although there are programming techniques to do that with graphics cards too
Whoops, I think you meant "hacks", there.
This is the same thing that's been going on with rasterization for years. Developers and hardware designers have built hack upon hack in order to implement what raytracing does so easily. The result is a library of tricks that often can't be easily intermixed, and are always a pain to work with.
So, if you can switch to raytracing and get similar performance, and end up with a larger feature set that produces higher quality results, why *wouldn't* you?
Actually, I don't think that's true at all. Raytracing, just like today's rasterizers, can greatly benefit from dedicated hardware for doing vector operations, geometry manipulation, and so forth. This is particularly true as raytracing benefits greatly from parallelization, and it would be far easier to build a dedicated card with a nice fat bus for shunting geometry and texture information between a large number of processing units than it would be to use a stock, general multicore processor which isn't really designed with those specific applications in mind.
Besides, the whole reason to have separate, specialized gear for doing things like audio/visual processing is to free up the main CPU for doing other things. Heck, we're even seeing specialized, third-party hardware for doing things like physics and AI calculations, not to mention accelerators for H.264 decoding, etc. As such, I see no reason to move graphics rendering back to the main CPU(s).
Heh, np, it's an interesting topic. I think it really depends on where you work. First off, to be clear, I'm actually a Canadian working in a small company split between the US and Canada (the corporate bigwigs, as they exist, exist in the US). They've tried to institute some "American-style" policies on us, such as the merged vacation/sick day regime, but we've resisted pretty heavily, and so far it's worked well. And because of Canadian labour laws, there's none of this "work-at-will" BS that you see in a lot of American states.
Meanwhile, I get flexible hours, a decent vacation policy, a work-at-home policy (obviously as long as it's not abused), and because the company is small, it goes without saying that one's accomplishments are usually public and visible (I've been lead of a couple major projects over the last couple months, and my work is visible right to the CEO).
But you're absolutely right about working in a big corporation. I worked a 16-month internship at Nortel Networks, and without question, you feel like a small cog in a very large machine. I can't say I'd ever go back to something like that, although I guess that depends on how this job goes... stability can be nice, even if the compromise is a certain level of anonymity. And, in the end, I have the freedom to quit and do something else if I want...
Oh, well, that's hardly a fair comparison. The military and corporate America are, needless to say, very different entities. I'm not surprised the standards for vacation are different, there.
Go work for the public sector for a while... then you'll see how the rest of the plebs live.:)
Actually, I would disagree. In traditional webapps, we build systems that are stateful and transaction oriented. Thus is fundamentally a consequence of the way the web works. Basically, the nature of the web has dictated how we build our systems. Seaside, OTOH, allows one to build apps in a much more straightforward manner. Workflows with the user are, in code, represented as just that. Workflows. It is, I think, a much cleaner way to look at the problem.
But, we are getting off the topic, here, which is, of course Ruby. OTOH, I think Ruby is just Smalltalk's bastard, warped stepchild, so maybe it's not so off-topic after all.;)
Except, and I know this is obvious but for those not aware, no other LCD display can use it's full set of subpixels in B&W mode for things like text rendering, like the OLPC can. So during full-colour use it's effective resolution is roughly 800x600, it also has the option of acting as a full, 1200x900 B&W display. And, let me tell ya, in that mode, it looks *fantastic*.
Just to be clear, Seaside isn't "batshit insane".:) Frankly, I love the way it works... will it be the Next Big Thing (tm)? I have no idea... I don't even know if it's really a good idea in the long run. But it should makes building stateful transactions in the stateless world of the web incredibly easy.
Which, I'm betting, is also pooled with your sick days, right? So 1 sick day = 1 vacation day = 1 paid day of leave per year. Sucks to be you if you get a bad cold...
- Widescreen. Ugh. Repeat after me, laptops are for documents, not for movies. "Widescreen" just means "missing the top and bottom of the display" - it should be renamed "shortscreen".
I used to have the same attitude. Then I bought a T61 and realized how wrong I was. A laptop should, above all things (in my mind) be portable. A widescreen display is shorter and wider, which means the fliptop takes up less room, making it workable in cramped spaces (like, say, on an airplane), while making the whole thing more stable.
Try flipping open a 4x3, 15" laptop on an aircraft. Sorry, but the widescreen laptop is superior when it comes to portability, and I can think of few more important things in a laptop.
