That sounds like a valid argument, but far too often, idiots post as AC so they can write stupid flames. They're too afraid to put a name to their vitriol and vulgarity.
You really aren't getting it. These results ARE protectable. They are novel and difficult to produce. But since we as a society value them more being in the public domain, we SPEND HUGE AMOUNTS OF TAX MONEY to produce them. And yet they are still protected in the sense no one can lay any exclusive claim to them either.
The only reason they're not locked up is because they're government funded, which means they're publicly funded. Rather than having a private corporation pay for these things, and then patent them, the public paid for them to ensure their public availability. There have also been plenty of things that have been liberated. Governments buy out patents on things, and IIRC, Blender used to be proprietary, but the community bought them out so that it could be GPL'd.
Also, keep in mind that once something's patent or copyright expires, that doesn't change the fact that it was expensive to produce, but the author's monopoly period is over, and now it's time to share.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I'm trying to make sure I'm clear, because I don't understand why you didn't get this. There are lots of aspects of what I said that may not be obvious, but this one seems simple.
Yes. People who try to contribute to the world get passionate about it when others try to devalue their contribution, either by dismissing it or by stealing it.
No. This is NOT a moronic post. It's intelligent and interesting. It also has absolutely nothing to do with my main point, which makes it even less stupid that you posted anonymously. In fact, it's quite apropos, because you posted anonymously about posting anonymously. It has a sprinkling of Zen quality to it.:)
Oh, and one other thing: "Rents for simple ideas" mischaracterizes what I was talking about. Simple, obvious ideas are not worthy of IP protection. Far too many patents in our system really do not belong there, but because of the incompetence of patent examiners (or their employer), the patent system is completely fucked up.
I'm talking about difficult, complex ideas that took significant effort, ingenuity, creativity, and resources to develop. Millions of dollars can be spent just to yield one page worth of information. Does the fact that the answers fit on one page obviate the fact that you may have needed an expensive particle accelerator, had to crash 1000 cars, or had to pay 10000 test subjects in order to get it correct? Even if all you had to do was spend a few months doing calculus and differential equations to solve the problem, that's still a significant expenditure of time and energy by someone who had already invested years in developing the necessary expertise. In order to justify that kind of effort, whose results could be of great benefit to society, investors require assurance that their investment will yield a profit. Without IP protection, they would not have that assurance, so they would not invest, and the invention would never happen.
There are some kinds of software that could plausibly be crowd-sourced but will never be. For instance, what Synopsys and Cadence do is never going to be replicated by Free Software. Trust me. I've tried to make that happen. The people willing to work on it lack the expertise, and the experts lack the desire to contribute. With my background in chip design and AI, I could conceivably do most of the work myself. Meanwhile, my family would starve to death, and I would never be able to recoup my investment. It would take far too much time and effort to justify it. And yet you cannot say that I haven't already made notable contributions to open hardware.
The potential benefit to society is obvious. IP protection encourages creative people to innovate, because they know they will be able to profit from their innovations, rather than have them ripped off by other people. It makes expending the effort worth while.
CURRENT IP law generally has the opposite effect, because it encourages people, creative or not, to innovate ONCE and then rest on their laurels, because they can collect royalties for excessive lengths of time. This is why my argument was not in favor of IP LAW, but rather about ethics.
And I've listened to enough RMS speeches to know that he firmly believes that there's no such thing as intellectual property. Or at least he professes to have that belief, over and over again. And this is part of what makes this all such a huge contradiction, because GPL'd works clearly have economic value (supply and demand, even if it's not primarily monetary) and are clearly intellectual and are clearly property, even if they are communal property. If RMS were consistent, then he would either admit that IP is real and that GPL'd works are IP (which is fine), or advocate more permissive licenses whose sole purpose is to legally indemnify the authors (because if you just put something into the public domain, without proper disclaimers, you may be legally liable should use of your product cause any harm).
The way RMS reasons it is that while he doesn't believe in Intellectual Property, he is aware of the existence of Intellectual Property LAW, even if he preferred that it did not exist, and the GPL is designed to exploit that law for his agenda.
I like RMS, and I'm a huge fan of Free Software. I use Free Software, and unlike most of you armchair "does it run Linux" lazyasses, I actually WRITE Free Software. Moreover, I also prefer to say "Free Software" than "open source", and I believe that GNU/Linux is perhaps a bit redundant but certainly a fair way to describe many Linux-based systems. I value Free Software because it fosters the free exchange of ideas, facilitates innovation, saves on wasted effort, and with the GPL, it prevents corporations from "stealing" the code and profiting from it without sharing in the same way they acquired it. It's awesome, really.
But this philosophy that intellectual property doesn't exist is absolutely bullshit pedaled by people too stupid or lazy to have or appreciate an original idea.
Indeed, this philosophy and the GPL stand in direct contradiction. On the one hand, if you download software in violation of its licensing terms, then you haven't done anything wrong, because all you did was copy. Fine. But if you lock up GPL'd code in voilation of ITS licence, then you've done something awful? It's the same fucking thing!
Whether or not you believe that something "intellectual" can be "property," what you have in both cases is someone (or some aggregate entity) produced some software code (or another kind of work) and chose to license it in a certain way. What's the difference? Are they any different just because one decided to lable their stuff as "Free" (based on some narrow definition of Free)? I don't think so.
Part of the problem is that most of the people whining about this are looking for a free handout. They don't contribute anything themselves (except useless rhetoric, perhaps), but they suffer from the modern entitlement complex that makes them think that everyone else should work so that they don't have to. It's just the same as people who live their whole lives on welfare without EVER trying to get a job and contribute properly to society. IMHO, nothing entitles them to anything except to starve to death if they won't work. And the fact that they DEMAND that I pay taxes so that they don't have to lift a finger makes me loathe them completely. It's one thing if you CAN'T work. I'll gladly pay taxes to assist people who DID work, but were rendered incapable by injury. But for those who REFUSE to work and want to bitch at me because I don't want to share my paycheck with their stupid asses, they're a complete waste of oxygen.
The fact is, in order to create a useful, interesting piece of software, you have to learn and think critically, and spend a whole hell of a lot of time and effort and sometimes money writing code and testing and debugging. GOOD software is not free (gratis) to produce. So when someone does develop software (or some other artistic work), it is no longer merely an idea. It is no longer MERELY intellectual. Although you can copy it easily, it embodies a great deal of effort, which makes if tangible, and within some reasoable bounds, they should have the right to control how that tangible is disseminated.
Although YOU, as a freeloader, may be unable to appreciate the effort involved in creating an intellectual work, that doesn't nevertheless give you the right to steal it. Ignorance and stupidity are NOT valid excuses for violating someone else's rights. Just because YOU have never had an original thought doesn't mean that original thoughts roll off of other people entirely effort-free.
The basic idea is that to create something of value, you have to expend effort. (Although effort doesn't necessarily produce something of value.) Of course, since you've never exerted any effort, you won't understand that, but some other people will. If you were to break that relationship, then people would have no incentive to create works of intellectual property, and then you'd have nothing to freeload off of. I think that might be a Catch 22.
By actually expending effort and creating something of value, an individual is entitled to some
But some significant percentage of the world's population has food allegies, and here in the US, we seem to have allergies to foods that people elsewhere in the world don't. For instance, peanut allergies seem to be unusually prevalent to the US, and some scientists suspect that it may have something to do with how we cultivate them, how they've been selectively bred or genetically engineered, or perhaps due to contamination from other sources. It's not clear that this is due to genetic modifications, but it's a suspect. IIRC, it's only like 10% of the US population that have a food sensitivity (that they know about, anyhow), but anecdotally, GM crops are more likely to be allergenic.
