Others have commented very nicely about the content of your post (though I did notice that no one has yet said "Would somebody please think about the poor hamsters?" Which I think is an unfortunate oversight, in that it gives the impression that the average slashdot geek has little feeling for the plight of harmless fluffy squeekers.)
I have found that the reduction in redundancy in the subject line of this thread has actually expanded its meaning a rather wonderfical way. My life is so much richer for now having a way to distinguish the redud posts from those that are merely duplicative, or just plain duds.
All this talk about "competing". Linux and FOSS isn't about competition. Linux and FOSS are about cooperation. This is about win-win approaches where developers help each other along. Everybody measures their progress not by how many wrecks they pass or whether there is anybody between them and some imaginary finish line, but simply by how many miles they've travelled so far. Cooperative people spend more time looking around at the scenery than staring at the ass of whoever happens to be in front of them at the moment. Coperative people pick the fruits of their labors as they move along.
Competition is too engrained in Microsoft's corporate culture for them to change. They can't even talk about cooperative development efforts without using competitive terms, and those terms just don't fit. So those few at Microsoft who do get it don't have any way of telling the others about it. They either learn to shut up or they become ostracized and shunned beccause their funny ideas make their coworkers uncomfortable. Or they leave.
Microsoft is dead. It just doesn't get it. Like some multi-ton dinosaur that can't adjust to changing conditions, it is going to stagger around for a while. Watch it's tail; it still packs a wallop.
Microsoft will continue to compete with Linux and FOSS until it exhausts all the fat it has hoarded up over the years. But it will never win, because Linux and FOSS don't do competitions. Open source is all about cooperation, and those who do get it are simply going to move over, let Microsoft rampage off into the distance, and get on with picking the ripe fruit and helping each other along. The closest thing to competition that Microsoft is going to evoke from them are complaints about the messes it makes and the fruit trees it damages. And Microsft, in its tunnel vision focus on the ass end of whoever it thinks is ahead of it at the moment is not even aware of the nature of these complaints. For it is already mostly brain dead.
Microsoft is dead. It just doesn't know it yet, and it takes quite a while for a big old dinosaur to finally keel over.
Microsoft is dead. Mind its tail; those dirt encrusted barbs still pack a wallop.
He's been at Microsoft since college and rattles off techie jargon like value proposition and customer sat (short for satisfaction) like any seasoned Microsoftie.
These are not examples of 'techie jargon'. Tech jargon is limited to words like 'bandwidth', 'optimization', 'standards compliance', and so on-- words that careful programmers use when they talk with each other about making good programs. Buzzwords like 'value proposition' and 'customer sat' are marketdroid crap.
Implying that marketing buzzwords are part of the tech jargon is a kind of 'embrace and extend' that I find loathsome. It pollutes the language.
Besides, think about it for a minute: Micro? Soft? Not exactly a good name for pornography.
Good point. Do you think this might explain some of Microsoft's behaviors-- like maybe they are compensating for something?
I wonder if calling the porn movie "MacroHard" would work? It could be about a dweebish geek who just happened to be hung like a horse but was clueless about how to use this hardware. Maybe he needs to rely on telephone tech support... from India... hmmm. Could make for a good mainstream comedy.
To me this strikes me as the same sort of "solution" as DRM is, sure it stops Joe Six-Pack from putting Britney Spears' head onto a porn stars body, but it will not stop anyone who knows what they are doing when it comes to digital image manipulation.
Another point is that this technique is going to have limited usefulness since some degree of image manipulation is a normal part of publishing photos-- whether on the web or in other media. Things like sharpness, color balance, and resolution are tweaked to fit the presentation. It seems to me that any authentication technique sensitive enough to identify good forgeries would also declare every image published by the NYT as being faked. I don't see how that would be useful.
There are circumstances where it would be good to be able to authenticate raw, unedited photos. But they are pretty few in my life.
Most of the time my concern is not going to be about whether an image has been manipulated-- I expect professionals and better amateurs to do some manipulation-- but about the degree and nature of the manipulation. Did the artist do something more than remove the outhouse that was in the background and clean up the dark shadows? That kind of question can best be answered by looking at the reputation of the artist rather than the image he's produced.
