The only reason I bother to block ads is the evil animated ads, especially flash, that eat up battery charge. You can make the ad as colorful and noticable as you want, as long as it doesn't burn CPU cycles for nothing.
There are two kinds of people who don't like copyright (as a general concept) (1) Those so prolifically and amazingly creative that they put very little value in any one thing they create, and (2) Those who are so incredibly lazy or uncreative that to get anything they have to rely on others to do it for them.
People in category (1) are incredibly rare. Lots of people THINK they're in (1), but most of them just produce a hell of a lot of useless crap, kindal like that Shampoo guy. I've never encountered anyone like this. A lot of writers create way more than they publish, but most of them will admit that the stuff they didn't publish wasn't very good, so they're really not in category (1).
People in caregory (2) are shamless wastes of carbon, leeching off everyone else because they're too stupid or lazy to do anything for themselves, and they don't want to work to earn money so they can PAY for the stuff other people create. They're the kinds of leaches that inevitably make socialism fail, sucking the system dry at the expense of everyone else who IS willing to work and contribute to society. This actually accounts for the vast majority of people who whine on and on about how copyright is EVIL. WRONG. Current US copyright LAW is evil. And people should be entitled to far more "fair use" than they have. But a proper and fair system of copyright enhances productivity for everone, because moderately creative people are encouraged to create more, because they can profit from it.
That leaves category (3), which is the rest of us people who are at least moderately creative. We have to work HARD to create something, and we're not happy when fools in category (2) decide to shamelessly rip us off. Say I create something. If I hadn't, then you wouldn't have it. You, worthless brat, are not entitled to it. If I hadn't worked on it, maybe someone else would have. Maybe not. Either way, we put time, money, and other resources into creating this thing, and I am as entitled to recouping and profiting from my investment as much as I am entitled to ask you to pay for a physical object I just built if you want to have it.
Money, BTW, isn't the only form of compensation that people want. When I compose a scientific conference paper, I am putting the knowledge into the public domain. But thereafter, if someone else uses my idea, they are required to cite my work. They cannot claim it as their own. The knowledge is in the public domain, but the mindshare is mine. I get credited for making my invention or discovery and doing all of the work and research necessary to prove that my idea is worthwhile.
What makes the GPL brilliant as a copyright license is that it allows people to both share information (which is very important), and also profit from it. If I put the GPL on something, I can release the source code so that others can learn from it, and if it's wrong, they can fix it. But if someone wants to just COPY what I worked so hard to create, then they have to follow the rules. If they embed it in another product, either they have to contribute knowledge to the world just as I did, or they can PAY me for a commercial license.
What's really evil about proprietary software, for instance, is not so much that they don't release the source code. It's that you pay money for something without any guarantee that what you're getting is any good, and if it IS broken, you are completely screwed. I've bought commercial software before. Some of it was really good and worth the money I spent. Some of it made me want to claw the eyes of of the scheisters who cheated me out of my money. In general, having the source code is the only way to permanently guarantee that you get your money's worth out of software you purchased.
Keep in mind that most people like Free Software not for the sake of freedom but because they don't want to pay for it. Again, LEECHES. They take and take but never give anything back to the community. Stop fooling yourselves into thinking most people use Linux
I'm a scientist, and my father was before me. Between the two of us, we've encounted an innumerable number of total boobs who call themselves "scientists."
We scientists like to go on and on about how stupid lay people are regarding science. And it's true. They are stupid about science.
But scientsts are people too and just as often just as stupid about science. You see, we're humans, we make mistakes, and we're motivated by our political views and our desire to further our careers. There really is no such thing as an objective scientist, and the main thing that keeps the whole community in line is peer review, and that works because every scientists wants to bury his competitors. Other scientists compete for grant money, and your main weapons are getting on review committees and poking holes in other people's articles. The articles that get published are the ones that are better science but also the ones that offend the politics and agendas of the fewest reviewers. Scientists also want to more favorably review their friends' works, and even in double-blind reviews, they figure who is who.
The ideal scientist tries to disprove his own work. The real scientist does just enough of this to try to ensure his work gets published. Hell, we even use the review process to vet our work just as much as we try to do it ourselves. When submitting a journal paper, the main question isn't "is this good science, novel and interesting" but "have I worded it cleverly enough to trick the reviewers into thinking it doesn't offend their biases." In the world of "science", the primary motivating factors are publishing, publishing, and publishing. Oh, and money -- to fund the research you need to do in order to publish.
Conferences REALLY show you what it's all about. Yes, there are very interesting presentation sessions. We people who enjoy science go to these and learn something. But what's really telling is what happens BETWEEN sessions. Do scientists go to lunch and talk about science? A little. But mostly, the socializing is all about getting noticed and meeting the big-wigs in your field. Oh, and grant money. Most of us struggle to get the once-in-a-lifetime NSF grant, while the REALLY big guys have money coming out their ears. If they like you, they'll recommend you and give you some of their cast-offs.
Don't kid yourselves, people. This isn't some utopia of god-like minds creating the future here. Most scientists are just average people who just happened to end up in that career and are clever enough to climb the right ladders and end up in the good-old-boys-club.
Am I surprised at all that the global warming people look really bad right now? No. Not at all. They weren't careful enough, made very human mistakes, and didn't do transparent-enough science.
Frankly, the scientific community NEEDS this kind of bubble-burst. For far too long, scientists (and physicians too) have enjoyed the same status that the priesthood once had, and we've come to rest on our laurels. For too long, we've expected laypeople to just "believe our conclusions, because it's too complicated for you to understand it," which is the exact same thing that caused the Catholic church to fall from the power they once had. Scientists, like priests, are our mediators between us and God, except this time, God is an equally nebulous thing called "Science".
