Because military applications are the only point for inventing anything, of course. I imagine that the purpose was to stimulate interest in:
-Helicopters -Mechanical Engineering -Engineering/Science generally - you know, those strange subjects they used to teach in school before everyone decided they were too hard and made the less bright kids feel bad.
Re:Open source software on eBay
on
P2P vs. The Clones
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Looking through the adverts for things like "Professional photoeditor 4" (otherwise known as GIMP 2) on ebay, the thing that really shocks me is just how stupid people must be. From the buyer feedback there must be real people buying the software - even if you assumed every positive feedback is fake, there are enough negative ones there as well.
Who buys software from a company with adverts so badly spelt, with english so bad as to be incomprehensible in places? Who can't type "free photo editor" into google? Are these the same people who believe they really have won the Dutch lottery?
Re:This is going to be a busy topic...
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 1
On my SuSE 9.1 box:
>Write a short 1 page summmary on your life and print it (no printer setup yet) >Listen to an mp3 >Check the news on CNN trivial on any OS - printer setup, browsers and music in KDE are as simple as Windows.
>Rip a CDROM >Burn a CDROM
K3B is one of the most userfriendly cd programs I've seen - better than Nero, certainly.
>Change your wallpaper
Right click->Configure Desktop->Background
>Download and install a list of programs that people might commonly install (ie; gaim/aim, a game written for both windows and linux)
YAST (/rpmdrake etc) -> install software. Or click on the RPM in a web browser and click "install"
>And then some more advanced tasks >Setup a website (IIS or apache preinstalled)
hmm, never used IIS. Does apache have any GUI front ends?
>Change your screen resolution
Right click->Configure desktop ->Size and orientation
Bloody hell, I thought you were kidding until I did a search on the patent office website:
United States Patent 6,004,596
1. A sealed crustless sandwich, comprising:
a first bread layer having a first perimeter surface coplanar to a contact surface;
at least one filling of an edible food juxtaposed to said contact surface;
a second bread layer juxtaposed to said at least one filling opposite of said first bread layer, wherein said second bread layer includes a second perimeter surface similar to said first perimeter surface;
a crimped edge directly between said first perimeter surface and said second perimeter surface for sealing said at least one filling between said first bread layer and said second bread layer;
wherein a crust portion of said first bread layer and said second bread layer has been removed.
Shame there's no "Unthinking idiot" moderation option. The only thing that can make society even vaguely fair is equal access to a good, free education. Without that, nobody can hope to improve the position they start off with in life. Only a state system can provide that on a national scale.
Unless he's using Linux, *BSD or anything else apart from Win/MacOS, in which case ATI cards would start to look pretty crappy. They may make nice hardware, but they couldn't write decent drivers if their lives depended on it.
I felt the same way. I started off two-finger typing on a Spectrum and thought that I could never learn to type properly. Then, at about twenty I realised that the amount of typing I was having to do made it really worthwhile to learn to touch type, so I sat down and forced myself to do it. I still lapse back into my old ways occasionally, but I'm definitely far faster than I was.
Have they made that menubar actually MacOS like? As in it actually has the menu for the active application in it, rather than just displaying a static applications/actions menu like it used to?
It depends on whether it is something you're just doing as a hobby or whether you really want to get something good done (and involve other people in it). There's nothing wrong with either approach, it's just that if you don't design and just keep hacking, the project is far more likely to just disintegrate into a mess of spaghetti code with unsightly hacks. Once that happens, I find my enthusiasm to keep coding fades rapidly.
I've learnt the importance of design the hard way.
Software design is important, but having spent yesterday evening trying to read the code of several OSS projects like the ones the article refers to, I'd say there are more immediate problems: - Functions that are three or more screens long. - class members called undescriptive names like w,w0,w1 etc scattered everywhere - No use of polymorphism to avoid switch statement nightmares - code copy-and-pasted about with a few values changed rather than factoring out the similar code and putting it in a separate function
C++ is hard, even without having to worry about large-scale design.
Not quite there? A slight understatement. I tried to get my gf's netMD sound software to work on my win2K partition. The autorun installer didn't work, I had to manually install all the bits to get it to even start up. Once it was running, it crashed constantly. Never at any point did I get the thing to transfer music.
OSS user testing for desktop software* is great if all you want is bug reports along the lines of "it, erm, like crashed when I clicked on the thingy". Maybe a bit more detailed than you'd get for a piece of commercial software, but not much. I ran into this problem in my (small) OSS project. My solution was to form a small testing group (seven members at present) from dedicated users - I send the release out to them, they do pretty thorough testing and I get back detailed bug reports. Seems to work very well, combined with unit testing etc.
