I don't know about your particular species, but humans did not evolve millions of years to eat the shit that JUST GROWS around us. Most of the shit we ate for the last millions of years is gone... what we eat is what we BREED AND CULTIVATE.
We're "civilized" now. We cultivate, and genetically-engineer the food we need, and exterminate species that we find sub-optimal when new "frankenfoods" are found.
This is not new. It predates all corporations, industrialization, etc. We've been doing this ever since we discovered agriculture and the domestication of animals, which was a few tens of thousands of years ago.
Cows and chickens are frankenanimals. Corn and wheat are frankenfoods. We use genetically-engineered felines (cats) for industrial (pest control) and emotional purposes (pets). We breed qualities into and out of living organism according to our needs.
If you're going to attack Monsanto because of the dangers of new, more efficient ways to genetically-engineer life, at least realize that we've been doing this for a long, long time. We have had our disasters and our successes, but already our nutrition is based on thousands of years of Frankenfoods.
Hopefully this will encourage more competitors (including open source) to go for the RDBMS-based filesystem model.
I don't understand the concerns of the poster regarding performance (at least without evidence of truly dismal performance): no one is forcing anyone to use the FS if they are not satisfied with performance.
For most users, they main bottleneck in storage is their own organizational faculties. I used to be exasperated when users didn't know where they put their files, but once you get past the 100GB mark, it becomes very understandable.
Consider what most people use their massive storage for these days: videos, music, multimedia, games. Not only is this the kind of content that SHOULD be stored in a database, it's the kind of content that is ALREADY being handled through a database because the filesystem is not enough: people are using their media players, P2P programs and other software to handle their files, up to the point they rarely ever interact with the filesystem unless they lost a file.
For most users, the performance penalty is well worth the price.
For those for whom it is not, it doesn't take a genius to realize you can use more than a single filesystem, and perhaps rediscover the joy of proper partition organization: keep the OS and applications separate from your data, and you can use your highly efficient filesystem for the first and your metadata-loaded one for the second.
Re:Hypocrisy
on
A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why don't they deal with it the capitalist way? It's probably the only to let them negotiate the issue without getting lost in rethoric and hypocresy: Factor it all in the numbers.
You don't want power plants in your backyard? Pay a higher price, or a MUCH higher price the less "in your backyard" they are.
Use that profit to pay the neighborhoods that are willing to put up with the power plant through subsidized electricity.
As power demands of other regions, including the ones that produce the electricity, increase, it only makes sense that the only way to preserve priority and get power is to pay even more for the privilege (which would pay for more facilities). Until either side decides it's not worth it.
But you benefit from more than five decades of cultural adaptation to this technology, plus centuries of cultural adaptation to other modern factors that these people haven't faced.
That's why we can be much more cynical regarding stimuli like television. We had more exposure, and more experience, and learn to filter it with much more skepticism, both personally and collectively.
A culture exposed to new influences with no period of adaptation can be much more vulnerable, just like people (recent immigrants are a prime target for scams, for example). When information is precious, and you have so little, you tend to take it at face-value more easily.
TV can be a powerful new influence, because it "trains" people on how to react to the rest of the new stuff.
Humans are creatures of imitation. Our behavior is defined by models we build on our minds from observation and education. When we don't have a given model, and we don't have enough experiences to observe, we can rely a lot on fictional narratives as models. Books, television, etc.
Your model, your expectations, how you react for the first time on a court of law, on a hospital, on a date, are heavily influenced by what you have heard from hearsay, what you have read, what you have seen on TV.
Consider that these people have no parents, friends, or general culture sharing experiences from modern societies. TV is their main source of knowledge such as "this is how you react when you are robbed" and "this is how you react when you rob someone".
It won't be as bad in a few years, I'm sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if TV is making it worse for a while.
All the professions that have spawned TV-series of their own are essentially social professions: police, doctors, investigators, lawyers, artists, teachers, reporters, etc. The core of the working-time (as seen in TV) in these cases has to do with interacting with people.
Even the exceptions that have more "technical meat" (CSI and the like) tend to be off-shoots of the typical case. Like a secondary character in a novel that becomes a favorite, but would normally not stand by itself.
This is not about who "influences society". It's about emotions. Emotions move plots more quickly and easily than ideas, and don't have to be explained too much. TV is about simple, approachable, uncomplicated emotions driving simple plots around emotions. The facts are not important unless emotionally charged, or sprinkled at least a little bit.
Face it, computer programming is not the most socially interesting profession. Certainly not the most emotionally charged for an outsider. It's logically, intellectually challenging, which means boring for someone looking for a sit-com instead of a documentary.
People connect to the pathologist's "determination", as he "earnestly" looks for evidence to "catch the evil bastard". They don't connect to a professional obsession for doing the job well. They might as well watch a mechanic work.
Of course, a TV series could be made around a computer programmer, as long as its thematic is about social interaction and not programming. It wouldn't be a show about programmers, though, just like "thirty something" was not a show about architects, and "Drew Carey" is not a show about HR coordinators. The profession will be an uninteresting prop, assumed to happen off the set.
Another choice would be to focus on the weirdness of the social interactions themselves are, as compared with the rest. But people don't want to watch that either, they want to connect to social interactions they're already familiar with, that they can empathize with. The excellent "Freaks and Geeks" was almost exclusively popular with... you guessed it, freaks and geeks. We all know where that one ended.
