I'm hoping that I can tread the line between being appreciative of the creative work that has obviously gone into this, and trying to keep my feet on the ground. I've worked in a lot of software companies that have tried to "design" the "next great thing", and to put it bluntly, I see a lot of that in these videos.
When you go to the Mozilla Labs site, you are informed that these are concepts; ideas that they want to flesh out. But what I think is missing (even to the designers) is the question of how it will actually work. It's blue sky thinking with all the inconvenient "it's impossible" tasks shoved down to the hapless "engineer" who tries to build it.
Seemingly simple things like taking a random table in a web page and building a meaningful line graph out of it turns out to be extremely hard in the general case. I speak from experience here, having been paid lots of money to do it several times before:-) (despite my protestations of impossibility). Random data in webpages (or other documents) are just not structured well enough to do it -- and it turns out that partial success (i.e., it works "most of the time") is mostly useless.
The car industry has a long tradition of building concept cars. These are cars that are not meant to be sold. They are only ideas that might fire the imagination for future designers. But the difference between concept cars and these software concepts (not just Mozilla Labs, but many large companies that I could name) is that concept cars *are actually cars*. You can drive them. These concepts are like pictures of concept cars -- or animated movies of concept cars. It's like saying, "My concept car is the one in Speed Racer".
Like I said, the ideas are interesting. But I'd really prefer it if the industry would build working software as a concept. One extremely good example of what I'd like to see is Englightenment. It often sucked (especially if you read the code in the early days). But the concepts were *magnificent*. And they were demonstrably *possible*.
A person writing a window manager could look at Enlightenment and say, "That's sooo cool, but I need it to be a bit more conservative in some ways" and write something that fit the bill. Looking at these concepts, all I can say is, "I'm glad I don't have to write it".
Do all of you who rail against the RIAA really want them defeated because they hired crappy lawyers, or do you want them defeated on the merits? I fear that the answer from the Slashdot crowd at large is "either way, doesn't matter" but I think that's a little intellectually dishonest.
Personally (and I don't think I'm alone in this) I want to see them defeated because of the tactics they are using. It's not so much that they have crappy lawyers (I couldn't say one way or the other), but that they are using crappy evidence in order to intimidate people into coughing up money. I couldn't say how many people who get hit with these lawsuits are *actually* infringing copyright. But what I can say with some conviction is that the evidence the RIAA is presenting should not be enough to decide the case. Couple that with the shotgun approach to selecting defendants (targets), and it really makes me want them shut down.
Many people on Slashdot (possibly even most) make their living from creating copyrighted works. The people here are in an interesting position of being creators *and* users. Many of us would prefer to see different business models emerge that make life better for users. This, despite the fact that we are creators (imagine that!). Given our position, I don't think it's terribly unusual that we have a bias against distributors, who are neither creators nor users. We would prefer that the link between creator and user be shortened -- to 0 if possible.
So while I understand your point, I think it's quite reasonable for many of us to despise the RIAAs tactics, fear their use of shoddy evidence *and* wish that they (and their ilk) disappear for good. From our perspective, life only gets better without the distribution cartels.
I'm not trying to be contrary, but I don't really see the point of wanting Microsoft to be one way or the other. Of course I'm happy if any person or organization helps me in an open and honest way. But I don't go around point fingers at specific entities and say, "I want you!"
I know many people believe that the industry revolves around Microsoft. But this is just an illusion. I think it is better for people to understand that there is work to be done and money to be made, with or without Microsoft's help. Things will not get magically better if Microsoft joins our side. There will always be someone else.
Concentrating on Microsoft means fighting against something we don't want. I'd rather be fighting *for* something I do want. And this means writing code, paying attention to government, and keeping our politicians honest, regardless of who might be influencing them.
There are a lot of important things to be done. Wooing Microsoft (or any other specific entity) to the side of OSS or Free Software is not one of them.
For the last 4 or 5 years that I was programming for a living I maintained a portfolio. I wrote a small application (about 2000 lines of code). I followed my own personal process for implementing it. I kept the planning, specification and design artifacts (fairly lightweight since I prefer to do something similar to XP).
Then I chose a couple of interesting areas in the code and annotated them. I explained what I was doing, why I chose a particular design approach, some aspects of my personal coding style, etc, etc.
The whole thing took me a month or two of working on my own. Then a little bit of time to keep it up to date (based on what I continued to learn over the years). While it was a toy problem, I found the exercise extremely useful for my own personal development. And when I applied for jobs I gave a link to my portfolio on my resume. This gave people a really good idea of what they were getting if they were to hire me.
I highly recommend any programmer to do the same. It *is* a fair amount of work in the short term, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. It's not just about getting a job. It's also about really understanding your own personal style.
A teacher's job is not to tell the children what some people believe, his job is to teach what is known to be the most accurate theory in existence.
I disagree. A science teacher's job is to teach science. This means that they should educate their students on currently accepted scientific models and show how they fit into the scientific process.
I get frustrated hearing people talk about scientific models as if their accuracy can be measured. Their *predictability* can be measured. We don't have a clue what's *really* happening. And we don't have to in science.
The scientific process is about making models. We want the simplest model whose predictions can be observed. We value the simplest model, not because it's most likely to be true, but because it is simple. Who wants to use a complicated model when a simple model predicts everything that you can see?
