If you are a professional engineer then you will always use the right tool for the job. This is why a professional knows numerous languages, and only some of those are OO.
In addition to his object-oriented tools, he'll also know his way around procedural, purely functional, dataflow and logic-oriented languages as well, to cover the major paradigms in computing. And orthogonal to that, he'll also know some languages at each of the various levels of abstraction, from low-level assemblers through generic scripting languages to the highest-level business or AI domain-oriented languages.
You may notice that the above bears no relationship whatsoever with the typical "OO-everything" attitude on Slashdot. That's not really surprising, when you consider that not many of the posters here seem to be professional engineers. Languages and paradigms are treated more akin to religions than to tools on this forum.
To answer your question then, I'd recommend that first you fill-in some of your missed education by taking a short course in a safe scripted OO language --- Python is one of the better candidates. Then, armed with procedural and objective tools (at the very least), you select which is most appropriate based on the job you're about to tackle. Some will be naturally objective, some won't.
And just ignore the Slashdot noobs as they so fervently whack in their screws with a hammer.:-)
The costs on either side have absolutely nothing to do with the provision of balanced justice. Even with the typical blind amorality of a lawyer, surely you must be able to see that the money issue merely distorts the delivery of justice.
It's pretty disgusting how you can proudly proclaim IAAL and in the same breath defend the concept of justice only for those who can afford it.
> the colour accuracy on an LCD monitor is still nowhere near as good as a high quality CRT.
I don't know about color, but I've clicked on the link in the blurb and it still shows the/. page after 5 minutes.
I got to the article without any problem, but it was hardly worth reading. The key element was missing, namely a link to the ICC profile for the monitor.
That's the key element in any discussion about monitors for professional (or even serious amateur) color work. First of all, the mere fact that the generic ICC profile for the model is provided would say a lot about both the product and the reviewer, and secondly, if the profile is linked then interested readers can plug it in to color gamut viewers and other analysis tools for themselves and see whether the monitor is good for their application.
You didn't miss much. The article was quite reasonable at a shallow consumer level, but did not hit the mark for the color professional.
One of the reasons extolled at length for choosing one type against abother is that a DSLR has a narrow depth of field and a "standard" digital camera has a greater depth. As anyone who knows about photography would know this is total tosh.
Actually, the article was perfectly right about that. I didn't like the way it dumbed the whole subject down, but it was correct in saying that non-DSLRs usually provide a greater depth of field --- because they do, in fact many times greater.
If you want the maths, here's a recognized authority on the subject, Bob Atkins. It's easy to summarize the relevant point:
Depth of Field (DoF) is inversely proportional to the linear size of the sensor, ie. CMOS or CCD or old fashioned film. Taking the standard 24x36mm frame of 35mm film as the basis for comparison, the most commonly used DSLR sensors employ the "APS-C" size which is just a little bit smaller: for example, Canon's 20D has a CMOS sensor 1.6 times smaller than 35mm film, and the Nikon D70 has a CCD sensor 1.5 times smaller than 35mm film. As a result, DSLRs provide slightly more DoF than 35mm cameras if all the other variables are left the same. 1.5 or 1.6 is not really a significant amount though.
In contrast, digital non-DSLRs almost all use *much* smaller sensors: for example, the Nikon E3100 is perfectly typical in employing a sensor with linear dimensions 6.5 times smaller than 35mm film, and hence 4+ times smaller than DSLRs. This is a very marked difference, and is immediately noticeable in the greatly increased DoF in almost any landscape shot containing nearby trees and distant horizons. Obviously other factors come into the equation as well, but by far the most significant factor for broadly similar conditions and lenses is the sensor size.
If you don't like maths, convince yourself by looking at photo galleries that provide full EXIF info for their shots. You'll find non-DSLR shots at f/2.8 over 1/60s in UK-style weak sunshine with a DoF all the way from 30 yards to the horizon, which is quite impossible with a DSLR. That said, I much prefer my DSLR, since I love the effect of narrow DoF.
Indeed, and that's why I agree with you about ATI not really helping AMD at all, but for a different reason to yourself.
ATI's effect on others is a curious mixture of help and hindrance because of its wierd market positioning, and the last thing that AMD needs is "help" that raises issues for a section of its customers.
ATI's problem is that it sees itself as betting on rival alternatives instead of (like Intel and nVidia) a backer of anything that moves. We see this with its marginal and quite unhelpful support for Linux, and it's just the same with OpenGL. In both cases, it does the absolute minimimum that it can to be able to claim that it provides "support". Trying to get any real movement from them is like trying to get blood out of a stone, even when they're supplied full details of major showstoppers by highly renowned game developers.
The state of its OpenGL support is particularly bad, and causes havoc in advanced games that go beyond the basics that ATI has bothered to hone. The fanboys will of course say that ATI is catering for the gaming DirectX majority, but that is precisely the point --- it is not "bothering" to provide full and effective support for "minorities" like Linux and OpenGL, and when you happen to be a member of that minority, it matters.
An AMD box crashing when it runs an advanced OpenGL game (there are several I can think of) is no help to AMD's fortunes at all. And that's the issue with ATI.
