A good example i can think of is "xv", it's a program for viewing images and thus really needs to hook into a GUI of some kind.
For the record, if you didn't know already, xv is shareware and not Free Software. Imagemagick's "display" command is much more recent and under an open source license.
Tell me, exactly, what the point would be in integrating it with a desktop environment, where this functionality is clearly not specific to that environment (many console programs use spell checking as well), other than to bloat that environment.
The point would be to avoid bloat. Why should 20 programs have 20 different wrappers around aspell instead of having one common wrapper that each of the programs call? In OS X, a program installs itself as a service, and you can run that service on any highlighted text in any program on the system. Each program gets speech synthesis, language translation, formatting, and other goodies "for free" without any additional overhead or programming. In what way is that not a worthy ideal?
I completely agree with you about a soldier being a soldier first and foremost. When I was in the Navy, I was in the medical department. Still, we went to firefighting school because if a fire breaks out on ship, then that's the first priority of everyone onboard. You might be holding a hose in front of a recruit fresh from boot camp and behind the captain and some pilots. You don't have the privilege of saying "that's not my job" when it hits the fan.
We can talk all day about how hackers have such special skills that no one else could possibly learn after age 13, but that's just masturbation. And it's not true.
However, I'm not really with you here. There is a large "natural talent" component to hacking (for all definitions of the word). I can teach my mother-in-law how to run Nmap, but there's absolutely no way I could ever teach her to become a hacker. That's not an insult to her or a boost to my own ego, but an observation that she simply does not have the mindset and nothing is going to change that.
It's really a lot like puzzle solving. While you can teach any random observer to solve one particular kind, you can't instill the sort of curiosity that makes someone good at figuring out how to work one they've never seen before. In much the same way, you could never teach me to become an artist. You could show me how to improve my drawings to be better than stick figures or the right way to put paint on a canvas, but I am not equipped to be a Picasso. I don't think this makes me a lesser person; that's just not where my talents are.
Still, even the geekiest of hackers can learn to do a situp.
I don't think spellchecking functionality is a desktop-wide feature by itself; I think it will depend on the application how exactly it is implemented.
That isn't right, is it? Please tell me that's not right. KDE has Kspell (KDE3) and Sonnet (KDE4) for implementing system-wide spellchecking in every app that cares to link it. OS X has system-wide spellchecking. I'm reasonably sure that Windows has system-wide spellchecking. Surely Gnome has also managed this, hasn't it?
A soldier is a soldier, and one who isn't trained or able to help his fellow soldier when the crap hits the fan is being a poor soldier.
When I was hanging out with the Marines, they said (not really jokingly) that their cooks were trained to kill you with their utensils. The idea was that no matter what job you were doing, if your camp got invaded then your first priority was fighting. In that light, of course military hackers need to be fit. If your group ends up tapping fibers in Afghanistan and is discovered by the local warlord, you better be able to defend yourself.
no one comments yet on a General's usage of "YGTBKM! LOL!"?
OK, I'll comment: I thought it was funny. Either the General wrote that himself, in which case he put a far more human face on the interview than I would have expected, or someone wrote that for him and talked him into putting his name on it. If that's true, then just imagine that conversation:
Junior Airman: Really, sir! I think they'll laugh.
General: I don't care! I'm not saying "LOL" in an interview.
Junior Airman: All the cool kids are doing it!
General: Sigh. OK, send it.
Regardless, I appreciate his answers and his attempt to talk to us and not at us. Whether he wrote that or not, I think it came across pretty well.
If you head over to the EEE user forums (google it), you'll find that someone has already worked up an application that allows the user to select from a wide variety of screen resolutions.
I'm sorry, but I lack the imagination to understand how that's supposed to improve the situation at all. Are your fonts too big? Use smaller fonts (and get to keep the subpixel antialiased goodness). Window decorations too big? Use smaller window decorations. I'm just not sure how telling an 800x480 LCD panel that it's actually a 1600x960 screen is going to do anything beyond making everything look awful.
My personal opinion is that 800x480 is mainly a poor resolution in theory, but not in practice. Yeah, it seems like the tiny screen would be a problem, but I stopped noticing it after a while. That's very much a subjective observation, though, like the small keyboard. If it bothers you, it doesn't matter how many other people are OK with it.
