The article doesn't actually say that he offered to disclose the location of the body. Instead it uses a lot of weasel words to *imply* that he might have done such a thing, without saying it.
The offer says that a "source" indicated that "overtures" had been made.
Note all the things it *doesn't* say, like if the overtures were coming *from* Reiser's team, or going *to* it.
>The source also cautioned that it remains to >be seen whether Reiser would follow through >with the proposal.
Why would that be a question if the source was from Reiser's team, or if Reiser had made the overture?
I think it's likely that he's guilty, but this is article uses so many weasel words that I can't take it seriously. It sounds like someone is trying to put a spin on a story.
>with upwards of 6,000 of its 20,000 current >employees opting to use the Mac over Windows.
Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default, so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.
Currently, there are way more development tools available for the mac than Linux. Things like textmate, araxis merge, DTrace, etc. Thus a lot of people, inside google and out, use mac workstations to develop software that gets deployed to linux servers.
>it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, >the release is heavily focused on performance >and nailing down speed and stability.
Sounds similar to the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1.
Maybe Microsoft could take some cues from this and update vista to address performance... yet saying that I instantly know it's the sort of thing they would never do.
he seems to be claiming that the judge at his hearing, and a number of other judges, did not sign loyalty oaths. This is the basis for his claim of the hearing being illegitimate.
Does anyone know what the deal with the loyalty oaths is? He tries to make it sound like his judge has done something heinous.
>The worst thing that Jack could do is >stop talking, though. He's like PETA. Some >people could agree with his points, but he >makes it very hard to espouse those >positions without being lumped in with the loonies.
I for one, enjoy having a rational discussion more than having crazies scream at me.
There are legitimate questions about what sort of material should be available to minors. I'm on the side of requiring the parents to do most of the footwork to protect their children, but it might also be helpful if extra tools were provided.
In particular, what if games came with an age group flag when they were installed, and operating system users could also have an age limit specified, so that applications with a "18+" flag would not launch of a user configured as "13."
>My guess is that Obama really wants Clinton as a VP candidate. >The reason is exactly what you mentioned: too many Clinton supporters >are disillusioned for some reason.
No... Clinton wants Clinton as a VP candidate, and has said so. The reason Clinton's supporters are bitter, is because she has *encouraged* them to be bitter.
This is not an accident. She's known for months that she can't win the election, so her strategy right now is to force Obama to pick her as a VP by getting at least *some* percentage of the democratic electorate to refuse to support him without her on the ticket.
Would Obama want her as a VP? Who knows. She's certainly qualified, but no one wants to be *forced* to give an employee a job. He's got to be looking down the road, and wondering if she would end up fighting him for power in office.
The Iraq war was definitely a mistake, and we should definitely leave, HOWEVER
>Any government formed under occupation, >no matter how many stained thumbs you show off, >is going to be seen as [illegitimate]
This is a patently false statement. Numerous governments that exist today were formed under foreign occupation. Probably the best example of a government formed by the US is Japan. MacArthur's staff *wrote* the Japanese constitution for them (it represented a pretty radical departure from the meiji constitution that the emperor and the remaining officials from the old government wanted to keep).
Furthermore, I've seen a lot of people who are opposed to the war suggest that spreading democracy by war is impossible. Again, this is false and anyone with any history should know better. Democratic ideas have been spread almost *entirely* by war. In fact, I can count on my left hand the number of countries where democratic reform came about internally, and still have three fingers left over.
Take Europe as an example. Today, we think of Europe as a bastion of democracy; however, this is relatively new. Until the 1800's, Europe was ruled by nobility with no patience for things like voting or equal rights, just like everywhere else. Republican ideals were spread to most of mainland Europe by France during Napoleon's conquest of the continent. After the British defeated Napolean and reinstituted monarchy in France, the ideas had already been spread, and ended up resulting in another major revolution (also put down the by the nobility) all across Europe in 1848.
Without the Napoleonic wars, Europe would still probably be monarchist.
Similarly, democratic ideas were spread to India during Britain's rule.
Democratic ideas were spread to Korea during the Korean war (although actual adoption of those ideas didn't occur until very recently).
Britain is probably the biggest exception, as reforms have been gradual over a period of a thousand years or so. There have been a number of internal revolutions (notably Oliver Cromwell's) as opposed to external invasions spreading democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell but the overall process has been incredibly slow (obviously Britain still *has* a monarchy, and still does *not have* the freedom of speech.) and it isn't really a model for spreading democracy elsewhere.
Democracy by osmosis does not happen often, and it certainly does not happen quickly. It is a fact of history that war is the best and in fact, only reliable way, to spread major political reform. This is an unfortunate fact for people opposed to war, but it is the truth.
