Actually I do consider myself a nerd, and yes, I too was once at the retarded stage I describe, of finding retarded justifications as to why being shafted is good, that the boss is my best buddy 'cause he likes my work, and that I'm such a "Nice Guy" (TM) that I can't do something as nasty as not staying overnight because the boss promised something done until tomorrow.
Took a rather rude awakening, in the form of some talks to the boss, with him asking such questions as "WTH do you need Sunday free? You'd just sit at a computer anyway?" Or "Well, if you want 5 day weeks, then I'll cut your wage."
But anyway, in spite of being a largely asocial nerd (you can tell by the tantrum, can't you?) and liking computers more than people, I _am_ in the meantime rather annoyed by "why it's good to be shafted" bullshit theories. And by their being based on views of the world that see as much of the picture as viewing the Sixtine Chapel through a keyhole.
And what really got me over the edge this time is the ISO-standard comparison with cats. Boiling down to "No siree, bob, we're like cats. We like to be defenseless and mis-treated."
Well, pick up Fluffy, look him/her in the eyes and ask yourself "Would this fuzzball even admit that he/she knows me if I mis-treated him badly?" Chances are good ol' Fluffy would leave at the first oportunity if you treated him/her like a PHB treats employees. And lemme tell you, I've even seen a cat attacking a human, after she'd been stressed hard enough. Bumped my opinion of cats up a lot.
You want to be like a cat? Then start caring about yourself a lot more, and less about justifying why it's good to be defenseless, passive and mis-treated.
I didn't mean untested or anything. But I mean you can skip a lot of the safety measures that exist just
1. to protect the pilot. E.g., in an airplane you want at least a reasonable chance that it wouldn't explode when landing. A lot of work in the Komet went into ensuring just that... and it still occasionally exploded. Whereas in a cruise missile, eh, you don't need it to land at all.
2. to make the plane reusable quickly. In an airplane you want it to be able to take off after just being refuelled and rearmed, not to spend months fixing it.
So maybe ok, the going apart on the other side of the channel was a bit too much of a hyperbole, but the point was that taking _some_ damage in flight would have been more acceptable than in an airplane. As in slightly bigger stress fissures, whatever.
Germany invested a lot in rocketry research, and the V2 wasn't the only thing the had designed.
Ballistic missiles are known by everyone because of the cold war hype, but with that era's technology and bearing in mind that they didn't need to go all the way to america with it, a cruise missile is where it's at. I.e., a rocket with wings. You don't have to launch the thing upwards with a rocket to hit Britain from France, you can just as well launch it horizontally or on a flat arc and use wings to provide the needed lift. Like the V-1 did, for example.
And they did research and build just that too: rockets with wings.
The Me-163 Komet for example was an interceptor aircraft with a liquid-fuel rocket (not turbojet) engine. It reached a speed of approximately 600 mph (almost 1000 km/h) and had a maximum range of about 80 km.
Nasty thing and more dangerous for the pilot than for the enemy, but to chuck a small bomb without a pilot across the channel it would have worked outstandingly.
And I have no doubt that, if they absolutely needed to chuck a 4 ton bomb (the weight of the hiroshima bomb), they could have slapped 2, 3 or 4 of those engines on an airframe with bigger wings.
It's a lot easier to design such a one-shot contraption, when you don't have to worry about being able to land safely, or about structural damage during flight. It can, for all you care, come apart at the end, as long as it does it on the other side of the channel.
1. Being disconnected from reality, and believing in nutjob ideals of purity and perfection, instead of more realistic compromises that work.
Which is at least mildly entertaining when it comes to "vi vs emacs vs Eclipse vs VS.NET" flame wars, in which some small detail is inflated to mean "it's not 100% perfect, so it 100% sucks." But it's less funny to see people shaft themselves and screw up their own life in pursuit of that pure utopia and relentless shunning anything less than perfect. Between something like (A) having a boss that shits on you, demands 84 hour weeks, makes "YOUR job could be the next to move to India" a corporate motto, and generally makes Dilbert's PHB and Catbert look like good compassionate folks, and (B) a union, a nerd will keep option A because B isn't 100% perfect.
2. Disconnected from reality again, in the form of believing in nut-job extremist theories, of course dressed up to look like some 100% perfect ideal as mentioned above. You're pretty much not a nerd if you don't really believe in some oriental religion, or magic, or global conspiracies, or... some bullshit idealization of pure unregulated capitalism, 19th century style. Which is what we're seeing waved around every time someone mentions unions.
"Noo, unions just let people demand more pay for worse performance! They get in the way of capitalism! Let's get rid of minimum wages, unemployment benefits, medical insurance, etc, too! Make those lazy bums work harder!"
Well, guess what, folks? That unregulated capitalism didn't work _that_ great for the country. It just served to funnel most of the benefits into the pockets of a small oligarhy, while 90% of the population was living only _barely_ better than slaves on a plantation, and were left to literally starve the instant they had an accident and couldn't work any more.
Using _that_ model to rise productivity and GDP, yeah, would work, except it wouldn't be _you_ who sees any benefits out of it. You'd just have over half the factories producing bigger yacht and personal planes for CEOs while you're starving on a miserable wage. That's what historically did happen.
3. Insecure. Nooo, maybe the boss will fire me if I don't kiss his ass and lick his boots. Or god forbid join a union that says "no, sorry, 110% unpaid overtime is right out." Better keep a low profile instead, not stand out from the crowd, and line up for the daily boot licking routine like everyone else.
Instead let's whine on/. and in blogs about how the boss sucks, and hope that somehow miraculously the problem will just fix itself.
Guess what, folks? It won't. If you're even vaguely tempted to compare your job to Dilbert comics, chances are that your management already knows you're spineless. They won't grow a compassionate side, they'll keep piling shit upon you and thinking it's _normal_. That's how you got there in the first place.
4. Hidden behind a "Nice Guy" (TM) facade. Nah, can't do something as nasty as, ugh, a strike to the boss. Would tarnish that "Nice Guy" facade and all that.
5. In reality not that nice, and self-centred to ridiculous extremes. Just you're the smart guy, everyone else is a retard, right?
The sad reality is that your average nerd doesn't want to fight for _others'_ rights. "Whaaat? And end up having to do a strike too, to support workers from another company? Why would I want to go on strike when it's not about _me_?" seems to be another major theme that pops up on these boards and others each time someone even mentions unions.
Well, guess what, folks? You're not really the centre of the universe. The Real World (TM) is a give-and-take place. People will help you if you help them. That's what it's all about. If you want it all to be only about _you_, then you're on your own. And that's how the IT worker conditions got to be the mess that they are.
"I have yet to see a reasonable explanation of why homework is a Good Thing(TM)"
How about the fact that to get the same amount of knowledge into you 100% in the school, you'd probably need to stay 8 hours a day in school? (And I mean actually get it into you, not just fake it by giving you some deliberately easy multi-choice tests that anyone can pass. And in fact let anyone pass even if they flipped a coin for the results.)
Yeah, it would be possible. It would also cost a lot more. It would need a lot more schools, a _lot_ more teachers, etc. If you're asking basically that instead of each kid doing some study on his/her own, there must be a teacher helping them with homework, you're talking at most a teacher for every 2-3 kids in that time. It's not something that works with 1 teacher for 30 kids.
So instead you're supposed to meet society half-way: school gives you X hours a week, and you're supposed to do an extra Y hours a week on your own. That's all. It's not someone intruding on your sacred free time, it's some time that wasn't supposed to be free to start with.
"If homework (as in the task that's supposed to be done, not where it's done) is supremely important, why isn't it done in school where it is more likely to be completed, and even more importantly, noticed when students are having trouble doing so they actually get timely assistance?"
Because, see above, it's possible, but your countrymen aren't willing to pay that much for education. Do you want to bet how well a tax hike to support that kind of an education system would go? My guess is it would sink like a lead duck.
"For instance, what is the analog of homework in real life?"
How about telecommuting? It's exactly that: you do X hours of work each week, from home. How about salesmen? Yeah, big whoop, it's a job you do outside the office and without fixed hours. Etc. So the notion of a job -- whether grown up or that of a student -- that's not 100% done sitting behind a desk in the office, isn't that unheard of.
Or let's talk about learning to study on your own. You know, investing some time into learning some marketable skills? A lot of people would have done well to learn doing that instead of bitching and moaning about how society _owes_ them a well paid job with no effort on their part?
"How many people in the work force have homework?"
All telecommuters for a start?
But if you mean as in "studying at home"... Yes, I thought I mentioned cultural failure. Noone wants to learn anything on their own, not even during office hours.
I see people every day who, after 5 years of being paid to program Java or C++, can't freaking pick a book on their own and actually learn it. They don't even know the most elementary basics of the language, because nosiree bob, picking up a book and doing _any_ learning on their own is a foreign concept.
That's what school taught them: nah, individual study is for losers.
The GP post was not saying that some racist parents suddenly find out that their kid is jewish by genes (presumably like the mailman;).
The problem is tainted science. There is pseudo-science out there with an agenda. People who don't want to find out whether margarine is better than butter, or how/whether global warming is happening, or whatever. They already have their conclusions (or their sponsors' conclusions) and have to convincingly massage some data, however flawed or non-representative, into supporting those.
