But once it is found, it can be fixed at one point, namely the jpeg library. If everyone reimplemented the jpeg routines themselves when they needed to use them, probably quite a few would have a similar bug, even more would have far more serious bugs, and as these were found, each developer would have to fix them independently. Thus, we would expend much more effort to write code, and we would expend much more effort to fix code, and at nearly every point in the game, the average crappiness of the code would be higher.
I quite agree. Also, don't just ask in the Comp Sci department. Talk to the physicists, the biologists, the chemists, the engineers, even some you might not expect, like the linguists (especially if you're around Ohio State U; they have an extensive Computational Linguistics program). In fact, oftentimes, the most interesting and useful in the future projects will not come from the comp sci people.
If you find that there are a lot of people interested in you, don't be afraid to be picky. OTOH, if you don't find yourself a hot commodity, be willing to accept a project bughunting in the crusty physics prof's FORTRAN77 simulation that has been around since FORTRAN77 itself, accumulating cruft (as programs are wont to do). You can do anything for a few months.
Dress smartly, get appointments rather than just walking down the hall knocking on doors, maek shure you're English is good when u right emails (or anything else) to them, and don't insult anybody's programming abilities unless you know your listener agrees with you (I think I managed to annoy my (physics) department head once because I asserted that most physicists are really bad programmers. Which they are. Naturally, I am the exception:-p ). Also, for extra credit (which might make or break), find out what research the people you are going to talk to do, and learn something about it before you go. Not only will you seem more useful to the profs, but you'll learn quite a bit that way, and possibly even find some field that you are really quite interested in.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."
I think that when there is a difference between theory and practice, that it simply means that the theory is wrong. A right theory will hold up in practice. Otherwise it is not right. So this should not be seen as a criticism of theory or theorists in general, but an exhortation to have right theory.
All too often that quote is taken to mean "Well, I don't know jack about this, but I'm not an academic who has studied it my whole life, so I must be right.".
Well, that isn't terribly surprising. Windows 2000, ie, released in the year 2000 or thereabouts, ie 6 years ago, was designed to run on machines of its time. Ubuntu, released, oh what, last week, is designed to run on machines of today. There are plenty of distros which are designed to run on machines of yesteryear. Many of them, I would expect, have hardware support that is possibly even better than ubuntu's, because they don't have to fuss about with new hardware. Perhaps you should give them a try. Right tool for the job and all that. If you'd have asked me, which you would have no reason to, of course, I'd have told you probably to try ubuntu, but also to give something like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux a shot, as those are intended to run on older hardware.
BTW- SATA stands for Serial ATA. Google is your friend.
And you think it isn't a screaming problem that the current latest version of Microsoft's OS came out in October 2001?
Sure, if you tried to install a linux distro from the same month, you'd also have problems with SATA (probably. I don't know this from experience). But does that mean that FC 4 has not fixed problems that Microsoft has neglected? The fact is, Joe User can sit down at a new computer (blank HDD), with the latest Windows install disk, and the latest install disk from *some* linux distros, and he will find that he has a much easier time installing the linux distros than Windows. Why? Hardware support!
This isn't the Special Olympics. Nobody is going to sigh and say "ooohhhh, but poor little Windows has the mind of an October 2001 release. Isn't he doing so well under the circumstances?" Either it works, today, or it doesn't.
From what you describe, it sounds as though the mouse maker (logitech) is certainly not the one "keeping [left-handers] down", but rather those who configure a computer to use those buttons. Blame where blame is due, but not elsewhere. Any completely symmetric mouse is exactly as well suited (from the point of view of mouse manufacturing) for left-handers as it is for right-handers.
Whereas this "accelerated growth" natural for embryonic stem cells, and VERY much unwanted, in adult stem cells, are less likely to give rise to the uncontrolled growth seen with embryonic stem cells.
I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but that sentence was so borked that I cannot understand it. Well, with sufficient work, I might be able to puzzle out what you meant. But I'm tired and it is not worth that much work. The amount of work required would almost certainly be more than that required to post a reply bitching about it.
Well, in your hypothetical situation, I think that the GPL3 has already accomplished its goal. A and B cannot be in each other's beds. B cannot ship their hardware with the GPL3'd software from a particular repository (apt-get is a program, not a repository or a signing system...) on it, or else they are clearly in violation of GPL3. And how large is the market for hardware shipping with no software on it? Or even hardware shipping with software other than the software it was designed for? The aim is to prevent (eg) TiVo from shipping PVRs with Linux on them, but only allowing that one version of Linux to ever run on them. Of course, since Linux is likely staying GPL2, this particular won't be prevented, but you get the point. TiVo is not going to ship PVRs with blank HDDs, and say "Oh, by the way, you can install this particular linux binary which is maintained by this completely unrelated company over here if you want to do anything with what you just bought".
