If LibreOffice can read and write MS Office documents, it's also looking to replace MS Office installations. If the scope of interoperability is limited to software that doesn't compete with the original, that would be a mess.
No, LibreOffice interoperates because you can transfer files both ways, and a user of one can collaborate with a user of the other. Dalvik does not interoperate with the JVM, as they will not run and load the same programmes. This is Oracle's point -- they are using JVM technology to their advantage without interoperating. Of course, this is irrelevant if Google has a license to use Java source code any way they like... isn't Java GPL...?
We need to stop the dangerous idea that interfaces can be copyrighted
Various cases have established the principle that interface copyright cannot hamper interoperability -- this is good, right? Now, Google aped the JVM nit for interoperability, but just to reduce their own effort in creating a complete system, and this led to the creation of code that is not JVM compatible, and won't normally run JVM code. Embrace and extend...
It's not about language -- Dalvik is a full-blown virtual machine, based on the JVM architecture. Using a different language wouldn't get them away from the lawsuit, as they'd still be compiling to the Dalvik VM as target architecture.
At the risk of strawmanning, there's a heck of a lot of variety in the production of bread worldwide, and yet most bread is made using certain basic ingredients: wheat, water and yeast. There are some that use other grains, and there are some that use other raising agents, so wheat and yeast aren't universals. But if we abstract away, we have "starchy grain" as a universal, and "raising agent". Chimsky failed to find universals because he was operating too near the surface -- but that's not his fault, as the area of research was only starting to open up, and people of his time didn't understand the brain well enough. Chomsky was looking for a single, unitary "language acquisition device", while it now looks as though language is a complex interaction of multiple parts of the brain.
The point about the Mandarin speakers is valid, though. We in the west are culturally primed to associate "up" with rising tones -- it's right there in the name "rising tones"... not to mention "high notes", so declaring a "universal" out of what could just be a shared cultural artefact is highly premature.
I think it's an intriguing study, and I use the word "intriguing" to mean it makes you thi, but provides absolutely no answers. The article mentions kiko-booba, but I've never seen anyone go into detail on that one. I would be interested to hear whether it has the same effect on illiterate peoples.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office. For a large number of office workers, Office is a collaboration tool. A document saved by one user and emailed to another, then edited and returned, needs to be able to preserve all of the formatting. Users care a *lot* about formatting, and if it gets messed up, they lose confidence in the software.
Office's formatting algorithms are abominable, and it's no surprise that LibreOffice can't mimic them perfectly. And users really, really need to apply a lot less formatting and focus instead on content.
This is why Microsoft Office is the problem and LibreOffice is not the solution. Word's "format as you go along" approach is an inefficient workflow, but the software actively encourages people to work that way. LibreOffice has a much better model for handling content and formatting at the file level, but the UI still presents an MS Office workflow. If there was an alternative UI that made content+semantic markup smooth and easy with formatting by specifying tag meaning done later, there would be something to sell to businesses: improved worker productivity.
I'm certainly not saying there's not a spectrum between pure "play" games and pure "badges" games -- there is. In traditional FPSes, you got access to better weapons as you progressed, but that was more than offset by the bad guys getting more difficult to beat, so you still had to improve as a player. Perhaps player skill has plateaued and we're all as good as we'll ever be until a sufficiently novel paradigm is invented. Role-playing games, on the other hand, typically don't encourage mastery, as mere XP farming will win any fight. That's why I got bored of playing Final Fantasy games on my iPad.
Of course the hash won't be bulletproof, but if nothing else, the picture will degrade with every kludge to get it to fail the hashing. But if the hash list is kept among the filterers, how do you know that you need to kludge it? And even if you do, how do you know what's enough to cheat the filter?
To the people involved in this iniciative, indecent material filtering is no "goose that lays golden eggs" -- it's an ingoing cost which generates no profit. But they don't have the power to take any action more meaningful than simply improving the efficiency of their filtering. Cooperation with rivals makes perfect sense, as there's no "commercial advantage" to be gained.
Gaming arcades had to make a game, and playing the game had to be fun, and you had to be able to get bette with practise or you wouldn't come back. Microtransaction games often have no "game" at all -- no mechanics to master, no real choices to make. With an arcade machine, you have to decide to start every time you come back to the machine, but with microtransaction games, you only choose to start once and all your progress is saved in perpetuity -- but you do have to decide to stop.
