Am I the only nerd in the world that's gets annoyed when someone uses "win" for "good idea"?
Well, it's traditional, to the point that the (hilarious) GNU coding standards quoth:
Please don't use "win" as an abbreviation for Microsoft Windows in GNU software or documentation. In hacker terminology, calling something a "win" is a form of praise. If you wish to praise Microsoft Windows when speaking on your own, by all means do so, but not in GNU software. Usually we write the name "Windows" in full, but when brevity is very important (as in file names and sometimes symbol names), we abbreviate it to "w". For instance, the files and functions in Emacs that deal with Windows start with 'w32'.
I've been playing with the math myself for primes, but what library or technique do they use to get past 32bits? It's probably simple, but I'd appreciate some help.
You'll probably find this article interesting - it covers prime finding (in C) from naive algorithms to complexe ones involving paging bit arrays in and out of memory:
"Fun With Prime Numbers"
Gah, that's why I don't get modded up! My 10-letter-word count is too high for 7th grade reading levels!
You might want to face the fact that several slashdot readers (almost certainly technical folks who are used to various types of jargon) reacted badly to your post based entirely on the language used. The words 'digerati', 'blogosphere' and 'blogerati' (and perhaps 'netizen', though that's been around a while) are clearly of new coinage and from a community (bloggers) already seen as overly self-regarding. Try speaking them out loud. They sound silly, partly because we don't tend to use them in spoken english, and partly because they are just plain silly hybrid words.
There is also the fact that whenever anyone from the 'traditional' media (e.g. television) talks about the internet, they attempt to appear knowledgeable by peppering their speech with jargon to a ludicrous extent. However, rather than technical jargon, they use words with non-technical meanings ('blogerati' is a good one). So it's easy to hate over-used jargon.
All I'm trying to say is, slashdot isn't ready for blogomaniagate of digerati in the blogosphere... yet.
My alarm clock run's Slackware. and does things that most people would kill for in an alarm clock. (mp3 wake "ringtone" text to speech good morning with weather and news, waking me 30 minutes early because it snowed last night, etc....)
What a cool project. If you can be bothered, a webpage describing it would be very interesting (and probably make the front page of slashdot).
The main character in the story, Tim Kehoe, spent years mixing dyes with soap in his kitchen and blowing bubbles with it. Nothing worked.
After ten years of almost entirely unsuccessful tinkering, he got some financial backing and finally employed a guy with a PhD. in dye chemistry to work on the problem - who apparently cracked it by synthesising an unusual molecule called a 'lactone ring' - something Kehoe would never have created in a lifetime of messing about in the kitchen.
The '11-year quest' makes a nice story, but it was an actual scientist who created the bubbles. Props to Kehoe for the idea, but he didn't have the skills to realise it.
"Shut up and hack" works no matter the situation, if you're not a contributing member of the community you have no say in the community - it's that simple.
Only if you want a userbase consisting entirely of hackers. Those who advocate free software for general use (whether they believe that it's morally or technically superior) have to accept that most users want to use software for a particular purpose (to interact with their friends, or to do their jobs, say) and not to develop software. While of course the coders deserve respect (and non-coders can still contribute - with money, hardware, documentation, advocacy, usability testing), if the requests of the users are ignored, the resulting project may be idiosyncratic, ill-designed and under-used.
I, Nimrangul, am not any of the above, I am (d) smarter than you.
There are certainly lots of smart people here on slashdot, but in my experience smart folks don't feel the need to post crap like you do. Perhaps I should be smart enough not to respond.
And since when, pray tell, did I become a developer? I'm just someone with more brain cells in my left nut then either of you dicksticks have in your heads... Do you understand now, pinprick?
You have a terrible attitude problem.
Besides, "Show me your code" breaks down when you want everyone to use OSS. Not everyone is a developer. Even developers don't have time to jump in and fix every project they have problems with. And the primary users of many projects will not be developers at all. If the average user can't suggest improvements without being ranted at, then don't expect them to use free software.
