I like to be near people, but I don't like to feel crowded by people. London was wonderful to visit, and I was more comfortable there than when I've been to New York City. I could imagine living somewhere well outside the city core and being happy to have the benefits of a large city nearby (similar to my current situation between LA and San Diego). I can't imagine living within the city itself, though. Plenty of people love the closeness, but it just feels like uncomfortable crowding to me, and I wonder if the GP might have a similar opinion.
As a programmer I don't have free time for games so I'm in the dark about them.
I don't see what the one has to do with the other. "As a programmer", I have friends who have been interested in various card games and RPGs for years, and I've also partaken every now and then.
Well I've always heard that these kind of games are classified as being for "social rejects" only.
Classified by whom? None of these games work well for someone who isn't social, since they can't be played alone.
That's true. I'm there on-again, off-again, and my strongest memories of Fark tend to be about a decade out of date at this point. I suppose that I do too much looking away when it comes to noticing how far they've fallen.
I used to clear out all the default subs and add some on specific programming topics, linguistics, some specific foreign languages, and a few of the smaller ones about gaming. I haven't been to Reddit in a couple years, because I tended to get obsessed, and it became too much of a time sink. In my experience, a lot of the smaller subs are better-behaved than any of the larger ones.
Fark is small enough that a lot of the users know each other by name, it seems like. It's just snarky commentary on odd news stories; kind of meaningless, but some people have fun with it.
Reddit isn't one coherent site. It's 5,000 places, each with a different focus, different content, different rules, etc. I've seen discussions that are better than what I've seen on Slashdot in a long time, but I've also seen some of the most rabidly ignorant chains of messages ever, there. Some of the "communities" aren't organized enough to call them that, but a lot of the subreddits with very specific focuses stay wonderfully on-topic and have insightful contributors. "Reddit" is defined by the subreddit subscriptions held by each specific user, though; my experience of Reddit may be quite different than yours.
Yes, but that might be acceptable once you got the app running, and until such time as it crashes. If you're only interested in text anyhow, I'd consider running the x86 Skype client using Qemu as a binary translation layer (the same technique has been used through Wine to run full Windows programs at a snail's pace). That would handle text chat just fine, without the pervasive instability of Android on the Pi. It's also the least interesting part of Skype to get working, since it's more widely known for its audio-video capabilities, and that's what I usually see people asking about.
I was thinking particularly of the Raspberry Pi, which doesn't have an accelerated Android available for it, so the best you can get is an unstable slideshow. That's beside the point, anyhow. What if I bought a MIPS board?
It's perhaps not "wrong" for a certain restricted definition of "Useable", but it is for the "pragmatic normal solution". If you bought a graphics accelerator, it's almost certainly not because you wanted to be restricted to the VESA driver. If it was, you probably would've stuck with the hardware that you already had, which was also capable of running as VESA. The definition of "useable" that you're using basically excludes anything beyond text and static images. You're making a strawman argument. Your "solution" addresses a reduced problem, rather than the problem that the rest of us are trying to solve.
I thought that the point is that the new blobs are basically the equivalent of the firmware that's already in the hardware, and that there's an open-source driver in the kernel. So, we'll be stuck if there's some bug in the blob that we'd like to fix but can't, but the interface between the kernel and the blob would happen in the driver. Or do I have something wrong?
This whole thread is pretty depressing, comments-wise. The assumption seems to be that since you advocate indicating which software is non-Free, that you'd also advocate removing it from the repository. Clearly, that's not at all the direction that you were going. There's a whole lot of gut reaction and not a whole lot of thought going on.
Why bother taking screen space from more useful info?
Because some people have different opinions on the usefulness of that information. In my experience, a piece of Free/Open software will continue to be updated for a while, and eventually abandoned if the developer(s) lose interest, or if the project loses popularity for whatever reason. Later, someone finds a use for it and either forks the project to fix it up or just compiles from source as-is, and the capabilities are there for them to use. Open software provides more options in the long run.
As a practical example, look at all the ARM SBCs around. People would like to use them as a little always-on Skype phone, or as a Teamspeak client so their gaming system doesn't have to bother with it. Those programs don't have compatible, open alternatives, and they don't have ARM Linux versions available.
Having those programs available is valuable, but in my experience, being closed is a risk factor for not working on all of my computers, being picky about library versions in a way that's difficult to fix, and being prone to have support dropped by the developer (or at least lagging distantly behind the Windows version of the software).
