"Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?"
What bullshit. Perhaps the question you should ask is, "How can I determine whether setting up a test suite is in his best interest?" But if you insist on pursuing an answer to your original question, you might want to dedicate some time to other questions, like figuring out how to convince people that humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together, or that people's astrological signs play an important role in determining their personalities, or that ingesting colloidal silver is a solution to a wide range of health problems.
Unless they're somehow collecting at least twice as much light, assuming that the beam splitting is perfectly efficient, then I fail to see how what they're doing really helps, as both of the images (or image streams) are going to wind up being shot at at least twice the ISO that they otherwise would be. That would not be good for sharpness and noise. There better be a large lens collecting light for these cameras.
I believe you may be falling prey to what Kurzweil warns about in his response to Meyers: linear thinking. Things go from impossible to inevitable without us much noticing. The bottom of a parabola looks a lot like a horizontal line.
Let's say Kurzweil has been too optimistic about the rate of growth of our understanding of the way the brain works. Assuming the exponent on the rate of growth of our knowledge and technology is greater than one, and assuming that Penrose and Searle are full of it—which they IMO are—and there isn't some mystical quantum mechanical woo-woo that is just as irrational as the Silicon Valley Deepak Chopra mumbo-jumbo that Meyers's crew accuses the Singularity Crows of pedaling, Kurzweil will ultimately be vindicated, even if he—or his cyborg replacement body—is not around to say, "I told you so."
This is a pointless argument over definitions, but since you're attempting to co-opt for your own purposes the definition of a highly valuable piece of definitional real estate, I'm going to bite.
What you describe as "democracy" is not democracy. That everyone has the freedom to take their marbles and go home (i.e. create their own distribution) is not democracy. It's freedom. Freedom and democracy are related in that the latter is often seen as a way of achieving the former.
Democracy denotes a broad range of methods for collective decision making, among them representative and direct democracy.
An open source project is whatever the hell you want it to be. "Whatever the hell you want" is not democracy. That is freedom, to a first order approximation. The organizational and social and economic dynamics of free software vis-a-vis proprietary code are subtle and multilayered and not suited to simplistic reduction to a term like democracy.
Two-bit would mean four levels; I think you mean one-bit ie. black and white. Regarding the SE vs. Plus, the SE had a newer/bigger ROM in it than the SE; perhaps this was the factor. I don't think the SE had Color QuickDraw in ROM as the SE/30 did, so that probably wasn't the issue.
Maybe it works today, but it didn't work six years ago. Did you read the part of my post that mentioned Rails broke when I did what some know-it-all like you suggested I do? Hello?!
Yes, but while there may not be right and wrong opinions, opinions can definitely be either thoughtful or stupid. A case in point: Rails likes to give your database tables plural names. This is a stupid opinion. I explained this on #rubyonrails years ago, but it seems that the developers, DHH included, were so enamored with their pluralize method that they didn't want to rip it out and do the sane thing.
It's convention over configuration, not instead of configuration, I read in another comment. Well, I tried to configure Rails to not pluralize table names...and Rails broke. If the pull of tradition and convention is so strong that very few people stray out of the ruts worn into the beaten path, deciding to break with convention means fixing all the latent bugs in the system.
One of the reasons to prefer singular table names is that it improves Rails's interoperability with the applications that either want to supply data to or consume data created by Rails. Web apps do not exist in a vacuum. I was told by DHH that such things were outside the scope of Rails, and therefore those pluralize calls would stay for the rest of eternity. And thus everyone who has their first involvement with relational databases using Rails becomes brain damaged. Hooray for opinionated software?
I soured on Rails early, though I have tried to go back to it on occasion, only to find that the hype still exceeds the reality by a significant factor. I'm very much a right-tool-for-the-job kind of person, but I haven't come across a project where a feature in Rails makes it uniquely suited to the situation over something like Django.
Don't get me wrong, I think Rails gave web development frameworks a much-needed wake-up call. The Java way of doing things circa 2004 was horrible. But Rails has no monopoly on smart developers -- an understatement? -- and smart developers are quick to adopt good ideas.
Looking at the before and after designs, I don't see anything spectacular. It simply looks more designed. I don't have anything against highly designed documents - after all, as I mentioned, I am a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts - but equating more designed with more usable is a mistake.
I wonder what the designer in question (Greg Storey) thinks of that most linear of documents, the novel. How might his tremendous design skills be brought to bear on the problem of more effectively presenting the information in A Tale of Two Cities than Dickens did?