ID fails as a scientific model in several respects. First *it makes no predictions*. So, as a scientific model, it is completely useless. "God did it" doesn't help me decide if I should try to wipe out the rabbits in Australia with a disease. There are lots of other problems with ID as a scientific theory. But you know what, I don't even go there because ID is not useful.
Now, I have absolutely *no* problem with someone teaching ID in a religion class. Religion is where we make believe that we understand how the universe really works. While we're at it, lets put the people who preach that our current scientific models is *actually* what's happening there too. Because that's just another religion.
As we can not directly observe the universe, we can say nothing (very much) about what is really there. We can say what we observe and we can predict what we will observe in the future, But that is not truth. It is, however, *useful* since our interaction with the universe is through our observations.
So to recap: Science is about making useful models. Religion is about conjecturing about the truth of the universe. Don't mix them up.
One potential solution (not without it's own problems of course) is to make another pigeon hole. If you accept that humans are beings with a group mentality, it starts to make sense to reason with them on a group basis. Instead of appealing to them on an individual basis, appeal to them using their built in methods of group communication.
We see this every day. You've got teenagers thinking that gangster rap is cool because the marketing machine of the music industry moved in. New collectives come and go frequently. Many are intentionally built.
I think we often view the manipulative actions of religion, government and business as being somewhat evil. Usually this is because when large groups of people are motivated, corrupt people can position themselves to take advantage of it.
But I wonder if this must always be the case. Can large groups of people be motivated, using well known, tried and true techniques (i.e., using the language they understand), but safeguarding it against abuse?
I'm sure everyone can think of at least one instance where this was supposed have taken place. It would be interesting to reflect upon whether it was successful and whether or not changes could be introduced to make it better. If one were successful in finding an improvement, I suppose it would make sense to try to convince the masses of it's benefits...
Man I'm sleepy. I wonder if I'm even making sense.
I believe MS now owns a controlling share in the company now owning WP, IMHO mostly to prevent that WordPerfect gets ported to QT and becomes a multi-platform wordprocessor on both Windows, Linux and OSX.
No. MS bought 25% non-voting shares a few years ago for $135M dollars. Then they sold the shares to a venture capital company (Vector -- Paul Allen is one of the investors) for $13M (i.e. less than 10% of the original cost). The shares had a veto on acquisitions. Corel was in the process of trying to make several acquisitions when Vector threatened to squelch all the deals unless the board recommended a Vector buyout.
Vector ended up buying out the company for about $110M IIRC. However the company had about $65M in cash at the time, so the overall cost was $45M plus their initial $13M -- grand total of $58M. A little while ago, Vector did an IPO of 25% of the stock and got about $60M IIRC
M$ doesn't play stupid games to stop things from being ported. They play ridiculously Machiavelian games to make huge sums of cash for themselves and their friends.
P.S. I lost my job at Corel when my department was dissolved following the Vector takeover;-)
Ha ha... I used to be a developer on Word Perfect:-). But I'm afraid that it too doesn't work nearly as well as I'd like (maybe I'm sensitive). However, the reveal codes certainly let you fix problems that crop up.
I've been a TeX user most of my working life. But since becoming a teacher, I've realized that I need a word processor for making pretty handouts. Each one of my handouts is layed out differently, so doing that in TeX was taking too much time.
But, OOWriter is driving me batty. Really, I just need to make numbered paragraphs with numbered points underneath. I need to be able to paste pretty clipart and wrap paragraphs around or through them. I need to be able to write Japanese text. And I need to be able to output PDF (optionally doc file format too).
It shouldn't be too bad. But OOWriter is insane. It keeps renumbering my paragraphs, seemingly randomly (and often between loads and saves). It changes my fonts on me (again often between loads and saves). I've tried to turn off every fricken' "auto" feature I can, but it still insists on guessing what I want (badly). I really do hate it.
So my question is, is there a very simple word processor that I can use to do simple construction and layout that does *nothing* automatically and works *every single time* without fucking up my formatting?
I don't think anyone can really claim to own Bach's Brandenburg Concertos written almost 300 years ago.
You'd think so wouldn't you. But what they do is get an "expert" to reinterpret the score every few years. They write notes, modify some things, etc, etc. I'm not musician, so I can't really comment, but some musician friends of mine really believe that the "new" scores have value.
Anyway, these new reinterpretations have valid copyright. Yes, you can play the ones from 100 years ago, but as one of my friends said, "Why would you want to. They're horrible." Again, I can't really comment either way except to admit to "not getting it".
I'll say it up front to get it out of the way: IMHO Dual licensing in order to keep a closed version and an open version (which are different) is a bad idea in almost every case. Note: dual licensing to maintain compatibility to a wide variety of licenses is a *good* idea if you want lots of participation.
Having said that, I think I understand why companies choose to dual license (one closed, one open). They want to maintain a competitive advantage over their potential competitors, but don't trust their development team to give it to them. This often happens when they have structured the business side of the deal to get paid after the fact rather than before it. They do the traditional: decide what's good for the customer, build it, convince the customer that what they've built is good.
Open source software development (IMHO) works better when you get paid up front: get a customer, ask them what they want, build it. That way you are relying on your ability to outperform your competitors in *development* rather than product (even if what you are doing is integrating products that you didn't build).
