I stick with GNOME based pretty much solely on the licensing. Qt is a fairly nice API (if buggy at times) but forcing me into GPL isn't good (I prefer LGPL and BSD-style).
Well in that case, you have no problem. Qt for X11 is available under the QPL, which permits applications to use a range of free software licenses, including the LGPL and BSD-style.
If the two factions fall out then it can only be bad for Linux and other FOSS.
Why? Linux isn't a derivative work of GNU and GNU isn't a derivative work of Linux. They can use different licenses without a problem. You can use GNU code on Windows legally. You can use proprietary software on Linux legally. The case where they are both using similar licenses (GPL2 vs GPL3) is no different.
Even if you are talking about culture and not law, there still isn't a problem. People use the LGPLed GNOME on the GPLed Linux happily. People use the GPLed GCC on the BSDs happily. So long as it remains free software, where's the problem?
You've clearly got a far higher opinion of the human race than is warranted. What I expect will happen is that we'll use up the last 99% of the Uranium we have left blowing each other to bits with nukes, fighting over the other 1%, which if we ever get, will be used to build more nukes.
I wonder why folks at Google do not first help us with the Linux desktop.
Yeah. What they should do is pay people to work on high-profile open-source projects like KDE and GNOME. Of course, Google might be rich, but they aren't bottomless pits of money, so maybe they could get better value for money if they just paid students. Although, what with students having to, you know, study, it would only really be effective in the summer, but if it goes well, maybe they could do it every summer. They could even give it a funky name, I dunno, maybe something like Summer of Code.
You're totally right. Google should get their priorities straight and start helping Linux!
given what I read everyday about the USA, I won't be surprised if 14 is the minimal legal age to be sent to the electric chair.
Actually, it was 16 until recently, and the only reason this was established in case law is because they tried to execute a 15 year-old (after trying him as an adult). See Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988) and Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989). Two years ago, Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005) raised the age to 18. So the USA is still in the ludicrous position of considering 18-20 year-olds to be responsible enough to be liable for the death penalty, but not responsible enough to drink alcohol or smoke marijuana. But at least they are heading in the right direction.
Can somebody explain the logic in going to the trouble of having different rules for minors and adults, when all you're going to do is ignore them and use the adult rules for minors anyway?
Lehman lay much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace
That's rich. The RIAA can't make law. The RIAA aren't charged with doing what's best for the USA public. That's your job, and you failed miserably at it. You can't fuck over the public because a corporation told you to, and then blame the corporation. It's your fault for listening to them instead of the public in the first place. The RIAA could "fail to adapt" a million times over and it still wouldn't make it any less your fault for pandering to them.
he tried to run Synaptic later on and it said 'you have to run dpkg update -a to fix these errors!' or something along those lines. Big mistake number one: it told the user to type in commands at the shell. Big mistake number two: it didn't tell him to use sudo.
The thing is, everyone knows someone who's pretty good with Windows and can help them with their problems. Five minutes with Google usually does the trick.
When I put dpkg superuser Ubuntu into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky", it took me straight to a page where somebody had exactly the same problem and was shown exactly what to do, with a link to a tutorial as well.
How is "five minutes with Google" not enough in the Ubuntu case?
premature optimisation being the root of all evil and all that
I have heard some people say that kind of thing before. I'm not sure where this comes from.
Donald Knuth said it. And yes, a counter-productive focus on efficiency has always been prevalent in the software industry, even if you haven't personally seen it.
Knowing assembly doesn't mean you have to try to code based on the fastest possible CPU execution.
Of course not. But you can't have it both ways: either you are worrying about what the CPU is doing — a pointless endeavour that distracts you from your real work — or you aren't worrying about what the CPU is doing, in which case knowledge of assembly isn't helping.
I can't say I think assembly knowledge is useful for the web programming I do. But I don't think it's hurting me either. It's not something I think about.
So my statement "making your decisions based on what instructions the CPU is getting" doesn't apply to you then.
