With my first major contribution to an open source project, the author essentially said "patches welcome", but he said it differently:
"I would definitely consider a patch that did that."
And, as I kept talking about it, but not actually sending it in -- my monkeypatch was pretty low-quality, and it'd take a weekend to polish it:
"I'm really starting to like this syntax of yours."
So, I was actually encouraged -- it wasn't confrontational, it was encouraging.
So, just as I would tell Person X not to simply say "This sucks!", but to offer a helpful suggestion, I would also tell anyone who would respond to think about how to help them get it implemented.
So, for example, if someone's a designer, but not a programmer, and you've got a programmer who you know wants to contribute, but he's not really sure what to work on, hook the two up. Or, with your example:
Why don't you do it yourself, or hire someone to do it for you? If you can't do either of those, why don't you contribute documentation, mockups, or something else that's not technical but is still useful?
Why don't you offer these up in a FAQ or guidelines somewhere, and mention them in your stock response? Simply saying "patches are welcome" is actually unhelpful, unless you can write a patch -- and even then, it simply comes across as standoffish.
It's the difference between "I can't bake that for you, but here's a recipe, and I can sell you some of the ingredients," and simply saying "Do it yourself."
I have no problem doing this at home, where the only account that it affects is my own. It's useful, for example, to avoid those mailing lists that people who know you inevitably put you on -- you know, the "Random link I found" list, the "Same Goddamned Joke I Just Got From Everyone Else, And Wasn't That Funny Last Year, Either" list, the "Upcoming Torah Services At Your Synagogue" list, the "Yet Another Attempt To Unsubscribe By Spamming The Whole Fucking Mailing List" crap, etc.
That is, not actually spam, because they actually know me, and must think I want to receive this stuff. But it's often easier to simply mark it as spam than to have to explain myself.
And I know that with my own filter, it will actually learn based on content -- so I won't get the Same Goddamned Joke, but I will get things I care about from the same person.
However, at work, we're on Gmail, so I don't do that -- especially because the signal/noise ratio isn't bad, and it's usually easy enough to create labels and filters. Amazon stuff goes in Amazon.
I'm not saying it's impossible, and I would agree with this:
But when you get significant results that contradict theory, it's the theory that should change, if you're doing science.
However, this being little more than a hobby, I don't really want to buy a book. If the results really are that compelling, there should be some web resource you can point me to.
In response to this the British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly and without "payment of any customs or duties whatsoever" in Britain, instead paying the much lower American duty.
In other words, smuggling aside, you couldn't be a legitimate tea merchant in America at the time, unless you were the East India Company. Favoritism, pure and simple.
And before all of you Ben Franklin quoters start yammering, the key word Ben Franklin used was "essential."
Actually, the way that reads, it doesn't sound like he's implying that liberty is essential, not that there are a select number of essential liberties, and all the rest are forfeit. Here's the quote:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
And if there's really any doubt in your mind of what Franklin's intent was, here's a quote from Poor Richard's Almanac:
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
Look, if you really have no problem giving up your liberty, go for it. I'm not stopping you. If you have no problem with the Israelis giving up their liberty, I'd love to hear your argument.
But picking apart the semantics of a historical quote, and then using that to imply that the man agrees with you -- that just makes you look stupid. Honestly, do you think any of the Founding Fathers would've consented to biometrics, when they literally got up in arms over a tea tax?
Good to know that education is defined by how well you can write a bureaucratic memo, not how well you think critically, problem solve, general knowledge or how to work as a team. No, no, we want drones that all think the same and use proper grammar.
Because using proper grammar naturally leads to "thinking the same", right?
Darwin used proper grammar. So did Jefferson. So did Martin Luther King, Jr -- and many other people who thought very differently, and actually had a big impact on the world.
Can you guess why?
It's about communication. It doesn't matter if you have all the ideas in the world if you can't communicate them. And it's kind of essential to "working as a team", also -- how can you work with a team if you can't understand them?
It certainly isn't making it easy for your teammates if they are wincing every time they have to read an email from you -- or if your code is awesome, but your comments are unreadable.
