With OpenBSD, if it's not in the faq it's in the man pages. If it's not in the man pages they say specifically where it is. Linux isn't anywhere near that point,
And you shouldn't expect it to be. OpenBSD is an OS distribution; Linux is an OS kernel.
One of them is an end-user product, the other is not. Comparing OpenBSD vs Fedora might be valid, but versus Linux is not.
There's no reason to overload one button for both play and pause, for example, they're completely opposite functions! [rant off]
No, they're complementary functions, and there's an important reason for them to share the same button.
"Play" and "Pause" are not both valid at the same time. Only one can work at a certain moment. To use 2 buttons would waste space, and more importantly, force a mouse-user to make precise, rapid short-range movements when she wants to play just a few deciseconds of media.
By having a single Play/Pause button, the user is empowered to toggle in/out of the playing state merely by clicking the mouse, without needing to move it around. Anyone needing split-second timing will value this. (or will use keyboard accelerators)
Linux can have phantom instability too. Just install the closed-source NVidia drivers (to play those 3d games), and you too can enter the world of semi-predictable voodoo crashes.
Oh, and on Linux they call it "libc/gtk/gcc version hell" instead.
It's barely more than a rant if you can manage to read between the lines.
Both of those rants are more helpful than any of the documents you just linked.
Here's some useful links to UI design concepts.
Not one of those is really applicable to the problem at hand. They're at too low of a level... tactical rather than strategic ideas.
Those pages only help you make an attractive UI that is consistent/compatible with the rest of the system, accessible to different styles of usage, and pleasing to the eye. All of that is necessary for a good UI, but pales in comparison to the importance of understanding the task that the user will want to solve.
OSS is said to be inspired by programmers wanting to "scratch your own itch" and then share it with others. But unfortunately, the problems faced by competent programmers are different from what a user needs.
In the case of the CUPS configurator, the programmers needed help writing CUPS configuration, while users like ESR need not only to do that, but also to understand the CUPS concepts applicable to their situation. The need to understand the jargon and fundamentals of a piece of software is more important for end-users than clickable settings... ESR would've completed his task
So the most important thing a UI can do for end-users is help understand the operational methology of the software. But this is where the OSS "scratch your own itch" concept breaks down- because "understanding the fundamentals" is the one task that no competent programmer will ever need help with! Once a developer has the technical knowledge to contribute to a project, he no longer has any need for the software to remind him of the fundamentals, so the itch will never be scratched.
Only by making a concious effort to not only create and share software useful to you, but also useless to you can OSS programmers prevent these corundrums in the future.
Step 6: Get an incomprehensible failure message because it's impossible to store the 12 gigabytes contained by a DVD onto a 4.7 gigabyte DVD-R.
The aforementioned easy-to-use Microsoft Windows software would've recompressed the DVD data as necessary to make it fit.
Or maybe you didn't understand that "DVD backup" means "back up a DVD"? If the topic was "backing up hard disk files onto DVD+-RW", they'd have said so.
Start by explaining why every intelligence agency in the world though Saddam had WMDs.
That's a line repeated by a lot of pro-Bush editorialists in the past months. It's partly false, and partly an oversimplification.
You see, there's WMD, and then there's WMD. Experts on WMD actually call it CBN (Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear), and they understand that chemical weapons score a distant third in potential for mass suffering. Historical research has shown they barely surpass conventional explosives in lethality (often falling short of TNT's destructiveness). Saddam might've had a little, but not enough to worry about.
The falsehood Bush can be accused of is not "Iraq has WMD", but "Iraqi WMD will threaten US citizens within a year".
Since the US funded Iraqi chemical weapons in the 80s, there was a reasonable expectation some of that capability had survived. But those weapons couldn't consitute a threat to the US, as Bush claimed. Since there was no threat, and no reason to believe there was a threat, the claim of "pre-emption" is false.
Of course, there were plenty of good reasons to remove Saddam Hussein. Above all, it was agreed that getting rid of him would improve life in Iraq and security in it's neighbors. But just prior to being elected, Bush swore that US soldiers would be used only for straightforward military conflicts, never for "nation building" jobs (which is where our troops are dying today). Ironically, Bush had painted his disdain for policing other countries as the strongest position distinguishing him from Al Gore on foreign policy topics.
By reversing on a campaign pledge, he has betrayed everyone who voted for him. (Runs in the family!). Gore told the hard truth about tough jobs the Armed Forces would face, honesty that prehaps contributed to his loss.
including three long range rocket programs (which are useless without WMD warheads),
Conventional warheads on long-range missiles have proven themselves to be quite useful over the past 60 years.
an active ricin program, botulin reference strains hidden in a home refrigerator at the orders of the Iraqi secret police, laboratories in secret police safe houses.