Oh well, you, Nimrangul, are (a) not a developer, (b) drunk or trolling, and (c) a known idiot, so it doesn't matter.
Your points all make sense, but bear in mind that minidisc players came along when most of us were happy with our tape decks.
Those clued in on minidisc (I wasn't one of them) were effectively enjoying most of the benefits of having an iPod since, when? 1995? Maybe '97 or so when the benefits of the internet became apparent to everyone. Whereas iPods didn't become really big worldwide until, well, maybe two years ago.
I believe it's acceptable usage to use semicolons as extra-powerful commas in lists to add clarity, the obvious example being when you have comma-separated clauses within the list.
e.g. "I visited Paris, the capital of France; Berlin, the capital of Germany; and Majorca, a Spanish island." In the post you replied to the quotes make the sentence look quite 'busy', so the semicolons add clarity.
(BTW hi Rosco, I friendlisted you some time back, probably because of some interesting comment you made)
For example, if they sold the first third of GTA:SA for under £10 instead of the £35 RRP, I'd be happy as a pig in the proverbial.
Buy second-hand. There are lots of great games that are a couple of years old, and most game shops now have buckets full of second-hand games, ridiculously cheap. I got 3 (decent) games for £10 *total* at my local video store the other day. Makes a lot more sense for those of us with other priorities than constant gaming. Why spend £80 on Devil May Cry 3 and GTA:SA, say, when you could have the original DMC and GTA: Vice City for £10.
...For some people, this causes motion sickness, and it is not limited to girls.
Yeah, I (male) have always had a touch of this, always in games with a first-person perspective. Years back I was addicted to the original Descent, but I had to take regular breaks as I started to feel funny. Some games are worse for this than others, and I've usually managed to play through it.
That was one hell of a post ("Wild ass crackhead prediction" and all). If you'd written it in a blog instead of as a comment, it'd be a frontpage story in itself.
You're right. I enjoy Graham's technical articles, but just because he was lucky enough to survive the.com bubble, he thinks he has special insight.
He says "The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft." Well, that's true, but most successful web companies got in there when the web was new and massively expanding. Microsoft came late to the party, but of course were able to buy into the market. Are those conditions likely to come again?
The GPL is less free than BSD because it does not grant the licensee as many freedoms.
No, the GPL is more free because it does not permit anyone to take away anyone else's freedom. Say I write some GPL code. You are free to use it, modify it, sell it if you want, but you may not tell any later user or developer that they can't enjoy the same freedoms you have enjoyed.
Scenario 1: Person A writes some GPL code. Person B uses it and modifies it, and releases the code. Everyone else is free to use that code as they wish, as long as they don't try to restrict anyone else's rights.
Scenario 2: Person A writes some BSD-licensed code. Person B uses it, modifies it and starts selling it as a shrink-wrapped product. All his users are restricted by EULAs. They can't have the source code, they can't legally share the program, and they're stuck if B discontinues the product.
In which scenario do you think the licensees have more freedom? It's free as in liberty, not free as in 'free ride'.
This is not what low voter turnout means in politics. What it means in politics (although the statists will never admit it) is that the people are (a) uninterested in politics, (b) opposed to the poltical process, or (c) consider the voting process hopeless or worthless.
That's the traditional theory, but in several local elections in recent years in the UK and europe, voter turnout has shot up in regions where there is a strong far-right candidate. It seems that people who are generally apathetic will turn out to vote when there is a danger that a candidate they strongly dislike (in this case a nazi) will get in, perhaps indicating that they are satisfied enough with things that they can't be bothered to vote usually.
" Perhaps you should try refreshing your browser cache?"