All XP lost on death in AO (which could be zero anyway because you can insure at any time) goes into a death pool, and it just comes back out to you in large chunks whenever you earn XP, so there is never any XP actually lost.
It's kind of fun to get huge amounts of XP back per kill while you still have XP in your death pool. Very good solution.
Don't answer that. I only mentioned it because it's slightly on-topic w.r.to my previous reply. Here's the tie-in:
After many years of trying to get networking used to its full capacity in amateur circles (I remember your packet program in the early years, and used to chat with you on the old amateur TCP/IP group), I gave up with amateur radio. You know why? Because of its detractors, both in national institutions and in local circles, always stifling innovation for one reason or another.
I applaud these slightly nutty (or at least uninhibited) visionaries at the margins of the space industry, because they have a positive effect on the spirit of man. It doesn't take away anything from the hard-working and brilliant scientists and engineers at NASA et al, but that's on a different level. And even they benefit from the mass population being inspired by the visionaries to look upwards a little more.
But that doesn't argue against the fact that Rutan in his role as a symbol plus a swarm of full-orbit wishful thinkers behind him are pushing the meme boundaries ever so slightly, and that's in our favour in the long run.
Although I'm a feet-on-the-ground engineer, the effect of detractors has always worried me much more than the effect of visionaries. The former place a chill on progress, whereas the latter encourage it no matter how misguided.
Phil, although you're right about what this means in the context of our technical ability to get into orbit, there is another very big issue at stake here.
We are not limited only by our technical ability. We are also very strongly limited by the restraints that our badly evolved and mutated institutions place upon us, and in the context of space, that means government controls.
Rutan and many other similar "impudent entrepreneurs" are pushing the envelope of what is considered normal for privateers in small ways that governments cannot easily squash, and that in itself is invaluable. It does pave the way for ordinary people to get into space eventually, despite this having absolutely no relationship to the $100k roy rides being planned. That's just a stepping stone in meme space, more than anything else.
Don't worry about new technologies for *real* space travel --- they will derive from the very light and very strong materials already on the horizon from advances in nanoscale manufacturing, even in the absence of major improvements in propulsion.
Thanks for the note, I grabbed a fresh 0.9.3 just to be sure, naturally compiled from source since this is Gentoo.
Same problem. All the other apps obey Icewm and don't raise on click, Firefox is the only one that does its own thing.
If ICCCM has changed recently then I could accept that Icewm might be at fault, although it's recognized as being one of the better WMs for that. However, if ICCCM hasn't changed recently then it's all down to Firefox being either bolshy or faulty, because every other app here obeys the WM setting.
While the IT job market has shrunk by close to 20%, how does the industry do?
You're right to point out that other issues need to be considered when looking at the statistic.
Many things are contributing to changes in the industry. The prevalent peer-group reaction of blaming job losses solely on outsourcing abroad is pretty blinkered. It may indeed be one factor, but then open source is another factor -- we will certainly be needing to employ fewer and fewer competent techies as the repository of quality reusable or easily customizable/modifiable components and applications becomes ever greater. It's still early days of course, but it's already undeniable that you longer need to hire developers to code a project from scratch.
And I think that that is a good thing, despite the ever-larger effect it will have on employment, my own included. One has to adapt.
Yesterday, the only one of mine that worked was AdBlock (the best one) and then today there was already an update for FoxyTunes
Well it would be nice if Firefox were a polite citizen in window manager land too. It totally ignores the window manager settings on what to do if a window is clicked.
Some WMs are more versatile than others, and for example Icewm allows you to configure focus-on-click-but-dont-raise mode. That's brilliant for me, because I like to type text into partially obscured windows without them raising.
Unfortunately, Firefox says "I know what's best for you" and ignores the WM hints. All other X11 apps that I use under Gentoo obey the WM. Only Firefox is fascist about the click model. Bleh.
It's a good question. Maybe creativity and earnings go hand in hand, in the sense that a lot of creative people want to make money from their creativity.
FOSS encourages creativity because it makes creating programs easier, by basing them on the open work of others. The trouble is, FOSS massively discourages earnings, because if you invented something that sells well then you would instantly have a pile of competitors selling the open code that you just developed. Under those conditions, you can't even get venture capital since you can't guarantee to pay back loans from software sales.
This makes people who want to cash in on selling a lot of copies at high prices (which scales excellently) stay well clear of free / open software, and among those people there will be a proportion of the most creative ones too. It's no good suggesting "Go make money from support" because support scales appallingly badly compared to replicating code, as it requires people-time and labor is fantastically expensive.
There probably isn't a way around this, since GPL-type licenses massively support the rights of redevelopers and don't help protect the original inventor's development investment at all. It's the price we pay for being able to use other people's sources.
dave420, while you gave a nice polite answer (thanks), there's nothing in there that addresses the key issue at all. Look:
it's a business not a religion. It has to be concerned with actual, tangible resources.
That's very true, but it's a business based on development of code by the FOSS community, and only minimally by RedHat themselves. The actual tangible resources (in programming) that limit their own product-related needs are merely those associated with small side products like their own installer.
