And yet the reboot movies have been hugely successful, bringing in a wider and more varied audience than the aging autistic weirdos that were associated with the franchise. You're out of touch with reality, sorry.:)
Imagine Ford relaunched the Fiesta as a sofa. Now imagine it was a really good sofa and really popular. Is still wouldn't be a Ford Fiesta. It wouldn't bring a new audience to the "Ford Fiesta".
Or imagine I built a theme park and called it Edinburgh Castle. Would it be bringing a new and young audience to Edinburgh Castle? No, because it wouldn't really be Edinburgh Castle.
My point: if you want to make something new, go ahead and do it; just don't pretend you're not making something new. JJ Abrams' Star Trek is not Star Trek -- it's just a lazy story built by borrowing a handful of names and ideas from Star Trek.
Why lazy? Because we accept a heck of a lot of nonsense when someone does a reboot. We accept characters because of their name, not because of their story. If you renamed everyone and redesigned every set and prop in Star Trek, it would look like an even weaker film than it already does.
The new Trek is when it finally decided to grow some balls and get good.
When someone objects to an old song for using gender specific terms and tries to rewrite it to be less offensive to them, I tell them if you don't like the song, don't sing it. This is my view about reboots too. If the story is not good, don't tell it. If you want to tell a different story, tell a different story. Changing an existing story leaves you something that is not new and is not old. Move on and do something else instead.
There is no such thing as empty space in a spaceship -- the voids are all filled with air, as the internal pressure must be maintained at pressures and gas concentrations suitable for the lifeforms within. This air has mass, and will need to be accelerated when the ship is accelerated. It will also put additional load on the artificial gravity generators, as the gases will be affected by gravity too. And the more air that's free, the tougher it's going to be to run the whole thing through filtration and heating/cooling systems.
Social justice is a term dating to the 1840s. The concept is to treat everyone fairly. There is no one group that has a monopoly on the term, and while there a few hypocrites who use it to do down others (completely missing the point), that does not invalidate the basic idea that social justice is a Good Thing.
You do know that there aren't really aliens right? Humans only have two genders (perhaps 3).
That depends on what you mean by genders. I prefer the feminist usage of the term -- that gender are the social norms expected by society of people of a given biological sex. We can extend that to the idea that we have created additional expected norms for non-heterosexuals -- for example, the highly camp persona typified by the Rocky Horror Picture Show could be considered a social construct that we apply to homosexual males, even though it restricts and incorrectly represents the population, and is thus a new "gender".
The point of the feminist view of "gender" is that it was a damaging thing, and the notion of "degendering society" was born. The camp-gay gender arose as gay people were being rejected by traditional gender views; by creating a new and very different identity, they distanced themselves from gender notions that rejected them. It's all summed up by "we're here, we're queer" -- i.e. your rejection of us is irrelevant, which was what was needed at the time. However, as society has become increasingly more tolerant, having a gender construct for homosexuals has become increasingly irrelevant. I've met plenty of camp people who are straight and plenty of gay people who don't behave any differently from the average straight person. And yet, there now seems to be pressure from the gender stereotype that gay people should act a particular way. And people who don't conform to that gender stereotype are now trying to define new genders that more closely define their personal inclinations, and we're getting a constant increase in the number of "genders".
How about we get back to degendering, stop trying to put people in boxes and just get on with treating everyone as simply "human"?
I recall an episode of Enterprise where there was a three gender race too, with the third gender being treated as little more than a breeding animal.
Not a particularly good episode (but then again, that was par for the course with Enterprise) but the basic premise was pretty imaginative (although they chickened out and had the really interesting bit delivered through crappy expository dialogue: trying to emancipate the third-gender individual ultimately led to her suicide (I say "her" because they used a female actor and there was clear parallels to women's rights, and also because I can't bring myself to call a person "it") and a dressing down from the captain for the guy responsible (the engineer) pointing out that the species would go extinct if the third-genders weren't dropping babies all the time. The engineer even told the captain he was trying to do what the captain himself would have done, which led to his telling off being even worse.
