hi there. very interesting point. didn't occur to me. but i did think about it after your post.
don't you think that you should also extend exploration three-dimensionally if our age increases? in other words won't we have new planets and stars and asteroids to go around ; just not plain dull cities on the earth.
personally i think we will always have curiosity. the argument that things become dull is akin to the famous statements that everything that has to be invented has been [by some patent office officiando in the late 1800's]
human curiosity is infinite. if we don't get something tangible/physical to look we have enough brains to evolve virtual complex worlds [think math formulae, matrix etc] in our tiny little minds
i agree with your pt. but it applies to EVERYONE who is dealing with some science related subject or the other. i dont see why the "programmer" is so special.
i would think a xray crystallography student will want to maul you if you disturb him/her while he is setting up the experiment and thinking through the steps. i guess the same goes with mathematicians who have flashes of inspired thought.
i think the "programmers are special" is hype. anybody interrupting is bloody painful. period.
i was puzzled to see slashdot have two stories for which no comments were present for quite sometime. one of them i remember was "windows xp patch slowing things down" or some such. anyway after sometime i happened to flush the cache and i come to slashdot again, i dont see those stories. whats up ? i am NOT a subscriber......but then how did i get to see the stories ? or am i making a mistake ? if so please correct me. thanks.
firstly you dont qualify sir/mam. you aint in the category of a "joe user". you are ready to play around with font names , font dirs , x config files, truetype fonts etc right ?
and secondly, i call BULLSHIT. sorry for the harsh words. not directed at you. i just finished a fresh install of psyche and i use debian and other versions of linux on and off daily and i think....
X SUCKS ASS.
believe me i cant stop laughing whenever i look at X and whenever i hear people say things like "too much eyecandy in XP and OSX". hello ? maybe we are just trying a wee bit to justify the defects in a system.i always tend to try to get the job done in the console....
lets look at the facts. randr in xfree86 4.x ? crappy font management still in 4.x ? and suppose one was to write a display system what CRITICAL features would they concentrate on other than the top two ?
frankly X is the biggest barrier to widespread linux usage. yes the new WM's are _AWESOME_, credit to the programmers but i think its in spite of X rather than anything else.
i also find it amusing that SUN is calling the shots on anything here. well maybe they think their contribution to the UI scene is important with their BRILLIANT [sarcasm] environment called CDE which i have used many a time and want to throw a brick at every single time.
anyway whatever. ANYTHING to make X development move is good. go for it.
keith works in the same company as me so call me biased but i hope he gets a free run, i think alan [cox] made a good pt in slashdot the other day that somebody or some people have to go out and make fast changes and try wild things to get X moving.
this is some marketing shmuck in M$ pulling what they do best , a publicity stunt. looks to me that we are the ones who need a reality check.
as another poster pointed out , oracle has the unbreakable ads. heck every company advertises their product as "the best", "the biggest innovation", "the change it all" - its called marketing. agreed that in this case the disconnect between what they say and what is the truth is a little appalling.....
i guess the ASA was worried about PHB's and joe's being misled. well they are a decade or two, too late! The money is in the kitty and the people have already been misled
looking at all of them one thing really strikes you, win95 was quite a leap. till then it really was not close to a usable desktop. win95 was the racehorse...
i use linux 24x7 on various machines and also use windows and mac's and solaris. i aint a newbie. i remember when i was playing around with apt-get i removed the/var/cache directories of apt once by mistake [instead of just the archives/*.deb] and tried to use apt after that. the errors it spewed out were _BS_ and totally non-related, especially it spewed it out multiple times. me not being a debian developer [yet] and thinking that this is something that can be improved - i looked at the bug reports. none of it at that time had this, so i thought i would report. before that i decided to check out the #debian channel on irc.debian.org whether this was ok.....my mistake! it was a horrible experience. basically the people said i was a) a troll b) just want to point out problems in debian c) a deadrat user d) maybe i should stick with windows e) some affirmative responses. no, it was not SOME folks just trolling as usual on irc, they are easy to spot. its more the uniform mindset of the "power users" and "developers". i got so pissed off and i have never been in irc after that. well i _know_ these things happen and can shrug them off. i also can assure you that i am not hyping up a single incident.