The 99.999% heart of their software product is just plain FOSS apps and kernels selected and configured to their tastes, not developed by them. And it could be no other way, since they are a build-distro and offer-support company, not a software development company at all except in that tiny 0.001% by code volume in their delivered software. (This doesn't include in-house support systems, which are not at issue here, but only the actual delivered code.)
Let's give it a name: DISTRO-DISTINCTIVE CODE, that's what I'll call that 0.001% (or whatever tiny figure it is) of code that is specific to the RH distros from here on down.
The theoretical millions-strong geek coding army is a nice idea and somewhat accurate, but it can't be called on by Red Hat to help them or their products when they want.
They don't need a million-strong army for their product coding needs, because they have no product coding needs outside of their distro-distinctive code.
You read the article, so you've seen the amount of money they have, versus that spent by MS each year.
Yes, but MS needs that money to pay for 100% of their code, since they obtain it by direct in-house development or by acquisition from corporate takeovers. RH needs to pay only a few in-house developers for their distro-distinctive coding, so this comparison is erroneous.
There's absolutely no way on earth they can compete.
Their coding money is not competing against MS's coding money, as per above. The huge MS product is competing against the even-bigger FOSS product, not against RH's tiny distro-distinctive coding. RH's product coding money is being used only to create a distinctive package, not to deliver a totally different operating system from the rest of the Linuxes out there. They don't need MS's billions for that, so the playing field is not distorted by MS's riches as far as developing delivered product is concerned.
I mean, Microsoft (whether you hate them or not) churns out entire operating systems (for every market you can think of), office suites, multimedia products, network server products, hardware, games, a console (with another on the way), etc. The list goes on.
That's my very point! RH has no need and no desire to do the same, they merely deliver an ordinary distro in a distinctive package, so they don't have those collosal product development costs that MS has.
You can see that Red Hat has its work cut out.
There's no denying that!:-) But it does not stem from RH not having enough software product developers in their ranks, since it's not their business goal to deliver an operating system that is significantly different from other distros. The huge core of their delivered system is FOSS and already exists.
A company that has its fingers in as many pies as MS, with the budget it has, is pretty much unstoppable when it comes to innovation and implementation (whether you agree with the philosophy or not).
MS's product coding budget (and that's the only type we're talking about here, not money for in-house systems, lawyer salaries, nor bribery of politicians) is indeed collosal, but what does that actually mean? It means that they can focus some thousands of developers in a particular direction, that's all, so that their product development can be very strongly targetted to be in line with a planned product direction.
Paul Salazar, the European marketing director at Red Hat, said his company has chosen to focus on Linux on the server rather than on the desktop, due to the fact that it cannot compete with Microsoft's research and development budget.
This is a pretty odd statement coming from a corporation with all its eggs in the Open Source basket. One would normally expect a company to believe in the superiority of its chosen business model.
Surely it's an article of faith that the "virtual equivalent R&D budget" of the FOSS community is hundreds of times greater than Microsoft's corporate R&D budget, and our R&D manpower is thousands of times larger. What FOSS lacks (comparatively) is strong product focus, but many would say that that is a good thing.
Is RedHat having second thoughts, or was this just an unfortunate individual comment from a marketting droid?
Every program in existence expands until it gains search engine capabilities
That's actually perfectly sane for apps that need search capability, as long as:
(i) The search engine facility is factored out of app code so that there is only one instance in the system which can be invoked by any application that needs it; and
(ii) The search engine is distributed in some way, perhaps using a DNS architecture or a P2P one, since most of us don't have machines with the processing nor storage capacity of a Google.
Well, to be 100% correct Deckard is the Hero: "The principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic presentation".
True enough, in our simplistic "hero always wins" mass media movie form. But in some ways, I consider Roy Batty (the lead replicant played by Rutger Hauer) as the Hero, albeit a tragic one. He dies with honour, accepting death at the end and letting his rival live. And his final "Time to die" is sheer poetry, not the death grunt of the archetypal villian, but truly heroic.
A really great film.:-)
Gender differences will become unimportant
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 1
In one hundred years we've developed flight, space travel, nuclear physics, gene therapy, and global digital communications networks, but we still can't get past treating women like property instead of people.
That's arguably the natural human condition, in the sense that the natural is wild. It won't change until that far-from-humane natural humanity is eroded out of us over the forthcoming centuries by gradual replacement of what nature made by machinery. We already "upgrade" ourselves with dentures, pacemakers, hip replacements and vaccines, but they're just the bottom rung of a gradual process of transformation. It's already fair to say that we're no longer the natural humans that evolved by random mutation. We're changing, not by alteration of our DNA but by parts improvement and replacement, both inside and out.
As things stand currently, we can't see a future for humanity that doesn't involve unlimited mental enhancement to ourselves, because unless that occurs, mankind will end up intellectually inferior to the AI of his machines. So far nobody has accepted a future where we are no longer the dominant intelligence on the planet, from which it follows that we will transform ourselves mentally by enhancing, extending and replacing our current protein apparatus. Or else. There appears to be no alternative. And that will change us mentally in many ways.