This monkey's arms and hands are no longer tied up in locomotion. She could now do things like easily carrying a tool from one place to another, things which would not have been feasible before. I think that gives her a significant "evolutionary edge" (I'm queasy about applying the term to an individual rather than a species, but I can't think of a better expression).
Another point is that not all evolution is genetic, nor is all heredity genetic. Some social animals have cultures that evolve independently of genetics. I'm sure you can think of at least one example.
I'm rather hoping this macaque gets a flash of insight and starts carrying around a digging stick or pair of nut-cracking rocks...
Why should english be primary language for international sites?
Only relatively small group of people use English as native language.
While it is true that there are only around 400 million native speakers of english in the world, there are also between 0.5 and 1.0 billion people who have been schooled in english as a second language.[1] There is probably an equal number of people who know english well enough for commerce and technical communications.
A very interesting thing is that there are at least twice as many people who are fluent in english as a second language as there are native speakers of english. I think that is very rare for a living language; I'm not sure it has ever happened before.
The way english is evolving is now more influenced by people who use it as a second language than it is by native speakers. The rate at which new words and expressions are coming into the language has never been higher; there is also a rapid acceptance of new alternate syntaxes, grammars, and spelling that I think is very unusual.
I for one welcome the new expressions our Brazilian internet users could bring to english (if they choose to mingle with the rest of the world).
Intuition would say that the population size would have to matter, but in fact it does not...
You make some good points.
Another point that people are missing is that this 1% change is not based on a single statistical sample. It is a monthly aggregation of daily samples-- and the "statistical significance" people have been bandying about here applies only to each individual daily sample, not to an aggregate of 30 samples.
Also from the way the numbers are reported (to 0.01% significance), it appears that the normal daily variance websitestory sees is less than 1/5 of 1%. So the trend they are reporting is something like 5 times greater than the normal background noise they see.
And of course if story had been reported from the other viewpoint, no one would be questioning whether Mozilla's 26% gain was significant.
All of which just goes to show that correctly reading technical information requires skills other than simply being literate. From what people have written on this thread, I'd guess that most of the slashdot contributors are still developing a discipline of critical thinking. That's not a slam-- simply a recognition that someone in their teens or twenties can't bring a couple of decades of training and experience to their reading.
Caps lock was created for backwars-compatible [sic] to all-caps-only machines.
Uh, I think it more likely that caps lock was carried over from typewriter technology since it was familiar to touch typists.
At the time IBM was introducing its first PC, its Selectric typewriter dominated the market. The original 84 key PC keyboard was designed to be like the Selectric keyboard.
All typewriters of that day had caps lock keys. One of the contributing reasons was because telegrams, that used uppercase only, were still the technology of choice for high speed long distance messaging. Another was carryover from manual typewriter design but that's too long a story for this post.
Perhaps I'm feeding a troll, but I'm going to respond in a general way.
Wiseleo writes: The real problem then is photographers not composing the shots right...
I disagree. The point of photography is to end up with a good print or display image. Whether the composition part of that is mostly done before the shutter click or by reworking the raw image in the computer is not really important. Whether there were 100 hundred snaps that were garbage and thrown away is also unimportant when judging the quality of the one good shot.
I see some fairly horrid shots routinely from some very nice cameras. I never need to edit my shots for brightness and contrast in any way. I haven't used crop in months either.
It sounds like Wiseleo is getting a great deal of expertise in taking certain kind of shots. But I don't think his advice is very good for most amateurs.
I think the key that separates shutterbugs from serious amateurs isn't anything so simple as applying the principles of composition. It is about will power, the stuff that makes successful diets.
Serious amateur photographers have developed a willingness to ruthlessly cull 90% to 99% of the shots they take, and only show others the few good pictures that remain. It is in making these "keep or toss" choices where you truly gain an appreciation for good composition, color use, and other aspects of the art. And you also gain a mental discipline that will allow you to experiment successfully. Knowing that you are going to throw most of your shots away allows you the freedom to take risks with different camera angles and settings. Every once in a while, those risks pay off in a big way.
I don't understand the whole hype about MEGApixXels.
