Let's say I make my folder as follows:/pictures/trip/2006/Christmas/pic001.jpg
Why shouldn't I be able to type in:/trip/2006/Christmas/pictures/pic001.jpg
And get the same result?
Hierarchies are a horrible way to manage data, because no one "category" is always a subset of another. Pick the more general term here:
Pictures 2006 Christmas Trip
You can't. Or else it depends on a number of things. Do I take a lot of trips? How many pictures do I take on those trips? Do I only take pictures at Christmas or on trips? And so on.
The only reason hierarchies seem like a good idea is because we've been using them since the birth of file systems, because computers at the time couldn't handle anything more expressive. It's time to move on.
I really like the ideas presented in the article. I'd love to go to a school where independent projects were the norm and lectures weren't. But even if all schools were like this, nothing would change. Colleges, professors, schools, and most institutions don't have as much influence on people as they like to believe.
For a "thinker" that's motivated to become an engineer, the vast amount of learning will be outside of the classroom, and would probably take place whether that classroom was there or not. True, the right program will facilitate the development of such a person, but in the end, these people are naturally curious self-starters, and would probably succeed without a formal education anyway.
Then you have the people who go to school to put a check in a box, and who hope that getting the right qualifications on paper will land them a job. These people will do whatever is necessary to get the qualification, whether it be going to lectures, doing projects, what have you. In the end, they'll also likely succeed in getting a job, but they'll likely never be the creative types with new ideas, no matter how they were taught.
The difference is one of personality and attitude. It doesn't matter how you teach. Changing the curriculum won't change the people.
So instead we end up with a country that's 20% free everywhere.
Yay.
The difference with the Federalist system is that if you don't like it, it's simple enough to move elsewhere. That way, we're still bound by the common laws we can agree on, (Federal govt) but nobody has to suffer at length in a state where their values don't jive with 90% of the people there.
This type of study has been done, ad infinitum. And any parent will tell you what will happen:
Most of the time, with no prompting, the girls will cuddle and mother the trucks that you give them, and the boys will throw the dolls.
There are inherent differences between girls and boys. And why wouldn't this be true? Every other species on the planet seems to recognize this fact.
Think of it this way. If the differences between male and female humans were arbitrarily decided by society, then how is it that every separate human culture on earth arrived at a similar result?
The experiment you describe happened thousands of years ago before there were baby dolls, footballs, and ovens. You can see the results of it by looking around you.
I think it's pretty sad that the PS3 gets such a bad rap on here. It's a consumer-grade super-computer that runs Linux out of the box, no mods required. What's not to like?
I'm thinking that my next PC won't be Intel-based at all, it will be a PS3.
The problem with Linux documentation isn't that it isn't there, but it's not in any single, readily accessible format.
There are two things you need to know to learn everything about FreeBSD: how to type "man command" and how to open the FreeBSD handbook.
With Linux, I've found a common problem to be that the documentation is either out of date, in a different format depending on who distributes the app (info, man, html, etc.)
I use Ubuntu on occasion, and it's great, and the people on the forums are exceptionally helpful, but many of the frequently asked questions and common problems would be much easier to solve if they were cataloged in a single place.
A good example is how Ubuntu loads the open source kernel-mode driver to my wireless card by default, rather than use NDIS. That's fine, except the open-source driver doesn't work, and there's no way of knowing that it's there unless you know what bcm43xx is. You also have to know that you have to unload that from the kernel in order to get NDIS working.
Yikes.
I found the answer to this problem on the Ubuntu forums and via a helpful mailing list entry, but it took hours. I've never encountered a similar scavenger hunt using the FreeBSD handbook and man pages. It's all right there.
I know you asked for Linux, but since you sound like you're interested in learning and capable of reading documentation, I have to recommend FreeBSD.
It's like a Linux distribution done properly. Everything works together properly, and EVERYTHING is well documented.
Not only that, but while package managers are great when you know what you want to install, if you don't know what you want, FreeBSD's Ports system has a categorized listing of every software package available for the system. Installing programs is just two simple steps from there.