It was a surprising turnaround for a Star Trek story to paint someone in the wrong for being (in effect) a "social justice warrior". Which is of course a stupid term, because while there are a number of people who genuinely go looking for causes to champion without thinking about what they're doing, most people labelled SJWs are not in that category.
Are you sure? Seems like a series set in a pre-warp-drive era would mostly be about a bunch of space mariners playing Poker for years at a time. Everything I've seen says that the story is set in a similar time to TOS, just slightly earlier.
and the USS Enterprise, and Starfleet itself, were new in ST: Enterprise. USS Discovery is a pre-Starfleet ship.
There have already been 7 USS Enterprises to date (and an Enterprise without the USS designation that was operated first by the US Navy and later by the Fisheries Bureau). The name was apparently taken from the British Royal Navy which has operated 11 ships designated HMS Enterprise and 2 HMS Enterprize. The name first entered the Royal Navy when they captured a French ship called L'Entreprise.
The naming of the Enterprise in TOS was following the long line of US naval tradition, and the naming of the ship in TNG followed that tradition, and the naming of the ship in ST:E was again consistent with this tradition. But as I said, this naming tradition predates Starfleet by a considerable margin -- the first USS Enterprise was christened in 1775. So even if this series is pre-Starfleet (which it appears not to be), they could still quite easily have dubbed the ship Enterprise if they'd wanted to.
I grew up with a family computer, and I had the option to tinker, but that was a family computer with ROM-based firmware and no persistent data between sessions. Kids with their own tablet are less likely to get access to tinker with the family PC that has a hard-drive based OS and a whole host of issues around the persistence of data between sessions, and interactions between installed apps (library dependencies etc).
hmm seems like asking someone to reinvent the wheel to me,
Yes and no.
The problem with modern software is that you can't get a wheel -- you have to buy a whole car. Software is pretty monolithic, and you end up faced with a bewilderingly complex interface that hides the very simple task that you want to do. Things have improved with the development of the market for 3rd-party plugins and filters, so certain tasks are portable and independent of the host package, but that still leaves you looking for a host environment that presents a suitable workflow. The workflow problem is the conflict between flexibility (being able to do everything) and ease-of-entry (being able to do the simple tasks at a beginners level). Almost all software is designed either to be flexible, causing it to be too complex for beginners, or simple, meaning that you can start off easily, but you'll never get any degree of complexity. It would be perfectly possible to design software that adapts its interface to increase the complexity as users develop their skills -- anyone who programs games for a living already does this (flight simulators that start you in a plane with fewer controls, shooters where you only have one weapon in the first level etc).
I'm no spring chicken myself, but I find simple photo editing much easier on a tablet simply due to the layout. Video editing too... to a point. The relatively uncluttered layout is far less scary. But the fine control is missing.
Slick, hadn't seenthe OLinuXino, and my off the cuff response would have been because it makes it more expensive... but I was wrong!
Yup. The chips in almost all SBCs were originally designed with portable devices in mind (the original Pi's Broadcom chip was an existing camcorder controller chip, for instance) so it's basically part of the architecture already.
Of course, the tone is one of "unrealistic expectation" and the response would be along the lines of "you can't do that without years of experience".
So that by itself is already helpful information. There's nothing unrealistic about people learning software development, it happens all the time. Yes, it means investing time, and yes, it pays off tenfold in unanticipated ways.
Add a suggestion on reasonable learning resources and a non pipe dream estimate of how long of a time investment they'd be in for it, that's the best one could do. All that can happen in a completely friendly tone.
And so could a response to this post... but it didn't. I think the most common response to a post like mine would be to be offended at the implication that programming is so easy that anyone could pick it up on a whim, and to therefore pile in on him and call him all sorts of names.
It's really, really hard to get the wording for something that you don't understand. This is why most requirements specs are not correct -- the person writing them doesn't understand computing. You cannot blame someone not in the "in group" for not knowing how we speak or think!
most open source software starts with a programmer having an itch to scratch. if they have an altrustic lapse, or no easy path to monetize it they can choose to open source it. There's no common open source industry body of programmers you pitch your ideas to for volunteers.
