A strict subset cares about freedom, and they're probably already running Linux.
I think the real trick is convincing people that freedom itself is worth real money. Yes, switching will cost you, but then, next time Microsoft says "You will buy Vista.", you don't have to. When you have this software that does X but you need it to do X+1, you can make it happen by hiring people, and there is nobody to tell you no. Presumably if you care about X+1 it comes down to "because it will save you money".
Arguing in pure freedom terms will shoot over many people's heads.
Try this objection on for size: I'm supposed to be able to read a patent and implement the device. I recently saw Mythbusters do just that for a couple of old patents. But software patents by my estimate get you far less than 1% of the way to an implementation.
A patent on the web would describe "a client machine that requests content from a server, and the server receives it." A series of further elaborations might be made mentioning that it could be cached, could travel over the internet, could travel wirelessly, etc.
However, I guarantee you the patent won't contain anything like this, which is at least enough to implement it, even if it still only constitutes a specification with no code whatsoever. (That's the HTTP 1.1 RFC, so you don't have to follow the link.)
There are a bare handful of patents this doesn't apply to, but all but one software patent I've ever read looks like this.
The reason most patents seem so obvious is that the mere statement of a problem is hard to make interesting.
The other basic problem is that to the extent that the difficult part is seeing a problem, many patents "patent" the only obvious solution. Realizing that people want a one-click checkout might be a good idea that nobody has. (Note the "might"; actually I think it's the obvious conclusion of a long refinement process of making checkout simpler, but maybe you disagree.) But once you say to me "Hey, I want a one-click checkout", the technical implementation is obvious. In fact, since there's only one basic way to do it it's actually even more obvious than a conventional checkout.
Most people don't seem to think about refactoring their GUIs; already there's one post here telling you not to code your GUIs but use the pathetic drawing tools to create them, even though GUI builders are evil, and one of the very reasons they are evil is they preclude even the simplest refactorings. The bulk of programmers seem to be happy about that.
My experience is that there really isn't anything special about GUI refactoring vs. any other kind of refactoring, at least in the languages I use. That may be a factor; dynamic languages like Python or Ruby seem to be a lot easier to implement "Don't Repeat Yourself" in. You may find you'd be better off switching to one of them, especially if you're trying to work in Java, with seems to elevate repeating yourself to a moral imperative.
But beyond that, I don't really see what's special about GUIs.
The other thing is that when you are first learning an environment, you need to cut yourself some slack. No matter what you do, your first few cuts will suck as you are getting your bearings. I'm all about refactoring and testing, but when I recently picked up Django, I didn't worry about either at all in the first week. Now I have to go back and re-examine everything I did and get the testing going for it, but I don't see any practical way to avoid it; testing my initial garbage would just increase the investment into code that I'm basically throwing away anyhow. (As I have a lot of web experience, that's probably faster than usual; any other framework type would probably take me longer.) You may find that you have built "one to throw away"; consider actually doing so.
Caveat: When I referred to the "stated goals", I mean with regard to blocking "child porn".
Hate speech is another topic entirely and one I find too scarily fuzzy and subjective for a government to be enforcing. Hate speech in many places is damn near "speech I disagree with".
True incitement to violence I can see continuing to enforce, but expanding that to "hate speech" is just asking for censorship. I try to read a wide range of sources on both the "left" and the "right", and I've seen on both sides the accusation of "hate speech" freely tossed about for things that really weren't. The problem with hate speech is that you get into the logic of "I like X because I love children. If you don't like X, you clearly hate children. Therefore, advocating against X is 'hate speech' against children." I've seen that argument used both for and against legal abortion. In neither case is it hate speech; in both cases the arguer genuinely believes they are advocating for children.
We Canadians don't tend to get so worked up about individual freedoms when the common good is at stake.
Without intending to debate the point directly, the "American" point of view is that the highest calling of government is to protect individual freedoms, and as a government by the people, for the people, that is the common good. Those who would claim to use the common good as an argument to curtail freedom need to be scrutinized very carefully.
That said, it is an immature interpretation of that idea to collapse that to "Those who would claim to use tho common good as an argument to curtail freedom are always automatically wrong". Clearly, there are many things that have passed this examination; in some sense every law on the books must pass that test.
Personally, I find it difficult to get too worked up over the stated goals of this program. However, humans and all their institutions have a proven track record of abuse of this sort of power; other comments bring up some historical instances, such as a telecom company blocking their union's website. Jumpy people help keep the system in check. Being nervous about this sort of thing is perfectly rational, and given a bell curve of reactions, that means some people will be frothing at the mouth. They are not necessarily representative, though.
(Part of the reason I don't spend too much time worrying about the impending tyranny over the United States is the number of people that are still free to scream about impending tyranny. I'll know that we're actually in trouble when you can only find people saying everything's just great, yay!)
Does anyone know how accurate/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state is? The article talks approvingly about 22W of power, but my ACPI reports:
jerf@localhost ~ $ cat/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state present: yes capacity state: ok charging state: discharging present rate: 1239 mA remaining capacity: 5708 mAh present voltage: 12232 mV
which by my calculations is 15W. This is on my lowest display setting and an idle CPU, but no other extreme power saving efforts (hard disk spinning, wireless on, etc.) (Highest display brightness gives me 21.3W; display is a big draw, apparently.)
I've wondered if this was accurate. (Although I have to admit the heat on this thing backs that up; even at full load it just gets "a little warm"; a previous laptop reached "burns your lap" while idling.)
