Um... if they are using a largely minority pool of test subjects, the test doesn't accurately reflect the demographics of traditional standardized tests.
From reading the article, I gathered that the point of these tests was to measure personal qualities that standardized tests tend to miss. The goal is to identify people with qualities that will enable them to succeed in college. According to the article, many poorer people with these qualities are passed over because of poor performance on standardized tests. Thus, the primary sample group was drawn from poorer sections of NYC. Due to the demographics of the city, these tent to be Afriacn-Americans and Hispanics, but the selection criterion was (lack of) affluence, not race.
If it is found that, in this small test group, the students that are selected do perform well in college and would not have been given the same consideration had addmissions been based on standardized tests, then I would imagine that the tests would be applied to a larger group of students comprised of a larger cross-section of income brackets.
--Phil (They should describe more of the tests. I wonder how I would do on them.)
It's still a nice idea - give college kids some legos and see what they build. However, if they're still bent on using tests (an ultimately doomed approach) instead of interviewing potential students, may I suggest giving potential candidates an objective (which varies from person to person) and see how they solve it?
That is what they're doing. According to the article, the students are asked to duplicate as closely as possible a robot in the next room. They work in groups, and each group member may look at the robot alone and may not take notes. It is also worth noting that the Lego test is but one of a dozen tests the prospective students undergo, and after the tests, there is a half-hour interview with each person.
--Phil (We'll have to wait several years to see how these tests work out, but they certainly sound promising.)
A while back (well before the IPO), a couple of VA people did a presentation for the local LUG. According to them, they run Linux exclusively, from their techs to their marketing people to (of course) their servers. One specifically pointed out that they didn't have an ERP system until they found one that ran with Linux (they may have funded the development of it; I don't remember exactly). If only I had the money to buy from VA.
--Phil (Most of my computers are assembled from used parts--much cheaper that way.)
Re:Before y'all get your panties in a twist...
on
RIAA Sues MP3.com
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· Score: 1
if you have the cd, why do you need to even bother with mp3.com when you can rip the mp3z directly from the cd?
Disk space and convenience. I have a small CD collection (~100 CDs) and it's taking up most of a 13GB drive. I know many people with collections much larger than mine, and not all of them would have the disk space to put their entire collection on a hard drive. One person to whom I was recently talking estimated that he has over 70GB of mp3s (all ripped from CDs he owns) burned onto mp3 collection CDs (~15 albums per CD). But not everyone has CD burners, either. So, mp3.com's Beam-It gives people the convenience of random access to their entire music collection without the problems of finding the local disk space to store it.
There is certainly a defendible legitimate use for the service. The question is whether the abuses (actual or projected) outweigh the benefits.
--Phil (Soon going to have get another drive as I get more CDs.)
What I find interesting is the way the web page brandished phrases like "Preemptive Multitasking" and "Protected Memory" as if they were amazing new tings just developed exclusively for Apple's use, while those of who actually know what they're talking about are saying, "About time, already!" I mean, it's really nice that Apple is moving into modern times and using modern OS features (they're even basing the core of the OS on BSD, which I think is a good decision), but why do the marketing people feel the need to sound like this is amazingly new stuff that no one has ever even heard of before, and all the Apple users should be really happy that they get to use this advanced software?
--Phil (Just a little marketing-sucks rant. Move along, citizen; nothing to see here.)
All recent book reviews have linked to fatbrain, not Amazon.com. I believe that Hemos stated in a comment on another book review that they're working on converting all the old ones to fatbrain, too, but there are a lot of reviews so it's going slowly.
--Phil (I'm too into instant gratification to buy online--I just drive down to the local Borders. (I want my books NOW!))
Not in the post I was replying to. Tom was inferring quite strongly that the GPL had a clause forbidding people to make money off GPLed software. He would have been better off taking your approach and showing that, as a side effect of the GPLs freeness, one cannot make money off a GPLed program.
In either case, I don't agree. You present two extreme examples (everyone buys from you or no one buys from you), but I think that a realistic example would lie somewhere in between. Let's say you form a company to write a program to make widgets. You call your company WidgetPeople. WisgetPeople makes a product and sells CDs, complete with manual and box. Bob buys one copy and starts selling things, too, but at a lower price and without the manual. WidgetPeople has a marketing budget; Bob does not. WidgetPeople has a manual; Bob says, "It's on the CD. You can print it (all 300 pages of it) yourself if you want." Bob sells a number of copies to people who just want the cheapest deal. WidgetPeople sells far more copies than Bob does, for various reasons, including the fact that most people have never even heard of Bob, people want manuals, your packaging looks slicker, and just desire to support the original authors.
