My view is that this is only an individual symptom of a larger scale problem. It seems that there are a lot of old, verified, almost showstopper bugs that just get ignored. I'm too busy/lazy to hunt the links at this point, but for example GNOME3 has probably from the beginning had a bug that it gets very sluggish after a few days, at least on some GPU's/drivers, the kernel's trashing behavior in out-of-memory situations is horrible, the audio stack is a horrible mess etc.
It's probably a wider problem of QA, that may be very difficult to solve. At least as a programmer I'm first to admit that I don't want to use my spare time fixing bugs. Debian's almost draconian policies seem to do quite well in terms of stability, but the desktop often lags behind (this may be unavoidable) and the desktop doesn't seem to be a very high priority for them.
PS. This post in no way suggests that things are better, or aren't a lot worse, in Windows-world and OS X with the controlled hardware platform is a very different situation. Maybe I should check if the grass is really greener in the BSD-side.
Android (and "app stores" in general) really reminds me of my dark days of Windows usage ten or so years back when nearly every single crappy piece of code implementing functionality of shell script one liner would nag for its few bucks. The contrast to open source software available on some better platforms (and even on Windows nowadays) is staggering. And this would have been perhaps the strongest point for MeeGo (and was for Maemo and hopefully will be for Jolla). Hopefully this "app" fad blows over soon.
No, this would justify not watching it at all. But the fact that the money paid for the film would mostly end up to people already filthy rich justifies downloading according to my sick and twisted socialist morals.
This may slide a bit off topic, but how the hell professionalism got such a good reputation? Is it some measure of quality that people who create a product must be persuaded with money to do something they wouldn't otherwise do? Maybe I do too much thinking instead of watching commercials, but for me the word professional has closer connotations to prostitution than quality.
Also MythTV along with most free software projects are done by amateurs, by definition being motivated by love to what they do, so demanding professionalism is an oxymoron.
The whole field of brain imaging, be it fMRI, MEG or EEG has way too much methodological problems to be used as anything resembling "mind reading".
One big issue is whether the location of brain activation in fact says anything about the function that it supposedly causes. Even for the "known" localities (Broca's area etc.), the position varies a lot between subjects. Especially for seemingly homogeneous area such as the neocortex this is a big issue. And even for the better known localities, there aren't very clear theoretical accounts about the computation.
Also it's to be proven that the blood oxygen level in certain place of the brain really correlates that well with the computation that's done in that part. And that intensive computation in some part even tells very much about what's really being represented in the brain.
The fMRI (etc) studies are mostly correlational and any significant results usually require many test subjects. The accuracy of the results are vastly overrepresented in the public, and unfortunately often also in recent cognitive science/neurology/psychology.
I don't think that the hemisphere-function division is as straightforward as you, and much of popularized psychology, suggest. From eg. lesion studies the evidence seems to hint that there are some tendencies to somewhat specialized functionality in the hemispheres, but these are quite "vague".
Some quotes from Wikipedia to back this up:
"Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg. logic, creativity) being lateralised, that is, located in the right or left side of the brain. These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides."
"Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program, though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far outside the implications of the research. For example, the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR and neurolinguistic programming (Drenth 2003:53), brain training equipment, or management training."
Also the study that the article refers to does some quite bold assumptions about how brain works (eg. quite strict functional localization) and the whole concept of "task" is so generally defined that it's quite easy to escape any falsification by modifying its properties.
In general, most of the stuff about psychology/cognitive science that "leaks" to public should be taken with a grain of salt. Much less about brain functioning is known that may appear to a casual reader, or to some self-criticism challenged researchers.
I did use Debian for years and updated to Ubuntu at Hoary just to get stuff "Just working". I like when the stuff "Just works". But what I really hate is the "Just doesn't work".
For some reason when stuff is made to "Just work", it's almost always at expense of flexibility and control. Why can't it be implemented so that the default configuration "Just works", but it's still hackable by hand. In fact when Ubuntu started, it was mostly a "Just works" default configuration for Debian.
I am using wireless networks and I'm using NetworkManager to manage them. I also have used them in times when they had to be manually configured using wireless-tools.
The problem here isn't NetworkManager when it, and everything it depends on (eg the Gnome applet), works as needed. I also know that it doesn't prevent confguring using iwlist, iwconfig and dhclient.
