You misunderstand what he means by "getting past" Amdahl's Law. That wouldn't involve somehow changing the fact that only speeding up part of a program can only do so much to speed the whole program- it'd involve radically changing the proportion of various algorithms which can be parallelized. For instance, if somebody were to come up with a constructive proof that P=NC that'd certainly do the trick (though most people's guess is that that's false).
Yes, earlier ATI units had a tesselator, but the tesselator isn't DX11 compliant at all. In addition, none of the other DX11 features-esp. notable here are Shader Model 5 and Compute Shaders-have hardware support in ATI units below the 5xxx series.
"Several tools," yes. Most major applications, no. Try building OO.O from scratch (if you succeed, you should consider submitting your resume to Sun Dresden). And you run into interesting version dependency issues and all kinds of joyous fun pretty quickly; the distribution maintenance stuff is a complicated problem. Further, there's no reason for every end-user machine to have all the development libraries/sources/headers installed which are required for building apps which have lots of dependencies as do most realistic GUI and multimedia programs. And even if the build system is perfect and foolproof and everyone you'd hope to distribute your app to will have all the necessary dependencies, the waste of time having everyone compile a larger project themselves can be a very serious detriment to seeing your project actually adopted in the real world.
For distributing a 10 KLOC command-line tool, having all your Linux end-users compile it themselves or hope it gets in their distribution is a perfectly viable option. For a lot of other things it simply isn't, and you need to distribute binaries. Those would be the targets of this project.
A nifty image mashup application may be interesting research, and it may even be worth funding, but that doesn't make it basic research. The label "basic research" comes because it's exploring areas which are fundamental to a wider field of science.
It's still crappy with IE 8, but considerably less so. IE 8 has about half the JS speed of FF 3.0, while IE 7 was more like 1/8 as fast. With modern CPUs you can do quite a good deal with JS on IE 8 before you run into major performance problems.
In a republic, the rule of law prevails rather than the rule of despots. These courts and Newsom stepped miles outside of the bounds of their offices as set by federal and state constitutions to override the will of the people. The courts and the executive are not there to invent their own laws.
This is patently absurd. How do you mean marriage has been open to all citizens? What, precisely, did Massachusetts, Conneticut and Iowa do when they legalized same-sex marriage?
There never has been anything stopping someone who has homosexual desires or has acted on such desires from getting married- though they're unlikely to want to do so. If there were a class of people who couldn't marry then it would be a matter of civil rights. But it makes no more sense for people to complain that they can't "marry" another person of the same gender than it does for them to complain that they can't "marry" their dog or their inflatable doll. What Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa did was radically redefine a word that has a perfectly clear meaning. Why? To grant legitimacy, official recognition, and government subsidy and benefits to a relationship which under any accurate name is easily recognized as entirely different from and inimical to the kind of marriage which is the fundamental building block of society.
Again, if some group of people democratically decides that they want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing perversion, teaching it in their schools, and propagandizing each other about how wonderful sodomy really is, then to the extent that people are free to leave that society and other societies are insulated from that society's poor decision, all one can say is "may the best set of ideals win in the long run." But to have a few corrupt officials force it down the nation's throat by declaring that gender has nothing to do with marriage and to have anybody who holds other standards labeled as a dangerous "antiprogressive" is abominable. Nor will those pushing the homosexual agenda be content to browbeat and threaten those who don't agree with their views in their own country (as well as resort to actual violence when they don't get their way- see the violence against blacks and Mormons after prop 8 passed in California) - they want to push their agenda down the throats of every nation in the world.
There's a reason why the decline and implosion of societies from ancient times to the present day has been strongly correlated with the rise of homosexuality and other perversions.
It's simply a description of what is happening. If I were to use your language, I would say: The group of people that live in the United States is deciding that the civil institution of marriage should be open to all citizens. They are deciding that this liberty is more important than the 'moral' benefit some people derive from limiting this liberty of others.