Don't believe me? Look at RedHat and Cheap*Bytes. Cheap*Bytes sells a lot of RedHat CDs. RedHat sells more. RedHat also sells support and various other merchandise, and manages to turn a profit.
--Phil (Sorry if this gets disjointed in places. I was interrupted several times while writing it.)
Aren't royalties somewhat extraneous to this discussion? As I understand it, under the royalty system, the author of a work is paid a certain amount of money every time someone buys their work. This works (ideally) for print media because the publishers have costs to print the books (or magazines or whatever) that they need to recoup, too. In software sales, no one, to my knowledge, uses royalties. They just charge up front for the software.
Selling a GPLed program is very similar. You can throw it on a CD, put it in a box, add a manual, shrink wrap it, and sell it. The difference is that the buyer also has permission to sell the program, or even give it away. The buyer also either has the source code or has the right to get it, but that's incedental to being able to sell the program. In such a market, a successful company will have a strong brand, and a good reputation for supporting the product. Witness RedHat, a company that is making a profit by selling and supporting free software. Anyone can download or buy RedHat Linux and then turn around and sell it to other people. This is the exact same freedom the GPL gives people. And RedHat remains successful.
So inability to receive royalty payments on GPLed programs is a nonissue. Do you have further complaints? (If so, please back them up with some evidence. It makes for a much sounder argument if you do so.)
--Phil (And, as others have noted, the author of a program is always free to release his software under multiple licenses.)
This discussion should be about the Artistic License, but I'm going to talk about the GPL, since you've taken a few potshots at it and I don't like to see my preferred license unfairly dragged through the mud.
Some people prefer to install poison-pills in their licences. Usually, this poison pill is about using the software to make money with. Sleepycat Software has that, the GPL has that, and so do lots of others.
I don't know about Sleepycat Software's license, but you are incorrect about the GPL. It seems to be a common misconception that the GPL disallows making a profit on software, and I'm not sure why. Nowhere in the GPL is there language barring people from selling GPLed software. In fact, the GPL states in section 1
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
I gather from your post that you don't like the GPL, but please argue against it from a basis of fact, not conjecture. The rhetoric and charged words ("poison pill", most notably) don't add much to your writing, either. Again, argue on fact, please. --Phil (Who wishes that more people who argue about the GPL (on both sides!) would read the thing first.)
However, after personally seeing IBM run away from Java on the mainframes (running OS/390-MVS), I have to doubt this is true. IBM looked scared to death of Java on the mainframes.
You sure? I don't know about their mainframes, but I've seen a lot of grumbling on MIDRANGE-L about IBM pushing Java as an alternative to RPG on the AS/400. (Not that getting rid of RPG would be a devastating thing, IMHO.)
But why 32bit? Isn't the total level of the human eye's color threshold that is perceivable at 24bpp? what good is an extra 8bpp? Couldn't that be just used to speed up the whole thing?
Indeed, 24bpp is about the limit of the eye's perception for color variations. The 32bpp is to accomidate computers, not people. Modern consumer processors are used to slinging numbers around in 32 bit chunks. At 32bpp, the processor (whether the CPU or the videocard's) can easily address one pixel at a time. In 24bpp, more work must be done to grab to 32bit space enclosing the pixel and then extract the pixel. 24bpp is generally used to try to squeeze a more pixels out of a specific amount of VRAM. In today's market, the monitor is often more of a limiting factor on resolution than the video card's memory is, so most programs just go for the faster 32bpp.
--Phil (Also, some programs (like Netscape) don't handle 24bpp in X very well.)
something like "/Program Files" (universal place for user programs)
Like/usr/bin? Or were you referring to the fact that windows programs put the majority of their stuff in a single directory under "Program Files"? Linux merely has a different philosophy about such things. Rather than grouping files by program, it groups them by function. (/etc,/usr,/var,/bin) This makes finding a specific file no more difficult than in Windows (I wouldn't say it makes it easier, either, though). The biggest place this would make a difference is in program installation and removal. More on this in the next point, but note that windows programs often throw stuff into \windows and the registry which is not removed if you just delete the directory.
a good, easy, standard way to install *and remove* software
apt-get install <package> dpkg --purge <package> Or whatever rpm uses. The major distributions all have package management. (Even slackware, to a degree.) You can smoothly install and uninstall programs as you wish. With such a system managing the various programs on your computer, you don't need to worry about the locations of all of the files for a specific program (removing what I see as the biggest argument for throwing everything from a program into a separate directory).
