If it's a small matter of 'NetBSD receives interest as part of open source coding intiative' it seems very much like a newspaper putting the weather report on page one, above the fold...
Except that this wasn't on page one, above the fold at all. It was in the targetted, optional, low-traffic BSD section. In that sense it's kind of like putting the weather report on the weather page. Wierd stuff.
Simply put, if the game allows it, it is part of the gameplay. It may not be the most obvious way to play, nor may it be how the manual TELLS you to play......nor may it be a sporting and friendly way to play, but fuck all that because I want to be king!
There's a distinction between fairness and ettiquette. Sure, only violating the prior makes you a cheater, but violating the latter just makes you an asshole.
...but will suffer a financial hit when someone gets it running on commodity hardware.
Really? They're going to take a hit when some bored hobbyist cracks the protection scheme and puts the solution up on some P2P site? You really think that many people who are seriously interested in the simplicity, stability, interface, and power of Apple products are suddenly going to learn how to scrounge through P2P sites and use custom machines to save a couple hundred bucks? Of course some people will, but that'll probably be made up for just as well by people who do it to test OS X and then make their next purchase an Apple PC with it OS X pre-installed.
If Apple does much of anything to restrict OS X to run on specific hardware, that's enough to deter pretty much everyone who isn't some too-poor-anyway college student or a hobbyist who's going to recommend the retail system to all his or her friends. Too many people are way too lazy and honest for what you're predicting.
I took your exact links and put them into my browser.
The very first link led me to a device priced at 800% of what the person reasonably expected. The second led me to one that only cost 400% more.
So no, neither of your links, nor their smartass delivery, fit the bill very well at all. It's pretty clear that he was already aware of these too, having made indirect reference to their kind in the article.
You might be the one who needs a dictionary. What the do you think non-profit means? It sure as hell doesn't mean "operating at a loss". These publishers incur substantial costs for proofreading, peer review, layout, and editing (not to mention the massive printing costs), and even as non-profits they rightfully make up the costs for this by selling their end products.
Effectively, non-profit just means that they don't have owners who are driven by a desire for huge shares of dividends and profits. Instead, business revenue is supposed to go back into their operations that further the public good. That's it.
Hundreds of thousands of email content publishers ask their users whether they want plain-text or HTML versions. Even if most users don't understand the question, they're used to being asked. Why don't you try that and then just publish one version of your newsletter to each of the resulting lists?
First, I didn't say "early-career professionals without a degree". I was writing about the huge difference between a 22-year old recent graduate, and the 25-year old graduate who has just a few years under his belt. They shouldn't be treated the same from an HR perspective, even if the 25 year old hasn't picked up that many new skills yet. The very fact that they have a couple years of being in an office 50 hours a week means that the employer doesn't need to worry that they have no idea what they're in for.
Second, Mattintosh (above) made a fantastic argument in favor of those "early career professionals without a degree". I can personally say that even the most rigorous (especially the most rigorous) CS or IT departments don't prepare workers for the daily grind of working in a devlopment company or for the variety of positions that they may be exposed to. And even in those departments that do offer a good program, you shouldn't be surprised to see plenty of students that manage to careen through without learning a drop of it. An undergraduate education can be valuable for a student, but a BS can only mean so much to a hiring manager.
I think the grandparent post was making the point that: given a pool of recent graduates, and a pool of early-career (2-5 yrs experience) professionals, the reliability of getting a good employee out of the former group is much lower. Not because an individual "recent grad" isn't going to be good at his job (the old wisdom), but because more of those recent grads are GenY'ers that still aren't sure what they want to actually do with their lives. There's too little information to determine whether or not a particular pick out of the pool of recent grads is going to be reliable, effective, and committed.
On the other hand, early-career professionals with just a few years experience are more reliable from an HR perspective because you can look at their work history to see how they're getting used to things. Have they been progressing in one specialty? Have they jumped from Dev to IT to QA and now want a Dev position again? Did they take a year off to "find themselves" already? These are questions that you can find answers to in early-career professionals, and these are questions that can lead to less turnover and unpredictability from your workforce.
What this all means is that recent graduates are a risky gamble and that the market should probably value them significantly less for their first few years of building a work history. Interestingly, it also means that those that do demonstrate their commitment and reliability should receive just the kind of frequent and large salary increases that more senior employees resent.
Apparently, you didn't read it very well. The excellent book was about a kid coping with autism, not Asberger's, informed by the author's career working with autistic children. While in some ways similar, autism and Asperger's are not the same thing and the book was quite explicitly about one and not the other.
