A chance to be funny! Or possibly insightful. Either way, yay me!
1. Describe the components of an operating system, besides the central component, the kernel.
The components of the operating system are as follows: The file browser, the kernelized window manager, the web browser, the media player, and the gaping remote exploit. As can be seen by this feature list, Microsoft Windows is the only true operating system on the market today.
2. What do programmers usually develop first, the compiler or the kernel?
Neither can be developed without access to a text editor, so invariably this is always written first. Unfortunately, once it is written, it needs to be compiled, and the compiler itself needs an operating system to run on. This "chicken and egg" problem wasn't solved until 2097, with the invention of time travel.
[Seriously, this guy is wrong to assume that both have to be written in order to have a complete system. Theoretically, you could develop an x86 operating system entirely on an Apple Powerbook, and just copy the binaries over, so you don't need to develop a compiler to develop an operating system.]
3. Does this sequence impact the OS at all?
Yes. Writing the compiler first opens a gaping hole in the fabric of the universe, while writing the kernel first causes a plague of sabre-toothed cows. The trick is to write them both at the same time so that the cows are immediately sucked into the gaping hole.
4. What's more complicated, the kernel or the compiler?
"Complicated" means "something I know how to do." "Simple" means "something I don't know how to do, but I know the people who do and they're a bunch of nitwits so how hard can it be?" Given that criteria, I would have to say that both are braindead simple. Ask me again in a couple of years.
5. Why does operating system development take as long as it does? What are the three key things in operating system development that take the longest to perfect?
There are three rules that apply here. The first is Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you think, even if you've accounted for Hofstadter's Law.
The second rule is the 90% rule: The first 90% of the project will take 90% of the time, and the last 10% will take the other 90% of the time.
The last rule is called the "There's no way in hell we can add all the features the marketing department has already promised our customers, and they just added twenty more, and by the way three of them violate laws of physics" rule. Unfortunately, only the name of the rule has been passed down over the years, so nobody remembers what it was about.
6. Do you need operating systems familiarity to write a kernel? Yes/ no? Elaborate please.
A basic familiarity with computers is helpful, but not strictly necessary. For example, when Dennis Ritchie wrote the compiler for the BCPL language, he didn't actually use a computer. He scrawled the whole thing on a ream of paper, and had his secretary transcribe it. Similarly, when Linus wrote the 0.1 kernel, he used a photocopier.
7. In your opinion, why aren't there more operating systems on the market?
Because it is not in the interests of the Freemasons to have more operating systems on the market. I can't say anything more about that in this forum, but it's absolutely true.
[Geez. There's a difference between an "operating system" (which a decent grad student can whip out in a few months) and an operating system which can be marketed as competition to the OSes already on the market. Linux 1.0 was probably closer to the former than the latter.]
I don't think it helps for you to think of yourself as normal. You should feel lucky that your appetites led you to "play" with abstract ideas, visualizations, and relationships between things. It's disturbing how few people really have that appetite. For most kids, if you give them a choice between an engaging, well-written book on meteorology or Greek history, or some teen-oriented high-school drama (are they still writing "Sweet Valley High" books?), they'll either take the fiction or kick you in the shins and demand to know where you've hidden Harry Potter.
I think there are a lot of different natural appetites. Everyone needs something to think about, but some people are more attracted to science, and others towards sociology (in the form of "Seventeen" magazine). If there were some way to really get across the importance of math and science, I think it would help. But some people don't naturally gravitate towards those things.
I wish the teaching profession would be seen more as a profession, with certain standards of performance, professional development, study into best practices, and the whole lot. Right now, teachers are given a minimum of training, maybe a couple hundred hours of apprenticeship under a more experienced teacher, then shoved into a room full of kids and left to fend for themselves.
I've read that a promising practice is just to let teachers observe each other teaching on a regular basis, so that they have some level of feedback.
That was my first reaction, anyhow. My second reaction was a bit more respectable. That was the reaction where I stopped thinking how horrible it was for you to say, and started thinking about why you're saying it.
If it's just about employability, you're right: most jobs these days don't require anything beyond basic algebra, and what little tidbits of science are needed can be trained on the job. Why learn all about the radio spectrum when all you need to work at Dish Network's call center is "trees and power lines block our signal?"
But there's something very dehumanizing about the idea of only teaching people that which they need to know to perform their function in life. It reminds me of Plato's ideal state, where astronomy, geometry, and dialectic were to be taught only to a few initiates. Everyone knows their place, and people are discouraged from ever straying from it.
