Addressing your original point, though, this isn't the old days, and McCain isn't Teddy. He's a man who was in every respect a great soldier- a man who was willing to die not only to make safe the people and territory of our nation, but to stop it from losing face. That's important, and in many ways it is an admirable quality- but he expects it of others, and right now, I don't want our soldiers dying to preserve our reputation. I want them back home, alive, and safe, and sound of mind and body, and that is something he will not do- not for himself, and not for his brothers in arms currently serving. Obama will do that, and when the time comes when American power is questioned, I don't think he will be so willing to send the sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, mothers, and fathers of our armed forces into combat to achieve a goal that has even the slightest chance of being accomplished through diplomacy. That is, in many ways, the sign of a true leader- not the man who wins every contest, no matter the cost; but rather the man who feels the cost most keenly, but knows what must be done. Those are the qualities I respect in Obama, and for all the honor I accord John McCain, whom I truly consider an American hero, I do not believe that it is in his heart to place those things that a good man holds above the honor of his country in their proper place.
I'm not. That's why I support Obama. But having said that, you do get points for knowing something about the military if you were in it, and, God forbid we found ourselves in a war we actually needed to fight, McCain would probably be better at the fighting part than Obama.
The counterpoint being that competence is as competence does, and nobody debates that McCain has been successful as both a senator and a soldier.
Of course, I'm supporting Obama for exactly those reasons....
Hillary is "the most competent leader running for office"? When did that happen? John McCain spent more time fighting and bleeding for our country than Hillary Clinton has in elected office, and after that distinguished military career, he was running for Senate when Hillary's most important position was on the Arkansas Rural Health Advisory Committee. Now, I know political biases make people say silly things now and again, but you're just being a tool if you think anybody but John McCain wins the experience issue.
At least they don't breathe out of it exclusively. If you're only distributing the code to your crippleware and selling the blobs for your more advanced features, you're implicitly saying that you don't trust the people you expect to be writing code for your product. Would you choose to volunteer for something like that?
So, we're going to let hundreds of thousands of GED-wielding line technicians handle thousands of miles of superconductive cabling that probably gets priced by the nanogram, surrounded by a coolant so cold that your first screwup leaves you an amputee on a good day, in order to deliver power to your endpoints without resistance. Then we're going to leave it there and hope nobody's around when a tree branch falls on it, or some moron tosses his sneakers up there, or little tommy just can't aim his BB gun. Sounds great.
Or... maybe you could just cool the things that need to be superconductive.
Even assuming you accept the validity of a given benchmark across multiple changes in hardware and software (you shouldn't), game performance is a very poor benchmark for CPU performance, since the bottlenecks in gaming tend to be in the GPU and disk I/O rather than in the CPU.
A better comparison would rather be the length of time required to complete an identical set of operations, which is the part of performance CPU clock speed masks- but we continue to use it because it's an easy number to arrive at as compared to the standard I described above, which would almost inevitably yield different results given two different instruction sets. Since we can't really remember (or market) large sets of floating point numbers, we use the (less relevant) clock speed calculation, which he was attempting to illustrate by relating it to the speed of light.
Seems like no more unreasonable analogue of CPU performance than its underlying metric.
This is exactly what I was just thinking. If you compress it, you can store voice at 4kb/s, but it's pretty bad quality and in many cases simply not worth having. To my math that sounds like in a given minute I could store maybe 10 seconds of crappy quality sound, to say nothing of full motion video, text, or metadata.
Ok, I'll fess up- I don't like Red Hat. Its a grudge and its not fair to them now, but going back a few years, those guys weren't much more fun to deal with than IBM, and for a small business, that's saying something. Now, of course, they're much better, they contribute more, and they participate more in the community, but I think there's probably always going to be a little knot of people for whom the words 'Red Hat' will always leave a bitter taste in their mouths.
Indeed. I'll try to find the study, but ACM published a paper not too long ago that concluded that virtually every non-trivial program written in the last ten years contained large and unavoidable patent violations. As a developer who has spent way too much time around lawyers, I must admit that I find that conclusion both repulsive and terrifying.
