That's not to say the MATE guys are wrong or wasting their time, either. Trying to force them to work on GNOME 3 would be just as stupid as trying to prohibit the creation of GNOME 3.
A small group of developers starting on a fresh (to them) project, which is often the most productive time, have shown that they can add a couple minor features, fix a few bugs, and do some renaming. You can always do something. The question is how effective you are. How much would they have accomplished if it was a nice clean codebase?
Plus, this is free software we're talking about here. Working on messy code is something we do for money, but even when it's fulfilling, make no mistake, working on messy code is work. When it comes to doing stuff for free, I know I for one have a high likelihood of just moving on to something else if working with it gets tedious. That's a pretty natural human reaction, so if you want more people to work on your stuff for free, it makes sense to create an environment that's fun to program in. The end result will very likely be more people working on your project, and not only that, well-structured code tends to result in less bugs from developers unfamiliar with the environment.
Monetizing means squeezing the maximum amount of money possible out of something, and letting everyone and their brother get their fingers into it. Much like Al Perry's mom, heyoo!.
*ahem* Anyway, it's unlikely Louis CK would have made a penny more (and pretty likely he'd have made a lot less less) if he'd have gone with Paramount. But we would have paid at least $20, so four times as much, and gotten a DRM'd-to-hell-and-back file, if we were even lucky enough to get one that can be played more than once. In return, Paramount promises to "promote" his shows, so he theoretically makes it up in volume. Paramount would make a bunch of money, the artist would have made less and pissed his audience off at the same time, everybody (who counts, i.e. the Paramount execs) is happy!
When Louis becomes over-saturated because Paramount would rather have $10 today than $2 year-after-year and can't sell tickets anymore, well, sorry bud, guess you're just not funny. Nope, it has nothing to do with the fact that we forced you into a terrible TV show because of some shitty clause in your contract and let Comedy Central rerun your specials until everybody knew them word for word and spent all of your money on over-promoting your stand-up shows that you don't have time to write new material for because we're running you ragged "monetizing" your every breath. Not our fault, the numbers don't lie. Next!
What exactly is bad about finally packing up all those new ideas? I'd rather not use 9 different IDEs for the 1 cool thing each does, and besides, once you get a bunch of things together, it's often more than the sum of its parts.
That's funny, I go around telling people they're secretly not a Christian, because if they really believed the unavoidable consequences to many of their actions would be eternal, maximal pain, they'd never, ever do those things.
Actually it doesn't work so well for Christians since there's so many ways to be forgiven, but Jews and Islamic and some sects of Christianity have got it bad.
The thing is, that wetware is your mind. You believe it on some level even if it is quickly put into a more rational model by your higher thought processes, and since we have yet to draw a firm line between consciousness and base-level processes (or even prove that there is a line at all, or even that consciousness is anything more than a pseudo-magical narrative that retro-actively applies intention to a complex set of reactions that we don't actually control at all), saying that the magical thought that occurs below your internal word-based internal monologue is somehow separate from the rest of you seems like more of a wishful distinction than anything else.
Having a theory of mind is a well-researched area of cognitive science. It's the basis for almost all human interaction, and a lot of non-human interaction.
In my experience, only people who are under a permanent state of self-delusion believe they never have irrational thoughts. It's simply contrary to everything we understand about how the brain works. You may suppress those thoughts, which is laudable, but if you think you never have flashes of irrationality from that lizard brain in the back of your head, you're lying to yourself.
The problem with lying to yourself is it becomes a habit, and it's easier to keep doing it than it is to stop. After all, that would require a shred of humility, and admitting to being imperfect.
Yes, they're vector-based, but rendered on a raster display. Look at how readable and attractive small fonts are when printed on a laser printer (high-DPI) vs an LCD (low-DPI).
But that's not even the primary issue--small fonts are plenty readable even if they aren't particularly pretty. The real problem is the rest of the GUI. A 1-px window border zoomed by 1.5x looks terrible. For an illustration of this, do a print-screen, open the image in an editor, and then scale by some non-integer value. Both 1.9 and 2.1x look much, much worse than 2.0x.
If displays were high-DPI enough that we couldn't see individual pixels, the difference between an integer and non-integer scale would be much less. Not only that, but non-integer scaling would be required less often. As it is, it's bad enough to discourage non-integer scaling completely, but 2.0x zoom reduces effective screen area too much on anything but the largest displays, and even then 1920x1200 at 2x zoom gives you 960x600, a resolution that hasn't been really viable in 5 years at least.
The end result is, nobody scales their displays, so nobody makes their interfaces work well scaled, so nobody makes a display with a high enough DPI to scale effectively.