The problem is that NetworkManager works mostly as a black box behind a quite simplistic GUI. Why can't it be done the good old way of having a command line tools which NetworkManager uses? D-BUS is nice to program IPC with and allows good interaction between _programs_, but usually at the same time the UI (generally meaning there's only GUI, no flexible CLI as before) is dumbed down. So the actual problem is that I'd like to use the nice features of NetworkManager with control of command line tools and human editable configurations. The jumps in levels of abstraction (in UI) are too large.
The situation is a bit like skipping a tool like dhclient and only having a GUI which would do the magic of reading the DHCP configuration and configuring the interface and on command line one would have to really hack around to configure a network interface using DHCP.
The situation with NetworkManager is still tolerable with ifconfig, wireless-tools and such around and I'm not ranting specifically about NetworkManager. I'm ranting about the trend to skip the flexibility, control and scriptability of command line tools altogether and having the GUI as only interaction and forcing the usage only to the situation that the GUI developer had in mind.
Again Intrepid seems to take the progression of and Linux desktops in general: abandon the traditional and well proven unix ideology, where simple tools do well defined tasks well. Instead things "Just work" meaning that when they don't work, they "Just don't work" and the only solution is to wait for new release. Yes yes, you have the source, but hacking around all of the "Just works" bugs isn't isn't very feasible even if one had the programming knowledge.
I've been using the prerelease versions of Intrepid for about a month and have witnessed again few cases of the new bloat-methodology.
For example the NetworkManager has been around for a while destroying an architecture that could be comfortably tweaked in command line and config files. Of course I don't have anything against GUIs that simplify this, but in the same time the command line usage has been stripped.
A great example is the new touted 3G automation, which does work quite nicely. However, for more experienced user it seems quite weird as there's no options to set up the network interface or serial device to use. Of course it turns out that this only works on USB devices that are somehow autoprobed probably by HAL (which itself has configurations that few mortals can edit by hand). And this leading the system not supporting 3G over Bluetooth, even if I'd set up the rfcomm serial device myself.
Another amazing way for "Just works" methodology is to write them in the DE itself, not as separate programs. For example in GNOME there's a applet to kill a misbehaving GUI program by clicking it's window (ie a xkill replacement). But of course it runs as part of gnome-panel process (or something like that). Well, when the kill cursor is on it prevents switching VTs (WHY!?) and also jams the whole screen in the process. Now of course the solution is to SSH to the box (because VT switch is prevented) and kill the offending process from command line. But with the new way to do things, there's no single process to kill.
And other great thing is the gconf. Sure it's nice to use from programmer's point of view, but of course it's practically unusable otherwise. With the GUI-editor there's change to find the proper configuration field in reasonable time, but using CLI is nearly impossible. Sure it uses ASCII files to store the data, but these are in some horrible illegible non-commented XML format nesting several directories deep with some "overlaying" stuff so that the offending parameter can be where ever.
It's a fun way to spend time trying to config your screen through gconf when Gnome has decided to screw up your display using XRandr.
These kinds of situations are already everywhere and getting more common by every distribution and DE release. In no time the big open desktop distros reach the "Just doesn't work" level of Windows and OSX.
Please don't get me wrong. I like the new stuff that makes computers simple to use (like automatic networking setup etc). But it really shouldn't be done in expense of flexibility and ability to fix things manually _when_ the automated stuff breaks.
I should note that this is quite different from scoffing the RIAA and the MPAA, partly because drug companies do not sic lawyers on patients who consume knockoff drugs.
You think..AA would waste money on lawyers if people died of not having enough overpriced entertainment?
Someone in Sun marketing should get a nice bonus for brainwashing the "Java is a compiled language" nonsense in 90% of people who know the difference.
The holy Java bytecode is practically Java source with a bit terser syntax. All the high level constructs are there and, as 50% of above mentioned group knows, Java can be decompiled from bytecode to almost identical source it was compiled from (sans comments of course).
What is Java beneath this hype? A scripting language without the benefits of being interpret and with the downsides of compiled languages. What a nice compromise.
How could someone get this in to the "programming experts" heads'? Hire the same guy who is responsible for current reputation of Java?
Slashdot Mirror
My view is that this is only an individual symptom of a larger scale problem. It seems that there are a lot of old, verified, almost showstopper bugs that just get ignored. I'm too busy/lazy to hunt the links at this point, but for example GNOME3 has probably from the beginning had a bug that it gets very sluggish after a few days, at least on some GPU's/drivers, the kernel's trashing behavior in out-of-memory situations is horrible, the audio stack is a horrible mess etc.
