No, it isn't. Slashdot sadly makes the "show oldest posts first" sort order the default, which means that posts do not get even moderation. I'm sure that there is a reason that Taco has chosen to do this.
I agree that my point was probably not *that* insightful.
When the poster uses pedophile, criminal activity is implied.
No. If he intended to use "pedophile" to imply a criminal, he was incorrectly using the word.
A pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to children. The term says nothing about what that person has done in real life, or whether that person has committed any crimes. It is quite reasonable for someone to be sexually attracted to children and yet to never violate a crime in their lives. There are many people who are sexually attracted to, say, married movie actresses, but they need not have had an affair with them.
Words with a "-phile" suffix simply mean someone who is attracted to something.
You know, a really good low-level manager really *is* worth the amount of money he's paid, if not more -- the problem is that many low-level managers are *not* really good and are paid as if they are.
* If you can enthuse your team as to what they're doing, that's a point. Enthusiastic people produce much better output than uninterested people. That's different from just enjoying the job -- having a jacuzzi in the office may make the job more enjoyable, but it doesn't necessarily make people enthusiastic about what they're doing.
* If you can pick up on what people's various triggers are, and adapt to them, that's a point. Some people like being presented with competitive environments, some people feel overwhelmed by them. Some people hate being told what to do -- it may be better to "guide" these people, ask them the same problems that you're trying to solve and let them come to the same conclusions you've reached, and other people feel more comfortable if they have clear instruction. Some people don't get work done without a clear schedule, and other people can't stand not having flexibility. Some people work best in serial -- one task at a time -- other people prefer being able to switch around between tasks. A good manager is going to be able to treat different employees differently, each as a different tool he can use to solve a problem, rather than try to force everyone to follow a particular mold.
High-level execs get a lot of flack on Slashdot. I haven't had to interact with these folks much, so I'm not really informed enough to make too much of a judgement. But consider, for a moment, what their role is (and ask yourself whether there is skill involved in it).
When an engineer is working on a problem, he usually gets to work on something that he's had the ability to specialize fairly much around. If someone, say, a vendor, starts feeding him technical bullshit, it's easier for him to figure out that something is up, because he's got a good deal of knowledge in the field. He has to know his field *intimately*, and there is generally little room for error -- if you're wrong about something from a technical standpoint, you are *wrong*. On the other hand, he does have some advantages. The things he's working with are fairly straightforward -- complex, perhaps, but they do something, are intended to do something, and if they aren't, something is wrong. It might be material used in a bridge or chips in a product, but this pretty much holds. He generally has tools that can let him get accurate information about any problems -- it may consume time to do so, or even be somewhat difficult, but if he wants to he can probably diagnose problems to a high degree of accuracy.
An exec has to run organizations that deal with things that he does not have the luxury of specializing in. He *knows* that he doesn't know the details of what he's working with, so he's essentially blind-fighting a bit. A vendor *can* sell him a line of bullshit on technical matters, because he hasn't had the time to specialize in a field. The things he's working with are usually groups of people that have all sorts of agendas, and frequently are not giving him accurate information -- how much funding they *really* could get by with, whether they really believe that they can still finish their project, people who are busy passing the buck and so forth. If he wants to have an engineer review a vendor's claims, he doesn't know whether or not the engineer may be claiming more knowledge than he really has, or may have bias, or whatnot. So he lacks the precision diagnostic tools of the engineer, and has no hard guarantee of being able to obtain accurate information. The upside of being an exec is that mistakes may lead to softer failures than technical mistakes -- you can do something "sort of right" and still have it work quite well, and not have anyone really be able to easily call you out on it. Someone who's really good at handling these tools and working within this kind of system *can* be really v
On previous epiodes of job hunting, I've been offered "aptitude tests" at the interview. The kind of thing I'm talking about is where the HR person gives you a printed sheet of C++ exercises. I find those a real turn-off. It means that that company cannot field an interviewer who they can rely on to gauge the technial ability of a candidate. Those question sheets also invariably contain errors. In fact every time this has happened I have done the test anyway, been offered the job, and turned it down.
