I've had the same experience. Of those students that do try to code, many complain that I'm not showing them how to write games or GUIs or flashy stuff. I think Logo's and UCSD Pascal's early emphasis on turtle graphics was the right idea.
The other reason is that GPL can be more business friendly than the BSD license.
That doesn't explain the pre-commercialization days of Linux. Is the GPL really more business friendly than the BSD license for a one man firm ten years ago? Hardly! They weren't worried about proprietary companies "stealing" their shell scripts because too many other one-man Linux outfits were "stealing" it instead!
Instead Linux's popularity can be attributed to two other things, in my opinion. First, BSD got bushwhacked by AT&T/USL. Second, Linux required integrating hundreds of different "parts", which resulted in commercial and semi-commercial firms providing that service, which in turn resulted in *marketing*.
A third of the environmentalists I know own beater that gets 20mpgo (miles per gallon of oil). These tend to be the anti-capitalist Berkeley alumni. Another third all drive SUVs. Seriously! They tend to be the soccer moms. The remaining third actually own clean and non-hypocritical vehicles, and as such aren't much different from the rest of us.
You're argument can be applied to everything. I just bought a Dr. Pepper at Safeway. What a ripoff! I should be able to buy my Dr. Pepper direct from the bottler! Hell, eliminate the bottler and let me buy it straight from the corporate showroom in Texas!
The states rights they were fighting for wasn't slavery so much, as it was the right to seceed. The slavery may have caused the secession, but it was the secession that the war was fought over. Lincoln didn't free the slaves until after the war was well under way.
What I was trying to say is that a FPGA isn't everything. At my company we're rolling out a new board of a product, and with four guys working on the hardware, only ONE of them is programming the FPGA.
A new open source video card would be similar. No matter how good your Verilog developer was, you would still need someone to lay out the board for you. Theoretically you could have an FPGA and some RAM alone on a board with an AGP or PCI bus on one end and a DVI connector on the other. But in practice it takes much more than that.
The people complaining about X are those people who don't understand what they're talking about. The biggest things holding back X performance aren't their favorite pet peeves like network connectivity, usermode graphics, or code that older than they are, but rather the lack of good drivers and system configuration.
I'm sure this post will get lost in deluge of posts here, but I'll post it anyway.
Perhaps the real problem that we don't have a separation of school and state? If there were no government schools, then there would be a problem with this, or with students voluntarily praying, or holding religious baccalaureates for those that want them, or saying the pledge of allegience, or having a creche on the lawn, or anything like that. If you don't want your kid taught evolution|creationism, you send him to a school that teaches creationism|evolution instead.
There's going to be some disagreements on how to finance non-government schools, but those disagreements are going to inconsequential compared to the current hate-generating disagreements over religion.
Re:The performance of compiled code
on
A Review of GCC 4.0
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you have a choice of algorithms, then of course use the better algorithm. But for most of the day-to-day code we deal with, we don't have that choice, because we're not dealing with code that has any grand algorithms to it. For example, if I'm writing a GUI frontend to a command line app, what are my choices of algorithms? Not much.
In my real life coding work, the places where algorithm efficiency makes a difference are far outweighed by those places that don't. And of those places that do make a difference, the performance is rarely a critical need. For example, I just coded up some RAMDAC lookup tables, and a difference of algorithm would make a huge difference in efficiency. But this particular routine was triggered by a user event (clicking a button in a config dialog), so that my dogslow but highly readable/understandable algorithm wasn't a bottleneck for anything. In this case tweaking the compiler settings would have given a 5% boost to everything, but a change in algorithm would only have given a 1/10 second boost for an event that would happen approximately once a week or less.
I have to doubt your $10,000 figure. Please give me a link to the AAA sources. My costs, which include payments, fuel and insurance, came out to $4500 last year. That was for a NEW car.
Oh, someone got out of the wrong side of bed this morning!
1) Our rising gas prices are still far cheaper than European gas prices, because we don't have a huge tax on it. Automobile owners have it good in the US, relatively speaking.
2) I don't blame your insurance company for jacking your rates if you make claims on something as minor a fender dings. Besides, it's still cheaper than European insurance prices (do we see a pattern here?)
3) If you know the repair was unnecessary, then demand, and get, your money back. Duh. You did ask for your original parts back, didn't you? Didn't you?
4) Yes, in some areas delays are real. But I still find it faster to get somewhere by car then by train... if I don't wait until rush hour before starting my trip.