I'm not a zealot. Almost all of my machines that have Linux have a Windows partition as well, and I do have some closed/proprietary software that I run under Linux. There are more practical reasons to care about something's license than obsession with software freedom.
The IoT versions of Windows 10 use the Windows kernel, but they aren't desktop Windows systems. They're more designed as deployment targets for apps written using Visual Studio on a full PC.
Well, either that or "every game I play" evaluates differently for him than for you. If I stuck to things that came out before 2000, then I could make the same claim about a Radeon R100 with a Pentium 3 CPU, too.
IT WOULD BE AWESOME if some CS got into lower education.
It would, although they'd probably taint it in peoples' minds, teaching it as a part of a mathematics course, or something. Looking back, a lot of my high school geometry course was similar to some of my theoretical computer science classes.
It is maddening the damage Slashdot has done to Computer Science
Slashdot is a minor player. The smallest TV news networks have larger audiences. Mainstream media and industry have done more to add a second definition (the one that you disagree with) to "Computer Science", in the minds of the public. Human language in general is stuck in a kind of out-of-control feedback loop, and that's one reason that we end up with islands of population-specific argot. It's useful for those groups to have more concrete definitions of words to use among themselves. I suppose that "Computer Science" acts as a kind of shibboleth; if you take it as a synonym for "Information Technology" instead of "The science of computability, computation, and information theory", then obviously you aren't a computer scientist.
Why would a CS grad want to be a software developer?
Because it pays better than academia.
They should have studied software development and programming.
Programming is useful as a tool for studying computer science, so it tends to be something that CS grads learn, to varying degrees. The software development process can be learned on the job. Companies look for CS degrees to mean "software developer"; I don't see many job postings around me for someone who has a SW Dev degree or certification. It's less of a fight to just major in CS and learn to apply the theory to practical engineering problems than it would be to convince a company that they don't actually want a CS grad.
That's like an MD hoping to get a job as a medical tech
More like a biology major trying to get a job as a doctor, IMO.
Their ideal employment will have little to do with coding.
I know two flavors of CS grads: Those who want to get jobs as academics and do teaching or research, and those looking to bend the purpose of a CS degree to get a programming job. In theory, it's a terrible fit. In practice, it's quite workable. After all, if one has the capacity to work out a clean mathematical proof, then one also has the capacity to build a clean piece of software.
I've waited minutes for ART to do its thing on a singular package
I've never seen that, but I can't say that it's unbelievable. On my device though (admittedly, a much faster phone), it's always taken under five-ten minutes to ART-compile about 150 apps, and the idea that invoking each of those 150 apps one at a time would cause a similar amount of JIT compilation has always sounded reasonable to me. Since it seems to work in my case, I haven't really looked into it.
Also, you sound a lot like the folks responding to those who question memory management on Android: "It's taken care of automatically," they say. "You can't do anything to improve it," they further proclaim.
I've seen too many memory leaks to try to claim that it couldn't be improved upon.
Can we compute the increased carbon emissions of this, including wear-and-tear due to increased battery aging and decreased lifespan (which more and more means death to the entire device)? Man-hours wasted staring, waiting for devices to compile their own apps?
It's better than JIT on Dalvik, which all non-Lollipop versions of Android would be using. You're complaining about compiling once, when the program is first installed. How about compiling once per time that you run the program? ART provides a net benefit over that scheme.
The "source code" is Java/Dalvik bytecode. ART just replaces the JIT compilation that used to run every time the code was executed on Dalvik with a one-time compilation to native code. Is the bytecode actually that much smaller than an X86/ARM binary?
Ah, yes. The OS that notifies my wife to reboot her phone daily, to avoid memory leak problems that haven't been fixed since she bought it. The OS that requires her to convince herself that "No, I'm not as interested in that app as I thought", because it's not available on the app store and has no alternatives available. The OS that goes into reboot loops if her phone goes out of range of a cell tower. Yes, I've used Windows Phone. If it worked properly more often and had a better app ecosystem, it would be a perfectly useable phone OS.
The version of mathematics where there's a $200 version of the phone, and they specified a $700 phone as the comparison. At least some versions of the Galaxy S6 are $700 when purchased off-contract, and the iPhone 6 seems to be around that price too.
If every manager needs to know the job of the underlings, how in the world would they ever get the time to get any management done.
My manager has told me "Software development isn't rocket science. I don't see why investigating a bug takes so long." She also hasn't done any development work herself, despite having a computer science degree. She went almost directly into a PM role out of college and doesn't have a frame of reference to understand her employees' work. She hasn't ever been able to understand what her employees are doing, what's reasonable in terms of timeframe for a feature or bug to be completed, doesn't know the product well enough to even know which part of it her team members are working on, etc.