Similar to peanuts, there is corn (maize), which is one of the most genetically modified crops we have. Even before scientists got their hands on it, it was selectively bred for thousands of years, from a barely edible grain to the high-glycemic food we have today. There are some people who have severe reactions to corn, which is basically impossible to avoid in the US, because most additives are derived from it, and the FDA doesn't regulate its use. These include dextrose (used to bind iodine in salt or elsewhere as a sweetener or preservative), citric acid (preservative), xanthan gum (thicker from a bacterium grown on corn), white vinegar (distilled but usually contaminated), microcrystalline cellulose, (high fructose) corn syrup, maltodextrin, any anonymous "starch", and countless other things. The refinement of these extracts is very poor. (Contrast soybean oil which, given that soy is listed as a major allergen, it is much better refined.) Some people with corn allergies even have trouble with milk from cows fed corn. Whether it's the genetic modifications, or whether it's allergies instead to the molds that typically grow on corn, some people with corn allergies report that they can safely eat "organic" corn. Corn allergies are relatively rare, but given that it's almost impossible to avoid, and those with corn allergies seem to have especially severe reactions to trace quantities, my guess is the primary reason the FDA doesn't regulate it is due to political pressure from the corn associations. Corn is huge business in the US.
It's interesting that the most cultivated foods we have seem to be the most allergenic. Soybeans, wheat, corn, peanuts, and milk (cows are highly domesticated). One hypothesis I have is that we're not cut out to eat certain kinds of foods, but desperate or clever people found ways to cultivate these barely-edible things into foods they could more readily consume. But we didn't evolve to eat them, for millions of years before we developed farming, so many people can't tolerate them. Wheat is an interesting hybrid plant, with a weird genetic structure. It's interesting because most people who can't have wheat aren't allergic -- they have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition. The body develops IgA antibodies to some of the gluten peptides, and those same antibodies attack other parts of the body, typically the gut lining. Those same antibodies can get into the blood and attack the thyroid gland, causing overproduction of thyroid hormone, which is any many celiac sufferers have panic attacks and other psychological symptoms.
A few concluding points:
- Genetic modification isn't inherently evil or anything. - But there may be unintended consequences if you introduce genes without knowing their effects. - And our ability to predict, up front, the effect of a given gene is poor, as is our ability to fully test the effects of the grown organism. - Most people seem unaffected by this. - But there is a notable portion of the population that MAY be impacted by these modifications. - Keep in mind that the primary motivation for making these modifications is increased yield and increased profits, so the scientists and farmers are not especially motivated to scrutinize any unexpected effects. If it grows better, that's all that matters, even if a few m
My guess is that this is just a Visual Studio limitation, in terms of how much RAM their tools need to link an executable that, ultimately, will require much less memory to load and run.
But what I'm wondering is why they don't switch to some dynamic linking? Modularize it into DLLs (or equivalent), so that each can be linked separately at compile time, and have all these modules pulled in at runtime. It really won't slow down loading much at all.
The main objection would be that this is impossible because Firefox is much too spaghettified in terms of how different components communicate. Components would have to be rewritten so that they're always accessed through a simpler interface.
If I were running a target^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompany the size of Apple, I'd want to patent everything I could as a defensive measure. Indeed, independent developers are sitting ducks, because you can't make anything without someone trying to claim it violates their patents. Even our favorite evil company, Microsoft, generally takes a defensive stance with patents. Sure, they've launched a few lawsuits, but they're nowhere hear as litigious as Apple. It's perfectly fine for Apple to HOLD the patents they have, but to use them as a weapon against innovation just turns my stomach.
And why do they need to so that? I'm sure many people disagree, but I tend to prefer Apple hardware and software. Unlike so many half-baked PC makers and FOSS projects, Apple actually puts thought into making good designs, paying attention to detail. They make really good stuff, so they're in absolutely no danger of other companies taking away market share. Apple is as big as it is because people like to buy their stuff, not because they've had to Microsoft anyone down in order to prevent competition.
So what the hell are they doing? Do they have a legal staff with nothing better to do? Too many lawyers, I guess. I realize that if you knowingly do not defend a patent, it MIGHT be taken away, but Apple is being a bit too aggressive here.
For one thing, surely the same phenomena occurred long before there were any intelligent observers.
Nope.
Right, and the laws of thermodynamic changed the moment intelligence evolved. Sheesh.
Then there's the question of why subatomic particles (and some larger things) can be in states of quantum superposition, while larger things cannot.
This is a common misconception. "Larger" things can be in a superposition as well; there is nothing about quantum mechanics that keeps it from working on a macroscopic scale.
It looks like there's some high-schooler who like to go around posting flames as an anonymous coward. Funny how such people are so cowardly that they can't put ANY name to such harsh words. Too bad we can't find these people and give them a good paddling.
Anyhow, this says nothing at all about whether I'm right or wrong, although some if what I said is consistent with the wikipedia article on quantum decoherence.
The key idea with regard to decoherence is, "Decoherence occurs when a system interacts with its environment in a thermodynamically irreversible way."
The way people often describe quantum decoherence is that an "observation" occurs that "collapses the wave function" and causes a superposition to converge to a single classical state. But I really think that's a misleading explanation. For one thing, surely the same phenomena occurred long before there were any intelligent observers, and secondly, scientists have observed things in states of quantum superposition WITHOUT causing decoherence.
The way think of it (as a total amateur in the area) is that rather than the wave function representing probabilities of states, it represents the degrees to which something is in all of those states. An "observation" is just like many other interactions with the environment that change those probabilities (or degrees of state).
Then there's the question of why subatomic particles (and some larger things) can be in states of quantum superposition, while larger things cannot. Penrose had a suggestion here. It's gravity. The more massive you are, the less your superimposed states can diverge from one another. Even a planet is in a state of superposition, but all of those states overlap so much relative to the dimensions of the object that you cannot distinguish them.
I know, people are going to complain that the BS degree is the new highschool diploma. Well, that's happened because everyone has a highschool diploma, so the employers are looking for an easy way to distinguish the capable from the incapable.
Assuming that you're really bright, having taught yourself computer science well, finishing a college degree should be a breeze for you. At many colleges, you could get through in 3 years instead of 4 if you go summers.
You'll also run into the problem that all of us who DID bite the bullet and get degrees are not going to tolerate anyone WITHOUT one getting paid as much as we do. The employers know this. Besides, to the employers, getting a degree demonstrates persistence and responsibility, while not having one suggests laziness. Is that a reasonable interpretation? I don't know, but that's how they feel, and I don't completely disagree. Sure, it's possible for one to learn CS well and get good at software engineering without a degree. However, getting a degree is one way to PROVE that you're good. (Even though it doesn't always prove a whole lot, a high GPA demonstrates that you're capable of starting and finishing something that isn't necessarily enjoyable.)
Some of the nonconformists out there will also want to complain that a degree is just "the man" or "the establishment" trying to hold you down or force you to conform. But that's bullshit. Many colleges are very intellectual and free-form in the way they teach or allow you to learn the material. If you're bright, you can select your courses, even opt out of many if you can prove that you know the material. You can actually have FUN getting a degree if you're above average in intellect. Many of the "harder" courses are even more difficult to get bad grades in, because the profs are looking for creative solutions to problems. It's mostly just the weed-out courses that are graded by a brand new masters student who expects you to answer identically to the answer key.