If you think about it, ALL games are designed to be addictive. The sort of pleasure/reward sensations are really no different between paid, free, free-to-play, buy-to-play, or any other variation. Instead, what's different is that the microtransaction based free-to-play games purposefully slow down the effort/reward ratio over time, and force the player to either slog through longer hours of gameplay with fewer rewards per hour spent, with the temptation of being able to increase that ratio with real money.
There is a fundamental difference between traditional games and pure microtransaction harvesters. And the problem is...
The problem is that the microtransaction model encourages developers to negatively impact these core game mechanics.
If by "negatively impact", you mean "completely eliminates", then you're right, because there are two types of pschological "reward" in gaming. Microtransactions fulfill our desire for recognition and completeness, and they are, as the guys at Extra Credits say, pur Skinner-boxing (I would link, but the stupid iPad would wipe this message if I tried to find another webpage).
Traditional gaming rewards in a more subtle level -- mastery of mechanics gets you into an almost meditative "flow" state during play, and improved mastery means longer unbroken sessions of flow, which is exhilarating (even more so when the play is physical and high-speed -- eg skiing). Early computer games didn't do a lot of recognition, with the waves in Space Invaders, for example, being identical apart from their speed. The next step was to include some visual confirmation of progression, and Centipede did that by changing colour between stages, whereas PacMan relied on stage numbers and occassional interstitial animations, and Donkey Kong had multiple different screens. Then we had progression through a combination of these (Pengo had the baddies change colour on each level, accompanied with interstitial screens on the same every-third-level schedule as PacMan, Ms PacMan added multiple maps).
As I say, these supported the mastery of mechanics by making explicit how much you had improved. I'm a language hobbyist, and my early experience of language at school was frustration at a perceived lack of progress, which was demotivating. As it turned out, I was progressing relatively fast, but I just couldn't see it at the time.
But microtransactions often completely replace the core mechanics, and there is nothing to learn, nothing to master. There is no lasting flow state, just momentary shots of neurochemicals when you get a stupid fanfare noise on the screen and hit the next arbitrary milestone
There were no communists involved in the cold war. Communism puts the means of production in the hands of the commune. USSR stood for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- not communist. The USSR was a case of state socialism, where the state represents society and owns the means of production. True communism puts ownership and decision-making powers at a local level, which was only ever tried for a brief spell in Spain before the fascist coup overthrew the democratically elected anarchists and communists.
Isn't this the hallmark of socialism where everyone gets the same benefits regardless of contribution?
No. Not even close.
The defining characteristic of socialism is that the means of production is owned by society. In this case, we have a privately held company who own the means of production, which is the hallmark of capitalism. In fact, the single fundamental difference between capitalism, socialism and communism is the model of ownership. Beyond that, they all share the same economic theory and ideas of industrial efficiency based on division of labour, specialisation of skills and the application of automation.
There is no more "money for nothing" in socialist theory than in capitalist theory, because a capitalist derives profit not from his work, but as dividends from the businesses his capital has been invested in. Now imagine that there was one company in the world, and everybody in the world held an equal share in it. Then everyone gets dividends. That's pure socialism. Notice that this says absolutely nothing about the pay structure within the company. In a capitalist society, a tiny number of people can acrue enough wealth to live off investments, but in a socialist society, no-one is going to live off dividends alone. Note how some countries have benefits that are barely livable, to encourage people into work. Some societies chose to provide livable benefits to the weak and vulnerable, but that is a natural human choice, and not a defining feature of socialism.
The report tells us that most developers make less than $500 / month. This is clearly not a sustainable income (except in a few countries) so we must suppose that these developers are not in it as a way of making a living. They must have some other means of earning a crust if they aren't still living with one or more parents.
That's an unsafe supposition. I've known several people who dedicated themselves for months fulltime to developing apps that in the end made so little money that they didn't cover the Apple developers' programme membership fees. It's a feature of every "goldrush" that for every one person who hits the motherlode, there are dozens of others who bankrupted themselves dynamiting ton after ton of worthless rock.