Huh, lots of downmods on this post. Since I'm such an excellent poster, the only viable conclusion is that there are a lot of Seven Mary Three fans in the audience. Who could have known?
It says explicitly not that in the article though.
But in December, he said, he received only about $3,000 of a $45,000 bonus he believed he had earned. Since Infosys has assigned him no work at all since last April, he received no bonus for 2011, losing one-third of his income.
If a loss of $42,000 means he lost 1/3 of his income, he's still collecting $84,000 a year.
I don't know, it just seems really odd to me, to hold an employer responsible for your life and happiness at the level he's doing. Like, if you're going to hold them responsible for making you a happy, fulfilled person, how do you reconcile any sort of separation of work and personal life? I don't think it would even be morally right to tell a company they're responsible for my happiness in that kind of way and then say, "no, I don't want to spam links to the product on my personal blog" or "no, you cannot see my cellphone records".
Hell, I think it's weird to even put that kind of responsibility on your spouse. Maybe I'm the weird one there, but I don't think so--I'm pretty sure that's at least some form of codependency.
I have to wonder if this is some sort of elaborate troll.
The guy is still drawing a check, but doesn't have to work, and he's upset? Why can't he work on his own projects if he's got all this free time? I understand that there may be legal ramifications to freelancing while in an employment lawsuit, but that doesn't mean you can't do your own stuff, or volunteer. He says he was used to people being around, but now he's describing a prison-like experience. If he really craves human interaction that much, why can't he just go out to a bar? Find local singles groups? Go to the mall? Volunteer for an animal shelter? So little of this makes sense.
“You’re around people every day, and then all of a sudden you are staring at four walls,” Mr. Palmer wrote in an e-mail. “No one will hire me and I can’t quit, so they just torture me. I have become numb and cumbersome to this world.”
Yeah, I used to have a car where the gas pedal was fixed to the floor with a hinge. It was a little odd at first, but man it was so much more comfortable than the floating pedal setup. As a bonus, the lever effect is in the opposite direction if you manage to skid the floor mat up over it, although there was also a little lip there that made skidding the floor mat up something I never managed to do.
I don't understand the problem you're trying to solve with that definition. Reducing the number of domains? Even with it limited to a single domain per person or corporation (which skews things even more heavily toward corporations, as they spawn new shell corporations like people buy socks), the rate will be so high that it would be indistinguishable from the current unfettered method, which as far as I can tell, is working just fine.
Also, you want to shut the anti-US agitators up by arbitrarily mandating a new domain policy that more than capitulates to everything they're asking? Sounds like a way to piss them off even more and burden us with more, completely pointless, restrictions, and then increasing namespace depth, leading to even less-convenient URLs. And further, unless you're proposing taking away registrations, it enshrines all the current domains as special, so that nobody will ever be able to have a.com in the future, raising the barrier to competition for the perceived credibility that comes from such a domain like the 212 area code and/or creating a new market in legacy domains. How is that not a classic lose-lose-lose-lose-lose situation?
Yeah, the problem is just the pesky reality that current pixels are large enough that anything that doesn't fall precisely on their lines looks like shit, so almost all scaling looks like shit because we actually need fonts that are 0.5 < ${CURRENT_SIZE} < 2 times their current size. Oh, virtually the problem's easy, and there are a number of solutions. We just need to get on the whole reality thing.
Oh god please come buy the monitors where I work. Still stuck on 1280x1024 here, and that probably won't change until these fucking things start breaking.
The real pathetic thing is that our GUIs are still tied to the pixel as the native scaling unit.
Unfortunately, they're likely to stay that way, as our current DPIs are low enough that scaled interfaces are much worse looking that pixel-aligned. Here's holding out hope that the iPad's doubled resolution thing catches on--it becoming popular, and allowing us the leeway to scale UIs without them looking like shit is the only path I can see to finally decoupling from pixels. Once that's done, we'll finally stop seeing laptops with lower resolutions as a selling point to old folks because the text is bigger.
So you're saying that we should buy monitors based on the minimum-width task we use them for? Or is it that we should buy monitors that conform to your personal preferences?
Also, do you realize that you're implicitly agreeing with the post that states that our ability to take advantage of horizontal resolution is limited (peaking 80 characters, apparently, I wish he would have specified what the efficiency curve is like and what the by-god conversion factor of characters-to-pixels is), while our ability to take advantage of vertical resolution is unlimited?
Slashdot Mirror
That's not to say the MATE guys are wrong or wasting their time, either. Trying to force them to work on GNOME 3 would be just as stupid as trying to prohibit the creation of GNOME 3.
A small group of developers starting on a fresh (to them) project, which is often the most productive time, have shown that they can add a couple minor features, fix a few bugs, and do some renaming. You can always do something. The question is how effective you are. How much would they have accomplished if it was a nice clean codebase?