Just like the priests used to perform sermons in Latin long past the point where anyone understood, scientists obfuscate their knowledge in jargon that few even in their own fields understand. (Some reviewers are even intimitidated into giving a good review by thinking they're not smart enough to get what you wrote.) Yes, there is most certainly a time and a place for using semantically dense terminology, equations, and the like. But scientists also have a duty to their paritioners to teach the science that they have discovered. There are a few scientists out there who take it upon themselves to help laypeople to understand, by writing
It's rather remarkable how much you HAVE to learn just to do something basic. I'm not saying learning isn't good. But learning is something we prefer to do gradually. One should not have to spend days reading man pages of completely unrelated things just to figure out how to burn a CD. I want to burn a CD NOW. So how can I figure out what SPECIFIC things I need to learn JUST to burn a CD?
I don't care whether your software is open source or not, Linux is a support nightmare. It's the dozens of distributions. What works on Red Hat won't necessarily work on Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, etc. In each case, due to minor differences in libraries, where libraries are stored, customizations of KDE and GNOME, other window managers, different xlib versions, and countless other things, apps often have to be PORTED from one Linux distro to another. And you certainly can't make a binary distribution (even if just for convenience), because those are even more brittle.
Don't let the LSB people fool you. There is no single, common, standard Linux ABI set to target when developing a commercial app. Even if you release it with source, you still have customer support problem to deal with. Right there, your profit is eliminated.
Google would spend more on support than they would make from subscription fees.
It would be one thing if they could leave it up to the distros to port, build, and test the software. But they can't. As soon as subscription fees are involved, users expect all kinds of unreasonable levels of support. Google can't JUST support Fedora or Ubuntu. Imagine the uproar over them playing favorites.
The fact is, they're better off taking some grief over not supporting Linux at all than inadvertently screwing countless of poorly supported Linux customers who will then come back and cause them some serious legal problems. If you can't do it right, you can't do it at all. And there's no way to do it right.
I'm a chip designer, and so I use Xilinx tools. When I do, I use the Windows versions. Not only are the Linux versions not very good, but you're forced into using specific versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (Or CentOS, I guess.) In this case, the software costs $1500 (unless you have contacts with good reps, which I have), but in that case, if you're going to spend that money, you might as well use the less annoying Windows version.
Now, here's what's really going to happen with this, and Google employees may be fully aware of this: The total lack of support for Linux itself will cause an uproar. Meanwhile, only a few existing customers are having any trouble, meaning that no NEW customers are getting screwed. The uproar will turn into pleading from the community, which Google will respond to with a list of support concerns, mostly involving distro support. The community, being blind to these issues, will deny them. Back and forth for a while. Then finally, community members will volunteer to help support Gizmo on various Linux distros. Google will then enlist their help, with the disclaimer that they only support Linux distros that have maintainers for Gizmo, and that certain kinds of support must come through the distro maintainers. At that point, it becomes potentially profitable for Google, because by then it'll be all out in the open that Google made a compromise and that Linux users can't get certain kinds of support directly from Google. With that community concensus in place, maybe everyone will be (mostly) happy.
I have some carpal tunnel problems. I also like to play Age of Empires which is almost unusable without a right mouse button. I've tried it before with Apple wired and wireless mice, and it's just painful. To right click, you have to lift your index finger so that it senses that the click is from the right side; otherwise, it registers a left click.
I can't imagine these multitouch mice being a whole lot better. If you have carpal tunnel problems, you might want to stay away. If you don't, be careful, because you might sustain a repetitive strain injury.
Of course, that's true about just about everything. Back in the 80's, I heard of this being referred to as a MISC processor (minimal instruction set computer).
Of course, it's cool that this guy actually BUILT one.:)
CDs aren't encoded in a straightforward manner. Data is stored as a composition of Reed-Solomon codes and 10-8 codes, and the RS encoded bits are interleaved. Without detailed knowledge of the encoding, it might as well be encrypted. You're expecting to see plain data interleaved with parit. You'll see nothing of the sort.
Only problem is, most of the people on Slashdot going on about how they can't fix bugs in Windows also do not have the technical skill to fix bugs in Linux. For most people, the "can fix bugs" thing is a straw man argument.
Don't lose sight of the fact that the primary issues in FOSS are (a) freedom from being controlled by evil corporations, and (b) communal development. Access to the source code is merely a requirement for those things.
Everyone wants to go on and on about some kind of metaphysical conspiracy by the universe to make sure the machine doesn't run.
But the very fact that dropping bread on an external part of the machine caused overheating is an undeniable indication of just lousy engineering. Maybe they didn't anticipate bread, but there are countless things in nature that could have landed on that machine. How about leaves or other pieces of plants? Or how about a bird dies and lands on the machine? Or just nests there?
All this spooky stuff is just a way for the engineers who fucked up to shift blame from themselves. The fact is, they just didn't think things through and built it poorly.
Now, I'm not telling you I could have done a better job. I've done more than my fair share of lousy engineering. Looking back on it, the mistakes are due to everything from silly typos to a lack of foresight. And that's actually a normal part of engineering. You can't anticipate everything, so things evolve as reality impacts your design. Lots of stupid mistakes are nevertheless understandable.
But my god, man up and admit that you didn't do it right!