And that kind of tainted research has been used as a support for racism already. E.g., the third reich had an army of people working at defining what the perfect aryan should be, and in which ways the others are inferior beings. E.g., there were UK pseudo-scientists in the past who worked hard to "prove" that the irish are inferior, and born that way. E.g., in the USA there was and is plenty of bad science out to "prove" that blacks are born stupid and/or otherwise inferior.
So what happens if such bad science is now disguised as really helping prevent genetic diseases? What if a gene that really doesn't do more than determine the shape of cheekbones or the nose is mis-presented as potentially carrying some major dysfunction?
It could do a lot of damage, in a lot of ways, before being shown to be bad science.
You have studies saying "but assigning more homework made no difference", then just looking through this thread you just see two dozen answers saying basically "hah! I didn't do any homework back when it was less of it. They can't make me do it. The teacher was soo funny getting all upset and foaming at the mouth about it."
Well, gee, maybe it's not homework that's causing the bad results, but _lack_ of actually _doing_ that homework. Yeah, I can see how the Japanese can do better on less homework... if they actually _do_ that homework and _study_ for it. Yeah, big surprise there, than someone on 1 hour a week of maths homework does better than someone who basically did _zero_ hours a week of maths homework.
Or what's the article's thrust? Basically "but some parents are too busy to help the kid with that homework." Well, gee, maybe it's the _kid_ that should learn how to do some work and study? Yeah, I can see how 2 hours of maths homework done by the _parent_ still leaves the kid behind someone who did only 1 hour of it, but did it personally.
Or in the article itself, "homework may not be cordially received, especially by parents of small children" or "Parents might sometimes see exercises in drill and memorization as intrusions into family time." So basically, forget even peer pressure from other kids. The message that the child gets even from the _parent_ is basically "oh, screw the homework, it's just getting in the way of other stuff you could do in that time."
Well, gee, maybe it's not the homework that's the problem. Maybe what they describe there is a massive cultural failure. It's a culture which basically discourages any attempt at personal responsibility, study, or academic results. A culture where being called "Einstein" in high school is actually an _insult_. A culture where (as reflected in another recent/. article), having the genes to be a slightly asocial genius instead of an air-head chatterbox, is proposed as a reason for abortion. (Now I have nothing against abortion, but just saying that it's put on the same undesirability level as carrying the genese for some fatal diseases.)
Maybe _that_ is the real failure.
And blaming homework for the lack of results of people who _didn't_ do that homework... well, seems to me just bloody stupid.
Seems to me like nowhere did He say that they can't be named post-mortem. "I hereby dub thee Sir Moosalot the Cheeseburger." *CHOMP* Problem solved, and the Lord must be pleased;)
Or even if you want the animal to be named while alive, it seems to me that the more logical approach would have been to have a market for parts of named animals. I mean, people spend a bit of extra money on eggs from chicken that didn't grow in cages, or the milk of cows that grew on open pastures. If obeying the Lord's will is that important to someone, I'm sure someone could sell them the meat together with a small certifficat saying "This cow was named Bessy."
See, it didn't get in the way of naming anything then. In fact, it would just do the proper Christian thing of encouraging the peasant to name his/her cows.
Or better yet, isn't the Lord satisfied with just naming the whole species? I'm pretty sure any meat you can buy these days will be from some named species, like "cow", "chicken", "pig", "turkey" or the like. I don't think any shop would stay long in business if they sold meat from some unknown species that noone had seen or named before. ("No idea, guv'nor. It was this weird looking three-legged green alien that landed in my back yard and I shot it. Want a pound of it?")
The thing about most other predator/prey relationships is that a predator can only live on a given set of prey species. E.g., you don't see foxes hunting bear when rabbits become scarce, nor wolves catching mice and birds for a change.
So there's an equilibrium. When rabbits become scarce, some foxes starve too, when rabbits become abbundant, more fox cubs have enough food to live on and breed some more. So one species can't "win" or push the other into extinction.
Even mild climate changes can't instantly shift the balance too much. E.g., if there'll be less food for rabbits in the new climate, then the number of foxes will drop proportionally. The balance is preserved.
Humans are the case that was completely outside this equilibrium scheme. When mammots became scarce, humans didn't start dying off too, to give the mammoth a chance to repopulate. Humans still found sustenance (on other game, berries, etc), kept breeding, and kept killing mammoths into extinction.
With humans it's not as much a case of being determined to kill only mammoth, or becomming the ultimate mammoth-killing experts. It's just being able to keep at it, unlike any other predator. Precisely _because_ they weren't killing only mammoths for dinner.
Combine that with climate changes, and you have some doomed species real fast.
I did say at the end of my message "That's what Apple did.", so yeah, we can quickly aggree there. You're perfectly illustrating my point, better than I did.
Apple understands its market thoroughly. Linux fans usually don't. Apple tells you what you can do with that computer and how utterly easy and intuitive is. Linux fans tell you how cool Linux itself is, why Microsoft must be stopped (as if Joe Average gave a damn about that), and some assorted _lies_ like that your Windows box crashes every 5 minutes (and Joe isn't that retarded, he knows how often Windows does crash: XP isn't Win 98 any more).
In fact, the usual Linux pitch is how you should be glad to _give_ _up_ some apps, for the privilege of fighting the evil empire. (You don't need Word. No, you really don't want Outlook, and losing the Exchange calendar functionality is no big deal. You're better off without IE, and you should change your bank if it only supports IE.) Often without offering any alternative, such as that if you really want to, you can jolly well run Outlook in Wine.
Or when they do demonstrate some elementary functionality, such as setting up the dial-up connection, they do it with some arcane CLI commands that Joe can't even follow and just scares the shit out of him.
And my message was mostly aimed at Linux advocates, such as the one who basically said "people will love buying this just to try Linux." Or look at the first answer to my message which basically says "yeah, but if using Linux makes you look like a computer expert, people will buy it as a status symbol."
Which is missing the point. They'd do well to take a lesson from Apple there, that's what I'm saying.
Whether a comic is about tech support (as already said by others the vast majority of comics are _not_ about tech support), and whether the artist and the writer have any talent are two completely unrelated things. They're completely orthogonal.
There is stuff that did (briefly) touch tech support issues or work in a tech company, but is most of the time funny. E.g., Angst Technology. No, it doesn't whine either, it's not a bitter "management sucks" Dilbert clone, and it has quite a funny take on a lot of games.
And conversely there is plenty of stuff that has nothing to do with tech support, and it still sucks because those folks really have no talent whatsoever.
And some folks just simply are whiners, and that's that. I've seen "comics" whining about tabletop gamers, whining about a boss in retail (totally not tech-related), or whining about their own life and patting themselves on the back in the most pathetic verbal-masturbation way possible. Again, it doesn't have to be about tech support, or even vaguely related.
The bottom line is that there's a _lot_ of stuff on the internet. There's just too much and too diverse of it to squeeze into a neat "everyone is in category X" (e.g., UF-clones, whiners, whatever) generalization.
That's just part of the internet, I guess. The good part is that anyone can post anything, but the bad part is also just that. You _will_ get to wade through tons of crap to find anything you're actually looking for.
But still, from there to claiming that basically there's _nothing_ on the web that isn't a whine or a clone of User Friendly, that's quite the blatantly false extrapolation.
If you think Joe Average will _ever_ say "hey, I want this computer because it runs Linux", methinks you got it all wrong. And it's this kind of getting it wrong that's why Linux is still a nerd-only OS. Not saying that Linux is bad or anything, but I'm saying that assuming everyone will see it as a goal, rather than a means, is the awfully wrong assumption and the awfully wrong way to market anything.
Frankly, other than die-hard nerds, noone gives a damn about the OS. The point that all the "Linux rules, Windows blows" or "MacOS rules, everything else blows" flamewars are missing is just that: that the OS itself is really the least important part.
In the real world what matters is what can you _do_ with a tool, and the computer or OS are just such tools to an end. What matters is what concrete goals can you achieve with it, not what a cool Apple logo it has on the box. What Joe Average asks is stuff like "Can I edit my digital photos with it and burn them on a CD"? What Joe is seeking just a solution to some clear problems, never "but I really wanted to try Linux, although I have no clue wth will run on it, or what can I do with it".
That solution means: apps. And the OS exists only to load those apps. Most people would run any OS just as gladly without an OS, if they could just pop the CD in and have the application start up.
Don't believe me? Look at the some 100 million game consoles sold, and how noone said "nah, if it doesn't show a Windows boot-up screen I'm not buying a PS2". What they _did_ however ask is: "what games are available on it, then?" I.e., they asked about the _apps_.
That's it. The apps are the alpha, omega, and the whole alphabet in between.
So all this OS brand zealotry is really like saying you buy only a certain brand of car for the dashboard, and not to actually drive it. Or better yet, saying that you're buying a microwave oven instead of a fridge because you like the interface more. It's... missing the point, to put it very diplomatically.
_Noone_ other than geeks will want to buy a computer for Linux or any other OS. In the real world they'll buy it for what they can do with that box.
Tell them "yeah, you can get this machine and you'll have a cheap, secure and very easy to use computer, that can edit your digital photos, surf the web, encode and decode movies and music, etc" and you'll have the people's attention. That's what Apple did. _That_ is the message that people want to hear.
But tell them "give me your money to try a new OS that exists just to fight MS's evil empire", and you've lost them. _Noone_ sane blows their paycheck just to fight in some idealistic nerd rebellion.
"I gather you think prison is "cruel and unusual punishment" then? It should be interesting to see how well you's survive there, in an environment that many survive for years."
