The situation is even weirder than that... I've read most of their exchanges, and as far as I can figure, a lot of the friction in this particular case stems from a bizarre ego thing with Hans: Christoph seems to be somewhat young, and Hans apparently feels that as "a professional", it's beneath him to interact with Christoph as an equal (despite the fact that Christoph seem to be as knowledgeable and skillful as anyone else in this area).
Hans' attitude obviously collides rather disastrously with the largely meritocratic nature of the LKML. Luckily, he really does want to see Reiser4 go in, so after blowing large volumes of hot air (not helped by Christoph's general lack of tact), he finally settled down and began to deal with the technical issues instead of feeding his ego.
My god... I thought that page was a joke until I looked at the URL!
Microsoft's entire web site has a sort of sickeningly sweet pandering-to-the-clueless-majority feel to it, but at least it's relatively low-key pandering. This subsite ("mactopia") on the other hand, is cringe-inducingly awful -- it's like the same dull web-designers that do MS's general site were trying to mimic Apple's style, but ended up producing a rather cruel mockery of it instead.
Well, I don't know about CHEAP watches. Good watches have sapphire crystals, which aren't very easy to scratch.
A lot of very good sport watches come with acrylic faces (and typically include a polishing kit to remove scratches).
The reason is that a sapphire crystal (or even hard glass) is more likely to shatter in extreme situations; it's harder than acrylic, but not tougher. Also apparently the failure mode of sapphire crystals is more nasty -- lots of extremely sharp shards flying around.
[The above told to me by a salesman, when I asked why an over-$2000 watch used an acrylic face and a different variation of the same watch used a sapphire crystal.]
Unfortunately, the PHBs here at the office disagree.
Man, I've heard of bizarro office rules, but this takes the cake...
Just out of curiousity, what happens when you download a PDF file? Do alarms go off and guards rush out to escort you away? [And what about.dvi files??? Robot machine-gun nests start pumpin' out the lead?]
I'm just trying to imagine how your boss phrases a reprimand for something so innocuous... "Sorry Bob, but we're all insane idiots here -- you're fired."
A random parent is pretty damn unlikely to be a whole lot better -- they can offer an individualized rate of study and a higher teacher-to-student ratio, but that's about it.
Actually I've noticed another thing they do better: improve the student's "self-esteem."
I've noticed this because every time the subject of education comes up on slashdot, home-schooling enthusiastics crawl out of the woodwork to crow about how insanely great home schooling is, and how's it made them into the wunderkind they are today.
It's also made me realize that sometimes nails should be beaten down (especially when it's the pointy end that's sticking up).
It does seem to have one nice GUI point -- no per-window menu bar!
The per-window menu bar is one of the most bletcherous evil things MS has inflicted upon the world (and slavishly copied by gnome and kde of course...).
[the mac-style per-screen menubar sucks too, but it's slightly less horrid.... at least it doesn't eat up space in every window]
Er, I expect just the opposite will happen: the time he spends on gaim will go drastically up -- he is after all, now being paid to work on it!
I've worked on FOSS for a long time, but now that I'm paid by my company to do it, I do a lot more, because my 9-5 time is also focused on FOSS, not just my free hacking time.
[Oddly enough, I find this doesn't lead to burnout -- the FOSS packages I focus on at work are those my employer values the most, which are not necessarily what I hack on at home. So there's a nice bit of variety to keep things interesting.]
i agree that python has a tendency (at least for me) to cause relaxation and make even otherwise boring tasks fun due to its extremely readable nature and good balance of write-once vs. read-often.
I think you underestimate the ability of people to write bad code -- I've seen a great deal of really crappy impossible-to-understand python code.
I get the impression that many people think "hey it's an easy-going casual high-level language, I don't need to use any care whatsoever!"
[This problem can be even worse with languages that have an "easy" reputation and are less naturally clean than python, e.g., perl, or (shudder!) tcl.]
Taiwan Irked at Google's Version of Earth Pissing off chinese... Thumbs Down
Google was following the ISO standard. So thumbs up.
Any official standard in this area was almost certainly the result of massive amounts of political horse-trading. So thumbs down. [Another case that looks influenced by political interference is "gb" versus "uk".]
Standards are not some kind of absolute; they are simply useful guidelines to consider (the costs versus benefits of following or not following varies greatly depending on exactly what is being standardized).
Taiwan should work on getting the standard changed.
With the PRC exerting all the political and economic pressure it has to counter such efforts? You've got to be kidding. As long as politicians have any influence in the matter, it ain't going to happen.
