As I said, if you're happy pluggin away at your small, web bound project in PHP then that's fine. Meanwhile those of us you can handle the Javas, Junits and sound methodologies will continue to earn the big bucks writing the large, scalable systems that you can't.
I started by saying that whatever was best in the corporate environment, is completely irrelevant for what is best for the open source community. I maintain this position.
Oh, by the way, I've been a corporate whore myself, so you don't need to lecture me about methodologies. I've already taken corporate whoring 101, and unlike you, I know the difference between methodology and bureaucracy. If you want to brag about money, find somebody who's interested.
Well, compared to e.g. PHP, I believe java starts to smell expensive. You don't need to have all these fancy acronyms starting with the letter "J", just to build a website. Java equals more work than most scripting languages, meaning higher costs. Luckily, nobody builds websites in C++.
As for hiring cheap inexperienced coders, having them stick to the fashion-of-the-week "best practices" (is it still Agile that's the buzzword in corporate circles?), and so on... Well, it's not the best way. But yeah, it's a predictable way, and it means you are able to plan, predict and budget for mediocre performance, which is what corporate bureaucracies are best at anyway. So it's maybe not the worst way either. At least corporate bureaucracies are able to get something done, which isn't always the case when you take the bureaucracy away from a corporation. And obviously java has more neat stuff going for it in a corporate environment, than C#.
But hey, I wasn't talking about choosing a language or platform for corporate use.
Sure. That can be said of any conspiracy theory. But we don't need a conspiracy theory for it. Linux haven't got standardized APIs for GUI programming because there are more than one group/person/whatever working on it.
Refute my points if you want to and if you have the info, but attacking me? That's so catholic church-like.
Yeah, I'm probably paid by Icaza to make fun of you. And the catholic church is probably into it too, all paid by Microsoft.
I fail to see why it's even relevant what the Fortune 500 companies are running on their websites. Presumably, java solutions are expensive, that's why Fortune 500 companies need to have java-backed websites. It's the fashion right now. (And besides, their CEOs have probably not heard of other languages)
For open source, we should instead try to focus on what is the best system. If I had to choose between java and mono, it would certainly be mono. C# can do everything java can. Java can't do everything C# can. Neither of the APIs are fantastic. End of story.
Ok, I've finished analyzing your thoughts. It goes like this:
I'm a linux fanboy, I know linux is best
I don't like Microsoft
Linux isn't succeeding on the desktop
One possible reason for failed linux desktop dominance is lack of API standardization
Icaza is a prominent linux developer
Icaza isn't completely negative towards everything from Microsoft
Therefore: There must be a conspiracy by Microsoft to lure linux developers into creating competing APIs. Icaza must be paid by Microsoft to do this
Personally, I think the current situation is better explained without resorting to conspiracy theories. But then again, the moon landing might have been fake...
Take GNOME, for instance. When GNOME was first established, KDE was already the premiere OSS desktop environment. There were some minor licensing issues,
Uhm, at that time, there was no good OSS desktop environment. Sure, KDE existed. So did a bunch of others (e.g. Gnustep, CDE, various fvwm-based shit, etc...). They all sucked. KDE may have sucked a little bit less than some others, but it was far from obvious that it was what everybody should bet on (if it was, everybody would have done just that). And the licensing issues seemed pretty unsolvable at the time. It is doubtful whether Trolltech would have caved in, if it wasn't for the rise in interest in GNOME.
Even today, we still see that GNOME has not yet caught up to KDE.
GNOME has never been about "catching up" to KDE. When GNOME was started, KDE was ignored out of political and philosophical grounds. Since then, both GNOME and KDE has gone out of their way to emulate Microsoft Windows. Sure, some ideas might have been brought from KDE to GNOME, or in the other direction, but for the most part, ideas have been stolen from more successful commercial products, not from some hobbyist open source desktop project.
And then we have Mono, the subject of this Slashdot topic. Again, so much valuable time and effort has been wasted on creating a product that really is of no benefit to the OSS community.
In my opinion, Mono has a lot to offer the OSS community. Does that make one of us wrong? Yes. Is it me? No. Just because you don't find any use for it, doesn't mean that it's useless. Personally, I find C++ to be pretty useless, but I don't go around blaming the gcc developers for spending their time writing a compiler for it. And if it wasn't for gcc supporting C++, there would be no KDE either.