First, the institution of marriage has always been open to all citizens. Homosexuals have always been just as free to get married as anybody else. But two men can no more marry each other in any meaningful sense than they can "marry" their dog or sheep. There's also no more reason for society to spend efforts legitimizing and subsidizing homosexual relations than bestial relations. The fact that anybody thinks this is about trampled "rights" is a sad commentary on how messed-up society has become in the past 15 years.
Second, it's not at all the case that the American people have decided that encouraging perversion and calling it "marriage" is preferable to living in a society where moral standards opposing perversion are upheld. The people have never voted this way anywhere. Instead you have activist judges rewriting the laws- overriding the ability of people and communities and states to set moral standards in Lawrence v. Texas and Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health. You have the mayor of San Francisco openly defying the law. Every time the homosexual cause advances an inch it is with fresh injustice and abuse of power by corrupt officials.
The idea that you can eliminate tyranny by providing a laundry list of rights is ridiculous in any case. The real way the Constitution was to protect against the tyranny of the majority was giving the federal government limited and separated powers while guaranteeing autonomy to the states. The Bill of Rights was tacked on because people were (rightfully) worried that the government would exceed these limits without going through the rigorous amendment process, which requires a real nationwide consensus rather than a simple majority (or the whims of Congress or an activist judiciary or the executive, all of which will if unchecked usurp power to further their own agenda). So they enshrined a few basic rights as a safety barrier (which have since been vastly misinterpreted). This has little to do with slogans about the tyranny of the majority which are bandied about today.
The ideal of liberty which the left touts no longer makes sense- liberty to do what? One person argues it's their "right" to have their sexual relationship with their same-sex partner or their sister or their sheep declared a marriage ("love is all that matters right?") and given the government's sanction, blessing, and benefits. There is no way to grant this person this "right" without making a society into a place which is hostile to any and all standards of morality which denounce these things. That person's "right" conflicts with everyone else's liberty to raise their children in an environment they would term "moral." How do you decide between these liberties?
The left would force the entire world against their will to choose the first because that's "progressive." Progress towards what? These and other similar steps are only progress towards a worldwide leveled-down society of irresponsibility and debauchery which will be perfectly miserable in its perfect lack of culture and morals. This is the real tyranny of the majority- where no one can choose to live in a different kind of society because society is a worldwide homogenized Hades.
The alternative is to allow for local autonomy and let small groups of people decide what kind of society they want to become and which liberties are important to them. This is what the Constitution provided for, in the "laboratory of the states" the GP referred to. Different societal ideals and standards could be tried in different states and communities. People could choose the kind of society they want to live in. If it's done right, then communities are responsible for their own survival, which provides a selection pressure which eliminates the worst societal ideas and hopefully helps the world make progress. [I think that if you took a group of messed-up criminals and put them in a situation where they had to form their own society and their own laws and become self-sufficient to be able to survive, most of them would turn out ok and in the long run the crime rate in their society would not be too different from that in the society from which the first criminals were exiled.]
To some extent the experiment happened naturally in previous ages of the world. Societies would rise to power when their energy, ideas, and ideals were fresh and would crumble under their own weight of degeneracy, decadence, hyperlitigiousness, and corruption as they decayed, making room for other societies and ideals to step in. The American experiment promised that this process could be streamlined by making the upheavals less bloody and violent and more democratic i.e. maximizing people's ability to choose what kind of society to live in. But the decline of local autonomy in favor of national and international government is ending that experiment. When this global society unravels under the pressure of its decadence, who will be left to pick up the pieces? Who will provide an alternative? Even if there is one, the upheaval will be enormously painful and cataclysmic.
What makes you think substituting meanings/definitions for terms isn't part of logic or proof? In doing a mathematical proof, substituting definitions/equivalent conditions is often half the battle.
Since progress has to be progress towards something,, an increase in something which is good, it makes no sense to talk, as so many over the past century and a half have, about universal progress unless we have a clear idea of what is good, i.e. unless we have answers to the moral questions.
He's not saying that anything is subjective (much of what enters into our modern (mis-)use of that term is the hardened byproduct of centuries of philosophical confusions since Descartes, a kind of dental tartar of thought- see Wittgenstein or Heidegger for more on that). He's complaining that society has (partly by dismissing questions about what is right or moral or just or true or beautiful as "subjective") given up on understanding what is good but persists in priding itself in being "progressive." I'd really recommend reading through the first two sections of Heretics and its conclusion (Gutenberg text here) for more on ideals, progress, and art.
