Your post reminds me of some of the (very) old slashdot stories asking the question of how non-technical/non-programmers can help the F/OSS movements. The response usually came in the for of "there's lots of stuff like documentation (real writing, not tech writing), art, etc, that are also needed."
This was and is true, but I think another big category was forgotten: management. That for a good project to succeed, the techies should keep doing techie stuff, and be shielded from politics and dull aspects of business as much as possible.[*] This Gentoo problem is a prefect example of this. The techies don't want to do business, so that's an area that non-techie people could really help.
I hope the pull through with this, regardless of the solution - I would hate to have to switch to another distro...
[*] - See: Brokes and the MMM, where he talks about the "surgical team"
Of course python counts as an entry for "languages of choice" as that's how the jargon is used. Evidence: this thread. Many people consider it a choice language, so the jargon fits.
That doesn't mean they are correct, though. Python is all about forcing you into a specific style of programming, and a pretty basic one at that. The fact that the designer thinks many important programming concepts are confusing is hilarious. The fact that he forces others down to his level by limiting how you can program in python is sad, at best.
Java is the new COBOL. And we will regret it in 20 years for much the same reasons.
It actually gives me hope that you have recognized this in hiring practices. That a CV with a list of Sun's Java buzzwords is not an indication of a useful programmer.
I was disturbed in college (1997-2001) that things were changing towards Java and other idiocy. Too many people didn't get pointers and other basic concepts, and Java was hiding them even more. I believe it was the one class we had in assembly programming that really pointed it out - when confronted with having to deal with real hardware, most of the students didn't know what to do. Concepts like "two's complement" vs "one's complement" caused a strange brain-lock for them, as they were so sheltered from the actual binary math and hardware of the computer.
It was only a handful of us that had been programming for years already (yay for the Atari 800XL) that had any idea of what was going on. The college (UC Davis) skipped entirely over very basic concepts like Von Newmann Architecture. I ended up having to spend most of my time trying to help my fellow students, there was so many fundamentals missing.
I think the most frightening part was having to yell at one of the professors one day, because the basic data structures he was teaching were being done incorrectly. He was teaching people to leak memory. ("Let's allocate a huge linked list, and then just set the head pointer to NULL and consider it freed!")
Sigh. It was frightening then, and apparently all my fears were justified, as now the entire discipline is getting a bad reputation. Unfortunately, I can't exactly disagree with that reputation from some of the CVs I've seen recently. My degree is destined fscked, apparently.
...and the kid's desire to explore and tinker stifled.
Isn't that the entire point? Microsoft has never encouraged "tinkering", and in fact goes out of their way to discourage it. In their eyes, computer tools and software should not come from any random user, but large industry that has bought their dev tools, taken their "training" courses, and generally done things The Microsoft Way.
The idea that anyone can tinker with the end product is unthinkable to them. I see this as being about use philosophy as much as general profits from windows licenses.
Now, if you could only pull the money-exchange game that big-business likes to pull, I'd think this strategy would actually work. (well, at least as well as the MPAA's version)
With a lot of "IP" issues, big business loves to sell these highly-priced items (patents, probably) back and forth. In the end, it's not actually any significant profit for any one player, but a lot of money changes hands making "sales" of their stuff.
So... if you could somehow get two Free Software groups to buy this commercial high-priced license from each other (net gain: $0), you'd be able to add "See? I have legitimate commercial sales!" as justification for those multi-million dollar damages.
Live by the sword, Die by the sword... Or as we like to call those swords in modern times, "Copyright".
In my opinion, hard places should be available from the start, and you SHOULD NOT GO THERE.
I am reminded of the original Dragon Warrior - you could go everywhere except the last castle right from the start of the game. It was great, as you could explore wherever you wanted, get items "out of order", etc. It's just that if you went to somewhere you shouldn't be a big dragon tended to show up and kill you in one hit. You learned really fast which areas were "high level" areas...
I think the point is that exercise doesn't contribute significantly to your overall change in weight. Yes, it helps a bit. (as is obvious by thermodynamics) The problem is that most aerobic activities that people think of don't actually burn than many kcal of energy. Your base metabolic rate is much more significant.