Why would we add in things you just made up from thin air? If any item on that list was real, these accusations against Bush just wouldn't be happening.
I would argue that nobody in the world, including those in Iraq, knew that Saddam had only a few WMD's,
I knew that. I informed the Pentagon, and posted on Slashdot too. We knew that Iraq had, at worst, a handful of low-effectiveness chemical weapons, and nothing biological or nuclear.
John Kerry lied about US policy and atrocities in the Vietnam War.
To deny that US military conduct in the Vietnam "Police Action" was atrocious suggests either deep ignorance or total misanthropy.
The point is that the commandment didn't prohibit all killings.
The commandment didn't prohibit anything at all. The entire sentence "Thou shall not commit murder" is 100% content-free.
A "murder" is a killing that has been forbidden (by the government or whoever's in charge). So forbidding murder equates to "Never kill someone without government permission" -> "obey your secular leaders" -> "once something's been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral".
OTOH, if someone declares himself a "Christian", then you can get into the juicy New Testament bits where it unambiguously states that killing humans is wrong, regardless of military context.
Unlike Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, she didn't say what she did during a declared war
Those two names are more myths. Learn a little history!
The women who broadcast in English from Japan (none was ever called "Rose") were blatantly pro-American, which is obvious by listening to any of the tapes.
Without a war, there's no enemy,
And if there's no war... then killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese is what? Some people say that killing a "non-enemy" is "murder".
To say that Jane Fonda did harm to our soldiers that were sent by the US Government to protect a foreign nation sounds a little like saying someone who threw a lit cigarette into a raging forest fire committed arson.
There is a specific allegation that Fonda, after meeting with US POWs, revealed to the guards their unauthorized attempts to smuggle out messages, which subjected them to corporal punishment.
I cannot say if there's a factual basis to the claim (it may be just a rumor), but if true, it would consitute a specific act of harming one or two US soldiers (not harming the war effort as a whole, which was beyond her ability). Even if true, it would be insufficient to make a legal case for treason against her.
It seems the author of the article wished to place emphasis on certain words in the article.
I think you're wrong. If he's anything like most authors, he wanted those words capitalized.
People today still don't think about writing in hypertext-friendly ways. The mental model is not "I want to emphasize some text", it's "I want to bold/italicize/capitalize some text". This behavioral pattern is unlikely to change as long as users remain wedded to WYSIWG applications, whose toolbars have buttons for "Bold" and "Italic" but not the generic "Emphasize".
It'd be great if application developers started to push users towards editing content instead of presentation. Slashdot (as an example of a forward-looking technophilic site) could help advance this cause by deprecating the use of HTML tags in user posts. In this post I used <i> for "quotation" and <b> for "emphasis", but it'd be better if I could've used semantic-tags that allowed a viewer to customize how he preferred each style to be rendered. The ad-hoc manner/. posters quote prior content is a bane of consistency.
The Enlightenment window manager does that already. Look at the lower left corner of of this screenshot.
No, it does not do that already. By definition, if I have to look at the "lower left" of the screen to see something, then that something is not taking up the "full screen".
Microsoft's "invention" is to quickly blow up the pager-previews to cover the whole monitor. While not innovative enough to deserve a patent, that's not something you can accomplish today in Enlightenment. This feature is probably meant to compete with Apple's "Expose", and is similar to an enhanced version of Microsoft's "Coolswitch" (accessible since Windows(r) 3.1 by pressing alt+tab); all are quickly accessible modal ways to choose what you want to see, rather than a constant feature of the environment's chrome.
The further step, and the step Ender's Game takes, is that as weapons become increasingly capable of being operated remotely,
No, Ender's Game did not take that step. In that fictional word, Ender was commanding real troops on real interstellar battlefields. He was giving out orders, but the weapons were operated by direct physical contact.
It would've been more a more realistic depiction of future technology if there had simply been computers running the battlefleets, but that would've drained some emotion from the story. The fact that Ender was sending human soldiers to give up their lives was an important element.
First, you'll never find an anthropologist who will use the word "primitive" as a nominative:
I agree with that sentiment, but was merely continuing with the verbage from the post to which I replied.
Second, you'd better believe there was warface before "civilization".
You're insulting both those groups by calling them uncivilized. The Maori were as civilized as any island-dweller can be by 1100 CE, and Africa of 1800 had certainly many major civilizations in it.
Slavery is another hallmark of civilization- the existence of a dedicated servitor-class is part of the professional specialisation that complex societies entail.
the adult generals wouldn't have done (or couldn't have due to socio-political pressures)
So again, the generals knew what had to be done, but choose to let another do it to avoid responsibility.