It's far more practical to cut the politicians out of the loop by simply ignoring the "standard" where it is flawed.
They're not officially binary compatible, many many packages are different
They're about 99.9% the same. I've moved back and forth between Debian and Unbuntu, and honestly speaking there's little real difference (maybe the installer/default install is different, I didn't try those).
I didn't even re-install, I just use apt-get to upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu (and later back to Debian when I realized how little was different in Ubuntu). Things were quite compatible.
Ubuntu's certainly done some nice stuff, but I think if anything they've gotten rather more credit than they deserve.
What sort of psychological issues do you have to be suffering from to become sychophantic to a company to the point of tying your ego to them and their products?
Er, I think it's more because the products from all the other companies simply suck.
I don't own any apple products, even an ipod, but it's pitifully clear how much better they are than their competition, scratches or no.
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments.
Sigh, there's nothing like a Tiananmen square thread to attract craven apologists for the PRC.
The western coverage of the incident was so biased that it is totally unreliable.
Bullshit. I've lived with students who participated in the Tiananmen protests (several of whom spent years in jail for their part), and according to them (and they were there, unlike you), the western news reports of the time were pretty accurate.
[The bizarre thing about chinese PRC apologists (and this extends to official PRC propaganda too) is their crudeness and lack of subtlety. Obviously the U.S. is no sweet angel in many ways, they've done plenty of nasty things -- but your silly exaggerated claims simply reduce your credibility, and to be honest make you look quite childish.]
However, there's no guarantee that if it does really well, the other companies wouldn't sneak in the aspects that work, like the gyroscopic controls.
That's what I'm afraid of. Sony and MS will copy "aspects" of it, but they'll fuck it up -- neither company, especially Sony, seems to care very much about the details of their controllers, they just slap together something that more or less works and don't seem to notice if the result is an ergonomic nightmare.
Then, because Sony is the market leader, their fucked up frankenstein version will become the standard....
Even worse, because of Sony's traditional behavior of never, ever, admitting a mistake, whatever screwups get incorporated into their first version will be enshrined, and we'll be stuck with them into the dim future (see: PS1 dpad of pain, screwed up dual-shock analogue stick positioning -- both replicated on the PSP!).
MS, for all their faults, seems much more nimble and willing to address their mistakes than Sony.
Most of my experience with java comes from examining programs my girlfriend writes for her cs classes. Her speed problems with java have been not so much technology issues as issues of style: because java makes it so convenient, it's easy to fall into the habit of creating many exteremely short-lived temporary objects, and this slows things a lot in some cases. Simply identifying the inner loops and, for instance, changing key functions to destructively modify a parameter rather than returning their result as an object can provide dramatic speedups.
Unfortunately, manually doing such transformations on the source program makes it much less readable; it would be nice it java compilers could automatically do such transformations during compilation. I'm no great fan of C++ but it does do a pretty good job of efficiently handling temporary values without ugly source hacks... now if only there were a way to combine the elegant GC'd behavior of java for long-lived objects, and the efficient "value-oriented" behavior of C++ for very temporary objects...
However, the system (barely) works because most coherent posts that weren't copied from someplace else (usually) get modded up regardless of whether or not they support the standard Slashdot position.
Yes; as I see it, people who follow the "party line" are given the benefit of the doubt, whereas people who oppose it are judged more critically -- but by and large well-written posts get modded fairly.
One common occurance is that if you insert random gratuitous flamebait into an otherwise intelligent post (an urge many people seem to succumb to), it's more likely to get you a flamebait mod if the rest of your post says something people don't like. [So, don't do that!]
Bitch about the length of term of copyright, fine. Legit arguments to be found on both sides. But please, Klaatu, don't call art "information." It's just wrong.
Of course it's not wrong (in either sense). Art is many other things besides information, but it is certainly information as well. For Google's immediate purposes, it's the informational content that's important; this doesn't somehow imply denigration of other aspects.
[And for that matter, most novels/music/whatever are hardly "art", even if you're in a generous mood; maybe even "information" is a little too kind...]
Modern Unixes have a vareity of modern editors with UIs designed along modern UI standards... if you have access to a GUI, you have access to a better editor (kedit, abiword, etc). why not use it?
Because the "modern UI standards" suck massively for anything except getting grandma painlessly up to speed on her first day. Granted they do a good job for grandma in those scary few hours.