(For reference, this is a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a 1.6GHz Pentium M on the Sonoma (IIRC) chipset.)
I've wondered how accurate that readout is. It offers four or five significant digits which I find hard to believe. If there are any power hackers out there who could tell me if this is reasonably accurate or full of shit, I'd be appreciative. (I've wondered if I'm seriously running what I find a rather nice computer setup overall on less power than a dim incandescent light bulb or our Christmas lights.)
You can customize a Dell E1505 right now with a 1680x1050 screen for well under $1000, though you'll probably want to bump that base model up a bit.
In previous months, I've seen it where if you pick the lowest model of the laptop at the customization screen, you won't be offered the higher screen res, but if you start with a higher base customization you will be offered better screens. This seems to come and go.
I have an earlier model of the E1505, called the "Inspiron 6000" (obviously just under 4 times better), which I bought about a year ago, and it was tricky then, too. I honestly don't know if you even have a significant choice other than Dell and maybe HP (which also comes and goes); if you can't customize it onto your system, it doesn't seem to be an option.
I understand your discomfort. It's a good thing. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" is more about keeping an eye on the small things than the big, flashy, obvious things.
But in the real world, the optimal balance between liberty and justice requires a few ugly bits, because that's just the way the world works. Nothing is ever as clean in practice as it is in theory and justice is no exception.
Arresting and convicting someone in a sting is certainly a bit dodgy, but it's a tool I would not want to take away from law enforcement; net-net, the benefits outweigh the dangers. Just watch them carefully (at least in the aggregate; we can't all watch ever law enforcement agency all the time).
This ruling now makes companies accountable for maintaining IM traffic (and possibly other similar data) as well. THAT will be of grave issue.
I submit to you that this ruling did not create that issue, but revealed the issue that already existed.
Legislation based on technical means is fatally flawed (and that's actually a summary of a richer argument; I know some people have already talked about this but the link talks about it in greater depth than a Slashdot posting can hold, especially in the context of that full work). When it gets down to it, it turns out to be very hard to draw a legal line between an email, an IM, this post to Slashdot, a post to Usenet that will be read by only a few people, etc.
I'm not saying you can't find some distinctive properties that allow you to talk about certain aspects of those things, I'm saying that it's hard to find a clear legal line that totally discriminates between those things based solely on technology aspects, given the flexibility of technology. I can do any of those things through an email gateway, for instance; would an illegal solicitation posted to Slashdot via an email gateway be illegal, whereas one posted directly be legal? Or maybe it's only illegal if it's received via an email gateway for reading slashdot?
You really need to work solely in terms of the distinctive properties, not the technical means, because technically speaking we can tunnel damn near anything over anything. Talking about "doing something on the web" is ultimately not a well-defined term, legally.
By market share, all have failed; all that has survived is the web browser and its basic standards.
Clarification (it's late for me): By "market share" I mean including HTML+Javascript "applications" and pages; Flash isn't a "failure" in the conventional sense, but for every truly Flash-based site (not just animations or fancy menus but truly flash based; the only one I can think of off the top of my head is J. K. Rowling's site) there are probably a hundred basically HTML+Javascript sites, like Slashdot or Google Email. By that measure even mighty Flash is just a blip.
The "correct" answer depends on what exactly it is you want to do.
The tricky thing about answering this question is that it is easy to end up with an answer that already exists.
"I want to run arbitrary apps on the client as if they are on a server": Do it. Terminal services, VNC, whatever.
"I want to be able to write a chat client that runs in the browser": All you really need here is real socket support instead of hacked up AJAX running on HTTP, which is an excellent protocol for many things, but not a continuous, small-scale back-and-forth. (Chat's a great example; the headers may well cost you a factor of 100x on the byte count.) But why not run a proper chat app? A browser by design can't integrate with the system tray or KNotify or whatever, and loading a second server with a connection to the actual IM server is silly.
"I want to write little applications that anybody can pick up and use, but I really need feature X": If you add in everybody's feature X, then before you know it, "nobody" wants to use the no-longer-simple web browser any more.
I think what it boils down to is that the very reason "mere mortals" like interacting with web "applications" is in fact a direct result of the simplicity that results from the limited palette web designers have. I've been developing on the web since 1996 and I could reel off a long list of things I'd like to see if I don't think about it, but if I think about it I start to see that for each feature I want, it would almost inevitably complicate the web and drive away the charm it has for so many "mere mortals". (I am explicitly talking about "your grandmother" here, not a Slashdot user.)
By way of evidence I offer up the long list of things that have tried to "improve" the web: Flash. Java. ActiveX. Any number of other solutions based on those. By market share, all have failed; all that has survived is the web browser and its basic standards.
Personally, if I had to choose, I'd say, maybe a few more widgets standard, certainly some tuning and tweaking, a raw socket might not hurt, but I'd rather see improvement come from the other direction: Make better desktop apps that focus on simplicity and connectivity, that don't bloat the user's desktop or act like they own it, and have better connections with the internet.
If you really nailed me down, give me some kind of standardized XBL that works across browsers. I've done what I can with that and other libraries have some entries on that front too, but there are certain last little bits that really need some browser help to make them slick. For the love of Knuth, don't embed this in XML, XBL and my experience prove it to be an extremely poor fit to the job of specifying widgets. (The sad thing is that it is poor in ways you can't see until you step out of the confines of the actual XBL Mozilla implements.) This really helps clean up the spaghetti code that Javascript development tends to turn into.
(In fact each browser has a poor, hacky, over-specialized implementation of the idea, but they are totally incompatible with each other and both extremely poorly known.)
