The biggest problems in the CS industry have come from people trying to get into it for the money. If you really love programming, then do it. If you don't, then go somewhere else. It's always been a feast-to-famine line of work, and people who jump into it during feast times just bring it crashing back down more quickly (and more harshly). In short, you're setting yourself up to fail if you're getting into it for the money, and you're dragging the rest of us down with you.
Most people who are in it for the money don't excel at it anyway. If your heart isn't in it, you won't be staying up late almost every night learning new things just because you love doing it. Even if you're exceptionally quick, that puts you at a bit of a disadvantage. Just click on my web site if you want to see the kinds of things we like to do with our spare time.;-)
I don't believe visual clarity helps you hit a fastball. I think it has more to do with speed, or more specifically, how fast your brain can process the input and determine when/where to swing the bat. If your brain could work fast enough to allow you to perceptually slow down time (making it seem like you had plenty of time to choose the best moment and angle to swing the bat), you may be able to bat close to 1000.
Well, you could say that, but only if you consider using fish the way kings and emperors used slaves to test their food for poison to be "coexisting peacefully".;-)
Assuming you always keep your Blackberry "on your person", why not rig it to have an alarm sound go off if the Blackberry gets more than 5-10 feet away from the holster? This would also help remind you to pick it up if you set it down somewhere and walk away.
Hot exhaust? What about poisonous exhaust? There's a reason people don't leave their car engines running in the garage with the door down. Can you imagine 50-100 laptops running these in a college lecture hall?
I don't think it would be confusing to most users at all. When my wife uses my computer, she gets confused by all the crap I've installed on it. If she installed her own apps and I installed my own, we would both be happy with it. She's gotten my PC infected with the Cool Web Search virus twice, and at the time it couldn't be removed without "format C:", so I would definitely like to quarantine what she does on my computer.;-)
For things like games and multimedia files, disk space could be a real problem. Perhaps each user could have a "share" folder to put things in that other users could access. I didn't say I had the whole concept worked out. I just think it would be nice.;-)
Trust me, I'll be very happy when they do that, but they're not there yet. And even if they do it relatively soon, it will be a few years before "almost everyone" has one.
Modern processors don't have a big "On/Off" switch for whole areas of functionality; rather, they can actually swing in and out of various states of activation depending on load. This means that your story about "3D mode", loud fans and power consumption is false. Desktops with minor 3d effects just don't place the kind of load on those chips that 3d games do.
Where graphics cards are concerned, you're dead wrong about that. They do have a big on/off switch for 3D mode. And in 3D mode, they pull out all the stops and try to run as fast as they can. As a graphics/game developer, I know a good bit about it. I've read of a number of indie games that had to add enforced sleeps into their code because they didn't tax the CPU enough, causing the latest video cards (i.e. GeForce 7800 Ultra) to run too fast in 3D mode, causing the cards to overheat and lock up. The fans have gotten quieter since the GeForce FX days (which were horrible), but they can still be quite loud and annoying.
Ok, poor choice of words. However, X without a window/desktop manager is pretty useless to an average user. Although many window managers are also light-weight, Gnome and KDE do not seem to be, and most users trying Linux or BSD for the first time end up trying one of those. I personally prefer some of the lighter window managers, but they don't seem to be accessible to the average user who just wants things to "work" effortlessly.
Also, I didn't say anything about availability of games. That won't come until a decent percentage of people are using these OS's. And I don't believe that will happen until various problems in X, and its window/desktop managers, are fixed. Actually, applications need to be fixed, too. Consistency and ease-of-use are key, and that includes the applications running on it, not just X. Performance is important too, and performance under Gnome/KDE has always seemed sluggish to me.
Oh, please. It's a lot less obnoxious than your preaching of the GPL and griping about ATI and nVidia not releasing specs or source code for their drivers. They shouldn't have to release them any more than other companies should be allowed to steal GPL'ed code. (From what I've read, I believe even Linus agrees with that.) Linux wouldn't be a even fraction as popular as it is today if ATI and nVidia hadn't graced it with their "shitty binary drivers", and it's still not very popular among average users.