I can't say I've ever seen a case where a programmer's ignorance of something, assembly or otherwise, was a strength
I don't think that's the case. It really depends on what you want to do. Typical desktop applications don't need any assembly language, nor in-depth knowledge of how the CPU works. In fact, it's probably a bad thing to worry about things like this — premature optimisation being the root of all evil and all that. You don't want to put a lot of work into making your application 1% faster and then realise you've ruined your portability.
In fact, these days, there's a case for even doing away with languages like C for a lot of desktop applications. With the speed of today's computers, if you can write your application quicker in a scripting language, it's a worthwhile trade-off for many organisations.
Sure, if you want to work with operating systems or things like games where performance is critical, then knowing assembly will make you a better developer even if you don't end up using it. But most of the software industry is working at a level far higher than that, and if you are at that level and making your decisions based on what instructions the CPU is getting, then you're probably doing a worse job than somebody who is entirely ignorant of assembly.
First, they admit that they were aiming too high with Duke Nukem Forever. And then, in the same interview, they say that they've got lots of new hires and they are increasing the scope of the project to include multiple platforms.
They just don't learn, do they? I bet in the next interview they'll tell everybody that they are switching engines again.
I'm sure everybody's already seen the list, I'm just wondering if it's worth placing a bet of whether humanity will achieve interstellar travel before 3D Realms finishes DNF. I wonder what it would take to convince Fred Brooks to visit Broussard and smack him around the head with a copy of The Mythical Man Month? I'd pay good money to see that.
John Resig, lead developer of the jQuery library, has already written about this alliance. Choice quote:
This is all (hopefully) an overreaction. But the very fact that no non-legally-backed entities exist in the alliance (and the fact that no good corporation would sign a legal agreement ambiguously defining the status of an "organization") leads me to believe that many of today's poplar JavaScript libraries are intended to be left out of the drafting of the OpenAjax requirements.
This lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is, without a doubt, the single dumbest thing I have ever seen any lawyers do in my thirty years of practicing law--while in continuous good standing to do so with The Florida Bar, I might add, the shock radio and video game industry's efforts notwithstanding.
Would that be the same Florida Bar that he has sued (unsuccessfully) twice, which he alleges is unconstitutional, engaged in a vendetta against him, and is made up of criminal racketeers? The Florida Bar that is in the process of disbarring him?
I guess his idea of "continuous good standing" and mine differ somewhat.
Microsoft have been taking the Internet seriously since before Google left Stanford University.
Have they? I havn't seen much fabled "innovation" coming from Microsoft on the internet.
For some reason I have yet to fathom, Microsoft as an organisation seem pathologically incapable of bringing innovative products to market. But this applies to every aspect of their business, not just the Internet. That doesn't mean they don't take the Internet seriously. They clearly take the Internet seriously. It's just this disabling mindset Microsoft has that interferes with them actually doing anything innovative. They've thrown money at the Internet, but don't know how to do anything more creative.
For example, they recognised that webmail was going to be huge and bought Hotmail... but then just let it languish until Google gave them new ideas a decade later. What was the biggest user-visible change to Hotmail before GMail arrived? Loads more ads? More downtime when they tried to switch away from FreeBSD? The disastrous single sign-on that they've been pushing for years without success?
Even when Microsoft does actually manage to do something innovative (Internet Explorer 4 "channels" was equivalent to in-browser RSS, something that wasn't replicated by anybody else for years AFAIK), they screw up on execution and it's dismal. Either that or it never makes it out of Microsoft's research department, or is crippled along the way. I even heard a rumour that Clippy was actually useful before the Office team got their hands on it.
Microsoft certainly have enough smart people working for them and enough resources to put out some amazing software and services. I don't know whether the problem is culture, bad management at the very top or what, but the organisation seems unable or unwilling to capitalise on their opportunities (after all, they are making plenty of money with non-innovative crap, why fix what isn't broken?).
If people are such unthinking sheep that take their moral cues from the television, should we really care if they get tortured a bit?