Moreover, there's some value in learning to pretend to conform. Many jobs expect you to follow a dress code, for instance, and if you want a good job, you may just have to deal with that. There are also many CONVENTIONS in CS that are just that. Conventions. They are arbitrary in the same way that red, yellow, and green lights are arbitrary for traffic control. But we follow them to maintain order, based on creating shared expectations. The same is true of many arbitrary conventions in software engineering. You do something a particular way simply so that other engineers with the same training can collaborate with you or maintain your code after you've left. It's not about holding you down. It's about teaching you how to function in established frameworks. And the fact is, you are not so special that you can be above cooperating with other engineers, no matter how much of a genius you are.
Having sat in jail a long time might be useful as a bargaining chip, depending on why he said in jail for that long. But if the prosecutors are willing to take a plea bargain, I see two things he might want to consider doing: (a) Decide that what he did was right and fight to the death, or (b) decide that he's willing to admit guilt (even if he still feels he's not guilty) and plea-bargain for time-served and a dishonorable discharge. Of course, neither may work. He's up for treason, which is a serious accusation. But if the government wants to make an example of this behavior without keeping him in prison forever, they can get their legal precedent, which is often what they want. "Making law" is a feather in their caps.
People tend to conflate power with energy, and you may be doing it here. If you're going to be executing a particular job, and you want to optmize its efficiency, then it will consume some power over some time period, which is ENERGY. On the other hand, if you're talking about the battery life of your laptop, then the computer is almost completely idle, and what we want to therefore minimize is idle and average power.
Optimizing just for power isn't sufficient. If something uses half the power but takes 4 times as long, then it's twice as bad. However, we don't typically wake our computers to run compute-intensive jobs, just to put them back to sleep when those are done. We do a lot of screen-staring, which complicates the issue.
Interestingly, performance per watt IS in the right units. Performance would be something comparable to operations per second, while watts is joules per second. The seconds cancel out, giving you operations per joule, which is the correct efficiency metric.
Sounds like he had a brain-fart. RIgth now, he's smacking his forehead and calling himself an idiot because he didn't put together this sigma with the sigma he knows about as the standard deviation.
This sort of thing happens to me all the time. (Sometimes I feel really old.) I hate it when it makes me look stupid in front of someone. Like the day I was in the office of a Linguistics professor and asked a really stupid question about the fridge magnet letters that just happened to be IPA characters. I know IPA like the back of my hand, so I don't know what I was thinking.
I do other things that make me look stupider than I really am. Recently, I did a doozie in a slashdot comment. But this time, I was just being lazy. They were talking about Bulldozer, and I said a bunch of things that were wrong, mostly because I had forgotten, and I didn't take the time to look it up. I'm getting a Ph.D. specializing in computer architecture, but my lazyness made me look like a total idiot.
Fortunately, my dissertation committee won't be looking at my slashdot comments.:)
Your description in inaccurate, but that's not surprising since most slashdot readers don't know much about CPU architecture.
Bulldozers are essentially full-fledged cores, where the two cores in each module are mostly independent. There are two completely independent integer pipelines, so people seem to want to harp on the fact that the FPU is "shared". It's really a single split FPU, where each half can execute independent instructions, as long as the data width is 128 bits or less. Only when it is executing 256-bit AVX instructions is there any competition for resources. This is a very sensible design decision, since you don't find enough AVX software right now to justify completely dedicated AVX logic. (Plus, IIRC sandy bridge's FPU is only 128 bits wide and issues AVX instructions in two cycles, so what's the difference?) Moreover, even with AVX-heavy workloads, most software won't issue AVX instructions every cycle, and two AVX-heavy tasks on the same module won't really run into much contention. Assuming my memory of Sandy Bridge's FPU is correct, then Bulldozer has the advantage of having lower latency within the FPU on isolated AVX instructions.
The PROBLEM with Bulldozer is that they just have not done some of the really aggressive and costly things that Intel has done in their design. Bulldozer is still a 3-issue design. While going to 4-issue doesn't help that much that often, it still gives Sandy Bridge a slight edge. But where SB REALLY gets its advantage is the huge instruction window. Intel found clever ways to shrink the logic for various components so that they could make room for a much larger physical register file and reorder buffer. As a result, SB can have many more decoded instructions in flight, which exposes more instruction-level parallelism and, critically, absorbs more memory access latency.
A Sun engineer (discussing Rock, among other things) once described modern CPU execution as a race between last-level cache misses. When you have a miss on your L3 cache, it can cost hundreds of cycles, upwards of 1000. During that miss, the CPU fills up its reservation station with other instructions and then stalls, waiting on something to retire. This won't happen for a long time. Because of the disparity in speed (and latency) between compute and memory access, this is typically the most significant bottleneck. By enlarging the instruction window, SB can achieve much higher throughput, and it shows in the benchmarks.
This is Bulldozer's Achilles' heel. I know there are a few benchmarks where Bulldozer is faster than SB, but they're not typical workloads with typical memory footprints. Anyhow, so if you're going to rag on Bulldozer, rag on it for the right reasons. Bulldozer's "shared" FPU is a red herring.
It was anticompetitive behavior. For many years before Netscape even existed, Microsoft had been requiring, among other things, PC makers to pay for a copy of DOS for every machine sold, even if it didn't ship with DOS. Yes, Microsoft was leveraging IE to stomp on Netscape, but restricting what Microsoft could do with IE in Windows was a legal remedy that had nothing to do with anything technical.
In fact, embedding a web browser into a desktop OS is a technically sound idea. Every other OS maker does it, and for good reason. Back before web browsers came on the scene, Windows had a help facility that provided a primitive form of markup and hypertext. But when HTML became the dominant markup language, and it became apparent that every OS was going to need to include a browser, and therefore an HTML rendering engine, the old help facility markup became redundant, and it was sensible to just use the web engine behind the help system.
There are lots of things besides web pages that can find a use for an HTML toolkit. Even in the 90's, I recall using an off-the-shelf application that embedded Netscape, because it was mostly written in HTML (and some extensions, I assume).
I didn't contradict myself. It's all relative. To begin with, they don't assume that ALL applicants are morons. They assume that any individual application has a high PROBABILITY of being a moron, but that the probability is a bit lower if you have a college degree. So to reduce their workload and improve their chances of finding that one gem in a reasonable time, they consider only the college graduates. If they assumed ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE was a moron, they'd throw in the towel.:)
Of course, I'm replying to an Anonymous Coward, and you are replying as such because you're afraid to put a name to your statements. Based on this, it suggests to me that you don't have a college degree, and moreover that you don't have one because of laziness. If you lacked a college degree for financial reasons, you would have posted under your own name and made a better argument. Your response also suggests laziness in terms of reading comprehension and critical thinking. However, your nearly perfect spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure suggest that you are intelligent. This is completely consistent with the typical no-degree complainer who is smart enough but too lazy (or, almost equivalently, disinterested) to get a degree. You justify this to yourself on the basis that you have above average intellect and therefore don't "need" a college degree. You can learn this stuff on your own and probably have already. Unfortunately: You are not special, and you are not exempt from expending effort to demonstrate that you are responsible. Rather, your attitude, should an employer even consider you, would suggest to that employer that you would generally be unwilling to expend effort on something that you didn't want to do. But real jobs involve lots of work that you don't want to do. Therefore, they will decline to hire you. Even if they decided you were intelligent, they would still conclude that you are not competent. The fact is, some of the brightest people are completely useless because they have no follow-through.
