There's a problem with your hypothetical situation. The problem is that scientists never seem to witness strange flying objects defying the laws of physics. And those that do usually try to understand what they are seeing rather than pigeonholing it into to "aliens" category.
And there's the assumption again. I've never seen anything in the sky that I couldn't explain, either. And I've seen planets, stars, satellites, and even a comet. As an educated individual, I've never had any trouble identifying them. Plus, I'm just as able to load up Photoshop and throw together a blurry UFO photo as the next guy.
But that's not the point of my hypothetical. What I'd like you to consider is the highly unlikely (and perhaps impossible--we have no proof, after all) situation that you did see something--up close--that you couldn't explain. Do you suppose that maybe you'd keep it to yourself? Talking about flying objects doing physically impossible aerobatics would be pretty embarrassing in front of other scientists, wouldn't it?
I just want you to think about it without immediately saying "but that won't happen."
I'm immediately marked as wrong because of one single phrase.
If you knew better you would know that science doesn't rely on "belief" but on reproducibbility and practical disproof/proof of theory.
Perhaps you should take a better look at how scientists react when confronted with a large body of sworn testimony of hundreds of highly trained individuals--people who are quite capable of identifying airplanes, satellites, meteors, weather balloons, and lightning. Said evidence would stand up in any court of law. Don't you think it at least warrants some open-minded scientific investigation?
Science, like anything else, is affected by belief. When people *believe* something to be untrue, they sometimes ignore reasonably solid evidence.
I'm not saying we have been visited by extraterrestrials. I suspect that we have, but that means nothing--just like if I were to suspect we haven't.
Take a look at disclosureproject.org. There's a lot of stuff in that testimony that can't be explained with lightning, weather balloons, secret aircraft, meteors, or swamp gas. And those people deserve better than to be dismissed as kooks and liars. Even if there are no extraterrestrials, there's definitely something going on that we don't know about, and that alone is worth the effort of serious research.
P.S. If anyone has any solid, verifiable information discrediting the Disclosure Project, I'm all ears. It just seems like it'd be a pretty hard thing to fake.
Let's say you're a scientist. You can five of your prestigious scientist buddies go out on a camping trip and witness a strange flying object doing crazy aerobatics that defy the laws of physics. Who exactly do you tell?
The trouble with all this stuff is that somewhat fringe ideas that might be worthy of further study (what if there are really alien visitors?) are lumped together with complete idiocy.
I've got a strong engineering background, and enough college physics to understand the basics of relativity, but I question some beliefs of the scientific establishment. The sad fact is that there are likely a lot of scientists who really would like to take a serious, open-minded look at the UFO phenomenon, but the only way to examine it and keep the respect of one's peers is the weather-balloons-full-of-swamp-gas approach.
At the moment, modern science isn't capable of giving serious attention to things like the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Why should it be trusted to be the final word?
One all-too-common mistake is the assumption that OSS means Linux/Unix. There are, at the very least, windows ports of many open-source programs that originated on Linux. Trouble is, the vast majority of these use their own (klunky) widget sets instead of Windows' native widgets.
Mind you, GTK works great under Linux, but its windows implementation is slow, weak, and buggy. It would be nice to see applications like X-Chat, The Gimp, and OpenOffice ported over to Windows using the standard Windows widgets. Yes, it would take more work, but it would also make them a heck of a lot more useable in the eyes of the average user. Nobody wants to use software that klunks.
The real bottom line is: On Windows, X has nothing to do with it. It's the fact that Windows ports are secondary to original Linux code, and don't get the attention they need to make them solid.
From now on, when you type the words "Fritz Hollings", be sure to link him to goatse.cx! Instead of just typing his name, type:
<a href='http://goatse.cx'>Fritz Hollings</a>
No sense of humor? Go ahead and mod me down. I don't mind.
That's not the point, moron.
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
He'd done nothing wrong, so they never should have cuffed him in the first place. It's one thing for the police to cuff someone who actually committed a crime, but it's quite another for them to cuff and publicly arrest an upstanding citizen who's done nothing wrong.