So why would a company building in a proprietary fashion open up their code? I think it has a lot to do with the perception that open source people are "hobbyists". They allow their customers to tinker with the internals to do something cool, but hamstring them so that they can't make a product out of it. They think this will give them a cool "open source community" without having to give up the family jewels.
However, the reality of the situation is that people will either just ignore you or freeload off your open source version. In fact, most enterprises (which I think are the defacto customer you want to target) don't like to upgrade more then every 18 months or so. And they don't mind being 6-12 months behind the times. And if you refuse to allow them to contribute, they will happily not give you any code *or* money.
Anyway, this is my impression of it all. Surely there's more to it, but in the end I tend to stay away from projects like this simply because I don't trust them to stay around for too long...
"When is it acceptable to encourage users to accept a self-signed SSL cert?"
The answer is: Never.
What is the point of being sure that no one can intercept your communication all the way from your browser to the server if you don't know who you are talking to in the first place?
There is a big difference between knowing who I'm talking to and knowing that I'm talking to the same person I talked to last time. Most of the time I don't care about the former. Do I care that an author is who they say they are? Or do I care that they wrote a specific book?
Most of the time relationships (especially on the internet) are not dependent upon the actual identity of the person I'm talking to. They rely on the history that I've had with that person. And there are many times when I might want to have a secure conversation with someone, knowing that they are the person I talked to the day before. But I usually don't care what their identity is.
In the case of a sales transaction, I agree that knowing the identity of the person is useful (i.e., I know who to chase if the sale goes wrong). But to say that there are no cases where I want to have continued secure conversations with someone without knowing their identity is just plain wrong.
To give you an example, let's suppose I downloaded a piece of software off the internet. I notice that there is a patch to the software. I want some security that the patch is being distributed by the same person I got the software from in the first place. I have no interest in knowing that person's name, where they live, etc, etc, etc. I have a trust relationship with them already and I simply want to continue it.
My understanding is that it is the company that gets fined, not you. The idea (again, in my understanding) is that the company is failing you by not providing an environment where you can be healthy. Thus it should be fined.
But I can say for certain that it will be applicable to foreign workers. I'm living in Japan now and I have to jump through all the same hoops that the locals do (just did my yearly medical exam... not fun at all).
Right now I'm hovering at about 33 in. But I'm cut at 31 inches, so it's more difficult for me. Most of my colleagues could easily get down below 30 inches. Some of my foreign friends are really tall and muscular, so I wonder if they could get down below 33 in. at all (without shedding muscle).
Yes. 3D performance on Intel's open sourced i915 driver sucks (IMHO). I don't know if there are kernel developers who have free time. Many other aspects of the driver (and there are lots of them) are good. So I'm not complaining in general. Just specifically about 3D performance.
The open source driver was written and maintained by a company on contract with Intel. Intel pays them to do the work. I'm not aware of any unpaid developers on this project (at least long term ones). AFAICT their goals do not include good 3D performance. They are mostly interested in adding code for the latest hardware that's coming out and and making sure that all the more regular features work on all manufacturer's mother boards (things like TV out, monitor rotation, etc, etc).
Like I said, I don't blame them for poor 3D performance. If you look at the code, most of it is geared toward other priorities. They get paid to do what they're asked to do.
The issue is that there are *not enough* cooks in the kitchen. Lately, some progress has been made in improving 3D performance. But there's a long way to go IMHO. We need to get more programmers working on it and show that open source development is a viable model.
What can we say when one of the most vaunted open source drivers really is lacking in such an obvious area? What will convince other manufacturers that open sourcing their drivers will result in something that will show off their hardware in a good light?
I think the answer to this is to do what we do best which is to write code.
Quit my job as a programmer. Sold my car and house. Gave up my dogs. Gave away all my possessions (Well, what wouldn't fit into a backpack, anyway -- kept a laptop of course!) Hmm... kept the money -- handy stuff, money. Then I moved to Japan to teach English.
Honestly, I did this because over the years I've found that when I had more stuff, it was just a burden. I realized I was actually happier with less stuff. I'm living on very little money now (about $1200 a month, total) and I'm surprisingly OK with it. It's been 1 year and I don't miss my old lifestyle one bit (OK... I miss pizza -- Don't come to Japan for the pizza...)
I've got a few things here. I've got a fairly decent bicycle. I've got a laptop. I've got a nice suit. I've got a fairly nice kitchen knife. I've got a nice rain coat. Hmm... the rest is just odds and ends that don't really matter, or stuff that came with the apartment. Oh, and a mountain of manga:-) Note to self: must dispose of manga...
So if you want to do it, then come on it -- the water's fine. However, I recommend practicing giving stuff up for a while. I gave away stuff for years before I made the plunge. Just to see if I would really miss it. It was actually tough at first. But eventually it didn't matter to me any more.
One thing that I've started realizing lately is that we need to improve the open source drivers that we already have. This may give companies more incentive to open their own drivers.
For example, we are all happy about the free software drivers that Intel provides for the i950, etc graphics chipsets. However, there are still some significant 3D performance issues with this driver. I don't blame the team working on it because they have other important priorities. However, it is a fact that games run many times faster on Windows with this chipset than in X (and I'm not just talking about Wine games). Games like Vegastrike just don't run acceptably in X on a i945GM box -- and it should be able to handle this game easily.
If we could pick a few drivers that need help and make them indisputably good, this might provide incentive for companies to support our efforts.