Outside of intensive numerical work, most tasks people want done on a computer are done sequentially.
At the highest levels, you're mostly right. At lower levels, you're definitely wrong. When an artist is applying filters in Photoshop, although they're only doing so one at a time, each filter's low-level code should be as parallelized as possible for best performance. When you open a web page, you don't want the browser to completely load one image, then completely load the next, then the next; you want quite a few coming in at the same time. Basically, each task people want done on a computer decompose to a huge number of mostly parallelizable subtasks.
I wrote a little replacement for Python's map() function one afternoon to play around with. Now, even though my implementation is unexciting, why wouldn't you want average boring code to be automatically spread across multiple processors if you can do so for free? Google did the same thing but on an entirely different level. Apparently they see quite a lot of value in the idea.
I guess what I'm saying is that even boring things like spreadsheets can be (and should be) optimized quite a lot so that ordinary people can get stuff done quicker. There are methods available to the average programmer that go a long way toward addressing these needs, and we really must start using them.
Are you willing to buy it back from me for the price I gave if one or more of its peripherals has no good Linux device driver, where by good I mean having speed and feature parity with the Windows driver?
If Vista can't pull it off, why hold Linux to that standard?
The instant people decide to learn for themselves the truth of an issue, they have at their fingertips every resource they could ever need to make their search both fast and rewarding, so ignorance in this case is very much a choice.
Thanks for joining us, Mr. Cruise!
I think in a large part, the reason there is so much resistance is that once one accepts astrology as something more than a fiction, one is required to question every other aspect of one's life which was once regarded as safe and secure. That's scary and life-changing, and hobbits are easily unsettled by the prospect of adventures.
Other things I'm too afraid to believe in: crop circles, sasquatch, the tooth fairy, and a flat Earth.
As you move through life, you will eventually discover that things aren't always true just because the majority of people refuse to believe them. At least, I hope so for your sake.
I'm sorry, at what point in my post did I ever say astrology was a religion? It most certainly is not.
In what way is it possibly not? It's a set of made-up beliefs about how some greater power affects us mere mortals. That's darn near the definition of religion. Except, in this case, it also tries to be science (and again, fails miserably).
I'm sure that the people who opposed the inclusion of the material I contributed were reasonable, well-meaning people who just didn't think through what it was that they wanted, and what the consequences of making the community more insular and deletionist would mean.
Actually, they were an ass about it and took it as a badge of honor.
Astrology is not just another tool of divination, like tarot or I Ching or picking petals off a daisy. It is a system of looking at the flow of energy in the universe and how it affects you.
You just completely lost the respect of, well, every educated person everywhere. No. Get this: astrology is crap and incompatible with science. Unlike most religions, which address different questions than science and are therefore orthogonal, astrology attempts to answer the same as science and fails miserably. You cannot be pro-science and pro-astrology - it's just not possible.
Sheesh. Where are all the other geek girls in here when you need 'em?
Probably in hiding from embarrassment after seeing the stereotype of ditzy women "proven" by one of their own.
Observing positions of various constellations is not one way to keep track of seasons?
Which seasons? Will the seasonal drop in daylight in, say, Dallas be the same as in London? Do you reverse the signs in Sydney, AUS? What about cities on the equator - do the ancient formulas handle them, too?
I see some biology and astronomy education in your stars.
I see some remedial geography on your report card.
Deletionists are like trolls: since destroying content is much easier than creating, they can win over a similar number of inclusionists no matter how hard the latters try.
Yep. Some basement-dweller ruined Wikipedia for me. I spent (a little too much) time fleshing out a fictional article only to see it deleted because it didn't meet that kid's purity ideal. The article wasn't hurting anyone. Its presence didn't degrade the rest of the content - particularly not when you consider the lists of Pokemon and anime characters that are left alone - but one kid on a power trip got off on ruining it.
Nuts to Wikipedia. Until they get things under control, I want nothing to do with it and certainly won't be donating to its status quo.
Make sure your language plays nice with others: Java, PHP, perl,.NET are all 'common', so these should be good.
One of those frameworks will forever tie you to the whims of one specific vendor with a reputation for abandoning old frameworks for no customer-driven reason. If you bet the farm on.NET and it doesn't pan out, you deserve what you get.
so you're far better off having something cuick and crude rather than late and fancy. I cannot emphasize this point enough.