'fraid so. My wife and I had our bags lost flying in to Miami the day before a cruise. They NEVER FOUND THEM. It was a great trip, lemme tell ya.
The trip involved a single connector in... Denver, I think, and since our arriving flight was delayed, we had to arrange a different flight to get to Miami. God knows what happened to our bags in-between, but they sure as hell never showed up at our destination.
Which only further illustrates why this is a stupid thing to do. Apparently all it did for you was instigate dissention among the rank and file, and given the soldiers are already exhausted fighting an unpopular war, possibly on extended duty with no way out thanks to stop-loss policies, you'd think that'd be the last thing you'd want to encourage.
In the original language Genesis is written in a style halfway between poetry and prose...kind of like the Odyssey.
Tell that to the biblical literalists.
A lot of scholars believe that Genesis doesn't really make many extremely bold claims about the origins of life beyond the fact that God created the world and that there is an order in which he did it moving from the simple to the complex.
Well that's all well and good, but why don't you jump down off your high horse for a second and realize that, odds are, the OP wasn't referring to people like you who, clearly, have some deeper understanding of theology than what their evangelical pastor told them in sunday school.
The OP is correctly pointing out that *evangelical literalists*, you know, those jackoffs who believe the world is 6,000 years old, are clearly delusional if they choose to hold to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming fact. And, unfortunately, a) there are, inexplicably, a *lot* of these people, particularly in the US, and b) it is these very people that are the driving force behind the attempt to equate evolution with theism, and to inject theism into school curriculae.
On the other hand, Firefox will likely always have some memory leaks, as all browsers certainly do.
As a software developer, that belief is, frankly, completely BS. Memory leaks are a result of poor design, or poor debugging. Regardless, they are *not* the inevitable product of complex software, nor are they (or bugs in general) something to be simply tolerated.
If you can find a way to magically thread javascript in a way that allows multiple windows and tabs to communicate with each other (as the DOM requires), I'm sure the mozilla folks would absolutely *love* to hear about it.
Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free.
Since when was that the point?
I write code and release it for free for one simple reason: I like to.
It's the same reason I enjoy cooking. I will happily cook meals and give them away to my guests. Why? I mean, I could charge them for it. How does it help me at all? Simple: I enjoy it. I enjoy people appreciating the fruits of my labour.
Maybe that's not enough for you, and that's fine. But I fail to see why people like me need to justify ourselves to people like you, who apparently don't enjoy programmings as a craft, and view it only as a means to an end.
Incidentally, I also have a day job as a professional programmer, and not *once* have I feared that OSS might somehow end my profession. The world of programming has always been dominated by internal or private contract projects that never reach the world at large. And these programmers are only empowered by OSS. Meanwhile, things like webapps are taking off in a big way, and the same goes there. And then there's the myriad niche markets (like the one I work in) where OSS will likely never flourish, due to the need for specialized knowledge and training, or simple lack of interest.
No, the only people threatened by OSS are those selling boxed software to consumers and who are incapable of continuing to innovate in a way that justifies the cost of their product. And, frankly, I shed no tears for those people.
Please note the word "essential", Ben put that word in there for a reason. His words were carefully crafted and extraneous words were not left in. In short, non-essential liberties are excluded by the quote and anonymity while driving is a non-essential liberty, actually a non-existent liberty
Err, you're misreading things, here, I think. Just to repeat, the original quote is:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
You're suggesting that "essential" is specializing the word "liberty", selecting a subset of the group of liberties, rather than simply describing the concept. I disagree. If he really meant only "essential liberties", he would have wrote that:
"They that can give up essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Or:
"They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But no, he wrote of "essential liberty"... ie, liberty, which is itself essential.
Now, that's not to say I disagree with the rest of your post. The idea that privacy in your car on the road is a right at all is, I think, quite silly. You're in a public place, and no one should expect the right to privacy in a public venue. However, I still believe you are misreading the quote.
A-hem. Go to someone's house who has, say, a 32" HD LCDTV (or Plasma). Look at something that is NOT HD on the television. Now, play something that IS in HD (a Blu-ray disc, HDTV channel, whatever). Now, within any REASONABLE distance, if you don't have terrible vision (like, needing -4.0 or more contacts and not having them)...you WILL notice a difference.