This highlights an interesting behavioral difference in the warfighting behavior between optimistic and pessimistic groups. (By "optimistic"/"pessimistic" I refer to how confident they are of eventual victory).
In any kind of war, it is known a-priori that some of your own men will die, even if you're victorious.
An optimistic opponent, feels they will win regardless of tactics, and thus minimizing losses of their own forces is important. They're disinclined to acknowledge that losses will be suffered, and especially refuse to predict which individual men will die. The commander sends each solider out to risk his life, but acts and plans as if all of them can make it back.
A pessimistic group (one that either has a trend of losing in the past, or who faces tough odds in the present) acknowledges that they might not be victorious either, which in some ways can be equivalent to a total loss of forces. They are more willing to send troops on what is undeniably a suicide-mission. (As per Japan 1944 or Palestine 2000). While acknowledging the truth of the situtation is in some ways admirable, it can quickly develop into a cultural pathology, where troops are ordered to their deaths as a sign of devotion, rather than to perform a truely effective last mission.
Since differential optimistic/pessimistic force-protection behavior is culturally ingrained, patterns can remain in place for a while even after the overall odds shift. This may be what had happened in Ender's Game. The terrestrial military was maintaining the optimistic tradition (which in the USA goes back centuries), and could not order space-sailors on suicide runs themselves. But by passing command to an outsider (whether a savant or AI doesn't matter as long as it's not part of the establishment), they evaded this responsibility.
*As Clarke pointed out in Venus Prime (another short scifi story needlessly extended to a book), the unforgiving conditions of interstellar travel make the distinctions between survival and death more easily predictable, allowing hard choices to be made long before the actual time of death.
** The USA government recently refused to face such hard choices about the dangers of space travel, when they decided to gamble on a successful shuttle landing rather than investigate possible damage. If they had determined the STS's wing was unusable, it might've been necessary to wait 5 weeks for rescue. The whole crew couldn't last that long that, but 80% of them could've...
the veneer of civilisation is a very thin one, and we can easily regress into the 'kill or be killed', 'fight or flight' primitive responses.
Tee hee hee! "Veneer of civilisation"?? What's that? War is the key sign of civilization! No primitive culture has ever waged or even comprehended warfare. The idea of two groups of armed men going to fight each other just baffles them. Primitives are too selfish to act like a soldier. Without the sublimation of the individual to the group that is the hallmark of civilization, men simply will not risk their own lives for abstract future gain.
A primitive may fight or murder; but war belongs solely to civilization. (This has been confirmed by recent interviews with New Guinean tribesmen, who are members of the 2nd-most primitive surviving culture)
You're saying "this isn't real", when it patently is.
You've got a severe reality-disfunction, it seems. Or is "patently" another word which, like "literally", has suffered a popular inversion of defined meaning?
different from treating war as a game, one is a deplorable attitude, the other is responsible accounting.
Tee hee. Where do you think games come from? They were originally created to represent war. From chess to football, all games are at their core a safe rehearsal for eventual violent battles.
The idea is that Ender would not have won the battle the way he did if he had known it wasn't a game (because there were sacrifices no one would really make that had to be made to win).
No, not really. It was easy- trivial in fact- for him to find the solution. It was the enemy civilians he was killing after all; "sacrifice" should mean giving up your own men; it's hardly appropriate to use that word for killing the other guy.
All the military commanders watching Ender lead the final battle knew what was needed to win. They just couldn't order it done, because detonating civilians was illegal. By placing Ender ahead of their forces, they deflected responsibility for breaking the laws of war from themselves.
Yes, I realize that it's *just* a book
It's not a book, it's a 49-page story. There is *also* a book by the same name, but it came later, and muddles the message.
And they did a test mission with a test rover out in the desert. Basically, the put a test rover out in the desert somewhere and had the team go through it as though it were a real mission.
Evidently they did not do that, or the bug would've been discovered.
but due to the weather at the Australia (IIRC) Deep Space Network site they weren't able to fully upload the utility meant to fix it.
It's acceptable that radio propagation may cause some messages to be lost or improperly recieved. But to not recognize that the command was incomplete and to execute it anyway is a gaping, fundamental system flaw.
Rule #0 of any remote digital control is that the recieving system must never execute any command without first verifying that the command message was recieved completely and correctly. (It's as easy as matching an MD5 sum!) To have ignored that basic software principle is a painful embarrasment to all US taxpayers.
Having Anakin build C3PO on the other hand if an innocuous change
The only (minor) anomaly it introduces is that Vader doesn't recognize (or detect) the android, since young Anakin had a supernatural attunment to machines, especially those he'd worked closely with.
