Gaim is indeed a nifty app, but my main beef with it is that, while it can do a lot of protocols, it can't seem to do any of them particularly well. From what I've played with in 2.0, that hasn't changed much. In particular, Gaim's IRC capabilities are lacking, a lot.
I dunno, I've only used it for AIM and jabber (gmail), and it seems to work great with those. I expect a more accurate statement is that "it doesn't do all of them well." Since AFAIK, gaim was originally based on the AIM model, I'm not surprised that it supports AIM and "AIM-like" protocols better than protocols like IRC which use a somewhat different model.
I don't even use gaim these days -- rather I use bitlbee (irc/im gateway based on gaim code) + an Emacs irc client -- but main beef with gaim is the annoying GUI interface, not the protocol support.
[Still, the gaim interface is a million times better than most of the horrid proprietary IM clients out there.]
It is VERY GENEROUS to call someone who fights against the right of software developers to control the distribution of their works a "freedom fighter."
I think it is accurate though.
The real problem with this term is that it's so incredibly loaded. In conventional usage it was long ago polluted with the cynical reagan-era definition -- "right wing guerilla fighting a government our government doesn't like" -- and generally seems to carry a strong connotation that user is trying to put a positive spin on something rather more ambiguous.
I don't think they're quite synonymous. In my mind (and this reflects how I moderate), a "troll" is a message whose main purpose is to provoke flames; "flamebait" may have the (often intentional) effect of provoking flames, but it does at least attempt to express a real opinion at the same time.
With an application, it shouldn't ever request more memory than it actually needs to operate, because it doesn't have the "god perspective" that the OS does, to determine how much is underutilized and ought to be taken up by stuff that's less-than-critical.
Er, that's a bit simplistic.
A modern OS with demand paging can pretty well manage apps using lots of memory as long as the apps' working set is reasonable. In many cases, it's far better for an app to use a simpler algorithm that uses more memory, or just use lots of memory to cache stuff (rather than implementing its own complicated disk-caching scheme), and let the OS worry about juggling things, because often the OS can do a better job. Morever, mapping lots of memory (either from file or anonymous memory) is typically almost free, as long as you don't touch it (and even with anonymous memory, mapping lots of untouched space can be useful, e.g., for some sort of sparse data structure).
Of course, there are caveats to this:
Some OSes are better than others at managing memory; modern versions of linux are pretty good, reputedly much better than ms-windows (though I don't use windows often enough to really judge).
It obviously depends on the way all this memory is being used -- if the app really does touch all that memory repeatedly, it has to be more careful
There are obviously still limits, due to paging-file/swap-partition sizes etc; the point is not that apps should totally ignore memory usage, but that there's much more headroom than many people think.
On a side note: I would like to see a game that could figure out that you just threw the controller across the room and bring up the help system.
Personally, I'd like to see a system where when one flings the controller across the room, the controller would halt itself in mid-flight using its reaction jets, then hover there in midair, slowly turn around, and say in a soft but chilling voice "I'm sorry <name>, I'm afraid I can't allow you to do that."
If Nintendo can pull that off with the wii, there's no stopping them!
[Remember that Nintendo has designed the wii to be left on and connected to the network, even when you're not playing, waiting....]
You're basically invalidating the copyright altogether by refusing to put definate numbers on "fair use".
That simply isn't true.
A "definite numbers" of copies is an overly simplistic concept that doesn't fit the intention of "fair use."
If my listening device breaks 300 times (silly, but certainly possible if it's a Sony), then I want to be able to transfer my songs 300 times. A real person, upon seeing the situation could tell in half a second that it's clearly fair use; overly simplistic rules do not capture that.
The providers do not care at all about the intent of copyright laws, they simply want money shovelled into their mouths as fast as possible; to that end, they'll ignore the law to whatever extent they can get away with. It's up to the public to stand up for their rights.