"Start->Settings->Control Panel" (universal place for drivers/configs - linuxconf is getting there for config stuff)
Debconf is quite nice at asking just the questions it needs to install and minimally configure your packages. gnomecc is looking pretty nice as a centralized configuration area for GNOME programs. I think the biggest thing Linux is missing that Windows has in this area is the automatic detection of hardware. There are people working on this, but it's not production quality yet.
Personally, I think that the hardest part of using Linux is the installation. As more major computer dealers begin preinstalling Linux (still a bit of a ways off), this will become less of an issue.
--Phil (Yes, my examples are from Debian. I assume that Red Hat is comparable.)
For reading slashdot on my Palm, I use sitescooper. There's another web site viewer that is reputed to generate better output than AvantGo (because it does a good bit of the rendering on the PC), but I don't remember the name at the moment. I'm quite happy with sitescooper.
--Phil (I'm quite pleased with my Palm III. My life has gotten a good bit more organized.)
Well, if you *know* it to be true without a lot of evidence, then that seems to indicate something unflattering about how hard you are to convince.
I rather tend to think that faith is a subjective thing. To have faith in something is to believe it because you feel that it is right. To me, religion's purpose is to give meaning to that which science cannot explain. Science (and I speak as a physics major) can explain the how of things. It cannot explain why.
Personally, I believe in God. I don't expect my belief to have much effect on you, because belief is a subjective thing, and everyone needs to determine for themselves what they believe in.
--Phil (Slashdot method #47 for starting a flamewar: mention religion.)
The program you're looking for is Strip (Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passwords). It is a GPLed program for the PalmOS that manages usernames and passwords. It stores all of its information in encrypted form, and you must enter the correct password un decrypt it for use. I'm currently using it to keep track of all of the users at the office, since I run of the network here.
--Phil (If only there were more GPLed Pilot apps...)
First off, he's apparently in a business environment, so there should be someone (probably him) to admin the machines. I've never seen a problem like your #1 (but I've never used Red Hat either), but that sounds like it's due to a bug in one of the programs which, hopefully, will get reported and fixed.
2) You click the foot menu and go to "pick an app that wasn't installed by the sysadmin." You click the list item and nothing happens.
For one thing, this is the sysadmin's responsibility. The users shouldn't have anything on their menus that isn't installed on the system. I probably have it easy. I just told GNOME to use the Debian menuing system. Regardless, the admin should know how to keep the menus up to date.
3) You come in one morning after a power outage and the computer is on, at a login prompt. Many services don't work right: you have no sound, CD-ROM, and/or impaired network functionality. You call your sysadmin over, who types:
lsmod insmod -a Now stuff works again.
This is definitely the sysadmin's responsibility. A well-configured system will load the needed modules in the startup scripts.
4) You want to cut and paste from Kedit to Netscape, from Netscape to Gedit, or from Gedit to Kedit.
How is this a problem? You highlight the text, go to the other window, and middle-click. The buggest hurdle here is people who are used to the way Windows does cut-and-paste.
Make no mistake, I love Linux and I try to get it used where it will shine. But as a desktop it's strictly for power users and hobbyists like you and me, unless it's locked down and minimalized to a degree that makes my hackles rise regardless of the OS being controlled.
I'll have to disagree with you a little here. I don't think that Linux is quite ready for the average user's desktop yet. (I do think that it's moving in that direction.) For use in a business, Linux, properly admined, is quite useable now. As long as someone else is worrying about the system setup, users can just log in, run their programs, and do their work. Locked down and minimalized? Maybe somewhat. Mortal users can't go mucking with the majority of the system. In a business environment, that's for the better. It keeps them from damaging things and lets the computer run much more smoothly. The users can still create and manage their own files. They can even play with their desktop themes. They just can't accidentally delete/usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.
--Phil (And yes, I've had to deal with windows users who have accidentally deleted important system files.)