coming to the pt, wtf are you guys thinking newbies will do ? you are telling bug reports to be "proper" ? yeah right. i cant begin to tell you the hypocrisy that exists in the minds of most of the developers/power users.
frankly it feels like most of the folks write open source software for _their_ name and use it to show _their_ coolness rather than anything else. i know everybody isnt like that, probably pareto's rule applies in that 20% of the folks do 80% of the work.
right on brother. i used to be an osnews reader and one of their first iirc. i think they are ABSOLUTE goddamn kiddies and trolls of the worst kind - the kind who are semi involved in the industry and hence think they can comment on anything in it.
and you know what, frankly its becoming the same here with slashdot lately.....
please. its just a PRO "chinese space visionary" statement. and even if they are thinking about mining i can bet its a long way off and not in the timeframe he seems to mention.
heck, we earthlings dont seem to be able to get 7 people and to and from from just outside the earths atmosphere.....and we are to expect china to launch their first mission and then soon start a deBeers moon branch immediately?:)
it was nice as long as it was a flourishing community of hackers in true spirit [like the MIT AI lab, the "altair" revolution etc]
the more and more IT has become mainstream the trend seems towards dumbing down towards the common good and innovation has been quite slow relatively [or at least purely based on "consumer demand" which is defined by the "market survey" folks].
i think this is the case for any industry. an industry maturing generally tampers the speed of superb innovation found in its initial stages. except in the case of IT the hype has been much more and the effects global.
huh....How does this hurt ? Of course it does. This is not economics, this is human society. When you want to provide an alternative to Microsoft then it is imperative to provide a unified face.
Actually its ironical that the most intelligent people in one dimension are so brainless [sorry for the harsh term] in another dimension. I have been like that when I was shouting up and down about linux. Let me give you an example: linux in itself came about due to a "critical mass" of organized people saying "hey lets get something out of this malleable chunk of cool code. There WAS before that the *BSD's and unix variants, what was definitely lacking was a concerted effort bounded together by the GPL and also the timing of the internet boom. But linux success HAS been in "rolling out" standard server based software - quickly roll out apache, php, mysql and get running....its SIMPLE isnt it ? its repeatable and its easy to do. quickly do a configure,make, make install - it works across MOST if NOT ALL of the software. WHY ? because the authors want to provide a uniform way of doing things. Extending this to a slightly larger scale doesnt seem to cross the minds of the ners?
While choice might be good for innovation and anti-monopolistic checks too much of choice does hurt. So a EE person asks me what is linux ? I say its an OS with a bunch of utilities. They ask "where can i download it"? and I say "huh....its like soap. you can get many flavours. The most popular is RedHat but you know this driver is supported better in the other distro but you know the security is best in Bastille but you know debian is the best in stability so you have to decide what you want to do" and the people go "huh-uh. thanks for the info.....later". This is for the end user side and believe me it does present a confused picture. For the developer side, thats us, it fractures a LOT of the effort. KDE reinvents the wheel,GNOME cannot *gasp* do what KDE has done and so reinvents it in a slightly different form and so on and on. Imagine the number of install work, the number of packages, the number of hacks, the effort going into each of these distros - if they were to be combined into a select few then I can bet those distros will be awesome.
I cant believe I typed so much. Very sorry for the length. I just really dont agree that too much choice is great. There is a balance just like in real life for most things.
And, by the way, my univ has a linux distro too : SULinux
huh? offtopic . dudes, have you ever read roald dahl's books . the poster above i think refers to that. check roald dahl's website.....
awesome children novels. which figured a larger than life character called willy wonka who did all sorts of zanny things including flying to space if i remember.
+2 ignorant might be better no?:)
vv
google...the *in thing* for CS folks
on
Google buys Pyra Labs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
i wanted to post anonymously but what the heck.
a related thing came up recently in our research group chitchat that google is actually sucking up quite a few of the top notch CS folks - rob pike anyone?:)
and it so happens that a couple of weeks back a bunch of lets say "highly talented" folks left the company i work for to google....:)
this acquisition seems to revalidate that they sure seem to be quite active and healthy and i am darn proud because the founders are our alumni......
i am curious as to why everything has to be done so grandoise. is it an american thing ?
