the Photoshop people on Mac seem perfectly happy without MDI and no one says PS on Mac sucks because of it.
On the contrary, all Mac apps are inherently MDI. It's just MDI done right, with the menu bar always on top of the screen, and no silly main window encompassing the document windows and covering everything else up.
Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Aqua and brushed metal looks from Mac OS X the menus now appear to operate more like a tab popping-out the right toolbar instead of a sub-menu.
And as usual, they manage to not only steal the Apple look but do everything to cheapen it and make it look as ugly as possible. Is there really nobody within the Microsoft moloch who has some feeling for style?
The biggest threat to Google is its own hiring practices.
As long as they hire people whose job it is to contribute then they'll
be ok. The second that they start hiring "strategic thinkers" and
"efficiency experts" then they're in trouble.
Furthermore, if RMS wants people to be remembered, he should fight for everyone to be remembered, whether he agrees with their development model or not.
Which is why he advocates for the system to be called GNU/Linux and not plainly GNU. Makes sense to me.
Parent is insightful, not flamebait. For a good example of what happens when science and enlightenment are replaced by theology and repression, just look at the Middle East. The Arab world was the cornerstone of world civilization in the Middle Ages -- they invented the zero, we still use Arabic digits, they were astronomers and mathematicians, and they initiated the Renaissance by preserving ancient Greek and Roman writings. But they let all that slip and became mostly a bunch of backward theocracies instead. America is next if it continues on this road.
The consciousness or unconsciousness of your "will" is immaterial -- it is the directedness and drive that are objectionable.
Sorry, but there is a directedness and a drive. The directedness is the survival of the fittest. The drive is every organism's will to live (if you deny the existence of that, try to go and jump off a bridge - oh, don't want to? thought so). Evolution necessarily cannot exist without these two. The use of the word "will" as an analogy/shorthand is therefore quite appropriate.
This is completely wrong. Source code, by its very nature, is self documenting (that is, source code provides "essential information about what it does" by it's mere existence; maybe you don't write code?).
That may be true in some theoretical or academic sense, but it doesn't hold out in practise, especially not where a huge, complex and hairy thing like a web rendering engine is concerned which needs to account to millions of different incompatibilities and quirks, and then even less if the code itself is written in a messy way.
I've written enough code in my life to realize that understanding someone else's uncommented spaghetti code (or your own, two weeks later) is more work than writing it from scratch yourself.
(This is to all the respondents -- I don't mean to single you out.)
Whoa. Did I touch a few nerves there, or something?
I said basic clue. Sheesh! You do have to learn to cook first before you start handling a stove, or you'll burn yourself and/or the house. You don't need to be a chef to cook, or a computer scientist to use a computer -- but you do need to have some basic idea of what you're doing, and what's more, if you're an adult, you're responsible for having some kind of basic idea of what you're doing!
But that kind of subtlety appears lost on you guys. Or maybe that "responsibility" thingy is just out of fashion (except, of course, when the Slashbot army bitches about parents who let their kids watch TV or play games). I guess you don't like driver's licenses either, after all, cars should be usable without any kind of basic instruction, never mind that not understanding the traffic rules is fatal. It's easier just to blame "the engineers" (what a nice and convenient nameless entity) so that Joe Sixpack does not have to feel the need to take responsibility for his actions. Meanwhile, their computers happily keep crapping in my inbox. Nice going, bozos.
Goodger went on to say the open source community could not accuse Apple of breaching any licences.
I would not be so sure of that. I seem to recall that the GPL defines source code as the "preferred form" of the program for making modifications of it. If Apple "comments" its patches by referring to numbers in a proprietary bug database to which only they have access, Apple could be accused of intentionally obfuscating its source code, which is a violation of the "preferred form" clause in the GPL. In any case, it's ethically wrong because the free-software concept is meaningless if the provided source code is not realistically usable without having access to essential information about what it does.
It was important, he said, realise that "no software is ever perfect".
Secondly, developers should prioritise releasing their products on time, even if they "may have to cut corners".
Gee, that sounds eerily familiar. Where have I heard it before, that "give Joe Sixpack what he wants and damn software quality" attitude? Marketing fluff at the expense of solidity and security? Oh right, of course, that's the attitude that brought us the virus propagation engine that is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Is it any wonder that Firefox is now on its way along the same route?
"Most developers probably don't alienate people intentionally... Over time, software has come to demand an impossibly high level of computer literacy," the Firefox creator wrote.