Just imagine how much further along projects like KDE, Python, Perl, and Ruby would be if effort and expertise hadn't been wastefully siphoned off to GNOME and Mono.
I have lots of trouble imagining that just because people stopped developing Mono, there would magically appear lots of worthwhile contributions to KDE, Python, Perl and Ruby instead. People work on what they want, not what you want.
And if you want to drive on the left side of the road, you are free to do so as long as you also accept that farm animals are not treated humanly? Your compromise makes about as much sense...
The big problem about starting a mythology in the 20th century is that
Nobody understands how mythologies develop, not even old English professors
Oral story-telling tradition is dead. It died with the invention of the printing press, bright lights to read in, and TV and radio.
Even assuming that old English professors understand how to create a new mythology, there are lots of English professors, and thus there would still not be one big mythology to unite people
Oh, and there are a few big differences between oral story-telling tradition and fan-fiction:
If somebody lacks talent, nobody will ask them to tell stories (in fact, they are most likely being told to shut up)
Oral story-tellers may experiment by making small changes to stories each time they tell them
In an oral tradition, it doesn't matter whether the story is invented by you or somebody else, or if it's in the original form or changed, or whatever, as long as it's exciting
In oral tradition, you are not limited to a given universe (e.g. Tolkiens or Spidermans), you can still invent freely, as long as the result is better than without it
In oral tradition, most listeners are not furries
In short, you need a seriously warped mind to believe that an english professor can sit down for fifty years and create in written form the equivalent of millennia of oral story-telling around the campfire. His attention to detail and consistency is a testament to that (something that typically lacks in most real-world mythologies). And if you want greek mythology, you know where to find it.
Furthermore, Tolkien intended his writings to form the basis of a mythology for the British Isles' peoples.
And in that respect, he was a raving madman.
Many lands and their peoples have mythologies.
Like that one about King Arthur and the knights of the round table. (Or Tolkiens own favourite: Beowulf)
If Ovid's son wrote stories that were intended to be part of the Roman mythology, nobody would have criticized him for "just trying to make a buck off of his father's work".
Yes, they would. Especially if what he wrote was essentially badly edited discarded manuscripts of his father. And if he made the publisher print the family name in large letters on the spine, and discard his personal name. And the Romans had a system of royalties for published works. And the Romans had a printing press.
If Tolkien had succeeded in truly creating a British mythology
He did. In fact, he succeeded in creating a worldwide mythology. Just like many other writers before him (and after him). If you mention Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Mordor, or Sauron to a random person, he/she will instantly recognize it, just as if you had mentioned King Arthur, Spiderman, or Adam and Eve.
, then dozens of British people would be contributing to it all the time.
This unfortunate phenomenon is known as fan-fiction. You'd better not ask for more of it.
Over the centuries, most of their works would likely fade away, but they would not properly be criticized for "trying to make a buck off of Tolkien's work", they would be applauded for contributing to their national mythos.
I ask you, which is worse, trying to capitalize on your parent's fortune or just sitting back and inheriting it and acting like a spoiled brat? At least he's tryiing to actually work, even if it's not all original. Some people wouldn't even bother working and just collect royalties.
And there would be no other way for Christopher Tolkien to work, than to look through his fathers' old manuscripts, and run to a publisher? It's not like Christopher could become a mailman, or kindergarten teacher, or astronaut, or computer programmer or something?
(And it's not like he's not still collecting his fathers royalties, so I fail to get your point in that respect as well).
Personally, I would prefer that all those unpublished manuscripts remained just that: unpublished. If his father had really wanted the Silmarillion published, he had 25 years to do that between LoTR was published, and his death. Christopher used 4.
Oh, and by the way, Tolkien pretty much despised his greatest fans. That probably includes you.
I agree that if there was a language called "O'Caml, Lisp", then it would probably have a horrible syntax. On the other hand, lisp has a clean beautiful syntax. O'Caml has a syntax that is at least no worse than e.g. C++ or java.
There was no such thing as "(g)cc compilers". If that expression is to have any meaning, it would be any vendor supplied C/C++ compiler on a unix system and/or the gcc compiler. In that case it's untrue. Some compilers, such as CFront, originally compiled C++ to C. Today almost all compilers, such as gcc, compile C++ to native code.