Nor should our goal be "satisfying a larger portion of the population" - nobody's interested in becoming a nation of lotus-eaters, nor would we think much of an artist who churned out filth because people were buying it.
You ask "show me a work that is not, in fact, an improvement over something that has gone before" - but so many derivative works are obviously inferior to the original work that again I don't know what makes you ask that.
What makes you think progress in art is inevitable? What do you even mean by progress in art?
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children." --G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Looking at or listening to the so-called "art" that the past 50 years has produced and comparing it to that of previous eras leaves me anything but convinced that "improving on what has gone before" is something we're automatically entitled to, is a basic human right, or cannot be prevented.
IE 8 is more than twice as fast at JS as IE 7; though it's still quite a bit slower at JS than Gecko, Webkit, and Presto (Opera) based browsers it's quite competitive in other areas of performance. It passes Acid2, and while its score on Acid3 isn't terribly impressive, Acid3 does test a lot of things which aren't terribly important to web developers, and the comments from web developers I've seen generally say IE 8 gets rid of the biggest headaches in standards compliance and cross-browser compatibility. If that's not a solid improvement on IE 6-7 then I don't know what you're really looking for.
Perhaps you thought I was saying IE 8 is an improvement over FF etc? The people whose default browser will be changed by the critical update aren't FF/Chrome/etc users.
I'm glad they're pushing it out more aggressively as that means more people will get better standards support and less-awful javascript performance, but I can't help wondering why they haven't put some effort into making it possible to slipstream it into an XP install image. They say it's because "Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 do not currently offer a solution for slipstreaming Windows components, which are built using update.exe." If they consider it a critical update, then given the number of new XP installations which are still happening and the needs of those trying to roll this out to tons of computers, you'd think they'd find a way around that.
Linus said himself, that his biggest error with Linux was, that he made it monolithic.
[citation needed] All these years after the Tenenbaum-Torvalds debate Linus admitted his prof was right? You'd think that would have been in the news somewhere.
VLC is a really good project, and they've done a lot of great work. But for a project of this scale they're critically understaffed. They have millions of Windows users and they're in desperate need of more help to make the Windows port solid- it's not been in too great of shape since they ditched the wxWidgets GUI for QT.
I'm not saying we could just bolt that kind of thing on to the current way things are taught- you're definitely right that just pushing people through all of that would not be helpful, and we're in agreement about the need to teach logic at an early stage (though if by "mathematical logic" you mean not just first-order logic plus the basics of dealing with sets but what is generally taught in a mathematical logic course, i.e. the soundness, completeness, and incompleteness theorems etc., that might be a little deeper than is required for high school IMHO).
I also think that it's possible to have too much focus on the traditional prerequisites when (especially with some logic under their belt- a lot of people don't get the epsilon-delta stuff because they don't understand logic and proofs) some basic introduction to the fundamental ideas of calculus etc could profitably be done at a fairly early stage. A lot of students suffer through trig classes in high school without any motivation for what they're doing, promptly forget what they learn, and then end up relearning the material when they find that they need those identities for integration.
As to students' maturity levels, I think the immaturity we see in students today is fostered by adults. People will often live up to higher expectations and live down to lower expectations. The average 17-year-old a hundred years ago was probably more mature in most ways than the average 27-year-old is today.
On that last part I wrote 'people either saying "but you have to believe <insert dubious conclusion backed by one or two sociology studies>! It's SCIENCE!"' and forgot to escape the angle brackets.
Part of the problem behind the public perception of a conflict between science and religion is that, until the college level, science classes often teach a somewhat blind belief in a body of results rather than the real methods of science. One big reason why is because really understanding the basis of a lot of scientific advances requires a lot of math, and math education in the US is terribly lacking*. The result is that science is perceived by the average joe as a magic art or a black box that produces oracular truths**. It's then just a question of which oracles you place your trust in, which dogma you select.