I'm glad you actually brought up prison in a talk about how parents treat their children. Because that's just the kind of comparison that popped into my head too.
Because prison is supposed to be punishment for a crime. There you have someone who murdered, robbed or raped. They're having a stressful time in prison, yes. They're not allowed any more control of their life, yes. But it's supposed to be punishment for a crime.
People usually feel pity or even outrage when they heard that an innocent served some years in prison.
I really hope you're not proposing that an innocent child deserves to be treated like in prison for 18 years straight. Rapists and often even murderers get out of jail in less than 18 years. So what horrible crime has that child committed, to deserve basically an 18 year jail sentence?
Well, as long as you _are_ aware that just having a tool doesn't mean having to use it daily, ok, you're not the one I'm worried about.
I do, however, know first hand that there _are_ control freaks out there who already drive their kids up the wall. I know there are people out there who _will_ outfit their kid with RFID, GPS, and just about any tracking device they can afford.
It's not even a matter of breaking trust. I don't think for example the daughter that bought _4_ _ounces_ of _juice_ for lunch was committing any major breach of trust by any sane person's criteria. Note coke, not alcohol, juice. Four ounces. It's two gulps, ffs, or about a third of the quantity in a can of coke. Anyone who thinks that the kid buying a _small_ glass of juice for lunch is committing some major crime and breach of trust, frankly, needs professional help. Yet someone just had to monitor that and nag the kid about that small drink.
It's downright sad. And it's _those_ I'm worried about.
Some people just can't get the idea that a kid is really a separate person. That's all. To use a poor video game metaphor, some people act like the kid is just another character of their own, which they have to power-level, buff and generally play themselves.
Sorta like playing with The Sims. You may like them, you may do only what you think is good for them, but I don't think you really care whether Bob Newbie (a character in the tutorial family) really wants to go to the toilet now, or if Betty Newbie really wants to spend all her free time studying mechanics. Bah, who cares. They're just a bunch of pixels. They'll do what _I_ want, and have as much freedom or privacy as I want to give them.
Well, some people treat their kid that way.
And I don't think the tool creates that problem, or anything equally silly. I _do_ however think that some people, if given such tools, _will_ use them 24/7 and make a kid's life a virtual prison. It's the kind of tool that's every control freak's wet dream come true. It's like given a pyromaniac a can of gasoline and a box of matches.
Let me give you some insight into privacy from a kid's point of view, because that's one of the things I still haven't forgotten. Much as I'd actually like to.
My most unpleasant memories are the pure stress associated with growing up with a mother and grandma who wanted to know _everything_ I do, every move I make, every breath I take. I usually had a parent coming with me to summer camps, or at least to the same town, to be damn sure what I do there too.
But wait, it goes downhill from there.
The first problem with that is receiving an endless stream of advice, typically in the form of being told how everything I ever did was wrong. The way I walked, the way I talked, the way I combed my hair, the way I ate, etc. They just had to tell me what minuscule detail I did less than 100% perfect. Even if I decided to, dunno, clean up my room or whatever, the usual "encouragement" was being told how I did it wrong.
Unfortunately that meant that it seemed most of the time like why-the-heck do I even bother, because everything I do is wrong anyway. Probably the only "right" thing to do was to sit and stare at a wall, or something.
It leaves permanent damage. I'm in the mid-30's now, and I still have to overcome an instinct to not even try whenever I want to start doing anything. I do overcome it, but somewhere in the back of my brains there's a circuit that _still_ says "mom probably wouldn't approve _that_, either." And I don't mean for doing anything bad, but even for mundane stuff like throwing the laundry into the washing machine: mom would probably disapprove of the temperature it's set on, or the exact quantity of detergent, or whatever.
Think you know better than to do that? Well, tell that to the lady in the story who got her knickers in a knot about her daughter buying 4 oz of juice to wash the food down with. ("Nooo! It's 150 calories!") Geeze, 4 oz is a _third_ of the liquid in, say, a can of coke. But even for that some retard had to basically go and tell her child, "no, again whatever you decide is wrong, and I know better than you."
Yeah, I'm with you about the license-to-breed part: I wish such retards were prevented from breeding, because I foresee some very serious psychological problems in that daughter's future.
But let's go back to my story, because it goes downhill from there.
The other problem about parents knowing everything is that they just had to talk to _everyone_ about it. And I really mean _everyone_, including perfect strangers on the street or the new cashier at the supermarket. A lot more positively than the feedback _I_ got, too. I guess they were very proud of me, or something, which isn't unusual for a parent. (Would have been nice to also tell _me_ that, though, instead of only negative feedback.) But still, every minute of my life was dissected
Why is that a problem? Because knowledge is power, and it gave others power over my life too. E.g., I couldn't tell a little white lie like "sorry, can't go with you there today, I haven't finished homework yet." Everyone already knew, or was going to be told, exactly at what hour I really finished homework and what did I do after that. _That_ kind of being a public figure essentially leaves you with a lot less choices of what you can do without losing every single friend you still have.
As late as high school, mom actually phoned my girlfriend to tell her basically "oh no, he does have plenty of time today." And not even tell me that she interfered. That was the end of that relationship there and then.
You know, other kids grow up dreaming of becoming an astronaut or a jedi or something. My nice fantasy was about the day when mom will finally STFU (Shut The Fsck Up) about me. Quite a nice fantasy too, but sadly just as unrealistic as the one about jedis. Still hasn't happened.
I actually liked school. It was the time when I finally had some time without someone looking over my shoulder.
Ironically, that's also a large factor in what drove me
Other than the good points already made, I'd like to add one: _everyone_ needs some privacy. _Noone_ is a 100% extrovert that actually likes having someone watching them (or over their shoulder) 24 hours a day. Even the most affectionate cat, if you own one, wants to just be alone and left alone now and then.
It seems that the way it's heading for children these days is basically monitored all day long: what you eat (via this), where you go (via GPS), exactly when, what and how many hours you've played on the computer, etc. Geeze, talk about pure stress.
Plus, this kind of 24h a day surveillance is one of those things that say "I don't trust you one bit, and nothing you could ever say or do will make me believe a word you say." It's not a fun message to grow up with.
Plus, in this case it's not even just privacy, taking away even what little freedom that kid had to start with. When I was a kid I'd want to occasionally save a little and buy something else. Dunno, a book, a cheap toy, something. But now nosiree, bob, the money will go directly to the cafeteria, and the kid gets to just receive whatever meal the parent selected (because if you take anything else, momy and daddy will know).
As someone else put it, "why don't you just lock them up in a little cell, then?"
AFAIK it's a modified XP that the console, or the macs used as an alpha development kit, boot.
Thing is, Windows is based on abstraction layers, to make as much of it hardware-agnostic as possible. Remember that NT used to run on Alpha, MIPS, and quite a few other architectures. So Microsoft could very easily (and in fact did for the XBox 360) port XP to Macs.
As for GCC, don't make me laugh. You do realize that Microsoft also sells some very good compilers, right? They have a whole division making compilers for any language ever invented, _and_ the.Net platform which (even if by virtue of being a shameless Java virtual machine clone) is designed to allow running the same program on any CPU or platform MS damn pleases.
They're not some small shop that has to use GCC to get their programs compiled. They can just support any CPU ever invented themselves. They only need to tell the compiler guys to add support for it, and that's that.
If you're still not convinced, also remember the variety of hardware that Windows CE runs on. There was a Windows CE kernel available even for the Dreamcast, and a lot of the Dreamcast games were Windows game ports, using Windows CE. And the Dreamcast was some obscure 128 bit proprietary CPU that noone else used. So MS does have plenty of experience with porting their stuff -- OS, compilers, and tools included -- to any CPU or platform they damn please.
Good to see I'm not the only one who wishes more PC games supported a good gamepad. The gamepad is certainly no good for FPS or RTS (at least until someone makes one like the idea I posted in another thread: a gamepad with a trackball instead of the right thumbstick.) But for a lot of genres I feel it's the far more comfortable interface.
Still, I'd heartily recommend that you get a _good_ gamepad then. Or even better, one of those addapters that let you use your PS2 controller with a PC. (I've bought about two dozen PC gamepads before settling on one of those. I can honestly say that most PC gamepads royally suck, when compared to any major console controller.)
You'd be surprised how many PC games do work with a controller, or can be coaxed into working well enough.
E.g., I've even played a MMO (City of Heroes, to be precise) on a gamepad. It worked. As long as you can settle for something like 4 attacks you want to use (and maybe have a 5th set on auto), and don't mind either occasionally reaching for the keyboard for the rarely used powers or using a shoulder trigger as shift for those, it leaves you with enough buttons to move around, target prev/next enemy, jump, follow, etc.
There'll always be games who don't work like that no matter what, though, but still, it can make it more fun in those that do work.
"What has happened is that game programmers (and game companies in general) have realized that about 90% of the code they write takes up roughly 10% of the total CPU/GPU time. In this 90%, they can be fairly wasteful with their choice of language and how tightly they bound their algorithms. (There are even game companies that write the bulk of this logic in LISP.)"
While that is technically true, I often see it become false anyway. Why? Because you can be _incredibly_ wasteful with that 90% of the code if you start with the frame of mind that it doesn't matter anyway. What _should_ have only been 10% of the CPU time can easily balloon into taking more time than that critical part.
