You're just revealing your ignorance about UI design when you imply that there's more than a superficial similarity between usability of the kernel and usability of a UI.
I know most developers think they're UI experts and that their opinions are just as reasoned and correct as people who actually have training in addition to opinions, but when programmer types (like Linus and most of us here) do UI design, you get crap like bugzilla. Compare that to Jira, and maybe you'll see a difference, but then I'm sure some programmers think that the bugzilla UI is better than Jira because it has more checkboxes and options, so maybe not.
Ah yes, the infamous ZeoSync. Thanks for the link and the name. I'm really surprised to see that they're apparently out of business;-). Shannon had the last laugh, I guess, as always.
The funniest thing I found was somebody quoting from some press release about how they compressed 128 bits of random data down to 100 bits, LOL..
I agree with you completely, as long as you ignore certain inconvenient facts like that the PRC systematically destroyed almost all of Tibet's 6000 or so monasteries (and the monasteries were the center of the culture, sort of a cross between library-university-museum-monastery) expressly because they were the centerpoints of Tibetan culture, or that 10-20% of the population was killed in the during the so-called 'invited peaceful liberation,. or that things like rape and torture of nuns in prison were and are extremely widespread and implicitly sanctioned, or that very many monks, nuns, and laypeople were shot without trial for no other reason than that they were Tibetan and perceived to be -- or possibly, perhaps, could sort of be -- troublemakers, the families of the victims often forced to pay for the bullets that were used to kill them, or even that Tibetans are now a minority in their capital city, and those that remain are second-class citizens.
Apart from minor quibbles like these, I agree that China has really been a poster-child for what we might call 'compassionate imperialism.'
You might have a different perception of their policies if you had spoken to as many former political prisoners who were raped by prison guards using electric cattle prods as I have. And no, these things are not only from the distant past. They are still occurring now, and if you go to Dharamsala, India, you can meet the newcomers who are arriving from Tibet, and hang out at the support organizations for former political prisoners (e.g., Gu Chu Sum) and see that these brutalities are not a thing of the past.
That page is quite out of date. The Java version they mention on the following page is 1.3, which was released in May, 2000. That makes that page between 3 and 5 years old (1.4 was released in Feb., 2002).
You get one guess who... talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in [to Open Source].
ESR and Bill Gates surprisingly have something in common, in that they are both egomaniacs with extraordinarily overinflated opinions of themselves.
Before the flamefest begins, please read his words carefully. There is no room for reading that sentence to mean anything but that ESR singlehandledly talked IBM, Wall Street, and the entire Fortune 500 into open source.
my problem is with their CVS integration, if you use SSH for cvs access, it puts the repository as ":extssh:..." , instead of ":ext:..." , and this makes the repository incompatible with anyother CVS tool.
There has been an option of doing CVS in Eclipse using ext: and not extssh: for a long time. I've been doing it for more than a year. Extssh may be the default on some wizard though, but if you just add the repository location yourself, you can select 'ext:' and it works great.
The very first sentence in the very first linked article is:
Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a "masculine" profession such as engineering or accountancy, a report has said.
How do you not read that as a suggestion that implies causality? I know they say 'could', but they obviously are implying that there is some kind of a causal link, and that there is evidence that changing profession increases chances of producing a son.
"Quality" means the resultant size of the output -- i.e., the ratio of output size to input size is smaller for a higher setting (at the cost of more cpu cycles).
Perhaps no more than Ritchie, et al., but nothing I said indicated that I put Linus in a different class.
A hero is somebody who makes great sacrifice for relatively altruistic reasons. I think this applies to Linus as much as to the fireman. Fires are not a prerequisite. Perhaps your mind is the tiny mind that can only conceive of the concept of heroism in the one tiny context in which it has traditionally been conceived.
I would include Linus and RMF in the category of hero, just as I include people like Einstein, Gauss, or Glenn Gould. Words are fuzzy, and there is no mathematical rule for determining if 'hero' applies to a person, but clearly many technically-minded people, as well as students, and some law professors and business people do believe this.
Your rule for 'hero' seems to be that Joe Average is aware of his/her existence? Well, too bad for Isaac Newton and a thousand other people whose work makes our lives better every day.
Linus is already a hero, as evidenced by things like this article, which are more and more common every day. Technically-minded school children all over the world look up to him, just as math geeks have worshipped Euler or Gauss.