i might be mistaken but living in the bay area for the last 3 years i see one thing: people going overboard mainly caused the dot com boom, caused all the moaning and crying now....the huge buildings, the parties, the vacations, the freebies. i believe the old school style was different and probably a little long lasting?
how is this related to lucas : $300 million in presidio ? yes lucas inc. has a lot of money [so did enron:)] but presidio is prime property in SF and talk of $300 million consolidationa.....whew
No offence but _yes_, you SHOULD get modded down for this. Not because what you say is *unorthodox* but you have got the wrong *reasons* for your argument
Pushing the envelope is always done by a select few. Thats why they are heroes. Why are Formula-1 drivers heroes ? They are ready [sorry for the cliche] to "go where no man/woman has gone". Every advancement _especially_ space is taken with risks and the people who come forward to shoulder the risks for the first few times - cheaply put , those who are ready to be guinea pigs for the betterment of humans _ARE_ DEFINITELY heroes in my book. right ?
Why dont we mourn the death of starving kids? I come from India and I have seen what you say exactly. You bet I agree with you and we should mourn them. But you shouldnt ask why we _are_ mourning the death of the shuttle astronauts. They _were_ pioneers who died for a cause.
really this guy is talking rot. imho i always feel people who say things like `i am smart, i have contacts` [see about cringely portion] blah blah...suck. overrated sensationalist crap. the true folks keep quiet and allow their work to talk instead.
can i say i have noticed that slashdot is becoming like a news rag hyping up people and technology [ooh...its MS bashing time]. similar to cringely, personally, i think lessig is overrated, i am right now in stanford and have seen his works and heard him speak. but then again i guess this site is full of such dual confused philosophies ? [we hate blizzard, i cant wait for next release, we hate m$ but this problem has nothing to do with it, free software rulez, lets beg for the money, linux rulez but how can redhat change a theme *gasp*, we develop software for passion not money , how can someone make money out of it *so bad*]
it was nice initially . now its quite painful to read most of the stuff. news.google + bottomquark + ars technica + cnn makes a good alternative seriously
hey , not to be a pita but can the editors just stop the crappy two line comments at the end of each post. it just makes them and us [the readers] look stupid. thanks but we also can read the stuff you know?
[actually if the comments made sense i would have never posted this but for quite a while it looks like its a ragtag set of folks passing yodaesque comments on the world and how it should run sitting from their basement]
Its nice.....Maybe I am mistaken but isn't this similar to most search technologies a.g. [after google:)] That is to say what other people prefer is automatically tagged the most relevant - google uses it for pageranking, these people display it and some more features.....
Also as another poster suggested what if I virtually stamp all over the place like goto a page and then immediately goto mine - ad inifnitum. Potential to abuse is always there I guess?
Look, you can say all you want but you are talking about something which can basically wipe us. Not to be a controversialist but wherein AIDS and hunger if you aren't there in the first place. Yes, I agree maybe its not top priority as much as the folks quote but its bloody well important. You think even if we spot an asteroid we can do anything about it.....throw a few nukes doesnt solve it. Want us to be sitting ducks and pray ? Maybe you should take a look again about Schu-Levy?
Also how many times will the AIDS+hunger thing come up ? If your view is right then we should stop all technological innovation and start feeding everyone. It doesn't work that way - we should try to fight AIDS, hunger but at the same time its _very_ important to look forward
"We dont know who issue the patent".....is it so tough to track who is the issuing officer. I am surprised it isn't done.
Anyways the reporter should have asked why such an absurd patent was issued in the first place and probably put her in the spot by giving many examples of such crappy patents being issued. Sheesh, its almost like the patent office wants us to think its a clerical error.....and the best is they get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
hi there. very interesting point. didn't occur to me. but i did think about it after your post.
don't you think that you should also extend exploration three-dimensionally if our age increases? in other words won't we have new planets and stars and asteroids to go around ; just not plain dull cities on the earth.
personally i think we will always have curiosity. the argument that things become dull is akin to the famous statements that everything that has to be invented has been [by some patent office officiando in the late 1800's]
human curiosity is infinite. if we don't get something tangible/physical to look we have enough brains to evolve virtual complex worlds [think math formulae, matrix etc] in our tiny little minds
thanks
i agree with your pt. but it applies to EVERYONE who is dealing with some science related subject or the other. i dont see why the "programmer" is so special.
