Well, my goal with that post was to inform, not to debate. If you're intent on "proving" Linux is dying, or Mac is dying, or BSD is dying, I'm sure you'll find a way to do so, and I'm not interested in arguing. I'm sorry if my post came across as abrasive or dismissive; it wasn't intended that way. It's just that I've looked through too many sites with OS percentage statistics to be able to remember all of the URLs, so I can't really give you a full list. Since you asked, I dug up a couple more references, though:
HitsLink's statistics don't inconsistent with IDC's shipment data and with the web browser market share estimations of other sites, like W3Schools. Do some Googling: everyone else has Mac around 3-5% and Linux around 2-4%.
The stats are global, but they're from HitsLink, http://marketshare.hitslink.com./ This site is known to overestimate Mac market share and to underestimate Linux market share.
It is plain wrong. The reason this happened is because people the instruction set in use, 32-bit x86, was not designed to be used with this much memory. The solution is to move to a 64-bit architecture, like x86_64.
> One last time: a theory's ability to make predictions is icing on the cake; it is not a litmus test or a definitional criteria for science itself.
You have a weaker definition of what science is than I. My definition is the more common, and for good reason. With your definition, a simple list of all observed phenomena would be a perfect scientific theory. That's rather silly; such a list would add nothing to our understanding about the world. My definition excludes this silliness as a list like that would have no predictive power.
Another advantage of the standard definition is that it excludes hand-wavy, plausible-sounding-but-untestable "theories". Good examples of these types of "theories" are intelligent design and evolutionary psychology. Both make claims that no one can really go out and disprove, and both can trivially explain all observed phenomena. With intelligent design, the explanation for everything is pretty much, "God did it.". With evolutionary psychology, you can make up any number of stories about what life may have been like for humans thousands of years ago that could explain why evolutionary pressure led to such-and-such observed phenomena. But, both of these "theories" are pretty much crap. And my definition can rule them out, while yours can't: neither of these theories have any predictive power, so they have no value as science.
So no, Bombula, I'm not ignorant, and I'm not wrong. You just have a different definition of science from the rest of the world. This doesn't mean you're wrong, but, as I've demonstrated above, the normal definition for science brings with it some distinct advantages, so you should give some serious consideration to adopting it yourself. This thread is starting to get off-topic, but I'd be happy to continue this discussion on one of our journal pages if you'd like.
"Why do men like large breasts?" is not the same question as "Why do women have large breasts?". Confusing these two issues suggests a misunderstanding of symbolic logic. The answers to these questions may be related, but the questions themselves are not equivalent.
I'd like to point out how predictable and revealing it is that you used evolution's status as a science to support your own discipline: evolution can sometimes get into the same problem. That species evolve is a well-known scientific fact, and we know that species evolve with a general hill-climbing type strategy toward local maxima, and we can simulate this artificially. However, many times, the explanations evolutionary biologists come up with for/why/ species evolved in a certain manner/are/ often little more than guesswork -- guesswork that does not, in fact, qualify as science.
Take your latest example, which is again from evolutionary biology, because it deals with behavior without regard to the mental states that accompany it, but you're getting a little warmer. You noticed a correlation between male testes size and female promiscuity in different species, hypothesized that this correlation might hold with humans, and were proven right. Good job; that's good science.
But wait -- that's not all you did. You also wrote a story about how the reason for this correlation is that female promiscuity causes greater competition among sperm inside a female at the same time. Woops.
Your story sounds really good -- so good that I intuitively think it's likely to be true. But, if you want to use science to support that story, you'd have to somehow do an experiment in which you artificially create female promiscuity and then watch to see if male testicle size increases over time. Until you do that, the story you wrote about this untested causation relationship is just plausible-sounding guesswork.
Despite the tendency of evolutionary biologists to write these untestable but plausible-sounding stories to accompany their work, evolutionary biology does have predictive power. The theory of evolution can predict things we did not know before about the past instead of about the future -- it predicted that certain kinds of fossils would be discovered, the fossils that represented missing links in species' evolutionary change, and such fossils were. Evolutionary psychology doesn't have equivalent successes; it just has plausible-sounding stories. I don't expect a response to this because you said you were going to cowardly run away in your last response -- kooks often do that when their kookery is pointed out to them.