It is actually true that Hispanics have been on the fence. Both Bush and McCain supported the comprehensive immigration reform. The one that was shot down because it included some amnesty for illegal immigrants. While the democratic party has pretty much the entire black vote, the hispanic vote and a few others are actually still up in the air.
That said, there is a flaw in the whole "women, white blue collar workers, and Hispanic" arguments, which is that she is merely listing the specific groups that voted for her, while more people actually voted against her.
A good example is the Hispanic vote, which went *slightly* more for her. If you compare that to the black vote, which makes up 15% of the country and is larger still as a percentage within the democratic party, that voted 90% to 80% for Barack, it's clear which would be more risky to lose in the general election.
Clinton has essentially been going down the list of people that voted for her and reading out those names individually, to try to make it *sound* longer than the list of people that voted for Obama. However, the hard numbers do not agree with her.
>In reality, no talk of compromises should >have been made, and Clinton should have >been penalized for deliberately stirring >up trouble.
Unfortunately politics sometimes unfairly influences... politics.
Realistically, the reason that the compromise was allowed was because it was very clear that it wouldn't matter.
Hillary Clinton has been running for months on the "if Barack Oboma has a heart attack and dies, I'll become the nominee by default" platform. If there was a real chance that she would win with the extra delegates, more people would have fought her over it. As far as it goes, Barack basically handed her the delegates as a conciliatory measure.
>What does OpenOffice offer the average >user that Google Docs is lacking? Why should we ever improve on software? Why should software ever do more than perform basic tasks poorly?
These are the attitudes behind your statement. Google docs is not as good as open office. Open office is not as good as microsoft office.
The arguments that people usually make are, "do you really need those extra features?" and to some extent it is true. I don't *absolutely* need everything that Microsoft Office has to offer, and so I save myself some money and download Star Office via the google pack.
Indeed, a lot of free and open source software tries to succeed, not by being the best software of its kind, but by being the *cheapest* software of its kind. Sometimes that strategy works, and sometimes it doesn't, but as a *developer* I'm always kind of disgusted by it.
Really, what's the point of being a software developer if all you ever aspire to do is put out crappy software that people will only use because it is free?
we almost had a *full slashdot article* where there was no mention of Microsoft, or its vast conspiracy to enslave all intelligent life into its hive mind.
Just you know, a piece of *news* for *nerds*.
> And Bill Gates once declared that the >average person would never have a need for >more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a >personal computer, too.'"
are all morons. If they really knew anything, they would be doing research, not trying to sell books full of bullshit predictions about human immortality (blatantly impossible and stupid) and the rise of a supreme race of machines.
Unbridled and irrational optimism is not science. It is at best science fiction, and at worst religion.
From wikipedia, Kurzweil's only research into AI comes from working with OCR systems and text to speech... which technically aren't even considered part of the AI field anymore. It hardly makes him qualified to predict where these fields are going.
Usually, futurists predict fast paced technological progression, or even exponential progression. Some even predict something called the "technological singularity" that has no clear definition, other than that basically all of your hopes and dreams will be fulfilled by advanced technology.
Why do they predict these ridiculous things? They might show some graph of how computers have gotten exponentially faster over time from Moore's law. However, this isn't a real justification for AI. A computer that runs windows twice as fast doesn't suddenly become self aware. Furthermore, we've *always* known the progression in the speed of computers will *stop* at a certain point, when making transistors any smaller would be impossible since certain quantum effects would come into play.
Why then, do fururists predict such things? Here's why:
Because a futurists *job* is to sell books and do speaking engagements, and books that say something like "AI is moving forward *very* slowly right now, and it will probably be a few hundred years before we have anything that is even a rough approximation of human" aren't very inspiring to science fiction fan boys, and so they don't sell well.
Thus, the technological singularity. The poorly defined event that guarantees that whatever nerdy science fiction fantasies you have, they will be realized within your lifetime.
What could possibly sell better? Other than the idea of human immortality (also promised by kurweil and other futurists!). Here's another book by some futurists that makes similar predictions about human immortality and a single event that transforms the human race:
I place both Kurweil's book and that book in the same category. Religious texts. You can believe in them if you *want* to believe in them (I mean, I'm not going to stop you) but you're kidding yourself if you think there's a rational justification.
and I generally think that anyone who refers to microsoft has M$ is an idiot. However, it is true that the IE team is still moving glacially slowly on the standards track.
CSS support has gotten better, and that's nice... but what about things like the event model, and support for HTML 5?
The truth is, that Microsoft still has a lot of incentive to *not* push for implementations of features that would make browsers better standards based application platforms. I think Microsoft is essentially still fearful that given how their competitors rule the web market, a more powerful browser will only make it easier for companies like google and yahoo to compete with with traditional desktop microsoft products.
I don't take the idea that things like google docs can, in their current form, compete with desktop microsoft products, even on the low end. However, it is at least *conceptually* possible that a strong enough browser would eventually become a decent platform for traditional applications. Certainly, it already is for mail.
