"Would you like to not have red hair, like just about everyone else?" "Would you like to be shorter/taller than you are, like just about everyone else?"
We build our surroundings inaccessible to people who are short or tall beyond the standard deviation. We discriminate - some of us, at least - against those who are "different". The moral dilemma is that we really should change that rather than change those who are "different". As long as we don't, there's an enormous amount of pressure on those "different", to the point where many of them might actually answer the above questions with "yes".
"Would you like to have darker/lighter skin than you do, like just about everyone else [where you live]?" "Would you like to have straighter/curlier hair than you do, like just about everyone else [where you live]?"
At that point we're dangerously close to racism. Which is just one form of discrimination; you can just as easily discriminate against the red-haired, the deaf, or the colour-blind.
If that's what you catch yourself doing, change yourself, not them.
There's been a relative scare over this a few months ago, in or around Novembre 2009. Suddenly a flurry of blog posts announced that the fragmentation in Android devices and OS versions will surely doom the platform forever.
Interestingly enough, round about the same time, some Facebook developer got vocal about Apple's app store policies and talked about rejecting the iPhone because it sucks so much (paraphrased).
To me, all this means that there's a platform war raging right now, and perpetuating one myth or another by reposting it is not going to help the better platform win.
Now I earn money developing for both platforms, and - if you take my word for it - I can tell you that each of them sucks in it's own way, and pretty hard in some cases. I'll not give a list of what *I* think sucks on each platform, because ymmv.
But this whole fragmentation thing being a problem is mostly a myth. Yes, you'll need to design your app a little carefully to run on all (or almost all) devices out there. But then you need to do the same thing for other platforms as well, it's just not as widely advertised.
The release of the iPad might change people's perceptions of that when it comes to iPhone OS - there's already a pretty severe fragmentation happening here, but people tend not to realize unless they use certain functionality. Games depending on high framerates. Or phone functionality. Or a compass. Or whatever.
Fragmentation when it comes to mobile devices is pretty much inevitable. If you didn't expect that, you're an idiot. At least Android tries to be helpful and points that out right in it's developer documentation.
I don't think privacy is a biological imperative, but a psychological one, which I would argue is based on biological imperatives. You may disagree, of course.
actually, some of my most interesting music purchases were from bargain bins. not many of them were particularily acclaimed pieces of music. taste varies...
it's a bigger change to slashdot per se, but little changes for the user: - strip the submission of credits and everything pointing to the submitter - add a link to the original, completely unaltered submission for readers to follow to if they're interested, and make the link name the submitter's name so there's some credit.
that would work for me as a reader, and if i imagine myself in the position of a submitter, i'd be happy as well.
i agree. it's similar to the time-honoured "read more" link at the bottom of a blurb. i've scanned the blurb quickly and sloppily, something caught my interest, now i want to open the real article in a new window/tab/widget-of-the-year.
... i.e. that open source projects lack in quality (security), because there is no quality assurance. as i see it, that's true for recent projects, and as the project matures, that changes drastically. for something like wikipedia, that probably means that you should treat every page as a project - the first couple of versions are likely (but not necessarily) of lower quality, and as the page gets revised, it matures. that _does_ pose a problem if you want to use wikipedia as a definite source. on the other hand, no encyclopedia article can replace a textbook on the same topic, so people should take a wikipedia article for what it is: an entrypoint to a topic.
as the subject says, imho it needs a lossless audio format to replace the cd. unless that's offered for a lower price, i'll always go for the cd. currently i use flac to rip my cds to disk. harddisks are getting cheaper and cheaper...
first, there are several kinds of ops, as you probably know. the ones i know of i'll list here:
PRK you shouldn't do, the risk of anything going wrong is comparatively high.
LASIK is the one i did, i'm and i'm pretty happy with the results.
LASEK is a moderately new one, it sounds like it's the same as LASIK with the flap that's being taken off much thinner, so they remove tissue from the same layer as in PRK, but it's about as safe as LASIK - more painful, takes longer to heal. it's recommended for those that can do it, but some skin layer might be too thin, so then you'd have to do LASIK.
anyway, i'm sure you can use google to read up more about those, in case you haven't.
the real problem with LASIK and LASEK is, that there's only about 5ish years 'long-term' experience with it. noone knows what'll happen 20 years after the op.
with PRK the long-term experience is a lot better, and for most people things stay just fine. so since both LASIK and LASEK are safer in principle, it's reasonable to assume that you'd be fine, too.