Ironically enough, I agree with you, but I did need to use penmanship to get into graduate school: the GRE general test requires a written statement in cursive before taking the test as some kind of proof of identity.
This is amusing when you realize, as you start writing, that you haven't written in cursive for more than 10 years, that you're remembering it as you write, and that by the time you're finished the document looks like it was written by 7 different people. If they asked me to write it again the new copy would probably look different too.
I wonder how long will cursive survive through bureaucracy and ceremony long after its usefulness.
It's not required to be cursive by any means. Many people do use their own names in cursive as a signature (including me), but by far the majority of the signatures I have dealt with share no similarity with cursive.
They're just a bunch of traces that are easily reproducible for a single person and difficult to reproduce for other people.
Sometimes you can see an A or an M here or there, but just as easily you could match it to the interesting parts of a seismograph's at LA.
I too fail to see what the big deal is, although the source of the moaning, as well as some button-pushing (since when is calligraphy a "unique form of American expression"?) tells me this has more to do with certain teachers afraid to lose their jobs as the skill they teach becomes irrelevant, than with the real consequences this could have.
Notice the lack of studies of any kind. There's a lot of "some say", "few statistics", "many adults", etc. No numbers, and no solid source.
Nor are there any quotes (much less trace of concern) by someone in the position to deal with this as a "problem". It's not that the Department of Education has to go out and say something about it, it's that it's interesting that no one asked anyone but a "teacher fighting the trend" and "a 54-year-old artist" who's former President of an Association of People Who Make A Living Writing And Teaching Cursive.
The only other people complaining apparently "parents who pride themselves on their penmanship", "bemoaning" that their kids don't write as they do. The tone is the same the mother might use to "bemoan" their daugther not taking the same piano lessons, the same ballerina classes, or perhaps having the debutante ball she had at X age. All that was so "character-defining".
This is a "social interest" story with no substance, not even as little as would be expected from the subject.
Considering the deficiencies in basic math and language skills present in US education (not to mention geography, history, literature and all that useless "general culture"), I would think there are more important things to worry about in education than whether Little Jimmy pens or types his homework. For example: whether he can actually do his homework, and learn something from it.
If they want to teach children an artistic skill that shows "your inner being, your core" and "it's not translated into dollars, like computer skills", I'm sure private lessons could be accomodated somewhere between tap-dancing and archery.
It proves nothing, shows nothing, says nothing, except that some people like penmanship so much they forgot why schools teach the Palmer Method of Business Writing in the first place: as a business skill.
Not to mention other activities which just as often don't encourage self-control, such as physically intensive competitive sports.
I think the teacher found a very adequate metaphor: when you teach martial arts you're teaching ways to hurt, and sometimes kill. There is no doubt this sort of knowledge can be misused to hurt people; it was perfected for that purpose.
Yet it is also taught and learned mostly for other reasons: for self-defense, for sportsmanship, for physical and/or psychological self-improvement. Sometimes kids are taught martial arts to (gasp!) teach self-control, responsability and discipline.
Society trusts that kind of training because the ethics and discipline are ingrained in the practical teaching, it's not just a chapter and a lecture in the curriculum. Perhaps a similar approach can be used for something like this.
Of course, if you're teaching programmers that's the way to do it. But programmers are not the ones who deal with security problems every day, SysAdmins do.
Typically a SysAdmin staff does not consist of programmers, and even if they are programmers, their job is not to write the security-intensive code and send the company to bankruptcy while they re-implement the OS, the terminal emulators, the network protocol, etc. Their job is to solve problems using the most efficient solution, and this often includes using other people's already developed, tested, code.
Their job is to install it, configure it, manipulate it and understand at a high level how it works; and when things inevitably go bad, minimize the damage and fix it quickly.
Learning to predict HOW things can go bad would help a lot.
I can't say honestly that I know whether she is a "brainless twit" or a genius, but that interview taken literally would be reason enough to doubt her intelligence, knowledge, and/or honesty.
However, I don't where the first, or even the second, has been called into question. If she were coached or even impersonated for the interview wouldn't have much to do with her intelligence, I think.
It does read like something written by some outsider tying to appeal to the "cool young kids". It's full of platitudes, sprinkled with attempts at pseudointellectuality through name-dropping. The kind of smalltalk that wouldn't survive a casual encounter, much less an actual interview, but is the core of a successful publicity stunt.
It's reads and feels like a marketing piece, like one of those info-mercials with testimonials at 3AM, only with an MTV attitude. If it were an honest and direct interview it would mean she is as shallow as the paid hip voices of Big Media are paid to be, or that she was edited to look that way by the publication.
I prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is willingly and intelligently doing her job: this is an ad, and either she playing her role as the shallow image of the young, hip, Madster user, or (if the interview was online) that she's letting the marketing people use her image as for any other ad.
Either way, she could be a very intelligent and professional young woman and this could still all be a manufactured interview. Considering what her job is, what the interview is about, and the actual content this seems the most likely intepretation.
From the statistical samples that I have gathered (i.e: my experience with about a dozen setups of XP and many more Win2000, plus the experience of almost everyone I know), I doubt your particular problem has anything to do with chaos theory, the bazillion lines of code (line-count is not identical to complexity) or XP per se.