I dunno, libpng seems ok. I've written image loading support for a lot of formats, and pretty much every image library seems to have a similar interface level -- essentially, they try not to make any assumptions about what internal format you will use for storing your image in memory, so a "load the whole thing" type of interface often won't fly.
In my case, it's just as well because I have my own constraints, so I'd have to either ignore their high-level all-in-one code, or end up translating the in-memory format they used into my own (and in the case of large images, even just two copies of an image in memory can cause VM thrashing).
I think many apps have similar constraints, so libraries like libpng (or libjpeg etc) try to offer an interface which is reasonably simple to use, but still remains memory-format-agnostic to a large degree. This is particularly true of the information in the image-header, as there's no telling what the app will want to do with it (especially given that the header information varies widely between different image formats).
Given this, libpng is not bad at all. It's only about 20 lines of code to read an image header, and a simple loop to read the data (and you can even read the entire image data in one function call, into an array of row pointers). Indeed, it offers many convenient features for simplifying image-loading, such as optional (but very easy to use) filters to automatically canonicalize different types of image data in case the app doesn't care about the distinctions. They could offer a few more convenience shortcuts ("turn on all image canonicalization features") for reading the header, but I don't think the existing interface is onerous.
Most (actually all) 10 year old kids I ever knew did not have sufficient access to such locations as to be able to become familiar with UNIX.
While that's certainly true for average 10 year olds, it's hardly some kind of "OMG event" for one to have had such experience.
My first exposure to unix was talking with people running it at a high-school computer fair circa 1980-1981. Before I graduated high school, I had a fair amount of programming experience on DEC minis, and even such esoterica as the perq (one of the first commercial workstations). Many of my friends in college got their first exposure to programming hands on on real mainframes in their early teens, via various "smart kids get to do cool stuff at local colleges" in the late '70s.
Given that SGI machines, although rather expensive, were actually quite widespread in the early '90s, it's very reasonable to imagine a college that teaches programming to bright youngsters where the kids would either use or at least have exposure to SGI machines.
The main difference between all versions of Windows is that the house just keeps getting bigger, but not much stronger.
Heh. If you've ever the endless fields of ticky-tacky mcmansions where many people from microsoft live, it all begins to make a certain kind of sense....!
[I went to a party at one of these places, and it was quite a surreal experience walking into a bathroom that just like an ordinary bathroom, but with all dimensions doubled!]
Judge a company on its quality, price, service and how many people it employs, not on local political BS as local rich get upset that they can no longer charge 3-4 times the price. In part why Sam's/Walmart is successful. BTW, they sell the same stuff as everyone else.
They're also a soul-searingly depressing place to shop.
I judge a store on your criteria, but I also judge it on whether
it's a nice place to shop, which includes more than just lighting or whatever -- a giant warehouse in the middle of an immense parking lot is a great deal more horrible than a small store on mainstreet
it positively or negatively affects the community it's in
Walmart and its ilk score basically a zero on these criteria. No thanks. There are more important things in life than getting the lowest conceivable price.
Everything is more real, physically. Maybe it's just a revival-hype,...
It's just yet another retro fad hipster thing. In a few years they'll discover something else to obsess and gloat about, music on wire spools, or white-wall tires, or something.
I grew up with vinyl, and yeah it's "more real physically." It's also a big pain in the ass, and for the most part has far worse sound quality, in ways that are truly annoying.
There are uses for which vinyl is arguably better, like maybe DJ stuff, but most of the time, it's just posing.
uClinux and the derived DSLinux (among others) run on CPUs without a memory management unit.
Note that uClinux was long ago merged into the mainstream linux 2.6 sources (in version 2.5.46 iirc). These days, the "uClinux patch" for 2.6 kernels mainly contains a few odds and ends for specific chips that haven't been merged yet.
So for many MMU-less chips, you can just grab "linux" and it will work, though if you want a 2.4-derived kernel, I guess uClinux is still necessary (2.6 can be slower and more bloated in some cases on small CPUs -- a lot of the optimization work on 2.6 seems to have focused on high-end systems).
if you are tossing many file read/writes at the same time at the drive, SCSI will simply way out preform SATA
Really? Could you describe in more detail?