The problem is that it's not the sheep that are being tortured. After all, they are sheep, there's no need to torture them.
No, the problem is that these sheep, through their votes and taxes, cause their military to invade other countries and torture the people they abduct from there. The CIA have even abducted a German citizen on holiday in Macedonia and tortured him just because his name was similar to a terrorist's. Nowhere in the world is safe from the effects of the violent mindset of these sheep.
If your company/organisation/you have any international contacts then you will NOT be using these international URLs.
No, it means you can't rely on them. Which is pretty much the same for any new technology that requires client support.
A practical way of using these domains is to set up an ASCII one that you advertise, and redirect to the canonical one with the umlauts etc. That way native speakers aren't alienated by the mangling of their language and don't get errors when they type in the real name of the company + '.com'.
You might think that native speakers of non-ASCII languages would be used to mangling their words for domains by now, but it's surprising how persistent muscle memory is when it comes to spelling. Even though I've been a web developer for many years, I still occasionally get frustrated with typing 'colour' when the CSS property is 'color'*, etc. It wouldn't be so bad if CSS came out of the USA, but it was a Norwegian who created it and the international organisation who developed it was created by an English guy working in France.
Most of the non-competes I've been asked to sign have a term of about one year. They usually specify that they only apply to working for a competitor, although on one occasion I had to get the contract amended to specify what the comapny's area of business was because the clause was so sloppily (or possibly intentionally) written that taking almost any other job could run afoul of it.
True. One place I worked had a badly-worded non-compete that I can only assume had been written by the company owner and never been seen by a solicitor. It was that poorly phrased that, although it looked like it was restricting you to not working for competitors for a year, it actually barred you from working for competitors forever. Although things like that would never stand up in court, it saves a lot of hassle to be attentive so that you don't need to go to court. In my case, I grumbled about the very thought of a non-compete as soon as I heard about it, and they "forgot" to present me with it to sign, even though it was company policy and all the other developers on my team hired before and since signed it.
"And the European constitution actually gives the right to freedom of expression, though of course it isn't anywhere near as long established as the US' right to free speech."
And that's the problem with it. The US document merely recognizes that and other freedoms.
You shouldn't be so snarky about something you are ignorant of. I quote:
1. The Union shall recognise the rights, freedoms and principles set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights which constitutes Part II.
How often do MPs in the UK defy their party leadership?
Interesting question, and one that can I can make a start at answering. TheyWorkForYou.com have taken data from a variety of official and non-official sources, compiled it and exposed it all as a web service. Included in this information is how often an MP rebels against their party line. It's fairly trivial to write a script that iterates over the MPs. Here's a basic one that simply prints the average rate of rebellion (remember to unmangle it; I don't know why Slashdot of all places makes it impossible to post code in a decent way):
#!/usr/bin/env python
import httplib2 from xml.etree.cElementTree import fromstring
people not quoting their SQL properly... but should the PHP interpreter developers really be held accountable for other peoples' shoddy coding practices?
In the case of SQL injection attacks, definitely yes. They provide add_slashes(), oh, but wait, that's insecure, so they provided mysql_escape_string() instead. Oh wait, that's insecure too, so they provided mysql_real_escape_string() instead. All the while, ignoring the fact that string concatenation is prone to security problems by its very nature, and ignoring the real solution — bound parameters — for years.
The House of Commons is hardly democratically elected.
First past the post has problems, true, but that doesn't mean it isn't democratic. People vote. Those votes elect MPs to constituencies. The party with the most constituencies wins. You may well argue that grouping voters into constitutencies leads to an unfair bias (and I'd agree), but the system is fundamentally democratic in nature.
Or just invoke the Parliament Act.
True, but that involves more than just "invoking the act", it has to be read again after a year before becoming law.