<snip>
I have a 2.0 megapixel camera... I've -never- seemed to need a new camera after this year of having owned it. Pictures are pretty clear, they're great for vacation...
You've got a great fun camera! Perfect for what you are doing with it. I can't see any need for you to replace it, until it gets lost, broken, or worn out. Or your growing photographic skills begin to push against the camera's limitations.
With your current camera, you should be able to get photorealistic prints up to around 4x5 inches (with a good printer, paper selection, etc). The main advantage for your style of shooting of going to a 3 or 4 MP camera is that you would be able to salvage more of those shots that were almost good, except for all the extraneous garbage, by cropping away up to 75% of the original image and still end up with a photorealistic 4x5 print.
That has to be balanced against cost and risk factors. There is a place for good low cost 2 MP cameras in professional use-- when I don't want to risk an expensive camera while kayaking, etc.
A 2 MP camera can be an excellent choice for fun photography. When and if you want to go beyond snapshots and get into digital darkroom work, you will probably want a more capable camera as well.
I'm pretty sure that JC Penny is big enough that it has its very own IT department. I just betcha that at least a couple of their tame geeks read slashdot. And that one of them will get a kick out of making sure that others in the company know about this thread.
Slashdot can be an effective social engineering tool, youbetcha.
I have shopped at JC Penny stores for more than 20 years. More than a third of my wardrobe has come from JC Penny during all that time.
I like the JC Penny stores.
But I dislike spyware and pop-up ads much more than I like JC Penny.
I will be shopping elsewhere until it is clear to me that JC Penny has adopted an advertising strategy that does not mess with my internet usage. JC Penny: know that in addition to what you have spent on pop-up ads, these have also just cost you a customer.
Thanks, LL Bean, for bringing this to my attention. I have never paid you much attention in the past, but I will be checking out your catalogs in the future.
It shouldn't take much of a boycott to get companies like JC Penny and Nordstrom to police their marketdroids more closely. And I wonder if something can be done with a slashdot poll wrt companies that subsidize the worst pop-ups?
Is the pattern just coincidence? I think not. While not openly acknowledged, I'm quite sure that this relationship had as much to do with the naming as the googol did. And that the intent to verbify the company's name was there from the inception.
The biggest improvement an amateur photographer can make is a simple matter of self-discipline:
Throw away 8 of every 10 photos you take, before showing them to anyone.
There are many reasons why this works. If you adopt this practice now, by the end of the summer you'll have discovered several of those reasons on your own. You'll also have taken many more pictures than you would have otherwise, yet have fewer to show for it. OTOH, you'll start getting more compliments on your work.
Later on, if you decide you like this and want to go to the next level, you can start reading about digital photography and throwing away at least 9 of every 10 shots.
Throw away what you've done and program something that works right
Only after the above is done:
Gross profile at the module level (remember HIPO charts?) for the slow spots, then program something that works better by rewriting bottlenecks with better algorithms and data structures.
Only then profile and optimize at the code level-- if that is actually required.
The main product of #1 is a detailed binding agreement with the client that will tell you when the work is done. If you use comments well, then keep those, too. But the code itself is crap: toss it. Neither you nor the client actually knew what you wanted the computer to do until you got your feet wet (one of you might think you knew, but that's the ass/u/me thing). (or the problem is truly trivial.)
Step #2 produces a working prototype, version 0.9x, that does everything in the specification. That might be all the client wants to pay for (right now). It solves his immediate computer problem, but it might cause his business to evolve in unexpected ways. Which could mean you'll be negotiating a new contract with him rather than trying to sell him on the advantages of optimizing the prototype-- which is both more lucrative and more fun.
A successful project might never get to step #3. So what? Especially if it generates a string of child projects...
As to buying new hardware to solve a software inefficiency-- it depends. Would the client be replacing or expanding existing hardware pretty soon anyway? If so, the hardware solution isn't going to cost him any more than what he is already budgeting for. I think much of the time, your software engineer prof's generalization makes a lot of sense.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
you are over-generalizing. Three lefts make a right only if they are right angle lefts (or if the sum of the angles of the three lefts equals the sum of three right angles).
