According to Marshall Savage, in his book, the Millenial Project, it would take 15000 700MW OTECs before the ocean's thermal energy achieves steady state.
X has nothing whatsoever to do with the look and behaviour of your widgets and dialogs. It is a graphics backend that renders them for the window managers which are the ones determining their look and behaviour. All these people screaming about how X sucks are misunderstanding the issue and blaming the wrong piece of software.
Most SMTP servers are set up to allow connections from anybody as anybody. It is entirely possible to restrict connections to authorized users only, and it is technically possible (although I am not sure if it is implemented) to force from: addresses to the authorized user's identity. Most users send mail only as themselves. The exception is relay hosts, but those can be explicitly authorized, and you wouldn't want to allow your server to relay from a known spammer, would you?
Most SMTP server can be set up to require authentication of the user; I think it should be possible to force each client to use only the from: address that it authenticated with.
Can I just point out that as well as people who don't program in C++, "C++ Templates: The Complete Guide" will also be of limited interest to those who can't read.
Which kind of categorizes one with the other:) *duck the flamethrowers*
Just like macros can bloat your code, so can templates. If you put "real" code in templates, it will be duplicated; however, consider that you would have probably had to write it anyway, and having template instances is FAR better than having cut-n-paste code. STL instances can get pretty big because they have lots of memory management code in there and type-specific operations; this is good because it gives you type safety and proper element assignments. You can implement it another way, but you have to sacrifice something. Either it is type safety (like Java does with its containers), or correct element handling (escuse the shameless plug for my own ustl library).
Nearly all the spam I get comes from bogus addresses. If SMTP servers did not allow forging of the from: address, the problem would be drastically reduced since the spammers would have to get new accounts much more frequently, and most people would be able to block all the "free" email domains like hotmail and msn, where spam is most probably coming from.
When you ignore a bug just because you do not like the tone is certainly unprofessional and hurts you more than it does the user. After all, you do want people to use your software? Right? However, I think that what the article means is that if the developer does not think "fixing" a particular "bug" is a good idea, then he is not under any obligation to do it. "No obligation" is not the same as "I'll ignore all your bugs if you are not nice to me", but it is also not the same as "customer is always right". If you want unconditional respect, then you should pay for it. Open source software developers *cough*likeme*cough* are always open to generous contributions of funds... (*hint*)
Whom are you "protecting", when you forbid foreigners to work? Sure, you can restrict immigration and your isolationist policy will indeed give more jobs to american citizens. But why would that be a goal? Nobody has a "right" to a job. By forcing employers to hire only citizens, you restrict their candidate pool, and are then interfering with their business. Such interference is quite contrary to the ideas of "free enterprise" upon which the United States was founded. In fact, it gets closer and closer to the old Soviet Union policies, with which I am quite familiar, being a citizen of that derelict country.
>>"With the quality of american programmers going >> down, is it really surprizing that companies >> turn to other countries to find qualified >> computer professionals?" > > This is a statement that cannot be left > unchallenged. Please provide proof.
Given that I can not sample all programmers, no proof is possible. However, this has been my general impression while working as a programmer myself. Most of the talented programmers I've met were foreigners. When I was at Microsoft, my team had only two Americans out of fourteen programmers. (yes, I'm a foreigner too, a Russian) The Americans were much more likely to be found in the testing labs than in development. I can not really explain this, since I do not personally believe that "all americans are lazy", but I can certainly see that the trend is there.
> I'd question the scope of this statement, as its > presumption is that the quality of all american > programmers is going down, meaning that no one > in the ever-expanding tech unemployment pool is > fit to hold an Indian programmer's jock strap,
If you are unemployed, that doesn't mean you have no talent. Indian programmers are not all that great either. There is just a lot more of them and while there are many bad ones, there are also many good ones.
It is obvious to every businessman that when you hire someone, you hire the best person for the job. With the quality of american programmers going down, is it really surprizing that companies turn to other countries to find qualified computer professionals? And as for the pricing, well, if they want to work for less, it is their prerogative. It is as normal as having one of your competitor companies slash prices in order to drive you out of the market. That is life, and that is justice. To tell the companies that they must hire americans is as dumb as telling them they have to hire blacks solely for their skin color, even when they are not qualified to do the work.And to tell the companies that they must pay everybody an equal wage is clearly a communist sentiment, the inevitable result of which is well described by Ayn Rand in "Atlas Shrugged". Read the story of the Twentieth Century Motor company.
