``Which means it actually may be getting close to the year of the Linux Desktop. After all, it's actually becoming usable by "morons", a.k.a. people that have a life.''
That, actually, is why I use Debian and Ubuntu. Several years ago now, I gave up on operating systems that required me to perform a lot of maintenance or care a lot about libraries, bleeding edge, performance, and disk space, and got something that Just Works. Debian did that for me, and then Ubuntu, and although especially Ubuntu has stained that track record in the past couple of years, they still seem to be doing better than many other operating systems. I certainly seem to spend less time working for my computer and more time having the computer working for me, compared to other people and compared to what I did before I discovered Debian.
Interestingly, 10.04 is the first release in a couple of years that has worked without a hitch for me. I installed it on a whim, hoping that it might include a driver with hardware-accelerated 3D for my RV730 video card. I was pleasantly surprised that not only does it include that driver, everything I have tried has actually _worked_, and the experience is a marked improvement over what I was running before.
The only issue I ran into is that GDM would not read my ~/.xsession, but it's not entirely clear if that is a bug or a design choice, and, regardless, there is a fix for it.
For the rest, it's stable, it's fast, it's beautiful, and it's even an LTS release. It's been a while since I've experienced that from Ubuntu, but they seem to have gotten everything I care about right this time.
Keeping in mind your experience, I am curious as to how people in general fare with this release. I share your observation that Ubuntu has been caring more about new features than quality, and I was hoping that they had found their way back to putting together top quality releases. I would really like to know what the trend is, qualitywise.
Actually, I wonder if the reason we aren't seeing more Theora adoption is for a much more mundane fear. Not the fear that Theora will actually turn out to contain intellectual property that will end up costing you... but rather that if you decide to use Theora, MPEG-LA will raise the fee it charges you for H.264 support. IANAL, but if they can do that, that will be a nice way to ensure that Theora has a price tag on it despite being Free, and in a world where people expect to have H.264 support, I can see why vendors would rather not pay the penalty for supporting another codec.
``Private industry is doing all sorts of analysis of you as a consumer to provide you better service and to let them make more profit. But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that.''
That correlation may work in the USA, but I don't think the public wanting or not wanting government information-gathering is the real issue here. I live in the Netherlands, and people here are, shall we say, not as adverse to the government collecting information about them as people in the USA. The government collects enormous amounts of information on citizens here, but I wouldn't argue that they operate a lot more efficiently and provide a lot more "customer satisfaction" than the government of the USA.
I rather think that the government being inefficient and not providing a lot of customer satisfaction, as compared to commercial entities, is really because the government is something you are pretty much stuck with. Interacting with other organizations is something you can take or leave, and if one widget seller doesn't provide you with satisfactory service, you can go to another. But governments typically leave you no such choice in the areas they hold a monopoly on, and the result is that, perceptually and probably also actually, they provide you worse service and get away with it.
To answer a few of the points and questions you raise:
``I've been a follower of Java since version 1, and I don't see any difference with other languages.''
That is sort of the point I was trying to make. Like every other language/platform, Java has its strengths and weaknesses. And that is to be expected, really.
I wrote: "In reality, Java wasn't actually all that great."
And then, you wrote: "Actually, it was and is pretty great.''
Right. I think I may not have expressed myself as clearly as I should have over there. What I meant to say is that Java wasn't (at the time) as great as the evangelists would have you believe. Like you said, you used Java since version 1, and don't see much of a difference with other languages. Java has its strengths and weaknesses. But that wasn't the word that was going around at the time. What I heard and read basically amounted to Java being the Messiah among programming languages, that it would deliver us from all the faults found in other programming languages, that we would write once and run anywhere, and so on. That's what I was referring to when I wrote Java wasn't actually _that_ great.
``Waste of time? Good gods, what other language would YOU have chosen 10 years back to develop major systems with? Yes, in retrospect you would not use basic types that overflow, single return values, have checked exceptions above unchecked ones, an underdeveloped module system, null-able references, mutable arrays... the list goes on.''
Truth be told, I can't give you a good answer to that question, other than "I don't know." When Java was first released, the only languages I knew how to program in were a few BASIC dialects and x86 assembly. You asked about 10 years ago, so that would have been 2000. I also knew C and PHP, then. Compared to those, Java would have been the better choice for most application development work (though I preferred PHP for web development at the time). However, I note that, by 2000, such languages as Ruby and Objective Caml were available (which I prefer over Java now), and even in 1995, Ada, Common Lisp, Delphi, Dylan, Eiffel, Erlang, Haskell, Modula-3, Obective C, Python, Smalltalk, and Standard ML were already around. Many of those contain good ideas that a lot of people think were introduced by Java, and many of them include good ideas that I feel Java lacks.