I've used MS Windows, Linux, and BSD, and I'm not a fan of any of them. I haven't spent much time with OS/X because I've never cared to buy a Mac. If they'll let it run on any of the machines I already have, I may give it a try. I didn't say that BSD's licensing made it a threat to proprietary interests in general. I don't think a general threat to proprietary interests is a good thing, and neither do those companies you mentioned like IBM, SGI, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, HP, Nortel, and others. Is Oracle open-source? What about DB2? I've used both of those, and their binaries are generally a lot shittier than nVidia's or ATI's. For some companies, BSD serves their proprietary interests extremely well. For other companies, it is a danger. It gives smaller companies a head-start and helps them compete against more well-established companies, which I do think is a good thing.
Oh, and I'm certain that Linux and X Windows are improving, and that's great, but they've been improving for several years, and they're still not ready for average users. Correction, I think Linux and BSD have been ready for years, but X Windows has been holding them back. You want facts to back that up? How about the low adoption rate by average users? How about the number of average users I've talked to that gave Linux a try, only to give up and go back to MS? These people didn't know or care about what's going on under the covers of the OS, they only saw the windowing system that was presented to them, and they got frustrated with it very quickly.
I've recently tried the current releases of Fedora and FreeBSD, and I was still frustrated by X on both systems. Are you going to tell me I need to download and compile more recent source code, or use a different distro, and still claim that it's ready for "average" users today? Also, XGL and Compiz do not look like a step forward to me. If they're anything like Vista's new 3D interface, they look like a step backward. Keeping the graphics card in 3D mode all the time, the laptops that can run it at a decent rate will have their batteries drained so fast that users will think something is broken (and laptop sales are growing faster than desktop sales). It will be a pain for desktop systems too, as electricity is not getting any cheaper, and most 3D cards have annoyingly loud fans kick in for 3D mode.
X Windows doesn't need extra flash, it needs to fix its consistency and ease-of-use issues. From what I know about X Windows and applications, I think it may be easier to start from scratch. If you make it easy enough for my wife to use without bitching at me about it, I will happily concede defeat. Until then, my gripe about X Windows is very real and legitimate.
Of course that will never happen, but you can make it safer for them to be blissfully ignorant. I was thinking more along the lines of not giving the average user root access to the core OS files (while still making sure he has direct exclusive access to the hardware). Make him have to do something relatively difficult (like change and recompile the kernel) to get root access if he really needs it. You could also make it an OS installation option for developers.
For the average user and PC, it's ok to make him install and run everything in his user folder. That means the worst that can happen is that he'll have to wipe his user folder and start over. Certain high-risk applications, like browsers and IM clients, can be quarantined so that getting a virus from one means you only have to reinstall that application.
Are you kidding? BSD was the bigger boogie man, which is why those companies kept beating it even after it had been effectively "put down" due to fear of law suits. Linux was definitely seen as the lesser of two evils by the powers that existed at the time, and with good reason. The license makes BSD much more of a threat to them than Linux will ever be.
Just look at what Apple did with OS X. Any company could do that, getting a huge head start by building on top of the rock solid BSD core (with no fear of being sued, as you would with the GPL). That is a very scary thought indeed for MS.
What free OS designers need to do is realize that Apple did something very right with OS X, and follow suit. Unix with X-Windows on top of it is not suitable for the average user. X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware). X-Windows will always be around for the power users who want it, but the average joe just wants his games/videos/music to run smoothly without any hassles, and he wants to be able to be stupid when it comes to using the Internet without having to worry about viruses, spam, and all that.
... when both sides are so despicable it makes you want to puke?
On one side, you have a patent lawyer who invents and patents something with incredible legal ramifications. (Being a laywer, I'm sure that thought hadn't crossed his mind at all.;-) When no one wants to pay his ridiculous licensing fees, he gets the law changed to force them all to pay. Keep in mind that he wasn't planning to manufacture anything, so he's asking for 8% per unit for the idea alone, and all per unit costs would be paid by the manufacturer. Of course, since the manufacturer would actually build the safety device, any lawsuits from failures of that device would also be paid by the manufacturer. The lawyer gets filthy rich on his legally enforced extortion while the manufacturer has to eat added manufacturing costs and law suits.