In theory writing good multi-threaded code shouldn't be much harder than designing good OO code
Which theory?
OO is just an aesthetic quality of code, so basically single-threaded OO code is to single-threaded code, as proper paragraph breaks are to a block of text. On the other hand, multi-threaded code opens up a can of worms. There are whole new classes of bugs to be avoided, and most of them can NOT be found by inspecting code locally.
If you're willing to let go of shared state concurrency and think in terms of message passing then things get much easier.
Yeah, yeah, lots of paradigms are supposed to make concurrency easier. And message-passing is nice. It's still not easier than single-threaded code, though...
If tht's too much trouble then try SCOOP for Eiffel
SCOOP, like all concurrent programming models, has all kinds of unexpected non-intuitive quirks. It's not easier than single-threaded programming.
Thousands threads for sure scale are a lot better then when you just have two or four or whatever, since with thousands you don't really have an upper limit of how many CPU you want to throw at the problem.
Yes, the upper limit is thousand(s)! Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Seriously, with companies already offering 4 cores per CPU, and promising to offer 16 cores in the near future, and Moores law being as it is, you don't exactly have to be a visionary to predict that the future might bring a shitload(TM) of processor cores to somewhere in your vicinity. Note that a shitload(TM) is more than a few measly thousands. Oh, and before you start telling me that nobody needs a shitload(TM) of processor cores, remember that nobody needed more than 640K RAM either.
The real issue with threads is that OS threads are extremely slow, so you can't have thousands threads or your machine would go to a crawl.
OS threads aren't necessarily slow (I assume you mean switching between them). If this is at all true, it is an artificial limitation of current hardware/software combos that can be easily fixed (at least the fix is much easier than the work involved in creating shitload-core CPUs). Note that the cost of OS-threads, user-space threads, and OS processes vary wildly among different systems already. But shared memory really needs to go. It just doesn't scale.
However for both these issues there exist solutions, namely Erlang, using user-level threads
Last time I checked, Erlang used only user-space threads, meaning that even if you had a shitload(TM) of cores, a given Erlang program would only use one of them. Erlang focuses on modelling, not performance. I suspect there to be good ideas in Erlang, but it's not going to be the system programming language of the next century.
Hope that unlike the HTML/Javascript/CSS soup we have now, this technology is designed from the ground up with security in mind.
I find that most of the time, the security problems don't come from anything to do with HTML/CSS/Javascript, but have more to do with web programmers who don't understand the implications of putting a database driven application online for anybody in the world to use,
And you feel this is somehow an excuse for not creating or using tools that are designed with security in mind?
Uhm, java applets and even java as a cross-platform GUI platform died almost a decade ago, precisely because the performance was so rotten. On the other hand, for some reason, java became the platform of choice for applications where even BASIC would remain portable: middleware.
One could argue that HTML is the most powerful language around: What other language has had as much influence on society in the last 15 years? What other language allows someone with 0 programming skills/experience to create an "app" that can be accessed by millions of people in 10 minutes?
Plain old text files has done the same for decades.
(I have never seen an "app" created in HTML, the "app"s you talk about are typically created using many tools, including HTML, javascript, and some server-side scripting language. This is beyond ordinary people, and even beyond many traditional programmers who haven't bothered to understand web "technologies". In fact, even HTML takes time to learn, someone with 0 programming skills/experience can often use many days simply to "get" how tags work.)
Is so small I don't even notice the lump where it's surgically placed inside my body. It runs on electricity generated within my body by consuming fat. It interfaces directly with my nervous system, and can do nifty tasks such as recording and playback of all sensory input, visual overlays over real world data, etc... It is immensively powerful, and won't need an upgrade for several life-times. It has easy-to-use software that is both intuitive (reacts to your reflexes), easy to learn, and hacker friendly. It must communicate with everything (e.g. GSM/GPRS/3G, wireless networks, TCP/IP, GPS, morse-code, whatever), yet still be perfectly secure.
You may want to check your facts on HIV. The chances of spreading the virus via saliva alone are extremely slim.
Ok, but what if you've got a small sore in your mouth somewhere? (lips, inside of cheeks, gums, etc). The probability is small, but if it happens, you've just gained HIV from helping someone. (I'm assuming here that it's a 100% chance of the victim having a sore somewhere in the mouth, as that has been the case with almost every drug addict OD'ing I've found so far).