Science and religion should be natural allies in the fight against the unthinking superstition, mob irrationality, cult of celebrity, irresponsibility, and self-deception which pervade our culture. People who are sincere in their faith should be able to see this- see where the real threat to faith comes from- and insist on more science education. Science makes thought responsible to the phenomena, forces us to face the limits of our own understanding, and stands apart from the opinions of the mob. When people face the fallacious arguments used by those pushing our society into moral decay, the difficulty of standing for truth when the tide of popular opinion seems to be turning against it, and the kind of sloppy thinking and tripe which often passes for education these days (the Sokal affair is a sad commentary on a lot of the modern university), things they've learned from doing real science can help them hold to their faith.
People from both sides of the spectrum - from the fundamentalist young-earth creationists trying to change the textbooks to Dawkins- who think that sound science and religion conflict understand neither science nor religion. To some extent that's excusable- one doesn't have to understand religion to be a good Christian/Jew/etc but rather one needs to love God and neighbor; one doesn't need to understand science to be a good scientist (cf. the quote attributed to Feynman saying philosophy of science is as relevant to scientists as ornithology is to birds) but rather one needs to press towards better mathematical models of data and of reality. But to criticize either from that kind of a standpoint is inexcusable. Not that I understand science and faith fully, but my experience with both and my study of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religious experience have helped me have some appreciation for both.
*That people get out of middle school without having had experience with logic and proofs is lamentable; that most people get out of high school without a good understanding of what derivatives and integrals are is unfortunate. We should aim to reach the point where the better students have the math they need for real scientific and engineering work- the basics of multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations- by the time they enter college.
**One way this view of science as a black box shows up which really annoys me: people either saying "but you have to believe ! It's SCIENCE!" or "evolution's just a theory" (depending on which oracle they trust).
They didn't talk about writing standards. Even if they had, that would have no relevance to whether or not they produce open-source drivers.
Are you sure you know what "hypocrite" means?
In any case, they're under no obligation to cater to you or the other few people who are unable or unwilling to use closed source drivers.
Don't get me wrong; I'd love to see open-source nV drivers and think that they and AMD/ATI are making a huge mistake by essentially allowing Intel to dictate the development of the revamped acceleration stack (GEM, UXA, DRI2, etc). nV should be providing input into this process instead of thinking that since their drivers don't use DRI that this isn't relevant to them. But I'm not under the delusion that they "owe me one" or that it's somehow "hypocritical" of them to use OpenCL just because they don't provide open source drivers.
Um, the framers of the Constitution knew that if it was static it wouldn't be adequate forever. That's why they included the amendment process. However, since the amendment process requires that you actually get a national consensus- which you need if your constitution is to be legit- abusers of power in all three branches of government have been fond of either ignoring the fact that their actions are unconstitutional or just reading the Constitution as "it says whatever I say it means." That's what the idea of a "living constitution" boils down to- a ploy to subtly force constitutional changes down people's throats without the required supermajority and to take power away from the people and the states and place it in the hands of despots in all three branches of the federal government.
A handful of the thousands of examples: the supposed right of Congress to grant copyright for unlimited times (Eldred v. Ashcroft) and the supposed "right to privacy" are obviously not constitutional. Clauses which are in the Constitution are abused by deliberately misconstruing them to mean something entirely different: the Commerce clause and General Welfare clause are abused to expand legislative power, while the restriction on "cruel and unusual punishment" (which is there to prevent singling out individuals to give them harsher penalties than everybody else, not to say the people of the individual states can't pass draconian laws) is abused to allow judges to legislate from the bench and import other nations' inclinations regarding punishment.
A while back I ordered a dvd writer on Newegg; when it arrived I found it didn't come with a SATA cable. Not wanting to do another Newegg order, pay a bunch for shipping, and wait another week before I could use the thing, I tried every shop with any connection to electronics or computers in the area- dozens of them. Nobody had a SATA cable in stock. The same thing happened some time later when I needed case screws. These kinds of things would have been extremely easy to find at a CompUSA back in the day; the few remaining stores never have a decent selection of anything. As you say, if it isn't there on hand for immediate use, there's no advantage over an online store.