And also, of course, that C3PO doesn't mention to Luke the concidence of having two masters with the same name. He could even have pointed out Obiwan's lie: "Vader killed your father"... "But Obiwan, I thought you destroyed Anakin Skywalker!"
Regardless continuity, it's still a bad change- it collapses the world in on itself, making it feel smaller. The suspended disbelief is gone, and the fictional world feels more like one man's imagination, instead of an unlimited natural expanse.
the whole "Blank their memory" comment Uncle Owen makes.
Luke clearly never got around to carrying that out. The robots never forgot about Leia or their assignment...
To preserve continuity, the screenwriters will have to erase the droid's brains in Episode 3.
It's not my approach. This is standard SE jargon. It's undoubtedly what Reasoning Inc meant when presenting the report. Anyone who's read much about "software correctness metrics" (for what they're worth) will be familiar with these definitions.
you should be counting the number of actual commands
There's no good answer to that, so people tend to use just an unabiguous method of counting, rather than trying to make a more complex system that is fairer in that case, but maybe less fair in others. Compare printf("%d %d %d\n",a,b,c) against cout<<a<<" "<<b<<" "c<<endl. Should the latter really count for 6 times as much code as the former?
Besides, there are more fundamental problems with the standard defintion of SLOC. For example, it counts printf("%d %d %d\n",
a,
b,
c);
as quadruple the code as if it were compactly presented. Add some more gratutious linefeeds before the commas, and you can make it 6x the code. There are 11 different whitespace-seperable tokens in that command, in the extreme, a newline between each of them would make it count as 11 SLOC.
If they ran the code bases through something like cindent and standardized the code formatting and removed all comments and whitespace then it's a somewhat more valid comparison.
Almost nobody who talks about "lines of code" in a software engineering context means "number of carriage returns". They're smart enough to understand that in languages which allow comments or whitespace, using the actual length of the file is just pointless.
Look at any SLOC counting script. For a C program, SLOC basically equals the number of ";" in the file (outside of comments and string constants, of course). Using the number of "\n" would be silly.
Maybe the article didn't reiterate what it meant by "lines of code"... but comments and whitespace aren't code, so they do not count towards LOC. The formal definition for "line of code" is often "a line ending in a newline or end-of-file marker, and which contains at least one non-whitespace non-comment character."
The Pledge of Allegiance isn't a formal part of being an American?
The Pledge of Allegiance has an interesting history. It first published in 1892, and said "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all"
It only became popular with the official government in 1954, when the McCarthyist Red Scare was in full swing. US citizens were randomly forced to take "loyalty oaths" to test if they were communist spies (a silly idea, because good spies are usually good liars). The Pledge was used as one loyalty oath. They added "Under God" into the middle of it, so that it'd be further disagreeable to USSR-style communists, who were officially atheist. (And also more agreeable to some branches of Christianity, who are not allowed to swear to anything other than The Lord)
Of course, with the added religious reference, the Pledge really started to violate the US 1st Amendment, especially when it was required before anyone could be sworn into public office. In recognition of this, in modern times the Pledge is not required of anyone, but the habit established in the 50s lives on, and it was ritualistically used in both public schools and inauguration ceremonies.
Until last year... when it was finally noticed that kids in a classroom have little real ability to disobey their teacher when she orders them to recite an oath. Therefore, the Pledge of Allegiance was banned from school ceremony. (The legal case will probably continue through a few more appeals & countersuits). The end result might be either that "Under God" is dropped, or that the Pledge of Allegiance itself dimishes in popularity. (Here's a Flash cartoon on the topic)
Even today I can't see any country that has acheived democracy.
Then you're using a fantasy definition of democracy. One that could only be achieved by a civilization like Star Trek's "Borg", which uses neural implants to allow everybody to instantly vote on tiny decisions made everyday.
In reality, "democracy" doesn't require that. It only means that "the common people are the main source of political power". The Greeks were much closer to democracy than the Romans, but both should still be called "aristocracies" rather than democracies, because only a minority could vote. Once voting is available to the large majority of people, it's safe to call a nation democratic. (It would obviously be impossible for absolutely 100% to vote, because some people are small childern, and others are dangerous criminals)
However, it is a little interesting to consider just what percentage of franchisement is required to honestly call a country democratic. I'm inclined to say that Israel is not democratic, because around 20% of the people are denied voting on religious grounds.
Slashdot Mirror
With OpenBSD, if it's not in the faq it's in the man pages. If it's not in the man pages they say specifically where it is. Linux isn't anywhere near that point,
And you shouldn't expect it to be. OpenBSD is an OS distribution; Linux is an OS kernel.