And you know what else? It's not that fucking hard. Even if it is stupid, and unnecessary, it's a simple barometer. It means you know how to pay attention in school, and learn things, even if it's not something you want to learn. It means you actually care what people think of you.
Misusing "they're" may have nothing directly to do with coding, but it is somewhat like showing up for an interview without a shirt. Depending on the job, it might not disqualify you, but you'd better be wearing some damned nice pants. (Apologies to "Persuit of Happyness".)
And it's far easier just to throw on something resembling a suit.
Generally yes, but Hushmail offered two methods of encrypting emails: on their servers and in a Java applet that did it locally.
The problem is that the applet can't be verified. And, honestly, this should never have been the first indication of that.
Or rather, the applet could be verified -- you'd just have to verify it every time. The only way I know of to make this easy would be with a Firefox extension -- but at that point, to borrow the other poster's idea, why use Hushmail in the first place?
Hushmail is really a way of making GPG easy for people who don't understand how it works. The flaw in this is that to use GPG at all securely, you need to have a fair understanding of how it works.
Wait, Slashdot told me that Foxconn was in the hole for Microsoft, purposely sabotaging Linux so Windows can live on! But now they're releasing a fix?
Finish reading the summary:
(which turned out to be the AMI BIOS that several board makers use)
{"TinfoilHat":" It looks like the AMI BIOS manufacturer is the one who's really purposely sabotaging Linux. "}// I've had it with XML jokes -- this one's JSON.
If you hate Apple's stifling environment so much, don't buy an iPhone.
Fine, show me something else that's as useful as a jailbreak'd iPhone.
I'm not going to get one, but then, I have principles -- I'd really rather not support Apple in their effort to become worse than Microsoft. But from a purely practical standpoint...
You will get shut down in a minute anyways.
And I'd be back up in less than a minute. Do you really think Apple is faster than the "hackers"?
This is not suing someone for downloading a song. This is about putting the song up for everyone on the Internet to download
I was going by TFS, which says, and I quote:
This is the case where a $222,000 verdict was awarded for downloading 24 songs
Furthermore, "making available" has, in fact, failed in court, at least once -- which means that they would have to show that he was actually distributing it.
The problem is, nobody knows how many people downloaded from Ms. Thomas. Nobody. Not even Ms. Thomas. Could be nobody. Could be the entire Internet-using population of the world. Nobody can find out.
Not strictly true. Depends what kind of logs the filesharing program kept, or her ISP.
According to some, this means her liability should be... nothing.
I like to call it "innocent until proven guilty", but apparently, this doesn't apply to civil cases.
And if this was about people actually selling pirated DVDs, it'd be a different story.
This is closer to suing one person for over $10k per cup of coffee they stole.
I'm going to stick with that for the moment, as it's equally unfair to both sides -- stealing a cup of coffee actually deprives someone of potential revenue, whereas stealing a song is just a copy. But stealing a cup of coffee only feeds you (or your caffeine addiction) for a day -- you'll be back later, either to steal or to buy -- whereas stealing a song means you can listen to that same song again, as many times as you like.
But no matter how you want to spin it, stealing a cup of coffee does not carry a $10k fine. Stealing a song shouldn't, either.
And don't try that bullshit of "we'll only get prepared for it when the cost goes up too high".
It's pretty obvious that's true -- notice how, despite common knowledge that the amount of oil in the world is limited, and that using it damages the environment, most of us still aren't prepared.
It's bullshit because the same people who are happy as pigs in shit that we're running out of oil now are the same people that stop us from embracing the only currently viable options.
Currently viable options... like, oh, this one? Or, wait a bit, and there's this one.
And don't forget about some old, clean, cheap or free modes of transportation.
We're working on real solutions. You just want a band-aid.
But the important thing to know is, EVERYONE knows that drinking too much alcohol is bad, but most people would be VERY surprised to learn that too much water can be lethal.
What are the relative dosages, though?
First case, they weren't urinating. That can't be good.
Second case was quite a lot of water for a three-year-old. In fact, when was the last time you drank most of a gallon in four hours?
Third case, no amount of water is actually mentioned, just that it was "excessive".