At some point this obsession with presentation begins to look like the problem it's trying to solve. Compare Storey's modified presidential daily briefing to Peter Norvig's PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. Not quite as bad, but moving in the same direction.
A theory as to why it's BinHex-ed....
on
iMac G5 Porn Roundup
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You're right. BinHex II (.hqx) is a format from the early days of the net and online services. Back when people would e-mail programs to a repository, get them through FTP-mail getways, or using Kermit. In this case, as someone else noted, all you're getting is the file meta-data, including icon.
The file was probably made available as a.hqx simply because its intended use is to be downloaded and used in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Freehand, Quark, or other design tool. Making it an.hqx file has the virtue of making it go to your hard drive, not perhaps a browser window. As a son-in-law of a graphic designer, I can say that the overhead of the BinHexing the file is more than worth not having to explain how to save an image in a browser window, especially if a designer's browser shows nothing but a broken image icon, because it can't display TIFFs.
Dragging and dropping as well as right- or control-clicking are, sadly, not techniques used extensively by many people. Of course a designer is dragging and dropping all the time in e.g. Illustrator or Photoshop, but the idea that you can drag a picture from a browser window to your desktop or to a folder can be mind blowing.
Greg, you've made a great point. At some point the computer will disappear, just like the flat screen TV: All that will remain is the experience of using it. I don't think such a development is so bad for Apple, as they have always been about the fusion of hardware and software into a unified experience.
I enjoy working with my PowerBook, and I enjoy using OS X. When I think about them. But most of the time, I'm not thinking about them; I'm simply being productive. I think that's what Apple products are about: getting stuff done, thinking about the problem at hand, not the computer that you're using to solve the problem. The drool-inducing industrial and UI design is there to as much to draw the attention of non-users as it is to enhance the experience of using -- and justify the purchase of -- Apple products.
But does it become more difficult to sell an experience when it has a less-tangible physical manifestation? This may be a problem for Apple, but it may also solve one of their problems: When there's less physicality to the experience of owning a Mac, perhaps there will be less resistance to purchasing one. The more invisible the hardware, the less difficult it may be for Apple to convince people to replace their invisible Gateway computer with an invisible Mac that works better.
In Star Wars, Han Solo shoots Greedo in the cantina as Greedo draws his weapon. In Star Wars: Episode Four: A New Hope: Special Edition Han lets Greedo draw and fire before shooting him under the table.
Some people, myself included, think that this change is quite lame. Han is a smuggler, not a school teacher, and as such, he survives by shooting first. Making him a nice guy from the start destroys Han's scoundrel to upstanding citizen transformation through the three movies.
My advice: There is no need to watch any Star Wars movie more than once, with the exception of The Empire Strikes Back. Every other Star Wars movie blows. It is not a coincidence that Empire is the only movie that wasn't directed by Lucas or, in the case of, wretch, Return of the Jedi, a Lucas lackey.
But on what basis do you think that Python and Perl aren't in Java's league?
I don't believe that there are programming languages and scripting languages; I believe that there are programmers and scripters. Programmers can create abstractions, while scripters only know how to use them. The wealth of pre-made abstractions make Python, Perl, and well as Java very appealing to programmers and scripters alike.
"Sun's insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl."
ESR's theory that Python and Perl have more users than they deserve due to Java's merely gratis license is insulting to the people who work hard to make Python and Perl as good as they are.
"Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's when I just checked."
Comparing stock prices of two companies is nonsensical. Sun's market capitalization is over six times larger than Red Hat's. The following data is current as of approximately 4pm ET on 18-Feb-2004.
Red Hat (RHAT): $3.20 billion Sun Microsystems (SUNW): $19.19 billion
With nothing but hyperspecialized technical skills, a person will never be anything more than a worker bee.
Positions for people with technical degrees are beginning to resemble those for assembly line workers. Programmers are now commodities. The only position a commodity education is going to get you is one that might move to India next week.
If you combine those skills with a healthy does of humanities education (or often experience), you can start offering something far less common. While you won't be able get a job (or find clients) with the same ease that someone who is trying hard to make themselves an interchangable can, you will become much more valuable to those people who do need your knowledge, skills, and talent.
To the iTunes Music Store? There is no subscription fee. The only risk you run is that you need to keep iTunes installed on your computer in order to play pruchased music. Or, you could buy an iPod. Or, you could burn and then re-rip the music, which of course carries a quality penalty unless you rip to a lossless format.
You pay for advertising-supported content. The dollars for the marketing budgets for the products you buy come from one of two places: investors or revenue.