Our configuration gurus have mentioned doing something with ALSA, so I think they are aware of the technique you describe. The plan is to eventually rewrite the install scripts to better utilize the onboard sound chips, but there are other scripting tasks of higher priority to take care of first (we've got plenty of salvaged sound cards to work with).
I couldn't get XYZ to work with my sound card at all, even though I was testing XYZ on a brand new PC from a major vendor. The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This isn't some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets.
Wrong. No onboard sound chips are standard, and some are as impossible to work with as "winmodems", possibly for the same reason. Their configuration details are often proprietary secrets, and I expect that at least some of them are doing nasty background stuff with the CPU.
Linux does work with any Sound-Blaster compatible sound card.
How do I know these things?
I volunteer as a Build Instructor at a computer recycler (Free Geek, in Portland, OR). I assist newbies in learning the fine art of skimming the garbage flows for re-useable components, putting those together to make working PCs, and installing a variant of Debian on top of it all. Some of the results go to non-profit organizations but many go to the volunteers as reward for their services. Donate 24 hours to busting up recycled computers into steel, aluminum, and plastic bins and you get to take a Freekbox home (233 MHz, 96 MB ram, 4.5 GB HD, 15" monitor, speakers, CD player: all stuff that isn't going to the dump).
I have sometimes been able to get on board Crystal sound chips to work under Linux, though usually it means fussing with configuration settings. I have never been able to get a Yamaha sound chip to work and I have never heard of anyone who has. When we can't get the onboard sound to work, we disable it in BIOS and drop in a 16 bit sound card. We sell used ones that work just fine from our store for $2.00 for anyone who is doing this at home.
Fred Langa needs to look at appropriate technology resources when he ventures from the world of marketdroids into things Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Others have commented very nicely about the content of your post (though I did notice that no one has yet said "Would somebody please think about the poor hamsters?" Which I think is an unfortunate oversight, in that it gives the impression that the average slashdot geek has little feeling for the plight of harmless fluffy squeekers.)
I have found that the reduction in redundancy in the subject line of this thread has actually expanded its meaning a rather wonderfical way. My life is so much richer for now having a way to distinguish the redud posts from those that are merely duplicative, or just plain duds.
Thank you very much.
Yes, they still don't get it. Microsoft is dying.
All this talk about "competing". Linux and FOSS isn't about competition. Linux and FOSS are about cooperation. This is about win-win approaches where developers help each other along. Everybody measures their progress not by how many wrecks they pass or whether there is anybody between them and some imaginary finish line, but simply by how many miles they've travelled so far. Cooperative people spend more time looking around at the scenery than staring at the ass of whoever happens to be in front of them at the moment. Coperative people pick the fruits of their labors as they move along.
Competition is too engrained in Microsoft's corporate culture for them to change. They can't even talk about cooperative development efforts without using competitive terms, and those terms just don't fit. So those few at Microsoft who do get it don't have any way of telling the others about it. They either learn to shut up or they become ostracized and shunned beccause their funny ideas make their coworkers uncomfortable. Or they leave.
Microsoft is dead. It just doesn't get it. Like some multi-ton dinosaur that can't adjust to changing conditions, it is going to stagger around for a while. Watch it's tail; it still packs a wallop.
Microsoft will continue to compete with Linux and FOSS until it exhausts all the fat it has hoarded up over the years. But it will never win, because Linux and FOSS don't do competitions. Open source is all about cooperation, and those who do get it are simply going to move over, let Microsoft rampage off into the distance, and get on with picking the ripe fruit and helping each other along. The closest thing to competition that Microsoft is going to evoke from them are complaints about the messes it makes and the fruit trees it damages. And Microsft, in its tunnel vision focus on the ass end of whoever it thinks is ahead of it at the moment is not even aware of the nature of these complaints. For it is already mostly brain dead.
Microsoft is dead. It just doesn't know it yet, and it takes quite a while for a big old dinosaur to finally keel over.
Microsoft is dead. Mind its tail; those dirt encrusted barbs still pack a wallop.
These are not examples of 'techie jargon'. Tech jargon is limited to words like 'bandwidth', 'optimization', 'standards compliance', and so on-- words that careful programmers use when they talk with each other about making good programs. Buzzwords like 'value proposition' and 'customer sat' are marketdroid crap.