I give your defense no credence. Reading crap like that leaves you less informed about actual science than before you read it. It's right up there with taking education about quantum mechanics from Star Trek; Star Trek on the balance leaves you less informed about real physics and engineering than if you didn't watch it at all. (On the plus, it exposes to you certain words. On the minus, it is completely and utterly wrong about what those words mean, routinely, to the point that them getting something right is the exception.)
Worst of all is the way India Times presents its babbling as accomplished fact.
Uh, "Informative" my ass. A selection of other "technology" articles from India Daily, obtained simply by clicking on the "technology" tab on their page:
Gravity wave connectors through black hole singularities connect integrated consciousness from the chilled universe: Mathematically it is clear now that gravity waves can easily pass through the points of singularities in the black holes. These connect the integrated consciousness and provide guidance from the chilled universe below the Hyperspace.
We are part of a super advanced Type IV extraterrestrial civilization- projection of Zero Point Energy Module encapsulated as life on 3-D vector space with increasing span: After attaining perfection or 'Error Vector zero', we move on to higher dimension and continue the process till we cross into the chilled universe.
The world of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations - life-surrounding singularities: The time and space dimensions (infinite in numbers) can be accessed individually, manipulated and new configurations can be created.
India Times articles often show on Fark; I'll leave it to you to guess why.
The only "ulterior" motivation that makes sense is having a foothold in the Middle East for other strategic purposes down the road, since it's clear the area isn't going to get any saner any time soon.
In fact, the disparity between motivation and skill is part of the reason I believe that he's not there for "crushing the brown guy" or "stealing oil", because, as I said in that article, if that was the goal, we sure as hell wouldn't still be there trying to hold the place together. We'd have killed the "brownies", grabbed what we wanted, and been out by now.
The 'Slashdot Consensus' on Bush's motivations is definitely a big example of the exact fallacy that article is about; all we have to do is accuse Iraq of being a "war for oil" and ipso facto, the accusation is true, regardless of the fact that if this were a war for oil we'd be behaving very differently (and the difference in our behavior has only magnified since I wrote that).
I've never seen a motivation imputed to Bush that makes sense by this standard. If the goal was to avenge his father's failures, mission accomplished a long time ago, so why are we still there? War for oil, like I said, makes no sense. The only reasons to still be there are the desire to hold the strategic ground for our inevitable conflicts with Iran/Syria, and to help the Iraqis.
I'm open to other valid motivations, but they actually need to produce a "best action" that matches what we're doing, not mere "explain" an action if you squint hard enough.
Why is open source software more likely to contain stolen code than any product from Microsoft or Oracle or any other proprietary vendor?
Don't be confused; this isn't really about stolen code or violated patents.
They're not doing this because they truly think Open Source is a festering pile of stolen code; if they did, they'd be suing. How to determine motivation from actions: The question is not whether motivation A "explains" action B, the question is whether given motivation A, is action B the best action? Given the belief that open source has a lot of stolen code, the "best action" would be a lawsuit blitz. Since they aren't doing that and are just trying to sow FUD, my conclusion is they do not believe that open source has a lot of stolen code. The motivation that matches is that they want to hobble open source; in that case, this is [what they believe is] their best action.
Business IT may not always be the most tech savvy people, but they are business savvy; this is going to work for a while but you can only talk about vague patent violations for so long before they notice that if they were real you'd be actually suing. That makes this a fairly pathetic attack; eventually everybody is going to see through it and they'll have spent real credibility on this last-ditch effort.
This is coming up because as pathetic as it is for that reason, it's the best attack they've got. RMS deserves some props for this, and anyone else who helped design and promote the copy-left ideal; it's a brilliant judo-flip on the copyright system. They can't invalidate Open Source licensing without also taking out their own licensing practices.
(Which is also why you see so many people trying to invalidate it on the grounds that they didn't have to pay money for it, as it, too, is the only available legal attack, and it doesn't work, because even if it works it doesn't mean GPL software is "public domain" in the full legal sense, it means it's a copyrighted work you have now no rights to possess or distribute. Oops.)
It's not about stolen code, it's about trying to find some way, any way to slow down open source. ("Stopping" it is almost certainly an unrealistic goal and I doubt they are really trying that, as I think in that case "best action" swings back to "lawsuit flurry", in the desperate hope that maybe they can win something important.)
I was careful not to say "nobody ever uses it", because that wouldn't be true.
But you have to admit that even if you use it "all the time", you're the exception, not the rule. (And self-reporting bias being what it is, I'd lay money that if I actually hooked up logging software to record the amount of time you're on "full" vs. you're actually using "half", "full" would be well over 90%.)
My real point is that using the whole controller is better. Where you are now the exception and the sibling to your post talks about being the only guy who can pull off tricky things because he knows how to use the analog controls, everybody will be able to do that, and do it within minutes, not with the amount of practice you almost certainly put it. (I know because it's taken me some time to get it right because it's so darned fiddly, even for your thumbs, and even with some practice it's still hard.)
If you still don't know what I mean, see if you can find a Gamestop with Excite Truck in it. The amount of control you have is no comparision to the amount of control you have with an analogue stick.
To be fair, "another analog stick" could be a big breakthrough for the PS3; maybe not as big as the Wii but still big.
The problem with analog sticks is that they are too small. Be honest; how often do you really use it as an analog stick, rather than a directional keypad? That is, how often do you really hold the stick "half up"? Not terribly often.
