Gentoo is a Linux distro that was modelled after the BSDs from the start, and it doesn't use systemd by default (though it's available). To me it's the best of both worlds, since Linux provides better hardware support and in some cases better software availability too.
On the ports/portage system, consider software you need to build yourself (bleeding edge stuff with no hope of being packaged for distros). For this, most distros want you to install ${LIBRARY}-devel or something for the headers. There's no need to leave these out from $LIBRARY in the first place, unless you want to put up artificial barriers between users and developers. But since Gentoo works by building packages in the first place, the headers are always included. This is great not just for actual developers, but for users who need to build stuff themselves.
So kids like you actually existed? I read all kinds of shit but never got picked on for it probably because I wasn't stupid enough to interact with the "popular" kids and stoners don't give a shit what you are reading.
Good point. I guess my school was small enough at a couple of hundred kids, that everyone knew a bit about everyone without actively engaging with each other. Plus, I was in a tight group studying German language with a handful of popular girls -- who were probably there more to maintain some group identity rather than actually study.
I guess it was not SF books per se, but generally being geeky, with things like social awkwardness. It's hard to shun somebody simply for doing smart (and potentially "cool") things, but it's easy to point out deficiencies. (Of course, even the part about awkward style was turned into "geek pride" by the cool kids some years later.)
Also, science fiction and cyberpunk are dead because the dystopia they predicted is already here. More importantly, all the popular kids who laughed at us for reading SF in our teens are now the biggest fanboys of movie adaptations of the same books, so to hell with them.
Do you have a source of open source FPGAs? Most that I know of are very closed.
I'm not sure this is what the GP means. There are already several opensource CPU designs ready for FPGA implementation, for example at opencores.
It's a good point to keep in mind that a closed FPGA toolchain could introduce unintended features in your opensource CPU. However, it's basically the same issue as running Linux on an Intel processor -- the practical implementation is not fully open source, even if the original software is.
This often gets framed as a technological issue, but it's really a sociological and psychological one. People need to re-learn that their true self-worth isn't contingent on being available and attentive to everyone and his dog on a 24/7 basis. They also need to learn that somebody else's unavailability is simply that - it isn't rejection.
For me, the only way somebody can remotely interrupt my train of thought is a phone call, and those have existed for over a century. But today there are less intrusive ways to convey a message, so phone calls feel relatively much worse. Personally, I feel phone calls are psychologically jarring because you need to engage with the person quite deeply, without getting all the clues of presence. I prefer either asynchronous messaging or actual presence. Then there's the interruption aspect, where the caller assumes their chatter is more important than whatever you are doing.
Now, if people want all this in their async web data, I guess it's their choice. I've found it's possible to use things like FB for coordinating collaborative projects, without spending your entire life there.
I think the real question is, why are Nobel prizes considered so disproportionately prestigious? Is it because they are a quirky old tradition compared to more modern ones, such as the Millennium technology prize with similar monetary worth?
What? AMD's opensource driver framework is actually better performing than their closed Linux drivers (although the opensource version currently lacks fancier features such as OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan). You install it the same way we used to do with most regular GPU drivers back in the day: select the appropriate part in vanilla kernel config, and then install the specific X/Mesa packages. Well, there's the firmware bit too, but in any case there's no need to reinstall anything upon kernel updates. I.e. no worrying about the latest kernel breaking the binary driver.
Lattice has(had?) a $20 fpga dev board with several thousand gates and free-as-in-beer software to run vhdl/verilog projects, open CPUs, or hybrids of the two without much effort. Someone with some basic programming and logic experience could have an FPGA project running over a weekend following easy tutorials.
Getting efficient speeds and gate usage takes quite a lot of experience, but getting started and tinkering does not.
Agreed. Not to toot my own horn, but I once released a pretty groundbreaking project (one of the first Bitcoin FPGA miners) after 3 weeks of owning my first FPGA board. I did have programming and electronics experience, but not exactly professional in either. I mostly used tutorials from fpga4fun to get started.
Of course, in reality many US companies will be forced to adopt things like RoHS 2 regardless of what the US government does, or lose a lot of sales.
On a side note, isn't it great how a "reduction of hazardous substances" directive (or at least the part about lead-free solder) makes electronics more likely to malfunction and harder to repair? I guess it's good for sales, though.