Of course, there's no guarantee that the human of 3004 will be more humane and even-handed than that of today... but you can pretty much guarantee that at some point, gender will no longer be such a powerful and divisive attribute as it has been until now. That follows unavoidably from the fact that the changes we will be making to ourselves will make sexual differences pale in comparison.
You're making the same mistake as various high profile advocates who seem to think that usability is just one single thing. It's not. Usability has many different aspects, and the importance assigned to each of those aspects varies across different target groups. Usability is not just something required by granny. Programmers and managers and accountants and 4-year old Joey and granny all require high usability, and it's a complete mistake to think that non-programmers are the only users to whom the concept of usability applies, and that therefore programmers can't produce the goods.
As a software developer, I expect high usability from my dev tools, and that includes powerful integration between all elements of the toolkit (instead of simplicity), and easy visibility of all component parts (instead of hiding detail on purpose). Neither of these are wanted by granny, but it's a total mistake to then conclude that important general issues of usability like consistency and layout clarity are of no interest to me. They are, and the tool programmer is the person best placed to understand that, and to deliver it.
To simply say "Don't expect usability from a programmer" may sound cool, but it's incorrect. It's incorrect because usability is a multipart issue, comprising a large body of domain-independent elements that underpin access to one or more domain-specific object sets and relationships.
Tool programmers are exceedingly well placed to develop high usability in the domain-independent parts (such as symmetry and clarity) since these require an analytic mind, as well as in the domain-specific parts that apply to the programming domain. The only area where they will often lack competence is in application domains outside of their personal sphere of knowledge. Well, nothing new there --- that's why additional input from domain experts is always required when writing a non-trivial app.
Does this mean that a programmer can deliver excellent usability in an educational app for Joey, unaided? That's unlikely, unless his or her domain expertise includes toddler education. However, the programmer has oodles of the usability expertise needed to deliver elements of usability like clarity and symmetry and effective feedback, because they apply to all target audiences, including programmers.
None of this excuses incompetent design from inexperienced coders of course, but that's a different subject altogether. Only a competent software engineer (both amateurs and professionals) will ever deliver a quality product, barring accidents.
That would be a perfectly viable way of ending the reign of RIAA-led corporate terrorism in music, if a majority of music listeners were to join in and stop listening to the crap. As things stand though, 99% of the audience consists of musical sheep, ie. people who despite their good intentions follow exactly the instructions of the music industry in deciding what music is "good" at any given time. The vast majority simply don't realize what's being done to them. Brainwashing is not too strong a term.
It's pretty inevitable. Unless you shut yourself off totally from the media, you get enveloped in the utterly pervasive music machine's output of not just music and video, but celebrity, hype and buzz. You literally cannot avoid it, it's as sticky as napalm. Face it, there is no future in asking the 99% of musically non-militant people to cut themselves off from the media, not even to enter the shopping malls where that sticky music is playing. The brainwashing is everywhere.
That public rating idea is great, and if it were to catch on then it might even improve the quality of "big business music" through perceived audience pressure. But meanwhile, music downloaders are being crucified, and leaving them to it in the hope that a long-term strategy might prevail is less than charitable. Some sort of direct legal action or preventative technical solution offers better prospects for the short term.
The embarassment probably arises from reading too much into the statistics. Here's one reason why.
Even if people are technically sophisticated and highly pro-Unix/Linux/*BSD, if they play many PC games then they probably have at least one separate box running Windoze. I have three, because I like to multi-box with several accounts in MMOGs. I treat the boxes as games consoles and not as computers, ie. there is nothing of any importance on them besides the games. All my real computers run some flavour of Unix. Such restricted use of Windoze isn't all that rare either --- several of my gaming friends do this too.
When one isn't gaming though, those Windoze boxes would be going to waste if unused, so it's only natural to have Mozilla or Firefox installed on them and use them for browsing. That's a use that creates no investment in the flakey MS platform, so it's acceptable.
Inevitably, this skews the stats gathered by webservers, but hey, I can think of worse problems in the world today. Reading too much into stats never was a safe thing to do anyway.
Max solar energy typically falling on a square metre of land: 1 KWh... PER HOUR
Yes indeed! And turning the question on its head, what does the "14 trillion KWh" represent, ie. has it been averaged back to KWh per hour as I assumed (which is just a power), or it it the total energy in KWh consumed over that year (2001 presumably, not circa at all). That should be easy to confirm either way since there's a huge difference between the two.
If 14 x 10^12 KWh is the actual total electrical energy consumed over the year 2001 then the ballpark figures look even better for solar devotees. Dividing it down by (24 x 365) = 8760 yields an average power requirement of 1.6 x 10^9 KW, so if our perfect square meter yields 1 KW, we need only 1,600 square Km to satisfy the world demand.
It can't be too hard to find a 40Km x 40Km empty space in Arizona.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970.
a ted+Universal+Time
h tm
l _Time
ROFL. That's so utterly incorrect.
Here are some links to the definition of UTC, although I guess the damage has already been done.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/Coordin
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-009/_1277.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universa
But what if I don't want OO?
:-)
If you are a professional engineer then you will always use the right tool for the job. This is why a professional knows numerous languages, and only some of those are OO.