No, it's a real problem, albeit one that appears to be getting better now. But several more remain:
In the posts it creates (and sends throughout USENET): It encourages not quoting and attributing properly, it mangles anything around the '@' sign indiscriminately, it defaults to sending out users' e-mail addresses unmunged. In how it appears: It mangles e-mail addresses (and anything containing the '@' sign), it gets confused about what is quoted text, it is awkward to navigate, and above all, it gives little indication that it is an interface to USENET. The old AOL lamer's comment, "This is not usenet you dum ass, tihs is AOL!!11!" has come again, in the form of people thinking newsgroups are Google groups.
On the other hand, they do respond to customer pressure, for example they have already stopped trimming leading whitespace from posts, and if we keep complaining long enough they might get it right. They are losing a lot of goodwill at the moment though - not from the general public, but from a lot of technical, net-savvy people who had previously been big fans of Google. It's commonly known as Google-broken-beta now.
I think you missed my point. You first study what features you need *before* making the short-cut language.
But why? If I want a sandwich, I don't decide what type of bread I want and start baking. And say I need to work with columns of figures, I just use a spreadsheet, even though I don't need most of the features. Do you think I should work along the lines of "Hmm, I need to work with columns of figures, I'd better write a basic spreadsheet... Now, how to write it: I'll need to invent a programming language..."
If you invent a markup language for one application, you'll need another one for the next application, or to extend your original one, wasting lots of time. While if you learn a good general-purpose method, you have something you can transfer to other things, a whole host of tools written by other people, and community support.
That's all very well, but what about if you want to include equations? How about automatic contents and bibliography? How about columns, margins, arrangement of 'box-outs' with extra information? Special symbols, macros for common arrangements? What about a program to take your markup and produce a beautifully-typeset document?
Of course, you could implement all this yourself, but let me give you a hint: TeX. A mature, free software system for all the typesetting you could wish for. To put it another way, are you gonna reinvent the wheel or trust Donald E. Knuth? I know where the smart money is.
Yes, but search engines are almost unique in that they can be tried out and switched between with next to no effort. If you hear of a search engine, you can try it out easily, and if it works better, you'll stick with it. For example, Google's technological superiority allowed them to rapidly become the leading engine.
I'm trying to think of a way to square this with your Britney analogy. Say you were sick of pop music, but you only had to change the channel to find any style of music you wanted. Welcome to the internet.
I really don't understand why Apple doesn't put in a little work and port the Mac OS to the x86 architecture.
Because they're a hardware company. To do as you say would mean a fundamental change in their business - they would go from a hardware and OS vendor (like Sun) to an OS vendor (like Microsoft). Even if you think it would be successful, it would be a huge business change and an enormous risk. Apple seem to be occupying a niche with their systems - to change their business so they are competing only with Microsoft would invite Microsoft to crush them (despite the superiority of OSX).
Your idea has a problem: now there's a hidden trapdoor for newbies. Not many, but the ones who for some reason press only the right-hand side of the button (perhaps they are scared of the computer and timidly pecking at the button in a strange way). Their programs will 'stop working' and bring up a strange menu.
It's important not to introduce invisible extra behaviour - context menus are a convenience, but the items can be reached elsewhere. A newbie doesn't need them, and will be confused if he/she accidentally brings one up.
My time may be scarce, but I am the one who gets to choose where it is spent.
Brandybuck, I salute you for your contribution to open source and home brewing:)
The point is was trying to make was more like, if you want to contribute to an open-source project, you shouldn't have to fork it because the current maintainers are dicks.
This article is awful. Surely every slashdot reader knows about all the events in TFA, and the author doesn't make any new points.
Of course, ability to fork is a vital part of software freedom, but in a world of scarce developer time, it is vital not to let politics and personalities interfere with development of the best software.
Slashdot Mirror
Hate to break it to you, but you can't save PSX games on PS2 cards.
You can copy back and forth though. So he could free up space on his existing cards by offloading his old saves onto a PS2 card.
Am I the only nerd in the world that's gets annoyed when someone uses "win" for "good idea"?