I would be happy to start working on the the Intel graphics driver with an aim to improving its 3D performance. However, even though I have 20 years of application development, I'm a newbie at driver development. I don't know where to start. If anyone can point me in the right direction.... Even if it takes me a really long time to make any improvement, I'll at least be another pair of eyes.
And I'm teaching English too. I guess I'd better start learning! Luckily, about the most difficult thing I'm teaching at the moment is "The dog is brown"!
I just started teaching this year. I'm not young either. I gave up my programming job to teach English to Japanese students.
Here on/. we love to complain about bad programmers who can hide in a large organization, spewing out horrible code while management gives them raises. But think about teaching for a bit. Here you have a profession where the success of the students (and hence the teacher) can literally be manipulated by the teacher. You can intentionally give them questions they can't answer (because you never taught them) or you can give them all the answers to the test the day before.
So to combat this you get standardized testing. If too many people fail the standard tests, then the teacher is bad. But what does that do? It means that the smart teacher will teach only what's on the test. And they will ensure that each student can score well on the test, ability be damned. It's all about the test.
This creates a curriculum which is meaningless. Just a bunch of hoops to jump through in order for the teacher to get their bonus (they get bonuses here in Japan... Does that happen other places?) Got a bright student that actually wants to learn something relevant? -- "Shut up kid. Talking to you costs me my bonus. You can already pass the test." Got a student struggling that needs to understand? -- "Just frickin' memorize this damn thing, OK? I don't care that you can't use it in real life. You only need it for the exam. Got it?"
The gaming potential here is enormous. I'm actually surprised that my school doesn't operate like that. Although we are one of the lowest ranked schools in the prefecture. So perhaps lack of need to achieve test results makes life better here. Most of the teachers are amazing, actually.
But it really begs the question. How the hell do you measure the success of teachers? They hold all the cards and there's no obvious objective measure that I can see....
Probably this will never be seen by anyone. But oh well....
Programming is a work of writing. Sure, it's written in a strange language. Sure it's constrained by having to actually do something useful. But from an asthetic point of view, it's still just writing.
What is good writing in English? If you can come up with a sound bite that is concise, exhaustive and true, then you are a great person. The same is true for programming.
You can find *examples* of good writing. You can argue if it is really good or not (and everyone will have their opinion). But this is not something you can define easily (or possibly at all).
If I were you I'd go from the exact opposite direction. I'd look for good design. Then I'd talk to the people who wrote it. I'd ask them, "What do you think is important in order to create good design". Then I'd write down what they said.
Finally, I would start a practice of design criticism. Review design. Write about it. Start a dialog with others.
In other words, do what English PhD candidates are doing...
Having worked in a software company that sold to the retail market, I'm going to guess the real reason for this is distribution.
Retail is hard. In fact it's ridiculously hard -- and expensive. I'm going to come out and say that the majority of the problem is the retail system itself. Large retail chains basically extort money. "Pay us X amount of money or you may unfortunately find your title on the bottom shelf of the last row, with the front of the box facing the wrong way."
And then the distributors extort money. "Pay us X amount of money or you may unfortunately find that your title will be sold exclusively through Harold's House of Homoerotica & Other Software".
And there is basically no competition (everybody having been muscled out previously, I guess). So the store makes 200% profit and the distributor makes 500% profit (or some other such ridiculous numbers). So not much money makes it back to the producer.
Often a software house will focus on only one market simply because it is so expensive (with real up front cash involved) to sell to retail. Then, if it is successful they will release to another market. But they don't work so hard in the other markets because they are busy on the next release of software in their primary market. So they just try to lock in a modest profit and allow the distributors and retailers to rape the customer.
I'm a programmer, though. This is just what I gleaned from talking to the sales guys at our company (which was trying to find *any* way to get out of the retail business because they were losing so much money in it).
It's funny how people think that selling natural resources is a good idea. I always think back to the days when I used to play empire. Most servers had a casual rule against "tech trading".
With tech trading, one country would sell it's natural resources in order to buy high tech finished products from another country. Why was this practice banned? It's such a bad practice for the country selling it's resources. Not only do you not improve your own technology level, but you also become dependent upon a foreign source for goods manufacturing infrastructure. Countries who did this *always* made an early exit from the game (which made the game boring).
Unfortunately, I come from Canada -- one of the richest countries in the world, resource wise. And one of the countries with the poorest infrastructure around. And people *still* say we don't need meat packing plants or sawmills because the Americans already have everything set up. Sigh...
OK. It doesn't change your ratio, but the cost of running seemed to be way more expensive than I would have anticipated. And then I realized that cooked corn is considerably heavier than dried corn (which is what they are quoting for bushels).
According the the USDA nutrient database (http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/cgi-bin/list_nut_edit.pl), whole grain cornmeal is 362 kcal per 100g, or about 91952 kcal per bushel. This gives 66.6 miles per bushel or about 6.4 cents per mile. That seems a bit more reasonable, but still bigger than I expected.
I'd hate to think that running was more expensive than driving (which seems to be about 10 cents a mile in the US, from what I can tell...)
I believe Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE4.0 is also *known* to be unstable and there is a suggestion to use KDE3.5 if you want things to work (unless things have changed in the last few weeks). I know a few people have gotten bitten by this one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hoping that I can tread the line between being appreciative of the creative work that has obviously gone into this, and trying to keep my feet on the ground. I've worked in a lot of software companies that have tried to "design" the "next great thing", and to put it bluntly, I see a lot of that in these videos.
