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Comment Re:middle ground: 2-3 people back-to-back (Score 1) 420

My sweet spot is 4-6 people in an office. A real office, with walls and a door. I've been in a cube sea, I've been in a private office, I've been in shared cubicles. For what I do and how I do it, the small shared office is the most comfortable. (Your mileage may vary, of course. It depends on work habits and the number of people you regularly collaborate with.)

It's kind of funny though, that we'll often have a discussion going on IRC when we're all in the same room and could, you know... just talk to each other.

Comment What a load of corbomite! (Score 1) 234

They really call it VULCANDEATHGRIP? As I recall (and Memory Alpha confirms) the "Vulcan death grip" does not exist, it was merely a ruse used to fool the Romulans. Given the code name I surmise that the ability to crack VPNs doesn't exist, the NSA just wants us to believe that it does.

Next they'll be telling us that if they go "by the book, hours will seem like days". We see through your clever wordplay, NSA!

P.S. Deal me in for the Tuesday night fizzbin game. I want a piece of that action!

Comment Re:How many virgins were involved? (Score 1) 59

Not sacrifice, just the 40 year old kind?

I realize you're making a funny, but back when I played, back in the ancient times when 1st edition was just called AD&D because there wasn't a 2nd edition yet, we had actual girls in my campaign. With real boobs and vaginas. Which I know for a fact 'cause I got nekkid with a couple of 'em from time to time. And this at a college with a 4:1 male:female ratio, even. I'm not sure how this "nerd == virgin" idea got started, but consenting nerds have been screwing each other at least as long as I've been old enough to join the fun, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the first.

Comment Re:No problem. (Score 1) 145

Looks interesting. I installed it and turned off Ad-Block Plus and Ghostery to let the badger do its thing. The first issue I see is that it requires a training period to identify what's tracking you. I'm not sure I can survive the sewer that is the unfiltered Internet long enough for it to identify trackers....

Comment Anyone here qualified to comment? (Score 5, Interesting) 194

I'd really like to hear from someone outside of academia who thinks this is useful. I've been programming in C-like languages ever since I graduated college 25 years ago, but my degree is in EE, not CS. The language definition is complete gibberish to me, containing solid pages of a mathematical notation that I've never before seen. Likewise, I have a very hard time following the demo code. I don't really feel qualified to evaluate it.

I do see some red flags, though. First, since the language spec is given in such an abstract notation I have a feeling that it's going to be very difficult for code monkeys like me to refer back to. I normally reach for the language spec or the official docs when I have a question, but neither are going to do me any good here. Similarly, the tutorial starts out by describing the similarities and differences between Ur and ML or Haskell. That'd be a lot more useful if I'd ever used either of those two languages. The tutorial is incomplete, and what's there never describes Ur on its own without comparing it to the other languages.

Second, the trivial demos look like some PHP variant, while the complicated demos are, well... Complicated. "Hello, World" simply returns a chunk of what appears to be free-form XML; some others return a chunk of XML with a few embedded Ur statements, similar to PHP. The SQL demos show embedded SQL statements. Are the XML and SQL chunks syntactically part of the Ur language thus checked for well-formedness, or are they just free-form text which get minimally processed to substitute variables before they're emitted? Or is there something else fundamental going on here that I'm missing completely due to my lack of familiarity with functional programming?

Third, the official web site looks like something out of 1995. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It is clean and functional, just really, really utilitarian. I assume the site is done in Ur/Web, and it's clear that the author of the language learned HTML back when Mosaic was the hot new browser. Is the utilitarian look just how the author or site designer does things, or is it baked into the language? How hard would it be to implement something that looks modern? In the same vein it looks like Ur/Web produces xhtml as its output, and it looks like Ur/Web pretty much relies on well-formed XML embedded in the Ur source code. Will it have access to any of the new goodies in HTML5? Or is it going to be obsolete before the first Dummies book can be written?

So if there's anyone here who does real-world web development and has the academic chops to evaluate Ur/Web for what it is, would you please post a summary for us code-troglodytes?

Comment Re:Limited Theatrical Release (Score 2) 176

"Wait a minute... If we don't do a theatrical release before the end of the year, this thing can't get nominated for an Oscar! Quick, call up some rinkydink art houses, let's get this nominated for 'Most courageous expression of free speech in the face of a terrorist threat'! Because God knows it's not going to get nominated for the writing or acting."

Comment Re:To hide the bad service regular people get? (Score 1) 131

He called and said "We've broken flash on both Macs and can't watch youtube videos now. I've installed it twice on your mom's Mac but it didn't help."

Could be a lot worse. I emailed my mom a screenshot and she replied, "How did you do that?" I wrote back saying, "I have a Mac and don't know how to do it on a PC like you have, but if you Google 'windows screenshot' you'll find something that will tell you." Two days later I get a call: "I did what you said and now my computer runs slow and has all these strange windows and icons everywhere and my email doesn't work." "What did you do, mom?" "I Googled what you said. Then one of those sites told me my computer had a virus and I clicked a button to clean it."

This was my mom so I helped her, but this is a good example of why I'd rather have burning bamboo shoved underneath my fingernails than work tier 1 tech support.

Comment How about an armband phone case? (Score 1) 232

Have you considered an armband-style case for your phone? It straps the phone to your body pretty much as if it were a watch. You'd have to remember to take your phone out of your pocket and put it in the case when you suit up, but I assume you'd have the same problem remembering to remove a watch and put it back on over your suit.

Comment Re:These idiots remain idiotic (Score 1) 388

That "shadow" system you speak of could in fact be the catalyst we've all been waiting for to push the majority into IPv6 space.

The majority would never even notice if thepiratebay.se, demonoid.pw, or any similar site were to vanish from the official root servers. The majority simply don't use such sites. The minority who do fall into two groups: People who casually download a show every now and then, and people who are hardcore into the whole pirating scene. The hardcore people will simply change DNS providers and use one the MPAA can't touch. And the casual downloaders would only be mildly inconvenienced until somebody puts out a DNS-switcher browser plugin that dynamically picks DNS providers the way FoxyProxy dynamically picks proxy servers.

That said, IPv6 probably would solve this problem. It solves a lot of problems that people don't actually have.

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