Now, I'm sure there are some games when you do, so again, be honest: When you do try to use the analog stick as an analog stick, how often do you have trouble getting it right? A quick muscle spams that gets interpreted as "running" and there goes your stealth in a poorly-programmed stealth game, for instance. And just how many distinct gradations can you get out of the stick? It's so small.
I was able to play Excite Truck in a Gamespot last week, and what really impressed me was how good of an analog stick(/driving control in this case) an entire controller was. It was easy to distinguish between "straight" and "panic turn right" and all manner of turn rates in between, because the controller isn't so small. On an analog stick you usually don't even put "panic turn right" on the stick because a normal user would then be incapable of controlling the vehicle, since they'd always be using it. The SixAxis ought to be able to do the same thing; if not it's a broken design.
It's not just "another analog stick", it's "another analog stick" that you can actually use. SixAxis may not be quite as rich as the Wii controller but expect to see a lot of racing games using it as a steering wheel, because it's incomparably better than an analog stick. (Or at least the Wii was; I'm extending the SixAxis the benefit of the doubt. The Wii controller was designed for the use Excite Truck uses; the SixAxis was a hasty retrofit and may be a lot more clumsy. We'll have to wait and see.)
I'd be most impressed if they took real-time, non FMV, footage actually cranked out from the PS3 so we can really see how good it'll look.
I really wish they'd do this, for all three consoles. I've had a hard time seeing them in action. The XBox360 at my local retailers are all on the verge of death. Who knows when the PS3 will have the spare units to put out on the floor? Online video captures have to use horrible compression.
The best way to show me your game's graphics is on TV, but instead they squander such opportunities on stupid set pieces, FMVs, or such rapid-fire screenshots that I barely have time to tell what's going on before we're on the next shot. (I understand the rapid-fire cutting techniques we use today but I think we often over-do it by about a factor of two; if the point is not to just beat the consumer over the head, but to actually show off your product, I need to see more than a.8 second snippet. Movie trailers have this problem two, and even worse; to populate the 60-second trailer with enough.8 second snippets you damn near end up showing the entire movie.)
This is doubly-true for High Def.
The XBox360 has done a few good commercials like this, I think, although I can't guarantee it was in-game graphics.
(I have seen the Wii in person now at my local gamestop, and played Excite Truck on a widescreen HD screen. I'll say this: It may not be an XBox 360 or a PS3, but it still looks pretty good even on high-quality screens and at point-blank range.)
The hard drive industry (so far) has this magical quality of doubling their products' capacity every year or two. This dovetails nicely with the rate at which crap piles up on your hard drive, necessitating an upgrade of capacity.
Upgrading because you need or want more capacity is not pre-emptively upgrading, thus my analysis doesn't apply as the fundamental assumptions it is based on are violated.
Disk drives have bearings and heads that wear out over time. They may not wear out enough to fail in a couple years, but why go through the grief of a disk crash if you don't have to?
You didn't understand my point; not surprising, most people's statistics/probability training is severely lacking. As my analysis shows, which is explicitly based on the understanding that hardware fails eventually (the probability of hardware failure rises to 100% over time), if you want to say "why go through the grief of a disk crash if you don't have to?", the correct path is not to just willy-nilly replace drives. You are not decreasing the probability of a crash with that policy, you are increasing it, by replacing drives with a low expected rate of failure per day with drives with a high rate of failure per day.
As I've already seen a couple of people say, don't preemptively replace your hard drives.
Allow me to add: Here's why.
Hardware failure rates follow a curve on average. They fail a lot after initial purchase, then slope down to their minimum after a couple of [relevant time periods] (probably "weeks" or "months" for hard drives, varies by what kind of thing it is), then slowly slopes upwards again.
(Please do not miss the phrase "on average". Certain specific flaws can cause a certain product line to have unusual characteristics, like a sudden spike at six months or something. However, unless you somehow figure out a way to guess which hard drives are going to have such failures in six months when it's pretty amazing for the exact same hard drive to even be on the market for six months, the fact that these things can theoretically happen can't have much impact on your decisions. After all, if you knew that was going to happen, you'd just plain not buy the drive, period, regardless of the argument in this post.)
Therefore, if you've got a "burned in" drive, you will be replacing a known-high-reliablility component with a component with a lower expected reliability. (I use "expected" in the probability/statistics sense here.) Unless you've discovered that you do have one of those funky products that all die in ten months, this is a bad move on average.
I replace hard drives when they fail. I try to act as if they could die at any minute, although I fail.
(But I try to get better. I'm in an all-laptop house, so it's difficult to have the convenience of an integrated backup solution and an automated, unforgettable script. However, with the recent Linux kernels finally supporting my SD card reader, I've gotten a high-capacity, slow, cheap SD card to stick in the previously-useless slot and I have an rsync now backing up the files I'd cry if I lost every hour. Sure, 1GB can't backup my entire system but most people's "cry if I lost it" datasets would fit into that. (Yes, there are exceptions... but if you're one of them, you've already got another back up solution in place, right? Right?))
Two reasons. First is the technical difficulty; until we finally have an OS that isn't based on C or C++ it's going to be problematic, and we really need to leave those apps behind (or in the hands of experts) too. Of course writing apps in buffer-safe languages isn't a total answer (still leaves all the escaping bugs behind, which accounts for things like SQL injection and XSS); it is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
"Trusting" buggy software, for pretty much any definition of "trust", is extremely problematic.