In addition to his object-oriented tools, he'll also know his way around procedural, purely functional, dataflow and logic-oriented languages as well, to cover the major paradigms in computing. And orthogonal to that, he'll also know some languages at each of the various levels of abstraction, from low-level assemblers through generic scripting languages to the highest-level business or AI domain-oriented languages.
You may notice that the above bears no relationship whatsoever with the typical "OO-everything" attitude on Slashdot. That's not really surprising, when you consider that not many of the posters here seem to be professional engineers. Languages and paradigms are treated more akin to religions than to tools on this forum.
To answer your question then, I'd recommend that first you fill-in some of your missed education by taking a short course in a safe scripted OO language --- Python is one of the better candidates. Then, armed with procedural and objective tools (at the very least), you select which is most appropriate based on the job you're about to tackle. Some will be naturally objective, some won't.
And just ignore the Slashdot noobs as they so fervently whack in their screws with a hammer.
The costs on either side have absolutely nothing to do with the provision of balanced justice. Even with the typical blind amorality of a lawyer, surely you must be able to see that the money issue merely distorts the delivery of justice.
It's pretty disgusting how you can proudly proclaim IAAL and in the same breath defend the concept of justice only for those who can afford it.
> the colour accuracy on an LCD monitor is still nowhere near as good as a high quality CRT.
/. page after 5 minutes.
I don't know about color, but I've clicked on the link in the blurb and it still shows the
I got to the article without any problem, but it was hardly worth reading. The key element was missing, namely a link to the ICC profile for the monitor.
That's the key element in any discussion about monitors for professional (or even serious amateur) color work. First of all, the mere fact that the generic ICC profile for the model is provided would say a lot about both the product and the reviewer, and secondly, if the profile is linked then interested readers can plug it in to color gamut viewers and other analysis tools for themselves and see whether the monitor is good for their application.
You didn't miss much. The article was quite reasonable at a shallow consumer level, but did not hit the mark for the color professional.
One of the reasons extolled at length for choosing one type against abother is that a DSLR has a narrow depth of field and a "standard" digital camera has a greater depth. As anyone who knows about photography would know this is total tosh.
Actually, the article was perfectly right about that. I didn't like the way it dumbed the whole subject down, but it was correct in saying that non-DSLRs usually provide a greater depth of field --- because they do, in fact many times greater.
If you want the maths, here's a recognized authority on the subject, Bob Atkins. It's easy to summarize the relevant point:
Depth of Field (DoF) is inversely proportional to the linear size of the sensor, ie. CMOS or CCD or old fashioned film. Taking the standard 24x36mm frame of 35mm film as the basis for comparison, the most commonly used DSLR sensors employ the "APS-C" size which is just a little bit smaller: for example, Canon's 20D has a CMOS sensor 1.6 times smaller than 35mm film, and the Nikon D70 has a CCD sensor 1.5 times smaller than 35mm film. As a result, DSLRs provide slightly more DoF than 35mm cameras if all the other variables are left the same. 1.5 or 1.6 is not really a significant amount though.
In contrast, digital non-DSLRs almost all use *much* smaller sensors: for example, the Nikon E3100 is perfectly typical in employing a sensor with linear dimensions 6.5 times smaller than 35mm film, and hence 4+ times smaller than DSLRs. This is a very marked difference, and is immediately noticeable in the greatly increased DoF in almost any landscape shot containing nearby trees and distant horizons. Obviously other factors come into the equation as well, but by far the most significant factor for broadly similar conditions and lenses is the sensor size.
If you don't like maths, convince yourself by looking at photo galleries that provide full EXIF info for their shots. You'll find non-DSLR shots at f/2.8 over 1/60s in UK-style weak sunshine with a DoF all the way from 30 yards to the horizon, which is quite impossible with a DSLR. That said, I much prefer my DSLR, since I love the effect of narrow DoF.
AMD has the superior product in the Athlon 64
Indeed, and that's why I agree with you about ATI not really helping AMD at all, but for a different reason to yourself.
ATI's effect on others is a curious mixture of help and hindrance because of its wierd market positioning, and the last thing that AMD needs is "help" that raises issues for a section of its customers.
ATI's problem is that it sees itself as betting on rival alternatives instead of (like Intel and nVidia) a backer of anything that moves. We see this with its marginal and quite unhelpful support for Linux, and it's just the same with OpenGL. In both cases, it does the absolute minimimum that it can to be able to claim that it provides "support". Trying to get any real movement from them is like trying to get blood out of a stone, even when they're supplied full details of major showstoppers by highly renowned game developers.
The state of its OpenGL support is particularly bad, and causes havoc in advanced games that go beyond the basics that ATI has bothered to hone. The fanboys will of course say that ATI is catering for the gaming DirectX majority, but that is precisely the point --- it is not "bothering" to provide full and effective support for "minorities" like Linux and OpenGL, and when you happen to be a member of that minority, it matters.
An AMD box crashing when it runs an advanced OpenGL game (there are several I can think of) is no help to AMD's fortunes at all. And that's the issue with ATI.
All XP lost on death in AO (which could be zero anyway because you can insure at any time) goes into a death pool, and it just comes back out to you in large chunks whenever you earn XP, so there is never any XP actually lost.
