Hey no joke man.... There are plenty of serious stories I first heard about on slashdot. It's like hearing somebody mention something down at the corner store.
Most notably I first became aware of what was happening on 2001-9-11 in various off-topic comments in a slashdot story; initially I thought people were joking (it seemed too absurd to be real). The feeling of disorientation and... dread as I realized it was really happening is still palpable.
Er. If you have your normal text-entry widget set up to use emacs-style keybindings, you'll notice the gmail rich-text text widget doesn't use them -- they apparently reimplemented the input handling in javascript or something.
I just checked out the website someone cited which uses this stuff, and... well, maybe it's better than other attempts to do the same thing (like "put all text in a image"), but it's still pretty lame.
Like most other solutions to the "control-freak web designer problem", it seems better suited for a demo than for actual users. For instance, cut-n-pasting the text: it has some clunky emulation of cut-n-paste, but it's obviously an emulation, and doesn't integrate well with the environment. It also has the "flash capture" problem, where flash will grab mouse events you don't want it too -- e.g. if you're scrolling along with the mouse-wheel, and scroll past one of these dynamic font flash thingies, wham! your scrolling stops, as the flash instance grabs all the scroll events.
Morever, I think any technology which is being touted as a tool to give the designer more control over the fine details is a double-edged sword, as there are so many completely awful web-page "designers" out there, who are none-the-less still utter control freaks. If the technology in question still allows proper user control and overriding of the web-page, and integrates well with the user's environment (e.g.: css), then fine, but this "fonts as flash" stuff seems to be typically lacking in that regard (which is not surprising because flash itself is a major offender).
At a university they won't teach you the specific skills you'll need to get a job. You're expected to learn the theory in class and learn the practical job-skill aspects on your own.
Oh, come on, maybe that's a reasonable way to describe the overall tenor of higher education, but it isn't really true for CS, unless you're only considering very low-level jobs.
A great deal of what they teach in a typical CS curriculum is directly applicable to a typical development job in the software industry (I expect the same is true of hardware, but I don't really know).
For instance a typical algorithms course will teach you both classic algorithms and ways of thinking about them, both of which are things you use on a daily basis in many software jobs.
In today's world, you need a BS. Really, you need a Masters, but you can work on that later.
Any more detail on that? In my experience, a bachelors degree is almost mandatory for getting a job in the computer industry, but a masters degree in CS is basically pointless except as a step towards a PhD: it holds no real attraction for business, and anything less than a PhD is not sufficient to advance in academia. [This is obviously not true of all fields, e.g., a MBA seems to have some bizarro magic attraction.]
Not an idle question BTW -- somebody I know is currently in a CS undergrad program, and trying to decide whether to get a masters or not; almost everybody, including profs, etc., are saying "Don't bother with the masters unless you want a PhD." If there's significant evidence to the contrary, it'd be nice to know.
Quite a bit actually; if I'm starting a new project one of the first things I do is add a few simple assert-like macros that use the appropriate error-reporting infrastructure.
I find that they can help quite a bit to catch less obvious bugs.
If I'm adding code to an existing large project though, I tend to follow whatever the general convention of that project is (i.e., I don't add my own assert macros:-).
[I was gonna fill in your survey too, but I'm not at work, so I can't reply to the email check...]
Sure GUIs have a place, but you're confused if you think that every task suddenly becomes obvious when it has a GUI attached. Just like everything else, users must learn how to use a GUI. Nothing is "obvious" [I know this from my own mom, who had great trouble with her new imac and web-browsing -- despite having had previous computer experience using WP to edit stuff and connecting to a dialup.]
So: most people will need to be taught what steps they have to take to install something. For many of them, this will be magic voodoo, GUI or no.
So the effort required to write down and type in a simple command name is not really very different from that to remember you need to do X, Y, and Z from the menus. The effort required to find package file FOO on web is no less than finding out the name "FOO" to type after said command name.
From the point of view of support, the command-line has a giant advantage: you can say "type this" over the phone much more easily than guiding somebody through a graphical application, and/or keeping track of what stuff they've downloaded ("somewhere").
Once they're in a domain-specific app, a GUI can help guide them, but package-installation seems more limited by other tasks which are external to the package manager.
