I'm not sure it's up to us to decdide this is an injustice. If Kansas were torturing their babies, yes, maybe that's time to step in. But all over the world there are people with interesting and diverse belief systems that are incompatible with each other. It seems to me that this is one area where you have to let people do what they choose.
Why not? If the people of Kansas want to inflict ignorance on their children so be it. It's not for groups outside of Kansas to force the people of Kansas to adopt another philosophical or ideological stance, even if that stance happens to be correct.
I also think dirty tactics are not the way to promote scientific education. Much of Western society is founded on freedom of speech and much of the success of Western science is due to the ability to propose and test theories unhindered by government. If our claim is correct, that teaching evolution will make Kansas a more backwards state, then their ideas will be tested by the passage of time without the need for outside interference. If Intelligent Design isn't up to the task of giving Kansanians a working world view for the tasks they carry out in their lives then eventually they'll have to give it up.
That must be the dumbest application of the lazy copy-and-paste-with-words-substituted argument that I've ever seen. The horrible thing is, it's not funny enough to be a joke.
I don't know. I haven't done the research. You need to take thousands of people and watch them handle thousands of emails and wait to see if someone does something other than deal quickly, slowly, or not at all with them. Painstaking work I'm sure. And if you find that all they do is one of these three things you can publish that as well, as these good folks have done. But you can't be sure unless you've done the work.
...days gone by have to say about the future we live in today then I recommend Today, Then, a collection of essays written about 100 years ago about now. It's amazing just how off the mark most people are. But there are some great insights: my favorite being one essay that opens saying something like "All mail will be electronic". Not bad for over 100 years ago! I don't recall reading even the slightest hint that number crunching machines would have any significance in anyone's life.
You're just making wild claims without evidence to back them up. You might reply to some emails quickly, slowly and never, but do you know for sure that other people do as well. Have you studied this? Have you logged other people's email traffic? Somehow I doubt it. Science isn't built on anecdote and opinion you know, it requires you to do real work.
Anyway, that's enough posting on Slashdot, I've got to get back to counting slugs. I have this theory, that I can't wait to publish, that when it rains some slugs come out from hiding and some don't...
And if it took more than one keystroke to rotate your screen under Windows you'd be moaning about how hard it is to rotate it. Windows is designed to be easy to use. It's even designed to be easy to use by people who are disabled. But are they supposed to dumb it down so much that it's easy to use by people who are too uncoordinated to aim their fingers at a keyboard? I hope not.
And how did you install those drivers for Windows? You probably just double-clicked on an executable. I use Linux all day at work but I still have no clue how you install drivers for anything under Linux.
Growing old is not, in his view, an inevitable consequence of the human condition; rather, it is the result of accumulated damage at the cellular and molecular levels
Similarly, most people being poor isn't an inevitable consequence of the human condition but simply a consequence of the fact that the protons and neutrons in all of the matter around them isn't arranged as gold nuclei. All we need is a bit more research and we can fix that. We can already do it to a small extent.
Take the above quote for example... I just DID what you described...
You can say this as much as you like but it's pretty obvious that copy-and-paste is broken. X appears to have at least two separate copy-and-paste buffers and different applications respond to each.
Aha! Here we go. Just tried to copy and paste some text from an xterm. I can paste to another terminal window but not to Firefox which instead pastes the last thing I copied from Firefox. Clearly two buffers at work. And there are lots of little annoyances like this. At least the bizarre behavior of the delete and backspace keys has gone away. But only because I spent ages trying to figure out how to configure xterm and stty to make them work and the config is still in my.cshrc. Firefox is fairly well behaved, different applications work by completely different rules. In fact, I appear to be able to use the two different buffers simultaneously when copy between different applications.
Everyone in question is using the same common application and IT is locking up, because it was poorly written or you've got server related issues along with poor code design.
I'm talking about the cursor freezing when using X in a general purpose manner. There's no DOS going on and everyone here knows this happens when the network is running at less then perfectly.
Considering that SuSE can pretty much handle ANY supported display configuration with SAX
If that's the case then for some bizarre reason our systems department are breaking this. Our displays are pretty standard (Dell LCDs). I find it pretty implausible that our systems department are so bad. As I say, we're something of a flagship company and can attract the best people. But then maybe we don't pay enough to keep them. Seems unlikely to me though.
