I'll usually be blunt and indicate that I'm interested in the solution methodology and not the specific answer...A bad attitude is destructive, no matter what degree of "leet skills" you think you have.
Since I've already blown away my mod points by posting earlier in this thread (so who cares anyway?) I'll just say "well said".
It is very wearisome to behold the spoonfed drones who are incapable of backtracking, looking at the big picture and acknowledging when they are barking up the wrong tree. It takes a degree of maturity to know when to stand one's ground or to admit error or misapprehensions and start afresh.
The question was "show me some of your code, something you programmed"
Back when I used to do this for a living (I have since moved on to other pastures and cud hitherto unchewed) nobody was interested in looking at my nice, pretty code. One catch-all test used to be to present me (or any aspiring programmer) with a binary (i.e. no source, since at the time it was not uncommon to work with objects to which the source code was a mere legend, but that's another story) which was to be patched to suit a particular purpose.
I suspect there might not be very many graduates able to do that any more, which I think is a bit sad. Geekdom has gone the way of nostalgia. It just isn't what it used to be...;-)
Maybe employers need to reinstate the archaic "aptitude tests" to sort the wheat from the chaff. I remember doing at least one such back in the early fourteenth century when I was first getting into EDP (as it was called then - I don't think the term "IT" didn't gain currency until at least 10 years later). I think the test I did was written by someone at IBM.
And yes, the informed reader will observe that I am indeed an old fart. But I'm not quite dead...
OK, who is the conspiracist modding against these posts? I rarely comment on this kind of thing because I consider doing so to be otiose, and I prefer to be selective with mod points, losing much more than I use; but this is an abuse.
Someone is suppressing this part of the thread, and while it might be considered marginally offtopic, greater breaches are often accepted with equanimity if not abandon.
Well, GIMP doesn't actually support RAW formats, and for good reason. They are both unnecessarily manifold and proprietary.
Even the most basic cameras generally offer support for uncompressed images (usually in some sort of TIFF encapsulation), and if this is what you need, then use it.
I have read so many posts on Slashdot dinging the GIMP for its interface, which I (as a latecomer to Photoshop) find perfectly intuitive and comfortable. The presence (or absence in the GIMP's case) of CMYK support is of no moment unless you are into hard copy publishing or have a printer that supports it.
With a binary distro you are usually stuck with the decisions that the maintainer has made about what features of the software to include/exclude.
Nonsense. There's nothing stopping you from excluding (or uninstalling) binary packages and building from source. That's why I like Slackware. It gives you a very simple world to stand on while you build the things that are important to you, rather than wasting your time building everything even though you might only actually use some of those programs for a few milliseconds in a year.
But you can do the same with any other package-based distro. I remember doing the same when I was having a fling with RedHat 5.2 and 6.1 for a while...
Re:Major problems with Firefox 3 on Gentoo 2008.0.
on
Gentoo 2008.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I too have failed at installing Ubuntu, partly because it didn't seem to like playing nice with the IDE hard drives I had on that machine, and I didn't persist.
I was only curious, anyway. I just went straight back to Slackware, which has been good to me for many many years. People keep asking me why I don't use a more "up to date" distro, but everything on my machine is up to the minute (except where I don't want it to be).
Seconded. (Though ethanol seems to work quicker than isopropanol.) The presence of water enables the active agents to attach that much more closely and strip away the hydration "shell" of the individual proteins which make up the cell wall (in the case of bacteria, or capsid in the case of viruses).
It's interesting though that these wipes are totally useless, except to calm down the patient.
Uhh, no. They usually contain ethanol 70% v/v, which kills bacteria (to stop them being poked into the body along with the needle, since people don't typically respond well to having their arms autoclaved) pretty much instantly on contact. Viruses may be easier or harder to destroy, depending on their morphology.
Ahh...but could he/she also "bring out the best" if they were told it was a Stradivarius but it was actually a "placebo" violin? Double-blind testing means that not just the subject (in this case, the listener) but also the tester (in this case, the musician) does not know the true conditions of the test.