Is the problem computer a brand-new no-name OEM, or is it the 5-year old machine?
Personally, I've seen XP spontaneously reboot often in the last year on brand-new computers, sure. However, after other operating systems were installed, they usually spontaneously rebooted as well.
In all cases this was a hardware problem. XP is very sensible to old, faulty, or "incompatible" hardware. This is no secret.
For old machines: unless you know your hardware very well and it's pretty standard, installing XP in 5-years old hardware is inviting disaster. They don't push customers to run compatibility checks and give them warnings certified drivers because it increases sales. It's a big red flag that the user can ignore at his own peril.
For new machines, it's a matter of hardware quality: as PC prices went down and everyone wanted a US$500 PC that can still play the latest games, there has been an epidemic of cheapo case+power-supply combinations (just a vibration of the case spontaneously reboots it), mislabeled or defective memory in the gray market, or blazing-fast and/or overclocked Athlons with cheap heatsink/fans (often badly mounted), etc. etc. etc.
The "faulty or badly mounted power-supply in the crappy case" issue in particular is annoying to no end, since the OEM coulnd't have saved more than 8 bucks for that choice.
There are many problems with Windows XP, for which I rarely recommend it. But spontaneous OS crashes and reboots are not one of them. About the only issue there are DirectX crashes in games, but games are not the most forgiving or well-behaved applications almost by definition.
I don't know. Ever since I put together my last Linux box it keeps peeing all over the carpet.
Argh, there it is again! BAD LINUX, BAD!
Maybe it just happens with Mandrake distributions. I understand some consider them younger, more immature. Although I would keep an eye on that RedHat box, they can lose control as they get older.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some cleaning up to do...
Everyone knows MS will do anything it can to hurt Linux.
No, not everyone "knows" that.
Everyone knows MS will do anything it can to hurt Linux.
Yes, there are plenty of people who will have that reaction.
For many of them, the word "Linux" does not convey something familiar that they can grasp, just a mixture of promises of free software and threatening images of dirty hippies taking over their MIS department.
For some of them, it's not even that. It's something they have read in some magazine or other and is as irrelevant to them as many other "IT-related hypes" they haven't really jumped into: Java, web services, XML, etc.
For a lot of them, Microsoft is an expensive business partners that, in their strange and costly ways, give them the solutions they know and need to keep their business running. They may not like the price, but they don't exactly hate the company or spell it as M$, or even distrust them. For them, Microsoft works.
There are people inside and outside the IT industry that don't read Slashdot, you know?
There are people who don't follow news related to Linux with the zeal of advocacy.
Many of them have the money and the position to make decisions and even force them over the rest of the technical crew. Even when they are the wrong decisions.
Remove the names and cultural baggage from the picture and you might see why the FUD works: big company X with expensive lawyers is sued by smaller, failing company S over IP. other big company Y and potential target, also with expensive lawyers, licenses the IP "before they get sued".
Most interpretations that don't imply Y is minimizing risk depend on a preconceived idea of what Y is like, what their strategy is and what their methods are. The bias is justified by a knowledge of the history of Y, of companies that interacted with it, and in no small amount by personal, political and technical judgement.
This is all good and nice, more than enough to understand there are more complex factors and motivations behind a Microsoft decision on the matter. But it would not be easy to convince someone to risk their business on that judgement over a half-hour discussion (before their eyes glaze over) unless you're preaching to the choir.
I only agree that dealing with to the main storyline of Evangelion with a movie would be stupid.
It's not that there isn't anything to add to the series, or that you couldn't fit more material somewhere in the series. There were enough open questions left throughout the series, and the timeline is not THAT tight.
But a movie could not be an OVA, it could not be some kind of extended episode that depends on the comprehensive whole that is the series. It would have to stand by itself, and I don't think that's possible because as you say, EVA is about emotions and character development. And a lot of it.
It couldn't be properly summed up in 2 hours, and it couldn't be taken out of EVA without destroying its narrative intent.
Because I suspect that's what the live action movie will attempt, I think it will be a waste of time and money.
However, this doesn't mean that a more sensible project could not add to the series in some other way. I would think, for example, that a prequel dealing with the whole SEELE/NERV/Ikari-family saga in either animated or live-action form would be a nice way of complementing the series with a story that can be as complex and messed up as the original (well, maybe less apocalyptic) without taking away the mystery.
I just wouldn't trust american hands on that one, though. American video/movie entertainment is not notorious for investing in storylines and universes in the long-term.
I'm not telling you software should be treated differently.
If anything, I'm telling you software should be treated just the same as other "intellectual property", and that there are practical reasons for which someone can lay claim to "ownership" of said "property" (I'm abusing the quotes because the metaphors are far from perfect), that is, claim a bit of control and responsability over it.
If you recognize the case of intellectual property in books as you point out here, then you're already agreeing with me!!
An individual or small group (author(s)) "owns" a piece of "intellectual progress" and the public is therefore restricted in its use.
This "ownership" is recognized because the "intellectual good" is released to the public only as a direct result of:
a) The fact that it was produced/acquired by the "owner" (author(s)) b) The willingness of said "owner" to release to the public for his/her/their own benefit.
