Unless someone can give me conclusive proof that this device was constructed under direct instructions from the anti-christ to be implanted in our head or hands to control whether we can buy or sell goods--no way am i getting one.
Without the satan angle its just some cheezy way for Big Brother to make sure i'm staying where i should, and nobody needs that kind of hassle.
Thats exactly what i thought when i saw it. I don't think i'd trust it around small children at all, it doesn't look like something cute like a puppy, and with its dorky shape and colors would encourage kicking.
The japanese scarecrow-like person that had it change the tv channel in the "what does it do?" section was pretty funny though.
The sourceXchange people just sent out a letter on their developer list explaining their activities, it starts out:
"A lot has happened since we last communicated; that's our fault, as we've been waiting for just the right moment to contact you again. That time is now."
Mighty funny how this got sent out 2 hours after I put my other message up, but maybe i'm just reading too much into it. A company based on Open Source software development reading the comments on an article about their arch rival on/., the place most likely to catch the eyeballs of OSS developers--no, that doesn't really sound that likely.
I would tend to agree that these incentive programs don't really lead to getting more code written. The reason why open source rocks is because the person who writes it actually cares about the quality of every line (or they should anyway...), not because they are getting paid to create something that adheres to some design specification with X% acceptable error rate. I have a bit of experience with CoSource's rival, sourceXchange, which is where i base my opinion on projects of this nature. There are differences between the 2 (sourceXchange seems to just have projects from HP for instance) but the concept is the same. I submitted a proposal for a project at sourceXchange, there was a few respones i got back from HP about it for a while, then the whole sourceXchange site just sort of went into sleep mode for a month or 2, or something. I had read quite a bit of HP's documentation on the software the sourceXchange project was to be based on, and it was fairly interesting. Interesting enough, that if it wasn't for the "incentive" of $20K for the person who got the contract i would have probably just written it and submitted it to the public. I just sort of forgot about sourceXchange after months of no visible activity on their site, then suddenly i got several emails saying that they were going to finally award the contract. I went back over all my notes, submitted another proposal to take into account the changed time schedule--then heard nothing. A few weeks later the entire sourceXchange site has a totally new "look", complete with a new list of projects! What the hell happened to the old ones that everybody put proposals in for? They just disappeared, nobody got them. I wouldn't be so pissed about it if they hadn't told me a couple of weeks before that they were going to assign the projects. I wouldn't be pissed at all if they had said, "Hey, can somebody write some software for us in their spare time? We can't pay you but we'll credit you as the author." I, or somebody else, if interested would just write the damn thing.
Documentation is another issue though (and i mean more than a cryptic message commented out in your code, real documentation like a user manual or API reference), i think that would have a much higher chance of success in this incentive model than software.
I'd have to tend to agree with you on this. I'm not familiar with this latest VAJ, because of all the bad things that were in previous versions i stopped using it. There have been some people making comments in threads on this that VAJ is the way to go for large projects, i'd have to argue against this. VAJ generates code that is damn near unreadable by anything other than VAJ, so if you really are making a LARGE piece of software, something that is going to be around for years, you better make sure you keep an old copy of VAJ around if you ever need to edit anything. This generated code also makes a real hassle if you plan to try and make the software open source--the only way to read your open source software is with a propietary IDE.
OBVIOUSLY the decision was released on a friday after the market closed so as not to cause a panic, doesn't take a genius to figure that out. A good argument can be made that the global economy is most influenced by the US economy, and the US economy is currently most influenced by tech stocks. What tech stock has performed so reliably well for years that it gave investors confidence in technology--M$. If investors doubt M$'s viability, maybe they'll think twice about all these other much more risky tech stocks they've inflated the price of. If this decision was released at the opening of trading, all it would take would be a couple of panic filled hours to have many billions of $ of the speculative worth of corp.'s disappear into the void. I'm not saying that it would be guaranteed to happen, but the potential for great damage is definitely there. How could this needless damage to the lives of millions across the globe (not to mention the damage to a certain public official's reputation) be averted? Thats right, release the news friday evening and give enough time for clearer heads to prevail. It would be imprudent in the extreme for a judge supposedly defending the rights of a free market economy to create such a threat to it.
Wow! You really got some metric people mad, guess they're really passionate about their units of measurement. I personally don't care whether i have to use the metric or english or whatever, seems all pretty arbitrary, except when it comes to the temperature scale. Outside of a chemistry class i have yet to find that the boiling point of water is easier to deal with at 100' then it is at 212', i don't usually have to make to many calculations to boil something it just sort of happens. When you have a range of degrees from 32-212 it gives you finer degree of control in setting your climate controls then 0-100. I like the room to be around 72'F, to get that same temperature in C i would have to resort to some fractional degree, making it tedious to get the temperature just right. So i don't know if your whole argument about non-metric units being more human friendly is correct, but i believe the Fahrenheit system is more human-centric because a change in 1'F is about as subtle a temperature change that a human can feel.
