The numbers are quite disheartening. In many ways, in fact. What frustrates me is how many one-man, burst-of-effort projects one sees. One wonders how many good ideas died for lack of re-inforcing enthusiasms.
There, are, however, complications to a stastical analysis based on one development site - even a high-profile site like sourceforge. Some projects exist in many places at once - sourceforge, freshmeat, happypenguin, savannah.nongnu.org, linuxgames, berlios, web presence, etc. According to Sourceforge, my project (Adonthell) hasn't updated a file since 2000 - very inactive, and hasn't posted news since 2002-09-30. It has no mailing lists. It's Inactive in Alpha.
According to happypenguin, we're only at 0.3.3. We've released 0.3.4 and are moving on to 0.4, but without specific feature updates, there's nothing to post. Berlios has even less, since we use it primarly as a hosting space for our Wiki and the API documentation.
But my project doesn't actually -use- sourceforge primarily, or the others I mentioned. We use savannah and berlios. All our lists are hosted on savannah, as well as the CVS. The CVS gets commits on an average of twice a week, though that's not a steady rate. So, all told, it's active, if slow, and exists somewhere between Alpha and Beta - we haven't actually declared a Beta-state effort yet. Berlios' main function, aside from API, is to host the Wiki, which we use for a lot of content development and storage.
Getting back to the original point - that of re-inforcing enthusiams - my project started with three people, not one, and had a previous project to work from. I just wish more projects started that way.
I said, exactly, "carried out with -some- respect for the laws of warfare by -some- of them." I can't claim that the war was carried out with perfect legality or civility by all parties or even by any one party.
The morality of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is subject to debate. Some call it murder. I view it as a necessary tragedy - unfortunate, but preferrable to the likely outcomes of a full-scale amphibious assault on the Japanese central islands: at least 2 million more deaths, at least another year of fighting, and the possible extinction of the Japanese culture. These targets were also chosen for their important to the Japanese war effort. To some degree, the cities were strategically significant and therefore legitimate targets.
If you wanted to prove your point more effectively, you might have cited Dresden instead. The city was almost completely obliterated by Allied fire-bombings, though, IIRC it had very little strategic significance.
I think you've managed to mistake the kind of violence that occurs when trained, authorized government soldiers start killing each other and their motivations with the kind of violence that occurred at Columbine.
World War II was a patriotic war, at least in part, for most everyone involved. For the British, it was about keeping England free. Ditto the Russians, who call the war on the Eastern Front "The Great Patriotic War". For the French, it was about getting their country back. That's not all there was to it, since motives for enlistment (or at least not resisting draft laws) varied from person to person. Even the soldiers of the Axis powers could have had a patriotic, quasi-patriotic (or some otherwise noble) motivation for doing what they did - even the conscripts, who at least had their home villages and close comrades to fight for.
In summation:
Government soldiers with varying degrees of training and armament fighting declared wars against armies consisting of total strangers in order to keep themselves, their comrades, and in some cases their countries safe.
Contrast this to the Columbine shooting:
A pair of untrained, unauthorized and heavily armed teenagers venting their rage at untrained, unarmed innocents whom they actually knew. Had they been soldiers at the time of the event, their actions would still be considered war crimes.
Columbine was murder. WWII was a war, legally sanctioned by most parties and carried out with some respect for the laws of warfare by some of them.
It is true that WWII killed more people over a longer period of time often in far more horrific fashion, but to equate the two occurrences of violence is to insult everyone involved, including yourself.
Because I could have sworn the article was about a "Dedicated Physics Professor", not a peripheral processor. For a moment, I had visions of a computer program that teaches advanced physics to its users.
Silly/me
If I had a nickle for every Japanese girl I have seen running around with a cutesy little keychain doll given to them for free by their cell-phone company attached to their $300 Louis Vuitton handbag, I could probably buy one myself.
But I am afraid, they have carried this even further. There is a certain computer game that is accompanied by a network server that allows people to play against each other and they communicate with some kind of cryptic protocol. And people figured this out and implemented their own server and they have their own free game which is some what similar. They wrote it themselves and is not a modified work within modified proprietary game that won't have been illegal anyway. So they wrote their own game and they have their own server. And you could use either game and talk to either server. And they were sued. A court ruled that these free alternatives are illegal ones under the digital millennium copyright act. Now please note that using either one of these free alternatives doesn't enable one to use the proprietary one without paying. We have here two separate products being tied together through the use of this law.
To what is he referring? Is it Blizzard and bnetd? If so, why not say so? I'm confused.