Heck, it even works across the wire in a remote context either through telnet, ssh, or NX initiated windows
When it works, it works nicely with x2x. (2 machines under my desk.) I'll say that in its favor. There are some things I like about Unix-like OSes, one of them being the relative seamlessness of remote access compared to crap like MS's Remote Desktop or whatever it was called. I've been a Linux user since version 0.99, I loved it for hacking at home, but using it at work is a new (1 yr) experience for me. I think I still might prefer it to Windows for solo development of command line tools - though I prefer MacOSX even more.
this one's just waaay too hard to swallow as it is.
Yup, that's the usual response I get. I'm used to it. Deny everything.
And I forgot to mention the problem that really annoys me. 3rd party applications seem to be built for one specific set of libraries and no longer function as you upgrade version of Linux. Currently I'd like to run Mathematica but it was purchased when we ran RedHat and on longer runs under SUSE. I'm sure someone could spend days tracking down all of the missing dsos and installing them but I've never had to do such a thing under Windows. I still use Office 97 on my XP machine at home and I've never seen a DLL error with it. And I certainly don't seem to have any hope of running old games (eg. the Loki implementations for Linux) ever again. I only have one Windows 95 game that fails to run under XP (and I think that stupidly it only fails because it explicitly checks OS version number rather than because of a DLL version issue). Of course you're going to tell me that any well written Linux app should run on any future version of Linux. Maybe helloworld does.
I work for a Linux based company that gets a lot of publicity on Slashdot for its use as Linux. In fact, it's seen as a kind of flagship Linux company. But for people inside the company it can be a real headache. The desktop (we're using SUSE 9.1 with 32 bit Intel and 9.3 with 64 bit AMD) is horrendous. Basic things like cut-and-paste between windows is broken. (If I want to copy this text to a console, say, it usually (but weirdly, not always) fails). Any time I want to change my display configuration or mouse I need to call the systems department so they can hack my xorg.conf or whatever it's called these days. The network is truly horrible but what's worse is that network stalls seem to cause countless local problems - like everyone's machines will frequently freeze for a few seconds and then wake up again.
I won't even mention that vast numbers of developers that have to write proprietary software because we've cut ourselves off from off-the-shelf software (which, incidentally, is already as good as most of the stuff we write, and far better supported).
I really don't like Windows. The dumbest command line window on the planet. The whole patronising way the OS treats you. The lack of easy personalization. Prior to that I'd been using FreeBSD and it really felt like a step back. But though I don't like it, I grudgingly have to accept that when I worked for a Windows based company things went much smoother. Network downtime was minimal. Plug-and-play really did seem to work, at least for ordinary devices like mice and displays. And we still had access to many good OSS tools such as Python and Perl. Going back to an open source OS has turned out to be a much more painful transition than the transition to Windows.
Whenever I read news stories about our company I cringe. I find it annoying when we're briefed before a conference (say) on what we are and aren't allowed to say to other people - in particular we're asked to lie about what software we use. It's clear that many decisions are made in this company based on the fact that nobody wants to pay for licenses for software but they don't mind paying to recruit extra people to write the software they could have gotten off-the-shelf because it increases their department size and hence power within the company. (And other decisions are made based on which vendors the CTO plays golf with: I think that's why we have such an awful network.) In fact, I once went to an industry conference on OSes for our industry. We had a company having success using Windows. It was clear that the rest of the conference didn't want to hear anything we wanted to say - they were basically a lynch mob to try to force everyone to switch to OSS so we could provide a unified front to our vendors to get them to switch to OSS operating systems.
So whenever you read that a company is switching OS bear in mind that it's just as likely to be part of political maneuvering within the company as it is likely to be a rational decision.
In one fell swoop they've put reverse engineers out of action. Now if you want to make an Apple or Sony device interoperate with an X-Box 360 you won't have to hack your device or install a mod-chip. How selfish! They put a whole industry out of business. How typical of Microsoft to shaft people this way.
If you learn a language like C you'll spend much of your time trying to understand things like memory allocation and confuse that with programming. Memory allocation is housekeeping and as interesting as watching paint dry. Haskell allows you to actually concentrate on writing code that does whatever it is you're trying to do. Haskell code often contains far fewer bugs than similar code in other languages, partly because of its strong type system. It's great for learning as you can use it in an interactive mode on the command line. You'll be able to get straight down to the interesting part of programming: algorithms. Haskell will give you a good theoretical foundation in programming that you can carry to any other language you learn.
If you learn Haskell first then when you eventually learn C, or Python, or whatever, you'll think they're trivial Mickey Mouse languages and master them quickly. If you start with something like C you'll have a ton of conceptual barriers that will make it hard to move to Haskell.