It's probably a wider problem of QA, that may be very difficult to solve. At least as a programmer I'm first to admit that I don't want to use my spare time fixing bugs. Debian's almost draconian policies seem to do quite well in terms of stability, but the desktop often lags behind (this may be unavoidable) and the desktop doesn't seem to be a very high priority for them.
PS. This post in no way suggests that things are better, or aren't a lot worse, in Windows-world and OS X with the controlled hardware platform is a very different situation. Maybe I should check if the grass is really greener in the BSD-side.
Android (and "app stores" in general) really reminds me of my dark days of Windows usage ten or so years back when nearly every single crappy piece of code implementing functionality of shell script one liner would nag for its few bucks. The contrast to open source software available on some better platforms (and even on Windows nowadays) is staggering. And this would have been perhaps the strongest point for MeeGo (and was for Maemo and hopefully will be for Jolla). Hopefully this "app" fad blows over soon.
No, this would justify not watching it at all. But the fact that the money paid for the film would mostly end up to people already filthy rich justifies downloading according to my sick and twisted socialist morals.
Watching The Hurt Locker caused great and irreparable waste of time that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money.
This may slide a bit off topic, but how the hell professionalism got such a good reputation? Is it some measure of quality that people who create a product must be persuaded with money to do something they wouldn't otherwise do? Maybe I do too much thinking instead of watching commercials, but for me the word professional has closer connotations to prostitution than quality.
Also MythTV along with most free software projects are done by amateurs, by definition being motivated by love to what they do, so demanding professionalism is an oxymoron.
The whole field of brain imaging, be it fMRI, MEG or EEG has way too much methodological problems to be used as anything resembling "mind reading".
One big issue is whether the location of brain activation in fact says anything about the function that it supposedly causes. Even for the "known" localities (Broca's area etc.), the position varies a lot between subjects. Especially for seemingly homogeneous area such as the neocortex this is a big issue. And even for the better known localities, there aren't very clear theoretical accounts about the computation.
Also it's to be proven that the blood oxygen level in certain place of the brain really correlates that well with the computation that's done in that part. And that intensive computation in some part even tells very much about what's really being represented in the brain.
The fMRI (etc) studies are mostly correlational and any significant results usually require many test subjects. The accuracy of the results are vastly overrepresented in the public, and unfortunately often also in recent cognitive science/neurology/psychology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_neuroimaging#Critique_and_careful_interpretation
I don't think that the hemisphere-function division is as straightforward as you, and much of popularized psychology, suggest. From eg. lesion studies the evidence seems to hint that there are some tendencies to somewhat specialized functionality in the hemispheres, but these are quite "vague".
Some quotes from Wikipedia to back this up:
"Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain function (eg. logic, creativity) being lateralised, that is, located in the right or left side of the brain. These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides."
"Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program, though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far outside the implications of the research. For example, the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR and neurolinguistic programming (Drenth 2003:53), brain training equipment, or management training."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function
Also the study that the article refers to does some quite bold assumptions about how brain works (eg. quite strict functional localization) and the whole concept of "task" is so generally defined that it's quite easy to escape any falsification by modifying its properties.
In general, most of the stuff about psychology/cognitive science that "leaks" to public should be taken with a grain of salt. Much less about brain functioning is known that may appear to a casual reader, or to some self-criticism challenged researchers.
Nobody sane would voluntarily develop anything for Symbian. It's most probably the worst and most hostile environment for development ever created.
For some evidence to my claim see how many open source projects there are for Symbian comparing to it's market share.
But the bugs in Fallout 3's case are of course just to be true to it predecessor.
I did use Debian for years and updated to Ubuntu at Hoary just to get stuff "Just working". I like when the stuff "Just works". But what I really hate is the "Just doesn't work".
For some reason when stuff is made to "Just work", it's almost always at expense of flexibility and control. Why can't it be implemented so that the default configuration "Just works", but it's still hackable by hand. In fact when Ubuntu started, it was mostly a "Just works" default configuration for Debian.
I am using wireless networks and I'm using NetworkManager to manage them. I also have used them in times when they had to be manually configured using wireless-tools.
The problem here isn't NetworkManager when it, and everything it depends on (eg the Gnome applet), works as needed. I also know that it doesn't prevent confguring using iwlist, iwconfig and dhclient.