You seem to be about 1/4 right. An announcement like "In the future, everyone will be a publishable author", even coming from the MIT Media Lab, is about as plausible as "In the future, everyone will drive a flying car", even coming from Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
But as for the "everyone needs to stop being greedy because capitalism is bad" argument...
You might be right and you might be wrong, but you've chosen to build your argument around the doomsayings of Robert Malthus...who predicted the imminent collapse of civiliztaion more than a hundred years ago. His predictions started to come true on some small scale when the Irish Potato Famine began...except that the some of the Irish compensated for it by migrating to North America. They started to come true again when the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl hit the heartland of America, but we compensated by finding new jobs. They have started to come true any number of times, but people (and sometimes their governments) find a way to make things work, whether by moving to new areas (Chernobyl) or by killing lots and lots and lots of chickens (Avian Flu). In short, Malthusian theory is based on the assumption that technology has now reached its zenith and that the human beings caught in the crucible are incapable of further adaptation.
As far as God and Creation vs evolution (or creationism/ID vs. evolution), I suppose my position is one of modal agnosticism. By that I mean that I believe as a matter of faith that God caused the world to come into being. I also consider myself too ill-informed to come to solid conclusions as to how it happened. God Himself says very little about exactly how He does it (only that He did it and continues to do it), exactly how long ago He started, or how long it took, so I have no leads from that end. At the same time, what I understand of evolutionary theory makes very little sense.
I know that Creationism can't be science because the basic concept is not open to refutation, being founded solidly in the religious beliefs of the adherents. At the same time, I don't know what conclusions I have come to regarding evolution.
Actually, I'm one of those kooky folks who believes in God and Creation, but my response to the idea was rather more like 'That can't possibly be true...' My second reaction was that his conclusion is plausible, challenging, and disturbing.
I can accept the idea that 50% or more of all conclusions reached through scientific inquiry will be refuted or replaced by more precise studies reaching more accurate conclusions. I can accept that idea because the history of science appears to bear the pattern out, e.g., the Newtonian->Einsteinian->Quantum Mechanics progression, but the idea that 50% of all 'scientifically' reached conclusions are both Bad and Wrong is a little scary. I wonder how much bother one has to endure in order to get a chance at accuracy.
I assume "american humans" was chosen in the interests of parallel structure. To go from "American cattle" to "people everywhere" breaks the parallelism.
I live a few blocks from my city's only branch library. It's cool that there is a branch library, but it's a storefront operation and rather small. The town has grown significantly since it was established. I daresay another branch closer to the economic center of town could be good. If not for the three university libraries in town, the community would be vastly underserved.
Perhaps I should clarify. It seemed that the story had already ended by the time I reached the final battle. I came to the conclusion (erroneous or otherwise) that there was nothing new to learn by killing Poquelin, so I didn't.
There are a lot of things one could say about Torment - whether the interface worked, how well the rotating class system worked, etc. I'm focusing on the writing.
For me, the fun of Planescape is wrapped up in the atmosphere of Sigil and how well written the whole adventure is. Sigil and its denizens are genuinely, entertainingly bizarre without being excessive (unless of course they have to be). The writers dropped Heaven only knows how many tidbits of history, culture, and glimpese of life on other planes, etc. I especially appreciated the way the writers used progressive exposition regarding the major characters, particularly D'akkon. To a certain degree, Torment so successful because Sigil is like a number of other settings, and like none of them at all.
The game is one grand riddle. Granted, some of the fetch-and-carry tasks can be tedious, but solving the main puzzle was fun. Heck, even the order and nature of the fetch-and-carry stuff is left up to the player. Help and join the Dustmen. Or don't. Or join the Dusties after you've joined the Sensates. Or the Chaosmen. Or sell your party into slavery and become totally evil. The possibilities are endless.
Torment is the only crpg I've actually finished. I gave up on IWD during the final battle. The party combat system was fun, but the story stopped. I gave up on Diablo and Dungeon Siege just before the final battle. With Diablo, the story wasn't hardly there and the combat got repetitive... With Dungeon Siege, the combat system was cool for quit a while, but the story stopped. I lost interest.
Re:Wanted: a few billion algae to help me move
on
Algae Can Carry Cargo
·
· Score: 1
As far as omens and portents go, I predict we won't be spending much time on/. between 9/17 and 9/20. (I won't even have access again until 9/25 or so.)
Re:Wanted: a few billion algae to help me move
on
Algae Can Carry Cargo
·
· Score: 1
Congratulations! As it turns out, I'm also getting married 9/17/05
And where do you live? I'm out in West Texas. With the exception of heavily populated counties like Taylor, Lubbock, Nolan and whatever county Midland is in, it's entirely normal for there to be one public library per county. One and only one guaranteed cluster of publicly accessible information for a few thousand people and about a thousand square miles. Maybe there are too many public libraries where you live, but around here, there are actually too few.
