And some of the job offers are really extravagant, especially for a startup firm. It really makes me wonder what they're doing over there. I've seen a few highly sucessfull startup firms, hi-tech firms at that, and they'd never consider hiring a cook or massuese
Or maybe they don't actually intend to hire a cook and massuese, but just want us to think they do.
...but it doesn't seem to be the point he thought he was making.
Actually, he understood my point perfectly.
...and set up a "configure" option to control whether to use GNOME stuff
...and that's exactly what I'd like to see. There are many applications targeted to run on Gnome systems and using gnome libraries (in short, Gnome apps), that could quite easily be made to run with just Gtk+, perhaps with a slight loss of functionality. With that little added effort, the program gains more users--both KDE and otherwise, and I and others don't have to duplicate the effort of modifying code (and yes I do send patches for what I do).
I'd be more interested in making Gnome programs compile on a system with just the Gtk+/glib libraries installed, without requiring any of the other Gnome libs. And similarily, being able to run KDE apps with just Qt installed.
My experience has been that trying to compile programs written for Gnome on a system with just Gtk/glib never works without removing the dependencies on gnome libs in the code yourself. Often, I find that it isn't that hard. I get the feeling that Gnome developers could care less about those that don't run gnome.
People running old systems, especially laptops, can't really be required to bear all the overhead of running Gnome or KDE just to be able to run one or two programs.
It would also solve, at least partially, the original Ask Slashdot question of how to write apps for both KDE and Gnome--just find the greatest common denominator, which is to make them compile with just the toolkits.
Why did you choose to stay in Pennsylvania? It looks like you never moved. Your resume shows a few different companies (all in PA?) until '85, and then you list yourself as an Independent Consultant for over eight years. I'm sure you got many offers in that time, many of them interesting, but likely most of them located in Northern California too. At the same time, your choices in PA must have been pretty slim.
If you could enlist Supermans help and reverse the rotation of the Earth and turn back time, would you make the same choices? What advice would you give to graduates and others that face the choice of whether to move to an area like Silicon Valley, or whether to stick it out and blaze their own path at home?
According to the EPA faq, paper represents 36% of waste. It may not seem like it, but most of that is actually in the form of cardboard boxes, not printer paper.
I too print stuff out on rare occasions, like pdf or ps docs. With postscript, the problem is the blurry fonts, and with both pdf and ps my 17" screen is too small to display the whole page which is frustrating. You also can't mark up a pdf doc with highlighter.
And for goodness sakes, how long do Slashdotters take to shit? If it's more than five minutes, then eat more dietary fiber or just concentrate harder.
So here are the ideas:... 2.When you have moderator access, only display moderate controls on say 20% of the comments.
It makes sense: negative karma users would never moderate, and more karma would give you more choice in your moderation. It would cripple good moderators because they might see a bad comment but be helpless to moderate it, However since there are 5x more moderators, the odds are someone else will get it.
No, it doesn't make sense. I hate this idea. When I moderate, it tends to take up a lot of time, browsing at -1, reading all the comments to recognize duplicates, and reading all the replies (I read FLAT not threaded) to catch the gems. But I only do this for news that interests me because I just have a limited amount of time available. With only 20% or so of news stories available, chances are I'd never use my points at all. In the three days given to use your points right now, I usually just get my points used before they expire.
Can you recommend any good books on creating comics? I found one book titled Understanding Comics over at Amazon that gets a lot of praise.
I'm also curious about the art side of comics. I used to work for a Marvel-like comic artist doing lettering (what talent!), and he said that anyone could learn to draw like he could (which was pretty impressive). So should you take the time to learn to draw life-like figures, and then find your own comic-drawing style, or is that a wasting your time learning stuff you won't need?
The air hockey table is a good idea. I'd guessed you were going to have to use the 'Vomit Comet' for testing--you could give that work to the interns.
Not sure if you'll read replies to your AC post (if you get an account there's a link that makes checking for replies much easier), but what kind of processor is used? Is the code written in LISP or C like most embedded code?