Yeah, the PSP is large, and worse, it's very heavy. If you could cram it in your pocket, it'd drag your pants down...:-)
The controls also kinda suck.
I'd far rather see something like a wider GBA SP -- not DS wide, but about 50% wider than the SP -- with a screen that completely occupies the top half, and a decent analogue controller in the sweet spot on the lower half (unlike the PSP, which has Sony's horrid digital pad there).
Re:IMHO DS is far better and the review is compari
on
PSP And DS Duke It Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The PSP's controls are not very good though though -- the analogue nub is badly placed and quite fiddly to use, and the digital pad is the same horrid painful thing Sony's been inflicting on players since the PS1.
It seems like Sony spent all their time obsessing about the display and simply didn't think very much about the controls. [I should say "SCE", not Sony -- it's a very SCE thing to do...]
I kinda like the PSP, but the crappy controls put me off quite a bit. A shame. Maybe Nintendo's future GBA replacement will be better...
This has bugged me ever since the first Star Wars film. They're flying around in spaceships, wearing funky clothing, fighting light-saber duels, etc., and I'll be suspending my disbelief just fine,... but wait... all the male actors have hair right out of the local teen boy-band concert! Gah!
C'mon guys, either make the hair (1) really weird (the female actors seem to have this down), or (2) mind-bendingly conservative (pick something that hasn't changed in 1500 years, like shaving it all off). At least stop using Tiger Teen Beat as your model.
The phrase "dropping support" is misleading. They're dropping the "stable" release for these archs. They are moved into a category called "second class citizen" architectures.
"unstable" -- which is what hacker-type individuals tend to run anyway (and is both much more up-to-date and not particularly unstable) -- will continue for all. As most of the affected archs fall into the "mostly for hackers" category, this change should have little real impact. I suppose the exception might be the sparc.
The benefit of all this is (besides, maybe, faster releases) that they have a plan for adding new scc archs easily.
[I think the "scc" archs will also not use the Debian mirror network, but probably don't have enough users to receive any real benefit from it either.]
You may "suspect" all you want. But there have been many opportunities for the FSF to act. I "suspect" than they will not, as they would have already if they where so inclined.
They have acted many times, but the offending party has always backed down instead of going to court. This suits the FSF well enough: as long as they always win anyway, there's no point in risking a court case (no matter how good the odds, there's a risk).
As far as I'm concerned, the GPL is worthless, and deceptively so.
From your many, many posts on this thread it's clear you wish desperately that this were so. However it's also clear to anybody familiar with the issues that you're quite wrong.
I base my observation of the desire for OSS to go forth, be fruitful and multiply on reading the sentiments of (mostly) pro-OSS people on forums like this one.
The random mutterings of the "pro-OSS crowd" are not necessarily synonymous with the desires of the people actually writing the software.
The former are very loud and noticeable, but the latter are the only thing that really matters when it comes to deciding how development should be done.
I'm surprised at the battery life of the PSP because I have a Sony portable CD...
Portable CD players, MD players, etc., are something Sony is very good at, can approach methodically and optimize. They are products of the "real" Sony, and are usually pretty elegant, if a bit conservative. The amount of hardware used is exactly enough for the problem at hand (or sometimes not quite enough...), and so things like battery life can be made pretty good.
The PSP on the other hand appears to be a typical rather half-assed SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) product: throw lots of hardware, glitz, and hype at the problem (grab the gameboy market in this case), and hope nobody notices how shoddy the construction and user-interface are. "Lots of hardware" may sound good, but it's usually designed very quickly, and ends up being inefficient for the task; something like battery life gets wacked upside the head.
The SCE approach seems to make Sony lots of money so it unfortunately may be on the ascendent. OTOH, Ken Kutaragi (SCE head) was apparently demoted in Sony's most recent shuffle, so who knows... [but that may have simply been personal -- Kutaragi is not well liked at Sony]
I can't quite figure out what the complaint is, but if they've added some relevant keywords, what's the scandal?
There isn't one. Some morons with a bug up their butt about google saw something they thought they could use -- with enough spin -- as an excuse to trot out their usual tired rants.
I think it's still possible that, if Jobs had the market dominance of Gates, he'd act just like him.
Well anything's possible, but judging from what I've read, Gates had the same basic attitude even when MS was a small unknown company, and Jobs probably has enough power and success that any potential nastiness would have shown itself (not that it hasn't of course, I don't really know -- but it doesn't seem likely that he would change greatly).