When you compare the several hundred kcal of energy you will burn, say, running for a while, with the 100-200 kcal of energy in a single can of soda, it's obvious your eating habits are the more significant factor.
[side note: now, exercise is good for other reasons, so that's not to be ignored, but you won't exercise yourself thin if you don't significantly change eating habits]
It's not necessary, it's just that it's fun. The game has an obvious design that is pointed towards 2-player. Sure, it's not a difficult game, but so what?
All the Contra games are great when you get into a two-player "rhythm". It's one of the only games where the teamwork actually helps you run through it easier, if you do it right. (yes, that's going from "easy" to "really easy", but again, so what?)
If you want hard, go get an "S" on Shattered Soldier
while it would be interesting to have a sim-game that let you try other theories (later versions of Sim-City were a bit better at allowing alternate construction methods, and the Civ games were pretty good about it), I think it's important to remember that everything in Sim-City is very archetypal. You don't build business in the game, you just put "commercial districts" in. I was even surprised in SC2000 when you could even decide between low and high density housing.
I think things like the hospitals and police stations can be seen as a more general icon of "investing in the crime problem", etc. Like, you don't deal with pollution directly either, but only at broad strokes of where you place heavy industry/etc. The game is too high-level for the kind of detail you are talking about.
For things like "raising the minimum wage", how would you model that? You mandate it, residential districts get more popular, commercial districts less? Would it affect your tax income? I really think that's way too complicated for the game. Even on the subject of "tax" it's just a summary number iconic of all the taxes a city has.
If you are worrying that people are getting taught ideas that the only solution to crime is to turn into a police state, that's pretty paranoid...
The original Contra is one of the definitive two-player co-op games!
While they expanded on it and made it a lot better in later Contra games (Contra III: The Alien Wars and Contra: Shattered Soldier being good examples), Contra 1 was still the one that started it all.
The only potential issue was the waterfall level where you had to make sure you didn't scroll-off your partner, but that was really just one level where it was a problem. The game was designed to be two-player. One player gets spread and keeps the screen clear of little enemies, and the other gets laser and goes straight for the main goals. When you get the teamwork down, the game flows amazingly smooth.
so instead of leaving things be on gootube, and letting google pay for the bandwidth, they decide to setup their own site so they can pay for the bandwidth themselves?
This "we must have control at all costs" never makes sense to me, especially when there's a financial reason not too...
While I'm in the camp that thinks axing the backwards compatibility is idiotic for Sony (like everything these days...), if you can indicate it with a color that would be very helpful for customers.
I know they are using the 40GB/60GB/80GB markers to indicate what version you have, but you can't see that by looking at the system. If they made them different colors, it'd be easy to see which ones were backwards compatible or not. Something tells me that "I have a black/white/pink PS3" will be less confusing than "I have the 40GB non-backwards compatible PS3" to most people.
They can collect on "public performances" of the radio when they start paying me for trespassing on my property with all that RF.
This is not a copyright violation as it's "publicly performing" things that were already sent out over public airways. Really, it's almost equivalent to the idiots suing because people used the "hacking technology" of HTTP to get the files they publicly offered.
need the legal equivalent of a two-by-four upside their head before they will obey the law
Or, the use of such overreactions by the law undermine the idea of "justice", leading to fewer people actually respecting the law as something worth following. Rule by fear is not a good method to build a society on...
But of course all messages from Fox News get through!
I was thinking more along the lines of "But of course all the messages still get billed".
Actually, the big part I want to know about is if they are accepting liability for censorship with this. Because they have demonstrated the ability to censor successfully, does this mean they have to censor anything "illegal"? So if some kid gets sent an SMS of "suggestive content", can the parent sue for exposing their kid to pr0n?
This is the big argument/lawsuit that was running around when the net was young, and the reason telcos/etc ran to "Common Carrier" status in the first place. They seem to have abandoned this position.
It sounds like my idea is happening, but at a much lower level than I was thinking (like the multiply example you gave). I guess I'm still thinking of things at the wrong level (software, high level functions), when it's much more basic things that need to be accelerated.