I'm wondering if it's possible to design a contest which is not someone else's work, and relies on ingenuosity and technical skill.
I've come across the Programmer of the Month contest. Every couple of months, the guy that runs it proposes some interesting problem that can be solved with a program and takes submissions to see who can write the program that best solves the problem.
The current problem involves a word search where the letters for the words need only be adjacent (i.e. not necessarily in a straight line) and each letter may only be used once. Previous contests have included: given a square piece of wood and an arbitrary linear cut, make up to ten other straight cuts such that all final pieces of wood have the same area; in a lottery with N balls where three of the numbers on a seven-number ticket must match three of the seven numbers drawn, generate the fewest tickets necessary to guarantee a win; and on a square grid, using a salesman that moves like a chess knight, visit all of a list of locations in a minimum number of moves. The challenges are very interesting. Some are easy enough that I enter them. Some are quite chellenging, but they're still fun to try to solve, even if I don't feel I have a glimmer of a chance of winning.
--Phil (Not that I've even ever come close to winning. I'm getting better, though.)
Heinlein had some interesting beliefs. What I objected to mostly is that his later books became more vessels for describing his ideas than pure tales. As such, I felt that the plots grew fairly tired (and, in several cases, inconsistent) as they were made subservient to the memetic dissemination. I don't object to the inclusion of the concepts, just that Heinlein deemed them to be more important than the story, and the work as a whole suffered.
Time Enough For Love is a good example. It's good, although I wouldn't deem it a classic, but the last third or so of the book just seemes to drag on solely for the sake of Heinlein (through Lazarus) expounding on his worldview. For a specific example, I didn't see how Lazarus having sex with his clones added anything to the story, other than allowing Heinlein to tell us that our incest taboos are going to be outmoded with the advent of genetic understanding.
--Phil (Unrelatedly, L.E. Modesitt, Jr. has some really good books that make you think without preaching to you too much.)
I'd also recommend some Heinlein. Preferably some of his earlier works, before he got too preachy. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was quite good. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls would also be good choices.
--Phil (Maybe some E.E. Smith? Or is he too dated now?)
ccording to Neal, Diamond Age and Snow Crash are not in the same universe at all. He stated further that any similarity is just due to the coincidence of the both novels having the same author.
Think of it as an easter egg for the astute reader.
--Phil (Much like the Doom marine hidden in Duke Nukem.)
Despite the fact that this is probably a troll (witness the "as well as the heavy reliance on free software, most of which _sucks ass_" line), I'll address some of your points.
I haven't used either KDE or GNOME really heavily, so I con't comment on your first complaint. From what I've hard, though KDE sounds quite good. I also don't know of any video editing software. It's not an area in which I've done a lot of work.
A GNU Mathematica equivalent? Try Octave. I probably haven't used the thing to its fullest capabilities (I'm only an undergraduate), but it's been able to handle everything I've thrown at it.
Why do you think that GCC is not a good compiler? It certainly seems to be working well for me.
Now if I'm confusing the issue of open source and linux, it's because the original post seemed to, and lots of people are talking about the end of the software business. Open source is great for things like a web server, or a kernel, or a compiler. But bigger stuff? Like antenna simulation software? Things like that? Forget it. No one is going to write something like that and just give it away.
I'm not so sure. "No one is going to write something like that and just give it away"? People said the same thing about operating systems. We currently have at least Linux and the free *BSDs. People said that about various applications. "Nobody'll write a compiler and give it away. Nobody would think it interesting enough." "Nobody would write a free graphics program anywhere near the same class as Photoshop. It's too esoteric a market." Both GCC and the GIMP have now been around for a while and have proven themselves. "Nobody would write a free office suite. It's not a sexy enough project." Both the KDE people and the GNOME people are currently working on office suites. On the GNOME side (not familiar with the KDE), Gnumeric and AbiWord are very useable, if not yet feature-for-feature comparable with Office or WordPerfect Suite.
So, it may not look like anyone will write a free version of software program <Q>, but you just might be surprised at what the free software world can do.
Finally, you had some complaints about specific programs. If you have problems, please take the time to file a bug report. The whole point of free software is that it gives everyone the freedom to rewrite the program. Even if you, personally, can't fix the problem, at least let others know that you had a problem so they can go looking for it. (I'll also note that there are many, many CD players out there. If one doesn't work for you, try another.)