When you go to the Mozilla Labs site, you are informed that these are concepts; ideas that they want to flesh out. But what I think is missing (even to the designers) is the question of how it will actually work. It's blue sky thinking with all the inconvenient "it's impossible" tasks shoved down to the hapless "engineer" who tries to build it.
Seemingly simple things like taking a random table in a web page and building a meaningful line graph out of it turns out to be extremely hard in the general case. I speak from experience here, having been paid lots of money to do it several times before :-) (despite my protestations of impossibility). Random data in webpages (or other documents) are just not structured well enough to do it -- and it turns out that partial success (i.e., it works "most of the time") is mostly useless.
The car industry has a long tradition of building concept cars. These are cars that are not meant to be sold. They are only ideas that might fire the imagination for future designers. But the difference between concept cars and these software concepts (not just Mozilla Labs, but many large companies that I could name) is that concept cars *are actually cars*. You can drive them. These concepts are like pictures of concept cars -- or animated movies of concept cars. It's like saying, "My concept car is the one in Speed Racer".
Like I said, the ideas are interesting. But I'd really prefer it if the industry would build working software as a concept. One extremely good example of what I'd like to see is Englightenment. It often sucked (especially if you read the code in the early days). But the concepts were *magnificent*. And they were demonstrably *possible*.
A person writing a window manager could look at Enlightenment and say, "That's sooo cool, but I need it to be a bit more conservative in some ways" and write something that fit the bill. Looking at these concepts, all I can say is, "I'm glad I don't have to write it".
Do all of you who rail against the RIAA really want them defeated because they hired crappy lawyers, or do you want them defeated on the merits? I fear that the answer from the Slashdot crowd at large is "either way, doesn't matter" but I think that's a little intellectually dishonest.
Personally (and I don't think I'm alone in this) I want to see them defeated because of the tactics they are using. It's not so much that they have crappy lawyers (I couldn't say one way or the other), but that they are using crappy evidence in order to intimidate people into coughing up money. I couldn't say how many people who get hit with these lawsuits are *actually* infringing copyright. But what I can say with some conviction is that the evidence the RIAA is presenting should not be enough to decide the case. Couple that with the shotgun approach to selecting defendants (targets), and it really makes me want them shut down.
Many people on Slashdot (possibly even most) make their living from creating copyrighted works. The people here are in an interesting position of being creators *and* users. Many of us would prefer to see different business models emerge that make life better for users. This, despite the fact that we are creators (imagine that!). Given our position, I don't think it's terribly unusual that we have a bias against distributors, who are neither creators nor users. We would prefer that the link between creator and user be shortened -- to 0 if possible.
So while I understand your point, I think it's quite reasonable for many of us to despise the RIAAs tactics, fear their use of shoddy evidence *and* wish that they (and their ilk) disappear for good. From our perspective, life only gets better without the distribution cartels.
Why?
I'm not trying to be contrary, but I don't really see the point of wanting Microsoft to be one way or the other. Of course I'm happy if any person or organization helps me in an open and honest way. But I don't go around point fingers at specific entities and say, "I want you!"
I know many people believe that the industry revolves around Microsoft. But this is just an illusion. I think it is better for people to understand that there is work to be done and money to be made, with or without Microsoft's help. Things will not get magically better if Microsoft joins our side. There will always be someone else.
Concentrating on Microsoft means fighting against something we don't want. I'd rather be fighting *for* something I do want. And this means writing code, paying attention to government, and keeping our politicians honest, regardless of who might be influencing them.
There are a lot of important things to be done. Wooing Microsoft (or any other specific entity) to the side of OSS or Free Software is not one of them.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
You just saved me lots of frustration trying to figure out why my cable modem/router is "locking up" when I open up lots of connections.
For the last 4 or 5 years that I was programming for a living I maintained a portfolio. I wrote a small application (about 2000 lines of code). I followed my own personal process for implementing it. I kept the planning, specification and design artifacts (fairly lightweight since I prefer to do something similar to XP).
Then I chose a couple of interesting areas in the code and annotated them. I explained what I was doing, why I chose a particular design approach, some aspects of my personal coding style, etc, etc.
The whole thing took me a month or two of working on my own. Then a little bit of time to keep it up to date (based on what I continued to learn over the years). While it was a toy problem, I found the exercise extremely useful for my own personal development. And when I applied for jobs I gave a link to my portfolio on my resume. This gave people a really good idea of what they were getting if they were to hire me.
I highly recommend any programmer to do the same. It *is* a fair amount of work in the short term, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. It's not just about getting a job. It's also about really understanding your own personal style.
A teacher's job is not to tell the children what some people believe, his job is to teach what is known to be the most accurate theory in existence.
I disagree. A science teacher's job is to teach science. This means that they should educate their students on currently accepted scientific models and show how they fit into the scientific process.
I get frustrated hearing people talk about scientific models as if their accuracy can be measured. Their *predictability* can be measured. We don't have a clue what's *really* happening. And we don't have to in science.
The scientific process is about making models. We want the simplest model whose predictions can be observed. We value the simplest model, not because it's most likely to be true, but because it is simple. Who wants to use a complicated model when a simple model predicts everything that you can see?