But the scenes I'm talking about, the pistol in question was almost certainly a Glock, which does lock the slide on an empty magazine and doesn't allow you to pull the trigger on an empty chamber.
And I left out the most annoying error, where a character simply pointing a pistol at something produces an ominous "click" sound.
The problem is, if you are not completely ignorant of any of these topics:
Firearms Physics Chemistry The Military Women Children Men Automobiles Computers
Then it's nearly impossible to watch a TV show or movie and not be constantly rolling your eyes. It's really hard to suspend disbelief when Jennifer Garner's semi-auto PISTOL runs out of ammo and then CLICKS when she pulls the trigger. The goddamn slide locks back, Hollywood assholes! Clicking only happens with revolvers!
They paid themselves one penny more than what anyone else would have paid to be the default.
If Yahoo were willing to give MS two million dollars to be the default, and MS decides to ignore their offer and sets the default to MSN, they've just lost a potential two million dollars.
It's not free for Microsoft to set their own defaults any more than it is for a shop owner to close up shop for a day. That's what economists call opportunity cost, and it's very real.
I find it amazing that the computer experts in TV and film never turn off the high pitched sound effects that play whenever a window opens, moves, a key is pressed, or a photo is "enhanced."
This appears to be a temporary measure based on the current threat level.
If the Infocon levels work anything like the other readiness levels in the DoD, then a shift to Infocon 4 requires a change (temporary) in policy. So it seems that a shift back to level 5 would mean HTML e-mail is no longer blocked.
It's like after 9-11, when all DoD installations had much stricter physical access rules and extra guards at the gates.
Which is a shame, because saying goodbye to html email entirely would be fine by me.
Also, what the solar guys neglect in their calculations is that if you're going purely by financial reasons, the investment of $10,000 today is a huge opportunity cost.
To say that the panels "will pay for themselves" in five years doesn't quite cut it. They not only need to pay for themselves, but also the earning potential of that initial $10,000 investment in order to be worthwhile. In a decent savings account, by then end of five years, you'll have $12,762 on your $10,000 assuming 5% interest. And at that point they'd need to continue saving you over $650 a year to eternity, just to break even. That number just increases as the interest compounds, while the decreasing effectiveness of the panels would ensure diminishing returns.
So, in order for the panels to be cost effective, they'll need to pay for themselves assuming a 5% interest on your initial investment, AND additionally save you another $10,000 within that 20 years to pay for the inevitable replace ment cost.
It would be nice if these were economically viable, but if you do the math they're just not there yet. Hopefully this printing process will change the equation.
I'm ambivalent toward Microsoft products. For the most part they get the job done, which is fine with me. I'm much more comfortable in a Unix environment, but Windows isn't horrible.
I like the fact that Windows has become a standard and that Microsoft has a huge market share. Most people here see this as a negative, but what they probably don't realize is that without a company like Microsoft having a huge majority of the market share, PC's would be substantially more expensive and less powerful than they are today.
Imagine if we had never standardized on an Intel platform. I seriously doubt that home computing would have taken off to the extent that it did, because so many people buying the same computer drive the price way down due to economy of scale.
Windows and Microsoft, by being the standard, help drive down the cost of PC's because people who would otherwise never consider purchasing a PC will now do so because Windows exists.
This isn't due to anything that Microsoft did in particular, other than protect their market share. But it had to happen, and I'm glad that it did, and that the personal computing world isn't split into eight different, incompatible standards. (Like it was in the early 80's.)
Do I wish that Unix or Amiga had become the PC standard instead? Sure. But no company was actually willing to get behind those platforms and push them until they were dominant. This is the value that Microsoft provided, and why they can continue to charge for Windows today.
You'll see a similar thing happen with Blue-ray / HD-DVD. One might be a much better standard than the other, but until either one dominates, neither is particularly valuable to me, or the average consumer.
So before hating Microsoft, ask yourself if you're better off with that nice, fast $400 Linux PC built from parts from several competing manufacturers, or whether you'd rather that no company had a "monopoly" and that your same Linux PC were half as powerful, half as reliable, and cost twice as much.