i would think a xray crystallography student will want to maul you if you disturb him/her while he is setting up the experiment and thinking through the steps. i guess the same goes with mathematicians who have flashes of inspired thought.
i think the "programmers are special" is hype.
anybody interrupting is bloody painful. period.
thanks for reading
vv
i was puzzled to see slashdot have two stories for which no comments were present for quite sometime. one of them i remember was "windows xp patch slowing things down" or some such. anyway after sometime i happened to flush the cache and i come to slashdot again, i dont see those stories. whats up ? i am NOT a subscriber......but then how did i get to see the stories ? or am i making a mistake ? if so please correct me. thanks.
vv
firstly you dont qualify sir/mam. you aint in the category of a "joe user". you are ready to play around with font names , font dirs , x config files, truetype fonts etc right ?
and secondly, i call BULLSHIT. sorry for the harsh words. not directed at you. i just finished a fresh install of psyche and i use debian and other versions of linux on and off
daily and i think....
X SUCKS ASS.
believe me i cant stop laughing whenever i look
at X and whenever i hear people say things like
"too much eyecandy in XP and OSX". hello ? maybe
we are just trying a wee bit to justify the
defects in a system.i always tend to try to get the job done in the console....
lets look at the facts. randr in xfree86 4.x ?
crappy font management still in 4.x ? and suppose
one was to write a display system what CRITICAL features would they concentrate on other than the top two ?
frankly X is the biggest barrier to widespread linux usage. yes the new WM's are _AWESOME_, credit to the programmers but i think its in spite of X rather than anything else.
i also find it amusing that SUN is calling the shots on anything here. well maybe they think their contribution to the UI scene is important with their BRILLIANT [sarcasm] environment called CDE which i have used many a time and want to throw a brick at every single time.
anyway whatever. ANYTHING to make X development move is good. go for it.
keith works in the same company as me so call me biased but i hope he gets a free run, i think alan [cox] made a good pt in slashdot the other day that somebody or some people have to go out and make fast changes and try wild things to get X moving.
thanks. sorry for the length of the post.
vv
I dont have anything to hide....
except probably your username?:)
this is some marketing shmuck in M$ pulling what they do best , a publicity stunt. looks to me that we are the ones who need a reality check.
as another poster pointed out , oracle has the
unbreakable ads. heck every company advertises
their product as "the best", "the biggest innovation", "the change it all" - its called
marketing. agreed that in this case the disconnect between what they say and what is the truth is a little appalling.....
i guess the ASA was worried about PHB's and joe's being misled. well they are a decade or two, too late! The money is in the kitty and the people have already been misled
vv
looking at all of them one thing really
strikes you, win95 was quite a leap.
till then it really was not close to
a usable desktop. win95 was the racehorse...
he works in the same floor. am i supposed to
cover my head and code at the same time.
what if he doesnt like a person , does he
just drop the blimp on them
my workplace has just become a chemical hazard. where is ashcroft when you need him!
vv
hear me out. sorry for the long mail.
i use linux 24x7 on various machines and also use windows and mac's and solaris. i aint a newbie. i remember when i was playing around with apt-get
i removed the
once by mistake [instead of just the archives/*.deb] and tried to use apt after
that. the errors it spewed out were _BS_
and totally non-related, especially it spewed
it out multiple times. me not being a debian developer [yet] and thinking that this is something that can be improved - i looked at the bug reports. none of it at that time had this, so i thought i would report. before that i decided to check out the #debian channel on irc.debian.org whether this was ok.....my mistake! it was a horrible experience. basically the people said i was a) a troll b) just want to point out problems in debian c) a deadrat user
d) maybe i should stick with windows e) some affirmative responses. no, it was not SOME
folks just trolling as usual on irc, they are easy to spot. its more the uniform mindset of the "power users" and "developers". i got so pissed off and i have never been in irc after that. well i _know_ these things happen and can shrug them off. i also can assure you that i am not hyping up a single incident.
coming to the pt, wtf are you guys thinking newbies will do ? you are telling bug reports to be "proper" ? yeah right. i cant begin to tell you the hypocrisy that exists in the minds of most of the developers/power users.
frankly it feels like most of the folks write
open source software for _their_ name and use
it to show _their_ coolness rather than anything else. i know everybody isnt like that, probably pareto's rule applies in that 20% of the folks do 80% of the work.