ID fails as a scientific model in several respects. First *it makes no predictions*. So, as a scientific model, it is completely useless. "God did it" doesn't help me decide if I should try to wipe out the rabbits in Australia with a disease. There are lots of other problems with ID as a scientific theory. But you know what, I don't even go there because ID is not useful.
Now, I have absolutely *no* problem with someone teaching ID in a religion class. Religion is where we make believe that we understand how the universe really works. While we're at it, lets put the people who preach that our current scientific models is *actually* what's happening there too. Because that's just another religion.
As we can not directly observe the universe, we can say nothing (very much) about what is really there. We can say what we observe and we can predict what we will observe in the future, But that is not truth. It is, however, *useful* since our interaction with the universe is through our observations.
So to recap: Science is about making useful models. Religion is about conjecturing about the truth of the universe. Don't mix them up.
One potential solution (not without it's own problems of course) is to make another pigeon hole. If you accept that humans are beings with a group mentality, it starts to make sense to reason with them on a group basis. Instead of appealing to them on an individual basis, appeal to them using their built in methods of group communication.
We see this every day. You've got teenagers thinking that gangster rap is cool because the marketing machine of the music industry moved in. New collectives come and go frequently. Many are intentionally built.
I think we often view the manipulative actions of religion, government and business as being somewhat evil. Usually this is because when large groups of people are motivated, corrupt people can position themselves to take advantage of it.
But I wonder if this must always be the case. Can large groups of people be motivated, using well known, tried and true techniques (i.e., using the language they understand), but safeguarding it against abuse?
I'm sure everyone can think of at least one instance where this was supposed have taken place. It would be interesting to reflect upon whether it was successful and whether or not changes could be introduced to make it better.
If one were successful in finding an improvement, I suppose it would make sense to try to convince the masses of it's benefits...
Man I'm sleepy. I wonder if I'm even making sense.
I believe MS now owns a controlling share in the company now owning WP, IMHO mostly to prevent that WordPerfect gets ported to QT and becomes a multi-platform wordprocessor on both Windows, Linux and OSX.
No. MS bought 25% non-voting shares a few years ago for $135M dollars. Then they sold the shares to a venture capital company (Vector -- Paul Allen is one of the investors) for $13M (i.e. less than 10% of the original cost). The shares had a veto on acquisitions. Corel was in the process of trying to make several acquisitions when Vector threatened to squelch all the deals unless the board recommended a Vector buyout.
Vector ended up buying out the company for about $110M IIRC. However the company had about $65M in cash at the time, so the overall cost was $45M plus their initial $13M -- grand total of $58M. A little while ago, Vector did an IPO of 25% of the stock and got about $60M IIRC
M$ doesn't play stupid games to stop things from being ported. They play ridiculously Machiavelian games to make huge sums of cash for themselves and their friends.
P.S. I lost my job at Corel when my department was dissolved following the Vector takeover ;-)
Ha ha... I used to be a developer on Word Perfect :-). But I'm afraid that it too doesn't work nearly as well as I'd like (maybe I'm sensitive). However, the reveal codes certainly let you fix problems that crop up.
I've been a TeX user most of my working life. But since becoming a teacher, I've realized that I need a word processor for making pretty handouts. Each one of my handouts is layed out differently, so doing that in TeX was taking too much time.
But, OOWriter is driving me batty. Really, I just need to make numbered paragraphs with numbered points underneath. I need to be able to paste pretty clipart and wrap paragraphs around or through them. I need to be able to write Japanese text. And I need to be able to output PDF (optionally doc file format too).
It shouldn't be too bad. But OOWriter is insane. It keeps renumbering my paragraphs, seemingly randomly (and often between loads and saves). It changes my fonts on me (again often between loads and saves). I've tried to turn off every fricken' "auto" feature I can, but it still insists on guessing what I want (badly). I really do hate it.
So my question is, is there a very simple word processor that I can use to do simple construction and layout that does *nothing* automatically and works *every single time* without fucking up my formatting?
Yes :-) Certainly better than what I posted! To bad I can't rate up the people who respond to me...
I don't think anyone can really claim to own Bach's Brandenburg Concertos written almost 300 years ago.
You'd think so wouldn't you. But what they do is get an "expert" to reinterpret the score every few years. They write notes, modify some things, etc, etc. I'm not musician, so I can't really comment, but some musician friends of mine really believe that the "new" scores have value.
Anyway, these new reinterpretations have valid copyright. Yes, you can play the ones from 100 years ago, but as one of my friends said, "Why would you want to. They're horrible." Again, I can't really comment either way except to admit to "not getting it".
I'll say it up front to get it out of the way: IMHO Dual licensing in order to keep a closed version and an open version (which are different) is a bad idea in almost every case. Note: dual licensing to maintain compatibility to a wide variety of licenses is a *good* idea if you want lots of participation.
Having said that, I think I understand why companies choose to dual license (one closed, one open). They want to maintain a competitive advantage over their potential competitors, but don't trust their development team to give it to them. This often happens when they have structured the business side of the deal to get paid after the fact rather than before it. They do the traditional: decide what's good for the customer, build it, convince the customer that what they've built is good.
Open source software development (IMHO) works better when you get paid up front: get a customer, ask them what they want, build it. That way you are relying on your ability to outperform your competitors in *development* rather than product (even if what you are doing is integrating products that you didn't build).