First of all, don't worry too much if your breadth of knowledge doesn't cover the entire field of computer science. It's just too huge a topic to be an expert in everything.
It's good to understand how low level things work, I think. Especially if you're interested in emulators, you might want to involve yourself in some open source project that emulates simple hardware. If you're just concerned that you don't know how an emulator works, a few days of research will help you there.
Part of being a good programmer though, is knowing your limits. It's OK not to know how to do everything, as long as you're able to incorporate the work of others who are experts. You'll likely never know how to write a really fast FFT algorithm on your own better than people who have already done so, but if you're able to incorporate a good open source version in your work, it won't matter.
But do try to become an expert in something. If emulators interest you, dive into that.
My point is mostly that you can't really be an expert in everything, as tempting as that may be. But if you do pick something you're interested in and become an expert in that, the knowledge you gain will likely carry over to other areas, making learning easier.
>Count the number of home desktops last year. Count the highest-selling PC game last year (sold-through, not sold-in). >Compare. I bet the second number is at least an order of magnitude less.
While it's true that not everyone plays games, you'd really have to do a calculation on how many games were sold in aggregate, not just the most popular one. Not everyone who plays games buys the most popular game.
I have no idea what the most popular game last year was. Let's say for the sake of example it was World of Warcraft. If you just go by those sales numbers, you're leaving out the people who stay on Windows to play Age of Empires III, or Civ IV.
It only takes one great game to give a compelling reason to stick with Windows.
Anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, the cheaper PC's get, the more people will be apt to replace them instead of upgrade or repair them.
They will break, or become virus ridden, eventually. To say that computers will never be replaced is the same as arguing that nobody will ever need a new dishwasher because theirs work fine, and everyone you know hasn't needed a new dishwasher in years.
And beyond that, there are people who will shell out good money to transfer images to digital cameras a few seconds faster, or have a prettier desktop (Mac users?). The demand exists, and always will.
Google doesn't make Windows irrelevant. Windows is here to stay.
It's here to stay because no matter how little their operating system changes or improves, it will always be at least a little bit better than the previous version, and as such it will always be the default on new machines.
Microsoft is saved by the fact that PC's are now a commodity, and people don't mind throwing old ones away every couple of years for minor performance improvements. The newest version of Windows will always succeed, because it's the default. All Microsoft has to do is maintain backward compatibility.
The only way Windows will ever be displaced is if another competitor offers something significantly better, which is unlikely. Operating systems are now a commodity, so the possibility that one could be significantly better than another on the same hardware is remote.
Another possibility is that a new hardware platform could displace Intel, but that is so unlikely because the economies of scale almost guarantee that the Intel architecture will always dominate desktop computing.
That is, until we hit a threshold where the hardware can't be made much faster. Then we might see some real innovation in hardware and software.
This is what happens when you let the wacko enviro-nuts run the publicity wing for your environmental cause. They make ridiculous doomsday scenarios sound like they're just around the corner, in order to "get people motivated."
Then, when you need to downgrade your prediction from "the world is going to end in ten years because all the oceans will rise up and DROWN US!!!!" to "we might not be having as much effect as we thought..." your entire movement loses ALL credibility.
It just goes to show that in the end, carefully reasoned debate and proportioned response is much more effective than hysterics. Sure, hysterics might get the headlines for a year or two, but when the wild predictions turn out to be false, the entire movement goes down in flames.
In the future, all you "Al Gore is the smartest man ever" and Earth First and Greenpeace people, try not to engage in the doomsday sort of predictions and you might have a chance to persuade the people who can make a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, ALL of the experimental data in the universe could do that.
So why do directories have to be hierarchical?
/pictures/trip/2006/Christmas/pic001.jpg
/trip/2006/Christmas/pictures/pic001.jpg
Let's say I make my folder as follows:
Why shouldn't I be able to type in:
And get the same result?
