Except that robots are horribly un-adaptable and even the Spirit/Opportunity team lamented the fact that with all the work their little robo-geologists accomplished in the first 30 days or so, a human geologist could have done the same work and much more in a matter of days instead of weeks.
So what? As the article pointed out, those two robots cost one-thousandth as much as a manned missions. We could send two thousand little robots for the cost of a manned mission, and those robots would learn a lot more about a larger area than any manned mission ever would.
Who modded this up, what was he drinking and can the rest of us have some? Let me address the AC's objections one-by-one:
...utterly useless for the 75% of the world that doesn't use the American English alphabet
Right--the software which is the only way to create many of the funky Roman ligatures needed to write other European languages is useful for that purpose. The software which supports one of the best font systems in the world is useless for supporting other glyph sets.
No support for generation of press-ready PDF's. That is to say, no PDF/X support at all.dvipdf and pdftex support PDF generation. More importantly, dvips supports conversion of DVI files to PostScript, which is the language spoken by just about every decent printer nowadays.
No support for managed color separations.
This doesn't belong in LaTeX, but in another tools which analyses the DVI, PostScript or PDF file.
No XML->TeX pathway, which means it can't integrate with modern authoring workflows.
DocBook is XML and can be converted in LaTeX.
LaTeX integrates very well indeed with a superior workflow using make, cvs, emacs &c.
No stylesheet support
I guess all those LaTeX stylesheets are merely a figment of my imagination, then. That's part of the entire point of LaTeX.
Only rudimentary support for contone and vector graphics. No intelligent text wrap, for example.
Ummm, DVI is a vector graphics format. What does text wrap have to do with vector graphics? Regardless, TeX's text-layout (and hence, word-wrap) algorithm is the best in the business, producing the most attractice documents in the world. I'm not familiar with 'contone,' so cannot say if LaTeX deals with it at all, or should.
I can only assume that the AC was trying for some kind of non-amusing humour, perhaps in an attempt to see if he could be modded up.
No, it's like writing: there are only 26 letters (with two cases) and a handful of punctuation. That's pretty simple. Huckleberry Finn, however, is far from simple. That's the difference: Unix is easy and simple, like the alphabet. Using it requires thought and skill, like writing.
When you get someone up on stage or screen who knows what his lines mean and can deliver them with conviction, it's just as comprehensible as any modern drama (and sometimes more exciting).
Amen to that. I'm not certain that any passage in modern cinema can compare the the battle-speech of Henry V at Agincourt. Paxton's blather in Independence Day was obviously meant to be, but it certainly wasn't.
And it's not just in the English-speaking world, either. Throughout the world, students study Shakespeare. He was that truly rare thing: an honest-to-God genius.
No--Unix is simple. The problem is that to use it, one must assemble its simple parts into complex patterns. Once one has learnt stdin, stdout & stderr, file redirection and a few other things, one knows the shell (the Unix interface for most folks). But using the shell requires being able to string a coherent thought together--a skill sadly too complex for the majority of mankind.
Aeons ago, the worthies of the Internet created The Usenet Cookbook, a set of files marked up in troff, which had everything one needed for early-netter cuisine. It was a glorious thing back then.
The thing is, if some folks are willing to do something for free and others wish to be paid, the guys who want to be paid are going to have to find some other line of work. It's a kind of extreme case of comparative advantage: a student can donate his work on an OS while a commercial OS programmer demands a wage.
Well, basic economics says that we'll go with the donated work (provided it's of equivalent quality).
The thing is, there is no right of a guaranteed career. Being an expert in mounted combat used to count for something--now it doesn't, and those who do it tend to do it for fun. Being an alchemist used to be quite profitable; now it is a hobby. Being a computer programmer used to be a job--in the future it, too, will be a hobby in most cases (just as there are folks getting paid for their skill at jousting, and getting paid for their alchemy--just not an awful lot).
Once software-writing has gotten to the point that it's so easily doable, there's no reason for it to behave as though the skill were a scarce one.