Any attempt to withhold [assent] now would probably result in the fall of the monarchy
This is widely accepted (and I agree) in the case of the monarchy becoming abusive. I think it's far less clear-cut in the case of the monarchy attempting to protect the people from an abusive government. Remember that the British military are sworn to the monarchy, not the government. Whilst they would almost certainly side with the government if the monarchy became abusive, I think they'd remain loyal to the monarchy if the populace did too.
There's a lot you are saying that I agree with. The UK government is badly in need of reform. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a dictatorship, there's a really odd mixture of checks and balances on all kinds of different levels that is a result of being such an old country with a colourful history. I think a written constitution would clear a lot of this up.
Yes, but read the article carefully. The big problem with this figure is that it's only the requests. How many were denied? It doesn't say. Also, this isn't all "wiretapping" in the commonly understood sense. It also includes applications for phone numbers dialled, email addresses, and so on. And is it one request per person? One request per email address? It doesn't say.
The real problem with this article is that it is extremely unclear about what is being counted, and doesn't cite primary sources. That makes any discussion about what the numbers mean just pure speculation.
However, doesn't this pretty much suggest that the powers that be are actually more interested in gathering and hoarding massive amounts of data than actually using the data they have to catch criminals?
Not really. Wiretaps are only going to reveal what people are talking about doing. Better to keep them under surveillance until they actually try to do something, don't you think? That way it's easier to prove and they get put away for longer. Furthermore, if they are all talk, arresting them won't make the public any safer, but if you don't arrest them, they might lead you to people who are more serious.
Slashdot Mirror
Well in that case, you have no problem. Qt for X11 is available under the QPL, which permits applications to use a range of free software licenses, including the LGPL and BSD-style.
Guess you'll be switching now then?
Why? Linux isn't a derivative work of GNU and GNU isn't a derivative work of Linux. They can use different licenses without a problem. You can use GNU code on Windows legally. You can use proprietary software on Linux legally. The case where they are both using similar licenses (GPL2 vs GPL3) is no different.
Even if you are talking about culture and not law, there still isn't a problem. People use the LGPLed GNOME on the GPLed Linux happily. People use the GPLed GCC on the BSDs happily. So long as it remains free software, where's the problem?
You've clearly got a far higher opinion of the human race than is warranted. What I expect will happen is that we'll use up the last 99% of the Uranium we have left blowing each other to bits with nukes, fighting over the other 1%, which if we ever get, will be used to build more nukes.
Yeah. What they should do is pay people to work on high-profile open-source projects like KDE and GNOME. Of course, Google might be rich, but they aren't bottomless pits of money, so maybe they could get better value for money if they just paid students. Although, what with students having to, you know, study, it would only really be effective in the summer, but if it goes well, maybe they could do it every summer. They could even give it a funky name, I dunno, maybe something like Summer of Code.
You're totally right. Google should get their priorities straight and start helping Linux!
Actually, it was 16 until recently, and the only reason this was established in case law is because they tried to execute a 15 year-old (after trying him as an adult). See Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988) and Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989). Two years ago, Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005) raised the age to 18. So the USA is still in the ludicrous position of considering 18-20 year-olds to be responsible enough to be liable for the death penalty, but not responsible enough to drink alcohol or smoke marijuana. But at least they are heading in the right direction.
Can somebody explain the logic in going to the trouble of having different rules for minors and adults, when all you're going to do is ignore them and use the adult rules for minors anyway?
That's rich. The RIAA can't make law. The RIAA aren't charged with doing what's best for the USA public. That's your job, and you failed miserably at it. You can't fuck over the public because a corporation told you to, and then blame the corporation. It's your fault for listening to them instead of the public in the first place. The RIAA could "fail to adapt" a million times over and it still wouldn't make it any less your fault for pandering to them.
When I put dpkg superuser Ubuntu into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky", it took me straight to a page where somebody had exactly the same problem and was shown exactly what to do, with a link to a tutorial as well.
How is "five minutes with Google" not enough in the Ubuntu case?
Don't be ridiculous, of course it can. Here's a step-by-step guide.