How about a slashdot addendum to Godwin's Law: the first person to mention Joe Average loses!
The difference between esearch and 'emerge -s' is like the difference between 'find / -name "foo"' and 'locate foo', for the same reason. It will index your ebuilds, and if you set a cron job to emerge sync and run 'eupdatedb' (to update the index) regularly, you'll always have up-to-date, lightning-fast searches.
Nowhere did I say that they were both scientifically valid hypotheses, so perhaps you should take a remedial reading comprehension course.
The point, of course, was that they are both absurdities--not that they are both scientific theories--and there will always be people who believe absurdities, regardless of whether they are falsifiable or not. I stand by that.
And on another note, falsifiability is not so simple and cut-and-dry as you seem to be implying. If you've read any philosophy of science, you know of the problem of underdeterminism.
I hope you're not trying to imply that every ignored dumbshit is destined for victory.
I don't think so. The creationists in 50 years will seem like the flat-earthers do today and witch-hunters did 50 years ago.
Yes, there are still some flat-earthers, just as there will still be creationists in 50 years. What can I say? To misappropriate a Buddhist aphorism, where there are humans you'll find Einsteins and shit--generally a lot more shit, but there you have it.
Yes, you're correct. The parent must have mistakenly inserted "[Thomas]" instead of "[Aldous]". It is the Aldous Huxley of Brave New World and (especially) Island fame who is clearly the correct Huxley.
I think the real productivity factor is that inefficiencies due to communication increase exponentially (loosely) when the number of programmers goes above 1, unless the project lends itself well to isolated modules that can be worked on without needing to understand other modules (and thus communicate with the owners of others modules, try to discern what the hell they are doing in their commentless code). Even computers are less efficient per cpu when multiple cpus are involved, and how much more difficult is multi-tasking, synchronizing, etc. for people than for computers?
Let's face it: a team of equally talented programers (size x) is never x times as productive as the single-man team of equal talent. After 1, it's all downhill, and not only because the PHB enters the picture shortly thereafter.
I respect your opinion too, and likewise, it's been a pleasure to have a discussion that didn't degrade.
I think we both understand each other, and your summary of my position is accurate. You may be right that it would be worse for the Chinese people not to have Google. I don't know what the consequences would be. It could provoke enough outrage for there to be a really positive change--can you imagine what American internet-savvy people (you and I probably included) would do if Google disappeared overnight?--or they might just quietly shrug and move on to another search engine that the government does allow. It's a very complex issue, and one that lots of U.S. corporations have to deal with, and almost all of them make the same choice that Google does.
I think we are really dealing with the extremely thorny ethical issue of utilitarian vs. deontological conceptions of ethics. If I might simplify both our positions a bit, you are taking the utilitarian position that the net effect of google's assisting the government's censorship is good, because it gives the Chinese people access to a great resource and a world (almost) of information, and I am taking the deontological position that it's just wrong, regardless of whether the consequences may or may not be positive in this instance. Philosophers argue about this stuff indefinitely, with no end in sight, so I think we are basically talking about judgments, as you say.
Slashdot Mirror
I know most developers think they're UI experts and that their opinions are just as reasoned and correct as people who actually have training in addition to opinions, but when programmer types (like Linus and most of us here) do UI design, you get crap like bugzilla. Compare that to Jira, and maybe you'll see a difference, but then I'm sure some programmers think that the bugzilla UI is better than Jira because it has more checkboxes and options, so maybe not.
FYI: regular expressions (finite automata) are not Turing-complete.
The funniest thing I found was somebody quoting from some press release about how they compressed 128 bits of random data down to 100 bits, LOL..
Oh wait, I think I read about that on slashdot a couple of years ago.
Apart from minor quibbles like these, I agree that China has really been a poster-child for what we might call 'compassionate imperialism.'
You might have a different perception of their policies if you had spoken to as many former political prisoners who were raped by prison guards using electric cattle prods as I have. And no, these things are not only from the distant past. They are still occurring now, and if you go to Dharamsala, India, you can meet the newcomers who are arriving from Tibet, and hang out at the support organizations for former political prisoners (e.g., Gu Chu Sum) and see that these brutalities are not a thing of the past.
See here for current information.
ESR and Bill Gates surprisingly have something in common, in that they are both egomaniacs with extraordinarily overinflated opinions of themselves.