i took the risk because i couldn't stand my glasses any longer. i kept misplacing them, and was nearsighted enough to not find them again once i misplaced them - funny in a way, but not when it happens to you. my eyes are smallish, and pretty dry, so even using contacts that let a lot of oxygen through i couldn't stand them for more than about 6 hours at a stretch, which sucks when you consider a normal workday.
anyway. the op was quick, painless, but terrifying because your vision goes (first completely, then blurry), while you're otherwise fully conscious, and you can't help thinking 'oh god i'll never be able to see again'. heh.
apparently my eyes were a bit sensitive to light, so right after the op i was blinded - i was given some sunglasses for my way home, and everything i saw had a glowing halo. for about a week lights had a halo, then everything was back to normal. i see better at night now than i used to, because my glasses also reflected light badly (good glasses, but some things you just can't do properly, it seems) - whether i see better or worse than with contacts i can't say. the pain for that day was a bit like when you've been cutting onions... annoying, but bearable.
after the op my vision changed from -6/-3.5 diopter (?) to +0.25/0, which is pretty much a perfect result. (+/- 0.5 after the op is considered normal).
which reminds me of something i don't think about often anymore: my eyes being so different, my brain just shut out information from my worse eye most of the time, so i didn't see in 3d. afterwards i kept being completely fascinated and deliriously happy about how plastic things looked.
so, while i'm not sure how things'll be in the future, i'm completely happy with the op.
one other thing to note is that of course your eyes will get worse again with age, just like any other persons. so in a way, the younger you are when you do the op, the more you get from it.
kcachegrind is a wonderful and very visual (=intuitive) tool that really helps you profiling (i.e. a frontend to valgrind). Instead of showing how much time is spent in a particular function, it shows how many instructions are executed in that context - often a much better approach, as functions may be waiting (and necessarily!) most of their time.
Altogether, with gprof and kcachegrind, it's pretty simple to find bottlenecks in an application. One of my colleagues added/helped add support for reading python profiling logs, so profiling python works well, too.
actually, green tea has a higher caffeine content than coffee. at least, that's what i read about it (can't quote sources, it's been some time). the fermentation process to make black tea out of green tea destroys a lot of the caffeine, so black tea has less than coffee. that's just afaik.
... for the most hypnotic effect, the great giana sisters (super mario brothers rip-off on c64) and tetris on the gameboy.... for the most frightening, doom/alien total conversion... for the most immersive, ultima underworld... the funniest ever, monkey island (quickly followed by space quest)... strategy: difficult. i used to love dune (the one _before_ dune 2 and all that realtime strategy stuff), but i'd say starcraft.
as you can see, recent games just don't do it. i don't know why, either i'm getting old, or they're getting a lot worse (which i privately suspect).
i agree, though i wouldn't have put it that eloquently. it seems to me that nemesis was the worst star trek since 'generations'. very predictable, very boring, very contrived, very much an action movie instead of the nice mixture of action and pure geekiness that star trek used to have. *shrugs* it's been a few years since i've been a fan, but i still enjoyed watching a new movie every couple of years. this one has put me off a little.
... i'll say whoever spends $250,000 on a cd production is bloody stupid. a good studio with technicians will cost around $1,000-$2,000 a week. if your artists aren't completely incompetent and can focus on production only (i.e. song-writing and most experimentation should be done!), that's more than enough to record an album.
original cover art (if it's painted, one of the more expensive things) will cost you around $2,000-$3,000 with all publishing rights. cover/booklet designers will cost something around $2,000 for the design.
so that'd be between $5,000-$7,000 per cd. let's say you're extravagant or are swimming in money, or stumble around blindly during production and take a lot more time, and triple the amount, you'd be at $21,000.
now _promoting_ the album is an entirely different matter. that not only costs a lot of money, but also time, and time == money for the business, i'm afraid.
considering that the figures you've heard are mostly about very popular artists (that's what i assume, at least), you can be sure that massive amounts are spent on propaganda... err.. marketing, i mean.
i'd be curious why you're asking, because if you're looking into producing cds yourself, don't worry about huge costs for that part.
he's compared to philip k. dick, which i don't really understand, but maybe you do. his writing is like he's paranoid and on drugs, but very intense and full of interesting ideas. i'd call it sf, but it's more like a trip into the psyche of the future's misfits.
i tend to find the 'old' authors better, so i suppose that's the only one i can name.
erm, just to avoid confusion, not to insult people: i tend to call sf what other people call hard sf. lem, asimov, brunner, that sort of thing. not something like otherland or similar nice but relatively shallow stuff.
i had the lasik operation about half a year ago, going from -6.25 left eye and -3.5 rigth eye with some addional myopia on the left to +.25 on the left (yeah, that wasn't perfect) and +/-0 on the right.