In contrast, my previous manager was promoted up from the ranks of the developers. She was amazing to work for, because she always made her team's jobs easier, and understood what we were working on (in a broad sense, not down to the deep details, of course).
If every manager needs to know the job of the underlings, how in the world would they ever get the time to get any management done.
Knowing their jobs isn't the same thing as taking the time to do their jobs. A manager should manage, but they should know what their decisions mean to their team members. To my current manager, a flurry of e-mails means work is being done, and she expects a constant flow of e-mail to go around her team. I've been chastised in her office several times for not communicating enough while working through bugs on a piece of code that no one else on the team has experience with. I explain to her which bugs I've fixed, which I am still working on, and which features I've implemented. Doesn't matter. No e-mail means no work, because that's how her world works: E-mail and meetings mean decisions are being made and work is being done. No e-mail or meetings == black hole where nothing is happening.
If I needed a manager that knew my job better than me in order not to feel bossed around by a dummy, I'd be looking in vain forever.
Ditto. I know my work better than my manager. That's basically by definition, except for in a very upside-down project. But if I say "I've got the fixes for these 3 bugs in, and I'm working on these 4 others", and I get a reply like "OK, but what are you actually doing?", you'll have a hard time convincing me that I'm not working for an idiot. They don't know my job, don't understand what their employees are doing (even in abstract), and don't belong in a management position over a team until they understand what it is that they're managing.
What kind of learning curve could I expect if I took on a new language I have no experience with?
If you're over 40 and you don't know how to answer that question based on past experience, I think you're in trouble. Picking up new languages, frameworks, APIs, and what have you are just par for the course. Those things have been a constant in every development job I've had. If a language is related to something that I already know, then within a few weeks, I may be writing some Perl-ish looking Python and becoming more comfortable using constructs that don't appear in Perl very quickly.
If math were taught correctly, it would have a lot more in common with a study of structured reasoning and logic, rather than memorizing algorithms for long division and lookup tables for arithmetic. Math education shouldn't be abandoned, just fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's common in the U.S., but not universal. False dichotomy has always seemed to me to be a signature feature of Tepples' comments.
I like to be near people, but I don't like to feel crowded by people. London was wonderful to visit, and I was more comfortable there than when I've been to New York City. I could imagine living somewhere well outside the city core and being happy to have the benefits of a large city nearby (similar to my current situation between LA and San Diego). I can't imagine living within the city itself, though. Plenty of people love the closeness, but it just feels like uncomfortable crowding to me, and I wonder if the GP might have a similar opinion.
As a programmer I don't have free time for games so I'm in the dark about them.
I don't see what the one has to do with the other. "As a programmer", I have friends who have been interested in various card games and RPGs for years, and I've also partaken every now and then.
Well I've always heard that these kind of games are classified as being for "social rejects" only.
Classified by whom? None of these games work well for someone who isn't social, since they can't be played alone.
That's true. I'm there on-again, off-again, and my strongest memories of Fark tend to be about a decade out of date at this point. I suppose that I do too much looking away when it comes to noticing how far they've fallen.
I used to clear out all the default subs and add some on specific programming topics, linguistics, some specific foreign languages, and a few of the smaller ones about gaming. I haven't been to Reddit in a couple years, because I tended to get obsessed, and it became too much of a time sink. In my experience, a lot of the smaller subs are better-behaved than any of the larger ones.
Fark is small enough that a lot of the users know each other by name, it seems like. It's just snarky commentary on odd news stories; kind of meaningless, but some people have fun with it.
Reddit isn't one coherent site. It's 5,000 places, each with a different focus, different content, different rules, etc. I've seen discussions that are better than what I've seen on Slashdot in a long time, but I've also seen some of the most rabidly ignorant chains of messages ever, there. Some of the "communities" aren't organized enough to call them that, but a lot of the subreddits with very specific focuses stay wonderfully on-topic and have insightful contributors. "Reddit" is defined by the subreddit subscriptions held by each specific user, though; my experience of Reddit may be quite different than yours.
Yes, but that might be acceptable once you got the app running, and until such time as it crashes. If you're only interested in text anyhow, I'd consider running the x86 Skype client using Qemu as a binary translation layer (the same technique has been used through Wine to run full Windows programs at a snail's pace). That would handle text chat just fine, without the pervasive instability of Android on the Pi. It's also the least interesting part of Skype to get working, since it's more widely known for its audio-video capabilities, and that's what I usually see people asking about.
