Is it too much to ask that Apple, after taking so much from the F/OSS community, contributes something back?
You mean like open-sourcing their Darwin base OS code? Or contributing their improvements to GCC to the world? Or providing the world with a free open source streaming server system? Or making Zeroconf an open standard and releasing a free reference implementation? Or contributing improvements to CUPS? Or to KDE's HTML renderer? Or releasing their unified replacement for cron, init and rc as an open source project?
Right now Apple is amongst the worst of F/OSS pariahs, in the same category as GPL violators.
Right now you are making a fool of yourself in public. Either that or you're trolling.
Still not worth producing 120fps video hardware for. It's much easier to generate 120fps in software and turn it into 60fps of video with motion blur applied, than to try and build a full 120fps video path.
Sounds like a business opportunity to me. You become her telecoms company--you arrange her phone line, deal with the multiple providers, and so on. You become her single point of contact, with excellent customer support.
And you charge her Good Old Days prices, adjusted for inflation. Including renting her a cheap no-features corded phone for $10 a month, and charging extra for each wall jack.
Special relativity was taken seriously because it built on accepted physical science. You can prove special relativity starting from only three assumptions:
1. The laws of physics are the same for all observers in inertial frames. (That is, the laws of physics are independent of location or time.)
2. Causes precede effects (causality).
3. The speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers in inertial frames.
Since there's a shitload of evidence for #3, I'd be interested to know which of #1 and #2 you think is false, if you think Einstein is all wrong.
You make it sound like Einstein just made up a bunch of stuff which sounded good. He didn't, he proved an interesting result using only well accepted science.
Just to add some detail about why this is stupid...
Douglas Trumbull, who worked on "2001", "Silent Running" and so on, went off and did a ton of basic research on what it would take to get moving pictures so realistic that a viewer couldn't distinguish them from reality.
The results showed that there was no measurable improvement in objective physiological response beyond 72 fps. Furthermore, subjectively people didn't see any improvement beyond around 60 fps.
Sadly, the Showscan company entered liquidation in 2002. Digital killed the chances of 60fps 70mm movies taking off.
But it's a safe bet we won't see 120 fps TVs any time soon.
FYI, Linux has improved an amazing amount in the last 3 years. I'd strongly recommend giving MEPIS a try. (It's Debian with better hardware detection and a better installer, on a bootable CD.)
Also, unless you're running Linux for the games, I'd suggest you consider running Windows in a VM inside Linux, rather than the other way around.
I got sick of the weekly process of: shut down all applications, log out, log in as administrator, run Windows update, download updates, run installers, click through dialogs, wait, reboot, wait, log in as administrator, wait, log out, log in as user, start up applications and continue what I was actually doing.
I got sick of Windows running out of some internal resource and needing to be rebooted, usually evidenced by redraw glitches or the clipboard suddenly not working.
I got fed up with having to reboot because an application crashed.
I got fed up with the system occasionally randomly rebooting on its own.
And most of all, I got sick of having to wipe the hard drive and install everything again from scratch at least once a year, when the glitches became too frequent.
I never thought the OS battle would come down to Unix vs Windows, but now that it has, it has been pretty easy to pick a side.
But an open streaming format DOESN'T inconvenience people, that's my whole point. MPEG-4 with Darwin Streaming Server/QTSS. Open format, open protocol, works on all three platforms. Does Microsoft's media player not handle MPEG-4 over RTSP? If so, how many Windows users don't have QuickTime or iTunes and don't know where to get them?
A real human is wearing a shroud of anonymity and handing out the bitchslap to a total stranger. [...] You have really no recourse against a GM. That scares me.
...you could just as easily be talking about the LiveJournal abuse team, who are empowered to hand out bitchslaps anonymously and have absolutely zero accountability. In that case, even Brad Fitz can't do anything about it, or doesn't care.
It's nothing to do with your being anonymous though; as the LJ example shows, they would bitchslap you just as happily if they had your photo and personal info right there in front of them.
