If I could bottle what it is that American children have and sell it, foreign parents would immediately purchase it and force their kids to drink it down.
Reckless experimentation and learning, a calm disregard for stupid laws and stupid people. Woz & Jobs were blue-boxers (telco hacking) before they started Apple.
I am now overseas in Deutschland, and all I have to say is, if you have a hard time going to the supermarket, go back to school where they teach you how to deal with such experiences.
Polarized lenses allow light to go through them in one direction but not the other. To avoid degradation in sunlight, why aren't such lenses used to shield the LEPs, especially the lower-lifed blue ones? I can imagine that viewing angle might be compromised? I have never played with them, I am curious if anyone knows about this.
While telling people where to find copies of a document is, arguably, a free speech issue, posting verbatim copies of a copyrighted work clearly isn't.
I don't agree. The point is that Microsoft is infringing on ground that should not be available to them, when they helped pass the DCMA.
You asked if Slashdot should remove a list of 100 stolen credit cards. Of course they would, because it would be unjust to allow those credit cards to be posted. But the DCMA itself is an unjust law, and censoring posts because of that law is also unjust. If you're American (as I think you are), then you're from a country that holds democratic principles. You're supposed to question laws that limit your freedom; you have a court that oversees the lawmakers' wisdom. Use your rights!
I like this, this is a message that is more to spur people, I imagine, than to be taken literally.
I think the main important thing is that UNIX is capable of being extended to become the perfect OS. Windows 9x is an OS on top of DOS; though it's hard to include it in a discussion of the 'perfect' OS, it shows how a higher layer can become the OS. There is a saying that something need not be fully-featured or perfect, just that it's simple to implement and maintainable, so others can build upon it. That's what an OS is all about.
I am not a systems programmer, though I can understand the code. There are a number of engineering, and philosophical issues that go into it.
One could use the quick linux/bsd box as a quick prototype for the project, then switch to the OS That Shall Not Be Named when it is finally ready months later. When the pointy-haired supervisors complain about the eventual speed decrease, you can point out the special Rapid Application Development Prototyping method you use, and in a flash of brilliance it may occur to him that the prototype model is faster and may win him points with his supervisors for thinking of switching back to it.
And if the person you're responding to knew that Slashdot is considered 'VA Linux' turf by certain competitors... He has no idea who the songwriter is, who probably works in San Francisco.
I sometimes wonder if people talk about about languages to the point where everything is so abstract, there is no resemblance to the actual language. I once had an assignment where I was to write a piece of Java code to take up the smallest amount of space, and keep it in one class file. Hard? "Working against the language?" Not at all. It's true, the code would be unmaintainable if it wasn't so small. But you can declare global variables and change them here & there, let the structure of Java give hints to the person reading your code. I had all the structure of Java if I wanted it, and I could also say No to it. Forget which language is the grandfather of which, and just see how you can do what you want with each language. If you start out with the mindset there are limitations in each language, you'll find them.
I would agree with this except that rms also tends to constrain himself in some ways when he writes; he writes forcefully about a particular point, knowing that he cannot abuse his airtime by saying something that seems nontopical. In some ways he is rather businesslike...
I hope the moderators moderate this one up, no matter its humor value. I get the impression RMS could really give an insightful answer to this.
Re:how good is the human eye?
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Persistence of vision (i.e no percieved flicker) is somewhere around 25-30Hz. It is still possible to spot events that take less time. I wonder how the latency between rendering a frame and displaying aframe is affected though.
I don't quite understand this wondering of yours. But if this is useful... A technique is used, where you draw everything to a canvas (any area of memory, capable of holding enough info) and then dump the canvas to the screen. The area of time between being done painting that canvas and then displaying it to screen is pretty minimal.
The software guesstimates the amount of time that passed from the last frame to calculate how much the objects of the screen should have moved... This is much larger than the time it takes to copy the final canvas to screen.
Whoops, I didn't notice you replied. Let me take on your points, since you wrote more than I did.
First, neither promote learning, you know it as well as I do. The most you can argue is that they entertain, but do not forget that they do so illegally
The lack of your imagination doesn't imply that that there are limits on what I can argue. Most of the best programmers I've known (Carmack, perhaps Stallman) have thrived in an environment of utterly ILLEGAL piracy. Why? Because being enriched and entertained is the whole point of learning anything -- and when people see they can use their computers for more interesting things than writing term papers, they will USE, not futz around with, their computers.
They are not obligated to entertain you--certainly on everyone else's dollar.
I know university admins. You don't. Their jobs aren't 'harder.' If you knew any admins, you'd know about the one cubicle everyone frequents because it has the sweet cd-rw setup that can copy anything they want. Guess who were the earliest adopters of Napster/Gnutella at univ's -- the admins!
With all due respect, people like you are always running around with their head in their hands screaming the world is about to ____end______!
