You mean that hiring someone to write a program that will generate truly random polls and paying at most a few hundred dollars and then just clicking a button every week is more work than doing them by hand?
Well, I'm the middle east(Lebanon to be specific) and no internet censorship here. Granted, the internet connections are extremely crappy, but they're not censored.
Also, for a language that does have object comparison I find it extremely odd how some functions in the standard library tend to implement comparison. For example, check out the manual for array_intersect. The interesting tidbit:
Note: Two elements are considered equal if and only if (string) $elem1 === (string) $elem2. In words: when the string representation is the same.
I find such hacks in the standard library a turnoff from using PHP. However, as a poster mentions below, ubiquity is its major strength.
1) highly skilled. Firstly, what's the chance that Bonga-Bonga land is going to produce anyone that's highly skilled? Secondly if they could, why would they come here?.
Is that really what you think? Third world countries do not produce people who are highly skilled? I myself am Lebanese. Seeing as you think all third world countries are Bonga-Bonga land where everyone lives in the jungle and hunts animals with sticks to survive, Lebanon is a small country just north of Israel and south-west of Syria. It's definitely a third world country having recently come out of a civil war that completely trashed its economy. It's not exactly stable right now either, we still have assassinations of political leaders, usually by means of car bombs(the most famous of the recent ones if the assassination of a former prime minister in 2005). We also like to have regular skirmishes with our neighbor in the south.
I could also go on a tangent here and state that most of the problems in the middle east were caused by the way the colonists(you, my British friend, and the French) handled things and divided up territories back in the early and mid 20th century: We feel very guilty about killing/causing the death of/watching passively the slaughter of so many jews, let's make up for that by giving them their own country! To hell with all the regional problems that this will create, what with displacing entire populations to make room(The Lebanese civil war was for the most part caused by the presence of Palestinian refugee camps) and begin hostile to all the neighbors. But I digress...
Yet, even with things as they are, our prime export as a country is probably highly skilled people. I like to think I'm a good programmer. I enjoy learning and playing with new languages. Currently exploring the functional programming world, though I'm still way too attached to python. I draw immense satisfaction from making things that others would find useful which is why I try to contribute as much as I can to FOSS projects and most of the software I use is FOSS. I've been running linux exclusively on my laptop for three years now(currently a happy archlinux user). My older brother graduated with high distinction in electrical engineering and is currently pursuing a master's degree at Imperial College in London. A friend of mine, a recently graduated computer science student is a Chiite Muslim(Who would thus be associated with our very own terrorist organization, Hizbullah). He's actually taught me all I know about user interface design. He went off to Parsons in New York where he'll probably stay and work once he's done studying.
I could go on and on with examples of skilled people who are born here and move off to greener pastures(I could also mention the fact that most people I know speak at least three languages fluently, which is more than can be said of British or American people). Money has nothing to do with intelligence or skill. It's actually specifically the type of people who are poor yet have enough wisdom and perseverance to work towards getting a proper education and a better standards of living for their children whom you want in a society.
Because 2.5months is enough to read thousands upon thousands of pages of documentation and fix an implementation that spans 300MB worth of source code.
"The problem lies not with the user, the problem lies with the Linux programmers who show clear disdain for the needs of their users[*], giving primacy to the nature of the technology instead."
First, most programmers program out of a need to scratch a personal itch, especially in the open source world. This will, of course lead to people who do not share said itch to perceive them in this way.
That being said, however, doesn't mean that linux does not, over time, acquire a "proper" user interface(a graphical one in your opinion). The desktop box at home is currently running ubuntu 7.04 (and has been since it came out, a year and a half ago) and it's what my younger brother(17 years old) and sister(10 years old) use exclusively (my parents have their laptops, and so do I). Both my siblings are not very technically inclined and yet they have managed to use -- and like to the point where they never asked me to get windows back up when it stopped booting when I replaced some hardware -- linux for almost two years.
The argument "linux is great, technology-wise, but it really sucks with the interface" is old and tired and quite false. It also usually comes from people who have never used linux or have used it for a very short amount of time before abandoning it and going back to windows. Its interface is just *different*. It takes some getting used to, like all things different. Just like the OSX interface is different, and takes getting used to, I had to use a mac a couple of weeks ago and I had a hard time finding my way around at first(The menu bar is not part of the window but rather appears at the top of the screen). The difference is that people expect the interface to be easy and great(because that's what marketing and hype tells them) so they take the time to learn it.