Uhuh. Let's see, I went here, threw in a 32" TV, and according to it, the "Maximum Viewing Distance for HDTV(Fully resolved 1080i; 1920 x 1080)" is... drumroll... *4 FEET*. Yeah, that's right, the furthest you can sit from your TV is four feet if you want to fully resolve, and thus actually see, a 1080i picture.
Sorry, that ain't happening. The viewing distance from my couch averages around *10* feet, and to fully resolve a 1080i image, I'd need a *72* inch TV, at least. Of course, one doesn't need to *fully* resolve the image, but I'd still need something far larger than I would ever tolerate in a space that is *not* meant to be solely dedicated to television watching (nor does it have the space for anything much larger than a 36" widescreen TV, in any case, due to the way the space is laid out, not to mention the presence of things *other* than a TV).
Good lord, 5' from a 42" TV? Yikes... I sit a good 10-12' from a 27" TV and that's plenty close enough for me, thanks. Are you one of those guys that likes to sit up front at those giant-screen megaplex theatres, too?:)
I am not questioning your desire to get a new TV, but I find it somewhat contradictory to think that your living room would be "dominated" by a 40+" TV, but yet the room is too large to get any benefit from HD on a smaller TV.
Simple:
a) My livingroom isn't just for watching TV, therefore I don't want it taking up a large amount of space. b) The layout of my livingroom is such that the viewing distance from the couch to the TV is large, while the actual available space for the TV is small, thanks to things like a fireplace, and pieces of furniture other than a TV and couch (yes, believe it or not, some people have livingrooms like that!)
And I'd have to buy a PC, get a video card with TV-out, get that working with my TV which means fiddling around with modelines and god knows what else, and in the end, to get a cool, low-power, fanless setup, it'll probably cost more than a Wii.
I *knew* someone would reply with something like that.:)
Slashdot Mirror
although there are programming techniques to do that with graphics cards too
Whoops, I think you meant "hacks", there.
This is the same thing that's been going on with rasterization for years. Developers and hardware designers have built hack upon hack in order to implement what raytracing does so easily. The result is a library of tricks that often can't be easily intermixed, and are always a pain to work with.
So, if you can switch to raytracing and get similar performance, and end up with a larger feature set that produces higher quality results, why *wouldn't* you?
Actually, I don't think that's true at all. Raytracing, just like today's rasterizers, can greatly benefit from dedicated hardware for doing vector operations, geometry manipulation, and so forth. This is particularly true as raytracing benefits greatly from parallelization, and it would be far easier to build a dedicated card with a nice fat bus for shunting geometry and texture information between a large number of processing units than it would be to use a stock, general multicore processor which isn't really designed with those specific applications in mind.
Besides, the whole reason to have separate, specialized gear for doing things like audio/visual processing is to free up the main CPU for doing other things. Heck, we're even seeing specialized, third-party hardware for doing things like physics and AI calculations, not to mention accelerators for H.264 decoding, etc. As such, I see no reason to move graphics rendering back to the main CPU(s).
Heh, np, it's an interesting topic. I think it really depends on where you work. First off, to be clear, I'm actually a Canadian working in a small company split between the US and Canada (the corporate bigwigs, as they exist, exist in the US). They've tried to institute some "American-style" policies on us, such as the merged vacation/sick day regime, but we've resisted pretty heavily, and so far it's worked well. And because of Canadian labour laws, there's none of this "work-at-will" BS that you see in a lot of American states.
Meanwhile, I get flexible hours, a decent vacation policy, a work-at-home policy (obviously as long as it's not abused), and because the company is small, it goes without saying that one's accomplishments are usually public and visible (I've been lead of a couple major projects over the last couple months, and my work is visible right to the CEO).
But you're absolutely right about working in a big corporation. I worked a 16-month internship at Nortel Networks, and without question, you feel like a small cog in a very large machine. I can't say I'd ever go back to something like that, although I guess that depends on how this job goes... stability can be nice, even if the compromise is a certain level of anonymity. And, in the end, I have the freedom to quit and do something else if I want...
Oh, well, that's hardly a fair comparison. The military and corporate America are, needless to say, very different entities. I'm not surprised the standards for vacation are different, there.
:)
Go work for the public sector for a while... then you'll see how the rest of the plebs live.