Seriously, if you think kedit/abiword are better editors, it's abundantly clear you haven't done very much serious text editing. They're not even on the same planet.
Word is designed to make content look good on the printer you're using, not fit a design into the limiations of your printer.
The problem is that word is actually quite crappy at "making it look good" if you simply enter your text in the most straight-forward way. Users want it to look good though, so they often "tweak" it by adding whitespace, etc., and then distribute their document expecting it to look the same for others -- and then when other people open it, the result looks even more crappy because of all the tweaking done by the naive user.
As far as I can tell it mostly follows the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines for keyboard shortcuts
Ah. I guess the answer would be "no" then.
Sigh; I suppose it's just a matter of time before Gnome's "(UI suckiness + developer arrogance) / eye-candy" ratio becomes simply too insanely large to ignore....
Does evince have nice keybindings? I generally avoid gpdf (though it's much prettier than xpdf) because while it has some keybindings, they're all annoying, and it generally seems to want you to use the mouse... xpdf has much nicer straight-forward keybindings, e.g., n for next page, etc.
Also, many pdf files I try to view cause gpdf or gv to spew tons of errors and give up, whereas xpdf or acroread handle them correctly. Hopefully they've made evince a lot more robust...
I have a Japanese software patent (a rather stupid one, I think, because the technique was more or less what any reasonably competent programmer would have done in the same situation, but they granted it...).
My company applied for a U.S. patent on the same thing as well. Eventually, it was rejected because the USPTO examiner found previous patents that overlapped too much (this was despite various attempts by the agency representing us to weasel around the conflicts).
I read the examiner's objections, and ended up feeling that indeed, he basically knew his stuff, and had done the right thing.
As far as I can tell though, the key thing is that patent examiners only really consider other patents in determining prior art, and otherwise seem to give the benefit of the doubt to the applicant. In the case of truly stupid patents like the Zen patent, nobody would have thought to patent something so obvious and common, so the first slimeball to actually try gets the patent.
This behavior of the USPTO encourages companies to patent anything and everything, even if they have no intention of ever enforcing their patents.
[The reason I even applied in the first place was because the place I was working required periodic patent applications from developers, regardless of what you were doing; as you can imagine, this generates lots of very stupid patent applications...]
Slashdot Mirror
The xbox, meanwhile, is going for the 15-year-old-mom market.
The situation is even weirder than that... I've read most of their exchanges, and as far as I can figure, a lot of the friction in this particular case stems from a bizarre ego thing with Hans: Christoph seems to be somewhat young, and Hans apparently feels that as "a professional", it's beneath him to interact with Christoph as an equal (despite the fact that Christoph seem to be as knowledgeable and skillful as anyone else in this area).
Hans' attitude obviously collides rather disastrously with the largely meritocratic nature of the LKML. Luckily, he really does want to see Reiser4 go in, so after blowing large volumes of hot air (not helped by Christoph's general lack of tact), he finally settled down and began to deal with the technical issues instead of feeding his ego.
Kutaragi: "... and it will able to fly!"
Even more so, when you consider this.
My god... I thought that page was a joke until I looked at the URL!
Microsoft's entire web site has a sort of sickeningly sweet pandering-to-the-clueless-majority feel to it, but at least it's relatively low-key pandering. This subsite ("mactopia") on the other hand, is cringe-inducingly awful -- it's like the same dull web-designers that do MS's general site were trying to mimic Apple's style, but ended up producing a rather cruel mockery of it instead.
As opposed to the more mainstream "fames per eurovision".
Well, I don't know about CHEAP watches. Good watches have sapphire crystals, which aren't very easy to scratch.
A lot of very good sport watches come with acrylic faces (and typically include a polishing kit to remove scratches).
The reason is that a sapphire crystal (or even hard glass) is more likely to shatter in extreme situations; it's harder than acrylic, but not tougher. Also apparently the failure mode of sapphire crystals is more nasty -- lots of extremely sharp shards flying around.
[The above told to me by a salesman, when I asked why an over-$2000 watch used an acrylic face and a different variation of the same watch used a sapphire crystal.]
Unfortunately, the PHBs here at the office disagree.
.dvi files??? Robot machine-gun nests start pumpin' out the lead?]
Man, I've heard of bizarro office rules, but this takes the cake...
Just out of curiousity, what happens when you download a PDF file? Do alarms go off and guards rush out to escort you away? [And what about
I'm just trying to imagine how your boss phrases a reprimand for something so innocuous... "Sorry Bob, but we're all insane idiots here -- you're fired."