*Projects like the Linux kernel, Apache are different - the kind of people who find bugs are going to be much more knowledgable.
So trained race drivers on a day with no other traffic and (presumably) all feed roads and junctions closed can go fast reasonably safely. What a bad example. If you're doing 40 in a 30 zone and a pedestrian steps out in front of you, you're far more likely to hit him.
The problem is not the speed itself - the problem is stopping when someone pulls out in front of you.
Yes, the 55 limit in the US is overly slow, and this encourages speeding. But as I said, motorway (highway?) traffic is not the problem.
There's no magical effect which takes place when one transitions from a mile below to a mile over.
That's a stupid argument. The limit has to be put somewhere - there's no magic transition for an extra 0.5mg of alcohol in a blood sample, but if it puts you over the limit, you'll be arrested all the same.
The point is: how do you judge what a safe speed is, if not by the speed limits posted? Do we just trust every driver to know his own reaction times exactly, to know the location of every children's playground near a road? Or do we post limits based on research in each area based on average drivers and enforce them?
I agree that the speed limit on motorways really isn't important - but aren't most speed cameras in residential areas or known accident blackspots anyway? The slippery slope argument is flawed in that it presupposes its conclusion - why should chips in the dangerous lumps of metal we use for transportation that kill and injure tens of thousands of people a year lead to chips in people?
I think the "grievous offences" bit was added by the big brother guys as an oh-so-witty sarcastic aside.
"...don't give a fsck about whether you're driving fast and safe or slow and dangerous"
This is the idiotic argument that the Clarkson brigade bring up all the time in the UK over speed cameras. It basically boils down to "I'm a good driver, I should be allowed to speed". Breaking the speed limit is illegal and dangerous - why should anyone be able to decide they're good enough to not obey the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the 5200 is better:
;)
Geforce 5200: ~$60
Gamecube: $99
Mario Kart:DD: ~$35
Extra controller: ~$20
=~$214
or
Geforce 6600: ~$200
I know which option I'd prefer
How many people do you see pedalling down the street?
It's impossible to walk around my town without seeing hundreds (thousands?) of two-wheeled 'pedal-cars'. But then I do live in Cambridge (UK).
Because military applications are the only point for inventing anything, of course.
I imagine that the purpose was to stimulate interest in:
-Helicopters
-Mechanical Engineering
-Engineering/Science generally - you know, those strange subjects they used to teach in school before everyone decided they were too hard and made the less bright kids feel bad.
Looking through the adverts for things like "Professional photoeditor 4" (otherwise known as GIMP 2) on ebay, the thing that really shocks me is just how stupid people must be. From the buyer feedback there must be real people buying the software - even if you assumed every positive feedback is fake, there are enough negative ones there as well.
Who buys software from a company with adverts so badly spelt, with english so bad as to be incomprehensible in places? Who can't type "free photo editor" into google? Are these the same people who believe they really have won the Dutch lottery?
On my SuSE 9.1 box:
>Write a short 1 page summmary on your life and print it (no printer setup yet)
>Listen to an mp3
>Check the news on CNN
trivial on any OS - printer setup, browsers and music in KDE are as simple as Windows.
>Rip a CDROM
>Burn a CDROM
K3B is one of the most userfriendly cd programs I've seen - better than Nero, certainly.
>Change your wallpaper
Right click->Configure Desktop->Background
>Download and install a list of programs that people might commonly install (ie; gaim/aim, a game written for both windows and linux)
YAST (/rpmdrake etc) -> install software. Or click on the RPM in a web browser and click "install"
>And then some more advanced tasks
>Setup a website (IIS or apache preinstalled)
hmm, never used IIS. Does apache have any GUI front ends?
>Change your screen resolution
Right click->Configure desktop ->Size and orientation
>Find a file somewhere on your computer
Kde menu -> find files
Linux seems to be doing pretty well...
Bloody hell, I thought you were kidding until I did a search on the patent office website:
United States Patent 6,004,596What's wrong with peanut butter?
Why not just require the loser in a law suit to pay the legal costs of the winner? You'd vastly reduce the numbers of nuisance lawsuits.
Shame there's no "Unthinking idiot" moderation option.
The only thing that can make society even vaguely fair is equal access to a good, free education. Without that, nobody can hope to improve the position they start off with in life. Only a state system can provide that on a national scale.
There's this great web page I heard of called Google. It seems to be able to provide answers to all sorts of questions.
