Minor: what's goatse?
/.er : (posts link)


Bam - you're a criminal.

Wow, what open source projects have YOU been working on? They sound magical.

Yes, spelling and grammar in comments are important for understanding, and proper spelling in variable names in particular makes it easier for developers after you to follow and track through code. However, I disagree with the generalization that long comments always mean you don't know what you are doing. Most of my code comments are 1-liners, but I always leave long comments for function headers so everyone is clear on what the inputs are. I also leave larger comments for equations that aren't immediately obvious, ESPECIALLY if the equations are coming from spec documents. A spec number, section number and explanation help developers FIND these things later and actually understand them. Spec documents in particular can be thick and it's not always easy to see at a glance how things are supposed to work. Plus, if there IS a mistake (let's face it, no one is perfect), it's way easier to track where something went wrong if you know what the start point is.

Actually both federal seats that were up for election went to Democrats including a seat in upstate New York that hadn't gone D since the Civil War. It was 2 Governorships that went to the R's.

Uh, no, that page describes how to rip a DVD to Matroksa in order to preserve the actual video content, audio channels, and subtitle streams. There's *nothing* in there about ripping the actual menu structure, and AFAIK, the Matroska menu spec a) is in it's infancy, b) has no tooling to make DVD -> MKV w/ menus actually doable, and c) isn't supported by any players out there.

'course, I'd *love* to be proven wrong. :)

You see porn is bad. Because it has naked people in it pretending to have sex. Which is bad because sex isn't fun, its a terrible thing that must be endured for the betterment of society. Or something. I dunno, don't ask me hard questions. Its in the bible, right after god said to go forth and multiply...

Sex = bad! Stop questioning things!

Maybe. But I think it's mostly just a disconnect between what the people who work in the field believe the term to mean and what the general public takes the term to mean. Some of that might just be naivete on the part of researchers. And maybe some bravado as well.

When I hear about intelligent anything to do with computers, I just think of a system that learns. That, to me, is the key differentiator. On the other hand, my mom's friend was telling me one night at dinner that her son was taking a class where they're "building machines like brains". Well, he was clearly learning about ANNs in some undergrad CI course, but man, it sure sounds better when you say you're building brains, eh? It sounds like self-aware systems are a semesters worth of work away. Maybe he was trying to make his work sound more impressive. Or maybe his mom just took the wrong thing away from the conversation. Either way, he's talking about building an XOR and she's thinking Commander Data.

To be honest, though, researchers aren't always clear on what the terms mean either. Don't get me wrong - you'd be hard pressed to find a researcher who genuinely believes they are going to build a self-aware system or anything of the sort, but I remember going to a conference with an hour and a half long panel discussion on whether or not the fields of AI and CI should be combined or separated in the conference, and what each encompassed. No one had a good answer.

I think the guy at the store tricked you...'round here 8 bits can count way past 18 - get up to 255 unsigned. Looks like you have about a 4 1/2 bit machine. I'd take it back, and never shop at best buy again.

Unit tests are good for ensuring that no one totals your code while making changes to other products/areas of the code base. But, yeah, I'd still rather have the QA guys sign off.

Agreed. Link to the official site - http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/safety/distracted-driving/index.shtml. Hand-held communication devices are banned. You can use hands-free. You can use items attached to the dash. You can buy a 10-dollar mount for your iPod and that's acceptable. If the GPS is attached, that's also OK. And unless someone has managed to get coffee or a chocolate bar re-classified as a "communication" device, those aren't even touched by the new law.

But, you know, no need to get facts in the way of a good story. I mean, it's not like you could have found this stuff at the top link in google or anything.

You make a very good point. Some of this may just be different wiring, some of it is also likely social norms. Women in general still tend to take a larger roll in housework etc. - maybe it's just a time issue (although this is becoming less of the norm - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/060719/dq060719b-eng.htm). In other words, maybe the fact that there are fewer women in FOSS development than men isn't necessarily evidence of greater sexism in the FOSS community and it's more a reflection of a different, external gender difference.

Could also be a remnant of old-school development teams too - when your entire team has been together since the start, it probably doesn't have too many females on it. There have been a couple of times I've wanted to submit some kernel patches (fairly minor stuff - I do driver development as part of my job so sometimes I see something here or there that could use a fix). I never have though, 'cause I know it won't get accepted. Not because I'm female necessarily - more because my name isn't morton or torvalds =).

It's funny how things like the size of your state or country skews your perspective of stuff too. I live in Canada (pretty dang big). When I visited Europe, I was amazed that you could take a flight to a WHOLE DIFFERENT COUNTRY for like 22 pounds. Of course, realistically, it's about as far as me going from Toronto to Ottawa.

My friends in the UK think it's a far drive to go from Birmingham to London (2 hours maybe?), but when I was living in Sudbury (north-ish Ontario), people would drive 6 hours to go shopping at a not very exciting outlet mall in Barrie. They measure car-driving distance in hours up there.

But it skews the other way too. When one of my friends came from London to Montreal someone told him he should go visit Niagara falls. Of course, that's a 6 hour drive here, but to them, hey, it's in-country, right? Can't be THAT far.

Ideally, that is true, but most users ARE used to MS style software, and packages like open office are very similar to word in their GUI at least. When software looks similar on the surface, but behaves differently, it confuses users. On the other hand, I disagree with the assertion that in general users see differences as faults. Some are though, and the big faults can easily dissuade users from even making a change.

I haven't actually used open office for a while, but a few years ago I TA'd an intro computer course for non-computer students. It's was typical easy-ish course (word, excel, basic HTML/CSS, some basic command line/ftp stuff in windows and linux), but we crammed in some harder stuff (some lectures on binary addressing, ram, caching) and we make them do some more obscure stuff in word (styles, sections, captions, table generation, cross referencing etc.) As part of one of the assignments, the prof asked them to check out open office and try one or two of the things we covered for Word and write a couple of paragraphs on them. There was a general agreement that the way OO handled captions was vastly superior to word, they were split on features like styles and somewhat indifferent to most of the regular word-processing features (most of which are basically identical). BUT, the first time my lab started up OO, there was a general sort of confusion because when the class double clicked the icon as instructed, they were greeted with a giant, blank grey screen. Once I told them they needed to go to the tiny menu in the corner and select to create a new word-processing document they were fine, but if they were on their own how many would have downloaded OO, seen the blank screen and through "hmmm...nothing opened...looks broken" and then promptly deleted it? Probably most. The article is correct - Linux and most of the mature OSS projects have very solid internals, they just need some non-developers to look at them to polish the externals up a bit.

Actually, Blizz would be better off if people played less per month. Fewer people on the servers, but they're all still paying the same monthly fee.