I think that anyone considering the strategy at microsoft has to be deeply ambivalent about IE. IE has to be good enough so that people don't switch over to another browser, but if it offers too much platform, it also gives a place for competitors to wedge their products into the windows market, and perhaps create added value over traditional desktop apps (like how gmail can search much more effectively than a desktop email client).
That's why you see Microsoft investing in silverlight as a web platform that microsoft can control, even though it seems like a doomed endeavor from the start, considering that flash has already dominated this space.
All of that said, I genuinely do not blame the people working at Microsoft for dragging their heals on IE standards compliance, and here's why you shouldn't either. No one develops software that they know for a fact will hurt their bottom line, and if they do, they are idiots. Every company out there, even google and apple, for all the goodwill that people have for them, will defend their bottom line tooth and nail if it comes under attack.
That's why it's the software *business* and not the software *charity*.
You might say the solution is open source, and to *some* extent that is true. However, that's a bigger discussion than I want to get into.
Also, anyone who use's the phrase "I'll call bullshit on that one" is a moron in my experience. It's the rhetorical equivalent of saying "like totally" or "hella" and not in an ironic fashion.
I'm all for more open source, but crippling your operating system by taking out all of the proprietary bits that were only there *because they are necessary to make things work* seems like just flagellating yourself.
When did open source become not about making great software, but about punishing yourself in order to achieve some greater level of software "purity"? When did the FSF become the catholic church?
Because the slashdot crowd is going to immediately say python, ruby, scala, or whatever the "hip" new langauge is, no matter what the question is.
Also, the poster seems just as bad, foaming at the mouth about using excel and vb. There's nothing worse than dealing with a co-worker screaming at you about about open source when you're trying to make a decision on rational merits.
The truth is that you should be using something like matlab, or mathematica, only more geared towards physics. My school's statistics course uses the R package, a programming language, library, etc designed specifically for learning about statistics.
I bashed the people who would recommend python a bit ago, but python is actually a good bet for problems like this. I merely despise those who argue for python because it is "cool" and not for technical reasons.
Keep in mind that it's pretty easy to teach people about procedural programming, but things like object orientation, or how to do package management, operator overloading, or any nontrivial language feature is just going to get in the way of people not interested in programming langauges in and of themselves.
A beginners programming language should always have a means of 1. Assigning values to variables 2. doing arithmetic 3. calling predefined functions 4. if then style conditionals
For people that have *never* programmed before, these are the basics, and the only things that will come intuitively.
The next step up are loops, and writing your own functions, and dealing with arrays.
Do *not* use a language like java that requires you to be exposed to a number of unnecessary abstractions (classes, importing packages, defining methods, and lots of keywords like "static" that mean nothing to a beginner) to just write hello world.
Python is linguistically a good choice, because it has no boilerplate. However, python requires libraries to display graphics, (say of graphs of data that has been collected) which will be problematic. Thus, you will either want to create a python runtime with various convenience functions preimported, or use a different scripting language that already has things like a basic graph function already imported into the glabal namespace.
A lot of noise comes up about these various flash in the pan languages periodicallly, but if you look at a chart of language uses, even python that has been around for 10 years or more has only a few percentage points marketshare.
Meanwhile, Java is the most widely used programming language ever, at around 20%.
Whereas C and C++ hover around the 10 or 20% range.
I use python for some small utilities, and in fact I do expect python's usage to increase over time. However, expecting java or c++ to die, is like expecting English and French to die, and some Esperanto to take over.
It doesn't even *matter* that much if there's some language out there that's so much better than C++ or Java (which is debatable, but functional programming fanatics will scream so loudly about it so I'm not going to bother to argue the point), but that fact that such a vast volume of existing code is written in c++ and java, and there are so many tools and libraries written to support c++ and java development, makes it a *huge mistake* to start some kinds of large software development projects in some other languages, where all of these things will need to be written from scratch at enormous expense.
Projects written in non mainstream languages tend to either fall into a specific program domain the language was designed for, or tend to be very small scale, and usually both. There are very few good *general purpose* langauges that scale up and have good library and tool support. Read: There are *two* of them.... well, three if you consider c#, which I don't, because it is proprietary.
VLC is excellent overall, but their subtitle support is horrendously broken. Subtitles show up in ugly fonts, and are sometimes unreadable. Worst of all, half the time the subtitles from the last segment of dialog will stay on the screen and *overlap* with the next segment of dialog, making everything totally unreadable. Subtitles will also disappear if you pause, and then restart the video. The bugs go on and on...
Eclipse was impressive for a time, primarily for it's refactoring and intellisense capabilities. Now ever editor and it's mother can do that, and eclipse has *major* stability issues.