Ridiculous. The use of software is demanding less computer literacy by the year -- compare today to the MS-DOS days of twenty years back. But that is in fact a big part of the problem. People should learn to accept that using a computer requires some basic form of clue. If people are not willing to acquire such clue, they should watch TV instead so that they won't harm anybody with the viruses, spam and DDoS attacks perpetrated through their zombified computers.
If Sun were to suddenly make Java pay-to-use, the programs could, for the most
part, be rewritten in C++ with minimal effort (most of the work could be done in 15 minutes by a Lisp program.)
If that is true, then why is there any reason to use Java at all?
Convert to C++, gain huge speed increase, retain cross-platform compatibility
with a simple recompile. Either Java is unneccesary or the conversion is
more complex than you make it out to be. In the latter case, the "Java Trap"
is very real, indeed, and very dangerous.
No, Asperger's Syndrome is not a disease, it's a syndrome (i.e.: a specific
set of symptoms/characteristics). A much more useful way of looking at it is as a disability.
AS is a consequence of a specific kind of brain-wiring, the manifestation
of which renders one largely incompatible with the way people normally
function in society. Therefore, adaptations are needed if (being AS) you
are to function well in society. Like wheelchair users need adapted
entrances (elevators; no thresholds) in order to move around in buildings,
folks with AS need social adaptations in order to function in a workplace
(no requirement of smalltalk or "fitting in the team"; acceptance of
individual work methods and quirks; flexibility to organize the work
environment around the person instead of vice versa).
Another reason why the disability perspective is infinitely more useful
than the disease perspective is that it opens the door to community building
and self-empowerment. Given the proper adaptations, there are positive
aspects to this condition as well as negative ones. One often-made analogy
is with the deaf culture: because of their disability, deaf people naturally
have a different way of communicating (using sign language), around which
has been built up an entire culture (Google for "deaf culture" for a lot
of info). Largely the same thing is true for folks with autism and AS:
because of our disability, we have a different way of communicating
(mostly verbal, little relevance of body language, more literal) which,
although it is a bit more elusive and harder to define precisely than
sign language, is still very real to those who are living it. If you put
a group of folks with AS together, the major communication problems that
these people have experienced all their lives tend to disappear gradually
for the duration of the meeting! (Yes, I speak from experience). The communication
problem only occurs if you cross the border between the two different "cultures"/ways
of being.
This is why you are now seeing so many sites and groups on the net built up
by folks with AS (of which this one, Autism
Network International is incidentally the first ever; they started some).
eleven years ago). The Internet, which eliminates most of the problems AS people face in communication (e.g. no body language), is the communication aid that folks
with AS have been needing to get together and organize. That's another way in
which the disability perspective applies.
There's nothing wrong with having a disability (any disability). It
doesn't mean you're sick. But it's tragic that so many people say that
AS can't be real just because it isn't a disease and you can't see the
disability from the outside. That attitude just serves to perpetuate the
alienation and isolation which, rather than AS itself, is what most folks with AS suffer from.
(I think you were joking with the mutilation of the word Asperger's, but
to everone else: please note spelling and pronunciation [no 'b']).
The stereotyped movements are not an essential characteristic, just
something that often occurs. You can have autism/AS without the stereotypical
movements, and you can have the stereotypical movements without having
autism/AS.
It's impossible to say from your short message whether you have AS or not.
I find Lorna Wings "Triad of Impairments" (google for it) useful:
Difficulty with communication (for example, taking things more literally
than they are meant, or expressing them too literally so you are misunderstood)
Difficulty with social interaction (you can't fit in no matter how hard
you try)
Difficulty with "imagination" (this one is easily misunderstood! It does
not mean that you can't imagine or fantasize; it means you have difficulty
thinking "outside the box" and coming up with creative solutions to unexpected
problems; or that your thinking is "stuck in a rut" a lot. In fact, folks
with AS often have lively imaginations while still having this impairment.)
This "Triad" is supposed to apply to the entire autistic spectrum
including AS -- of course, in different degrees. For AS it may have
to be interpreted in a less than absolute way.
I think for someone who is genuinely trying to find out if s/he has AS
or not, the best way is to get in touch with other folks who have AS. If you
have AS and it's undiagnosed, chances are that you have been misunderstood,
shunned, ridiculed, etc. all your life without understanding why, and chances
are your life is pretty much ruined. In such a situation, meeting other folks
with AS and exchanging experiences is like finally coming home to your own
planet after a lifetime of having been abducted. (Mind you, it can take a lot of getting
used to, and a lot of emotions to work through! That feeling often does not
appear immediately and often not but after a lot of profoundly conditioned
self-doubt has been worked through.)