MSDOS was generally considered something of an improvement.
My memory from the time (C.1981?) is that MS-DOS was considered a crappy low-rent OS (the alternative on the IBM PC being CPM-86 or whatever it was called) -- but cheap.
The eClipz project is tied very closely to this. "e" as in eServer, "l" as in Linux, "i" as in iSeries, "p" as in pSeries and "z" as in zSeries will.. eclips the Sun.
I knew IBM had good research people, but I never realized their acronym technology was that far advanced! My god, with an acronym like that... their competitors might as well just give up now and save themselves the embarrassment.
I have. There's so much damn foam in the standard SB cappuccino that it doesn't seem to make all that much difference (and of course they charge a lot more for multiple shots). Another thing that doesn't seem to work is asking them to put less foam/milk in -- I've done this, and they've fucked it up every time (e.g., they reduce the foam, but increase the milk to compensate, despite my asking them not to).
I don't know what exactly the proportions used by cafes that make a better cappuccino are (is a typical "real" cappuccino always two shots?) but starbucks employees seem fundamentally incapable of using them unless maybe you hold a gun to their head or something.
... many times the barrista serving you is not going to be accustomed to making proper espresso beverages such as a plain ol' macchiato or cappucino.
If you order cappuccino at starbucks, you're gonna get a "starbucks style cappuccino" anyway, a single shot of espresso with 2,682 gallons of foam/milk. You can barely taste the coffee.
This particular little detail drives me nuts, because I often want something a little more foamy than a macchiato, but I don't want a glass of milk. Other large cafe chains, like Segafredo seem to be capable of making a great cappuccino that's exactly the right foaminess, but no amount of bitching at starbucks employees has gotten me anything anywhere near acceptable. [Some cafes, like Intelligentsia now even serve both "Traditional cappuccino" and "American-style cappuccino".]
I don't know WTF is wrong with all these people complaining that "starbucks coffee is burnt" either -- it's not the best there is, but it's decent, and of course about 5 billion times better than traditional American coffee. Maybe the starbucks near them are sub-par or something, but starbucks in general seems to be a pretty reasonable "minimal standard" cafe chain, for when you can't find anything better. Mind you, it's a creepy corporate borg-like entity, but hey, when you need caffeine, you need caffeine.:-)
It also probably depends a lot on where you live. I've known people in the Japanese countryside that have minivans, but they're pretty rare around Tokyo.
In the city there generally seems to be an even split between "small elegant efficient" cars (much smaller -- and more elegant -- than anything you'll find in the U.S.) and "big bloated mercedes" (conspicuous consumption by rich people) type cars.
Given that Mac OS X does so much, it is, yes, a pretty absurd concept for me that people might want to throw all that functionality away and use an operating system that makes you feel like it's 1979 all over again.
Um, look: we all know OSX is very pretty, highly functional, reasonably solid, easy-to-use, nicely supported, etc. It's great! We know!
But it's really frustrating arguing with OSX zealots, because they simply cannot seem to grasp the concept that other people might in fact differ in what they like.
Some people might value the freedom to hack the entire OS, and the community spirit they get with Debian, and not particularly give much of a shit about Apple's suite-of-software-with-cringe-inducing-names (iTunes, iEtc.). These people could just possibly be happier running Debian than OSX, despite knowing full-well what particular features they're missing out on by choosing to do so.
So come on, please, open your eyes: OSX is lovely, but it's not some kind of ultimate good. It's merely a very respectable choice of OS, with good and bad points like every other.
it is interesting how on one side NASA feels it's possible to control and affect positive massive global climate change on Mars but fears comparatively tiny changes on Earth.
Hmmm, think maybe it has something to do with the fact that Mars is an uninhabited wasteland, whereas if Earth gets screwed up, all we know is destroyed and we all die horrible agonizing deaths?
Of course that might not happen -- but when the stakes are very high, you should pay a lot more attention to the risks...
Slashdot Mirror
Hey no joke man.... There are plenty of serious stories I first heard about on slashdot. It's like hearing somebody mention something down at the corner store.
... dread as I realized it was really happening is still palpable.