E.g., my canonical example is a crap framework we had to use at work. Think: exercise in having every "enterprise" buzzword in the same framework. Everything went through XML, SOAP, XSLT, EJB, etc, even though it was essentially internal calls inside the same program.
But it shouldn't matter, because it's that unimportant part of the program that only takes 10% of the CPU, right? Doesn't matter if we use a few more CPU cycles for those buzzwords, right? Can be as wasteful as we want there, right?
I've actually benchmarked it: it took over a second to call an _empty_ function through that framework. On a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4. It wasn't a couple of extra CPU cycles, it was almost 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles of pure overhead.
So basically I'd say that there's a (not so) fine line between "you don't need to spend time optimizing that (but you still write clean, efficient code)", which is probably what you had in mind, and "you can be wasteful". Once you're in the frame of mind that you can be wasteful, abhominations like the above happen.
Oh, I've played with both. The willy had more replay value, but I think people are more interested in the graphics card here;)
Or with CPUs for that matter. Had a 450 MHz K6-III which, when overclocked to about 500 MHz, would process about a SETI packet per minute. Lemme detail that: its FPU glitched hard, produced only garbage for any floating point operation, but zipped through SETI packets at surrealistic speeds. Again, producing just garbage as results. But, boy, did it churn garbage fast.
Quite a useful glitch that, if I were dishonest enough to post that as proof of my l33t overclocked performance. Could have probably claimed I had some liquid-nitrogen rig cooling that rig:P
Well, let's start with Firefox. Exactly what great, utterly innovative features did it come up with? No, seriously?
Tabbed browsing? I do believe that Opera had it first.
Gestures? Ditto, Opera was the first, and copied it from Black and White, which debatably got the idea from PDAs, starting with Apple's Newton if I'm not mistaken. Was _any_ along that chain open source? Nope.
Anything else? I'm already drawing blanks here. Skins? Nope, it's not a Firefox invention, sorry. Plugins? ActiveX. A half-arsed popup-blocking that worked only because noone bothered circumventing it for the benefit of 1% of the market? Nope, Opera had that too, and there were a ton of IE plugins that did the same. What's utterly innovative about Firefox that I'm missing?
I thought the _whole_ idea of Firefox was to be "just a browser". I.e., just to render HTML, something that they did _not_ pioneer or invent. Mind you, I actually like that idea. But utterly original and innovative it _ain't_.
Well, ok, maybe Firefox was the wrong example. So let's look at other "original" and "innovative" OSS stuff.
BitTorrent? Need I point out that file sharing was pioneered by Napster? Yep, another app that copied a closed source product.
OpenOffice? Need I point out that the vast majority of work was originally called StarOffice and was a closed source product? And its innovations are...? Reverse-engineering MS's file formats? (Which just makes the point about reverse-engineering.) The interface? Nope, I seem to remember closed source publishing packages (e.g., Ventura Publisher) with a very similar interface long before Star Office ever existed. So the great innovation is...? Let's face it Star Office and then Open Office have been officially struggling to copy MS Office for as long as I can remember.
PHP? Yet another clone of MS's ASP. Yes, MS did invent that kind of server-side inline scripting. (Yes, I know they're supposed to never have invented anything. Sorry 'bout letting reality get in the way of that.)
MySQL? Need I point out who and from what corporation invented SQL? Hint: it starts with I and ends with BM. Wasn't an open source project. Sorry. And MySQL consistently got features only by the time everyone else got them. E.g., took them a while to support XA transactions too. Kinda doesn't really count as innovative.
OK, I could go on for a few more pages, but you can tell that I'm drawing blanks already. Everything I can think of is either a blatant clone of a closed source product, or a former closed source product that's being given away by some corporation (IBM, Sun, Novell, whatever) as their way to fight MS.
Speaking of which, how many of those do make a revenue from support? Exactly what neat profit does Sun make from supporting Open Office? Last I've heard, it was losing money hand over fist with it.
You have to take all overclocking claims with a bit of salt, because for some people it's like the size of their penis depends on it. They'll be... very creative and selective in what they tell you, and that's putting it very mildly.
I've briefly been into the overclocker willy-waving scene myself, so you can take that as an admission. Guilty as charged, guv'nor.
Anyway, I've played with it long enough to know that there very rarely is a hard point where the card works 100% flawlessly, and 1 MHz higher it just locks up. There's more of a gradient grey zone where the card sorta works enough to finish one particular benchmark, but glitches, is unstable, or eventually overheats. And where it might work at that frequency in one game or benchmark, but lock up hard in 20 others.
The big overclocking brag-fests you read are usually from this grey area, not from the 100% stable zone.
Yes, you see some screenshots of a mondo 3DMark number there or of some utility showing the card running at 4 gazillion megaherz, but what you don't see is that it runs stable only for the 10 minutes needed to finish the benchmark. After that it overheats and starts artefacting, or outright locking up.
Be even more suspicious of brag-fests where they only ran half of 3DMark, and hand-waved the other tests as "bah, they didn't make much of a difference on the score anyway." (Ever notice how the biggest overclocking claims fall in that category?) Usually it means it crashed or locked up in those tests.
So I wouldn't take those as a baseline or as "_all_ 6800 cards make it that high with no problems, and it's just the mean MBAs at Nvidia marking them down." Fully expect that any card you buy might not be quite stable that high.
Which brings me to another point. To paraphrase another saying "overclocking gives you something for 'free', if your time is worth nothing." Because in the end the price you'll pay is a lot of time tweaking and testing that overclock... for each new game you buy, time replaying 30 minutes worth of something _again_ because the card locked up just before the save point, etc. It can end up a passtime in and by itself.
The less one knows about computers and networks, the more one can believe any "digital Pearl Harbour" scenarios.
E.g., I still fondly remember when I was 18, and mind you I was programming assembly for some years already, I thought I could write _the_ virus that would bring the whole economy to its knees. (Which is why I didn't actually release it.) Looking back in retrospect, omg, that idea was soo retarded.
Now throw in politicians, who have about as much clue of computers as your cat has _and_ make a living by blowing things out of proportion to an audience who knows even less. Right. You can see where that is going.
In practice, our computers aren't that vulnerable, ironically, because we know they're a fragile contraption. They don't exist in a vaccuum, as some box in a corner that noone knows about. Any company has a small army of admins who can deal with threats, has backups, etc.
Even things like Blaster didn't really do that much harm. The network congestion died pretty quickly, as everyone scrambled to block ports and disinfect machines. At the corporation I work for, it cost a total of a couple of days of the IT staff's work, to deal with some tens of infected computers out of many thousands. And that was the only virus I know of that made it inside in the last half a decade. (Unlike what Linux zealots like to claim about Windows securitiy, IRL it doesn't really cost _that_ much to keep it running.)
Or I remember one bank bitching about their DB/2 corruption, but even that didn't shut them down. Even doing the irresponsible thing and keeping running with a corrupt database and repairing it on the fly, in the end worked. It cost them some millions per day, yes, but the bank continued to work.
Just about the only thing one can't really defend against is a DDOS attack. No matter how well patched and firewalled a network is, when you have 10 GB/s stuffing your inbound pipe, you're stuffed.
But here's the fun part about those: they work against one site at a time. Directing some tens of thousands of zombies to spew 10 GB/s at one site, yeah, stuffs it. Directing the same 10 GB/s at 10,000 sites, won't even start to matter. There is no way that can be a threat to the whole economy or anything.
Every bloody time someone makes a new cordless mouse, especially Logitech, wouldn't you know it, the invariable claim is that it has no power-up delay. I keep reading that since the year _2000_ or so. When the MX700 came out, you guessed, the exact same hype was all over the sites. Nosiree bob, it has no noticeable delay, it's perfect for gaming.
And invariably the usual conspicuous consumption crowd was swearing they see the emperor's fine new clothes.
And nosiree bob, it wasn't true. I've actually tried it, brought it back and brought one with a cord. The delay wasn't huge, but it was long enough so the same twitch of the hand didn't move exactly as many pixels in the game. If you play by reflex, rather than by working at lining up pixels, there is no way to not notice the difference.
So I hope you'll excuse me if, after trying literally a _dozen_ cordless mice (yes, I have a box of mice by now), I'm a tad skeptical by default. I've heard that before, it never was true. Who knows, maybe the MX1000 finally has micro-second power-up times or something, but I've been scammed before.
You also don't address the main point of my "Stupid Fashion Victim" claim, the "IT'S LASER!!!" hype. _That_ is the bullshit buzzword that annoys me the most.
As I've said, there is _no_ difference coherent light will make in a _mouse_. It's a small camera, the LED is just light for that camera. There is no bloody way using laser as a light will make the camera higher resolution, or you'd have a laser as a flash in all digital cameras so far.
It's just a buzzword so Logitech can charge twice as much for it. No more, no less.
Re:Depends on the user (smack-down lecture, short)
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" Translation: Our guys don't know how to set up and use a CLI, so I'll use anecdotal evidence to smack CLI's around a bit."
No, translation: yes, a lot of those self-proclaimed "gurus" and CLI-zealots aren't that good with it. In fact, they're outright worse than a newbie with a GUI. And there are a lot of those around: all arrogance and self-promotion, and little actual results to show for that self-proclaimed expertise.
As for anecdotal or non-anecdotal, the studies are real, and were done by Apple. Now if you're telling me that even a corporation like Apple, back in the day where they were a dominant player, couldn't find someone who can use the CLI right, it seems to me like you've just made my point.