Dude, they aren't doing it because they can't possibly find a single person who can ask a single technical question. They're doing it because companies are innundated with people looking for technical jobs who have absolutely zero idea what they're talking about, and they have to have some kind of filter to keep their engineers from spending all day interviewing idiots.
As you've pointed out, you had no difficulty doing their tests -- but a number of people would be filtered out there.
Now, if that is the *only* interview content, I agree that this would be overkill, but it seems reasonable for the first phase of the interview process.
I mean, you have no idea how goddamn ignorant many of the people applying for jobs are. I remember sitting in a room where an informal interview was being done. Some guy (suit, slicked-back hair, impressive resume, etc) had described himself as an "expert C programmer" (for some reason, every person, no matter their actual experience, is determined to describe themselves as "expert" in at least a couple things -- while this might happen occasionally, the engineer interviewing you is not that stupid). He was asked to write a strcpy() implementation. After something like five minutes of him nervously doodling (he needed to be told what strcpy() was, which didn't look like a good sign), the interviewer started asking him a couple questions. The guy had some sort of confused concept of a string -- he seemed to recall that strings were copied with a member function, seemed to have a fuzzy idea what a Java string was, and then started talking about LDAP (he must have using a string in something database-related in the past). The interviewer tried prompting him, giving him hints, tried asking some other C questions. It was embarassing. And if you have a bunch of your engineers lined up to interview this guy, to try to get some feel of what he can do, you've just blown a man-day completely. You have to have some kind of a filter. So, yes, a set of preprinted questions may not exactly challenge your technical wizardry, but it's cheap in terms of man-hours to apply. If those are the only questions you're being asked, then you might be right -- you might not want to work there. You shouldn't just pass on a job, though, because you have to pass a basic filter.
There are tons of identity thieves and pedophiles out there that the FBI hasn't gotten around to nailing, either.
What would the point of "nailing" pedophiles be?
You don't "nail" Satanists. Nothing wrong with being a Satanist. The problem comes in if some guy starts cutting human hearts out on an altar somewhere -- then you're nailing a murderer who happens to be a Satanist.
Similarly, you could maybe nail someone guilty of sexual abuse of a child who happened to be a pedophile, but what would be the benefit of nailing pedophiles?
Identity thieves, on the other hand, have committed a crime.
It's an unhabitable island. Can't even get to it during the winter and it's really tiny. What do they want from it exactly?
Why do all your suburbanite neighbors spend time and money growing masses of grass, which are no good to them, since they never leave their air-conditioned house?
Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society...
I'm not a patent lawyer.
The idea is that patents provide a mechanism to provide incentive to do research. It may or may not be worthwhile; it may or may not be worthwhile in this particular case. The hope is that, after factoring in all the advantages and drawbacks, that the increased funding to corporate research offsets the damage caused by the monopolies granted.
There's no way to say, based on a single case, whether or not software patents are worthwhile.
I tend to feel that software patents have some major issues:
* First, unlike some guy making, say, shovels, a software designer is frequently designing new systems. The per-unit production cost of software is almost zero, so almost all work is on design. The patent system was tuned for a system in which design work is a small chunk of cost. Since the patent system is being applied to software, suddenly almost *all* work done is patentable, instead of just a small chunk of it, so patents start flying off the shelf. The patent system simply is not adapted for a production environment in which almost all cost goes into design and none into per-unit production.
* Second, the patent system was originally oriented more towards mechanical improvements. Inventions here might take a good deal of expensive and time-consuming trial and error to come up with, but once a machine is built, it will continue to be built for some time (a new plow design might be manufactured for decades to come). In addition, anyone can take a look at it and produce another -- the reverse-engineering cost was very low. For software patents, this is not the case. The product lifetime is relatively short, and reverse engineering is far more expensive than any other environment. So, if I write a piece of software, I don't need a patent as much, because even with no patent law whatsoever, simply due to the time to reverse-engineer my software, I am going to have a monopoly for some time, and that time will probably be a significant chunk of the lifetime of my product.