Actually, I would disagree. In traditional webapps, we build systems that are stateful and transaction oriented. Thus is fundamentally a consequence of the way the web works. Basically, the nature of the web has dictated how we build our systems. Seaside, OTOH, allows one to build apps in a much more straightforward manner. Workflows with the user are, in code, represented as just that. Workflows. It is, I think, a much cleaner way to look at the problem.
;)
But, we are getting off the topic, here, which is, of course Ruby. OTOH, I think Ruby is just Smalltalk's bastard, warped stepchild, so maybe it's not so off-topic after all.
Except, and I know this is obvious but for those not aware, no other LCD display can use it's full set of subpixels in B&W mode for things like text rendering, like the OLPC can. So during full-colour use it's effective resolution is roughly 800x600, it also has the option of acting as a full, 1200x900 B&W display. And, let me tell ya, in that mode, it looks *fantastic*.
Just to be clear, Seaside isn't "batshit insane". :) Frankly, I love the way it works... will it be the Next Big Thing (tm)? I have no idea... I don't even know if it's really a good idea in the long run. But it should makes building stateful transactions in the stateless world of the web incredibly easy.
Which, I'm betting, is also pooled with your sick days, right? So 1 sick day = 1 vacation day = 1 paid day of leave per year. Sucks to be you if you get a bad cold...
- Widescreen. Ugh. Repeat after me, laptops are for documents, not for movies. "Widescreen" just means "missing the top and bottom of the display" - it should be renamed "shortscreen".
I used to have the same attitude. Then I bought a T61 and realized how wrong I was. A laptop should, above all things (in my mind) be portable. A widescreen display is shorter and wider, which means the fliptop takes up less room, making it workable in cramped spaces (like, say, on an airplane), while making the whole thing more stable.
Try flipping open a 4x3, 15" laptop on an aircraft. Sorry, but the widescreen laptop is superior when it comes to portability, and I can think of few more important things in a laptop.
'fraid so. My wife and I had our bags lost flying in to Miami the day before a cruise. They NEVER FOUND THEM. It was a great trip, lemme tell ya.
The trip involved a single connector in... Denver, I think, and since our arriving flight was delayed, we had to arrange a different flight to get to Miami. God knows what happened to our bags in-between, but they sure as hell never showed up at our destination.
, but I have seen other kids not travel great and ppl just gripping left, right, and sideways about it. It gets old.
I agree... listening to other people's whiney, poorly disciplined carpet monkeys *does* get old, incredibly fast.
and you have to wait two days for it to get back to you.
Or forever. My wife and I had our luggage lost by an airline the day before we were set to depart for a cruise... and they never found them.
Never again will I check a bag.
It saddens me a little that such basic gradeschool science education is so easily forgotten...
Might I suggest that, just because your job sucks balls, doesn't mean everyone else's must?
Which only further illustrates why this is a stupid thing to do. Apparently all it did for you was instigate dissention among the rank and file, and given the soldiers are already exhausted fighting an unpopular war, possibly on extended duty with no way out thanks to stop-loss policies, you'd think that'd be the last thing you'd want to encourage.
In the original language Genesis is written in a style halfway between poetry and prose...kind of like the Odyssey.
Tell that to the biblical literalists.
A lot of scholars believe that Genesis doesn't really make many extremely bold claims about the origins of life beyond the fact that God created the world and that there is an order in which he did it moving from the simple to the complex.
Well that's all well and good, but why don't you jump down off your high horse for a second and realize that, odds are, the OP wasn't referring to people like you who, clearly, have some deeper understanding of theology than what their evangelical pastor told them in sunday school.
The OP is correctly pointing out that *evangelical literalists*, you know, those jackoffs who believe the world is 6,000 years old, are clearly delusional if they choose to hold to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming fact. And, unfortunately, a) there are, inexplicably, a *lot* of these people, particularly in the US, and b) it is these very people that are the driving force behind the attempt to equate evolution with theism, and to inject theism into school curriculae.
On the other hand, Firefox will likely always have some memory leaks, as all browsers certainly do.
As a software developer, that belief is, frankly, completely BS. Memory leaks are a result of poor design, or poor debugging. Regardless, they are *not* the inevitable product of complex software, nor are they (or bugs in general) something to be simply tolerated.