Hierarchies are a horrible way to manage data, because no one "category" is always a subset of another. Pick the more general term here:
Pictures
2006
Christmas
Trip
You can't. Or else it depends on a number of things. Do I take a lot of trips? How many pictures do I take on those trips? Do I only take pictures at Christmas or on trips? And so on.
The only reason hierarchies seem like a good idea is because we've been using them since the birth of file systems, because computers at the time couldn't handle anything more expressive. It's time to move on.
I really like the ideas presented in the article. I'd love to go to a school where independent projects were the norm and lectures weren't. But even if all schools were like this, nothing would change. Colleges, professors, schools, and most institutions don't have as much influence on people as they like to believe.
For a "thinker" that's motivated to become an engineer, the vast amount of learning will be outside of the classroom, and would probably take place whether that classroom was there or not. True, the right program will facilitate the development of such a person, but in the end, these people are naturally curious self-starters, and would probably succeed without a formal education anyway.
Then you have the people who go to school to put a check in a box, and who hope that getting the right qualifications on paper will land them a job. These people will do whatever is necessary to get the qualification, whether it be going to lectures, doing projects, what have you. In the end, they'll also likely succeed in getting a job, but they'll likely never be the creative types with new ideas, no matter how they were taught.
The difference is one of personality and attitude. It doesn't matter how you teach. Changing the curriculum won't change the people.
So instead we end up with a country that's 20% free everywhere.
Yay.
The difference with the Federalist system is that if you don't like it, it's simple enough to move elsewhere. That way, we're still bound by the common laws we can agree on, (Federal govt) but nobody has to suffer at length in a state where their values don't jive with 90% of the people there.
This type of study has been done, ad infinitum. And any parent will tell you what will happen:
Most of the time, with no prompting, the girls will cuddle and mother the trucks that you give them, and the boys will throw the dolls.
There are inherent differences between girls and boys. And why wouldn't this be true? Every other species on the planet seems to recognize this fact.
Think of it this way. If the differences between male and female humans were arbitrarily decided by society, then how is it that every separate human culture on earth arrived at a similar result?
The experiment you describe happened thousands of years ago before there were baby dolls, footballs, and ovens. You can see the results of it by looking around you.
I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for this release.
So last night I downloaded 6.1 and installed it.
Voila! 6.2 out today.
Wanna see it rain? I'm going to go wash my car.
Yeah, it's really the specialized tasks I'm interested in.
I'm particularly intrigued by Toshiba's HDTV decoding demo.
You know, I didn't get excited about the PS3 until I read the technical specs a few weeks ago. Now I'd love to play around with the Cell.
Cell processor info
I think it's pretty sad that the PS3 gets such a bad rap on here. It's a consumer-grade super-computer that runs Linux out of the box, no mods required. What's not to like?
I'm thinking that my next PC won't be Intel-based at all, it will be a PS3.
You could go one step further and hire the same call center that Dell uses to answer the refund calls.
That way, they can save money on phone bills and just shout across the room at each other.
Do you mean like this guy: Sim Survivor
The problem with Linux documentation isn't that it isn't there, but it's not in any single, readily accessible format.
There are two things you need to know to learn everything about FreeBSD: how to type "man command" and how to open the FreeBSD handbook.
With Linux, I've found a common problem to be that the documentation is either out of date, in a different format depending on who distributes the app (info, man, html, etc.)
I use Ubuntu on occasion, and it's great, and the people on the forums are exceptionally helpful, but many of the frequently asked questions and common problems would be much easier to solve if they were cataloged in a single place.
A good example is how Ubuntu loads the open source kernel-mode driver to my wireless card by default, rather than use NDIS. That's fine, except the open-source driver doesn't work, and there's no way of knowing that it's there unless you know what bcm43xx is. You also have to know that you have to unload that from the kernel in order to get NDIS working.
Yikes.
I found the answer to this problem on the Ubuntu forums and via a helpful mailing list entry, but it took hours. I've never encountered a similar scavenger hunt using the FreeBSD handbook and man pages. It's all right there.
I know you asked for Linux, but since you sound like you're interested in learning and capable of reading documentation, I have to recommend FreeBSD.