The drives are hooked up using fibre channel as though they were local hard drives to the machine. If you know what you're doing, getting inside one of these links can be quite easy.
I haven't used any fibre channel devices yet, but isn't this just a fiberoptic link? If it is, how can it be easy to get inside a link? From what I've seen, fiber optic communications are among the hardest to tap physically.
--Phil (Pardon if I misunderstood--as I said, I haven't yet had much experience in this area.)
But seriously, folks... I was reading O'Reilly's new tome on Perl Algorithms and I was struck by a point mentioned in this article; no-one cares about efficiency any more. Just let your PIII do the work.
I'll mostly agree with you. A lot of, shall we say, less-experienced programmers tend to ignore speed considerations. In many cases, speed is not necessarily a critical attribute, especially as processors et faster and faster. OTOH, a "good" programmer will at least consider speed as an important characteristic. The days of tuning your code to save a couple of milliseconds in the middle of a tight loop are probably largely behind us. The better programmers do consider algorithm complexity, though. If you can use an O(n logn) algorithm and you pick an O(n!) one instead, you just might be surprised when you try to sort that 10,000 record database! A good programmer ought to spend more time developing a solid algorithm than performance-tuning the program once it's written:
The rule of program optimization: Don't do it!
The rule of program optimization (for experts only): Don't do it yet!
--Phil (Still working through my copy of Volume 1.)
I'd like to take a look at your initial statements.
Being very computer literate and being a geek are two separate things entirely. You can know everything there is to know about computers, but not be a geek.
Geeks, in the social sense, have little to no social graces. And that is the crux of the article: Why don't they have social graces?
You seem to be defining a geek not only as someone who is good with computers, but as someone who is socially inept. Then, you ask why geeks don't have social graces. In your context, geeks don't have social graces because that's how you defined 'geek'.
I'm going to have to place myself with the people who took this report with a rather large grain of salt. I tend to consider myself a geek. I'm also somewhat introverted. Regardless, I have somehow managed to be a functioning member of society. If a person is different but is in no way hindered by those differences, is there a need for the differences to be explained and people diagnosed to determine why they are different?
--Phil (Sorry for the topic drift, but I did want to speak my piece.)
Slashdot Mirror
From reading the article, I gathered that the point of these tests was to measure personal qualities that standardized tests tend to miss. The goal is to identify people with qualities that will enable them to succeed in college. According to the article, many poorer people with these qualities are passed over because of poor performance on standardized tests. Thus, the primary sample group was drawn from poorer sections of NYC. Due to the demographics of the city, these tent to be Afriacn-Americans and Hispanics, but the selection criterion was (lack of) affluence, not race.
If it is found that, in this small test group, the students that are selected do perform well in college and would not have been given the same consideration had addmissions been based on standardized tests, then I would imagine that the tests would be applied to a larger group of students comprised of a larger cross-section of income brackets.
--Phil (They should describe more of the tests. I wonder how I would do on them.)
--Phil (We'll have to wait several years to see how these tests work out, but they certainly sound promising.)
A while back (well before the IPO), a couple of VA people did a presentation for the local LUG. According to them, they run Linux exclusively, from their techs to their marketing people to (of course) their servers. One specifically pointed out that they didn't have an ERP system until they found one that ran with Linux (they may have funded the development of it; I don't remember exactly). If only I had the money to buy from VA.
--Phil (Most of my computers are assembled from used parts--much cheaper that way.)
Disk space and convenience. I have a small CD collection (~100 CDs) and it's taking up most of a 13GB drive. I know many people with collections much larger than mine, and not all of them would have the disk space to put their entire collection on a hard drive. One person to whom I was recently talking estimated that he has over 70GB of mp3s (all ripped from CDs he owns) burned onto mp3 collection CDs (~15 albums per CD). But not everyone has CD burners, either. So, mp3.com's Beam-It gives people the convenience of random access to their entire music collection without the problems of finding the local disk space to store it.
There is certainly a defendible legitimate use for the service. The question is whether the abuses (actual or projected) outweigh the benefits.
--Phil (Soon going to have get another drive as I get more CDs.)
