and you get cold hands and lube once again.
Basically, if the courts don't challenge it and the laws are taken to their natural conclusion, the US will become Brazil (the movie, not the country):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)
Not a fun place to live.
What if this conversation were taking place in person or by phone instead of email?
I understand the intent of the law, but it's so easy to bypass
because most decisions and discussions are made outside the computer
in most businesses. And if a decision is going to have legal reprocussions,
you can be sure that it won't have a paper trail. I don't see how
this law can be enforced, unless you record all voice conversation
made by all employees (inside and outside the office) and ensure that
employees can't turn off the recorder.
Depending on the building and number of employees in the company, it may be easier
than that. At the last place I worked, you needed a card reader to get into the
office areas (on different floors), but the stairwell was shared with other companies
in the building. If you wanted to "break in", all you needed to do was carry some
large boxes and fumble for the "access card" in your pocket. Without fail, someone
would always open the door (to be nice) within a few minutes and not ask further
questions as long as you say "thank you" (after all, you're carrying a load and
since you were looking for an access card, you must have one. Right?).
A problem with this approach is that many problems can't be solved in a day (unless you've experienced the same problem before), but they can be solved in a week or a month. Giving a 20 year patent for something that can be independently invented in a week doesn't make sense.
Another key problem is that if there are 6 obvious ways of solving the problem and you hire 5 experts, you'll let one slip.
Another problem is that how do you know you've hired the right experts? Some problems are dead obvious to anyone who knows graph theory, but opaque to someone that knows cryptography. If the problem is presented as a cryptographic problem, you'll hire the wrong experts and the experts will agree that it's not obvious.
Another problem is that it doesn't capture the case of patenting file formats since there are an infinite number of ways of encoding them but only one way to interoperate with them (the patent pending way).
Another problem is patenting standard business methods. Something nonobvious (because of regulations) was done "in the real world" but it gets patented because it's done in a computer.
The key problem with patents is the basic assumption. If they can be reinvented independently, then the patent added no value to society and adds a cost to society, so the patent should be invalidated. If it's required for interoperability or for legal regulations or common business practices, it adds no value and adds a cost to society, so the patent should be invalidated.
Agreed, but for other reasons.
I used to work in an office that had one cubicle per person. It was extremely noisy -- not from sales or tech support since they were far from us -- but from other developers. The problem with cubicles is that people automatically assume that just because any neighbours that they aren't there, so they talk louder. When the walls come down, you see your neighbours, so you tend to talk in a quieter voice. This is precisely what happened when the walls came down. The whole development area was *a lot* more quiet and it was a lot easier to concentrate.
Agreed. There is at least one good use of the BLINK tag:e r's_cat_-_BLINK_tag.gif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Schr%C3%B6ding
Worse than that. The US already has an alarmingly high incident of childhood obesity.
Playing tag and other active games is a good way to get children to exercise. especially in this age of "why should I bother doing the hard work of tag/soccer/tennis/football/... when my Nintendo has tag/soccer/tennis/football/... installed on it"? Besides that, it's one of the few things that are fun for children that is actually good for them.
Sure you'd get hurt playing these "risky" games, but if you don't exercise, you'll more more liable to injury from nonrisky games (i.e. you don't learn to fall properly or recover your balance) and more likely to get heart issues or diabetes in later life.
The full story is explained here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDckbqhpW8
I'm on the fence on the GPL3 issue, but the comment "I think that the GPL should not used to fight this. Let the Marketplace fight this." is easy to dismiss. The market was mostly open source back in the 1970s and it *did* decide the issue -- it wanted proprietary software. In the mid 80s (when the GPL was created) there was virtually no free software available for the PC. I have some computer magazines from the time which interview Stallman on the GNU manifesto and the GPL. They portray him as an a idealistic windmill chaser who was doomed to fail since "free software doesn't work in the real world". Thankfully, they were wrong and systems such as Linux are thriving.
At the moment, I don't think that the DRM will be the threat that Stallman thinks it will be. But if DMCA laws become stricter and people are willing to swallow those restrictions since they think that have no other choice (as they did in the mid 1980s), then it will be a serious threat to Linux that needs to be guarded against. After all, what's the point of being able to see the code for Linux if you can't run it anywhere without contacting a company for a new "time limitted" key that authorizes you to update the kernel?