No, I was just pointing out that you "don't adapt well when change occurs." My world is just getting more interesting, while yours is spent dealing with unpleasant (for you) mindsets. Every major change requires a bit of upheaval on those who are shocked at the change. Always people are inconvenienced at the change. Always people adapt.
In any case, time will prove me right. By that time, maybe you will have come a bit more center after your Xth failed prediction of impending doom or cataclysmic change. No offense, and good night.
No, you do intend offense, which shows you are a better and subtler writer than a thinker. I have no worry about doom; you are more worried than I am. But we shall see, won't we? I enjoy the wait; I hope you will sit with me and enjoy the view.
Ok well first off, a great deal of these napster and Gnutella users are on college campuses. Those network admins are only expected to facilitate legimate uses--providing for free pirated music simply isn't in their job descriptions.
The nice thing is that you're not the one to define what "legitimate uses" means. If napster/gnutella promotes computer learning and entertainment, then its the admins' jobs to serve the students who largely subsidize their jobs.
With all due respect, you're locked into the conservative models too much. People like you don't adapt well when change occurs.
a. Frodo's lack of military experience gave him no preconceptions on the 'proper route.' His thinking was less blunt, less predictable.
b. Everyone else was swept up in Gandalf's plan to throw everything at Sauron to gain Frodo some advantage in disposing of the ring.
c. Sauron generally did not respect anything but brute, obvious power. One main theme in the book is everyone's blindness (except for the wise, eccentric ones) to the enormous potential of power in the soul of a little being. Gandalf would often say that he was endlessly surprised at the deep hardiness of the hobbits, underneath all their painful stupidity. Even then, he was required to divert Sauron's attention, since Sauron was a quick study.
d. Sauron may still have been weakened from the ordeal of coming to power, but he could concentrate a great deal of force whenever he wanted, especially in his own territory. In addition, he mastered the dark illusory arts where he could mess with the morale of an otherwise exemplary army. Gandalf saw that he needed to split Sauron's forces, hit him with two threats that were each very deadly.
e. The elves were in the pocket of Gandalf (though he would call it 'respect') and he was a student of overconfidence. (There were a number of encounters with adversaries where this possible aspect of his personality was brought out.) He felt that Sauron was the type to take a grim sort of glee in exercising his renewed power and rest on his laurels just enough to make a feint work.
Yes it is true, online universities are a new concept. And like all new concepts, people initially have a difficult time seeing the merit of it.
Even right now, universities struggle to give weight to the degrees they hand out. This is the reason for all the competition involved in getting high rankings in some national magazine. Online universities are no different in this regard.
Of course online universities can't ignore the problems posed by being online. They will look at existing models such as sysadmin certification, where the tests are administered in the regular world, with pen, paper, and proctors, regardless of how the person studied.
You don't have to read it, or read it all, if it doesn't interest you. And for most coding, a deep knowledge of nonobvious algorithms is not really useful. But I think it is pretty rewarding to know about MIX and the timing of code. And every concept is explained carefully before you learn it, so you only really need a knowledge of highschool algebra. Take a closer look at the foreword, it answers your questions about what you need to know.
What you should do is listen, as well. The best companies have people working on their own initiative, and the management are there to help, not get in the damn way.
Not true; if management is competent enough (which occurs in certain rare companies), they are part of the "workers" and can take part successfully in quality. An amazon search on Six Sigma should a good book full of case studies at various large companies.
Even forgetting for a moment the error in #3 (which someone else has pointed out), the three assumptions (plus the castling one) are incomplete. There are many rules in chess, you have forgotten one of them.
A thought might be to not concentrate only on world-shattering implications, and use paper 'puters for smaller things, like novelties aimed at Japanese markets. The parts of the device humans must interface with should be protected by plastic or whatnot (sounding wonderful for the environment already), but there are attractive things that can be made on an almost completely flat surface. Try floating the idea without trying to make much money.
That way, the items become more pervasive, and the components of normal computers are very energy-intensive in the first place.
I certainly miss them, though I would not go back since I no longer have the time to devote to such an intense thing. Well... You might be interested in BLaH tfiles (txt files) here. A lot of it was looking for places that hopefully were not too far away, for interesting files and/or discussions.
Don't worry, your ideas will certainly be stolen regardless of what platform you develop for. Did you not know that MS is famous for this? Or do you think that GUIs began with Windows?
If VMWare has a good product, it will make them well off, regardless of free competiton. Freemware and other ambitious open source projects spend a great deal of time organizing, and they are unlikely to support the product as well as VMWare. (Of course, time will make certain.) Especially if it's true that Freemware is designed to destroy VMWare for someone's personal benefit.
Of course, don't support linux if you don't want. It's there only if it's something you enjoy. If you don't, your aura will probably be bad for it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
If I could bottle what it is that American children have and sell it, foreign parents would immediately purchase it and force their kids to drink it down.