Donald Knuth said it. And yes, a counter-productive focus on efficiency has always been prevalent in the software industry, even if you haven't personally seen it.
Of course not. But you can't have it both ways: either you are worrying about what the CPU is doing — a pointless endeavour that distracts you from your real work — or you aren't worrying about what the CPU is doing, in which case knowledge of assembly isn't helping.
So my statement "making your decisions based on what instructions the CPU is getting" doesn't apply to you then.
Not a strength, just not a liability.
I don't think that's the case. It really depends on what you want to do. Typical desktop applications don't need any assembly language, nor in-depth knowledge of how the CPU works. In fact, it's probably a bad thing to worry about things like this — premature optimisation being the root of all evil and all that. You don't want to put a lot of work into making your application 1% faster and then realise you've ruined your portability.
In fact, these days, there's a case for even doing away with languages like C for a lot of desktop applications. With the speed of today's computers, if you can write your application quicker in a scripting language, it's a worthwhile trade-off for many organisations.
Sure, if you want to work with operating systems or things like games where performance is critical, then knowing assembly will make you a better developer even if you don't end up using it. But most of the software industry is working at a level far higher than that, and if you are at that level and making your decisions based on what instructions the CPU is getting, then you're probably doing a worse job than somebody who is entirely ignorant of assembly.
First, they admit that they were aiming too high with Duke Nukem Forever. And then, in the same interview, they say that they've got lots of new hires and they are increasing the scope of the project to include multiple platforms.
They just don't learn, do they? I bet in the next interview they'll tell everybody that they are switching engines again.
I'm sure everybody's already seen the list, I'm just wondering if it's worth placing a bet of whether humanity will achieve interstellar travel before 3D Realms finishes DNF. I wonder what it would take to convince Fred Brooks to visit Broussard and smack him around the head with a copy of The Mythical Man Month? I'd pay good money to see that.
John Resig, lead developer of the jQuery library, has already written about this alliance. Choice quote:
Would that be the same Florida Bar that he has sued (unsuccessfully) twice, which he alleges is unconstitutional, engaged in a vendetta against him, and is made up of criminal racketeers? The Florida Bar that is in the process of disbarring him?
I guess his idea of "continuous good standing" and mine differ somewhat.
For some reason I have yet to fathom, Microsoft as an organisation seem pathologically incapable of bringing innovative products to market. But this applies to every aspect of their business, not just the Internet. That doesn't mean they don't take the Internet seriously. They clearly take the Internet seriously. It's just this disabling mindset Microsoft has that interferes with them actually doing anything innovative. They've thrown money at the Internet, but don't know how to do anything more creative.
For example, they recognised that webmail was going to be huge and bought Hotmail... but then just let it languish until Google gave them new ideas a decade later. What was the biggest user-visible change to Hotmail before GMail arrived? Loads more ads? More downtime when they tried to switch away from FreeBSD? The disastrous single sign-on that they've been pushing for years without success?
Even when Microsoft does actually manage to do something innovative (Internet Explorer 4 "channels" was equivalent to in-browser RSS, something that wasn't replicated by anybody else for years AFAIK), they screw up on execution and it's dismal. Either that or it never makes it out of Microsoft's research department, or is crippled along the way. I even heard a rumour that Clippy was actually useful before the Office team got their hands on it.
Microsoft certainly have enough smart people working for them and enough resources to put out some amazing software and services. I don't know whether the problem is culture, bad management at the very top or what, but the organisation seems unable or unwilling to capitalise on their opportunities (after all, they are making plenty of money with non-innovative crap, why fix what isn't broken?).
The problem is that it's not the sheep that are being tortured. After all, they are sheep, there's no need to torture them.
No, the problem is that these sheep, through their votes and taxes, cause their military to invade other countries and torture the people they abduct from there. The CIA have even abducted a German citizen on holiday in Macedonia and tortured him just because his name was similar to a terrorist's. Nowhere in the world is safe from the effects of the violent mindset of these sheep.