Nonetheless, the book is a really refreshing and novel read that I've recommended to many friends of all ages.
What's up with all these speed and performance benchmarks. I may be dead wrong (or at least outdated), but I thought GCC was developed with architecture compatibility, standards, and language features in mind--in that order. If you really want performance, you're usually better off using a commercial compiler targetted at a specific architecture, like Intel's. Did things change, or is this review completely missing the mark?
Dude. Seriously. Using version control doesn't necessarily mean "check in each feature/bug fix as one change". It could just as easily be weekly check-ins by the one or two guys working on this branch. Who knows. So stop whining, stop acting like you know what the heck you're talking about, and grow up.
It's called cross-promotion, and companies that are completely unaffiliated "cash in" on it all the time. You see, because of the publicity and marketing driven by the movie, there is presently a market of people interested in facts about Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide, British Comedy, Old Science Fiction, and who knows what else.
Any editor worth his salt would consider running stories that capitalize on that interest. The interest is bigger than it was two years ago, and bigger than it will be in six months. It would be idiotic not to run stories like this if you have access to them. It's not "disingenious", people want to read about things like this right now!
there's no reason Apple wouldn't be able to hand over all individual patches seperately, which would make things immensely simpler for the KHTML guys.
I see you've spent some time involved in the Apple workflow. Has it occurred to you that the Safari team's development methodology might not easily lend itself to individual diffs and CVS logs?
A lot of the history of Christianity revolves around bashing people who try to point out the actual reality of the universe.
You are factually dead wrong and should take a look at books like "Against Method" by esteemed philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend to broaden your mind past the bunk you learned in 8th grade.
Nobody gives them free money. Even today, we see how the social cost of what money is offered often comes at a terribly high cost--the result of lending policies that absolutely nobody has enough experience to get right (yet). Even though you want to make the answers to third-world development sound simple, it repeatedly demonstrates itself as being beyond every program's and individual's expectations.
You sound interested, so Read up, buddy, and expand your mind at the expense of your confidence.
I'm having a hard time bring traffic to my website. I know that getting a link posted on another high-traffic website would be a boon, but haven't figured out how to get it to happen. Any thoughts?
I mean really, I don't think MTV is giving away air time to Microsoft...right?
Are you kidding?
The odds that Microsoft has to pay for this ad are slim to none, for the very reason you gave! In addition to a good chuck of their normal demographic, tens of thousands of Slashdotter-like nerds, even, who would never tolerate MTV under normal circumstances will secretly tune into their network to see this program. MTV will have other advertisers beating at their door to get the interstitial spots in this program, and that's where the funding comes from.
The first public unveiling of the XBox 2 isn't exactly yet another run of the Oreck Air Purifier ad, you know. It's a highly anticipated event (whether it should be or not), and will draw a huge audience, as you pointed out.
There's no more error in anthropomorphizing the emergent behavior of natural selection than there is in anthropomorphizing the emergent behavior of that heterogenous collection of cells, molecules, bacteria, and electricity that we call people.
In both cases, we're just talking about a model that helps open up an understanding of the system. It helps us to make predictions and form intuitions, and this form of model-building is a valuable tool for everything from a scientist to a monkey that uses tools.
The only thing that prevents people from maintaining more than one model in their head simultaneously is the kind of counterproductive stuborness that you yourself are exhibiting. A model, even one which we know to be wrong in some cases, can be a valuable stepping stone for discusssion, expression, and analysis.
What frustrates me far more than any supposed misrepresentation of "True Science" by journalists and critics is the utter lack of knowledge that people like you exhibit about the history and philosophy of science. It is not so cut and dry as you seem to suspect. As a result, your hard-line stance does a disservice to everyone, as it discourages the dissemination of widlely intuitive and accessible ideas in favor of either silence or talk that simply flies over people's heads.
If you're such a big fan of science and the expansion of scientific knowledge among the public, you should support the spread of accessible models like the one used in the article. It helps people to form a foundation of understanding that they otherwise wouldn't bother to develop. Those that are particularly interested will then go on to further sources and will most likely bring their understanding even closer to your own. Those that aren't interested wouldn't listen to your account anyway.
So get over youself, put down the textbooks, start reading Popper, Kuhn, and all the other philosophers of science, and take that god damn stick out of your ass.