A random parent is pretty damn unlikely to be a whole lot better -- they can offer an individualized rate of study and a higher teacher-to-student ratio, but that's about it.
Actually I've noticed another thing they do better: improve the student's "self-esteem."
I've noticed this because every time the subject of education comes up on slashdot, home-schooling enthusiastics crawl out of the woodwork to crow about how insanely great home schooling is, and how's it made them into the wunderkind they are today.
It's also made me realize that sometimes nails should be beaten down (especially when it's the pointy end that's sticking up).
It does seem to have one nice GUI point -- no per-window menu bar!
The per-window menu bar is one of the most bletcherous evil things MS has inflicted upon the world (and slavishly copied by gnome and kde of course...).
[the mac-style per-screen menubar sucks too, but it's slightly less horrid.... at least it doesn't eat up space in every window]
Er, I expect just the opposite will happen: the time he spends on gaim will go drastically up -- he is after all, now being paid to work on it!
I've worked on FOSS for a long time, but now that I'm paid by my company to do it, I do a lot more, because my 9-5 time is also focused on FOSS, not just my free hacking time.
[Oddly enough, I find this doesn't lead to burnout -- the FOSS packages I focus on at work are those my employer values the most, which are not necessarily what I hack on at home. So there's a nice bit of variety to keep things interesting.]
i agree that python has a tendency (at least for me) to cause relaxation and make even otherwise boring tasks fun due to its extremely readable nature and good balance of write-once vs. read-often.
I think you underestimate the ability of people to write bad code -- I've seen a great deal of really crappy impossible-to-understand python code.
I get the impression that many people think "hey it's an easy-going casual high-level language, I don't need to use any care whatsoever!"
[This problem can be even worse with languages that have an "easy" reputation and are less naturally clean than python, e.g., perl, or (shudder!) tcl.]
Any official standard in this area was almost certainly the result of massive amounts of political horse-trading. So thumbs down. [Another case that looks influenced by political interference is "gb" versus "uk".]
Standards are not some kind of absolute; they are simply useful guidelines to consider (the costs versus benefits of following or not following varies greatly depending on exactly what is being standardized).
With the PRC exerting all the political and economic pressure it has to counter such efforts? You've got to be kidding. As long as politicians have any influence in the matter, it ain't going to happen.
It's far more practical to cut the politicians out of the loop by simply ignoring the "standard" where it is flawed.
They're not officially binary compatible, many many packages are different
They're about 99.9% the same. I've moved back and forth between Debian and Unbuntu, and honestly speaking there's little real difference (maybe the installer/default install is different, I didn't try those).
I didn't even re-install, I just use apt-get to upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu (and later back to Debian when I realized how little was different in Ubuntu). Things were quite compatible.
Ubuntu's certainly done some nice stuff, but I think if anything they've gotten rather more credit than they deserve.
What sort of psychological issues do you have to be suffering from to become sychophantic to a company to the point of tying your ego to them and their products?
Er, I think it's more because the products from all the other companies simply suck.
I don't own any apple products, even an ipod, but it's pitifully clear how much better they are than their competition, scratches or no.
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments.
Sigh, there's nothing like a Tiananmen square thread to attract craven apologists for the PRC.
The western coverage of the incident was so biased that it is totally unreliable.
Bullshit. I've lived with students who participated in the Tiananmen protests (several of whom spent years in jail for their part), and according to them (and they were there, unlike you), the western news reports of the time were pretty accurate.
[The bizarre thing about chinese PRC apologists (and this extends to official PRC propaganda too) is their crudeness and lack of subtlety. Obviously the U.S. is no sweet angel in many ways, they've done plenty of nasty things -- but your silly exaggerated claims simply reduce your credibility, and to be honest make you look quite childish.]
However, there's no guarantee that if it does really well, the other companies wouldn't sneak in the aspects that work, like the gyroscopic controls.
That's what I'm afraid of. Sony and MS will copy "aspects" of it, but they'll fuck it up -- neither company, especially Sony, seems to care very much about the details of their controllers, they just slap together something that more or less works and don't seem to notice if the result is an ergonomic nightmare.
Then, because Sony is the market leader, their fucked up frankenstein version will become the standard....
Even worse, because of Sony's traditional behavior of never, ever, admitting a mistake, whatever screwups get incorporated into their first version will be enshrined, and we'll be stuck with them into the dim future (see: PS1 dpad of pain, screwed up dual-shock analogue stick positioning -- both replicated on the PSP!).