At first, BTRFS started out as an also-ran, trying to duplicate a bunch of ZFS features for Linux (where licensing wasn't compatible to incorporate ZFS into Linux). But then BTRFS took a number of things that were overly rigid about ZFS (shrinking volumes, block sizes, and some other stuff), and made it better, including totally unifying how data and metadata are stored. I'm sure there are a number of ways in which ZFS is still better (RAIDZ), but putting aside some of the enterprise features that most of us don't need, BTRFS is turning out to be more flexible, more expandable, more efficient, and better supported.
Most guys who are "sick of the complaints" are so because they in large part don't understand them, and for the parts they don't understands, impose restrictions they don't want to be subject to. In the former case, it's failure to put in the effort to understand. In the latter, it's pure selfishness.
I don't know if you've noticed, but some men have more success with women than others. Much of that success comes from a talent or skill at listening to women and understanding them. And those are necessary in order to treat women like human beings rather than some object to contend with.
I really find it amusing when I think about it. Our culture pressures women to listen to men and give them what they want. So everyone's accustomed to it. Then when all of a sudden, women want the same treatment, the men are all up in arms about how unfair it is.
Unfortunately, it's a life-long challenge for some men to loose themselves from the bonds of their own self-centeredness.
I'll tell you something interesting. I try to do a little cleaning and stuff around the house. I keep on top of the dishes, occasionally do the lawn, maybe repair something here or there. One week, I tried really hard to keep track of what chores I did and what chores she did. Usually, when I finish some chore like loading the dish washer, I feel like i've made some great accomplishment and can rest. Well, what I found was that not only did a lot of things get dealt with around the house magically with no complaint or statement on her part, but that when she was done with one chore, she would often just move on directly to another one.
Even a relatively feeble attempt at trying to be objective showed that no matter how burdened I felt by doing chores, she was doing more without making a peep. (Except those weeks when I totally dropped the ball, and it was plain as day to everyone that I had done nothing.)
Another common thing I observe with women (again, culturally influenced) is that they're very tolerant, up to a point. I've seen men break up with their girlfriends after one instance where they felt she had taken advantage. By contrast, I see men (blindly) take advantage all the time, and the women just take it. But they file it away, and when the imbalance goes too far, the women EXPLODE with an avalanche of complaints. Having been blissfully unaware of what they were doing, the men are invariably taken aback, insulted, put-upon, etc. I've certainly been in that position! Fortunately, like many of my other friends who have stayed married, I've managed to be diplomatic enough to listen and taken seriously what was said and even try to learn from it and change!
The biggest threats to equality are the biases that you are unaware that you have.
I'm aware of social boundaries that I do not respect, so I find myself having to consciously avoid doing things like mixing professors with students or jocks with nerds at parties. If I had my druthers, I'd invite everyone, but different social circles do different things, and I don't want to make people uncomfortable. A lot of the time, it comes down to the fact that certain topics of discussion are not compatible with the people who don't have pertinant experiences. Men typically don't want to hear about menstruation, while the topic might come up at a party of all women. Conversely, women don't tend to want to hear about men's jock itch, but it's a common enough occurence among male athletes that the discussion might arise. A lot of nerds don't know much about sports, and a lot of jocks don't know the fine details of compiling Linux kernels, so putting them together might result in people stuggling for things to talk about that interest them all.
All of these things stem from stereotypes. Stereotypes are sometimes completely false, like the depiction of the Irish in the US in the 19th century. But generally, there's some grain of truth, if only resulting from some people's narrow and biased experiences. It's a fact, though, that humans like to create convenient categories and generalize. People have a natural tendency to think "all blacks are..." and "all women are...", because they have observed these things in what they perceive to be a majority of encounters.
I like to think of myself as being above these petty prejudices, but there's a danger in thinking this, because I can miss subtle biases. I grew up in a family that is clearly male-dominated. My father and I both have graduate degrees, while my mother and sister do not. When I was single, I had expressed a desire to find a partner who was my intellectual equal, but my family discouraged me, telling me that I would have a very hard time finding what I was after. Despite their bias, I ended up marrying a woman that I often think of as my intellectual superior. Still, there are a lot of subtle effects that stem from an implicit assumption that men are generally more intelligent than women, things that MUST have affected me in ways that I'm not aware of.
I remember a Star Trek episode where Janice Lester had wanted to become a starship captain (but they were not allowed) switched bodies with Kirk. In the end, Kirk makes some comment about how she could have had as full a life as any woman. Of course, our culture has matured significantly in the last 40 years. But in some ways, many people haven't really been taught that women are equal to men; they've only been trained to parrot a politically correct thing to say. They tell themselves that in the hypothetical a woman can be as capable as a man, but they don't believe it to be very LIKELY. And of course, since no one wants to admit to others or even themselves that they feel this way, what really happens is that they judgement is affected subconsciously in a way that they can't defeat.
Women end up being judged "statistically" (you've never met a woman who was strong in IT, so this one you're interviewing is unlikely to be good). And they're scrutinized more harshly (since you're more ready to accept that a man is smart, you're going to work harder to make damn sure that this woman is as smart, and what really happens is that you make the interview more difficult).
I have biases. Many of those biases are unfair. But the only way I can defeat them is to admit them. Not to others, because it's not PC to ever express bias openly, but to myself so I can explore them and recognize how my thoughts might be unfair if I were to act upon them.
So for instance, when interviewing, to avoid bias, I ask everyone the same questions. But I developed those questions partly by exploring my biases. For isntance, while I may assume that men and women have equal intelligence, I don't
I don't know anything about this Intel case. But I met Dr. Sohi at ISCA 2009, and he's definitely a cool guy and interesting to talk to. The guy really knows his stuff and is highly respected by everyone else in the field.