It's like a Linux distribution done properly. Everything works together properly, and EVERYTHING is well documented.
Not only that, but while package managers are great when you know what you want to install, if you don't know what you want, FreeBSD's Ports system has a categorized listing of every software package available for the system. Installing programs is just two simple steps from there.
You're right, my mistake.
But the scenes I'm talking about, the pistol in question was almost certainly a Glock, which does lock the slide on an empty magazine and doesn't allow you to pull the trigger on an empty chamber.
And I left out the most annoying error, where a character simply pointing a pistol at something produces an ominous "click" sound.
The problem is, if you are not completely ignorant of any of these topics:
Firearms
Physics
Chemistry
The Military
Women
Children
Men
Automobiles
Computers
Then it's nearly impossible to watch a TV show or movie and not be constantly rolling your eyes. It's really hard to suspend disbelief when Jennifer Garner's semi-auto PISTOL runs out of ammo and then CLICKS when she pulls the trigger. The goddamn slide locks back, Hollywood assholes! Clicking only happens with revolvers!
Thank you, I feel much better.
They paid themselves one penny more than what anyone else would have paid to be the default.
If Yahoo were willing to give MS two million dollars to be the default, and MS decides to ignore their offer and sets the default to MSN, they've just lost a potential two million dollars.
It's not free for Microsoft to set their own defaults any more than it is for a shop owner to close up shop for a day. That's what economists call opportunity cost, and it's very real.
I find it amazing that the computer experts in TV and film never turn off the high pitched sound effects that play whenever a window opens, moves, a key is pressed, or a photo is "enhanced."
That would drive me crazy.
This appears to be a temporary measure based on the current threat level.
If the Infocon levels work anything like the other readiness levels in the DoD, then a shift to Infocon 4 requires a change (temporary) in policy. So it seems that a shift back to level 5 would mean HTML e-mail is no longer blocked.
It's like after 9-11, when all DoD installations had much stricter physical access rules and extra guards at the gates.
Which is a shame, because saying goodbye to html email entirely would be fine by me.
That word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
You're right on the money there.
Also, what the solar guys neglect in their calculations is that if you're going purely by financial reasons, the investment of $10,000 today is a huge opportunity cost.
To say that the panels "will pay for themselves" in five years doesn't quite cut it. They not only need to pay for themselves, but also the earning potential of that initial $10,000 investment in order to be worthwhile. In a decent savings account, by then end of five years, you'll have $12,762 on your $10,000 assuming 5% interest. And at that point they'd need to continue saving you over $650 a year to eternity, just to break even. That number just increases as the interest compounds, while the decreasing effectiveness of the panels would ensure diminishing returns.
So, in order for the panels to be cost effective, they'll need to pay for themselves assuming a 5% interest on your initial investment, AND additionally save you another $10,000 within that 20 years to pay for the inevitable replace ment cost.
It would be nice if these were economically viable, but if you do the math they're just not there yet. Hopefully this printing process will change the equation.
I'm ambivalent toward Microsoft products. For the most part they get the job done, which is fine with me. I'm much more comfortable in a Unix environment, but Windows isn't horrible.
I like the fact that Windows has become a standard and that Microsoft has a huge market share. Most people here see this as a negative, but what they probably don't realize is that without a company like Microsoft having a huge majority of the market share, PC's would be substantially more expensive and less powerful than they are today.
Imagine if we had never standardized on an Intel platform. I seriously doubt that home computing would have taken off to the extent that it did, because so many people buying the same computer drive the price way down due to economy of scale.
Windows and Microsoft, by being the standard, help drive down the cost of PC's because people who would otherwise never consider purchasing a PC will now do so because Windows exists.
This isn't due to anything that Microsoft did in particular, other than protect their market share. But it had to happen, and I'm glad that it did, and that the personal computing world isn't split into eight different, incompatible standards. (Like it was in the early 80's.)
Do I wish that Unix or Amiga had become the PC standard instead? Sure. But no company was actually willing to get behind those platforms and push them until they were dominant. This is the value that Microsoft provided, and why they can continue to charge for Windows today.