Just as with offshore outsourcing, economies move towards the most efficient solution. Paying a few dozen engineers $100,000 apiece for several years to produce an OS isn't nearly as efficient as letting college students and hobbyists (many of whom are engineers in their day jobs) hack on an OS until it's good. OSes are solved problems: there's just not much more that needs to be added.
Code-writing just isn't going to be a mass-marketable skill someday. Neither is aurochs-hunting.
A Compaq computer bought for a tech-support desk in India does no more for the American economy than the same computer bought for a tech-support desk in the US.
Except, of course, that Compaq may never have been purchased in the US, since it's so expensive to hire US labour. It's cheaper in India, and therefore less money can buy more labour--and more of the incidents of labour, like computers and bottled water.
The total cost of an American worker is astronomical--it's only natural to outsource as much as possible to less expensive locales. It is, in fact, the only sane thing to do. If one grocer sells pears for $30 apiece and another for a quarter--and if the cheaper pears are generally better--which are you going to patronise?
It's amazing how folks see nothing wrong with comparison shopping when they're on the buying end, but whine when their employers are.
To save even more money, set your home to 85 when you're home, 95 when you're out in the summer, and 60 when you're asleep/64 otherwise in the winter. Man was not designed to live within a ten-degree window.
Re:Before you do *any* of this stuff.
on
DIY HVAC
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· Score: 1
Ummm...glazing is windows. What do they teach in the schools these days?
Free Software Developers either need to make their usable or they need to stop their lobbying and go back to the server closet they came from.
We don't need to do anything. Our software works well: it is more stable and produces better results than the competition's. Compare the output of *roff or LaTeX with Word. Compare the uptime of a Unix host with that of Microsoft's products.
Yes, much of our software requires a bit of intelligence to use. So does a car. Any moron can make a pungee stake with a pocketknife: it takes skill to use whittling tools to make a statue.
Not that there are not ways in which things can and should improve. esr is quite right that the CUPS setup process is ridiculously difficult (although I disagree with one of his points). He's quite right about the broad issue at hand: there's too much poorly designed software out there.
There's a difference between difficult to learn and difficult to use. Things done once, then forgotten (like setting up a printer), should be easy to learn--effectively, every time you do 'em you're learning 'em again. Things learnt once, then used daily can get away with being difficult to learn so long as they are easy to use. The GIMP is a pain to learn--but it's incredibly powerful to use, and beats xpaint hands-down. LaTeX is somewhat difficult to learn--but its output is heart-rendingly beautiful, and beats everything else hands-down. The violin takes years upon years to learn, but a good piece of violin music beats all the guitar-and-drums pieces ever played.
The problem is that some software is neither a guitar (easy to learn, but not as pretty to hear) nor a violin (difficult to learn, but beautiful to listen to), but is instead a Rube Goldberg contraption requiring seven hands, and instruction manual and three pet monkeys to produce a loud, raspberry-like sound.
Now, I actually disagree with many of his policies: he's been more of a socialist than Clinton, increasing social spending beyond belief (labour, education &c.). But the man's not an idiot.
No, it's not surprising that Walker was a traitor; people have been betraying their nations for millennia. It is, however, legitimately angering. And why shouldn't one deride a song sympathetic to a traitor? I'm not aware of any ballads to the memory of Petain, Quisling or Arnold...
I make money working with Windows because it's a mess. When I get home I want something that works.
That's my feeling, only I admin Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux & BSD) at work and when I get home it's Linux waiting for me. I don't like Unix because I'm a Unix admin; I'm a Unix admin because I like Unix.
A certain Large Cyan company is getting ideas that really every Windows admin wants to (and can) handle Unix, and every Unix admin wants to admin Windows. We'll see how it goes, but I've my doubts.
Muscle-labour is one area in which men tend to be better on average than women. Another is mathematics (have there been any great female mathematicians?); given that computer science is mathematics, it's not surprising and is in fact quite reasonable to consider excellence therein to be a masculine activity.