All you need for authority to become abusive is anonymity and lack of accountability on the part of those with the authority; though it helps tremendously if they're given the power to outright silence critics. (At least that isn't the case of the moderation system on Slashdot.)
What with the abusive moderators, the spyware, the copy protection to prevent first sale rights, the lawsuits against bnetd, and the high price, I find it really hard to understand why so many people bend over and take it from Blizzard for the privilege of playing World of Warcraft. Like with Microsoft and their customers, I find myself wondering how far the company could go before people would actually revolt.
I didn't say Macs with MMUs weren't available, I said that Macs without MMUs made up a substantial proportion of the installed base. In 1991 I had a 68000 based Mac, and all the Macs at college were 68000 based as well.
What it is designed to be is a feature packed phone that doesn't mind compromising on the ergonomics to pack in every last bit of functionality you could ever want on a camera phone.
The functionality I want is for it to be a quad-band phone, so I can use it everywhere. This phone isn't, so it won't work in some places.
Why do they keep packing in the extra features when they haven't got the basic phone functionality sorted out yet?
Imagine a 900 year old Strom Thurmond staring cabbage-like into space as our artificially stupid computerized Republican overlords tell him how to vote.
An IT job can be hellish if you're not actively interested in the stuff. I have a friend who learned Java development though she wasn't actually particularly interested in it. She made good money from it, but couldn't deal with basing an entire career on it.
To pick another example, there are also lots of people who have a miserable time doing sysadmin work. They can do it just fine, it pays well, but they don't have the right personality and end up stressed out. The ideal sysadmin maintains a zen-like calm even when a critical server is crashing, approaching the problem with pleasure as an interesting little puzzle to solve. If you don't have that kind of personality, I wouldn't recommend being a sysadmin.
Here's my bias: I've written code in over a dozen languages, ranging from BASIC back in the 70s to the usual big ones (C, Java, C++), with a few of the weird ones too (Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk).
I'd say:
First decide why you're doing it. If it's for money, don't bother.
If there's some specific niche you're interested in, pick the appropriate first language for that niche. For example, if you build web sites, start with JavaScript. If you work in an all-Microsoft shop, learn VB.NET. If you want to help with open source projects, learn ANSI C.
If you don't have any specific goal in mind, examine your own biases. If you're a mathematician, try something like Lisp, Scheme, ML. If you're a biologist, Perl might be useful. If you're a chemist, FORTRAN is probably still the thing.
If you still don't have a clear choice of language, pick Ruby. It supports modern styles like OO as well as basic concepts from functional programming. It's very clean and easy to learn, very consistent, it can actually do useful stuff, and it runs on Windows or Linux well. All you need is to download a Ruby interpreter and find a good text editor. The first edition of the Pickaxe Book is available online for reference for free, and it's a very well-written and clear book. There area also a few "learn to program" tutorials online for it.
Start off by writing handy little command-line utilities for yourself. For example, write something to total up the disk space used by each directory on your hard drive, sorted in reverse order. Write something to clean out all the files in your temporary directory older than N days. Write something to suck down your favorite comics and turn them into a set of indexed local web pages. Write something to clean all the porn URLs out of your browser history.
Then you can look at some graphics stuff. OpenGL is one direction, or you could head towards GUI via Qt or wxWidgets or GTK or Cocoa. Once you've got some of that working, it might be time to look at learning your second language. At that point you could sensibly choose C++, Java, or Objective-C.
But I really wouldn't start with C++, Java, or Objective-C. I wouldn't start with BASIC, even though I did so myself, because there are so many variants, and it's pretty primitive compared to modern scripting languages. I wouldn't bother with FORTRAN or Perl unless they're the standard in your industry, because they're ugly. I wouldn't advise Common Lisp as a first language, as it's too huge and mind-bending. Java's a bad start because the API is huge and apparently thrown together without much planning. C is a bad first choice because it has little support for abstraction, no automatic memory management, and so on. I used to suggest Scheme, but Ruby is far more useful and supports OO.