I don't think I've ever worked on an eclipse project for significant time without it crashing. The biggest issue tends to be eclipse *running out of memory* on big projects. This often still occurs when I give eclipse a gigabyte or more of memory to work with. How the hell is eclipse using that much memory?
Also, most of eclipse's lauded plugins have major stability issues, to the point where you basically can't use them. I find that your average eclipse plugin, even one's included in a common eclipse distribution, will die on basic things like null pointer errors. Haven't these people heard of unit tests? How about *any* kind of testing?
Finally, I generally don't think that Java makes for good desktop applications. Java may be great for the server, but just because I'm *writing* java code, doesn't mean I want to be using java code to write it.
Generally, long running desktop applications should be written in c or c++, and sometimes in python. Java's memory profile is such that desktop applications tend to suck up all available memory, and then crash, or become unresponsive while doing long garbage collections. In comparison c++ always uses the minimal amount of memory, and python is almost optimal since it uses reference counting.
When the eclipse team had to roll it's own widget toolkit, they should have taken that as a hint and written it in c++, where there are numerous widget toolkit's available.
The final problem with eclipse that I see, is that they are turning it into a general platform, that people can munge all of their java code into to write desktop applications as plugins to eclipse. All of these applications just inherit the problems that eclipse has.
If you want to do java development, there are a lot of java editors and java IDE's out there.
On the java java ide front there is: netbeans (by sun) intellij (costs money, but is supposed to be the best, so if you work at a company that will pay for it, who cares?)
I can't speak as to whether these java IDE's have solved the memory problem, but they can't possibly be as bad as eclipse.
For native c++ editors, check out slick edit. It supports intellisense and refactoring. It is highly efficient, and can support intellisense and refactoring *without* being used in IDE mode. Instead, you can use it as a light weight editor, while getting the benefits of an IDE in terms of a high level of understanding of the code. It does cost money, but then, who cares?
It's true that there's a lot of markup on apple hardware, especially the low end stuff. However, these guys are claiming that their hardware is *one fourth* the cost for a similar system, which is clearly not true.
"One version of Psystar's Open Computer features Apple's Leopard OS X 10.5 operating system ported onto generic PC hardware that includes anIntel (NSDQ: INTC) Core2Duo processor at 2.66 GHz, a 250 GB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card.
The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer could cost more than $2,000. "
They are here comparing their core2due based system, to the mac pros which *8 core harpertown xeon* system with a 1600 mhz bus and 800 mhz memory. They aren't in the same class, the mac pros are heavy duty workstations, and what they are selling are dinky gaming boxes.
The mac pro processor, straight from intel, costs *alone* more than these guys entire system. So the comparison isn't even close to valid.
The truth is that apple's higher end stuff has maybe a 10 or 20% markup over what you could get form dell *with the same hardware*. People often look at the 2000 or 3000 dollar computers and think they are overpriced, but what they aren't taking into account is that apple tends to use very expensive components, like the 1600 mhz bus harpertowns (most expensive cpu on the market), 800 mhz ram, maybe a raid card so you can use SAS harddrives.
The mid to low end systems and the laptops are actually the systems where you are really paying the apple tax; however, even there it's never a 5 times the cost of the competition like they are claiming.
The main problem the lineup apple has is that it has a limited range of products. They have good options for the low end, and the very high end, but they don't have the cheap but upgradeable desktops that gamers like, and they don't offer a whole lot in the server market (they have *1* model of server).
Really, since gaming on the mac sucks anyway, what I'd like to see is some kind of generic osx for servers, or at least a better darwin that's actually usable. That way, you could develop on real mac dev machines, and deploy to a darwin server.
"our current package format is somewhat similar in idea to Gentoos ebuilds but is completely incompatible due to the many technical differences."
I'm so exited that someone has finally stepped up and created one more custom Linux distribution. I think we were all feeling disempowered by the lack of choice afforded by the only 300 or so Linux distributions out there. Now that there are 301 mutually incompatible Linux distributions with their own directory layout, package management system, and configuration system, I finally feel like I have enough choices.
I'm glad that the authors didn't spend their time doing something worthless like writing new software that we don't already have, or improving an existing distribution. Instead, they did the smart thing and spent months making a Linux distribution, of which they can say (from the article) "Just don't expect anything to work (seriously!)."
Yay for new, incompatible, and broken Linux distributions written to satisfy some random guys questionable engineering sense!
Slashdot Mirror
The article doesn't actually say that he offered to disclose the location of the body. Instead it uses a lot of weasel words to *imply* that he might have done such a thing, without saying it.
The offer says that a "source" indicated that "overtures" had been made.
Note all the things it *doesn't* say, like if the overtures were coming *from* Reiser's team, or going *to* it.
>The source also cautioned that it remains to
>be seen whether Reiser would follow through
>with the proposal.
Why would that be a question if the source was from Reiser's team, or if Reiser had made the overture?