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Actually I do consider myself a nerd, and yes, I too was once at the retarded stage I describe, of finding retarded justifications as to why being shafted is good, that the boss is my best buddy 'cause he likes my work, and that I'm such a "Nice Guy" (TM) that I can't do something as nasty as not staying overnight because the boss promised something done until tomorrow.
Took a rather rude awakening, in the form of some talks to the boss, with him asking such questions as "WTH do you need Sunday free? You'd just sit at a computer anyway?" Or "Well, if you want 5 day weeks, then I'll cut your wage."
But anyway, in spite of being a largely asocial nerd (you can tell by the tantrum, can't you?) and liking computers more than people, I _am_ in the meantime rather annoyed by "why it's good to be shafted" bullshit theories. And by their being based on views of the world that see as much of the picture as viewing the Sixtine Chapel through a keyhole.
And what really got me over the edge this time is the ISO-standard comparison with cats. Boiling down to "No siree, bob, we're like cats. We like to be defenseless and mis-treated."
Well, pick up Fluffy, look him/her in the eyes and ask yourself "Would this fuzzball even admit that he/she knows me if I mis-treated him badly?" Chances are good ol' Fluffy would leave at the first oportunity if you treated him/her like a PHB treats employees. And lemme tell you, I've even seen a cat attacking a human, after she'd been stressed hard enough. Bumped my opinion of cats up a lot.
You want to be like a cat? Then start caring about yourself a lot more, and less about justifying why it's good to be defenseless, passive and mis-treated.
Just something to think of.
I didn't mean untested or anything. But I mean you can skip a lot of the safety measures that exist just
1. to protect the pilot. E.g., in an airplane you want at least a reasonable chance that it wouldn't explode when landing. A lot of work in the Komet went into ensuring just that... and it still occasionally exploded. Whereas in a cruise missile, eh, you don't need it to land at all.
2. to make the plane reusable quickly. In an airplane you want it to be able to take off after just being refuelled and rearmed, not to spend months fixing it.
So maybe ok, the going apart on the other side of the channel was a bit too much of a hyperbole, but the point was that taking _some_ damage in flight would have been more acceptable than in an airplane. As in slightly bigger stress fissures, whatever.
Germany invested a lot in rocketry research, and the V2 wasn't the only thing the had designed.
Ballistic missiles are known by everyone because of the cold war hype, but with that era's technology and bearing in mind that they didn't need to go all the way to america with it, a cruise missile is where it's at. I.e., a rocket with wings. You don't have to launch the thing upwards with a rocket to hit Britain from France, you can just as well launch it horizontally or on a flat arc and use wings to provide the needed lift. Like the V-1 did, for example.
And they did research and build just that too: rockets with wings.
The Me-163 Komet for example was an interceptor aircraft with a liquid-fuel rocket (not turbojet) engine. It reached a speed of approximately 600 mph (almost 1000 km/h) and had a maximum range of about 80 km.
Nasty thing and more dangerous for the pilot than for the enemy, but to chuck a small bomb without a pilot across the channel it would have worked outstandingly.
And I have no doubt that, if they absolutely needed to chuck a 4 ton bomb (the weight of the hiroshima bomb), they could have slapped 2, 3 or 4 of those engines on an airframe with bigger wings.
It's a lot easier to design such a one-shot contraption, when you don't have to worry about being able to land safely, or about structural damage during flight. It can, for all you care, come apart at the end, as long as it does it on the other side of the channel.
The problem with nerds is:
/. and in blogs about how the boss sucks, and hope that somehow miraculously the problem will just fix itself.
1. Being disconnected from reality, and believing in nutjob ideals of purity and perfection, instead of more realistic compromises that work.
Which is at least mildly entertaining when it comes to "vi vs emacs vs Eclipse vs VS.NET" flame wars, in which some small detail is inflated to mean "it's not 100% perfect, so it 100% sucks." But it's less funny to see people shaft themselves and screw up their own life in pursuit of that pure utopia and relentless shunning anything less than perfect. Between something like (A) having a boss that shits on you, demands 84 hour weeks, makes "YOUR job could be the next to move to India" a corporate motto, and generally makes Dilbert's PHB and Catbert look like good compassionate folks, and (B) a union, a nerd will keep option A because B isn't 100% perfect.
2. Disconnected from reality again, in the form of believing in nut-job extremist theories, of course dressed up to look like some 100% perfect ideal as mentioned above. You're pretty much not a nerd if you don't really believe in some oriental religion, or magic, or global conspiracies, or... some bullshit idealization of pure unregulated capitalism, 19th century style. Which is what we're seeing waved around every time someone mentions unions.
"Noo, unions just let people demand more pay for worse performance! They get in the way of capitalism! Let's get rid of minimum wages, unemployment benefits, medical insurance, etc, too! Make those lazy bums work harder!"
Well, guess what, folks? That unregulated capitalism didn't work _that_ great for the country. It just served to funnel most of the benefits into the pockets of a small oligarhy, while 90% of the population was living only _barely_ better than slaves on a plantation, and were left to literally starve the instant they had an accident and couldn't work any more.
Using _that_ model to rise productivity and GDP, yeah, would work, except it wouldn't be _you_ who sees any benefits out of it. You'd just have over half the factories producing bigger yacht and personal planes for CEOs while you're starving on a miserable wage. That's what historically did happen.
3. Insecure. Nooo, maybe the boss will fire me if I don't kiss his ass and lick his boots. Or god forbid join a union that says "no, sorry, 110% unpaid overtime is right out." Better keep a low profile instead, not stand out from the crowd, and line up for the daily boot licking routine like everyone else.
Instead let's whine on
Guess what, folks? It won't. If you're even vaguely tempted to compare your job to Dilbert comics, chances are that your management already knows you're spineless. They won't grow a compassionate side, they'll keep piling shit upon you and thinking it's _normal_. That's how you got there in the first place.
4. Hidden behind a "Nice Guy" (TM) facade. Nah, can't do something as nasty as, ugh, a strike to the boss. Would tarnish that "Nice Guy" facade and all that.
5. In reality not that nice, and self-centred to ridiculous extremes. Just you're the smart guy, everyone else is a retard, right?
The sad reality is that your average nerd doesn't want to fight for _others'_ rights. "Whaaat? And end up having to do a strike too, to support workers from another company? Why would I want to go on strike when it's not about _me_?" seems to be another major theme that pops up on these boards and others each time someone even mentions unions.
Well, guess what, folks? You're not really the centre of the universe. The Real World (TM) is a give-and-take place. People will help you if you help them. That's what it's all about. If you want it all to be only about _you_, then you're on your own. And that's how the IT worker conditions got to be the mess that they are.
"I have yet to see a reasonable explanation of why homework is a Good Thing(TM)"
How about the fact that to get the same amount of knowledge into you 100% in the school, you'd probably need to stay 8 hours a day in school? (And I mean actually get it into you, not just fake it by giving you some deliberately easy multi-choice tests that anyone can pass. And in fact let anyone pass even if they flipped a coin for the results.)
Yeah, it would be possible. It would also cost a lot more. It would need a lot more schools, a _lot_ more teachers, etc. If you're asking basically that instead of each kid doing some study on his/her own, there must be a teacher helping them with homework, you're talking at most a teacher for every 2-3 kids in that time. It's not something that works with 1 teacher for 30 kids.
So instead you're supposed to meet society half-way: school gives you X hours a week, and you're supposed to do an extra Y hours a week on your own. That's all. It's not someone intruding on your sacred free time, it's some time that wasn't supposed to be free to start with.
"If homework (as in the task that's supposed to be done, not where it's done) is supremely important, why isn't it done in school where it is more likely to be completed, and even more importantly, noticed when students are having trouble doing so they actually get timely assistance?"
Because, see above, it's possible, but your countrymen aren't willing to pay that much for education. Do you want to bet how well a tax hike to support that kind of an education system would go? My guess is it would sink like a lead duck.
"For instance, what is the analog of homework in real life?"
How about telecommuting? It's exactly that: you do X hours of work each week, from home. How about salesmen? Yeah, big whoop, it's a job you do outside the office and without fixed hours. Etc. So the notion of a job -- whether grown up or that of a student -- that's not 100% done sitting behind a desk in the office, isn't that unheard of.
Or let's talk about learning to study on your own. You know, investing some time into learning some marketable skills? A lot of people would have done well to learn doing that instead of bitching and moaning about how society _owes_ them a well paid job with no effort on their part?
"How many people in the work force have homework?"
All telecommuters for a start?
But if you mean as in "studying at home"... Yes, I thought I mentioned cultural failure. Noone wants to learn anything on their own, not even during office hours.
I see people every day who, after 5 years of being paid to program Java or C++, can't freaking pick a book on their own and actually learn it. They don't even know the most elementary basics of the language, because nosiree bob, picking up a book and doing _any_ learning on their own is a foreign concept.
That's what school taught them: nah, individual study is for losers.
The GP post was not saying that some racist parents suddenly find out that their kid is jewish by genes (presumably like the mailman;).
The problem is tainted science. There is pseudo-science out there with an agenda. People who don't want to find out whether margarine is better than butter, or how/whether global warming is happening, or whatever. They already have their conclusions (or their sponsors' conclusions) and have to convincingly massage some data, however flawed or non-representative, into supporting those.