Most notably I first became aware of what was happening on 2001-9-11 in various off-topic comments in a slashdot story; initially I thought people were joking (it seemed too absurd to be real). The feeling of disorientation and
The rich text editing is done very well too.
Er. If you have your normal text-entry widget set up to use emacs-style keybindings, you'll notice the gmail rich-text text widget doesn't use them -- they apparently reimplemented the input handling in javascript or something.
Lose, lose.
I just checked out the website someone cited which uses this stuff, and ... well, maybe it's better than other attempts to do the same thing (like "put all text in a image"), but it's still pretty lame.
Like most other solutions to the "control-freak web designer problem", it seems better suited for a demo than for actual users. For instance, cut-n-pasting the text: it has some clunky emulation of cut-n-paste, but it's obviously an emulation, and doesn't integrate well with the environment. It also has the "flash capture" problem, where flash will grab mouse events you don't want it too -- e.g. if you're scrolling along with the mouse-wheel, and scroll past one of these dynamic font flash thingies, wham! your scrolling stops, as the flash instance grabs all the scroll events.
Morever, I think any technology which is being touted as a tool to give the designer more control over the fine details is a double-edged sword, as there are so many completely awful web-page "designers" out there, who are none-the-less still utter control freaks. If the technology in question still allows proper user control and overriding of the web-page, and integrates well with the user's environment (e.g.: css), then fine, but this "fonts as flash" stuff seems to be typically lacking in that regard (which is not surprising because flash itself is a major offender).
At a university they won't teach you the specific skills you'll need to get a job. You're expected to learn the theory in class and learn the practical job-skill aspects on your own.
Oh, come on, maybe that's a reasonable way to describe the overall tenor of higher education, but it isn't really true for CS, unless you're only considering very low-level jobs.
A great deal of what they teach in a typical CS curriculum is directly applicable to a typical development job in the software industry (I expect the same is true of hardware, but I don't really know).
For instance a typical algorithms course will teach you both classic algorithms and ways of thinking about them, both of which are things you use on a daily basis in many software jobs.
In today's world, you need a BS. Really, you need a Masters, but you can work on that later.
Any more detail on that? In my experience, a bachelors degree is almost mandatory for getting a job in the computer industry, but a masters degree in CS is basically pointless except as a step towards a PhD: it holds no real attraction for business, and anything less than a PhD is not sufficient to advance in academia. [This is obviously not true of all fields, e.g., a MBA seems to have some bizarro magic attraction.]
Not an idle question BTW -- somebody I know is currently in a CS undergrad program, and trying to decide whether to get a masters or not; almost everybody, including profs, etc., are saying "Don't bother with the masters unless you want a PhD." If there's significant evidence to the contrary, it'd be nice to know.
Quite a bit actually; if I'm starting a new project one of the first things I do is add a few simple assert-like macros that use the appropriate error-reporting infrastructure.
:-).
I find that they can help quite a bit to catch less obvious bugs.
If I'm adding code to an existing large project though, I tend to follow whatever the general convention of that project is (i.e., I don't add my own assert macros
[I was gonna fill in your survey too, but I'm not at work, so I can't reply to the email check...]
Sure GUIs have a place, but you're confused if you think that every task suddenly becomes obvious when it has a GUI attached. Just like everything else, users must learn how to use a GUI. Nothing is "obvious" [I know this from my own mom, who had great trouble with her new imac and web-browsing -- despite having had previous computer experience using WP to edit stuff and connecting to a dialup.]
So: most people will need to be taught what steps they have to take to install something. For many of them, this will be magic voodoo, GUI or no.
So the effort required to write down and type in a simple command name is not really very different from that to remember you need to do X, Y, and Z from the menus. The effort required to find package file FOO on web is no less than finding out the name "FOO" to type after said command name.
From the point of view of support, the command-line has a giant advantage: you can say "type this" over the phone much more easily than guiding somebody through a graphical application, and/or keeping track of what stuff they've downloaded ("somewhere").
Once they're in a domain-specific app, a GUI can help guide them, but package-installation seems more limited by other tasks which are external to the package manager.
Er, no. My mom can install Windows software. Nice, descriptive dialogues and buttons for easy clicking. She sure as hell can't use apt-get
Oh for god's sake, she can too.
sudo aptitude install package
Ooooh that was hard!