Those who can contribute significant, above-and-beyond value naturally feel that people should be rewarded in proportion to their contributions.
This is only natural. However, this ends up leading to promotions for people whose "above-and-beyond" contribution means working late frequently and getting the work/life balance out of whack. This can end up with a de facto situation that anyone who works damn hard during their allotted hours but never stays late is clocked as "underperforming". The CEO's point was to release that tension and expectation, freeing up employees to have proper downtime without stressing over perceptions.
The problem is that it is too late to implement in this case -- if you look at the complaints of exiting staff members, you'll see that many of them explicitly mention he fact that they worked long hours to get their promotions, which have now been invalidated. You can't free people from the stress of expectation to work long hours after they've worked them.
They quickly learn why concatenating SQL together is a bad idea. When you render your data did you sanitize it? Even though it came from the DB?
That reminds me of a statement that pretty much blew my mind -- the idea that string datatypes were inherently unsound and should not be allowed to exist. The alternative would be computationally complex object types with constant consistency checks, but the trade-off of pformance against security is a bullet we really should be biting.
Quite right. After all, it's their fault things were done to them generations ago.
E
Non sequitur. The State of Israel gets away with a heck of a lot of shit by playing on our collective guilt for the very real atrocities visited on their ancestors in Europe. But they are not the victims any more, and "the Jews" is not a synonym for "Israel", however much the country wants to present itself that way. It is not anti-semitic to point out the dangerous politicking of an oppressive regime that is actively engaged in systematic genocide. It is not even anti-semitic to draw parallels between the ghettoisation and extermination of the Palestinians with the Holocaust. Israel is a country, not a race or a religion, and its policies are abominable.
While it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, it may be the case that people who program already possessed that skill and programming merely reinforces it.
If it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, you're holding it wrong.
The imperative-procedural paradigm that virtually all mainstream programming is based on hides logic behind a slavish step-by-step drudge. You can't see the program (woods) for the code (trees). This is why you have to have a particularly strong grasp of logical thought before you go into computing -- it's a huge strain keeping the bigger picture in mind while fighting over the minutiae.
Last year I switched a project I was working on from Python to Prolog. People still think I'm mad because it's so much slower in operation, but coding up a component takes hours instead of days because I only have to think about the logic. This is the prototype, and I'm perfectly happy to optimise late, because that way I don't paint myself into a corner.
I was CS too, and I completely get what you're saying, but I think a certain amount of programming really helps you understand the whys of CS. But that point is tyat you need to be addressing programming problems, rather than simply going through the motions of implementing a standard "catch the falling object" game. Addressing a curriculum-related problem not only teaches programming, but also brings up motivation for optimisation, hence a jumping-off point for teaching CS concepts. Combinations and permutations are a good start, because you end up with a factorial on the numerator and denominator, so you can optimise the formula by removing redundancy in the factorial calculation, as well as the standard CS stuff about the factorials itself. You then get to compare the two approaches and demonstrate how what is optimal in one situation isn't optimal in another.
I would not expect computers and/or computer science to improve the performance of students in SAT Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Statistics.
We use computers so we dont have to remember all that crap. The computer does the math.
I would expect it to improve reading, reading comprehension, written language skills, and logical thinking. That is what the student is learning!
Computing teaches any problem domain that you are asked to code solutions for.
The problem with initiatives like code.org is that they generally try to engage kids by making things move on the screen. Most of that means doing very basic arithmetic in an esoteric firmat surrounded by Byzantine library calls.
If you want kids to do better in statistics, you shouldn't start with the paradigm of interactive entertainment, but with the far less abstract view of a computer as something that computes stuff. Kids might not like their schoolwork, but it's certainly relevant to them. Part of the problem teaching complex maths is that the mechanics of carrying out the underlying computations diverts attention from the "big picture" view. Procedural computing was designed specifically to address the problem of "can't see the wood for the trees" by separating the general algorithm from the specifics of implementation.
Did you invent the handgun? Did you invent gunpowder? Did you invent fire? No, no and no, yet you benefit from the chain of invention that led from the last to the first, irrespective of your personal level of intelligence. Technology is not genetic. Aboriginal Australians were isolated from the development of technology elsewhere having migrated before even the invention of counting. Just as fertile ground produces no food until a seed is planted, so does an intelligent mind need external input.