You mention credentialism. And I agree that this is a problem. But look at it this way: Because college grads have been successful in the past, we've developed a culture that associates success with a college degree. As a result, we've been flooding the colleges with people who are responsible and persistent but not necessarily competent or intelligent. Pressure from so many less intelligent students causes professors to dumb down their cirricula.
It's all a huge mess. I'm not saying that it's right. I'm not saying lacking a college degree really implies a lack of intelligence. What I AM saying is that for efficiency reasons, employers are justified in taking this approach in the current academic climate. It's not that highschool graduates are all morons (indeed, anyone who gets a college degree was at one point at least the equivalent of a highschool grad). It's that someone without a college degree is SO much less likely to be worth considering. As I say, the employer doesn't care who they hire. They just want someone competent. There are multiple competent people in this pile of resumes. Determining which highschool grads are competent requires a lot more effort than determining which college grads are competent, so they just don't bother with the highschool students. This is not laziness on their part. It's efficiency.
So, you, as an intelligent person who wants to get a good job, find yourself in the position of needing a "piece of paper" just to get through the starting gate. This requires eating and living like a pauper for four years (or less if you're really on the ball). But once you're done, the number of job opportunities and the potential salary increase significantly. There is one consollation: If you really want to, you can learn a hell of a lot in college. Perhaps you can learn this on your own, but now you have proof that you did. Moreover, no matter how smart you are, when you're stumped on something, there's no substitu
I, like many others, feel that those coming out of highschool aren't necessarily disciplined enough. Listening to teachers in my family complain about how the system forces them to "teach to the test", discouraging actual exploration and learning, I also feel that students coming out of highschool aren't very well educated.
At the very least, having a bachelors degree demonstrates that a person has the discipline to start and finish something that they were not required by law to do, and if their GPA is reasonable, it means they probably learned something, at least unconsciously. This is why employers want a person to have a degree but don't care what the subject is.
Having a high highschool GPA may indicate that the person had the discipline to show up to class. That's good. But I don't know anyone who really respects a highschool education. Most of us feel that highschool was torment and indoctrination, and the real learning starts in college. That isn't entirely fair, of course, because a lot of what you do in pre-college school is "learn how to learn." Interestingly, it's those who actually learned something in highschool who are more likely to go to college, oftentimes because they learned in highschool _despite_ the system.
Not all undergrad degree programs are all that hot either. The college I went to (which has much improved since them) would give good grades to students who clearly did not understand the material. I know this, because I saw it happening as a student, and then after I got a job, I interviewed many graduates from this same institution. Although computer science isn't about learning programming languages, this school would graduate students who clearly did not know a single programming language. (IMHO, programming languages are generally something you should be able to learn on the fly, and you should acquire a number of them by necessity while taking courses.) The interesting effect of this is that it was easy to distinguish the smart graduates from the stupid ones, because the smart ones actually knew something about computer science, while the the rest did not. By contrast, when we went to a job fair at NCSU, every student who spoke to us, even those with math and other engineering degrees, knew computer science so well that we had no ability (or even need) to categorize people on the basis of intelligence, discipline, etc.
So, back to highschool, someone coming out of a really good prep school or other private institution (like a Montessori school) IS likely to have education and discipline (even the snobby rich kids). However, nearly all of those people will go on to college anyhow.
So if you went to a good highschool, you'll probably go to college because you're smart enough. If you went to a public school, and you managed to learn discipline and get an education anyway, you'll also go on to college. All we have left are the duds from public schools who don't go to college. McDonalds wants to make sure you can count change, and they explicitly train their employees in this, under the reasonable assumption that most of their applicants will not have learned this in school. Other employers are going to want a simple test that has a high probability of correctly filtering intelligent people from the duds, and a college degree is one such easy test.
So from the individual's perspective, it may seem unfair that employers have this "arbitrary" requirement for a degree. I've met a number of smart people who didn't get a college degree, and it's too bad that they are shut out of so many jobs they're intellectually qualified for, especially if the reason they didn't go to college was financial (as opposed to a lack of discipline).
But from the employer's perspective, you are interchangable with anyone else. They just want someone who is qualified for the position. They don't care who. They don't care about you at all. They just need a cog to perform a job. When considering candidates, they get a huge stack of resumes, and they look
So you're known as petermgreen here and plugwash everywhere else? Wow. That's almost as boring as the fact that I'm known as theovon here and theosib everywhere else.:)
That does seem like an inconsistency. However, it turns out that most of the complaints regarding growl aren't true. The original post was made by some nutcase that was being very hostile to the growl contributors, and he was banned for that. So he made up a story to make the growl people look bad.
The lead developer of Growl posted a response to this. You should read that an ignore part of what I said.
You're playing with semantics. There is a philosophy, not a rule, that releasing often and early is good, and this is how it's normally done. But it doesn't have to be that way. With the GPL, if you want to follow the rules, you have to release source code when you release a binary. I'm guessing that growl isn't under GPL; either that, or all of the original contributors have agreed to delay release of the source. In that case, there's no violation of the GPL, just the spirit of Free Software, if they decide to release the source late.
Why might they want to release source late? Let's think of some reasons:
- Their revision control infrastructure makes it inconvenient to just plop on a web interface. - They don't want to be pestered with bug reports for stuff they know is broken. - They don't want outside contributions right now, because those aren't necessarily in line with their goals. - The are embarrassed about the state of some of their code, even if it works well.
On the side, I'm right now working on a project that I plan to release under GPL. It's complete enough that some people could use it productively. But _I_ don't feel it's polished enough, so I haven't released it in any form to anyone but myself. This is because it doesn't meet my standards of completeness and usability. That is my choice. The likelihood of me getting outside contributions is low anyhow. That's how it usually is anyhow. So I have chosen to just work on it until I'm good and ready.
It appears that the growl people have made a similar choice about 1.3. It may have been accepted to the App Store, but we know how flaky Apple can be about their acceptance policies. If you look at the App Store reviews, huge numbers of them are complaints. Clearly, Growl 1.3 is not ready for prime time. Since they are unlikely to receive any outside help anyhow, they have chosen to focus their attention on fixing the problems, rather than pandering to the uber-entitled whiners who want the source code for no practical purpose other than to complain if they don't get it.
Releasing source code can be more trouble than it's worth. As soon as you become "open source", you open yourself up to criticism that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And why do we bother with this in the first place? Mostly altruism. We release source code, not because it's easy but because it's the right thing to do. But most of what we get in return is complaints without any help. Or we get ignored. It's the rare open source project that gets a lot of attention and assistance from outside contributors. Mind you, most open source projects are crap, so I don't blame most people for not contributing. Contributing is an investment too. But don't delude yourself into thinking the world of Free Software is a bed of roses.
It's amazing how many people, who haven't paid a penny or contributed a single line of code, will make really demanding, nasty-sounding bug reports. I understand what it's like to rely on some software just to have it fail and cost you time. But the fact is, it's FREE. You did nothing that entitles you to any control over it.
In any case, none of this addresses the main point, that the original poster was an asshole for lying about what the growl people are actually going to do.
Growl is not going closed source. They just don't have releasing the source EARLY as a priority. That's their choice. As long as the source is eventually released, that's all most of us care about.
The way I judge this, this slashdot story is grossly slanderous and was posted by an asshole whose sole intent was to spread FUD and stir up trouble. There's no way they couldn't have been ignorant of the FAQ. Probably what happened is that they felt entitled, were refused, and got mad, so they decided to make up this bullshit. And the slashdot editors are not competent to filter out this kind of crap.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a valid argument, but far too often, idiots post as AC so they can write stupid flames. They're too afraid to put a name to their vitriol and vulgarity.
