Minor correction: A stock option is properly the option to buy or sell a given number of shares on a given date for a given price. See Wikipedia for a more thorough discussion, but in short what a stock option as a means of compensation entails is this: The company gives you an option to buy N shares for X dollars each on D date. If the stock price on the open market is greater than X dollars per share (call it Y), then you can exercise your option by spending N * X dollars to buy N shares of stock. Actually, you can do that even if Y
If you hear someone say their stock options are "under water," it means that Y
But the other people pointing out that this story is not about stock options but rather about actual stock shares are probably correct, at least as far as the company's founders go. They already own shares of stock and are just selling the shares off into the market for cash. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both do this from time to time with their respective companies. How it works is you form a company, call it Acme. You incorporate it as Acme Inc. and, in the articles of incorporation, grant yourself 1 million shares of common stock. Then you later make an initial public offering and the Acme Inc. board authorizes the issue of 1 million more shares of common stock, which get sold through the stock market (probably covered by an underwriter or something initially and sold from there). So now you own 1 million shares and other people own 1 million shares. All you have to do to get rich is sell your shares out into the market.
Re:Very nice - but has some rough edges currently
on
Slashdot Index Code Update
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't like the way they display. It makes them look like they are part of the story listed above them. Maybe a line with "In other news..." and a rounded upper-left corner would help. Or just the rounded upper-left corner. But right now, they look like footnotes to the story above them.
For an article on "administrative subpoenas," see here (linked to from here). I have not read the entire article, so I don't know if it's biased or not in its facts, but it does discuss some situations in which there doesn't need to be a trial to have subpoenas.
Does that definition of "use" include modifying it for personal use? How do you explain having received a copy of something to which you have no license? (This is an area of the law with which I am not that familiar.) What rights do you have to another's copyrighted work without a license, and how do you secure and make use of those rights? If the software was originally given to you in exchange for you accepting the terms of the GPL, do you still have a right to possess (forget using it, since that presumes possession) it when you violate the terms of the agreement under which you acquired it?
It's clear that you can use software any way you want, internally, without violating the GPL. But what if you violate the GPL some other way - do you still have the right to use it? If so, why? There don't seem to be any good analogies to other copyrightable things to help this discussion out.
But use of the program "is not restricted" by the GPL. It may be restricted by copyright law in absence of a license to use it, so it is possible that violating the GPL and thus terminating your privileges under it would also revoke your right to use that particular piece of software since you would no longer have any license to it.
Should there be any doubt (note that "S: " and "C: " are inserted after the fact to clarify what I typed and what I got back, following the XMPP RFC convention):
$ telnet jabber.org 5222 Trying 208.245.212.98... Connected to jabber.org. Escape character is '^]'. C: <?xml version='1.0'?> C: <s:stream to='jabber.org' xmlns='jabber:client' xmlns:s='http://etherx.jabber.org/streams' version='1.0'> S: <stream:stream xmlns='jabber:server' xml:lang='en' xmlns:stream='http://etherx.jabber.org/streams' xmlns:db='jabber:server:dialback' id='86D84E441A15' version='1.0'><stream:error><bad-format xmlns='urn:ietf:parms:xml:ns:xmpp-streams'/><text xml:lang='en' xmlns='urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-streams'>Invali d stream header</text></stream:error></stream:stream>Connec tion closed by foreign host.
...and even this...
$ telnet jabber.org 5222 Trying 208.245.212.98... Connected to jabber.org. Escape character is '^]'. C: bad header S: </stream:stream>Connection closed by foreign host.
While it may be fair to respond to my "bad header" with completely wrong XML (namely, </stream:stream> with no other XML before it - no XML version declaration, a closing tag with no opening tag, and an undefined namespace), I challenge anyone to demonstrate for me how my previous example warrants an error when RFC 3920 says:
(See page 17.) Note that the RFC example is an official demonstration and that my input went to jabber.org port 5222, arguably an official implementation of the XMPP protocol. The only change I made from the RFC's example input (which, by the way, works just fine at jabber.org:5222) was the name of the prefix, which according to the XML standard as I understand it (please point me to contrary provisions) is irrelevant but only serves to bind an XML namespace to elements and attributes.