Yes, there's also Python. I think of Python as Ruby for people with bad taste, but that's an aesthetic judgement, you may love it. It's certainly better than BASIC, Perl or C.
There were other CPUs with an MMU. The problem was that not all commonly used CPUs had one, or had one that worked properly.
One big problem was the 68000 used in the Mac, Amiga and Atari ST. Until the 68030, certain traps resulted in a loss of state, effectively making it impossible to implement fully pre-emptive multi-tasking and memory protection. (There was at least one obscure UNIX box that worked around the problem by running the same code on two 68000s simultaneously, and having one peek at the other after an interrupt to find out what had been lost.)
I gather the 8088 thru 80286 had similar problems, but I never learnt machine code for those so I'm just going by hearsay there.
At the time, the combination of Mac, Amiga and Atari ST plus 8088, 8086 and 80286 was a sizeable chunk of the installed base compared to 80386. Particularly at universities, which couldn't afford to go out and rip and replace all their hardware, and couldn't demand that CS students all have expensive new computers.
Linus went off in a huff and turned Linux into a complete OS by ripping out all the MINIX and adding all the GNU stuff instead.
There wasn't ever any MINIX code in Linux
Linux-the-kernel never contained MINIX code, but Linux-the-OS was Linux-the-kernel running inside an OS made of MINIX code. A new Linux-the-OS was made by ripping the MINIX bits out and replacing them with the OS bits from GNU and newly written stuff as necessary.
And I don't remember ever hearing about MINIX-386--but then again, as I mentioned, I wasn't using x86 hardware...
You can download and use GPL software without agreeing to any part of the GPL whatsoever.
The only time the GPL applies is if you wish to negotiate extra rights beyond those to download and use the software--specifically, the right to copy and re-distribute it yourself. In which case, the GPL is merely one possible set of terms for such redistribution; often the copyright owner has other terms available too.
The GPL is basically a convenience document saying "Hey, by the way, if you want to copy and distribute this, I'll tell you in advance that you're allowed to do so under these terms. No need to contact me and ask. If you want other terms, go ahead and ask. If you don't want to copy and distribute, ignore all this."
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you missed the followups. They gave the KDE developers access to the CVS logs.
http://dot.kde.org/1118138374/
Everything I know about team building I learned from David Brent.
Just remember that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue.
You mean like open-sourcing their Darwin base OS code? Or contributing their improvements to GCC to the world? Or providing the world with a free open source streaming server system? Or making Zeroconf an open standard and releasing a free reference implementation? Or contributing improvements to CUPS? Or to KDE's HTML renderer? Or releasing their unified replacement for cron, init and rc as an open source project?
Right now you are making a fool of yourself in public. Either that or you're trolling.
Still not worth producing 120fps video hardware for. It's much easier to generate 120fps in software and turn it into 60fps of video with motion blur applied, than to try and build a full 120fps video path.
Sounds like a business opportunity to me. You become her telecoms company--you arrange her phone line, deal with the multiple providers, and so on. You become her single point of contact, with excellent customer support.
And you charge her Good Old Days prices, adjusted for inflation. Including renting her a cheap no-features corded phone for $10 a month, and charging extra for each wall jack.
I'd prefer a theme park based on the PARANOIA RPG...
Special relativity was taken seriously because it built on accepted physical science. You can prove special relativity starting from only three assumptions:
1. The laws of physics are the same for all observers in inertial frames. (That is, the laws of physics are independent of location or time.)
2. Causes precede effects (causality).
3. The speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers in inertial frames.
Since there's a shitload of evidence for #3, I'd be interested to know which of #1 and #2 you think is false, if you think Einstein is all wrong.
You make it sound like Einstein just made up a bunch of stuff which sounded good. He didn't, he proved an interesting result using only well accepted science.
Just to add some detail about why this is stupid...
Douglas Trumbull, who worked on "2001", "Silent Running" and so on, went off and did a ton of basic research on what it would take to get moving pictures so realistic that a viewer couldn't distinguish them from reality.
