The premise: The time needed to boot desktop Linux systems is becoming an issue.
Am I missing an aspect of desktop computing, that requires regular reboots, to care how long a reboot takes?
Kernel recompiles are the only thing I run into on a desktop machine that requires a reboot, and those are so infrequent that I don't care if the restart takes 2 seconds or 2 minutes.
It's all fine and good that Apple doesn't want to support company X's DRM. They're under no obligation to do so, and I certainly didn't purchase my iPod under the impression that they would support DRM other than their own.
Apple kindly supplies MP3 support as a nod to the millions who use it, rather than forcing some silly stubborn transcoding (*cough* Sony *cough*) into a proprietary DRMed format. Thank you for that, Apple.
But I rip my CDs to FLAC because it's great insurance against CD loss, damage, and an Open Source format guarantees that my terabytes representing my fair use of my music will always be decodable and transcodable, in theory. FLAC is a mature, well-documented, nicely tagged, easily playable format.
I highly doubt it's technology or firmware limitations, so is it just a numbers game that compels them to support MP3 but not FLAC?
Routers just pass packets, they don't examine packets for certain data. I've never seen a firewall that will examine TCP/25 packets for a RCPT TO address, either
Check out ROPE. It's a firewall scripting language (iptables matching module) that will filter based on packet data. Examples are given for filtering based on "key: value" strings in HTTP headers, for example. Seems reasonable that it could see a RCPT TO field, no? More here
The license is what matters. It allows players to modify and redistribute the game. Whether or not it was typed in OpenOffice... is relatively insignificant.
Actually, "not tested on animals", "union made", or "built with OSS tools" are examples of appealing to social, ethical, or economic belief systems. Those qualities don't necessarily result in a different product at all, but as with any product, some gamers may prefer to use products built in ways they agree with or wish to bring awareness to.
Currently in Python, the C floating point libraries used will produce this:
>>> 1.1 1.1000000000000001
Thus, the Decimal data type was born.
From PEP 327: "The inaccuracy isn't always visible when you print the number because the FP-to-decimal-string conversion is provided by the C library, and most C libraries try to produce sensible output. Even if it's not displayed, however, the inaccuracy is still there and subsequent operations can magnify the error."
While it's obvious that the evidence a CSI biofecalneurotoxochemologist can "find" today (and feed to a trusting jury) is very impressive, consider the other side of the sword. Twenty years ago, a criminal did not have the tools of crime scene manipulation and investigator distraction that forensic priorities give them today. For example, leaving a bunch of other people's hair and skin flakes at a crime scene didn't help a criminal very much twenty years ago. Such things probably wouldn't even be noticed, let alone be entered into evidence, get analyzed, waste time and money, and eventually act as confounding theories in court.
Programmers line up at the door to EA (and other studios) to get jobs in that industry. They jump through the interviews and HR hoops. They work as 9-5 institutional programmers, government contractors, MCSEs, or anything, hoping to score an opportunity to make games. Not everyone wants this, of course, but believe it or not, thousands and thousands of people look forward to working extremely long hours to make video games. Let those people apply and work the jobs. If everyone walked out of EA today because of unfulfilled expectations, their desks would be filled in fairly short order by people who want those jobs for the guts and glory. The unionizers amongst you may call these people 'scabs', I suppose.
Aspiring game programmers write games in their spare time, graphics demos, etc. and put these things together in a portfolio to apply for a paid job as a game programmer. I know; I did this, I write code, and I hire other coders. Show me another industry where you'll work for hundreds and hundreds of hours on your own time to craft a software demo to impress a potential banking/government/oil&gas employer...
You could argue that programmers are lined up to work there because economic times are hard for the North American programmer right now. If you've been watching the games industry for the last 15 years or so, you'd know that programmers have been begging to work at video game studios (large and small) constantly, through boom times and bust. Not so true of other (less glorious?) programming specialties.
During the late nineties boom times, I can assure you that the hours worked at EA Sports were brutal. I was there, coding like a monkey, and it was just fine. We all could have left; there were lots of opportunities to make more money in software for less hours. So... Different economic climate now, but what's constant? What's constant over the decades is the fact that plenty of people are willing to work unusually long hours to make video games (and other software). If game programmers see no glory in that sacrifice, why on earth did they get into video games?