You seem to be arguing in a discussion that has little or nothing to do with my comment. At no point did I argue against Fair Use or expressed support for SCO, whose claim can be legitimately debunked within the rules of intellectual property.
Once more: an absurdly wrong claim does not invalidate a legal framework, unless the claim is patently neither absurd nor wrong within the legal framework itself.
An abusive parent does not invalidate the idea of parenthood, a bad piece of software does not mean computers are useless, and an illicit fortune does not invalidate the concept of money.
The problem with SCO is not that they have a copyright. The problem with SCO is that they make overreaching claims without providing evidence and accusations which don't seem to have a real base.
You might also want to tell me why you think selling hibiscus plants with a label saying: "Propagation prohibited." is not as ridiculous as it looks, or why you believe that to be a different situation.
The fact that a contract is as ridiculous as it looks doesn't make it wrong or illegal. Just ridiculous.
It's arguable whether you accepting the ridiculous contract is wrong or just even more ridiculous, but breaking it knowingly is definitely wrong.
Making a bad deal is not illegal, nor should it be. Even Microsoft has had to deal with those facts.
Now, I'm sure you'll bring something else: if you hide this label in some little corner in the package and assume that the contract is implicitely accepted by the buyer without negotiation or acknowledgement this would be wrong.
That's a completely separate argument:
Whether a contract is valid or not has nothing to do with its "ridiculousness". It has to do with whether it was a contract, was consciously negotiated and accepted, and its terms are legally enforceable.
I think software sales should be dealt with no different than other sales contract, such as the ones you execute every day buying lunch, books, a TV set, etc.
The thing is that most software is not sold, it's rented or otherwise provided without real transference of ownership, neither physical nor intellectual. It's just a different type of contract.
The obstacles stopping dealers from renting you goods under very restricted conditions instead of selling them to you are not legal: People are not sufficiently stupid to lease most of their property, and when they do need to lease (cars, apartments, etc) they are careful to read their contracts.
Still, from what I understand the parent said the application used 2.7MB of RAM in cached pixmaps within X that are not reported in the normal memory consumption.
That would be BESIDES the normal memory consumption of the application.
And that would be memory specifically dedicated to pixmaps of the GUI elements.
Contemplate the fact that nowhere in my comment is SCO mentioned, and contemplate the fact that nowhere in the parent comment is SCO solidly tied to the premise.
I'm arguing against a set of generalities. The fact that the SCO case is absurd has nothing to do with whether "a small group can own a piece of progress".
Perhaps it would if it were a strong and clear-cut IP case representative of these legal concepts, but it's not (unless spectacular, unexpected new evidence is revealed).
Next you are going to tell me that, as an employee the only thing I have an incentive to do is the least amount of work that keeps me not even my job but my monthly payment, right?
Not unless you believed you had no hope or future. Some people live like that, and they do exactly that.
Most people do the amount of work that will help them get noticed, get raises, get a promotion, and in general get higher monthly payments for less work.
Or maybe that the opportunity to wave all my code goodbye when I leave the company would be a great incentive making me produce more of it?
It's certainly not. And the company that requires that knows it. They put that clause in the contract for a reason, and they calculated their expected costs.
Namely, they prefer to have control over the production rather than have creative developers. They prefer the risk of not making money out of innovation than the risk of losing money out of lost intellectual property.
If it's their contract and they're paying the money, it's their choice, and they're the ones living with the consequences (employees who are not eager to share the really spectacular ideas).
I don't see what this has to do with my comment, though. Unless you mean it as an ironic way of reaffirming my point.
Open remains the question how many of todays owners of the entity named SCO actually did put any physical and/or intellectual efforts into the evolution of operating systems.
Indeed.
Open remains whether there is any relationship between SCO and the advances in operating systems which they claim as theirs.
That's not the point. SCO is not the point. The absurdity of a wrong claim in a special case does not translate into the absurdity of the concepts on which the claim is expressed.
You generalized the issue to the concept of "ownership of progress" and Linux as part of "mankind's perpetual discovery" or other such nonsense, and I'm criticizing your generalization.
Your statement begs the question: regardless of where is the memory reported (on X11 or on the applications), is X11 the memory hog people claim it is?
Maybe it's because I haven't downloaded the latest spyware-laden clock program, but the last time I checked the memory usage of my clock application on windows it certainly didn't take 2.7MB all by itself.
If told the applications are to blame, I would be skeptical unless a good sample of X applications that are not memory hogs shows it's not a platform issue.
I mean, the Microsoft development world is not regarded as terribly concerned about memory (or other resources) efficiency. If you have to go out of your way for your watch application NOT to take 3MB of RAM, I could care less where the resources are reported... the problem is the same.
Although I agree with the general spirit of the sarcastic note (themes seem to have gained a disturbing priority level on typical desktop discussions), the particular market segment this seems to aim for has very good reasons to worry about themeing.
Don't think about users in big workstations wasting hundreds of hours a year playing with the colors and transparencies of their windows, on their 21'' LCD monitors.
Think about manufacturers of PDAs and other small-factor devices having user interface experts create brand-new user interfaces adapted to their devices. Without worrying about developing the OS, a new windowing system, or porting applications... or, in the alternative, losing sales because using a GUI designed for a monitor+keyboard+mouse combination sucks on their tiny device. Heck, it even sucks in most laptops.