Need to explain begets the need for higher math.
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think that the reason that most people do not know mathematics is that they do not care about mathematics. When you are reading about abstract concepts that have no correspondence to your own experience, you are justifiably frustrated. Just as the desire to learn the subtleties of one's natural language can come only from the need to explain new experiences, so the desire for higher mathematics can come only from the need to express new abstractions that vaguely coalesce in your mind as you tackle some unusual programming task. My recent programming adventures provide an example of this happening. For the last few months I've been struggling with using dataflow graphs as a generic programming tool, and the need to describe the entities I was creating pushed me into rereading mathematical texts that lay dormant on my shelves for quite some time. And I found consolation in multivalued functions, and operators, and some abstruse terminology from group theory. And then my ideas suddenly seemed a little clearer and cleaner and I think I could explain them better now than before.
I am not writing software because I like providing technical support, selling manuals, training people in its use, or doing T-shirt fundraisers. I am not good at those things. I am good at writing software. Are you going to tell Sears that they can only charge you for the installation of a heat pump, not the cost of the unit? Let people be paid for what they do best. If you make them do their best for free and sell you some service they can only do in a more inferior manner, their business will hardly last a week.
If the escrow is not met and you no longer wish to develop the program, release the source code to the people who purchased the program under a totally proprietary license allowing internal modification, but not redistribution of source or binaries. This way, if you paid for it, you'll have the source to hack for yourself, but nobody else benefits; after all, they didn't pay for it.
From my personal experience in looking at various open source code, is that most of it is not reusable. Download bash source code, for instance, and see if you can cut-n-paste some of it into your own shell. Unless you use identical development style, this is nearly impossible. All that code is very tightly bound together, it is all in C, and most of it is rather ugly. If you are bright enough to design some new program, you are bright enough to rewrite the code to make it better. This is not reinventing the wheel, it is reimplementing the wheel. Take the ideas, trash the implementation. Flame me if you want, but I am convinced that it is the only way to make good software based on anything open source.
In Frank Herbert's "Whipping Star", Beachballs were "houses" for multidimensional superbeings whose three-dimensional projections on our universe were our stars.
If you recall the infamous cold fusion experiments, the energy there was supposedly generated by bringing deuterium atoms closer together by packing them into a palladium electrode. Results were difficult to reproduce, but clearly something was leading them to believe that net energy increase was occuring. Sounds like "hydrinos" may indeed be undergoing fusion.
Educated people don't need spelling checkers.
on
Mozilla Bug Week
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
If you habitually misspell words in your e-mail messages, the problem is likely to lie with your education rather than the software. Inclusion of software crutches for a wetware problem only makes the latter worse.
If you read the article, you'll see that the mechanism blocks drivers which crash the system frequently as determined by the crash dump reports sent to MS. Clearly, if you write your driver so it crashes the system all the time, it will be blocked. So stop complaining that you are "denied market share" and write a better driver. What, do you think you are entitled to be installed on every Windows machine just because your software is free?
It is always amusing to observe the drastic vocabulary simplification that occured since that time. When have you last seen words like 'illuminated', 'concentric', 'radiate', 'galeproof', 'miscall'? The sentence structure also is notably changed. If compared with modern newspaper, the difference is similar to that between "By 2000, a vast amount of research has to be conducted to exploit principles that were embryonic in the first quarter of the 20th century." and "By year 2000, scientists will still be busy working on ideas from the 20th century. Public upset. Politicians complain about funding. Scientists work"
And how may I ask do they propose to connect my rifle, my laser targeting devices, my night vision goggles, and all the other equipment to that big battery? Wires? AA batteries don't weigh that much; definitely not enough to justify adding a 2-3 lb power generator to the 80 lb of equipment that I already have to carry around. Seriously, those designers need to be taken out to the field on a short infantry mission to ensure sanity.
It's not "as a females", but "with a female".
on
Men Playing as Women
·
· Score: 1
Personally, I've never thought of the those on-screen characters as myself. Rather they are someone I'm travelling with (even though she does all the fighting:) Not so hard to choose your character's gender now, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
According to Marshall Savage, in his book, the Millenial Project, it would take 15000 700MW OTECs before the ocean's thermal energy achieves steady state.