One of them is an end-user product, the other is not. Comparing OpenBSD vs Fedora might be valid, but versus Linux is not.
There's no reason to overload one button for both play and pause, for example, they're completely opposite functions! [rant off]
No, they're complementary functions, and there's an important reason for them to share the same button.
"Play" and "Pause" are not both valid at the same time. Only one can work at a certain moment. To use 2 buttons would waste space, and more importantly, force a mouse-user to make precise, rapid short-range movements when she wants to play just a few deciseconds of media.
By having a single Play/Pause button, the user is empowered to toggle in/out of the playing state merely by clicking the mouse, without needing to move it around. Anyone needing split-second timing will value this. (or will use keyboard accelerators)
Linux can have phantom instability too. Just install the closed-source NVidia drivers (to play those 3d games), and you too can enter the world of semi-predictable voodoo crashes.
Oh, and on Linux they call it "libc/gtk/gcc version hell" instead.
It's barely more than a rant if you can manage to read between the lines.
Both of those rants are more helpful than any of the documents you just linked.
Here's some useful links to UI design concepts.
Not one of those is really applicable to the problem at hand. They're at too low of a level... tactical rather than strategic ideas.
Those pages only help you make an attractive UI that is consistent/compatible with the rest of the system, accessible to different styles of usage, and pleasing to the eye. All of that is necessary for a good UI, but pales in comparison to the importance of understanding the task that the user will want to solve.
OSS is said to be inspired by programmers wanting to "scratch your own itch" and then share it with others. But unfortunately, the problems faced by competent programmers are different from what a user needs.
In the case of the CUPS configurator, the programmers needed help writing CUPS configuration, while users like ESR need not only to do that, but also to understand the CUPS concepts applicable to their situation. The need to understand the jargon and fundamentals of a piece of software is more important for end-users than clickable settings... ESR would've completed his task
So the most important thing a UI can do for end-users is help understand the operational methology of the software. But this is where the OSS "scratch your own itch" concept breaks down- because "understanding the fundamentals" is the one task that no competent programmer will ever need help with! Once a developer has the technical knowledge to contribute to a project, he no longer has any need for the software to remind him of the fundamentals, so the itch will never be scratched.
Only by making a concious effort to not only create and share software useful to you, but also useless to you can OSS programmers prevent these corundrums in the future.
5. wait, remove DVD
Step 6: Get an incomprehensible failure message because it's impossible to store the 12 gigabytes contained by a DVD onto a 4.7 gigabyte DVD-R.
The aforementioned easy-to-use Microsoft Windows software would've recompressed the DVD data as necessary to make it fit.
Or maybe you didn't understand that "DVD backup" means "back up a DVD"? If the topic was "backing up hard disk files onto DVD+-RW", they'd have said so.
There's where the disconnect lies
Grammar nazi: "Disconnect" is a verb, but you used it as a noun. The noun form is "disconnection".
Start by explaining why every intelligence agency in the world though Saddam had WMDs.
That's a line repeated by a lot of pro-Bush editorialists in the past months. It's partly false, and partly an oversimplification.
You see, there's WMD, and then there's WMD. Experts on WMD actually call it CBN (Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear), and they understand that chemical weapons score a distant third in potential for mass suffering. Historical research has shown they barely surpass conventional explosives in lethality (often falling short of TNT's destructiveness). Saddam might've had a little, but not enough to worry about.
The falsehood Bush can be accused of is not "Iraq has WMD", but "Iraqi WMD will threaten US citizens within a year".
Since the US funded Iraqi chemical weapons in the 80s, there was a reasonable expectation some of that capability had survived. But those weapons couldn't consitute a threat to the US, as Bush claimed. Since there was no threat, and no reason to believe there was a threat, the claim of "pre-emption" is false.
Of course, there were plenty of good reasons to remove Saddam Hussein. Above all, it was agreed that getting rid of him would improve life in Iraq and security in it's neighbors. But just prior to being elected, Bush swore that US soldiers would be used only for straightforward military conflicts, never for "nation building" jobs (which is where our troops are dying today). Ironically, Bush had painted his disdain for policing other countries as the strongest position distinguishing him from Al Gore on foreign policy topics.
By reversing on a campaign pledge, he has betrayed everyone who voted for him. (Runs in the family!). Gore told the hard truth about tough jobs the Armed Forces would face, honesty that prehaps contributed to his loss.
including three long range rocket programs (which are useless without WMD warheads),
Conventional warheads on long-range missiles have proven themselves to be quite useful over the past 60 years.
an active ricin program, botulin reference strains hidden in a home refrigerator at the orders of the Iraqi secret police, laboratories in secret police safe houses.