Millions of innocent jews and others were tortured and killed by members of the Nazi party. It was evil, and it should be condemned.
But it happened. It's part of reality, and it's something we should learn from. Denying its existence (or acknowledging it in a way) by censoring it seems counterproductive to me. Let's no stick our heads in the sand. There are lots of "symbols of evil" that the Germans do not ban. People see them and are told they represent evil, and they can be taught a lesson about evil.
And let's not forget that the swastika was an ancient Hindu religious symbol that had very positive connotations. People should be taught its original meaning and how the Nazis desecrated it.
WWII happened in the 1940's. The Germans are good people. As a culture, they have always been inventive and industrious. And, like every other nation on earth, they have a sense of superiority. And a long time ago, some people took that sense of superiority too far. In a very Microsoft-like way, they dealt with their "competitors" by crushing them, rather than trying to a better job. (Note that I don't think Microsoft are nearly as evil as the Nazis. Bill Gates is excessively competitive, but he's also a philanthropist and deserves recognition for it.) The Germans and everyone else in the world have to grow up and get past this fear of the past.
If you're a white American, and your ancestors owned slaves, should you be ashamed of yourself? No. You can be ashamed of your ancestors, and you can be ashamed of all of the cruelty and torture that went along with it. But you yourself know that slavery was wrong. You're not responsible for it. You can get past it without pretending it didn't happen.
On a Mac, Firefox will use somewhere around 1% extra CPU for each additonal document open, even if none of them have flash or animated images. For instance, right now, I have 34 documents open, and it's using 17% CPU constant (which is unusually low). Nothing's going on. I've checked all of the documents. No animations, and gmail is the only one with any active Javascript. I've compared it to Safari, and it'll use roughly 0% for the same load.
The reason I switched to Firefox is because its memory consumption is WAY better. But then it burns CPU and eats battery charge. So I have to close tabs. So basically there's no point. On Safari, I'm restricted by memory; on Firefox, I'm restricted by CPU. As soon as Saft has a 64-bit version, I'm switching back.
There is a whole host of other ways in which Firefox devs treat the Mac like a second-class citizen. Firefox works great on Windows and Linux, but it has all sorts of problems on the Mac. It's less stable, eats more CPU, and it even prevents the Mac from automatically going to sleep after you've left it alone for a while (known bug, something to do with sqlite, lots of people comment on the bugzilla entry, none of them devs).
Firefox still has lots of problems. (For instance, preventing sleep on the Mac and using excessive CPU for completely idle tabs.) But the first reason I keep using it is memory. It uses less memory than any other browser for the same set of open tabs. Also, it has PROPER built-in crash protection and session restore. Safari doesn't unless you install Saft, and Saft costs money and keeps breaking every time Apple upgrades Safari.
I know what some of you are going to say, but the fact is, unlike a lot of parents who might home-school their children, teachers at traditional schools usually have specialized expertise in each of the areas being taught.
For instance, if I were to home-school my children, I'd do fine at teaching them math, science, and computers. But while I can write reasonably well, I'd do a miserable job at teaching literary analysis. While I know quite a lot about linguistics, I have only passing knowledge of a handful of foreign languages. With regard to health, I don't know jack about sports, although I do know a fair amount about nutrition. I played violin in high school, but I couldn't teach it or any other instrument. I know what I know well, but there are numerous areas of standard school curricula that I am unqualified to teach. So while I could get good books on those areas and read to them what someone else wrote, I would have little capacity to answer hard questions that might come up. By contrast, a teacher who knows their subject area is likely to be able to answer a lot more of those questions.
Of course, there are also disadvantages to classroom schooling. There are bad teachers. There are too many students in class. There is too much distraction and not enough learning. There are bullies (although learning to effectively cope with bullies would be a good interpersonal skill). And there is a lack of funding for a lot of areas that need resources to be taught.
Just don't lose sight of the value of specailized expertise and tutoring.
This really isn't all that odd. "Y'all" may LOOK like a contraction of "You all" (because really, it is), but it has become lexicalized in several dialects of English. It now functions as a single word that is the standard second person plural personal pronoun.
So just as you can get "he'll", you can also get "Y'all'll". The GP misspelled it.:)
Pharm companies are doing this kind of stuff all the time, and the FDA just lets them get away with it. Somehow, I don't see criminal charges ever getting filed here. CEOs will pass the buck, and they'll go on with business as usual.
Why don't they show the Air theme in the video?
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KDE 4.3 Released
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They've talked about making the window theme consistent with the rest of KDE's styling. And the plasma widgets have this new theme. But then they mention how it integrates with KWin and then don't show it. Why?
I thought I was clear in saying that it wasn't necessarily a superior design. By no means is it perfect. (It's from Microsoft, after all.) But it IS interesting and it IS vulnerable to a different set of frustrations.
I spoke with my wife (who is an attorney) about this, and I may have been a bit hasty.
(1) It wasn't inappropriate for this guy to try this experiment, although the way he announced the result may have been a bit jerky. (2) If the AP's web site is going to be "dumb" like this, they need a very prominent disclaimer that explains how dumb it is. (3) If, in light of this discovery, the AP does not post an appropriate disclaimer, then they are clearly in the wrong, because then they would be KNOWINGLY selling licenses to content that they don't (necessarily) own.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason I bother to block ads is the evil animated ads, especially flash, that eat up battery charge. You can make the ad as colorful and noticable as you want, as long as it doesn't burn CPU cycles for nothing.