An earlier poster fed us an awful lot of crap drawing comparisons with the kind of rubbish that some audiophiles peddle, but I was pointing up the differences between the "old master" instruments, which are OBVIOUS to anyone who is not actually tone-deaf. You don't have to take my word for it, just try listening to some recordings.
By "bringing out the best", I was simply making the point that to get a decent sound out of a violin without strangling it, you have to have good technique. It is not like banging a key on a piano, where you get essentially the same sound no matter what you do.
If you really don't believe this, I suggest you try listening to a beginner. It's not fun.
As far as your point re. double-blind tests are concerned, that is simply not going to happen. Yes, there are heaps of stupendously good modern instruments, all producing beautiful sounds, but any decent violinist will know immediately if the instrument s/he is playing is an old one. The violin becomes sort of an extension to the musician's body, and this intimacy precludes the kind of testing you describe.
Is that actually true though? And indeed how would you even measure it? I've heard this many times, and it sort of sounds true -- but is there actually any evidence for it?
Yes, it is true, but I guess it is almost impossible to quantify by rigorous scientific method.
I still have a cranky 1746 Stainer copy that is a beautiful player by any standard, but if I ever lend it to anybody else it comes back playing like a Chinese orange-box. And I'm damned if I know how to measure the difference...
But can you detect a Stradivarius without knowing it is one? And telling it apart from a Guarnerius or Amati? Or even a good quality modern instrument?
Actually, yes you can, when the instruments are in the hands of a musician who is capable of bringing out the best in his/her instrument.
It is also true that equivalent instruments are made now with much the same properties, though the "feel" of the instrument is never the same as an old one, which may not be an identifiable characteristic to anyone except the violinist.
Getting back to the point, a Giuseppe Guarneri instrument has a distinctly sweet "rasp" [subjective impression - if anyone can come up with a better description, I'm happy with that] by comparison to most Strads. Most of the Amati instruments and all of the Stainers are also "sweeties", much less powerful than their later cousins (due to the much more promounced arch of the belly and back), with what might perhaps be described as a bell-like plangency to their tone.
I saw a special, on History Channel I think, where they thought that the trees that Stradivarius used to make his violins had unusual density qualities caused by the mini ice age.
I would be surprised if, in his entire lifetime, Antonio Stradivari used much more than two trees. I say this because, as any violinist knows (and yes IAAV and violin-maker) most violins are made with a spruce belly and maple backs and sides.
Given that these members were and are quarter-sawn (i.e cut radially across the trunk), he would have got quite a few instruments out of each 14.5" (the usual total length of the back) section.
There is a rumour that the maple was sourced from ships' oars, but that has been pretty much debunked.
...by forcing me into the Gimp because Photoshop isn't ported to Linux yet.
Personally, I don't give a damn whether Adobe open up PhotoShop to Linux or not. Since I learned to use the Gimp long before I encountered PhotoShop, I have learned my way around it reasonably well, and PS does not necessarily do any better job. The interface is much more cluttered than the Gimp's, though providing little more (if anything) in the way of functionality.
I frequently hear or read of people bleating that the Gimp doesn't support CMYK (which is true), but neglecting to mention that this feature is only of any use to people producing hard copy images on printers which support CMYK. For anything presented online, any of the RGB formats are perfectly sufficient.
"a massive wad of cash for the privilege of owning a 3G iPhone" If you're not allowed to do what you want with the device, you do not own it.
Am I the only person here who doesn't really like the look of the iPhone and doesn't want one?
I am not bashing Apple machinery here: although I have been a Linux user since 1994, I also have an iBook G4 which still works too well to deserve replacement, and I now have two iPods.
But when I replaced my phone a few months ago, I opted for the Motorola Razr2 V9, of which I much prefer the interface, even if the cross-platform support is not stellar by any standard.
I don't get this thing about two fingers on the touchpad etc. I'm using an oldish iBook G4 right now (OS X 10.4.11), and leaving 2 fingers on the touchpad disables it. Is this a configuration issue I have overlooked, or is it a feature available only in Leopard?