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I don't know about your particular species, but humans did not evolve millions of years to eat the shit that JUST GROWS around us. Most of the shit we ate for the last millions of years is gone... what we eat is what we BREED AND CULTIVATE.
We're "civilized" now. We cultivate, and genetically-engineer the food we need, and exterminate species that we find sub-optimal when new "frankenfoods" are found.
This is not new. It predates all corporations, industrialization, etc. We've been doing this ever since we discovered agriculture and the domestication of animals, which was a few tens of thousands of years ago.
Cows and chickens are frankenanimals. Corn and wheat are frankenfoods. We use genetically-engineered felines (cats) for industrial (pest control) and emotional purposes (pets). We breed qualities into and out of living organism according to our needs.
If you're going to attack Monsanto because of the dangers of new, more efficient ways to genetically-engineer life, at least realize that we've been doing this for a long, long time. We have had our disasters and our successes, but already our nutrition is based on thousands of years of Frankenfoods.
Hopefully this will encourage more competitors (including open source) to go for the RDBMS-based filesystem model.
I don't understand the concerns of the poster regarding performance (at least without evidence of truly dismal performance): no one is forcing anyone to use the FS if they are not satisfied with performance.
For most users, they main bottleneck in storage is their own organizational faculties. I used to be exasperated when users didn't know where they put their files, but once you get past the 100GB mark, it becomes very understandable.
Consider what most people use their massive storage for these days: videos, music, multimedia, games. Not only is this the kind of content that SHOULD be stored in a database, it's the kind of content that is ALREADY being handled through a database because the filesystem is not enough: people are using their media players, P2P programs and other software to handle their files, up to the point they rarely ever interact with the filesystem unless they lost a file.
For most users, the performance penalty is well worth the price.
For those for whom it is not, it doesn't take a genius to realize you can use more than a single filesystem, and perhaps rediscover the joy of proper partition organization: keep the OS and applications separate from your data, and you can use your highly efficient filesystem for the first and your metadata-loaded one for the second.
Why don't they deal with it the capitalist way? It's probably the only to let them negotiate the issue without getting lost in rethoric and hypocresy: Factor it all in the numbers.
You don't want power plants in your backyard? Pay a higher price, or a MUCH higher price the less "in your backyard" they are.
Use that profit to pay the neighborhoods that are willing to put up with the power plant through subsidized electricity.
As power demands of other regions, including the ones that produce the electricity, increase, it only makes sense that the only way to preserve priority and get power is to pay even more for the privilege (which would pay for more facilities). Until either side decides it's not worth it.
But you benefit from more than five decades of cultural adaptation to this technology, plus centuries of cultural adaptation to other modern factors that these people haven't faced.
That's why we can be much more cynical regarding stimuli like television. We had more exposure, and more experience, and learn to filter it with much more skepticism, both personally and collectively.
A culture exposed to new influences with no period of adaptation can be much more vulnerable, just like people (recent immigrants are a prime target for scams, for example). When information is precious, and you have so little, you tend to take it at face-value more easily.
TV can be a powerful new influence, because it "trains" people on how to react to the rest of the new stuff.
Humans are creatures of imitation. Our behavior is defined by models we build on our minds from observation and education. When we don't have a given model, and we don't have enough experiences to observe, we can rely a lot on fictional narratives as models. Books, television, etc.
Your model, your expectations, how you react for the first time on a court of law, on a hospital, on a date, are heavily influenced by what you have heard from hearsay, what you have read, what you have seen on TV.
Consider that these people have no parents, friends, or general culture sharing experiences from modern societies. TV is their main source of knowledge such as "this is how you react when you are robbed" and "this is how you react when you rob someone".
It won't be as bad in a few years, I'm sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if TV is making it worse for a while.
False.
All the professions that have spawned TV-series of their own are essentially social professions: police, doctors, investigators, lawyers, artists, teachers, reporters, etc. The core of the working-time (as seen in TV) in these cases has to do with interacting with people.
Even the exceptions that have more "technical meat" (CSI and the like) tend to be off-shoots of the typical case. Like a secondary character in a novel that becomes a favorite, but would normally not stand by itself.
This is not about who "influences society". It's about emotions. Emotions move plots more quickly and easily than ideas, and don't have to be explained too much. TV is about simple, approachable, uncomplicated emotions driving simple plots around emotions. The facts are not important unless emotionally charged, or sprinkled at least a little bit.
Face it, computer programming is not the most socially interesting profession. Certainly not the most emotionally charged for an outsider. It's logically, intellectually challenging, which means boring for someone looking for a sit-com instead of a documentary.
People connect to the pathologist's "determination", as he "earnestly" looks for evidence to "catch the evil bastard". They don't connect to a professional obsession for doing the job well. They might as well watch a mechanic work.
Of course, a TV series could be made around a computer programmer, as long as its thematic is about social interaction and not programming. It wouldn't be a show about programmers, though, just like "thirty something" was not a show about architects, and "Drew Carey" is not a show about HR coordinators. The profession will be an uninteresting prop, assumed to happen off the set.
Another choice would be to focus on the weirdness of the social interactions themselves are, as compared with the rest. But people don't want to watch that either, they want to connect to social interactions they're already familiar with, that they can empathize with. The excellent "Freaks and Geeks" was almost exclusively popular with... you guessed it, freaks and geeks. We all know where that one ended.