Well, it's traditional, to the point that the (hilarious) GNU coding standards quoth:
Please don't use "win" as an abbreviation for Microsoft Windows in GNU software or documentation. In hacker terminology, calling something a "win" is a form of praise. If you wish to praise Microsoft Windows when speaking on your own, by all means do so, but not in GNU software. Usually we write the name "Windows" in full, but when brevity is very important (as in file names and sometimes symbol names), we abbreviate it to "w". For instance, the files and functions in Emacs that deal with Windows start with 'w32'.
I've been playing with the math myself for primes, but what library or technique do they use to get past 32bits? It's probably simple, but I'd appreciate some help.
You'll probably find this article interesting - it covers prime finding (in C) from naive algorithms to complexe ones involving paging bit arrays in and out of memory: "Fun With Prime Numbers"
Gah, that's why I don't get modded up! My 10-letter-word count is too high for 7th grade reading levels!
You might want to face the fact that several slashdot readers (almost certainly technical folks who are used to various types of jargon) reacted badly to your post based entirely on the language used. The words 'digerati', 'blogosphere' and 'blogerati' (and perhaps 'netizen', though that's been around a while) are clearly of new coinage and from a community (bloggers) already seen as overly self-regarding. Try speaking them out loud. They sound silly, partly because we don't tend to use them in spoken english, and partly because they are just plain silly hybrid words.
There is also the fact that whenever anyone from the 'traditional' media (e.g. television) talks about the internet, they attempt to appear knowledgeable by peppering their speech with jargon to a ludicrous extent. However, rather than technical jargon, they use words with non-technical meanings ('blogerati' is a good one). So it's easy to hate over-used jargon.
All I'm trying to say is, slashdot isn't ready for blogomaniagate of digerati in the blogosphere... yet.
My alarm clock run's Slackware. and does things that most people would kill for in an alarm clock. (mp3 wake "ringtone" text to speech good morning with weather and news, waking me 30 minutes early because it snowed last night, etc....)
What a cool project. If you can be bothered, a webpage describing it would be very interesting (and probably make the front page of slashdot).
The main character in the story, Tim Kehoe, spent years mixing dyes with soap in his kitchen and blowing bubbles with it. Nothing worked.
After ten years of almost entirely unsuccessful tinkering, he got some financial backing and finally employed a guy with a PhD. in dye chemistry to work on the problem - who apparently cracked it by synthesising an unusual molecule called a 'lactone ring' - something Kehoe would never have created in a lifetime of messing about in the kitchen.
The '11-year quest' makes a nice story, but it was an actual scientist who created the bubbles. Props to Kehoe for the idea, but he didn't have the skills to realise it.
"Shut up and hack" works no matter the situation, if you're not a contributing member of the community you have no say in the community - it's that simple.
Only if you want a userbase consisting entirely of hackers. Those who advocate free software for general use (whether they believe that it's morally or technically superior) have to accept that most users want to use software for a particular purpose (to interact with their friends, or to do their jobs, say) and not to develop software. While of course the coders deserve respect (and non-coders can still contribute - with money, hardware, documentation, advocacy, usability testing), if the requests of the users are ignored, the resulting project may be idiosyncratic, ill-designed and under-used.
I, Nimrangul, am not any of the above, I am (d) smarter than you.
There are certainly lots of smart people here on slashdot, but in my experience smart folks don't feel the need to post crap like you do. Perhaps I should be smart enough not to respond.
And since when, pray tell, did I become a developer? I'm just someone with more brain cells in my left nut then either of you dicksticks have in your heads... Do you understand now, pinprick?
You have a terrible attitude problem.
Besides, "Show me your code" breaks down when you want everyone to use OSS. Not everyone is a developer. Even developers don't have time to jump in and fix every project they have problems with. And the primary users of many projects will not be developers at all. If the average user can't suggest improvements without being ranted at, then don't expect them to use free software.