That said, the police were just doing their job--however, the Best Buy manager should never have made that false report in the first place. It should never have happened. It's that simple.
It'd be great, though, if they started looking out for the little guy by, say, repealing the ridiculous 90-year copyright. It's great that they're doing a little bit to protect free speech, but there are some other free expression matters out there that are in more need of attention.
People will pay money to play the same game, provided that the game engine is better. Since every game engine has its own inherent limitations, the drive in commercial game development will most likely be to develop good games on top of good engines.
Of course, there are cases like Deus Ex (and many other games that borrow their predecessors' engines), but a game engine only remains viable for so long. The Half-Life engine, for instance, has been pushed to its limit, and it's unlikely that there will be any more hugely successful half-life mods. People will inevitably want to move on to things like the upcoming Doom 3 engine.
How common is it for the ORIGINAL developers to be the people doing the code rewrite? Rewrites are usually done because the new developers cannot understand how the original code works. Were the four applications you rewrote your code or someone else's code? If you cannot extend your own code without rewriting it from scratch, then you need to learn about information hiding.
Okay, I admit, two of those projects were my own, and when I wrote them the first time, I did need to learn a bit more about information hiding. Mind you, I was an intern at the time. Since then, I've been hired on as a full-time employee.
The other two projects were written very badly, by people who had obviously never attempted to write projects of this type before. To give you an example, one used Netscape 4 and Apache to form the user interface of a local non-web application. The program itself used a postgres database to send signals between various daemons and cgi scripts. The re-coded version is a single executable that uses GTK+ as the gui. It's simpler, and a lot less crash-prone. Sometimes, bad design decisions don't give you the option of editing code that you already have. It's a fact of life.
I'm not saying that rewrites are great. Sometimes, they're just necessary.
The problem isn't with Joe Idiot Manager but with Joe Idiot Customer who ultimately pays Joe Idiot Programmer's salary. Joe Idiot Customer wishes to buy the feature now instead of when Joe Idiot Programmer feels the code base is right.
These things take time. When new features are hurriedly glommed onto an existing, already shoddy code base, you get a shoddy product. If Joe Idiot Customer wants a program that doesn't blue screen all the time, then he needs to wait long enough for quality code to be produced.
And if the original code base was so inflexible that it couldn't support much enhancement, then you can blame Joe Idiot Programmer and his Idiot Manager who, alas, developed it without the benefit of knowing what mistakes they made the first time were.
Times change. In the tech industry, when you design a product, you have no idea what people are going to want put on it five years down the road. If you can accurately predict that sort of thing, you need to be in R&D, and not programming.
Some things can be anticipated, others can't. When Netscape was originally written, they didn't expect to have to add in support for tables. Since it was added in version 2, Netscape's table support has always been slow, weak, and buggy. The renderer should have been gutted and rewritten then, but it wasn't. Since then, the problems have grown worse because bad code has been piled on top of bad code.
You claim that Netscape should have made their code more flexible. Well, they didn't. "Should have" doesn't get you very far when you're producing a prodct, and Mozilla is no exception.
Over the course of my employment--about three years now--I've rewritten over four applications from scratch... and it's the best thing that could have ever happened to the code.
The problem with application development is that new features tend to get tacked on over the years. Joe Idiot Manager says, "Ahh, it looks good, but can you make it do my laundry?" and all of a sudden, you're given a chice: either hack on a modification to make the code do something it wasn't originally intended to do, or rewrite it from scratch. The first choice is quicker the first few times through, but programs grow more and more buggy and cumbersome as more and more extra features are hacked into the code. Pretty soon, you're left with a horrid, unmaintainable mess that has tons of random, hard-to-find bugs--much like Netscape 4.x.
If you're writing a piece of software the second time around, you know what mistakes you made the first time, and can avoid them. Mozilla may have taken longer to write because it was written from scratch, but you can be damn sure it's a better browser than it would have been had it been based on the Netscape 4 code. The Mozilla project wouldn't have thrown away all that code unless they had a good reason to do so, and anyone outside the project who arbitrarily says they should have kept it is talking out of their ass.
However, if it was my kid, I'd still want to know exactly what was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Problem is, this particular straw would end up being used against them in court.
