The GP isn't mainly talking about what the laws are like but what they should be like. So pointing out what is illegal is irrelevant.
There is no moral problem with filesharing as I see it. Culture is meant to be shared. I blog about the absurdity of trying to control ideas and expressions of ideas here.
I am not Indian but I would say that claiming that any India team lacks the skills to do the job is a little bit harsh. I'm pretty sure there are fine programmers in India too and generalizations like those aren't helpful.
As far as education and college goes, I'll say this again. Today's schools do not work using a problem-solution pattern which leads to students who can quote a great number of books but can't really solve problems unless they have been previously described and solved in said books.
I think Markus' lack of faith in trial and error reflects a very common and fundamental misunderstanding of how the human brain works. In fact, it reflects one of the basic flaws in American modern education over all.
Programming is easy. Easy as hell. But by tackling it with an academic 'hands off' approach a problem is created and that is why you can find room-fulls of hopeful future programmers who couldn't write a Tick Tack Toe game to save their lives.
When learning anything, anything at all, the only efficient method is trial and error. Now you might say, 'but when I was 18 I had to memorize a programming bible backwards and forwards and it sure came in handy.' But what you might not realize is that memorizing that was just a tool to allow you to do different, more roundabout, trial and error. The human brain is a neural network. It is built to find solutions in very vast search spaces. One such search space might be finding the right program to solve a given problem. When the neural network is untrained, it will find very random solutions which are likely to be very far from the correct solution. But by reacting to negative and positive stimuli the correct patterns are eventually created in the network and a solution crystalizes. This neural search process is amazingly fast compared to almost everything else we have studied just because it is a feedback loop.
The more complicated you make the feedback loop, the harder it is to learn anything and even something ridiculously easy as programming starts to look hard. This is the fault of today's and yesterday's education systems.
I write a Java Swing application for a living and trust me, it's not about not being able to 'get' it. It just is that bad. I believe Swing was not designed to be useable in practice, but just to have a 'really nice looking API'. That's a very cute goal but it doesn't cut it when writing real software.
In most UI toolkits you aren't expected to reinvent the wheel or fight with the API to achieve a normal native look and functionality. Try to create a simple JTable sortable by clicking the column headers to see what I mean. Once you're done implementing everything from logic to UI drawing, without any assistance from Swing, it still won't look anything like the user expects in most cases.
Here's a blog entry where I talk more about the 'designed for beauty' vs 'designed for use': Java Grows Up.
It is interesting how you resort to drama and emotional wording in arguing against Fnkmaster's argument. As we all know, that kind of argument is very effective on an irrational level, i.e. you picked a psychological tool. So perhaps you are the real psychological ninja here.
Just grab Desktop Manager and you've got virtual desktops as sleek as they get. Helps my productivity a lot while still looking so friggin' cool (with cube switch) that people blink and look again when they see it.
The new study doesn't necessarily show the opposit at all.
The first study says "more educated people are less likely to develop Alzheimer's". The other study appears to say "...but if they DO develop Alzheimer's, its really fast once discovered."
So what will this tremendous power be used for? Since the GPU will handle the rendering task, what will the vector units do (the vector units is where the power of the system is)?
Actually, the CPU speed has a lot to do with graphics speed. If you look at recent performance charts for nVidia's high end GPUs in SLI setups you will find that their performance levels off unless you run the absolutely highest resoultion with top filtering and antialias settings. In fact, the high end cards are still CPU limited at the highest settings for many but the most recent games. [Tom's Hardware Guide]
In addition, programmers will always find things to do with additional CPU power. Ray traced occlusion culling to reduce the number of polygons sent to the GPU is one idea if you have extreme amounts of processing power just sitting around. That in turn would allow you to use extremely advanced pixel shaders as overdraw is almost eliminated. It would also allow you to add a few more polygons to every scene, knowing that most polygons are correctly culled.
When you buy CDs you're buying the right to listen to a copy of the music in digital form.