Plus, this is free software we're talking about here. Working on messy code is something we do for money, but even when it's fulfilling, make no mistake, working on messy code is work. When it comes to doing stuff for free, I know I for one have a high likelihood of just moving on to something else if working with it gets tedious. That's a pretty natural human reaction, so if you want more people to work on your stuff for free, it makes sense to create an environment that's fun to program in. The end result will very likely be more people working on your project, and not only that, well-structured code tends to result in less bugs from developers unfamiliar with the environment.
Even better. It points out that he's completely useless.
Monetizing means squeezing the maximum amount of money possible out of something, and letting everyone and their brother get their fingers into it. Much like Al Perry's mom, heyoo!.
*ahem* Anyway, it's unlikely Louis CK would have made a penny more (and pretty likely he'd have made a lot less less) if he'd have gone with Paramount. But we would have paid at least $20, so four times as much, and gotten a DRM'd-to-hell-and-back file, if we were even lucky enough to get one that can be played more than once. In return, Paramount promises to "promote" his shows, so he theoretically makes it up in volume. Paramount would make a bunch of money, the artist would have made less and pissed his audience off at the same time, everybody (who counts, i.e. the Paramount execs) is happy!
When Louis becomes over-saturated because Paramount would rather have $10 today than $2 year-after-year and can't sell tickets anymore, well, sorry bud, guess you're just not funny. Nope, it has nothing to do with the fact that we forced you into a terrible TV show because of some shitty clause in your contract and let Comedy Central rerun your specials until everybody knew them word for word and spent all of your money on over-promoting your stand-up shows that you don't have time to write new material for because we're running you ragged "monetizing" your every breath. Not our fault, the numbers don't lie. Next!
Spoiler: It's practically every site.
What exactly is bad about finally packing up all those new ideas? I'd rather not use 9 different IDEs for the 1 cool thing each does, and besides, once you get a bunch of things together, it's often more than the sum of its parts.
A bit early, this is the reception.
Very, very true.
However, we should have a better method in place before we drop the old one. And the two methods should be tested.
And before that, a proof-of-concept should be done. Is it even possible to plasticize the brain in that way?
Even if it is effective, if you haven't tested the results with something more objective than a general "this feels faster", it's superstition.
Time some stuff that particularly annoys you, before and after. Control for reboots, etc. Write the results down. Then, you'll know.
That's funny, I go around telling people they're secretly not a Christian, because if they really believed the unavoidable consequences to many of their actions would be eternal, maximal pain, they'd never, ever do those things.
Actually it doesn't work so well for Christians since there's so many ways to be forgiven, but Jews and Islamic and some sects of Christianity have got it bad.
The thing is, that wetware is your mind. You believe it on some level even if it is quickly put into a more rational model by your higher thought processes, and since we have yet to draw a firm line between consciousness and base-level processes (or even prove that there is a line at all, or even that consciousness is anything more than a pseudo-magical narrative that retro-actively applies intention to a complex set of reactions that we don't actually control at all), saying that the magical thought that occurs below your internal word-based internal monologue is somehow separate from the rest of you seems like more of a wishful distinction than anything else.
Having a theory of mind is a well-researched area of cognitive science. It's the basis for almost all human interaction, and a lot of non-human interaction.
So yeah, I can read your mind. So can my cat.
In my experience, only people who are under a permanent state of self-delusion believe they never have irrational thoughts. It's simply contrary to everything we understand about how the brain works. You may suppress those thoughts, which is laudable, but if you think you never have flashes of irrationality from that lizard brain in the back of your head, you're lying to yourself.
The problem with lying to yourself is it becomes a habit, and it's easier to keep doing it than it is to stop. After all, that would require a shred of humility, and admitting to being imperfect.
Yes, they're vector-based, but rendered on a raster display. Look at how readable and attractive small fonts are when printed on a laser printer (high-DPI) vs an LCD (low-DPI).
But that's not even the primary issue--small fonts are plenty readable even if they aren't particularly pretty. The real problem is the rest of the GUI. A 1-px window border zoomed by 1.5x looks terrible. For an illustration of this, do a print-screen, open the image in an editor, and then scale by some non-integer value. Both 1.9 and 2.1x look much, much worse than 2.0x.
If displays were high-DPI enough that we couldn't see individual pixels, the difference between an integer and non-integer scale would be much less. Not only that, but non-integer scaling would be required less often. As it is, it's bad enough to discourage non-integer scaling completely, but 2.0x zoom reduces effective screen area too much on anything but the largest displays, and even then 1920x1200 at 2x zoom gives you 960x600, a resolution that hasn't been really viable in 5 years at least.