So why would a company building in a proprietary fashion open up their code? I think it has a lot to do with the perception that open source people are "hobbyists". They allow their customers to tinker with the internals to do something cool, but hamstring them so that they can't make a product out of it. They think this will give them a cool "open source community" without having to give up the family jewels.
However, the reality of the situation is that people will either just ignore you or freeload off your open source version. In fact, most enterprises (which I think are the defacto customer you want to target) don't like to upgrade more then every 18 months or so. And they don't mind being 6-12 months behind the times. And if you refuse to allow them to contribute, they will happily not give you any code *or* money.
Anyway, this is my impression of it all. Surely there's more to it, but in the end I tend to stay away from projects like this simply because I don't trust them to stay around for too long...
"When is it acceptable to encourage users to accept a self-signed SSL cert?"
The answer is: Never.
What is the point of being sure that no one can intercept your communication all the way from your browser to the server if you don't know who you are talking to in the first place?
There is a big difference between knowing who I'm talking to and knowing that I'm talking to the same person I talked to last time. Most of the time I don't care about the former. Do I care that an author is who they say they are? Or do I care that they wrote a specific book?
Most of the time relationships (especially on the internet) are not dependent upon the actual identity of the person I'm talking to. They rely on the history that I've had with that person. And there are many times when I might want to have a secure conversation with someone, knowing that they are the person I talked to the day before. But I usually don't care what their identity is.
In the case of a sales transaction, I agree that knowing the identity of the person is useful (i.e., I know who to chase if the sale goes wrong). But to say that there are no cases where I want to have continued secure conversations with someone without knowing their identity is just plain wrong.
To give you an example, let's suppose I downloaded a piece of software off the internet. I notice that there is a patch to the software. I want some security that the patch is being distributed by the same person I got the software from in the first place. I have no interest in knowing that person's name, where they live, etc, etc, etc. I have a trust relationship with them already and I simply want to continue it.
My understanding is that it is the company that gets fined, not you. The idea (again, in my understanding) is that the company is failing you by not providing an environment where you can be healthy. Thus it should be fined.
But I can say for certain that it will be applicable to foreign workers. I'm living in Japan now and I have to jump through all the same hoops that the locals do (just did my yearly medical exam... not fun at all).
Right now I'm hovering at about 33 in. But I'm cut at 31 inches, so it's more difficult for me. Most of my colleagues could easily get down below 30 inches. Some of my foreign friends are really tall and muscular, so I wonder if they could get down below 33 in. at all (without shedding muscle).
Yes. 3D performance on Intel's open sourced i915 driver sucks (IMHO). I don't know if there are kernel developers who have free time. Many other aspects of the driver (and there are lots of them) are good. So I'm not complaining in general. Just specifically about 3D performance.
The open source driver was written and maintained by a company on contract with Intel. Intel pays them to do the work. I'm not aware of any unpaid developers on this project (at least long term ones). AFAICT their goals do not include good 3D performance. They are mostly interested in adding code for the latest hardware that's coming out and and making sure that all the more regular features work on all manufacturer's mother boards (things like TV out, monitor rotation, etc, etc).
Like I said, I don't blame them for poor 3D performance. If you look at the code, most of it is geared toward other priorities. They get paid to do what they're asked to do.
The issue is that there are *not enough* cooks in the kitchen. Lately, some progress has been made in improving 3D performance. But there's a long way to go IMHO. We need to get more programmers working on it and show that open source development is a viable model.
What can we say when one of the most vaunted open source drivers really is lacking in such an obvious area? What will convince other manufacturers that open sourcing their drivers will result in something that will show off their hardware in a good light?
I think the answer to this is to do what we do best which is to write code.
I actually did this, I guess.
Quit my job as a programmer. Sold my car and house. Gave up my dogs. Gave away all my possessions (Well, what wouldn't fit into a backpack, anyway -- kept a laptop of course!) Hmm... kept the money -- handy stuff, money. Then I moved to Japan to teach English.
Honestly, I did this because over the years I've found that when I had more stuff, it was just a burden. I realized I was actually happier with less stuff. I'm living on very little money now (about $1200 a month, total) and I'm surprisingly OK with it. It's been 1 year and I don't miss my old lifestyle one bit (OK... I miss pizza -- Don't come to Japan for the pizza...)
I've got a few things here. I've got a fairly decent bicycle. I've got a laptop. I've got a nice suit. I've got a fairly nice kitchen knife. I've got a nice rain coat. Hmm... the rest is just odds and ends that don't really matter, or stuff that came with the apartment. Oh, and a mountain of manga :-) Note to self: must dispose of manga...
So if you want to do it, then come on it -- the water's fine. However, I recommend practicing giving stuff up for a while. I gave away stuff for years before I made the plunge. Just to see if I would really miss it. It was actually tough at first. But eventually it didn't matter to me any more.
One thing that I've started realizing lately is that we need to improve the open source drivers that we already have. This may give companies more incentive to open their own drivers.
For example, we are all happy about the free software drivers that Intel provides for the i950, etc graphics chipsets. However, there are still some significant 3D performance issues with this driver. I don't blame the team working on it because they have other important priorities. However, it is a fact that games run many times faster on Windows with this chipset than in X (and I'm not just talking about Wine games). Games like Vegastrike just don't run acceptably in X on a i945GM box -- and it should be able to handle this game easily.
