There was a discussion a while back on Slashdot on what was called extreme programming, where no one would code solo; instead, programmers would pair up and code together (on a single machine, and a single subject.) Any thoughts on whether this slight social aspect of programming might be more appealing to women than the Lone Coder approach?
How many people REALLY want to spend all their time sitting in front of a computer banging out code - something most people find incredibly boring?
Probably not that many -- perhaps the reason I spend somewhat too much time on Slashdot is that I no longer want to -- but this answer doesn't explain why this is even more true of women than men. If I had to give a couple of hyphotheses, I would say that a) as nurturers, women are more empathic, and computers are absolutely emotionless; and b) men are more oriented towards demonstrable achievements, and achieving some programming goal is such a thing.
LinuxOne is obviously bullshit but your remarks might some day apply to RedHat as well. They do not believe in their core business generating enough revenue to support this outrageous stock value and , recently, started buying out profitable companies to fix that rather serious problem.
Yes, but Red Hat didn't cause the stock to skyrocket through deceptive techniques. It skyrocketed based on hype, and there's not much they can do about that. What do you do, issue press releases saying "Look guys, when we predicted maybe 30% growth [or whatever they said] a year and limited profits, we actually meant it?" Best you can do is buy other money-making companies and then perhaps the bubble won't burst, or if it does, people won't lose their shirts, just a few buttons.
I think this technology is amazing, but like many other medical technologies that are available, I fear it will lead to a larger gap between rich and poor.
The gap really doesn't matter, the living conditions of the poor are what matter. And at least in this country, technology has generally improved standards of living.
I think that's why, referencing another story, Steve Wozniak has a generally optimistic view of things. Despite fits and starts, monopolies and EULAs, greed and envy, the computer community makes dramatically better and nicer-to-use machines now than it did in the past, and the benefits of those are going to a large percentage of the population.
I think you're missing the point that Stephen Hawkings was trying to make. He said that;- ". If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time. We have not seen any tourists from the future. That means that..."
But that assumes the implications of our current model of how the universe works is correct. His flow of logic here is "FTL implies time travel is possible, time travel means at some point the future equivalent of a script kiddie would have come back and wiped out civilization, therefore no time travel." But that assumes the "FTL implies time travel" statement is correct. It probably is, but I wouldn't state it (or *anything* in science) as gospel.
also would like an internal messaging system so that the system can send users notes. This would be really useful so that the system could alert users that a comment they wrote had been replied to.
Note that Slashdot currently has a feature that makes this reasonably easy, although it's a "pull" rather than a "push" system. Although the page deprecates itself, the list of one's comments available if you go to 'User Info' -- most immediately by clicking on your user name in tiny type on the front page -- also counts the responses. I check it periodically for responses to my postings.
Not quite, as MIP-mapping layers are simply pre-scaled versions of the largest version (thus allowing interpolation between the scaled versions without having to look at large numbers of pixels each time.) The problem the originator of this thread referred to is that even with perfect color scaling, an icon that looks good at one scale may not look so good at another. You may always want 1-pixel outlines, for example. If you're running Windows or have access to it, look at the differences between large icons and their small equivalents for things like folders.
Since Apple isn't scaling these bitmaps on the fly except one at a time, MIP-mapping is irrelevant. Apple will presumably store the current scaled version of the bitmap and blit that to the screen when needed.
I realize things will be different at the interface level, but does Apple's use of a BSD-like kernel mean that the meat of device drivers for Mac OS X will be similar enough to the needs of Linux/BSD/Unices that porting drivers between them will be fairly easy? Anyone have any idea?
At work we do a Mac/Windows application, and I've got to say, OS X has me tempted to switch from doing most of my work in Windows...
One possibility, and I'm not claiming Apple is supporting this, would be to have multiple bitmaps for different sizes, and interpolate between them for intermediate scales. You could have some sort of feedback in the scaling to highlight when you're at one of the optimal positions.
The icons all look like they're true color though, for which I think downscaling problems are less significant. The problems you mention are most dramatic when you want sharp edges or have a limited palette.
Actually, although I never personally learned much of it, Apple provided a pretty decent command line interface in their MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Work(shop?) system. They did at least understand that programmers should have access to command lines, although it would have been better if it was csh/bash/tsh-like, so people wouldn't have to learn Yet Another Language to switch between the two.
Because, mistaken Eccles, WE are the owners of these roads, we picked up the tab for the land, the materials, and labor, WE ARE the ownership committee.