5) The DMV sucks. Truly. But your examples vary widely from state to state. In fact, I can't even think of a state that suspends licenses due to unmowed lawns (please refresh my memory).
Overall, automobiles give me more convenience and practical independence than trains or airplanes. But everything is relative. If I lived in the middle of New York City, I wouldn't find a car convenient. But living in the middle of the San Fransisco penninsula, even with its extraordinary traffic, I still find the car more convenient.
I thought it was a great movie as well. The problem most Slashdotters had is that they were expecting either an unparalled cinematic masterpiece or a dry recitation of the books, and several of them seemed to want both at the same time.
I've listened to the radio broadcasts, read the books, seen the television series, and played the computer game. This movie can stand proudly with its cheesy brethren.
What does the H2G2 say about towels? Essential, that they're important. That's what Ford tells Arthur. So what? In the books and television series no one really uses their towel. But in the movie they do.
Sheesh. Next you're going to be bitching about the lack of digital watches.
If I had mod points I would. Sigh. People ranting about the mediocrity of the proletariet in movie reviews should be forced to watch "XXX: State of the Union" repeatedly until their brains explode.
He also mugs the camera. When our intrepid heroes point over to the picture of the Galactic president, there's Old Marvin, leaning into the shot. Hah!
Other good stuff from the television series: Simon Jones who played the original Arthur Dent, plays the Magrathean announcer; and the music for the "second" title sequence, was from the series.
Let me guess, you're one of those guys still pissed that Peter Jackson cut out all the extended Elvish poetry readings, even though it would have made nine hours of film into thirty.
This movie is a <gasp> movie. It's a different medium than a book, or even a radio or television series. People (other than you) aren't going to put up with two hours of a Stephen Fry monologue.
Who cares that they left out "mostly harmless"? If they need it they can put it in the next movie while they're sitting around waiting for their dinner to nip off and shoot itself in the head.
The movie had a G rating? Even with the sawing off of Zaphod's head, and the attempted sawing off of Arthur's skull? Maybe I just grew up in a sheltered pre-Doom3 world, but if I had seen that latter scene when I was six years old, I would have had nightmares for a week.
You didn't say it directly, but your first post certainly implied it.
From a cursory look, that simply turns off anti-aliasing for the following display drawings. If the Konqueror guys need help were to turn off anti-aliasing, maybe they should read the KDokumentation.
Maybe your quote just has so much sarcasm that I misunderstood what you meant. But I don't think so. You meant to imply that konqueror guys were so stupid they needed Apple's help to turn off anti-aliasing for drawings. This "help" is a patch. How should one conclude anything other than you don't want them to use a patch?
That comment is way too verbose. We're talking about technically literate people here, not kindergartners expecting to find a full shell tutorial in their.bashrc. Sheesh.
Your basic idea is good, but keep that comment down to one line: "set the search path". Otherwise your users will think you're overcompensating for something.
In your stereotypical Slashdot arrogance, you completely missed every available point. I don't know why you want the KDE developers to ignore this patch just because it happens to be simple, but it's a stupid attitude. It's almost like you think they could reimplement the fix faster than they could apply the patch. Well if the patch is so bloody simple, then why did it take so long for Apple to discover it? Maybe the Apple developers should be the ones reading the "KDokumentation" instead.
Have you even read the quote in your post? Have you? It says, and I requote: "KHTML became a lot, lot better as a result of patches we merged from Apple folks." Patches are GOOD things to have, not superflous fluff developers should ignore because one happens to be simple enough for your feeble brain to comprehend.
Sheesh, yesterday some guy tells me not to comment code, and today you're telling me not to accept patches. I swear the programming aptitude of Slashdot is diminishing by the minute...
We all would like cheaper computer, and I'm sure these will do a lot of good where they're going. But what a lot of third world nations need more than cheap computers, is a sane economy. To that you need to eliminate the corrupt politics, excessive taxes and barriers to trade (both internally and externally). Yes, the US and Europe have these problems as well, but the reason we're not third world is because we don't have them in excess.
Mr. Jackson and Mrs. Stuart are not that important in the grand scheme of things, but the Pope is. That's because he's the head of the largest and most influential denomination of the largest and most influential religion in the world. I would have to check a current almanac, but I suspect he's a leader to more people than any other leader in the world.
Just because he doesn't have armies and navies, or platinum albums, or a line of towels at KMart, doesn't make him unimportant. He may not be important to you, but he's important to half a billion people or more. That's significant.