I think it's likely that he's guilty, but this is article uses so many weasel words that I can't take it seriously. It sounds like someone is trying to put a spin on a story.
Watching this video *on* firefox 3 on my laptop with 1024 x 768 resolution doesn't work!
For some reason if the whole flash doesn't fit on the screen, firefox won't let me scroll to see the rest of it. Bug?
>with upwards of 6,000 of its 20,000 current
>employees opting to use the Mac over Windows.
Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default, so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.
Currently, there are way more development tools available for the mac than Linux. Things like textmate, araxis merge, DTrace, etc. Thus a lot of people, inside google and out, use mac workstations to develop software that gets deployed to linux servers.
>it will not contain major OS changes. Instead,
>the release is heavily focused on performance
>and nailing down speed and stability.
Sounds similar to the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1.
Maybe Microsoft could take some cues from this and update vista to address performance... yet saying that I instantly know it's the sort of thing they would never do.
I installed silverlight 2 beta from the download linked from the site and this is what it gives me:
installed version 2.0.30523.6
requested version 2.0.30226
So the problem is that I have a *newer* version of silverlight? Or are the version strings getting mangled during comparison?
I have firefox 3. Is anyone else running into this problem?
Check out his article, which I found to be pretty intelligent.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/readers-have-their-say-in-the-e-publishing-debate/#more-475
I have to say that his argument is fairly well reasoned.
Huh, I didn't know they had that in vista, as I don't have it installed.
he seems to be claiming that the judge at his hearing, and a number of other judges, did not sign loyalty oaths. This is the basis for his claim of the hearing being illegitimate.
Does anyone know what the deal with the loyalty oaths is? He tries to make it sound like his judge has done something heinous.
>The worst thing that Jack could do is
>stop talking, though. He's like PETA. Some
>people could agree with his points, but he
>makes it very hard to espouse those
>positions without being lumped in with the loonies.
I for one, enjoy having a rational discussion more than having crazies scream at me.
There are legitimate questions about what sort of material should be available to minors. I'm on the side of requiring the parents to do most of the footwork to protect their children, but it might also be helpful if extra tools were provided.
In particular, what if games came with an age group flag when they were installed, and operating system users could also have an age limit specified, so that applications with a "18+" flag would not launch of a user configured as "13."
>My guess is that Obama really wants Clinton as a VP candidate.
>The reason is exactly what you mentioned: too many Clinton supporters
>are disillusioned for some reason.
No... Clinton wants Clinton as a VP candidate, and has said so. The reason Clinton's supporters are bitter, is because she has *encouraged* them to be bitter.
This is not an accident. She's known for months that she can't win the election, so her strategy right now is to force Obama to pick her as a VP by getting at least *some* percentage of the democratic electorate to refuse to support him without her on the ticket.
Would Obama want her as a VP? Who knows. She's certainly qualified, but no one wants to be *forced* to give an employee a job. He's got to be looking down the road, and wondering if she would end up fighting him for power in office.
The Iraq war was definitely a mistake, and we should definitely leave, HOWEVER
>Any government formed under occupation,
>no matter how many stained thumbs you show off,
>is going to be seen as [illegitimate]
This is a patently false statement. Numerous governments that exist today were formed under foreign occupation. Probably the best example of a government formed by the US is Japan. MacArthur's staff *wrote* the Japanese constitution for them (it represented a pretty radical departure from the meiji constitution that the emperor and the remaining officials from the old government wanted to keep).
Furthermore, I've seen a lot of people who are opposed to the war suggest that spreading democracy by war is impossible. Again, this is false and anyone with any history should know better. Democratic ideas have been spread almost *entirely* by war. In fact, I can count on my left hand the number of countries where democratic reform came about internally, and still have three fingers left over.
Take Europe as an example. Today, we think of Europe as a bastion of democracy; however, this is relatively new. Until the 1800's, Europe was ruled by nobility with no patience for things like voting or equal rights, just like everywhere else. Republican ideals were spread to most of mainland Europe by France during Napoleon's conquest of the continent. After the British defeated Napolean and reinstituted monarchy in France, the ideas had already been spread, and ended up resulting in another major revolution (also put down the by the nobility) all across Europe in 1848.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
Without the Napoleonic wars, Europe would still probably be monarchist.
Similarly, democratic ideas were spread to India during Britain's rule.
Democratic ideas were spread to Korea during the Korean war (although actual adoption of those ideas didn't occur until very recently).
Britain is probably the biggest exception, as reforms have been gradual over a period of a thousand years or so. There have been a number of internal revolutions (notably Oliver Cromwell's) as opposed to external invasions spreading democracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell
but the overall process has been incredibly slow (obviously Britain still *has* a monarchy, and still does *not have* the freedom of speech.) and it isn't really a model for spreading democracy elsewhere.