It's kind of fun to get huge amounts of XP back per kill while you still have XP in your death pool. Very good solution.
Maybe suggest that for CoH?
By the way, how's amateur radio coming along? :-)
Don't answer that. I only mentioned it because it's slightly on-topic w.r.to my previous reply. Here's the tie-in:
After many years of trying to get networking used to its full capacity in amateur circles (I remember your packet program in the early years, and used to chat with you on the old amateur TCP/IP group), I gave up with amateur radio. You know why? Because of its detractors, both in national institutions and in local circles, always stifling innovation for one reason or another.
I applaud these slightly nutty (or at least uninhibited) visionaries at the margins of the space industry, because they have a positive effect on the spirit of man. It doesn't take away anything from the hard-working and brilliant scientists and engineers at NASA et al, but that's on a different level. And even they benefit from the mass population being inspired by the visionaries to look upwards a little more.
Oh, I agree, totally.
But that doesn't argue against the fact that Rutan in his role as a symbol plus a swarm of full-orbit wishful thinkers behind him are pushing the meme boundaries ever so slightly, and that's in our favour in the long run.
Although I'm a feet-on-the-ground engineer, the effect of detractors has always worried me much more than the effect of visionaries. The former place a chill on progress, whereas the latter encourage it no matter how misguided.
The broadcast flag is the only TV content worth watching these days, for crissakes leave it in! :-)
Oh wait, we've got several of those already.
.... :-)
Meanwhile us old timers just repeat the mantra "The Internet is not the web" over and over
Phil, although you're right about what this means in the context of our technical ability to get into orbit, there is another very big issue at stake here.
We are not limited only by our technical ability. We are also very strongly limited by the restraints that our badly evolved and mutated institutions place upon us, and in the context of space, that means government controls.
Rutan and many other similar "impudent entrepreneurs" are pushing the envelope of what is considered normal for privateers in small ways that governments cannot easily squash, and that in itself is invaluable. It does pave the way for ordinary people to get into space eventually, despite this having absolutely no relationship to the $100k roy rides being planned. That's just a stepping stone in meme space, more than anything else.
Don't worry about new technologies for *real* space travel --- they will derive from the very light and very strong materials already on the horizon from advances in nanoscale manufacturing, even in the absence of major improvements in propulsion.
Thanks for the note, I grabbed a fresh 0.9.3 just to be sure, naturally compiled from source since this is Gentoo.
Same problem. All the other apps obey Icewm and don't raise on click, Firefox is the only one that does its own thing.
If ICCCM has changed recently then I could accept that Icewm might be at fault, although it's recognized as being one of the better WMs for that. However, if ICCCM hasn't changed recently then it's all down to Firefox being either bolshy or faulty, because every other app here obeys the WM setting.
While the IT job market has shrunk by close to 20%, how does the industry do?
You're right to point out that other issues need to be considered when looking at the statistic.
Many things are contributing to changes in the industry. The prevalent peer-group reaction of blaming job losses solely on outsourcing abroad is pretty blinkered. It may indeed be one factor, but then open source is another factor -- we will certainly be needing to employ fewer and fewer competent techies as the repository of quality reusable or easily customizable/modifiable components and applications becomes ever greater. It's still early days of course, but it's already undeniable that you longer need to hire developers to code a project from scratch.
And I think that that is a good thing, despite the ever-larger effect it will have on employment, my own included. One has to adapt.
Yesterday, the only one of mine that worked was AdBlock (the best one) and then today there was already an update for FoxyTunes
Well it would be nice if Firefox were a polite citizen in window manager land too. It totally ignores the window manager settings on what to do if a window is clicked.
Some WMs are more versatile than others, and for example Icewm allows you to configure focus-on-click-but-dont-raise mode. That's brilliant for me, because I like to type text into partially obscured windows without them raising.
Unfortunately, Firefox says "I know what's best for you" and ignores the WM hints. All other X11 apps that I use under Gentoo obey the WM. Only Firefox is fascist about the click model. Bleh.
Where is the real creativity?
It's a good question. Maybe creativity and earnings go hand in hand, in the sense that a lot of creative people want to make money from their creativity.
FOSS encourages creativity because it makes creating programs easier, by basing them on the open work of others. The trouble is, FOSS massively discourages earnings, because if you invented something that sells well then you would instantly have a pile of competitors selling the open code that you just developed. Under those conditions, you can't even get venture capital since you can't guarantee to pay back loans from software sales.
This makes people who want to cash in on selling a lot of copies at high prices (which scales excellently) stay well clear of free / open software, and among those people there will be a proportion of the most creative ones too. It's no good suggesting "Go make money from support" because support scales appallingly badly compared to replicating code, as it requires people-time and labor is fantastically expensive.
There probably isn't a way around this, since GPL-type licenses massively support the rights of redevelopers and don't help protect the original inventor's development investment at all. It's the price we pay for being able to use other people's sources.
dave420, while you gave a nice polite answer (thanks), there's nothing in there that addresses the key issue at all. Look:
:-) But it does not stem from RH not having enough software product developers in their ranks, since it's not their business goal to deliver an operating system that is significantly different from other distros. The huge core of their delivered system is FOSS and already exists.
it's a business not a religion. It has to be concerned with actual, tangible resources.