This may present some issues in having both X and non-X OpenGL implementations resident on the same platform.
What non-X implementations of OpenGL exist? I've never heard of any.
slightly offtopic: Has there been any progress on a Java OpenGL API standard? I recall news about perhaps magician becoming the standard, but no word since then.
Why are there so few good authors of books for programmers? With the recent death of Richard Stevens, in one fell swoop we've lost the author of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, Unix Network Programming, and the three books of the TCP/IP series. If you program on Unix and write networking code, those books are essential. Yet even before Stevens wrote UNP in 1990, nobody had written anything but man pages, and nobody other than Stevens has written anything since.
Is the dearth of authors because not enough copy gets sold to amply reward all the hard work? Do programmers make lousy authors? Or is it that many people start books but never finish them?
Certainly that last reason applies to software engineers too. It seems to be a suprisingly rare skill to actually get a product finished. But there seems to be such a large pool of people who enjoy writing and programming that I find the scarcity difficult to understand.
I've had hours to think about it now, and I'm even more depressed by his death than before. So I went to his homepage and dug around some. His FAQ is interesting. My favorite excerpt:
I really believe that my background is fundamental to the success of UNP and my other books. That is, I was not one of the developers at Berkeley or AT&T, so the writing of UNP was not a "memory dump". Everything that is in the book I had to dig out of somewhere and understand myself. This process of digging up the details and learning how things work leads down many side streets and to many dead ends, but is fundamental (I think) to understanding something new. Many times in my books I have set out to write how something works, thinking I know how it works, only to write some test programs that lead me to things that I never knew. I try to convey some of these missteps in my books, as I think seeing the wrong solution to a problem (and understanding why it is wrong) is often as informative as seeing the correct solution.
Surf around some more and you find out he loved to ski (he used to have a GIF of an old ski pass on his home page), he was a pilot, got his Ph.D while working a full time job at Kitt Peak observatory, has lived in Zambia, Utah, New Mexico, Virginia, Michigan, Oklahoma, Georgia, California, Arizona, Connecticut, and South Africa.
And among all the people who understood Unix systems programming and networking in 1988, this was the guy who had the courage to actually sit down and start writing his first book, Unix Network Programming. Just think of all the people who didn't write that book. He was a unique mix of talented engineer,programmer, and author. It's really no suprise that nobody beat him to writing APUE and his TCP/IP series.
His home page is here, and reading it is to find out what a truly great guy he was. My favorite is his recipe for chocolate chip cookies, which are harder to make than a bug free threaded tcp/ip stack.
His books were the best. Well written with the best exercises of any books out there. I think the reason he obviously put so much thought into the exercises at the end of chapters was because he knew that's where readers did most of their learning. Unlike other fine books like Knuth's, his books actually got used, reread, and handed around to be used again. He accomplished better than any author I can name exactly what he sought to do--teach.
I just wish I'd written and thanked him a long time ago. RIP.
Stop thinking like Sun. It's only interpreted if you compile it to java bytecodes and run it with a java VM. With a compiler like gcc/gcj, you just compile it like you would C. The only real problem with compiled Java that I see is getting the GC to behave.
He almost used Java and the Kaffe VM instead of C according to an old interview. His most interesting comment was about Java being a superior language to C, and what sounds like his willingness to write q4 in Java (if it is possible by then with a java->x86 compiler like gcj)
I can't resist. I'm racking my brain thinking of reasons why writing as a collaborative effort will or won't work. I'm thinking about the boundry conditions. What is the best possible outcome and what is the worst? This came to mind;)
Tandem story
Remember the book "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"? Well, here's a prime example offered by an English professor at Southern Methodist University:
English 44A SMU, Creative Writing Prof. Miller
In-class Assignment for Wednesday:
"Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to re-read what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached."
"The following was actually turned in by two of my English students: Rebecca - last name deleted, and Gary - last name deleted."
STORY:
Rebecca: At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.