If we could pick a few drivers that need help and make them indisputably good, this might provide incentive for companies to support our efforts.
I would be happy to start working on the the Intel graphics driver with an aim to improving its 3D performance. However, even though I have 20 years of application development, I'm a newbie at driver development. I don't know where to start. If anyone can point me in the right direction.... Even if it takes me a really long time to make any improvement, I'll at least be another pair of eyes.
Ha ha! Thanks for that.
And I'm teaching English too. I guess I'd better start learning! Luckily, about the most difficult thing I'm teaching at the moment is "The dog is brown"!
I just started teaching this year. I'm not young either. I gave up my programming job to teach English to Japanese students.
/. we love to complain about bad programmers who can hide in a large organization, spewing out horrible code while management gives them raises. But think about teaching for a bit. Here you have a profession where the success of the students (and hence the teacher) can literally be manipulated by the teacher. You can intentionally give them questions they can't answer (because you never taught them) or you can give them all the answers to the test the day before.
Here on
So to combat this you get standardized testing. If too many people fail the standard tests, then the teacher is bad. But what does that do? It means that the smart teacher will teach only what's on the test. And they will ensure that each student can score well on the test, ability be damned. It's all about the test.
This creates a curriculum which is meaningless. Just a bunch of hoops to jump through in order for the teacher to get their bonus (they get bonuses here in Japan... Does that happen other places?) Got a bright student that actually wants to learn something relevant? -- "Shut up kid. Talking to you costs me my bonus. You can already pass the test." Got a student struggling that needs to understand? -- "Just frickin' memorize this damn thing, OK? I don't care that you can't use it in real life. You only need it for the exam. Got it?"
The gaming potential here is enormous. I'm actually surprised that my school doesn't operate like that. Although we are one of the lowest ranked schools in the prefecture. So perhaps lack of need to achieve test results makes life better here. Most of the teachers are amazing, actually.
But it really begs the question. How the hell do you measure the success of teachers? They hold all the cards and there's no obvious objective measure that I can see....
Probably this will never be seen by anyone. But oh well....
Programming is a work of writing. Sure, it's written in a strange language. Sure it's constrained by having to actually do something useful. But from an asthetic point of view, it's still just writing.
What is good writing in English? If you can come up with a sound bite that is concise, exhaustive and true, then you are a great person. The same is true for programming.
You can find *examples* of good writing. You can argue if it is really good or not (and everyone will have their opinion). But this is not something you can define easily (or possibly at all).
If I were you I'd go from the exact opposite direction. I'd look for good design. Then I'd talk to the people who wrote it. I'd ask them, "What do you think is important in order to create good design". Then I'd write down what they said.
Finally, I would start a practice of design criticism. Review design. Write about it. Start a dialog with others.
In other words, do what English PhD candidates are doing...
Having worked in a software company that sold to the retail market, I'm going to guess the real reason for this is distribution.
Retail is hard. In fact it's ridiculously hard -- and expensive. I'm going to come out and say that the majority of the problem is the retail system itself. Large retail chains basically extort money. "Pay us X amount of money or you may unfortunately find your title on the bottom shelf of the last row, with the front of the box facing the wrong way."
And then the distributors extort money. "Pay us X amount of money or you may unfortunately find that your title will be sold exclusively through Harold's House of Homoerotica & Other Software".
And there is basically no competition (everybody having been muscled out previously, I guess). So the store makes 200% profit and the distributor makes 500% profit (or some other such ridiculous numbers). So not much money makes it back to the producer.
Often a software house will focus on only one market simply because it is so expensive (with real up front cash involved) to sell to retail. Then, if it is successful they will release to another market. But they don't work so hard in the other markets because they are busy on the next release of software in their primary market. So they just try to lock in a modest profit and allow the distributors and retailers to rape the customer.
I'm a programmer, though. This is just what I gleaned from talking to the sales guys at our company (which was trying to find *any* way to get out of the retail business because they were losing so much money in it).
It's funny how people think that selling natural resources is a good idea. I always think back to the days when I used to play empire. Most servers had a casual rule against "tech trading".
With tech trading, one country would sell it's natural resources in order to buy high tech finished products from another country. Why was this practice banned? It's such a bad practice for the country selling it's resources. Not only do you not improve your own technology level, but you also become dependent upon a foreign source for goods manufacturing infrastructure. Countries who did this *always* made an early exit from the game (which made the game boring).
Unfortunately, I come from Canada -- one of the richest countries in the world, resource wise. And one of the countries with the poorest infrastructure around. And people *still* say we don't need meat packing plants or sawmills because the Americans already have everything set up. Sigh...
OK. It doesn't change your ratio, but the cost of running seemed to be way more expensive than I would have anticipated. And then I realized that cooked corn is considerably heavier than dried corn (which is what they are quoting for bushels).
According the the USDA nutrient database (http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/cgi-bin/list_nut_edit.pl), whole grain cornmeal is 362 kcal per 100g, or about 91952 kcal per bushel. This gives 66.6 miles per bushel or about 6.4 cents per mile. That seems a bit more reasonable, but still bigger than I expected.
I'd hate to think that running was more expensive than driving (which seems to be about 10 cents a mile in the US, from what I can tell...)
I believe Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE4.0 is also *known* to be unstable and there is a suggestion to use KDE3.5 if you want things to work (unless things have changed in the last few weeks). I know a few people have gotten bitten by this one.