Oh, you might've mentioned that you've never worked in IT before. You see, in reality, you'll end up stuck with "quick and crude" 5 years from now and will be cursing that half-assed pile of fragile dysfunctionality until you decide you've finally had enough and start over. On that day, you'll probably write a question to Slashdot: "when should we ditch our platform?", and someone will advise you to crank out something "quick and crude".
They need to retract their claim. That graph clearly shows a performance difference based on installed CPU count.
Alternatively, you could bring your definition of "linear" in agreement with the rest of the world's, meaning "looks more like a line than anything else".
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, if you didn't know already, xv is shareware and not Free Software. Imagemagick's "display" command is much more recent and under an open source license.
The point would be to avoid bloat. Why should 20 programs have 20 different wrappers around aspell instead of having one common wrapper that each of the programs call? In OS X, a program installs itself as a service, and you can run that service on any highlighted text in any program on the system. Each program gets speech synthesis, language translation, formatting, and other goodies "for free" without any additional overhead or programming. In what way is that not a worthy ideal?
I completely agree with you about a soldier being a soldier first and foremost. When I was in the Navy, I was in the medical department. Still, we went to firefighting school because if a fire breaks out on ship, then that's the first priority of everyone onboard. You might be holding a hose in front of a recruit fresh from boot camp and behind the captain and some pilots. You don't have the privilege of saying "that's not my job" when it hits the fan.
We can talk all day about how hackers have such special skills that no one else could possibly learn after age 13, but that's just masturbation. And it's not true.However, I'm not really with you here. There is a large "natural talent" component to hacking (for all definitions of the word). I can teach my mother-in-law how to run Nmap, but there's absolutely no way I could ever teach her to become a hacker. That's not an insult to her or a boost to my own ego, but an observation that she simply does not have the mindset and nothing is going to change that.
It's really a lot like puzzle solving. While you can teach any random observer to solve one particular kind, you can't instill the sort of curiosity that makes someone good at figuring out how to work one they've never seen before. In much the same way, you could never teach me to become an artist. You could show me how to improve my drawings to be better than stick figures or the right way to put paint on a canvas, but I am not equipped to be a Picasso. I don't think this makes me a lesser person; that's just not where my talents are.
Still, even the geekiest of hackers can learn to do a situp.
That isn't right, is it? Please tell me that's not right. KDE has Kspell (KDE3) and Sonnet (KDE4) for implementing system-wide spellchecking in every app that cares to link it. OS X has system-wide spellchecking. I'm reasonably sure that Windows has system-wide spellchecking. Surely Gnome has also managed this, hasn't it?
I hope these Model M keyboards really are dishwashable, because I'll be needing to clean the Dr. Pepper out of mine.
When I was hanging out with the Marines, they said (not really jokingly) that their cooks were trained to kill you with their utensils. The idea was that no matter what job you were doing, if your camp got invaded then your first priority was fighting. In that light, of course military hackers need to be fit. If your group ends up tapping fibers in Afghanistan and is discovered by the local warlord, you better be able to defend yourself.
OK, I'll comment: I thought it was funny. Either the General wrote that himself, in which case he put a far more human face on the interview than I would have expected, or someone wrote that for him and talked him into putting his name on it. If that's true, then just imagine that conversation:
Junior Airman: Really, sir! I think they'll laugh.
General: I don't care! I'm not saying "LOL" in an interview.
Junior Airman: All the cool kids are doing it!
General: Sigh. OK, send it.
Regardless, I appreciate his answers and his attempt to talk to us and not at us. Whether he wrote that or not, I think it came across pretty well.
Ahhh, OK. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the followup.
I'm sorry, but I lack the imagination to understand how that's supposed to improve the situation at all. Are your fonts too big? Use smaller fonts (and get to keep the subpixel antialiased goodness). Window decorations too big? Use smaller window decorations. I'm just not sure how telling an 800x480 LCD panel that it's actually a 1600x960 screen is going to do anything beyond making everything look awful.
My personal opinion is that 800x480 is mainly a poor resolution in theory, but not in practice. Yeah, it seems like the tiny screen would be a problem, but I stopped noticing it after a while. That's very much a subjective observation, though, like the small keyboard. If it bothers you, it doesn't matter how many other people are OK with it.