Not, I should note, that a lower average ability in mathematics means that one is instrinsically worth even a little bit.
And as for some geeks being rude & crude, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me. If those are masculine traits (learned or genetic doesn't matter, in this case), one would expect them to be. A cripple may be macho about chess-playing, even though he cannot move his legs; why would a coder not be macho about coding?
That said, I tend to think that machismo, trash-talking and the like are pretty silly.
Firefox 0.8 is less than 7 megs and getting smaller.
Is that the compressed download? My installs of MozillaFirebird and firefox come in at 27MB and 23MB, respectively (that is with the Java & Flash plugins, tho--remove about 1 1/2 MB for those).
OTOH, it is demonstrably true that firefox is smaller than firebird which was smaller than Mozilla. Obviously this won't last forever--but it's a glorious trend (much like each release of the Linux kernel getting faster, as opposed to each release of Windows getting slower).
But then again I am sure many slashdotters are smokers and there is no more evil empire then Big Tobacco.
What's so evil about (so-called) 'Big' Tobacco? People want cigarettes; the cigarette companies make them. What's wrong with that?
Now, my personal opinion is that Marlboro, Benson & Hedges, Pall Mall & al. produce a rather foul-tasting product, but that's also my opinion of Anheuser-Busch and Coors: apparently a good number of people disagree.
And why is it always called 'Big' Tobacco anyway? No-one ever calls Kraft Big Pasta, or McDonald's, Burger King & Wendys Big Burgers.
What's so evil about companies filling a need? Sure, smoke (all smoke, not just from cigarettes) kills--and alcohol's a poison, and caffeine's bad for you, and grease will get your heart in the end. It only hurts the one who ingests it (second-hand smoke being, in every non-biased study, a non-factor).
I don't smoke cigarettes, myself (partial to a nice pipe, though), but I fail to see any good reason for the venom people spew about the things.
If the candidates are equivalent to the beliefs of the average Joe, then that is a success of democracy. If the candidates are not, then another candidate will arise who more closely approximates the beliefs of the average Joe, and will get the most votes. As politics becomes a finer and finer science, I expect that all elections will become cases of winning by a few votes in a thousand.
...personally I think something is wrong with our system that the two candidates can so exactly center themselves that the vote is divided so perfectly
Why? To me, that means that both candidates pretty well approximated the desires of the people. Now, my own opinion is that 'the people' are for the most part morons who think that McDonald's is tasty, tobacco is nasty and whatever feels right is--but, if one has any sort of fealty to democratic principles then the creation of candidates who are nearly identical is a triumph of the process.
Meanwhile, aristocrats and monarchists roll their eyes:-)
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So what? As the article pointed out, those two robots cost one-thousandth as much as a manned missions. We could send two thousand little robots for the cost of a manned mission, and those robots would learn a lot more about a larger area than any manned mission ever would.
Simple economics.
If it was only needed for the shuttle, and the shuttle was pointless, then it's not needed.
- DocBook is XML and can be converted in LaTeX.
- LaTeX integrates very well indeed with a superior workflow using make, cvs, emacs &c.
No stylesheet support I guess all those LaTeX stylesheets are merely a figment of my imagination, then. That's part of the entire point of LaTeX. Only rudimentary support for contone and vector graphics. No intelligent text wrap, for example. Ummm, DVI is a vector graphics format. What does text wrap have to do with vector graphics? Regardless, TeX's text-layout (and hence, word-wrap) algorithm is the best in the business, producing the most attractice documents in the world. I'm not familiar with 'contone,' so cannot say if LaTeX deals with it at all, or should.I can only assume that the AC was trying for some kind of non-amusing humour, perhaps in an attempt to see if he could be modded up.
No, it's like writing: there are only 26 letters (with two cases) and a handful of punctuation. That's pretty simple. Huckleberry Finn, however, is far from simple. That's the difference: Unix is easy and simple, like the alphabet. Using it requires thought and skill, like writing.