So, in the situation you describe, the hardware sold by B would be essentially useless (you can't run the GNU utilities because they're GPL3, and you can't run any other utilities because they're not signed). But, if you went ahead and installed the signed GNU utility binaries, knowing that this was not permitted, then you the end user would of course be in violation of the GPL3, not A or B.
OTOH, I think it unlikely that Stallman or anyone else will spend a great deal of effort to stop that particular sort of violation. 1) It is unlikely to occur much, because B shipping hardware without software is not going to sell much. 2) It would go against his ideas of freedom, as I understand them. You've bought this hardware, you can do what you like with it. But I could be wrong in this paragraph; it is mere speculation.
This is a situation which could be deemed in part a consequence of raising a generation on TV rather than books. I spent my childhood reading everything I could get my hands on, and as an ancestor poster pointed out, mechanical errors stick, out like soar thum to me. But talking (well, ok, emailing and instant-messaging) to many of my friends, most of whom are really very intelligent people, I find that, as you say, they understand the spoken language very thoroughly, but translating from spoken to written language is far more error-prone.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I am a physicist, and I am not particularly impressed with Hawking. Many other physicists that I know feel similarly. The physics world is certainly not in awe of him, as the science-for-the-layman reading crowd generally is. He is fairly widely viewed as a decent theorist, but his fame certainly outstrips his accomplishments. My fiancee is a linguist, and according to her, many linguists feel roughly the same way about Noam Chomsky.
According to the wikipedia article that you cite, the hydrogen used for buoyancy was not the main contributor to the flames, but rather a compound used to dope the fabric that formed the skin on the zeppelin.
Wheres the diarrhea warning? Any self-respecting perscription has that side effect.
Clearly, for a self-esteem problem, one would not take a self-respecting prescription. If you had any self-respect, you wouldn't need the prescription in the first place. Ohhhh logic.... what do they teach them in these schools?
My experience with physics classes has been that the best explanations of theory are generally (almost) explanations of discovery. An emphasis on why something was thought tends to make it much easier to understand what was thought.
I am a (experimental) particle physicist, and I also am not particularly enamored of Stephen Hawking. He has done some excellent work on black holes, and he has done some excellent work to keep himself in the media limelight since then.
Yeah, you missed the point. There was a time at which OSes (like the various DOSes that were mentioned) didn't implement those things. At that time, we could have made the argument that "well, if those things were useful, we would have implemented them in every OS long ago". However, that argument would have been wrong at that time for those things. So, by analogy, perhaps the argument "if RT processing were useful on the desktop, Linux, Windows, and AIX would have implemented it long ago" is also wrong today. That, I believe, was the point.
OSS and Linux zealots scream the advantages of using that kind of software
Ummmm no. Perhaps you should go back and read catb again. And try to understand it this time. <gross oversimplification>It claims the superiority of software developed by many people all doing a small part </>, which is pretty much the opposite of relying so heavily on a single person.
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But once it is found, it can be fixed at one point, namely the jpeg library. If everyone reimplemented the jpeg routines themselves when they needed to use them, probably quite a few would have a similar bug, even more would have far more serious bugs, and as these were found, each developer would have to fix them independently. Thus, we would expend much more effort to write code, and we would expend much more effort to fix code, and at nearly every point in the game, the average crappiness of the code would be higher.
I generally start writing a program by creating the universe. (With apologies to Carl Sagan)
I quite agree. Also, don't just ask in the Comp Sci department. Talk to the physicists, the biologists, the chemists, the engineers, even some you might not expect, like the linguists (especially if you're around Ohio State U; they have an extensive Computational Linguistics program). In fact, oftentimes, the most interesting and useful in the future projects will not come from the comp sci people.
:-p ). Also, for extra credit (which might make or break), find out what research the people you are going to talk to do, and learn something about it before you go. Not only will you seem more useful to the profs, but you'll learn quite a bit that way, and possibly even find some field that you are really quite interested in.
If you find that there are a lot of people interested in you, don't be afraid to be picky. OTOH, if you don't find yourself a hot commodity, be willing to accept a project bughunting in the crusty physics prof's FORTRAN77 simulation that has been around since FORTRAN77 itself, accumulating cruft (as programs are wont to do). You can do anything for a few months.
Dress smartly, get appointments rather than just walking down the hall knocking on doors, maek shure you're English is good when u right emails (or anything else) to them, and don't insult anybody's programming abilities unless you know your listener agrees with you (I think I managed to annoy my (physics) department head once because I asserted that most physicists are really bad programmers. Which they are. Naturally, I am the exception
All too often that quote is taken to mean "Well, I don't know jack about this, but I'm not an academic who has studied it my whole life, so I must be right.".
Well, that isn't terribly surprising. Windows 2000, ie, released in the year 2000 or thereabouts, ie 6 years ago, was designed to run on machines of its time. Ubuntu, released, oh what, last week, is designed to run on machines of today. There are plenty of distros which are designed to run on machines of yesteryear. Many of them, I would expect, have hardware support that is possibly even better than ubuntu's, because they don't have to fuss about with new hardware. Perhaps you should give them a try. Right tool for the job and all that. If you'd have asked me, which you would have no reason to, of course, I'd have told you probably to try ubuntu, but also to give something like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux a shot, as those are intended to run on older hardware.