Slashdot Mirror
If LibreOffice can read and write MS Office documents, it's also looking to replace MS Office installations. If the scope of interoperability is limited to software that doesn't compete with the original, that would be a mess.
No, LibreOffice interoperates because you can transfer files both ways, and a user of one can collaborate with a user of the other. Dalvik does not interoperate with the JVM, as they will not run and load the same programmes. This is Oracle's point -- they are using JVM technology to their advantage without interoperating. Of course, this is irrelevant if Google has a license to use Java source code any way they like... isn't Java GPL...?
We need to stop the dangerous idea that interfaces can be copyrighted
Various cases have established the principle that interface copyright cannot hamper interoperability -- this is good, right? Now, Google aped the JVM nit for interoperability, but just to reduce their own effort in creating a complete system, and this led to the creation of code that is not JVM compatible, and won't normally run JVM code. Embrace and extend...
It's not about language -- Dalvik is a full-blown virtual machine, based on the JVM architecture. Using a different language wouldn't get them away from the lawsuit, as they'd still be compiling to the Dalvik VM as target architecture.
I don't think there's a lot of physical metaphor involved in the form of the word for morning, though.
That is the acculturated expectation of most office workers the world over. It's standard practice, hence the default assumption.
The point about the Mandarin speakers is valid, though. We in the west are culturally primed to associate "up" with rising tones -- it's right there in the name "rising tones"... not to mention "high notes", so declaring a "universal" out of what could just be a shared cultural artefact is highly premature.
I think it's an intriguing study, and I use the word "intriguing" to mean it makes you thi, but provides absolutely no answers. The article mentions kiko-booba, but I've never seen anyone go into detail on that one. I would be interested to hear whether it has the same effect on illiterate peoples.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office. For a large number of office workers, Office is a collaboration tool. A document saved by one user and emailed to another, then edited and returned, needs to be able to preserve all of the formatting. Users care a *lot* about formatting, and if it gets messed up, they lose confidence in the software.
Office's formatting algorithms are abominable, and it's no surprise that LibreOffice can't mimic them perfectly. And users really, really need to apply a lot less formatting and focus instead on content.
This is why Microsoft Office is the problem and LibreOffice is not the solution. Word's "format as you go along" approach is an inefficient workflow, but the software actively encourages people to work that way. LibreOffice has a much better model for handling content and formatting at the file level, but the UI still presents an MS Office workflow. If there was an alternative UI that made content+semantic markup smooth and easy with formatting by specifying tag meaning done later, there would be something to sell to businesses: improved worker productivity.
I'm certainly not saying there's not a spectrum between pure "play" games and pure "badges" games -- there is. In traditional FPSes, you got access to better weapons as you progressed, but that was more than offset by the bad guys getting more difficult to beat, so you still had to improve as a player. Perhaps player skill has plateaued and we're all as good as we'll ever be until a sufficiently novel paradigm is invented. Role-playing games, on the other hand, typically don't encourage mastery, as mere XP farming will win any fight. That's why I got bored of playing Final Fantasy games on my iPad.
Most people don't understand encryption. That doesn't make them idiots -- just ill-informed.
Of course the hash won't be bulletproof, but if nothing else, the picture will degrade with every kludge to get it to fail the hashing. But if the hash list is kept among the filterers, how do you know that you need to kludge it? And even if you do, how do you know what's enough to cheat the filter?
To the people involved in this iniciative, indecent material filtering is no "goose that lays golden eggs" -- it's an ingoing cost which generates no profit. But they don't have the power to take any action more meaningful than simply improving the efficiency of their filtering. Cooperation with rivals makes perfect sense, as there's no "commercial advantage" to be gained.
Gaming arcades had to make a game, and playing the game had to be fun, and you had to be able to get bette with practise or you wouldn't come back. Microtransaction games often have no "game" at all -- no mechanics to master, no real choices to make. With an arcade machine, you have to decide to start every time you come back to the machine, but with microtransaction games, you only choose to start once and all your progress is saved in perpetuity -- but you do have to decide to stop.