So if somebody downloads some digital music without listening to it, it's fine?
I believe that when you pay for a CD you are buying not only the content, but also some plastic, some paper, the salary of the store clerk, the truck driver transporting the CD and his gas, the limousine fees for the label owner as he goes to his Manhattan office, etc. If it was only a matter of buying the listening, I believe most people would be perfectly happy to pay the few cents that in the end go to the artist.
I think it really isn't a matter of being on top as much as its about the US working hard to be on the bottom. If the kind of budget deficit we see today is a recuring thing, its only a matter of time before borrowing money becomes more difficult for the US, which in turn makes it more difficult to pay back old loans, which in turn means even bigger loans are needed.
The US dollar might some day really be forever gone if the economy isn't handled better.
As for HP, they'll be happy by that time since they already protected themselves from crashing currencies anywhere in the world by localizing their product lines.
Yeah, datatypes were like that. If I understood it correctly at the time, it would for example be like... if you had a graphics program, it would support the datatype 'images.' Then the operating system would handle the rest: it would read and write any image type file you had the correct datatype for. Meanwhile the program could just sit back and look like it supported everything. If after a while a new type of image data files appeared, say JPEG2000, it'd just be a matter of downloading the new datatype plugin from Aminet for the users and boom, all your graphics programs were ready.
Actually, I appreciate the set of features which seem to exist in this remade OS. Datatypes is just a great idea, and a quick startup time is something else I remember and miss from the time I ran an Amiga. But most amazing is that MUI is still around; I remember that as a graphical user interface with amazing flexibility. MUI took the whole idea of 'themes' one step further - before most people had even thought of themes in the first place. It was a breeze to sit down and design your own personal look on all your programs, and make it look really really good.
So those things, together with the speed, are really what I miss from the Amiga. And they're right there in this OS. For me, this is what Amiga was all about. Good design, good speed.
That's not how I understood it. In the article, he talks about the extremely small size of the operating system in conjunction with this statement. It seems reasonable he is describing that he likes the small memory footprint of the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
The GP isn't mainly talking about what the laws are like but what they should be like. So pointing out what is illegal is irrelevant.
There is no moral problem with filesharing as I see it. Culture is meant to be shared. I blog about the absurdity of trying to control ideas and expressions of ideas here.
I am not Indian but I would say that claiming that any India team lacks the skills to do the job is a little bit harsh. I'm pretty sure there are fine programmers in India too and generalizations like those aren't helpful.
As far as education and college goes, I'll say this again. Today's schools do not work using a problem-solution pattern which leads to students who can quote a great number of books but can't really solve problems unless they have been previously described and solved in said books.
I think Markus' lack of faith in trial and error reflects a very common and fundamental misunderstanding of how the human brain works. In fact, it reflects one of the basic flaws in American modern education over all.
Programming is easy. Easy as hell. But by tackling it with an academic 'hands off' approach a problem is created and that is why you can find room-fulls of hopeful future programmers who couldn't write a Tick Tack Toe game to save their lives.
When learning anything, anything at all, the only efficient method is trial and error. Now you might say, 'but when I was 18 I had to memorize a programming bible backwards and forwards and it sure came in handy.' But what you might not realize is that memorizing that was just a tool to allow you to do different, more roundabout, trial and error. The human brain is a neural network. It is built to find solutions in very vast search spaces. One such search space might be finding the right program to solve a given problem. When the neural network is untrained, it will find very random solutions which are likely to be very far from the correct solution. But by reacting to negative and positive stimuli the correct patterns are eventually created in the network and a solution crystalizes. This neural search process is amazingly fast compared to almost everything else we have studied just because it is a feedback loop.
The more complicated you make the feedback loop, the harder it is to learn anything and even something ridiculously easy as programming starts to look hard. This is the fault of today's and yesterday's education systems.
I write a Java Swing application for a living and trust me, it's not about not being able to 'get' it. It just is that bad. I believe Swing was not designed to be useable in practice, but just to have a 'really nice looking API'. That's a very cute goal but it doesn't cut it when writing real software.
