I tend to agree. But good mentors of the kind you describe are in pretty short supply. It's far too common to see people get bawled out because they've made a mistake more than once. That's really off-putting.
Why would he do this? The whole point of a story is it has a beginning, a middle and an end. The original trilogy had that. Okay, so the beginning was a bit ropey: this ship appears from nowhere and starts blasting, and there's these two droids that we know little about. But that's how stories often work best - they throw you in at the deep end so it's exciting and you have to think and work out what's going on. Okay, the prequels fill out the early story a bit for the hardcore fans, but nobody in their right minds, new to the series, would sit through 6+ hours of dross just to understand what the secret plans R2 had were, or to have the "I am your father" surprise ruined for them.
But while the prequels just made the series a bit worse, the sequels would be awful. Even if you think the beginning of the middle trilogy requires some fleshing out, the end is very good. It's a final, definitive end: the bad guy is dead and the galaxy is on the road towards stability. But for gods' sake, we don't need to see it get there. Star Wars became a parody of itself a long time ago, and that's a crying shame because before it was spoilt it was very, very good.
I've wasted four hours of my life on I and II: I suppose I'll waste two more on the off-chance that Boba Fett does something cool, or that Jar-Jar meets a spectacularly bloody end, but that's it. No more. If III is of the same quality as I and II I can't believe Lucas has the nerve even to bring it out, now that LoTR has shown us what can be done with the SF/fantasy epic genre.
Could you really use direct sun as a backlight? At least with a monitor, if the sun gets on it I can shift it: it would suck to have to stop work because the sun is directly behind the window you're working on.
Amen, brother. I never use anything else these days. For me its killer features are its popup blocking and the "Adblock" extension. Surfing is so much more pleasant these days!
All of this, of course, doesn't apply to those who start their separate standalone projects even though there are dozens of other reasonably good projects to contribute to (and maybe rewrite some parts of). Freshmeat.net is full of examples.
Sometimes writing a whole piece of software is the best way to take your coding to the next level regardless of how many other similar applications there are. You wouldn't get the same benefit from just contributing to someone else's project. So don't flame these people, once they've finished their own project they'll probably have a lot more skill to contribute to someone else's. And you never know, one of those projects just might turn out to be the One True Notepad-style Application we've all been waiting for....
Hi premise seems to be that "OK is good enough". The point is, often it seems good enough until you see what a difference the improved version makes. Take Mozilla, for example. I'm not going to argue about the slowness of XUL - there are lean, fast Gecko-based browsers (Firebird, Galeon etc.) - but I do beg to differ with the rest of what he says. Yes, you may be advised to write a stylesheet now, but you only have to do it once for your entire website. That's, what, a couple of hours' work? The beauty is, you get that time back and then some. Every time you want to change your site's look you just alter the stylesheet. Bang! All pages updated as if by magic. And you don't even have to use them. It may be deprecated, but Mozilla hasn't stopped rendering all those old, crappy websites that he professes to like. (Though you can force it not to render <blink> - this is a feature;-))
All those little kluges: yes, they're important, but they could almost certainly have been written better if they'd been planned from the start. A re-write gives you the chance to do that.
In short, yes, sometimes it is worth starting again. After all, if it does all go wrong there's always the old version to fall back on.
It might make sense in some ways. From what I remember (aleit vaguely) one of the problems with the whole X / OpenGL thing is that while X was designed around network transparency OpenGL is almost by definition local to the machine that has the 3D card. So having X (the networky bit) on top of OpenGL (the local bit) might make sense.
Or maybe I've just been eating too much chilli and my brain has melted.
I agree with you that most distros still don't get things right at the install stage. They install way too much by default: if power users want that stuff they can turn it on later, whereas the dummies who don't want it probably don't know how to turn it off. As for hardware support I think you may be a bit out of touch. Certainly my Powershot A70 is supported fine: possibly something that was out last week isn't, but that isn't going to change any time soon, until developers start getting access to specs prior to product launches. I've never been able to afford bleeding-edge hardware (but neither can anyone except Joe Gamer, who probably has better reasons to avoid Linux than ease of use) but the only problems I've had with hardware were a Winmodem (there was a very alpha driver but it clashed with my soundcard) and WiFi (not really a problem, but I wanted to avoid certain chipsets with proprietary binary-only drivers, in fact Windows presented more of a problem in getting WiFi working properly).