If you are backpacking, the general idea should be to carry as little as possible. You need one pair of good shoes, a backpack, comfortable pants, water-repellant jacket, underwear (wool is a good choice as it smells less, and is easy to handwash), silk bed liner, soap, disinfectant, sports tape, water filter, sunglasses, sunscreen, cellphone with charger/adapter, money/credit cards, passport/visas, and tickets. Anything beyond that is optional (well, depending on location, e.g. Antarctica requires some warm clothes, a jungle would require insect repellent, and swimwear is often nice to have, but you get the idea).
Remember, backpacking does usually not mean taking a cab from the airport to the hotel. If it does, then forget what I said, but travelling light has definite advantages for almost anywhere you choose to go; it is easier to carry, less stuff break, and less stuff get stolen. If you want to carry more, try some of these: a travel guide, compass, gps, camera, book, deck of cards, sudoku-puzzles, mp3-player, portable electronic game, etc... Depending on your travelling style/budget, you might also find a use for a sleeping bag, insect net, tent, and/or cooking gear.
I see very little purpose for bringing a fragile, heavy, easily stolen laptop anywhere in the world, unless you are there to work. Any internet café will have access to both gmail and your bank, and that's all you're going to need anyway.
Researchers in England are attempting to build a desktop computer that runs on light rather than electronics.
No, they aren't! The article didn't mention desktop computers at all. As expected, this is basic research on photonics. The researchers are nowhere closer to build a desktop computer that run on light, than they are to build a desktop computer that runs on steam and valves. Whether it is the submitters or editors who are idiots is hard to tell, but my guess is that both of them would score pretty well on that scale! Maybe we should build desktop computers of them?
Slashdot Mirror
No. KDE 4.0 is not the holy grail of desktops. Anything else you wondered about?
Why? Wouldn't it be enough to switch just one time?
I started by saying that whatever was best in the corporate environment, is completely irrelevant for what is best for the open source community. I maintain this position.
Oh, by the way, I've been a corporate whore myself, so you don't need to lecture me about methodologies. I've already taken corporate whoring 101, and unlike you, I know the difference between methodology and bureaucracy. If you want to brag about money, find somebody who's interested.
Well, compared to e.g. PHP, I believe java starts to smell expensive. You don't need to have all these fancy acronyms starting with the letter "J", just to build a website. Java equals more work than most scripting languages, meaning higher costs. Luckily, nobody builds websites in C++.
As for hiring cheap inexperienced coders, having them stick to the fashion-of-the-week "best practices" (is it still Agile that's the buzzword in corporate circles?), and so on... Well, it's not the best way. But yeah, it's a predictable way, and it means you are able to plan, predict and budget for mediocre performance, which is what corporate bureaucracies are best at anyway. So it's maybe not the worst way either. At least corporate bureaucracies are able to get something done, which isn't always the case when you take the bureaucracy away from a corporation. And obviously java has more neat stuff going for it in a corporate environment, than C#.
But hey, I wasn't talking about choosing a language or platform for corporate use.
Sure. That can be said of any conspiracy theory. But we don't need a conspiracy theory for it. Linux haven't got standardized APIs for GUI programming because there are more than one group/person/whatever working on it.
Yeah, I'm probably paid by Icaza to make fun of you. And the catholic church is probably into it too, all paid by Microsoft.
I fail to see why it's even relevant what the Fortune 500 companies are running on their websites. Presumably, java solutions are expensive, that's why Fortune 500 companies need to have java-backed websites. It's the fashion right now. (And besides, their CEOs have probably not heard of other languages)
For open source, we should instead try to focus on what is the best system. If I had to choose between java and mono, it would certainly be mono. C# can do everything java can. Java can't do everything C# can. Neither of the APIs are fantastic. End of story.
Therefore: There must be a conspiracy by Microsoft to lure linux developers into creating competing APIs. Icaza must be paid by Microsoft to do this
Personally, I think the current situation is better explained without resorting to conspiracy theories. But then again, the moon landing might have been fake...
Uhm, at that time, there was no good OSS desktop environment. Sure, KDE existed. So did a bunch of others (e.g. Gnustep, CDE, various fvwm-based shit, etc...). They all sucked. KDE may have sucked a little bit less than some others, but it was far from obvious that it was what everybody should bet on (if it was, everybody would have done just that). And the licensing issues seemed pretty unsolvable at the time. It is doubtful whether Trolltech would have caved in, if it wasn't for the rise in interest in GNOME.