As far as science being able to explain human behavior, it's not really there yet. Psychology as a whole/sometimes/, just/barely/, makes it as a science, and the parts that do aren't really enough to form a coherent discipline able to predict human behavior. In 200 years, when neuroscientists create a complete and accurate model of the human brain inside a supercomputer, then we might have a science able to predict human behavior. But, we don't have a science able to predict most aspects of human behavior. Not yet.
And, since I don't work in the field of evolutionary psychology (why would I? I think it's BS.), no, I don't really keep up with research in it. If the best example you can come up with plainly is from normal evolutionary biology instead of psychology, I remain convinced my time is better spent elsewhere.
The claims evolutionary psychologists make that convince me that the field is not only immature, but populated by people with low scientific standards, are like those made by you in this Slashdot article. You observe (or guess at) an aspect of human behavior, and then attempt to construct a story about tribal conditions thousands of years ago that fits your observation. That's plainly back-asswards, and it's not science. Nothing you can do can make that science. A good example is the case about men liking women with large breasts. First, evolutionary psychologists just assumed this was true and postulated it was because large-breasted women produced more milk. Then, a study of men in different cultures strongly suggested that men liking women with large breasts was purely a Western cultural phenomenon, and the evolutionary psychologists said that this was explainable since even women with small breasts could produce/enough/ milk. Then, biologists (i.e., real scientists) found that there was, actually, a very weak biological component to men liking large-breasted women, but also that breast size didn't correlate at all with milk production! Evolutionary psychologists responded by saying that this was because large breasts were a good indicator of age, and hence fertility, since larger breasts will start to sag over time. Well, la-di-da then!
Do you see what's wrong here? No matter what the facts, evolutionary psychologists can construct a plausible-sounding story to support them, and no one can go and test it. That's not science. It's storytelling. And storytellers pretending to be scientists are called bullshitters.
Heh, wow; I seem to have hit a nerve there. I haven't encountered such pompous prose since I last watched/Frasier/.
You subtly confused the issue here by providing an example from evolutionary/biology/, rather than evolutionary/psychology/, which is what I was criticizing. I'm not an anti-evolutionist, so you can't paint me as one and criticize those people instead. I do maintain that evolutionary psychology has not yet proven itself to be a successful scientific discipline.
And I meant exactly what I said about science -- the criterion of a successful science is its ability to make correct predictions. After it can/do/ that, then you can go and try to use it to explain observed phenomena -- but, unless and until it can do that, you're no better than the ancient tribes who explained the observed phenomena of lightening by saying it was a dude throwing bolts down from the clouds.
You're obviously unaware that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscientific bullshit. For it to be a successful science, it would have to be able to make correct predictions about things the answers to which were not already known. Until then, it's right up there with Freudianism in the hierarchy of psychological BS.
Maybe men and women have different reproductive strategies for entirely biological reasons -- though, given the increase in female promiscuity since the invention of birth control, the "entirely" part of that is pretty suspect -- and maybe it's all social conditioning. We don't know, and speculation from your pet pseudoscience doesn't really help.
I think it might be possible to use FUSE to create something like that over a normal CVS / SVN/ GIT repo.
Just a few months ago, I created a gigantic SVN repo of my entire home directory. It's been working better than I thought it would, but being able to use it from the file system would be ideal.
Good for you for finding a way to better your life. No sarcasm intended there; you really deserve congratulations for thinking that out. I wish you the best of luck.
> Because you would commute without having to work? Why wouldn't you include the commute? That's being silly.
I didn't include the commute because I was being conservative. I was trying to argue that it's very likely someone would spend more time at work than with his spouse, EVEN IF there were no commute.
> As for no alternative, sure there is. There's always an alternative. It just depends upon your priorities.