Which I think is a gap in the market. There are plenty of people who are curious about a new area of programming and would benefit from a real-world task to complete. Scratch-an-itch OSS often ends up being rather esoteric, following an ad hoc workflow that the coder hacked together as he developed it (and I say that as someone who has never opened any of my personal tools precisely because the interface is so hacky and idiosyncratic).
Funny how every single poster crying "snowflake" here doesn't have the guts to do it with a username. Posting AC makes it look a heck of a lot like simple trolling. If you want to say what you think, say it as you. If you don't want to do that, why are you even saying it in the first place?
Actually, there is a certain class of programmer that's always looking for ideas: the senior CS undergrad -- if you've got to write a program for your final year, why not make it one that someone wants? An "ideas bank" for CS dissertation projects presumably exists out there somewhere....
Exactly. It's like a database equivalent of using hashtags instead of defined categories. Informal categorisation and structuring has its place, but that's an entirely different beast to a relational database. Also, if columns can be "missing" in records and there's no distinction between a missing column and one that didn't exist, how does hashing work? Surely the only reason database lookup is efficient is because of the predictability of the content structure?
Now as for what the article was asking for, seems rather specialized. No one is going to do some specialized work for free so the requester can make tones of money off of it, even if it is open source.
It seems specialised, but if you break down the task, what the OP's friend wants is: 1) a GPU pixel-shader filter for video editing and 2) a video editor UI that doesn't have any extraneous fluff, but just runs a single filter on a single file and generates an output file.
To me, that cuts to the core problem in OSS in my book -- there are large-scale projects that try to deliver a fully-featured package and there are ad hoc projects that produce a small-scale tool for a particular task, but aren't particularly user friendly, and aren't very flexible.
There are probably still plenty of packages out there that can be used in the old-school Unix pipes way, but they're getting harder and harder to find.
Also, those who chip in large amounts (including organizations) could perhaps add to the spec, or at least add stretch goals.
Double-plus ungood -- no pigs should be more equal than others.
As soon as you do that, you're no longer all contributing to the proposed project by the developers -- you're all contributing to the unknown and undisclosed project favoured by the big spenders. I've seen projects for language learning materials where everyone chips in and has their say as to which language the materials are developed for, and what ends up happening is that the resources of all are pushed into the most popular languages, which already have a bunch of material available anyway, and the languages that need support are now effectively subsidising those that don't. In software, this same thing would end up happening, with big spenders saying "I want it to be like XYZ Studio Pro" and nothing new ever being created.
The tone dramatically changes when the question is not "Can you do xyz for me?" but "Can you help me learn xyz?".
"Hi, I'm not a programmer. Can you help me learn to create a software package that applies GPU pixel shaders to a video and outputs the result as a video file?"
Oh yes, the tone does change dramatically. Of course, the tone is one of "unrealistic expectation" and the response would be along the lines of "you can't do that without years of experience".
The original poster was asking, in effect, if there is an "ideas bank" for software somewhere on the net where people who have a specific suggestion can place it, and programmers who are looking for ideas can go to get suggestions from other people -- that's something that sounds like a very good idea to me.
We're just coming upon the latest "throw your old shit away" with USB-C replacing ALL connectivity. Your next "PC"/Smartphone will have a single USB-C plug that you connect to a "Power delivery and switch hub" that will likely be built into all TV/Monitors.
When the USB spec first came out, people asked why it wasn't a daisy-chainable interface. The USB consortium said that the hub technology was so cheap that every device would have a hub built in. And then we had no devices with inbuilt hubs. A couple of monitors (that weren't popular) and the occasional keyboard-with-a-pass-through-for-a-single-mouse. And we all spent good money on those silly little external hubs. What's going to make it different this time?