I used the official Jabber server, which was at the time the official reference implementation of XMPP. The specific brokenness that I encountered relates to namespaces. Rather than treating XML namespaces as namespaces, it treated them as as xmlns attributes and element names with colons in them. For instance, standard XML treats the following things the same (a "tag" element in the "http://theari.com/xml/illustration" namespace) whereas the XMPP protocol (at least in 2002 and 2003) treated them differently (as having, respectively, an "xmlns" vs. "xmlns:blah" attribute and a "tag" vs. "blah:tag" element name). Note that any errors I've made are from my own forgetfulness over the past 3 years and not a lack of understanding of XML 3 years ago.
It is as possible that things have changed in the past 3 years. However, if they have not, then it is impossible for a piece of software to strictly comply with both the XML standard and the XMPP standard. They are mutually exclusive areas of compliance.
The word moot, as an adjective, has two definitions that seem odd when put together but both work just fine. A "moot point" is one that is debatable, but irrelevant. You can make a reasonable argument for or against it, but no matter how it comes out, the world will not change at all.
Most political arguments are moot (for instance, it doesn't matter why the US is in Iraq right now - we're there). Law schools have "moot court" where you make legal arguments for cases just like those before, say, the US Supreme Court, but it doesn't matter who wins.
If something is not at all debatable, then it's not moot. If it's debatable but the outcome will have some effect on the world, then it's not moot. Only debatable but pointless arguments are moot. And the argument about whether or not to use induction braking in a maglev elevator is probably moot - the costs of doing it any other way are high and get no return benefits.
That was one of the first things I learned about XMPP back when I wrote a Jabber library in C++ to support my honors thesis project. I wrote this fancy XML-stream library and then re-wrote it when I tried to use it to talk to a Jabber server and discovered that Jabber's concept of what XML is and how it works is more broken than .
To be frank, if Jabber weren't already so popular, I would have written a replacement for it 4 years ago. It wouldn't be that hard to do it right.
As a special exception, the Complete Corresponding Source Code need not include a particular subunit if... the identical subunit is normally included as an adjunct in the distribution of either a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs or a compiler used to produce the executable or an object code interpreter used to run it...
I read it differently than you did. Assuming (without reading the rest of the new GPL yet) that "Complete Corresponding Source Code" refers to the thing you have to distribute along with a binary copy to comply with the GPL, then what this says to me is that you don't have to include pieces of the compiler just because your program uses them. For instance, if you #include , you don't have to put stdio.h into the tarball of your sources when you distribute them.
I think that this passage alone could have been written so much better as to put the entire document into suspicion.
I think that the gpp's points are all (save for one or two) valid, given that this/. story is about adding all sorts of wacky and unnecessary features to C++ that make it look like a different language, anyhow.
Some of your contention is that syntactic sugar is inherently bad. This is not the case. For instance, being able to initialize a member where it is declared makes it easier to avoid bugs and easier to maintain code. It is not inherently bad just because you can do it somewhere else already. This seems to be part of the underlying philosophy of C++0x, anyhow: the parts of C++ syntax that make it difficult to write clean, bug-free, maintainable code should be covered up with better syntax.
The same thing applies to the mutable vtables, closures (although I think that anonymous functions that are not closures would fit better into C++), and message passing - all of these common problems' solutions would be cleaner, more maintainable, and less bug-prone if they were part of the language and not a buggy, ad hoc implementation written every time the problems are encountered. (But see Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming.)
Please cite your source for the proposition that "a professional encyclopaedia writer's job is to take as much information as possible and fit it into as small a space as possible." Either way, you can go up and down the wall with the sample space and whether the error rate was higher per-word or per-article. The fact of the matter is that, for every article studied in this way, Wikipedia and Britannica are substantially identical in terms of erroneous content. The error rate is simply not that different between the two.
I am not in any way a Wikipedia fanboy. I actually own a full Britannica and will be getting another (along with their full bound collection of books and so forth) in the future. I am just reporting the facts, which indicate that your original commends are ill-founded at best.
What the hell are you talking about? I'm not elite and I'm not part of any such few, and yet I have contributed substantially to Wikipedia and have done so recently.
If they are preventing average Joes like me from contributing, I haven't seen any evidence of it. Care to point us to some?
Even in America, I doubt that when Bill the redneck from Texas goes into a bar after a shift at the hardware store he asks for a 'Lemon cheesecake martini'.
That is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard. You really ought to learn a little before you try to judge other countries. I bet you consider all Americans to be inherently ignorant of the world around them, while you're at it. If so, you're a hypocrite. If not, then you're just ignorant, which is a curable condition.