Just to clarify: landing upside-down wasn't a failure mode because the lander could right itself by "flipping over" during deployment.
That's what I like to see: a practical use for Robot Wars technology:-) Does it also have a big spinning disk and a wedge design for upending other robo^H^H^H^H Martia... oh, never mind!
I must say I often agree with the/. consensus on civil rights when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, even freedom for the weirdos to keep running Windows if they so choose:-) But I've never seen the problem with being on CCTV. Maybe it's because England (specifically: Wales and Scotland aren't as bad) is such a damned overcrowded place that you don't have much privacy anyway. Like, USAians complain that the Appalachian Trail is getting crowded if they meet five other trekkers in a day. In the hills here it would be very rare to come across only five other people in a day - more like 200! What with all the crowding CCTV just seems like a technological extension of Neighbourhood Watch schemes, which in turn are an extension of gossipy old women watching what's going on in their street / other people's houses. When the police come round for me and start torturing me, then I'll start complaining about fascism. But they don't need CCTV to do that, it's not exactly hard for them to find out where I live. I don't know, maybe I'm just selling out to The Man, but there are things that worry me a lot more than CCTV.
Godel never showed that you can't come up with proofs any more. (Obviously - people still are proving things, even quite difficult ones like Fermat's Last Theorem.) His Incompleteness Theorem was more subtle than that: (IIRC) it said that you can't guarantee to either prove or disprove an arbitrary theorem. It might be possible to prove it or disprove it, but in the general case you can't guarantee it.
Think of it in terms of sets: you can quite easily decide that a Dodge Viper should go into the set containing all cars, and that an Athlon XP 2400+ should not. However you can't make a (correct) statement either way about whether the set containing all sets that do not contain themselves should contain itself or not.
Proofs are perfectly possible in certain cases, but thanks to self-referentiality you can't prove everything. You may not even be able to decide whether some statements are provable or not.
I'll mention a book that's been on my must-read list for a while now but I still haven't got round to: Douglas Hofstader's "Godel, Escher, Bach": apparently it's very good at helping to understand such things.
Demon comes from the greek word diamon, or, more accurately delta-iota-alpha-mu-omicron-nu, depending on how it's declined. That's singular nominative (i think).
Careful with all that Greek. You might be mistaken for Darl McBride...
Jeez... you know how skin can get stuck to frozen lamp posts at -30{\deg}C or so? Now just think for a minute about using a sex toy that's been cooled to 2.7mK... *wince*:-)
Why does only running every half hour defeat the point of a superfast train? You have to plan your day a little but it still means you spend much less time on the train than if it pootled along at 100kph.
It's not, it's a daemon. A friendly helper that lives inside your computer serving websites, answering your spam and being fingered. Really, if I had to put up with all that it'd be enough to make me grow horns and a tail!
I would prefer that non-Americans were treated as potential customers too. Otherwise, especially with rare stuff, they might have to remain reluctant criminals.
According to the DVD, Peter Jackson's place in London didn't have a decent connection, so they used iPods to get the data the last mile. My opinion of iPods went up when I saw that:-)
Though surely there's an argument that you'd have been better off with cisco.org for a personal homepage. I have no idea which way it would go, but I bet Cisco Corp's lawyers would play heavily on that. John Cisco's best chance of keeping the domain, I reckon, would be to set up as a small business called Cisco in a field absolutely nothing to do with computers - pre-folded origami kits, or as a reseller of picture tacks, something like that - register a trademark and use the domain for business purposes.
Am I the only one that thinks the TLD is actually a really good thing and should be used far more rigorously (only companies in.com,.biz,.co.uk etc, only TV stuff in.tv, and a better range of TLDs available so that there's an obvious one for personal homepages (I guess.info is okay but that seems really generic)?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've just hit on 2004's preferred LART: the clue-gavel!
They're just waiting for the judge to award them damages so they can send round Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemaar to collect ;-)
I tend to agree. But good mentors of the kind you describe are in pretty short supply. It's far too common to see people get bawled out because they've made a mistake more than once. That's really off-putting.