That is true, but one must also consider the status of the cadets in question. It would be nice to know how many of the cadets were plebes, cows, firsties, etc. A firstie (junior or senior) making this kind of mistake is far more serious than a plebe (freshman) doing the same. AFAIK, plebes really aren't in a position to question orders from anyone.
Most of my paid experience is in deskside/onsite user support - hardware, migrations, etc. But I'm currently "underemployed", so I wonder about how I might use what I have to pursue a full-time position as a programmer.
This certainly is cool biotech, but slapping this wild prediction on to the end of the article doesn't make it more so.
Yes, and no. Yes, it seems terribly far-fetched to start growing bacteria on chips just so they can excrete random nanowires, but OTOH, a great deal of what we might refer to as classic science fiction - Verne, Wells, etc. was also far-fetched at the time it was written. A fair quantity of what Wells wrote hasn't even come true yet, but it catalyzed exploration, or at least the more considered thought experiments of later writers like Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, et al., whose predictions have begun to come true.
I suppose it's a good thing, then, that the ChiComs are doing it. MIPS might get away with suing another Western company, but I doubt they'll have the same sucess suing a Chinese company, especially if that company is backed by Beijing. They don't seem to be known for taking criticism both seriously and well when it's coming from a small group of plaintiffs.
I wonder what would happen to MIPS' business forecast if any hint of a market in the PRC dried up all of a sudden?
IANAComputerScientist. (I'm an entry-level field circus rep with a degree in CS.)
Perhaps it would be better to say that most people don't -know- that we need as many computer scientists. Generations of research ago, when hobbyists were building computers from mail-order kits or borrowing time on mainframe or minicomputers, the state of the art was easily accessible. How accessible is the current state of the art?
It reminds me of the early days of the established physical sciences - the innovators we read about were often landed, titled, or otherwise wealthy enthusiasts - i.e. hobbyists. Once their hobbies had been established as meaningful, interesting pursuits, their work passed into the hands of trained professional classes. Chemistry, geology, and botany didn't cease to exist because Robert, the Fourth Earl of Wheelbarrow could not longer practice them without study. They simply became less accessible. So it may be with computer science.
There is no way we've figured everything out about everything. I say this not because I know where to find the gaps in the research, but because the history of science strongly suggests they exist. It seems that every law, theory, or axiom has eventually been (or will eventually be) found to be a less-than-accurate statement of observed reality. Such statements must eventually be revised or scrapped in favor of better descriptions of reality. I presume that the same can be said for C.S.
I daresay there are new languages left to be invented, new approaches to programming to be found once we get used to running programs on multiple inexpensive processor cores at the same time, etc. The research may have shifted to the hardware for a while - multiple cores on chip, 64-bit computing, etc. - but the software will have to keep pace.
Perhaps the problem now is that the average user (or even the average "Computer Scientist) is busily playing with half a bin of Legos, while the other half of the pile is still in the bin. Enthralled by what we can do, we have yet to fully realize how much we are leaving undone. But that's just a hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
The numbers are quite disheartening. In many ways, in fact. What frustrates me is how many one-man, burst-of-effort projects one sees. One wonders how many good ideas died for lack of re-inforcing enthusiasms.
There, are, however, complications to a stastical analysis based on one development site - even a high-profile site like sourceforge. Some projects exist in many places at once - sourceforge, freshmeat, happypenguin, savannah.nongnu.org, linuxgames, berlios, web presence, etc. According to Sourceforge, my project (Adonthell) hasn't updated a file since 2000 - very inactive, and hasn't posted news since 2002-09-30. It has no mailing lists. It's Inactive in Alpha.
According to happypenguin, we're only at 0.3.3. We've released 0.3.4 and are moving on to 0.4, but without specific feature updates, there's nothing to post. Berlios has even less, since we use it primarly as a hosting space for our Wiki and the API documentation.
But my project doesn't actually -use- sourceforge primarily, or the others I mentioned. We use savannah and berlios. All our lists are hosted on savannah, as well as the CVS. The CVS gets commits on an average of twice a week, though that's not a steady rate. So, all told, it's active, if slow, and exists somewhere between Alpha and Beta - we haven't actually declared a Beta-state effort yet. Berlios' main function, aside from API, is to host the Wiki, which we use for a lot of content development and storage.
Getting back to the original point - that of re-inforcing enthusiams - my project started with three people, not one, and had a previous project to work from. I just wish more projects started that way.
I said, exactly, "carried out with -some- respect for the laws of warfare by -some- of them." I can't claim that the war was carried out with perfect legality or civility by all parties or even by any one party.