Evidently "bartender" does not mean the same where you are as it does where I am. Here, a bartender is generally a mixologist - someone skilled at and knowledgeable about mixing drinks. Pouring a draught beer is easy. Expertly and stylishly making a Long Island Iced Tea or a Lemon Cheesecake Martini, or even for that matter just making a good gin martini, takes a lot more skill than that.
American bartenders are sometimes hired with no training and learn on the job - this is actually very common. But many people attend a bartending school to get the basics and learn about 100 drinks to start them off. I have done this, and it was a great experience even though I have not worked in a bar since before I went to the school for it. (Note that it's generally 40 hours of training, not an associate's degree or anything.)
As to using an "optic" (although I had not heard it called that until this thread, I know what you refer to), American patrons despise the things. Also, they do not measure anything but one-shot increments, so if you are making a drink that requires 1-1/2 oz. of one liquor, 1 oz. of another, 3/4 oz. of another, and 1/2 oz. of a fourth, you can't do it with such a device. Using measuring glasses is also problematic because they only tend to come in 1 oz. and 1-1/2 oz. sizes.
Counting is also not a good idea, as each bartender will have his or her own count. Basically, you practice pouring with the spout until you can personally accurately pour every quantity of liquor you will foreseeably need. That means 1/4 oz., 1/2 oz, 3/4 oz., 1 oz., 1-1/2 oz., and then you can work from there to get any greater quantity you might need (although more than 2 oz. is rare in mixed drinks, and even more than 1-1/2 oz. is somewhat uncommon).
Bartenders learn to do this by feel. Part of it is counting, part is watching the liquor, and part is just the feel of it pouring out of the bottle. It comes with experience.
Like I said, in America "bartender" is a very different job from much of the rest of the world.
If Microsoft by their own accord want to park this weapon of bad rendering and vileness, please please please lets not give them a game plan to continue!
I agree. This is like the Soviet Union saying "Okay, we give up on this communist dictatorship thing. How about a capitalist democracy for a change?" and the USA stepping in and helping them stay communist. In a cold war, when your opponent bows out, you do not force him back into the ring.
Re:Ruby is what Perl and Python want to be
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 1
It's not that you contradicted my statement - it's that you apparently ignored it entirely. That said, you are free to name something that is easier to do in Python than in Ruby. I couldn't think of anything - maybe you, the Python advocate, can. If not, then I'm the only one here who has backed up his statement with anything at all. It is impossible to prove a negative - but if you can provide a counterexample I will gladly concede the point.
Re:Ruby is what Perl and Python want to be
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 1
"largest mandatory toolchain"... the Debian package for ghc6 is 62.2 MB. GCC is 4.2 MB plus 8.8 MB for libc6-dev, or about 1/5 the size to get up and running. Also, Miranda's syntax is easier to read than Haskell's, IMHO (to which I am entitled).
Re:Ruby is what Perl and Python want to be
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 1
Care to name any examples of the advantages of Python over Ruby, or just rely on sweeping statements with nothing to back them up? I said that Ruby has a readability advantage over Perl and a writability one over Python. Being able to format your code how you want is a good thing.
Re:Ruby is what Perl and Python want to be
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 1
Miranda has a more readable syntax than Haskell. Haskell also has the largest mandatory toolchain of any language other than the.NET family.
In case you are being serious, try reading my post again with more salt applied - I was ridiculing the liberals.
Ruby is what Perl and Python want to be
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 0
I used Ruby for a while a few years ago, enough to fall in love with it and wish I had more uses for it. I was unable to think of anything that I could do in Perl and not do more readably in Ruby, or anything I could do in Python and not do more easily in Ruby.
Then again, I like Common Lisp and my Christmas list this year included an open-source Miranda compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
Minor correction: A stock option is properly the option to buy or sell a given number of shares on a given date for a given price. See Wikipedia for a more thorough discussion, but in short what a stock option as a means of compensation entails is this: The company gives you an option to buy N shares for X dollars each on D date. If the stock price on the open market is greater than X dollars per share (call it Y), then you can exercise your option by spending N * X dollars to buy N shares of stock. Actually, you can do that even if Y
If you hear someone say their stock options are "under water," it means that Y
But the other people pointing out that this story is not about stock options but rather about actual stock shares are probably correct, at least as far as the company's founders go. They already own shares of stock and are just selling the shares off into the market for cash. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both do this from time to time with their respective companies. How it works is you form a company, call it Acme. You incorporate it as Acme Inc. and, in the articles of incorporation, grant yourself 1 million shares of common stock. Then you later make an initial public offering and the Acme Inc. board authorizes the issue of 1 million more shares of common stock, which get sold through the stock market (probably covered by an underwriter or something initially and sold from there). So now you own 1 million shares and other people own 1 million shares. All you have to do to get rich is sell your shares out into the market.