There are two kinds of people who don't like copyright (as a general concept) (1) Those so prolifically and amazingly creative that they put very little value in any one thing they create, and (2) Those who are so incredibly lazy or uncreative that to get anything they have to rely on others to do it for them.
People in category (1) are incredibly rare. Lots of people THINK they're in (1), but most of them just produce a hell of a lot of useless crap, kindal like that Shampoo guy. I've never encountered anyone like this. A lot of writers create way more than they publish, but most of them will admit that the stuff they didn't publish wasn't very good, so they're really not in category (1).
People in caregory (2) are shamless wastes of carbon, leeching off everyone else because they're too stupid or lazy to do anything for themselves, and they don't want to work to earn money so they can PAY for the stuff other people create. They're the kinds of leaches that inevitably make socialism fail, sucking the system dry at the expense of everyone else who IS willing to work and contribute to society. This actually accounts for the vast majority of people who whine on and on about how copyright is EVIL. WRONG. Current US copyright LAW is evil. And people should be entitled to far more "fair use" than they have. But a proper and fair system of copyright enhances productivity for everone, because moderately creative people are encouraged to create more, because they can profit from it.
That leaves category (3), which is the rest of us people who are at least moderately creative. We have to work HARD to create something, and we're not happy when fools in category (2) decide to shamelessly rip us off. Say I create something. If I hadn't, then you wouldn't have it. You, worthless brat, are not entitled to it. If I hadn't worked on it, maybe someone else would have. Maybe not. Either way, we put time, money, and other resources into creating this thing, and I am as entitled to recouping and profiting from my investment as much as I am entitled to ask you to pay for a physical object I just built if you want to have it.
Money, BTW, isn't the only form of compensation that people want. When I compose a scientific conference paper, I am putting the knowledge into the public domain. But thereafter, if someone else uses my idea, they are required to cite my work. They cannot claim it as their own. The knowledge is in the public domain, but the mindshare is mine. I get credited for making my invention or discovery and doing all of the work and research necessary to prove that my idea is worthwhile.
What makes the GPL brilliant as a copyright license is that it allows people to both share information (which is very important), and also profit from it. If I put the GPL on something, I can release the source code so that others can learn from it, and if it's wrong, they can fix it. But if someone wants to just COPY what I worked so hard to create, then they have to follow the rules. If they embed it in another product, either they have to contribute knowledge to the world just as I did, or they can PAY me for a commercial license.
What's really evil about proprietary software, for instance, is not so much that they don't release the source code. It's that you pay money for something without any guarantee that what you're getting is any good, and if it IS broken, you are completely screwed. I've bought commercial software before. Some of it was really good and worth the money I spent. Some of it made me want to claw the eyes of of the scheisters who cheated me out of my money. In general, having the source code is the only way to permanently guarantee that you get your money's worth out of software you purchased.
Keep in mind that most people like Free Software not for the sake of freedom but because they don't want to pay for it. Again, LEECHES. They take and take but never give anything back to the community. Stop fooling yourselves into thinking most people use Linux
I'm a scientist, and my father was before me. Between the two of us, we've encounted an innumerable number of total boobs who call themselves "scientists."
We scientists like to go on and on about how stupid lay people are regarding science. And it's true. They are stupid about science.
But scientsts are people too and just as often just as stupid about science. You see, we're humans, we make mistakes, and we're motivated by our political views and our desire to further our careers. There really is no such thing as an objective scientist, and the main thing that keeps the whole community in line is peer review, and that works because every scientists wants to bury his competitors. Other scientists compete for grant money, and your main weapons are getting on review committees and poking holes in other people's articles. The articles that get published are the ones that are better science but also the ones that offend the politics and agendas of the fewest reviewers. Scientists also want to more favorably review their friends' works, and even in double-blind reviews, they figure who is who.
The ideal scientist tries to disprove his own work. The real scientist does just enough of this to try to ensure his work gets published. Hell, we even use the review process to vet our work just as much as we try to do it ourselves. When submitting a journal paper, the main question isn't "is this good science, novel and interesting" but "have I worded it cleverly enough to trick the reviewers into thinking it doesn't offend their biases." In the world of "science", the primary motivating factors are publishing, publishing, and publishing. Oh, and money -- to fund the research you need to do in order to publish.
Conferences REALLY show you what it's all about. Yes, there are very interesting presentation sessions. We people who enjoy science go to these and learn something. But what's really telling is what happens BETWEEN sessions. Do scientists go to lunch and talk about science? A little. But mostly, the socializing is all about getting noticed and meeting the big-wigs in your field. Oh, and grant money. Most of us struggle to get the once-in-a-lifetime NSF grant, while the REALLY big guys have money coming out their ears. If they like you, they'll recommend you and give you some of their cast-offs.
Don't kid yourselves, people. This isn't some utopia of god-like minds creating the future here. Most scientists are just average people who just happened to end up in that career and are clever enough to climb the right ladders and end up in the good-old-boys-club.
Am I surprised at all that the global warming people look really bad right now? No. Not at all. They weren't careful enough, made very human mistakes, and didn't do transparent-enough science.
Frankly, the scientific community NEEDS this kind of bubble-burst. For far too long, scientists (and physicians too) have enjoyed the same status that the priesthood once had, and we've come to rest on our laurels. For too long, we've expected laypeople to just "believe our conclusions, because it's too complicated for you to understand it," which is the exact same thing that caused the Catholic church to fall from the power they once had. Scientists, like priests, are our mediators between us and God, except this time, God is an equally nebulous thing called "Science".