You really aren't getting it. These results ARE protectable. They are novel and difficult to produce. But since we as a society value them more being in the public domain, we SPEND HUGE AMOUNTS OF TAX MONEY to produce them. And yet they are still protected in the sense no one can lay any exclusive claim to them either.
The only reason they're not locked up is because they're government funded, which means they're publicly funded. Rather than having a private corporation pay for these things, and then patent them, the public paid for them to ensure their public availability. There have also been plenty of things that have been liberated. Governments buy out patents on things, and IIRC, Blender used to be proprietary, but the community bought them out so that it could be GPL'd.
Also, keep in mind that once something's patent or copyright expires, that doesn't change the fact that it was expensive to produce, but the author's monopoly period is over, and now it's time to share.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I'm trying to make sure I'm clear, because I don't understand why you didn't get this. There are lots of aspects of what I said that may not be obvious, but this one seems simple.
Yes. People who try to contribute to the world get passionate about it when others try to devalue their contribution, either by dismissing it or by stealing it.
No. This is NOT a moronic post. It's intelligent and interesting. It also has absolutely nothing to do with my main point, which makes it even less stupid that you posted anonymously. In fact, it's quite apropos, because you posted anonymously about posting anonymously. It has a sprinkling of Zen quality to it. :)
Oh, and one other thing: "Rents for simple ideas" mischaracterizes what I was talking about. Simple, obvious ideas are not worthy of IP protection. Far too many patents in our system really do not belong there, but because of the incompetence of patent examiners (or their employer), the patent system is completely fucked up.
I'm talking about difficult, complex ideas that took significant effort, ingenuity, creativity, and resources to develop. Millions of dollars can be spent just to yield one page worth of information. Does the fact that the answers fit on one page obviate the fact that you may have needed an expensive particle accelerator, had to crash 1000 cars, or had to pay 10000 test subjects in order to get it correct? Even if all you had to do was spend a few months doing calculus and differential equations to solve the problem, that's still a significant expenditure of time and energy by someone who had already invested years in developing the necessary expertise. In order to justify that kind of effort, whose results could be of great benefit to society, investors require assurance that their investment will yield a profit. Without IP protection, they would not have that assurance, so they would not invest, and the invention would never happen.
There are some kinds of software that could plausibly be crowd-sourced but will never be. For instance, what Synopsys and Cadence do is never going to be replicated by Free Software. Trust me. I've tried to make that happen. The people willing to work on it lack the expertise, and the experts lack the desire to contribute. With my background in chip design and AI, I could conceivably do most of the work myself. Meanwhile, my family would starve to death, and I would never be able to recoup my investment. It would take far too much time and effort to justify it. And yet you cannot say that I haven't already made notable contributions to open hardware.
I'm going to have to blog about this. :)
The potential benefit to society is obvious. IP protection encourages creative people to innovate, because they know they will be able to profit from their innovations, rather than have them ripped off by other people. It makes expending the effort worth while.
CURRENT IP law generally has the opposite effect, because it encourages people, creative or not, to innovate ONCE and then rest on their laurels, because they can collect royalties for excessive lengths of time. This is why my argument was not in favor of IP LAW, but rather about ethics.
And I've listened to enough RMS speeches to know that he firmly believes that there's no such thing as intellectual property. Or at least he professes to have that belief, over and over again. And this is part of what makes this all such a huge contradiction, because GPL'd works clearly have economic value (supply and demand, even if it's not primarily monetary) and are clearly intellectual and are clearly property, even if they are communal property. If RMS were consistent, then he would either admit that IP is real and that GPL'd works are IP (which is fine), or advocate more permissive licenses whose sole purpose is to legally indemnify the authors (because if you just put something into the public domain, without proper disclaimers, you may be legally liable should use of your product cause any harm).
The way RMS reasons it is that while he doesn't believe in Intellectual Property, he is aware of the existence of Intellectual Property LAW, even if he preferred that it did not exist, and the GPL is designed to exploit that law for his agenda.
I like RMS, and I'm a huge fan of Free Software. I use Free Software, and unlike most of you armchair "does it run Linux" lazyasses, I actually WRITE Free Software. Moreover, I also prefer to say "Free Software" than "open source", and I believe that GNU/Linux is perhaps a bit redundant but certainly a fair way to describe many Linux-based systems. I value Free Software because it fosters the free exchange of ideas, facilitates innovation, saves on wasted effort, and with the GPL, it prevents corporations from "stealing" the code and profiting from it without sharing in the same way they acquired it. It's awesome, really.
But this philosophy that intellectual property doesn't exist is absolutely bullshit pedaled by people too stupid or lazy to have or appreciate an original idea.
Indeed, this philosophy and the GPL stand in direct contradiction. On the one hand, if you download software in violation of its licensing terms, then you haven't done anything wrong, because all you did was copy. Fine. But if you lock up GPL'd code in voilation of ITS licence, then you've done something awful? It's the same fucking thing!
Whether or not you believe that something "intellectual" can be "property," what you have in both cases is someone (or some aggregate entity) produced some software code (or another kind of work) and chose to license it in a certain way. What's the difference? Are they any different just because one decided to lable their stuff as "Free" (based on some narrow definition of Free)? I don't think so.
Part of the problem is that most of the people whining about this are looking for a free handout. They don't contribute anything themselves (except useless rhetoric, perhaps), but they suffer from the modern entitlement complex that makes them think that everyone else should work so that they don't have to. It's just the same as people who live their whole lives on welfare without EVER trying to get a job and contribute properly to society. IMHO, nothing entitles them to anything except to starve to death if they won't work. And the fact that they DEMAND that I pay taxes so that they don't have to lift a finger makes me loathe them completely. It's one thing if you CAN'T work. I'll gladly pay taxes to assist people who DID work, but were rendered incapable by injury. But for those who REFUSE to work and want to bitch at me because I don't want to share my paycheck with their stupid asses, they're a complete waste of oxygen.
The fact is, in order to create a useful, interesting piece of software, you have to learn and think critically, and spend a whole hell of a lot of time and effort and sometimes money writing code and testing and debugging. GOOD software is not free (gratis) to produce. So when someone does develop software (or some other artistic work), it is no longer merely an idea. It is no longer MERELY intellectual. Although you can copy it easily, it embodies a great deal of effort, which makes if tangible, and within some reasoable bounds, they should have the right to control how that tangible is disseminated.
Although YOU, as a freeloader, may be unable to appreciate the effort involved in creating an intellectual work, that doesn't nevertheless give you the right to steal it. Ignorance and stupidity are NOT valid excuses for violating someone else's rights. Just because YOU have never had an original thought doesn't mean that original thoughts roll off of other people entirely effort-free.
The basic idea is that to create something of value, you have to expend effort. (Although effort doesn't necessarily produce something of value.) Of course, since you've never exerted any effort, you won't understand that, but some other people will. If you were to break that relationship, then people would have no incentive to create works of intellectual property, and then you'd have nothing to freeload off of. I think that might be a Catch 22.
By actually expending effort and creating something of value, an individual is entitled to some
But some significant percentage of the world's population has food allegies, and here in the US, we seem to have allergies to foods that people elsewhere in the world don't. For instance, peanut allergies seem to be unusually prevalent to the US, and some scientists suspect that it may have something to do with how we cultivate them, how they've been selectively bred or genetically engineered, or perhaps due to contamination from other sources. It's not clear that this is due to genetic modifications, but it's a suspect. IIRC, it's only like 10% of the US population that have a food sensitivity (that they know about, anyhow), but anecdotally, GM crops are more likely to be allergenic.