I only ever look at logs when something is wrong(or I suspect something is wrong) and I am trying to track down the problem. In such a case I will easily ignore all the meaningless log entries(by doing grep "^(EE)"/var/log/Xorg.0.log if something's wrong with X for example) and find "the good stuff".
There may be minor errors that go unnoticed, sure, but since they don't affect any of my work, what do I care? until one of them does I don't want to know about it, and when I want to know about it, I know how to.
Now compare that with dialogue boxes. They get in your face, they're annoying, most of them don't tell you anything useful or that you want to know. You see so many of them that at the end you just click through to be able to get back to work.
Saying that dialogue boxes on Windows are equivalent to logs on linux is simply wrong.
Guess what? A lot of people feel the same way about Windows: They simply don't feel it's worth their time and effort to learn all the implications of every prompt they click "yes" to. And if it comes to it, they'll just reinstall Windows. It's simply not that big a deal to them.
I disagree, while you, an Ubuntu user, don't have a problem reformatting and installing Ubuntu should something go terribly wrong; Windows users definitely don't think that a reformat is "not that big a deal"
To most Windows users Windows *is* the computer and they'll put up with all kinds of things not working and being slow(due to 3 year old viruses still lurking around) with hundreds of popups at every startup from an anti-virus with 2 year old definitions telling them some threat has been taken care of(and they won't find it bizarre that it's the same one every time). They'll always say "yeah my computer needs to be reformatted" but they'll carry on for ages without actually doing that until some more knowledgeable person does it for them.
I know because to a lot of people I happen to be the more knowledgeable person they call on eventually (although I've been out of touch with the windows world for nearly two years now I still have a reputation as the "go to" guy in case of computer trouble among my acquaintances). Some of these computers are in an incredibly sorry state and I really don't know how anyone could still be using them on a daily basis and not go crazy.
Well yes, but in the case described above said ownage would be immediately visible, ease of cleaning up would be the only thing that matters then. Of course it'd be annoying and possibly destructive.
You forget about the web developers who need to get their sites working under all major browsers though.
Most web devs these days will develop a site according to standards, test it under firefox, opera, safari, etc... Notice that it works just fine under those(with sometimes the need for minor tweaking) then proceed to hack it up to support IE6 (and 7 to a lesser extent)
Actually, just tested this, but if you block the flash object after it's taken over your clipboard the clipboard is released. The string placed in there stays but you can copy/paste stuff normally afterwards.
You shouldn't be grepping for error messages as a privileged user anyway. At worst this strategy can be destructive with an rm -rf ~ but that's about it.
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ?
on
ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead
·
· Score: 1
> and level of integration comparable with javascript engines shipped with browsers. ==> Java... check
Latency is becoming more an more of a bottleneck in today's computers. Which mostly explains the ever-deepening memory hierarchy(L1 and L2 cache, DRAM, flash, HDD and finally the network). Playing a flash-based game or using an online application for a quick job is one thing, running an OS is...
And blasting it to pieces would make a little difference, only in distribution of the damage - we'd get stoned with a swarm of fragments instead of one big piece, yet the same mass and total energy.
Not exactly, a bigger number of smaller fragments means a bigger surface area. Bigger surface area means that a larger part of the total mass would deteriorate in the atmosphere before even reaching the ground. Which means, less mass and energy actually affect us.
I already answered this: "If the kernel knew enough of what was wrong to provide a "useful error message" to the end user it wouldn't have needed to panic in the first place." The information is can be very useful to kernel developers, and, usually, if the user is not skilled enough he/she can post to forums and/or mailing lists with that particular, reproducible error. A workaround will usually get produced for that specific hardware or if one exists and the problem is known, the user will be pointed to it. Also, I am pretty sure the kernel developers don't get care as much about being "user friendly" as delivering a stable kernel that behaves rationally even when faced with irrational hardware.
The kernel routines that handle panics (in AT&T-derived and BSD Unix source code, a routine known as panic()) are generally designed to output an error message to the console[...]The information provided is of highly technical nature and aims to assist a system administrator or software developer in diagnosing the problem.
[...]
While technically often the operating system could continue operation, after memory violations have occurred the system is in an unstable state. Rather than risk security breaches and data corruption, the operating system stops to prevent further damage and facilitate diagnosis of the error.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean that hiring someone to write a program that will generate truly random polls and paying at most a few hundred dollars and then just clicking a button every week is more work than doing them by hand?
Well, I'm the middle east(Lebanon to be specific) and no internet censorship here. Granted, the internet connections are extremely crappy, but they're not censored.