Implement a flight simulator on top of that and go help the air force bomb Iraq. Ender lives!
X has nothing whatsoever to do with the look and behaviour of your widgets and dialogs. It is a graphics backend that renders them for the window managers which are the ones determining their look and behaviour. All these people screaming about how X sucks are misunderstanding the issue and blaming the wrong piece of software.
Most SMTP servers are set up to allow connections from anybody as anybody. It is entirely possible to restrict connections to authorized users only, and it is technically possible (although I am not sure if it is implemented) to force from: addresses to the authorized user's identity. Most users send mail only as themselves. The exception is relay hosts, but those can be explicitly authorized, and you wouldn't want to allow your server to relay from a known spammer, would you?
Most SMTP server can be set up to require authentication of the user; I think it should be possible to force each client to use only the from: address that it authenticated with.
Can I just point out that as well as people who don't program in C++, "C++ Templates: The Complete Guide" will also be of limited interest to those who can't read.
Which kind of categorizes one with the other
*duck the flamethrowers*
Just like macros can bloat your code, so can templates. If you put "real" code in templates, it will be duplicated; however, consider that you would have probably had to write it anyway, and having template instances is FAR better than having cut-n-paste code. STL instances can get pretty big because they have lots of memory management code in there and type-specific operations; this is good because it gives you type safety and proper element assignments. You can implement it another way, but you have to sacrifice something. Either it is type safety (like Java does with its containers), or correct element handling (escuse the shameless plug for my own ustl library).
At least implement it as a wait period! Pegging the CPU wastes electricity with heat and reduces the processor lifetime. And can you say DOS attack?
Nearly all the spam I get comes from bogus addresses. If SMTP servers did not allow forging of the from: address, the problem would be drastically reduced since the spammers would have to get new accounts much more frequently, and most people would be able to block all the "free" email domains like hotmail and msn, where spam is most probably coming from.
When you ignore a bug just because you do not like the tone is certainly unprofessional and hurts you more than it does the user. After all, you do want people to use your software? Right? However, I think that what the article means is that if the developer does not think "fixing" a particular "bug" is a good idea, then he is not under any obligation to do it. "No obligation" is not the same as "I'll ignore all your bugs if you are not nice to me", but it is also not the same as "customer is always right". If you want unconditional respect, then you should pay for it. Open source software developers *cough*likeme*cough* are always open to generous contributions of funds... (*hint*)
a) What is the same as "the developers must do my bidding"?
"All your jobs are belong to us."
b) What is the phrase or action that will get the developers to actually do my bidding? I'm very busy and quite imperio
"If you do my bidding, I'll pay you $1,000,000"
Whom are you "protecting", when you forbid foreigners to work? Sure, you can restrict immigration and your isolationist policy will indeed give more jobs to american citizens. But why would that be a goal? Nobody has a "right" to a job. By forcing employers to hire only citizens, you restrict their candidate pool, and are then interfering with their business. Such interference is quite contrary to the ideas of "free enterprise" upon which the United States was founded. In fact, it gets closer and closer to the old Soviet Union policies, with which I am quite familiar, being a citizen of that derelict country.
>>"With the quality of american programmers going
>> down, is it really surprizing that companies
>> turn to other countries to find qualified
>> computer professionals?"
>
> This is a statement that cannot be left
> unchallenged. Please provide proof.
Given that I can not sample all programmers, no
proof is possible. However, this has been my
general impression while working as a programmer
myself. Most of the talented programmers I've met
were foreigners. When I was at Microsoft, my team
had only two Americans out of fourteen programmers.
(yes, I'm a foreigner too, a Russian)
The Americans were much more likely to be found in
the testing labs than in development. I can not
really explain this, since I do not personally
believe that "all americans are lazy", but I can
certainly see that the trend is there.
> I'd question the scope of this statement, as its
> presumption is that the quality of all american
> programmers is going down, meaning that no one
> in the ever-expanding tech unemployment pool is
> fit to hold an Indian programmer's jock strap,
If you are unemployed, that doesn't mean you have
no talent. Indian programmers are not all that
great either. There is just a lot more of them and
while there are many bad ones, there are also many good ones.