Anyway, what I'd like to know is how far all of this is going to go? What'll happen if we end up in a world where you can be sued for, say, breaking up with someone who has psychological problems, prompting them to hurt or kill themselves? More and more nowadays, it seems like litigation is something that bereaved families use to lash out and place blame, rather than dealing with their grief.
It's very hard to talk about all this without coming across as an uncaring bastard. I don't want to make light of someone's loss, but spreading misery isn't a good way to deal with these sorts of things.
but it is interesting that Sony won't release any of the game data citing privacy policy, even if it could help unlock what exactly drove the guy to end his life
Sony (rightly) believes that giving this case the time of day is in a way admitting possibility of fault. The simple fact is that people commit suicide over a lot of things. If someone reads a book and it depresses them to the point that they kill themselves, it's not the fault of the author. Likewise, while it's very sad that this person killed himself, it's in absolutely no way Sony's fault.
Sony (again, rightly) believes that their game data is irrelevant to the case. What would be a lot more telling is an analysis of any possible psychological problems the boy had that led to his suicide.
Subliminal messages are a fun, safe way to make learning easy! Imagine the incredible advances that would be possible if this technology were made available to the consumer.
If you want to have more choices in your entertainment stop lining the pockets of big media.
Awfully hostile answer to someone who was asking to do just that.
Get a clue and go see a recital at your local college, go to art gallery or museum, go to your community theatre, go see a local band, go to a bluegrass festival, get off the goddamn computer!!!
FYI, one of the things that the internet is supposed to be is a distribution channel for art and information. What really excites people is that, for a very small amount of money (less than $100/year in hosting costs), an artist can reach a virtually unlimited number of people. My assumption is that there are people out there doing just that--I just want to know where to find them.
As for local stuff: I *do* go to the local theatre at times. The local band scene, though, is mostly just grunge, which I'm not really a fan of.
That's actually the point of the question. The entertainment industry lost me when they became an industry. What I'd like to find out is where I can find real art created by real people who are creating for fun, not profit.
To all those who have said I should create something myself--I do. I write. I also program in my spare time. However, it's nice at times to sit back, relax, and enjoy someone else's creation.
IE may come installed with all copies of Windows but that doesn't mean that Mozilla can't compete. In fact, Mozilla.9.7 was already better than IE in almost every category..9.9 just blows everything else out of the water. The browser war is alive and well on Windows.
As someone who uses Mozilla as my primary browser, I'd like to see some benchmarks supporting what you're talking about. I'd love to know what I'm (not) missing.:)
Matter of preference and familiarity, both self-reinforcing I know.
You say it yourself: people are generally more comfortable with what they're used to. It's fairly safe to say that most Linux users are more familiar with single-window style applications. KDE, Gnome, and Windows GUIs have standardized on this. Documents (pictures or whatever) go inside the main window, which also includes all toolbars and the like. Options should also be reachable from the main application menu bar.
I'll backpedal slightly from my previous argument and admit that The Gimp isn't *unpleasant* to use. It's just not (in my opinion, and others I've spoken with) *as* pleasant as Photoshop. New users, for instance, often have a bit of trouble figuring out how to cut and paste, run filters, or perform any number of other advanced functions.
Of course, I've been deliberately avoiding the price issue. All of my arguments are based on the fundamental assumption that whoever is going to be using this program has several hundred dollars to blow on purchasing it. And The Gimp isn't so complicated that people can't pick it up by spending a little extra time familiarizing themselves with it. I just think they shouldn't *have* to.
Slashdot Mirror
According to Google, I'm not the first person to come up with the word Buckybomb.
There's a problem with your hypothetical situation. The problem is that scientists never seem to witness strange flying objects defying the laws of physics. And those that do usually try to understand what they are seeing rather than pigeonholing it into to "aliens" category.
And there's the assumption again. I've never seen anything in the sky that I couldn't explain, either. And I've seen planets, stars, satellites, and even a comet. As an educated individual, I've never had any trouble identifying them. Plus, I'm just as able to load up Photoshop and throw together a blurry UFO photo as the next guy.