Implying that marketing buzzwords are part of the tech jargon is a kind of 'embrace and extend' that I find loathsome. It pollutes the language.
"It's the smell. If there is such a thing."
Besides, think about it for a minute: Micro? Soft? Not exactly a good name for pornography.
Good point. Do you think this might explain some of Microsoft's behaviors-- like maybe they are compensating for something?
I wonder if calling the porn movie "MacroHard" would work? It could be about a dweebish geek who just happened to be hung like a horse but was clueless about how to use this hardware. Maybe he needs to rely on telephone tech support... from India... hmmm. Could make for a good mainstream comedy.
Where is the fairness in that?
In the same place as always, right next to the spoon.
There is no spoon.
You make some good points.
To me this strikes me as the same sort of "solution" as DRM is, sure it stops Joe Six-Pack from putting Britney Spears' head onto a porn stars body, but it will not stop anyone who knows what they are doing when it comes to digital image manipulation.
Another point is that this technique is going to have limited usefulness since some degree of image manipulation is a normal part of publishing photos-- whether on the web or in other media. Things like sharpness, color balance, and resolution are tweaked to fit the presentation. It seems to me that any authentication technique sensitive enough to identify good forgeries would also declare every image published by the NYT as being faked. I don't see how that would be useful.
There are circumstances where it would be good to be able to authenticate raw, unedited photos. But they are pretty few in my life.
Most of the time my concern is not going to be about whether an image has been manipulated-- I expect professionals and better amateurs to do some manipulation-- but about the degree and nature of the manipulation. Did the artist do something more than remove the outhouse that was in the background and clean up the dark shadows? That kind of question can best be answered by looking at the reputation of the artist rather than the image he's produced.
Where do lossless graphic compression efforts stand?
As completed. PNG uses lossless compression, and is being used more widely as more recent browsers give it better support.
Is this an area where a proprietary standard might lead to big $$$?
Probably not, since PNG fills that niche.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Sir:
Your sig is irrational.
Just thought you'd like to know that.
This monkey's arms and hands are no longer tied up in locomotion. She could now do things like easily carrying a tool from one place to another, things which would not have been feasible before. I think that gives her a significant "evolutionary edge" (I'm queasy about applying the term to an individual rather than a species, but I can't think of a better expression).
Another point is that not all evolution is genetic, nor is all heredity genetic. Some social animals have cultures that evolve independently of genetics. I'm sure you can think of at least one example.
I'm rather hoping this macaque gets a flash of insight and starts carrying around a digging stick or pair of nut-cracking rocks...
Why should english be primary language for international sites?
Only relatively small group of people use English as native language.
While it is true that there are only around 400 million native speakers of english in the world, there are also between 0.5 and 1.0 billion people who have been schooled in english as a second language.[1] There is probably an equal number of people who know english well enough for commerce and technical communications.
A very interesting thing is that there are at least twice as many people who are fluent in english as a second language as there are native speakers of english. I think that is very rare for a living language; I'm not sure it has ever happened before.
The way english is evolving is now more influenced by people who use it as a second language than it is by native speakers. The rate at which new words and expressions are coming into the language has never been higher; there is also a rapid acceptance of new alternate syntaxes, grammars, and spelling that I think is very unusual.
I for one welcome the new expressions our Brazilian internet users could bring to english (if they choose to mingle with the rest of the world).
[1]Start with Wikipedia's article and work your way through the links...
Intuition would say that the population size would have to matter, but in fact it does not...
You make some good points.
Another point that people are missing is that this 1% change is not based on a single statistical sample. It is a monthly aggregation of daily samples-- and the "statistical significance" people have been bandying about here applies only to each individual daily sample, not to an aggregate of 30 samples.
Also from the way the numbers are reported (to 0.01% significance), it appears that the normal daily variance websitestory sees is less than 1/5 of 1%. So the trend they are reporting is something like 5 times greater than the normal background noise they see.
And of course if story had been reported from the other viewpoint, no one would be questioning whether Mozilla's 26% gain was significant.