[Be nice and give her an alias apt='sudo aptitude']
Yeah, the PSP is large, and worse, it's very heavy. If you could cram it in your pocket, it'd drag your pants down... :-)
The controls also kinda suck.
I'd far rather see something like a wider GBA SP -- not DS wide, but about 50% wider than the SP -- with a screen that completely occupies the top half, and a decent analogue controller in the sweet spot on the lower half (unlike the PSP, which has Sony's horrid digital pad there).
The PSP's controls are not very good though though -- the analogue nub is badly placed and quite fiddly to use, and the digital pad is the same horrid painful thing Sony's been inflicting on players since the PS1.
It seems like Sony spent all their time obsessing about the display and simply didn't think very much about the controls. [I should say "SCE", not Sony -- it's a very SCE thing to do...]
I kinda like the PSP, but the crappy controls put me off quite a bit. A shame. Maybe Nintendo's future GBA replacement will be better...
Introducing Windows TurnedOffEmbeddedInConcreteBuried50feetUnderground Edition -- It can't crash!
Probably.
I just wish they'd pick a good hairdresser.
... but wait ... all the male actors have hair right out of the local teen boy-band concert! Gah!
This has bugged me ever since the first Star Wars film. They're flying around in spaceships, wearing funky clothing, fighting light-saber duels, etc., and I'll be suspending my disbelief just fine,
C'mon guys, either make the hair (1) really weird (the female actors seem to have this down), or (2) mind-bendingly conservative (pick something that hasn't changed in 1500 years, like shaving it all off). At least stop using Tiger Teen Beat as your model.
The phrase "dropping support" is misleading. They're dropping the "stable" release for these archs. They are moved into a category called "second class citizen" architectures.
"unstable" -- which is what hacker-type individuals tend to run anyway (and is both much more up-to-date and not particularly unstable) -- will continue for all. As most of the affected archs fall into the "mostly for hackers" category, this change should have little real impact. I suppose the exception might be the sparc.
The benefit of all this is (besides, maybe, faster releases) that they have a plan for adding new scc archs easily.
[I think the "scc" archs will also not use the Debian mirror network, but probably don't have enough users to receive any real benefit from it either.]
You may "suspect" all you want. But there have been many opportunities for the FSF to act. I "suspect" than they will not, as they would have already if they where so inclined.
They have acted many times, but the offending party has always backed down instead of going to court. This suits the FSF well enough: as long as they always win anyway, there's no point in risking a court case (no matter how good the odds, there's a risk).
As far as I'm concerned, the GPL is worthless, and deceptively so.
From your many, many posts on this thread it's clear you wish desperately that this were so. However it's also clear to anybody familiar with the issues that you're quite wrong.
I base my observation of the desire for OSS to go forth, be fruitful and multiply on reading the sentiments of (mostly) pro-OSS people on forums like this one.
The random mutterings of the "pro-OSS crowd" are not necessarily synonymous with the desires of the people actually writing the software.
The former are very loud and noticeable, but the latter are the only thing that really matters when it comes to deciding how development should be done.
I'm surprised at the battery life of the PSP because I have a Sony portable CD ...
Portable CD players, MD players, etc., are something Sony is very good at, can approach methodically and optimize. They are products of the "real" Sony, and are usually pretty elegant, if a bit conservative. The amount of hardware used is exactly enough for the problem at hand (or sometimes not quite enough...), and so things like battery life can be made pretty good.
The PSP on the other hand appears to be a typical rather half-assed SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) product: throw lots of hardware, glitz, and hype at the problem (grab the gameboy market in this case), and hope nobody notices how shoddy the construction and user-interface are. "Lots of hardware" may sound good, but it's usually designed very quickly, and ends up being inefficient for the task; something like battery life gets wacked upside the head.
The SCE approach seems to make Sony lots of money so it unfortunately may be on the ascendent. OTOH, Ken Kutaragi (SCE head) was apparently demoted in Sony's most recent shuffle, so who knows... [but that may have simply been personal -- Kutaragi is not well liked at Sony]
I can't quite figure out what the complaint is, but if they've added some relevant keywords, what's the scandal?
There isn't one. Some morons with a bug up their butt about google saw something they thought they could use -- with enough spin -- as an excuse to trot out their usual tired rants.
Pathetic really.