No, it means you can't rely on them. Which is pretty much the same for any new technology that requires client support.
A practical way of using these domains is to set up an ASCII one that you advertise, and redirect to the canonical one with the umlauts etc. That way native speakers aren't alienated by the mangling of their language and don't get errors when they type in the real name of the company + '.com'.
You might think that native speakers of non-ASCII languages would be used to mangling their words for domains by now, but it's surprising how persistent muscle memory is when it comes to spelling. Even though I've been a web developer for many years, I still occasionally get frustrated with typing 'colour' when the CSS property is 'color'*, etc. It wouldn't be so bad if CSS came out of the USA, but it was a Norwegian who created it and the international organisation who developed it was created by an English guy working in France.
"I'll be back in a jiffy."
True. One place I worked had a badly-worded non-compete that I can only assume had been written by the company owner and never been seen by a solicitor. It was that poorly phrased that, although it looked like it was restricting you to not working for competitors for a year, it actually barred you from working for competitors forever. Although things like that would never stand up in court, it saves a lot of hassle to be attentive so that you don't need to go to court. In my case, I grumbled about the very thought of a non-compete as soon as I heard about it, and they "forgot" to present me with it to sign, even though it was company policy and all the other developers on my team hired before and since signed it.
I bet she's no fun at Christmas.
You shouldn't be so snarky about something you are ignorant of. I quote:
Interesting question, and one that can I can make a start at answering. TheyWorkForYou.com have taken data from a variety of official and non-official sources, compiled it and exposed it all as a web service. Included in this information is how often an MP rebels against their party line. It's fairly trivial to write a script that iterates over the MPs. Here's a basic one that simply prints the average rate of rebellion (remember to unmangle it; I don't know why Slashdot of all places makes it impossible to post code in a decent way):
Okay, it's not great and undoubtedly an oversimplification, but it's not bad considering it took longer to run than to write.
Oh, and when I ran it, the average rebellion rate was ~1.2%.
In the case of SQL injection attacks, definitely yes. They provide add_slashes(), oh, but wait, that's insecure, so they provided mysql_escape_string() instead. Oh wait, that's insecure too, so they provided mysql_real_escape_string() instead. All the while, ignoring the fact that string concatenation is prone to security problems by its very nature, and ignoring the real solution — bound parameters — for years.
First past the post has problems, true, but that doesn't mean it isn't democratic. People vote. Those votes elect MPs to constituencies. The party with the most constituencies wins. You may well argue that grouping voters into constitutencies leads to an unfair bias (and I'd agree), but the system is fundamentally democratic in nature.
True, but that involves more than just "invoking the act", it has to be read again after a year before becoming law.
This is widely accepted (and I agree) in the case of the monarchy becoming abusive. I think it's far less clear-cut in the case of the monarchy attempting to protect the people from an abusive government. Remember that the British military are sworn to the monarchy, not the government. Whilst they would almost certainly side with the government if the monarchy became abusive, I think they'd remain loyal to the monarchy if the populace did too.
There's a lot you are saying that I agree with. The UK government is badly in need of reform. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a dictatorship, there's a really odd mixture of checks and balances on all kinds of different levels that is a result of being such an old country with a colourful history. I think a written constitution would clear a lot of this up.
Yes, but read the article carefully. The big problem with this figure is that it's only the requests. How many were denied? It doesn't say. Also, this isn't all "wiretapping" in the commonly understood sense. It also includes applications for phone numbers dialled, email addresses, and so on. And is it one request per person? One request per email address? It doesn't say.
The real problem with this article is that it is extremely unclear about what is being counted, and doesn't cite primary sources. That makes any discussion about what the numbers mean just pure speculation.
Not really. Wiretaps are only going to reveal what people are talking about doing. Better to keep them under surveillance until they actually try to do something, don't you think? That way it's easier to prove and they get put away for longer. Furthermore, if they are all talk, arresting them won't make the public any safer, but if you don't arrest them, they might lead you to people who are more serious.