...which is why WE vote for the steering committee (at least in Democratic Republics), who decide whether to put these measures in place or not. They are well within the powers of government to do so, or not to do so.
We, the majority of active voters, should not be subjected to anything which we deem innappropriate
More properly, that is the case in (generally non-existent) pure democracies. In a democratic republic, we vote for representatives (and can run for those positions ourselves) so we are not subjected to anything *they* deem inappropriate. If their judgement is faulty, we should vote for someone else next time or start a recall campaign.
Automatically ticketting speeders has been tried before in the US and didn't work at all.
Locally (MD), we have red light cameras, which take a picture of cars if they go through (duh!) red lights. They seem pretty widespread. Given how many people are "so nice, they go through lights after me to reassure me I didn't go through the light too late", I'm for it.
Fundamentally, the "rights" people here are missing something: you can drive a car as fast as you want to on YOUR OWN ROAD. Dale Earnhardt can drive 200 MPH at Talledega, no problem. It's just when you drive on publicly-owned roads that you are subject to tighter restrictions. And yes, if the ownership committee for the roads (the Government) decided that you need limiters to use their roads, then by golly, why are they any less entitled to do so any more than the owners of Talledega could impose a 50 MPH limit on their course?
This doesn't address the idea of whether it's a good idea or not, however.
For instance you can't losslessly compress white noise using any known method.
This sounds flat out wrong to me. You can take white noise and apply a Huffman scheme to it.
Fundamentally you are always limited by mathematics: if you have a 1 to 1 matching function, your domain and range must be the same size. A lossless compression scheme is a 1 to 1 matching function, mapping the original image data to a unique "compressed" image. So you're stuck. Now, most images that we're likely to compress have the sorts of patterns that allow us to do some compression, so generally we don't have to worry about that.
What is often missed regarding lossy compression, however, is that that nature of the loss is very significant in the perceived quality of the compression. For example, one problem you often see in compressed video is changes in parts of the image that shouldn't change: the viewpoint is still, a wall is still, but compression artifacts on the wall are different from frame to frame. Software that evaluates the effects of losses on an image, taking things like this into account, would be good -- as would compression software that does likewise.
[USB is] just too slow. Firewire is better but... I think ethernet would have been a better peripheral bus choice. Ethernet doesn't supply power, does it? One big advantage of USB is providing power to low-power devices.
I have gotten "Pajama Sam" working successfully with Wine under Linux. I suspect a number of other programs would work as well, I just haven't had the time to test them.
1) Establish a method other than the courts (something akin to arbitration) for determining whether an idea is novel enough and unique enough for patenting, where all parties expressing a concern have input.
2) Shorten the duration of patent protections (copyrights too).
3) Establish that patents must be truly *novel*, not simply a logical extension of current practice that your average person in the field would come up with after an afternoon's thinking, nor the use of a known technique with a new technology.
I agree that DVD is waaay better then VHS, and my DVD library is already nicely stocked. But what will happen to it when HDTV rolls around?
It won't look any less nice...
Essentially there's a level of detail captured in the MPEG data stream, and that's your "not to be exceeded" quality level. If it captures Natalie Portman's pores in that detail level, you'll see them in HDTV; if it doesn't, you won't. MPEG2 allows for variability in data rates, and thus it would be possible to recreate the data stream at a higher quality level, and thus get an HDTV quality data stream that does look better. But it's a big question as to whether this will happen, just as S-VHS hasn't taken over the VHS market. As-is, DVD is at a sort of "magic" level -- a disk format that can handle 2 hours of movie. And I've seen players that will take 200 disks, so DVD's size isn't much of an issue. It would take a lot for a new format to push current DVD and its MPEG quality out of the market.
You might end up wanting a new player that puts out an HDTV signal rather than an NTSC signal that gets converted. The new player should still play your old disks, but it may also work with "Ultra" DVDs that use a higher compression. Odds are you'll only notice the difference if you're looking for it or doing image capture.
Actually, that would qualify as a "derivative work" under copyright law, and you could be prohibited from distributing your license. On the other hand, you could write "This code is licensed under the GPL, with the following exception: you may only compile the code if you're standing on your head, [yadda yadda yadda]"
I also think the banana clause would be rather hard to enforce -- particularly given trade disputes over bananas -- so I think you would have to allow for any local fruit to be an acceptable substitute.
RMS' point about attaching GNU to Linux to accentuate the freedom that comes along with GNU/Linux is something that I think is good and very important
But how does attaching GNU achieve this? GNU is the label for the GNU project, FSF's effort to build a free Unix. If we need a term that means "libre", Linux is just as valid a label for that as GNU. I'm not alone in failing to see how naming it after Stallman's effort emphasizes "free" any more than just calling it Linux. Indeed, the grab for naming rights seems to imply exactly the opposite.