There is actually a simple compromise within the GPL 3 itself that could satisfy both of you. The GPL 3 has a clause that says something to the effect that if you write a GPLed app that provides the source code of the program through a webservice, then anyone who uses your code can't take out that feature. This closes the "ASP hole" for application developers who care about it, and leaves the "ASP hole" open for the rest of us who don't care if you customize your application and don't make your changes public.
Suppose the GPL3 contained a similar clause wrt to DRM? If your original application allows private keys to be kept *without providing a key generator with the source* (I'm not sure the best way of specifying it) then DRM to lock out your source is okay. Otherwise, the pro-keygen clause kicks in.
The trick is to make the GPL3 virtually idential to the GPL2 so as to make adoption a no brainer, but provide additional features that allow you the flexibility to provide more protection for your code if you desire.
> Pair programming can be seen as a kind of code review, but with the reviewer in equal position with the programmer.
It depends on the personalities. It likely works well if you have a uniform team, but it you have a diverse team (which is a good thing since your weeknesses are compensated by someone else's strengths), it can be very suboptimal. For instance, if you put a reflexive analytical introvert with a shoot from the hip intuitive extrovert, the extrovert will more than likely steamroll over most of the input of the introvert and feel validated because the shoot from the hip extovert thinks that the code has the approval of the reflexive analytical programmer.
In the case of a code review, the reflexive analytical introvert gets to do things the way he/she wanted to do and gets input during the review from the extrovert if there are alternate ways of doing things. More than likely, it's also learning experience for the shoot from the hip programmer to program more safely. In the reverse case, the shoot from the hip intuitive extrovert gets to do things the way he/she wants and gets validation that that code is safe and handles all conditions. It's also likely a learning experience for the reflexive introvert to see that "crazy new techniques" can actually be better.
I think you're missing the important thing about open source. Because you have the source, you can hire any number of companies to maintain the source if you don't like one vendor. You can even hire two or three companies to maintain at the same time to provide extra redundancy and provide assurances that no one company is able to push you around.
How about closed source? Take the VISTA situation, for instance. If the source code was closed and the company lost interest or went out of business. It would be stuck holding the bags for a product that they didn't have the source code for. Is it better to be stuck with no solution or have the chance to recover and fix things? Is it better to be trapped to the whims of a single company or have the choice of picking the company that treats you best?
Even if (closed source) VISTA where under code escrow agreements, there would be no guarentee that the code was immediately compilable or documented on how to set it up in the government's computers or that the code could be gotten without legal battles. It's a huge headaches and delay in being able to make customizations and fix security issues and the end result is that you're have a limitted form of open source where only you have the write to change the software.
> I started programming when I was ten, and I did it by hand-converting Z80 assembly
> language
I doubt that's when you *first* tried programming. Since you're old school, I'm willing to bet that you started programming the way most programmers did, by typing the following program:
10 print "Hello World"
20 goto 10
The barrier to entry was trivial and you likely got excited that you were able to get the computer to do something and *slowly* advanced from there to more advanced programs that did something useful.
On Linux, it's just as easy as the old days (no apt-gets required). Pull up a command prompt and type:
while [ -z "" ] ; do
echo 'Hello World'
done
That's the equivalent program to the old "Goto 10" program. The main problem isn't that languages aren't available, it's that expectations have increased and the belief that you have to get it perfect the first time or you're not cut out for it.
Newbies are no long satisfied with useless programs that teach you the foundations or finding flaws in their work, so they get frustrated when they see the source code of things like the Linux kernel and realize that they have no idea what it's doing. So programming seems out of reach. Unfortunately, those "useless" fundamentals are needed in much the same way as learning the scales is needed if you want to play an instrument.