For someone with a "mild" variant the experience may not be so profound,
but then again, I am speaking from experience and I do not have a "mild"
variant, nor do I necessarily believe that the idea of a "mild" variant is useful - I am wary of diluting the name of what is to many a pretty damn serious disability that requires significant adaptations in order to be able to live happily.
Anyway, if you're serious and mercilessly honest with yourself, then
the best judge of whether you have AS or not is ultimately you.
Yes, an AS person can learn social interaction, but it's like running
Virtual PC on a Mac: you have to run in
NT emulation mode, which is exhausting rather than relaxing. In the workplace,
it's during the breaks that AS folks have to work (by far) the hardest, unless
social accomodations have been made.
Incidentally, this is one reason why many adults with AS have had trouble
obtaining a diagnosis: they have been (often literally) forced to learn
extensive coping strategies, which (as exhausting and destructive as they are)
for many have become second nature to such a degree that the real personality
gets buried (speaking from experience here, as someone with lifelong high
functioning autism but not properly diagnosed before age 22). Since AS is
currently diagnosed according to behavioral criteria, current diagnostic
methods fail to take into account these learned coping strategies, and
only the rare very experienced and/or special professional is able to
accurately diagnose AS in adults.
So I suspect that AS is highly underdiagnosed in adults, especially
in women who tend to be better at social compensation than men are.
(Incidentally,
that does not preclude that it may be simultaneously overdiagnosed, as it *is*
also rather becoming like a fad diagnosis. A condition may in fact be both
underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed at the same time, which is tragic for all
involved -- for the overdiagnosed because they would be better served with
another or no diagnosis, and for the underdiagnosed because the overdiagnosis
generates skepticism and makes it harder for them to get properly diagnosed,
and to get any understanding if a proper diagnosis does happen.)
The conditions in question are indeed not diseases at all, nor is anyone informed calling them that. They are disorders, or more accurately, neurological disabilities. The proper analogy is with other neurological disorders such as dyslexia (I often call Asperger's "social dyslexia" although that doesn't cover nearly all of it). The parent post is a complete red herring, and should be modded down.
Proper diagnoses are based on specific, well-defined problems a person has. The behaviorally-based criteria are inherently flawed because they do not account for varieties in personality and coping strategies, and knowledgeable people have long since stopped taking those too literally. Of course, in the future, diagnosis might well be based on brain scans.
I should wish that anyone who thinks Asperger's is merely a set of behavioural traits could "have Asperger's for a while" - they'd get cured of that misconception real fast. Of course, they might also need to be in a psychiatric hospital for a while to recover from the experience. This is not an easy thing to live with. The highly intelligent high achievers are the exception, not the rule -- it's far more common to be normally intelligent and/or unemployed.
OK, har har har, and now for real: Asperger's Syndrome was named after Hans Asperger, an Austrian. The "a" is like in "father" but shorter, the "p" is a "p" as in "pet" (and not a "b"), the following "e" is like in "bet", and the "g" is hard as in "get".
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, all Mac apps are inherently MDI. It's just MDI done right, with the menu bar always on top of the screen, and no silly main window encompassing the document windows and covering everything else up.
And as usual, they manage to not only steal the Apple look but do everything to cheapen it and make it look as ugly as possible. Is there really nobody within the Microsoft moloch who has some feeling for style?
Uh oh. Too late.
Which is why he advocates for the system to be called GNU/Linux and not plainly GNU. Makes sense to me.
Parent is insightful, not flamebait. For a good example of what happens when science and enlightenment are replaced by theology and repression, just look at the Middle East. The Arab world was the cornerstone of world civilization in the Middle Ages -- they invented the zero, we still use Arabic digits, they were astronomers and mathematicians, and they initiated the Renaissance by preserving ancient Greek and Roman writings. But they let all that slip and became mostly a bunch of backward theocracies instead. America is next if it continues on this road.
Anyone taking even a cursory look at the sitepronews.com article source code can see that the layout is done with the usual mess of tables.
slashslashslash dotdotdotdot slashdot slashslashslash dot dotdotdot!!!!!!11!!1one
So is the mob. What separates a good business from a bad business is the way in which they try to make money.
Sorry, you don't get to get off until Microsoft has in turn bought the Church of Scientology. After all, in the end, Microsoft buys everything.