During the dotcom boom, you could make a case that you did not pay for advertising-supported content, because the money for the advertising was coming from, in large part, venture capital funds. Today a far larger share of advertising dollars are coming from the revenue that companies generate by selling products.
There might as well be a line item on every invoice or receipt detailing how many dollars from the purchase went toward subsidizing media.
GCC is the compiler that Apple's Project Manager application uses unless you provide another compiler -- such as CodeWarrior's, which cost $400 plus $200 or so a year to keep up to date.
Douglas Comer started a company named Mt Xinu (read it backwards) that put out a Unix-like OS a long, long time ago . It was a companion to the book Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, published my Prentice Hall in 1984.
My Apple II+ came with a reference manual that contained all of the firmware's assembly source code (not including AppleSoft BASIC, which was copyrighted by MS).
Apple wanted to ship MacBASIC with the Mac 128K, but MS held a gun to the company's head (kill MacBASIC or no business apps) and Apple complied.
Apple shipped many Macs during the '80s and '90s with HyperCard, a tool that turned tons of people into Mac software developers.
In the mid '90s, Apple shipped every Mac with tools for writing programs in AppleScript, a language that uses the Open Scripting Architecture to allow people to with relatively little pain fully automate OSA-compliant applications.
OS X 10.0 and later shipped with a developer tools CD that contained classic Unix development tools as well as Interface Builder, Project Builder, and everything else necessary to create world-class applications for OS X.
The collective mind of Slashdot has already determined that education -- especially higher education -- is meant to give you the skills to go out and get a job. Any of this meaningless crap about putting the present in the context of the past or scrutinizing received opinions is worthless crap in that it does not contribute to increasing anyone's starting salary or help in defeating the evil forces of those who do not wish to license all of their code under the GPL.
(For context, please see the relatively recent Ask Slashdot story where some punk brazenly asks why his computer science curriculum insists on teaching him how to think at the expense of learning the latest sexy languages and APIs.)
Slashdot Mirror
1. It's Turing complete. 2. Umm...
What bullshit. Perhaps the question you should ask is, "How can I determine whether setting up a test suite is in his best interest?" But if you insist on pursuing an answer to your original question, you might want to dedicate some time to other questions, like figuring out how to convince people that humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together, or that people's astrological signs play an important role in determining their personalities, or that ingesting colloidal silver is a solution to a wide range of health problems.
You are part of the problem.
The more trivial the topic under discussion, the more likely someone will attempt to shame people who hold a contrary opinion.
Unless they're somehow collecting at least twice as much light, assuming that the beam splitting is perfectly efficient, then I fail to see how what they're doing really helps, as both of the images (or image streams) are going to wind up being shot at at least twice the ISO that they otherwise would be. That would not be good for sharpness and noise. There better be a large lens collecting light for these cameras.
I believe you may be falling prey to what Kurzweil warns about in his response to Meyers: linear thinking. Things go from impossible to inevitable without us much noticing. The bottom of a parabola looks a lot like a horizontal line.
Let's say Kurzweil has been too optimistic about the rate of growth of our understanding of the way the brain works. Assuming the exponent on the rate of growth of our knowledge and technology is greater than one, and assuming that Penrose and Searle are full of it—which they IMO are—and there isn't some mystical quantum mechanical woo-woo that is just as irrational as the Silicon Valley Deepak Chopra mumbo-jumbo that Meyers's crew accuses the Singularity Crows of pedaling, Kurzweil will ultimately be vindicated, even if he—or his cyborg replacement body—is not around to say, "I told you so."
This is a pointless argument over definitions, but since you're attempting to co-opt for your own purposes the definition of a highly valuable piece of definitional real estate, I'm going to bite.
What you describe as "democracy" is not democracy. That everyone has the freedom to take their marbles and go home (i.e. create their own distribution) is not democracy. It's freedom. Freedom and democracy are related in that the latter is often seen as a way of achieving the former.
Democracy denotes a broad range of methods for collective decision making, among them representative and direct democracy.
An open source project is whatever the hell you want it to be. "Whatever the hell you want" is not democracy. That is freedom, to a first order approximation. The organizational and social and economic dynamics of free software vis-a-vis proprietary code are subtle and multilayered and not suited to simplistic reduction to a term like democracy.
Two-bit would mean four levels; I think you mean one-bit ie. black and white. Regarding the SE vs. Plus, the SE had a newer/bigger ROM in it than the SE; perhaps this was the factor. I don't think the SE had Color QuickDraw in ROM as the SE/30 did, so that probably wasn't the issue.