Yes, there's always an alternative. But that alternative's not always reasonable. Your alternative, while commendable, takes a lot of planning and time.
Oh yeah, re work weeks actually being 60-80 hours: I didn't include the commute. It really was just 40 hours in my calculation, so you are being rather silly.
Re logical fallacy: I wasn't giving you a proof, but if you're going to say that >90% of the working force in the U.S. is being stupid you'd better have something unarguably better. And it's flat-out ridiculous to counsel everyone against working full-time; there's no reasonable alternative for most.
You spend about a third of your life sleeping, and that's not really living your life, so everyone loses by that definition.
And unless you're arguing everyone should just be independently wealthy or work part-time and have very little money, what would you propose they do other than work 40 hours a week? I think I'd rather spend 40 hours a week doing something in a field I like than less than that doing some brainless part-time job like being a Walmart greeter and having significantly less money, which seems to be what you recommend.
And who are you, anyway, if you're not working 40 hours a week? I'm guessing either clueless teenager (who will end up working 40 hours a week) or arrogant rich snob (who either worked >40 hours a week in the past to get there, or his ancestors did). Am I right?
Okay, so if you can get to the.amz file without needing the Amazon Download Manager, is it possible to decode the playlist and then wget the tracks individually?
> If you are spending that large a portion of your life at work, you lose at life. Do you understand, now?
If you work 40 hours a week, you lose at life? That's what you meant, really? Because all those calculations were done with the assumption of a standard, 40 hour work week. If everyone who works 40 hours a week fails at life in your book, you're being rather silly.
> If this is true for "you", then "you" are not doing it right. "You" lose at life.
k, let's see...
A day is 24 hours.
Workdays (5 per week): 8 - sleep (you could count that as "with your spouse" but I assume we mean conscious interaction) 8.5-9 - work (including lunch) 6.5-7 - free time
So, on a workday, even if you spent all your time with your spouse that was not time at work, you're spending more time at work during work days.
Weekends (2 per week): 8 - sleep 16 - free time
So, let's find the percentage of "other stuff" time that would need to be spent with your spouse in order to make it equal the amount of time spent at work. I'll assume 9 hours at work because if you add in commute time, that's probably about what it takes even if you do a short lunch.
Trivially, this is the solution to the equation:
6.5*5*x + 16*2*x = 9*5
Chugging through that, we get
64.5*x = 45
x = 45 / 64.5 ~= 70%
So, in order to spend more time with your spouse than at work, you would need to spend more than 70% of your total free time with her (or him, but this is Slashdot so "her"). Is it reasonable to expect someone to do that? Maybe for some people, but I certainly wouldn't say someone has "lost at life" if he decides to divide his free time up differently.
> (1) Netbeans has compiled code for students that javac refuses, causing them to fail an assignment. This was entirely the fault of their compiler being broken.
Oh, really? You looked up the standard, and javac was right and Netbeans was wrong? Or, you just assumed that was the case and are talking out of an orifice not your mouth?
> (2) Eclipse refactoring pretty much takes the cake. No one else even comes close.
And you need this for intro-level assignments... why?
> (3) If you know how to use Eclipse well, you can write about 50% of the boilerplate java code (or about 90% of the code in an intro class) using dialogs and menus.
Sounds more like a reason to ban Eclipse since it enables cheating to me. If they're just clicking buttons, they're not learning Java.
> (4) Unless you're in the vim camp, I've never seen anyone save time not using Eclipse.
Whatever. Unless you're in the vim camp, I've never seen anyone save time not using Emacs.
> (5) All my A students for the last 6 semesters have used Eclipse, except one who used vim. I used vim then switched to eclipse myself. All my students that use other IDE's tend to get B- or worse.
