Question for the reviewer: is the book based on actual scientific research or is it anecdotal evidence?
Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with anecdotes and good advice, you can learn a lot from the success of others. It's just that there's a lot of advice flying around in this trade, and not all of it has as firm a base as it sounds like, ahem, Extreme Programming, ahem. The note about staying out of the zone sounds more in the anecdotal than the scientific category to me.
If you're talking about Hitler, that's not really what happened. He got some power, then abused that massively to suppress the democratic institutions, which by the way were relatively young in Germany at that point (the Weimar Republic was established in 1918). Those institutions were also under pressure from other groups, including conservatives. Keep in mind that Germany had enormous problems in the aftermath of the first World War and the conditions that were imposed upon the country.
I was looking for some references; you can find a good account in the Wikipedia article on Adolf Hitler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler).
That sounds mostly like nonsense coming from someone who don't know his history. The truth is that most people are relatively reasonable if you make sure they cannot make rash decisions. That's why democracy works pretty well, much better than previous and contemporary competing systems. It's not infallible, and of course, people need to have access to accurate information. But overall it does work.
As you say, democracy needs to be checked against the masses trampling over some people. But democracies realize that by asserting inviolable rights. There's a baseline protected by the police and the justice system.
You are exaggerating. Javascript is a nice little language and is actually standardized pretty well. What's not properly standardized is the DOM/browser API, that's why you find yourself a little utility library like jQuery with a really nice API.
Yes, you need to use multiple languages (unless you use Node.js). It has its upsides and downsides, just like GWT. One of the upsides is that it's easier to figure out what's going on since you're much closer to the DOM and the protocols.
This is obviously a prototype, but if you've ever tried keeping a videochat open for a while with speakers on without actually chatting with the other person, the sounds and to some extent the image can in fact create an illusion that your room has grown to encompass the room in the other end. At least, it did that for me once. I've never felt the same kind of illusion with plain phone calls.
I think this is research in somewhat the same idea - try to transfer the presence of others without actually transfering them. As such I think it is interesting.
Imagine chatting with a little robot that can turn to face you all the time while you cook or do the laundry or whatever, and is connected with voice to your traveling girlfriend in the other end? Wouldn't that be different and maybe fulfill a different need than sitting in front of the computer with a videochat?
BTW the "Hugging the elderly so you don't have to." in the summary is just stupid hyberbole.
Except that Google probably mostly was a success because they kept their page simple compared to Altavista, the previous darling that started out simple and turned into a big slow portal mess.
This is not the first time I've heard about a big hosting centre losing data even though it never happens, and they are keeping backups, etc.
It if it's at all manageable, keep one copy safe at your own place in addition to the replication at the hosting centre. You can set up a cheap box at the office with a couple of terabytes disk space and suck down the data periodically with something like rsync and rdiff-backup. It's not a whole lot of work and can make the difference between having a big problem and total disaster.
It would help if hosting centres actually told you how exactly they store and backup your data and what they do in case of emergency instead of throwing meaningless phrases like "99.999% uptime!" and "fully redundant storage backbone!" at you. Fully redundant storage backbone is nothing if it means it's built with some big arse proprietary SAN stuff where the whole array goes down if the main controller goes down. Which it of course does because it's a flaky embedded thing with 2k memory that has to be programmed in assembler and C with dangling memory pointers all over the place.
I'll migrate to something functional for me, and Gnome ain't it.
Fixed that for you.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you're right smack bang in the middle of the GNOME 3 target group. Indeed, you're probably going to be more happy in another camp, unless you change something fundamental in the way you work.
That's what I've been saying all along. And if you compare the power technologies that way [nextbigfuture.com], no bias, no subjective measures, just objective data making a best effort to tally all deaths caused vs. power generated,
Did you actually bother reading some of the comments on your link there? Best effort, maybe, objective data, hardly.:)
Maybe you could use a trick with the domain or path when setting the session cookie so that static files don't get it. Then serve static files over HTTP and only the actual pages over HTTPS.