Again: Too much of anything can kill you. It's the relative dosages that are interesting here.
Given that:
- It's noisy on planes
- If you didn't bring headphones, you can ask for them I'd say you don't have to listen to her at all, if you don't want to. The point is whether you not listening should also force her to not talk.
Ok then, point me to an open source benchmarking program that's as complete, and I'll use it.
glxgears.
Seriously, when they are changing the results based on the vendor name, it makes any result suspect -- which makes it pretty much useless as a benchmark. At least with glxgears, while it may not be a particularly accurate benchmark, it's at least guaranteed to be fair.
Anyway, as an open source developer myself I don't really buy this 'open source will always be better' deal.
That's not the point of this exercise.
Open source will not always make a better game, or a better office suite, or even a better text editor.
But there are some kinds of software which you need to trust, and which are difficult to verify without the source. Benchmarks are one example. SSH clients are another. For these, I would not even consider a proprietary version -- it's not about features or relative quality; open source is a necessity.
Depends on the game, but most games come in demo form, and I suspect that most of the demos can be used to perform some kind of benchmark.
Doom3, for example, has a "timedemo" benchmark, and this runs entirely on levels included in the demo. So unless they explicitly disabled it in the demo version, I think that qualifies.
Slashdot Mirror
With my first major contribution to an open source project, the author essentially said "patches welcome", but he said it differently:
"I would definitely consider a patch that did that."
And, as I kept talking about it, but not actually sending it in -- my monkeypatch was pretty low-quality, and it'd take a weekend to polish it:
"I'm really starting to like this syntax of yours."
So, I was actually encouraged -- it wasn't confrontational, it was encouraging.
So, just as I would tell Person X not to simply say "This sucks!", but to offer a helpful suggestion, I would also tell anyone who would respond to think about how to help them get it implemented.
So, for example, if someone's a designer, but not a programmer, and you've got a programmer who you know wants to contribute, but he's not really sure what to work on, hook the two up. Or, with your example:
Why don't you do it yourself, or hire someone to do it for you? If you can't do either of those, why don't you contribute documentation, mockups, or something else that's not technical but is still useful?
Why don't you offer these up in a FAQ or guidelines somewhere, and mention them in your stock response? Simply saying "patches are welcome" is actually unhelpful, unless you can write a patch -- and even then, it simply comes across as standoffish.
It's the difference between "I can't bake that for you, but here's a recipe, and I can sell you some of the ingredients," and simply saying "Do it yourself."
And when the ISPs stop delivering the newsfeeds?
Doesn't work for Hotmail, either, which is especially annoying, considering my IM client will then spam me, telling me that I've got mail.
The determination of spam is based on whether you want it to continue or not.
That's not a simple boolean, and indifference doesn't mark it as spam. It might make it useless, but it doesn't make it spam.
A paying subscriber will know.
And what about the free subscribers?
I have no problem doing this at home, where the only account that it affects is my own. It's useful, for example, to avoid those mailing lists that people who know you inevitably put you on -- you know, the "Random link I found" list, the "Same Goddamned Joke I Just Got From Everyone Else, And Wasn't That Funny Last Year, Either" list, the "Upcoming Torah Services At Your Synagogue" list, the "Yet Another Attempt To Unsubscribe By Spamming The Whole Fucking Mailing List" crap, etc.
That is, not actually spam, because they actually know me, and must think I want to receive this stuff. But it's often easier to simply mark it as spam than to have to explain myself.
And I know that with my own filter, it will actually learn based on content -- so I won't get the Same Goddamned Joke, but I will get things I care about from the same person.
However, at work, we're on Gmail, so I don't do that -- especially because the signal/noise ratio isn't bad, and it's usually easy enough to create labels and filters. Amazon stuff goes in Amazon.
Some of their 'hits' detailed in this book are pretty darn impressive.
Care to relate any of them?
The tricky thing about remote viewing is not that it doesn't work, but that it's hard to separate the 'signal' from the 'noise'.
Which is, in essence, the definition of a cold reading.
While I'm at it, check out Banachek.
I'm not saying it's impossible, and I would agree with this:
But when you get significant results that contradict theory, it's the theory that should change, if you're doing science.