thanks for reading.
vv
right on brother. i used to be an osnews reader and one of their first iirc. i think they are ABSOLUTE goddamn kiddies and trolls of the worst kind - the kind who are semi involved in the industry and hence think they can comment on anything in it.
and you know what, frankly its becoming the same here with slashdot lately.....
vv
please. its just a PRO "chinese space visionary" statement. and even if they are thinking about mining i can bet its a long way off and not in the timeframe he seems to mention.
heck, we earthlings dont seem to be able to get 7 people and to and from from just outside the earths atmosphere.....and we are to expect china to launch their first mission and then soon start a deBeers moon branch immediately?:)
vv
it was nice as long as it was a flourishing
community of hackers in true spirit [like the
MIT AI lab, the "altair" revolution etc]
the more and more IT has become mainstream the
trend seems towards dumbing down towards
the common good and innovation has been quite
slow relatively [or at least purely based on
"consumer demand" which is defined by the "market survey" folks].
i think this is the case for any industry.
an industry maturing generally tampers the
speed of superb innovation found in its
initial stages. except in the case of IT the hype has been much more and the effects global.
thanks for reading,
vv
huh....How does this hurt ? Of course it does. This is not economics, this is human society. When you want to provide an alternative to Microsoft then it is imperative to provide a unified face.
Actually its ironical that the most intelligent people in one dimension are so brainless [sorry for the harsh term] in another dimension. I have been like that when I was shouting up and down about linux. Let me give you an example: linux in itself came about due to a "critical mass" of organized people saying "hey lets get something out of this malleable chunk of cool code. There WAS before that the *BSD's and unix variants, what was definitely lacking was a concerted effort bounded together by the GPL and also the timing of the internet boom. But linux success HAS been in "rolling out" standard server based software - quickly roll out apache, php, mysql and get running....its SIMPLE isnt it ? its repeatable and its easy to do. quickly do a configure,make, make install - it works across MOST if NOT ALL of the software. WHY ? because the authors want to provide a uniform way of doing things. Extending this to a slightly larger scale doesnt seem to cross the minds of the ners?
While choice might be good for innovation and anti-monopolistic checks too much of choice does hurt. So a EE person asks me what is linux ? I say its an OS with a bunch of utilities. They ask "where can i download it"? and I say "huh....its like soap. you can get many flavours. The most popular is RedHat but you know this driver is supported better in the other distro but you know the security is best in Bastille but you know debian is the best in stability so you have to decide what you want to do" and the people go "huh-uh. thanks for the info.....later". This is for the end user side and believe me it does present a confused picture. For the developer side, thats us, it fractures a LOT of the effort. KDE reinvents the wheel,GNOME cannot *gasp* do what KDE has
done and so reinvents it in a slightly different form and so on and on. Imagine the number of install work, the number of packages, the number of hacks, the effort going into each of these distros - if they were to be combined into a select few then I can bet those distros will be awesome.
I cant believe I typed so much. Very sorry for the length. I just really dont agree that too much choice is great. There is a balance just like in real life for most things.
And, by the way, my univ has a linux distro too : SULinux
Thanks for reading.
vv
from the now-that-takes-some-work department......
look who is talking! obviously taco it didnt
take too much work on your part to go ahead
and post a dupe:)
vv
huh? offtopic . dudes, have you ever read roald dahl's books . the poster above i think refers to that. check roald dahl's website.....
awesome children novels. which figured a larger than life character called willy wonka who did all sorts of zanny things including flying to space if i remember.
+2 ignorant might be better no?:)
vv
i wanted to post anonymously but what the heck.
a related thing came up recently in our research group chitchat that google is actually sucking up quite a few of the top notch CS folks - rob pike anyone?:)
and it so happens that a couple of weeks back a bunch of lets say "highly talented" folks left the company i work for to google....:)
this acquisition seems to revalidate that they sure seem to be quite active and healthy and i am darn proud because the founders are our alumni......
i am curious as to why everything has to be
done so grandoise. is it an american thing ?
i might be mistaken but living in the
bay area for the last 3 years i see one thing:
people going overboard mainly caused the dot com boom, caused all the moaning and crying now....the huge buildings, the parties, the vacations, the freebies. i believe the old school style was different and probably a little long lasting?