I think it's still possible that, if Jobs had the market dominance of Gates, he'd act just like him.
Well anything's possible, but judging from what I've read, Gates had the same basic attitude even when MS was a small unknown company, and Jobs probably has enough power and success that any potential nastiness would have shown itself (not that it hasn't of course, I don't really know -- but it doesn't seem likely that he would change greatly).
MSDOS was generally considered something of an improvement.
My memory from the time (C.1981?) is that MS-DOS was considered a crappy low-rent OS (the alternative on the IBM PC being CPM-86 or whatever it was called) -- but cheap.
Cheap usually wins...
The eClipz project is tied very closely to this. "e" as in eServer, "l" as in Linux, "i" as in iSeries, "p" as in pSeries and "z" as in zSeries will.. eclips the Sun.
... their competitors might as well just give up now and save themselves the embarrassment.
I knew IBM had good research people, but I never realized their acronym technology was that far advanced! My god, with an acronym like that
I have. There's so much damn foam in the standard SB cappuccino that it doesn't seem to make all that much difference (and of course they charge a lot more for multiple shots). Another thing that doesn't seem to work is asking them to put less foam/milk in -- I've done this, and they've fucked it up every time (e.g., they reduce the foam, but increase the milk to compensate, despite my asking them not to).
I don't know what exactly the proportions used by cafes that make a better cappuccino are (is a typical "real" cappuccino always two shots?) but starbucks employees seem fundamentally incapable of using them unless maybe you hold a gun to their head or something.
Hmmm, now there's an idea...
... many times the barrista serving you is not going to be accustomed to making proper espresso beverages such as a plain ol' macchiato or cappucino.
:-)
If you order cappuccino at starbucks, you're gonna get a "starbucks style cappuccino" anyway, a single shot of espresso with 2,682 gallons of foam/milk. You can barely taste the coffee.
This particular little detail drives me nuts, because I often want something a little more foamy than a macchiato, but I don't want a glass of milk. Other large cafe chains, like Segafredo seem to be capable of making a great cappuccino that's exactly the right foaminess, but no amount of bitching at starbucks employees has gotten me anything anywhere near acceptable. [Some cafes, like Intelligentsia now even serve both "Traditional cappuccino" and "American-style cappuccino".]
I don't know WTF is wrong with all these people complaining that "starbucks coffee is burnt" either -- it's not the best there is, but it's decent, and of course about 5 billion times better than traditional American coffee. Maybe the starbucks near them are sub-par or something, but starbucks in general seems to be a pretty reasonable "minimal standard" cafe chain, for when you can't find anything better. Mind you, it's a creepy corporate borg-like entity, but hey, when you need caffeine, you need caffeine.
It also probably depends a lot on where you live. I've known people in the Japanese countryside that have minivans, but they're pretty rare around Tokyo.
In the city there generally seems to be an even split between "small elegant efficient" cars (much smaller -- and more elegant -- than anything you'll find in the U.S.) and "big bloated mercedes" (conspicuous consumption by rich people) type cars.
Given that Mac OS X does so much, it is, yes, a pretty absurd concept for me that people might want to throw all that functionality away and use an operating system that makes you feel like it's 1979 all over again.
Um, look: we all know OSX is very pretty, highly functional, reasonably solid, easy-to-use, nicely supported, etc. It's great! We know!
But it's really frustrating arguing with OSX zealots, because they simply cannot seem to grasp the concept that other people might in fact differ in what they like.
Some people might value the freedom to hack the entire OS, and the community spirit they get with Debian, and not particularly give much of a shit about Apple's suite-of-software-with-cringe-inducing-names (iTunes, iEtc.). These people could just possibly be happier running Debian than OSX, despite knowing full-well what particular features they're missing out on by choosing to do so.
So come on, please, open your eyes: OSX is lovely, but it's not some kind of ultimate good. It's merely a very respectable choice of OS, with good and bad points like every other.
it is interesting how on one side NASA feels it's possible to control and affect positive massive global climate change on Mars but fears comparatively tiny changes on Earth.
Hmmm, think maybe it has something to do with the fact that Mars is an uninhabited wasteland, whereas if Earth gets screwed up, all we know is destroyed and we all die horrible agonizing deaths?
Of course that might not happen -- but when the stakes are very high, you should pay a lot more attention to the risks...