Every time the issue of Flash vs HTML5 comes up on Slashdot, there is a slew of upmodded posts explaining how Flash is already not relevant and should be discovered, and how HTML5 can fully replace any legitimate use of Flash. I'm pointing out that this doesn't seem to be the case.
I think it's optimism mostly. A lot of people hate Flash for various reasons, many of them perhaps having to do with its perceived lack of stability, at least on Linux. So naturally people are just waiting for the moment where they can drop Flash without missing out. I'm in that category.:)
But I'm totally with you on readiness - I made an animation example last year, and the conclusion then was that you can't have big images moving in HTML without occasional flickering in any of the browsers I tried, and that included IE, Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox (some tested both on Linux and in Windows).
It's a good thing that Adobe has started the process, because it can push the browser developers to actually fix the issues.
If you're in the 49% minority group, there isn't theoretically much difference between a dictatorship and democracy. The 49% figure is not contrived, even in Denmark where we have plenty of parties, they tend to divide into two blocks of about the same size and only offer the losing group little power after the elections.
Of course, in practice it turns out there are big differences. For instance, most democracies seem to adopt a constitution that prevents the majority from the most blatant violations of individuals' rights. That's why the OP's assertion is silly, although interesting to ponder.
The fact of the matter is, the only things that a consumer can't replace in a laptop is the screen, CPU and mainboard.
And the battery. And the keyboard. And the optical drive...
Sure, for these you can still get a spare part. At least as long as it's new and not too obscure. That's different from being able to replace it with something new and different, though. I think this sounds like a fantastic idea. Cheaper, more flexible hardware. If somebody would force it down the manufacturers' throats I would be happy.:)
I've opened a couple of notebooks to fix things on them, and I don't think you're necessarily right. There's plenty of space in there - not compared to a desktop pc, but still enough that it isn't a totally packed mess (I've opened a Mac mini, and that was a mess). Heck, it's not about total innovation, it's just about standardizing certain physical features so you can replace them. Memory and hard disk are already standardized, we just need optical drive, motherboard, maybe even screen and keyboard?
Being able to replace a fried motherboard would be sweet. Many laptops live hard and die young.
Well, the target groups are different. Debian never was really good at addressing the needs of Linux illiterates. Ubuntu wasn't exactly the first fork. I think part of the problem is that you have to cut some things in order to make it simpler (or otherwise spend an eternity trying to keep flexibility), and in Debian, well, people don't want to upset users who can claim legitimate needs.
Ubuntu on the other hand has always been about saying no and focusing on a target group. It's easier for them to make Things Just Work (minus bugs of course) without configuration or stupid questions. The dark side of it is that if you have a problem and it's not a typical target group problem, then you're in trouble.
That's why I'm running Ubuntu on my desktop at work, but Debian (testing) on the server. I didn't want to spend forever setting up the desktop, and I don't want to have a packaging problem with some software on the server and have it closed or ignored because the Ubuntu package maintainer is hired by Canonical to maintain a gazillion packages and this one is not one of those the central administration has declared important. Better battle with a Debian geek who might need a beating with a clue bat but who at least cares.
Of course, over time, some of the differences vanish as both distributions improve. For instance, it's much easier to install Debian these days, and conversely there a lot more packages and package maintainers for Ubuntu than there used to be.
However, the target group Ubuntu is addressing is by far the biggest and the one with the most press. Still, Debian is a testament to the power of self-organization, just like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Life without Debian would be sad.
Is space junk really a problem? I know it flies around at high speed so impact is really bad, but it just seems to me that the probably of hitting something would still be so miniscule considering how big the space is that it's just not really worth worrying about?
and that his always forced to create new stuff and bring new ideias to the table, complete impossible tasks, and learn complex new things in a matter of days
I guess we're all different. Sounds like great fun to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Question for the reviewer: is the book based on actual scientific research or is it anecdotal evidence?
Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with anecdotes and good advice, you can learn a lot from the success of others. It's just that there's a lot of advice flying around in this trade, and not all of it has as firm a base as it sounds like, ahem, Extreme Programming, ahem. The note about staying out of the zone sounds more in the anecdotal than the scientific category to me.