I sell Eee PC's, and size is a big selling point. A lot of women like a laptop they can slip into their purses, and a lot of the construction guys around here like clipping it to their clipboards. Some of the college kids think it looks cool, and that helps too.
same here, brownish-yellow for daylight, blue for twilight, green for full night. As a matter of fact, I think I'm going to write a script to set that.
Usually, not listening is followed by not thinking. However, you seem to be the unusual case where not listening is followed by a wildly imaginative tour through an alternate reality in which he claimed that it was the year of the Linux desktop. A casual glance at the OP reveals that this was not the case, and in fact that the OP did nothing more than express the relatively modest and pretty reasonable idea that the increasing prevalence of Linux on low-end, low-cost machines might eventually translate into higher prevalence on the more common desktop machines.
Next time, make sure you're fighting the right strawman.
Well, copyright and patent laws come to mind. The agreement explicitly agrees that you have independent intellectual property rights and that Google has no claim over them.
The bottom line is that unless you have a no-compete clause (of questionable legality) in your existing contracts, you have the exact same legal protection against Google that you have against your own employees.
I dunno- I can just imagine Joel patting Servo on the head, only to have him explode in a shower of what appears to be pink tempera, ala bloodrayne. I'd laugh.
Laws are not static things. They get interpreted, and they get implemented, and in the course of either process bad things can happen to even the best of ideas. The 'laws' regarding privacy in the states are a joke anymore, having been effectively interpreted into oblivion, and bounded on all sides by public safety measures designed to countermand what should have been basic rights. We do not need more useless laws, or more laws restricting our rights, that much we agree on; but to say that we don't need any more privacy laws (or constitutional amendments) does nothing but allow conflicting laws precedence.
I still don't really see the point, I guess. Doesn't seem to be anything that can't be accomplished more quickly with screen and the traditional tools. Am I missing something?
Slashdot Mirror
Addressing your original point, though, this isn't the old days, and McCain isn't Teddy. He's a man who was in every respect a great soldier- a man who was willing to die not only to make safe the people and territory of our nation, but to stop it from losing face. That's important, and in many ways it is an admirable quality- but he expects it of others, and right now, I don't want our soldiers dying to preserve our reputation. I want them back home, alive, and safe, and sound of mind and body, and that is something he will not do- not for himself, and not for his brothers in arms currently serving. Obama will do that, and when the time comes when American power is questioned, I don't think he will be so willing to send the sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, mothers, and fathers of our armed forces into combat to achieve a goal that has even the slightest chance of being accomplished through diplomacy. That is, in many ways, the sign of a true leader- not the man who wins every contest, no matter the cost; but rather the man who feels the cost most keenly, but knows what must be done. Those are the qualities I respect in Obama, and for all the honor I accord John McCain, whom I truly consider an American hero, I do not believe that it is in his heart to place those things that a good man holds above the honor of his country in their proper place.
I'm not. That's why I support Obama. But having said that, you do get points for knowing something about the military if you were in it, and, God forbid we found ourselves in a war we actually needed to fight, McCain would probably be better at the fighting part than Obama.
I just might. You never know.
The counterpoint being that competence is as competence does, and nobody debates that McCain has been successful as both a senator and a soldier.
Of course, I'm supporting Obama for exactly those reasons....
Yes, I am joking.
With very few exceptions, people aren't guns.
Hillary is "the most competent leader running for office"? When did that happen? John McCain spent more time fighting and bleeding for our country than Hillary Clinton has in elected office, and after that distinguished military career, he was running for Senate when Hillary's most important position was on the Arkansas Rural Health Advisory Committee. Now, I know political biases make people say silly things now and again, but you're just being a tool if you think anybody but John McCain wins the experience issue.
At least they don't breathe out of it exclusively. If you're only distributing the code to your crippleware and selling the blobs for your more advanced features, you're implicitly saying that you don't trust the people you expect to be writing code for your product. Would you choose to volunteer for something like that?
So, we're going to let hundreds of thousands of GED-wielding line technicians handle thousands of miles of superconductive cabling that probably gets priced by the nanogram, surrounded by a coolant so cold that your first screwup leaves you an amputee on a good day, in order to deliver power to your endpoints without resistance. Then we're going to leave it there and hope nobody's around when a tree branch falls on it, or some moron tosses his sneakers up there, or little tommy just can't aim his BB gun. Sounds great.