Why would we add in things you just made up from thin air? If any item on that list was real, these accusations against Bush just wouldn't be happening.
I would argue that nobody in the world, including those in Iraq, knew that Saddam had only a few WMD's,
I knew that. I informed the Pentagon, and posted on Slashdot too. We knew that Iraq had, at worst, a handful of low-effectiveness chemical weapons, and nothing biological or nuclear.
John Kerry lied about US policy and atrocities in the Vietnam War.
To deny that US military conduct in the Vietnam "Police Action" was atrocious suggests either deep ignorance or total misanthropy.
The point is that the commandment didn't prohibit all killings.
The commandment didn't prohibit anything at all. The entire sentence "Thou shall not commit murder" is 100% content-free.
A "murder" is a killing that has been forbidden (by the government or whoever's in charge). So forbidding murder equates to "Never kill someone without government permission" -> "obey your secular leaders" -> "once something's been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral".
OTOH, if someone declares himself a "Christian", then you can get into the juicy New Testament bits where it unambiguously states that killing humans is wrong, regardless of military context.
Unlike Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, she didn't say what she did during a declared war
Those two names are more myths. Learn a little history!
The women who broadcast in English from Japan (none was ever called "Rose") were blatantly pro-American, which is obvious by listening to any of the tapes.
Without a war, there's no enemy,
And if there's no war... then killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese is what? Some people say that killing a "non-enemy" is "murder".
To say that Jane Fonda did harm to our soldiers that were sent by the US Government to protect a foreign nation sounds a little like saying someone who threw a lit cigarette into a raging forest fire committed arson.
There is a specific allegation that Fonda, after meeting with US POWs, revealed to the guards their unauthorized attempts to smuggle out messages, which subjected them to corporal punishment.
I cannot say if there's a factual basis to the claim (it may be just a rumor), but if true, it would consitute a specific act of harming one or two US soldiers (not harming the war effort as a whole, which was beyond her ability). Even if true, it would be insufficient to make a legal case for treason against her.
I think you're wrong. If he's anything like most authors, he wanted those words capitalized.
People today still don't think about writing in hypertext-friendly ways. The mental model is not "I want to emphasize some text", it's "I want to bold/italicize/capitalize some text". This behavioral pattern is unlikely to change as long as users remain wedded to WYSIWG applications, whose toolbars have buttons for "Bold" and "Italic" but not the generic "Emphasize".
It'd be great if application developers started to push users towards editing content instead of presentation. Slashdot (as an example of a forward-looking technophilic site) could help advance this cause by deprecating the use of HTML tags in user posts. In this post I used <i> for "quotation" and <b> for "emphasis", but it'd be better if I could've used semantic-tags that allowed a viewer to customize how he preferred each style to be rendered. The ad-hoc manner /. posters quote prior content is a bane of consistency.
The Enlightenment window manager does that already. Look at the lower left corner of of this screenshot.
No, it does not do that already. By definition, if I have to look at the "lower left" of the screen to see something, then that something is not taking up the "full screen".
Microsoft's "invention" is to quickly blow up the pager-previews to cover the whole monitor. While not innovative enough to deserve a patent, that's not something you can accomplish today in Enlightenment. This feature is probably meant to compete with Apple's "Expose", and is similar to an enhanced version of Microsoft's "Coolswitch" (accessible since Windows(r) 3.1 by pressing alt+tab); all are quickly accessible modal ways to choose what you want to see, rather than a constant feature of the environment's chrome.
The further step, and the step Ender's Game takes, is that as weapons become increasingly capable of being operated remotely,
No, Ender's Game did not take that step. In that fictional word, Ender was commanding real troops on real interstellar battlefields. He was giving out orders, but the weapons were operated by direct physical contact.
It would've been more a more realistic depiction of future technology if there had simply been computers running the battlefleets, but that would've drained some emotion from the story. The fact that Ender was sending human soldiers to give up their lives was an important element.
First, you'll never find an anthropologist who will use the word "primitive" as a nominative:
I agree with that sentiment, but was merely continuing with the verbage from the post to which I replied.
Second, you'd better believe there was warface before "civilization".
You're insulting both those groups by calling them uncivilized. The Maori were as civilized as any island-dweller can be by 1100 CE, and Africa of 1800 had certainly many major civilizations in it.
Slavery is another hallmark of civilization- the existence of a dedicated servitor-class is part of the professional specialisation that complex societies entail.
the adult generals wouldn't have done (or couldn't have due to socio-political pressures)
So again, the generals knew what had to be done, but choose to let another do it to avoid responsibility.