My own story, I got an A in my horrendously-taught high school CS1 class by virtue of the fact that I already knew the material going in. I came in knowing C++, so I saw Java for what it was: a mutated, brain-dead, bastard child of C++. Having to use it instead of a better language (such as C++) was a huge step down. Perhaps Java would be better for beginners, but I would have liked the option to do the assignments in C++. Beginners, perhaps, would have liked to do the assignments in a pseudocode or a language like Logo; ideally we could both have been indulged, but I recognized that pragmatically you have to force a single language in a class like that. However, I'd been coding in Vi and Emacs for a little while already, so having JCreator forced down my throat in that class was a huge step down. Anything other than Emacs or Vi would have been a huge step down, of course, but JCreator was particularly horrendous, and I see no reason that JCreator should have been required.
My Intro to CS class was the single worst experience I've ever had in a CS course, and I've taken about 14 at this point. I'm lucky to have recognized that my bad experience was due to the instructor, not the material, and I went on to take CS2; most others did not. I beg you not to turn potential computer scientists off of the subject by having their first exposure to the subject be soured by their grades being based on trivialities (like the compiler used) and by a focus on irrelevant details (like a particular IDE's code generation features).
In my experience, Open Office is more full featured and a better program than Microsoft Office.
Let me give you just one example: Open Office, since at least version 1.0, has had autocompletion for previously typed words. Microsoft Office doesn't. The reason why Open Office can have this feature and Microsoft Office doesn't is because Microsoft doesn't have the manpower to add features like this. This is because Microsoft Office is developed in a closed-source manner, so interested coders don't get a chance to make the software better.
And, yes, I agree about the integration with Java. What was Sun smoking that day?
Heh, okay now we've both violated our promise to not reply anymore;)
> I'm glad you acknowledged that a stable API is needed and that there are problems with the Linux model.
There's no problem with Linux, and it doesn't need a stable API. There are problems with people who for some odd reason think they can do out-of-tree development without having to deal with the versioning conflicts inherent in maintaining a private branch of a software project.
> What you call "out-of-tree" we in the real world call just regular "software". You know the world where anyone can develop and release any software under any license they wish (not just under the GPL as part of a bloated monolithic kernel that includes every driver ever written).
Nope, the Linux kernel is one software project, drivers included, no matter how much that fact offends your religion. A driver for Linux is not a piece of software, it's a piece of Linux, and (for reasons the kernel developers and I have stated/many/ times before), that's how it should be. Now, anyone is free to checkout a private branch of Linux and start working on it, which is what the external driver developers are in effect doing, but if you do that you have to be prepared to deal with version conflicts when you merge your checkout with the mainline branch.
Linux doesn't want out-of-tree drivers. It wants those drivers to be in the mainline. And having an unstable driver API gives developers incentives to merge faster, since they have to deal with breakage if they don't. All this is by design, and it actually all works pretty well in practice. Because of this model I only need two out-of-tree drivers to get full functionality on my laptop, and one of those is in the process of being merged to the mainline, probably because of the difficulties involved in/not/ doing that. This merge will make maintenance of the driver easier, stop me from having to download an out-of-tree source tarball, and generally make life better for everyone involved. What's your problem with this?
> It's not only closed source drivers. But also open source THIRD PARTY EXTERNAL drivers, such as TrueCrypt. Every MINOR update of the Linux kernel caused the TrueCrypt driver to stop working and it required that the developers REWROTE parts of the driver!
Yup, out-of-tree development tends to do that. They should get it merged. This has been hashed over and over again on LKML.
> Do you get it now? Why a stable API for drivers is needed?
No, what you don't seem to get is that Linux just doesn't work that way, and it is very successful in the way it does work.
> And don't bother replying -- I don't read messages from religious zealots.
I tend not to read messages from ignorant fools, so I guess we're even.
> It's the same sort of difference that code completion or Google search made.
Search engines I'll give you; Google is just a good one.
I've used code completion, and it's annoying. If it makes a difference in the way you work, you're either doing something wrong or using a very bad API.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my goal with that post was to inform, not to debate. If you're intent on "proving" Linux is dying, or Mac is dying, or BSD is dying, I'm sure you'll find a way to do so, and I'm not interested in arguing. I'm sorry if my post came across as abrasive or dismissive; it wasn't intended that way. It's just that I've looked through too many sites with OS percentage statistics to be able to remember all of the URLs, so I can't really give you a full list. Since you asked, I dug up a couple more references, though:
http://www.radok.com/internet-statistics.html
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php.