But that's not the point of my hypothetical. What I'd like you to consider is the highly unlikely (and perhaps impossible--we have no proof, after all) situation that you did see something--up close--that you couldn't explain. Do you suppose that maybe you'd keep it to yourself? Talking about flying objects doing physically impossible aerobatics would be pretty embarrassing in front of other scientists, wouldn't it?
I just want you to think about it without immediately saying "but that won't happen."
I'm immediately marked as wrong because of one single phrase.
If you knew better you would know that science doesn't rely on "belief" but on reproducibbility and practical disproof/proof of theory.
Perhaps you should take a better look at how scientists react when confronted with a large body of sworn testimony of hundreds of highly trained individuals--people who are quite capable of identifying airplanes, satellites, meteors, weather balloons, and lightning. Said evidence would stand up in any court of law. Don't you think it at least warrants some open-minded scientific investigation?
Science, like anything else, is affected by belief. When people *believe* something to be untrue, they sometimes ignore reasonably solid evidence.
I'm not saying we have been visited by extraterrestrials. I suspect that we have, but that means nothing--just like if I were to suspect we haven't.
Take a look at disclosureproject.org. There's a lot of stuff in that testimony that can't be explained with lightning, weather balloons, secret aircraft, meteors, or swamp gas. And those people deserve better than to be dismissed as kooks and liars. Even if there are no extraterrestrials, there's definitely something going on that we don't know about, and that alone is worth the effort of serious research.
P.S. If anyone has any solid, verifiable information discrediting the Disclosure Project, I'm all ears. It just seems like it'd be a pretty hard thing to fake.
Let's say you're a scientist. You can five of your prestigious scientist buddies go out on a camping trip and witness a strange flying object doing crazy aerobatics that defy the laws of physics. Who exactly do you tell?
The trouble with all this stuff is that somewhat fringe ideas that might be worthy of further study (what if there are really alien visitors?) are lumped together with complete idiocy.
I've got a strong engineering background, and enough college physics to understand the basics of relativity, but I question some beliefs of the scientific establishment. The sad fact is that there are likely a lot of scientists who really would like to take a serious, open-minded look at the UFO phenomenon, but the only way to examine it and keep the respect of one's peers is the weather-balloons-full-of-swamp-gas approach.
At the moment, modern science isn't capable of giving serious attention to things like the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Why should it be trusted to be the final word?
One all-too-common mistake is the assumption that OSS means Linux/Unix. There are, at the very least, windows ports of many open-source programs that originated on Linux. Trouble is, the vast majority of these use their own (klunky) widget sets instead of Windows' native widgets.
Mind you, GTK works great under Linux, but its windows implementation is slow, weak, and buggy. It would be nice to see applications like X-Chat, The Gimp, and OpenOffice ported over to Windows using the standard Windows widgets. Yes, it would take more work, but it would also make them a heck of a lot more useable in the eyes of the average user. Nobody wants to use software that klunks.
The real bottom line is: On Windows, X has nothing to do with it. It's the fact that Windows ports are secondary to original Linux code, and don't get the attention they need to make them solid.
Chances are, the cases for the 400mhz machines don't come with the 300 watt power supplies that are necessary to run an Athlon.
Oh, and you can be sure that they think that a machine with Linux preinstalled is an OS-free machine.
...but as Linux users, we know better. It is, in fact, a free OS machine.
From now on, when you type the words "Fritz Hollings", be sure to link him to goatse.cx! Instead of just typing his name, type:
<a href='http://goatse.cx'>Fritz Hollings</a>
No sense of humor? Go ahead and mod me down. I don't mind.
He'd done nothing wrong, so they never should have cuffed him in the first place. It's one thing for the police to cuff someone who actually committed a crime, but it's quite another for them to cuff and publicly arrest an upstanding citizen who's done nothing wrong.
That said, the police were just doing their job--however, the Best Buy manager should never have made that false report in the first place. It should never have happened. It's that simple.
Privacy bills are generally a good thing. We Slashdotters would rather bash Fritz Hollings for the other legislative idiocy he's been trying to pass.
Note: Do yourself a favor and don't actually click on the Fritz Hollings link.