The second, and in some ways larger stopper, is the question of who gets the trust. That's the big stopper for me, because anybody capable of producing "trustable" hardware (Intel, etc.) seems to produce hardware that they can trust, not that I can trust. I personally trust my current hardware more than the "trustable" hardware being produced and researched currently.
Why would you assume that a movie made today would use the same production values and look of the Babylon 5 of ~ten years ago?
I've never seen B5. It just seems weird to see you leap to the conclusion that they somehow aren't going to take advantage of the advances in technology since then.
Raymond Chen's blog is worth reading for the technical posts, and the most interesting ones are about Windows reverse compatibility or why certain Windows API things are the way they are, but there is no one link that you can give for them. That's probably why the submitter's links seem unfocused. His blogging software doesn't seem to have any categorization.
There are some real gems in there and if you are serious about software development you should probably just read the whole blog. Doesn't take that long and you can skip the more personal posts if you like.
Should the situation ever become that dire, there are still some options. Many of the costs associated with building a nuclear plant are basically phantoms, costs of excessive regulation, costs of defending against inevitable and well-funded litigation, and the cost of designing something that is often highly customized.
You can't whack all those costs, but if push comes to shove many can be cut down by a lot. If we need a lot of plants, we'll standardize the design. The litigation costs can be basically eliminated with new laws that encourage building nuclear, rather than current laws designed to discourage it. Regulatory costs shouldn't be eliminated but they can be made more sane; the level that they are at now doesn't reflect a desire for public safety but a desire to make it too expensive to build plants at all.
As I like to say, nuclear is dangerous but it isn't really exceptionally dangerous; there's a lot of dangerous industrial processes we use. The only thing really special about nuclear power is the waste it generates, and honestly, I consider almost any solution we come up with for that problem to be better than our current solution of "pumping it all into the atmosphere" that we use for coal and the radioactive products contained within.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody cares about money.
A strict subset cares about freedom, and they're probably already running Linux.
I think the real trick is convincing people that freedom itself is worth real money. Yes, switching will cost you, but then, next time Microsoft says "You will buy Vista.", you don't have to. When you have this software that does X but you need it to do X+1, you can make it happen by hiring people, and there is nobody to tell you no. Presumably if you care about X+1 it comes down to "because it will save you money".
Arguing in pure freedom terms will shoot over many people's heads.
I'm going to zig to every other replier's zag.
Try this objection on for size: I'm supposed to be able to read a patent and implement the device. I recently saw Mythbusters do just that for a couple of old patents. But software patents by my estimate get you far less than 1% of the way to an implementation.
A patent on the web would describe "a client machine that requests content from a server, and the server receives it." A series of further elaborations might be made mentioning that it could be cached, could travel over the internet, could travel wirelessly, etc.
However, I guarantee you the patent won't contain anything like this, which is at least enough to implement it, even if it still only constitutes a specification with no code whatsoever. (That's the HTTP 1.1 RFC, so you don't have to follow the link.)
There are a bare handful of patents this doesn't apply to, but all but one software patent I've ever read looks like this.
The reason most patents seem so obvious is that the mere statement of a problem is hard to make interesting.
The other basic problem is that to the extent that the difficult part is seeing a problem, many patents "patent" the only obvious solution. Realizing that people want a one-click checkout might be a good idea that nobody has. (Note the "might"; actually I think it's the obvious conclusion of a long refinement process of making checkout simpler, but maybe you disagree.) But once you say to me "Hey, I want a one-click checkout", the technical implementation is obvious. In fact, since there's only one basic way to do it it's actually even more obvious than a conventional checkout.
Most people don't seem to think about refactoring their GUIs; already there's one post here telling you not to code your GUIs but use the pathetic drawing tools to create them, even though GUI builders are evil, and one of the very reasons they are evil is they preclude even the simplest refactorings. The bulk of programmers seem to be happy about that.
My experience is that there really isn't anything special about GUI refactoring vs. any other kind of refactoring, at least in the languages I use. That may be a factor; dynamic languages like Python or Ruby seem to be a lot easier to implement "Don't Repeat Yourself" in. You may find you'd be better off switching to one of them, especially if you're trying to work in Java, with seems to elevate repeating yourself to a moral imperative.
But beyond that, I don't really see what's special about GUIs.
The other thing is that when you are first learning an environment, you need to cut yourself some slack. No matter what you do, your first few cuts will suck as you are getting your bearings. I'm all about refactoring and testing, but when I recently picked up Django, I didn't worry about either at all in the first week. Now I have to go back and re-examine everything I did and get the testing going for it, but I don't see any practical way to avoid it; testing my initial garbage would just increase the investment into code that I'm basically throwing away anyhow. (As I have a lot of web experience, that's probably faster than usual; any other framework type would probably take me longer.) You may find that you have built "one to throw away"; consider actually doing so.
Caveat: When I referred to the "stated goals", I mean with regard to blocking "child porn".
Hate speech is another topic entirely and one I find too scarily fuzzy and subjective for a government to be enforcing. Hate speech in many places is damn near "speech I disagree with".
True incitement to violence I can see continuing to enforce, but expanding that to "hate speech" is just asking for censorship. I try to read a wide range of sources on both the "left" and the "right", and I've seen on both sides the accusation of "hate speech" freely tossed about for things that really weren't. The problem with hate speech is that you get into the logic of "I like X because I love children. If you don't like X, you clearly hate children. Therefore, advocating against X is 'hate speech' against children." I've seen that argument used both for and against legal abortion. In neither case is it hate speech; in both cases the arguer genuinely believes they are advocating for children.