Fair enough; that's a better reason to omit the information than some complaint about wasting screen space.
I was thinking particularly of the Raspberry Pi, which doesn't have an accelerated Android available for it, so the best you can get is an unstable slideshow. That's beside the point, anyhow. What if I bought a MIPS board?
It's perhaps not "wrong" for a certain restricted definition of "Useable", but it is for the "pragmatic normal solution". If you bought a graphics accelerator, it's almost certainly not because you wanted to be restricted to the VESA driver. If it was, you probably would've stuck with the hardware that you already had, which was also capable of running as VESA. The definition of "useable" that you're using basically excludes anything beyond text and static images. You're making a strawman argument. Your "solution" addresses a reduced problem, rather than the problem that the rest of us are trying to solve.
I thought that the point is that the new blobs are basically the equivalent of the firmware that's already in the hardware, and that there's an open-source driver in the kernel. So, we'll be stuck if there's some bug in the blob that we'd like to fix but can't, but the interface between the kernel and the blob would happen in the driver. Or do I have something wrong?
This whole thread is pretty depressing, comments-wise. The assumption seems to be that since you advocate indicating which software is non-Free, that you'd also advocate removing it from the repository. Clearly, that's not at all the direction that you were going. There's a whole lot of gut reaction and not a whole lot of thought going on.
Why bother taking screen space from more useful info?
Because some people have different opinions on the usefulness of that information. In my experience, a piece of Free/Open software will continue to be updated for a while, and eventually abandoned if the developer(s) lose interest, or if the project loses popularity for whatever reason. Later, someone finds a use for it and either forks the project to fix it up or just compiles from source as-is, and the capabilities are there for them to use. Open software provides more options in the long run.
As a practical example, look at all the ARM SBCs around. People would like to use them as a little always-on Skype phone, or as a Teamspeak client so their gaming system doesn't have to bother with it. Those programs don't have compatible, open alternatives, and they don't have ARM Linux versions available.
Having those programs available is valuable, but in my experience, being closed is a risk factor for not working on all of my computers, being picky about library versions in a way that's difficult to fix, and being prone to have support dropped by the developer (or at least lagging distantly behind the Windows version of the software).
I'm not a zealot. Almost all of my machines that have Linux have a Windows partition as well, and I do have some closed/proprietary software that I run under Linux. There are more practical reasons to care about something's license than obsession with software freedom.
The IoT versions of Windows 10 use the Windows kernel, but they aren't desktop Windows systems. They're more designed as deployment targets for apps written using Visual Studio on a full PC.
Well, either that or "every game I play" evaluates differently for him than for you. If I stuck to things that came out before 2000, then I could make the same claim about a Radeon R100 with a Pentium 3 CPU, too.
IT WOULD BE AWESOME if some CS got into lower education.
It would, although they'd probably taint it in peoples' minds, teaching it as a part of a mathematics course, or something. Looking back, a lot of my high school geometry course was similar to some of my theoretical computer science classes.
It is maddening the damage Slashdot has done to Computer Science
Slashdot is a minor player. The smallest TV news networks have larger audiences. Mainstream media and industry have done more to add a second definition (the one that you disagree with) to "Computer Science", in the minds of the public. Human language in general is stuck in a kind of out-of-control feedback loop, and that's one reason that we end up with islands of population-specific argot. It's useful for those groups to have more concrete definitions of words to use among themselves. I suppose that "Computer Science" acts as a kind of shibboleth; if you take it as a synonym for "Information Technology" instead of "The science of computability, computation, and information theory", then obviously you aren't a computer scientist.
Why would a CS grad want to be a software developer?
Because it pays better than academia.
They should have studied software development and programming.
Programming is useful as a tool for studying computer science, so it tends to be something that CS grads learn, to varying degrees. The software development process can be learned on the job. Companies look for CS degrees to mean "software developer"; I don't see many job postings around me for someone who has a SW Dev degree or certification. It's less of a fight to just major in CS and learn to apply the theory to practical engineering problems than it would be to convince a company that they don't actually want a CS grad.
That's like an MD hoping to get a job as a medical tech
More like a biology major trying to get a job as a doctor, IMO.
Their ideal employment will have little to do with coding.
I know two flavors of CS grads: Those who want to get jobs as academics and do teaching or research, and those looking to bend the purpose of a CS degree to get a programming job. In theory, it's a terrible fit. In practice, it's quite workable. After all, if one has the capacity to work out a clean mathematical proof, then one also has the capacity to build a clean piece of software.