Why would he do this? The whole point of a story is it has a beginning, a middle and an end. The original trilogy had that. Okay, so the beginning was a bit ropey: this ship appears from nowhere and starts blasting, and there's these two droids that we know little about.
But that's how stories often work best - they throw you in at the deep end so it's exciting and you have to think and work out what's going on. Okay, the prequels fill out the early story a bit for the hardcore fans, but nobody in their right minds, new to the series, would sit through 6+ hours of dross just to understand what the secret plans R2 had were, or to have the "I am your father" surprise ruined for them.
But while the prequels just made the series a bit worse, the sequels would be awful. Even if you think the beginning of the middle trilogy requires some fleshing out, the end is very good. It's a final, definitive end: the bad guy is dead and the galaxy is on the road towards stability. But for gods' sake, we don't need to see it get there. Star Wars became a parody of itself a long time ago, and that's a crying shame because before it was spoilt it was very, very good.
I've wasted four hours of my life on I and II: I suppose I'll waste two more on the off-chance that Boba Fett does something cool, or that Jar-Jar meets a spectacularly bloody end, but that's it. No more. If III is of the same quality as I and II I can't believe Lucas has the nerve even to bring it out, now that LoTR has shown us what can be done with the SF/fantasy epic genre.
Could you really use direct sun as a backlight? At least with a monitor, if the sun gets on it I can shift it: it would suck to have to stop work because the sun is directly behind the window you're working on.
Amen, brother. I never use anything else these days. For me its killer features are its popup blocking and the "Adblock" extension. Surfing is so much more pleasant these days!
All of this, of course, doesn't apply to those who start their separate standalone projects even though there are dozens of other reasonably good projects to contribute to (and maybe rewrite some parts of). Freshmeat.net is full of examples.
Sometimes writing a whole piece of software is the best way to take your coding to the next level regardless of how many other similar applications there are. You wouldn't get the same benefit from just contributing to someone else's project. So don't flame these people, once they've finished their own project they'll probably have a lot more skill to contribute to someone else's. And you never know, one of those projects just might turn out to be the One True Notepad-style Application we've all been waiting for....
Hi premise seems to be that "OK is good enough". The point is, often it seems good enough until you see what a difference the improved version makes. Take Mozilla, for example. I'm not going to argue about the slowness of XUL - there are lean, fast Gecko-based browsers (Firebird, Galeon etc.) - but I do beg to differ with the rest of what he says. Yes, you may be advised to write a stylesheet now, but you only have to do it once for your entire website. That's, what, a couple of hours' work? The beauty is, you get that time back and then some. Every time you want to change your site's look you just alter the stylesheet. Bang! All pages updated as if by magic. And you don't even have to use them. It may be deprecated, but Mozilla hasn't stopped rendering all those old, crappy websites that he professes to like. (Though you can force it not to render <blink> - this is a feature ;-))
All those little kluges: yes, they're important, but they could almost certainly have been written better if they'd been planned from the start. A re-write gives you the chance to do that.
In short, yes, sometimes it is worth starting again. After all, if it does all go wrong there's always the old version to fall back on.
It might make sense in some ways. From what I remember (aleit vaguely) one of the problems with the whole X / OpenGL thing is that while X was designed around network transparency OpenGL is almost by definition local to the machine that has the 3D card. So having X (the networky bit) on top of OpenGL (the local bit) might make sense.
Or maybe I've just been eating too much chilli and my brain has melted.
Oh, yes. It'll be version number heaven.
I agree with you that most distros still don't get things right at the install stage. They install way too much by default: if power users want that stuff they can turn it on later, whereas the dummies who don't want it probably don't know how to turn it off.
As for hardware support I think you may be a bit out of touch. Certainly my Powershot A70 is supported fine: possibly something that was out last week isn't, but that isn't going to change any time soon, until developers start getting access to specs prior to product launches. I've never been able to afford bleeding-edge hardware (but neither can anyone except Joe Gamer, who probably has better reasons to avoid Linux than ease of use) but the only problems I've had with hardware were a Winmodem (there was a very alpha driver but it clashed with my soundcard) and WiFi (not really a problem, but I wanted to avoid certain chipsets with proprietary binary-only drivers, in fact Windows presented more of a problem in getting WiFi working properly).