If you'd like to look for more, I find that Googling for things like
"operating system" desktop market share
OS market share
etc., usually yield better results than things like
Linux market share
mac Linux market share
mac market share
for finding websites with web browser/OS hit statistics.
HitsLink's statistics don't inconsistent with IDC's shipment data and with the web browser market share estimations of other sites, like W3Schools. Do some Googling: everyone else has Mac around 3-5% and Linux around 2-4%.
The stats are global, but they're from HitsLink, http://marketshare.hitslink.com./ This site is known to overestimate Mac market share and to underestimate Linux market share.
It is plain wrong. The reason this happened is because people the instruction set in use, 32-bit x86, was not designed to be used with this much memory. The solution is to move to a 64-bit architecture, like x86_64.
> One last time: a theory's ability to make predictions is icing on the cake; it is not a litmus test or a definitional criteria for science itself.
You have a weaker definition of what science is than I. My definition is the more common, and for good reason. With your definition, a simple list of all observed phenomena would be a perfect scientific theory. That's rather silly; such a list would add nothing to our understanding about the world. My definition excludes this silliness as a list like that would have no predictive power.
Another advantage of the standard definition is that it excludes hand-wavy, plausible-sounding-but-untestable "theories". Good examples of these types of "theories" are intelligent design and evolutionary psychology. Both make claims that no one can really go out and disprove, and both can trivially explain all observed phenomena. With intelligent design, the explanation for everything is pretty much, "God did it.". With evolutionary psychology, you can make up any number of stories about what life may have been like for humans thousands of years ago that could explain why evolutionary pressure led to such-and-such observed phenomena. But, both of these "theories" are pretty much crap. And my definition can rule them out, while yours can't: neither of these theories have any predictive power, so they have no value as science.
So no, Bombula, I'm not ignorant, and I'm not wrong. You just have a different definition of science from the rest of the world. This doesn't mean you're wrong, but, as I've demonstrated above, the normal definition for science brings with it some distinct advantages, so you should give some serious consideration to adopting it yourself. This thread is starting to get off-topic, but I'd be happy to continue this discussion on one of our journal pages if you'd like.
"Why do men like large breasts?" is not the same question as "Why do women have large breasts?". Confusing these two issues suggests a misunderstanding of symbolic logic. The answers to these questions may be related, but the questions themselves are not equivalent.
/why/ species evolved in a certain manner /are/ often little more than guesswork -- guesswork that does not, in fact, qualify as science.
I'd like to point out how predictable and revealing it is that you used evolution's status as a science to support your own discipline: evolution can sometimes get into the same problem. That species evolve is a well-known scientific fact, and we know that species evolve with a general hill-climbing type strategy toward local maxima, and we can simulate this artificially. However, many times, the explanations evolutionary biologists come up with for
Take your latest example, which is again from evolutionary biology, because it deals with behavior without regard to the mental states that accompany it, but you're getting a little warmer. You noticed a correlation between male testes size and female promiscuity in different species, hypothesized that this correlation might hold with humans, and were proven right. Good job; that's good science.
But wait -- that's not all you did. You also wrote a story about how the reason for this correlation is that female promiscuity causes greater competition among sperm inside a female at the same time. Woops.
Your story sounds really good -- so good that I intuitively think it's likely to be true. But, if you want to use science to support that story, you'd have to somehow do an experiment in which you artificially create female promiscuity and then watch to see if male testicle size increases over time. Until you do that, the story you wrote about this untested causation relationship is just plausible-sounding guesswork.
Despite the tendency of evolutionary biologists to write these untestable but plausible-sounding stories to accompany their work, evolutionary biology does have predictive power. The theory of evolution can predict things we did not know before about the past instead of about the future -- it predicted that certain kinds of fossils would be discovered, the fossils that represented missing links in species' evolutionary change, and such fossils were. Evolutionary psychology doesn't have equivalent successes; it just has plausible-sounding stories. I don't expect a response to this because you said you were going to cowardly run away in your last response -- kooks often do that when their kookery is pointed out to them.