"They shouldn't have to work so much" is mostly what I'm hearing. Not an argument. They don't have to. If EA is breaking laws, nail them to the wall. But if they're matching a certain personality type and inner drive to really hard jobs, and there's a clear pattern of people freely willing to leave easier positions to code games, well, then chalk one up for EA finding a good business model.
The other thing to consider, is that things have an end to them, and jobs don't need to last for 20 years. Some jobs simply can't because of their demands. There are jobs so physically and mentally demanding that they're simply not life-long jobs. Maybe game programming is like that.
Former EA Sports programmer shares thoughts...
on
EA Games: The Human Story
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Disclaimer: I worked at EA for a few years as a programmer on sports titles. It was extremely consuming work.
I wonder if the claims of "abuse" aren't more than simply "expectations not met". The former is serious problem, and there may be laws or employment contracts to help you. The latter simply means you're working at the wrong job for you.
I see more than a few suggestions here to "just unionize" and I strongly disagree. We're talking about professionals. People who, by definition, are well educated, literate, capable of understanding and negotiating on their own. Engineers have their own professional society as support, as do many other professions. Programmers can join professional organizations such as IEEE or EFF for resources they may find helpful. Professional organizations are a far cry from unions, and thankfully, they don't generally promote union-style blocking of communication and empathy between management and workers.
Also, please consider that as more unionized programming shops and union-only projects are created in your country, more and more programming opportunities will be lost to nations where programmers are content to negotiate their own terms and work without unionized representation.
For me, personally, EA Sports was a really really exhausting place to work. The demands were very very high. The hours were all-consuming. No personal life during finalling. The salary was okay. I loved it for years and then moved on before burnout arrived. If you don't want that life, seek work elsewhere because I assure you that what you consider abusive, hundreds or thousands of other people consider a dream job. Nobody is being whipped, starved, or prevented from quitting. They're just working really really damn hard.
Faceball 2000 is a 2 player FPS for the SNES, you young whipper snapper.
Actually, Faceball 2000 on the Game Boy in 1991 preceded the SNES version by approximately a year, you young whipper snapper. It was the followup (by the same company, Xanth Software FX) to MIDI Maze on the Atari ST (in 1987).
The Game Boy version allowed play for 2 handhelds head-to-head, cabled together with standard Nintendo cables. With a special (non-commercialized cable), it would allow up to 16 Game Boys to join in the FPS goodness.
I stopped taking supplements after reading this article a few weeks ago.
I agree too many people think vitamins and herbal supplements are the magical solution to simple problems so thanks for sharing the link. But I think it's important to consider the serious limitations of that study and what one can justifiably conclude from it.
1. The study did not include 'healthy' people. All participants had cancer of the gullet, stomach and intestine, bowel, pancreas or liver. Conclusions about any supplement's effect on a person without those cancers is not supported by this study. It would have been interesting to include a group of healthy patients in the study to see if the supplements were accelerating the existing cancer or causing some other form of death. The cause(s) of death is not stated in the article but probably is in the study itself. (Link to the study, anyone?)
2. The supplements studied were limited to beta-carotene, vitamins A, C, and E, and selenium, alone or in combination. The premature death increases were connected to taking both beta-carotene and either A or E. Conclusions about supplements other than beta-carotene and A or E aren't supported by this study.
I'm not saying you can't extrapolate in your own mind about what other supplements might do to healthy people. Maybe that's a safe thing to do. But it isn't something the study is suggesting.
From the post: "It's smaller than a standard postcard."
You know, I've received postcards from folks in the UK and I don't recall them being nearly as large as that PDA. Perhaps the conference he attended was in Flatland.
If you use all new stuff, you're not hacking, but developing new hardware.
No, I disagree. If you use "all new stuff" in unforseen, questionable, or previously-considered-impossible ways, then you are most definitely hacking.
Hacking requires passion and looking beyond the limits of existing systems (in this case, hardware components). I don't believe it matters if those components are new or salvaged, if you're bolting them together in brilliant and bizarre ways.
...and whether or not it had been properly conveyed to the Pirahã that different quantities of fish in numbers greater than three were significantly distinct.
Do you agree though that it would be nearly impossible for a researcher to convey to the Pirahã that there even exist distinct quantities greater than three?