On the other side, you have manufacturers who should have added safety features similar to this a long time ago, but wouldn't because they fear that the safety features themselves will open them up to lawsuits.
Ooh, I almost forgot about the third side. It's the lawyers and judges that award millions of dollars to complete morons in frivolous lawsuits, making the manufacturers afraid to add safety features to their products. It kind of makes me ashamed to be an American.
The more general problem with "nothing to hide" is that some people do have things to hide. Not everyone necessarily agrees with certain laws (e.g., possession of drugs, or also certain consensual acts between adults are still illegal in the UK).
I understand that, and I agree with it 100%. I even agree that many of those sex and recreational drug laws are ridiculous. However, many child molesters (the ones who try to get consent from the children) don't believe they're hurting anyone, and most of those believe that it should be legal for children to be able to consent to sex. A line has to be drawn somewhere. I can see many pros and cons to this "solution", but when you weigh more pot-smokers getting busted against saving more kids from sexual predators, the scales seem to tip very heavily to the right on that one. A lot of child protection laws/rules are ludicrous, and I feel that some hurt more than they help, but not this one.
Almost no one with XP Pro cares about IIS. The main reasons to have XP Pro are:
More than one processor. XP Home only allows 1 processor. Not sure how it handles a single dual-core CPU, but my bet is that it doesn't have SMP enabled, which means it won't work without Pro.
Most cases involving missing children are never solved. So when you refer to the bad few doing naughty things with children, you're only referring to the bad few that actually get caught. One study I read about claimed that approximately 1 in 4 girls have been molested/raped by the time they turn 16 (not counting consensual sex with an underage partner). It was usually by an adult the girl knew, either a neighbor or a relative, and it usually went unreported. I haven't cross-checked the study myself, but if it's anywhere close to that, it doesn't come close to classifying as few.
I didn't fall for anything in this case. I've felt that way about it for a long time (even before I had kids to worry about), and for a lot of different reasons.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not information being free - it's information being collected to control the masses - thus being a complete solution for the removal of freedoms.
What kinds of things do we have to hide? What kinds of freedoms are we losing? Are they the legal freedoms or the illegal ones? There was a news story on the radio this morning about a man in our local area getting caught pimping out his daughters (as young as 5) on the Internet. The DJ's were discussing how large the child porn industry is, and asking whether a certain amount of privacy invasion should be allowed to catch guys like that. I have children, ages 6 and 7, and given how many kids get kidnapped/raped/killed each year (many of whom are simply never heard from again), I know what my answer would be.
I agree that corruption and abuse are a problem, and I don't feel that punishments for those crimes are stiff enough, but I still want the police and FBI to have the information they need to find people who do things like that. I don't have anything to hide, and if a corrupt police officer is going to mess with me, he doesn't need any more information than he has now to do it.
WARNING: Never aim toward anyone's head, neck, or torso (unless that person is a suspected terrorist, a suspected insurgent, or an enemy combatant being held at a secret prison).
Why don't they just magnetically seal the walls/doors, like in the trash compactor in Star Wars? Then you'd also have the added benefit of being able to make shots around corners.
If all the walls were mirrors, you wouldn't even have to worry about not being able to see around the corner. Hey, that's not a bad idea for an FPS game (or perhaps even a RL game). Laser tag inside a fun-house. If all the mirrors were perfect and flat, in theory you should hit whatever you see in the mirror when you fire at it. You could increase the difficulty level by adding curved mirrors.;-) Calculating all the reflections would probably melt your video card, though.