If you can find a way to magically thread javascript in a way that allows multiple windows and tabs to communicate with each other (as the DOM requires), I'm sure the mozilla folks would absolutely *love* to hear about it.
Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free.
Since when was that the point?
I write code and release it for free for one simple reason: I like to.
It's the same reason I enjoy cooking. I will happily cook meals and give them away to my guests. Why? I mean, I could charge them for it. How does it help me at all? Simple: I enjoy it. I enjoy people appreciating the fruits of my labour.
Maybe that's not enough for you, and that's fine. But I fail to see why people like me need to justify ourselves to people like you, who apparently don't enjoy programmings as a craft, and view it only as a means to an end.
Incidentally, I also have a day job as a professional programmer, and not *once* have I feared that OSS might somehow end my profession. The world of programming has always been dominated by internal or private contract projects that never reach the world at large. And these programmers are only empowered by OSS. Meanwhile, things like webapps are taking off in a big way, and the same goes there. And then there's the myriad niche markets (like the one I work in) where OSS will likely never flourish, due to the need for specialized knowledge and training, or simple lack of interest.
No, the only people threatened by OSS are those selling boxed software to consumers and who are incapable of continuing to innovate in a way that justifies the cost of their product. And, frankly, I shed no tears for those people.
Please note the word "essential", Ben put that word in there for a reason. His words were carefully crafted and extraneous words were not left in. In short, non-essential liberties are excluded by the quote and anonymity while driving is a non-essential liberty, actually a non-existent liberty
Err, you're misreading things, here, I think. Just to repeat, the original quote is:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
You're suggesting that "essential" is specializing the word "liberty", selecting a subset of the group of liberties, rather than simply describing the concept. I disagree. If he really meant only "essential liberties", he would have wrote that:
"They that can give up essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Or:
"They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But no, he wrote of "essential liberty"... ie, liberty, which is itself essential.
Now, that's not to say I disagree with the rest of your post. The idea that privacy in your car on the road is a right at all is, I think, quite silly. You're in a public place, and no one should expect the right to privacy in a public venue. However, I still believe you are misreading the quote.
A-hem. Go to someone's house who has, say, a 32" HD LCDTV (or Plasma). Look at something that is NOT HD on the television. Now, play something that IS in HD (a Blu-ray disc, HDTV channel, whatever). Now, within any REASONABLE distance, if you don't have terrible vision (like, needing -4.0 or more contacts and not having them)...you WILL notice a difference.
Uhuh. Let's see, I went here, threw in a 32" TV, and according to it, the "Maximum Viewing Distance for HDTV(Fully resolved 1080i; 1920 x 1080)" is... drumroll... *4 FEET*. Yeah, that's right, the furthest you can sit from your TV is four feet if you want to fully resolve, and thus actually see, a 1080i picture.
Sorry, that ain't happening. The viewing distance from my couch averages around *10* feet, and to fully resolve a 1080i image, I'd need a *72* inch TV, at least. Of course, one doesn't need to *fully* resolve the image, but I'd still need something far larger than I would ever tolerate in a space that is *not* meant to be solely dedicated to television watching (nor does it have the space for anything much larger than a 36" widescreen TV, in any case, due to the way the space is laid out, not to mention the presence of things *other* than a TV).
Good lord, 5' from a 42" TV? Yikes... I sit a good 10-12' from a 27" TV and that's plenty close enough for me, thanks. Are you one of those guys that likes to sit up front at those giant-screen megaplex theatres, too? :)
I am not questioning your desire to get a new TV, but I find it somewhat contradictory to think that your living room would be "dominated" by a 40+" TV, but yet the room is too large to get any benefit from HD on a smaller TV.
Simple:
a) My livingroom isn't just for watching TV, therefore I don't want it taking up a large amount of space.
b) The layout of my livingroom is such that the viewing distance from the couch to the TV is large, while the actual available space for the TV is small, thanks to things like a fireplace, and pieces of furniture other than a TV and couch (yes, believe it or not, some people have livingrooms like that!)
And I'd have to buy a PC, get a video card with TV-out, get that working with my TV which means fiddling around with modelines and god knows what else, and in the end, to get a cool, low-power, fanless setup, it'll probably cost more than a Wii.
:)
I *knew* someone would reply with something like that.