The dual-port RAM interface makes a lot of sense - it'd be a lot nicer than trying to do it yourself with general purpose pins, I'd think.
That all sounds wonderful... (and does make me want to try some FPGA programming - it sounds really cool)...but that sounds like it's still implemented in the main programmable logic gates of the FPGA (that is, in "software"), like how a.so/.dll is great on a normal CPU, but is still just part of your program running.
I'm more thinking of a specific hardware piece, like an FPU co-processor. Something not re-programmable, but theoretically much faster for that specific task. It wouldn't make sense for a lot of things, but I'm thinking specific common number-crunching like checksums/FFT/etc that lots of people do could maybe work.
hmm... you seem to know a lot about FPGAs, so I'll ask you something I've been wondering for a while...
Coming from a traditional software end of things, I'm used to seeing "accelerating co-processors" available to do useful tasks much faster than the main CPU. I'm thinking not only the FPU (when it was a separate chip), but things like a modern GPU and such. Many of these have been slowly integrated back into the CPU as time has gone on, the FPU being the best example, so now it's something you can just call on with a special instruction.
From my understanding, FPGAs are mainly all generic logic blocks, arranged in fancy ways, and therefor are rather "generic" like the general CPU - you have to implement any fancy processing yourself.
My question is has anybody thought about putting fancy co-processing hardware local to the FPGA? I'm thinking some built-in FFT units and such that you could just include anywhere in your pipeline would be really useful, and might help that "timing critical" areas by having some common "higher level" functions computed in full hardware (ASIC?) speed.
Like, as a programmer, it sounds like it'd be cool to be able to buy an FPGA with built-in FFT, CRC/MD5/etc, maybe part of some encryption routines, etc to work with as common things that need to be accelerated.
Is this sane? Does it already exist and I just don't know about it? Is it totally incompatible with how FPGAs work?
SecureROM installs a service to let those running without admin privileges run the SecureROM stuff.
So it's installing a privilege-escalation bug for you? That would nicely remove the benefits of running as a non-root user, but I suppose this is typical for windows junk...
...for me at least. Blocking Google Analytics, Doubleclick, etc, with noscript has made my browsing experience much smoother. Not only is it nice to not have the random pauses while it hits the ad-server, not running the javascript has helped the render time on some pages as well (even if you still run the javascript for the page itself!)
You know... a lot of the problems that Sony has had recently are not necessarily the action they took. Discounting this version of the product so you can introduce an improved* version can be a great move. The quote in the summary brings up a good point, though - it's about their PR! They had a chance to make this great PR, or at least "neutral", but they instead choose to confuse everybody with this idiocy.
I think this has been typical of a lot of their boneheaded moves in the last few years; they have some brain-damaged idea they want to accomplish with the PR, and end up totally screwing the entire announcement. Someone needs to fire the entire PR department over there. It's really damaging their reputation in ways way above and beyond their "normal fuck-ups".
(*) - for some definitions of "improved", which is not really relevant to this point
The frightening part is that opiates in general are still the most effective anti-depressant out there. They have been used for hundreds (more?) of years for that purpose, and it's only in the modern "all addictive things are bad!" mindset that we have made this use taboo.
The big irony, though, is most of the other drugs used (SSRIs, SNRIs, etc) are just as addictive! It's not like many people can suddenly stop taking them, and I know that I and many others have noted that the absolute worst addiction-symptoms come from the SSRIS. Kicking Lexapro was/way/ worse than kicking heroin.
This is an insane situation, where we taboo one drug class for being "bad", and use another class that has most of the same "bad" effects.
- it's all useful for some people, we shouldn't limit our options -- I know some people have great success with SSRIs as well
Slashdot Mirror
Your post reminds me of some of the (very) old slashdot stories asking the question of how non-technical/non-programmers can help the F/OSS movements. The response usually came in the for of "there's lots of stuff like documentation (real writing, not tech writing), art, etc, that are also needed."