All of which just goes to show that correctly reading technical information requires skills other than simply being literate. From what people have written on this thread, I'd guess that most of the slashdot contributors are still developing a discipline of critical thinking. That's not a slam-- simply a recognition that someone in their teens or twenties can't bring a couple of decades of training and experience to their reading.
"If it isn't one thing, it's another..." --Gilda
Did you think I was hot dogging? I just meant to offer a frank comment.
Sausage.
(It had to be said.)
That's the wurst I've heard...
Caps lock was created for backwars-compatible [sic] to all-caps-only machines.
Uh, I think it more likely that caps lock was carried over from typewriter technology since it was familiar to touch typists.
At the time IBM was introducing its first PC, its Selectric typewriter dominated the market. The original 84 key PC keyboard was designed to be like the Selectric keyboard.
All typewriters of that day had caps lock keys. One of the contributing reasons was because telegrams, that used uppercase only, were still the technology of choice for high speed long distance messaging. Another was carryover from manual typewriter design but that's too long a story for this post.
Perhaps I'm feeding a troll, but I'm going to respond in a general way.
Wiseleo writes: The real problem then is photographers not composing the shots right...
I disagree. The point of photography is to end up with a good print or display image. Whether the composition part of that is mostly done before the shutter click or by reworking the raw image in the computer is not really important. Whether there were 100 hundred snaps that were garbage and thrown away is also unimportant when judging the quality of the one good shot.
I see some fairly horrid shots routinely from some very nice cameras. I never need to edit my shots for brightness and contrast in any way. I haven't used crop in months either.
It sounds like Wiseleo is getting a great deal of expertise in taking certain kind of shots. But I don't think his advice is very good for most amateurs.
I think the key that separates shutterbugs from serious amateurs isn't anything so simple as applying the principles of composition. It is about will power, the stuff that makes successful diets.
Serious amateur photographers have developed a willingness to ruthlessly cull 90% to 99% of the shots they take, and only show others the few good pictures that remain. It is in making these "keep or toss" choices where you truly gain an appreciation for good composition, color use, and other aspects of the art. And you also gain a mental discipline that will allow you to experiment successfully. Knowing that you are going to throw most of your shots away allows you the freedom to take risks with different camera angles and settings. Every once in a while, those risks pay off in a big way.
I don't understand the whole hype about MEGApixXels.
<snip>
I have a 2.0 megapixel camera... I've -never- seemed to need a new camera after this year of having owned it. Pictures are pretty clear, they're great for vacation...
You've got a great fun camera! Perfect for what you are doing with it. I can't see any need for you to replace it, until it gets lost, broken, or worn out. Or your growing photographic skills begin to push against the camera's limitations.
With your current camera, you should be able to get photorealistic prints up to around 4x5 inches (with a good printer, paper selection, etc). The main advantage for your style of shooting of going to a 3 or 4 MP camera is that you would be able to salvage more of those shots that were almost good, except for all the extraneous garbage, by cropping away up to 75% of the original image and still end up with a photorealistic 4x5 print.
That has to be balanced against cost and risk factors. There is a place for good low cost 2 MP cameras in professional use-- when I don't want to risk an expensive camera while kayaking, etc.
A 2 MP camera can be an excellent choice for fun photography. When and if you want to go beyond snapshots and get into digital darkroom work, you will probably want a more capable camera as well.
You mean like with a stamp and everything? That's thirty seven cents, plus the hassle of loading an envelope in the printer.
Besides, I've hung around slashdot so long there's no way I could be normal.
I'm pretty sure that JC Penny is big enough that it has its very own IT department. I just betcha that at least a couple of their tame geeks read slashdot. And that one of them will get a kick out of making sure that others in the company know about this thread.
Slashdot can be an effective social engineering tool, youbetcha.
I have shopped at JC Penny stores for more than 20 years. More than a third of my wardrobe has come from JC Penny during all that time.
I like the JC Penny stores.
But I dislike spyware and pop-up ads much more than I like JC Penny.
I will be shopping elsewhere until it is clear to me that JC Penny has adopted an advertising strategy that does not mess with my internet usage. JC Penny: know that in addition to what you have spent on pop-up ads, these have also just cost you a customer.
Thanks, LL Bean, for bringing this to my attention. I have never paid you much attention in the past, but I will be checking out your catalogs in the future.