I've waited minutes for ART to do its thing on a singular package
I've never seen that, but I can't say that it's unbelievable. On my device though (admittedly, a much faster phone), it's always taken under five-ten minutes to ART-compile about 150 apps, and the idea that invoking each of those 150 apps one at a time would cause a similar amount of JIT compilation has always sounded reasonable to me. Since it seems to work in my case, I haven't really looked into it.
Also, you sound a lot like the folks responding to those who question memory management on Android: "It's taken care of automatically," they say. "You can't do anything to improve it," they further proclaim.
I've seen too many memory leaks to try to claim that it couldn't be improved upon.
Can we compute the increased carbon emissions of this, including wear-and-tear due to increased battery aging and decreased lifespan (which more and more means death to the entire device)? Man-hours wasted staring, waiting for devices to compile their own apps?
It's better than JIT on Dalvik, which all non-Lollipop versions of Android would be using. You're complaining about compiling once, when the program is first installed. How about compiling once per time that you run the program? ART provides a net benefit over that scheme.
The "source code" is Java/Dalvik bytecode. ART just replaces the JIT compilation that used to run every time the code was executed on Dalvik with a one-time compilation to native code. Is the bytecode actually that much smaller than an X86/ARM binary?
Ah, yes. The OS that notifies my wife to reboot her phone daily, to avoid memory leak problems that haven't been fixed since she bought it. The OS that requires her to convince herself that "No, I'm not as interested in that app as I thought", because it's not available on the app store and has no alternatives available. The OS that goes into reboot loops if her phone goes out of range of a cell tower. Yes, I've used Windows Phone. If it worked properly more often and had a better app ecosystem, it would be a perfectly useable phone OS.
The version of mathematics where there's a $200 version of the phone, and they specified a $700 phone as the comparison. At least some versions of the Galaxy S6 are $700 when purchased off-contract, and the iPhone 6 seems to be around that price too.
If every manager needs to know the job of the underlings, how in the world would they ever get the time to get any management done.
My manager has told me "Software development isn't rocket science. I don't see why investigating a bug takes so long." She also hasn't done any development work herself, despite having a computer science degree. She went almost directly into a PM role out of college and doesn't have a frame of reference to understand her employees' work. She hasn't ever been able to understand what her employees are doing, what's reasonable in terms of timeframe for a feature or bug to be completed, doesn't know the product well enough to even know which part of it her team members are working on, etc.
In contrast, my previous manager was promoted up from the ranks of the developers. She was amazing to work for, because she always made her team's jobs easier, and understood what we were working on (in a broad sense, not down to the deep details, of course).
If every manager needs to know the job of the underlings, how in the world would they ever get the time to get any management done.
Knowing their jobs isn't the same thing as taking the time to do their jobs. A manager should manage, but they should know what their decisions mean to their team members. To my current manager, a flurry of e-mails means work is being done, and she expects a constant flow of e-mail to go around her team. I've been chastised in her office several times for not communicating enough while working through bugs on a piece of code that no one else on the team has experience with. I explain to her which bugs I've fixed, which I am still working on, and which features I've implemented. Doesn't matter. No e-mail means no work, because that's how her world works: E-mail and meetings mean decisions are being made and work is being done. No e-mail or meetings == black hole where nothing is happening.
If I needed a manager that knew my job better than me in order not to feel bossed around by a dummy, I'd be looking in vain forever.
Ditto. I know my work better than my manager. That's basically by definition, except for in a very upside-down project. But if I say "I've got the fixes for these 3 bugs in, and I'm working on these 4 others", and I get a reply like "OK, but what are you actually doing?", you'll have a hard time convincing me that I'm not working for an idiot. They don't know my job, don't understand what their employees are doing (even in abstract), and don't belong in a management position over a team until they understand what it is that they're managing.
What kind of learning curve could I expect if I took on a new language I have no experience with?
If you're over 40 and you don't know how to answer that question based on past experience, I think you're in trouble. Picking up new languages, frameworks, APIs, and what have you are just par for the course. Those things have been a constant in every development job I've had. If a language is related to something that I already know, then within a few weeks, I may be writing some Perl-ish looking Python and becoming more comfortable using constructs that don't appear in Perl very quickly.
If math were taught correctly, it would have a lot more in common with a study of structured reasoning and logic, rather than memorizing algorithms for long division and lookup tables for arithmetic. Math education shouldn't be abandoned, just fixed.