Gary: Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago.
"A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
Rebecca: He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4 "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning.
The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth -- when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her.
"Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
Gary: Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race.
Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans.
The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow'em out of the sky!"
Rebecca: This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.
Gary: Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.
Then there's the responsibility issue: we know that FSF and SPI will run their projects for the benefit of the community. We can't say the same about the for-profits, they'll try to do the right thing when they can afford it and they'll put some free software pundits on their boards to appease us
I don't understand what you're worried about. The reason that sourceXchange was formed seems clear: from Brian,
"All too often a great idea will come up while developing Apache and disappear because there is no one with the time to work on it...
In other words, to fill the gaps where free software doesn't work very well.
And it wont work if everybody isn't happy. If the sponsor, or the developer, or the peers don't like the situation, they can just say, "later dude!" and leave. Too many people leave, word gets around, and no more sourceXchange.
It's called "Hole Man" (as someone else already pointed out) and he won a Hugo for it, which he found suprising:
Out of five Hugo awards, this is the only one that surprised me. I always think I earned it; I'm always half-sure I'll take it home; except this once. "The Hole Man" is a straightforward crime story rendered distinctive only by an unusual murder weapon.
That's from a collection of short stories of his called N-Space--highly recommended.
Articles like this that attempt to use scare-mongering to whip up readership, at the expense of science, are very dangerous for everyone.
Saying that the accelerator could destroy the Earth is a bit of sensationalism--I agree there. But it grabs your attention, didn't it? If it doesn't this story never get printed.
So maybe they sell a few more papers. But maybe too a kid finds this interesting enough that he's steered into science rather than law school.
I thought it was somewhat interesting until I found out there wasn't any source. Rather than security through obscurity, seti@home should have come up with a way of verifying results. Then we'd get something more out there than boring front-ends and closed source.
If they are allowing select people access to the code, somebody should make a real screensaver for Linux too. A hack for xscreensaver would do, with a starfield and some dancing aliens.
The xlib version of mozilla already works better for me than the gtk toolkit version. When I tried to submit a comment with the gtk build, first it paused, then everything shifted, then scrambled. Of course, with the xlib version I couldn't even get to slashdot, but it seemed more stable and it let me use my arrow keys and spacebar to navigate pages.
You do have to build it yourself, but it's pretty painless. Just add --enable-toolkit=xlib when you run configure. If you add --disable-debug, you can save massive amounts of space, ~250M. I also add --disable-mailnews --disable-editor --disable-tests --disable-static too, which saves some more space and speeds up the compile. On my roaring P133, a build takes 1.5 hours and uses about 165M total (100M source, 65M for build).
Should be a pretty slick and small browser when it's finished.
It was a bug in libc that caused shared libraries to be loaded more than once. So the bug is still there if you run RH 5.2 or Debian 2.1. If you build mozilla from cvs, the configure script will bark at you if it detects a buggy libc. The problem is cured in Debian potato and RH 6.0 though.
Anyone want to guess what number they'll reach before they have a feasible space craft? The X-3.7e3?
There is a good history of what can happen when you remove government meddling and NASA bureaucracy; Check out the book Sled Driver by Brian Shul, about the Skunk Works and the SR-71 Blackbird. The author piloted the SR-71.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be more interested in making Gnome programs compile on a system with just the Gtk+/glib libraries installed, without requiring any of the other Gnome libs. And similarily, being able to run KDE apps with just Qt installed.
My experience has been that trying to compile programs written for Gnome on a system with just Gtk/glib never works without removing the dependencies on gnome libs in the code yourself. Often, I find that it isn't that hard. I get the feeling that Gnome developers could care less about those that don't run gnome.
People running old systems, especially laptops, can't really be required to bear all the overhead of running Gnome or KDE just to be able to run one or two programs.
It would also solve, at least partially, the original Ask Slashdot question of how to write apps for both KDE and Gnome--just find the greatest common denominator, which is to make them compile with just the toolkits.