The results showed that there was no measurable improvement in objective physiological response beyond 72 fps. Furthermore, subjectively people didn't see any improvement beyond around 60 fps.
Sadly, the Showscan company entered liquidation in 2002. Digital killed the chances of 60fps 70mm movies taking off.
But it's a safe bet we won't see 120 fps TVs any time soon.
FYI, Linux has improved an amazing amount in the last 3 years. I'd strongly recommend giving MEPIS a try. (It's Debian with better hardware detection and a better installer, on a bootable CD.)
Also, unless you're running Linux for the games, I'd suggest you consider running Windows in a VM inside Linux, rather than the other way around.
Yup, spot on.
I got sick of the weekly process of: shut down all applications, log out, log in as administrator, run Windows update, download updates, run installers, click through dialogs, wait, reboot, wait, log in as administrator, wait, log out, log in as user, start up applications and continue what I was actually doing.
I got sick of Windows running out of some internal resource and needing to be rebooted, usually evidenced by redraw glitches or the clipboard suddenly not working.
I got fed up with having to reboot because an application crashed.
I got fed up with the system occasionally randomly rebooting on its own.
And most of all, I got sick of having to wipe the hard drive and install everything again from scratch at least once a year, when the glitches became too frequent.
I never thought the OS battle would come down to Unix vs Windows, but now that it has, it has been pretty easy to pick a side.
But an open streaming format DOESN'T inconvenience people, that's my whole point. MPEG-4 with Darwin Streaming Server/QTSS. Open format, open protocol, works on all three platforms. Does Microsoft's media player not handle MPEG-4 over RTSP? If so, how many Windows users don't have QuickTime or iTunes and don't know where to get them?
I can't get WMV3 files to play on OS X.
If you want Mac and Linux users to be able to watch it, use MPEG-4 via QTSS.
If you want to give Mac and Linux users the finger, go ahead and use Microsoft's tools.
Yet another reason to avoid buying tickets from TicketBastard.
Definitely not. When you write:
...you could just as easily be talking about the LiveJournal abuse team, who are empowered to hand out bitchslaps anonymously and have absolutely zero accountability. In that case, even Brad Fitz can't do anything about it, or doesn't care.
It's nothing to do with your being anonymous though; as the LJ example shows, they would bitchslap you just as happily if they had your photo and personal info right there in front of them.
All you need for authority to become abusive is anonymity and lack of accountability on the part of those with the authority; though it helps tremendously if they're given the power to outright silence critics. (At least that isn't the case of the moderation system on Slashdot.)
What with the abusive moderators, the spyware, the copy protection to prevent first sale rights, the lawsuits against bnetd, and the high price, I find it really hard to understand why so many people bend over and take it from Blizzard for the privilege of playing World of Warcraft. Like with Microsoft and their customers, I find myself wondering how far the company could go before people would actually revolt.
I didn't say Macs with MMUs weren't available, I said that Macs without MMUs made up a substantial proportion of the installed base. In 1991 I had a 68000 based Mac, and all the Macs at college were 68000 based as well.
Perhaps they're just big Edgar Froese / Tangerine Dream fans.
"NGC891" was a track on his album Aqua .
The functionality I want is for it to be a quad-band phone, so I can use it everywhere. This phone isn't, so it won't work in some places.
Why do they keep packing in the extra features when they haven't got the basic phone functionality sorted out yet?
Death is dead, long live death!
Imagine a 900 year old Strom Thurmond staring cabbage-like into space as our artificially stupid computerized Republican overlords tell him how to vote.
An IT job can be hellish if you're not actively interested in the stuff. I have a friend who learned Java development though she wasn't actually particularly interested in it. She made good money from it, but couldn't deal with basing an entire career on it.
To pick another example, there are also lots of people who have a miserable time doing sysadmin work. They can do it just fine, it pays well, but they don't have the right personality and end up stressed out. The ideal sysadmin maintains a zen-like calm even when a critical server is crashing, approaching the problem with pleasure as an interesting little puzzle to solve. If you don't have that kind of personality, I wouldn't recommend being a sysadmin.