Oh well, you, Nimrangul, are (a) not a developer, (b) drunk or trolling, and (c) a known idiot, so it doesn't matter.
1. ipods run MP3's natively...
Your points all make sense, but bear in mind that minidisc players came along when most of us were happy with our tape decks.
Those clued in on minidisc (I wasn't one of them) were effectively enjoying most of the benefits of having an iPod since, when? 1995? Maybe '97 or so when the benefits of the internet became apparent to everyone. Whereas iPods didn't become really big worldwide until, well, maybe two years ago.
You should have used colons here, not semicolons.
I believe it's acceptable usage to use semicolons as extra-powerful commas in lists to add clarity, the obvious example being when you have comma-separated clauses within the list.
e.g. "I visited Paris, the capital of France; Berlin, the capital of Germany; and Majorca, a Spanish island." In the post you replied to the quotes make the sentence look quite 'busy', so the semicolons add clarity.
(BTW hi Rosco, I friendlisted you some time back, probably because of some interesting comment you made)
"Yes, but what would be the point of writing a story where all the subjects are in the ship travelling near c?"
Funny you should say that. Poul Anderson wrote a very interesting novel about precisely that, Tau Zero.
It's no classic, but it gives a plausible method of space colonisation without hyperspace.
For example, if they sold the first third of GTA:SA for under £10 instead of the £35 RRP, I'd be happy as a pig in the proverbial.
Buy second-hand. There are lots of great games that are a couple of years old, and most game shops now have buckets full of second-hand games, ridiculously cheap. I got 3 (decent) games for £10 *total* at my local video store the other day. Makes a lot more sense for those of us with other priorities than constant gaming. Why spend £80 on Devil May Cry 3 and GTA:SA, say, when you could have the original DMC and GTA: Vice City for £10.
...For some people, this causes motion sickness, and it is not limited to girls.
Yeah, I (male) have always had a touch of this, always in games with a first-person perspective. Years back I was addicted to the original Descent, but I had to take regular breaks as I started to feel funny. Some games are worse for this than others, and I've usually managed to play through it.
That was one hell of a post ("Wild ass crackhead prediction" and all). If you'd written it in a blog instead of as a comment, it'd be a frontpage story in itself.
You're right. I enjoy Graham's technical articles, but just because he was lucky enough to survive the .com bubble, he thinks he has special insight.
:)
He says "The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft." Well, that's true, but most successful web companies got in there when the web was new and massively expanding. Microsoft came late to the party, but of course were able to buy into the market. Are those conditions likely to come again?
It may be that Paul Graham is obsolete
The GPL is less free than BSD because it does not grant the licensee as many freedoms.
No, the GPL is more free because it does not permit anyone to take away anyone else's freedom. Say I write some GPL code. You are free to use it, modify it, sell it if you want, but you may not tell any later user or developer that they can't enjoy the same freedoms you have enjoyed.
Scenario 1: Person A writes some GPL code. Person B uses it and modifies it, and releases the code. Everyone else is free to use that code as they wish, as long as they don't try to restrict anyone else's rights.
Scenario 2: Person A writes some BSD-licensed code. Person B uses it, modifies it and starts selling it as a shrink-wrapped product. All his users are restricted by EULAs. They can't have the source code, they can't legally share the program, and they're stuck if B discontinues the product.
In which scenario do you think the licensees have more freedom? It's free as in liberty, not free as in 'free ride'.
This is not what low voter turnout means in politics. What it means in politics (although the statists will never admit it) is that the people are (a) uninterested in politics, (b) opposed to the poltical process, or (c) consider the voting process hopeless or worthless.
That's the traditional theory, but in several local elections in recent years in the UK and europe, voter turnout has shot up in regions where there is a strong far-right candidate. It seems that people who are generally apathetic will turn out to vote when there is a danger that a candidate they strongly dislike (in this case a nazi) will get in, perhaps indicating that they are satisfied enough with things that they can't be bothered to vote usually.