It wasn't until i was well into being a teenager that i taught myself all the non-metric units--because in school all that was ever taught was metric (and yes, i did go to school in the US). How the hell do you get to design flights for spacecraft and not know that you're supposed to use metric units?!!?! This is just bizarre, truly unthinkable idiocy. If that was my project i had just pumped years into i would be thinking lawsuit, heads should literally roll over something like this. The story said the confusion was between Lockheed Martin and JPL, anybody know who the stupid (i mean guilty...) party is? My guess is it would be Lockheed Martin, but you never know...
I believe this DOES have relevance to origins discussion--if it can be done it proves that the "spark" of life can be created without resorting to divine intervention. All that is required is ordinary materials arranged in a particular pattern to create life, no miracle required.
"This is of no relevance to origins discussion because it doesn't show what can come about by chance. I'll be impressed when they cook a pot of chemicals into a bacteria"
If it can be accomplished, i believe we have a starting point to determine exactly how difficult the arrangement of chemicals to form life is. Someone who is a greater chemist than I should then be able to roughly calculate (model more likely) the probabability of given a solution of the required chemicals, what is the probability that they will combine in the proper pattern to create life. I'll bet the probability will be pretty low--it will probably turn out that you need a pot of chemicals about the size of the earth and a few hundred million years to cook it to ever create one bacteria...
Java gives you *much* better code inoperablity right now. interoperablitity...sigh... It is generally good, but you can occasionally come across errors--it's not perfect. If you have something tweaked and optimized with threads on one os, uh-oh some of that native thread stuff works a little different someplace else. There is also the problem of just plain bugs that can happen in the Java logic itself (unrelated to native code dependency) that only occur on one distribution, making funny effects across different machines.
I had a (somewhat) similar thought when I read the article.
I'm not cool enough to be able to speed read in parallel, but i'm pretty sure i can edit that way. For the last couple of years i've been able to look at a page of print, and my eyes will suddenly focus on a typo--it takes a second or two for my conscious mind to recognize what my eyes are focusing on is an error. Other people have mentioned the experiment of when given any number of green boxes, and one red box, that a person can find the red box in the same amount of time irregardless of how many green boxes there are. I believe that my high speed editing parlor trick is similar to this problem--over time my mind has become trained to recognize patterns of text as naturally as patterns of color. If the "nick on the box" test was carried out for several months, possibly several years, the results might vary. Meaning, that over time the people would become more expert at noticing nicks on boxes and the brain might process the information on a higher symbolic level. I doubt that anyone would want to check for nicks on boxes for that long, but there must surely be a job similar to the experiment in manufacturing or processing. Some sort of quality control job where a person has to watch a line of goods go by that they check for defects. Testing if a person who has done a task like that for several years (and is actually good at it!) has trained their neural net to perform the task in a parallel manner would be interesting, and would give a broader view of the nature of the cognitive process. You would only need to find one person that could process image data this way and it would muddy the picture presented by the article.
Who knows, maybe people in Iowa are just more proned to seeing things serially than other humans;-)
In the article it said that larger companies could get an expensive 'Enterprise Server' to send email without need for people to have a desktop. It seems a 'larger company' could also mean an ISP, so an ISP with $ to burn could set up the Blackberry service as a user account perk. The article wasn't clear exactly what was meant by 'Enterprise Server'. I assume it to mean software that most likely would only run on NT, but it could possibly be some sort of special Blackberry hardware as well.
I guess an argument could be made that prostitutes are SHAREware, but i'm sure he would argue that they should give up their 'product' for free for the benefit of the community. Maybe he'd be willing to pay for the documentation from them to figure out what the hell to do.
Here i thought i was the only person that dreamed about living in am impenetrable fortress of solitude. I've seriously dreamed about living in something like this since i was about 8. But $2.3 *10^6??!!?? There's got to be more of these old gov't ratholes laying around that nobody has turned into some gentrified apocalypse retreat yet that you could get cheap(er). Anybody out there ever seen a listing of gov't surplus bomb shelter/fortresses out there? I know something like this must exist somewhere, it would involve paperwork so it would make the gov't happy, plus the people that made this silo house had to find out where to buy the land in the first place
How about something like DirectX?
on
Gaming on Linux
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Does anyone else have experience (good or bad) with other X-servers besides just Accelerated X? Speedier graphics is definitely in my top 3 wishes for my linux box right now. The few times I've crashed i can always trace it back to piss poor performance from Xfree86 trying to display something a Classic Mac could handle.