The point I am trying to make here is that the folks behind Java certainly did a good job of getting their platform and programming language widely adopted, but in terms of making it the best platform and programming language out there, they could have been a lot better. And the thing that annoys me is not so much that Java didn't adopt all the great ideas out there (I know building a platform and programming language is hard and a lot of work), but that the world seems to have pretty much adopted Java to the exclusion of everything else, so that the great ideas that Java doesn't incorporate are still not mainstream 25 years later.
``I do try many "generic" languages out there (ECMA Script, C#, LUA, Go hell even Erlang, PHP and Perl and C++ to name a few).''
That is great, and I hope you keep doing it. And if you keep coming to the conclusion that Java is best for your needs, more power to you. You should definitely go and use it.
``Nobody would expect someone to write down 1/3 as a decimal number, but because people keep forgetting that computers use binary floating point numbers, they do expect them not to make rounding errors with numbers like 0.2.''
A problem which is exacerbated by the fact that many popular programming languages use (base 10) decimal syntax for (base 2) floating point literals. Which, first of all, puts people on the wrong foot (you would think that if "0.2" is a valid float literal, it could be represented accurately as a float), and, secondly, makes it impossible to write literals for certain values that _could_ actually be represented exactly as a float.
``What is it that lets Java have such a bad name on SlashDot?''
I can only speak for myself, but the beef I have with Java is that it was promoted as if it was a great step ahead in programming languages and really the right way to do things. A lot of people fell for the propaganda (including myself) and an enormous amount of time has been spent on Java since - writing software with it, improving the platform, re-implementing things from other platforms for Java, basing research on Java, etc.
In reality, Java wasn't actually all that great. None of the features that were touted with much fanfare at the time were actually new. The language had a pretty lame type system and a lame implementation. If, at the time, I had known the languages I know now, I never would have thought Java was a great language. But I didn't know many languages back then, so I swallowed the propaganda and was really enthusiastic about Java. I can only assume the same has happened to many other people. At any rate, Java took off and went on to become a dominant language (not to say _the_ dominant language) in the software business and many universities.
To be sure, Java has changed a lot since its inception, and there definitely has been improvement. The type system is much better now than it used to be, and there are now several implementations for different niches, some of which are very impressive indeed. Still, after 15 years of enormous exposure, success, and development, I still find the language and platform lacking. Many features or missing features in the language make it difficult to express certain programs in their most natural form, often requiring much more code to write in Java than in another language. The standard library, while indeed extensive, is full of rough edges, bad APIs, and long-unfixed bugs. Many features of the host platform are simply not available in Java. Very few things in Java or the popular frameworks strike me as done right.
Now, what bothers me is not that there are features of Java I don't like. Even if they could be shown to objectively make Java less good than some other platform or programming language, I wouldn't care very much. My problem is that Java has these shortcomings, has long had such shortcomings, and is _still_ being touted by many as the greatest platform out there, still receives enormous amounts of research and development effort, and is still extremely widely used _and_ taught to students. To me, that's a lot of energy, time, and money that we, as humanity, could have more effectively spent on other things. The way I see it, Java has been a colossal waste of time, and I blame the vocal advocacy for that.
Now, what any of this has to do with IEEE 754, I don't know. As far as I am concerned, fully IEEE-754-compliant is better than just IEEE-754-like, but only marginally so - in either case, your results will be inexact and there will be many gotchas. Java does have BigInteger and BigDecimal types, which I usually find better choices than floats.
``The non-trivial problems with floating-point really only turn up in the kind of calculations where *any* format would have the same or worse problems (most scientific computing simply *cannot* be done in integers, as they overflow too easily).''
Fixed-size integers, that is. Yes. But fixed-precision ints and floats are not the only choices available. Many programming languages offer arbitrary-precision numeric types, and some even perform symbolic computation.
Many bugs in programs are the result of a mismatch between what a programmer meant to express and what the program actually expresses, and treating fixed-precision ints or floats as if they were actual, mathematical integers or reals / decimals / rationals is a very common example of exactly such a mismatch. It's fine in some cases, but it is not, strictly speaking, correct, and, sometimes, the incorrectness will come and bite you.
``The patent game seems to be that everyone patents everything and no one can make anything without stepping on someone's patents. So by having enough patents you can't be sued, at best you can grant a patent license....''
The problem with that is that patenting things costs money. So this game raises the barrier of entry to many activities, including software development. You wouldn't be able to fire up your text editor and start coding anymore; you'd have to drop some cash on acquiring patents first, or risk being sued into the ground once your product becomes too successful. Every minute you don't patent your invention is a minute in which someone else could patent the same invention - making it illegal for you to implement your idea, unless you acquire a license.
``Suffice it to say that h264 is a very sophisticated technology that is the product of many contributions by many people and companies over a long period of time. We can debate whether software should be patentable all day, but video codecs are a pretty clear example of a piece of software that are very expensive to develop and probably do need some kind of patent protection.''