But the more important argument against this position is a pragmatic one: People need to know science. People need to know it so that they don't get suckered by alternative medicine scams, so that they can critically evaluate claims in a debate between a business and an environmental group, so that they can have some conception of what claims are reasonable and what claims are utter hogwash. How do we expect to run a democracy with a citizenry who decides issues like genetically modified foods and abortion rights based on trite aphorisms?
A firm understanding of science is a powerful innoculation against those pernicious memes which want to infect your brain and steal your money.
Hell, I once had a very long debate with a music teacher over a certain cash-only multi-level marketing scam. I could mathematically prove that the only money coming into the system was money provided by other people, and that it was entirely impossible for everyone to see their money come back eightfold. But no matter how I dumbed it down for him, he just didn't get that you can't make money by simply trading it around with other people. I lost touch with him, so I don't know the outcome, but he's probably a few hundred dollars poorer for it.
I grudgingly have to agree with you on one point: Given a choice between a school that turned out mathematicians and science geeks and one which turned out readers and critical thinkers, I would have to choose the latter. But given that our educational system has these kids for 1260 hours per year from first grade onward, there should be plenty of time for both.
I've owned a '94 Saturn for a few years now, and I'd always been able to consistently get around 40-45 MPG (mostly highway). I bought the car from my sister, who only got 37MPG despite similar travel patterns.
It all comes down to different driving patterns. I'm generally pretty easy on the accelerator, shift into higher gears early (stickshifts are wonderful), and generally keep my speed under 65. I also throw the car into neutral on long downhills, which takes a couple thousand unneeded RPMs off the engine. But I wouldn't recommend this, as people keep trying to convince me that it's either unsafe or bad for the transmission. Screw 'em.
My car before that was an '89 Ford Festiva, which generally got around 48MPG. I loved that car so very very much.
What if, one night as you slept, tens of thousands of very small, very strong gnomes crept all over your skin. At a pre-arranged signal, they would each grab the base of a different hair follicle, count to three, and give it a good hard yank.
Shocked, confused, and bald all the way down to your eyebrows. Not a good way to wake up.
That, in a nutshell, is my entire argument against further development of nanotechnology.
A project I was doing last semester had just what you described: thousands of arrays of twenty members each. I was still able to double the performance by switching from bubblesort to quicksort. Besides, you never know when those arrays are going to get bumped up from a few hundred members to a few thousand.
I'm still a firm believer in the principle that bubblesort is never the way to go.
"Performance gains occur at the hardware level?" Not really. At least in the realm of high performance computing, the speed increases due to hardware over the decades has actually been dwarfed by improvements in algorithms.
[I don't remember the name of the book where I learned this. It was originally an IBM whitepaper on multiprocessor systems versus beowulf cluster-style computing. It had a really cool drawing of a five-headed dog fighting five one-headed dogs. Two Karma points to anyone who remembers the title.]
'Sides, whatever technology you're trying to ship, it won't actually exist in the minds of consumers until Microsoft "invents" it.
Also depends on the size of the app. With a small app, what excuse do you have for not optimizing? Wouldn't take that long. With a big project? Depends on your work environment.
The level of optimization needed for small projects varies wildly. If it's a one-shot deal to allow one secretary to generate a report twice a week, who really cares if it takes two seconds or twenty? Even if you assume that's thirty-six seconds every week, it's going to take years of use before it would have been worthwhile to optimize it.
On the other hand, if it's something that hundreds of people are going to be using four or five times a day, then it's probably worthwhile to do some algorithmic/data structure improvements.
Finally, you get the extreme case: some library that will end up being used by millions. Those are the times when you want to eke out every bit of performance you can. The size of the project doesn't always determine its importance, nor does the importance of the project always determine how much optimization is needed.
My old physics teacher once told us a story about how his mathy brain fails to mesh with the rest of the world. He had cable installed. The repairman came in, got him up and running, and left. About a week later, the cable company sent in a survey asking him how the repairman did.
He thought, "Okay, the scale is 1-10, meaning 5 should be around average. I think I got better than average service." Then he proceeded to fill the survey with 7's and 8's.
A couple more weeks go by, and he gets a call from the cable company, apologizing for the poor customer service he received and asking if there was anything they could do to make him feel better.
I'm not totally sure I remember the punchline correctly. However, I think after about forty minutes of trying to explain why "7" wasn't a bad thing under a normal gaussian distribution, he broke down and asked for a month of free cable just to end the phone call.
My 1.2 GHz Duron w/ 256MB RAM still kicks the crap out of all my non-techie friends' systems, and I'm not feeling any compelling need to upgrade either. Right now, any game that doesn't run on a P3-800 with a ho-hum graphics card is automatically relegated to a niche market.