If he's only a tenth as influential as his predecessor was, his election is more than newsworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the same experience. Of those students that do try to code, many complain that I'm not showing them how to write games or GUIs or flashy stuff. I think Logo's and UCSD Pascal's early emphasis on turtle graphics was the right idea.
The other reason is that GPL can be more business friendly than the BSD license.
That doesn't explain the pre-commercialization days of Linux. Is the GPL really more business friendly than the BSD license for a one man firm ten years ago? Hardly! They weren't worried about proprietary companies "stealing" their shell scripts because too many other one-man Linux outfits were "stealing" it instead!
Instead Linux's popularity can be attributed to two other things, in my opinion. First, BSD got bushwhacked by AT&T/USL. Second, Linux required integrating hundreds of different "parts", which resulted in commercial and semi-commercial firms providing that service, which in turn resulted in *marketing*.
A third of the environmentalists I know own beater that gets 20mpgo (miles per gallon of oil). These tend to be the anti-capitalist Berkeley alumni. Another third all drive SUVs. Seriously! They tend to be the soccer moms. The remaining third actually own clean and non-hypocritical vehicles, and as such aren't much different from the rest of us.
</slam>
You're argument can be applied to everything. I just bought a Dr. Pepper at Safeway. What a ripoff! I should be able to buy my Dr. Pepper direct from the bottler! Hell, eliminate the bottler and let me buy it straight from the corporate showroom in Texas!
The left never lets the facts get in the way of a good rant.
The states rights they were fighting for wasn't slavery so much, as it was the right to seceed. The slavery may have caused the secession, but it was the secession that the war was fought over. Lincoln didn't free the slaves until after the war was well under way.
What I was trying to say is that a FPGA isn't everything. At my company we're rolling out a new board of a product, and with four guys working on the hardware, only ONE of them is programming the FPGA.
A new open source video card would be similar. No matter how good your Verilog developer was, you would still need someone to lay out the board for you. Theoretically you could have an FPGA and some RAM alone on a board with an AGP or PCI bus on one end and a DVI connector on the other. But in practice it takes much more than that.
You need more than Verilog and a FPGA. You can't take a video card and make it an ethernet card by reprogramming a Xilinx chip, for example.
Hear, hear!
The people complaining about X are those people who don't understand what they're talking about. The biggest things holding back X performance aren't their favorite pet peeves like network connectivity, usermode graphics, or code that older than they are, but rather the lack of good drivers and system configuration.
I'm sure this post will get lost in deluge of posts here, but I'll post it anyway.
Perhaps the real problem that we don't have a separation of school and state? If there were no government schools, then there would be a problem with this, or with students voluntarily praying, or holding religious baccalaureates for those that want them, or saying the pledge of allegience, or having a creche on the lawn, or anything like that. If you don't want your kid taught evolution|creationism, you send him to a school that teaches creationism|evolution instead.
There's going to be some disagreements on how to finance non-government schools, but those disagreements are going to inconsequential compared to the current hate-generating disagreements over religion.
If you have a choice of algorithms, then of course use the better algorithm. But for most of the day-to-day code we deal with, we don't have that choice, because we're not dealing with code that has any grand algorithms to it. For example, if I'm writing a GUI frontend to a command line app, what are my choices of algorithms? Not much.
In my real life coding work, the places where algorithm efficiency makes a difference are far outweighed by those places that don't. And of those places that do make a difference, the performance is rarely a critical need. For example, I just coded up some RAMDAC lookup tables, and a difference of algorithm would make a huge difference in efficiency. But this particular routine was triggered by a user event (clicking a button in a config dialog), so that my dogslow but highly readable/understandable algorithm wasn't a bottleneck for anything. In this case tweaking the compiler settings would have given a 5% boost to everything, but a change in algorithm would only have given a 1/10 second boost for an event that would happen approximately once a week or less.
I have to doubt your $10,000 figure. Please give me a link to the AAA sources. My costs, which include payments, fuel and insurance, came out to $4500 last year. That was for a NEW car.
Oh, someone got out of the wrong side of bed this morning!
1) Our rising gas prices are still far cheaper than European gas prices, because we don't have a huge tax on it. Automobile owners have it good in the US, relatively speaking.
2) I don't blame your insurance company for jacking your rates if you make claims on something as minor a fender dings. Besides, it's still cheaper than European insurance prices (do we see a pattern here?)
3) If you know the repair was unnecessary, then demand, and get, your money back. Duh. You did ask for your original parts back, didn't you? Didn't you?
4) Yes, in some areas delays are real. But I still find it faster to get somewhere by car then by train... if I don't wait until rush hour before starting my trip.