Ironically enough, I agree with you, but I did need to use penmanship to get into graduate school: the GRE general test requires a written statement in cursive before taking the test as some kind of proof of identity.
This is amusing when you realize, as you start writing, that you haven't written in cursive for more than 10 years, that you're remembering it as you write, and that by the time you're finished the document looks like it was written by 7 different people. If they asked me to write it again the new copy would probably look different too.
I wonder how long will cursive survive through bureaucracy and ceremony long after its usefulness.
A signature is a unique personal mark.
It's not required to be cursive by any means. Many people do use their own names in cursive as a signature (including me), but by far the majority of the signatures I have dealt with share no similarity with cursive.
They're just a bunch of traces that are easily reproducible for a single person and difficult to reproduce for other people.
Sometimes you can see an A or an M here or there, but just as easily you could match it to the interesting parts of a seismograph's at LA.
... complain about times changing. News at 11.
I too fail to see what the big deal is, although the source of the moaning, as well as some button-pushing (since when is calligraphy a "unique form of American expression"?) tells me this has more to do with certain teachers afraid to lose their jobs as the skill they teach becomes irrelevant, than with the real consequences this could have.
Notice the lack of studies of any kind. There's a lot of "some say", "few statistics", "many adults", etc. No numbers, and no solid source.
Nor are there any quotes (much less trace of concern) by someone in the position to deal with this as a "problem". It's not that the Department of Education has to go out and say something about it, it's that it's interesting that no one asked anyone but a "teacher fighting the trend" and "a 54-year-old artist" who's former President of an Association of People Who Make A Living Writing And Teaching Cursive.
The only other people complaining apparently "parents who pride themselves on their penmanship", "bemoaning" that their kids don't write as they do. The tone is the same the mother might use to "bemoan" their daugther not taking the same piano lessons, the same ballerina classes, or perhaps having the debutante ball she had at X age. All that was so "character-defining".
This is a "social interest" story with no substance, not even as little as would be expected from the subject.
Considering the deficiencies in basic math and language skills present in US education (not to mention geography, history, literature and all that useless "general culture"), I would think there are more important things to worry about in education than whether Little Jimmy pens or types his homework. For example: whether he can actually do his homework, and learn something from it.
If they want to teach children an artistic skill that shows "your inner being, your core" and "it's not translated into dollars, like computer skills", I'm sure private lessons could be accomodated somewhere between tap-dancing and archery.
It proves nothing, shows nothing, says nothing, except that some people like penmanship so much they forgot why schools teach the Palmer Method of Business Writing in the first place: as a business skill.
Most adults act irresponsibly at least some of the time.
If you never did anything out of the line after your second decade of life, then I think you're in the minority.
Not to mention other activities which just as often don't encourage self-control, such as physically intensive competitive sports.
I think the teacher found a very adequate metaphor: when you teach martial arts you're teaching ways to hurt, and sometimes kill. There is no doubt this sort of knowledge can be misused to hurt people; it was perfected for that purpose.
Yet it is also taught and learned mostly for other reasons: for self-defense, for sportsmanship, for physical and/or psychological self-improvement. Sometimes kids are taught martial arts to (gasp!) teach self-control, responsability and discipline.
Society trusts that kind of training because the ethics and discipline are ingrained in the practical teaching, it's not just a chapter and a lecture in the curriculum. Perhaps a similar approach can be used for something like this.
Of course, if you're teaching programmers that's the way to do it. But programmers are not the ones who deal with security problems every day, SysAdmins do.
Typically a SysAdmin staff does not consist of programmers, and even if they are programmers, their job is not to write the security-intensive code and send the company to bankruptcy while they re-implement the OS, the terminal emulators, the network protocol, etc. Their job is to solve problems using the most efficient solution, and this often includes using other people's already developed, tested, code.
Their job is to install it, configure it, manipulate it and understand at a high level how it works; and when things inevitably go bad, minimize the damage and fix it quickly.
Learning to predict HOW things can go bad would help a lot.
Too many... terrible, terrible, masturbation jokes... approaching on the horizon...
Someone stop this merger before it's too late!
I can't say honestly that I know whether she is a "brainless twit" or a genius, but that interview taken literally would be reason enough to doubt her intelligence, knowledge, and/or honesty.
However, I don't where the first, or even the second, has been called into question. If she were coached or even impersonated for the interview wouldn't have much to do with her intelligence, I think.
It does read like something written by some outsider tying to appeal to the "cool young kids". It's full of platitudes, sprinkled with attempts at pseudointellectuality through name-dropping. The kind of smalltalk that wouldn't survive a casual encounter, much less an actual interview, but is the core of a successful publicity stunt.
It's reads and feels like a marketing piece, like one of those info-mercials with testimonials at 3AM, only with an MTV attitude. If it were an honest and direct interview it would mean she is as shallow as the paid hip voices of Big Media are paid to be, or that she was edited to look that way by the publication.
I prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is willingly and intelligently doing her job: this is an ad, and either she playing her role as the shallow image of the young, hip, Madster user, or (if the interview was online) that she's letting the marketing people use her image as for any other ad.