That's very true, but it's a business based on development of code by the FOSS community, and only minimally by RedHat themselves. The actual tangible resources (in programming) that limit their own product-related needs are merely those associated with small side products like their own installer.
The 99.999% heart of their software product is just plain FOSS apps and kernels selected and configured to their tastes, not developed by them. And it could be no other way, since they are a build-distro and offer-support company, not a software development company at all except in that tiny 0.001% by code volume in their delivered software. (This doesn't include in-house support systems, which are not at issue here, but only the actual delivered code.)
Let's give it a name: DISTRO-DISTINCTIVE CODE, that's what I'll call that 0.001% (or whatever tiny figure it is) of code that is specific to the RH distros from here on down.
The theoretical millions-strong geek coding army is a nice idea and somewhat accurate, but it can't be called on by Red Hat to help them or their products when they want.
They don't need a million-strong army for their product coding needs, because they have no product coding needs outside of their distro-distinctive code.
You read the article, so you've seen the amount of money they have, versus that spent by MS each year.
Yes, but MS needs that money to pay for 100% of their code, since they obtain it by direct in-house development or by acquisition from corporate takeovers. RH needs to pay only a few in-house developers for their distro-distinctive coding, so this comparison is erroneous.
There's absolutely no way on earth they can compete.
Their coding money is not competing against MS's coding money, as per above. The huge MS product is competing against the even-bigger FOSS product, not against RH's tiny distro-distinctive coding. RH's product coding money is being used only to create a distinctive package, not to deliver a totally different operating system from the rest of the Linuxes out there. They don't need MS's billions for that, so the playing field is not distorted by MS's riches as far as developing delivered product is concerned.
I mean, Microsoft (whether you hate them or not) churns out entire operating systems (for every market you can think of), office suites, multimedia products, network server products, hardware, games, a console (with another on the way), etc. The list goes on.
That's my very point! RH has no need and no desire to do the same, they merely deliver an ordinary distro in a distinctive package, so they don't have those collosal product development costs that MS has.
You can see that Red Hat has its work cut out.
There's no denying that!
A company that has its fingers in as many pies as MS, with the budget it has, is pretty much unstoppable when it comes to innovation and implementation (whether you agree with the philosophy or not).
MS's product coding budget (and that's the only type we're talking about here, not money for in-house systems, lawyer salaries, nor bribery of politicians) is indeed collosal, but what does that actually mean? It means that they can focus some thousands of developers in a particular direction, that's all, so that their product development can be very strongly targetted to be in line with a planned product direction.
From the article:
Paul Salazar, the European marketing director at Red Hat, said his company has chosen to focus on Linux on the server rather than on the desktop, due to the fact that it cannot compete with Microsoft's research and development budget.
This is a pretty odd statement coming from a corporation with all its eggs in the Open Source basket. One would normally expect a company to believe in the superiority of its chosen business model.
Surely it's an article of faith that the "virtual equivalent R&D budget" of the FOSS community is hundreds of times greater than Microsoft's corporate R&D budget, and our R&D manpower is thousands of times larger. What FOSS lacks (comparatively) is strong product focus, but many would say that that is a good thing.
Is RedHat having second thoughts, or was this just an unfortunate individual comment from a marketting droid?
Every program in existence expands until it gains search engine capabilities
That's actually perfectly sane for apps that need search capability, as long as:
(i) The search engine facility is factored out of app code so that there is only one instance in the system which can be invoked by any application that needs it; and
(ii) The search engine is distributed in some way, perhaps using a DNS architecture or a P2P one, since most of us don't have machines with the processing nor storage capacity of a Google.
It's definitely doable, and sounds like fun.
Well, to be 100% correct Deckard is the Hero:
:-)
"The principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic presentation".
True enough, in our simplistic "hero always wins" mass media movie form. But in some ways, I consider Roy Batty (the lead replicant played by Rutger Hauer) as the Hero, albeit a tragic one. He dies with honour, accepting death at the end and letting his rival live. And his final "Time to die" is sheer poetry, not the death grunt of the archetypal villian, but truly heroic.
A really great film.
In one hundred years we've developed flight, space travel, nuclear physics, gene therapy, and global digital communications networks, but we still can't get past treating women like property instead of people.
... but you can pretty much guarantee that at some point, gender will no longer be such a powerful and divisive attribute as it has been until now. That follows unavoidably from the fact that the changes we will be making to ourselves will make sexual differences pale in comparison.
That's arguably the natural human condition, in the sense that the natural is wild. It won't change until that far-from-humane natural humanity is eroded out of us over the forthcoming centuries by gradual replacement of what nature made by machinery. We already "upgrade" ourselves with dentures, pacemakers, hip replacements and vaccines, but they're just the bottom rung of a gradual process of transformation. It's already fair to say that we're no longer the natural humans that evolved by random mutation. We're changing, not by alteration of our DNA but by parts improvement and replacement, both inside and out.