I'm pretty sure a simple accelerometer can distinguish between standing and sitting in practice, because in a standing job, you will be moving around much more. Unless you're something like a soldier on guard duty standing in attention for hours.
I'm tired of posting the same thing again and again, but I guess it's not obvious until you try it: a standing desk makes you want to move, and IMHO it can help with some attention disorders to some extent. So it's much more than simply about different postures -- or maybe it is, because you'll have lots of slightly different postures while standing.
Get a standing desk, so you can focus on your work while allowing your body parts to move around. I've had one for a few years and it was a kind of revelation -- I love computers, but I hate sitting still. While standing, people don't generally stay in a fixed position for very long, so a standing desk forces you to do all kinds of natural movements.
Me too. IMHO, creativity feeds on downtime, which by definition is separate from working hours so your brain can switch into different modes in different times. It looks like these guys are trying to integrate downtime into their working hours. It's like having an open office plan so that you can have a downtimely chat with your friends while focusing on your work.
Excellent post, I'd mod this up if I hadn't already posted.
Python appears to be the language of people who want to get shit done properly right away and then move on. Python, whilst being a very neat programming language, doesn't lend itself to self-indulgance. Maybe those twot traits are correlated.
I guess the "batteries included" philosophy also helps -- include plenty of useful libraries in the base install. This helps maintain the idea that there's a standard way of doing things, and I believe it affects those who write/maintain external libraries too.
On the obligatory whitespace issue, I'm worried that it is a problem for large-scale projects with many people on different platforms -- it's happened to me with only a handful of contributors in a project of mine. (I personally would prefer the Fortran/Julia style where line breaks matter but indentation doesn't, so you need some kind of start/end tags for blocks, but no semicolons after each statement.)
That "Made with Code" project seems particularly absurd. They're trying to trick girls into learning how to program by making it about clothes and fashion.
I organized a workshop of algorithmic art for students aged 12 to 16, using Python to create fractal art. Generally speaking, the girls were at least as interested as boys, if not more. Some of them became interested in coding in general, as they realized it's not just something for the boys and the suits; their perception of computers was limited to things like FPS games and spreadsheets.
People need personally engaging projects to get into coding, and if it's clothes/fashion that gets you started, I don't see anything wrong with it. I generally try to widen people's perspective of math and programming, in that it's everywhere and not just in the engineering and economics, and it can be wildly creative instead of just crunching numbers for profit.
In that video they say that males play with the dolls 1/3 of the time, so it's not quite so clear cut. I recall that Horizon episode and they explained that both sexes are interested in toys that look like their young, but the males are more into things with moving parts. So a gross simplification like
Every time it is conducted, the female monkeys play with the dolls and the male monkey's play with the trucks.
looks like "fascist style propaganda" to me. And I say this as a very tech-oriented male myself, but then again it makes me want to be careful with facts and figures.
I can understand using sliders with a touch screen, though it's a bit of a stretch; on a real mixer, I usually prefer to grab it between my fingers for a better control feel. Still, the general sliding action can be replicated with a single-finger touch.
However, how does one use knobs "as you would real ones"? Do you have a 3D morphing screen where a knob emerges outwards so you can grab it? Because sliding your finger along the perimeter won't cut it.
I was always the "good at math" guy, but my interests were more on the engineering side, so I studied physics while dabbling with programming. As I got deeper into programming, I found all these ideas of pure math, and I went back to university for the math department. I didn't quite finish my secondary master's thesis as other life projects got in the way, but I feel much stronger a programmer now due to all the higher math (e.g. general topology, functional analysis).
As a teacher, I've also struggled with the idea of teaching pure math theory first, vs. learning by doing. But if you look at school math, it's mostly learning by doing examples from the real world. Programming is one way of learning math by doing, and in many cases much better than the alternatives. Nevertheless, my programming still involves a pen and paper on the side.
I also use Audacious whenever I need extended functionality in terms of input/output plugins. It also ties in with my curses frontent I originally wrote in 2002 for XMMS. However, for everyday use I prefer simpler textmode players such as Herrie.
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Gentoo is a Linux distro that was modelled after the BSDs from the start, and it doesn't use systemd by default (though it's available). To me it's the best of both worlds, since Linux provides better hardware support and in some cases better software availability too.