Slashdot Mirror
That suggests a partial solution... red ink cartridge refills anyone?
You misunderstand what he means by "getting past" Amdahl's Law. That wouldn't involve somehow changing the fact that only speeding up part of a program can only do so much to speed the whole program- it'd involve radically changing the proportion of various algorithms which can be parallelized. For instance, if somebody were to come up with a constructive proof that P=NC that'd certainly do the trick (though most people's guess is that that's false).
Yes, earlier ATI units had a tesselator, but the tesselator isn't DX11 compliant at all. In addition, none of the other DX11 features-esp. notable here are Shader Model 5 and Compute Shaders-have hardware support in ATI units below the 5xxx series.
"Several tools," yes. Most major applications, no. Try building OO.O from scratch (if you succeed, you should consider submitting your resume to Sun Dresden). And you run into interesting version dependency issues and all kinds of joyous fun pretty quickly; the distribution maintenance stuff is a complicated problem. Further, there's no reason for every end-user machine to have all the development libraries/sources/headers installed which are required for building apps which have lots of dependencies as do most realistic GUI and multimedia programs. And even if the build system is perfect and foolproof and everyone you'd hope to distribute your app to will have all the necessary dependencies, the waste of time having everyone compile a larger project themselves can be a very serious detriment to seeing your project actually adopted in the real world.
For distributing a 10 KLOC command-line tool, having all your Linux end-users compile it themselves or hope it gets in their distribution is a perfectly viable option. For a lot of other things it simply isn't, and you need to distribute binaries. Those would be the targets of this project.
A nifty image mashup application may be interesting research, and it may even be worth funding, but that doesn't make it basic research. The label "basic research" comes because it's exploring areas which are fundamental to a wider field of science.
Of course there's a party kit. Instant party. Just add water.
It's still crappy with IE 8, but considerably less so. IE 8 has about half the JS speed of FF 3.0, while IE 7 was more like 1/8 as fast. With modern CPUs you can do quite a good deal with JS on IE 8 before you run into major performance problems.
In a republic, the rule of law prevails rather than the rule of despots. These courts and Newsom stepped miles outside of the bounds of their offices as set by federal and state constitutions to override the will of the people. The courts and the executive are not there to invent their own laws.
There never has been anything stopping someone who has homosexual desires or has acted on such desires from getting married- though they're unlikely to want to do so. If there were a class of people who couldn't marry then it would be a matter of civil rights. But it makes no more sense for people to complain that they can't "marry" another person of the same gender than it does for them to complain that they can't "marry" their dog or their inflatable doll. What Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa did was radically redefine a word that has a perfectly clear meaning. Why? To grant legitimacy, official recognition, and government subsidy and benefits to a relationship which under any accurate name is easily recognized as entirely different from and inimical to the kind of marriage which is the fundamental building block of society.
Again, if some group of people democratically decides that they want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing perversion, teaching it in their schools, and propagandizing each other about how wonderful sodomy really is, then to the extent that people are free to leave that society and other societies are insulated from that society's poor decision, all one can say is "may the best set of ideals win in the long run." But to have a few corrupt officials force it down the nation's throat by declaring that gender has nothing to do with marriage and to have anybody who holds other standards labeled as a dangerous "antiprogressive" is abominable. Nor will those pushing the homosexual agenda be content to browbeat and threaten those who don't agree with their views in their own country (as well as resort to actual violence when they don't get their way- see the violence against blacks and Mormons after prop 8 passed in California) - they want to push their agenda down the throats of every nation in the world.
There's a reason why the decline and implosion of societies from ancient times to the present day has been strongly correlated with the rise of homosexuality and other perversions.
First, the institution of marriage has always been open to all citizens. Homosexuals have always been just as free to get married as anybody else. But two men can no more marry each other in any meaningful sense than they can "marry" their dog or sheep. There's also no more reason for society to spend efforts legitimizing and subsidizing homosexual relations than bestial relations. The fact that anybody thinks this is about trampled "rights" is a sad commentary on how messed-up society has become in the past 15 years.