It shouldn't take much of a boycott to get companies like JC Penny and Nordstrom to police their marketdroids more closely. And I wonder if something can be done with a slashdot poll wrt companies that subsidize the worst pop-ups?
Nice troll.
In a related matter:
goggle
google
Is the pattern just coincidence? I think not. While not openly acknowledged, I'm quite sure that this relationship had as much to do with the naming as the googol did. And that the intent to verbify the company's name was there from the inception.
Don't be afraid to throw away the crap ones
YES!
The biggest improvement an amateur photographer can make is a simple matter of self-discipline:
Throw away 8 of every 10 photos you take, before showing them to anyone.
There are many reasons why this works. If you adopt this practice now, by the end of the summer you'll have discovered several of those reasons on your own. You'll also have taken many more pictures than you would have otherwise, yet have fewer to show for it. OTOH, you'll start getting more compliments on your work.
Later on, if you decide you like this and want to go to the next level, you can start reading about digital photography and throwing away at least 9 of every 10 shots.
Back in the day, I was taught this approach:
Only after the above is done:
The main product of #1 is a detailed binding agreement with the client that will tell you when the work is done. If you use comments well, then keep those, too. But the code itself is crap: toss it. Neither you nor the client actually knew what you wanted the computer to do until you got your feet wet (one of you might think you knew, but that's the ass/u/me thing). (or the problem is truly trivial.)
Step #2 produces a working prototype, version 0.9x, that does everything in the specification. That might be all the client wants to pay for (right now). It solves his immediate computer problem, but it might cause his business to evolve in unexpected ways. Which could mean you'll be negotiating a new contract with him rather than trying to sell him on the advantages of optimizing the prototype-- which is both more lucrative and more fun.
A successful project might never get to step #3. So what? Especially if it generates a string of child projects...
As to buying new hardware to solve a software inefficiency-- it depends. Would the client be replacing or expanding existing hardware pretty soon anyway? If so, the hardware solution isn't going to cost him any more than what he is already budgeting for. I think much of the time, your software engineer prof's generalization makes a lot of sense.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
you are over-generalizing. Three lefts make a right only if they are right angle lefts (or if the sum of the angles of the three lefts equals the sum of three right angles).
Heh, heh. Karma burning time.
Our configuration gurus have mentioned doing something with ALSA, so I think they are aware of the technique you describe. The plan is to eventually rewrite the install scripts to better utilize the onboard sound chips, but there are other scripting tasks of higher priority to take care of first (we've got plenty of salvaged sound cards to work with).
From Fred Langa's article:
I couldn't get XYZ to work with my sound card at all, even though I was testing XYZ on a brand new PC from a major vendor. The system was based on an utterly mainstream Intel motherboard with an on-board Intel sound system. This isn't some weird, off-brand system using unknown components: It's about as mainstream as it gets.
Wrong. No onboard sound chips are standard, and some are as impossible to work with as "winmodems", possibly for the same reason. Their configuration details are often proprietary secrets, and I expect that at least some of them are doing nasty background stuff with the CPU.
Linux does work with any Sound-Blaster compatible sound card.
How do I know these things?
I volunteer as a Build Instructor at a computer recycler (Free Geek, in Portland, OR). I assist newbies in learning the fine art of skimming the garbage flows for re-useable components, putting those together to make working PCs, and installing a variant of Debian on top of it all. Some of the results go to non-profit organizations but many go to the volunteers as reward for their services. Donate 24 hours to busting up recycled computers into steel, aluminum, and plastic bins and you get to take a Freekbox home (233 MHz, 96 MB ram, 4.5 GB HD, 15" monitor, speakers, CD player: all stuff that isn't going to the dump).
I have sometimes been able to get on board Crystal sound chips to work under Linux, though usually it means fussing with configuration settings. I have never been able to get a Yamaha sound chip to work and I have never heard of anyone who has. When we can't get the onboard sound to work, we disable it in BIOS and drop in a 16 bit sound card. We sell used ones that work just fine from our store for $2.00 for anyone who is doing this at home.
Fred Langa needs to look at appropriate technology resources when he ventures from the world of marketdroids into things Linux.