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Comment Lying sometimes needed for effective leadership? (Score 1) 265

Something no one seems to have mentioned yet is that lying might sometimes be necessary for effective leadership.

Since this is Slashdot, think of Theoden at the battle at Helm's Deep. Putting on a brace face, sometimes straight out lying about things. I can imagine e.g. tribal leaders doing the same thing. So there might be a mechanism whereby people either develop these skills when in a leadership position, or the people who tend towards lying more easily attain these positions.

Of course, this can only ever be a positive thing if the leader in question actually cares about his underlings.

Comment Re:Qt (Score 0) 310

QString has function to convert to/from std::string, and the Qt containers can all give you STL compatible iterators. I've found working with Qt and the STL in general to be quite easy - in fact I prefer to use the Qt classes whenever I can, as I much prefer their API.

Comment Re:Use Qt.... (Score 1, Insightful) 948

Sounds like KDE modified Qt.

No. Qt has several event loops - it will default to the glib-based one if glib is available at compile time. It will fall back to the generic Unix event loop if glib is not found. You can also disable the glib event loop by setting the environment variable QT_NO_GLIB if you need to - for example debugging is simpler with the generic Unix main loop.

This was developed by Trolltech back in 2006, see here. Interesting quote: the ideal would be for all applications on the X11 desktop to use the same event dispatching mechanism. Here are Trolltech, we think the Glib main loop should be that mechanism...

This has the nice side-effect of being able to use gtk and Qt in the same process. This can be convenient at times, for example I have been developing a Qt-based user interface for the mupen64plus emulator. The glib event loop makes it possible to use plugins with gtk interfaces where no Qt interface exists yet. It also makes integrating glib-based things in general pretty much completely painless.

Comment Re:What's really behind Finlands IT success (Score 1, Interesting) 229

A common expression amongst Finns is "Vaikka läpi harmaan kiven", "Even through gray rock". More elaborately put, if you are determined enough, you'll get there eventually, no matter the obstacles. There are other similar expressions, and even a word that sums it all up, sisu.
United States

Discuss the US Presidential Election & the Economy 2369

A number of folks have been submitting topics that indicate that they want to have a serious discussion on the issues surrounding this election. Since we're under a week now, I've decided to run a series of discussion stories to give you guys a place to discuss the issue. So here's the first one: The Economy. It's the biggest topic these days, eclipsing even war as the most important issue to most Americans. But how will that affect your choice next week? And why?
Debian

Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? 544

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article where they provide Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 benchmarks and had ran many tests. In that article, when using an Intel notebook they witness major slowdowns in different areas and ask the question, Is Ubuntu getting slower? From the article: 'A number of significant kernel changes had went on between these Ubuntu Linux releases including the Completely Fair Scheduler, the SLUB allocator, tickless kernel support, etc. We had also repeated many of these tests to confirm we were not experiencing a performance fluke or other issue (even though the Phoronix Test Suite carries out each test in a completely automated and repeatable fashion) but nothing had changed. Ubuntu 7.04 was certainly the Feisty Fawn for performance, but based upon these results perhaps it would be better to call Ubuntu 7.10 the Gooey Gibbon, 8.04 the Hungover Heron, and 8.10 the Idling Ibex.'"
Programming

New Contestants On the Turing Test 630

vitamine73 writes "At 9 a.m. next Sunday, six computer programs — 'artificial conversational entities' — will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognized 'thinking' machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious' — and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off."

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