My guess is that it's a Host Bus Adapter, a kind of interface for SCSI systems.
Either that or the Hispanic Basketball Association, which I believe Linux provides better support for.
Unless he's using Linux, *BSD or anything else apart from Win/MacOS, in which case ATI cards would start to look pretty crappy. They may make nice hardware, but they couldn't write decent drivers if their lives depended on it.
Dammit, "Comments are for team members only".
I felt the same way. I started off two-finger typing on a Spectrum and thought that I could never learn to type properly. Then, at about twenty I realised that the amount of typing I was having to do made it really worthwhile to learn to touch type, so I sat down and forced myself to do it.
I still lapse back into my old ways occasionally, but I'm definitely far faster than I was.
Have they made that menubar actually MacOS like? As in it actually has the menu for the active application in it, rather than just displaying a static applications/actions menu like it used to?
I suppose. I guess I'd class it as "being able to program", rather than strictly design.
It depends on whether it is something you're just doing as a hobby or whether you really want to get something good done (and involve other people in it). There's nothing wrong with either approach, it's just that if you don't design and just keep hacking, the project is far more likely to just disintegrate into a mess of spaghetti code with unsightly hacks. Once that happens, I find my enthusiasm to keep coding fades rapidly.
I've learnt the importance of design the hard way.
Software design is important, but having spent yesterday evening trying to read the code of several OSS projects like the ones the article refers to, I'd say there are more immediate problems:
- Functions that are three or more screens long.
- class members called undescriptive names like w,w0,w1 etc scattered everywhere
- No use of polymorphism to avoid switch statement nightmares
- code copy-and-pasted about with a few values changed rather than factoring out the similar code and putting it in a separate function
C++ is hard, even without having to worry about large-scale design.
The ultimate test does seem to be actually using them - many cards seem to randomly corrupt in my Palm Tungsten, for example.
Not quite there? A slight understatement.
I tried to get my gf's netMD sound software to work on my win2K partition. The autorun installer didn't work, I had to manually install all the bits to get it to even start up. Once it was running, it crashed constantly. Never at any point did I get the thing to transfer music.
OSS user testing for desktop software* is great if all you want is bug reports along the lines of "it, erm, like crashed when I clicked on the thingy". Maybe a bit more detailed than you'd get for a piece of commercial software, but not much.
I ran into this problem in my (small) OSS project. My solution was to form a small testing group (seven members at present) from dedicated users - I send the release out to them, they do pretty thorough testing and I get back detailed bug reports. Seems to work very well, combined with unit testing etc.
*Projects like the Linux kernel, Apache are different - the kind of people who find bugs are going to be much more knowledgable.
Longhorn release date: ~2005
OSX release date: 2001
Very fast.
So trained race drivers on a day with no other traffic and (presumably) all feed roads and junctions closed can go fast reasonably safely. What a bad example. If you're doing 40 in a 30 zone and a pedestrian steps out in front of you, you're far more likely to hit him.
The problem is not the speed itself - the problem is stopping when someone pulls out in front of you.
Yes, the 55 limit in the US is overly slow, and this encourages speeding. But as I said, motorway (highway?) traffic is not the problem.
There's no magical effect which takes place when one transitions from a mile below to a mile over.That's a stupid argument. The limit has to be put somewhere - there's no magic transition for an extra 0.5mg of alcohol in a blood sample, but if it puts you over the limit, you'll be arrested all the same.
The point is: how do you judge what a safe speed is, if not by the speed limits posted? Do we just trust every driver to know his own reaction times exactly, to know the location of every children's playground near a road? Or do we post limits based on research in each area based on average drivers and enforce them?
If you're stupid enough to break the speed limit, you should pay for it. If the camera wasn't there, would it be any less illegal to speed?
I agree that the speed limit on motorways really isn't important - but aren't most speed cameras in residential areas or known accident blackspots anyway?
The slippery slope argument is flawed in that it presupposes its conclusion - why should chips in the dangerous lumps of metal we use for transportation that kill and injure tens of thousands of people a year lead to chips in people?
I think the "grievous offences" bit was added by the big brother guys as an oh-so-witty sarcastic aside.
"...don't give a fsck about whether you're driving fast and safe or slow and dangerous"This is the idiotic argument that the Clarkson brigade bring up all the time in the UK over speed cameras. It basically boils down to "I'm a good driver, I should be allowed to speed". Breaking the speed limit is illegal and dangerous - why should anyone be able to decide they're good enough to not obey the law.
Sales of books (in the UK, at least) have actually increased, despite many books here being much more expensive:
Book Marketing Literacy trust