Also, for a language that does have object comparison I find it extremely odd how some functions in the standard library tend to implement comparison. For example, check out the manual for array_intersect. The interesting tidbit:
Note: Two elements are considered equal if and only if (string) $elem1 === (string) $elem2. In words: when the string representation is the same.
I find such hacks in the standard library a turnoff from using PHP. However, as a poster mentions below, ubiquity is its major strength.
WHOOOSH?
Lebanon? I'd really like to see some sources for that
How about python? It's an "easy" language, and yet I've seen plenty of really good applications written in it.
1) highly skilled.
Firstly, what's the chance that Bonga-Bonga land is going to produce anyone that's highly skilled? Secondly if they could, why would they come here?.
Is that really what you think? Third world countries do not produce people who are highly skilled? I myself am Lebanese. Seeing as you think all third world countries are Bonga-Bonga land where everyone lives in the jungle and hunts animals with sticks to survive, Lebanon is a small country just north of Israel and south-west of Syria. It's definitely a third world country having recently come out of a civil war that completely trashed its economy. It's not exactly stable right now either, we still have assassinations of political leaders, usually by means of car bombs(the most famous of the recent ones if the assassination of a former prime minister in 2005). We also like to have regular skirmishes with our neighbor in the south.
I could also go on a tangent here and state that most of the problems in the middle east were caused by the way the colonists(you, my British friend, and the French) handled things and divided up territories back in the early and mid 20th century: We feel very guilty about killing/causing the death of/watching passively the slaughter of so many jews, let's make up for that by giving them their own country! To hell with all the regional problems that this will create, what with displacing entire populations to make room(The Lebanese civil war was for the most part caused by the presence of Palestinian refugee camps) and begin hostile to all the neighbors. But I digress...
Yet, even with things as they are, our prime export as a country is probably highly skilled people. I like to think I'm a good programmer. I enjoy learning and playing with new languages. Currently exploring the functional programming world, though I'm still way too attached to python. I draw immense satisfaction from making things that others would find useful which is why I try to contribute as much as I can to FOSS projects and most of the software I use is FOSS. I've been running linux exclusively on my laptop for three years now(currently a happy archlinux user). My older brother graduated with high distinction in electrical engineering and is currently pursuing a master's degree at Imperial College in London. A friend of mine, a recently graduated computer science student is a Chiite Muslim(Who would thus be associated with our very own terrorist organization, Hizbullah). He's actually taught me all I know about user interface design. He went off to Parsons in New York where he'll probably stay and work once he's done studying.
I could go on and on with examples of skilled people who are born here and move off to greener pastures(I could also mention the fact that most people I know speak at least three languages fluently, which is more than can be said of British or American people). Money has nothing to do with intelligence or skill. It's actually specifically the type of people who are poor yet have enough wisdom and perseverance to work towards getting a proper education and a better standards of living for their children whom you want in a society.
Because 2.5months is enough to read thousands upon thousands of pages of documentation and fix an implementation that spans 300MB worth of source code.
Yeah right.
Any more and it'll start looking like perl.
"The problem lies not with the user, the problem lies with the Linux programmers who show clear disdain for the needs of their users[*], giving primacy to the nature of the technology instead."
First, most programmers program out of a need to scratch a personal itch, especially in the open source world. This will, of course lead to people who do not share said itch to perceive them in this way.
That being said, however, doesn't mean that linux does not, over time, acquire a "proper" user interface(a graphical one in your opinion). The desktop box at home is currently running ubuntu 7.04 (and has been since it came out, a year and a half ago) and it's what my younger brother(17 years old) and sister(10 years old) use exclusively (my parents have their laptops, and so do I).
Both my siblings are not very technically inclined and yet they have managed to use -- and like to the point where they never asked me to get windows back up when it stopped booting when I replaced some hardware -- linux for almost two years.
The argument "linux is great, technology-wise, but it really sucks with the interface" is old and tired and quite false. It also usually comes from people who have never used linux or have used it for a very short amount of time before abandoning it and going back to windows. Its interface is just *different*. It takes some getting used to, like all things different. Just like the OSX interface is different, and takes getting used to, I had to use a mac a couple of weeks ago and I had a hard time finding my way around at first(The menu bar is not part of the window but rather appears at the top of the screen). The difference is that people expect the interface to be easy and great(because that's what marketing and hype tells them) so they take the time to learn it.
Yes it is different, logs don't get in your face
I only ever look at logs when something is wrong(or I suspect something is wrong) and I am trying to track down the problem. In such a case I will easily ignore all the meaningless log entries(by doing grep "^(EE)" /var/log/Xorg.0.log if something's wrong with X for example) and find "the good stuff".