Democracy by osmosis does not happen often, and it certainly does not happen quickly. It is a fact of history that war is the best and in fact, only reliable way, to spread major political reform. This is an unfortunate fact for people opposed to war, but it is the truth.
It is actually true that Hispanics have been on the fence. Both Bush and McCain supported the comprehensive immigration reform. The one that was shot down because it included some amnesty for illegal immigrants. While the democratic party has pretty much the entire black vote, the hispanic vote and a few others are actually still up in the air.
That said, there is a flaw in the whole "women, white blue collar workers, and Hispanic" arguments, which is that she is merely listing the specific groups that voted for her, while more people actually voted against her.
A good example is the Hispanic vote, which went *slightly* more for her. If you compare that to the black vote, which makes up 15% of the country and is larger still as a percentage within the democratic party, that voted 90% to 80% for Barack, it's clear which would be more risky to lose in the general election.
Clinton has essentially been going down the list of people that voted for her and reading out those names individually, to try to make it *sound* longer than the list of people that voted for Obama. However, the hard numbers do not agree with her.
>In reality, no talk of compromises should
>have been made, and Clinton should have
>been penalized for deliberately stirring
>up trouble.
Unfortunately politics sometimes unfairly influences... politics.
Realistically, the reason that the compromise was allowed was because it was very clear that it wouldn't matter.
Hillary Clinton has been running for months on the "if Barack Oboma has a heart attack and dies, I'll become the nominee by default" platform. If there was a real chance that she would win with the extra delegates, more people would have fought her over it. As far as it goes, Barack basically handed her the delegates as a conciliatory measure.
>What does OpenOffice offer the average
>user that Google Docs is lacking?
Why should we ever improve on software? Why should software ever do more than perform basic tasks poorly?
These are the attitudes behind your statement. Google docs is not as good as open office. Open office is not as good as microsoft office.
The arguments that people usually make are, "do you really need those extra features?" and to some extent it is true. I don't *absolutely* need everything that Microsoft Office has to offer, and so I save myself some money and download Star Office via the google pack.
Indeed, a lot of free and open source software tries to succeed, not by being the best software of its kind, but by being the *cheapest* software of its kind. Sometimes that strategy works, and sometimes it doesn't, but as a *developer* I'm always kind of disgusted by it.
Really, what's the point of being a software developer if all you ever aspire to do is put out crappy software that people will only use because it is free?
we almost had a *full slashdot article* where there was no mention of Microsoft, or its vast conspiracy to enslave all intelligent life into its hive mind.
Just you know, a piece of *news* for *nerds*.
> And Bill Gates once declared that the
>average person would never have a need for
>more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a
>personal computer, too.'"
Awww, and then you ruined it.
are all morons. If they really knew anything, they would be doing research, not trying to sell books full of bullshit predictions about human immortality (blatantly impossible and stupid) and the rise of a supreme race of machines.
Unbridled and irrational optimism is not science. It is at best science fiction, and at worst religion.
From wikipedia, Kurzweil's only research into AI comes from working with OCR systems and text to speech... which technically aren't even considered part of the AI field anymore. It hardly makes him qualified to predict where these fields are going.
Usually, futurists predict fast paced technological progression, or even exponential progression. Some even predict something called the "technological singularity" that has no clear definition, other than that basically all of your hopes and dreams will be fulfilled by advanced technology.
Why do they predict these ridiculous things? They might show some graph of how computers have gotten exponentially faster over time from Moore's law. However, this isn't a real justification for AI. A computer that runs windows twice as fast doesn't suddenly become self aware. Furthermore, we've *always* known the progression in the speed of computers will *stop* at a certain point, when making transistors any smaller would be impossible since certain quantum effects would come into play.
Why then, do fururists predict such things? Here's why:
http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/0670033847
Because a futurists *job* is to sell books and do speaking engagements, and books that say something like "AI is moving forward *very* slowly right now, and it will probably be a few hundred years before we have anything that is even a rough approximation of human" aren't very inspiring to science fiction fan boys, and so they don't sell well.
Thus, the technological singularity. The poorly defined event that guarantees that whatever nerdy science fiction fantasies you have, they will be realized within your lifetime.
What could possibly sell better? Other than the idea of human immortality (also promised by kurweil and other futurists!). Here's another book by some futurists that makes similar predictions about human immortality and a single event that transforms the human race:
http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Authorized-James-Version-Apocrypha/dp/0192835254
I place both Kurweil's book and that book in the same category. Religious texts. You can believe in them if you *want* to believe in them (I mean, I'm not going to stop you) but you're kidding yourself if you think there's a rational justification.
and I generally think that anyone who refers to microsoft has M$ is an idiot. However, it is true that the IE team is still moving glacially slowly on the standards track.
CSS support has gotten better, and that's nice... but what about things like the event model, and support for HTML 5?