Why did you choose to stay in Pennsylvania? It looks like you never moved. Your resume shows a few different companies (all in PA?) until '85, and then you list yourself as an Independent Consultant for over eight years. I'm sure you got many offers in that time, many of them interesting, but likely most of them located in Northern California too. At the same time, your choices in PA must have been pretty slim.
If you could enlist Supermans help and reverse the rotation of the Earth and turn back time, would you make the same choices? What advice would you give to graduates and others that face the choice of whether to move to an area like Silicon Valley, or whether to stick it out and blaze their own path at home?
Thanks for fetchmail, by the way...
P.S. would you take the blue pill or the red one?
According to the EPA faq, paper represents 36% of waste. It may not seem like it, but most of that is actually in the form of cardboard boxes, not printer paper.
I too print stuff out on rare occasions, like pdf or ps docs. With postscript, the problem is the blurry fonts, and with both pdf and ps my 17" screen is too small to display the whole page which is frustrating. You also can't mark up a pdf doc with highlighter.
And for goodness sakes, how long do Slashdotters take to shit? If it's more than five minutes, then eat more dietary fiber or just concentrate harder.
when your choice for Favorite Linux Game is BattleBall
No, it doesn't make sense. I hate this idea. When I moderate, it tends to take up a lot of time, browsing at -1, reading all the comments to recognize duplicates, and reading all the replies (I read FLAT not threaded) to catch the gems. But I only do this for news that interests me because I just have a limited amount of time available. With only 20% or so of news stories available, chances are I'd never use my points at all. In the three days given to use your points right now, I usually just get my points used before they expire.
Can you recommend any good books on creating comics? I found one book titled Understanding Comics over at Amazon that gets a lot of praise.
I'm also curious about the art side of comics. I used to work for a Marvel-like comic artist doing lettering (what talent!), and he said that anyone could learn to draw like he could (which was pretty impressive). So should you take the time to learn to draw life-like figures, and then find your own comic-drawing style, or is that a wasting your time learning stuff you won't need?
The air hockey table is a good idea. I'd guessed you were going to have to use the 'Vomit Comet' for testing--you could give that work to the interns.
Not sure if you'll read replies to your AC post (if you get an account there's a link that makes checking for replies much easier), but what kind of processor is used? Is the code written in LISP or C like most embedded code?
Thanks.
Try not to worry about the total Score of the comment, but concern yourself with the individual moderation at hand.
Rob's wording is too weak: try not to worry, but it's still clear enough.
slightly offtopic: Has there been any progress on a Java OpenGL API standard? I recall news about perhaps magician becoming the standard, but no word since then.
My Java Quake-wannabe development is suffering :)
Why are there so few good authors of books for programmers? With the recent death of Richard Stevens, in one fell swoop we've lost the author of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, Unix Network Programming, and the three books of the TCP/IP series. If you program on Unix and write networking code, those books are essential. Yet even before Stevens wrote UNP in 1990, nobody had written anything but man pages, and nobody other than Stevens has written anything since.
Is the dearth of authors because not enough copy gets sold to amply reward all the hard work? Do programmers make lousy authors? Or is it that many people start books but never finish them?
Certainly that last reason applies to software engineers too. It seems to be a suprisingly rare skill to actually get a product finished. But there seems to be such a large pool of people who enjoy writing and programming that I find the scarcity difficult to understand.
Thanks. --Chris.
He already answered that question satisfactorily: it didn't sell enough copies to motivate the authors to write a new edition.
I've had hours to think about it now, and I'm even more depressed by his death than before. So I went to his homepage and dug around some. His FAQ is interesting. My favorite excerpt:
Surf around some more and you find out he loved to ski (he used to have a GIF of an old ski pass on his home page), he was a pilot, got his Ph.D while working a full time job at Kitt Peak observatory, has lived in Zambia, Utah, New Mexico, Virginia, Michigan, Oklahoma, Georgia, California, Arizona, Connecticut, and South Africa.