5) The DMV sucks. Truly. But your examples vary widely from state to state. In fact, I can't even think of a state that suspends licenses due to unmowed lawns (please refresh my memory).
Overall, automobiles give me more convenience and practical independence than trains or airplanes. But everything is relative. If I lived in the middle of New York City, I wouldn't find a car convenient. But living in the middle of the San Fransisco penninsula, even with its extraordinary traffic, I still find the car more convenient.
I thought it was a great movie as well. The problem most Slashdotters had is that they were expecting either an unparalled cinematic masterpiece or a dry recitation of the books, and several of them seemed to want both at the same time.
I've listened to the radio broadcasts, read the books, seen the television series, and played the computer game. This movie can stand proudly with its cheesy brethren.
What does the H2G2 say about towels? Essential, that they're important. That's what Ford tells Arthur. So what? In the books and television series no one really uses their towel. But in the movie they do.
Sheesh. Next you're going to be bitching about the lack of digital watches.
If I had mod points I would. Sigh. People ranting about the mediocrity of the proletariet in movie reviews should be forced to watch "XXX: State of the Union" repeatedly until their brains explode.
He also mugs the camera. When our intrepid heroes point over to the picture of the Galactic president, there's Old Marvin, leaning into the shot. Hah!
Other good stuff from the television series: Simon Jones who played the original Arthur Dent, plays the Magrathean announcer; and the music for the "second" title sequence, was from the series.
Let me guess, you're one of those guys still pissed that Peter Jackson cut out all the extended Elvish poetry readings, even though it would have made nine hours of film into thirty.
This movie is a <gasp> movie. It's a different medium than a book, or even a radio or television series. People (other than you) aren't going to put up with two hours of a Stephen Fry monologue.
Who cares that they left out "mostly harmless"? If they need it they can put it in the next movie while they're sitting around waiting for their dinner to nip off and shoot itself in the head.
The movie had a G rating? Even with the sawing off of Zaphod's head, and the attempted sawing off of Arthur's skull? Maybe I just grew up in a sheltered pre-Doom3 world, but if I had seen that latter scene when I was six years old, I would have had nightmares for a week.
Maybe your quote just has so much sarcasm that I misunderstood what you meant. But I don't think so. You meant to imply that konqueror guys were so stupid they needed Apple's help to turn off anti-aliasing for drawings. This "help" is a patch. How should one conclude anything other than you don't want them to use a patch?
But important to the point of deserving nearly 100% of the world news media for more than two weeks?
A gross exaggeration. Try to stay in the same reality as the rest of us.
That comment is way too verbose. We're talking about technically literate people here, not kindergartners expecting to find a full shell tutorial in their .bashrc. Sheesh.
Your basic idea is good, but keep that comment down to one line: "set the search path". Otherwise your users will think you're overcompensating for something.
In your stereotypical Slashdot arrogance, you completely missed every available point. I don't know why you want the KDE developers to ignore this patch just because it happens to be simple, but it's a stupid attitude. It's almost like you think they could reimplement the fix faster than they could apply the patch. Well if the patch is so bloody simple, then why did it take so long for Apple to discover it? Maybe the Apple developers should be the ones reading the "KDokumentation" instead.
Have you even read the quote in your post? Have you? It says, and I requote: "KHTML became a lot, lot better as a result of patches we merged from Apple folks." Patches are GOOD things to have, not superflous fluff developers should ignore because one happens to be simple enough for your feeble brain to comprehend.
Sheesh, yesterday some guy tells me not to comment code, and today you're telling me not to accept patches. I swear the programming aptitude of Slashdot is diminishing by the minute...
We all would like cheaper computer, and I'm sure these will do a lot of good where they're going. But what a lot of third world nations need more than cheap computers, is a sane economy. To that you need to eliminate the corrupt politics, excessive taxes and barriers to trade (both internally and externally). Yes, the US and Europe have these problems as well, but the reason we're not third world is because we don't have them in excess.
Mr. Jackson and Mrs. Stuart are not that important in the grand scheme of things, but the Pope is. That's because he's the head of the largest and most influential denomination of the largest and most influential religion in the world. I would have to check a current almanac, but I suspect he's a leader to more people than any other leader in the world.
Just because he doesn't have armies and navies, or platinum albums, or a line of towels at KMart, doesn't make him unimportant. He may not be important to you, but he's important to half a billion people or more. That's significant.
If he's only a tenth as influential as his predecessor was, his election is more than newsworthy.