On the ports/portage system, consider software you need to build yourself (bleeding edge stuff with no hope of being packaged for distros). For this, most distros want you to install ${LIBRARY}-devel or something for the headers. There's no need to leave these out from $LIBRARY in the first place, unless you want to put up artificial barriers between users and developers. But since Gentoo works by building packages in the first place, the headers are always included. This is great not just for actual developers, but for users who need to build stuff themselves.
So kids like you actually existed? I read all kinds of shit but never got picked on for it probably because I wasn't stupid enough to interact with the "popular" kids and stoners don't give a shit what you are reading.
Good point. I guess my school was small enough at a couple of hundred kids, that everyone knew a bit about everyone without actively engaging with each other. Plus, I was in a tight group studying German language with a handful of popular girls -- who were probably there more to maintain some group identity rather than actually study.
I guess it was not SF books per se, but generally being geeky, with things like social awkwardness. It's hard to shun somebody simply for doing smart (and potentially "cool") things, but it's easy to point out deficiencies. (Of course, even the part about awkward style was turned into "geek pride" by the cool kids some years later.)
Also, science fiction and cyberpunk are dead because the dystopia they predicted is already here. More importantly, all the popular kids who laughed at us for reading SF in our teens are now the biggest fanboys of movie adaptations of the same books, so to hell with them.
Do you have a source of open source FPGAs? Most that I know of are very closed.
I'm not sure this is what the GP means. There are already several opensource CPU designs ready for FPGA implementation, for example at opencores.
It's a good point to keep in mind that a closed FPGA toolchain could introduce unintended features in your opensource CPU. However, it's basically the same issue as running Linux on an Intel processor -- the practical implementation is not fully open source, even if the original software is.
Yep. http://www.userfriendly.org/ca...
This often gets framed as a technological issue, but it's really a sociological and psychological one. People need to re-learn that their true self-worth isn't contingent on being available and attentive to everyone and his dog on a 24/7 basis. They also need to learn that somebody else's unavailability is simply that - it isn't rejection.
For me, the only way somebody can remotely interrupt my train of thought is a phone call, and those have existed for over a century. But today there are less intrusive ways to convey a message, so phone calls feel relatively much worse. Personally, I feel phone calls are psychologically jarring because you need to engage with the person quite deeply, without getting all the clues of presence. I prefer either asynchronous messaging or actual presence. Then there's the interruption aspect, where the caller assumes their chatter is more important than whatever you are doing.
Now, if people want all this in their async web data, I guess it's their choice. I've found it's possible to use things like FB for coordinating collaborative projects, without spending your entire life there.
With all that interbreeding, at least they had their sin worked out.
I think the real question is, why are Nobel prizes considered so disproportionately prestigious? Is it because they are a quirky old tradition compared to more modern ones, such as the Millennium technology prize with similar monetary worth?
Without Linux drivers? Hah...
What? AMD's opensource driver framework is actually better performing than their closed Linux drivers (although the opensource version currently lacks fancier features such as OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan). You install it the same way we used to do with most regular GPU drivers back in the day: select the appropriate part in vanilla kernel config, and then install the specific X/Mesa packages. Well, there's the firmware bit too, but in any case there's no need to reinstall anything upon kernel updates. I.e. no worrying about the latest kernel breaking the binary driver.
Example: https://www.phoronix.com/scan....
Lattice has(had?) a $20 fpga dev board with several thousand gates and free-as-in-beer software to run vhdl/verilog projects, open CPUs, or hybrids of the two without much effort. Someone with some basic programming and logic experience could have an FPGA project running over a weekend following easy tutorials.
Getting efficient speeds and gate usage takes quite a lot of experience, but getting started and tinkering does not.
Agreed. Not to toot my own horn, but I once released a pretty groundbreaking project (one of the first Bitcoin FPGA miners) after 3 weeks of owning my first FPGA board. I did have programming and electronics experience, but not exactly professional in either. I mostly used tutorials from fpga4fun to get started.
Of course, in reality many US companies will be forced to adopt things like RoHS 2 regardless of what the US government does, or lose a lot of sales.
On a side note, isn't it great how a "reduction of hazardous substances" directive (or at least the part about lead-free solder) makes electronics more likely to malfunction and harder to repair? I guess it's good for sales, though.