Or they were writing about web security and not about etoy vs etoys. They did not misrepresent the case[...]
Note that they talk about this being "fresh reminders of the need for e-commerce sites to keep their defenses sharp." If that need is triggered by reaction to an action taken by the retailer, that seems particularly pertinent to me. Don't want to get DOSed? You don't need the defenses, you need to stop throwing lawyers at people.
On the other hand, I haven't had any trouble reaching etoys.com (not that I shop there), so it seems to be a pretty ineffective attack anyway.
They do have a link on that very page to an idg.net article which goes into more detail about etoy and etoys, including mentioning that etoy.com was around for a year before etoys.com opened. Guess they don't fol,low their own links either...
All you Americans are whining all day is that everything non-western (in this case Russia) is evil If you truly believe this is what we say and we think, you don't understand Americans. We know Hitler was Western; we know he took a country of "good" people and created one of the most terrible forces in history. (It was Japanse subs that bombed the U.S., however; German subs confined themselves to sinking American ships within sight of the coast.) All it took was a charismatic, nationalistic lunatic who took advantage of terrible economic times. So what do we have in Russia? Looks like a disturbingly simi;lar situation. Look, Americans don't want to "keep Russia down;" we want an economically strong Russia that no longer feels a need for nukes, or at least no need to threaten anyone with them. If we could figure out how to build Russia's infrastructure to make that happen, we would. Unfortunately, our efforts so far seem to have done more harm than good, at least in Russia. (We do seem to have done rather better in Eastern Europe, and we're really hoping that starts to rub off.)
I believe that if you have a patent you're required to enforce it and protect it against violations and other infringements.
*Sigh*...
This is TRADEMARKS. TRADEMARKS are the only IP that need active enforcement. Patents don't need to be enforced; see the LZW patent of GIFs if you need an example.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to reply to you twice...
There was a discussion a while back on Slashdot on what was called extreme programming, where no one would code solo; instead, programmers would pair up and code together (on a single machine, and a single subject.) Any thoughts on whether this slight social aspect of programming might be more appealing to women than the Lone Coder approach?
How many people REALLY want to spend all their time sitting in front of a computer banging out code - something most people find incredibly boring?
Probably not that many -- perhaps the reason I spend somewhat too much time on Slashdot is that I no longer want to -- but this answer doesn't explain why this is even more true of women than men. If I had to give a couple of hyphotheses, I would say that a) as nurturers, women are more empathic, and computers are absolutely emotionless; and b) men are more oriented towards demonstrable achievements, and achieving some programming goal is such a thing.
If you have a penis between your legs, you will be given better technical education when you are young.
Assuming that it's *your* penis, of course.
Internet taxes are not an issue for just the 'geeks'. It's an issue for all Americans, like any tax.
And frankly, it should be treated just the same. Whether you order a product by phone or by web page shouldn't differentiate the taxes.
LinuxOne is obviously bullshit but your remarks might some day apply to RedHat as well. They do not believe in their core business generating enough revenue to support this outrageous stock value and , recently, started buying out profitable companies to fix that rather serious problem.
Yes, but Red Hat didn't cause the stock to skyrocket through deceptive techniques. It skyrocketed based on hype, and there's not much they can do about that. What do you do, issue press releases saying "Look guys, when we predicted maybe 30% growth [or whatever they said] a year and limited profits, we actually meant it?" Best you can do is buy other money-making companies and then perhaps the bubble won't burst, or if it does, people won't lose their shirts, just a few buttons.
I think this technology is amazing, but like many other medical technologies that are available, I fear it will lead to a larger gap between rich and poor.
The gap really doesn't matter, the living conditions of the poor are what matter. And at least in this country, technology has generally improved standards of living.
I think that's why, referencing another story, Steve Wozniak has a generally optimistic view of things. Despite fits and starts, monopolies and EULAs, greed and envy, the computer community makes dramatically better and nicer-to-use machines now than it did in the past, and the benefits of those are going to a large percentage of the population.
I think you're missing the point that Stephen Hawkings was trying to make. He said that;- ". If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time. We have not seen any tourists from the future. That means that..."