As things stand currently, we can't see a future for humanity that doesn't involve unlimited mental enhancement to ourselves, because unless that occurs, mankind will end up intellectually inferior to the AI of his machines. So far nobody has accepted a future where we are no longer the dominant intelligence on the planet, from which it follows that we will transform ourselves mentally by enhancing, extending and replacing our current protein apparatus. Or else. There appears to be no alternative. And that will change us mentally in many ways.
Of course, there's no guarantee that the human of 3004 will be more humane and even-handed than that of today
Don't expect usability from a programmer.
You're making the same mistake as various high profile advocates who seem to think that usability is just one single thing. It's not. Usability has many different aspects, and the importance assigned to each of those aspects varies across different target groups. Usability is not just something required by granny. Programmers and managers and accountants and 4-year old Joey and granny all require high usability, and it's a complete mistake to think that non-programmers are the only users to whom the concept of usability applies, and that therefore programmers can't produce the goods.
As a software developer, I expect high usability from my dev tools, and that includes powerful integration between all elements of the toolkit (instead of simplicity), and easy visibility of all component parts (instead of hiding detail on purpose). Neither of these are wanted by granny, but it's a total mistake to then conclude that important general issues of usability like consistency and layout clarity are of no interest to me. They are, and the tool programmer is the person best placed to understand that, and to deliver it.
To simply say "Don't expect usability from a programmer" may sound cool, but it's incorrect. It's incorrect because usability is a multipart issue, comprising a large body of domain-independent elements that underpin access to one or more domain-specific object sets and relationships.
Tool programmers are exceedingly well placed to develop high usability in the domain-independent parts (such as symmetry and clarity) since these require an analytic mind, as well as in the domain-specific parts that apply to the programming domain. The only area where they will often lack competence is in application domains outside of their personal sphere of knowledge. Well, nothing new there --- that's why additional input from domain experts is always required when writing a non-trivial app.
Does this mean that a programmer can deliver excellent usability in an educational app for Joey, unaided? That's unlikely, unless his or her domain expertise includes toddler education. However, the programmer has oodles of the usability expertise needed to deliver elements of usability like clarity and symmetry and effective feedback, because they apply to all target audiences, including programmers.
None of this excuses incompetent design from inexperienced coders of course, but that's a different subject altogether. Only a competent software engineer (both amateurs and professionals) will ever deliver a quality product, barring accidents.
Stop listening to crap ...
That would be a perfectly viable way of ending the reign of RIAA-led corporate terrorism in music, if a majority of music listeners were to join in and stop listening to the crap. As things stand though, 99% of the audience consists of musical sheep, ie. people who despite their good intentions follow exactly the instructions of the music industry in deciding what music is "good" at any given time. The vast majority simply don't realize what's being done to them. Brainwashing is not too strong a term.
It's pretty inevitable. Unless you shut yourself off totally from the media, you get enveloped in the utterly pervasive music machine's output of not just music and video, but celebrity, hype and buzz. You literally cannot avoid it, it's as sticky as napalm. Face it, there is no future in asking the 99% of musically non-militant people to cut themselves off from the media, not even to enter the shopping malls where that sticky music is playing. The brainwashing is everywhere.
That public rating idea is great, and if it were to catch on then it might even improve the quality of "big business music" through perceived audience pressure. But meanwhile, music downloaders are being crucified, and leaving them to it in the hope that a long-term strategy might prevail is less than charitable. Some sort of direct legal action or preventative technical solution offers better prospects for the short term.
it was embarassing to show 75% Windows hits
The embarassment probably arises from reading too much into the statistics. Here's one reason why.
Even if people are technically sophisticated and highly pro-Unix/Linux/*BSD, if they play many PC games then they probably have at least one separate box running Windoze. I have three, because I like to multi-box with several accounts in MMOGs. I treat the boxes as games consoles and not as computers, ie. there is nothing of any importance on them besides the games. All my real computers run some flavour of Unix. Such restricted use of Windoze isn't all that rare either --- several of my gaming friends do this too.
When one isn't gaming though, those Windoze boxes would be going to waste if unused, so it's only natural to have Mozilla or Firefox installed on them and use them for browsing. That's a use that creates no investment in the flakey MS platform, so it's acceptable.
Inevitably, this skews the stats gathered by webservers, but hey, I can think of worse problems in the world today. Reading too much into stats never was a safe thing to do anyway.
Max solar energy typically falling on a square metre of land: 1 KWh ... PER HOUR
:-)
Yes indeed! And turning the question on its head, what does the "14 trillion KWh" represent, ie. has it been averaged back to KWh per hour as I assumed (which is just a power), or it it the total energy in KWh consumed over that year (2001 presumably, not circa at all). That should be easy to confirm either way since there's a huge difference between the two.
If 14 x 10^12 KWh is the actual total electrical energy consumed over the year 2001 then the ballpark figures look even better for solar devotees. Dividing it down by (24 x 365) = 8760 yields an average power requirement of 1.6 x 10^9 KW, so if our perfect square meter yields 1 KW, we need only 1,600 square Km to satisfy the world demand.
It can't be too hard to find a 40Km x 40Km empty space in Arizona.