Slashdot Mirror
And yet the reboot movies have been hugely successful, bringing in a wider and more varied audience than the aging autistic weirdos that were associated with the franchise. You're out of touch with reality, sorry. :)
Imagine Ford relaunched the Fiesta as a sofa. Now imagine it was a really good sofa and really popular. Is still wouldn't be a Ford Fiesta. It wouldn't bring a new audience to the "Ford Fiesta".
Or imagine I built a theme park and called it Edinburgh Castle. Would it be bringing a new and young audience to Edinburgh Castle? No, because it wouldn't really be Edinburgh Castle.
My point: if you want to make something new, go ahead and do it; just don't pretend you're not making something new. JJ Abrams' Star Trek is not Star Trek -- it's just a lazy story built by borrowing a handful of names and ideas from Star Trek.
Why lazy? Because we accept a heck of a lot of nonsense when someone does a reboot. We accept characters because of their name, not because of their story. If you renamed everyone and redesigned every set and prop in Star Trek, it would look like an even weaker film than it already does.
In my Opinion Star Trek started jumping the shark, where Sisco started to get super Profit powers,
Quark was the one with the profit powers, Sisco/Cisco/Sisqó/Sisko only had prophet ones. ;-)
The new Trek is when it finally decided to grow some balls and get good.
When someone objects to an old song for using gender specific terms and tries to rewrite it to be less offensive to them, I tell them if you don't like the song, don't sing it. This is my view about reboots too. If the story is not good, don't tell it. If you want to tell a different story, tell a different story. Changing an existing story leaves you something that is not new and is not old. Move on and do something else instead.
There is no such thing as empty space in a spaceship -- the voids are all filled with air, as the internal pressure must be maintained at pressures and gas concentrations suitable for the lifeforms within. This air has mass, and will need to be accelerated when the ship is accelerated. It will also put additional load on the artificial gravity generators, as the gases will be affected by gravity too. And the more air that's free, the tougher it's going to be to run the whole thing through filtration and heating/cooling systems.
Social justice is a term dating to the 1840s. The concept is to treat everyone fairly. There is no one group that has a monopoly on the term, and while there a few hypocrites who use it to do down others (completely missing the point), that does not invalidate the basic idea that social justice is a Good Thing.
You do know that there aren't really aliens right? Humans only have two genders (perhaps 3).
That depends on what you mean by genders. I prefer the feminist usage of the term -- that gender are the social norms expected by society of people of a given biological sex. We can extend that to the idea that we have created additional expected norms for non-heterosexuals -- for example, the highly camp persona typified by the Rocky Horror Picture Show could be considered a social construct that we apply to homosexual males, even though it restricts and incorrectly represents the population, and is thus a new "gender".
The point of the feminist view of "gender" is that it was a damaging thing, and the notion of "degendering society" was born. The camp-gay gender arose as gay people were being rejected by traditional gender views; by creating a new and very different identity, they distanced themselves from gender notions that rejected them. It's all summed up by "we're here, we're queer" -- i.e. your rejection of us is irrelevant, which was what was needed at the time. However, as society has become increasingly more tolerant, having a gender construct for homosexuals has become increasingly irrelevant. I've met plenty of camp people who are straight and plenty of gay people who don't behave any differently from the average straight person. And yet, there now seems to be pressure from the gender stereotype that gay people should act a particular way. And people who don't conform to that gender stereotype are now trying to define new genders that more closely define their personal inclinations, and we're getting a constant increase in the number of "genders".
How about we get back to degendering, stop trying to put people in boxes and just get on with treating everyone as simply "human"?
I recall an episode of Enterprise where there was a three gender race too, with the third gender being treated as little more than a breeding animal.
Not a particularly good episode (but then again, that was par for the course with Enterprise) but the basic premise was pretty imaginative (although they chickened out and had the really interesting bit delivered through crappy expository dialogue: trying to emancipate the third-gender individual ultimately led to her suicide (I say "her" because they used a female actor and there was clear parallels to women's rights, and also because I can't bring myself to call a person "it") and a dressing down from the captain for the guy responsible (the engineer) pointing out that the species would go extinct if the third-genders weren't dropping babies all the time. The engineer even told the captain he was trying to do what the captain himself would have done, which led to his telling off being even worse.