You clearly have the luxury of not having to learn a language just because you need it to interoperate with your colleagues. So learn a language that's fun, intellectually stimulating, designed (as opposed to accreted like most languages), beautiful and functional (in at least two sense of the word).
Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation
Why would a new document structure lead to a new copyright realm? The same idea that allowed Shakespeare's contemporaries to have monopolies on the printing of his plays is the one governing the copying of XML documents today. Changing the 'structure' doesn't free you to remix without 'negotiation'. And anyway, if you can do this freely, how is it a new 'copyright realm' as opposed to simply dumping copyright?
They don't have keyboards, d'oh! How are you supposed to enter memos in the memo pad application, or diary entries in the diary, or new names and addresses in the contact app when all we're given is a crude pseudo-handwriting recognition system that's about as fast to write as carving cuneiform?
In the old days PDAs had this amazing invention attached: a keyboard. Whether it was a PSION II, III or V, a Windows CE device, or even an Atari Portfolio, you could actually type useful stuff in. It's completely idiotic the way the "coolness" of having a touch screen seems to have outweighed the usefulness of keyboards in the eyes of PDA designers.
Slashdot Mirror
Reproduce? It's below the age of consent and therefore a sex offender. Lock it up!
I'm not sure it's up to us to decdide this is an injustice. If Kansas were torturing their babies, yes, maybe that's time to step in. But all over the world there are people with interesting and diverse belief systems that are incompatible with each other. It seems to me that this is one area where you have to let people do what they choose.
I also think dirty tactics are not the way to promote scientific education. Much of Western society is founded on freedom of speech and much of the success of Western science is due to the ability to propose and test theories unhindered by government. If our claim is correct, that teaching evolution will make Kansas a more backwards state, then their ideas will be tested by the passage of time without the need for outside interference. If Intelligent Design isn't up to the task of giving Kansanians a working world view for the tasks they carry out in their lives then eventually they'll have to give it up.
How do you know it's the start of a new life? It might be the start of two lives if the zygote splits.
Software Development!=Science
Technology!=Science
Business!=Science
That must be the dumbest application of the lazy copy-and-paste-with-words-substituted argument that I've ever seen. The horrible thing is, it's not funny enough to be a joke.
Mars orbits the Sun. So does the Earth. There simply is no 'usual' distance between Earth and Mars. Sheesh!
I think you'll make a great social scientist! Good thing too, we don't have enough of them in the world.
I don't know. I haven't done the research. You need to take thousands of people and watch them handle thousands of emails and wait to see if someone does something other than deal quickly, slowly, or not at all with them. Painstaking work I'm sure. And if you find that all they do is one of these three things you can publish that as well, as these good folks have done. But you can't be sure unless you've done the work.
...days gone by have to say about the future we live in today then I recommend Today, Then, a collection of essays written about 100 years ago about now. It's amazing just how off the mark most people are. But there are some great insights: my favorite being one essay that opens saying something like "All mail will be electronic". Not bad for over 100 years ago! I don't recall reading even the slightest hint that number crunching machines would have any significance in anyone's life.
Anyway, that's enough posting on Slashdot, I've got to get back to counting slugs. I have this theory, that I can't wait to publish, that when it rains some slugs come out from hiding and some don't...
And how did you install those drivers for Windows? You probably just double-clicked on an executable. I use Linux all day at work but I still have no clue how you install drivers for anything under Linux.
I think your comment is pure idiocy. You don't forget language features because you're developing in a GUI.
Tell me. What problems, exactly, would this solve?
Aha! Here we go. Just tried to copy and paste some text from an xterm. I can paste to another terminal window but not to Firefox which instead pastes the last thing I copied from Firefox. Clearly two buffers at work. And there are lots of little annoyances like this. At least the bizarre behavior of the delete and backspace keys has gone away. But only because I spent ages trying to figure out how to configure xterm and stty to make them work and the config is still in my .cshrc. Firefox is fairly well behaved, different applications work by completely different rules. In fact, I appear to be able to use the two different buffers simultaneously when copy between different applications.