That said, it is an immature interpretation of that idea to collapse that to "Those who would claim to use tho common good as an argument to curtail freedom are always automatically wrong". Clearly, there are many things that have passed this examination; in some sense every law on the books must pass that test.
Personally, I find it difficult to get too worked up over the stated goals of this program. However, humans and all their institutions have a proven track record of abuse of this sort of power; other comments bring up some historical instances, such as a telecom company blocking their union's website. Jumpy people help keep the system in check. Being nervous about this sort of thing is perfectly rational, and given a bell curve of reactions, that means some people will be frothing at the mouth. They are not necessarily representative, though.
(Part of the reason I don't spend too much time worrying about the impending tyranny over the United States is the number of people that are still free to scream about impending tyranny. I'll know that we're actually in trouble when you can only find people saying everything's just great, yay!)
I've wondered if this was accurate. (Although I have to admit the heat on this thing backs that up; even at full load it just gets "a little warm"; a previous laptop reached "burns your lap" while idling.)
(For reference, this is a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a 1.6GHz Pentium M on the Sonoma (IIRC) chipset.)
I've wondered how accurate that readout is. It offers four or five significant digits which I find hard to believe. If there are any power hackers out there who could tell me if this is reasonably accurate or full of shit, I'd be appreciative. (I've wondered if I'm seriously running what I find a rather nice computer setup overall on less power than a dim incandescent light bulb or our Christmas lights.)
They are hard to find, but it can be done.
You can customize a Dell E1505 right now with a 1680x1050 screen for well under $1000, though you'll probably want to bump that base model up a bit.
In previous months, I've seen it where if you pick the lowest model of the laptop at the customization screen, you won't be offered the higher screen res, but if you start with a higher base customization you will be offered better screens. This seems to come and go.
I have an earlier model of the E1505, called the "Inspiron 6000" (obviously just under 4 times better), which I bought about a year ago, and it was tricky then, too. I honestly don't know if you even have a significant choice other than Dell and maybe HP (which also comes and goes); if you can't customize it onto your system, it doesn't seem to be an option.
Because we say it is.
I understand your discomfort. It's a good thing. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" is more about keeping an eye on the small things than the big, flashy, obvious things.
But in the real world, the optimal balance between liberty and justice requires a few ugly bits, because that's just the way the world works. Nothing is ever as clean in practice as it is in theory and justice is no exception.
Arresting and convicting someone in a sting is certainly a bit dodgy, but it's a tool I would not want to take away from law enforcement; net-net, the benefits outweigh the dangers. Just watch them carefully (at least in the aggregate; we can't all watch ever law enforcement agency all the time).
Legislation based on technical means is fatally flawed (and that's actually a summary of a richer argument; I know some people have already talked about this but the link talks about it in greater depth than a Slashdot posting can hold, especially in the context of that full work). When it gets down to it, it turns out to be very hard to draw a legal line between an email, an IM, this post to Slashdot, a post to Usenet that will be read by only a few people, etc.
I'm not saying you can't find some distinctive properties that allow you to talk about certain aspects of those things, I'm saying that it's hard to find a clear legal line that totally discriminates between those things based solely on technology aspects, given the flexibility of technology. I can do any of those things through an email gateway, for instance; would an illegal solicitation posted to Slashdot via an email gateway be illegal, whereas one posted directly be legal? Or maybe it's only illegal if it's received via an email gateway for reading slashdot?
You really need to work solely in terms of the distinctive properties, not the technical means, because technically speaking we can tunnel damn near anything over anything. Talking about "doing something on the web" is ultimately not a well-defined term, legally.
The "correct" answer depends on what exactly it is you want to do.
The tricky thing about answering this question is that it is easy to end up with an answer that already exists.
"I want to run arbitrary apps on the client as if they are on a server": Do it. Terminal services, VNC, whatever.
"I want to be able to write a chat client that runs in the browser": All you really need here is real socket support instead of hacked up AJAX running on HTTP, which is an excellent protocol for many things, but not a continuous, small-scale back-and-forth. (Chat's a great example; the headers may well cost you a factor of 100x on the byte count.) But why not run a proper chat app? A browser by design can't integrate with the system tray or KNotify or whatever, and loading a second server with a connection to the actual IM server is silly.
"I want to write little applications that anybody can pick up and use, but I really need feature X": If you add in everybody's feature X, then before you know it, "nobody" wants to use the no-longer-simple web browser any more.
I think what it boils down to is that the very reason "mere mortals" like interacting with web "applications" is in fact a direct result of the simplicity that results from the limited palette web designers have. I've been developing on the web since 1996 and I could reel off a long list of things I'd like to see if I don't think about it, but if I think about it I start to see that for each feature I want, it would almost inevitably complicate the web and drive away the charm it has for so many "mere mortals". (I am explicitly talking about "your grandmother" here, not a Slashdot user.)
By way of evidence I offer up the long list of things that have tried to "improve" the web: Flash. Java. ActiveX. Any number of other solutions based on those. By market share, all have failed; all that has survived is the web browser and its basic standards.
Personally, if I had to choose, I'd say, maybe a few more widgets standard, certainly some tuning and tweaking, a raw socket might not hurt, but I'd rather see improvement come from the other direction: Make better desktop apps that focus on simplicity and connectivity, that don't bloat the user's desktop or act like they own it, and have better connections with the internet.