To elaborate some:
/sometimes/, just /barely/, makes it as a science, and the parts that do aren't really enough to form a coherent discipline able to predict human behavior. In 200 years, when neuroscientists create a complete and accurate model of the human brain inside a supercomputer, then we might have a science able to predict human behavior. But, we don't have a science able to predict most aspects of human behavior. Not yet.
/enough/ milk. Then, biologists (i.e., real scientists) found that there was, actually, a very weak biological component to men liking large-breasted women, but also that breast size didn't correlate at all with milk production! Evolutionary psychologists responded by saying that this was because large breasts were a good indicator of age, and hence fertility, since larger breasts will start to sag over time. Well, la-di-da then!
As far as science being able to explain human behavior, it's not really there yet. Psychology as a whole
And, since I don't work in the field of evolutionary psychology (why would I? I think it's BS.), no, I don't really keep up with research in it. If the best example you can come up with plainly is from normal evolutionary biology instead of psychology, I remain convinced my time is better spent elsewhere.
The claims evolutionary psychologists make that convince me that the field is not only immature, but populated by people with low scientific standards, are like those made by you in this Slashdot article. You observe (or guess at) an aspect of human behavior, and then attempt to construct a story about tribal conditions thousands of years ago that fits your observation. That's plainly back-asswards, and it's not science. Nothing you can do can make that science. A good example is the case about men liking women with large breasts. First, evolutionary psychologists just assumed this was true and postulated it was because large-breasted women produced more milk. Then, a study of men in different cultures strongly suggested that men liking women with large breasts was purely a Western cultural phenomenon, and the evolutionary psychologists said that this was explainable since even women with small breasts could produce
Do you see what's wrong here? No matter what the facts, evolutionary psychologists can construct a plausible-sounding story to support them, and no one can go and test it. That's not science. It's storytelling. And storytellers pretending to be scientists are called bullshitters.
Heh, wow; I seem to have hit a nerve there. I haven't encountered such pompous prose since I last watched /Frasier/.
/biology/, rather than evolutionary /psychology/, which is what I was criticizing. I'm not an anti-evolutionist, so you can't paint me as one and criticize those people instead. I do maintain that evolutionary psychology has not yet proven itself to be a successful scientific discipline.
/do/ that, then you can go and try to use it to explain observed phenomena -- but, unless and until it can do that, you're no better than the ancient tribes who explained the observed phenomena of lightening by saying it was a dude throwing bolts down from the clouds.
You subtly confused the issue here by providing an example from evolutionary
And I meant exactly what I said about science -- the criterion of a successful science is its ability to make correct predictions. After it can
You're obviously unaware that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscientific bullshit. For it to be a successful science, it would have to be able to make correct predictions about things the answers to which were not already known. Until then, it's right up there with Freudianism in the hierarchy of psychological BS.
Maybe men and women have different reproductive strategies for entirely biological reasons -- though, given the increase in female promiscuity since the invention of birth control, the "entirely" part of that is pretty suspect -- and maybe it's all social conditioning. We don't know, and speculation from your pet pseudoscience doesn't really help.
I know I'm rare here, but, whenever I listen to music, that is all I'm doing. So it's not "background stuff" for everyone.
Very cool idea.
I think it might be possible to use FUSE to create something like that over a normal CVS / SVN/ GIT repo.
Just a few months ago, I created a gigantic SVN repo of my entire home directory. It's been working better than I thought it would, but being able to use it from the file system would be ideal.
People like you are why I very loudly make known my opinion that the liberal and fine art disciplines form the world's largest conglomeration of BS.
Good for you for finding a way to better your life. No sarcasm intended there; you really deserve congratulations for thinking that out. I wish you the best of luck.
> Because you would commute without having to work? Why wouldn't you include the commute? That's being silly.
I didn't include the commute because I was being conservative. I was trying to argue that it's very likely someone would spend more time at work than with his spouse, EVEN IF there were no commute.