Before the flamefest begins, please read his words carefully. There is no room for reading that sentence to mean anything but that ESR singlehandledly talked IBM, Wall Street, and the entire Fortune 500 into open source.
my problem is with their CVS integration, if you use SSH for cvs access, it puts the repository as ":extssh:..." , instead of ":ext:..." , and this makes the repository incompatible with anyother CVS tool.
There has been an option of doing CVS in Eclipse using ext: and not extssh: for a long time. I've been doing it for more than a year. Extssh may be the default on some wizard though, but if you just add the repository location yourself, you can select 'ext:' and it works great.
Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a "masculine" profession such as engineering or accountancy, a report has said.
How do you not read that as a suggestion that implies causality? I know they say 'could', but they obviously are implying that there is some kind of a causal link, and that there is evidence that changing profession increases chances of producing a son.
The name is Glenn Gould, with two ens.
The Collections API, designed by Joshua Bloch (sp.?) is excellent, in my opinion and in the opinion of many others.
"Quality" means the resultant size of the output -- i.e., the ratio of output size to input size is smaller for a higher setting (at the cost of more cpu cycles).
If you put all those hours into x number of 10-hour days, on the other hand, you would certainly have accomplished more.
Can it recognize duplicate stories and not allow the primates to submit them again and again?
A hero is somebody who makes great sacrifice for relatively altruistic reasons. I think this applies to Linus as much as to the fireman. Fires are not a prerequisite. Perhaps your mind is the tiny mind that can only conceive of the concept of heroism in the one tiny context in which it has traditionally been conceived.
Your rule for 'hero' seems to be that Joe Average is aware of his/her existence? Well, too bad for Isaac Newton and a thousand other people whose work makes our lives better every day.
Linus is already a hero, as evidenced by things like this article, which are more and more common every day. Technically-minded school children all over the world look up to him, just as math geeks have worshipped Euler or Gauss.
How about a slashdot addendum to Godwin's Law: the first person to mention Joe Average loses!
Should have done the obvious:
Maybe the articles wrong, or maybe it's just been a long time since I've done any Python.
<insert-line-about-moral-obligation-of-disobeyin g-unjust-laws/>
The difference between esearch and 'emerge -s' is like the difference between 'find / -name "foo"' and 'locate foo', for the same reason. It will index your ebuilds, and if you set a cron job to emerge sync and run 'eupdatedb' (to update the index) regularly, you'll always have up-to-date, lightning-fast searches.
The point, of course, was that they are both absurdities--not that they are both scientific theories--and there will always be people who believe absurdities, regardless of whether they are falsifiable or not. I stand by that.
And on another note, falsifiability is not so simple and cut-and-dry as you seem to be implying. If you've read any philosophy of science, you know of the problem of underdeterminism.
I don't think so. The creationists in 50 years will seem like the flat-earthers do today and witch-hunters did 50 years ago.
Yes, there are still some flat-earthers, just as there will still be creationists in 50 years. What can I say? To misappropriate a Buddhist aphorism, where there are humans you'll find Einsteins and shit--generally a lot more shit, but there you have it.
Yes, you're correct. The parent must have mistakenly inserted "[Thomas]" instead of "[Aldous]". It is the Aldous Huxley of Brave New World and (especially) Island fame who is clearly the correct Huxley.
Let's face it: a team of equally talented programers (size x) is never x times as productive as the single-man team of equal talent. After 1, it's all downhill, and not only because the PHB enters the picture shortly thereafter.
I think we both understand each other, and your summary of my position is accurate. You may be right that it would be worse for the Chinese people not to have Google. I don't know what the consequences would be. It could provoke enough outrage for there to be a really positive change--can you imagine what American internet-savvy people (you and I probably included) would do if Google disappeared overnight?--or they might just quietly shrug and move on to another search engine that the government does allow. It's a very complex issue, and one that lots of U.S. corporations have to deal with, and almost all of them make the same choice that Google does.
I think we are really dealing with the extremely thorny ethical issue of utilitarian vs. deontological conceptions of ethics. If I might simplify both our positions a bit, you are taking the utilitarian position that the net effect of google's assisting the government's censorship is good, because it gives the Chinese people access to a great resource and a world (almost) of information, and I am taking the deontological position that it's just wrong, regardless of whether the consequences may or may not be positive in this instance. Philosophers argue about this stuff indefinitely, with no end in sight, so I think we are basically talking about judgments, as you say.
Anyway, thanks again for the discussion.