I know old ATA was a crap standard, but I thought SATA had corrected many of ATA's problems, and copied a lot of the good stuff from SCSI (e.g., "NCQ" to allow reordering of requests).
not a touchpad fan - I don't want it anywhere on my system. Such a difficult attitude on my part prevents me from buying many otherwise great systems, as they don't offer 'em without the touchpad.
Yeah, it's pretty lame that the vast majority of laptop manufs have, sheeplike, adopted the trackpad as a defacto "standard". Some of the alternatives were really nice, like panasonic's very usable mini trackball (similarly positioned to a trackpad, but far easier to control precisely when your hands are in a typing position), and the IBM eraser (especially if you mainly do broad movements like window switching).
[It seems counter-intuitive, but I've found the IBM eraser is often easier than a trackpad even for precise movements. Other companies' erasers (e.g. Toshiba) never seemed quite so nice, so I guess IBM must have very good acceleration algorithms or something.]
they should be learning the fundamentals, not specializing on facility with particular current tools
Amen.
Once they do reach the point (like 15 years later) when they might actually need to use PP, learning it will take about 5 minutes -- if you ignore all the idiot graphical animation crap etc that are so insanely overused in PP presentations [*].
Really, it's not very hard: Make bullet point, type in some text. Make another bullet point, type some more. Hmmm, maybe 5 minutes is an overestimate.
[*] I'm not sure I've ever seen a valid use of that stuff -- if you have an interesting point to make about your embedded CPU board, say it; the pixellated picture of the board flying around on the page does not help, even if it took two days of tweaking to get it to look cool! [BTW, I'm not making up this example...]
Re:What goes around comes around
on
The Future of NetBSD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Charles Hannum is a cool guy (I worked in the same office with him for years), and very, very smart. Theo is also smart, but well-known for being a complete and utter asshole much of the time.
I never followed the theo/netbsd split closely (not being part of netbsd project), but I suspect a great part of the blame for the split lies squarely with Theo...
[I do remember the beginnings of the openbsd project, where the members seemed to have no other goal than to annoy people as much as possible with crap like their idiotic "OLF" format.]
shouldn't schools/governments be worrying about the best tool for the job instead of making blanket statements like "100% open source by 20xx"?
Governments and goverment agencies often have other goals which they try to satisfy (e.g., "buy american"). Typically that kind of thing will slightly increase the cost, but the other goals are deemed worthy enough to make this acceptable.
There are a number of worthy goals which can be helped by adopting free software, and presumably they judge the increased cost of re-training people used to microsoft products worth it.
Mostly it's only businesses that have a "short term utility regardless of the long-term cost" attitude.
Still, I look forward to being old so I can start blaming the problems that have existed for millenia on the latest, greatest thing that I do not understand.
Why on earth is the user interface predominantly neon green (and not just neon green highlights, but vast solid areas of neon green)?!?
I guess if it's for kids you want a somewhat cheerful and happy looking interface, but it seems a bit excessive. If you're simply going to blind them, why bother including an LCD in the first place?
I've heard it said that Linux is for those who hate Windows, while BSD is for those that love Unix.
It's pithy, but I think it's wrong. The vast majority of linux users I've met simply don't care about windows -- it's just a slightly annoying and clunky OS they have to occasionally use to run some proprietary app or another.
I suppose there probably is slightly more appreciation for "unix tradition" among BSD users, but I'm not sure that means much...
A lot of managers, and especially upper executives who may walk by your cube on the way to their private washroom, don't understand that a software engineer is not the same thing as a typist.
Yeah, amen.