If you're talking about Hitler, that's not really what happened. He got some power, then abused that massively to suppress the democratic institutions, which by the way were relatively young in Germany at that point (the Weimar Republic was established in 1918). Those institutions were also under pressure from other groups, including conservatives. Keep in mind that Germany had enormous problems in the aftermath of the first World War and the conditions that were imposed upon the country.
I was looking for some references; you can find a good account in the Wikipedia article on Adolf Hitler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler).
That sounds mostly like nonsense coming from someone who don't know his history. The truth is that most people are relatively reasonable if you make sure they cannot make rash decisions. That's why democracy works pretty well, much better than previous and contemporary competing systems. It's not infallible, and of course, people need to have access to accurate information. But overall it does work.
As you say, democracy needs to be checked against the masses trampling over some people. But democracies realize that by asserting inviolable rights. There's a baseline protected by the police and the justice system.
Sorry, been there, done that, didn't work.
Maybe it wasn't, but it certainly has become.
Sorry, that's the truth.
You are exaggerating. Javascript is a nice little language and is actually standardized pretty well. What's not properly standardized is the DOM/browser API, that's why you find yourself a little utility library like jQuery with a really nice API.
Yes, you need to use multiple languages (unless you use Node.js). It has its upsides and downsides, just like GWT. One of the upsides is that it's easier to figure out what's going on since you're much closer to the DOM and the protocols.
That's what you like to think! :)
This is obviously a prototype, but if you've ever tried keeping a videochat open for a while with speakers on without actually chatting with the other person, the sounds and to some extent the image can in fact create an illusion that your room has grown to encompass the room in the other end. At least, it did that for me once. I've never felt the same kind of illusion with plain phone calls.
I think this is research in somewhat the same idea - try to transfer the presence of others without actually transfering them. As such I think it is interesting.
Imagine chatting with a little robot that can turn to face you all the time while you cook or do the laundry or whatever, and is connected with voice to your traveling girlfriend in the other end? Wouldn't that be different and maybe fulfill a different need than sitting in front of the computer with a videochat?
BTW the "Hugging the elderly so you don't have to." in the summary is just stupid hyberbole.
Except that Google probably mostly was a success because they kept their page simple compared to Altavista, the previous darling that started out simple and turned into a big slow portal mess.
This is not the first time I've heard about a big hosting centre losing data even though it never happens, and they are keeping backups, etc.
It if it's at all manageable, keep one copy safe at your own place in addition to the replication at the hosting centre. You can set up a cheap box at the office with a couple of terabytes disk space and suck down the data periodically with something like rsync and rdiff-backup. It's not a whole lot of work and can make the difference between having a big problem and total disaster.
It would help if hosting centres actually told you how exactly they store and backup your data and what they do in case of emergency instead of throwing meaningless phrases like "99.999% uptime!" and "fully redundant storage backbone!" at you. Fully redundant storage backbone is nothing if it means it's built with some big arse proprietary SAN stuff where the whole array goes down if the main controller goes down. Which it of course does because it's a flaky embedded thing with 2k memory that has to be programmed in assembler and C with dangling memory pointers all over the place.
I'll migrate to something functional for me, and Gnome ain't it.
Fixed that for you.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you're right smack bang in the middle of the GNOME 3 target group. Indeed, you're probably going to be more happy in another camp, unless you change something fundamental in the way you work.
Maybe longer than this nuclear plant if a similar amount of money had gone into protecting the wind mills?
That's what I've been saying all along. And if you compare the power technologies that way [nextbigfuture.com], no bias, no subjective measures, just objective data making a best effort to tally all deaths caused vs. power generated,
Did you actually bother reading some of the comments on your link there? Best effort, maybe, objective data, hardly. :)
Maybe you could use a trick with the domain or path when setting the session cookie so that static files don't get it. Then serve static files over HTTP and only the actual pages over HTTPS.