If you really nailed me down, give me some kind of standardized XBL that works across browsers. I've done what I can with that and other libraries have some entries on that front too, but there are certain last little bits that really need some browser help to make them slick. For the love of Knuth, don't embed this in XML, XBL and my experience prove it to be an extremely poor fit to the job of specifying widgets. (The sad thing is that it is poor in ways you can't see until you step out of the confines of the actual XBL Mozilla implements.) This really helps clean up the spaghetti code that Javascript development tends to turn into.
(In fact each browser has a poor, hacky, over-specialized implementation of the idea, but they are totally incompatible with each other and both extremely poorly known.)
I give your defense no credence. Reading crap like that leaves you less informed about actual science than before you read it. It's right up there with taking education about quantum mechanics from Star Trek; Star Trek on the balance leaves you less informed about real physics and engineering than if you didn't watch it at all. (On the plus, it exposes to you certain words. On the minus, it is completely and utterly wrong about what those words mean, routinely, to the point that them getting something right is the exception.)
Worst of all is the way India Times presents its babbling as accomplished fact.
Moderators: Big words != informative.
Intent/motivation != skill.
The only "ulterior" motivation that makes sense is having a foothold in the Middle East for other strategic purposes down the road, since it's clear the area isn't going to get any saner any time soon.
In fact, the disparity between motivation and skill is part of the reason I believe that he's not there for "crushing the brown guy" or "stealing oil", because, as I said in that article, if that was the goal, we sure as hell wouldn't still be there trying to hold the place together. We'd have killed the "brownies", grabbed what we wanted, and been out by now.
The 'Slashdot Consensus' on Bush's motivations is definitely a big example of the exact fallacy that article is about; all we have to do is accuse Iraq of being a "war for oil" and ipso facto, the accusation is true, regardless of the fact that if this were a war for oil we'd be behaving very differently (and the difference in our behavior has only magnified since I wrote that).
I've never seen a motivation imputed to Bush that makes sense by this standard. If the goal was to avenge his father's failures, mission accomplished a long time ago, so why are we still there? War for oil, like I said, makes no sense. The only reasons to still be there are the desire to hold the strategic ground for our inevitable conflicts with Iran/Syria, and to help the Iraqis.
I'm open to other valid motivations, but they actually need to produce a "best action" that matches what we're doing, not mere "explain" an action if you squint hard enough.
They're not doing this because they truly think Open Source is a festering pile of stolen code; if they did, they'd be suing. How to determine motivation from actions: The question is not whether motivation A "explains" action B, the question is whether given motivation A, is action B the best action? Given the belief that open source has a lot of stolen code, the "best action" would be a lawsuit blitz. Since they aren't doing that and are just trying to sow FUD, my conclusion is they do not believe that open source has a lot of stolen code. The motivation that matches is that they want to hobble open source; in that case, this is [what they believe is] their best action.
Business IT may not always be the most tech savvy people, but they are business savvy; this is going to work for a while but you can only talk about vague patent violations for so long before they notice that if they were real you'd be actually suing. That makes this a fairly pathetic attack; eventually everybody is going to see through it and they'll have spent real credibility on this last-ditch effort.
This is coming up because as pathetic as it is for that reason, it's the best attack they've got. RMS deserves some props for this, and anyone else who helped design and promote the copy-left ideal; it's a brilliant judo-flip on the copyright system. They can't invalidate Open Source licensing without also taking out their own licensing practices.
(Which is also why you see so many people trying to invalidate it on the grounds that they didn't have to pay money for it, as it, too, is the only available legal attack, and it doesn't work, because even if it works it doesn't mean GPL software is "public domain" in the full legal sense, it means it's a copyrighted work you have now no rights to possess or distribute. Oops.)
It's not about stolen code, it's about trying to find some way, any way to slow down open source. ("Stopping" it is almost certainly an unrealistic goal and I doubt they are really trying that, as I think in that case "best action" swings back to "lawsuit flurry", in the desperate hope that maybe they can win something important.)
I was careful not to say "nobody ever uses it", because that wouldn't be true.
But you have to admit that even if you use it "all the time", you're the exception, not the rule. (And self-reporting bias being what it is, I'd lay money that if I actually hooked up logging software to record the amount of time you're on "full" vs. you're actually using "half", "full" would be well over 90%.)
My real point is that using the whole controller is better. Where you are now the exception and the sibling to your post talks about being the only guy who can pull off tricky things because he knows how to use the analog controls, everybody will be able to do that, and do it within minutes, not with the amount of practice you almost certainly put it. (I know because it's taken me some time to get it right because it's so darned fiddly, even for your thumbs, and even with some practice it's still hard.)
If you still don't know what I mean, see if you can find a Gamestop with Excite Truck in it. The amount of control you have is no comparision to the amount of control you have with an analogue stick.
To be fair, "another analog stick" could be a big breakthrough for the PS3; maybe not as big as the Wii but still big.
The problem with analog sticks is that they are too small. Be honest; how often do you really use it as an analog stick, rather than a directional keypad? That is, how often do you really hold the stick "half up"? Not terribly often.
Now, I'm sure there are some games when you do, so again, be honest: When you do try to use the analog stick as an analog stick, how often do you have trouble getting it right? A quick muscle spams that gets interpreted as "running" and there goes your stealth in a poorly-programmed stealth game, for instance. And just how many distinct gradations can you get out of the stick? It's so small.
I was able to play Excite Truck in a Gamespot last week, and what really impressed me was how good of an analog stick(/driving control in this case) an entire controller was. It was easy to distinguish between "straight" and "panic turn right" and all manner of turn rates in between, because the controller isn't so small. On an analog stick you usually don't even put "panic turn right" on the stick because a normal user would then be incapable of controlling the vehicle, since they'd always be using it. The SixAxis ought to be able to do the same thing; if not it's a broken design.