If these specs are for real, I consider Microsoft's view of a "normal system" to be wildly optimistic.
Cute. But for all our sakes, I hope that some sort of standard emerges. I don't want to be crossing the street, and be warned to jump out of the way by "Ride of the Valkries" or "Sounds Made by an Angry Cat One Fine Tuesday Morn."
Ideally, it would be a sound fairly similar to other cars of its size, projected mostly in the direction of travel. On the upside, the people inside the car would barely have to hear it. But this also means adding a "check vroom-vroom noise" light to the dashboard.
With 3200+ comments under your belt, you should be able to write your own rebuttal with half your brain tied behind your back, even if you don't believe it.
Nevertheless, because I'm avoiding studying for finals, I'll dish out the standard reply:
There are two reasons to choose a piece of open source software. The first is the pragmatic, is-this-the-best-fit reason. You choose an OSS app because it does what you want better than any of the alternatives.
The often low-to-zero price is sometimes a big advantage from this perspective, but it is just one part of the overall fit. The availability of source code is another. Availability from multiple vendors and adherence to standards can also be attractive from this viewpoint.
The second reason, of course, is all about freedom. This is the one that causes many people to embrace open source applications even when the proprietary world is kicking its butt as far as features and ease of use go. The freedom to explore, to experiment, to use in virtually any way you see fit. The freedom to modify and redistribute. Also, because anyone can take the product and fork it if they're unhappy, OSS packages generally have to avoid doing nasty things to annoy the user base. Spyware, malware, ad-ware, all becomes virtually impossible. Why? Because people don't want it, and because it's *free* nobody can force it on them.
Look at the web browser situation. When IE doesn't have stiff competition, everyone writes HTML with an eye towards IE, not towards accepted standards. This gives Microsoft a great deal of control over how most of us experience the Internet.
This is just one of many examples of how ordinary software users are affected by their choice of tools, and why software can be considered a worthwhile cause for non-developers.
You're assuming that the only difference between the two situations is that one involves "our copyrights," and the other involves "their copyrights."
But the differences are at least a bit more subtle. One difference lies in how copyrights are used by the Linux community and the RIAA. The goal of the GPL is to protect the freedom to share and alter software. The RIAA uses it to protect the revenues of its member companies. While there is nothing inherently wrong with a copyright system that protects the ability of artists to get compensated for their work (more on that later), it's a hell of a lot easier to root for the ragtag hippies than a bunch of middle-man suits who often profit at the expense of artists and customers alike.
Next, look at the conditions under which the GPL is enforced, versus the enforcement policies of the music industry. If I have a Linkin Park CD and a copy of Debian, what can I do with each. Let's say I make a dozen copies of each and sell them on the street corner. Or maybe I put ISOs of both up on a public server. Maybe I take each and remix them. Say I add some drum tracks to the audio CD, and set up Debian so that it only has KDE 3.2, with all things Gnome surrepititiously moved to/dev/null. Now I start giving away both.
In every one of these cases, take a guess at which copyright holder will NOT be unleashing the demon lawyer horde.
Finally, let's look at what happens to people who violate the GPL vs those who go afoul of some other software copyright. Assuming everyone is playing nice, both will receive notice of their infringement, and a request for the cessation of infringing activities. But while the violator of standard copyright can only desist (or pay a huge fee, if the copyright holder is feeling generous), the GPL violator needs only to publish the source code to become fully compliant.
There's also the simple fact that Slashdotters have a better appreciation for the amount of work that goes into software, as opposed to the amount of work that goes into music. But that's just ordinary tunnel vision.
There. I have articulated the Slashdot groupthink. You may mod me upward now.:)
Here's how it works (in a parody of a trademarked style):
Ad-word: $500
Getting sued because somebody bought an adword that their competitor considers their own: -$1,000,000
Getting a judgment stating that Google is well within its rights to return whatever sponsored links it sees fit: Priceless
As you say, no individual adword is worth keeping around when compared to the legal costs of defending it against a lawsuit. But Google might fight a lawsuit anyways just to get rid of the costs associated with complying with every C&D that comes along.
I'm a bit confused by your math. At $150/hr, it would take 24,000 minutes to reach 60K. If, as you suppose, ten minutes every day are wasted by OOo, it would take 6.5 years to reach that figure, assuming they work every day. Are you really expecting that Microsoft won't have pushed three or four more "upgrades" on you in this time.
I'm also confused at why your users are billing you, much less billing at such an absurdly high rate. What is it these people do? What business are you in, exactly?