GNOME has never been about "catching up" to KDE. When GNOME was started, KDE was ignored out of political and philosophical grounds. Since then, both GNOME and KDE has gone out of their way to emulate Microsoft Windows. Sure, some ideas might have been brought from KDE to GNOME, or in the other direction, but for the most part, ideas have been stolen from more successful commercial products, not from some hobbyist open source desktop project.
In my opinion, Mono has a lot to offer the OSS community. Does that make one of us wrong? Yes. Is it me? No. Just because you don't find any use for it, doesn't mean that it's useless. Personally, I find C++ to be pretty useless, but I don't go around blaming the gcc developers for spending their time writing a compiler for it. And if it wasn't for gcc supporting C++, there would be no KDE either.
I have lots of trouble imagining that just because people stopped developing Mono, there would magically appear lots of worthwhile contributions to KDE, Python, Perl and Ruby instead. People work on what they want, not what you want.
Huh?
And if you want to drive on the left side of the road, you are free to do so as long as you also accept that farm animals are not treated humanly? Your compromise makes about as much sense...
The big problem about starting a mythology in the 20th century is that
Oh, and there are a few big differences between oral story-telling tradition and fan-fiction:
In short, you need a seriously warped mind to believe that an english professor can sit down for fifty years and create in written form the equivalent of millennia of oral story-telling around the campfire. His attention to detail and consistency is a testament to that (something that typically lacks in most real-world mythologies). And if you want greek mythology, you know where to find it.
And in that respect, he was a raving madman.
Like that one about King Arthur and the knights of the round table. (Or Tolkiens own favourite: Beowulf)
Yes, they would. Especially if what he wrote was essentially badly edited discarded manuscripts of his father. And if he made the publisher print the family name in large letters on the spine, and discard his personal name. And the Romans had a system of royalties for published works. And the Romans had a printing press.
He did. In fact, he succeeded in creating a worldwide mythology. Just like many other writers before him (and after him). If you mention Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Mordor, or Sauron to a random person, he/she will instantly recognize it, just as if you had mentioned King Arthur, Spiderman, or Adam and Eve.
This unfortunate phenomenon is known as fan-fiction. You'd better not ask for more of it.
Most fan-fiction is actually silently ignored.
And there would be no other way for Christopher Tolkien to work, than to look through his fathers' old manuscripts, and run to a publisher? It's not like Christopher could become a mailman, or kindergarten teacher, or astronaut, or computer programmer or something?
(And it's not like he's not still collecting his fathers royalties, so I fail to get your point in that respect as well).
Personally, I would prefer that all those unpublished manuscripts remained just that: unpublished. If his father had really wanted the Silmarillion published, he had 25 years to do that between LoTR was published, and his death. Christopher used 4.
Oh, and by the way, Tolkien pretty much despised his greatest fans. That probably includes you.
Or work in the cold? Or be simpler to use than plugging in my charger?
If not so, why would I even be interested? Fuel cells running alcohol, gasoline, or LPG, sounds like a much better idea.
I agree that if there was a language called "O'Caml, Lisp", then it would probably have a horrible syntax. On the other hand, lisp has a clean beautiful syntax. O'Caml has a syntax that is at least no worse than e.g. C++ or java.
There was no such thing as "(g)cc compilers". If that expression is to have any meaning, it would be any vendor supplied C/C++ compiler on a unix system and/or the gcc compiler. In that case it's untrue. Some compilers, such as CFront, originally compiled C++ to C. Today almost all compilers, such as gcc, compile C++ to native code.
Which theory?
OO is just an aesthetic quality of code, so basically single-threaded OO code is to single-threaded code, as proper paragraph breaks are to a block of text. On the other hand, multi-threaded code opens up a can of worms. There are whole new classes of bugs to be avoided, and most of them can NOT be found by inspecting code locally.
Yeah, yeah, lots of paradigms are supposed to make concurrency easier. And message-passing is nice. It's still not easier than single-threaded code, though...
SCOOP, like all concurrent programming models, has all kinds of unexpected non-intuitive quirks. It's not easier than single-threaded programming.