I'm not so sure. I agree with you that a video codec like H.264 is a complex beast and that a lot of effort has gone into developing it, but does that make it a good idea to allow it to be patented? The same thing can be said about a lot of other software, and it seems to get developed just fine without patents - actually, many would argue it gets better the fewer patents there are. I can't think of any reason why the same wouldn't go for video codecs, and, indeed, several video codecs have been developed without the developers seeking to patent their inventions.
My personal point of view is that patents are problematic, both philosophically and practically. If we agree that we want to stimulate innovation, we should carefully evaluate what ways we have to accomplish that (current and also newly implementable). If patents turn out to really be the best possible way to stimulate innovation, I say let's stick with them. But the idea that something I think of may be covered by a patent, and that people are willing to assert those patents and sue me if I implement my idea, does not strike me as particularly conductive to innovation. Nor does the idea of having to grep the massive body of existing patents to check that my idea is not covered by any of them - especially if that means my costs go up if someone ends up bringing a successful claim against me after all.
Now, none of this means that I want to deny the creators of H.264 compensation for their efforts. I think H.264 is a great codec (it certainly seems to be one of the best codecs we have managed to come up with so far), and if they want people to pay for using it, I feel they should have that option. It is the fruit of their labor, after all. I just wonder if we can't come up with something better than the current patent system.
it's active directory and all the other systems that ms puts together for fleet management.''
Yes, absolutely.
``i'll slap the shit out of the next person who says openldap. it is pretty easy to do stuff like point an entire OU to a WSUS server and specify how updates are done.
they've built an impressive system for enterprise setups that would take a shitload of work in linux. pushing down group policies to a fleet of macs?''
I'm not so sure about that part of your post. I don't know much about Windows (I don't even know what WSUS is), but, as near as I can tell, Windows admins swear by Windows, *nix admins swear by *nix, and VMS admins swear by VMS, and they all use the same argumentation: on $my_system, doing X is a breeze, but it's a nightmare on $other_system. Most of the time, they're wrong - they just didn't know how to do X on the other system. So, what are group policies, what do you use them for, and what makes you think that accomplishing that would be hard on non-Windows systems?
Also, from my personal observations, I see Windows admins doing a lot of running around and clicking mouse buttons, whereas I don't tend to see Unix admins a lot at all - but, when I seek them out, they are usually sitting at their desk, writing a script, reading the output of some monitoring process, or browsing some supposedly work-related website. Same for VMS admins. It makes me wonder if that is because Windows doesn't allow as much automation and remote work, because the Windows admins don't know how to do it, or because they simply like to do things manually and locally. I do know that Windows bombards me with popups and messages and warnings every time I use it. So maybe it is very nice for sysadmins, but, as a user, I hate working with it.
``Why would you use a signed integer for a value like this?''
Probably because you would be programming in a language that makes it easier to use signed integers than, say, a type that could actually represent arbitrarily large values, as long as there were enough bits of memory available. Had the program been written in, say, Common Lisp, Ruby, or Python, using such an unconstrained numeric would actually have been the easiest thing to do.
The summary nicely illustrates what I have been saying for a while, and that is that the big players in the multimedia game just don't want Theora to succeed. Widespread support for H.264 but not Theora could have been for any number of reasons, but a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now sends a pretty clear message that "we don't want you here".
In fact, I think even Dia is overkill. I would like to specify just the few elements that my diagram has in a simple text file, then have that render to some kind of standard (scalable and/or pixmap) image format. Preferably it would try to automagically lay out the diagram elements in a sensible way, so that I don't have to specify positions for all of them. Something like pic or dot might do very nicely.
``When you're doing something for a potential client or for a client, having little imperfections like that, imperfections that are uncontrollable, does not make a good impression.''
I agree. On the other hand, if you are concerned about your document rendering a specific way, none of the Microsoft Office programs are actually the way to go. That's not what they are for. The Microsoft Office products are for quickly whipping up documents, spreadsheets and simple data entry applications. If you want professional quality output, where the way it looks is an important part of the product, you're in the domain of software like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Scribus, and TeX.
If you still want to produce your documentation in Microsoft Office and have it look the same on different systems, you need to convert the document to a format like PDF before sending it. Microsoft Office files simply don't render the same on different systems - because of competing office suites like OpenOffice.org and WordPerfect Office, but also because different versions of Microsoft Office don't render the same documents the same way. Again, that's not what they are for.
``I was also amused that he saw Lotus Symphony as a replacement for Microsoft Works. (IBM calls Symphony "Award-winning office productivity software".) Heh.''
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the joke here? I don't know Lotus Symphony at all, and have only the barest of experience with Microsoft Works.
I think the Slashdot crowd is actually quite diverse. I can only speak for myself, but I am happy with the article and the Slashdot story. I don't have the time to keep up with everything myself, so it helps me if other people perform these reviews and tell me about their results.