It was a surprising turnaround for a Star Trek story to paint someone in the wrong for being (in effect) a "social justice warrior". Which is of course a stupid term, because while there are a number of people who genuinely go looking for causes to champion without thinking about what they're doing, most people labelled SJWs are not in that category.
ST: Discovery takes place before ST: Enterprise,
Are you sure? Seems like a series set in a pre-warp-drive era would mostly be about a bunch of space mariners playing Poker for years at a time. Everything I've seen says that the story is set in a similar time to TOS, just slightly earlier.
and the USS Enterprise, and Starfleet itself, were new in ST: Enterprise. USS Discovery is a pre-Starfleet ship.
There have already been 7 USS Enterprises to date (and an Enterprise without the USS designation that was operated first by the US Navy and later by the Fisheries Bureau). The name was apparently taken from the British Royal Navy which has operated 11 ships designated HMS Enterprise and 2 HMS Enterprize. The name first entered the Royal Navy when they captured a French ship called L'Entreprise.
The naming of the Enterprise in TOS was following the long line of US naval tradition, and the naming of the ship in TNG followed that tradition, and the naming of the ship in ST:E was again consistent with this tradition. But as I said, this naming tradition predates Starfleet by a considerable margin -- the first USS Enterprise was christened in 1775. So even if this series is pre-Starfleet (which it appears not to be), they could still quite easily have dubbed the ship Enterprise if they'd wanted to.
There's something iffy in the architecture here.
hmm seems like asking someone to reinvent the wheel to me,
Yes and no.
The problem with modern software is that you can't get a wheel -- you have to buy a whole car. Software is pretty monolithic, and you end up faced with a bewilderingly complex interface that hides the very simple task that you want to do. Things have improved with the development of the market for 3rd-party plugins and filters, so certain tasks are portable and independent of the host package, but that still leaves you looking for a host environment that presents a suitable workflow. The workflow problem is the conflict between flexibility (being able to do everything) and ease-of-entry (being able to do the simple tasks at a beginners level). Almost all software is designed either to be flexible, causing it to be too complex for beginners, or simple, meaning that you can start off easily, but you'll never get any degree of complexity. It would be perfectly possible to design software that adapts its interface to increase the complexity as users develop their skills -- anyone who programs games for a living already does this (flight simulators that start you in a plane with fewer controls, shooters where you only have one weapon in the first level etc).
I'm no spring chicken myself, but I find simple photo editing much easier on a tablet simply due to the layout. Video editing too... to a point. The relatively uncluttered layout is far less scary. But the fine control is missing.
OK, I see your point.
Slick, hadn't seenthe OLinuXino, and my off the cuff response would have been because it makes it more expensive... but I was wrong!
Yup. The chips in almost all SBCs were originally designed with portable devices in mind (the original Pi's Broadcom chip was an existing camcorder controller chip, for instance) so it's basically part of the architecture already.
Of course, the tone is one of "unrealistic expectation" and the response would be along the lines of "you can't do that without years of experience".
So that by itself is already helpful information. There's nothing unrealistic about people learning software development, it happens all the time. Yes, it means investing time, and yes, it pays off tenfold in unanticipated ways. Add a suggestion on reasonable learning resources and a non pipe dream estimate of how long of a time investment they'd be in for it, that's the best one could do. All that can happen in a completely friendly tone.
And so could a response to this post... but it didn't. I think the most common response to a post like mine would be to be offended at the implication that programming is so easy that anyone could pick it up on a whim, and to therefore pile in on him and call him all sorts of names.
It's really, really hard to get the wording for something that you don't understand. This is why most requirements specs are not correct -- the person writing them doesn't understand computing. You cannot blame someone not in the "in group" for not knowing how we speak or think!
most open source software starts with a programmer having an itch to scratch. if they have an altrustic lapse, or no easy path to monetize it they can choose to open source it. There's no common open source industry body of programmers you pitch your ideas to for volunteers.