I think I spend a lot of time at work doing "other" stuff (like reading slashdot), but usually I don't feel that I'm just being willfully lazy: there are times for intense work, and times to let things percolate in the background, and I've found that it's often almost impossible to force the issue. I end up going crazy if I try to micromanage my time beyond a certain point. Like most people, I also frankly don't want to work in a stressful and unpleasant environment, and am not very productive if I'm unhappy.
My managers certainly know this (at a company dinner, I said something like "I'm not particularly hard-working," and to my surprise, my immediate manager immediately agreed, and his manager nodded sagely...!), but apparently accept it as part of the deal.
However there is obviously a lot of margin here, and having good management really helps -- they know when to push you and get on your case, and when doing so is simply going to make things worse.
The gap between theater and home theater has narrowed, and some would say they've traded places.
Um, no.
Unless you're bill gates, your "home theater" isn't even close to that 3-story high screen. However loving your family is, they're simply not the same as an enthusiastic sold-out crowd.
It certainly may be the case that in many cases movie theaters (and audiences) have degraded significantly (especially in suburban/sprawl areas, which I guess constitutes a large portion of the U.S.), and that sucks, but don't fool yourself into thinking what you have at home even approaches the experience a real theater can offer.
Now that someone has mentioned that "pluton" refers to both an intrusive igneous body and a type of planet, I think that the IAU was pretty stupid.
Why? It's not like anybody's going to confuse the two meanings, even if the "old" meaning was commonly used among geologists.
From reading the article, it sounds more like one geologist who's spent his career studying plutons (and apparently could use a wee bit more perspective) is upset, not the field as a whole.
The dynamic range is poor compared to a crt. That's why you'll almost always see them demoing with animated movies,or scenes with large areas of similar colurs.
Maybe you just go to the wrong stores...
The LCD demos I always see are typically very slow nature/travelogs with huge amounts of contrast and (probably over) saturated color. They are also usually in brightly-lit settings that are probably rather demanding (not dimly-lit "theater rooms"); the store I see most often usually puts their best demo sets in front of the store so passers-by can see it, so it has to compete with sunlight (albeit in the shade)! [I suppose with the emphasis on travelogs and such, maybe they're avoiding a problem with update speed?]
I recently saw a demo of an HDTV LCD set like this that had me just standing there transfixed with my jaw on the ground, it was so good. CRTs are nice too, but frankly, have nothing on this.
[This in in Japan, mind you, and the U.S. is often a bit behind the curve on consumer items.]
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Gaim is indeed a nifty app, but my main beef with it is that, while it can do a lot of protocols, it can't seem to do any of them particularly well. From what I've played with in 2.0, that hasn't changed much. In particular, Gaim's IRC capabilities are lacking, a lot.
I dunno, I've only used it for AIM and jabber (gmail), and it seems to work great with those. I expect a more accurate statement is that "it doesn't do all of them well." Since AFAIK, gaim was originally based on the AIM model, I'm not surprised that it supports AIM and "AIM-like" protocols better than protocols like IRC which use a somewhat different model.
I don't even use gaim these days -- rather I use bitlbee (irc/im gateway based on gaim code) + an Emacs irc client -- but main beef with gaim is the annoying GUI interface, not the protocol support.
[Still, the gaim interface is a million times better than most of the horrid proprietary IM clients out there.]
It is VERY GENEROUS to call someone who fights against the right of software developers to control the distribution of their works a "freedom fighter."
I think it is accurate though.
The real problem with this term is that it's so incredibly loaded. In conventional usage it was long ago polluted with the cynical reagan-era definition -- "right wing guerilla fighting a government our government doesn't like" -- and generally seems to carry a strong connotation that user is trying to put a positive spin on something rather more ambiguous.
As a noun, synonymous with flamebait.
I don't think they're quite synonymous. In my mind (and this reflects how I moderate), a "troll" is a message whose main purpose is to provoke flames; "flamebait" may have the (often intentional) effect of provoking flames, but it does at least attempt to express a real opinion at the same time.
Er, that's a bit simplistic.