``it's like the local computer geek spouting about the technical reasons his N64 is better then a SEGA - no one is going to give a shit and the other nerds have already made up their minds, so he won't do anything to sway them.''
You are likely correct, but I still think it is useful to provide good argumentation based on technical facts. After all, opinions can vary, but facts stay the same. Some of us like to make choices based on technical merits rather than opinions. I often base my arguments on technical facts, and, even though people have gone in directions that weren't what I recommended in many cases, they often ended up coming around to my point of view in the end. The truth is that technical differences matter, and technically better ends up being Real World better and better for what you are trying to do in many cases, too.
Note that I am not saying that any container format is technically better than any other. I am sure this is the case, but I don't know anywhere near enough about container formats to make an informed statement about that.
``Ogg is not like that at all. The only thing it stores in a codec-independant manner is framing. Every other piece of information you might expect a container to have is stored in a codec-dependant manner. Even metadata!''
Ok, so you are saying that there are things that you can do which, with Ogg, require you to understand the codec, whereas other containers allow you to do these things without having to understand the codec. Correct?
Could you or someone else provide (or link to) some examples of things you may want to do that require knowledge of the codec when Ogg is used as a container, but can be done with only knowledge of the container for other container formats?
``If "big oil" scientists cannot be trusted because of how they get paid, neither can academics.''
Thanks for pointing that out.
Perhaps your post will help more people realize that it's not about the people, it's about the work. The validity of the results does not depend on who funded the research or on the bias of the researchers - it depends on the methods that were used to arrive at the results.
``I lost faith in the climatologists when they stopped calling it global warming and went for the more neutral "climate change." If that isn't an example of politicizing their own debate then I don't know what is.''
Actually, I think it is simply a more accurate expression of the real concerns. Speaking for myself, average temperature rising by a few Kelvins isn't really what I am concerned about. However, effects such as more heavy rain, floods, and cyclones do have me concerned, and if climate were to change in such a way as to cause large-scale destruction of ecosystems, I feel that that would be a Bad Thing, too. Also, if the concern were really global warming, than perhaps a global drop in temperatures by 20 Kelvins would be cause for celebration. I hardly think that this is the case.
It doesn't seem to take much to upset the global warming crowd. ANY opposition is an affront to them, a personal attack to be answered in the most extreme and violent language available. Actual data is immaterial. The naysayers are demonized, discredited as scientifically illiterate imbeciles, and marginalized as either shills of the responsible industries or seeking to profit from their outbursts.
As it currently stands we merely have 2 sides yelling at one another calling the other group a bunch of morons.
and
As they say, "follow the money." Who is it that is profiting from the climate change argument? Simple answer: climate change scientists. The same climate change scientists who deleted the raw data.
I think all that nicely illustrates the problem. You claim that the climate change crowd uses strong language and demonizes and discredits the other side, rather than looking at actual data. Then you and Gandalf_Greyhame proceed to do exactly the same.
And you are right. The publicly visible discussion isn't about the actual data. It's a full-blown flamewar, made of one part fallacious arguments and three parts abuse.
The media, for their part, are doing what they have always been doing: carrying and shaping stories so that they can maximize profits and/or other goals that they may have, such as support for their favorite ideology. The media are useful, but they are not the bringers of truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Even if they try for that, I don't think it is reasonable to expect a reporter to know everything about everything they write about.
So, if you are looking for the truth, I can only advise you to, first of all, think carefully about what you will accept. Will you accept the words of people you don't know at face value? How about people you do know? What if the person has a degree, is a renown authority in some field, or even in the field he is making claims about? If you are looking at data, will you accept data from possibly flawed measuring devices as truth? What about data reported by others? What about data that you know has been combined, averaged, or otherwise processed? If you are looking at arguments, will you accept arguments if they seem to make sense, or only if they are logically sound? What if they are based on statistics - will you simply accept the outcome, or do you need to see all the parameters and results, or at least the p-value? What probability is enough for you? How much faith do you have in models and their implementations, and what criteria do you have for accepting predictions obtained from a model? Models are everywhere, but even very commonly accepted models such as Newtonian physics have been shown to be flawed. Does this mean data obtained from such models should be ignored?
With your acceptance criteria firmly in mind, you will be able to sift through the vast body of statements about climate change. Depending on your criteria, you will probably end up with (A) a bunch of contradictory conclusions, (B) a number of conclusions that agree, or (C) the conclusion that none of what you reviewed is good enough to warrant any conclusion. If you end up with a number of agreeing conclusions, congratulations. You can now live your life in accordance with those. If not, or if you gave up because it's just too much work, there is one more question for you: What are you going to do - are you going to err on the side of caution and limit your environmental footprint just in case, or are you going to decide that, since you aren't convinced that you may be harming the environment, you are not going to burden yourself?