And among all the people who understood Unix systems programming and networking in 1988, this was the guy who had the courage to actually sit down and start writing his first book, Unix Network Programming. Just think of all the people who didn't write that book. He was a unique mix of talented engineer,programmer, and author. It's really no suprise that nobody beat him to writing APUE and his TCP/IP series.
And you thought Linus was unique.
His home page is here, and reading it is to find out what a truly great guy he was. My favorite is his recipe for chocolate chip cookies, which are harder to make than a bug free threaded tcp/ip stack.
His books were the best. Well written with the best exercises of any books out there. I think the reason he obviously put so much thought into the exercises at the end of chapters was because he knew that's where readers did most of their learning. Unlike other fine books like Knuth's, his books actually got used, reread, and handed around to be used again. He accomplished better than any author I can name exactly what he sought to do--teach.
I just wish I'd written and thanked him a long time ago. RIP.
Stop thinking like Sun. It's only interpreted if you compile it to java bytecodes and run it with a java VM. With a compiler like gcc/gcj, you just compile it like you would C. The only real problem with compiled Java that I see is getting the GC to behave.
He almost used Java and the Kaffe VM instead of C according to an old interview. His most interesting comment was about Java being a superior language to C, and what sounds like his willingness to write q4 in Java (if it is possible by then with a java->x86 compiler like gcj)
I can't resist. I'm racking my brain thinking of reasons why writing as a collaborative effort will or won't work. I'm thinking about the boundry conditions. What is the best possible outcome and what is the worst? This came to mind ;)
I don't understand what you're worried about. The reason that sourceXchange was formed seems clear: from Brian,
In other words, to fill the gaps where free software doesn't work very well.
And it wont work if everybody isn't happy. If the sponsor, or the developer, or the peers don't like the situation, they can just say, "later dude!" and leave. Too many people leave, word gets around, and no more sourceXchange.
It's called "Hole Man" (as someone else already pointed out) and he won a Hugo for it, which he found suprising:
That's from a collection of short stories of his called N-Space--highly recommended.
Saying that the accelerator could destroy the Earth is a bit of sensationalism--I agree there. But it grabs your attention, didn't it? If it doesn't this story never get printed.
So maybe they sell a few more papers. But maybe too a kid finds this interesting enough that he's steered into science rather than law school.
That's not a bad trade, is it?
I thought it was somewhat interesting until I found out there wasn't any source. Rather than security through obscurity, seti@home should have come up with a way of verifying results. Then we'd get something more out there than boring front-ends and closed source.
If they are allowing select people access to the code, somebody should make a real screensaver for Linux too. A hack for xscreensaver would do, with a starfield and some dancing aliens.
The xlib version of mozilla already works better for me than the gtk toolkit version. When I tried to submit a comment with the gtk build, first it paused, then everything shifted, then scrambled. Of course, with the xlib version I couldn't even get to slashdot, but it seemed more stable and it let me use my arrow keys and spacebar to navigate pages.
You do have to build it yourself, but it's pretty painless. Just add --enable-toolkit=xlib when you run configure. If you add --disable-debug, you can save massive amounts of space, ~250M. I also add --disable-mailnews --disable-editor --disable-tests --disable-static too, which saves some more space and speeds up the compile. On my roaring P133, a build takes 1.5 hours and uses about 165M total (100M source, 65M for build).
Should be a pretty slick and small browser when it's finished.
It was a bug in libc that caused shared libraries to be loaded more than once. So the bug is still there if you run RH 5.2 or Debian 2.1. If you build mozilla from cvs, the configure script will bark at you if it detects a buggy libc. The problem is cured in Debian potato and RH 6.0 though.
Anyone want to guess what number they'll reach before they have a feasible space craft? The X-3.7e3?
There is a good history of what can happen when you remove government meddling and NASA bureaucracy; Check out the book Sled Driver by Brian Shul, about the Skunk Works and the SR-71 Blackbird. The author piloted the SR-71.