Maybe this simply means there's too much of a barrier between our cultures to do even 'simple' experiments like this and be able to draw sound conclusions.
it's often used to distinguish proper nouns, which, in my opinion, improves understanding. E.g., Which network are you referring to? Oh, the Internet.
do you believe that there are more than one internet?
please explain how confusion could result if i change your example to:
which network are you referring to? oh the internet?
no capitals are used, yet the same degree of understanding is conveyed in my opinion.
now you're free to tell me that, visually, you prefer the word capitalized, but i'm not seeing proof that capitalizing the word improves understanding.
Please do not call the non-English Wikipedias translations. The are independent projects, the are other versions of Wikipedia and absolutely not translations of the English Wikipedia.
This translation stuff is great and I'm glad it's happening. From the Wikipedia:
Small languages can't produce articles as fast as English wikipedia because the number of wikipedians is too low. The solution for this problem is the translation of English wikipedia. But, some languages will not have enough translators. Machine Translation can improve the productivity of the community. But manual translation can be added later, for a more accurate text.
So I'm not sure why "translation" is a bad word, because it's commonly the activity that occurs to create the non-English Wikipedias. Wikipedia encourages you to translate the English version (i.e. the one with the most pages) into other languages and also vice versa. The translation instructions there suggest you pick an original version (sometimes English, sometimes not), and then create a translation of it. "Translate the page", "translate the navigation"; I'm just calling it as I read it.
So the different language versions are independent in that there's no automagic machine translation off a master set of facts happening (yet, but see below), but there is a constant translation process that binds all the different languages (including English) together.
Whichever language contains the best research effectively becomes the master, and translations fall out of it. It's just the efficient way a community project like this will avoid some duplicate effort.
For example, if I'm doing edits on the English entry for Marcus Aurelius, I'll scan the Italian entry for more useful external links, images, section headings, interwiki links, names, people, places, etc. This just seems obvious since I'd expect Italians to have contributed some interesting content about him. I'll translate those parts to the best of my ability, and now the English version is a partial translation of the italian version. In this specific case, the English version is actually the most comprehensive, but you can also see that the German and French entries have near word-for-word translations of some of the paragraphs. The other language entries are smaller, but when they grow, they typically follow the English article. I can place a watch on the Italian page so when large contributions are made there, I can see if I have the measly skills to translate at least some of the changes into English.
Craig Venter is the same fellow from this story 2 years ago. He was selling people their own gene maps for USD$621,500. Sounds like a successful way of privately funding research.
From the dead-tree encyclopedia guy... We take special pains to ensure that the content is at a level that our audience can digest.... I doubt very much that wikipedia can attain the same amount of attention to the K-12 market as we do.
The English language translation of Wikipedia is the largest, but there are a dozen or more equally active translations in other languages. Consider K-12 another "language" essentially. Each language exposes the same underlying facts in their own way.
So if the English entry on Widgets is not available in Swedish, then someone who cares about knowledge in Swedish will create it. The basic research has already been done. One person doesn't have to take this all on; it will start as a stub, like all articles do, and the translation will grow alongside the English one, roughly synchronized, to appeal to the Swedish market. In fact, if the Swedish contributors do better research, the Swedish version may become the "master" article and effectively feed back into the English one.
Ditto for K-12. Only it's easier. Because in theory, anyone who speaks "adult" English can edit down into the K-12 version.
So 99% of the required K-12 base articles are already there in "adult" form. The only assumption here is that there are enough people who care about the K-12 market to do the editing for free. The amount of educators, parents, target students, and older students who are online is staggering, and I think they'd make a fantastic base of contributors/editors.
wouldn't it be great if we could have some open-network DISTCC farms to use in completing Gentoo builds?
There are no publicized farms that I know of yet, but setting up a host list among friends and office PCs is quite easy under Gentoo. The Gentoo DISTCC Documnetation is a good place to start. This will even work at the bootstrapping stage.
you cannot simultaneously protect cows and the environment.
Within a generation of cows that are already born, of cour you're right. But, if we'd just stop eating the damn things, then we wouldn't have to breed them by the millions. Thus we can simultaneously stop inflicting additional cows on the environment and stop inflicting our unnecessarily harmful practices on cows who would otherwise be born into a life of nothing but suffering.