Just like the priests used to perform sermons in Latin long past the point where anyone understood, scientists obfuscate their knowledge in jargon that few even in their own fields understand. (Some reviewers are even intimitidated into giving a good review by thinking they're not smart enough to get what you wrote.) Yes, there is most certainly a time and a place for using semantically dense terminology, equations, and the like. But scientists also have a duty to their paritioners to teach the science that they have discovered. There are a few scientists out there who take it upon themselves to help laypeople to understand, by writing
Yeah. I mostly use K3b, but I should check out what KDE has built-in to see if it saves me any effort.
It's rather remarkable how much you HAVE to learn just to do something basic. I'm not saying learning isn't good. But learning is something we prefer to do gradually. One should not have to spend days reading man pages of completely unrelated things just to figure out how to burn a CD. I want to burn a CD NOW. So how can I figure out what SPECIFIC things I need to learn JUST to burn a CD?
If you want the truth about this, I strongly suggest you watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsJryWc5XE
I don't care whether your software is open source or not, Linux is a support nightmare. It's the dozens of distributions. What works on Red Hat won't necessarily work on Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, etc. In each case, due to minor differences in libraries, where libraries are stored, customizations of KDE and GNOME, other window managers, different xlib versions, and countless other things, apps often have to be PORTED from one Linux distro to another. And you certainly can't make a binary distribution (even if just for convenience), because those are even more brittle.
Don't let the LSB people fool you. There is no single, common, standard Linux ABI set to target when developing a commercial app. Even if you release it with source, you still have customer support problem to deal with. Right there, your profit is eliminated.
Google would spend more on support than they would make from subscription fees.
It would be one thing if they could leave it up to the distros to port, build, and test the software. But they can't. As soon as subscription fees are involved, users expect all kinds of unreasonable levels of support. Google can't JUST support Fedora or Ubuntu. Imagine the uproar over them playing favorites.
The fact is, they're better off taking some grief over not supporting Linux at all than inadvertently screwing countless of poorly supported Linux customers who will then come back and cause them some serious legal problems. If you can't do it right, you can't do it at all. And there's no way to do it right.
I'm a chip designer, and so I use Xilinx tools. When I do, I use the Windows versions. Not only are the Linux versions not very good, but you're forced into using specific versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (Or CentOS, I guess.) In this case, the software costs $1500 (unless you have contacts with good reps, which I have), but in that case, if you're going to spend that money, you might as well use the less annoying Windows version.
Now, here's what's really going to happen with this, and Google employees may be fully aware of this: The total lack of support for Linux itself will cause an uproar. Meanwhile, only a few existing customers are having any trouble, meaning that no NEW customers are getting screwed. The uproar will turn into pleading from the community, which Google will respond to with a list of support concerns, mostly involving distro support. The community, being blind to these issues, will deny them. Back and forth for a while. Then finally, community members will volunteer to help support Gizmo on various Linux distros. Google will then enlist their help, with the disclaimer that they only support Linux distros that have maintainers for Gizmo, and that certain kinds of support must come through the distro maintainers. At that point, it becomes potentially profitable for Google, because by then it'll be all out in the open that Google made a compromise and that Linux users can't get certain kinds of support directly from Google. With that community concensus in place, maybe everyone will be (mostly) happy.
I have some carpal tunnel problems. I also like to play Age of Empires which is almost unusable without a right mouse button. I've tried it before with Apple wired and wireless mice, and it's just painful. To right click, you have to lift your index finger so that it senses that the click is from the right side; otherwise, it registers a left click.
I can't imagine these multitouch mice being a whole lot better. If you have carpal tunnel problems, you might want to stay away. If you don't, be careful, because you might sustain a repetitive strain injury.
Of course, that's true about just about everything. Back in the 80's, I heard of this being referred to as a MISC processor (minimal instruction set computer).
Of course, it's cool that this guy actually BUILT one. :)
CDs aren't encoded in a straightforward manner. Data is stored as a composition of Reed-Solomon codes and 10-8 codes, and the RS encoded bits are interleaved. Without detailed knowledge of the encoding, it might as well be encrypted. You're expecting to see plain data interleaved with parit. You'll see nothing of the sort.
Only problem is, most of the people on Slashdot going on about how they can't fix bugs in Windows also do not have the technical skill to fix bugs in Linux. For most people, the "can fix bugs" thing is a straw man argument.
Don't lose sight of the fact that the primary issues in FOSS are (a) freedom from being controlled by evil corporations, and (b) communal development. Access to the source code is merely a requirement for those things.
Everyone wants to go on and on about some kind of metaphysical conspiracy by the universe to make sure the machine doesn't run.
But the very fact that dropping bread on an external part of the machine caused overheating is an undeniable indication of just lousy engineering. Maybe they didn't anticipate bread, but there are countless things in nature that could have landed on that machine. How about leaves or other pieces of plants? Or how about a bird dies and lands on the machine? Or just nests there?
All this spooky stuff is just a way for the engineers who fucked up to shift blame from themselves. The fact is, they just didn't think things through and built it poorly.
Now, I'm not telling you I could have done a better job. I've done more than my fair share of lousy engineering. Looking back on it, the mistakes are due to everything from silly typos to a lack of foresight. And that's actually a normal part of engineering. You can't anticipate everything, so things evolve as reality impacts your design. Lots of stupid mistakes are nevertheless understandable.