The morality of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is subject to debate. Some call it murder. I view it as a necessary tragedy - unfortunate, but preferrable to the likely outcomes of a full-scale amphibious assault on the Japanese central islands: at least 2 million more deaths, at least another year of fighting, and the possible extinction of the Japanese culture. These targets were also chosen for their important to the Japanese war effort. To some degree, the cities were strategically significant and therefore legitimate targets.
If you wanted to prove your point more effectively, you might have cited Dresden instead. The city was almost completely obliterated by Allied fire-bombings, though, IIRC it had very little strategic significance.
World War II was a patriotic war, at least in part, for most everyone involved. For the British, it was about keeping England free. Ditto the Russians, who call the war on the Eastern Front "The Great Patriotic War". For the French, it was about getting their country back. That's not all there was to it, since motives for enlistment (or at least not resisting draft laws) varied from person to person. Even the soldiers of the Axis powers could have had a patriotic, quasi-patriotic (or some otherwise noble) motivation for doing what they did - even the conscripts, who at least had their home villages and close comrades to fight for.
In summation:
Government soldiers with varying degrees of training and armament fighting declared wars against armies consisting of total strangers in order to keep themselves, their comrades, and in some cases their countries safe.
Contrast this to the Columbine shooting:
A pair of untrained, unauthorized and heavily armed teenagers venting their rage at untrained, unarmed innocents whom they actually knew. Had they been soldiers at the time of the event, their actions would still be considered war crimes.
Columbine was murder. WWII was a war, legally sanctioned by most parties and carried out with some respect for the laws of warfare by some of them.
It is true that WWII killed more people over a longer period of time often in far more horrific fashion, but to equate the two occurrences of violence is to insult everyone involved, including yourself.
How about "In Communist China, the chip researches you"?
shouldn't it be tardegy?
Because I could have sworn the article was about a "Dedicated Physics Professor", not a peripheral processor. For a moment, I had visions of a computer program that teaches advanced physics to its users. Silly /me
You seem to be about 1/4 right. An announcement like "In the future, everyone will be a publishable author", even coming from the MIT Media Lab, is about as plausible as "In the future, everyone will drive a flying car", even coming from Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. But as for the "everyone needs to stop being greedy because capitalism is bad" argument... You might be right and you might be wrong, but you've chosen to build your argument around the doomsayings of Robert Malthus...who predicted the imminent collapse of civiliztaion more than a hundred years ago. His predictions started to come true on some small scale when the Irish Potato Famine began...except that the some of the Irish compensated for it by migrating to North America. They started to come true again when the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl hit the heartland of America, but we compensated by finding new jobs. They have started to come true any number of times, but people (and sometimes their governments) find a way to make things work, whether by moving to new areas (Chernobyl) or by killing lots and lots and lots of chickens (Avian Flu). In short, Malthusian theory is based on the assumption that technology has now reached its zenith and that the human beings caught in the crucible are incapable of further adaptation.
As far as God and Creation vs evolution (or creationism/ID vs. evolution), I suppose my position is one of modal agnosticism. By that I mean that I believe as a matter of faith that God caused the world to come into being. I also consider myself too ill-informed to come to solid conclusions as to how it happened. God Himself says very little about exactly how He does it (only that He did it and continues to do it), exactly how long ago He started, or how long it took, so I have no leads from that end. At the same time, what I understand of evolutionary theory makes very little sense.
I know that Creationism can't be science because the basic concept is not open to refutation, being founded solidly in the religious beliefs of the adherents. At the same time, I don't know what conclusions I have come to regarding evolution.
Actually, I'm one of those kooky folks who believes in God and Creation, but my response to the idea was rather more like 'That can't possibly be true...' My second reaction was that his conclusion is plausible, challenging, and disturbing. I can accept the idea that 50% or more of all conclusions reached through scientific inquiry will be refuted or replaced by more precise studies reaching more accurate conclusions. I can accept that idea because the history of science appears to bear the pattern out, e.g., the Newtonian->Einsteinian->Quantum Mechanics progression, but the idea that 50% of all 'scientifically' reached conclusions are both Bad and Wrong is a little scary. I wonder how much bother one has to endure in order to get a chance at accuracy.
I assume "american humans" was chosen in the interests of parallel structure. To go from "American cattle" to "people everywhere" breaks the parallelism.
I live a few blocks from my city's only branch library. It's cool that there is a branch library, but it's a storefront operation and rather small. The town has grown significantly since it was established. I daresay another branch closer to the economic center of town could be good. If not for the three university libraries in town, the community would be vastly underserved.