It's not just "another analog stick", it's "another analog stick" that you can actually use. SixAxis may not be quite as rich as the Wii controller but expect to see a lot of racing games using it as a steering wheel, because it's incomparably better than an analog stick. (Or at least the Wii was; I'm extending the SixAxis the benefit of the doubt. The Wii controller was designed for the use Excite Truck uses; the SixAxis was a hasty retrofit and may be a lot more clumsy. We'll have to wait and see.)
Cross-platform is hard.
But Trolltech did all the work for you. They make it easy.
Anybody who has never experienced that may not believe it. Trolltech is hiding a lot from you. (This is a good thing.)
The best way to show me your game's graphics is on TV, but instead they squander such opportunities on stupid set pieces, FMVs, or such rapid-fire screenshots that I barely have time to tell what's going on before we're on the next shot. (I understand the rapid-fire cutting techniques we use today but I think we often over-do it by about a factor of two; if the point is not to just beat the consumer over the head, but to actually show off your product, I need to see more than a
This is doubly-true for High Def.
The XBox360 has done a few good commercials like this, I think, although I can't guarantee it was in-game graphics.
(I have seen the Wii in person now at my local gamestop, and played Excite Truck on a widescreen HD screen. I'll say this: It may not be an XBox 360 or a PS3, but it still looks pretty good even on high-quality screens and at point-blank range.)
You didn't understand my point; not surprising, most people's statistics/probability training is severely lacking. As my analysis shows, which is explicitly based on the understanding that hardware fails eventually (the probability of hardware failure rises to 100% over time), if you want to say "why go through the grief of a disk crash if you don't have to?", the correct path is not to just willy-nilly replace drives. You are not decreasing the probability of a crash with that policy, you are increasing it, by replacing drives with a low expected rate of failure per day with drives with a high rate of failure per day.
As I've already seen a couple of people say, don't preemptively replace your hard drives.
Allow me to add: Here's why.
Hardware failure rates follow a curve on average. They fail a lot after initial purchase, then slope down to their minimum after a couple of [relevant time periods] (probably "weeks" or "months" for hard drives, varies by what kind of thing it is), then slowly slopes upwards again.
(Please do not miss the phrase "on average". Certain specific flaws can cause a certain product line to have unusual characteristics, like a sudden spike at six months or something. However, unless you somehow figure out a way to guess which hard drives are going to have such failures in six months when it's pretty amazing for the exact same hard drive to even be on the market for six months, the fact that these things can theoretically happen can't have much impact on your decisions. After all, if you knew that was going to happen, you'd just plain not buy the drive, period, regardless of the argument in this post.)
Therefore, if you've got a "burned in" drive, you will be replacing a known-high-reliablility component with a component with a lower expected reliability. (I use "expected" in the probability/statistics sense here.) Unless you've discovered that you do have one of those funky products that all die in ten months, this is a bad move on average.
I replace hard drives when they fail. I try to act as if they could die at any minute, although I fail.
(But I try to get better. I'm in an all-laptop house, so it's difficult to have the convenience of an integrated backup solution and an automated, unforgettable script. However, with the recent Linux kernels finally supporting my SD card reader, I've gotten a high-capacity, slow, cheap SD card to stick in the previously-useless slot and I have an rsync now backing up the files I'd cry if I lost every hour. Sure, 1GB can't backup my entire system but most people's "cry if I lost it" datasets would fit into that. (Yes, there are exceptions... but if you're one of them, you've already got another back up solution in place, right? Right?))
"Trusting" buggy software, for pretty much any definition of "trust", is extremely problematic.
The second, and in some ways larger stopper, is the question of who gets the trust. That's the big stopper for me, because anybody capable of producing "trustable" hardware (Intel, etc.) seems to produce hardware that they can trust, not that I can trust. I personally trust my current hardware more than the "trustable" hardware being produced and researched currently.
Why would you assume that a movie made today would use the same production values and look of the Babylon 5 of ~ten years ago?
I've never seen B5. It just seems weird to see you leap to the conclusion that they somehow aren't going to take advantage of the advances in technology since then.
Raymond Chen's blog is worth reading for the technical posts, and the most interesting ones are about Windows reverse compatibility or why certain Windows API things are the way they are, but there is no one link that you can give for them. That's probably why the submitter's links seem unfocused. His blogging software doesn't seem to have any categorization.
There are some real gems in there and if you are serious about software development you should probably just read the whole blog. Doesn't take that long and you can skip the more personal posts if you like.
Should the situation ever become that dire, there are still some options. Many of the costs associated with building a nuclear plant are basically phantoms, costs of excessive regulation, costs of defending against inevitable and well-funded litigation, and the cost of designing something that is often highly customized.
You can't whack all those costs, but if push comes to shove many can be cut down by a lot. If we need a lot of plants, we'll standardize the design. The litigation costs can be basically eliminated with new laws that encourage building nuclear, rather than current laws designed to discourage it. Regulatory costs shouldn't be eliminated but they can be made more sane; the level that they are at now doesn't reflect a desire for public safety but a desire to make it too expensive to build plants at all.
As I like to say, nuclear is dangerous but it isn't really exceptionally dangerous; there's a lot of dangerous industrial processes we use. The only thing really special about nuclear power is the waste it generates, and honestly, I consider almost any solution we come up with for that problem to be better than our current solution of "pumping it all into the atmosphere" that we use for coal and the radioactive products contained within.