Yes, the upper limit is thousand(s)! Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Seriously, with companies already offering 4 cores per CPU, and promising to offer 16 cores in the near future, and Moores law being as it is, you don't exactly have to be a visionary to predict that the future might bring a shitload(TM) of processor cores to somewhere in your vicinity. Note that a shitload(TM) is more than a few measly thousands. Oh, and before you start telling me that nobody needs a shitload(TM) of processor cores, remember that nobody needed more than 640K RAM either.
OS threads aren't necessarily slow (I assume you mean switching between them). If this is at all true, it is an artificial limitation of current hardware/software combos that can be easily fixed (at least the fix is much easier than the work involved in creating shitload-core CPUs). Note that the cost of OS-threads, user-space threads, and OS processes vary wildly among different systems already. But shared memory really needs to go. It just doesn't scale.
Last time I checked, Erlang used only user-space threads, meaning that even if you had a shitload(TM) of cores, a given Erlang program would only use one of them. Erlang focuses on modelling, not performance. I suspect there to be good ideas in Erlang, but it's not going to be the system programming language of the next century.
And you feel this is somehow an excuse for not creating or using tools that are designed with security in mind?
Uhm, java applets and even java as a cross-platform GUI platform died almost a decade ago, precisely because the performance was so rotten. On the other hand, for some reason, java became the platform of choice for applications where even BASIC would remain portable: middleware.
Plain old text files has done the same for decades.
(I have never seen an "app" created in HTML, the "app"s you talk about are typically created using many tools, including HTML, javascript, and some server-side scripting language. This is beyond ordinary people, and even beyond many traditional programmers who haven't bothered to understand web "technologies". In fact, even HTML takes time to learn, someone with 0 programming skills/experience can often use many days simply to "get" how tags work.)
Is so small I don't even notice the lump where it's surgically placed inside my body. It runs on electricity generated within my body by consuming fat. It interfaces directly with my nervous system, and can do nifty tasks such as recording and playback of all sensory input, visual overlays over real world data, etc... It is immensively powerful, and won't need an upgrade for several life-times. It has easy-to-use software that is both intuitive (reacts to your reflexes), easy to learn, and hacker friendly. It must communicate with everything (e.g. GSM/GPRS/3G, wireless networks, TCP/IP, GPS, morse-code, whatever), yet still be perfectly secure.
Ok, but what if you've got a small sore in your mouth somewhere? (lips, inside of cheeks, gums, etc). The probability is small, but if it happens, you've just gained HIV from helping someone. (I'm assuming here that it's a 100% chance of the victim having a sore somewhere in the mouth, as that has been the case with almost every drug addict OD'ing I've found so far).
...and a towel. Never go anywhere in the world without a towel!
If you are backpacking, the general idea should be to carry as little as possible. You need one pair of good shoes, a backpack, comfortable pants, water-repellant jacket, underwear (wool is a good choice as it smells less, and is easy to handwash), silk bed liner, soap, disinfectant, sports tape, water filter, sunglasses, sunscreen, cellphone with charger/adapter, money/credit cards, passport/visas, and tickets. Anything beyond that is optional (well, depending on location, e.g. Antarctica requires some warm clothes, a jungle would require insect repellent, and swimwear is often nice to have, but you get the idea).
Remember, backpacking does usually not mean taking a cab from the airport to the hotel. If it does, then forget what I said, but travelling light has definite advantages for almost anywhere you choose to go; it is easier to carry, less stuff break, and less stuff get stolen. If you want to carry more, try some of these: a travel guide, compass, gps, camera, book, deck of cards, sudoku-puzzles, mp3-player, portable electronic game, etc... Depending on your travelling style/budget, you might also find a use for a sleeping bag, insect net, tent, and/or cooking gear.
I see very little purpose for bringing a fragile, heavy, easily stolen laptop anywhere in the world, unless you are there to work. Any internet café will have access to both gmail and your bank, and that's all you're going to need anyway.
No, they aren't! The article didn't mention desktop computers at all. As expected, this is basic research on photonics. The researchers are nowhere closer to build a desktop computer that run on light, than they are to build a desktop computer that runs on steam and valves. Whether it is the submitters or editors who are idiots is hard to tell, but my guess is that both of them would score pretty well on that scale! Maybe we should build desktop computers of them?