In most UI toolkits you aren't expected to reinvent the wheel or fight with the API to achieve a normal native look and functionality. Try to create a simple JTable sortable by clicking the column headers to see what I mean. Once you're done implementing everything from logic to UI drawing, without any assistance from Swing, it still won't look anything like the user expects in most cases.
Here's a blog entry where I talk more about the 'designed for beauty' vs 'designed for use': Java Grows Up.
It is interesting how you resort to drama and emotional wording in arguing against Fnkmaster's argument. As we all know, that kind of argument is very effective on an irrational level, i.e. you picked a psychological tool. So perhaps you are the real psychological ninja here.
Just grab Desktop Manager and you've got virtual desktops as sleek as they get. Helps my productivity a lot while still looking so friggin' cool (with cube switch) that people blink and look again when they see it.
The new study doesn't necessarily show the opposit at all.
The first study says "more educated people are less likely to develop Alzheimer's". The other study appears to say "...but if they DO develop Alzheimer's, its really fast once discovered."
Actually, the CPU speed has a lot to do with graphics speed. If you look at recent performance charts for nVidia's high end GPUs in SLI setups you will find that their performance levels off unless you run the absolutely highest resoultion with top filtering and antialias settings. In fact, the high end cards are still CPU limited at the highest settings for many but the most recent games. [Tom's Hardware Guide]
In addition, programmers will always find things to do with additional CPU power. Ray traced occlusion culling to reduce the number of polygons sent to the GPU is one idea if you have extreme amounts of processing power just sitting around. That in turn would allow you to use extremely advanced pixel shaders as overdraw is almost eliminated. It would also allow you to add a few more polygons to every scene, knowing that most polygons are correctly culled.
When you buy CDs you're buying the right to listen to a copy of the music in digital form.
So if somebody downloads some digital music without listening to it, it's fine?
I believe that when you pay for a CD you are buying not only the content, but also some plastic, some paper, the salary of the store clerk, the truck driver transporting the CD and his gas, the limousine fees for the label owner as he goes to his Manhattan office, etc. If it was only a matter of buying the listening, I believe most people would be perfectly happy to pay the few cents that in the end go to the artist.
CDs are out, iTunes is in.
I think it really isn't a matter of being on top as much as its about the US working hard to be on the bottom. If the kind of budget deficit we see today is a recuring thing, its only a matter of time before borrowing money becomes more difficult for the US, which in turn makes it more difficult to pay back old loans, which in turn means even bigger loans are needed.
The US dollar might some day really be forever gone if the economy isn't handled better.
As for HP, they'll be happy by that time since they already protected themselves from crashing currencies anywhere in the world by localizing their product lines.
Yeah, datatypes were like that. If I understood it correctly at the time, it would for example be like... if you had a graphics program, it would support the datatype 'images.' Then the operating system would handle the rest: it would read and write any image type file you had the correct datatype for. Meanwhile the program could just sit back and look like it supported everything. If after a while a new type of image data files appeared, say JPEG2000, it'd just be a matter of downloading the new datatype plugin from Aminet for the users and boom, all your graphics programs were ready.
Actually, I appreciate the set of features which seem to exist in this remade OS. Datatypes is just a great idea, and a quick startup time is something else I remember and miss from the time I ran an Amiga. But most amazing is that MUI is still around; I remember that as a graphical user interface with amazing flexibility. MUI took the whole idea of 'themes' one step further - before most people had even thought of themes in the first place. It was a breeze to sit down and design your own personal look on all your programs, and make it look really really good. So those things, together with the speed, are really what I miss from the Amiga. And they're right there in this OS. For me, this is what Amiga was all about. Good design, good speed.
That's not how I understood it. In the article, he talks about the extremely small size of the operating system in conjunction with this statement. It seems reasonable he is describing that he likes the small memory footprint of the OS.