i was left badly blinded after the operation, and saw only through a white haze for about two days, but apart from that and a slight stinging in the eyes for the remainder of the day i had the op on, there was no trouble.
i did suffer glare for about 4 weeks or so, but that's more or less gone now (halos are a tiny bit bigger than previously around bright lights in the dark).
so much for the problems. the good thing is: i can see in 3d again:D and that is worth the risk any time. i'd recommend it. my eyes are too good for coding by now:P
basically, there are two types of customers for linux, those who want a good server os, and those who want a desktop os. the server os (including ftp, http, ssh, nfs and whatnot) should not grow bigger than 500 megs (in binaries, libraries, other resources and documentation) unless you're doing something wrong. a lot of those servers (like caching proxies) may need more disk space for their purposes, but that's not really part of the distro.
desktop os's on the other hand are another matter. if you've downloaded and installed staroffice, for example, you might note that you'll easily lose 300 megs just for that.
the "bloat" is in my opinion the attempt to
a) serve both types of customers and
b) to put several programs that do essentially the same on one distro.
if you take a look at the lfs-howto, you might see that with it's help you can create a good base system (no servers, no user-apps, but just about anything you need to build your own programs), which does not exceed 250 megs in size. suse, to state one example, requires more than twice that for their basic system, and if you install the development stuff you can easily go beyond the 1gig border. granted, there's a lot of development stuff on that distro.
well, being german myself i don't think that's too funny. the issue about the defrag tool has not been raised so much for security reasons, but for political ones. scientology, while not illegal, has certain aspects that are contrary to how most people here interpret the human rights.
a lot of companies here do not offer jobs to scientologists. that's because the sect rewards people getting into influential positions in their jobs... i certainly don't know why, but i can make wild guesses.
the security hole with the win2k defrag tool exists only in potentia. imagine having someone you can trust to do their job at least partly for the sect they are a member of to have rather unrestricted access to your (secure) system.
of course germans may be a little paranoid as concerns scientology - on the other hand, _one_ organized, well-structured mob out for world domination has been enough.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty simplistic attitude.
"Would you like to not have red hair, like just about everyone else?"
"Would you like to be shorter/taller than you are, like just about everyone else?"
We build our surroundings inaccessible to people who are short or tall beyond the standard deviation. We discriminate - some of us, at least - against those who are "different". The moral dilemma is that we really should change that rather than change those who are "different". As long as we don't, there's an enormous amount of pressure on those "different", to the point where many of them might actually answer the above questions with "yes".
"Would you like to have darker/lighter skin than you do, like just about everyone else [where you live]?"
"Would you like to have straighter/curlier hair than you do, like just about everyone else [where you live]?"
At that point we're dangerously close to racism. Which is just one form of discrimination; you can just as easily discriminate against the red-haired, the deaf, or the colour-blind.
If that's what you catch yourself doing, change yourself, not them.
There's been a relative scare over this a few months ago, in or around Novembre 2009. Suddenly a flurry of blog posts announced that the fragmentation in Android devices and OS versions will surely doom the platform forever.
Interestingly enough, round about the same time, some Facebook developer got vocal about Apple's app store policies and talked about rejecting the iPhone because it sucks so much (paraphrased).
To me, all this means that there's a platform war raging right now, and perpetuating one myth or another by reposting it is not going to help the better platform win.
Now I earn money developing for both platforms, and - if you take my word for it - I can tell you that each of them sucks in it's own way, and pretty hard in some cases. I'll not give a list of what *I* think sucks on each platform, because ymmv.
But this whole fragmentation thing being a problem is mostly a myth. Yes, you'll need to design your app a little carefully to run on all (or almost all) devices out there. But then you need to do the same thing for other platforms as well, it's just not as widely advertised.
The release of the iPad might change people's perceptions of that when it comes to iPhone OS - there's already a pretty severe fragmentation happening here, but people tend not to realize unless they use certain functionality. Games depending on high framerates. Or phone functionality. Or a compass. Or whatever.
Fragmentation when it comes to mobile devices is pretty much inevitable. If you didn't expect that, you're an idiot. At least Android tries to be helpful and points that out right in it's developer documentation.
My thoughts exactly.
Oddly enough, I ranted about the whole thing yesterday here: http://www.unwesen.de/articles/ive_got_nothing_to_ hide
I don't think privacy is a biological imperative, but a psychological one, which I would argue is based on biological imperatives. You may disagree, of course.
Sounds suspiciously like a rehash of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_I nfluence
My favourite is when people write "bare with me". Get naked with me?