* Third, because the per-unit cost of software is so low, there are a number of people doing it for fun, and releasing their work to the public. You can't design a shovel and give the shovel away for free because of the per-unit costs, but you can afford to distribute copies of the software. Unfortunately, these people cannot afford to hire a patent lawyer to work with them, so in their case any threat of patent litigation shuts them down. This is fairly unique -- in most other industries that mainly produce IP (music, writing, etc) copyrights are more important than patents.
No, because Microsoft could set up whatever price discrimination schemes they wanted to make it affordable to anyone. Right now, they get $0 for pirated copies.
Instead of letting Bob pirate a copy, sell it to him for $5.
Why? Microsoft WANTS people to pirate Windows. Very, very few private individuals would pay $300 for an OS plus $300 for an office app suite. However, if "everyone" uses it already, then the sort of customers who do buy, such as businesses and governments, will far more likely go with Microsoft.
Bull.
Piracy simply represents a segment of the market that Microsoft cannot directly control. They could be charging on $5 or $10 or just making Windows free to those people that they want to get using it.
The daemons are not what is slowing you down, unless they're polling.
Most of what the perceptual slowness is in Linux comes from a couple things.
* Inefficient GUI software. GNOME 2 software simply starts up and runs more slowly than GNOME 1 software.
* Heavyweight desktop managers and similar programs. I use sawfish, have a copy of gkrellm running, and use xbindkeys to launch all my programs Most of what I have open at any one time are Firefox windows, xterms (not the far slower gnome-terminals), and xemacs windows. These are all interactive programs, but things are much snappier when running these than when running the GNOME or KDE suites.
* Use accelerated drivers. There aren't that many that have RENDER acceleration, for example, and without that, all the antialised character blits to the screen are unaccelerated -- one reason why the antialiasing in GTK/GNOME 2 "felt" so slow. I use a Radeon 9250/128 bit data path and have no problems.
For all that, there's still a few things I'd like to point out.
* As a kernel, Linux *is* generally faster than Windows. You might be using slower userspace software, though.
* In The Olden Days, Linux distros tended to have an awful lot more daemons running out of box -- my Red Hat 5.2 box, IIRC, ran fingerd, ftp, ssh, telnet, and I think even a web server by default. There might be more -- talk might have been in there as well.
* Linux does a pretty good job of paging. If a daemon isn't doing anything, it isn't going to be consuming your resources.
You made it difficult by stripping off the brackets around 'em in ps output.
Type "ps aux", and the threads with brackets are kernel threads.
Nothing else is essential to run Linux except for init. I don't run, nor am I familiar with any of the "xf*" processes. udevd will be auto-started if udev needs it -- you obviously won't need or see it if you aren't using udev.
I'm not a kernel hacker, and I can tell this all to you pretty easily.
The Microsoft engineers, on the other hand, had no clue, which means that their system is over-complicated and harder to understand.
You know, there is a long list of things that can be abused that are just fine if used reasonably (goto is another candidate). Just throwing out an operator because it might be abused is silly.
Note that renderfarms are probably the place where it's easiest of all to switch platforms, since they are not interactive and the renderers are usually very portable.
So animators are the best place to look to predict the future, since they are the "first switchers", and the rest of the market trails them?
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of Satanic cults that sacrifice humans is an urban legend - in reality Satanism is a group of relatively benign religions.
Okay, fair enough. I was just looking around for something that people tend to find equally taboo.
It's very strange this post was so highly modded.
No, it isn't. Slashdot sadly makes the "show oldest posts first" sort order the default, which means that posts do not get even moderation. I'm sure that there is a reason that Taco has chosen to do this.
I agree that my point was probably not *that* insightful.
When the poster uses pedophile, criminal activity is implied.
No. If he intended to use "pedophile" to imply a criminal, he was incorrectly using the word.
A pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to children. The term says nothing about what that person has done in real life, or whether that person has committed any crimes. It is quite reasonable for someone to be sexually attracted to children and yet to never violate a crime in their lives. There are many people who are sexually attracted to, say, married movie actresses, but they need not have had an affair with them.
Words with a "-phile" suffix simply mean someone who is attracted to something.