A modern OS with demand paging can pretty well manage apps using lots of memory as long as the apps' working set is reasonable. In many cases, it's far better for an app to use a simpler algorithm that uses more memory, or just use lots of memory to cache stuff (rather than implementing its own complicated disk-caching scheme), and let the OS worry about juggling things, because often the OS can do a better job. Morever, mapping lots of memory (either from file or anonymous memory) is typically almost free, as long as you don't touch it (and even with anonymous memory, mapping lots of untouched space can be useful, e.g., for some sort of sparse data structure).
Of course, there are caveats to this:
On a side note: I would like to see a game that could figure out that you just threw the controller across the room and bring up the help system.
Personally, I'd like to see a system where when one flings the controller across the room, the controller would halt itself in mid-flight using its reaction jets, then hover there in midair, slowly turn around, and say in a soft but chilling voice "I'm sorry <name>, I'm afraid I can't allow you to do that."
If Nintendo can pull that off with the wii, there's no stopping them!
[Remember that Nintendo has designed the wii to be left on and connected to the network, even when you're not playing, waiting....]
You're basically invalidating the copyright altogether by refusing to put definate numbers on "fair use".
That simply isn't true.
A "definite numbers" of copies is an overly simplistic concept that doesn't fit the intention of "fair use."
If my listening device breaks 300 times (silly, but certainly possible if it's a Sony), then I want to be able to transfer my songs 300 times. A real person, upon seeing the situation could tell in half a second that it's clearly fair use; overly simplistic rules do not capture that.
The providers do not care at all about the intent of copyright laws, they simply want money shovelled into their mouths as fast as possible; to that end, they'll ignore the law to whatever extent they can get away with. It's up to the public to stand up for their rights.
I dunno, libpng seems ok. I've written image loading support for a lot of formats, and pretty much every image library seems to have a similar interface level -- essentially, they try not to make any assumptions about what internal format you will use for storing your image in memory, so a "load the whole thing" type of interface often won't fly.
In my case, it's just as well because I have my own constraints, so I'd have to either ignore their high-level all-in-one code, or end up translating the in-memory format they used into my own (and in the case of large images, even just two copies of an image in memory can cause VM thrashing).
I think many apps have similar constraints, so libraries like libpng (or libjpeg etc) try to offer an interface which is reasonably simple to use, but still remains memory-format-agnostic to a large degree. This is particularly true of the information in the image-header, as there's no telling what the app will want to do with it (especially given that the header information varies widely between different image formats).
Given this, libpng is not bad at all. It's only about 20 lines of code to read an image header, and a simple loop to read the data (and you can even read the entire image data in one function call, into an array of row pointers). Indeed, it offers many convenient features for simplifying image-loading, such as optional (but very easy to use) filters to automatically canonicalize different types of image data in case the app doesn't care about the distinctions. They could offer a few more convenience shortcuts ("turn on all image canonicalization features") for reading the header, but I don't think the existing interface is onerous.
Most (actually all) 10 year old kids I ever knew did not have sufficient access to such locations as to be able to become familiar with UNIX.
While that's certainly true for average 10 year olds, it's hardly some kind of "OMG event" for one to have had such experience.
My first exposure to unix was talking with people running it at a high-school computer fair circa 1980-1981. Before I graduated high school, I had a fair amount of programming experience on DEC minis, and even such esoterica as the perq (one of the first commercial workstations). Many of my friends in college got their first exposure to programming hands on on real mainframes in their early teens, via various "smart kids get to do cool stuff at local colleges" in the late '70s.
Given that SGI machines, although rather expensive, were actually quite widespread in the early '90s, it's very reasonable to imagine a college that teaches programming to bright youngsters where the kids would either use or at least have exposure to SGI machines.
The main difference between all versions of Windows is that the house just keeps getting bigger, but not much stronger.
Heh. If you've ever the endless fields of ticky-tacky mcmansions where many people from microsoft live, it all begins to make a certain kind of sense....!