This was and is true, but I think another big category was forgotten: management. That for a good project to succeed, the techies should keep doing techie stuff, and be shielded from politics and dull aspects of business as much as possible.[*] This Gentoo problem is a prefect example of this. The techies don't want to do business, so that's an area that non-techie people could really help.
I hope the pull through with this, regardless of the solution - I would hate to have to switch to another distro...
[*] - See: Brokes and the MMM, where he talks about the "surgical team"
what, you think I haven't read the jargon file?
Of course python counts as an entry for "languages of choice" as that's how the jargon is used. Evidence: this thread. Many people consider it a choice language, so the jargon fits.
That doesn't mean they are correct, though. Python is all about forcing you into a specific style of programming, and a pretty basic one at that. The fact that the designer thinks many important programming concepts are confusing is hilarious. The fact that he forces others down to his level by limiting how you can program in python is sad, at best.
And I'm not EVEN going to talk about whitespace.
Just say no to Bondage and Discipline Languages!
...any language where the author thinks lambda is "too confusing" and should be removed is doomed from the start.
Java is part of the dumbing down of CS.
Java is the new COBOL. And we will regret it in 20 years for much the same reasons.
It actually gives me hope that you have recognized this in hiring practices. That a CV with a list of Sun's Java buzzwords is not an indication of a useful programmer.
I was disturbed in college (1997-2001) that things were changing towards Java and other idiocy. Too many people didn't get pointers and other basic concepts, and Java was hiding them even more. I believe it was the one class we had in assembly programming that really pointed it out - when confronted with having to deal with real hardware, most of the students didn't know what to do. Concepts like "two's complement" vs "one's complement" caused a strange brain-lock for them, as they were so sheltered from the actual binary math and hardware of the computer.
It was only a handful of us that had been programming for years already (yay for the Atari 800XL) that had any idea of what was going on. The college (UC Davis) skipped entirely over very basic concepts like Von Newmann Architecture. I ended up having to spend most of my time trying to help my fellow students, there was so many fundamentals missing.
I think the most frightening part was having to yell at one of the professors one day, because the basic data structures he was teaching were being done incorrectly. He was teaching people to leak memory. ("Let's allocate a huge linked list, and then just set the head pointer to NULL and consider it freed!")
Sigh. It was frightening then, and apparently all my fears were justified, as now the entire discipline is getting a bad reputation. Unfortunately, I can't exactly disagree with that reputation from some of the CVs I've seen recently. My degree is destined fscked, apparently.
You hiring? ^_^
...and the kid's desire to explore and tinker stifled.
Isn't that the entire point? Microsoft has never encouraged "tinkering", and in fact goes out of their way to discourage it. In their eyes, computer tools and software should not come from any random user, but large industry that has bought their dev tools, taken their "training" courses, and generally done things The Microsoft Way.
The idea that anyone can tinker with the end product is unthinkable to them. I see this as being about use philosophy as much as general profits from windows licenses.
Now, if you could only pull the money-exchange game that big-business likes to pull, I'd think this strategy would actually work. (well, at least as well as the MPAA's version)
With a lot of "IP" issues, big business loves to sell these highly-priced items (patents, probably) back and forth. In the end, it's not actually any significant profit for any one player, but a lot of money changes hands making "sales" of their stuff.
So... if you could somehow get two Free Software groups to buy this commercial high-priced license from each other (net gain: $0), you'd be able to add "See? I have legitimate commercial sales!" as justification for those multi-million dollar damages.
Live by the sword, Die by the sword...
Or as we like to call those swords in modern times, "Copyright".
In my opinion, hard places should be available from the start, and you SHOULD NOT GO THERE.
I am reminded of the original Dragon Warrior - you could go everywhere except the last castle right from the start of the game. It was great, as you could explore wherever you wanted, get items "out of order", etc. It's just that if you went to somewhere you shouldn't be a big dragon tended to show up and kill you in one hit. You learned really fast which areas were "high level" areas...
I think the point is that exercise doesn't contribute significantly to your overall change in weight. Yes, it helps a bit. (as is obvious by thermodynamics) The problem is that most aerobic activities that people think of don't actually burn than many kcal of energy. Your base metabolic rate is much more significant.