Slashdot Mirror
``Which means it actually may be getting close to the year of the Linux Desktop. After all, it's actually becoming usable by "morons", a.k.a. people that have a life.''
That, actually, is why I use Debian and Ubuntu. Several years ago now, I gave up on operating systems that required me to perform a lot of maintenance or care a lot about libraries, bleeding edge, performance, and disk space, and got something that Just Works. Debian did that for me, and then Ubuntu, and although especially Ubuntu has stained that track record in the past couple of years, they still seem to be doing better than many other operating systems. I certainly seem to spend less time working for my computer and more time having the computer working for me, compared to other people and compared to what I did before I discovered Debian.
Interestingly, 10.04 is the first release in a couple of years that has worked without a hitch for me. I installed it on a whim, hoping that it might include a driver with hardware-accelerated 3D for my RV730 video card. I was pleasantly surprised that not only does it include that driver, everything I have tried has actually _worked_, and the experience is a marked improvement over what I was running before.
The only issue I ran into is that GDM would not read my ~/.xsession, but it's not entirely clear if that is a bug or a design choice, and, regardless, there is a fix for it.
For the rest, it's stable, it's fast, it's beautiful, and it's even an LTS release. It's been a while since I've experienced that from Ubuntu, but they seem to have gotten everything I care about right this time.
Keeping in mind your experience, I am curious as to how people in general fare with this release. I share your observation that Ubuntu has been caring more about new features than quality, and I was hoping that they had found their way back to putting together top quality releases. I would really like to know what the trend is, qualitywise.
Hi,
If you want to implement video in a cross-browser compatible way, couldn't you do it with an object tag?
That's what I used to do in the 1990s, and, as far as I can tell, that method still works.
Actually, I wonder if the reason we aren't seeing more Theora adoption is for a much more mundane fear. Not the fear that Theora will actually turn out to contain intellectual property that will end up costing you ... but rather that if you decide to use Theora, MPEG-LA will raise the fee it charges you for H.264 support. IANAL, but if they can do that, that will be a nice way to ensure that Theora has a price tag on it despite being Free, and in a world where people expect to have H.264 support, I can see why vendors would rather not pay the penalty for supporting another codec.
``Private industry is doing all sorts of analysis of you as a consumer to provide you better service and to let them make more profit. But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that.''
That correlation may work in the USA, but I don't think the public wanting or not wanting government information-gathering is the real issue here. I live in the Netherlands, and people here are, shall we say, not as adverse to the government collecting information about them as people in the USA. The government collects enormous amounts of information on citizens here, but I wouldn't argue that they operate a lot more efficiently and provide a lot more "customer satisfaction" than the government of the USA.
I rather think that the government being inefficient and not providing a lot of customer satisfaction, as compared to commercial entities, is really because the government is something you are pretty much stuck with. Interacting with other organizations is something you can take or leave, and if one widget seller doesn't provide you with satisfactory service, you can go to another. But governments typically leave you no such choice in the areas they hold a monopoly on, and the result is that, perceptually and probably also actually, they provide you worse service and get away with it.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
To answer a few of the points and questions you raise:
``I've been a follower of Java since version 1, and I don't see any difference with other languages.''
That is sort of the point I was trying to make. Like every other language/platform, Java has its strengths and weaknesses. And that is to be expected, really.
I wrote: "In reality, Java wasn't actually all that great."
And then, you wrote: "Actually, it was and is pretty great.''
Right. I think I may not have expressed myself as clearly as I should have over there. What I meant to say is that Java wasn't (at the time) as great as the evangelists would have you believe. Like you said, you used Java since version 1, and don't see much of a difference with other languages. Java has its strengths and weaknesses. But that wasn't the word that was going around at the time. What I heard and read basically amounted to Java being the Messiah among programming languages, that it would deliver us from all the faults found in other programming languages, that we would write once and run anywhere, and so on. That's what I was referring to when I wrote Java wasn't actually _that_ great.
``Waste of time? Good gods, what other language would YOU have chosen 10 years back to develop major systems with? Yes, in retrospect you would not use basic types that overflow, single return values, have checked exceptions above unchecked ones, an underdeveloped module system, null-able references, mutable arrays ... the list goes on.''
Truth be told, I can't give you a good answer to that question, other than "I don't know." When Java was first released, the only languages I knew how to program in were a few BASIC dialects and x86 assembly. You asked about 10 years ago, so that would have been 2000. I also knew C and PHP, then. Compared to those, Java would have been the better choice for most application development work (though I preferred PHP for web development at the time). However, I note that, by 2000, such languages as Ruby and Objective Caml were available (which I prefer over Java now), and even in 1995, Ada, Common Lisp, Delphi, Dylan, Eiffel, Erlang, Haskell, Modula-3, Obective C, Python, Smalltalk, and Standard ML were already around. Many of those contain good ideas that a lot of people think were introduced by Java, and many of them include good ideas that I feel Java lacks.