Reckless experimentation and learning, a calm disregard for stupid laws and stupid people. Woz & Jobs were blue-boxers (telco hacking) before they started Apple.
I am now overseas in Deutschland, and all I have to say is, if you have a hard time going to the supermarket, go back to school where they teach you how to deal with such experiences.
Polarized lenses allow light to go through them in one direction but not the other. To avoid degradation in sunlight, why aren't such lenses used to shield the LEPs, especially the lower-lifed blue ones? I can imagine that viewing angle might be compromised? I have never played with them, I am curious if anyone knows about this.
While telling people where to find copies of a document is, arguably, a free speech issue, posting verbatim copies of a copyrighted work clearly isn't.
I don't agree. The point is that Microsoft is infringing on ground that should not be available to them, when they helped pass the DCMA.
You asked if Slashdot should remove a list of 100 stolen credit cards. Of course they would, because it would be unjust to allow those credit cards to be posted. But the DCMA itself is an unjust law, and censoring posts because of that law is also unjust. If you're American (as I think you are), then you're from a country that holds democratic principles. You're supposed to question laws that limit your freedom; you have a court that oversees the lawmakers' wisdom. Use your rights!
I like this, this is a message that is more to spur people, I imagine, than to be taken literally.
I think the main important thing is that UNIX is capable of being extended to become the perfect OS. Windows 9x is an OS on top of DOS; though it's hard to include it in a discussion of the 'perfect' OS, it shows how a higher layer can become the OS. There is a saying that something need not be fully-featured or perfect, just that it's simple to implement and maintainable, so others can build upon it. That's what an OS is all about.
I am not a systems programmer, though I can understand the code. There are a number of engineering, and philosophical issues that go into it.
It is always interesting to read these 'rants,' since it seems that in the future, people will be a LOT more thick-skinned.
One could use the quick linux/bsd box as a quick prototype for the project, then switch to the OS That Shall Not Be Named when it is finally ready months later. When the pointy-haired supervisors complain about the eventual speed decrease, you can point out the special Rapid Application Development Prototyping method you use, and in a flash of brilliance it may occur to him that the prototype model is faster and may win him points with his supervisors for thinking of switching back to it.
And if the person you're responding to knew that Slashdot is considered 'VA Linux' turf by certain competitors... He has no idea who the songwriter is, who probably works in San Francisco.
I sometimes wonder if people talk about about languages to the point where everything is so abstract, there is no resemblance to the actual language.
I once had an assignment where I was to write a piece of Java code to take up the smallest amount of space, and keep it in one class file. Hard? "Working against the language?" Not at all. It's true, the code would be unmaintainable if it wasn't so small. But you can declare global variables and change them here & there, let the structure of Java give hints to the person reading your code. I had all the structure of Java if I wanted it, and I could also say No to it.
Forget which language is the grandfather of which, and just see how you can do what you want with each language. If you start out with the mindset there are limitations in each language, you'll find them.
I would agree with this except that rms also tends to constrain himself in some ways when he writes; he writes forcefully about a particular point, knowing that he cannot abuse his airtime by saying something that seems nontopical. In some ways he is rather businesslike...
I hope the moderators moderate this one up, no matter its humor value. I get the impression RMS could really give an insightful answer to this.
Persistence of vision (i.e no percieved flicker) is somewhere around 25-30Hz. It is still possible to spot events that take less time. I wonder how the latency between rendering a frame and displaying aframe is affected though.
I don't quite understand this wondering of yours. But if this is useful... A technique is used, where you draw everything to a canvas (any area of memory, capable of holding enough info) and then dump the canvas to the screen. The area of time between being done painting that canvas and then displaying it to screen is pretty minimal.
The software guesstimates the amount of time that passed from the last frame to calculate how much the objects of the screen should have moved... This is much larger than the time it takes to copy the final canvas to screen.
Whoops, I didn't notice you replied. Let me take on your points, since you wrote more than I did.
First, neither promote learning, you know it as well as I do. The most you can argue is that they entertain, but do not forget that they do so illegally
The lack of your imagination doesn't imply that that there are limits on what I can argue. Most of the best programmers I've known (Carmack, perhaps Stallman) have thrived in an environment of utterly ILLEGAL piracy. Why? Because being enriched and entertained is the whole point of learning anything -- and when people see they can use their computers for more interesting things than writing term papers, they will USE, not futz around with, their computers.
They are not obligated to entertain you--certainly on everyone else's dollar.
I know university admins. You don't. Their jobs aren't 'harder.' If you knew any admins, you'd know about the one cubicle everyone frequents because it has the sweet cd-rw setup that can copy anything they want. Guess who were the earliest adopters of Napster/Gnutella at univ's -- the admins!
With all due respect, people like you are always running around with their head in their hands screaming the world is about to ____end______!