More important, I question your claim that switching to OOo will automatically "burn up an extra 10 minutes a day". What are your specific complaints? What if I can point to areas where OOo actually speeds up workflow when compared to Office (word completion, etc)?
Finally, you're ignoring the hidden costs of staying with MS Office. For example, the cost of a BSA software audit. Or the cost of keeping records in the event of said audits. What about the cost of being locked into Windows for every desktop in your company?* OOo runs on a wide variety of platforms. What are the hidden costs of having all your documents in a format only Microsoft can effectively support?
* Sure, there's Office for Macs. Just like there used to be Internet Explorer for Macs. Microsoft could drop it on a whim.
Read Lessig's Free Culture, especially chapter 10. Here's a good excerpt regarding the MPAA's version of copyright law:
In 1982, Valenti's testimony to Congress captured the strategy perfectly:
No matter the lengthy arguments made, no matter the charges and the counter-charges, no matter the tumult and the shouting, reasonable men and women will keep returning to the fundamental issue, the central theme which animates this entire debate: Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation. That is the issue. That is the question. And that is the rostrum on which this entire hearing and the debates to follow must rest.
The strategy of this rhetoric, like the strategy of most of Valenti's rhetoric, is brilliant and simple and brilliant because simple. The "central theme" to which "reasonable men and women" will return is this: "Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protections 118 resident in all other property owners in the nation." There are no second-class citizens, Valenti might have continued. There should be no second-class property owners.
This claim has an obvious and powerful intuitive pull. It is stated with such clarity as to make the idea as obvious as the notion that we use elections to pick presidents. But in fact, there is no more extreme a claim made by anyone who is serious in this debate than this claim of Valenti's. Jack Valenti, however sweet and however brilliant, is perhaps the nation's foremost extremist when it comes to the nature and scope of "creative property." His views have no reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition, even if the subtle pull of his Texan charm has slowly redefined that tradition, at least in Washington.
The MPAA does indeed have its own version of copyright law. It frequently litigates on the basis of this version, and it frequently wins because of the difficulty of fighting against even an unreasonable lawsuit.
One example of copyright silliness occurs in Chapter 7, where a documentary creator was threatened with a lawsuit if he didn't pay $10,000 because his camera caught approximately four seconds of "The Simpsons" on a TV playing in the background (at the last moment they digitally altered the film so that the TV was showing one of the director's other documentaries).
Lessig doesn't support piracy. His views on copyright are far more mainstream than my own. Not everyone who thinks that our copyright system is fundamentally broken is looking for a quick path to free stuff.
As someone who lived basically the same life, I have one word for you: BOOOOOOOOO-RIIIIIIIIIIIING!
I spent my whole childhood thinking that rules were there for a reason. Rules were there to protect us, to keep us safe from terrible dangers, and to keep us working towards becoming the best people we could possibly be. To me, rule-breakers were slime. They were worse than slime. They were violating the Great Social Contract that kept everyone from setting fire to old ladies and blowing up kittens.
After high school, I joined the Army. Learning a whole new and intricate set of rules was an interesting experience. I followed the rules dutifully, but ninety percent of the rules governing soldiers in Basic Training are there solely for the purpose of teaching the soldiers to obey without questioning. The need for that obedience is understandable in some situations. The military is just one of those places where sometimes lives depend on swift, coordinated action.
But in the end, I realized that sometimes the rules were wrong, arbitrary, self-serving, or simply lacking in coherence. Sometimes the process by which the rules are made exhibits the same flaws. Enforcement was either non-existent or arbitrary, and breaking them was more than merely harmless; sometimes it was the only way to get things done.
About the same time, I was becoming aware of the effects of being raised in an extremely rule-oriented religion.
Unquestioning obedience is fine for four year olds. But as soon as possible, kids need to be given explanations for the rules, to the best of their ability to understand. If they don't learn the difference between good rules* and bad rules**, then we're all doomed. The whole democracy thing doesn't work if everyone just does what they're told.
I worry almost as much for the kids who follow the rules compulsively, and are afraid to do anything without explicit permission, as I do for the ones who go around vandalizing and stealing out of boredom. I like the kids who creatively push the limits, game the system, and question those who wield power over them. Especially if they show some level of judgment about the actions that will do real damage, as opposed to the ones that merely make things more interesting.
* Don't set fire to old ladies. Never give your passwords out.
** You must request permission to go to the bathroom, and be back in precisely three minutes.
First, what is this "prosumer" thing? With over a million words in the English language, do we really need to invent another one? I'm not even sure whether this brand new buzzword describes hobbyists looking for professional quality, or professionals who happen to buy stuff, or something else entirely.