I'm pretty sure a simple accelerometer can distinguish between standing and sitting in practice, because in a standing job, you will be moving around much more. Unless you're something like a soldier on guard duty standing in attention for hours.
I'm tired of posting the same thing again and again, but I guess it's not obvious until you try it: a standing desk makes you want to move, and IMHO it can help with some attention disorders to some extent. So it's much more than simply about different postures -- or maybe it is, because you'll have lots of slightly different postures while standing.
Fleas come from stray dogs. FTFY.
Get a standing desk, so you can focus on your work while allowing your body parts to move around. I've had one for a few years and it was a kind of revelation -- I love computers, but I hate sitting still. While standing, people don't generally stay in a fixed position for very long, so a standing desk forces you to do all kinds of natural movements.
Me too. IMHO, creativity feeds on downtime, which by definition is separate from working hours so your brain can switch into different modes in different times. It looks like these guys are trying to integrate downtime into their working hours. It's like having an open office plan so that you can have a downtimely chat with your friends while focusing on your work.
Python appears to be the language of people who want to get shit done properly right away and then move on. Python, whilst being a very neat programming language, doesn't lend itself to self-indulgance. Maybe those twot traits are correlated.
I guess the "batteries included" philosophy also helps -- include plenty of useful libraries in the base install. This helps maintain the idea that there's a standard way of doing things, and I believe it affects those who write/maintain external libraries too.
On the obligatory whitespace issue, I'm worried that it is a problem for large-scale projects with many people on different platforms -- it's happened to me with only a handful of contributors in a project of mine. (I personally would prefer the Fortran/Julia style where line breaks matter but indentation doesn't, so you need some kind of start/end tags for blocks, but no semicolons after each statement.)
I'm well aware of the Real Scots^Wwhitespace issue in Python. Read all about it here.
Hopefully something which doesn't make so much importance out of whitespace will be next.
OhyeahliketheEnglishlanguageandprettymucheverynaturallanguageoutthere.
Speaking of metals in marine use, my upcoming band will be in the genre of sacrificial metal.
Try I2P.
That "Made with Code" project seems particularly absurd. They're trying to trick girls into learning how to program by making it about clothes and fashion.
I organized a workshop of algorithmic art for students aged 12 to 16, using Python to create fractal art. Generally speaking, the girls were at least as interested as boys, if not more. Some of them became interested in coding in general, as they realized it's not just something for the boys and the suits; their perception of computers was limited to things like FPS games and spreadsheets.
People need personally engaging projects to get into coding, and if it's clothes/fashion that gets you started, I don't see anything wrong with it. I generally try to widen people's perspective of math and programming, in that it's everywhere and not just in the engineering and economics, and it can be wildly creative instead of just crunching numbers for profit.
Every time it is conducted, the female monkeys play with the dolls and the male monkey's play with the trucks.
looks like "fascist style propaganda" to me. And I say this as a very tech-oriented male myself, but then again it makes me want to be careful with facts and figures.
I can understand using sliders with a touch screen, though it's a bit of a stretch; on a real mixer, I usually prefer to grab it between my fingers for a better control feel. Still, the general sliding action can be replicated with a single-finger touch.
However, how does one use knobs "as you would real ones"? Do you have a 3D morphing screen where a knob emerges outwards so you can grab it? Because sliding your finger along the perimeter won't cut it.
I was always the "good at math" guy, but my interests were more on the engineering side, so I studied physics while dabbling with programming. As I got deeper into programming, I found all these ideas of pure math, and I went back to university for the math department. I didn't quite finish my secondary master's thesis as other life projects got in the way, but I feel much stronger a programmer now due to all the higher math (e.g. general topology, functional analysis).
As a teacher, I've also struggled with the idea of teaching pure math theory first, vs. learning by doing. But if you look at school math, it's mostly learning by doing examples from the real world. Programming is one way of learning math by doing, and in many cases much better than the alternatives. Nevertheless, my programming still involves a pen and paper on the side.
I also use Audacious whenever I need extended functionality in terms of input/output plugins. It also ties in with my curses frontent I originally wrote in 2002 for XMMS. However, for everyday use I prefer simpler textmode players such as Herrie.