Second, it's not at all the case that the American people have decided that encouraging perversion and calling it "marriage" is preferable to living in a society where moral standards opposing perversion are upheld. The people have never voted this way anywhere. Instead you have activist judges rewriting the laws- overriding the ability of people and communities and states to set moral standards in Lawrence v. Texas and Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health. You have the mayor of San Francisco openly defying the law. Every time the homosexual cause advances an inch it is with fresh injustice and abuse of power by corrupt officials.
The idea that you can eliminate tyranny by providing a laundry list of rights is ridiculous in any case. The real way the Constitution was to protect against the tyranny of the majority was giving the federal government limited and separated powers while guaranteeing autonomy to the states. The Bill of Rights was tacked on because people were (rightfully) worried that the government would exceed these limits without going through the rigorous amendment process, which requires a real nationwide consensus rather than a simple majority (or the whims of Congress or an activist judiciary or the executive, all of which will if unchecked usurp power to further their own agenda). So they enshrined a few basic rights as a safety barrier (which have since been vastly misinterpreted). This has little to do with slogans about the tyranny of the majority which are bandied about today.
The ideal of liberty which the left touts no longer makes sense- liberty to do what? One person argues it's their "right" to have their sexual relationship with their same-sex partner or their sister or their sheep declared a marriage ("love is all that matters right?") and given the government's sanction, blessing, and benefits. There is no way to grant this person this "right" without making a society into a place which is hostile to any and all standards of morality which denounce these things. That person's "right" conflicts with everyone else's liberty to raise their children in an environment they would term "moral." How do you decide between these liberties?
The left would force the entire world against their will to choose the first because that's "progressive." Progress towards what? These and other similar steps are only progress towards a worldwide leveled-down society of irresponsibility and debauchery which will be perfectly miserable in its perfect lack of culture and morals. This is the real tyranny of the majority- where no one can choose to live in a different kind of society because society is a worldwide homogenized Hades.
The alternative is to allow for local autonomy and let small groups of people decide what kind of society they want to become and which liberties are important to them. This is what the Constitution provided for, in the "laboratory of the states" the GP referred to. Different societal ideals and standards could be tried in different states and communities. People could choose the kind of society they want to live in. If it's done right, then communities are responsible for their own survival, which provides a selection pressure which eliminates the worst societal ideas and hopefully helps the world make progress. [I think that if you took a group of messed-up criminals and put them in a situation where they had to form their own society and their own laws and become self-sufficient to be able to survive, most of them would turn out ok and in the long run the crime rate in their society would not be too different from that in the society from which the first criminals were exiled.]
To some extent the experiment happened naturally in previous ages of the world. Societies would rise to power when their energy, ideas, and ideals were fresh and would crumble under their own weight of degeneracy, decadence, hyperlitigiousness, and corruption as they decayed, making room for other societies and ideals to step in. The American experiment promised that this process could be streamlined by making the upheavals less bloody and violent and more democratic i.e. maximizing people's ability to choose what kind of society to live in. But the decline of local autonomy in favor of national and international government is ending that experiment. When this global society unravels under the pressure of its decadence, who will be left to pick up the pieces? Who will provide an alternative? Even if there is one, the upheaval will be enormously painful and cataclysmic.
What makes you think substituting meanings/definitions for terms isn't part of logic or proof? In doing a mathematical proof, substituting definitions/equivalent conditions is often half the battle.
Since progress has to be progress towards something,, an increase in something which is good, it makes no sense to talk, as so many over the past century and a half have, about universal progress unless we have a clear idea of what is good, i.e. unless we have answers to the moral questions.
He's not saying that anything is subjective (much of what enters into our modern (mis-)use of that term is the hardened byproduct of centuries of philosophical confusions since Descartes, a kind of dental tartar of thought- see Wittgenstein or Heidegger for more on that). He's complaining that society has (partly by dismissing questions about what is right or moral or just or true or beautiful as "subjective") given up on understanding what is good but persists in priding itself in being "progressive." I'd really recommend reading through the first two sections of Heretics and its conclusion (Gutenberg text here) for more on ideals, progress, and art.