Either way, she could be a very intelligent and professional young woman and this could still all be a manufactured interview. Considering what her job is, what the interview is about, and the actual content this seems the most likely intepretation.
About that crying need:
Does anyone know exactly why on heaven and earth Java overloads the '+' sign for a String and NOT for any of the number wrappers?
Was there a particular reason, did someone get really drunk and lose a bet, or was it just because?
From the statistical samples that I have gathered (i.e: my experience with about a dozen setups of XP and many more Win2000, plus the experience of almost everyone I know), I doubt your particular problem has anything to do with chaos theory, the bazillion lines of code (line-count is not identical to complexity) or XP per se.
Is the problem computer a brand-new no-name OEM, or is it the 5-year old machine?
Personally, I've seen XP spontaneously reboot often in the last year on brand-new computers, sure. However, after other operating systems were installed, they usually spontaneously rebooted as well.
In all cases this was a hardware problem. XP is very sensible to old, faulty, or "incompatible" hardware. This is no secret.
For old machines: unless you know your hardware very well and it's pretty standard, installing XP in 5-years old hardware is inviting disaster. They don't push customers to run compatibility checks and give them warnings certified drivers because it increases sales. It's a big red flag that the user can ignore at his own peril.
For new machines, it's a matter of hardware quality: as PC prices went down and everyone wanted a US$500 PC that can still play the latest games, there has been an epidemic of cheapo case+power-supply combinations (just a vibration of the case spontaneously reboots it), mislabeled or defective memory in the gray market, or blazing-fast and/or overclocked Athlons with cheap heatsink/fans (often badly mounted), etc. etc. etc.
The "faulty or badly mounted power-supply in the crappy case" issue in particular is annoying to no end, since the OEM coulnd't have saved more than 8 bucks for that choice.
There are many problems with Windows XP, for which I rarely recommend it. But spontaneous OS crashes and reboots are not one of them. About the only issue there are DirectX crashes in games, but games are not the most forgiving or well-behaved applications almost by definition.
I don't know. Ever since I put together my last Linux box it keeps peeing all over the carpet.
Argh, there it is again! BAD LINUX, BAD!
Maybe it just happens with Mandrake distributions. I understand some consider them younger, more immature. Although I would keep an eye on that RedHat box, they can lose control as they get older.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some cleaning up to do...
No, not everyone "knows" that.
Yes, there are plenty of people who will have that reaction.
For many of them, the word "Linux" does not convey something familiar that they can grasp, just a mixture of promises of free software and threatening images of dirty hippies taking over their MIS department.
For some of them, it's not even that. It's something they have read in some magazine or other and is as irrelevant to them as many other "IT-related hypes" they haven't really jumped into: Java, web services, XML, etc.
For a lot of them, Microsoft is an expensive business partners that, in their strange and costly ways, give them the solutions they know and need to keep their business running. They may not like the price, but they don't exactly hate the company or spell it as M$, or even distrust them. For them, Microsoft works.
There are people inside and outside the IT industry that don't read Slashdot, you know?
There are people who don't follow news related to Linux with the zeal of advocacy.
Many of them have the money and the position to make decisions and even force them over the rest of the technical crew. Even when they are the wrong decisions.
Remove the names and cultural baggage from the picture and you might see why the FUD works: big company X with expensive lawyers is sued by smaller, failing company S over IP. other big company Y and potential target, also with expensive lawyers, licenses the IP "before they get sued".
Most interpretations that don't imply Y is minimizing risk depend on a preconceived idea of what Y is like, what their strategy is and what their methods are. The bias is justified by a knowledge of the history of Y, of companies that interacted with it, and in no small amount by personal, political and technical judgement.
This is all good and nice, more than enough to understand there are more complex factors and motivations behind a Microsoft decision on the matter. But it would not be easy to convince someone to risk their business on that judgement over a half-hour discussion (before their eyes glaze over) unless you're preaching to the choir.
What are you talking about?
.Net and therefore doesn't have this problem with its sandbox model, don't you?
You are aware that Java is NOT part of
I only agree that dealing with to the main storyline of Evangelion with a movie would be stupid.
It's not that there isn't anything to add to the series, or that you couldn't fit more material somewhere in the series. There were enough open questions left throughout the series, and the timeline is not THAT tight.
But a movie could not be an OVA, it could not be some kind of extended episode that depends on the comprehensive whole that is the series. It would have to stand by itself, and I don't think that's possible because as you say, EVA is about emotions and character development. And a lot of it.
It couldn't be properly summed up in 2 hours, and it couldn't be taken out of EVA without destroying its narrative intent.
Because I suspect that's what the live action movie will attempt, I think it will be a waste of time and money.
However, this doesn't mean that a more sensible project could not add to the series in some other way. I would think, for example, that a prequel dealing with the whole SEELE/NERV/Ikari-family saga in either animated or live-action form would be a nice way of complementing the series with a story that can be as complex and messed up as the original (well, maybe less apocalyptic) without taking away the mystery.
I just wouldn't trust american hands on that one, though. American video/movie entertainment is not notorious for investing in storylines and universes in the long-term.
If anything, I'm telling you software should be treated just the same as other "intellectual property", and that there are practical reasons for which someone can lay claim to "ownership" of said "property" (I'm abusing the quotes because the metaphors are far from perfect), that is, claim a bit of control and responsability over it.