You'll see a similar thing happen with Blue-ray / HD-DVD. One might be a much better standard than the other, but until either one dominates, neither is particularly valuable to me, or the average consumer.
So before hating Microsoft, ask yourself if you're better off with that nice, fast $400 Linux PC built from parts from several competing manufacturers, or whether you'd rather that no company had a "monopoly" and that your same Linux PC were half as powerful, half as reliable, and cost twice as much.
First of all, don't worry too much if your breadth of knowledge doesn't cover the entire field of computer science. It's just too huge a topic to be an expert in everything.
It's good to understand how low level things work, I think. Especially if you're interested in emulators, you might want to involve yourself in some open source project that emulates simple hardware. If you're just concerned that you don't know how an emulator works, a few days of research will help you there.
Part of being a good programmer though, is knowing your limits. It's OK not to know how to do everything, as long as you're able to incorporate the work of others who are experts. You'll likely never know how to write a really fast FFT algorithm on your own better than people who have already done so, but if you're able to incorporate a good open source version in your work, it won't matter.
But do try to become an expert in something. If emulators interest you, dive into that.
My point is mostly that you can't really be an expert in everything, as tempting as that may be. But if you do pick something you're interested in and become an expert in that, the knowledge you gain will likely carry over to other areas, making learning easier.
>Count the number of home desktops last year. Count the highest-selling PC game last year (sold-through, not sold-in).
>Compare. I bet the second number is at least an order of magnitude less.
While it's true that not everyone plays games, you'd really have to do a calculation on how many games were sold in aggregate, not just the most popular one. Not everyone who plays games buys the most popular game.
I have no idea what the most popular game last year was. Let's say for the sake of example it was World of Warcraft. If you just go by those sales numbers, you're leaving out the people who stay on Windows to play Age of Empires III, or Civ IV.
It only takes one great game to give a compelling reason to stick with Windows.
Anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, the cheaper PC's get, the more people will be apt to replace them instead of upgrade or repair them.
They will break, or become virus ridden, eventually. To say that computers will never be replaced is the same as arguing that nobody will ever need a new dishwasher because theirs work fine, and everyone you know hasn't needed a new dishwasher in years.
And beyond that, there are people who will shell out good money to transfer images to digital cameras a few seconds faster, or have a prettier desktop (Mac users?). The demand exists, and always will.
Google doesn't make Windows irrelevant. Windows is here to stay.
It's here to stay because no matter how little their operating system changes or improves, it will always be at least a little bit better than the previous version, and as such it will always be the default on new machines.
Microsoft is saved by the fact that PC's are now a commodity, and people don't mind throwing old ones away every couple of years for minor performance improvements. The newest version of Windows will always succeed, because it's the default. All Microsoft has to do is maintain backward compatibility.
The only way Windows will ever be displaced is if another competitor offers something significantly better, which is unlikely. Operating systems are now a commodity, so the possibility that one could be significantly better than another on the same hardware is remote.
Another possibility is that a new hardware platform could displace Intel, but that is so unlikely because the economies of scale almost guarantee that the Intel architecture will always dominate desktop computing.
That is, until we hit a threshold where the hardware can't be made much faster. Then we might see some real innovation in hardware and software.
But until then, learn to love Windows.
This is what happens when you let the wacko enviro-nuts run the publicity wing for your environmental cause. They make ridiculous doomsday scenarios sound like they're just around the corner, in order to "get people motivated."
Then, when you need to downgrade your prediction from "the world is going to end in ten years because all the oceans will rise up and DROWN US!!!!" to "we might not be having as much effect as we thought..." your entire movement loses ALL credibility.
It just goes to show that in the end, carefully reasoned debate and proportioned response is much more effective than hysterics. Sure, hysterics might get the headlines for a year or two, but when the wild predictions turn out to be false, the entire movement goes down in flames.
In the future, all you "Al Gore is the smartest man ever" and Earth First and Greenpeace people, try not to engage in the doomsday sort of predictions and you might have a chance to persuade the people who can make a difference.