However, this being little more than a hobby, I don't really want to buy a book. If the results really are that compelling, there should be some web resource you can point me to.
According to Wikipedia: [citation needed]
But, taking that at face value:
In response to this the British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly and without "payment of any customs or duties whatsoever" in Britain, instead paying the much lower American duty.
In other words, smuggling aside, you couldn't be a legitimate tea merchant in America at the time, unless you were the East India Company. Favoritism, pure and simple.
And I should use Preview more often:
it does sound like he's implying that liberty is essential, not that there are a select number of essential liberties...
And before all of you Ben Franklin quoters start yammering, the key word Ben Franklin used was "essential."
Actually, the way that reads, it doesn't sound like he's implying that liberty is essential, not that there are a select number of essential liberties, and all the rest are forfeit. Here's the quote:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
And if there's really any doubt in your mind of what Franklin's intent was, here's a quote from Poor Richard's Almanac:
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
Look, if you really have no problem giving up your liberty, go for it. I'm not stopping you. If you have no problem with the Israelis giving up their liberty, I'd love to hear your argument.
But picking apart the semantics of a historical quote, and then using that to imply that the man agrees with you -- that just makes you look stupid. Honestly, do you think any of the Founding Fathers would've consented to biometrics, when they literally got up in arms over a tea tax?
Bleh. I really wanted YAML, but Slashdot would screw up the indentation.
It's also an Android target, should that matter to you (it does to me).
Can I actually run Android on it now?
Good to know that education is defined by how well you can write a bureaucratic memo, not how well you think critically, problem solve, general knowledge or how to work as a team. No, no, we want drones that all think the same and use proper grammar.
Because using proper grammar naturally leads to "thinking the same", right?
Darwin used proper grammar. So did Jefferson. So did Martin Luther King, Jr -- and many other people who thought very differently, and actually had a big impact on the world.
Can you guess why?
It's about communication. It doesn't matter if you have all the ideas in the world if you can't communicate them. And it's kind of essential to "working as a team", also -- how can you work with a team if you can't understand them?
It certainly isn't making it easy for your teammates if they are wincing every time they have to read an email from you -- or if your code is awesome, but your comments are unreadable.
And you know what else? It's not that fucking hard. Even if it is stupid, and unnecessary, it's a simple barometer. It means you know how to pay attention in school, and learn things, even if it's not something you want to learn. It means you actually care what people think of you.
Misusing "they're" may have nothing directly to do with coding, but it is somewhat like showing up for an interview without a shirt. Depending on the job, it might not disqualify you, but you'd better be wearing some damned nice pants. (Apologies to "Persuit of Happyness".)
And it's far easier just to throw on something resembling a suit.
Generally yes, but Hushmail offered two methods of encrypting emails: on their servers and in a Java applet that did it locally.
The problem is that the applet can't be verified. And, honestly, this should never have been the first indication of that.
Or rather, the applet could be verified -- you'd just have to verify it every time. The only way I know of to make this easy would be with a Firefox extension -- but at that point, to borrow the other poster's idea, why use Hushmail in the first place?
Hushmail is really a way of making GPG easy for people who don't understand how it works. The flaw in this is that to use GPG at all securely, you need to have a fair understanding of how it works.
Wait, Slashdot told me that Foxconn was in the hole for Microsoft, purposely sabotaging Linux so Windows can live on! But now they're releasing a fix?
Finish reading the summary:
(which turned out to be the AMI BIOS that several board makers use)
{"TinfoilHat":" // I've had it with XML jokes -- this one's JSON.
It looks like the AMI BIOS manufacturer is the one who's really purposely sabotaging Linux.
"}
It must be very exciting for the folks on the design team to see this coming together.
Still, imagine the letdown if they don't find anything. Of course, there's always a silver lining...
Truth is stranger than fiction...
Turns out, the government really did have a Stargate Project -- it was just about psychics, not aliens. And they didn't find any. Of either.
If you hate Apple's stifling environment so much, don't buy an iPhone.
Fine, show me something else that's as useful as a jailbreak'd iPhone.