Every time the issue of Flash vs HTML5 comes up on Slashdot, there is a slew of upmodded posts explaining how Flash is already not relevant and should be discovered, and how HTML5 can fully replace any legitimate use of Flash. I'm pointing out that this doesn't seem to be the case.
I think it's optimism mostly. A lot of people hate Flash for various reasons, many of them perhaps having to do with its perceived lack of stability, at least on Linux. So naturally people are just waiting for the moment where they can drop Flash without missing out. I'm in that category. :)
But I'm totally with you on readiness - I made an animation example last year, and the conclusion then was that you can't have big images moving in HTML without occasional flickering in any of the browsers I tried, and that included IE, Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox (some tested both on Linux and in Windows).
It's a good thing that Adobe has started the process, because it can push the browser developers to actually fix the issues.
If you're in the 49% minority group, there isn't theoretically much difference between a dictatorship and democracy. The 49% figure is not contrived, even in Denmark where we have plenty of parties, they tend to divide into two blocks of about the same size and only offer the losing group little power after the elections.
Of course, in practice it turns out there are big differences. For instance, most democracies seem to adopt a constitution that prevents the majority from the most blatant violations of individuals' rights. That's why the OP's assertion is silly, although interesting to ponder.
The fact of the matter is, the only things that a consumer can't replace in a laptop is the screen, CPU and mainboard.
And the battery. And the keyboard. And the optical drive...
Sure, for these you can still get a spare part. At least as long as it's new and not too obscure. That's different from being able to replace it with something new and different, though. I think this sounds like a fantastic idea. Cheaper, more flexible hardware. If somebody would force it down the manufacturers' throats I would be happy. :)
I've opened a couple of notebooks to fix things on them, and I don't think you're necessarily right. There's plenty of space in there - not compared to a desktop pc, but still enough that it isn't a totally packed mess (I've opened a Mac mini, and that was a mess). Heck, it's not about total innovation, it's just about standardizing certain physical features so you can replace them. Memory and hard disk are already standardized, we just need optical drive, motherboard, maybe even screen and keyboard?
Being able to replace a fried motherboard would be sweet. Many laptops live hard and die young.
Well, the target groups are different. Debian never was really good at addressing the needs of Linux illiterates. Ubuntu wasn't exactly the first fork. I think part of the problem is that you have to cut some things in order to make it simpler (or otherwise spend an eternity trying to keep flexibility), and in Debian, well, people don't want to upset users who can claim legitimate needs.
Ubuntu on the other hand has always been about saying no and focusing on a target group. It's easier for them to make Things Just Work (minus bugs of course) without configuration or stupid questions. The dark side of it is that if you have a problem and it's not a typical target group problem, then you're in trouble.
That's why I'm running Ubuntu on my desktop at work, but Debian (testing) on the server. I didn't want to spend forever setting up the desktop, and I don't want to have a packaging problem with some software on the server and have it closed or ignored because the Ubuntu package maintainer is hired by Canonical to maintain a gazillion packages and this one is not one of those the central administration has declared important. Better battle with a Debian geek who might need a beating with a clue bat but who at least cares.
Of course, over time, some of the differences vanish as both distributions improve. For instance, it's much easier to install Debian these days, and conversely there a lot more packages and package maintainers for Ubuntu than there used to be.
However, the target group Ubuntu is addressing is by far the biggest and the one with the most press. Still, Debian is a testament to the power of self-organization, just like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Life without Debian would be sad.
Is space junk really a problem? I know it flies around at high speed so impact is really bad, but it just seems to me that the probably of hitting something would still be so miniscule considering how big the space is that it's just not really worth worrying about?
What's the point in streaming an announcement if NOBODY HAS AN IP? :P
Ahem. Some of us got an IP while there was still time. Of course, seing you have a 7-digit Slashdot id, I can see where you're coming from.
How does that help you? You just never check your Hotmail account? Otherwise you now have to fight spam on two accounts.
and that his always forced to create new stuff and bring new ideias to the table, complete impossible tasks, and learn complex new things in a matter of days
I guess we're all different. Sounds like great fun to me.
Mod parent up.
Grandparent is one big strawman.
[citation needed]