Sorry, but I had to get that out of my system. I've had experience with two digital cameras, both Sony Cybershots (a 2.1 and a 5.0 megapixel model). The 2.1 model feels rugged, the pictures are very colorful and sharp, and a 64MB stick will last you pretty much all day. But of course, the resolution sucks.
The 5.0 model has a more fragile feel to it, and doesn't do nearly as well in low light. Nor is it fun to swap sticks every twenty pictures. Finally, you have to hold the camera reeeeeeally still if you want it to come out crisp. I use a tripod whenever possible.
I never expected to use the 2.1 again, and I'm surprised how much I still use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't know. I was just making up something that sounded silly but ever-so-slightly plausible.
The components of the operating system are as follows: The file browser, the kernelized window manager, the web browser, the media player, and the gaping remote exploit. As can be seen by this feature list, Microsoft Windows is the only true operating system on the market today.
Neither can be developed without access to a text editor, so invariably this is always written first. Unfortunately, once it is written, it needs to be compiled, and the compiler itself needs an operating system to run on. This "chicken and egg" problem wasn't solved until 2097, with the invention of time travel.
[Seriously, this guy is wrong to assume that both have to be written in order to have a complete system. Theoretically, you could develop an x86 operating system entirely on an Apple Powerbook, and just copy the binaries over, so you don't need to develop a compiler to develop an operating system.]
Yes. Writing the compiler first opens a gaping hole in the fabric of the universe, while writing the kernel first causes a plague of sabre-toothed cows. The trick is to write them both at the same time so that the cows are immediately sucked into the gaping hole.
"Complicated" means "something I know how to do." "Simple" means "something I don't know how to do, but I know the people who do and they're a bunch of nitwits so how hard can it be?" Given that criteria, I would have to say that both are braindead simple. Ask me again in a couple of years.
There are three rules that apply here. The first is Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you think, even if you've accounted for Hofstadter's Law.
The second rule is the 90% rule: The first 90% of the project will take 90% of the time, and the last 10% will take the other 90% of the time.
The last rule is called the "There's no way in hell we can add all the features the marketing department has already promised our customers, and they just added twenty more, and by the way three of them violate laws of physics" rule. Unfortunately, only the name of the rule has been passed down over the years, so nobody remembers what it was about.
A basic familiarity with computers is helpful, but not strictly necessary. For example, when Dennis Ritchie wrote the compiler for the BCPL language, he didn't actually use a computer. He scrawled the whole thing on a ream of paper, and had his secretary transcribe it. Similarly, when Linus wrote the 0.1 kernel, he used a photocopier.
Because it is not in the interests of the Freemasons to have more operating systems on the market. I can't say anything more about that in this forum, but it's absolutely true.
[Geez. There's a difference between an "operating system" (which a decent grad student can whip out in a few months) and an operating system which can be marketed as competition to the OSes already on the market. Linux 1.0 was probably closer to the former than the latter.]
I don't think it helps for you to think of yourself as normal. You should feel lucky that your appetites led you to "play" with abstract ideas, visualizations, and relationships between things. It's disturbing how few people really have that appetite. For most kids, if you give them a choice between an engaging, well-written book on meteorology or Greek history, or some teen-oriented high-school drama (are they still writing "Sweet Valley High" books?), they'll either take the fiction or kick you in the shins and demand to know where you've hidden Harry Potter.
I think there are a lot of different natural appetites. Everyone needs something to think about, but some people are more attracted to science, and others towards sociology (in the form of "Seventeen" magazine). If there were some way to really get across the importance of math and science, I think it would help. But some people don't naturally gravitate towards those things.
I wish the teaching profession would be seen more as a profession, with certain standards of performance, professional development, study into best practices, and the whole lot. Right now, teachers are given a minimum of training, maybe a couple hundred hours of apprenticeship under a more experienced teacher, then shoved into a room full of kids and left to fend for themselves.
I've read that a promising practice is just to let teachers observe each other teaching on a regular basis, so that they have some level of feedback.
Funny. When I was in high school, I dated myself too.
"Me? It's me. Look, if you're not doing anything tonight, want to study at my house? Maybe I, er, I mean we can watch a video afterwards."
What a total waste of time those years were.
Bull.
That was my first reaction, anyhow. My second reaction was a bit more respectable. That was the reaction where I stopped thinking how horrible it was for you to say, and started thinking about why you're saying it.