Which I think is a gap in the market. There are plenty of people who are curious about a new area of programming and would benefit from a real-world task to complete. Scratch-an-itch OSS often ends up being rather esoteric, following an ad hoc workflow that the coder hacked together as he developed it (and I say that as someone who has never opened any of my personal tools precisely because the interface is so hacky and idiosyncratic).
Funny how every single poster crying "snowflake" here doesn't have the guts to do it with a username. Posting AC makes it look a heck of a lot like simple trolling. If you want to say what you think, say it as you. If you don't want to do that, why are you even saying it in the first place?
Actually, there is a certain class of programmer that's always looking for ideas: the senior CS undergrad -- if you've got to write a program for your final year, why not make it one that someone wants? An "ideas bank" for CS dissertation projects presumably exists out there somewhere....
Exactly. It's like a database equivalent of using hashtags instead of defined categories. Informal categorisation and structuring has its place, but that's an entirely different beast to a relational database. Also, if columns can be "missing" in records and there's no distinction between a missing column and one that didn't exist, how does hashing work? Surely the only reason database lookup is efficient is because of the predictability of the content structure?
If you have a need, you start a project and write code.
If you have a food need, cook it. (Why ask a chef?) If you have a house need, design it and build it. (Why ask architects and builders?)
Now as for what the article was asking for, seems rather specialized. No one is going to do some specialized work for free so the requester can make tones of money off of it, even if it is open source.
It seems specialised, but if you break down the task, what the OP's friend wants is: 1) a GPU pixel-shader filter for video editing and 2) a video editor UI that doesn't have any extraneous fluff, but just runs a single filter on a single file and generates an output file.
To me, that cuts to the core problem in OSS in my book -- there are large-scale projects that try to deliver a fully-featured package and there are ad hoc projects that produce a small-scale tool for a particular task, but aren't particularly user friendly, and aren't very flexible.
There are probably still plenty of packages out there that can be used in the old-school Unix pipes way, but they're getting harder and harder to find.
Also, those who chip in large amounts (including organizations) could perhaps add to the spec, or at least add stretch goals.
Double-plus ungood -- no pigs should be more equal than others.
As soon as you do that, you're no longer all contributing to the proposed project by the developers -- you're all contributing to the unknown and undisclosed project favoured by the big spenders. I've seen projects for language learning materials where everyone chips in and has their say as to which language the materials are developed for, and what ends up happening is that the resources of all are pushed into the most popular languages, which already have a bunch of material available anyway, and the languages that need support are now effectively subsidising those that don't. In software, this same thing would end up happening, with big spenders saying "I want it to be like XYZ Studio Pro" and nothing new ever being created.
The tone dramatically changes when the question is not "Can you do xyz for me?" but "Can you help me learn xyz?".
"Hi, I'm not a programmer. Can you help me learn to create a software package that applies GPU pixel shaders to a video and outputs the result as a video file?"
Oh yes, the tone does change dramatically. Of course, the tone is one of "unrealistic expectation" and the response would be along the lines of "you can't do that without years of experience".
The original poster was asking, in effect, if there is an "ideas bank" for software somewhere on the net where people who have a specific suggestion can place it, and programmers who are looking for ideas can go to get suggestions from other people -- that's something that sounds like a very good idea to me.
We're just coming upon the latest "throw your old shit away" with USB-C replacing ALL connectivity. Your next "PC"/Smartphone will have a single USB-C plug that you connect to a "Power delivery and switch hub" that will likely be built into all TV/Monitors.
When the USB spec first came out, people asked why it wasn't a daisy-chainable interface. The USB consortium said that the hub technology was so cheap that every device would have a hub built in. And then we had no devices with inbuilt hubs. A couple of monitors (that weren't popular) and the occasional keyboard-with-a-pass-through-for-a-single-mouse. And we all spent good money on those silly little external hubs. What's going to make it different this time?