Or... maybe you could just cool the things that need to be superconductive.
Oh to have mod points... bravo, sir!
Even assuming you accept the validity of a given benchmark across multiple changes in hardware and software (you shouldn't), game performance is a very poor benchmark for CPU performance, since the bottlenecks in gaming tend to be in the GPU and disk I/O rather than in the CPU.
A better comparison would rather be the length of time required to complete an identical set of operations, which is the part of performance CPU clock speed masks- but we continue to use it because it's an easy number to arrive at as compared to the standard I described above, which would almost inevitably yield different results given two different instruction sets. Since we can't really remember (or market) large sets of floating point numbers, we use the (less relevant) clock speed calculation, which he was attempting to illustrate by relating it to the speed of light.
Seems like no more unreasonable analogue of CPU performance than its underlying metric.
This is exactly what I was just thinking. If you compress it, you can store voice at 4kb/s, but it's pretty bad quality and in many cases simply not worth having. To my math that sounds like in a given minute I could store maybe 10 seconds of crappy quality sound, to say nothing of full motion video, text, or metadata.
Ok, I'll fess up- I don't like Red Hat. Its a grudge and its not fair to them now, but going back a few years, those guys weren't much more fun to deal with than IBM, and for a small business, that's saying something. Now, of course, they're much better, they contribute more, and they participate more in the community, but I think there's probably always going to be a little knot of people for whom the words 'Red Hat' will always leave a bitter taste in their mouths.
Indeed. I'll try to find the study, but ACM published a paper not too long ago that concluded that virtually every non-trivial program written in the last ten years contained large and unavoidable patent violations. As a developer who has spent way too much time around lawyers, I must admit that I find that conclusion both repulsive and terrifying.
I sell Eee PC's, and size is a big selling point. A lot of women like a laptop they can slip into their purses, and a lot of the construction guys around here like clipping it to their clipboards. Some of the college kids think it looks cool, and that helps too.
same here, brownish-yellow for daylight, blue for twilight, green for full night. As a matter of fact, I think I'm going to write a script to set that.
Usually, not listening is followed by not thinking. However, you seem to be the unusual case where not listening is followed by a wildly imaginative tour through an alternate reality in which he claimed that it was the year of the Linux desktop. A casual glance at the OP reveals that this was not the case, and in fact that the OP did nothing more than express the relatively modest and pretty reasonable idea that the increasing prevalence of Linux on low-end, low-cost machines might eventually translate into higher prevalence on the more common desktop machines.
Next time, make sure you're fighting the right strawman.
Well, copyright and patent laws come to mind. The agreement explicitly agrees that you have independent intellectual property rights and that Google has no claim over them.
The bottom line is that unless you have a no-compete clause (of questionable legality) in your existing contracts, you have the exact same legal protection against Google that you have against your own employees.
I dunno- I can just imagine Joel patting Servo on the head, only to have him explode in a shower of what appears to be pink tempera, ala bloodrayne. I'd laugh.
Amen to the Doom comment. I mean, damn, if you can't make Hell (on Mars!) scary, you really need to have a hole or two put in your head.
Laws are not static things. They get interpreted, and they get implemented, and in the course of either process bad things can happen to even the best of ideas. The 'laws' regarding privacy in the states are a joke anymore, having been effectively interpreted into oblivion, and bounded on all sides by public safety measures designed to countermand what should have been basic rights. We do not need more useless laws, or more laws restricting our rights, that much we agree on; but to say that we don't need any more privacy laws (or constitutional amendments) does nothing but allow conflicting laws precedence.
You know, slashdot is a bad place to be ignorant AND loudmouthed. And yes, I'm writing this from a Ubuntu install with an ATI card.
Not to nitpick, but if you're selling things 5:1, only one out of six laptops has Linux on it.
Just sayin'
I still don't really see the point, I guess. Doesn't seem to be anything that can't be accomplished more quickly with screen and the traditional tools. Am I missing something?
Done years of embedded dev. Never liked eclipse. Any particular benefits I may have missed?