The problem is that NetworkManager works mostly as a black box behind a quite simplistic GUI. Why can't it be done the good old way of having a command line tools which NetworkManager uses? D-BUS is nice to program IPC with and allows good interaction between _programs_, but usually at the same time the UI (generally meaning there's only GUI, no flexible CLI as before) is dumbed down. So the actual problem is that I'd like to use the nice features of NetworkManager with control of command line tools and human editable configurations. The jumps in levels of abstraction (in UI) are too large.
The situation is a bit like skipping a tool like dhclient and only having a GUI which would do the magic of reading the DHCP configuration and configuring the interface and on command line one would have to really hack around to configure a network interface using DHCP.
The situation with NetworkManager is still tolerable with ifconfig, wireless-tools and such around and I'm not ranting specifically about NetworkManager. I'm ranting about the trend to skip the flexibility, control and scriptability of command line tools altogether and having the GUI as only interaction and forcing the usage only to the situation that the GUI developer had in mind.
Again Intrepid seems to take the progression of and Linux desktops in general: abandon the traditional and well proven unix ideology, where simple tools do well defined tasks well. Instead things "Just work" meaning that when they don't work, they "Just don't work" and the only solution is to wait for new release. Yes yes, you have the source, but hacking around all of the "Just works" bugs isn't isn't very feasible even if one had the programming knowledge.
I've been using the prerelease versions of Intrepid for about a month and have witnessed again few cases of the new bloat-methodology.
For example the NetworkManager has been around for a while destroying an architecture that could be comfortably tweaked in command line and config files. Of course I don't have anything against GUIs that simplify this, but in the same time the command line usage has been stripped.
A great example is the new touted 3G automation, which does work quite nicely. However, for more experienced user it seems quite weird as there's no options to set up the network interface or serial device to use. Of course it turns out that this only works on USB devices that are somehow autoprobed probably by HAL (which itself has configurations that few mortals can edit by hand). And this leading the system not supporting 3G over Bluetooth, even if I'd set up the rfcomm serial device myself.
Another amazing way for "Just works" methodology is to write them in the DE itself, not as separate programs. For example in GNOME there's a applet to kill a misbehaving GUI program by clicking it's window (ie a xkill replacement). But of course it runs as part of gnome-panel process (or something like that). Well, when the kill cursor is on it prevents switching VTs (WHY!?) and also jams the whole screen in the process. Now of course the solution is to SSH to the box (because VT switch is prevented) and kill the offending process from command line. But with the new way to do things, there's no single process to kill.
And other great thing is the gconf. Sure it's nice to use from programmer's point of view, but of course it's practically unusable otherwise. With the GUI-editor there's change to find the proper configuration field in reasonable time, but using CLI is nearly impossible. Sure it uses ASCII files to store the data, but these are in some horrible illegible non-commented XML format nesting several directories deep with some "overlaying" stuff so that the offending parameter can be where ever.
It's a fun way to spend time trying to config your screen through gconf when Gnome has decided to screw up your display using XRandr.
These kinds of situations are already everywhere and getting more common by every distribution and DE release. In no time the big open desktop distros reach the "Just doesn't work" level of Windows and OSX.
Please don't get me wrong. I like the new stuff that makes computers simple to use (like automatic networking setup etc). But it really shouldn't be done in expense of flexibility and ability to fix things manually _when_ the automated stuff breaks.
You think ..AA would waste money on lawyers if people died of not having enough overpriced entertainment?
*cough*
Someone in Sun marketing should get a nice bonus for brainwashing the "Java is a compiled language" nonsense in 90% of people who know the difference.
The holy Java bytecode is practically Java source with a bit terser syntax. All the high level constructs are there and, as 50% of above mentioned group knows, Java can be decompiled from bytecode to almost identical source it was compiled from (sans comments of course).
What is Java beneath this hype? A scripting language without the benefits of being interpret and with the downsides of compiled languages. What a nice compromise.
How could someone get this in to the "programming experts" heads'? Hire the same guy who is responsible for current reputation of Java?
As an insider, I have seen the huge banners in Redmond: "If it compiles, ship!"
Yet another damn missing semicolon!
Sure it could. Implement image loading and rendering in Java and nobody has patience to load images anymore.
Something like this?
Perhaps more like fingerpainting.