At the highest levels, you're mostly right. At lower levels, you're definitely wrong. When an artist is applying filters in Photoshop, although they're only doing so one at a time, each filter's low-level code should be as parallelized as possible for best performance. When you open a web page, you don't want the browser to completely load one image, then completely load the next, then the next; you want quite a few coming in at the same time. Basically, each task people want done on a computer decompose to a huge number of mostly parallelizable subtasks.
I wrote a little replacement for Python's map() function one afternoon to play around with. Now, even though my implementation is unexciting, why wouldn't you want average boring code to be automatically spread across multiple processors if you can do so for free? Google did the same thing but on an entirely different level. Apparently they see quite a lot of value in the idea.
I guess what I'm saying is that even boring things like spreadsheets can be (and should be) optimized quite a lot so that ordinary people can get stuff done quicker. There are methods available to the average programmer that go a long way toward addressing these needs, and we really must start using them.
If Vista can't pull it off, why hold Linux to that standard?
Vista could never be that efficient. A Vista urinal would take 8 gallons per mandatory flush, but still stink.
Thanks for joining us, Mr. Cruise!
I think in a large part, the reason there is so much resistance is that once one accepts astrology as something more than a fiction, one is required to question every other aspect of one's life which was once regarded as safe and secure. That's scary and life-changing, and hobbits are easily unsettled by the prospect of adventures.Other things I'm too afraid to believe in: crop circles, sasquatch, the tooth fairy, and a flat Earth.
As you move through life, you will eventually discover that things aren't always true just because the majority of people refuse to believe them. At least, I hope so for your sake.
In what way is it possibly not? It's a set of made-up beliefs about how some greater power affects us mere mortals. That's darn near the definition of religion. Except, in this case, it also tries to be science (and again, fails miserably).
Actually, they were an ass about it and took it as a badge of honor.
You just completely lost the respect of, well, every educated person everywhere. No. Get this: astrology is crap and incompatible with science. Unlike most religions, which address different questions than science and are therefore orthogonal, astrology attempts to answer the same as science and fails miserably. You cannot be pro-science and pro-astrology - it's just not possible.
Sheesh. Where are all the other geek girls in here when you need 'em?Probably in hiding from embarrassment after seeing the stereotype of ditzy women "proven" by one of their own.
Which seasons? Will the seasonal drop in daylight in, say, Dallas be the same as in London? Do you reverse the signs in Sydney, AUS? What about cities on the equator - do the ancient formulas handle them, too?
I see some biology and astronomy education in your stars.I see some remedial geography on your report card.
Yep. Some basement-dweller ruined Wikipedia for me. I spent (a little too much) time fleshing out a fictional article only to see it deleted because it didn't meet that kid's purity ideal. The article wasn't hurting anyone. Its presence didn't degrade the rest of the content - particularly not when you consider the lists of Pokemon and anime characters that are left alone - but one kid on a power trip got off on ruining it.
Nuts to Wikipedia. Until they get things under control, I want nothing to do with it and certainly won't be donating to its status quo.
I will assume that Microsoft told Miguel once and for all that they weren't going to hire him, so he decided to quit sucking up to them.
I walked into a job interview and saw a book, "Web Development with Visual RPG". I got up and left.
You mean the GPLv2, of course. It's my understanding that GPLv3 code isn't eligible for inclusion, either.
One of those frameworks will forever tie you to the whims of one specific vendor with a reputation for abandoning old frameworks for no customer-driven reason. If you bet the farm on .NET and it doesn't pan out, you deserve what you get.
so you're far better off having something cuick and crude rather than late and fancy. I cannot emphasize this point enough.Oh, you might've mentioned that you've never worked in IT before. You see, in reality, you'll end up stuck with "quick and crude" 5 years from now and will be cursing that half-assed pile of fragile dysfunctionality until you decide you've finally had enough and start over. On that day, you'll probably write a question to Slashdot: "when should we ditch our platform?", and someone will advise you to crank out something "quick and crude".
Alternatively, you could bring your definition of "linear" in agreement with the rest of the world's, meaning "looks more like a line than anything else".
Off-topic observation: you said the exact same thing as the AC above you, but you got +1 and he got -1. Nice one, mods. :-)
I think you meant:
Intel's HTT = Hyperthreading Technology