Perhaps I should clarify. It seemed that the story had already ended by the time I reached the final battle. I came to the conclusion (erroneous or otherwise) that there was nothing new to learn by killing Poquelin, so I didn't.
There are a lot of things one could say about Torment - whether the interface worked, how well the rotating class system worked, etc. I'm focusing on the writing. For me, the fun of Planescape is wrapped up in the atmosphere of Sigil and how well written the whole adventure is. Sigil and its denizens are genuinely, entertainingly bizarre without being excessive (unless of course they have to be). The writers dropped Heaven only knows how many tidbits of history, culture, and glimpese of life on other planes, etc. I especially appreciated the way the writers used progressive exposition regarding the major characters, particularly D'akkon. To a certain degree, Torment so successful because Sigil is like a number of other settings, and like none of them at all. The game is one grand riddle. Granted, some of the fetch-and-carry tasks can be tedious, but solving the main puzzle was fun. Heck, even the order and nature of the fetch-and-carry stuff is left up to the player. Help and join the Dustmen. Or don't. Or join the Dusties after you've joined the Sensates. Or the Chaosmen. Or sell your party into slavery and become totally evil. The possibilities are endless. Torment is the only crpg I've actually finished. I gave up on IWD during the final battle. The party combat system was fun, but the story stopped. I gave up on Diablo and Dungeon Siege just before the final battle. With Diablo, the story wasn't hardly there and the combat got repetitive... With Dungeon Siege, the combat system was cool for quit a while, but the story stopped. I lost interest.
As far as omens and portents go, I predict we won't be spending much time on /. between 9/17 and 9/20. (I won't even have access again until 9/25 or so.)
Congratulations! As it turns out, I'm also getting married 9/17/05
And where do you live? I'm out in West Texas. With the exception of heavily populated counties like Taylor, Lubbock, Nolan and whatever county Midland is in, it's entirely normal for there to be one public library per county. One and only one guaranteed cluster of publicly accessible information for a few thousand people and about a thousand square miles. Maybe there are too many public libraries where you live, but around here, there are actually too few.
That is true, but one must also consider the status of the cadets in question. It would be nice to know how many of the cadets were plebes, cows, firsties, etc. A firstie (junior or senior) making this kind of mistake is far more serious than a plebe (freshman) doing the same. AFAIK, plebes really aren't in a position to question orders from anyone.
Any advice on getting an uncrippled copy of VS.NET. I daresay learning C# or VB.NET would prove difficult otherwise.
Most of my paid experience is in deskside/onsite user support - hardware, migrations, etc. But I'm currently "underemployed", so I wonder about how I might use what I have to pursue a full-time position as a programmer.
I suppose it's a good thing, then, that the ChiComs are doing it. MIPS might get away with suing another Western company, but I doubt they'll have the same sucess suing a Chinese company, especially if that company is backed by Beijing. They don't seem to be known for taking criticism both seriously and well when it's coming from a small group of plaintiffs. I wonder what would happen to MIPS' business forecast if any hint of a market in the PRC dried up all of a sudden?
IANAComputerScientist. (I'm an entry-level field circus rep with a degree in CS.)
Perhaps it would be better to say that most people don't -know- that we need as many computer scientists. Generations of research ago, when hobbyists were building computers from mail-order kits or borrowing time on mainframe or minicomputers, the state of the art was easily accessible. How accessible is the current state of the art?
It reminds me of the early days of the established physical sciences - the innovators we read about were often landed, titled, or otherwise wealthy enthusiasts - i.e. hobbyists. Once their hobbies had been established as meaningful, interesting pursuits, their work passed into the hands of trained professional classes. Chemistry, geology, and botany didn't cease to exist because Robert, the Fourth Earl of Wheelbarrow could not longer practice them without study. They simply became less accessible. So it may be with computer science.
There is no way we've figured everything out about everything. I say this not because I know where to find the gaps in the research, but because the history of science strongly suggests they exist. It seems that every law, theory, or axiom has eventually been (or will eventually be) found to be a less-than-accurate statement of observed reality. Such statements must eventually be revised or scrapped in favor of better descriptions of reality. I presume that the same can be said for C.S.
I daresay there are new languages left to be invented, new approaches to programming to be found once we get used to running programs on multiple inexpensive processor cores at the same time, etc. The research may have shifted to the hardware for a while - multiple cores on chip, 64-bit computing, etc. - but the software will have to keep pace.
Perhaps the problem now is that the average user (or even the average "Computer Scientist) is busily playing with half a bin of Legos, while the other half of the pile is still in the bin. Enthralled by what we can do, we have yet to fully realize how much we are leaving undone. But that's just a hypothesis.