Nor should our goal be "satisfying a larger portion of the population" - nobody's interested in becoming a nation of lotus-eaters, nor would we think much of an artist who churned out filth because people were buying it.
You ask "show me a work that is not, in fact, an improvement over something that has gone before" - but so many derivative works are obviously inferior to the original work that again I don't know what makes you ask that.
What makes you think progress in art is inevitable? What do you even mean by progress in art?
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children." --G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Looking at or listening to the so-called "art" that the past 50 years has produced and comparing it to that of previous eras leaves me anything but convinced that "improving on what has gone before" is something we're automatically entitled to, is a basic human right, or cannot be prevented.
is to nominate all of them for Cabinet posts.
IE 8 is more than twice as fast at JS as IE 7; though it's still quite a bit slower at JS than Gecko, Webkit, and Presto (Opera) based browsers it's quite competitive in other areas of performance. It passes Acid2, and while its score on Acid3 isn't terribly impressive, Acid3 does test a lot of things which aren't terribly important to web developers, and the comments from web developers I've seen generally say IE 8 gets rid of the biggest headaches in standards compliance and cross-browser compatibility. If that's not a solid improvement on IE 6-7 then I don't know what you're really looking for.
Perhaps you thought I was saying IE 8 is an improvement over FF etc? The people whose default browser will be changed by the critical update aren't FF/Chrome/etc users.
I'm glad they're pushing it out more aggressively as that means more people will get better standards support and less-awful javascript performance, but I can't help wondering why they haven't put some effort into making it possible to slipstream it into an XP install image. They say it's because "Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 do not currently offer a solution for slipstreaming Windows components, which are built using update.exe." If they consider it a critical update, then given the number of new XP installations which are still happening and the needs of those trying to roll this out to tons of computers, you'd think they'd find a way around that.
[citation needed]
All these years after the Tenenbaum-Torvalds debate Linus admitted his prof was right? You'd think that would have been in the news somewhere.
If you visit their home page you'll find that they do have a new logo for 1.0. I don't know that the bulldozer is an improvement though.
!loof lirpA
VLC is a really good project, and they've done a lot of great work. But for a project of this scale they're critically understaffed. They have millions of Windows users and they're in desperate need of more help to make the Windows port solid- it's not been in too great of shape since they ditched the wxWidgets GUI for QT.
I'm not saying we could just bolt that kind of thing on to the current way things are taught- you're definitely right that just pushing people through all of that would not be helpful, and we're in agreement about the need to teach logic at an early stage (though if by "mathematical logic" you mean not just first-order logic plus the basics of dealing with sets but what is generally taught in a mathematical logic course, i.e. the soundness, completeness, and incompleteness theorems etc., that might be a little deeper than is required for high school IMHO).
I also think that it's possible to have too much focus on the traditional prerequisites when (especially with some logic under their belt- a lot of people don't get the epsilon-delta stuff because they don't understand logic and proofs) some basic introduction to the fundamental ideas of calculus etc could profitably be done at a fairly early stage. A lot of students suffer through trig classes in high school without any motivation for what they're doing, promptly forget what they learn, and then end up relearning the material when they find that they need those identities for integration.
As to students' maturity levels, I think the immaturity we see in students today is fostered by adults. People will often live up to higher expectations and live down to lower expectations. The average 17-year-old a hundred years ago was probably more mature in most ways than the average 27-year-old is today.
Wow that was a longer rant than I thought. Time for bed.
On that last part I wrote 'people either saying "but you have to believe <insert dubious conclusion backed by one or two sociology studies>! It's SCIENCE!"' and forgot to escape the angle brackets.
Part of the problem behind the public perception of a conflict between science and religion is that, until the college level, science classes often teach a somewhat blind belief in a body of results rather than the real methods of science. One big reason why is because really understanding the basis of a lot of scientific advances requires a lot of math, and math education in the US is terribly lacking*. The result is that science is perceived by the average joe as a magic art or a black box that produces oracular truths**. It's then just a question of which oracles you place your trust in, which dogma you select.