But that assumes the implications of our current model of how the universe works is correct. His flow of logic here is "FTL implies time travel is possible, time travel means at some point the future equivalent of a script kiddie would have come back and wiped out civilization, therefore no time travel." But that assumes the "FTL implies time travel" statement is correct. It probably is, but I wouldn't state it (or *anything* in science) as gospel.
also would like an internal messaging system so that the system can send users notes. This would be really useful so that the system could alert users that a comment they wrote had been replied to.
Note that Slashdot currently has a feature that makes this reasonably easy, although it's a "pull" rather than a "push" system. Although the page deprecates itself, the list of one's comments available if you go to 'User Info' -- most immediately by clicking on your user name in tiny type on the front page -- also counts the responses. I check it periodically for responses to my postings.
This is the essence (sp?) of mipmaping,
Not quite, as MIP-mapping layers are simply pre-scaled versions of the largest version (thus allowing interpolation between the scaled versions without having to look at large numbers of pixels each time.) The problem the originator of this thread referred to is that even with perfect color scaling, an icon that looks good at one scale may not look so good at another. You may always want 1-pixel outlines, for example. If you're running Windows or have access to it, look at the differences between large icons and their small equivalents for things like folders.
Since Apple isn't scaling these bitmaps on the fly except one at a time, MIP-mapping is irrelevant. Apple will presumably store the current scaled version of the bitmap and blit that to the screen when needed.
I realize things will be different at the interface level, but does Apple's use of a BSD-like kernel mean that the meat of device drivers for Mac OS X will be similar enough to the needs of Linux/BSD/Unices that porting drivers between them will be fairly easy? Anyone have any idea?
At work we do a Mac/Windows application, and I've got to say, OS X has me tempted to switch from doing most of my work in Windows...
One possibility, and I'm not claiming Apple is supporting this, would be to have multiple bitmaps for different sizes, and interpolate between them for intermediate scales. You could have some sort of feedback in the scaling to highlight when you're at one of the optimal positions.
The icons all look like they're true color though, for which I think downscaling problems are less significant. The problems you mention are most dramatic when you want sharp edges or have a limited palette.
Actually, although I never personally learned much of it, Apple provided a pretty decent command line interface in their MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Work(shop?) system. They did at least understand that programmers should have access to command lines, although it would have been better if it was csh/bash/tsh-like, so people wouldn't have to learn Yet Another Language to switch between the two.
Because, mistaken Eccles, WE are the owners of these roads, we picked up the tab for the land, the materials, and labor, WE ARE the ownership committee.
...which is why WE vote for the steering committee (at least in Democratic Republics), who decide whether to put these measures in place or not. They are well within the powers of government to do so, or not to do so.
We, the majority of active voters, should not be subjected to anything which we deem innappropriate
More properly, that is the case in (generally non-existent) pure democracies. In a democratic republic, we vote for representatives (and can run for those positions ourselves) so we are not subjected to anything *they* deem inappropriate. If their judgement is faulty, we should vote for someone else next time or start a recall campaign.
Automatically ticketting speeders has been tried before in the US and didn't work at all.
Locally (MD), we have red light cameras, which take a picture of cars if they go through (duh!) red lights. They seem pretty widespread. Given how many people are "so nice, they go through lights after me to reassure me I didn't go through the light too late", I'm for it.
Fundamentally, the "rights" people here are missing something: you can drive a car as fast as you want to on YOUR OWN ROAD. Dale Earnhardt can drive 200 MPH at Talledega, no problem. It's just when you drive on publicly-owned roads that you are subject to tighter restrictions. And yes, if the ownership committee for the roads (the Government) decided that you need limiters to use their roads, then by golly, why are they any less entitled to do so any more than the owners of Talledega could impose a 50 MPH limit on their course?
This doesn't address the idea of whether it's a good idea or not, however.
For instance you can't losslessly compress white noise using any known method.
This sounds flat out wrong to me. You can take white noise and apply a Huffman scheme to it.
Fundamentally you are always limited by mathematics: if you have a 1 to 1 matching function, your domain and range must be the same size. A lossless compression scheme is a 1 to 1 matching function, mapping the original image data to a unique "compressed" image. So you're stuck. Now, most images that we're likely to compress have the sorts of patterns that allow us to do some compression, so generally we don't have to worry about that.
What is often missed regarding lossy compression, however, is that that nature of the loss is very significant in the perceived quality of the compression. For example, one problem you often see in compressed video is changes in parts of the image that shouldn't change: the viewpoint is still, a wall is still, but compression artifacts on the wall are different from frame to frame. Software that evaluates the effects of losses on an image, taking things like this into account, would be good -- as would compression software that does likewise.