What I find interesting is the way the web page brandished phrases like "Preemptive Multitasking" and "Protected Memory" as if they were amazing new tings just developed exclusively for Apple's use, while those of who actually know what they're talking about are saying, "About time, already!" I mean, it's really nice that Apple is moving into modern times and using modern OS features (they're even basing the core of the OS on BSD, which I think is a good decision), but why do the marketing people feel the need to sound like this is amazingly new stuff that no one has ever even heard of before, and all the Apple users should be really happy that they get to use this advanced software?
--Phil (Just a little marketing-sucks rant. Move along, citizen; nothing to see here.)
All recent book reviews have linked to fatbrain, not Amazon.com. I believe that Hemos stated in a comment on another book review that they're working on converting all the old ones to fatbrain, too, but there are a lot of reviews so it's going slowly.
--Phil (I'm too into instant gratification to buy online--I just drive down to the local Borders. (I want my books NOW!))
Not in the post I was replying to. Tom was inferring quite strongly that the GPL had a clause forbidding people to make money off GPLed software. He would have been better off taking your approach and showing that, as a side effect of the GPLs freeness, one cannot make money off a GPLed program.
In either case, I don't agree. You present two extreme examples (everyone buys from you or no one buys from you), but I think that a realistic example would lie somewhere in between. Let's say you form a company to write a program to make widgets. You call your company WidgetPeople. WisgetPeople makes a product and sells CDs, complete with manual and box. Bob buys one copy and starts selling things, too, but at a lower price and without the manual. WidgetPeople has a marketing budget; Bob does not. WidgetPeople has a manual; Bob says, "It's on the CD. You can print it (all 300 pages of it) yourself if you want." Bob sells a number of copies to people who just want the cheapest deal. WidgetPeople sells far more copies than Bob does, for various reasons, including the fact that most people have never even heard of Bob, people want manuals, your packaging looks slicker, and just desire to support the original authors.
Don't believe me? Look at RedHat and Cheap*Bytes. Cheap*Bytes sells a lot of RedHat CDs. RedHat sells more. RedHat also sells support and various other merchandise, and manages to turn a profit.
--Phil (Sorry if this gets disjointed in places. I was interrupted several times while writing it.)
Aren't royalties somewhat extraneous to this discussion? As I understand it, under the royalty system, the author of a work is paid a certain amount of money every time someone buys their work. This works (ideally) for print media because the publishers have costs to print the books (or magazines or whatever) that they need to recoup, too. In software sales, no one, to my knowledge, uses royalties. They just charge up front for the software.
Selling a GPLed program is very similar. You can throw it on a CD, put it in a box, add a manual, shrink wrap it, and sell it. The difference is that the buyer also has permission to sell the program, or even give it away. The buyer also either has the source code or has the right to get it, but that's incedental to being able to sell the program. In such a market, a successful company will have a strong brand, and a good reputation for supporting the product. Witness RedHat, a company that is making a profit by selling and supporting free software. Anyone can download or buy RedHat Linux and then turn around and sell it to other people. This is the exact same freedom the GPL gives people. And RedHat remains successful.
So inability to receive royalty payments on GPLed programs is a nonissue. Do you have further complaints? (If so, please back them up with some evidence. It makes for a much sounder argument if you do so.)
--Phil (And, as others have noted, the author of a program is always free to release his software under multiple licenses.)
<sigh>
This discussion should be about the Artistic License, but I'm going to talk about the GPL, since you've taken a few potshots at it and I don't like to see my preferred license unfairly dragged through the mud.
I don't know about Sleepycat Software's license, but you are incorrect about the GPL. It seems to be a common misconception that the GPL disallows making a profit on software, and I'm not sure why. Nowhere in the GPL is there language barring people from selling GPLed software. In fact, the GPL states in section 1 I gather from your post that you don't like the GPL, but please argue against it from a basis of fact, not conjecture. The rhetoric and charged words ("poison pill", most notably) don't add much to your writing, either. Again, argue on fact, please.--Phil (Who wishes that more people who argue about the GPL (on both sides!) would read the thing first.)
You sure? I don't know about their mainframes, but I've seen a lot of grumbling on MIDRANGE-L about IBM pushing Java as an alternative to RPG on the AS/400. (Not that getting rid of RPG would be a devastating thing, IMHO.)
--Phil (OS/400 > OS/390 ?)