It is obvious to every businessman that when you hire someone, you hire the best person for the job. With the quality of american programmers going down, is it really surprizing that companies turn to other countries to find qualified computer professionals? And as for the pricing, well, if they want to work for less, it is their prerogative. It is as normal as having one of your competitor companies slash prices in order to drive you out of the market. That is life, and that is justice. To tell the companies that they must hire americans is as dumb as telling them they have to hire blacks solely for their skin color, even when they are not qualified to do the work.And to tell the companies that they must pay everybody an equal wage is clearly a communist sentiment, the inevitable result of which is well described by Ayn Rand in "Atlas Shrugged". Read the story of the Twentieth Century Motor company.
I think that the reason that most people do not know mathematics is that they do not care about mathematics. When you are reading about abstract concepts that have no correspondence to your own experience, you are justifiably frustrated. Just as the desire to learn the subtleties of one's natural language can come only from the need to explain new experiences, so the desire for higher mathematics can come only from the need to express new abstractions that vaguely coalesce in your mind as you tackle some unusual programming task. My recent programming adventures provide an example of this happening. For the last few months I've been struggling with using dataflow graphs as a generic programming tool, and the need to describe the entities I was creating pushed me into rereading mathematical texts that lay dormant on my shelves for quite some time. And I found consolation in multivalued functions, and operators, and some abstruse terminology from group theory. And then my ideas suddenly seemed a little clearer and cleaner and I think I could explain them better now than before.
I am not writing software because I like providing technical support, selling manuals, training people in its use, or doing T-shirt fundraisers. I am not good at those things. I am good at writing software. Are you going to tell Sears that they can only charge you for the installation of a heat pump, not the cost of the unit? Let people be paid for what they do best. If you make them do their best for free and sell you some service they can only do in a more inferior manner, their business will hardly last a week.
If the escrow is not met and you no longer wish to develop the program, release the source code to the people who purchased the program under a totally proprietary license allowing internal modification, but not redistribution of source or binaries. This way, if you paid for it, you'll have the source to hack for yourself, but nobody else benefits; after all, they didn't pay for it.
From my personal experience in looking at various open source code, is that most of it is not reusable. Download bash source code, for instance, and see if you can cut-n-paste some of it into your own shell. Unless you use identical development style, this is nearly impossible. All that code is very tightly bound together, it is all in C, and most of it is rather ugly. If you are bright enough to design some new program, you are bright enough to rewrite the code to make it better. This is not reinventing the wheel, it is reimplementing the wheel. Take the ideas, trash the implementation. Flame me if you want, but I am convinced that it is the only way to make good software based on anything open source.
In Frank Herbert's "Whipping Star", Beachballs were "houses" for multidimensional superbeings whose three-dimensional projections on our universe were our stars.
If you recall the infamous cold fusion experiments, the energy there was supposedly generated by bringing deuterium atoms closer together by packing them into a palladium electrode. Results were difficult to reproduce, but clearly something was leading them to believe that net energy increase was occuring. Sounds like "hydrinos" may indeed be undergoing fusion.
If you habitually misspell words in your e-mail
messages, the problem is likely to lie with your
education rather than the software. Inclusion of
software crutches for a wetware problem only
makes the latter worse.
If you read the article, you'll see that the mechanism
blocks drivers which crash the system frequently
as determined by the crash dump reports sent to MS.
Clearly, if you write your driver so it crashes the
system all the time, it will be blocked. So stop
complaining that you are "denied market share" and
write a better driver. What, do you think you are
entitled to be installed on every Windows machine just
because your software is free?
It is always amusing to observe the drastic vocabulary simplification that occured since that time. When have you last seen words like 'illuminated', 'concentric', 'radiate', 'galeproof', 'miscall'? The sentence structure also is notably changed. If compared with modern newspaper, the difference is similar to that between "By 2000, a vast amount of research has to be conducted to exploit principles that were embryonic in the first quarter of the 20th century." and "By year 2000, scientists will still be busy working on ideas from the 20th century. Public upset. Politicians complain about funding. Scientists work"
And how may I ask do they propose to connect my rifle, my laser targeting devices, my night vision goggles, and all the other equipment to that big battery? Wires? AA batteries don't weigh that much; definitely not enough to justify adding a 2-3 lb power generator to the 80 lb of equipment that I already have to carry around. Seriously, those designers need to be taken out to the field on a short infantry mission to ensure sanity.
Personally, I've never thought of the those on-screen characters as myself. Rather they are someone I'm travelling with (even though she does all the fighting :) Not so hard to choose your character's gender now, is it?