BTW- SATA stands for Serial ATA. Google is your friend.
And you think it isn't a screaming problem that the current latest version of Microsoft's OS came out in October 2001?
Sure, if you tried to install a linux distro from the same month, you'd also have problems with SATA (probably. I don't know this from experience). But does that mean that FC 4 has not fixed problems that Microsoft has neglected? The fact is, Joe User can sit down at a new computer (blank HDD), with the latest Windows install disk, and the latest install disk from *some* linux distros, and he will find that he has a much easier time installing the linux distros than Windows. Why? Hardware support!
This isn't the Special Olympics. Nobody is going to sigh and say "ooohhhh, but poor little Windows has the mind of an October 2001 release. Isn't he doing so well under the circumstances?" Either it works, today, or it doesn't.
Ah fair enough. 'Twas due to my own ignorance.
From what you describe, it sounds as though the mouse maker (logitech) is certainly not the one "keeping [left-handers] down", but rather those who configure a computer to use those buttons. Blame where blame is due, but not elsewhere. Any completely symmetric mouse is exactly as well suited (from the point of view of mouse manufacturing) for left-handers as it is for right-handers.
No problem. Thanks for not lashing out at me as a nazi.
Ah yes. Both the light of morning (and coffee!) and your explanation have made everything much more clear. Thank you most kindly sir.
Well, in your hypothetical situation, I think that the GPL3 has already accomplished its goal. A and B cannot be in each other's beds. B cannot ship their hardware with the GPL3'd software from a particular repository (apt-get is a program, not a repository or a signing system...) on it, or else they are clearly in violation of GPL3. And how large is the market for hardware shipping with no software on it? Or even hardware shipping with software other than the software it was designed for? The aim is to prevent (eg) TiVo from shipping PVRs with Linux on them, but only allowing that one version of Linux to ever run on them. Of course, since Linux is likely staying GPL2, this particular won't be prevented, but you get the point. TiVo is not going to ship PVRs with blank HDDs, and say "Oh, by the way, you can install this particular linux binary which is maintained by this completely unrelated company over here if you want to do anything with what you just bought".
So, in the situation you describe, the hardware sold by B would be essentially useless (you can't run the GNU utilities because they're GPL3, and you can't run any other utilities because they're not signed). But, if you went ahead and installed the signed GNU utility binaries, knowing that this was not permitted, then you the end user would of course be in violation of the GPL3, not A or B.
OTOH, I think it unlikely that Stallman or anyone else will spend a great deal of effort to stop that particular sort of violation. 1) It is unlikely to occur much, because B shipping hardware without software is not going to sell much. 2) It would go against his ideas of freedom, as I understand them. You've bought this hardware, you can do what you like with it. But I could be wrong in this paragraph; it is mere speculation.
Or put it another way: Why should Britney Spears have less privacy than a press reporter? Perhaps what the tabloids do shouldn't be legal? Discuss.
This is a situation which could be deemed in part a consequence of raising a generation on TV rather than books. I spent my childhood reading everything I could get my hands on, and as an ancestor poster pointed out, mechanical errors stick, out like soar thum to me. But talking (well, ok, emailing and instant-messaging) to many of my friends, most of whom are really very intelligent people, I find that, as you say, they understand the spoken language very thoroughly, but translating from spoken to written language is far more error-prone.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I am a physicist, and I am not particularly impressed with Hawking. Many other physicists that I know feel similarly. The physics world is certainly not in awe of him, as the science-for-the-layman reading crowd generally is. He is fairly widely viewed as a decent theorist, but his fame certainly outstrips his accomplishments. My fiancee is a linguist, and according to her, many linguists feel roughly the same way about Noam Chomsky.
According to the wikipedia article that you cite, the hydrogen used for buoyancy was not the main contributor to the flames, but rather a compound used to dope the fabric that formed the skin on the zeppelin.
My experience with physics classes has been that the best explanations of theory are generally (almost) explanations of discovery. An emphasis on why something was thought tends to make it much easier to understand what was thought.
I am a (experimental) particle physicist, and I also am not particularly enamored of Stephen Hawking. He has done some excellent work on black holes, and he has done some excellent work to keep himself in the media limelight since then.
Redundancy is also usually an expensive thing. They can take it out of your taxes, not mine.
Yeah, you missed the point. There was a time at which OSes (like the various DOSes that were mentioned) didn't implement those things. At that time, we could have made the argument that "well, if those things were useful, we would have implemented them in every OS long ago". However, that argument would have been wrong at that time for those things. So, by analogy, perhaps the argument "if RT processing were useful on the desktop, Linux, Windows, and AIX would have implemented it long ago" is also wrong today. That, I believe, was the point.