Indeed, 24bpp is about the limit of the eye's perception for color variations. The 32bpp is to accomidate computers, not people. Modern consumer processors are used to slinging numbers around in 32 bit chunks. At 32bpp, the processor (whether the CPU or the videocard's) can easily address one pixel at a time. In 24bpp, more work must be done to grab to 32bit space enclosing the pixel and then extract the pixel. 24bpp is generally used to try to squeeze a more pixels out of a specific amount of VRAM. In today's market, the monitor is often more of a limiting factor on resolution than the video card's memory is, so most programs just go for the faster 32bpp.
--Phil (Also, some programs (like Netscape) don't handle 24bpp in X very well.)
Of those, my favorite is Strip. Not only does it have all the functionality I need and uses strong encryption to store the passwords, it's also GPLed.
--Phil (Always looking for GPLed Pilot programs.)
dpkg --purge <package>
Or whatever rpm uses.
The major distributions all have package management. (Even slackware, to a degree.) You can smoothly install and uninstall programs as you wish. With such a system managing the various programs on your computer, you don't need to worry about the locations of all of the files for a specific program (removing what I see as the biggest argument for throwing everything from a program into a separate directory). Debconf is quite nice at asking just the questions it needs to install and minimally configure your packages. gnomecc is looking pretty nice as a centralized configuration area for GNOME programs. I think the biggest thing Linux is missing that Windows has in this area is the automatic detection of hardware. There are people working on this, but it's not production quality yet.
Personally, I think that the hardest part of using Linux is the installation. As more major computer dealers begin preinstalling Linux (still a bit of a ways off), this will become less of an issue.
--Phil (Yes, my examples are from Debian. I assume that Red Hat is comparable.)
For reading slashdot on my Palm, I use sitescooper. There's another web site viewer that is reputed to generate better output than AvantGo (because it does a good bit of the rendering on the PC), but I don't remember the name at the moment. I'm quite happy with sitescooper.
--Phil (I'm quite pleased with my Palm III. My life has gotten a good bit more organized.)
I rather tend to think that faith is a subjective thing. To have faith in something is to believe it because you feel that it is right. To me, religion's purpose is to give meaning to that which science cannot explain. Science (and I speak as a physics major) can explain the how of things. It cannot explain why.
Personally, I believe in God. I don't expect my belief to have much effect on you, because belief is a subjective thing, and everyone needs to determine for themselves what they believe in.
--Phil (Slashdot method #47 for starting a flamewar: mention religion.)
The program you're looking for is Strip (Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passwords). It is a GPLed program for the PalmOS that manages usernames and passwords. It stores all of its information in encrypted form, and you must enter the correct password un decrypt it for use. I'm currently using it to keep track of all of the users at the office, since I run of the network here.
--Phil (If only there were more GPLed Pilot apps...)
First off, he's apparently in a business environment, so there should be someone (probably him) to admin the machines. I've never seen a problem like your #1 (but I've never used Red Hat either), but that sounds like it's due to a bug in one of the programs which, hopefully, will get reported and fixed.
For one thing, this is the sysadmin's responsibility. The users shouldn't have anything on their menus that isn't installed on the system. I probably have it easy. I just told GNOME to use the Debian menuing system. Regardless, the admin should know how to keep the menus up to date. This is definitely the sysadmin's responsibility. A well-configured system will load the needed modules in the startup scripts. How is this a problem? You highlight the text, go to the other window, and middle-click. The buggest hurdle here is people who are used to the way Windows does cut-and-paste. I'll have to disagree with you a little here. I don't think that Linux is quite ready for the average user's desktop yet. (I do think that it's moving in that direction.) For use in a business, Linux, properly admined, is quite useable now. As long as someone else is worrying about the system setup, users can just log in, run their programs, and do their work. Locked down and minimalized? Maybe somewhat. Mortal users can't go mucking with the majority of the system. In a business environment, that's for the better. It keeps them from damaging things and lets the computer run much more smoothly. The users can still create and manage their own files. They can even play with their desktop themes. They just can't accidentally delete--Phil (And yes, I've had to deal with windows users who have accidentally deleted important system files.)
I've come across the Programmer of the Month contest. Every couple of months, the guy that runs it proposes some interesting problem that can be solved with a program and takes submissions to see who can write the program that best solves the problem.