Sorry, but there is a directedness and a drive. The directedness is the survival of the fittest. The drive is every organism's will to live (if you deny the existence of that, try to go and jump off a bridge - oh, don't want to? thought so). Evolution necessarily cannot exist without these two. The use of the word "will" as an analogy/shorthand is therefore quite appropriate.
Never trust a corporation to keep their promises more than a couple of years at most. Management changes, stockholders make demands, etc.
Since when did that ever stop anyone? :)
#include <obYouMustBeNewHere.h>
That may be true in some theoretical or academic sense, but it doesn't hold out in practise, especially not where a huge, complex and hairy thing like a web rendering engine is concerned which needs to account to millions of different incompatibilities and quirks, and then even less if the code itself is written in a messy way.
I've written enough code in my life to realize that understanding someone else's uncommented spaghetti code (or your own, two weeks later) is more work than writing it from scratch yourself.
(This is to all the respondents -- I don't mean to single you out.)
Whoa. Did I touch a few nerves there, or something?
I said basic clue. Sheesh! You do have to learn to cook first before you start handling a stove, or you'll burn yourself and/or the house. You don't need to be a chef to cook, or a computer scientist to use a computer -- but you do need to have some basic idea of what you're doing, and what's more, if you're an adult, you're responsible for having some kind of basic idea of what you're doing!
But that kind of subtlety appears lost on you guys. Or maybe that "responsibility" thingy is just out of fashion (except, of course, when the Slashbot army bitches about parents who let their kids watch TV or play games). I guess you don't like driver's licenses either, after all, cars should be usable without any kind of basic instruction, never mind that not understanding the traffic rules is fatal. It's easier just to blame "the engineers" (what a nice and convenient nameless entity) so that Joe Sixpack does not have to feel the need to take responsibility for his actions. Meanwhile, their computers happily keep crapping in my inbox. Nice going, bozos.
That's OK, I thought the moderation was pretty funny. :)
From TFA:
I would not be so sure of that. I seem to recall that the GPL defines source code as the "preferred form" of the program for making modifications of it. If Apple "comments" its patches by referring to numbers in a proprietary bug database to which only they have access, Apple could be accused of intentionally obfuscating its source code, which is a violation of the "preferred form" clause in the GPL. In any case, it's ethically wrong because the free-software concept is meaningless if the provided source code is not realistically usable without having access to essential information about what it does.
Gee, that sounds eerily familiar. Where have I heard it before, that "give Joe Sixpack what he wants and damn software quality" attitude? Marketing fluff at the expense of solidity and security? Oh right, of course, that's the attitude that brought us the virus propagation engine that is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Is it any wonder that Firefox is now on its way along the same route?
Ridiculous. The use of software is demanding less computer literacy by the year -- compare today to the MS-DOS days of twenty years back. But that is in fact a big part of the problem. People should learn to accept that using a computer requires some basic form of clue. If people are not willing to acquire such clue, they should watch TV instead so that they won't harm anybody with the viruses, spam and DDoS attacks perpetrated through their zombified computers.
Alternatively, the religiously inclined may prefer a new theory of origin named Stupid Design, which the teenager in question may soon be patenting.
If that is true, then why is there any reason to use Java at all? Convert to C++, gain huge speed increase, retain cross-platform compatibility with a simple recompile. Either Java is unneccesary or the conversion is more complex than you make it out to be. In the latter case, the "Java Trap" is very real, indeed, and very dangerous.
Another reason why the disability perspective is infinitely more useful than the disease perspective is that it opens the door to community building and self-empowerment. Given the proper adaptations, there are positive aspects to this condition as well as negative ones. One often-made analogy is with the deaf culture: because of their disability, deaf people naturally have a different way of communicating (using sign language), around which has been built up an entire culture (Google for "deaf culture" for a lot of info). Largely the same thing is true for folks with autism and AS: because of our disability, we have a different way of communicating (mostly verbal, little relevance of body language, more literal) which, although it is a bit more elusive and harder to define precisely than sign language, is still very real to those who are living it. If you put a group of folks with AS together, the major communication problems that these people have experienced all their lives tend to disappear gradually for the duration of the meeting! (Yes, I speak from experience). The communication problem only occurs if you cross the border between the two different "cultures"/ways of being.
This is why you are now seeing so many sites and groups on the net built up by folks with AS (of which this one, Autism Network International is incidentally the first ever; they started some). eleven years ago). The Internet, which eliminates most of the problems AS people face in communication (e.g. no body language), is the communication aid that folks with AS have been needing to get together and organize. That's another way in which the disability perspective applies.