Slashdot Mirror
The premise: The time needed to boot desktop Linux systems is becoming an issue.
Am I missing an aspect of desktop computing, that requires regular reboots, to care how long a reboot takes?
Kernel recompiles are the only thing I run into on a desktop machine that requires a reboot, and those are so infrequent that I don't care if the restart takes 2 seconds or 2 minutes.
It's all fine and good that Apple doesn't want to support company X's DRM. They're under no obligation to do so, and I certainly didn't purchase my iPod under the impression that they would support DRM other than their own.
Apple kindly supplies MP3 support as a nod to the millions who use it, rather than forcing some silly stubborn transcoding (*cough* Sony *cough*) into a proprietary DRMed format. Thank you for that, Apple.
But I rip my CDs to FLAC because it's great insurance against CD loss, damage, and an Open Source format guarantees that my terabytes representing my fair use of my music will always be decodable and transcodable, in theory. FLAC is a mature, well-documented, nicely tagged, easily playable format.
I highly doubt it's technology or firmware limitations, so is it just a numbers game that compels them to support MP3 but not FLAC?
Routers just pass packets, they don't examine packets for certain data. I've never seen a firewall that will examine TCP/25 packets for a RCPT TO address, either
Check out ROPE. It's a firewall scripting language (iptables matching module) that will filter based on packet data. Examples are given for filtering based on "key: value" strings in HTTP headers, for example. Seems reasonable that it could see a RCPT TO field, no? More here
The license is what matters. It allows players to modify and redistribute the game. Whether or not it was typed in OpenOffice ... is relatively insignificant.
Actually, "not tested on animals", "union made", or "built with OSS tools" are examples of appealing to social, ethical, or economic belief systems. Those qualities don't necessarily result in a different product at all, but as with any product, some gamers may prefer to use products built in ways they agree with or wish to bring awareness to.
I'll take Secure Hasing Trivia for $500, Alex.
Q: What is d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e ?
Currently in Python, the C floating point libraries used will produce this:
>>> 1.1
1.1000000000000001
Thus, the Decimal data type was born.
From PEP 327: "The inaccuracy isn't always visible when you print the number because the FP-to-decimal-string conversion is provided by the C library, and most C libraries try to produce sensible output. Even if it's not displayed, however, the inaccuracy is still there and subsequent operations can magnify the error."
As an employee for a very large ISP (the one that's dispised), ...
The one that's despised? Haw haw haw...
While it's obvious that the evidence a CSI biofecalneurotoxochemologist can "find" today (and feed to a trusting jury) is very impressive, consider the other side of the sword. Twenty years ago, a criminal did not have the tools of crime scene manipulation and investigator distraction that forensic priorities give them today. For example, leaving a bunch of other people's hair and skin flakes at a crime scene didn't help a criminal very much twenty years ago. Such things probably wouldn't even be noticed, let alone be entered into evidence, get analyzed, waste time and money, and eventually act as confounding theories in court.
Programmers line up at the door to EA (and other studios) to get jobs in that industry. They jump through the interviews and HR hoops. They work as 9-5 institutional programmers, government contractors, MCSEs, or anything, hoping to score an opportunity to make games. Not everyone wants this, of course, but believe it or not, thousands and thousands of people look forward to working extremely long hours to make video games. Let those people apply and work the jobs. If everyone walked out of EA today because of unfulfilled expectations, their desks would be filled in fairly short order by people who want those jobs for the guts and glory. The unionizers amongst you may call these people 'scabs', I suppose.
Aspiring game programmers write games in their spare time, graphics demos, etc. and put these things together in a portfolio to apply for a paid job as a game programmer. I know; I did this, I write code, and I hire other coders. Show me another industry where you'll work for hundreds and hundreds of hours on your own time to craft a software demo to impress a potential banking/government/oil&gas employer...
You could argue that programmers are lined up to work there because economic times are hard for the North American programmer right now. If you've been watching the games industry for the last 15 years or so, you'd know that programmers have been begging to work at video game studios (large and small) constantly, through boom times and bust. Not so true of other (less glorious?) programming specialties.
During the late nineties boom times, I can assure you that the hours worked at EA Sports were brutal. I was there, coding like a monkey, and it was just fine. We all could have left; there were lots of opportunities to make more money in software for less hours. So... Different economic climate now, but what's constant? What's constant over the decades is the fact that plenty of people are willing to work unusually long hours to make video games (and other software). If game programmers see no glory in that sacrifice, why on earth did they get into video games?