> As for no alternative, sure there is. There's always an alternative. It just depends upon your priorities.
Yes, there's always an alternative. But that alternative's not always reasonable. Your alternative, while commendable, takes a lot of planning and time.
Oh yeah, re work weeks actually being 60-80 hours: I didn't include the commute. It really was just 40 hours in my calculation, so you are being rather silly.
Re logical fallacy: I wasn't giving you a proof, but if you're going to say that >90% of the working force in the U.S. is being stupid you'd better have something unarguably better. And it's flat-out ridiculous to counsel everyone against working full-time; there's no reasonable alternative for most.
You spend about a third of your life sleeping, and that's not really living your life, so everyone loses by that definition.
And unless you're arguing everyone should just be independently wealthy or work part-time and have very little money, what would you propose they do other than work 40 hours a week? I think I'd rather spend 40 hours a week doing something in a field I like than less than that doing some brainless part-time job like being a Walmart greeter and having significantly less money, which seems to be what you recommend.
And who are you, anyway, if you're not working 40 hours a week? I'm guessing either clueless teenager (who will end up working 40 hours a week) or arrogant rich snob (who either worked >40 hours a week in the past to get there, or his ancestors did). Am I right?
Okay, so if you can get to the .amz file without needing the Amazon Download Manager, is it possible to decode the playlist and then wget the tracks individually?
> If you are spending that large a portion of your life at work, you lose at life. Do you understand, now?
If you work 40 hours a week, you lose at life? That's what you meant, really? Because all those calculations were done with the assumption of a standard, 40 hour work week. If everyone who works 40 hours a week fails at life in your book, you're being rather silly.
> If this is true for "you", then "you" are not doing it right. "You" lose at life.
k, let's see...
A day is 24 hours.
Workdays (5 per week):
8 - sleep (you could count that as "with your spouse" but I assume we mean conscious interaction)
8.5-9 - work (including lunch)
6.5-7 - free time
So, on a workday, even if you spent all your time with your spouse that was not time at work, you're spending more time at work during work days.
Weekends (2 per week):
8 - sleep
16 - free time
So, let's find the percentage of "other stuff" time that would need to be spent with your spouse in order to make it equal the amount of time spent at work. I'll assume 9 hours at work because if you add in commute time, that's probably about what it takes even if you do a short lunch.
Trivially, this is the solution to the equation:
6.5*5*x + 16*2*x = 9*5
Chugging through that, we get
64.5*x = 45
x = 45 / 64.5 ~= 70%
So, in order to spend more time with your spouse than at work, you would need to spend more than 70% of your total free time with her (or him, but this is Slashdot so "her"). Is it reasonable to expect someone to do that? Maybe for some people, but I certainly wouldn't say someone has "lost at life" if he decides to divide his free time up differently.
> (1) Netbeans has compiled code for students that javac refuses, causing them to fail an assignment. This was entirely the fault of their compiler being broken.
... why?
Oh, really? You looked up the standard, and javac was right and Netbeans was wrong? Or, you just assumed that was the case and are talking out of an orifice not your mouth?
> (2) Eclipse refactoring pretty much takes the cake. No one else even comes close.
And you need this for intro-level assignments
> (3) If you know how to use Eclipse well, you can write about 50% of the boilerplate java code (or about 90% of the code in an intro class) using dialogs and menus.
Sounds more like a reason to ban Eclipse since it enables cheating to me. If they're just clicking buttons, they're not learning Java.
> (4) Unless you're in the vim camp, I've never seen anyone save time not using Eclipse.
Whatever. Unless you're in the vim camp, I've never seen anyone save time not using Emacs.
> (5) All my A students for the last 6 semesters have used Eclipse, except one who used vim. I used vim then switched to eclipse myself. All my students that use other IDE's tend to get B- or worse.