Indeed. I wasn't even going to raise these issues in my supposedly "idiotic" post, but you've done it for me.
I might add a remark re the kernel panics, however. I've been using Linux nearly exclusively since ~1995, and the only times I have ever seen a kernel panic in these 13 years are when I have done something stupid like forgetting to build in support for my root filesystem. If this guy really claims XP is comparable in stability, then he is either a liar or even more idiotic than I am.
Linux has needed a single, unified, vision from the beginning to get past all o fthe choice/freedom crap and get on to a unified UI, a solid look and feel, and most importantly ONE of everything that is best in class and 100% working by default. Since the OSS community will never agree to do this, a company is my only hope (as sad as that is). I'm wishing ASUS nothing but luck.
Fair enough, in a way I sort of agree, in the sense that Linux might be seen as a competitor to Windows as a marketable item. However, a strength of Linux (OK, and the BSDs too) is the customisability of the interface(s), since neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to care much about this. By now, the bigger players in the UI scene (i.e Gnome and KDE) have pretty much got their act together, and their products work at least as well as their proprietary counterparts.
The last thing Linux users need is to be squeezed into a proprietary box. We've seen enough of that already.
Unfortunately: this hasn't happened yet (in a big way) in the corporate desktop market. That will happen next year -- as I have been predicting for the last 8 years.
OK. But that's only because the corporate market hasn't cottoned on to the fact that the rest of the world realised long ago that Windows is still not ready for the desktop, while Linux supports much more hardware "out of the box" and never bluescreens. Though I have to admit that those guys at Apple seem to do a reasonably good job of it, since I'm happily using an ageing iBook G4 right now...
Seems to me that the only possible use for a Windows box these days is to play games, which by definition sort of implies that it is (still) not for serious users.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll usually be blunt and indicate that I'm interested in the solution methodology and not the specific answer...A bad attitude is destructive, no matter what degree of "leet skills" you think you have.
Since I've already blown away my mod points by posting earlier in this thread (so who cares anyway?) I'll just say "well said".
It is very wearisome to behold the spoonfed drones who are incapable of backtracking, looking at the big picture and acknowledging when they are barking up the wrong tree. It takes a degree of maturity to know when to stand one's ground or to admit error or misapprehensions and start afresh.
The question was "show me some of your code, something you programmed"
;-)
Back when I used to do this for a living (I have since moved on to other pastures and cud hitherto unchewed) nobody was interested in looking at my nice, pretty code. One catch-all test used to be to present me (or any aspiring programmer) with a binary (i.e. no source, since at the time it was not uncommon to work with objects to which the source code was a mere legend, but that's another story) which was to be patched to suit a particular purpose.
I suspect there might not be very many graduates able to do that any more, which I think is a bit sad. Geekdom has gone the way of nostalgia. It just isn't what it used to be...
Maybe employers need to reinstate the archaic "aptitude tests" to sort the wheat from the chaff. I remember doing at least one such back in the early fourteenth century when I was first getting into EDP (as it was called then - I don't think the term "IT" didn't gain currency until at least 10 years later). I think the test I did was written by someone at IBM.
And yes, the informed reader will observe that I am indeed an old fart. But I'm not quite dead...
;-)
OK, who is the conspiracist modding against these posts? I rarely comment on this kind of thing because I consider doing so to be otiose, and I prefer to be selective with mod points, losing much more than I use; but this is an abuse.
Someone is suppressing this part of the thread, and while it might be considered marginally offtopic, greater breaches are often accepted with equanimity if not abandon.
If you don't know why RAW is needed then don't comment on it please.
I call bullshit. If you can't take a simple family snap without ballsing it up, you have no business commenting on the format.
Well, GIMP doesn't actually support RAW formats, and for good reason. They are both unnecessarily manifold and proprietary.
Even the most basic cameras generally offer support for uncompressed images (usually in some sort of TIFF encapsulation), and if this is what you need, then use it.