Similar to peanuts, there is corn (maize), which is one of the most genetically modified crops we have. Even before scientists got their hands on it, it was selectively bred for thousands of years, from a barely edible grain to the high-glycemic food we have today. There are some people who have severe reactions to corn, which is basically impossible to avoid in the US, because most additives are derived from it, and the FDA doesn't regulate its use. These include dextrose (used to bind iodine in salt or elsewhere as a sweetener or preservative), citric acid (preservative), xanthan gum (thicker from a bacterium grown on corn), white vinegar (distilled but usually contaminated), microcrystalline cellulose, (high fructose) corn syrup, maltodextrin, any anonymous "starch", and countless other things. The refinement of these extracts is very poor. (Contrast soybean oil which, given that soy is listed as a major allergen, it is much better refined.) Some people with corn allergies even have trouble with milk from cows fed corn. Whether it's the genetic modifications, or whether it's allergies instead to the molds that typically grow on corn, some people with corn allergies report that they can safely eat "organic" corn. Corn allergies are relatively rare, but given that it's almost impossible to avoid, and those with corn allergies seem to have especially severe reactions to trace quantities, my guess is the primary reason the FDA doesn't regulate it is due to political pressure from the corn associations. Corn is huge business in the US.
It's interesting that the most cultivated foods we have seem to be the most allergenic. Soybeans, wheat, corn, peanuts, and milk (cows are highly domesticated). One hypothesis I have is that we're not cut out to eat certain kinds of foods, but desperate or clever people found ways to cultivate these barely-edible things into foods they could more readily consume. But we didn't evolve to eat them, for millions of years before we developed farming, so many people can't tolerate them. Wheat is an interesting hybrid plant, with a weird genetic structure. It's interesting because most people who can't have wheat aren't allergic -- they have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition. The body develops IgA antibodies to some of the gluten peptides, and those same antibodies attack other parts of the body, typically the gut lining. Those same antibodies can get into the blood and attack the thyroid gland, causing overproduction of thyroid hormone, which is any many celiac sufferers have panic attacks and other psychological symptoms.
A few concluding points:
- Genetic modification isn't inherently evil or anything.
- But there may be unintended consequences if you introduce genes without knowing their effects.
- And our ability to predict, up front, the effect of a given gene is poor, as is our ability to fully test the effects of the grown organism.
- Most people seem unaffected by this.
- But there is a notable portion of the population that MAY be impacted by these modifications.
- Keep in mind that the primary motivation for making these modifications is increased yield and increased profits, so the scientists and farmers are not especially motivated to scrutinize any unexpected effects. If it grows better, that's all that matters, even if a few m
My guess is that this is just a Visual Studio limitation, in terms of how much RAM their tools need to link an executable that, ultimately, will require much less memory to load and run.
But what I'm wondering is why they don't switch to some dynamic linking? Modularize it into DLLs (or equivalent), so that each can be linked separately at compile time, and have all these modules pulled in at runtime. It really won't slow down loading much at all.
The main objection would be that this is impossible because Firefox is much too spaghettified in terms of how different components communicate. Components would have to be rewritten so that they're always accessed through a simpler interface.
If I were running a target^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompany the size of Apple, I'd want to patent everything I could as a defensive measure. Indeed, independent developers are sitting ducks, because you can't make anything without someone trying to claim it violates their patents. Even our favorite evil company, Microsoft, generally takes a defensive stance with patents. Sure, they've launched a few lawsuits, but they're nowhere hear as litigious as Apple. It's perfectly fine for Apple to HOLD the patents they have, but to use them as a weapon against innovation just turns my stomach.
And why do they need to so that? I'm sure many people disagree, but I tend to prefer Apple hardware and software. Unlike so many half-baked PC makers and FOSS projects, Apple actually puts thought into making good designs, paying attention to detail. They make really good stuff, so they're in absolutely no danger of other companies taking away market share. Apple is as big as it is because people like to buy their stuff, not because they've had to Microsoft anyone down in order to prevent competition.
So what the hell are they doing? Do they have a legal staff with nothing better to do? Too many lawyers, I guess. I realize that if you knowingly do not defend a patent, it MIGHT be taken away, but Apple is being a bit too aggressive here.
For one thing, surely the same phenomena occurred long before there were any intelligent observers.
Nope.
Right, and the laws of thermodynamic changed the moment intelligence evolved. Sheesh.
Then there's the question of why subatomic particles (and some larger things) can be in states of quantum superposition, while larger things cannot.
This is a common misconception. "Larger" things can be in a superposition as well; there is nothing about quantum mechanics that keeps it from working on a macroscopic scale.
I think that's what I said.
It looks like there's some high-schooler who like to go around posting flames as an anonymous coward. Funny how such people are so cowardly that they can't put ANY name to such harsh words. Too bad we can't find these people and give them a good paddling.
Anyhow, this says nothing at all about whether I'm right or wrong, although some if what I said is consistent with the wikipedia article on quantum decoherence.
The key idea with regard to decoherence is, "Decoherence occurs when a system interacts with its environment in a thermodynamically irreversible way."
The way people often describe quantum decoherence is that an "observation" occurs that "collapses the wave function" and causes a superposition to converge to a single classical state. But I really think that's a misleading explanation. For one thing, surely the same phenomena occurred long before there were any intelligent observers, and secondly, scientists have observed things in states of quantum superposition WITHOUT causing decoherence.
The way think of it (as a total amateur in the area) is that rather than the wave function representing probabilities of states, it represents the degrees to which something is in all of those states. An "observation" is just like many other interactions with the environment that change those probabilities (or degrees of state).
Then there's the question of why subatomic particles (and some larger things) can be in states of quantum superposition, while larger things cannot. Penrose had a suggestion here. It's gravity. The more massive you are, the less your superimposed states can diverge from one another. Even a planet is in a state of superposition, but all of those states overlap so much relative to the dimensions of the object that you cannot distinguish them.
I know, people are going to complain that the BS degree is the new highschool diploma. Well, that's happened because everyone has a highschool diploma, so the employers are looking for an easy way to distinguish the capable from the incapable.
Assuming that you're really bright, having taught yourself computer science well, finishing a college degree should be a breeze for you. At many colleges, you could get through in 3 years instead of 4 if you go summers.
You'll also run into the problem that all of us who DID bite the bullet and get degrees are not going to tolerate anyone WITHOUT one getting paid as much as we do. The employers know this. Besides, to the employers, getting a degree demonstrates persistence and responsibility, while not having one suggests laziness. Is that a reasonable interpretation? I don't know, but that's how they feel, and I don't completely disagree. Sure, it's possible for one to learn CS well and get good at software engineering without a degree. However, getting a degree is one way to PROVE that you're good. (Even though it doesn't always prove a whole lot, a high GPA demonstrates that you're capable of starting and finishing something that isn't necessarily enjoyable.)
Some of the nonconformists out there will also want to complain that a degree is just "the man" or "the establishment" trying to hold you down or force you to conform. But that's bullshit. Many colleges are very intellectual and free-form in the way they teach or allow you to learn the material. If you're bright, you can select your courses, even opt out of many if you can prove that you know the material. You can actually have FUN getting a degree if you're above average in intellect. Many of the "harder" courses are even more difficult to get bad grades in, because the profs are looking for creative solutions to problems. It's mostly just the weed-out courses that are graded by a brand new masters student who expects you to answer identically to the answer key.