My own story, I got an A in my horrendously-taught high school CS1 class by virtue of the fact that I already knew the material going in. I came in knowing C++, so I saw Java for what it was: a mutated, brain-dead, bastard child of C++. Having to use it instead of a better language (such as C++) was a huge step down. Perhaps Java would be better for beginners, but I would have liked the option to do the assignments in C++. Beginners, perhaps, would have liked to do the assignments in a pseudocode or a language like Logo; ideally we could both have been indulged, but I recognized that pragmatically you have to force a single language in a class like that. However, I'd been coding in Vi and Emacs for a little while already, so having JCreator forced down my throat in that class was a huge step down. Anything other than Emacs or Vi would have been a huge step down, of course, but JCreator was particularly horrendous, and I see no reason that JCreator should have been required.
My Intro to CS class was the single worst experience I've ever had in a CS course, and I've taken about 14 at this point. I'm lucky to have recognized that my bad experience was due to the instructor, not the material, and I went on to take CS2; most others did not. I beg you not to turn potential computer scientists off of the subject by having their first exposure to the subject be soured by their grades being based on trivialities (like the compiler used) and by a focus on irrelevant details (like a particular IDE's code generation features).
In my experience, Open Office is more full featured and a better program than Microsoft Office.
Let me give you just one example: Open Office, since at least version 1.0, has had autocompletion for previously typed words. Microsoft Office doesn't. The reason why Open Office can have this feature and Microsoft Office doesn't is because Microsoft doesn't have the manpower to add features like this. This is because Microsoft Office is developed in a closed-source manner, so interested coders don't get a chance to make the software better.
And, yes, I agree about the integration with Java. What was Sun smoking that day?
> Some might think making money is evil, but i dont. I like making money.
Whether making money is evil depends on how you make it. In particular, anticompetitive behavior is not a legal or moral way to make money.
Heh, okay now we've both violated our promise to not reply anymore ;)
/many/ times before), that's how it should be. Now, anyone is free to checkout a private branch of Linux and start working on it, which is what the external driver developers are in effect doing, but if you do that you have to be prepared to deal with version conflicts when you merge your checkout with the mainline branch.
/not/ doing that. This merge will make maintenance of the driver easier, stop me from having to download an out-of-tree source tarball, and generally make life better for everyone involved. What's your problem with this?
> I'm glad you acknowledged that a stable API is needed and that there are problems with the Linux model.
There's no problem with Linux, and it doesn't need a stable API. There are problems with people who for some odd reason think they can do out-of-tree development without having to deal with the versioning conflicts inherent in maintaining a private branch of a software project.
> What you call "out-of-tree" we in the real world call just regular "software". You know the world where anyone can develop and release any software under any license they wish (not just under the GPL as part of a bloated monolithic kernel that includes every driver ever written).
Nope, the Linux kernel is one software project, drivers included, no matter how much that fact offends your religion. A driver for Linux is not a piece of software, it's a piece of Linux, and (for reasons the kernel developers and I have stated
Linux doesn't want out-of-tree drivers. It wants those drivers to be in the mainline. And having an unstable driver API gives developers incentives to merge faster, since they have to deal with breakage if they don't. All this is by design, and it actually all works pretty well in practice. Because of this model I only need two out-of-tree drivers to get full functionality on my laptop, and one of those is in the process of being merged to the mainline, probably because of the difficulties involved in
> It's not only closed source drivers. But also open source THIRD PARTY EXTERNAL drivers, such as TrueCrypt. Every MINOR update of the Linux kernel caused the TrueCrypt driver to stop working and it required that the developers REWROTE parts of the driver!
Yup, out-of-tree development tends to do that. They should get it merged. This has been hashed over and over again on LKML.
> Do you get it now? Why a stable API for drivers is needed?
No, what you don't seem to get is that Linux just doesn't work that way, and it is very successful in the way it does work.
> And don't bother replying -- I don't read messages from religious zealots.
I tend not to read messages from ignorant fools, so I guess we're even.
> It's the same sort of difference that code completion or Google search made.
Search engines I'll give you; Google is just a good one.
I've used code completion, and it's annoying. If it makes a difference in the way you work, you're either doing something wrong or using a very bad API.