The truth is, that Microsoft still has a lot of incentive to *not* push for implementations of features that would make browsers better standards based application platforms. I think Microsoft is essentially still fearful that given how their competitors rule the web market, a more powerful browser will only make it easier for companies like google and yahoo to compete with with traditional desktop microsoft products.
I don't take the idea that things like google docs can, in their current form, compete with desktop microsoft products, even on the low end. However, it is at least *conceptually* possible that a strong enough browser would eventually become a decent platform for traditional applications. Certainly, it already is for mail.
I think that anyone considering the strategy at microsoft has to be deeply ambivalent about IE. IE has to be good enough so that people don't switch over to another browser, but if it offers too much platform, it also gives a place for competitors to wedge their products into the windows market, and perhaps create added value over traditional desktop apps (like how gmail can search much more effectively than a desktop email client).
That's why you see Microsoft investing in silverlight as a web platform that microsoft can control, even though it seems like a doomed endeavor from the start, considering that flash has already dominated this space.
All of that said, I genuinely do not blame the people working at Microsoft for dragging their heals on IE standards compliance, and here's why you shouldn't either. No one develops software that they know for a fact will hurt their bottom line, and if they do, they are idiots. Every company out there, even google and apple, for all the goodwill that people have for them, will defend their bottom line tooth and nail if it comes under attack.
That's why it's the software *business* and not the software *charity*.
You might say the solution is open source, and to *some* extent that is true. However, that's a bigger discussion than I want to get into.
"Corporate" power doesn't refer an american "corporation," in the fascist system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
Also, anyone who use's the phrase "I'll call bullshit on that one" is a moron in my experience. It's the rhetorical equivalent of saying "like totally" or "hella" and not in an ironic fashion.
I'm all for more open source, but crippling your operating system by taking out all of the proprietary bits that were only there *because they are necessary to make things work* seems like just flagellating yourself.
When did open source become not about making great software, but about punishing yourself in order to achieve some greater level of software "purity"? When did the FSF become the catholic church?
Because the slashdot crowd is going to immediately say python, ruby, scala, or whatever the "hip" new langauge is, no matter what the question is.
Also, the poster seems just as bad, foaming at the mouth about using excel and vb. There's nothing worse than dealing with a co-worker screaming at you about about open source when you're trying to make a decision on rational merits.
The truth is that you should be using something like matlab, or mathematica, only more geared towards physics. My school's statistics course uses the R package, a programming language, library, etc designed specifically for learning about statistics.
I bashed the people who would recommend python a bit ago, but python is actually a good bet for problems like this. I merely despise those who argue for python because it is "cool" and not for technical reasons.
Keep in mind that it's pretty easy to teach people about procedural programming, but things like object orientation, or how to do package management, operator overloading, or any nontrivial language feature is just going to get in the way of people not interested in programming langauges in and of themselves.
A beginners programming language should always have a means of
1. Assigning values to variables
2. doing arithmetic
3. calling predefined functions
4. if then style conditionals
For people that have *never* programmed before, these are the basics, and the only things that will come intuitively.
The next step up are loops, and writing your own functions, and dealing with arrays.
Do *not* use a language like java that requires you to be exposed to a number of unnecessary abstractions (classes, importing packages, defining methods, and lots of keywords like "static" that mean nothing to a beginner) to just write hello world.
Python is linguistically a good choice, because it has no boilerplate. However, python requires libraries to display graphics, (say of graphs of data that has been collected) which will be problematic. Thus, you will either want to create a python runtime with various convenience functions preimported, or use a different scripting language that already has things like a basic graph function already imported into the glabal namespace.
A lot of noise comes up about these various flash in the pan languages periodicallly, but if you look at a chart of language uses, even python that has been around for 10 years or more has only a few percentage points marketshare.
Meanwhile, Java is the most widely used programming language ever, at around 20%.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/programming-language-trends.html
Whereas C and C++ hover around the 10 or 20% range.
I use python for some small utilities, and in fact I do expect python's usage to increase over time. However, expecting java or c++ to die, is like expecting English and French to die, and some Esperanto to take over.
It doesn't even *matter* that much if there's some language out there that's so much better than C++ or Java (which is debatable, but functional programming fanatics will scream so loudly about it so I'm not going to bother to argue the point), but that fact that such a vast volume of existing code is written in c++ and java, and there are so many tools and libraries written to support c++ and java development, makes it a *huge mistake* to start some kinds of large software development projects in some other languages, where all of these things will need to be written from scratch at enormous expense.
Projects written in non mainstream languages tend to either fall into a specific program domain the language was designed for, or tend to be very small scale, and usually both. There are very few good *general purpose* langauges that scale up and have good library and tool support. Read: There are *two* of them.... well, three if you consider c#, which I don't, because it is proprietary.