If you recognize the case of intellectual property in books as you point out here, then you're already agreeing with me!!
An individual or small group (author(s)) "owns" a piece of "intellectual progress" and the public is therefore restricted in its use.
This "ownership" is recognized because the "intellectual good" is released to the public only as a direct result of:
a) The fact that it was produced/acquired by the "owner" (author(s))
b) The willingness of said "owner" to release to the public for his/her/their own benefit.
You seem to be arguing in a discussion that has little or nothing to do with my comment. At no point did I argue against Fair Use or expressed support for SCO, whose claim can be legitimately debunked within the rules of intellectual property.
Once more: an absurdly wrong claim does not invalidate a legal framework, unless the claim is patently neither absurd nor wrong within the legal framework itself.
An abusive parent does not invalidate the idea of parenthood, a bad piece of software does not mean computers are useless, and an illicit fortune does not invalidate the concept of money.
The problem with SCO is not that they have a copyright. The problem with SCO is that they make overreaching claims without providing evidence and accusations which don't seem to have a real base.
The fact that a contract is as ridiculous as it looks doesn't make it wrong or illegal. Just ridiculous.
It's arguable whether you accepting the ridiculous contract is wrong or just even more ridiculous, but breaking it knowingly is definitely wrong.
Making a bad deal is not illegal, nor should it be. Even Microsoft has had to deal with those facts.
Now, I'm sure you'll bring something else: if you hide this label in some little corner in the package and assume that the contract is implicitely accepted by the buyer without negotiation or acknowledgement this would be wrong.
That's a completely separate argument:
Whether a contract is valid or not has nothing to do with its "ridiculousness". It has to do with whether it was a contract, was consciously negotiated and accepted, and its terms are legally enforceable.
I think software sales should be dealt with no different than other sales contract, such as the ones you execute every day buying lunch, books, a TV set, etc.
The thing is that most software is not sold, it's rented or otherwise provided without real transference of ownership, neither physical nor intellectual. It's just a different type of contract.
The obstacles stopping dealers from renting you goods under very restricted conditions instead of selling them to you are not legal: People are not sufficiently stupid to lease most of their property, and when they do need to lease (cars, apartments, etc) they are careful to read their contracts.
Yep, I need new contacts.
Still, from what I understand the parent said the application used 2.7MB of RAM in cached pixmaps within X that are not reported in the normal memory consumption.
That would be BESIDES the normal memory consumption of the application.
And that would be memory specifically dedicated to pixmaps of the GUI elements.
It still seems a bit much to me.
Contemplate the fact that nowhere in my comment is SCO mentioned, and contemplate the fact that nowhere in the parent comment is SCO solidly tied to the premise.
I'm arguing against a set of generalities. The fact that the SCO case is absurd has nothing to do with whether "a small group can own a piece of progress".
Perhaps it would if it were a strong and clear-cut IP case representative of these legal concepts, but it's not (unless spectacular, unexpected new evidence is revealed).
Not unless you believed you had no hope or future. Some people live like that, and they do exactly that.
Most people do the amount of work that will help them get noticed, get raises, get a promotion, and in general get higher monthly payments for less work.
It's certainly not. And the company that requires that knows it. They put that clause in the contract for a reason, and they calculated their expected costs.
Namely, they prefer to have control over the production rather than have creative developers. They prefer the risk of not making money out of innovation than the risk of losing money out of lost intellectual property.
If it's their contract and they're paying the money, it's their choice, and they're the ones living with the consequences (employees who are not eager to share the really spectacular ideas).
I don't see what this has to do with my comment, though. Unless you mean it as an ironic way of reaffirming my point.
Indeed.
Open remains whether there is any relationship between SCO and the advances in operating systems which they claim as theirs.
That's not the point. SCO is not the point. The absurdity of a wrong claim in a special case does not translate into the absurdity of the concepts on which the claim is expressed.
You generalized the issue to the concept of "ownership of progress" and Linux as part of "mankind's perpetual discovery" or other such nonsense, and I'm criticizing your generalization.
Your statement begs the question: regardless of where is the memory reported (on X11 or on the applications), is X11 the memory hog people claim it is?
Maybe it's because I haven't downloaded the latest spyware-laden clock program, but the last time I checked the memory usage of my clock application on windows it certainly didn't take 2.7MB all by itself.
If told the applications are to blame, I would be skeptical unless a good sample of X applications that are not memory hogs shows it's not a platform issue.
I mean, the Microsoft development world is not regarded as terribly concerned about memory (or other resources) efficiency. If you have to go out of your way for your watch application NOT to take 3MB of RAM, I could care less where the resources are reported... the problem is the same.
Although I agree with the general spirit of the sarcastic note (themes seem to have gained a disturbing priority level on typical desktop discussions), the particular market segment this seems to aim for has very good reasons to worry about themeing.
Don't think about users in big workstations wasting hundreds of hours a year playing with the colors and transparencies of their windows, on their 21'' LCD monitors.
Think about manufacturers of PDAs and other small-factor devices having user interface experts create brand-new user interfaces adapted to their devices. Without worrying about developing the OS, a new windowing system, or porting applications... or, in the alternative, losing sales because using a GUI designed for a monitor+keyboard+mouse combination sucks on their tiny device. Heck, it even sucks in most laptops.