Most internal applications like the kind you are talking about are poorly engineered monstrosities that few would want to see the light of public exposure. They were thrown together on a far too short schedule just to fill a need, and are therefore exhibit some large subset of the following embarassing characteristics: unscalable, uncommented, unstable, hard-coded/non-modular, inefficient, unadaptable, buggy, etc.
While a switch from a DIY mentality to a shared/open-source model might alleviate these problems, whose going to be the one to put their crap forward as the starting point? Management will never give anyone the time to finish it and clean it up properly for publication, since there's no immediate or guaranteed benefit to the company (though certainly some to the competitors), and few in-house developers will have the balls to put their disfigured lump of an application out their for public review.
Cable network bundling is something that your cable provider is confronted with, not just you. Content providers sell groups of channels together. This helps them launch new channels by leveraging the value of large established channels. New channels get guaranteed wide-availabilty and can get noticed by channel surfers who wouldn't otherwise hear about them. In turn, advertisers are made more comfortable about advertising on the channel, and the cost of launching it can get subsidized. Without that kind of bundling, launching a new channel would take an enourmous capital expenditure and we wouldn't have the 300+ niche networks that we have now.
Anyway, the point is that cable network bundling is a completely different ball of wax from the kind of service bundling mentioned in the article.
For a lot of city dwellers, yes. Kitchens are expensive real estate, grocers are always packed, and the combination of restaurant competition and higher-than-average salaries makes prepared food relatively affordable.
1) RAM is expensive. Game developers and console designers, like most other embedded programmers, have an incentive and opportunity to write efficient and well-optimized code to meet specific hardware requirements.
2) Consoles run very little by way of background processes, and when they do, they're almost always modules relevant to the application (i.e. XBox Live-enabled services). This trims the base requirements down and still leaves a lot of space for the actual application.
Desktops, on the other hand, run an OS that has a whole bunch of background services running, plus a bunch of preloaded platforms to improve responsiveness when the user wants to start something new. In addition, we expect them to be able to run more than one primary application at a time. They eat RAM for breakfast.
Even though your stock Windows XP machine may crawl when running a program with 512MB of RAM, a console (or other embedded/dedicated platform) probably wouldn't need a fraction of that to get excellent performance.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a small matter of 'NetBSD receives interest as part of open source coding intiative' it seems very much like a newspaper putting the weather report on page one, above the fold...
Except that this wasn't on page one, above the fold at all. It was in the targetted, optional, low-traffic BSD section. In that sense it's kind of like putting the weather report on the weather page. Wierd stuff.
Simply put, if the game allows it, it is part of the gameplay. It may not be the most obvious way to play, nor may it be how the manual TELLS you to play... ...nor may it be a sporting and friendly way to play, but fuck all that because I want to be king!
There's a distinction between fairness and ettiquette. Sure, only violating the prior makes you a cheater, but violating the latter just makes you an asshole.
...but will suffer a financial hit when someone gets it running on commodity hardware.
Really? They're going to take a hit when some bored hobbyist cracks the protection scheme and puts the solution up on some P2P site? You really think that many people who are seriously interested in the simplicity, stability, interface, and power of Apple products are suddenly going to learn how to scrounge through P2P sites and use custom machines to save a couple hundred bucks? Of course some people will, but that'll probably be made up for just as well by people who do it to test OS X and then make their next purchase an Apple PC with it OS X pre-installed.
If Apple does much of anything to restrict OS X to run on specific hardware, that's enough to deter pretty much everyone who isn't some too-poor-anyway college student or a hobbyist who's going to recommend the retail system to all his or her friends. Too many people are way too lazy and honest for what you're predicting.
I took your exact links and put them into my browser.
The very first link led me to a device priced at 800% of what the person reasonably expected. The second led me to one that only cost 400% more.
So no, neither of your links, nor their smartass delivery, fit the bill very well at all. It's pretty clear that he was already aware of these too, having made indirect reference to their kind in the article.
and the citer would have to obtain and read more than the snippet anyhow.
Heh. Have you worked in academia much?
You might be the one who needs a dictionary. What the do you think non-profit means? It sure as hell doesn't mean "operating at a loss". These publishers incur substantial costs for proofreading, peer review, layout, and editing (not to mention the massive printing costs), and even as non-profits they rightfully make up the costs for this by selling their end products.
Effectively, non-profit just means that they don't have owners who are driven by a desire for huge shares of dividends and profits. Instead, business revenue is supposed to go back into their operations that further the public good. That's it.
Hundreds of thousands of email content publishers ask their users whether they want plain-text or HTML versions. Even if most users don't understand the question, they're used to being asked. Why don't you try that and then just publish one version of your newsletter to each of the resulting lists?