VLC is excellent overall, but their subtitle support is horrendously broken. Subtitles show up in ugly fonts, and are sometimes unreadable. Worst of all, half the time the subtitles from the last segment of dialog will stay on the screen and *overlap* with the next segment of dialog, making everything totally unreadable. Subtitles will also disappear if you pause, and then restart the video. The bugs go on and on...
Eclipse was impressive for a time, primarily for it's refactoring and intellisense capabilities. Now ever editor and it's mother can do that, and eclipse has *major* stability issues.
I don't think I've ever worked on an eclipse project for significant time without it crashing. The biggest issue tends to be eclipse *running out of memory* on big projects. This often still occurs when I give eclipse a gigabyte or more of memory to work with. How the hell is eclipse using that much memory?
Also, most of eclipse's lauded plugins have major stability issues, to the point where you basically can't use them. I find that your average eclipse plugin, even one's included in a common eclipse distribution, will die on basic things like null pointer errors. Haven't these people heard of unit tests? How about *any* kind of testing?
Finally, I generally don't think that Java makes for good desktop applications. Java may be great for the server, but just because I'm *writing* java code, doesn't mean I want to be using java code to write it.
Generally, long running desktop applications should be written in c or c++, and sometimes in python. Java's memory profile is such that desktop applications tend to suck up all available memory, and then crash, or become unresponsive while doing long garbage collections. In comparison c++ always uses the minimal amount of memory, and python is almost optimal since it uses reference counting.
When the eclipse team had to roll it's own widget toolkit, they should have taken that as a hint and written it in c++, where there are numerous widget toolkit's available.
The final problem with eclipse that I see, is that they are turning it into a general platform, that people can munge all of their java code into to write desktop applications as plugins to eclipse. All of these applications just inherit the problems that eclipse has.
If you want to do java development, there are a lot of java editors and java IDE's out there.
On the java java ide front there is:
netbeans (by sun)
intellij (costs money, but is supposed to be the best, so if you work at a company that will pay for it, who cares?)
I can't speak as to whether these java IDE's have solved the memory problem, but they can't possibly be as bad as eclipse.
For native c++ editors, check out slick edit. It supports intellisense and refactoring. It is highly efficient, and can support intellisense and refactoring *without* being used in IDE mode. Instead, you can use it as a light weight editor, while getting the benefits of an IDE in terms of a high level of understanding of the code. It does cost money, but then, who cares?
It's true that there's a lot of markup on apple hardware, especially the low end stuff. However, these guys are claiming that their hardware is *one fourth* the cost for a similar system, which is clearly not true.
"One version of Psystar's Open Computer features Apple's Leopard OS X 10.5 operating system ported onto generic PC hardware that includes anIntel (NSDQ: INTC) Core2Duo processor at 2.66 GHz, a 250 GB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card.
The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer could cost more than $2,000. "
They are here comparing their core2due based system, to the mac pros which *8 core harpertown xeon* system with a 1600 mhz bus and 800 mhz memory. They aren't in the same class, the mac pros are heavy duty workstations, and what they are selling are dinky gaming boxes.
The mac pro processor, straight from intel, costs *alone* more than these guys entire system. So the comparison isn't even close to valid.
The truth is that apple's higher end stuff has maybe a 10 or 20% markup over what you could get form dell *with the same hardware*. People often look at the 2000 or 3000 dollar computers and think they are overpriced, but what they aren't taking into account is that apple tends to use very expensive components, like the 1600 mhz bus harpertowns (most expensive cpu on the market), 800 mhz ram, maybe a raid card so you can use SAS harddrives.
The mid to low end systems and the laptops are actually the systems where you are really paying the apple tax; however, even there it's never a 5 times the cost of the competition like they are claiming.
The main problem the lineup apple has is that it has a limited range of products. They have good options for the low end, and the very high end, but they don't have the cheap but upgradeable desktops that gamers like, and they don't offer a whole lot in the server market (they have *1* model of server).
Really, since gaming on the mac sucks anyway, what I'd like to see is some kind of generic osx for servers, or at least a better darwin that's actually usable. That way, you could develop on real mac dev machines, and deploy to a darwin server.
"our current package format is somewhat similar in idea to Gentoos ebuilds but is completely incompatible due to the many technical differences."
I'm so exited that someone has finally stepped up and created one more custom Linux distribution. I think we were all feeling disempowered by the lack of choice afforded by the only 300 or so Linux distributions out there. Now that there are 301 mutually incompatible Linux distributions with their own directory layout, package management system, and configuration system, I finally feel like I have enough choices.
I'm glad that the authors didn't spend their time doing something worthless like writing new software that we don't already have, or improving an existing distribution. Instead, they did the smart thing and spent months making a Linux distribution, of which they can say (from the article) "Just don't expect anything to work (seriously!)."
Yay for new, incompatible, and broken Linux distributions written to satisfy some random guys questionable engineering sense!
Hip Hip Horay!