And that kind of tainted research has been used as a support for racism already. E.g., the third reich had an army of people working at defining what the perfect aryan should be, and in which ways the others are inferior beings. E.g., there were UK pseudo-scientists in the past who worked hard to "prove" that the irish are inferior, and born that way. E.g., in the USA there was and is plenty of bad science out to "prove" that blacks are born stupid and/or otherwise inferior.
So what happens if such bad science is now disguised as really helping prevent genetic diseases? What if a gene that really doesn't do more than determine the shape of cheekbones or the nose is mis-presented as potentially carrying some major dysfunction?
It could do a lot of damage, in a lot of ways, before being shown to be bad science.
You have studies saying "but assigning more homework made no difference", then just looking through this thread you just see two dozen answers saying basically "hah! I didn't do any homework back when it was less of it. They can't make me do it. The teacher was soo funny getting all upset and foaming at the mouth about it."
/. article), having the genes to be a slightly asocial genius instead of an air-head chatterbox, is proposed as a reason for abortion. (Now I have nothing against abortion, but just saying that it's put on the same undesirability level as carrying the genese for some fatal diseases.)
Well, gee, maybe it's not homework that's causing the bad results, but _lack_ of actually _doing_ that homework. Yeah, I can see how the Japanese can do better on less homework... if they actually _do_ that homework and _study_ for it. Yeah, big surprise there, than someone on 1 hour a week of maths homework does better than someone who basically did _zero_ hours a week of maths homework.
Or what's the article's thrust? Basically "but some parents are too busy to help the kid with that homework." Well, gee, maybe it's the _kid_ that should learn how to do some work and study? Yeah, I can see how 2 hours of maths homework done by the _parent_ still leaves the kid behind someone who did only 1 hour of it, but did it personally.
Or in the article itself, "homework may not be cordially received, especially by parents of small children" or "Parents might sometimes see exercises in drill and memorization as intrusions into family time." So basically, forget even peer pressure from other kids. The message that the child gets even from the _parent_ is basically "oh, screw the homework, it's just getting in the way of other stuff you could do in that time."
Well, gee, maybe it's not the homework that's the problem. Maybe what they describe there is a massive cultural failure. It's a culture which basically discourages any attempt at personal responsibility, study, or academic results. A culture where being called "Einstein" in high school is actually an _insult_. A culture where (as reflected in another recent
Maybe _that_ is the real failure.
And blaming homework for the lack of results of people who _didn't_ do that homework... well, seems to me just bloody stupid.
Seems to me like nowhere did He say that they can't be named post-mortem. "I hereby dub thee Sir Moosalot the Cheeseburger." *CHOMP* Problem solved, and the Lord must be pleased ;)
Or even if you want the animal to be named while alive, it seems to me that the more logical approach would have been to have a market for parts of named animals. I mean, people spend a bit of extra money on eggs from chicken that didn't grow in cages, or the milk of cows that grew on open pastures. If obeying the Lord's will is that important to someone, I'm sure someone could sell them the meat together with a small certifficat saying "This cow was named Bessy."
See, it didn't get in the way of naming anything then. In fact, it would just do the proper Christian thing of encouraging the peasant to name his/her cows.
Or better yet, isn't the Lord satisfied with just naming the whole species? I'm pretty sure any meat you can buy these days will be from some named species, like "cow", "chicken", "pig", "turkey" or the like. I don't think any shop would stay long in business if they sold meat from some unknown species that noone had seen or named before. ("No idea, guv'nor. It was this weird looking three-legged green alien that landed in my back yard and I shot it. Want a pound of it?")
The thing about most other predator/prey relationships is that a predator can only live on a given set of prey species. E.g., you don't see foxes hunting bear when rabbits become scarce, nor wolves catching mice and birds for a change.
So there's an equilibrium. When rabbits become scarce, some foxes starve too, when rabbits become abbundant, more fox cubs have enough food to live on and breed some more. So one species can't "win" or push the other into extinction.
Even mild climate changes can't instantly shift the balance too much. E.g., if there'll be less food for rabbits in the new climate, then the number of foxes will drop proportionally. The balance is preserved.
Humans are the case that was completely outside this equilibrium scheme. When mammots became scarce, humans didn't start dying off too, to give the mammoth a chance to repopulate. Humans still found sustenance (on other game, berries, etc), kept breeding, and kept killing mammoths into extinction.
With humans it's not as much a case of being determined to kill only mammoth, or becomming the ultimate mammoth-killing experts. It's just being able to keep at it, unlike any other predator. Precisely _because_ they weren't killing only mammoths for dinner.
Combine that with climate changes, and you have some doomed species real fast.
I did say at the end of my message "That's what Apple did.", so yeah, we can quickly aggree there. You're perfectly illustrating my point, better than I did.
Apple understands its market thoroughly. Linux fans usually don't. Apple tells you what you can do with that computer and how utterly easy and intuitive is. Linux fans tell you how cool Linux itself is, why Microsoft must be stopped (as if Joe Average gave a damn about that), and some assorted _lies_ like that your Windows box crashes every 5 minutes (and Joe isn't that retarded, he knows how often Windows does crash: XP isn't Win 98 any more).
In fact, the usual Linux pitch is how you should be glad to _give_ _up_ some apps, for the privilege of fighting the evil empire. (You don't need Word. No, you really don't want Outlook, and losing the Exchange calendar functionality is no big deal. You're better off without IE, and you should change your bank if it only supports IE.) Often without offering any alternative, such as that if you really want to, you can jolly well run Outlook in Wine.
Or when they do demonstrate some elementary functionality, such as setting up the dial-up connection, they do it with some arcane CLI commands that Joe can't even follow and just scares the shit out of him.
And my message was mostly aimed at Linux advocates, such as the one who basically said "people will love buying this just to try Linux." Or look at the first answer to my message which basically says "yeah, but if using Linux makes you look like a computer expert, people will buy it as a status symbol."
Which is missing the point. They'd do well to take a lesson from Apple there, that's what I'm saying.
Whether a comic is about tech support (as already said by others the vast majority of comics are _not_ about tech support), and whether the artist and the writer have any talent are two completely unrelated things. They're completely orthogonal.
There is stuff that did (briefly) touch tech support issues or work in a tech company, but is most of the time funny. E.g., Angst Technology. No, it doesn't whine either, it's not a bitter "management sucks" Dilbert clone, and it has quite a funny take on a lot of games.
And conversely there is plenty of stuff that has nothing to do with tech support, and it still sucks because those folks really have no talent whatsoever.
And some folks just simply are whiners, and that's that. I've seen "comics" whining about tabletop gamers, whining about a boss in retail (totally not tech-related), or whining about their own life and patting themselves on the back in the most pathetic verbal-masturbation way possible. Again, it doesn't have to be about tech support, or even vaguely related.
The bottom line is that there's a _lot_ of stuff on the internet. There's just too much and too diverse of it to squeeze into a neat "everyone is in category X" (e.g., UF-clones, whiners, whatever) generalization.
That's just part of the internet, I guess. The good part is that anyone can post anything, but the bad part is also just that. You _will_ get to wade through tons of crap to find anything you're actually looking for.
But still, from there to claiming that basically there's _nothing_ on the web that isn't a whine or a clone of User Friendly, that's quite the blatantly false extrapolation.
If you think Joe Average will _ever_ say "hey, I want this computer because it runs Linux", methinks you got it all wrong. And it's this kind of getting it wrong that's why Linux is still a nerd-only OS. Not saying that Linux is bad or anything, but I'm saying that assuming everyone will see it as a goal, rather than a means, is the awfully wrong assumption and the awfully wrong way to market anything.
Frankly, other than die-hard nerds, noone gives a damn about the OS. The point that all the "Linux rules, Windows blows" or "MacOS rules, everything else blows" flamewars are missing is just that: that the OS itself is really the least important part.
In the real world what matters is what can you _do_ with a tool, and the computer or OS are just such tools to an end. What matters is what concrete goals can you achieve with it, not what a cool Apple logo it has on the box. What Joe Average asks is stuff like "Can I edit my digital photos with it and burn them on a CD"? What Joe is seeking just a solution to some clear problems, never "but I really wanted to try Linux, although I have no clue wth will run on it, or what can I do with it".
That solution means: apps. And the OS exists only to load those apps. Most people would run any OS just as gladly without an OS, if they could just pop the CD in and have the application start up.
Don't believe me? Look at the some 100 million game consoles sold, and how noone said "nah, if it doesn't show a Windows boot-up screen I'm not buying a PS2". What they _did_ however ask is: "what games are available on it, then?" I.e., they asked about the _apps_.
That's it. The apps are the alpha, omega, and the whole alphabet in between.
So all this OS brand zealotry is really like saying you buy only a certain brand of car for the dashboard, and not to actually drive it. Or better yet, saying that you're buying a microwave oven instead of a fridge because you like the interface more. It's... missing the point, to put it very diplomatically.
_Noone_ other than geeks will want to buy a computer for Linux or any other OS. In the real world they'll buy it for what they can do with that box.
Tell them "yeah, you can get this machine and you'll have a cheap, secure and very easy to use computer, that can edit your digital photos, surf the web, encode and decode movies and music, etc" and you'll have the people's attention. That's what Apple did. _That_ is the message that people want to hear.
But tell them "give me your money to try a new OS that exists just to fight MS's evil empire", and you've lost them. _Noone_ sane blows their paycheck just to fight in some idealistic nerd rebellion.
"I gather you think prison is "cruel and unusual punishment" then?