MS, for all their faults, seems much more nimble and willing to address their mistakes than Sony.
Most of my experience with java comes from examining programs my girlfriend writes for her cs classes. Her speed problems with java have been not so much technology issues as issues of style: because java makes it so convenient, it's easy to fall into the habit of creating many exteremely short-lived temporary objects, and this slows things a lot in some cases. Simply identifying the inner loops and, for instance, changing key functions to destructively modify a parameter rather than returning their result as an object can provide dramatic speedups.
Unfortunately, manually doing such transformations on the source program makes it much less readable; it would be nice it java compilers could automatically do such transformations during compilation. I'm no great fan of C++ but it does do a pretty good job of efficiently handling temporary values without ugly source hacks... now if only there were a way to combine the elegant GC'd behavior of java for long-lived objects, and the efficient "value-oriented" behavior of C++ for very temporary objects...
However, the system (barely) works because most coherent posts that weren't copied from someplace else (usually) get modded up regardless of whether or not they support the standard Slashdot position.
Yes; as I see it, people who follow the "party line" are given the benefit of the doubt, whereas people who oppose it are judged more critically -- but by and large well-written posts get modded fairly.
One common occurance is that if you insert random gratuitous flamebait into an otherwise intelligent post (an urge many people seem to succumb to), it's more likely to get you a flamebait mod if the rest of your post says something people don't like. [So, don't do that!]
Bitch about the length of term of copyright, fine. Legit arguments to be found on both sides. But please, Klaatu, don't call art "information." It's just wrong.
Of course it's not wrong (in either sense). Art is many other things besides information, but it is certainly information as well. For Google's immediate purposes, it's the informational content that's important; this doesn't somehow imply denigration of other aspects.
[And for that matter, most novels/music/whatever are hardly "art", even if you're in a generous mood; maybe even "information" is a little too kind...]
Modern Unixes have a vareity of modern editors with UIs designed along modern UI standards ... if you have access to a GUI, you have access to a better editor (kedit, abiword, etc). why not use it?
Because the "modern UI standards" suck massively for anything except getting grandma painlessly up to speed on her first day. Granted they do a good job for grandma in those scary few hours.
Seriously, if you think kedit/abiword are better editors, it's abundantly clear you haven't done very much serious text editing. They're not even on the same planet.
Word is designed to make content look good on the printer you're using, not fit a design into the limiations of your printer.
The problem is that word is actually quite crappy at "making it look good" if you simply enter your text in the most straight-forward way. Users want it to look good though, so they often "tweak" it by adding whitespace, etc., and then distribute their document expecting it to look the same for others -- and then when other people open it, the result looks even more crappy because of all the tweaking done by the naive user.
Ah. I guess the answer would be "no" then.
Sigh; I suppose it's just a matter of time before Gnome's "(UI suckiness + developer arrogance) / eye-candy" ratio becomes simply too insanely large to ignore....
Does evince have nice keybindings? I generally avoid gpdf (though it's much prettier than xpdf) because while it has some keybindings, they're all annoying, and it generally seems to want you to use the mouse... xpdf has much nicer straight-forward keybindings, e.g., n for next page, etc.
Also, many pdf files I try to view cause gpdf or gv to spew tons of errors and give up, whereas xpdf or acroread handle them correctly. Hopefully they've made evince a lot more robust...
Why the hell do you think we elected GWB to the Whitehouse twice?
Because you're stupid?
I have a Japanese software patent (a rather stupid one, I think, because the technique was more or less what any reasonably competent programmer would have done in the same situation, but they granted it...).
My company applied for a U.S. patent on the same thing as well. Eventually, it was rejected because the USPTO examiner found previous patents that overlapped too much (this was despite various attempts by the agency representing us to weasel around the conflicts).
I read the examiner's objections, and ended up feeling that indeed, he basically knew his stuff, and had done the right thing.
As far as I can tell though, the key thing is that patent examiners only really consider other patents in determining prior art, and otherwise seem to give the benefit of the doubt to the applicant. In the case of truly stupid patents like the Zen patent, nobody would have thought to patent something so obvious and common, so the first slimeball to actually try gets the patent.
This behavior of the USPTO encourages companies to patent anything and everything, even if they have no intention of ever enforcing their patents.
[The reason I even applied in the first place was because the place I was working required periodic patent applications from developers, regardless of what you were doing; as you can imagine, this generates lots of very stupid patent applications...]