I'm sure the people of Hawaii thank you for your insight into their language and culture.
Here's my bias: I've written code in over a dozen languages, ranging from BASIC back in the 70s to the usual big ones (C, Java, C++), with a few of the weird ones too (Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk).
I'd say:
First decide why you're doing it. If it's for money, don't bother.
If there's some specific niche you're interested in, pick the appropriate first language for that niche. For example, if you build web sites, start with JavaScript. If you work in an all-Microsoft shop, learn VB.NET. If you want to help with open source projects, learn ANSI C.
If you don't have any specific goal in mind, examine your own biases. If you're a mathematician, try something like Lisp, Scheme, ML. If you're a biologist, Perl might be useful. If you're a chemist, FORTRAN is probably still the thing.
If you still don't have a clear choice of language, pick Ruby. It supports modern styles like OO as well as basic concepts from functional programming. It's very clean and easy to learn, very consistent, it can actually do useful stuff, and it runs on Windows or Linux well. All you need is to download a Ruby interpreter and find a good text editor. The first edition of the Pickaxe Book is available online for reference for free, and it's a very well-written and clear book. There area also a few "learn to program" tutorials online for it.
Start off by writing handy little command-line utilities for yourself. For example, write something to total up the disk space used by each directory on your hard drive, sorted in reverse order. Write something to clean out all the files in your temporary directory older than N days. Write something to suck down your favorite comics and turn them into a set of indexed local web pages. Write something to clean all the porn URLs out of your browser history.
Then you can look at some graphics stuff. OpenGL is one direction, or you could head towards GUI via Qt or wxWidgets or GTK or Cocoa. Once you've got some of that working, it might be time to look at learning your second language. At that point you could sensibly choose C++, Java, or Objective-C.
But I really wouldn't start with C++, Java, or Objective-C. I wouldn't start with BASIC, even though I did so myself, because there are so many variants, and it's pretty primitive compared to modern scripting languages. I wouldn't bother with FORTRAN or Perl unless they're the standard in your industry, because they're ugly. I wouldn't advise Common Lisp as a first language, as it's too huge and mind-bending. Java's a bad start because the API is huge and apparently thrown together without much planning. C is a bad first choice because it has little support for abstraction, no automatic memory management, and so on. I used to suggest Scheme, but Ruby is far more useful and supports OO.
Yes, there's also Python. I think of Python as Ruby for people with bad taste, but that's an aesthetic judgement, you may love it. It's certainly better than BASIC, Perl or C.
There were other CPUs with an MMU. The problem was that not all commonly used CPUs had one, or had one that worked properly.
One big problem was the 68000 used in the Mac, Amiga and Atari ST. Until the 68030, certain traps resulted in a loss of state, effectively making it impossible to implement fully pre-emptive multi-tasking and memory protection. (There was at least one obscure UNIX box that worked around the problem by running the same code on two 68000s simultaneously, and having one peek at the other after an interrupt to find out what had been lost.)
I gather the 8088 thru 80286 had similar problems, but I never learnt machine code for those so I'm just going by hearsay there.
At the time, the combination of Mac, Amiga and Atari ST plus 8088, 8086 and 80286 was a sizeable chunk of the installed base compared to 80386. Particularly at universities, which couldn't afford to go out and rip and replace all their hardware, and couldn't demand that CS students all have expensive new computers.
Because the GPL isn't an EULA, troll-boy.
You can download and use GPL software without agreeing to any part of the GPL whatsoever.
The only time the GPL applies is if you wish to negotiate extra rights beyond those to download and use the software--specifically, the right to copy and re-distribute it yourself. In which case, the GPL is merely one possible set of terms for such redistribution; often the copyright owner has other terms available too.
The GPL is basically a convenience document saying "Hey, by the way, if you want to copy and distribute this, I'll tell you in advance that you're allowed to do so under these terms. No need to contact me and ask. If you want other terms, go ahead and ask. If you don't want to copy and distribute, ignore all this."