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Unless someone can give me conclusive proof that this device was constructed under direct instructions from the anti-christ to be implanted in our head or hands to control whether we can buy or sell goods--no way am i getting one.
Without the satan angle its just some cheezy way for Big Brother to make sure i'm staying where i should, and nobody needs that kind of hassle.
Thats exactly what i thought when i saw it. I don't think i'd trust it around small children at all, it doesn't look like something cute like a puppy, and with its dorky shape and colors would encourage kicking.
The japanese scarecrow-like person that had it change the tv channel in the "what does it do?" section was pretty funny though.
The sourceXchange people just sent out a letter on their developer list explaining their activities, it starts out:
/., the place most likely to catch the eyeballs of OSS developers--no, that doesn't really sound that likely.
"A lot has happened since we last communicated; that's our fault, as we've been waiting for just the right moment to contact you again. That time is now."
Mighty funny how this got sent out 2 hours after I put my other message up, but maybe i'm just reading too much into it. A company based on Open Source software development reading the comments on an article about their arch rival on
Well, they're trying anyway...
They wanted Java RMI code to work with the HP e-speak product.
I would tend to agree that these incentive programs don't really lead to getting more code written. The reason why open source rocks is because the person who writes it actually cares about the quality of every line (or they should anyway...), not because they are getting paid to create something that adheres to some design specification with X% acceptable error rate.
I have a bit of experience with CoSource's rival, sourceXchange, which is where i base my opinion on projects of this nature. There are differences between the 2 (sourceXchange seems to just have projects from HP for instance) but the concept is the same. I submitted a proposal for a project at sourceXchange, there was a few respones i got back from HP about it for a while, then the whole sourceXchange site just sort of went into sleep mode for a month or 2, or something. I had read quite a bit of HP's documentation on the software the sourceXchange project was to be based on, and it was fairly interesting. Interesting enough, that if it wasn't for the "incentive" of $20K for the person who got the contract i would have probably just written it and submitted it to the public. I just sort of forgot about sourceXchange after months of no visible activity on their site, then suddenly i got several emails saying that they were going to finally award the contract. I went back over all my notes, submitted another proposal to take into account the changed time schedule--then heard nothing. A few weeks later the entire sourceXchange site has a totally new "look", complete with a new list of projects! What the hell happened to the old ones that everybody put proposals in for? They just disappeared, nobody got them. I wouldn't be so pissed about it if they hadn't told me a couple of weeks before that they were going to assign the projects.
I wouldn't be pissed at all if they had said, "Hey, can somebody write some software for us in their spare time? We can't pay you but we'll credit you as the author." I, or somebody else, if interested would just write the damn thing.
Documentation is another issue though (and i mean more than a cryptic message commented out in your code, real documentation like a user manual or API reference), i think that would have a much higher chance of success in this incentive model than software.
I'd have to tend to agree with you on this. I'm not familiar with this latest VAJ, because of all the bad things that were in previous versions i stopped using it.
There have been some people making comments in threads on this that VAJ is the way to go for large projects, i'd have to argue against this. VAJ generates code that is damn near unreadable by anything other than VAJ, so if you really are making a LARGE piece of software, something that is going to be around for years, you better make sure you keep an old copy of VAJ around if you ever need to edit anything. This generated code also makes a real hassle if you plan to try and make the software open source--the only way to read your open source software is with a propietary IDE.
now who's being naive...
OBVIOUSLY the decision was released on a friday after the market closed so as not to cause a panic, doesn't take a genius to figure that out. A good argument can be made that the global economy is most influenced by the US economy, and the US economy is currently most influenced by tech stocks. What tech stock has performed so reliably well for years that it gave investors confidence in technology--M$. If investors doubt M$'s viability, maybe they'll think twice about all these other much more risky tech stocks they've inflated the price of. If this decision was released at the opening of trading, all it would take would be a couple of panic filled hours to have many billions of $ of the speculative worth of corp.'s disappear into the void.
I'm not saying that it would be guaranteed to happen, but the potential for great damage is definitely there. How could this needless damage to the lives of millions across the globe (not to mention the damage to a certain public official's reputation) be averted? Thats right, release the news friday evening and give enough time for clearer heads to prevail. It would be imprudent in the extreme for a judge supposedly defending the rights of a free market economy to create such a threat to it.
-travis
Wow! You really got some metric people mad, guess they're really passionate about their units of measurement. I personally don't care whether i have to use the metric or english or whatever, seems all pretty arbitrary, except when it comes to the temperature scale. Outside of a chemistry class i have yet to find that the boiling point of water is easier to deal with at 100' then it is at 212', i don't usually have to make to many calculations to boil something it just sort of happens. When you have a range of degrees from 32-212 it gives you finer degree of control in setting your climate controls then 0-100. I like the room to be around 72'F, to get that same temperature in C i would have to resort to some fractional degree, making it tedious to get the temperature just right. So i don't know if your whole argument about non-metric units being more human friendly is correct, but i believe the Fahrenheit system is more human-centric because a change in 1'F is about as subtle a temperature change that a human can feel.