You know, a really good low-level manager really *is* worth the amount of money he's paid, if not more -- the problem is that many low-level managers are *not* really good and are paid as if they are.
* If you can enthuse your team as to what they're doing, that's a point. Enthusiastic people produce much better output than uninterested people. That's different from just enjoying the job -- having a jacuzzi in the office may make the job more enjoyable, but it doesn't necessarily make people enthusiastic about what they're doing.
* If you can pick up on what people's various triggers are, and adapt to them, that's a point. Some people like being presented with competitive environments, some people feel overwhelmed by them. Some people hate being told what to do -- it may be better to "guide" these people, ask them the same problems that you're trying to solve and let them come to the same conclusions you've reached, and other people feel more comfortable if they have clear instruction. Some people don't get work done without a clear schedule, and other people can't stand not having flexibility. Some people work best in serial -- one task at a time -- other people prefer being able to switch around between tasks. A good manager is going to be able to treat different employees differently, each as a different tool he can use to solve a problem, rather than try to force everyone to follow a particular mold.
High-level execs get a lot of flack on Slashdot. I haven't had to interact with these folks much, so I'm not really informed enough to make too much of a judgement. But consider, for a moment, what their role is (and ask yourself whether there is skill involved in it).
When an engineer is working on a problem, he usually gets to work on something that he's had the ability to specialize fairly much around. If someone, say, a vendor, starts feeding him technical bullshit, it's easier for him to figure out that something is up, because he's got a good deal of knowledge in the field. He has to know his field *intimately*, and there is generally little room for error -- if you're wrong about something from a technical standpoint, you are *wrong*. On the other hand, he does have some advantages. The things he's working with are fairly straightforward -- complex, perhaps, but they do something, are intended to do something, and if they aren't, something is wrong. It might be material used in a bridge or chips in a product, but this pretty much holds. He generally has tools that can let him get accurate information about any problems -- it may consume time to do so, or even be somewhat difficult, but if he wants to he can probably diagnose problems to a high degree of accuracy.
An exec has to run organizations that deal with things that he does not have the luxury of specializing in. He *knows* that he doesn't know the details of what he's working with, so he's essentially blind-fighting a bit. A vendor *can* sell him a line of bullshit on technical matters, because he hasn't had the time to specialize in a field. The things he's working with are usually groups of people that have all sorts of agendas, and frequently are not giving him accurate information -- how much funding they *really* could get by with, whether they really believe that they can still finish their project, people who are busy passing the buck and so forth. If he wants to have an engineer review a vendor's claims, he doesn't know whether or not the engineer may be claiming more knowledge than he really has, or may have bias, or whatnot. So he lacks the precision diagnostic tools of the engineer, and has no hard guarantee of being able to obtain accurate information. The upside of being an exec is that mistakes may lead to softer failures than technical mistakes -- you can do something "sort of right" and still have it work quite well, and not have anyone really be able to easily call you out on it. Someone who's really good at handling these tools and working within this kind of system *can* be really v
On previous epiodes of job hunting, I've been offered "aptitude tests" at the interview. The kind of thing I'm talking about is where the HR person gives you a printed sheet of C++ exercises. I find those a real turn-off. It means that that company cannot field an interviewer who they can rely on to gauge the technial ability of a candidate. Those question sheets also invariably contain errors. In fact every time this has happened I have done the test anyway, been offered the job, and turned it down.
Dude, they aren't doing it because they can't possibly find a single person who can ask a single technical question. They're doing it because companies are innundated with people looking for technical jobs who have absolutely zero idea what they're talking about, and they have to have some kind of filter to keep their engineers from spending all day interviewing idiots.
As you've pointed out, you had no difficulty doing their tests -- but a number of people would be filtered out there.
Now, if that is the *only* interview content, I agree that this would be overkill, but it seems reasonable for the first phase of the interview process.