I have read so many posts on Slashdot dinging the GIMP for its interface, which I (as a latecomer to Photoshop) find perfectly intuitive and comfortable. The presence (or absence in the GIMP's case) of CMYK support is of no moment unless you are into hard copy publishing or have a printer that supports it.
With a binary distro you are usually stuck with the decisions that the maintainer has made about what features of the software to include/exclude.
Nonsense. There's nothing stopping you from excluding (or uninstalling) binary packages and building from source. That's why I like Slackware. It gives you a very simple world to stand on while you build the things that are important to you, rather than wasting your time building everything even though you might only actually use some of those programs for a few milliseconds in a year.
But you can do the same with any other package-based distro. I remember doing the same when I was having a fling with RedHat 5.2 and 6.1 for a while...
I too have failed at installing Ubuntu, partly because it didn't seem to like playing nice with the IDE hard drives I had on that machine, and I didn't persist.
I was only curious, anyway. I just went straight back to Slackware, which has been good to me for many many years. People keep asking me why I don't use a more "up to date" distro, but everything on my machine is up to the minute (except where I don't want it to be).
No. Children are the very worst form of infection.
;-)
Seconded. (Though ethanol seems to work quicker than isopropanol.) The presence of water enables the active agents to attach that much more closely and strip away the hydration "shell" of the individual proteins which make up the cell wall (in the case of bacteria, or capsid in the case of viruses).
It's interesting though that these wipes are totally useless, except to calm down the patient.
Uhh, no. They usually contain ethanol 70% v/v, which kills bacteria (to stop them being poked into the body along with the needle, since people don't typically respond well to having their arms autoclaved) pretty much instantly on contact. Viruses may be easier or harder to destroy, depending on their morphology.
Alternatively, autoclave it. :-)
only if you wear a turban
Hindus are the new terrorists? I hadn't heard that...
Ahh...but could he/she also "bring out the best" if they were told it was a Stradivarius but it was actually a "placebo" violin? Double-blind testing means that not just the subject (in this case, the listener) but also the tester (in this case, the musician) does not know the true conditions of the test.
An earlier poster fed us an awful lot of crap drawing comparisons with the kind of rubbish that some audiophiles peddle, but I was pointing up the differences between the "old master" instruments, which are OBVIOUS to anyone who is not actually tone-deaf. You don't have to take my word for it, just try listening to some recordings.
By "bringing out the best", I was simply making the point that to get a decent sound out of a violin without strangling it, you have to have good technique. It is not like banging a key on a piano, where you get essentially the same sound no matter what you do.
If you really don't believe this, I suggest you try listening to a beginner. It's not fun.
As far as your point re. double-blind tests are concerned, that is simply not going to happen. Yes, there are heaps of stupendously good modern instruments, all producing beautiful sounds, but any decent violinist will know immediately if the instrument s/he is playing is an old one. The violin becomes sort of an extension to the musician's body, and this intimacy precludes the kind of testing you describe.
... and you're volunteering to have your violin scratched?
Is that actually true though? And indeed how would you even measure it? I've heard this many times, and it sort of sounds true -- but is there actually any evidence for it?
Yes, it is true, but I guess it is almost impossible to quantify by rigorous scientific method.
I still have a cranky 1746 Stainer copy that is a beautiful player by any standard, but if I ever lend it to anybody else it comes back playing like a Chinese orange-box. And I'm damned if I know how to measure the difference...
But can you detect a Stradivarius without knowing it is one? And telling it apart from a Guarnerius or Amati? Or even a good quality modern instrument?
Actually, yes you can, when the instruments are in the hands of a musician who is capable of bringing out the best in his/her instrument.
It is also true that equivalent instruments are made now with much the same properties, though the "feel" of the instrument is never the same as an old one, which may not be an identifiable characteristic to anyone except the violinist.
Getting back to the point, a Giuseppe Guarneri instrument has a distinctly sweet "rasp" [subjective impression - if anyone can come up with a better description, I'm happy with that] by comparison to most Strads. Most of the Amati instruments and all of the Stainers are also "sweeties", much less powerful than their later cousins (due to the much more promounced arch of the belly and back), with what might perhaps be described as a bell-like plangency to their tone.