If you think about it, ALL games are designed to be addictive. The sort of pleasure/reward sensations are really no different between paid, free, free-to-play, buy-to-play, or any other variation. Instead, what's different is that the microtransaction based free-to-play games purposefully slow down the effort/reward ratio over time, and force the player to either slog through longer hours of gameplay with fewer rewards per hour spent, with the temptation of being able to increase that ratio with real money.
There is a fundamental difference between traditional games and pure microtransaction harvesters. And the problem is...
The problem is that the microtransaction model encourages developers to negatively impact these core game mechanics.
If by "negatively impact", you mean "completely eliminates", then you're right, because there are two types of pschological "reward" in gaming. Microtransactions fulfill our desire for recognition and completeness, and they are, as the guys at Extra Credits say, pur Skinner-boxing (I would link, but the stupid iPad would wipe this message if I tried to find another webpage).
Traditional gaming rewards in a more subtle level -- mastery of mechanics gets you into an almost meditative "flow" state during play, and improved mastery means longer unbroken sessions of flow, which is exhilarating (even more so when the play is physical and high-speed -- eg skiing). Early computer games didn't do a lot of recognition, with the waves in Space Invaders, for example, being identical apart from their speed. The next step was to include some visual confirmation of progression, and Centipede did that by changing colour between stages, whereas PacMan relied on stage numbers and occassional interstitial animations, and Donkey Kong had multiple different screens. Then we had progression through a combination of these (Pengo had the baddies change colour on each level, accompanied with interstitial screens on the same every-third-level schedule as PacMan, Ms PacMan added multiple maps).
As I say, these supported the mastery of mechanics by making explicit how much you had improved. I'm a language hobbyist, and my early experience of language at school was frustration at a perceived lack of progress, which was demotivating. As it turned out, I was progressing relatively fast, but I just couldn't see it at the time.
But microtransactions often completely replace the core mechanics, and there is nothing to learn, nothing to master. There is no lasting flow state, just momentary shots of neurochemicals when you get a stupid fanfare noise on the screen and hit the next arbitrary milestone
There were no communists involved in the cold war. Communism puts the means of production in the hands of the commune. USSR stood for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- not communist. The USSR was a case of state socialism, where the state represents society and owns the means of production. True communism puts ownership and decision-making powers at a local level, which was only ever tried for a brief spell in Spain before the fascist coup overthrew the democratically elected anarchists and communists.
Isn't this the hallmark of socialism where everyone gets the same benefits regardless of contribution?
No. Not even close.
The defining characteristic of socialism is that the means of production is owned by society. In this case, we have a privately held company who own the means of production, which is the hallmark of capitalism. In fact, the single fundamental difference between capitalism, socialism and communism is the model of ownership. Beyond that, they all share the same economic theory and ideas of industrial efficiency based on division of labour, specialisation of skills and the application of automation.
There is no more "money for nothing" in socialist theory than in capitalist theory, because a capitalist derives profit not from his work, but as dividends from the businesses his capital has been invested in. Now imagine that there was one company in the world, and everybody in the world held an equal share in it. Then everyone gets dividends. That's pure socialism. Notice that this says absolutely nothing about the pay structure within the company. In a capitalist society, a tiny number of people can acrue enough wealth to live off investments, but in a socialist society, no-one is going to live off dividends alone. Note how some countries have benefits that are barely livable, to encourage people into work. Some societies chose to provide livable benefits to the weak and vulnerable, but that is a natural human choice, and not a defining feature of socialism.
The report tells us that most developers make less than $500 / month. This is clearly not a sustainable income (except in a few countries) so we must suppose that these developers are not in it as a way of making a living. They must have some other means of earning a crust if they aren't still living with one or more parents.
That's an unsafe supposition. I've known several people who dedicated themselves for months fulltime to developing apps that in the end made so little money that they didn't cover the Apple developers' programme membership fees. It's a feature of every "goldrush" that for every one person who hits the motherlode, there are dozens of others who bankrupted themselves dynamiting ton after ton of worthless rock.
Those who can contribute significant, above-and-beyond value naturally feel that people should be rewarded in proportion to their contributions.