" Perhaps you should try refreshing your browser cache?"
No, it's a real problem, albeit one that appears to be getting better now. But several more remain:
In the posts it creates (and sends throughout USENET): It encourages not quoting and attributing properly, it mangles anything around the '@' sign indiscriminately, it defaults to sending out users' e-mail addresses unmunged.
In how it appears: It mangles e-mail addresses (and anything containing the '@' sign), it gets confused about what is quoted text, it is awkward to navigate, and above all, it gives little indication that it is an interface to USENET. The old AOL lamer's comment, "This is not usenet you dum ass, tihs is AOL!!11!" has come again, in the form of people thinking newsgroups are Google groups.
On the other hand, they do respond to customer pressure, for example they have already stopped trimming leading whitespace from posts, and if we keep complaining long enough they might get it right. They are losing a lot of goodwill at the moment though - not from the general public, but from a lot of technical, net-savvy people who had previously been big fans of Google. It's commonly known as Google-broken-beta now.
I think you missed my point. You first study what features you need *before* making the short-cut language.
But why? If I want a sandwich, I don't decide what type of bread I want and start baking. And say I need to work with columns of figures, I just use a spreadsheet, even though I don't need most of the features. Do you think I should work along the lines of "Hmm, I need to work with columns of figures, I'd better write a basic spreadsheet... Now, how to write it: I'll need to invent a programming language..."
If you invent a markup language for one application, you'll need another one for the next application, or to extend your original one, wasting lots of time. While if you learn a good general-purpose method, you have something you can transfer to other things, a whole host of tools written by other people, and community support.
That's all very well, but what about if you want to include equations? How about automatic contents and bibliography? How about columns, margins, arrangement of 'box-outs' with extra information? Special symbols, macros for common arrangements? What about a program to take your markup and produce a beautifully-typeset document?
Of course, you could implement all this yourself, but let me give you a hint: TeX. A mature, free software system for all the typesetting you could wish for. To put it another way, are you gonna reinvent the wheel or trust Donald E. Knuth? I know where the smart money is.
Yes, but search engines are almost unique in that they can be tried out and switched between with next to no effort. If you hear of a search engine, you can try it out easily, and if it works better, you'll stick with it. For example, Google's technological superiority allowed them to rapidly become the leading engine.
I'm trying to think of a way to square this with your Britney analogy. Say you were sick of pop music, but you only had to change the channel to find any style of music you wanted. Welcome to the internet.
I really don't understand why Apple doesn't put in a little work and port the Mac OS to the x86 architecture.
Because they're a hardware company. To do as you say would mean a fundamental change in their business - they would go from a hardware and OS vendor (like Sun) to an OS vendor (like Microsoft). Even if you think it would be successful, it would be a huge business change and an enormous risk. Apple seem to be occupying a niche with their systems - to change their business so they are competing only with Microsoft would invite Microsoft to crush them (despite the superiority of OSX).
Your idea has a problem: now there's a hidden trapdoor for newbies. Not many, but the ones who for some reason press only the right-hand side of the button (perhaps they are scared of the computer and timidly pecking at the button in a strange way). Their programs will 'stop working' and bring up a strange menu.
It's important not to introduce invisible extra behaviour - context menus are a convenience, but the items can be reached elsewhere. A newbie doesn't need them, and will be confused if he/she accidentally brings one up.
My time may be scarce, but I am the one who gets to choose where it is spent.
:)
Brandybuck, I salute you for your contribution to open source and home brewing
The point is was trying to make was more like, if you want to contribute to an open-source project, you shouldn't have to fork it because the current maintainers are dicks.
This article is awful. Surely every slashdot reader knows about all the events in TFA, and the author doesn't make any new points.
Of course, ability to fork is a vital part of software freedom, but in a world of scarce developer time, it is vital not to let politics and personalities interfere with development of the best software.