[I went to a party at one of these places, and it was quite a surreal experience walking into a bathroom that just like an ordinary bathroom, but with all dimensions doubled!]
They're also a soul-searingly depressing place to shop.
I judge a store on your criteria, but I also judge it on whether
Walmart and its ilk score basically a zero on these criteria. No thanks. There are more important things in life than getting the lowest conceivable price.
Everything is more real, physically. Maybe it's just a revival-hype, ...
It's just yet another retro fad hipster thing. In a few years they'll discover something else to obsess and gloat about, music on wire spools, or white-wall tires, or something.
I grew up with vinyl, and yeah it's "more real physically." It's also a big pain in the ass, and for the most part has far worse sound quality, in ways that are truly annoying.
There are uses for which vinyl is arguably better, like maybe DJ stuff, but most of the time, it's just posing.
uClinux and the derived DSLinux (among others) run on CPUs without a memory management unit.
Note that uClinux was long ago merged into the mainstream linux 2.6 sources (in version 2.5.46 iirc). These days, the "uClinux patch" for 2.6 kernels mainly contains a few odds and ends for specific chips that haven't been merged yet.
So for many MMU-less chips, you can just grab "linux" and it will work, though if you want a 2.4-derived kernel, I guess uClinux is still necessary (2.6 can be slower and more bloated in some cases on small CPUs -- a lot of the optimization work on 2.6 seems to have focused on high-end systems).
if you are tossing many file read/writes at the same time at the drive, SCSI will simply way out preform SATA
Really? Could you describe in more detail?
I know old ATA was a crap standard, but I thought SATA had corrected many of ATA's problems, and copied a lot of the good stuff from SCSI (e.g., "NCQ" to allow reordering of requests).
not a touchpad fan - I don't want it anywhere on my system. Such a difficult attitude on my part prevents me from buying many otherwise great systems, as they don't offer 'em without the touchpad.
Yeah, it's pretty lame that the vast majority of laptop manufs have, sheeplike, adopted the trackpad as a defacto "standard". Some of the alternatives were really nice, like panasonic's very usable mini trackball (similarly positioned to a trackpad, but far easier to control precisely when your hands are in a typing position), and the IBM eraser (especially if you mainly do broad movements like window switching).
[It seems counter-intuitive, but I've found the IBM eraser is often easier than a trackpad even for precise movements. Other companies' erasers (e.g. Toshiba) never seemed quite so nice, so I guess IBM must have very good acceleration algorithms or something.]
they should be learning the fundamentals, not specializing on facility with particular current tools
Amen.
Once they do reach the point (like 15 years later) when they might actually need to use PP, learning it will take about 5 minutes -- if you ignore all the idiot graphical animation crap etc that are so insanely overused in PP presentations [*].
Really, it's not very hard: Make bullet point, type in some text. Make another bullet point, type some more. Hmmm, maybe 5 minutes is an overestimate.
[*] I'm not sure I've ever seen a valid use of that stuff -- if you have an interesting point to make about your embedded CPU board, say it; the pixellated picture of the board flying around on the page does not help, even if it took two days of tweaking to get it to look cool! [BTW, I'm not making up this example...]
Charles Hannum is a cool guy (I worked in the same office with him for years), and very, very smart. Theo is also smart, but well-known for being a complete and utter asshole much of the time.
I never followed the theo/netbsd split closely (not being part of netbsd project), but I suspect a great part of the blame for the split lies squarely with Theo...
[I do remember the beginnings of the openbsd project, where the members seemed to have no other goal than to annoy people as much as possible with crap like their idiotic "OLF" format.]
shouldn't schools/governments be worrying about the best tool for the job instead of making blanket statements like "100% open source by 20xx"?
Governments and goverment agencies often have other goals which they try to satisfy (e.g., "buy american"). Typically that kind of thing will slightly increase the cost, but the other goals are deemed worthy enough to make this acceptable.