Maybe it works today, but it didn't work six years ago. Did you read the part of my post that mentioned Rails broke when I did what some know-it-all like you suggested I do? Hello?!
Yes, but while there may not be right and wrong opinions, opinions can definitely be either thoughtful or stupid. A case in point: Rails likes to give your database tables plural names. This is a stupid opinion. I explained this on #rubyonrails years ago, but it seems that the developers, DHH included, were so enamored with their pluralize method that they didn't want to rip it out and do the sane thing.
It's convention over configuration, not instead of configuration, I read in another comment. Well, I tried to configure Rails to not pluralize table names...and Rails broke. If the pull of tradition and convention is so strong that very few people stray out of the ruts worn into the beaten path, deciding to break with convention means fixing all the latent bugs in the system.
One of the reasons to prefer singular table names is that it improves Rails's interoperability with the applications that either want to supply data to or consume data created by Rails. Web apps do not exist in a vacuum. I was told by DHH that such things were outside the scope of Rails, and therefore those pluralize calls would stay for the rest of eternity. And thus everyone who has their first involvement with relational databases using Rails becomes brain damaged. Hooray for opinionated software?
I soured on Rails early, though I have tried to go back to it on occasion, only to find that the hype still exceeds the reality by a significant factor. I'm very much a right-tool-for-the-job kind of person, but I haven't come across a project where a feature in Rails makes it uniquely suited to the situation over something like Django.
Don't get me wrong, I think Rails gave web development frameworks a much-needed wake-up call. The Java way of doing things circa 2004 was horrible. But Rails has no monopoly on smart developers -- an understatement? -- and smart developers are quick to adopt good ideas.
Looking at the before and after designs, I don't see anything spectacular. It simply looks more designed. I don't have anything against highly designed documents - after all, as I mentioned, I am a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts - but equating more designed with more usable is a mistake.
I wonder what the designer in question (Greg Storey) thinks of that most linear of documents, the novel. How might his tremendous design skills be brought to bear on the problem of more effectively presenting the information in A Tale of Two Cities than Dickens did?
At some point this obsession with presentation begins to look like the problem it's trying to solve. Compare Storey's modified presidential daily briefing to Peter Norvig's PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. Not quite as bad, but moving in the same direction.
You're right. BinHex II (.hqx) is a format from the early days of the net and online services. Back when people would e-mail programs to a repository, get them through FTP-mail getways, or using Kermit. In this case, as someone else noted, all you're getting is the file meta-data, including icon.
.hqx simply because its intended use is to be downloaded and used in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Freehand, Quark, or other design tool. Making it an .hqx file has the virtue of making it go to your hard drive, not perhaps a browser window. As a son-in-law of a graphic designer, I can say that the overhead of the BinHexing the file is more than worth not having to explain how to save an image in a browser window, especially if a designer's browser shows nothing but a broken image icon, because it can't display TIFFs.
The file was probably made available as a
Dragging and dropping as well as right- or control-clicking are, sadly, not techniques used extensively by many people. Of course a designer is dragging and dropping all the time in e.g. Illustrator or Photoshop, but the idea that you can drag a picture from a browser window to your desktop or to a folder can be mind blowing.
Greg, you've made a great point. At some point the computer will disappear, just like the flat screen TV: All that will remain is the experience of using it. I don't think such a development is so bad for Apple, as they have always been about the fusion of hardware and software into a unified experience.
I enjoy working with my PowerBook, and I enjoy using OS X. When I think about them. But most of the time, I'm not thinking about them; I'm simply being productive. I think that's what Apple products are about: getting stuff done, thinking about the problem at hand, not the computer that you're using to solve the problem. The drool-inducing industrial and UI design is there to as much to draw the attention of non-users as it is to enhance the experience of using -- and justify the purchase of -- Apple products.
But does it become more difficult to sell an experience when it has a less-tangible physical manifestation? This may be a problem for Apple, but it may also solve one of their problems: When there's less physicality to the experience of owning a Mac, perhaps there will be less resistance to purchasing one. The more invisible the hardware, the less difficult it may be for Apple to convince people to replace their invisible Gateway computer with an invisible Mac that works better.
In Star Wars, Han Solo shoots Greedo in the cantina as Greedo draws his weapon. In Star Wars: Episode Four: A New Hope: Special Edition Han lets Greedo draw and fire before shooting him under the table.