This highlights an interesting behavioral difference in the warfighting behavior between optimistic and pessimistic groups. (By "optimistic"/"pessimistic" I refer to how confident they are of eventual victory).
In any kind of war, it is known a-priori that some of your own men will die, even if you're victorious.
An optimistic opponent, feels they will win regardless of tactics, and thus minimizing losses of their own forces is important. They're disinclined to acknowledge that losses will be suffered, and especially refuse to predict which individual men will die. The commander sends each solider out to risk his life, but acts and plans as if all of them can make it back.
A pessimistic group (one that either has a trend of losing in the past, or who faces tough odds in the present) acknowledges that they might not be victorious either, which in some ways can be equivalent to a total loss of forces. They are more willing to send troops on what is undeniably a suicide-mission. (As per Japan 1944 or Palestine 2000). While acknowledging the truth of the situtation is in some ways admirable, it can quickly develop into a cultural pathology, where troops are ordered to their deaths as a sign of devotion, rather than to perform a truely effective last mission.
Since differential optimistic/pessimistic force-protection behavior is culturally ingrained, patterns can remain in place for a while even after the overall odds shift. This may be what had happened in Ender's Game. The terrestrial military was maintaining the optimistic tradition (which in the USA goes back centuries), and could not order space-sailors on suicide runs themselves. But by passing command to an outsider (whether a savant or AI doesn't matter as long as it's not part of the establishment), they evaded this responsibility.
*As Clarke pointed out in Venus Prime (another short scifi story needlessly extended to a book), the unforgiving conditions of interstellar travel make the distinctions between survival and death more easily predictable, allowing hard choices to be made long before the actual time of death.
** The USA government recently refused to face such hard choices about the dangers of space travel, when they decided to gamble on a successful shuttle landing rather than investigate possible damage. If they had determined the STS's wing was unusable, it might've been necessary to wait 5 weeks for rescue. The whole crew couldn't last that long that, but 80% of them could've...
the veneer of civilisation is a very thin one, and we can easily regress into the 'kill or be killed', 'fight or flight' primitive responses.
Tee hee hee! "Veneer of civilisation"?? What's that? War is the key sign of civilization! No primitive culture has ever waged or even comprehended warfare. The idea of two groups of armed men going to fight each other just baffles them. Primitives are too selfish to act like a soldier. Without the sublimation of the individual to the group that is the hallmark of civilization, men simply will not risk their own lives for abstract future gain.
A primitive may fight or murder; but war belongs solely to civilization. (This has been confirmed by recent interviews with New Guinean tribesmen, who are members of the 2nd-most primitive surviving culture)
You're saying "this isn't real", when it patently is.
You've got a severe reality-disfunction, it seems. Or is "patently" another word which, like "literally", has suffered a popular inversion of defined meaning?
different from treating war as a game, one is a deplorable attitude, the other is responsible accounting.
Tee hee. Where do you think games come from? They were originally created to represent war. From chess to football, all games are at their core a safe rehearsal for eventual violent battles.
The idea is that Ender would not have won the battle the way he did if he had known it wasn't a game (because there were sacrifices no one would really make that had to be made to win).
No, not really. It was easy- trivial in fact- for him to find the solution. It was the enemy civilians he was killing after all; "sacrifice" should mean giving up your own men; it's hardly appropriate to use that word for killing the other guy.
All the military commanders watching Ender lead the final battle knew what was needed to win. They just couldn't order it done, because detonating civilians was illegal. By placing Ender ahead of their forces, they deflected responsibility for breaking the laws of war from themselves.
Yes, I realize that it's *just* a book
It's not a book, it's a 49-page story. There is *also* a book by the same name, but it came later, and muddles the message.
And they did a test mission with a test rover out in the desert. Basically, the put a test rover out in the desert somewhere and had the team go through it as though it were a real mission.
Evidently they did not do that, or the bug would've been discovered.
but due to the weather at the Australia (IIRC) Deep Space Network site they weren't able to fully upload the utility meant to fix it.
It's acceptable that radio propagation may cause some messages to be lost or improperly recieved. But to not recognize that the command was incomplete and to execute it anyway is a gaping, fundamental system flaw.
Rule #0 of any remote digital control is that the recieving system must never execute any command without first verifying that the command message was recieved completely and correctly. (It's as easy as matching an MD5 sum!) To have ignored that basic software principle is a painful embarrasment to all US taxpayers.
Having Anakin build C3PO on the other hand if an innocuous change
The only (minor) anomaly it introduces is that Vader doesn't recognize (or detect) the android, since young Anakin had a supernatural attunment to machines, especially those he'd worked closely with.