That's just great. So now we'll get a million times more emails from Nigerian oil tycoons, princes, etc. asking for help in smuggling their money out of the country? I'm still waiting for the payoff from the last one I sent money to. (Yes, that was a joke.;-)
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The biggest problems in the CS industry have come from people trying to get into it for the money. If you really love programming, then do it. If you don't, then go somewhere else. It's always been a feast-to-famine line of work, and people who jump into it during feast times just bring it crashing back down more quickly (and more harshly). In short, you're setting yourself up to fail if you're getting into it for the money, and you're dragging the rest of us down with you.
Most people who are in it for the money don't excel at it anyway. If your heart isn't in it, you won't be staying up late almost every night learning new things just because you love doing it. Even if you're exceptionally quick, that puts you at a bit of a disadvantage. Just click on my web site if you want to see the kinds of things we like to do with our spare time. ;-)
I don't believe visual clarity helps you hit a fastball. I think it has more to do with speed, or more specifically, how fast your brain can process the input and determine when/where to swing the bat. If your brain could work fast enough to allow you to perceptually slow down time (making it seem like you had plenty of time to choose the best moment and angle to swing the bat), you may be able to bat close to 1000.
They taste like chicken. ;-)
(That reply timer is extremely annoying.)
Yes, but their range is rather limited. They can't exactly check out the poles AND the equator AND that rock formation that looks like a face.
"variability in temperatures prior to the past century were generated by Mann and his co-authors."
;-)
See? Global warming isn't caused by man, it's caused by Mann and his cronies. We need to find them and make them pay.
Well, you could say that, but only if you consider using fish the way kings and emperors used slaves to test their food for poison to be "coexisting peacefully". ;-)
Assuming you always keep your Blackberry "on your person", why not rig it to have an alarm sound go off if the Blackberry gets more than 5-10 feet away from the holster? This would also help remind you to pick it up if you set it down somewhere and walk away.
Hot exhaust? What about poisonous exhaust? There's a reason people don't leave their car engines running in the garage with the door down. Can you imagine 50-100 laptops running these in a college lecture hall?
I don't think it would be confusing to most users at all. When my wife uses my computer, she gets confused by all the crap I've installed on it. If she installed her own apps and I installed my own, we would both be happy with it. She's gotten my PC infected with the Cool Web Search virus twice, and at the time it couldn't be removed without "format C:", so I would definitely like to quarantine what she does on my computer. ;-)
;-)
For things like games and multimedia files, disk space could be a real problem. Perhaps each user could have a "share" folder to put things in that other users could access. I didn't say I had the whole concept worked out. I just think it would be nice.
Trust me, I'll be very happy when they do that, but they're not there yet. And even if they do it relatively soon, it will be a few years before "almost everyone" has one.
Modern processors don't have a big "On/Off" switch for whole areas of functionality; rather, they can actually swing in and out of various states of activation depending on load. This means that your story about "3D mode", loud fans and power consumption is false. Desktops with minor 3d effects just don't place the kind of load on those chips that 3d games do.
Where graphics cards are concerned, you're dead wrong about that. They do have a big on/off switch for 3D mode. And in 3D mode, they pull out all the stops and try to run as fast as they can. As a graphics/game developer, I know a good bit about it. I've read of a number of indie games that had to add enforced sleeps into their code because they didn't tax the CPU enough, causing the latest video cards (i.e. GeForce 7800 Ultra) to run too fast in 3D mode, causing the cards to overheat and lock up. The fans have gotten quieter since the GeForce FX days (which were horrible), but they can still be quite loud and annoying.
Ok, poor choice of words. However, X without a window/desktop manager is pretty useless to an average user. Although many window managers are also light-weight, Gnome and KDE do not seem to be, and most users trying Linux or BSD for the first time end up trying one of those. I personally prefer some of the lighter window managers, but they don't seem to be accessible to the average user who just wants things to "work" effortlessly.
Also, I didn't say anything about availability of games. That won't come until a decent percentage of people are using these OS's. And I don't believe that will happen until various problems in X, and its window/desktop managers, are fixed. Actually, applications need to be fixed, too. Consistency and ease-of-use are key, and that includes the applications running on it, not just X. Performance is important too, and performance under Gnome/KDE has always seemed sluggish to me.