[USB is] just too slow. Firewire is better but... I think ethernet would have been a better peripheral bus choice. Ethernet doesn't supply power, does it? One big advantage of USB is providing power to low-power devices.
I have gotten "Pajama Sam" working successfully with Wine under Linux. I suspect a number of other programs would work as well, I just haven't had the time to test them.
If you were congress, who would you fix it?
1) Establish a method other than the courts (something akin to arbitration) for determining whether an idea is novel enough and unique enough for patenting, where all parties expressing a concern have input.
2) Shorten the duration of patent protections (copyrights too).
3) Establish that patents must be truly *novel*, not simply a logical extension of current practice that your average person in the field would come up with after an afternoon's thinking, nor the use of a known technique with a new technology.
I agree that DVD is waaay better then VHS, and my DVD library is already nicely stocked. But what will happen to it when HDTV rolls around?
It won't look any less nice...
Essentially there's a level of detail captured in the MPEG data stream, and that's your "not to be exceeded" quality level. If it captures Natalie Portman's pores in that detail level, you'll see them in HDTV; if it doesn't, you won't. MPEG2 allows for variability in data rates, and thus it would be possible to recreate the data stream at a higher quality level, and thus get an HDTV quality data stream that does look better. But it's a big question as to whether this will happen, just as S-VHS hasn't taken over the VHS market. As-is, DVD is at a sort of "magic" level -- a disk format that can handle 2 hours of movie. And I've seen players that will take 200 disks, so DVD's size isn't much of an issue. It would take a lot for a new format to push current DVD and its MPEG quality out of the market.
You might end up wanting a new player that puts out an HDTV signal rather than an NTSC signal that gets converted. The new player should still play your old disks, but it may also work with "Ultra" DVDs that use a higher compression. Odds are you'll only notice the difference if you're looking for it or doing image capture.
I can take the GPL, add a clause[...]
Actually, that would qualify as a "derivative work" under copyright law, and you could be prohibited from distributing your license. On the other hand, you could write "This code is licensed under the GPL, with the following exception: you may only compile the code if you're standing on your head, [yadda yadda yadda]"
I also think the banana clause would be rather hard to enforce -- particularly given trade disputes over bananas -- so I think you would have to allow for any local fruit to be an acceptable substitute.
RMS' point about attaching GNU to Linux to accentuate the freedom that comes along with GNU/Linux is something that I think is good and very important
But how does attaching GNU achieve this? GNU is the label for the GNU project, FSF's effort to build a free Unix. If we need a term that means "libre", Linux is just as valid a label for that as GNU. I'm not alone in failing to see how naming it after Stallman's effort emphasizes "free" any more than just calling it Linux. Indeed, the grab for naming rights seems to imply exactly the opposite.
Or they were writing about web security and not about etoy vs etoys. They did not misrepresent the case[...]
Note that they talk about this being "fresh reminders of the need for e-commerce sites to keep their defenses sharp." If that need is triggered by reaction to an action taken by the retailer, that seems particularly pertinent to me. Don't want to get DOSed? You don't need the defenses, you need to stop throwing lawyers at people.
On the other hand, I haven't had any trouble reaching etoys.com (not that I shop there), so it seems to be a pretty ineffective attack anyway.
They do have a link on that very page to an idg.net article which goes into more detail about etoy and etoys, including mentioning that etoy.com was around for a year before etoys.com opened. Guess they don't fol,low their own links either...
All you Americans are whining all day is that everything non-western (in this case Russia) is evil If you truly believe this is what we say and we think, you don't understand Americans. We know Hitler was Western; we know he took a country of "good" people and created one of the most terrible forces in history. (It was Japanse subs that bombed the U.S., however; German subs confined themselves to sinking American ships within sight of the coast.) All it took was a charismatic, nationalistic lunatic who took advantage of terrible economic times. So what do we have in Russia? Looks like a disturbingly simi;lar situation. Look, Americans don't want to "keep Russia down;" we want an economically strong Russia that no longer feels a need for nukes, or at least no need to threaten anyone with them. If we could figure out how to build Russia's infrastructure to make that happen, we would. Unfortunately, our efforts so far seem to have done more harm than good, at least in Russia. (We do seem to have done rather better in Eastern Europe, and we're really hoping that starts to rub off.)
I believe that if you have a patent you're required to enforce it and protect it against violations and other infringements.
*Sigh*...
This is TRADEMARKS. TRADEMARKS are the only IP that need active enforcement. Patents don't need to be enforced; see the LZW patent of GIFs if you need an example.