I don't like the way they display. It makes them look like they are part of the story listed above them. Maybe a line with "In other news..." and a rounded upper-left corner would help. Or just the rounded upper-left corner. But right now, they look like footnotes to the story above them.
For an article on "administrative subpoenas," see here (linked to from here). I have not read the entire article, so I don't know if it's biased or not in its facts, but it does discuss some situations in which there doesn't need to be a trial to have subpoenas.
Does that definition of "use" include modifying it for personal use? How do you explain having received a copy of something to which you have no license? (This is an area of the law with which I am not that familiar.) What rights do you have to another's copyrighted work without a license, and how do you secure and make use of those rights? If the software was originally given to you in exchange for you accepting the terms of the GPL, do you still have a right to possess (forget using it, since that presumes possession) it when you violate the terms of the agreement under which you acquired it?
It's clear that you can use software any way you want, internally, without violating the GPL. But what if you violate the GPL some other way - do you still have the right to use it? If so, why? There don't seem to be any good analogies to other copyrightable things to help this discussion out.
But use of the program "is not restricted" by the GPL. It may be restricted by copyright law in absence of a license to use it, so it is possible that violating the GPL and thus terminating your privileges under it would also revoke your right to use that particular piece of software since you would no longer have any license to it.
N/p. And thanks for asking - I was bored this morning otherwise. :)
It is as possible that things have changed in the past 3 years. However, if they have not, then it is impossible for a piece of software to strictly comply with both the XML standard and the XMPP standard. They are mutually exclusive areas of compliance.
The word moot, as an adjective, has two definitions that seem odd when put together but both work just fine. A "moot point" is one that is debatable, but irrelevant. You can make a reasonable argument for or against it, but no matter how it comes out, the world will not change at all.
Most political arguments are moot (for instance, it doesn't matter why the US is in Iraq right now - we're there). Law schools have "moot court" where you make legal arguments for cases just like those before, say, the US Supreme Court, but it doesn't matter who wins.
If something is not at all debatable, then it's not moot. If it's debatable but the outcome will have some effect on the world, then it's not moot. Only debatable but pointless arguments are moot. And the argument about whether or not to use induction braking in a maglev elevator is probably moot - the costs of doing it any other way are high and get no return benefits.
That was one of the first things I learned about XMPP back when I wrote a Jabber library in C++ to support my honors thesis project. I wrote this fancy XML-stream library and then re-wrote it when I tried to use it to talk to a Jabber server and discovered that Jabber's concept of what XML is and how it works is more broken than .
To be frank, if Jabber weren't already so popular, I would have written a replacement for it 4 years ago. It wouldn't be that hard to do it right.
Yeah, unless the mechanical brakes go unused for so long that they fail to deploy. I like the magnetic induction idea someone else mentioned better.
I think that this passage alone could have been written so much better as to put the entire document into suspicion.
I think that the gpp's points are all (save for one or two) valid, given that this /. story is about adding all sorts of wacky and unnecessary features to C++ that make it look like a different language, anyhow.
Some of your contention is that syntactic sugar is inherently bad. This is not the case. For instance, being able to initialize a member where it is declared makes it easier to avoid bugs and easier to maintain code. It is not inherently bad just because you can do it somewhere else already. This seems to be part of the underlying philosophy of C++0x, anyhow: the parts of C++ syntax that make it difficult to write clean, bug-free, maintainable code should be covered up with better syntax.
The same thing applies to the mutable vtables, closures (although I think that anonymous functions that are not closures would fit better into C++), and message passing - all of these common problems' solutions would be cleaner, more maintainable, and less bug-prone if they were part of the language and not a buggy, ad hoc implementation written every time the problems are encountered. (But see Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming.)
Please cite your source for the proposition that "a professional encyclopaedia writer's job is to take as much information as possible and fit it into as small a space as possible." Either way, you can go up and down the wall with the sample space and whether the error rate was higher per-word or per-article. The fact of the matter is that, for every article studied in this way, Wikipedia and Britannica are substantially identical in terms of erroneous content. The error rate is simply not that different between the two.