"They shouldn't have to work so much" is mostly what I'm hearing. Not an argument. They don't have to. If EA is breaking laws, nail them to the wall. But if they're matching a certain personality type and inner drive to really hard jobs, and there's a clear pattern of people freely willing to leave easier positions to code games, well, then chalk one up for EA finding a good business model.
The other thing to consider, is that things have an end to them, and jobs don't need to last for 20 years. Some jobs simply can't because of their demands. There are jobs so physically and mentally demanding that they're simply not life-long jobs. Maybe game programming is like that.
Disclaimer: I worked at EA for a few years as a programmer on sports titles. It was extremely consuming work.
I wonder if the claims of "abuse" aren't more than simply "expectations not met". The former is serious problem, and there may be laws or employment contracts to help you. The latter simply means you're working at the wrong job for you.
I see more than a few suggestions here to "just unionize" and I strongly disagree. We're talking about professionals. People who, by definition, are well educated, literate, capable of understanding and negotiating on their own. Engineers have their own professional society as support, as do many other professions. Programmers can join professional organizations such as IEEE or EFF for resources they may find helpful. Professional organizations are a far cry from unions, and thankfully, they don't generally promote union-style blocking of communication and empathy between management and workers.
Also, please consider that as more unionized programming shops and union-only projects are created in your country, more and more programming opportunities will be lost to nations where programmers are content to negotiate their own terms and work without unionized representation.
For me, personally, EA Sports was a really really exhausting place to work. The demands were very very high. The hours were all-consuming. No personal life during finalling. The salary was okay. I loved it for years and then moved on before burnout arrived. If you don't want that life, seek work elsewhere because I assure you that what you consider abusive, hundreds or thousands of other people consider a dream job. Nobody is being whipped, starved, or prevented from quitting. They're just working really really damn hard.
Faceball 2000 is a 2 player FPS for the SNES, you young whipper snapper.
Actually, Faceball 2000 on the Game Boy in 1991 preceded the SNES version by approximately a year, you young whipper snapper. It was the followup (by the same company, Xanth Software FX) to MIDI Maze on the Atari ST (in 1987).
The Game Boy version allowed play for 2 handhelds head-to-head, cabled together with standard Nintendo cables. With a special (non-commercialized cable), it would allow up to 16 Game Boys to join in the FPS goodness.
FPS on Atari STs, networked with MIDI cables in a ring configuration. Now that's a nice little hack.
Maybe today's equivalent would be an FPS on cell phones with Bluetooth or IRDA. No, too obvious.
I stopped taking supplements after reading this article a few weeks ago.
I agree too many people think vitamins and herbal supplements are the magical solution to simple problems so thanks for sharing the link. But I think it's important to consider the serious limitations of that study and what one can justifiably conclude from it.
1. The study did not include 'healthy' people. All participants had cancer of the gullet, stomach and intestine, bowel, pancreas or liver. Conclusions about any supplement's effect on a person without those cancers is not supported by this study. It would have been interesting to include a group of healthy patients in the study to see if the supplements were accelerating the existing cancer or causing some other form of death. The cause(s) of death is not stated in the article but probably is in the study itself. (Link to the study, anyone?)
2. The supplements studied were limited to beta-carotene, vitamins A, C, and E, and selenium, alone or in combination. The premature death increases were connected to taking both beta-carotene and either A or E. Conclusions about supplements other than beta-carotene and A or E aren't supported by this study.
I'm not saying you can't extrapolate in your own mind about what other supplements might do to healthy people. Maybe that's a safe thing to do. But it isn't something the study is suggesting.
From the post: "It's smaller than a standard postcard."
You know, I've received postcards from folks in the UK and I don't recall them being nearly as large as that PDA. Perhaps the conference he attended was in Flatland.
If you use all new stuff, you're not hacking, but developing new hardware.
No, I disagree. If you use "all new stuff" in unforseen, questionable, or previously-considered-impossible ways, then you are most definitely hacking.
Hacking requires passion and looking beyond the limits of existing systems (in this case, hardware components). I don't believe it matters if those components are new or salvaged, if you're bolting them together in brilliant and bizarre ways.