I'm not going to get one, but then, I have principles -- I'd really rather not support Apple in their effort to become worse than Microsoft. But from a purely practical standpoint...
You will get shut down in a minute anyways.
And I'd be back up in less than a minute. Do you really think Apple is faster than the "hackers"?
And you are giving the RIAA the logs from your computer?
If subpoena'd, I think I'd kind of have to, right? My impulse is to destroy them, but that would be tampering with evidence.
Her ISP is not logging her file sharing activities.
And you know this how?
ISPs are starting to do deep packet inspection, which means some will have exactly these kinds of logs.
This is not suing someone for downloading a song. This is about putting the song up for everyone on the Internet to download
I was going by TFS, which says, and I quote:
This is the case where a $222,000 verdict was awarded for downloading 24 songs
Furthermore, "making available" has, in fact, failed in court, at least once -- which means that they would have to show that he was actually distributing it.
The problem is, nobody knows how many people downloaded from Ms. Thomas. Nobody. Not even Ms. Thomas. Could be nobody. Could be the entire Internet-using population of the world. Nobody can find out.
Not strictly true. Depends what kind of logs the filesharing program kept, or her ISP.
According to some, this means her liability should be ... nothing.
I like to call it "innocent until proven guilty", but apparently, this doesn't apply to civil cases.
And if this was about people actually selling pirated DVDs, it'd be a different story.
This is closer to suing one person for over $10k per cup of coffee they stole.
I'm going to stick with that for the moment, as it's equally unfair to both sides -- stealing a cup of coffee actually deprives someone of potential revenue, whereas stealing a song is just a copy. But stealing a cup of coffee only feeds you (or your caffeine addiction) for a day -- you'll be back later, either to steal or to buy -- whereas stealing a song means you can listen to that same song again, as many times as you like.
But no matter how you want to spin it, stealing a cup of coffee does not carry a $10k fine. Stealing a song shouldn't, either.
And don't try that bullshit of "we'll only get prepared for it when the cost goes up too high".
It's pretty obvious that's true -- notice how, despite common knowledge that the amount of oil in the world is limited, and that using it damages the environment, most of us still aren't prepared.
It's bullshit because the same people who are happy as pigs in shit that we're running out of oil now are the same people that stop us from embracing the only currently viable options.
Currently viable options... like, oh, this one? Or, wait a bit, and there's this one.
And don't forget about some old, clean, cheap or free modes of transportation.
We're working on real solutions. You just want a band-aid.
But the important thing to know is, EVERYONE knows that drinking too much alcohol is bad, but most people would be VERY surprised to learn that too much water can be lethal.
What are the relative dosages, though?
First case, they weren't urinating. That can't be good.
Second case was quite a lot of water for a three-year-old. In fact, when was the last time you drank most of a gallon in four hours?
Third case, no amount of water is actually mentioned, just that it was "excessive".
Again: Too much of anything can kill you. It's the relative dosages that are interesting here.
Given that:
- It's noisy on planes
- If you didn't bring headphones, you can ask for them
I'd say you don't have to listen to her at all, if you don't want to. The point is whether you not listening should also force her to not talk.
Ok then, point me to an open source benchmarking program that's as complete, and I'll use it.
glxgears.
Seriously, when they are changing the results based on the vendor name, it makes any result suspect -- which makes it pretty much useless as a benchmark. At least with glxgears, while it may not be a particularly accurate benchmark, it's at least guaranteed to be fair.
Anyway, as an open source developer myself I don't really buy this 'open source will always be better' deal.
That's not the point of this exercise.
Open source will not always make a better game, or a better office suite, or even a better text editor.
But there are some kinds of software which you need to trust, and which are difficult to verify without the source. Benchmarks are one example. SSH clients are another. For these, I would not even consider a proprietary version -- it's not about features or relative quality; open source is a necessity.
Depends on the game, but most games come in demo form, and I suspect that most of the demos can be used to perform some kind of benchmark.
Doom3, for example, has a "timedemo" benchmark, and this runs entirely on levels included in the demo. So unless they explicitly disabled it in the demo version, I think that qualifies.
Can't speak for UT3, though.