But my god, man up and admit that you didn't do it right!
At first, BTRFS started out as an also-ran, trying to duplicate a bunch of ZFS features for Linux (where licensing wasn't compatible to incorporate ZFS into Linux). But then BTRFS took a number of things that were overly rigid about ZFS (shrinking volumes, block sizes, and some other stuff), and made it better, including totally unifying how data and metadata are stored. I'm sure there are a number of ways in which ZFS is still better (RAIDZ), but putting aside some of the enterprise features that most of us don't need, BTRFS is turning out to be more flexible, more expandable, more efficient, and better supported.
Most guys who are "sick of the complaints" are so because they in large part don't understand them, and for the parts they don't understands, impose restrictions they don't want to be subject to. In the former case, it's failure to put in the effort to understand. In the latter, it's pure selfishness.
I don't know if you've noticed, but some men have more success with women than others. Much of that success comes from a talent or skill at listening to women and understanding them. And those are necessary in order to treat women like human beings rather than some object to contend with.
I really find it amusing when I think about it. Our culture pressures women to listen to men and give them what they want. So everyone's accustomed to it. Then when all of a sudden, women want the same treatment, the men are all up in arms about how unfair it is.
Unfortunately, it's a life-long challenge for some men to loose themselves from the bonds of their own self-centeredness.
I'll tell you something interesting. I try to do a little cleaning and stuff around the house. I keep on top of the dishes, occasionally do the lawn, maybe repair something here or there. One week, I tried really hard to keep track of what chores I did and what chores she did. Usually, when I finish some chore like loading the dish washer, I feel like i've made some great accomplishment and can rest. Well, what I found was that not only did a lot of things get dealt with around the house magically with no complaint or statement on her part, but that when she was done with one chore, she would often just move on directly to another one.
Even a relatively feeble attempt at trying to be objective showed that no matter how burdened I felt by doing chores, she was doing more without making a peep. (Except those weeks when I totally dropped the ball, and it was plain as day to everyone that I had done nothing.)
Another common thing I observe with women (again, culturally influenced) is that they're very tolerant, up to a point. I've seen men break up with their girlfriends after one instance where they felt she had taken advantage. By contrast, I see men (blindly) take advantage all the time, and the women just take it. But they file it away, and when the imbalance goes too far, the women EXPLODE with an avalanche of complaints. Having been blissfully unaware of what they were doing, the men are invariably taken aback, insulted, put-upon, etc. I've certainly been in that position! Fortunately, like many of my other friends who have stayed married, I've managed to be diplomatic enough to listen and taken seriously what was said and even try to learn from it and change!
The biggest threats to equality are the biases that you are unaware that you have.
I'm aware of social boundaries that I do not respect, so I find myself having to consciously avoid doing things like mixing professors with students or jocks with nerds at parties. If I had my druthers, I'd invite everyone, but different social circles do different things, and I don't want to make people uncomfortable. A lot of the time, it comes down to the fact that certain topics of discussion are not compatible with the people who don't have pertinant experiences. Men typically don't want to hear about menstruation, while the topic might come up at a party of all women. Conversely, women don't tend to want to hear about men's jock itch, but it's a common enough occurence among male athletes that the discussion might arise. A lot of nerds don't know much about sports, and a lot of jocks don't know the fine details of compiling Linux kernels, so putting them together might result in people stuggling for things to talk about that interest them all.
All of these things stem from stereotypes. Stereotypes are sometimes completely false, like the depiction of the Irish in the US in the 19th century. But generally, there's some grain of truth, if only resulting from some people's narrow and biased experiences. It's a fact, though, that humans like to create convenient categories and generalize. People have a natural tendency to think "all blacks are..." and "all women are...", because they have observed these things in what they perceive to be a majority of encounters.
I like to think of myself as being above these petty prejudices, but there's a danger in thinking this, because I can miss subtle biases. I grew up in a family that is clearly male-dominated. My father and I both have graduate degrees, while my mother and sister do not. When I was single, I had expressed a desire to find a partner who was my intellectual equal, but my family discouraged me, telling me that I would have a very hard time finding what I was after. Despite their bias, I ended up marrying a woman that I often think of as my intellectual superior. Still, there are a lot of subtle effects that stem from an implicit assumption that men are generally more intelligent than women, things that MUST have affected me in ways that I'm not aware of.
I remember a Star Trek episode where Janice Lester had wanted to become a starship captain (but they were not allowed) switched bodies with Kirk. In the end, Kirk makes some comment about how she could have had as full a life as any woman. Of course, our culture has matured significantly in the last 40 years. But in some ways, many people haven't really been taught that women are equal to men; they've only been trained to parrot a politically correct thing to say. They tell themselves that in the hypothetical a woman can be as capable as a man, but they don't believe it to be very LIKELY. And of course, since no one wants to admit to others or even themselves that they feel this way, what really happens is that they judgement is affected subconsciously in a way that they can't defeat.
Women end up being judged "statistically" (you've never met a woman who was strong in IT, so this one you're interviewing is unlikely to be good). And they're scrutinized more harshly (since you're more ready to accept that a man is smart, you're going to work harder to make damn sure that this woman is as smart, and what really happens is that you make the interview more difficult).
I have biases. Many of those biases are unfair. But the only way I can defeat them is to admit them. Not to others, because it's not PC to ever express bias openly, but to myself so I can explore them and recognize how my thoughts might be unfair if I were to act upon them.