If it's just about employability, you're right: most jobs these days don't require anything beyond basic algebra, and what little tidbits of science are needed can be trained on the job. Why learn all about the radio spectrum when all you need to work at Dish Network's call center is "trees and power lines block our signal?"
But there's something very dehumanizing about the idea of only teaching people that which they need to know to perform their function in life. It reminds me of Plato's ideal state, where astronomy, geometry, and dialectic were to be taught only to a few initiates. Everyone knows their place, and people are discouraged from ever straying from it.
But the more important argument against this position is a pragmatic one: People need to know science. People need to know it so that they don't get suckered by alternative medicine scams, so that they can critically evaluate claims in a debate between a business and an environmental group, so that they can have some conception of what claims are reasonable and what claims are utter hogwash. How do we expect to run a democracy with a citizenry who decides issues like genetically modified foods and abortion rights based on trite aphorisms?
A firm understanding of science is a powerful innoculation against those pernicious memes which want to infect your brain and steal your money.
Hell, I once had a very long debate with a music teacher over a certain cash-only multi-level marketing scam. I could mathematically prove that the only money coming into the system was money provided by other people, and that it was entirely impossible for everyone to see their money come back eightfold. But no matter how I dumbed it down for him, he just didn't get that you can't make money by simply trading it around with other people. I lost touch with him, so I don't know the outcome, but he's probably a few hundred dollars poorer for it.
I grudgingly have to agree with you on one point: Given a choice between a school that turned out mathematicians and science geeks and one which turned out readers and critical thinkers, I would have to choose the latter. But given that our educational system has these kids for 1260 hours per year from first grade onward, there should be plenty of time for both.
I've owned a '94 Saturn for a few years now, and I'd always been able to consistently get around 40-45 MPG (mostly highway). I bought the car from my sister, who only got 37MPG despite similar travel patterns.
It all comes down to different driving patterns. I'm generally pretty easy on the accelerator, shift into higher gears early (stickshifts are wonderful), and generally keep my speed under 65. I also throw the car into neutral on long downhills, which takes a couple thousand unneeded RPMs off the engine. But I wouldn't recommend this, as people keep trying to convince me that it's either unsafe or bad for the transmission. Screw 'em.
My car before that was an '89 Ford Festiva, which generally got around 48MPG. I loved that car so very very much.
What if, one night as you slept, tens of thousands of very small, very strong gnomes crept all over your skin. At a pre-arranged signal, they would each grab the base of a different hair follicle, count to three, and give it a good hard yank.
Shocked, confused, and bald all the way down to your eyebrows. Not a good way to wake up.
That, in a nutshell, is my entire argument against further development of nanotechnology.
A project I was doing last semester had just what you described: thousands of arrays of twenty members each. I was still able to double the performance by switching from bubblesort to quicksort. Besides, you never know when those arrays are going to get bumped up from a few hundred members to a few thousand.
I'm still a firm believer in the principle that bubblesort is never the way to go.
"Performance gains occur at the hardware level?" Not really. At least in the realm of high performance computing, the speed increases due to hardware over the decades has actually been dwarfed by improvements in algorithms.
[I don't remember the name of the book where I learned this. It was originally an IBM whitepaper on multiprocessor systems versus beowulf cluster-style computing. It had a really cool drawing of a five-headed dog fighting five one-headed dogs. Two Karma points to anyone who remembers the title.]
'Sides, whatever technology you're trying to ship, it won't actually exist in the minds of consumers until Microsoft "invents" it.
On the other hand, if it's something that hundreds of people are going to be using four or five times a day, then it's probably worthwhile to do some algorithmic/data structure improvements.
Finally, you get the extreme case: some library that will end up being used by millions. Those are the times when you want to eke out every bit of performance you can. The size of the project doesn't always determine its importance, nor does the importance of the project always determine how much optimization is needed.
My old physics teacher once told us a story about how his mathy brain fails to mesh with the rest of the world. He had cable installed. The repairman came in, got him up and running, and left. About a week later, the cable company sent in a survey asking him how the repairman did.
He thought, "Okay, the scale is 1-10, meaning 5 should be around average. I think I got better than average service." Then he proceeded to fill the survey with 7's and 8's.
A couple more weeks go by, and he gets a call from the cable company, apologizing for the poor customer service he received and asking if there was anything they could do to make him feel better.
I'm not totally sure I remember the punchline correctly. However, I think after about forty minutes of trying to explain why "7" wasn't a bad thing under a normal gaussian distribution, he broke down and asked for a month of free cable just to end the phone call.
Don't see why they'd need one, unless they're planning to ship 2.8 with a kernelized window manager.