Surely you're ignoring the cost of bandwidth?
actually, some of my most interesting music purchases were from bargain bins. not many of them were particularily acclaimed pieces of music. taste varies...
it's a bigger change to slashdot per se, but little changes for the user:
- strip the submission of credits and everything pointing to the submitter
- add a link to the original, completely unaltered submission for readers to follow to if they're interested, and make the link name the submitter's name so there's some credit.
that would work for me as a reader, and if i imagine myself in the position of a submitter, i'd be happy as well.
i agree. it's similar to the time-honoured "read more" link at the bottom of a blurb. i've scanned the blurb quickly and sloppily, something caught my interest, now i want to open the real article in a new window/tab/widget-of-the-year.
... i.e. that open source projects lack in quality (security), because there is no quality assurance. as i see it, that's true for recent projects, and as the project matures, that changes drastically. for something like wikipedia, that probably means that you should treat every page as a project - the first couple of versions are likely (but not necessarily) of lower quality, and as the page gets revised, it matures. that _does_ pose a problem if you want to use wikipedia as a definite source. on the other hand, no encyclopedia article can replace a textbook on the same topic, so people should take a wikipedia article for what it is: an entrypoint to a topic.
as the subject says, imho it needs a lossless audio format to replace the cd. unless that's offered for a lower price, i'll always go for the cd. currently i use flac to rip my cds to disk. harddisks are getting cheaper and cheaper...
well.
first, there are several kinds of ops, as you probably know. the ones i know of i'll list here:
PRK you shouldn't do, the risk of anything going wrong is comparatively high.
LASIK is the one i did, i'm and i'm pretty happy with the results.
LASEK is a moderately new one, it sounds like it's the same as LASIK with the flap that's being taken off much thinner, so they remove tissue from the same layer as in PRK, but it's about as safe as LASIK - more painful, takes longer to heal. it's recommended for those that can do it, but some skin layer might be too thin, so then you'd have to do LASIK.
anyway, i'm sure you can use google to read up more about those, in case you haven't.
the real problem with LASIK and LASEK is, that there's only about 5ish years 'long-term' experience with it. noone knows what'll happen 20 years after the op.
with PRK the long-term experience is a lot better, and for most people things stay just fine. so since both LASIK and LASEK are safer in principle, it's reasonable to assume that you'd be fine, too.
i took the risk because i couldn't stand my glasses any longer. i kept misplacing them, and was nearsighted enough to not find them again once i misplaced them - funny in a way, but not when it happens to you. my eyes are smallish, and pretty dry, so even using contacts that let a lot of oxygen through i couldn't stand them for more than about 6 hours at a stretch, which sucks when you consider a normal workday.
anyway. the op was quick, painless, but terrifying because your vision goes (first completely, then blurry), while you're otherwise fully conscious, and you can't help thinking 'oh god i'll never be able to see again'. heh.
apparently my eyes were a bit sensitive to light, so right after the op i was blinded - i was given some sunglasses for my way home, and everything i saw had a glowing halo. for about a week lights had a halo, then everything was back to normal. i see better at night now than i used to, because my glasses also reflected light badly (good glasses, but some things you just can't do properly, it seems) - whether i see better or worse than with contacts i can't say. the pain for that day was a bit like when you've been cutting onions... annoying, but bearable.
after the op my vision changed from -6/-3.5 diopter (?) to +0.25/0, which is pretty much a perfect result. (+/- 0.5 after the op is considered normal).
which reminds me of something i don't think about often anymore: my eyes being so different, my brain just shut out information from my worse eye most of the time, so i didn't see in 3d. afterwards i kept being completely fascinated and deliriously happy about how plastic things looked.
so, while i'm not sure how things'll be in the future, i'm completely happy with the op.
one other thing to note is that of course your eyes will get worse again with age, just like any other persons. so in a way, the younger you are when you do the op, the more you get from it.
hope this helped!
kcachegrind is a wonderful and very visual (=intuitive) tool that really helps you profiling (i.e. a frontend to valgrind). Instead of showing how much time is spent in a particular function, it shows how many instructions are executed in that context - often a much better approach, as functions may be waiting (and necessarily!) most of their time.
Altogether, with gprof and kcachegrind, it's pretty simple to find bottlenecks in an application. One of my colleagues added/helped add support for reading python profiling logs, so profiling python works well, too.
actually, green tea has a higher caffeine content than coffee. at least, that's what i read about it (can't quote sources, it's been some time). the fermentation process to make black tea out of green tea destroys a lot of the caffeine, so black tea has less than coffee. that's just afaik.