Any ERP worth its salt has a Unix port and Linux is easy to port from Unix, so this shouldn't be a problem. Since 2000, most ERPs have moved towards web based solutions, so this should be even less of a problem on the client side. WINE is just a wrong-headed approach. It's nothing more than a stop-gap for a reverse engineered moving target that changes at Microsoft's whims and for Microsoft's convenience. Win32 is also becoming less and less relevant in the MS world as .NET starts exerting its influence. I'd have a hard time justifying Linux for enterprise-wide deployment if I had to rely on WINE as an argument. If your ERP is deep in bed with Microsoft and you don't plan on changing, there it's likely that your vendor is also deeply int .NET. If that's the case, then its your job to petition that your vendor to fully support Mono 1.x or Mono 2.x on a non-Microsoft platform. It's not perfect, but it will buy you freedom and security. If they don't do that, then I strongly suggest on finding a vendor that isn't so shortsighed and ignores its customers and migrate towards that vendor. Ultimately, you'd be better off.
s p , http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/originalContent /0,289142,sid4_gci817266,00.html )
> often NONE of them support Linux.
Really. How about the following list: IBM, SAP, Oracle Corp. PeopleSoft ERP , and Lotus?
(see http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1730276,00.a
It would also be illegal in Canada too:_ Protection_and_Electronic_Documents_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Information
http://www.privacyinfo.ca/
For the record, this privacy law definitely makes writing inhouse programs for the enterprise interesting since you can't automatically assume that just because you have information available for use in the company, that you reuse it for another use within the company, even if the typical employee would expect such reuse to happen. You have to be explicit when you collect it or go back to people and get their permission after the fact about the new use. If they balk, you can't use that info. Period.
In the case of the business cards, if you place "please refer me " on your cards, your contacts could likely get away with putting it on jigsaw without issues. But if it's a plain card given with the explicit purpose of you being contacted by this other person, your contact and jigsaw would be out of luck.
Unfortunately, you have bigger things to worry about than jigsaw. Apparently another company has published far more personal information about you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Comics
It's absolutely necessary.
Think about it. If you run GNOME on a distro that uses the default GNOME applications, you'll see this on your menu item:
Epiphany Web Browser
but if you run Ubuntu, you'll see:
Firefox Web Browser
These are *different* apps with different features and limitations so they should not be given the same name (i.e. GNOME Web Browser) even if the naming convention is consistent within a distribution. By force-fitting the branding, you're eliminating the possibility that GNOME can change its mind about web browsers and you're making it difficult to support GNOME. And it confuses novices who buy "GNOME for dummies" books and expect one thing to work and has a different result because they're getting another app.
Let's extend this a bit further. Suppose I want to run Firefox, Epiphany, Opera, and Konqueror. My menu would look like:
Epiphany Web Browser
Firefox Web Browser
Opera Web Browser
Konqueror Web Browser
All these options are available and even a new user on my machine that only knew one of these browsers would see that they are all web browsers.
What's wrong with unique names anyway? Is Excel any more descriptive than iLife or OpenOffice? None make sense, but all are well known. People like unique names since they're easy to remember. And for people who don't know what these apps mean, the old "OpenOffice Word Processor"/"OpenOffice Spreadsheet"/... menu items should give them all the information they need to know.
I think so, Brain, but where are we going to find duct tape and a pink tutu at this time of night?
> Why are laws written in english anyway? English is ambiguous,
Seeing that few judges, laywers, or lay people understand Lojban ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban ), there isn't much choice.
The key thing is, any language that has poetry and metaphor, is ambigious by its very nature because these things tend to create multiple meanings for a single noun or verb or phases. Any language with slang like "so hot it's cool" or "so bad it's good" (i.e. most languages) is also ambigious.
Since most popular languages have flaws and no-one wants to use unpopular unambigious languanges, it makes most sense to settle on the most popular language (which tends to absorb concepts from all languages) and work with that (even if it means rewriting contracts every 100 years as different languages go into fashion).
As a side note, the GPL has several official translations.
SLIDE 1
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Power Point is not pointless (*scroll effect*)
SLIDE 2
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It has these benefits:
* You don't have to think in sentences
* Bullets allows you to effectively fake knowledge
* Many more things (*sound effect*)
SLIDE 3
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It's also required by future managers
to make unimportant ideas seem important.
(*flashing effect plus annoying sound*)
SLIDE 4
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Power Corrupts.
PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely
-- Edward Tufte
It's also a good place to place random quotations.
SLIDE 5
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Q&A?