Amen to that. I'm not certain that any passage in modern cinema can compare the the battle-speech of Henry V at Agincourt. Paxton's blather in Independence Day was obviously meant to be, but it certainly wasn't.
And it's not just in the English-speaking world, either. Throughout the world, students study Shakespeare. He was that truly rare thing: an honest-to-God genius.
Speaking of, did he ever release the full version on video/DVD? Last I checked, it was a severely cut-down version, which defeats the whole purpose.
Of course, I saw a not-for-release VHS full version, but I had connexions. And sadly, I didn't make a copy (more fool I).
No--Unix is simple. The problem is that to use it, one must assemble its simple parts into complex patterns. Once one has learnt stdin, stdout & stderr, file redirection and a few other things, one knows the shell (the Unix interface for most folks). But using the shell requires being able to string a coherent thought together--a skill sadly too complex for the majority of mankind.
Aeons ago, the worthies of the Internet created The Usenet Cookbook, a set of files marked up in troff, which had everything one needed for early-netter cuisine. It was a glorious thing back then.
Well, basic economics says that we'll go with the donated work (provided it's of equivalent quality).
The thing is, there is no right of a guaranteed career. Being an expert in mounted combat used to count for something--now it doesn't, and those who do it tend to do it for fun. Being an alchemist used to be quite profitable; now it is a hobby. Being a computer programmer used to be a job--in the future it, too, will be a hobby in most cases (just as there are folks getting paid for their skill at jousting, and getting paid for their alchemy--just not an awful lot).
Once software-writing has gotten to the point that it's so easily doable, there's no reason for it to behave as though the skill were a scarce one.
Just as with offshore outsourcing, economies move towards the most efficient solution. Paying a few dozen engineers $100,000 apiece for several years to produce an OS isn't nearly as efficient as letting college students and hobbyists (many of whom are engineers in their day jobs) hack on an OS until it's good. OSes are solved problems: there's just not much more that needs to be added.
Code-writing just isn't going to be a mass-marketable skill someday. Neither is aurochs-hunting.
Except, of course, that Compaq may never have been purchased in the US, since it's so expensive to hire US labour. It's cheaper in India, and therefore less money can buy more labour--and more of the incidents of labour, like computers and bottled water.
The total cost of an American worker is astronomical--it's only natural to outsource as much as possible to less expensive locales. It is, in fact, the only sane thing to do. If one grocer sells pears for $30 apiece and another for a quarter--and if the cheaper pears are generally better--which are you going to patronise?
It's amazing how folks see nothing wrong with comparison shopping when they're on the buying end, but whine when their employers are.
To save even more money, set your home to 85 when you're home, 95 when you're out in the summer, and 60 when you're asleep/64 otherwise in the winter. Man was not designed to live within a ten-degree window.
Ummm...glazing is windows. What do they teach in the schools these days?
We don't need to do anything. Our software works well: it is more stable and produces better results than the competition's. Compare the output of *roff or LaTeX with Word. Compare the uptime of a Unix host with that of Microsoft's products.
Yes, much of our software requires a bit of intelligence to use. So does a car. Any moron can make a pungee stake with a pocketknife: it takes skill to use whittling tools to make a statue.
Not that there are not ways in which things can and should improve. esr is quite right that the CUPS setup process is ridiculously difficult (although I disagree with one of his points). He's quite right about the broad issue at hand: there's too much poorly designed software out there.
There's a difference between difficult to learn and difficult to use. Things done once, then forgotten (like setting up a printer), should be easy to learn--effectively, every time you do 'em you're learning 'em again. Things learnt once, then used daily can get away with being difficult to learn so long as they are easy to use. The GIMP is a pain to learn--but it's incredibly powerful to use, and beats xpaint hands-down. LaTeX is somewhat difficult to learn--but its output is heart-rendingly beautiful, and beats everything else hands-down. The violin takes years upon years to learn, but a good piece of violin music beats all the guitar-and-drums pieces ever played.