There may be minor errors that go unnoticed, sure, but since they don't affect any of my work, what do I care? until one of them does I don't want to know about it, and when I want to know about it, I know how to.
Now compare that with dialogue boxes. They get in your face, they're annoying, most of them don't tell you anything useful or that you want to know. You see so many of them that at the end you just click through to be able to get back to work.
Saying that dialogue boxes on Windows are equivalent to logs on linux is simply wrong.
Guess what? A lot of people feel the same way about Windows: They simply don't feel it's worth their time and effort to learn all the implications of every prompt they click "yes" to. And if it comes to it, they'll just reinstall Windows. It's simply not that big a deal to them.
I disagree, while you, an Ubuntu user, don't have a problem reformatting and installing Ubuntu should something go terribly wrong; Windows users definitely don't think that a reformat is "not that big a deal"
To most Windows users Windows *is* the computer and they'll put up with all kinds of things not working and being slow(due to 3 year old viruses still lurking around) with hundreds of popups at every startup from an anti-virus with 2 year old definitions telling them some threat has been taken care of(and they won't find it bizarre that it's the same one every time). They'll always say "yeah my computer needs to be reformatted" but they'll carry on for ages without actually doing that until some more knowledgeable person does it for them.
I know because to a lot of people I happen to be the more knowledgeable person they call on eventually (although I've been out of touch with the windows world for nearly two years now I still have a reputation as the "go to" guy in case of computer trouble among my acquaintances). Some of these computers are in an incredibly sorry state and I really don't know how anyone could still be using them on a daily basis and not go crazy.
you forget windows ME
Well yes, but in the case described above said ownage would be immediately visible, ease of cleaning up would be the only thing that matters then. Of course it'd be annoying and possibly destructive.
You forget about the web developers who need to get their sites working under all major browsers though.
Most web devs these days will develop a site according to standards, test it under firefox, opera, safari, etc... Notice that it works just fine under those(with sometimes the need for minor tweaking) then proceed to hack it up to support IE6 (and 7 to a lesser extent)
Actually, just tested this, but if you block the flash object after it's taken over your clipboard the clipboard is released. The string placed in there stays but you can copy/paste stuff normally afterwards.
You shouldn't be grepping for error messages as a privileged user anyway. At worst this strategy can be destructive with an rm -rf ~ but that's about it.
> and level of integration comparable with javascript engines shipped with browsers. ==> Java ... check
how so?
A very interesting presentation(that took place at microsoft and that was done by a microsoft engineer): http://www.nwcpp.org/Meetings/2007/09.html
Latency is becoming more an more of a bottleneck in today's computers. Which mostly explains the ever-deepening memory hierarchy(L1 and L2 cache, DRAM, flash, HDD and finally the network). Playing a flash-based game or using an online application for a quick job is one thing, running an OS is...
entropy@entropy-laptop ~ $ wtf is SOL
SOL: shit out [of] luck
That's what *she* said
And blasting it to pieces would make a little difference, only in distribution of the damage - we'd get stoned with a swarm of fragments instead of one big piece, yet the same mass and total energy.
Not exactly, a bigger number of smaller fragments means a bigger surface area. Bigger surface area means that a larger part of the total mass would deteriorate in the atmosphere before even reaching the ground. Which means, less mass and energy actually affect us.
I already answered this:
"If the kernel knew enough of what was wrong to provide a "useful error message" to the end user it wouldn't have needed to panic in the first place."
The information is can be very useful to kernel developers, and, usually, if the user is not skilled enough he/she can post to forums and/or mailing lists with that particular, reproducible error. A workaround will usually get produced for that specific hardware or if one exists and the problem is known, the user will be pointed to it.
Also, I am pretty sure the kernel developers don't get care as much about being "user friendly" as delivering a stable kernel that behaves rationally even when faced with irrational hardware.
When that happens to me I simply ask my computer:
entropy@entropy-laptop ~ $ wtf is IANAL
IANAL: I am not a lawyer
entropy@entropy-laptop ~ $
I seem to have borked the wikipedia quote:
The kernel routines that handle panics (in AT&T-derived and BSD Unix source code, a routine known as panic()) are generally designed to output an error message to the console[...]The information provided is of highly technical nature and aims to assist a system administrator or software developer in diagnosing the problem.
[...]
While technically often the operating system could continue operation, after memory violations have occurred the system is in an unstable state. Rather than risk security breaches and data corruption, the operating system stops to prevent further damage and facilitate diagnosis of the error.