When you compare the several hundred kcal of energy you will burn, say, running for a while, with the 100-200 kcal of energy in a single can of soda, it's obvious your eating habits are the more significant factor.
[side note: now, exercise is good for other reasons, so that's not to be ignored, but you won't exercise yourself thin if you don't significantly change eating habits]
Completely unneccesary.
It's not necessary, it's just that it's fun. The game has an obvious design that is pointed towards 2-player. Sure, it's not a difficult game, but so what?
All the Contra games are great when you get into a two-player "rhythm". It's one of the only games where the teamwork actually helps you run through it easier, if you do it right. (yes, that's going from "easy" to "really easy", but again, so what?)
If you want hard, go get an "S" on Shattered Soldier
while it would be interesting to have a sim-game that let you try other theories (later versions of Sim-City were a bit better at allowing alternate construction methods, and the Civ games were pretty good about it), I think it's important to remember that everything in Sim-City is very archetypal. You don't build business in the game, you just put "commercial districts" in. I was even surprised in SC2000 when you could even decide between low and high density housing.
I think things like the hospitals and police stations can be seen as a more general icon of "investing in the crime problem", etc. Like, you don't deal with pollution directly either, but only at broad strokes of where you place heavy industry/etc. The game is too high-level for the kind of detail you are talking about.
For things like "raising the minimum wage", how would you model that? You mandate it, residential districts get more popular, commercial districts less? Would it affect your tax income? I really think that's way too complicated for the game. Even on the subject of "tax" it's just a summary number iconic of all the taxes a city has.
If you are worrying that people are getting taught ideas that the only solution to crime is to turn into a police state, that's pretty paranoid...
what kind of crack are you smoking?!
The original Contra is one of the definitive two-player co-op games!
While they expanded on it and made it a lot better in later Contra games (Contra III: The Alien Wars and Contra: Shattered Soldier being good examples), Contra 1 was still the one that started it all.
The only potential issue was the waterfall level where you had to make sure you didn't scroll-off your partner, but that was really just one level where it was a problem. The game was designed to be two-player. One player gets spread and keeps the screen clear of little enemies, and the other gets laser and goes straight for the main goals. When you get the teamwork down, the game flows amazingly smooth.
so instead of leaving things be on gootube, and letting google pay for the bandwidth, they decide to setup their own site so they can pay for the bandwidth themselves?
This "we must have control at all costs" never makes sense to me, especially when there's a financial reason not too...
Are you saying that they are actually trying to do the Rez music-game-shooter thing? Rez was a great game...
While I'm in the camp that thinks axing the backwards compatibility is idiotic for Sony (like everything these days...), if you can indicate it with a color that would be very helpful for customers.
I know they are using the 40GB/60GB/80GB markers to indicate what version you have, but you can't see that by looking at the system. If they made them different colors, it'd be easy to see which ones were backwards compatible or not. Something tells me that "I have a black/white/pink PS3" will be less confusing than "I have the 40GB non-backwards compatible PS3" to most people.
They can collect on "public performances" of the radio when they start paying me for trespassing on my property with all that RF.
This is not a copyright violation as it's "publicly performing" things that were already sent out over public airways. Really, it's almost equivalent to the idiots suing because people used the "hacking technology" of HTTP to get the files they publicly offered.
need the legal equivalent of a two-by-four upside their head before they will obey the law
Or, the use of such overreactions by the law undermine the idea of "justice", leading to fewer people actually respecting the law as something worth following. Rule by fear is not a good method to build a society on...
As opposed to asking the patient about the same information?
I would trust a written history before an oral one any time - at least they may have had a chance to edit out errors in the written version.
The huge ego of doctors gets in the way here...
But of course all messages from Fox News get through!
I was thinking more along the lines of "But of course all the messages still get billed".
Actually, the big part I want to know about is if they are accepting liability for censorship with this. Because they have demonstrated the ability to censor successfully, does this mean they have to censor anything "illegal"? So if some kid gets sent an SMS of "suggestive content", can the parent sue for exposing their kid to pr0n?