There's nothing wrong with having a disability (any disability). It doesn't mean you're sick. But it's tragic that so many people say that AS can't be real just because it isn't a disease and you can't see the disability from the outside. That attitude just serves to perpetuate the alienation and isolation which, rather than AS itself, is what most folks with AS suffer from.
The stereotyped movements are not an essential characteristic, just something that often occurs. You can have autism/AS without the stereotypical movements, and you can have the stereotypical movements without having autism/AS.
It's impossible to say from your short message whether you have AS or not. I find Lorna Wings "Triad of Impairments" (google for it) useful:
This "Triad" is supposed to apply to the entire autistic spectrum including AS -- of course, in different degrees. For AS it may have to be interpreted in a less than absolute way.
I think for someone who is genuinely trying to find out if s/he has AS or not, the best way is to get in touch with other folks who have AS. If you have AS and it's undiagnosed, chances are that you have been misunderstood, shunned, ridiculed, etc. all your life without understanding why, and chances are your life is pretty much ruined. In such a situation, meeting other folks with AS and exchanging experiences is like finally coming home to your own planet after a lifetime of having been abducted. (Mind you, it can take a lot of getting used to, and a lot of emotions to work through! That feeling often does not appear immediately and often not but after a lot of profoundly conditioned self-doubt has been worked through.)
For someone with a "mild" variant the experience may not be so profound, but then again, I am speaking from experience and I do not have a "mild" variant, nor do I necessarily believe that the idea of a "mild" variant is useful - I am wary of diluting the name of what is to many a pretty damn serious disability that requires significant adaptations in order to be able to live happily.
Anyway, if you're serious and mercilessly honest with yourself, then the best judge of whether you have AS or not is ultimately you.
Yes, an AS person can learn social interaction, but it's like running Virtual PC on a Mac: you have to run in NT emulation mode, which is exhausting rather than relaxing. In the workplace, it's during the breaks that AS folks have to work (by far) the hardest, unless social accomodations have been made.
Incidentally, this is one reason why many adults with AS have had trouble obtaining a diagnosis: they have been (often literally) forced to learn extensive coping strategies, which (as exhausting and destructive as they are) for many have become second nature to such a degree that the real personality gets buried (speaking from experience here, as someone with lifelong high functioning autism but not properly diagnosed before age 22). Since AS is currently diagnosed according to behavioral criteria, current diagnostic methods fail to take into account these learned coping strategies, and only the rare very experienced and/or special professional is able to accurately diagnose AS in adults.
So I suspect that AS is highly underdiagnosed in adults, especially in women who tend to be better at social compensation than men are.
(Incidentally, that does not preclude that it may be simultaneously overdiagnosed, as it *is* also rather becoming like a fad diagnosis. A condition may in fact be both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed at the same time, which is tragic for all involved -- for the overdiagnosed because they would be better served with another or no diagnosis, and for the underdiagnosed because the overdiagnosis generates skepticism and makes it harder for them to get properly diagnosed, and to get any understanding if a proper diagnosis does happen.)
Well, I'll quit rambling for now.
By the way, the parent post has been copied with attribution from here.
The conditions in question are indeed not diseases at all, nor is anyone informed calling them that. They are disorders, or more accurately, neurological disabilities. The proper analogy is with other neurological disorders such as dyslexia (I often call Asperger's "social dyslexia" although that doesn't cover nearly all of it). The parent post is a complete red herring, and should be modded down.
Proper diagnoses are based on specific, well-defined problems a person has. The behaviorally-based criteria are inherently flawed because they do not account for varieties in personality and coping strategies, and knowledgeable people have long since stopped taking those too literally. Of course, in the future, diagnosis might well be based on brain scans.
I should wish that anyone who thinks Asperger's is merely a set of behavioural traits could "have Asperger's for a while" - they'd get cured of that misconception real fast. Of course, they might also need to be in a psychiatric hospital for a while to recover from the experience. This is not an easy thing to live with. The highly intelligent high achievers are the exception, not the rule -- it's far more common to be normally intelligent and/or unemployed.
Yes, I speak from personal experience.
OK, har har har, and now for real: Asperger's Syndrome was named after Hans Asperger, an Austrian. The "a" is like in "father" but shorter, the "p" is a "p" as in "pet" (and not a "b"), the following "e" is like in "bet", and the "g" is hard as in "get".