I am not in any way a Wikipedia fanboy. I actually own a full Britannica and will be getting another (along with their full bound collection of books and so forth) in the future. I am just reporting the facts, which indicate that your original commends are ill-founded at best.
Even if the error rate is less?
What the hell are you talking about? I'm not elite and I'm not part of any such few, and yet I have contributed substantially to Wikipedia and have done so recently.
If they are preventing average Joes like me from contributing, I haven't seen any evidence of it. Care to point us to some?
Even in America, I doubt that when Bill the redneck from Texas goes into a bar after a shift at the hardware store he asks for a 'Lemon cheesecake martini'.
That is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard. You really ought to learn a little before you try to judge other countries. I bet you consider all Americans to be inherently ignorant of the world around them, while you're at it. If so, you're a hypocrite. If not, then you're just ignorant, which is a curable condition.
Evidently "bartender" does not mean the same where you are as it does where I am. Here, a bartender is generally a mixologist - someone skilled at and knowledgeable about mixing drinks. Pouring a draught beer is easy. Expertly and stylishly making a Long Island Iced Tea or a Lemon Cheesecake Martini, or even for that matter just making a good gin martini, takes a lot more skill than that.
American bartenders are sometimes hired with no training and learn on the job - this is actually very common. But many people attend a bartending school to get the basics and learn about 100 drinks to start them off. I have done this, and it was a great experience even though I have not worked in a bar since before I went to the school for it. (Note that it's generally 40 hours of training, not an associate's degree or anything.)
As to using an "optic" (although I had not heard it called that until this thread, I know what you refer to), American patrons despise the things. Also, they do not measure anything but one-shot increments, so if you are making a drink that requires 1-1/2 oz. of one liquor, 1 oz. of another, 3/4 oz. of another, and 1/2 oz. of a fourth, you can't do it with such a device. Using measuring glasses is also problematic because they only tend to come in 1 oz. and 1-1/2 oz. sizes.
Counting is also not a good idea, as each bartender will have his or her own count. Basically, you practice pouring with the spout until you can personally accurately pour every quantity of liquor you will foreseeably need. That means 1/4 oz., 1/2 oz, 3/4 oz., 1 oz., 1-1/2 oz., and then you can work from there to get any greater quantity you might need (although more than 2 oz. is rare in mixed drinks, and even more than 1-1/2 oz. is somewhat uncommon).
Bartenders learn to do this by feel. Part of it is counting, part is watching the liquor, and part is just the feel of it pouring out of the bottle. It comes with experience.
Like I said, in America "bartender" is a very different job from much of the rest of the world.
If Microsoft by their own accord want to park this weapon of bad rendering and vileness, please please please lets not give them a game plan to continue!
I agree. This is like the Soviet Union saying "Okay, we give up on this communist dictatorship thing. How about a capitalist democracy for a change?" and the USA stepping in and helping them stay communist. In a cold war, when your opponent bows out, you do not force him back into the ring.
It's not that you contradicted my statement - it's that you apparently ignored it entirely. That said, you are free to name something that is easier to do in Python than in Ruby. I couldn't think of anything - maybe you, the Python advocate, can. If not, then I'm the only one here who has backed up his statement with anything at all. It is impossible to prove a negative - but if you can provide a counterexample I will gladly concede the point.
"largest mandatory toolchain" ... the Debian package for ghc6 is 62.2 MB. GCC is 4.2 MB plus 8.8 MB for libc6-dev, or about 1/5 the size to get up and running. Also, Miranda's syntax is easier to read than Haskell's, IMHO (to which I am entitled).
Care to name any examples of the advantages of Python over Ruby, or just rely on sweeping statements with nothing to back them up? I said that Ruby has a readability advantage over Perl and a writability one over Python. Being able to format your code how you want is a good thing.
Miranda has a more readable syntax than Haskell. Haskell also has the largest mandatory toolchain of any language other than the .NET family.
In case you are being serious, try reading my post again with more salt applied - I was ridiculing the liberals.
I used Ruby for a while a few years ago, enough to fall in love with it and wish I had more uses for it. I was unable to think of anything that I could do in Perl and not do more readably in Ruby, or anything I could do in Python and not do more easily in Ruby.
Then again, I like Common Lisp and my Christmas list this year included an open-source Miranda compiler.