Oh, please. It's a lot less obnoxious than your preaching of the GPL and griping about ATI and nVidia not releasing specs or source code for their drivers. They shouldn't have to release them any more than other companies should be allowed to steal GPL'ed code. (From what I've read, I believe even Linus agrees with that.) Linux wouldn't be a even fraction as popular as it is today if ATI and nVidia hadn't graced it with their "shitty binary drivers", and it's still not very popular among average users.
I've used MS Windows, Linux, and BSD, and I'm not a fan of any of them. I haven't spent much time with OS/X because I've never cared to buy a Mac. If they'll let it run on any of the machines I already have, I may give it a try. I didn't say that BSD's licensing made it a threat to proprietary interests in general. I don't think a general threat to proprietary interests is a good thing, and neither do those companies you mentioned like IBM, SGI, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, HP, Nortel, and others. Is Oracle open-source? What about DB2? I've used both of those, and their binaries are generally a lot shittier than nVidia's or ATI's. For some companies, BSD serves their proprietary interests extremely well. For other companies, it is a danger. It gives smaller companies a head-start and helps them compete against more well-established companies, which I do think is a good thing.
Oh, and I'm certain that Linux and X Windows are improving, and that's great, but they've been improving for several years, and they're still not ready for average users. Correction, I think Linux and BSD have been ready for years, but X Windows has been holding them back. You want facts to back that up? How about the low adoption rate by average users? How about the number of average users I've talked to that gave Linux a try, only to give up and go back to MS? These people didn't know or care about what's going on under the covers of the OS, they only saw the windowing system that was presented to them, and they got frustrated with it very quickly.
I've recently tried the current releases of Fedora and FreeBSD, and I was still frustrated by X on both systems. Are you going to tell me I need to download and compile more recent source code, or use a different distro, and still claim that it's ready for "average" users today? Also, XGL and Compiz do not look like a step forward to me. If they're anything like Vista's new 3D interface, they look like a step backward. Keeping the graphics card in 3D mode all the time, the laptops that can run it at a decent rate will have their batteries drained so fast that users will think something is broken (and laptop sales are growing faster than desktop sales). It will be a pain for desktop systems too, as electricity is not getting any cheaper, and most 3D cards have annoyingly loud fans kick in for 3D mode.
X Windows doesn't need extra flash, it needs to fix its consistency and ease-of-use issues. From what I know about X Windows and applications, I think it may be easier to start from scratch. If you make it easy enough for my wife to use without bitching at me about it, I will happily concede defeat. Until then, my gripe about X Windows is very real and legitimate.
Of course that will never happen, but you can make it safer for them to be blissfully ignorant. I was thinking more along the lines of not giving the average user root access to the core OS files (while still making sure he has direct exclusive access to the hardware). Make him have to do something relatively difficult (like change and recompile the kernel) to get root access if he really needs it. You could also make it an OS installation option for developers.
For the average user and PC, it's ok to make him install and run everything in his user folder. That means the worst that can happen is that he'll have to wipe his user folder and start over. Certain high-risk applications, like browsers and IM clients, can be quarantined so that getting a virus from one means you only have to reinstall that application.
Are you kidding? BSD was the bigger boogie man, which is why those companies kept beating it even after it had been effectively "put down" due to fear of law suits. Linux was definitely seen as the lesser of two evils by the powers that existed at the time, and with good reason. The license makes BSD much more of a threat to them than Linux will ever be.
Just look at what Apple did with OS X. Any company could do that, getting a huge head start by building on top of the rock solid BSD core (with no fear of being sued, as you would with the GPL). That is a very scary thought indeed for MS.
What free OS designers need to do is realize that Apple did something very right with OS X, and follow suit. Unix with X-Windows on top of it is not suitable for the average user. X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware). X-Windows will always be around for the power users who want it, but the average joe just wants his games/videos/music to run smoothly without any hassles, and he wants to be able to be stupid when it comes to using the Internet without having to worry about viruses, spam, and all that.