It should be interesting to see how well you's survive there, in an environment that many survive for years."
I'm glad you actually brought up prison in a talk about how parents treat their children. Because that's just the kind of comparison that popped into my head too.
Because prison is supposed to be punishment for a crime. There you have someone who murdered, robbed or raped. They're having a stressful time in prison, yes. They're not allowed any more control of their life, yes. But it's supposed to be punishment for a crime.
People usually feel pity or even outrage when they heard that an innocent served some years in prison.
I really hope you're not proposing that an innocent child deserves to be treated like in prison for 18 years straight. Rapists and often even murderers get out of jail in less than 18 years. So what horrible crime has that child committed, to deserve basically an 18 year jail sentence?
Well, as long as you _are_ aware that just having a tool doesn't mean having to use it daily, ok, you're not the one I'm worried about.
I do, however, know first hand that there _are_ control freaks out there who already drive their kids up the wall. I know there are people out there who _will_ outfit their kid with RFID, GPS, and just about any tracking device they can afford.
It's not even a matter of breaking trust. I don't think for example the daughter that bought _4_ _ounces_ of _juice_ for lunch was committing any major breach of trust by any sane person's criteria. Note coke, not alcohol, juice. Four ounces. It's two gulps, ffs, or about a third of the quantity in a can of coke. Anyone who thinks that the kid buying a _small_ glass of juice for lunch is committing some major crime and breach of trust, frankly, needs professional help. Yet someone just had to monitor that and nag the kid about that small drink.
It's downright sad. And it's _those_ I'm worried about.
Some people just can't get the idea that a kid is really a separate person. That's all. To use a poor video game metaphor, some people act like the kid is just another character of their own, which they have to power-level, buff and generally play themselves.
Sorta like playing with The Sims. You may like them, you may do only what you think is good for them, but I don't think you really care whether Bob Newbie (a character in the tutorial family) really wants to go to the toilet now, or if Betty Newbie really wants to spend all her free time studying mechanics. Bah, who cares. They're just a bunch of pixels. They'll do what _I_ want, and have as much freedom or privacy as I want to give them.
Well, some people treat their kid that way.
And I don't think the tool creates that problem, or anything equally silly. I _do_ however think that some people, if given such tools, _will_ use them 24/7 and make a kid's life a virtual prison. It's the kind of tool that's every control freak's wet dream come true. It's like given a pyromaniac a can of gasoline and a box of matches.
Let me give you some insight into privacy from a kid's point of view, because that's one of the things I still haven't forgotten. Much as I'd actually like to.
My most unpleasant memories are the pure stress associated with growing up with a mother and grandma who wanted to know _everything_ I do, every move I make, every breath I take. I usually had a parent coming with me to summer camps, or at least to the same town, to be damn sure what I do there too.
But wait, it goes downhill from there.
The first problem with that is receiving an endless stream of advice, typically in the form of being told how everything I ever did was wrong. The way I walked, the way I talked, the way I combed my hair, the way I ate, etc. They just had to tell me what minuscule detail I did less than 100% perfect. Even if I decided to, dunno, clean up my room or whatever, the usual "encouragement" was being told how I did it wrong.
Unfortunately that meant that it seemed most of the time like why-the-heck do I even bother, because everything I do is wrong anyway. Probably the only "right" thing to do was to sit and stare at a wall, or something.
It leaves permanent damage. I'm in the mid-30's now, and I still have to overcome an instinct to not even try whenever I want to start doing anything. I do overcome it, but somewhere in the back of my brains there's a circuit that _still_ says "mom probably wouldn't approve _that_, either." And I don't mean for doing anything bad, but even for mundane stuff like throwing the laundry into the washing machine: mom would probably disapprove of the temperature it's set on, or the exact quantity of detergent, or whatever.
Think you know better than to do that? Well, tell that to the lady in the story who got her knickers in a knot about her daughter buying 4 oz of juice to wash the food down with. ("Nooo! It's 150 calories!") Geeze, 4 oz is a _third_ of the liquid in, say, a can of coke. But even for that some retard had to basically go and tell her child, "no, again whatever you decide is wrong, and I know better than you."
Yeah, I'm with you about the license-to-breed part: I wish such retards were prevented from breeding, because I foresee some very serious psychological problems in that daughter's future.
But let's go back to my story, because it goes downhill from there.
The other problem about parents knowing everything is that they just had to talk to _everyone_ about it. And I really mean _everyone_, including perfect strangers on the street or the new cashier at the supermarket. A lot more positively than the feedback _I_ got, too. I guess they were very proud of me, or something, which isn't unusual for a parent. (Would have been nice to also tell _me_ that, though, instead of only negative feedback.) But still, every minute of my life was dissected
Why is that a problem? Because knowledge is power, and it gave others power over my life too. E.g., I couldn't tell a little white lie like "sorry, can't go with you there today, I haven't finished homework yet." Everyone already knew, or was going to be told, exactly at what hour I really finished homework and what did I do after that. _That_ kind of being a public figure essentially leaves you with a lot less choices of what you can do without losing every single friend you still have.
As late as high school, mom actually phoned my girlfriend to tell her basically "oh no, he does have plenty of time today." And not even tell me that she interfered. That was the end of that relationship there and then.
You know, other kids grow up dreaming of becoming an astronaut or a jedi or something. My nice fantasy was about the day when mom will finally STFU (Shut The Fsck Up) about me. Quite a nice fantasy too, but sadly just as unrealistic as the one about jedis. Still hasn't happened.
I actually liked school. It was the time when I finally had some time without someone looking over my shoulder.
Ironically, that's also a large factor in what drove me
Other than the good points already made, I'd like to add one: _everyone_ needs some privacy. _Noone_ is a 100% extrovert that actually likes having someone watching them (or over their shoulder) 24 hours a day. Even the most affectionate cat, if you own one, wants to just be alone and left alone now and then.
It seems that the way it's heading for children these days is basically monitored all day long: what you eat (via this), where you go (via GPS), exactly when, what and how many hours you've played on the computer, etc. Geeze, talk about pure stress.
Plus, this kind of 24h a day surveillance is one of those things that say "I don't trust you one bit, and nothing you could ever say or do will make me believe a word you say." It's not a fun message to grow up with.
Plus, in this case it's not even just privacy, taking away even what little freedom that kid had to start with. When I was a kid I'd want to occasionally save a little and buy something else. Dunno, a book, a cheap toy, something. But now nosiree, bob, the money will go directly to the cafeteria, and the kid gets to just receive whatever meal the parent selected (because if you take anything else, momy and daddy will know).
As someone else put it, "why don't you just lock them up in a little cell, then?"
AFAIK it's a modified XP that the console, or the macs used as an alpha development kit, boot.
.Net platform which (even if by virtue of being a shameless Java virtual machine clone) is designed to allow running the same program on any CPU or platform MS damn pleases.
Thing is, Windows is based on abstraction layers, to make as much of it hardware-agnostic as possible. Remember that NT used to run on Alpha, MIPS, and quite a few other architectures. So Microsoft could very easily (and in fact did for the XBox 360) port XP to Macs.
As for GCC, don't make me laugh. You do realize that Microsoft also sells some very good compilers, right? They have a whole division making compilers for any language ever invented, _and_ the
They're not some small shop that has to use GCC to get their programs compiled. They can just support any CPU ever invented themselves. They only need to tell the compiler guys to add support for it, and that's that.
If you're still not convinced, also remember the variety of hardware that Windows CE runs on. There was a Windows CE kernel available even for the Dreamcast, and a lot of the Dreamcast games were Windows game ports, using Windows CE. And the Dreamcast was some obscure 128 bit proprietary CPU that noone else used. So MS does have plenty of experience with porting their stuff -- OS, compilers, and tools included -- to any CPU or platform they damn please.
Good to see I'm not the only one who wishes more PC games supported a good gamepad. The gamepad is certainly no good for FPS or RTS (at least until someone makes one like the idea I posted in another thread: a gamepad with a trackball instead of the right thumbstick.) But for a lot of genres I feel it's the far more comfortable interface.
Still, I'd heartily recommend that you get a _good_ gamepad then. Or even better, one of those addapters that let you use your PS2 controller with a PC. (I've bought about two dozen PC gamepads before settling on one of those. I can honestly say that most PC gamepads royally suck, when compared to any major console controller.)
You'd be surprised how many PC games do work with a controller, or can be coaxed into working well enough.
E.g., I've even played a MMO (City of Heroes, to be precise) on a gamepad. It worked. As long as you can settle for something like 4 attacks you want to use (and maybe have a 5th set on auto), and don't mind either occasionally reaching for the keyboard for the rarely used powers or using a shoulder trigger as shift for those, it leaves you with enough buttons to move around, target prev/next enemy, jump, follow, etc.
There'll always be games who don't work like that no matter what, though, but still, it can make it more fun in those that do work.
"What has happened is that game programmers (and game companies in general) have realized that about 90% of the code they write takes up roughly 10% of the total CPU/GPU time. In this 90%, they can be fairly wasteful with their choice of language and how tightly they bound their algorithms. (There are even game companies that write the bulk of this logic in LISP.)"
While that is technically true, I often see it become false anyway. Why? Because you can be _incredibly_ wasteful with that 90% of the code if you start with the frame of mind that it doesn't matter anyway. What _should_ have only been 10% of the CPU time can easily balloon into taking more time than that critical part.