I saw a special, on History Channel I think, where they thought that the trees that Stradivarius used to make his violins had unusual density qualities caused by the mini ice age.
I would be surprised if, in his entire lifetime, Antonio Stradivari used much more than two trees. I say this because, as any violinist knows (and yes IAAV and violin-maker) most violins are made with a spruce belly and maple backs and sides.
Given that these members were and are quarter-sawn (i.e cut radially across the trunk), he would have got quite a few instruments out of each 14.5" (the usual total length of the back) section.
There is a rumour that the maple was sourced from ships' oars, but that has been pretty much debunked.
...by forcing me into the Gimp because Photoshop isn't ported to Linux yet.
Personally, I don't give a damn whether Adobe open up PhotoShop to Linux or not. Since I learned to use the Gimp long before I encountered PhotoShop, I have learned my way around it reasonably well, and PS does not necessarily do any better job. The interface is much more cluttered than the Gimp's, though providing little more (if anything) in the way of functionality.
I frequently hear or read of people bleating that the Gimp doesn't support CMYK (which is true), but neglecting to mention that this feature is only of any use to people producing hard copy images on printers which support CMYK. For anything presented online, any of the RGB formats are perfectly sufficient.
It would be interesting to see the actual curve if we had more data points.
Here in Australia it's easy no matter how you plot it. I can do it here:
c
o| |
s| |
t| |
---------
time
"a massive wad of cash for the privilege of owning a 3G iPhone" If you're not allowed to do what you want with the device, you do not own it.
Am I the only person here who doesn't really like the look of the iPhone and doesn't want one?
I am not bashing Apple machinery here: although I have been a Linux user since 1994, I also have an iBook G4 which still works too well to deserve replacement, and I now have two iPods.
But when I replaced my phone a few months ago, I opted for the Motorola Razr2 V9, of which I much prefer the interface, even if the cross-platform support is not stellar by any standard.
I don't get this thing about two fingers on the touchpad etc. I'm using an oldish iBook G4 right now (OS X 10.4.11), and leaving 2 fingers on the touchpad disables it. Is this a configuration issue I have overlooked, or is it a feature available only in Leopard?
Indeed. I wasn't even going to raise these issues in my supposedly "idiotic" post, but you've done it for me.
I might add a remark re the kernel panics, however. I've been using Linux nearly exclusively since ~1995, and the only times I have ever seen a kernel panic in these 13 years are when I have done something stupid like forgetting to build in support for my root filesystem. If this guy really claims XP is comparable in stability, then he is either a liar or even more idiotic than I am.
Linux has needed a single, unified, vision from the beginning to get past all o fthe choice/freedom crap and get on to a unified UI, a solid look and feel, and most importantly ONE of everything that is best in class and 100% working by default. Since the OSS community will never agree to do this, a company is my only hope (as sad as that is). I'm wishing ASUS nothing but luck.
Fair enough, in a way I sort of agree, in the sense that Linux might be seen as a competitor to Windows as a marketable item. However, a strength of Linux (OK, and the BSDs too) is the customisability of the interface(s), since neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to care much about this. By now, the bigger players in the UI scene (i.e Gnome and KDE) have pretty much got their act together, and their products work at least as well as their proprietary counterparts.
The last thing Linux users need is to be squeezed into a proprietary box. We've seen enough of that already.
Unfortunately: this hasn't happened yet (in a big way) in the corporate desktop market. That will happen next year -- as I have been predicting for the last 8 years.
OK. But that's only because the corporate market hasn't cottoned on to the fact that the rest of the world realised long ago that Windows is still not ready for the desktop, while Linux supports much more hardware "out of the box" and never bluescreens. Though I have to admit that those guys at Apple seem to do a reasonably good job of it, since I'm happily using an ageing iBook G4 right now...
Seems to me that the only possible use for a Windows box these days is to play games, which by definition sort of implies that it is (still) not for serious users.
Cue flamethrowers...