The earth sucks.
...and whether or not it had been properly conveyed to the Pirahã that different quantities of fish in numbers greater than three were significantly distinct.
Do you agree though that it would be nearly impossible for a researcher to convey to the Pirahã that there even exist distinct quantities greater than three?
Maybe this simply means there's too much of a barrier between our cultures to do even 'simple' experiments like this and be able to draw sound conclusions.
it's often used to distinguish proper nouns, which, in my opinion, improves understanding. E.g., Which network are you referring to? Oh, the Internet.
do you believe that there are more than one internet?
please explain how confusion could result if i change your example to:
which network are you referring to? oh the internet?
no capitals are used, yet the same degree of understanding is conveyed in my opinion.
now you're free to tell me that, visually, you prefer the word capitalized, but i'm not seeing proof that capitalizing the word improves understanding.
Well, of course you trust your client machine.
Not if my client machine runs Windows.
This translation stuff is great and I'm glad it's happening. From the Wikipedia:
So I'm not sure why "translation" is a bad word, because it's commonly the activity that occurs to create the non-English Wikipedias. Wikipedia encourages you to translate the English version (i.e. the one with the most pages) into other languages and also vice versa. The translation instructions there suggest you pick an original version (sometimes English, sometimes not), and then create a translation of it. "Translate the page", "translate the navigation"; I'm just calling it as I read it.
So the different language versions are independent in that there's no automagic machine translation off a master set of facts happening (yet, but see below), but there is a constant translation process that binds all the different languages (including English) together.
Whichever language contains the best research effectively becomes the master, and translations fall out of it. It's just the efficient way a community project like this will avoid some duplicate effort.
For example, if I'm doing edits on the English entry for Marcus Aurelius, I'll scan the Italian entry for more useful external links, images, section headings, interwiki links, names, people, places, etc. This just seems obvious since I'd expect Italians to have contributed some interesting content about him. I'll translate those parts to the best of my ability, and now the English version is a partial translation of the italian version. In this specific case, the English version is actually the most comprehensive, but you can also see that the German and French entries have near word-for-word translations of some of the paragraphs. The other language entries are smaller, but when they grow, they typically follow the English article. I can place a watch on the Italian page so when large contributions are made there, I can see if I have the measly skills to translate at least some of the changes into English.
Craig Venter is the same fellow from this story 2 years ago. He was selling people their own gene maps for USD$621,500. Sounds like a successful way of privately funding research.
From the dead-tree encyclopedia guy... We take special pains to ensure that the content is at a level that our audience can digest. ... I doubt very much that wikipedia can attain the same amount of attention to the K-12 market as we do.
The English language translation of Wikipedia is the largest, but there are a dozen or more equally active translations in other languages. Consider K-12 another "language" essentially. Each language exposes the same underlying facts in their own way.
So if the English entry on Widgets is not available in Swedish, then someone who cares about knowledge in Swedish will create it. The basic research has already been done. One person doesn't have to take this all on; it will start as a stub, like all articles do, and the translation will grow alongside the English one, roughly synchronized, to appeal to the Swedish market. In fact, if the Swedish contributors do better research, the Swedish version may become the "master" article and effectively feed back into the English one.
Ditto for K-12. Only it's easier. Because in theory, anyone who speaks "adult" English can edit down into the K-12 version.
So 99% of the required K-12 base articles are already there in "adult" form. The only assumption here is that there are enough people who care about the K-12 market to do the editing for free. The amount of educators, parents, target students, and older students who are online is staggering, and I think they'd make a fantastic base of contributors/editors.
...then it's made of nice, transparent Plexiglas.
wouldn't it be great if we could have some open-network DISTCC farms to use in completing Gentoo builds?
There are no publicized farms that I know of yet, but setting up a host list among friends and office PCs is quite easy under Gentoo. The Gentoo DISTCC Documnetation is a good place to start. This will even work at the bootstrapping stage.
you cannot simultaneously protect cows and the environment.
Within a generation of cows that are already born, of cour you're right. But, if we'd just stop eating the damn things, then we wouldn't have to breed them by the millions. Thus we can simultaneously stop inflicting additional cows on the environment and stop inflicting our unnecessarily harmful practices on cows who would otherwise be born into a life of nothing but suffering.