I mean, you have no idea how goddamn ignorant many of the people applying for jobs are. I remember sitting in a room where an informal interview was being done. Some guy (suit, slicked-back hair, impressive resume, etc) had described himself as an "expert C programmer" (for some reason, every person, no matter their actual experience, is determined to describe themselves as "expert" in at least a couple things -- while this might happen occasionally, the engineer interviewing you is not that stupid). He was asked to write a strcpy() implementation. After something like five minutes of him nervously doodling (he needed to be told what strcpy() was, which didn't look like a good sign), the interviewer started asking him a couple questions. The guy had some sort of confused concept of a string -- he seemed to recall that strings were copied with a member function, seemed to have a fuzzy idea what a Java string was, and then started talking about LDAP (he must have using a string in something database-related in the past). The interviewer tried prompting him, giving him hints, tried asking some other C questions. It was embarassing. And if you have a bunch of your engineers lined up to interview this guy, to try to get some feel of what he can do, you've just blown a man-day completely. You have to have some kind of a filter. So, yes, a set of preprinted questions may not exactly challenge your technical wizardry, but it's cheap in terms of man-hours to apply. If those are the only questions you're being asked, then you might be right -- you might not want to work there. You shouldn't just pass on a job, though, because you have to pass a basic filter.
In India, M$ is paying a fresh graduate around Rs. 7,50,000 which is way higher than the average of Rs. 2,80,000.
That's an interesting number system that you've got there.
There are tons of identity thieves and pedophiles out there that the FBI hasn't gotten around to nailing, either.
What would the point of "nailing" pedophiles be?
You don't "nail" Satanists. Nothing wrong with being a Satanist. The problem comes in if some guy starts cutting human hearts out on an altar somewhere -- then you're nailing a murderer who happens to be a Satanist.
Similarly, you could maybe nail someone guilty of sexual abuse of a child who happened to be a pedophile, but what would be the benefit of nailing pedophiles?
Identity thieves, on the other hand, have committed a crime.
n/t
An Attorney General is a politician. They're interested in what sounds good to the masses. You want legal accuracy, find a judge.
It's an unhabitable island. Can't even get to it during the winter and it's really tiny.
What do they want from it exactly?
Why do all your suburbanite neighbors spend time and money growing masses of grass, which are no good to them, since they never leave their air-conditioned house?
It's all about penis length.
Funny stuff!
Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society...
I'm not a patent lawyer.
The idea is that patents provide a mechanism to provide incentive to do research. It may or may not be worthwhile; it may or may not be worthwhile in this particular case. The hope is that, after factoring in all the advantages and drawbacks, that the increased funding to corporate research offsets the damage caused by the monopolies granted.
There's no way to say, based on a single case, whether or not software patents are worthwhile.
I tend to feel that software patents have some major issues:
* First, unlike some guy making, say, shovels, a software designer is frequently designing new systems. The per-unit production cost of software is almost zero, so almost all work is on design. The patent system was tuned for a system in which design work is a small chunk of cost. Since the patent system is being applied to software, suddenly almost *all* work done is patentable, instead of just a small chunk of it, so patents start flying off the shelf. The patent system simply is not adapted for a production environment in which almost all cost goes into design and none into per-unit production.
* Second, the patent system was originally oriented more towards mechanical improvements. Inventions here might take a good deal of expensive and time-consuming trial and error to come up with, but once a machine is built, it will continue to be built for some time (a new plow design might be manufactured for decades to come). In addition, anyone can take a look at it and produce another -- the reverse-engineering cost was very low. For software patents, this is not the case. The product lifetime is relatively short, and reverse engineering is far more expensive than any other environment. So, if I write a piece of software, I don't need a patent as much, because even with no patent law whatsoever, simply due to the time to reverse-engineer my software, I am going to have a monopoly for some time, and that time will probably be a significant chunk of the lifetime of my product.
* Third, because the per-unit cost of software is so low, there are a number of people doing it for fun, and releasing their work to the public. You can't design a shovel and give the shovel away for free because of the per-unit costs, but you can afford to distribute copies of the software. Unfortunately, these people cannot afford to hire a patent lawyer to work with them, so in their case any threat of patent litigation shuts them down. This is fairly unique -- in most other industries that mainly produce IP (music, writing, etc) copyrights are more important than patents.