...for pornographers.
It'd be great, though, if they started looking out for the little guy by, say, repealing the ridiculous 90-year copyright. It's great that they're doing a little bit to protect free speech, but there are some other free expression matters out there that are in more need of attention.
People will pay money to play the same game, provided that the game engine is better. Since every game engine has its own inherent limitations, the drive in commercial game development will most likely be to develop good games on top of good engines.
Of course, there are cases like Deus Ex (and many other games that borrow their predecessors' engines), but a game engine only remains viable for so long. The Half-Life engine, for instance, has been pushed to its limit, and it's unlikely that there will be any more hugely successful half-life mods. People will inevitably want to move on to things like the upcoming Doom 3 engine.
How common is it for the ORIGINAL developers to be the people doing the code rewrite? Rewrites are usually done because the new developers cannot understand how the original code works. Were the four applications you rewrote your code or someone else's code? If you cannot extend your own code without rewriting it from scratch, then you need to learn about information hiding.
Okay, I admit, two of those projects were my own, and when I wrote them the first time, I did need to learn a bit more about information hiding. Mind you, I was an intern at the time. Since then, I've been hired on as a full-time employee.
The other two projects were written very badly, by people who had obviously never attempted to write projects of this type before. To give you an example, one used Netscape 4 and Apache to form the user interface of a local non-web application. The program itself used a postgres database to send signals between various daemons and cgi scripts. The re-coded version is a single executable that uses GTK+ as the gui. It's simpler, and a lot less crash-prone. Sometimes, bad design decisions don't give you the option of editing code that you already have. It's a fact of life.
I'm not saying that rewrites are great. Sometimes, they're just necessary.
The problem isn't with Joe Idiot Manager but with Joe Idiot Customer who ultimately pays Joe Idiot Programmer's salary. Joe Idiot Customer wishes to buy the feature now instead of when Joe Idiot Programmer feels the code base is right.
These things take time. When new features are hurriedly glommed onto an existing, already shoddy code base, you get a shoddy product. If Joe Idiot Customer wants a program that doesn't blue screen all the time, then he needs to wait long enough for quality code to be produced.
And if the original code base was so inflexible that it couldn't support much enhancement, then you can blame Joe Idiot Programmer and his Idiot Manager who, alas, developed it without the benefit of knowing what mistakes they made the first time were.
Times change. In the tech industry, when you design a product, you have no idea what people are going to want put on it five years down the road. If you can accurately predict that sort of thing, you need to be in R&D, and not programming.
Some things can be anticipated, others can't. When Netscape was originally written, they didn't expect to have to add in support for tables. Since it was added in version 2, Netscape's table support has always been slow, weak, and buggy. The renderer should have been gutted and rewritten then, but it wasn't. Since then, the problems have grown worse because bad code has been piled on top of bad code.
You claim that Netscape should have made their code more flexible. Well, they didn't. "Should have" doesn't get you very far when you're producing a prodct, and Mozilla is no exception.
Over the course of my employment--about three years now--I've rewritten over four applications from scratch... and it's the best thing that could have ever happened to the code.
The problem with application development is that new features tend to get tacked on over the years. Joe Idiot Manager says, "Ahh, it looks good, but can you make it do my laundry?" and all of a sudden, you're given a chice: either hack on a modification to make the code do something it wasn't originally intended to do, or rewrite it from scratch. The first choice is quicker the first few times through, but programs grow more and more buggy and cumbersome as more and more extra features are hacked into the code. Pretty soon, you're left with a horrid, unmaintainable mess that has tons of random, hard-to-find bugs--much like Netscape 4.x.
If you're writing a piece of software the second time around, you know what mistakes you made the first time, and can avoid them. Mozilla may have taken longer to write because it was written from scratch, but you can be damn sure it's a better browser than it would have been had it been based on the Netscape 4 code. The Mozilla project wouldn't have thrown away all that code unless they had a good reason to do so, and anyone outside the project who arbitrarily says they should have kept it is talking out of their ass.
I suspect that they are worried that a bit of GPLed code will somehow make it into a bit of the windows codebase - intentionally or otherwise.