This is only natural. However, this ends up leading to promotions for people whose "above-and-beyond" contribution means working late frequently and getting the work/life balance out of whack. This can end up with a de facto situation that anyone who works damn hard during their allotted hours but never stays late is clocked as "underperforming". The CEO's point was to release that tension and expectation, freeing up employees to have proper downtime without stressing over perceptions.
The problem is that it is too late to implement in this case -- if you look at the complaints of exiting staff members, you'll see that many of them explicitly mention he fact that they worked long hours to get their promotions, which have now been invalidated. You can't free people from the stress of expectation to work long hours after they've worked them.
They quickly learn why concatenating SQL together is a bad idea. When you render your data did you sanitize it? Even though it came from the DB?
That reminds me of a statement that pretty much blew my mind -- the idea that string datatypes were inherently unsound and should not be allowed to exist. The alternative would be computationally complex object types with constant consistency checks, but the trade-off of pformance against security is a bullet we really should be biting.
Quite right. After all, it's their fault things were done to them generations ago.
E
Non sequitur. The State of Israel gets away with a heck of a lot of shit by playing on our collective guilt for the very real atrocities visited on their ancestors in Europe. But they are not the victims any more, and "the Jews" is not a synonym for "Israel", however much the country wants to present itself that way. It is not anti-semitic to point out the dangerous politicking of an oppressive regime that is actively engaged in systematic genocide. It is not even anti-semitic to draw parallels between the ghettoisation and extermination of the Palestinians with the Holocaust. Israel is a country, not a race or a religion, and its policies are abominable.
Not just a bug; it's a virus, Misterr Anderrson.
While it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, it may be the case that people who program already possessed that skill and programming merely reinforces it.
If it seems intuitive that programming develops logical thinking, you're holding it wrong.
The imperative-procedural paradigm that virtually all mainstream programming is based on hides logic behind a slavish step-by-step drudge. You can't see the program (woods) for the code (trees). This is why you have to have a particularly strong grasp of logical thought before you go into computing -- it's a huge strain keeping the bigger picture in mind while fighting over the minutiae.
Last year I switched a project I was working on from Python to Prolog. People still think I'm mad because it's so much slower in operation, but coding up a component takes hours instead of days because I only have to think about the logic. This is the prototype, and I'm perfectly happy to optimise late, because that way I don't paint myself into a corner.
Wee disgust spell-chequers inn our last meting.
I was CS too, and I completely get what you're saying, but I think a certain amount of programming really helps you understand the whys of CS. But that point is tyat you need to be addressing programming problems, rather than simply going through the motions of implementing a standard "catch the falling object" game. Addressing a curriculum-related problem not only teaches programming, but also brings up motivation for optimisation, hence a jumping-off point for teaching CS concepts. Combinations and permutations are a good start, because you end up with a factorial on the numerator and denominator, so you can optimise the formula by removing redundancy in the factorial calculation, as well as the standard CS stuff about the factorials itself. You then get to compare the two approaches and demonstrate how what is optimal in one situation isn't optimal in another.
I would not expect computers and/or computer science to improve the performance of students in SAT Mathematics, AP Calculus, and AP Statistics.
We use computers so we dont have to remember all that crap. The computer does the math.
I would expect it to improve reading, reading comprehension, written language skills, and logical thinking. That is what the student is learning!
Computing teaches any problem domain that you are asked to code solutions for.
The problem with initiatives like code.org is that they generally try to engage kids by making things move on the screen. Most of that means doing very basic arithmetic in an esoteric firmat surrounded by Byzantine library calls.
If you want kids to do better in statistics, you shouldn't start with the paradigm of interactive entertainment, but with the far less abstract view of a computer as something that computes stuff. Kids might not like their schoolwork, but it's certainly relevant to them. Part of the problem teaching complex maths is that the mechanics of carrying out the underlying computations diverts attention from the "big picture" view. Procedural computing was designed specifically to address the problem of "can't see the wood for the trees" by separating the general algorithm from the specifics of implementation.
Did you invent the handgun? Did you invent gunpowder? Did you invent fire? No, no and no, yet you benefit from the chain of invention that led from the last to the first, irrespective of your personal level of intelligence. Technology is not genetic. Aboriginal Australians were isolated from the development of technology elsewhere having migrated before even the invention of counting. Just as fertile ground produces no food until a seed is planted, so does an intelligent mind need external input.