how is this related to lucas : $300 million
in presidio ? yes lucas inc. has a lot of
money [so did enron:)] but presidio is prime property in SF and talk of $300 million consolidationa.....whew
thanks
No offence but _yes_, you SHOULD get modded down for this. Not because what you say is *unorthodox* but you have got the wrong *reasons* for your argument
Pushing the envelope is always done by a select few. Thats why they are heroes. Why are Formula-1 drivers heroes ? They are ready [sorry for the cliche] to "go where no man/woman has gone". Every advancement _especially_ space is taken with risks and the people who come forward to shoulder the risks for the first few times - cheaply put , those who are ready to be guinea pigs for the betterment of humans _ARE_ DEFINITELY heroes in my book. right ?
Why dont we mourn the death of starving kids? I come from India and I have seen what you say exactly. You bet I agree with you and we should mourn them. But you shouldnt ask why we _are_ mourning the death of the shuttle astronauts. They _were_ pioneers who died for a cause.
Thanks.
vv
really this guy is talking rot. imho i always feel people who say things like `i am smart, i have contacts` [see about cringely portion] blah blah...suck. overrated sensationalist crap. the true folks keep quiet and allow their work to talk instead.
can i say i have noticed that slashdot is becoming like a news rag hyping up people and technology [ooh...its MS bashing time]. similar to cringely, personally, i think lessig is overrated, i am right now in stanford and have seen his works and heard him speak. but then again i guess this site is full of such dual confused philosophies ? [we hate blizzard, i cant wait for next release, we hate m$ but this problem has nothing to do with it, free software rulez, lets beg for the money, linux rulez but how can redhat change a theme *gasp*, we develop software for passion not money , how can someone make money out of it *so bad*]
it was nice initially . now its quite painful to read most of the stuff. news.google + bottomquark + ars technica + cnn makes a good alternative seriously
sorry for the long mail. my $.02 . no offence
vv
hey , not to be a pita but can the editors just
stop the crappy two line comments at
the end of each post. it just makes them
and us [the readers] look stupid. thanks but we also can read the stuff you know?
[actually if the comments made sense i would have never posted this but for quite a while it looks like its a ragtag set of folks passing yodaesque comments on the world and how it should run sitting from their basement]
no offence please.
vv
your comment made perfect sense and i agreed fully until i read...
(mozilla is by far a more complex project that IE ever wanted to be)
huh ? IE and the OS are one and the same dude!! you been under a rock or what ?
*shakes head*
Its nice.....Maybe I am mistaken but isn't this similar to most search technologies a.g. [after google:)] That is to say what other people prefer is automatically tagged the most relevant - google uses it for pageranking, these people display it and some more features.....
Also as another poster suggested what if I virtually stamp all over the place like goto a page and then immediately goto mine - ad inifnitum. Potential to abuse is always there I guess?
Thanks,
vv
Gee...talk about brand name being a problem in this case. I bet half the folks think of a CGA display 40x25 text mode when they hear the name "Amiga".
Unfortunately the amiga folks have to shake that image - I guess a consistently good product over time is the key here , as is the case anywhere
vv
I think you are being way to skeptical here .
Look, you can say all you want but you are talking about something which can basically wipe us. Not to be a controversialist but wherein AIDS and hunger if you aren't there in the first place. Yes, I agree maybe its not top priority as much as the folks quote but its bloody well important. You think even if we spot an asteroid we can do anything about it.....throw a few nukes doesnt solve it. Want us to be sitting ducks and pray ? Maybe you should take a look again about Schu-Levy?
Also how many times will the AIDS+hunger thing come up ? If your view is right then we should stop all technological innovation and start feeding everyone. It doesn't work that way - we should try to fight AIDS, hunger but at the same time its _very_ important to look forward
No offence. Thanks,
vv
What does the lady from the patent office mean?!
"We dont know who issue the patent".....is it so tough to track who is the issuing officer. I am surprised it isn't done.
Anyways the reporter should have asked why such an absurd patent was issued in the first place and probably put her in the spot by giving many examples of such crappy patents being issued. Sheesh, its almost like the patent office wants us to think its a clerical error.....and the best is they get away with it.
vv