I don't think they're worried about that much at all. It just makes a good excuse to shut out anything GPLed, because it cuts into their sales.
If they don't read the document, they're not bound to the license, and can still reverse engineer it, right?
Lendrick
However, if it was my kid, I'd still want to know exactly what was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Problem is, this particular straw would end up being used against them in court.
Anyway, what I'd like to know is how far all of this is going to go? What'll happen if we end up in a world where you can be sued for, say, breaking up with someone who has psychological problems, prompting them to hurt or kill themselves? More and more nowadays, it seems like litigation is something that bereaved families use to lash out and place blame, rather than dealing with their grief.
It's very hard to talk about all this without coming across as an uncaring bastard. I don't want to make light of someone's loss, but spreading misery isn't a good way to deal with these sorts of things.
Lendrick
but it is interesting that Sony won't release any of the game data citing privacy policy, even if it could help unlock what exactly drove the guy to end his life
Sony (rightly) believes that giving this case the time of day is in a way admitting possibility of fault. The simple fact is that people commit suicide over a lot of things. If someone reads a book and it depresses them to the point that they kill themselves, it's not the fault of the author. Likewise, while it's very sad that this person killed himself, it's in absolutely no way Sony's fault.
Sony (again, rightly) believes that their game data is irrelevant to the case. What would be a lot more telling is an analysis of any possible psychological problems the boy had that led to his suicide.
Lendrick
...does this mean that you'll retract the Wheateon story if it turns out he's telling the truth?
Subliminal messages are a fun, safe way to make learning easy! Imagine the incredible advances that would be possible if this technology were made available to the consumer.
All hail Bill Gates, our benevolent leader.
Lendrick
If you want to have more choices in your entertainment stop lining the pockets of big media.
Awfully hostile answer to someone who was asking to do just that.
Get a clue and go see a recital at your local college, go to art gallery or museum, go to your community theatre, go see a local band, go to a bluegrass festival, get off the goddamn computer!!!
FYI, one of the things that the internet is supposed to be is a distribution channel for art and information. What really excites people is that, for a very small amount of money (less than $100/year in hosting costs), an artist can reach a virtually unlimited number of people. My assumption is that there are people out there doing just that--I just want to know where to find them.
As for local stuff: I *do* go to the local theatre at times. The local band scene, though, is mostly just grunge, which I'm not really a fan of.
Lendrick
Who needs an industry?
That's actually the point of the question. The entertainment industry lost me when they became an industry. What I'd like to find out is where I can find real art created by real people who are creating for fun, not profit.
To all those who have said I should create something myself--I do. I write. I also program in my spare time. However, it's nice at times to sit back, relax, and enjoy someone else's creation.
Peace,
Lendrick
IE may come installed with all copies of Windows but that doesn't mean that Mozilla can't compete. In fact, Mozilla .9.7 was already better than IE in almost every category. .9.9 just blows everything else out of the water. The browser war is alive and well on Windows.
:)
As someone who uses Mozilla as my primary browser, I'd like to see some benchmarks supporting what you're talking about. I'd love to know what I'm (not) missing.
Got a link?
Matter of preference and familiarity, both self-reinforcing I know.
You say it yourself: people are generally more comfortable with what they're used to. It's fairly safe to say that most Linux users are more familiar with single-window style applications. KDE, Gnome, and Windows GUIs have standardized on this. Documents (pictures or whatever) go inside the main window, which also includes all toolbars and the like. Options should also be reachable from the main application menu bar.
I'll backpedal slightly from my previous argument and admit that The Gimp isn't *unpleasant* to use. It's just not (in my opinion, and others I've spoken with) *as* pleasant as Photoshop. New users, for instance, often have a bit of trouble figuring out how to cut and paste, run filters, or perform any number of other advanced functions.
Of course, I've been deliberately avoiding the price issue. All of my arguments are based on the fundamental assumption that whoever is going to be using this program has several hundred dollars to blow on purchasing it. And The Gimp isn't so complicated that people can't pick it up by spending a little extra time familiarizing themselves with it. I just think they shouldn't *have* to.
Lendrick