You don't remember the enormous amount of bitching that went on when he told the kernel list to use BitKeeper, do you?
Just to clarify: landing upside-down wasn't a failure mode because the lander could right itself by "flipping over" during deployment.
:-)
That's what I like to see: a practical use for Robot Wars technology
Does it also have a big spinning disk and a wedge design for upending other robo^H^H^H^H Martia... oh, never mind!
I must say I often agree with the /. consensus on civil rights when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, even freedom for the weirdos to keep running Windows if they so choose :-)
But I've never seen the problem with being on CCTV. Maybe it's because England (specifically: Wales and Scotland aren't as bad) is such a damned overcrowded place that you don't have much privacy anyway. Like, USAians complain that the Appalachian Trail is getting crowded if they meet five other trekkers in a day. In the hills here it would be very rare to come across only five other people in a day - more like 200! What with all the crowding CCTV just seems like a technological extension of Neighbourhood Watch schemes, which in turn are an extension of gossipy old women watching what's going on in their street / other people's houses.
When the police come round for me and start torturing me, then I'll start complaining about fascism. But they don't need CCTV to do that, it's not exactly hard for them to find out where I live. I don't know, maybe I'm just selling out to The Man, but there are things that worry me a lot more than CCTV.
Godel never showed that you can't come up with proofs any more. (Obviously - people still are proving things, even quite difficult ones like Fermat's Last Theorem.)
His Incompleteness Theorem was more subtle than that: (IIRC) it said that you can't guarantee to either prove or disprove an arbitrary theorem. It might be possible to prove it or disprove it, but in the general case you can't guarantee it.
Think of it in terms of sets: you can quite easily decide that a Dodge Viper should go into the set containing all cars, and that an Athlon XP 2400+ should not. However you can't make a (correct) statement either way about whether the set containing all sets that do not contain themselves should contain itself or not.
Proofs are perfectly possible in certain cases, but thanks to self-referentiality you can't prove everything. You may not even be able to decide whether some statements are provable or not.
I'll mention a book that's been on my must-read list for a while now but I still haven't got round to: Douglas Hofstader's "Godel, Escher, Bach": apparently it's very good at helping to understand such things.
This sentence no verb.
Was it written by the scientists or the robot, though?
Oh come on. Surely they wouldn't forget to build in Asimov's Laws of Robotics?
Demon comes from the greek word diamon, or, more accurately delta-iota-alpha-mu-omicron-nu, depending on how it's declined. That's singular nominative (i think).
Careful with all that Greek. You might be mistaken for Darl McBride...
Jeez... you know how skin can get stuck to frozen lamp posts at -30{\deg}C or so? Now just think for a minute about using a sex toy that's been cooled to 2.7mK... *wince* :-)
Why does only running every half hour defeat the point of a superfast train? You have to plan your day a little but it still means you spend much less time on the train than if it pootled along at 100kph.
> It's a devil.
It's not, it's a daemon. A friendly helper that lives inside your computer serving websites, answering your spam and being fingered. Really, if I had to put up with all that it'd be enough to make me grow horns and a tail!
I would prefer that non-Americans were treated as potential customers too. Otherwise, especially with rare stuff, they might have to remain reluctant criminals.
According to the DVD, Peter Jackson's place in London didn't have a decent connection, so they used iPods to get the data the last mile. My opinion of iPods went up when I saw that :-)
Though surely there's an argument that you'd have been better off with cisco.org for a personal homepage. I have no idea which way it would go, but I bet Cisco Corp's lawyers would play heavily on that.
.com, .biz, .co.uk etc, only TV stuff in .tv, and a better range of TLDs available so that there's an obvious one for personal homepages (I guess .info is okay but that seems really generic)?
John Cisco's best chance of keeping the domain, I reckon, would be to set up as a small business called Cisco in a field absolutely nothing to do with computers - pre-folded origami kits, or as a reseller of picture tacks, something like that - register a trademark and use the domain for business purposes.
Am I the only one that thinks the TLD is actually a really good thing and should be used far more rigorously (only companies in
rm certainly is an unusual name, but come to think of it your other names are pretty unusual too, Mr. $HOME. :)