The end result is, nobody scales their displays, so nobody makes their interfaces work well scaled, so nobody makes a display with a high enough DPI to scale effectively.
Huh, lots of downmods on this post. Since I'm such an excellent poster, the only viable conclusion is that there are a lot of Seven Mary Three fans in the audience. Who could have known?
It says explicitly not that in the article though.
But in December, he said, he received only about $3,000 of a $45,000 bonus he believed he had earned. Since Infosys has assigned him no work at all since last April, he received no bonus for 2011, losing one-third of his income.
If a loss of $42,000 means he lost 1/3 of his income, he's still collecting $84,000 a year.
I don't know, it just seems really odd to me, to hold an employer responsible for your life and happiness at the level he's doing. Like, if you're going to hold them responsible for making you a happy, fulfilled person, how do you reconcile any sort of separation of work and personal life? I don't think it would even be morally right to tell a company they're responsible for my happiness in that kind of way and then say, "no, I don't want to spam links to the product on my personal blog" or "no, you cannot see my cellphone records".
Hell, I think it's weird to even put that kind of responsibility on your spouse. Maybe I'm the weird one there, but I don't think so--I'm pretty sure that's at least some form of codependency.
I have to wonder if this is some sort of elaborate troll.
The guy is still drawing a check, but doesn't have to work, and he's upset? Why can't he work on his own projects if he's got all this free time? I understand that there may be legal ramifications to freelancing while in an employment lawsuit, but that doesn't mean you can't do your own stuff, or volunteer. He says he was used to people being around, but now he's describing a prison-like experience. If he really craves human interaction that much, why can't he just go out to a bar? Find local singles groups? Go to the mall? Volunteer for an animal shelter? So little of this makes sense.
“You’re around people every day, and then all of a sudden you are staring at four walls,” Mr. Palmer wrote in an e-mail. “No one will hire me and I can’t quit, so they just torture me. I have become numb and cumbersome to this world.”
And did he just quote a Seven Mary Three song?
Yeah, I used to have a car where the gas pedal was fixed to the floor with a hinge. It was a little odd at first, but man it was so much more comfortable than the floating pedal setup. As a bonus, the lever effect is in the opposite direction if you manage to skid the floor mat up over it, although there was also a little lip there that made skidding the floor mat up something I never managed to do.
I don't understand the problem you're trying to solve with that definition. Reducing the number of domains? Even with it limited to a single domain per person or corporation (which skews things even more heavily toward corporations, as they spawn new shell corporations like people buy socks), the rate will be so high that it would be indistinguishable from the current unfettered method, which as far as I can tell, is working just fine.
Also, you want to shut the anti-US agitators up by arbitrarily mandating a new domain policy that more than capitulates to everything they're asking? Sounds like a way to piss them off even more and burden us with more, completely pointless, restrictions, and then increasing namespace depth, leading to even less-convenient URLs. And further, unless you're proposing taking away registrations, it enshrines all the current domains as special, so that nobody will ever be able to have a .com in the future, raising the barrier to competition for the perceived credibility that comes from such a domain like the 212 area code and/or creating a new market in legacy domains. How is that not a classic lose-lose-lose-lose-lose situation?
Yeah, the problem is just the pesky reality that current pixels are large enough that anything that doesn't fall precisely on their lines looks like shit, so almost all scaling looks like shit because we actually need fonts that are 0.5 < ${CURRENT_SIZE} < 2 times their current size. Oh, virtually the problem's easy, and there are a number of solutions. We just need to get on the whole reality thing.
Oh god please come buy the monitors where I work. Still stuck on 1280x1024 here, and that probably won't change until these fucking things start breaking.
The real pathetic thing is that our GUIs are still tied to the pixel as the native scaling unit.
Unfortunately, they're likely to stay that way, as our current DPIs are low enough that scaled interfaces are much worse looking that pixel-aligned. Here's holding out hope that the iPad's doubled resolution thing catches on--it becoming popular, and allowing us the leeway to scale UIs without them looking like shit is the only path I can see to finally decoupling from pixels. Once that's done, we'll finally stop seeing laptops with lower resolutions as a selling point to old folks because the text is bigger.
So you're saying that we should buy monitors based on the minimum-width task we use them for? Or is it that we should buy monitors that conform to your personal preferences?
Also, do you realize that you're implicitly agreeing with the post that states that our ability to take advantage of horizontal resolution is limited (peaking 80 characters, apparently, I wish he would have specified what the efficiency curve is like and what the by-god conversion factor of characters-to-pixels is), while our ability to take advantage of vertical resolution is unlimited?
What constitutes an entity?