No, I was just pointing out that you "don't adapt well when change occurs." My world is just getting more interesting, while yours is spent dealing with unpleasant (for you) mindsets. Every major change requires a bit of upheaval on those who are shocked at the change. Always people are inconvenienced at the change. Always people adapt.
In any case, time will prove me right. By that time, maybe you will have come a bit more center after your Xth failed prediction of impending doom or cataclysmic change. No offense, and good night.
No, you do intend offense, which shows you are a better and subtler writer than a thinker. I have no worry about doom; you are more worried than I am. But we shall see, won't we? I enjoy the wait; I hope you will sit with me and enjoy the view.
Ok well first off, a great deal of these napster and Gnutella users are on college campuses. Those network admins are only expected to facilitate legimate uses--providing for free pirated music simply isn't in their job descriptions.
The nice thing is that you're not the one to define what "legitimate uses" means. If napster/gnutella promotes computer learning and entertainment, then its the admins' jobs to serve the students who largely subsidize their jobs.
With all due respect, you're locked into the conservative models too much. People like you don't adapt well when change occurs.
a. Frodo's lack of military experience gave him no preconceptions on the 'proper route.' His thinking was less blunt, less predictable.
b. Everyone else was swept up in Gandalf's plan to throw everything at Sauron to gain Frodo some advantage in disposing of the ring.
c. Sauron generally did not respect anything but brute, obvious power. One main theme in the book is everyone's blindness (except for the wise, eccentric ones) to the enormous potential of power in the soul of a little being. Gandalf would often say that he was endlessly surprised at the deep hardiness of the hobbits, underneath all their painful stupidity. Even then, he was required to divert Sauron's attention, since Sauron was a quick study.
d. Sauron may still have been weakened from the ordeal of coming to power, but he could concentrate a great deal of force whenever he wanted, especially in his own territory. In addition, he mastered the dark illusory arts where he could mess with the morale of an otherwise exemplary army. Gandalf saw that he needed to split Sauron's forces, hit him with two threats that were each very deadly.
e. The elves were in the pocket of Gandalf (though he would call it 'respect') and he was a student of overconfidence. (There were a number of encounters with adversaries where this possible aspect of his personality was brought out.) He felt that Sauron was the type to take a grim sort of glee in exercising his renewed power and rest on his laurels just enough to make a feint work.
Yes it is true, online universities are a new concept. And like all new concepts, people initially have a difficult time seeing the merit of it.
Even right now, universities struggle to give weight to the degrees they hand out. This is the reason for all the competition involved in getting high rankings in some national magazine. Online universities are no different in this regard.
Of course online universities can't ignore the problems posed by being online. They will look at existing models such as sysadmin certification, where the tests are administered in the regular world, with pen, paper, and proctors, regardless of how the person studied.
You don't have to read it, or read it all, if it doesn't interest you. And for most coding, a deep knowledge of nonobvious algorithms is not really useful. But I think it is pretty rewarding to know about MIX and the timing of code. And every concept is explained carefully before you learn it, so you only really need a knowledge of highschool algebra.
Take a closer look at the foreword, it answers your questions about what you need to know.
What you should do is listen, as well. The best companies have people working on their own initiative, and the management are there to help, not get in the damn way.
Not true; if management is competent enough (which occurs in certain rare companies), they are part of the "workers" and can take part successfully in quality. An amazon search on Six Sigma should a good book full of case studies at various large companies.
Even forgetting for a moment the error in #3 (which someone else has pointed out), the three assumptions (plus the castling one) are incomplete. There are many rules in chess, you have forgotten one of them.
A thought might be to not concentrate only on world-shattering implications, and use paper 'puters for smaller things, like novelties aimed at Japanese markets. The parts of the device humans must interface with should be protected by plastic or whatnot (sounding wonderful for the environment already), but there are attractive things that can be made on an almost completely flat surface. Try floating the idea without trying to make much money.
That way, the items become more pervasive, and the components of normal computers are very energy-intensive in the first place.
--fourthstring
I certainly miss them, though I would not go back since I no longer have the time to devote to such an intense thing. Well... You might be interested in BLaH tfiles (txt files) here. A lot of it was looking for places that hopefully were not too far away, for interesting files and/or discussions.
Don't worry, your ideas will certainly be stolen regardless of what platform you develop for. Did you not know that MS is famous for this? Or do you think that GUIs began with Windows?
If VMWare has a good product, it will make them well off, regardless of free competiton. Freemware and other ambitious open source projects spend a great deal of time organizing, and they are unlikely to support the product as well as VMWare. (Of course, time will make certain.) Especially if it's true that Freemware is designed to destroy VMWare for someone's personal benefit.
Of course, don't support linux if you don't want. It's there only if it's something you enjoy. If you don't, your aura will probably be bad for it anyway.