It wasn't until i was well into being a teenager that i taught myself all the non-metric units--because in school all that was ever taught was metric (and yes, i did go to school in the US). How the hell do you get to design flights for spacecraft and not know that you're supposed to use metric units?!!?! This is just bizarre, truly unthinkable idiocy. If that was my project i had just pumped years into i would be thinking lawsuit, heads should literally roll over something like this. The story said the confusion was between Lockheed Martin and JPL, anybody know who the stupid (i mean guilty...) party is? My guess is it would be Lockheed Martin, but you never know...
I believe this DOES have relevance to origins discussion--if it can be done it proves that the "spark" of life can be created without resorting to divine intervention. All that is required is ordinary materials arranged in a particular pattern to create life, no miracle required.
"This is of no relevance to origins discussion because it doesn't show what can come about by chance.
I'll be impressed when they cook a pot of chemicals into a bacteria"
If it can be accomplished, i believe we have a starting point to determine exactly how difficult the arrangement of chemicals to form life is. Someone who is a greater chemist than I should then be able to roughly calculate (model more likely) the probabability of given a solution of the required chemicals, what is the probability that they will combine in the proper pattern to create life. I'll bet the probability will be pretty low--it will probably turn out that you need a pot of chemicals about the size of the earth and a few hundred million years to cook it to ever create one bacteria...
Java gives you *much* better code inoperablity right now.
interoperablitity...sigh...
It is generally good, but you can occasionally come across errors--it's not perfect. If you have something tweaked and optimized with threads on one os, uh-oh some of that native thread stuff works a little different someplace else. There is also the problem of just plain bugs that can happen in the Java logic itself (unrelated to native code dependency) that only occur on one distribution, making funny effects across different machines.
I had a (somewhat) similar thought when I read the article.
;-)
I'm not cool enough to be able to speed read in parallel, but i'm pretty sure i can edit that way. For the last couple of years i've been able to look at a page of print, and my eyes will suddenly focus on a typo--it takes a second or two for my conscious mind to recognize what my eyes are focusing on is an error. Other people have mentioned the experiment of when given any number of green boxes, and one red box, that a person can find the red box in the same amount of time irregardless of how many green boxes there are. I believe that my high speed editing parlor trick is similar to this problem--over time my mind has become trained to recognize patterns of text as naturally as patterns of color.
If the "nick on the box" test was carried out for several months, possibly several years, the results might vary. Meaning, that over time the people would become more expert at noticing nicks on boxes and the brain might process the information on a higher symbolic level. I doubt that anyone would want to check for nicks on boxes for that long, but there must surely be a job similar to the experiment in manufacturing or processing. Some sort of quality control job where a person has to watch a line of goods go by that they check for defects. Testing if a person who has done a task like that for several years (and is actually good at it!) has trained their neural net to perform the task in a parallel manner would be interesting, and would give a broader view of the nature of the cognitive process. You would only need to find one person that could process image data this way and it would muddy the picture presented by the article.
Who knows, maybe people in Iowa are just more proned to seeing things serially than other humans
In the article it said that larger companies could get an expensive 'Enterprise Server' to send email without need for people to have a desktop. It seems a 'larger company' could also mean an ISP, so an ISP with $ to burn could set up the Blackberry service as a user account perk. The article wasn't clear exactly what was meant by 'Enterprise Server'. I assume it to mean software that most likely would only run on NT, but it could possibly be some sort of special Blackberry hardware as well.
I guess an argument could be made that prostitutes are SHAREware, but i'm sure he would argue that they should give up their 'product' for free for the benefit of the community. Maybe he'd be willing to pay for the documentation from them to figure out what the hell to do.
Here i thought i was the only person that dreamed about living in am impenetrable fortress of solitude. I've seriously dreamed about living in something like this since i was about 8. But $2.3 *10^6??!!?? There's got to be more of these old gov't ratholes laying around that nobody has turned into some gentrified apocalypse retreat yet that you could get cheap(er). Anybody out there ever seen a listing of gov't surplus bomb shelter/fortresses out there? I know something like this must exist somewhere, it would involve paperwork so it would make the gov't happy, plus the people that made this silo house had to find out where to buy the land in the first place
Does anyone else have experience (good or bad) with other X-servers besides just Accelerated X? Speedier graphics is definitely in my top 3 wishes for my linux box right now. The few times I've crashed i can always trace it back to piss poor performance from Xfree86 trying to display something a Classic Mac could handle.