So for instance, when interviewing, to avoid bias, I ask everyone the same questions. But I developed those questions partly by exploring my biases. For isntance, while I may assume that men and women have equal intelligence, I don't
I don't know anything about this Intel case. But I met Dr. Sohi at ISCA 2009, and he's definitely a cool guy and interesting to talk to. The guy really knows his stuff and is highly respected by everyone else in the field.
Millions of innocent jews and others were tortured and killed by members of the Nazi party. It was evil, and it should be condemned.
But it happened. It's part of reality, and it's something we should learn from. Denying its existence (or acknowledging it in a way) by censoring it seems counterproductive to me. Let's no stick our heads in the sand. There are lots of "symbols of evil" that the Germans do not ban. People see them and are told they represent evil, and they can be taught a lesson about evil.
And let's not forget that the swastika was an ancient Hindu religious symbol that had very positive connotations. People should be taught its original meaning and how the Nazis desecrated it.
WWII happened in the 1940's. The Germans are good people. As a culture, they have always been inventive and industrious. And, like every other nation on earth, they have a sense of superiority. And a long time ago, some people took that sense of superiority too far. In a very Microsoft-like way, they dealt with their "competitors" by crushing them, rather than trying to a better job. (Note that I don't think Microsoft are nearly as evil as the Nazis. Bill Gates is excessively competitive, but he's also a philanthropist and deserves recognition for it.) The Germans and everyone else in the world have to grow up and get past this fear of the past.
If you're a white American, and your ancestors owned slaves, should you be ashamed of yourself? No. You can be ashamed of your ancestors, and you can be ashamed of all of the cruelty and torture that went along with it. But you yourself know that slavery was wrong. You're not responsible for it. You can get past it without pretending it didn't happen.
But that's just my opinion.
On a Mac, Firefox will use somewhere around 1% extra CPU for each additonal document open, even if none of them have flash or animated images. For instance, right now, I have 34 documents open, and it's using 17% CPU constant (which is unusually low). Nothing's going on. I've checked all of the documents. No animations, and gmail is the only one with any active Javascript. I've compared it to Safari, and it'll use roughly 0% for the same load.
The reason I switched to Firefox is because its memory consumption is WAY better. But then it burns CPU and eats battery charge. So I have to close tabs. So basically there's no point. On Safari, I'm restricted by memory; on Firefox, I'm restricted by CPU. As soon as Saft has a 64-bit version, I'm switching back.
There is a whole host of other ways in which Firefox devs treat the Mac like a second-class citizen. Firefox works great on Windows and Linux, but it has all sorts of problems on the Mac. It's less stable, eats more CPU, and it even prevents the Mac from automatically going to sleep after you've left it alone for a while (known bug, something to do with sqlite, lots of people comment on the bugzilla entry, none of them devs).
Firefox still has lots of problems. (For instance, preventing sleep on the Mac and using excessive CPU for completely idle tabs.) But the first reason I keep using it is memory. It uses less memory than any other browser for the same set of open tabs. Also, it has PROPER built-in crash protection and session restore. Safari doesn't unless you install Saft, and Saft costs money and keeps breaking every time Apple upgrades Safari.
I know what some of you are going to say, but the fact is, unlike a lot of parents who might home-school their children, teachers at traditional schools usually have specialized expertise in each of the areas being taught.
For instance, if I were to home-school my children, I'd do fine at teaching them math, science, and computers. But while I can write reasonably well, I'd do a miserable job at teaching literary analysis. While I know quite a lot about linguistics, I have only passing knowledge of a handful of foreign languages. With regard to health, I don't know jack about sports, although I do know a fair amount about nutrition. I played violin in high school, but I couldn't teach it or any other instrument. I know what I know well, but there are numerous areas of standard school curricula that I am unqualified to teach. So while I could get good books on those areas and read to them what someone else wrote, I would have little capacity to answer hard questions that might come up. By contrast, a teacher who knows their subject area is likely to be able to answer a lot more of those questions.
Of course, there are also disadvantages to classroom schooling. There are bad teachers. There are too many students in class. There is too much distraction and not enough learning. There are bullies (although learning to effectively cope with bullies would be a good interpersonal skill). And there is a lack of funding for a lot of areas that need resources to be taught.
Just don't lose sight of the value of specailized expertise and tutoring.
This really isn't all that odd. "Y'all" may LOOK like a contraction of "You all" (because really, it is), but it has become lexicalized in several dialects of English. It now functions as a single word that is the standard second person plural personal pronoun.
So just as you can get "he'll", you can also get "Y'all'll". The GP misspelled it. :)
Pharm companies are doing this kind of stuff all the time, and the FDA just lets them get away with it. Somehow, I don't see criminal charges ever getting filed here. CEOs will pass the buck, and they'll go on with business as usual.
They've talked about making the window theme consistent with the rest of KDE's styling. And the plasma widgets have this new theme. But then they mention how it integrates with KWin and then don't show it. Why?
I thought I was clear in saying that it wasn't necessarily a superior design. By no means is it perfect. (It's from Microsoft, after all.) But it IS interesting and it IS vulnerable to a different set of frustrations.
I spoke with my wife (who is an attorney) about this, and I may have been a bit hasty.
(1) It wasn't inappropriate for this guy to try this experiment, although the way he announced the result may have been a bit jerky.
(2) If the AP's web site is going to be "dumb" like this, they need a very prominent disclaimer that explains how dumb it is.
(3) If, in light of this discovery, the AP does not post an appropriate disclaimer, then they are clearly in the wrong, because then they would be KNOWINGLY selling licenses to content that they don't (necessarily) own.