[-1, Pedantic]
My Numerical Analysis final is in 30 minutes. Can you explain the whole predictor-corrector thing? Cuz' I'm lost.
My 1.2 GHz Duron w/ 256MB RAM still kicks the crap out of all my non-techie friends' systems, and I'm not feeling any compelling need to upgrade either. Right now, any game that doesn't run on a P3-800 with a ho-hum graphics card is automatically relegated to a niche market.
If these specs are for real, I consider Microsoft's view of a "normal system" to be wildly optimistic.
Cute. But for all our sakes, I hope that some sort of standard emerges. I don't want to be crossing the street, and be warned to jump out of the way by "Ride of the Valkries" or "Sounds Made by an Angry Cat One Fine Tuesday Morn."
Ideally, it would be a sound fairly similar to other cars of its size, projected mostly in the direction of travel. On the upside, the people inside the car would barely have to hear it. But this also means adding a "check vroom-vroom noise" light to the dashboard.
With 3200+ comments under your belt, you should be able to write your own rebuttal with half your brain tied behind your back, even if you don't believe it.
Nevertheless, because I'm avoiding studying for finals, I'll dish out the standard reply:
There are two reasons to choose a piece of open source software. The first is the pragmatic, is-this-the-best-fit reason. You choose an OSS app because it does what you want better than any of the alternatives.
The often low-to-zero price is sometimes a big advantage from this perspective, but it is just one part of the overall fit. The availability of source code is another. Availability from multiple vendors and adherence to standards can also be attractive from this viewpoint.
The second reason, of course, is all about freedom. This is the one that causes many people to embrace open source applications even when the proprietary world is kicking its butt as far as features and ease of use go. The freedom to explore, to experiment, to use in virtually any way you see fit. The freedom to modify and redistribute. Also, because anyone can take the product and fork it if they're unhappy, OSS packages generally have to avoid doing nasty things to annoy the user base. Spyware, malware, ad-ware, all becomes virtually impossible. Why? Because people don't want it, and because it's *free* nobody can force it on them.
Look at the web browser situation. When IE doesn't have stiff competition, everyone writes HTML with an eye towards IE, not towards accepted standards. This gives Microsoft a great deal of control over how most of us experience the Internet.
This is just one of many examples of how ordinary software users are affected by their choice of tools, and why software can be considered a worthwhile cause for non-developers.
You're assuming that the only difference between the two situations is that one involves "our copyrights," and the other involves "their copyrights."
/dev/null. Now I start giving away both.
:)
But the differences are at least a bit more subtle. One difference lies in how copyrights are used by the Linux community and the RIAA. The goal of the GPL is to protect the freedom to share and alter software. The RIAA uses it to protect the revenues of its member companies. While there is nothing inherently wrong with a copyright system that protects the ability of artists to get compensated for their work (more on that later), it's a hell of a lot easier to root for the ragtag hippies than a bunch of middle-man suits who often profit at the expense of artists and customers alike.
Next, look at the conditions under which the GPL is enforced, versus the enforcement policies of the music industry. If I have a Linkin Park CD and a copy of Debian, what can I do with each. Let's say I make a dozen copies of each and sell them on the street corner. Or maybe I put ISOs of both up on a public server. Maybe I take each and remix them. Say I add some drum tracks to the audio CD, and set up Debian so that it only has KDE 3.2, with all things Gnome surrepititiously moved to
In every one of these cases, take a guess at which copyright holder will NOT be unleashing the demon lawyer horde.
Finally, let's look at what happens to people who violate the GPL vs those who go afoul of some other software copyright. Assuming everyone is playing nice, both will receive notice of their infringement, and a request for the cessation of infringing activities. But while the violator of standard copyright can only desist (or pay a huge fee, if the copyright holder is feeling generous), the GPL violator needs only to publish the source code to become fully compliant.
There's also the simple fact that Slashdotters have a better appreciation for the amount of work that goes into software, as opposed to the amount of work that goes into music. But that's just ordinary tunnel vision.
There. I have articulated the Slashdot groupthink. You may mod me upward now.
I was probably seven or eight when I started playing around with BASIC on the Commodore 64.
:)
It was another ten years before I discovered that other programming languages existed.
BASIC is evil. 'nuff said.
Here's how it works (in a parody of a trademarked style):
Ad-word: $500
Getting sued because somebody bought an adword that their competitor considers their own: -$1,000,000
Getting a judgment stating that Google is well within its rights to return whatever sponsored links it sees fit: Priceless
As you say, no individual adword is worth keeping around when compared to the legal costs of defending it against a lawsuit. But Google might fight a lawsuit anyways just to get rid of the costs associated with complying with every C&D that comes along.