There are a number of worthy goals which can be helped by adopting free software, and presumably they judge the increased cost of re-training people used to microsoft products worth it.
Mostly it's only businesses that have a "short term utility regardless of the long-term cost" attitude.
Still, I look forward to being old so I can start blaming the problems that have existed for millenia on the latest, greatest thing that I do not understand.
Mall store naming?
Why on earth is the user interface predominantly neon green (and not just neon green highlights, but vast solid areas of neon green)?!?
I guess if it's for kids you want a somewhat cheerful and happy looking interface, but it seems a bit excessive. If you're simply going to blind them, why bother including an LCD in the first place?
I've heard it said that Linux is for those who hate Windows, while BSD is for those that love Unix.
It's pithy, but I think it's wrong. The vast majority of linux users I've met simply don't care about windows -- it's just a slightly annoying and clunky OS they have to occasionally use to run some proprietary app or another.
I suppose there probably is slightly more appreciation for "unix tradition" among BSD users, but I'm not sure that means much...
A lot of managers, and especially upper executives who may walk by your cube on the way to their private washroom, don't understand that a software engineer is not the same thing as a typist.
Yeah, amen.
I think I spend a lot of time at work doing "other" stuff (like reading slashdot), but usually I don't feel that I'm just being willfully lazy: there are times for intense work, and times to let things percolate in the background, and I've found that it's often almost impossible to force the issue. I end up going crazy if I try to micromanage my time beyond a certain point. Like most people, I also frankly don't want to work in a stressful and unpleasant environment, and am not very productive if I'm unhappy.
My managers certainly know this (at a company dinner, I said something like "I'm not particularly hard-working," and to my surprise, my immediate manager immediately agreed, and his manager nodded sagely...!), but apparently accept it as part of the deal.
However there is obviously a lot of margin here, and having good management really helps -- they know when to push you and get on your case, and when doing so is simply going to make things worse.
The gap between theater and home theater has narrowed, and some would say they've traded places.
Um, no.
Unless you're bill gates, your "home theater" isn't even close to that 3-story high screen. However loving your family is, they're simply not the same as an enthusiastic sold-out crowd.
It certainly may be the case that in many cases movie theaters (and audiences) have degraded significantly (especially in suburban/sprawl areas, which I guess constitutes a large portion of the U.S.), and that sucks, but don't fool yourself into thinking what you have at home even approaches the experience a real theater can offer.
Now that someone has mentioned that "pluton" refers to both an intrusive igneous body and a type of planet, I think that the IAU was pretty stupid.
Why? It's not like anybody's going to confuse the two meanings, even if the "old" meaning was commonly used among geologists.
From reading the article, it sounds more like one geologist who's spent his career studying plutons (and apparently could use a wee bit more perspective) is upset, not the field as a whole.
The dynamic range is poor compared to a crt. That's why you'll almost always see them demoing with animated movies,or scenes with large areas of similar colurs.
Maybe you just go to the wrong stores...
The LCD demos I always see are typically very slow nature/travelogs with huge amounts of contrast and (probably over) saturated color. They are also usually in brightly-lit settings that are probably rather demanding (not dimly-lit "theater rooms"); the store I see most often usually puts their best demo sets in front of the store so passers-by can see it, so it has to compete with sunlight (albeit in the shade)! [I suppose with the emphasis on travelogs and such, maybe they're avoiding a problem with update speed?]
I recently saw a demo of an HDTV LCD set like this that had me just standing there transfixed with my jaw on the ground, it was so good. CRTs are nice too, but frankly, have nothing on this.
[This in in Japan, mind you, and the U.S. is often a bit behind the curve on consumer items.]
He may be a great programmer, but his knowledge of the human sciences is somewhat lacking
The funny thing is that he's not a great programmer either. He's never really done anything of note technically.
Other FOSS leaders like RMS and Linus, are great programmers, so I guess it's understandable that people assume ESR must be too -- but he's not.