The current problem involves a word search where the letters for the words need only be adjacent (i.e. not necessarily in a straight line) and each letter may only be used once. Previous contests have included: given a square piece of wood and an arbitrary linear cut, make up to ten other straight cuts such that all final pieces of wood have the same area; in a lottery with N balls where three of the numbers on a seven-number ticket must match three of the seven numbers drawn, generate the fewest tickets necessary to guarantee a win; and on a square grid, using a salesman that moves like a chess knight, visit all of a list of locations in a minimum number of moves. The challenges are very interesting. Some are easy enough that I enter them. Some are quite chellenging, but they're still fun to try to solve, even if I don't feel I have a glimmer of a chance of winning.
--Phil (Not that I've even ever come close to winning. I'm getting better, though.)
Heinlein had some interesting beliefs. What I objected to mostly is that his later books became more vessels for describing his ideas than pure tales. As such, I felt that the plots grew fairly tired (and, in several cases, inconsistent) as they were made subservient to the memetic dissemination. I don't object to the inclusion of the concepts, just that Heinlein deemed them to be more important than the story, and the work as a whole suffered.
Time Enough For Love is a good example. It's good, although I wouldn't deem it a classic, but the last third or so of the book just seemes to drag on solely for the sake of Heinlein (through Lazarus) expounding on his worldview. For a specific example, I didn't see how Lazarus having sex with his clones added anything to the story, other than allowing Heinlein to tell us that our incest taboos are going to be outmoded with the advent of genetic understanding.
--Phil (Unrelatedly, L.E. Modesitt, Jr. has some really good books that make you think without preaching to you too much.)
I'd also recommend some Heinlein. Preferably some of his earlier works, before he got too preachy. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was quite good. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls would also be good choices.
--Phil (Maybe some E.E. Smith? Or is he too dated now?)
--Phil (Much like the Doom marine hidden in Duke Nukem.)
Despite the fact that this is probably a troll (witness the "as well as the heavy reliance on free software, most of which _sucks ass_" line), I'll address some of your points.
I haven't used either KDE or GNOME really heavily, so I con't comment on your first complaint. From what I've hard, though KDE sounds quite good. I also don't know of any video editing software. It's not an area in which I've done a lot of work.
A GNU Mathematica equivalent? Try Octave. I probably haven't used the thing to its fullest capabilities (I'm only an undergraduate), but it's been able to handle everything I've thrown at it.
Why do you think that GCC is not a good compiler? It certainly seems to be working well for me.
I'm not so sure. "No one is going to write something like that and just give it away"? People said the same thing about operating systems. We currently have at least Linux and the free *BSDs. People said that about various applications. "Nobody'll write a compiler and give it away. Nobody would think it interesting enough." "Nobody would write a free graphics program anywhere near the same class as Photoshop. It's too esoteric a market." Both GCC and the GIMP have now been around for a while and have proven themselves. "Nobody would write a free office suite. It's not a sexy enough project." Both the KDE people and the GNOME people are currently working on office suites. On the GNOME side (not familiar with the KDE), Gnumeric and AbiWord are very useable, if not yet feature-for-feature comparable with Office or WordPerfect Suite.So, it may not look like anyone will write a free version of software program <Q>, but you just might be surprised at what the free software world can do.
Finally, you had some complaints about specific programs. If you have problems, please take the time to file a bug report. The whole point of free software is that it gives everyone the freedom to rewrite the program. Even if you, personally, can't fix the problem, at least let others know that you had a problem so they can go looking for it. (I'll also note that there are many, many CD players out there. If one doesn't work for you, try another.)
--Phil (Non-rabid (hopefully) free software advocate.)
--Phil (Pardon if I misunderstood--as I said, I haven't yet had much experience in this area.)
The rule of program optimization:
Don't do it!
The rule of program optimization (for experts only):
Don't do it yet!
--Phil (Still working through my copy of Volume 1.)
You seem to be defining a geek not only as someone who is good with computers, but as someone who is socially inept. Then, you ask why geeks don't have social graces. In your context, geeks don't have social graces because that's how you defined 'geek'.
I'm going to have to place myself with the people who took this report with a rather large grain of salt. I tend to consider myself a geek. I'm also somewhat introverted. Regardless, I have somehow managed to be a functioning member of society. If a person is different but is in no way hindered by those differences, is there a need for the differences to be explained and people diagnosed to determine why they are different?
--Phil (Sorry for the topic drift, but I did want to speak my piece.)