And also, of course, that C3PO doesn't mention to Luke the concidence of having two masters with the same name. He could even have pointed out Obiwan's lie: "Vader killed your father"... "But Obiwan, I thought you destroyed Anakin Skywalker!"
Regardless continuity, it's still a bad change- it collapses the world in on itself, making it feel smaller. The suspended disbelief is gone, and the fictional world feels more like one man's imagination, instead of an unlimited natural expanse.
the whole "Blank their memory" comment Uncle Owen makes.
Luke clearly never got around to carrying that out. The robots never forgot about Leia or their assignment...
To preserve continuity, the screenwriters will have to erase the droid's brains in Episode 3.
Your approach is a good start,
It's not my approach. This is standard SE jargon. It's undoubtedly what Reasoning Inc meant when presenting the report. Anyone who's read much about "software correctness metrics" (for what they're worth) will be familiar with these definitions.
you should be counting the number of actual commands
There's no good answer to that, so people tend to use just an unabiguous method of counting, rather than trying to make a more complex system that is fairer in that case, but maybe less fair in others. Compare printf("%d %d %d\n",a,b,c) against cout<<a<<" "<<b<<" "c<<endl. Should the latter really count for 6 times as much code as the former?
Besides, there are more fundamental problems with the standard defintion of SLOC. For example, it counts
printf("%d %d %d\n",
a,
b,
c);
as quadruple the code as if it were compactly presented. Add some more gratutious linefeeds before the commas, and you can make it 6x the code. There are 11 different whitespace-seperable tokens in that command, in the extreme, a newline between each of them would make it count as 11 SLOC.
mySQL IS NOT A COMMERCIAL-GRADE DATABASE. Period.
Your definition of "commercial-grade database" is blatantly incorrect.
If they ran the code bases through something like cindent and standardized the code formatting and removed all comments and whitespace then it's a somewhat more valid comparison.
Almost nobody who talks about "lines of code" in a software engineering context means "number of carriage returns". They're smart enough to understand that in languages which allow comments or whitespace, using the actual length of the file is just pointless.
Look at any SLOC counting script. For a C program, SLOC basically equals the number of ";" in the file (outside of comments and string constants, of course). Using the number of "\n" would be silly.
Maybe the article didn't reiterate what it meant by "lines of code"... but comments and whitespace aren't code, so they do not count towards LOC. The formal definition for "line of code" is often "a line ending in a newline or end-of-file marker, and which contains at least one non-whitespace non-comment character."
bubble sort can beat them easily.
Even in the excruciatingly rare case where bubble sort beats an overall superior one, you can just pull out shell sort to beat bubble.
The Pledge of Allegiance isn't a formal part of being an American?
The Pledge of Allegiance has an interesting history. It first published in 1892, and said "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all"
It only became popular with the official government in 1954, when the McCarthyist Red Scare was in full swing. US citizens were randomly forced to take "loyalty oaths" to test if they were communist spies (a silly idea, because good spies are usually good liars). The Pledge was used as one loyalty oath. They added "Under God" into the middle of it, so that it'd be further disagreeable to USSR-style communists, who were officially atheist. (And also more agreeable to some branches of Christianity, who are not allowed to swear to anything other than The Lord)
Of course, with the added religious reference, the Pledge really started to violate the US 1st Amendment, especially when it was required before anyone could be sworn into public office. In recognition of this, in modern times the Pledge is not required of anyone, but the habit established in the 50s lives on, and it was ritualistically used in both public schools and inauguration ceremonies.
Until last year... when it was finally noticed that kids in a classroom have little real ability to disobey their teacher when she orders them to recite an oath. Therefore, the Pledge of Allegiance was banned from school ceremony. (The legal case will probably continue through a few more appeals & countersuits). The end result might be either that "Under God" is dropped, or that the Pledge of Allegiance itself dimishes in popularity. (Here's a Flash cartoon on the topic)
Even today I can't see any country that has acheived democracy.
Then you're using a fantasy definition of democracy. One that could only be achieved by a civilization like Star Trek's "Borg", which uses neural implants to allow everybody to instantly vote on tiny decisions made everyday.
In reality, "democracy" doesn't require that. It only means that "the common people are the main source of political power". The Greeks were much closer to democracy than the Romans, but both should still be called "aristocracies" rather than democracies, because only a minority could vote. Once voting is available to the large majority of people, it's safe to call a nation democratic. (It would obviously be impossible for absolutely 100% to vote, because some people are small childern, and others are dangerous criminals)
However, it is a little interesting to consider just what percentage of franchisement is required to honestly call a country democratic. I'm inclined to say that Israel is not democratic, because around 20% of the people are denied voting on religious grounds.