Moreover, there's some value in learning to pretend to conform. Many jobs expect you to follow a dress code, for instance, and if you want a good job, you may just have to deal with that. There are also many CONVENTIONS in CS that are just that. Conventions. They are arbitrary in the same way that red, yellow, and green lights are arbitrary for traffic control. But we follow them to maintain order, based on creating shared expectations. The same is true of many arbitrary conventions in software engineering. You do something a particular way simply so that other engineers with the same training can collaborate with you or maintain your code after you've left. It's not about holding you down. It's about teaching you how to function in established frameworks. And the fact is, you are not so special that you can be above cooperating with other engineers, no matter how much of a genius you are.
Having sat in jail a long time might be useful as a bargaining chip, depending on why he said in jail for that long. But if the prosecutors are willing to take a plea bargain, I see two things he might want to consider doing: (a) Decide that what he did was right and fight to the death, or (b) decide that he's willing to admit guilt (even if he still feels he's not guilty) and plea-bargain for time-served and a dishonorable discharge. Of course, neither may work. He's up for treason, which is a serious accusation. But if the government wants to make an example of this behavior without keeping him in prison forever, they can get their legal precedent, which is often what they want. "Making law" is a feather in their caps.
People tend to conflate power with energy, and you may be doing it here. If you're going to be executing a particular job, and you want to optmize its efficiency, then it will consume some power over some time period, which is ENERGY. On the other hand, if you're talking about the battery life of your laptop, then the computer is almost completely idle, and what we want to therefore minimize is idle and average power.
Optimizing just for power isn't sufficient. If something uses half the power but takes 4 times as long, then it's twice as bad. However, we don't typically wake our computers to run compute-intensive jobs, just to put them back to sleep when those are done. We do a lot of screen-staring, which complicates the issue.
Interestingly, performance per watt IS in the right units. Performance would be something comparable to operations per second, while watts is joules per second. The seconds cancel out, giving you operations per joule, which is the correct efficiency metric.
Sounds like he had a brain-fart. RIgth now, he's smacking his forehead and calling himself an idiot because he didn't put together this sigma with the sigma he knows about as the standard deviation.
This sort of thing happens to me all the time. (Sometimes I feel really old.) I hate it when it makes me look stupid in front of someone. Like the day I was in the office of a Linguistics professor and asked a really stupid question about the fridge magnet letters that just happened to be IPA characters. I know IPA like the back of my hand, so I don't know what I was thinking.
I do other things that make me look stupider than I really am. Recently, I did a doozie in a slashdot comment. But this time, I was just being lazy. They were talking about Bulldozer, and I said a bunch of things that were wrong, mostly because I had forgotten, and I didn't take the time to look it up. I'm getting a Ph.D. specializing in computer architecture, but my lazyness made me look like a total idiot.
Fortunately, my dissertation committee won't be looking at my slashdot comments. :)
Your description in inaccurate, but that's not surprising since most slashdot readers don't know much about CPU architecture.
Bulldozers are essentially full-fledged cores, where the two cores in each module are mostly independent. There are two completely independent integer pipelines, so people seem to want to harp on the fact that the FPU is "shared". It's really a single split FPU, where each half can execute independent instructions, as long as the data width is 128 bits or less. Only when it is executing 256-bit AVX instructions is there any competition for resources. This is a very sensible design decision, since you don't find enough AVX software right now to justify completely dedicated AVX logic. (Plus, IIRC sandy bridge's FPU is only 128 bits wide and issues AVX instructions in two cycles, so what's the difference?) Moreover, even with AVX-heavy workloads, most software won't issue AVX instructions every cycle, and two AVX-heavy tasks on the same module won't really run into much contention. Assuming my memory of Sandy Bridge's FPU is correct, then Bulldozer has the advantage of having lower latency within the FPU on isolated AVX instructions.
The PROBLEM with Bulldozer is that they just have not done some of the really aggressive and costly things that Intel has done in their design. Bulldozer is still a 3-issue design. While going to 4-issue doesn't help that much that often, it still gives Sandy Bridge a slight edge. But where SB REALLY gets its advantage is the huge instruction window. Intel found clever ways to shrink the logic for various components so that they could make room for a much larger physical register file and reorder buffer. As a result, SB can have many more decoded instructions in flight, which exposes more instruction-level parallelism and, critically, absorbs more memory access latency.
A Sun engineer (discussing Rock, among other things) once described modern CPU execution as a race between last-level cache misses. When you have a miss on your L3 cache, it can cost hundreds of cycles, upwards of 1000. During that miss, the CPU fills up its reservation station with other instructions and then stalls, waiting on something to retire. This won't happen for a long time. Because of the disparity in speed (and latency) between compute and memory access, this is typically the most significant bottleneck. By enlarging the instruction window, SB can achieve much higher throughput, and it shows in the benchmarks.
This is Bulldozer's Achilles' heel. I know there are a few benchmarks where Bulldozer is faster than SB, but they're not typical workloads with typical memory footprints. Anyhow, so if you're going to rag on Bulldozer, rag on it for the right reasons. Bulldozer's "shared" FPU is a red herring.
It was anticompetitive behavior. For many years before Netscape even existed, Microsoft had been requiring, among other things, PC makers to pay for a copy of DOS for every machine sold, even if it didn't ship with DOS. Yes, Microsoft was leveraging IE to stomp on Netscape, but restricting what Microsoft could do with IE in Windows was a legal remedy that had nothing to do with anything technical.
In fact, embedding a web browser into a desktop OS is a technically sound idea. Every other OS maker does it, and for good reason. Back before web browsers came on the scene, Windows had a help facility that provided a primitive form of markup and hypertext. But when HTML became the dominant markup language, and it became apparent that every OS was going to need to include a browser, and therefore an HTML rendering engine, the old help facility markup became redundant, and it was sensible to just use the web engine behind the help system.
There are lots of things besides web pages that can find a use for an HTML toolkit. Even in the 90's, I recall using an off-the-shelf application that embedded Netscape, because it was mostly written in HTML (and some extensions, I assume).
I didn't contradict myself. It's all relative. To begin with, they don't assume that ALL applicants are morons. They assume that any individual application has a high PROBABILITY of being a moron, but that the probability is a bit lower if you have a college degree. So to reduce their workload and improve their chances of finding that one gem in a reasonable time, they consider only the college graduates. If they assumed ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE was a moron, they'd throw in the towel. :)
Of course, I'm replying to an Anonymous Coward, and you are replying as such because you're afraid to put a name to your statements. Based on this, it suggests to me that you don't have a college degree, and moreover that you don't have one because of laziness. If you lacked a college degree for financial reasons, you would have posted under your own name and made a better argument. Your response also suggests laziness in terms of reading comprehension and critical thinking. However, your nearly perfect spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure suggest that you are intelligent. This is completely consistent with the typical no-degree complainer who is smart enough but too lazy (or, almost equivalently, disinterested) to get a degree. You justify this to yourself on the basis that you have above average intellect and therefore don't "need" a college degree. You can learn this stuff on your own and probably have already. Unfortunately: You are not special, and you are not exempt from expending effort to demonstrate that you are responsible. Rather, your attitude, should an employer even consider you, would suggest to that employer that you would generally be unwilling to expend effort on something that you didn't want to do. But real jobs involve lots of work that you don't want to do. Therefore, they will decline to hire you. Even if they decided you were intelligent, they would still conclude that you are not competent. The fact is, some of the brightest people are completely useless because they have no follow-through.