I'm talking about the cursor freezing when using X in a general purpose manner. There's no DOS going on and everyone here knows this happens when the network is running at less then perfectly. If that's the case then for some bizarre reason our systems department are breaking this. Our displays are pretty standard (Dell LCDs). I find it pretty implausible that our systems department are so bad. As I say, we're something of a flagship company and can attract the best people. But then maybe we don't pay enough to keep them. Seems unlikely to me though. When it works, it works nicely with x2x. (2 machines under my desk.) I'll say that in its favor. There are some things I like about Unix-like OSes, one of them being the relative seamlessness of remote access compared to crap like MS's Remote Desktop or whatever it was called. I've been a Linux user since version 0.99, I loved it for hacking at home, but using it at work is a new (1 yr) experience for me. I think I still might prefer it to Windows for solo development of command line tools - though I prefer MacOSX even more. Yup, that's the usual response I get. I'm used to it. Deny everything.And I forgot to mention the problem that really annoys me. 3rd party applications seem to be built for one specific set of libraries and no longer function as you upgrade version of Linux. Currently I'd like to run Mathematica but it was purchased when we ran RedHat and on longer runs under SUSE. I'm sure someone could spend days tracking down all of the missing dsos and installing them but I've never had to do such a thing under Windows. I still use Office 97 on my XP machine at home and I've never seen a DLL error with it. And I certainly don't seem to have any hope of running old games (eg. the Loki implementations for Linux) ever again. I only have one Windows 95 game that fails to run under XP (and I think that stupidly it only fails because it explicitly checks OS version number rather than because of a DLL version issue). Of course you're going to tell me that any well written Linux app should run on any future version of Linux. Maybe helloworld does.
I won't even mention that vast numbers of developers that have to write proprietary software because we've cut ourselves off from off-the-shelf software (which, incidentally, is already as good as most of the stuff we write, and far better supported).
I really don't like Windows. The dumbest command line window on the planet. The whole patronising way the OS treats you. The lack of easy personalization. Prior to that I'd been using FreeBSD and it really felt like a step back. But though I don't like it, I grudgingly have to accept that when I worked for a Windows based company things went much smoother. Network downtime was minimal. Plug-and-play really did seem to work, at least for ordinary devices like mice and displays. And we still had access to many good OSS tools such as Python and Perl. Going back to an open source OS has turned out to be a much more painful transition than the transition to Windows.
Whenever I read news stories about our company I cringe. I find it annoying when we're briefed before a conference (say) on what we are and aren't allowed to say to other people - in particular we're asked to lie about what software we use. It's clear that many decisions are made in this company based on the fact that nobody wants to pay for licenses for software but they don't mind paying to recruit extra people to write the software they could have gotten off-the-shelf because it increases their department size and hence power within the company. (And other decisions are made based on which vendors the CTO plays golf with: I think that's why we have such an awful network.) In fact, I once went to an industry conference on OSes for our industry. We had a company having success using Windows. It was clear that the rest of the conference didn't want to hear anything we wanted to say - they were basically a lynch mob to try to force everyone to switch to OSS so we could provide a unified front to our vendors to get them to switch to OSS operating systems.
So whenever you read that a company is switching OS bear in mind that it's just as likely to be part of political maneuvering within the company as it is likely to be a rational decision.
nt
In one fell swoop they've put reverse engineers out of action. Now if you want to make an Apple or Sony device interoperate with an X-Box 360 you won't have to hack your device or install a mod-chip. How selfish! They put a whole industry out of business. How typical of Microsoft to shaft people this way.
I guess they're sighing with relief right now.
If you learn Haskell first then when you eventually learn C, or Python, or whatever, you'll think they're trivial Mickey Mouse languages and master them quickly. If you start with something like C you'll have a ton of conceptual barriers that will make it hard to move to Haskell.
You clearly have the luxury of not having to learn a language just because you need it to interoperate with your colleagues. So learn a language that's fun, intellectually stimulating, designed (as opposed to accreted like most languages), beautiful and functional (in at least two sense of the word).
I guess you're just going along with what everyone else tells you.
Why would a new document structure lead to a new copyright realm? The same idea that allowed Shakespeare's contemporaries to have monopolies on the printing of his plays is the one governing the copying of XML documents today. Changing the 'structure' doesn't free you to remix without 'negotiation'. And anyway, if you can do this freely, how is it a new 'copyright realm' as opposed to simply dumping copyright?
In the old days PDAs had this amazing invention attached: a keyboard. Whether it was a PSION II, III or V, a Windows CE device, or even an Atari Portfolio, you could actually type useful stuff in. It's completely idiotic the way the "coolness" of having a touch screen seems to have outweighed the usefulness of keyboards in the eyes of PDA designers.
Frankly, I think it's idiotic.