... for the most hypnotic effect, the great giana sisters (super mario brothers rip-off on c64) and tetris on the gameboy. ... for the most frightening, doom/alien total conversion ... for the most immersive, ultima underworld ... the funniest ever, monkey island (quickly followed by space quest) ... strategy: difficult. i used to love dune (the one _before_ dune 2 and all that realtime strategy stuff), but i'd say starcraft.
as you can see, recent games just don't do it. i don't know why, either i'm getting old, or they're getting a lot worse (which i privately suspect).
i agree, though i wouldn't have put it that eloquently. it seems to me that nemesis was the worst star trek since 'generations'. very predictable, very boring, very contrived, very much an action movie instead of the nice mixture of action and pure geekiness that star trek used to have. *shrugs* it's been a few years since i've been a fan, but i still enjoyed watching a new movie every couple of years. this one has put me off a little.
... i'll say whoever spends $250,000 on a cd production is bloody stupid. a good studio with technicians will cost around $1,000-$2,000 a week. if your artists aren't completely incompetent and can focus on production only (i.e. song-writing and most experimentation should be done!), that's more than enough to record an album.
original cover art (if it's painted, one of the more expensive things) will cost you around $2,000-$3,000 with all publishing rights. cover/booklet designers will cost something around $2,000 for the design.
so that'd be between $5,000-$7,000 per cd. let's say you're extravagant or are swimming in money, or stumble around blindly during production and take a lot more time, and triple the amount, you'd be at $21,000.
now _promoting_ the album is an entirely different matter. that not only costs a lot of money, but also time, and time == money for the business, i'm afraid.
considering that the figures you've heard are mostly about very popular artists (that's what i assume, at least), you can be sure that massive amounts are spent on propaganda... err.. marketing, i mean.
i'd be curious why you're asking, because if you're looking into producing cds yourself, don't worry about huge costs for that part.
he's compared to philip k. dick, which i don't really understand, but maybe you do. his writing is like he's paranoid and on drugs, but very intense and full of interesting ideas. i'd call it sf, but it's more like a trip into the psyche of the future's misfits.
i tend to find the 'old' authors better, so i suppose that's the only one i can name.
erm, just to avoid confusion, not to insult people: i tend to call sf what other people call hard sf. lem, asimov, brunner, that sort of thing. not something like otherland or similar nice but relatively shallow stuff.
... but it's interesting to find out an origin for the vurt feather's name.
hi!
:D and that is worth the risk any time. i'd recommend it. my eyes are too good for coding by now :P
i had the lasik operation about half a year ago, going from -6.25 left eye and -3.5 rigth eye with some addional myopia on the left to +.25 on the left (yeah, that wasn't perfect) and +/-0 on the right.
i was left badly blinded after the operation, and saw only through a white haze for about two days, but apart from that and a slight stinging in the eyes for the remainder of the day i had the op on, there was no trouble.
i did suffer glare for about 4 weeks or so, but that's more or less gone now (halos are a tiny bit bigger than previously around bright lights in the dark).
so much for the problems. the good thing is: i can see in 3d again
basically, there are two types of customers for linux, those who want a good server os, and those who want a desktop os. the server os (including ftp, http, ssh, nfs and whatnot) should not grow bigger than 500 megs (in binaries, libraries, other resources and documentation) unless you're doing something wrong. a lot of those servers (like caching proxies) may need more disk space for their purposes, but that's not really part of the distro.
desktop os's on the other hand are another matter. if you've downloaded and installed staroffice, for example, you might note that you'll easily lose 300 megs just for that.
the "bloat" is in my opinion the attempt to
a) serve both types of customers and
b) to put several programs that do essentially the same on one distro.
if you take a look at the lfs-howto, you might see that with it's help you can create a good base system (no servers, no user-apps, but just about anything you need to build your own programs), which does not exceed 250 megs in size. suse, to state one example, requires more than twice that for their basic system, and if you install the development stuff you can easily go beyond the 1gig border. granted, there's a lot of development stuff on that distro.
well, being german myself i don't think that's too funny. the issue about the defrag tool has not been raised so much for security reasons, but for political ones. scientology, while not illegal, has certain aspects that are contrary to how most people here interpret the human rights.
a lot of companies here do not offer jobs to scientologists. that's because the sect rewards people getting into influential positions in their jobs... i certainly don't know why, but i can make wild guesses.
the security hole with the win2k defrag tool exists only in potentia. imagine having someone you can trust to do their job at least partly for the sect they are a member of to have rather unrestricted access to your (secure) system.
of course germans may be a little paranoid as concerns scientology - on the other hand, _one_ organized, well-structured mob out for world domination has been enough.