E.g., my canonical example is a crap framework we had to use at work. Think: exercise in having every "enterprise" buzzword in the same framework. Everything went through XML, SOAP, XSLT, EJB, etc, even though it was essentially internal calls inside the same program.
But it shouldn't matter, because it's that unimportant part of the program that only takes 10% of the CPU, right? Doesn't matter if we use a few more CPU cycles for those buzzwords, right? Can be as wasteful as we want there, right?
I've actually benchmarked it: it took over a second to call an _empty_ function through that framework. On a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4. It wasn't a couple of extra CPU cycles, it was almost 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles of pure overhead.
So basically I'd say that there's a (not so) fine line between "you don't need to spend time optimizing that (but you still write clean, efficient code)", which is probably what you had in mind, and "you can be wasteful". Once you're in the frame of mind that you can be wasteful, abhominations like the above happen.
Oh, I've played with both. The willy had more replay value, but I think people are more interested in the graphics card here ;)
Or with CPUs for that matter. Had a 450 MHz K6-III which, when overclocked to about 500 MHz, would process about a SETI packet per minute. Lemme detail that: its FPU glitched hard, produced only garbage for any floating point operation, but zipped through SETI packets at surrealistic speeds. Again, producing just garbage as results. But, boy, did it churn garbage fast.
Quite a useful glitch that, if I were dishonest enough to post that as proof of my l33t overclocked performance. Could have probably claimed I had some liquid-nitrogen rig cooling that rig :P
Well, let's start with Firefox. Exactly what great, utterly innovative features did it come up with? No, seriously?
Tabbed browsing? I do believe that Opera had it first.
Gestures? Ditto, Opera was the first, and copied it from Black and White, which debatably got the idea from PDAs, starting with Apple's Newton if I'm not mistaken. Was _any_ along that chain open source? Nope.
Anything else? I'm already drawing blanks here. Skins? Nope, it's not a Firefox invention, sorry. Plugins? ActiveX. A half-arsed popup-blocking that worked only because noone bothered circumventing it for the benefit of 1% of the market? Nope, Opera had that too, and there were a ton of IE plugins that did the same. What's utterly innovative about Firefox that I'm missing?
I thought the _whole_ idea of Firefox was to be "just a browser". I.e., just to render HTML, something that they did _not_ pioneer or invent. Mind you, I actually like that idea. But utterly original and innovative it _ain't_.
Well, ok, maybe Firefox was the wrong example. So let's look at other "original" and "innovative" OSS stuff.
BitTorrent? Need I point out that file sharing was pioneered by Napster? Yep, another app that copied a closed source product.
OpenOffice? Need I point out that the vast majority of work was originally called StarOffice and was a closed source product? And its innovations are...? Reverse-engineering MS's file formats? (Which just makes the point about reverse-engineering.) The interface? Nope, I seem to remember closed source publishing packages (e.g., Ventura Publisher) with a very similar interface long before Star Office ever existed. So the great innovation is...? Let's face it Star Office and then Open Office have been officially struggling to copy MS Office for as long as I can remember.
PHP? Yet another clone of MS's ASP. Yes, MS did invent that kind of server-side inline scripting. (Yes, I know they're supposed to never have invented anything. Sorry 'bout letting reality get in the way of that.)
MySQL? Need I point out who and from what corporation invented SQL? Hint: it starts with I and ends with BM. Wasn't an open source project. Sorry. And MySQL consistently got features only by the time everyone else got them. E.g., took them a while to support XA transactions too. Kinda doesn't really count as innovative.
OK, I could go on for a few more pages, but you can tell that I'm drawing blanks already. Everything I can think of is either a blatant clone of a closed source product, or a former closed source product that's being given away by some corporation (IBM, Sun, Novell, whatever) as their way to fight MS.
Speaking of which, how many of those do make a revenue from support? Exactly what neat profit does Sun make from supporting Open Office? Last I've heard, it was losing money hand over fist with it.
You have to take all overclocking claims with a bit of salt, because for some people it's like the size of their penis depends on it. They'll be... very creative and selective in what they tell you, and that's putting it very mildly.
I've briefly been into the overclocker willy-waving scene myself, so you can take that as an admission. Guilty as charged, guv'nor.
Anyway, I've played with it long enough to know that there very rarely is a hard point where the card works 100% flawlessly, and 1 MHz higher it just locks up. There's more of a gradient grey zone where the card sorta works enough to finish one particular benchmark, but glitches, is unstable, or eventually overheats. And where it might work at that frequency in one game or benchmark, but lock up hard in 20 others.
The big overclocking brag-fests you read are usually from this grey area, not from the 100% stable zone.
Yes, you see some screenshots of a mondo 3DMark number there or of some utility showing the card running at 4 gazillion megaherz, but what you don't see is that it runs stable only for the 10 minutes needed to finish the benchmark. After that it overheats and starts artefacting, or outright locking up.
Be even more suspicious of brag-fests where they only ran half of 3DMark, and hand-waved the other tests as "bah, they didn't make much of a difference on the score anyway." (Ever notice how the biggest overclocking claims fall in that category?) Usually it means it crashed or locked up in those tests.
So I wouldn't take those as a baseline or as "_all_ 6800 cards make it that high with no problems, and it's just the mean MBAs at Nvidia marking them down." Fully expect that any card you buy might not be quite stable that high.
Which brings me to another point. To paraphrase another saying "overclocking gives you something for 'free', if your time is worth nothing." Because in the end the price you'll pay is a lot of time tweaking and testing that overclock... for each new game you buy, time replaying 30 minutes worth of something _again_ because the card locked up just before the save point, etc. It can end up a passtime in and by itself.
The less one knows about computers and networks, the more one can believe any "digital Pearl Harbour" scenarios.
E.g., I still fondly remember when I was 18, and mind you I was programming assembly for some years already, I thought I could write _the_ virus that would bring the whole economy to its knees. (Which is why I didn't actually release it.) Looking back in retrospect, omg, that idea was soo retarded.
Now throw in politicians, who have about as much clue of computers as your cat has _and_ make a living by blowing things out of proportion to an audience who knows even less. Right. You can see where that is going.
In practice, our computers aren't that vulnerable, ironically, because we know they're a fragile contraption. They don't exist in a vaccuum, as some box in a corner that noone knows about. Any company has a small army of admins who can deal with threats, has backups, etc.
Even things like Blaster didn't really do that much harm. The network congestion died pretty quickly, as everyone scrambled to block ports and disinfect machines. At the corporation I work for, it cost a total of a couple of days of the IT staff's work, to deal with some tens of infected computers out of many thousands. And that was the only virus I know of that made it inside in the last half a decade. (Unlike what Linux zealots like to claim about Windows securitiy, IRL it doesn't really cost _that_ much to keep it running.)
Or I remember one bank bitching about their DB/2 corruption, but even that didn't shut them down. Even doing the irresponsible thing and keeping running with a corrupt database and repairing it on the fly, in the end worked. It cost them some millions per day, yes, but the bank continued to work.
Just about the only thing one can't really defend against is a DDOS attack. No matter how well patched and firewalled a network is, when you have 10 GB/s stuffing your inbound pipe, you're stuffed.
But here's the fun part about those: they work against one site at a time. Directing some tens of thousands of zombies to spew 10 GB/s at one site, yeah, stuffs it. Directing the same 10 GB/s at 10,000 sites, won't even start to matter. There is no way that can be a threat to the whole economy or anything.
Every bloody time someone makes a new cordless mouse, especially Logitech, wouldn't you know it, the invariable claim is that it has no power-up delay. I keep reading that since the year _2000_ or so. When the MX700 came out, you guessed, the exact same hype was all over the sites. Nosiree bob, it has no noticeable delay, it's perfect for gaming.
And invariably the usual conspicuous consumption crowd was swearing they see the emperor's fine new clothes.
And nosiree bob, it wasn't true. I've actually tried it, brought it back and brought one with a cord. The delay wasn't huge, but it was long enough so the same twitch of the hand didn't move exactly as many pixels in the game. If you play by reflex, rather than by working at lining up pixels, there is no way to not notice the difference.
So I hope you'll excuse me if, after trying literally a _dozen_ cordless mice (yes, I have a box of mice by now), I'm a tad skeptical by default. I've heard that before, it never was true. Who knows, maybe the MX1000 finally has micro-second power-up times or something, but I've been scammed before.
You also don't address the main point of my "Stupid Fashion Victim" claim, the "IT'S LASER!!!" hype. _That_ is the bullshit buzzword that annoys me the most.
As I've said, there is _no_ difference coherent light will make in a _mouse_. It's a small camera, the LED is just light for that camera. There is no bloody way using laser as a light will make the camera higher resolution, or you'd have a laser as a flash in all digital cameras so far.
It's just a buzzword so Logitech can charge twice as much for it. No more, no less.
" Translation: Our guys don't know how to set up and use a CLI, so I'll use anecdotal evidence to smack CLI's around a bit."
No, translation: yes, a lot of those self-proclaimed "gurus" and CLI-zealots aren't that good with it. In fact, they're outright worse than a newbie with a GUI. And there are a lot of those around: all arrogance and self-promotion, and little actual results to show for that self-proclaimed expertise.
As for anecdotal or non-anecdotal, the studies are real, and were done by Apple. Now if you're telling me that even a corporation like Apple, back in the day where they were a dominant player, couldn't find someone who can use the CLI right, it seems to me like you've just made my point.