First, I didn't say "early-career professionals without a degree". I was writing about the huge difference between a 22-year old recent graduate, and the 25-year old graduate who has just a few years under his belt. They shouldn't be treated the same from an HR perspective, even if the 25 year old hasn't picked up that many new skills yet. The very fact that they have a couple years of being in an office 50 hours a week means that the employer doesn't need to worry that they have no idea what they're in for.
Second, Mattintosh (above) made a fantastic argument in favor of those "early career professionals without a degree". I can personally say that even the most rigorous (especially the most rigorous) CS or IT departments don't prepare workers for the daily grind of working in a devlopment company or for the variety of positions that they may be exposed to. And even in those departments that do offer a good program, you shouldn't be surprised to see plenty of students that manage to careen through without learning a drop of it. An undergraduate education can be valuable for a student, but a BS can only mean so much to a hiring manager.
I think the grandparent post was making the point that: given a pool of recent graduates, and a pool of early-career (2-5 yrs experience) professionals, the reliability of getting a good employee out of the former group is much lower. Not because an individual "recent grad" isn't going to be good at his job (the old wisdom), but because more of those recent grads are GenY'ers that still aren't sure what they want to actually do with their lives. There's too little information to determine whether or not a particular pick out of the pool of recent grads is going to be reliable, effective, and committed.
On the other hand, early-career professionals with just a few years experience are more reliable from an HR perspective because you can look at their work history to see how they're getting used to things. Have they been progressing in one specialty? Have they jumped from Dev to IT to QA and now want a Dev position again? Did they take a year off to "find themselves" already? These are questions that you can find answers to in early-career professionals, and these are questions that can lead to less turnover and unpredictability from your workforce.
What this all means is that recent graduates are a risky gamble and that the market should probably value them significantly less for their first few years of building a work history. Interestingly, it also means that those that do demonstrate their commitment and reliability should receive just the kind of frequent and large salary increases that more senior employees resent.
Apparently, you didn't read it very well. The excellent book was about a kid coping with autism, not Asberger's, informed by the author's career working with autistic children. While in some ways similar, autism and Asperger's are not the same thing and the book was quite explicitly about one and not the other.
Nonetheless, the book is a really refreshing and novel read that I've recommended to many friends of all ages.
What's up with all these speed and performance benchmarks. I may be dead wrong (or at least outdated), but I thought GCC was developed with architecture compatibility, standards, and language features in mind--in that order. If you really want performance, you're usually better off using a commercial compiler targetted at a specific architecture, like Intel's. Did things change, or is this review completely missing the mark?
Dude. Seriously. Using version control doesn't necessarily mean "check in each feature/bug fix as one change". It could just as easily be weekly check-ins by the one or two guys working on this branch. Who knows. So stop whining, stop acting like you know what the heck you're talking about, and grow up.
or a perfect time to publish an article.
It's called cross-promotion, and companies that are completely unaffiliated "cash in" on it all the time. You see, because of the publicity and marketing driven by the movie, there is presently a market of people interested in facts about Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide, British Comedy, Old Science Fiction, and who knows what else.
Any editor worth his salt would consider running stories that capitalize on that interest. The interest is bigger than it was two years ago, and bigger than it will be in six months. It would be idiotic not to run stories like this if you have access to them. It's not "disingenious", people want to read about things like this right now!
there's no reason Apple wouldn't be able to hand over all individual patches seperately, which would make things immensely simpler for the KHTML guys.
I see you've spent some time involved in the Apple workflow. Has it occurred to you that the Safari team's development methodology might not easily lend itself to individual diffs and CVS logs?
A lot of the history of Christianity revolves around bashing people who try to point out the actual reality of the universe.
You are factually dead wrong and should take a look at books like "Against Method" by esteemed philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend to broaden your mind past the bunk you learned in 8th grade.
Brilliant. ;)
Nobody gives them free money. Even today, we see how the social cost of what money is offered often comes at a terribly high cost--the result of lending policies that absolutely nobody has enough experience to get right (yet). Even though you want to make the answers to third-world development sound simple, it repeatedly demonstrates itself as being beyond every program's and individual's expectations.
You sound interested, so Read up, buddy, and expand your mind at the expense of your confidence.
Dear Slashdot,
I'm having a hard time bring traffic to my website. I know that getting a link posted on another high-traffic website would be a boon, but haven't figured out how to get it to happen. Any thoughts?