You mention credentialism. And I agree that this is a problem. But look at it this way: Because college grads have been successful in the past, we've developed a culture that associates success with a college degree. As a result, we've been flooding the colleges with people who are responsible and persistent but not necessarily competent or intelligent. Pressure from so many less intelligent students causes professors to dumb down their cirricula.
It's all a huge mess. I'm not saying that it's right. I'm not saying lacking a college degree really implies a lack of intelligence. What I AM saying is that for efficiency reasons, employers are justified in taking this approach in the current academic climate. It's not that highschool graduates are all morons (indeed, anyone who gets a college degree was at one point at least the equivalent of a highschool grad). It's that someone without a college degree is SO much less likely to be worth considering. As I say, the employer doesn't care who they hire. They just want someone competent. There are multiple competent people in this pile of resumes. Determining which highschool grads are competent requires a lot more effort than determining which college grads are competent, so they just don't bother with the highschool students. This is not laziness on their part. It's efficiency.
So, you, as an intelligent person who wants to get a good job, find yourself in the position of needing a "piece of paper" just to get through the starting gate. This requires eating and living like a pauper for four years (or less if you're really on the ball). But once you're done, the number of job opportunities and the potential salary increase significantly. There is one consollation: If you really want to, you can learn a hell of a lot in college. Perhaps you can learn this on your own, but now you have proof that you did. Moreover, no matter how smart you are, when you're stumped on something, there's no substitu
I, like many others, feel that those coming out of highschool aren't necessarily disciplined enough. Listening to teachers in my family complain about how the system forces them to "teach to the test", discouraging actual exploration and learning, I also feel that students coming out of highschool aren't very well educated.
At the very least, having a bachelors degree demonstrates that a person has the discipline to start and finish something that they were not required by law to do, and if their GPA is reasonable, it means they probably learned something, at least unconsciously. This is why employers want a person to have a degree but don't care what the subject is.
Having a high highschool GPA may indicate that the person had the discipline to show up to class. That's good. But I don't know anyone who really respects a highschool education. Most of us feel that highschool was torment and indoctrination, and the real learning starts in college. That isn't entirely fair, of course, because a lot of what you do in pre-college school is "learn how to learn." Interestingly, it's those who actually learned something in highschool who are more likely to go to college, oftentimes because they learned in highschool _despite_ the system.
Not all undergrad degree programs are all that hot either. The college I went to (which has much improved since them) would give good grades to students who clearly did not understand the material. I know this, because I saw it happening as a student, and then after I got a job, I interviewed many graduates from this same institution. Although computer science isn't about learning programming languages, this school would graduate students who clearly did not know a single programming language. (IMHO, programming languages are generally something you should be able to learn on the fly, and you should acquire a number of them by necessity while taking courses.) The interesting effect of this is that it was easy to distinguish the smart graduates from the stupid ones, because the smart ones actually knew something about computer science, while the the rest did not. By contrast, when we went to a job fair at NCSU, every student who spoke to us, even those with math and other engineering degrees, knew computer science so well that we had no ability (or even need) to categorize people on the basis of intelligence, discipline, etc.
So, back to highschool, someone coming out of a really good prep school or other private institution (like a Montessori school) IS likely to have education and discipline (even the snobby rich kids). However, nearly all of those people will go on to college anyhow.
So if you went to a good highschool, you'll probably go to college because you're smart enough. If you went to a public school, and you managed to learn discipline and get an education anyway, you'll also go on to college. All we have left are the duds from public schools who don't go to college. McDonalds wants to make sure you can count change, and they explicitly train their employees in this, under the reasonable assumption that most of their applicants will not have learned this in school. Other employers are going to want a simple test that has a high probability of correctly filtering intelligent people from the duds, and a college degree is one such easy test.
So from the individual's perspective, it may seem unfair that employers have this "arbitrary" requirement for a degree. I've met a number of smart people who didn't get a college degree, and it's too bad that they are shut out of so many jobs they're intellectually qualified for, especially if the reason they didn't go to college was financial (as opposed to a lack of discipline).
But from the employer's perspective, you are interchangable with anyone else. They just want someone who is qualified for the position. They don't care who. They don't care about you at all. They just need a cog to perform a job. When considering candidates, they get a huge stack of resumes, and they look
So you're known as petermgreen here and plugwash everywhere else? Wow. That's almost as boring as the fact that I'm known as theovon here and theosib everywhere else. :)
That does seem like an inconsistency. However, it turns out that most of the complaints regarding growl aren't true. The original post was made by some nutcase that was being very hostile to the growl contributors, and he was banned for that. So he made up a story to make the growl people look bad.
The lead developer of Growl posted a response to this. You should read that an ignore part of what I said.
You're playing with semantics. There is a philosophy, not a rule, that releasing often and early is good, and this is how it's normally done. But it doesn't have to be that way. With the GPL, if you want to follow the rules, you have to release source code when you release a binary. I'm guessing that growl isn't under GPL; either that, or all of the original contributors have agreed to delay release of the source. In that case, there's no violation of the GPL, just the spirit of Free Software, if they decide to release the source late.
Why might they want to release source late? Let's think of some reasons:
- Their revision control infrastructure makes it inconvenient to just plop on a web interface.
- They don't want to be pestered with bug reports for stuff they know is broken.
- They don't want outside contributions right now, because those aren't necessarily in line with their goals.
- The are embarrassed about the state of some of their code, even if it works well.
On the side, I'm right now working on a project that I plan to release under GPL. It's complete enough that some people could use it productively. But _I_ don't feel it's polished enough, so I haven't released it in any form to anyone but myself. This is because it doesn't meet my standards of completeness and usability. That is my choice. The likelihood of me getting outside contributions is low anyhow. That's how it usually is anyhow. So I have chosen to just work on it until I'm good and ready.
It appears that the growl people have made a similar choice about 1.3. It may have been accepted to the App Store, but we know how flaky Apple can be about their acceptance policies. If you look at the App Store reviews, huge numbers of them are complaints. Clearly, Growl 1.3 is not ready for prime time. Since they are unlikely to receive any outside help anyhow, they have chosen to focus their attention on fixing the problems, rather than pandering to the uber-entitled whiners who want the source code for no practical purpose other than to complain if they don't get it.
Releasing source code can be more trouble than it's worth. As soon as you become "open source", you open yourself up to criticism that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And why do we bother with this in the first place? Mostly altruism. We release source code, not because it's easy but because it's the right thing to do. But most of what we get in return is complaints without any help. Or we get ignored. It's the rare open source project that gets a lot of attention and assistance from outside contributors. Mind you, most open source projects are crap, so I don't blame most people for not contributing. Contributing is an investment too. But don't delude yourself into thinking the world of Free Software is a bed of roses.
It's amazing how many people, who haven't paid a penny or contributed a single line of code, will make really demanding, nasty-sounding bug reports. I understand what it's like to rely on some software just to have it fail and cost you time. But the fact is, it's FREE. You did nothing that entitles you to any control over it.
In any case, none of this addresses the main point, that the original poster was an asshole for lying about what the growl people are actually going to do.
Growl is not going closed source. They just don't have releasing the source EARLY as a priority. That's their choice. As long as the source is eventually released, that's all most of us care about.
The way I judge this, this slashdot story is grossly slanderous and was posted by an asshole whose sole intent was to spread FUD and stir up trouble. There's no way they couldn't have been ignorant of the FAQ. Probably what happened is that they felt entitled, were refused, and got mad, so they decided to make up this bullshit. And the slashdot editors are not competent to filter out this kind of crap.
The main summary needs to updated.