This is the big argument/lawsuit that was running around when the net was young, and the reason telcos/etc ran to "Common Carrier" status in the first place. They seem to have abandoned this position.
ok, thanks for the explanation...
It sounds like my idea is happening, but at a much lower level than I was thinking (like the multiply example you gave). I guess I'm still thinking of things at the wrong level (software, high level functions), when it's much more basic things that need to be accelerated.
The dual-port RAM interface makes a lot of sense - it'd be a lot nicer than trying to do it yourself with general purpose pins, I'd think.
That all sounds wonderful... (and does make me want to try some FPGA programming - it sounds really cool) ...but that sounds like it's still implemented in the main programmable logic gates of the FPGA (that is, in "software"), like how a .so/.dll is great on a normal CPU, but is still just part of your program running.
I'm more thinking of a specific hardware piece, like an FPU co-processor. Something not re-programmable, but theoretically much faster for that specific task. It wouldn't make sense for a lot of things, but I'm thinking specific common number-crunching like checksums/FFT/etc that lots of people do could maybe work.
hmm... you seem to know a lot about FPGAs, so I'll ask you something I've been wondering for a while...
Coming from a traditional software end of things, I'm used to seeing "accelerating co-processors" available to do useful tasks much faster than the main CPU. I'm thinking not only the FPU (when it was a separate chip), but things like a modern GPU and such. Many of these have been slowly integrated back into the CPU as time has gone on, the FPU being the best example, so now it's something you can just call on with a special instruction.
From my understanding, FPGAs are mainly all generic logic blocks, arranged in fancy ways, and therefor are rather "generic" like the general CPU - you have to implement any fancy processing yourself.
My question is has anybody thought about putting fancy co-processing hardware local to the FPGA? I'm thinking some built-in FFT units and such that you could just include anywhere in your pipeline would be really useful, and might help that "timing critical" areas by having some common "higher level" functions computed in full hardware (ASIC?) speed.
Like, as a programmer, it sounds like it'd be cool to be able to buy an FPGA with built-in FFT, CRC/MD5/etc, maybe part of some encryption routines, etc to work with as common things that need to be accelerated.
Is this sane? Does it already exist and I just don't know about it? Is it totally incompatible with how FPGAs work?
SecureROM installs a service to let those running without admin privileges run the SecureROM stuff.
So it's installing a privilege-escalation bug for you? That would nicely remove the benefits of running as a non-root user, but I suppose this is typical for windows junk...
...for me at least. Blocking Google Analytics, Doubleclick, etc, with noscript has made my browsing experience much smoother. Not only is it nice to not have the random pauses while it hits the ad-server, not running the javascript has helped the render time on some pages as well (even if you still run the javascript for the page itself!)
You know... a lot of the problems that Sony has had recently are not necessarily the action they took. Discounting this version of the product so you can introduce an improved* version can be a great move. The quote in the summary brings up a good point, though - it's about their PR! They had a chance to make this great PR, or at least "neutral", but they instead choose to confuse everybody with this idiocy.
I think this has been typical of a lot of their boneheaded moves in the last few years; they have some brain-damaged idea they want to accomplish with the PR, and end up totally screwing the entire announcement. Someone needs to fire the entire PR department over there. It's really damaging their reputation in ways way above and beyond their "normal fuck-ups".
(*) - for some definitions of "improved", which is not really relevant to this point
The frightening part is that opiates in general are still the most effective anti-depressant out there. They have been used for hundreds (more?) of years for that purpose, and it's only in the modern "all addictive things are bad!" mindset that we have made this use taboo.
/way/ worse than kicking heroin.
The big irony, though, is most of the other drugs used (SSRIs, SNRIs, etc) are just as addictive! It's not like many people can suddenly stop taking them, and I know that I and many others have noted that the absolute worst addiction-symptoms come from the SSRIS. Kicking Lexapro was
This is an insane situation, where we taboo one drug class for being "bad", and use another class that has most of the same "bad" effects.
- it's all useful for some people, we shouldn't limit our options
-- I know some people have great success with SSRIs as well