Thanks!
I mean really, I don't think MTV is giving away air time to Microsoft...right?
Are you kidding?
The odds that Microsoft has to pay for this ad are slim to none, for the very reason you gave! In addition to a good chuck of their normal demographic, tens of thousands of Slashdotter-like nerds, even, who would never tolerate MTV under normal circumstances will secretly tune into their network to see this program. MTV will have other advertisers beating at their door to get the interstitial spots in this program, and that's where the funding comes from.
The first public unveiling of the XBox 2 isn't exactly yet another run of the Oreck Air Purifier ad, you know. It's a highly anticipated event (whether it should be or not), and will draw a huge audience, as you pointed out.
There's no more error in anthropomorphizing the emergent behavior of natural selection than there is in anthropomorphizing the emergent behavior of that heterogenous collection of cells, molecules, bacteria, and electricity that we call people.
In both cases, we're just talking about a model that helps open up an understanding of the system. It helps us to make predictions and form intuitions, and this form of model-building is a valuable tool for everything from a scientist to a monkey that uses tools.
The only thing that prevents people from maintaining more than one model in their head simultaneously is the kind of counterproductive stuborness that you yourself are exhibiting. A model, even one which we know to be wrong in some cases, can be a valuable stepping stone for discusssion, expression, and analysis.
What frustrates me far more than any supposed misrepresentation of "True Science" by journalists and critics is the utter lack of knowledge that people like you exhibit about the history and philosophy of science. It is not so cut and dry as you seem to suspect. As a result, your hard-line stance does a disservice to everyone, as it discourages the dissemination of widlely intuitive and accessible ideas in favor of either silence or talk that simply flies over people's heads.
If you're such a big fan of science and the expansion of scientific knowledge among the public, you should support the spread of accessible models like the one used in the article. It helps people to form a foundation of understanding that they otherwise wouldn't bother to develop. Those that are particularly interested will then go on to further sources and will most likely bring their understanding even closer to your own. Those that aren't interested wouldn't listen to your account anyway.
So get over youself, put down the textbooks, start reading Popper, Kuhn, and all the other philosophers of science, and take that god damn stick out of your ass.
Most internal applications like the kind you are talking about are poorly engineered monstrosities that few would want to see the light of public exposure. They were thrown together on a far too short schedule just to fill a need, and are therefore exhibit some large subset of the following embarassing characteristics: unscalable, uncommented, unstable, hard-coded/non-modular, inefficient, unadaptable, buggy, etc.
While a switch from a DIY mentality to a shared/open-source model might alleviate these problems, whose going to be the one to put their crap forward as the starting point? Management will never give anyone the time to finish it and clean it up properly for publication, since there's no immediate or guaranteed benefit to the company (though certainly some to the competitors), and few in-house developers will have the balls to put their disfigured lump of an application out their for public review.
Cable network bundling is something that your cable provider is confronted with, not just you. Content providers sell groups of channels together. This helps them launch new channels by leveraging the value of large established channels. New channels get guaranteed wide-availabilty and can get noticed by channel surfers who wouldn't otherwise hear about them. In turn, advertisers are made more comfortable about advertising on the channel, and the cost of launching it can get subsidized. Without that kind of bundling, launching a new channel would take an enourmous capital expenditure and we wouldn't have the 300+ niche networks that we have now.
Anyway, the point is that cable network bundling is a completely different ball of wax from the kind of service bundling mentioned in the article.
And now that you've finished your 7th Grade History class, read "Against Method" by Paul Feyerabend. Thank you.
For a lot of city dwellers, yes. Kitchens are expensive real estate, grocers are always packed, and the combination of restaurant competition and higher-than-average salaries makes prepared food relatively affordable.
1) RAM is expensive. Game developers and console designers, like most other embedded programmers, have an incentive and opportunity to write efficient and well-optimized code to meet specific hardware requirements.
2) Consoles run very little by way of background processes, and when they do, they're almost always modules relevant to the application (i.e. XBox Live-enabled services). This trims the base requirements down and still leaves a lot of space for the actual application.
Desktops, on the other hand, run an OS that has a whole bunch of background services running, plus a bunch of preloaded platforms to improve responsiveness when the user wants to start something new. In addition, we expect them to be able to run more than one primary application at a time. They eat RAM for breakfast.
Even though your stock Windows XP machine may crawl when running a program with 512MB of RAM, a console (or other embedded/dedicated platform) probably wouldn't need a fraction of that to get excellent performance.