... when both sides are so despicable it makes you want to puke?
On one side, you have a patent lawyer who invents and patents something with incredible legal ramifications. (Being a laywer, I'm sure that thought hadn't crossed his mind at all. ;-) When no one wants to pay his ridiculous licensing fees, he gets the law changed to force them all to pay. Keep in mind that he wasn't planning to manufacture anything, so he's asking for 8% per unit for the idea alone, and all per unit costs would be paid by the manufacturer. Of course, since the manufacturer would actually build the safety device, any lawsuits from failures of that device would also be paid by the manufacturer. The lawyer gets filthy rich on his legally enforced extortion while the manufacturer has to eat added manufacturing costs and law suits.
On the other side, you have manufacturers who should have added safety features similar to this a long time ago, but wouldn't because they fear that the safety features themselves will open them up to lawsuits.
Ooh, I almost forgot about the third side. It's the lawyers and judges that award millions of dollars to complete morons in frivolous lawsuits, making the manufacturers afraid to add safety features to their products. It kind of makes me ashamed to be an American.
I understand that, and I agree with it 100%. I even agree that many of those sex and recreational drug laws are ridiculous. However, many child molesters (the ones who try to get consent from the children) don't believe they're hurting anyone, and most of those believe that it should be legal for children to be able to consent to sex. A line has to be drawn somewhere. I can see many pros and cons to this "solution", but when you weigh more pot-smokers getting busted against saving more kids from sexual predators, the scales seem to tip very heavily to the right on that one. A lot of child protection laws/rules are ludicrous, and I feel that some hurt more than they help, but not this one.
But we're talking about his home PC. I would be surprised if he'd set up a domain controller in his home.
Almost no one with XP Pro cares about IIS. The main reasons to have XP Pro are:
Most cases involving missing children are never solved. So when you refer to the bad few doing naughty things with children, you're only referring to the bad few that actually get caught. One study I read about claimed that approximately 1 in 4 girls have been molested/raped by the time they turn 16 (not counting consensual sex with an underage partner). It was usually by an adult the girl knew, either a neighbor or a relative, and it usually went unreported. I haven't cross-checked the study myself, but if it's anywhere close to that, it doesn't come close to classifying as few.
I didn't fall for anything in this case. I've felt that way about it for a long time (even before I had kids to worry about), and for a lot of different reasons.
What kinds of things do we have to hide? What kinds of freedoms are we losing? Are they the legal freedoms or the illegal ones? There was a news story on the radio this morning about a man in our local area getting caught pimping out his daughters (as young as 5) on the Internet. The DJ's were discussing how large the child porn industry is, and asking whether a certain amount of privacy invasion should be allowed to catch guys like that. I have children, ages 6 and 7, and given how many kids get kidnapped/raped/killed each year (many of whom are simply never heard from again), I know what my answer would be.
I agree that corruption and abuse are a problem, and I don't feel that punishments for those crimes are stiff enough, but I still want the police and FBI to have the information they need to find people who do things like that. I don't have anything to hide, and if a corrupt police officer is going to mess with me, he doesn't need any more information than he has now to do it.
WARNING: Never aim toward anyone's head, neck, or torso (unless that person is a suspected terrorist, a suspected insurgent, or an enemy combatant being held at a secret prison).
Why don't they just magnetically seal the walls/doors, like in the trash compactor in Star Wars? Then you'd also have the added benefit of being able to make shots around corners.
If all the walls were mirrors, you wouldn't even have to worry about not being able to see around the corner. Hey, that's not a bad idea for an FPS game (or perhaps even a RL game). Laser tag inside a fun-house. If all the mirrors were perfect and flat, in theory you should hit whatever you see in the mirror when you fire at it. You could increase the difficulty level by adding curved mirrors. ;-) Calculating all the reflections would probably melt your video card, though.
That's just great. So now we'll get a million times more emails from Nigerian oil tycoons, princes, etc. asking for help in smuggling their money out of the country? I'm still waiting for the payoff from the last one I sent money to. (Yes, that was a joke. ;-)