Science and religion should be natural allies in the fight against the unthinking superstition, mob irrationality, cult of celebrity, irresponsibility, and self-deception which pervade our culture. People who are sincere in their faith should be able to see this- see where the real threat to faith comes from- and insist on more science education. Science makes thought responsible to the phenomena, forces us to face the limits of our own understanding, and stands apart from the opinions of the mob. When people face the fallacious arguments used by those pushing our society into moral decay, the difficulty of standing for truth when the tide of popular opinion seems to be turning against it, and the kind of sloppy thinking and tripe which often passes for education these days (the Sokal affair is a sad commentary on a lot of the modern university), things they've learned from doing real science can help them hold to their faith.
People from both sides of the spectrum - from the fundamentalist young-earth creationists trying to change the textbooks to Dawkins- who think that sound science and religion conflict understand neither science nor religion. To some extent that's excusable- one doesn't have to understand religion to be a good Christian/Jew/etc but rather one needs to love God and neighbor; one doesn't need to understand science to be a good scientist (cf. the quote attributed to Feynman saying philosophy of science is as relevant to scientists as ornithology is to birds) but rather one needs to press towards better mathematical models of data and of reality. But to criticize either from that kind of a standpoint is inexcusable. Not that I understand science and faith fully, but my experience with both and my study of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religious experience have helped me have some appreciation for both.
*That people get out of middle school without having had experience with logic and proofs is lamentable; that most people get out of high school without a good understanding of what derivatives and integrals are is unfortunate. We should aim to reach the point where the better students have the math they need for real scientific and engineering work- the basics of multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations- by the time they enter college.
**One way this view of science as a black box shows up which really annoys me: people either saying "but you have to believe ! It's SCIENCE!" or "evolution's just a theory" (depending on which oracle they trust).
They didn't talk about writing standards. Even if they had, that would have no relevance to whether or not they produce open-source drivers.
Are you sure you know what "hypocrite" means?
In any case, they're under no obligation to cater to you or the other few people who are unable or unwilling to use closed source drivers.
Don't get me wrong; I'd love to see open-source nV drivers and think that they and AMD/ATI are making a huge mistake by essentially allowing Intel to dictate the development of the revamped acceleration stack (GEM, UXA, DRI2, etc). nV should be providing input into this process instead of thinking that since their drivers don't use DRI that this isn't relevant to them. But I'm not under the delusion that they "owe me one" or that it's somehow "hypocritical" of them to use OpenCL just because they don't provide open source drivers.
Um, the framers of the Constitution knew that if it was static it wouldn't be adequate forever. That's why they included the amendment process. However, since the amendment process requires that you actually get a national consensus- which you need if your constitution is to be legit- abusers of power in all three branches of government have been fond of either ignoring the fact that their actions are unconstitutional or just reading the Constitution as "it says whatever I say it means." That's what the idea of a "living constitution" boils down to- a ploy to subtly force constitutional changes down people's throats without the required supermajority and to take power away from the people and the states and place it in the hands of despots in all three branches of the federal government.
A handful of the thousands of examples: the supposed right of Congress to grant copyright for unlimited times (Eldred v. Ashcroft) and the supposed "right to privacy" are obviously not constitutional. Clauses which are in the Constitution are abused by deliberately misconstruing them to mean something entirely different: the Commerce clause and General Welfare clause are abused to expand legislative power, while the restriction on "cruel and unusual punishment" (which is there to prevent singling out individuals to give them harsher penalties than everybody else, not to say the people of the individual states can't pass draconian laws) is abused to allow judges to legislate from the bench and import other nations' inclinations regarding punishment.
A while back I ordered a dvd writer on Newegg; when it arrived I found it didn't come with a SATA cable. Not wanting to do another Newegg order, pay a bunch for shipping, and wait another week before I could use the thing, I tried every shop with any connection to electronics or computers in the area- dozens of them. Nobody had a SATA cable in stock. The same thing happened some time later when I needed case screws. These kinds of things would have been extremely easy to find at a CompUSA back in the day; the few remaining stores never have a decent selection of anything. As you say, if it isn't there on hand for immediate use, there's no advantage over an online store.