I'm a bit confused by your math. At $150/hr, it would take 24,000 minutes to reach 60K. If, as you suppose, ten minutes every day are wasted by OOo, it would take 6.5 years to reach that figure, assuming they work every day. Are you really expecting that Microsoft won't have pushed three or four more "upgrades" on you in this time.
I'm also confused at why your users are billing you, much less billing at such an absurdly high rate. What is it these people do? What business are you in, exactly?
More important, I question your claim that switching to OOo will automatically "burn up an extra 10 minutes a day". What are your specific complaints? What if I can point to areas where OOo actually speeds up workflow when compared to Office (word completion, etc)?
Finally, you're ignoring the hidden costs of staying with MS Office. For example, the cost of a BSA software audit. Or the cost of keeping records in the event of said audits. What about the cost of being locked into Windows for every desktop in your company?* OOo runs on a wide variety of platforms. What are the hidden costs of having all your documents in a format only Microsoft can effectively support?
* Sure, there's Office for Macs. Just like there used to be Internet Explorer for Macs. Microsoft could drop it on a whim.
The MPAA does indeed have its own version of copyright law. It frequently litigates on the basis of this version, and it frequently wins because of the difficulty of fighting against even an unreasonable lawsuit.
One example of copyright silliness occurs in Chapter 7, where a documentary creator was threatened with a lawsuit if he didn't pay $10,000 because his camera caught approximately four seconds of "The Simpsons" on a TV playing in the background (at the last moment they digitally altered the film so that the TV was showing one of the director's other documentaries).
Lessig doesn't support piracy. His views on copyright are far more mainstream than my own. Not everyone who thinks that our copyright system is fundamentally broken is looking for a quick path to free stuff.
As someone who lived basically the same life, I have one word for you: BOOOOOOOOO-RIIIIIIIIIIIING!
I spent my whole childhood thinking that rules were there for a reason. Rules were there to protect us, to keep us safe from terrible dangers, and to keep us working towards becoming the best people we could possibly be. To me, rule-breakers were slime. They were worse than slime. They were violating the Great Social Contract that kept everyone from setting fire to old ladies and blowing up kittens.
After high school, I joined the Army. Learning a whole new and intricate set of rules was an interesting experience. I followed the rules dutifully, but ninety percent of the rules governing soldiers in Basic Training are there solely for the purpose of teaching the soldiers to obey without questioning. The need for that obedience is understandable in some situations. The military is just one of those places where sometimes lives depend on swift, coordinated action.
But in the end, I realized that sometimes the rules were wrong, arbitrary, self-serving, or simply lacking in coherence. Sometimes the process by which the rules are made exhibits the same flaws. Enforcement was either non-existent or arbitrary, and breaking them was more than merely harmless; sometimes it was the only way to get things done.
About the same time, I was becoming aware of the effects of being raised in an extremely rule-oriented religion.
Unquestioning obedience is fine for four year olds. But as soon as possible, kids need to be given explanations for the rules, to the best of their ability to understand. If they don't learn the difference between good rules* and bad rules**, then we're all doomed. The whole democracy thing doesn't work if everyone just does what they're told.
I worry almost as much for the kids who follow the rules compulsively, and are afraid to do anything without explicit permission, as I do for the ones who go around vandalizing and stealing out of boredom. I like the kids who creatively push the limits, game the system, and question those who wield power over them. Especially if they show some level of judgment about the actions that will do real damage, as opposed to the ones that merely make things more interesting.
* Don't set fire to old ladies. Never give your passwords out.
** You must request permission to go to the bathroom, and be back in precisely three minutes.
First, what is this "prosumer" thing? With over a million words in the English language, do we really need to invent another one? I'm not even sure whether this brand new buzzword describes hobbyists looking for professional quality, or professionals who happen to buy stuff, or something else entirely.
Sorry, but I had to get that out of my system. I've had experience with two digital cameras, both Sony Cybershots (a 2.1 and a 5.0 megapixel model). The 2.1 model feels rugged, the pictures are very colorful and sharp, and a 64MB stick will last you pretty much all day. But of course, the resolution sucks.
The 5.0 model has a more fragile feel to it, and doesn't do nearly as well in low light. Nor is it fun to swap sticks every twenty pictures. Finally, you have to hold the camera reeeeeeally still if you want it to come out crisp. I use a tripod whenever possible.
I never expected to use the 2.1 again, and I'm surprised how much I still use it.