The point I am trying to make here is that the folks behind Java certainly did a good job of getting their platform and programming language widely adopted, but in terms of making it the best platform and programming language out there, they could have been a lot better. And the thing that annoys me is not so much that Java didn't adopt all the great ideas out there (I know building a platform and programming language is hard and a lot of work), but that the world seems to have pretty much adopted Java to the exclusion of everything else, so that the great ideas that Java doesn't incorporate are still not mainstream 25 years later.
``I do try many "generic" languages out there (ECMA Script, C#, LUA, Go hell even Erlang, PHP and Perl and C++ to name a few).''
That is great, and I hope you keep doing it. And if you keep coming to the conclusion that Java is best for your needs, more power to you. You should definitely go and use it.
``Your preference is to have the conflict in Times Square instead of Pakistan? I'm gonna go with "not in my backyard".''
Are those the available options? Because perhaps the choice is actually between having the conflict in Pakistan, or not having the conflict at all.
``Nobody would expect someone to write down 1/3 as a decimal number, but because people keep forgetting that computers use binary floating point numbers, they do expect them not to make rounding errors with numbers like 0.2.''
A problem which is exacerbated by the fact that many popular programming languages use (base 10) decimal syntax for (base 2) floating point literals. Which, first of all, puts people on the wrong foot (you would think that if "0.2" is a valid float literal, it could be represented accurately as a float), and, secondly, makes it impossible to write literals for certain values that _could_ actually be represented exactly as a float.
``What is it that lets Java have such a bad name on SlashDot?''
I can only speak for myself, but the beef I have with Java is that it was promoted as if it was a great step ahead in programming languages and really the right way to do things. A lot of people fell for the propaganda (including myself) and an enormous amount of time has been spent on Java since - writing software with it, improving the platform, re-implementing things from other platforms for Java, basing research on Java, etc.
In reality, Java wasn't actually all that great. None of the features that were touted with much fanfare at the time were actually new. The language had a pretty lame type system and a lame implementation. If, at the time, I had known the languages I know now, I never would have thought Java was a great language. But I didn't know many languages back then, so I swallowed the propaganda and was really enthusiastic about Java. I can only assume the same has happened to many other people. At any rate, Java took off and went on to become a dominant language (not to say _the_ dominant language) in the software business and many universities.
To be sure, Java has changed a lot since its inception, and there definitely has been improvement. The type system is much better now than it used to be, and there are now several implementations for different niches, some of which are very impressive indeed. Still, after 15 years of enormous exposure, success, and development, I still find the language and platform lacking. Many features or missing features in the language make it difficult to express certain programs in their most natural form, often requiring much more code to write in Java than in another language. The standard library, while indeed extensive, is full of rough edges, bad APIs, and long-unfixed bugs. Many features of the host platform are simply not available in Java. Very few things in Java or the popular frameworks strike me as done right.
Now, what bothers me is not that there are features of Java I don't like. Even if they could be shown to objectively make Java less good than some other platform or programming language, I wouldn't care very much. My problem is that Java has these shortcomings, has long had such shortcomings, and is _still_ being touted by many as the greatest platform out there, still receives enormous amounts of research and development effort, and is still extremely widely used _and_ taught to students. To me, that's a lot of energy, time, and money that we, as humanity, could have more effectively spent on other things. The way I see it, Java has been a colossal waste of time, and I blame the vocal advocacy for that.
Now, what any of this has to do with IEEE 754, I don't know. As far as I am concerned, fully IEEE-754-compliant is better than just IEEE-754-like, but only marginally so - in either case, your results will be inexact and there will be many gotchas. Java does have BigInteger and BigDecimal types, which I usually find better choices than floats.
``The non-trivial problems with floating-point really only turn up in the kind of calculations where *any* format would have the same or worse problems (most scientific computing simply *cannot* be done in integers, as they overflow too easily).''
Fixed-size integers, that is. Yes. But fixed-precision ints and floats are not the only choices available. Many programming languages offer arbitrary-precision numeric types, and some even perform symbolic computation.
Many bugs in programs are the result of a mismatch between what a programmer meant to express and what the program actually expresses, and treating fixed-precision ints or floats as if they were actual, mathematical integers or reals / decimals / rationals is a very common example of exactly such a mismatch. It's fine in some cases, but it is not, strictly speaking, correct, and, sometimes, the incorrectness will come and bite you.
``The patent game seems to be that everyone patents everything and no one can make anything without stepping on someone's patents. So by having enough patents you can't be sued, at best you can grant a patent license....''
The problem with that is that patenting things costs money. So this game raises the barrier of entry to many activities, including software development. You wouldn't be able to fire up your text editor and start coding anymore; you'd have to drop some cash on acquiring patents first, or risk being sued into the ground once your product becomes too successful. Every minute you don't patent your invention is a minute in which someone else could patent the same invention - making it illegal for you to implement your idea, unless you acquire a license.