Some people, myself included, think that this change is quite lame. Han is a smuggler, not a school teacher, and as such, he survives by shooting first. Making him a nice guy from the start destroys Han's scoundrel to upstanding citizen transformation through the three movies.
My advice: There is no need to watch any Star Wars movie more than once, with the exception of The Empire Strikes Back. Every other Star Wars movie blows. It is not a coincidence that Empire is the only movie that wasn't directed by Lucas or, in the case of, wretch, Return of the Jedi, a Lucas lackey.
But on what basis do you think that Python and Perl aren't in Java's league?
I don't believe that there are programming languages and scripting languages; I believe that there are programmers and scripters. Programmers can create abstractions, while scripters only know how to use them. The wealth of pre-made abstractions make Python, Perl, and well as Java very appealing to programmers and scripters alike.
Regards,
Ed
You need to print that out and frame it. I'm amazed by the stubborn, willful ignorance of his reply.
Regards,
Ed
From ESR's original letter:
"Sun's insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged Sun's long-term interests by throttling acceptance of the language in the open-source community, ceding the field (and probably the future) to scripting-language competitors like Python and Perl."
ESR's theory that Python and Perl have more users than they deserve due to Java's merely gratis license is insulting to the people who work hard to make Python and Perl as good as they are.
Regards,
Ed
From his open letter:
"Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's when I just checked."
Comparing stock prices of two companies is nonsensical. Sun's market capitalization is over six times larger than Red Hat's. The following data is current as of approximately 4pm ET on 18-Feb-2004.
Red Hat (RHAT): $3.20 billion
Sun Microsystems (SUNW): $19.19 billion
Regards,
Ed
With nothing but hyperspecialized technical skills, a person will never be anything more than a worker bee.
Positions for people with technical degrees are beginning to resemble those for assembly line workers. Programmers are now commodities. The only position a commodity education is going to get you is one that might move to India next week.
If you combine those skills with a healthy does of humanities education (or often experience), you can start offering something far less common. While you won't be able get a job (or find clients) with the same ease that someone who is trying hard to make themselves an interchangable can, you will become much more valuable to those people who do need your knowledge, skills, and talent.
To the iTunes Music Store? There is no subscription fee. The only risk you run is that you need to keep iTunes installed on your computer in order to play pruchased music. Or, you could buy an iPod. Or, you could burn and then re-rip the music, which of course carries a quality penalty unless you rip to a lossless format.
You pay for advertising-supported content. The dollars for the marketing budgets for the products you buy come from one of two places: investors or revenue.
During the dotcom boom, you could make a case that you did not pay for advertising-supported content, because the money for the advertising was coming from, in large part, venture capital funds. Today a far larger share of advertising dollars are coming from the revenue that companies generate by selling products.
There might as well be a line item on every invoice or receipt detailing how many dollars from the purchase went toward subsidizing media.
GCC is the compiler that Apple's Project Manager application uses unless you provide another compiler -- such as CodeWarrior's, which cost $400 plus $200 or so a year to keep up to date.
Also, OS X itself is built with GCC.
...You are perpetuating the lie that Al Gore claimed to invent the Internet.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.htm
Douglas Comer started a company named Mt Xinu (read it backwards) that put out a Unix-like OS a long, long time ago . It was a companion to the book Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, published my Prentice Hall in 1984.
Xinu Home Page
My Apple II+ came with a reference manual that contained all of the firmware's assembly source code (not including AppleSoft BASIC, which was copyrighted by MS).
Apple wanted to ship MacBASIC with the Mac 128K, but MS held a gun to the company's head (kill MacBASIC or no business apps) and Apple complied.
Apple shipped many Macs during the '80s and '90s with HyperCard, a tool that turned tons of people into Mac software developers.
In the mid '90s, Apple shipped every Mac with tools for writing programs in AppleScript, a language that uses the Open Scripting Architecture to allow people to with relatively little pain fully automate OSA-compliant applications.
OS X 10.0 and later shipped with a developer tools CD that contained classic Unix development tools as well as Interface Builder, Project Builder, and everything else necessary to create world-class applications for OS X.
The collective mind of Slashdot has already determined that education -- especially higher education -- is meant to give you the skills to go out and get a job. Any of this meaningless crap about putting the present in the context of the past or scrutinizing received opinions is worthless crap in that it does not contribute to increasing anyone's starting salary or help in defeating the evil forces of those who do not wish to license all of their code under the GPL.
(For context, please see the relatively recent Ask Slashdot story where some punk brazenly asks why his computer science curriculum insists on teaching him how to think at the expense of learning the latest sexy languages and APIs.)