The problem is that some software is neither a guitar (easy to learn, but not as pretty to hear) nor a violin (difficult to learn, but beautiful to listen to), but is instead a Rube Goldberg contraption requiring seven hands, and instruction manual and three pet monkeys to produce a loud, raspberry-like sound.
The commonly-accepted number is 6 million Jews, 2 million others. That's 1 other killed for every three Jews killed; hardly a few.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington is nicely balanced, I thought.
Now, I actually disagree with many of his policies: he's been more of a socialist than Clinton, increasing social spending beyond belief (labour, education &c.). But the man's not an idiot.
To use an inferior product just because you don't wish to be free is to shackle oneself with ideology.
Even were mutt inferior to pine, its freedom would mean that you could improve it yourself.
No, it's not surprising that Walker was a traitor; people have been betraying their nations for millennia. It is, however, legitimately angering. And why shouldn't one deride a song sympathetic to a traitor? I'm not aware of any ballads to the memory of Petain, Quisling or Arnold...
That's my feeling, only I admin Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux & BSD) at work and when I get home it's Linux waiting for me. I don't like Unix because I'm a Unix admin; I'm a Unix admin because I like Unix.
A certain Large Cyan company is getting ideas that really every Windows admin wants to (and can) handle Unix, and every Unix admin wants to admin Windows. We'll see how it goes, but I've my doubts.
Not, I should note, that a lower average ability in mathematics means that one is instrinsically worth even a little bit.
And as for some geeks being rude & crude, it doesn't seem all that illogical to me. If those are masculine traits (learned or genetic doesn't matter, in this case), one would expect them to be. A cripple may be macho about chess-playing, even though he cannot move his legs; why would a coder not be macho about coding?
That said, I tend to think that machismo, trash-talking and the like are pretty silly.
The American record for the mile is 3:47.69; the women's record is 4:16.71. That is worse then the men's worldwide record of 1895.
There's plenty of thing men can do that women do more poorly, and plenty of things that women can do that men do more poorly.
Is that the compressed download? My installs of MozillaFirebird and firefox come in at 27MB and 23MB, respectively (that is with the Java & Flash plugins, tho--remove about 1 1/2 MB for those).
OTOH, it is demonstrably true that firefox is smaller than firebird which was smaller than Mozilla. Obviously this won't last forever--but it's a glorious trend (much like each release of the Linux kernel getting faster, as opposed to each release of Windows getting slower).
What's so evil about (so-called) 'Big' Tobacco? People want cigarettes; the cigarette companies make them. What's wrong with that?
Now, my personal opinion is that Marlboro, Benson & Hedges, Pall Mall & al. produce a rather foul-tasting product, but that's also my opinion of Anheuser-Busch and Coors: apparently a good number of people disagree.
And why is it always called 'Big' Tobacco anyway? No-one ever calls Kraft Big Pasta, or McDonald's, Burger King & Wendys Big Burgers.
What's so evil about companies filling a need? Sure, smoke (all smoke, not just from cigarettes) kills--and alcohol's a poison, and caffeine's bad for you, and grease will get your heart in the end. It only hurts the one who ingests it (second-hand smoke being, in every non-biased study, a non-factor).
I don't smoke cigarettes, myself (partial to a nice pipe, though), but I fail to see any good reason for the venom people spew about the things.
If the candidates are equivalent to the beliefs of the average Joe, then that is a success of democracy. If the candidates are not, then another candidate will arise who more closely approximates the beliefs of the average Joe, and will get the most votes. As politics becomes a finer and finer science, I expect that all elections will become cases of winning by a few votes in a thousand.
Why? To me, that means that both candidates pretty well approximated the desires of the people. Now, my own opinion is that 'the people' are for the most part morons who think that McDonald's is tasty, tobacco is nasty and whatever feels right is--but, if one has any sort of fealty to democratic principles then the creation of candidates who are nearly identical is a triumph of the process.
Meanwhile, aristocrats and monarchists roll their eyes:-)