``Suffice it to say that h264 is a very sophisticated technology that is the product of many contributions by many people and companies over a long period of time. We can debate whether software should be patentable all day, but video codecs are a pretty clear example of a piece of software that are very expensive to develop and probably do need some kind of patent protection.''
I'm not so sure. I agree with you that a video codec like H.264 is a complex beast and that a lot of effort has gone into developing it, but does that make it a good idea to allow it to be patented? The same thing can be said about a lot of other software, and it seems to get developed just fine without patents - actually, many would argue it gets better the fewer patents there are. I can't think of any reason why the same wouldn't go for video codecs, and, indeed, several video codecs have been developed without the developers seeking to patent their inventions.
My personal point of view is that patents are problematic, both philosophically and practically. If we agree that we want to stimulate innovation, we should carefully evaluate what ways we have to accomplish that (current and also newly implementable). If patents turn out to really be the best possible way to stimulate innovation, I say let's stick with them. But the idea that something I think of may be covered by a patent, and that people are willing to assert those patents and sue me if I implement my idea, does not strike me as particularly conductive to innovation. Nor does the idea of having to grep the massive body of existing patents to check that my idea is not covered by any of them - especially if that means my costs go up if someone ends up bringing a successful claim against me after all.
Now, none of this means that I want to deny the creators of H.264 compensation for their efforts. I think H.264 is a great codec (it certainly seems to be one of the best codecs we have managed to come up with so far), and if they want people to pay for using it, I feel they should have that option. It is the fruit of their labor, after all. I just wonder if we can't come up with something better than the current patent system.
``the beauty of windows isn't windows.
it's active directory and all the other systems that ms puts together for fleet management.''
Yes, absolutely.
``i'll slap the shit out of the next person who says openldap. it is pretty easy to do stuff like point an entire OU to a WSUS server and specify how updates are done.
they've built an impressive system for enterprise setups that would take a shitload of work in linux. pushing down group policies to a fleet of macs?''
I'm not so sure about that part of your post. I don't know much about Windows (I don't even know what WSUS is), but, as near as I can tell, Windows admins swear by Windows, *nix admins swear by *nix, and VMS admins swear by VMS, and they all use the same argumentation: on $my_system, doing X is a breeze, but it's a nightmare on $other_system. Most of the time, they're wrong - they just didn't know how to do X on the other system. So, what are group policies, what do you use them for, and what makes you think that accomplishing that would be hard on non-Windows systems?
Also, from my personal observations, I see Windows admins doing a lot of running around and clicking mouse buttons, whereas I don't tend to see Unix admins a lot at all - but, when I seek them out, they are usually sitting at their desk, writing a script, reading the output of some monitoring process, or browsing some supposedly work-related website. Same for VMS admins. It makes me wonder if that is because Windows doesn't allow as much automation and remote work, because the Windows admins don't know how to do it, or because they simply like to do things manually and locally. I do know that Windows bombards me with popups and messages and warnings every time I use it. So maybe it is very nice for sysadmins, but, as a user, I hate working with it.
``Why would you use a signed integer for a value like this?''
Probably because you would be programming in a language that makes it easier to use signed integers than, say, a type that could actually represent arbitrarily large values, as long as there were enough bits of memory available. Had the program been written in, say, Common Lisp, Ruby, or Python, using such an unconstrained numeric would actually have been the easiest thing to do.
The summary nicely illustrates what I have been saying for a while, and that is that the big players in the multimedia game just don't want Theora to succeed. Widespread support for H.264 but not Theora could have been for any number of reasons, but a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now sends a pretty clear message that "we don't want you here".
You make a very good point.
In fact, I think even Dia is overkill. I would like to specify just the few elements that my diagram has in a simple text file, then have that render to some kind of standard (scalable and/or pixmap) image format. Preferably it would try to automagically lay out the diagram elements in a sensible way, so that I don't have to specify positions for all of them. Something like pic or dot might do very nicely.
``When you're doing something for a potential client or for a client, having little imperfections like that, imperfections that are uncontrollable, does not make a good impression.''
I agree. On the other hand, if you are concerned about your document rendering a specific way, none of the Microsoft Office programs are actually the way to go. That's not what they are for. The Microsoft Office products are for quickly whipping up documents, spreadsheets and simple data entry applications. If you want professional quality output, where the way it looks is an important part of the product, you're in the domain of software like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Scribus, and TeX.
If you still want to produce your documentation in Microsoft Office and have it look the same on different systems, you need to convert the document to a format like PDF before sending it. Microsoft Office files simply don't render the same on different systems - because of competing office suites like OpenOffice.org and WordPerfect Office, but also because different versions of Microsoft Office don't render the same documents the same way. Again, that's not what they are for.
``I was also amused that he saw Lotus Symphony as a replacement for Microsoft Works. (IBM calls Symphony "Award-winning office productivity software".) Heh.''