Slashdot clearly needs a better trust system to avoid forcing people to adopt such ad-hoc systems...
No, because Microsoft could set up whatever price discrimination schemes they wanted to make it affordable to anyone. Right now, they get $0 for pirated copies.
Instead of letting Bob pirate a copy, sell it to him for $5.
Why? Microsoft WANTS people to pirate Windows. Very, very few private individuals would pay $300 for an OS plus $300 for an office app suite. However, if "everyone" uses it already, then the sort of customers who do buy, such as businesses and governments, will far more likely go with Microsoft.
Bull.
Piracy simply represents a segment of the market that Microsoft cannot directly control. They could be charging on $5 or $10 or just making Windows free to those people that they want to get using it.
The daemons are not what is slowing you down, unless they're polling.
Most of what the perceptual slowness is in Linux comes from a couple things.
* Inefficient GUI software. GNOME 2 software simply starts up and runs more slowly than GNOME 1 software.
* Heavyweight desktop managers and similar programs. I use sawfish, have a copy of gkrellm running, and use xbindkeys to launch all my programs Most of what I have open at any one time are Firefox windows, xterms (not the far slower gnome-terminals), and xemacs windows. These are all interactive programs, but things are much snappier when running these than when running the GNOME or KDE suites.
* Use accelerated drivers. There aren't that many that have RENDER acceleration, for example, and without that, all the antialised character blits to the screen are unaccelerated -- one reason why the antialiasing in GTK/GNOME 2 "felt" so slow. I use a Radeon 9250/128 bit data path and have no problems.
For all that, there's still a few things I'd like to point out.
* As a kernel, Linux *is* generally faster than Windows. You might be using slower userspace software, though.
* In The Olden Days, Linux distros tended to have an awful lot more daemons running out of box -- my Red Hat 5.2 box, IIRC, ran fingerd, ftp, ssh, telnet, and I think even a web server by default. There might be more -- talk might have been in there as well.
* Linux does a pretty good job of paging. If a daemon isn't doing anything, it isn't going to be consuming your resources.
You made it difficult by stripping off the brackets around 'em in ps output.
Type "ps aux", and the threads with brackets are kernel threads.
Nothing else is essential to run Linux except for init. I don't run, nor am I familiar with any of the "xf*" processes. udevd will be auto-started if udev needs it -- you obviously won't need or see it if you aren't using udev.
I'm not a kernel hacker, and I can tell this all to you pretty easily.
The Microsoft engineers, on the other hand, had no clue, which means that their system is over-complicated and harder to understand.
On Linux, this would be not just free but open source and part of the kernel -- look in /proc.
Other handy monitoring utilities are strace, netstat, ltrace, lsof, and lslk.
Don't get me wrong -- Sysinternals makes Windows much more bearable, but Windows still ain't Linux.
So what would your call on the OJ case have been?
Given that Google's researchers seem to be beating the pants off Microsoft's researchers, I'm not sure I'd be so concerned.
Websites that require IE only are very unprofessional IMHO.
That would make Verizon's "transfer your service when moving" website unprofessional.
You know, there is a long list of things that can be abused that are just fine if used reasonably (goto is another candidate). Just throwing out an operator because it might be abused is silly.
Can Cell Phones Damage Our Eyes?
Given sufficient speed and/or thermal energy, most definitely yes.
Note that renderfarms are probably the place where it's easiest of all to switch platforms, since they are not interactive and the renderers are usually very portable.
So animators are the best place to look to predict the future, since they are the "first switchers", and the rest of the market trails them?
Interesting. I like the idea.
I have a copy of The Incredibles handy, so I took a quick skim for the logo, but couldn't find it? Could you be more specific?
Thunderhead, the first hapless hero in the "no capes" scene has a combined lightning/tornado logo that looks a little bit reminicent.
Dynaguy, in the same scene, is also a little bit reminicent, but still not that close.
Nobody in the "computer list of dead heroes" scene is even close.
Assuming the voice actors, storyboarders, and artists work for free, of course.
A million dollars a second seems high even for the fanciest of special effects snippits in a movie.