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the joke here? I don't know Lotus Symphony at all, and have only the barest of experience with Microsoft Works.
``Since Oracle took over, the online "support" is best described as "developer in denial".''
So much for the oft-repeated idea that for-profit companies provide great support. They may, but it's not a given.
I think the Slashdot crowd is actually quite diverse. I can only speak for myself, but I am happy with the article and the Slashdot story. I don't have the time to keep up with everything myself, so it helps me if other people perform these reviews and tell me about their results.
``it's like the local computer geek spouting about the technical reasons his N64 is better then a SEGA - no one is going to give a shit and the other nerds have already made up their minds, so he won't do anything to sway them.''
You are likely correct, but I still think it is useful to provide good argumentation based on technical facts. After all, opinions can vary, but facts stay the same. Some of us like to make choices based on technical merits rather than opinions. I often base my arguments on technical facts, and, even though people have gone in directions that weren't what I recommended in many cases, they often ended up coming around to my point of view in the end. The truth is that technical differences matter, and technically better ends up being Real World better and better for what you are trying to do in many cases, too.
Note that I am not saying that any container format is technically better than any other. I am sure this is the case, but I don't know anywhere near enough about container formats to make an informed statement about that.
``Ogg is not like that at all. The only thing it stores in a codec-independant manner is framing. Every other piece of information you might expect a container to have is stored in a codec-dependant manner. Even metadata!''
Ok, so you are saying that there are things that you can do which, with Ogg, require you to understand the codec, whereas other containers allow you to do these things without having to understand the codec. Correct?
Could you or someone else provide (or link to) some examples of things you may want to do that require knowledge of the codec when Ogg is used as a container, but can be done with only knowledge of the container for other container formats?
``If "big oil" scientists cannot be trusted because of how they get paid, neither can academics.''
Thanks for pointing that out.
Perhaps your post will help more people realize that it's not about the people, it's about the work. The validity of the results does not depend on who funded the research or on the bias of the researchers - it depends on the methods that were used to arrive at the results.
``I lost faith in the climatologists when they stopped calling it global warming and went for the more neutral "climate change." If that isn't an example of politicizing their own debate then I don't know what is.''
Actually, I think it is simply a more accurate expression of the real concerns. Speaking for myself, average temperature rising by a few Kelvins isn't really what I am concerned about. However, effects such as more heavy rain, floods, and cyclones do have me concerned, and if climate were to change in such a way as to cause large-scale destruction of ecosystems, I feel that that would be a Bad Thing, too. Also, if the concern were really global warming, than perhaps a global drop in temperatures by 20 Kelvins would be cause for celebration. I hardly think that this is the case.
You wrote:
And then, Gandalf_Greyhame wrote:
and
I think all that nicely illustrates the problem. You claim that the climate change crowd uses strong language and demonizes and discredits the other side, rather than looking at actual data. Then you and Gandalf_Greyhame proceed to do exactly the same.
And you are right. The publicly visible discussion isn't about the actual data. It's a full-blown flamewar, made of one part fallacious arguments and three parts abuse.
The media, for their part, are doing what they have always been doing: carrying and shaping stories so that they can maximize profits and/or other goals that they may have, such as support for their favorite ideology. The media are useful, but they are not the bringers of truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Even if they try for that, I don't think it is reasonable to expect a reporter to know everything about everything they write about.
So, if you are looking for the truth, I can only advise you to, first of all, think carefully about what you will accept. Will you accept the words of people you don't know at face value? How about people you do know? What if the person has a degree, is a renown authority in some field, or even in the field he is making claims about? If you are looking at data, will you accept data from possibly flawed measuring devices as truth? What about data reported by others? What about data that you know has been combined, averaged, or otherwise processed? If you are looking at arguments, will you accept arguments if they seem to make sense, or only if they are logically sound? What if they are based on statistics - will you simply accept the outcome, or do you need to see all the parameters and results, or at least the p-value? What probability is enough for you? How much faith do you have in models and their implementations, and what criteria do you have for accepting predictions obtained from a model? Models are everywhere, but even very commonly accepted models such as Newtonian physics have been shown to be flawed. Does this mean data obtained from such models should be ignored?
With your acceptance criteria firmly in mind, you will be able to sift through the vast body of statements about climate change. Depending on your criteria, you will probably end up with (A) a bunch of contradictory conclusions, (B) a number of conclusions that agree, or (C) the conclusion that none of what you reviewed is good enough to warrant any conclusion. If you end up with a number of agreeing conclusions, congratulations. You can now live your life in accordance with those. If not, or if you gave up because it's just too much work, there is one more question for you: What are you going to do - are you going to err on the side of caution and limit your environmental footprint just in case, or are you going to decide that, since you aren't convinced that you may be harming the environment, you are not going to burden yourself?