See if you can turn the bios to non plug and play os and change the dma and irq settings for that pci slot. PS disabling plug and play os can make windows2k and occasionally XP blue screen due to the hal being setup during installation.
Yes, that's a fucking awesome solution.
I thought we all stopped accepting crap like that in 1999.
Of course we're all speaking from wild generalisations, but there is one thing from the techn-only techies I'd like to defend:
It's ridiculously difficult to correctly estimate how long a certain coding project will take. There are simply too many unknown variables to always get it right, all the time - not to mention changing requirements. I agree that it's not crazy to expect a reasonable estimate, but it might never get to the point where you can actually ship on a preset, specific day ages ahead of time (well, unless you seriously overestimate).
That's a pretty selfish point of view, tho I suppose you are somewhat self righteous when you are annoyed at Al Gore not being the greatest example.
I'd just like to say that, as far as Global Warming goes, it's pretty much Going To Happen (TM). Ignoring that is tantamount to ignoring the consensus of our scientific community, academic-chasing-grants or not. If you want to classify that as mere statistical noise, you might as well start ignoring all the other things that community has pretty-much-reached a consensus on - why not start drinking pesticides, forego sun block cremes at all times, offer your backyard as a nuclear waste disposal site. I mean, any such prediction can also be classified as 'mere statistical noise' if you draw your histograms just right. Let's be be consistent! Science is Satan spelled backwards, afterall.
So, assuming you trust scientists most of the time, even if you wish to continue to disregard Global Warming, you still can't argue that cutting back our pollution is going to somehow fundamentally hurt us. It just can't possibly hurt to cut back on the amount of crap we dump into our environment. There are thousands of carcinogens and heavy metals in the air of our cities all put there by the internal combustion engine or industry.
More pertinently, we are not "being asked to overturn the very edifice of free-market capitalism". Jeez, guy. There are govermental regulations in EVERY industry, starting with establishing a minimum wage all the way to forbidding the usage of dangerous chemicals. You wouldn't suck on a car's tail pipe or inhale a factory's chimney's output; why are we okay with having millions of them flushing it all out, all the time? It's a basic fact that it eventually comes back to haunt us or others along the way. Why not extend the current regulations to curb excessive CO2 production? Presumably that so well regarded free market will just innovate around the new restrictions and we're all back to where we began.
Making this happen today is essentially hedging our bets. If GW happens, we don't fuck up the planet. If it doesn't, we presumably have a more efficient industry that shits out less carcinogens. Win-win, n'est pas?
At the very least our kids will live healthier, longer lives.
I suppose I do imply, in general, that non falsifiable questions are false. You're perfectly right that for non falsifiable questions all positions are equally valid. I also go after christianty more because I'm more familiar with it.
I guess what I'm trying to say when I act negatively to the unfalsifiable aspect is, why should we base our behaviour and lives around untestable or highly unlikely conclusions? We don't decide on anything else using other hypotheses that are either untestable or highly unlikely; any scientist would be hard pressed to publish a paper in a reputable journal that had conclusions with either of those qualities.
As for ceremonies, well, who cares? I'm more concerned as to why people think other people shoulnd't have gay sex or that women are inferior or that you must not receive blood transfusions or that other people and certain kinds of animals are unclean or etc.
The only answer is a simple: No. It cannot be proven or disproven.
1) Excellent. It is therefore a non falsiable hypothesis, which means that it (the hypothesis) should be disregarded. Kind of makes discussing it a moot point.
If such a being exists, then we are in a closed system and cannot observe him through the laws of our Universe. He would be invisible to us, yet omnipresent in the machinations around us.
For the sake of argument, ignoring 1), If such a being exists, then, yes, that is the definition of omnipotent.
We humans appear to be hardwired to believe in the existence of a higher power. Was it really an accident? Or does this being actually communicate to us through his creation? That is a question that science is ill-suited to answer. Attempting to apply scientific rigor to the question produces the equivalent of a divide-by-zero: There is no answer. Science can only say that inside our Universe, the laws of nature work according to these provable models. It cannot provide answers to things that go beyond that system.
That makes no sense. Just because we are predisposed to believe in a higher power does not automatically imply that it must therefore exist. You are begging the question. A more reasonable suggestion is that it is an evolutionary trait that confers some form of survival skill or advantage to those within early human societies - i.e. sacrificing yourself for the common good. However, I'll leave that for the anthropologists to answer. It is more reasonable because it doesn't automatically presuppose what it is trying implying.
You also seem to misunderstand the scientific method. It's a series of processes for evaulating hypotheses and determining, usually through some form of trial and error and evidence gathering, how likely it is that a event is true or false (i.e. you can make whatever you are testing occur predictably). I don't think anything is outside of it's scope, as long as it's a valid hypotheses (i.e. it is falsiable, or, it is capable of being proved wrong or right).
As such, making conjectures about things outside of our ability to detect them, while maintaining that we will never be able able to detect them, makes these conjectures unfalsiable (as we can thus never be able to gather evidence either way) and thus they too be disregarded, or relegated to dinner party conversations.
Finally, <pedantic>actually, divide by zero is undefined. It's not that there is no answer, it's more like there is no useful answer, given the definition of division.</pedantic>
Who suggests that they don't? (...)
I do! There is no way of telling who is right: the muslims, the jews, the christians, the hindus, the buddhists, the hindus or any of the thousands of sub sects and variations. Who is going to hell, exactly? You apparently need to be dead to confirm that one.
A scientist can apply rigorous thinking to a choice in religion, that would appear to show a correlation between events x and y to lead to conclusion z. Yet if put into a statistical model, it would disappear as if it were merely noise as related to the laws of our Universe. Subjective weightings (like the importance of a particular event) cannot to used to weight a scientific model, because the weightings are subjective.
I don't understand this sentence. If what is put into a statistical model? What disappears? Subjective weightings are subjective? What?
As for the rest of your post, The problem is that we have no grounds for believing anything that we can't prove, let alone anything we can't disprove. If you abide by the rules of logic and reasoning, there is no way you can accept anything you've just stated, because it either depends on accept facts 'just because', as most of them are unfalsiable or depend on
A scientists eats and breathes logic and the scientific method. It's her job. She uses the scientific method as a way for confirming, with varying degrees of confidence, certain statements or disproving (which, in turn, can be done with complete certainty) other statements. It is less of a tool and more of a way of thinking and it is in effect the best way we have for adquiring new and dependable knowledge.
Giving religion this free pass by not applying the scientific method to it because its "different", somehow (or, more often, "just because") undermines the validity of the scientific method, which in turn undermines the foundations of science and everything that depends on it.
Now, I'm not completely opposed to certain scientists who might gaze upon the stars and sigh, mystified, "I suppose I'd feel more comfortable sleeping at night if there were some form of higher power out there". That's more or less okay. It's kind of natural and I suppose healthy to have some form of intense, mystic curiosity about your work. However, scientists who actually believe in the importance of certain ceremonies and are certain about the whole virgin birth, afterlife et al aspects of certain religions are doing a disservice to themselves and their creed by not applying their personal beliefs to the same standards they apply to their professional ones.
Again, why shouldn't we weigh hypotheses and seek out evidence to support them in every facet of our lives? On what grounds should we accept that there are certain kinds of information that don't need any form of validation?
Then that should be distinguished in their advertising. You and I both understand the limitations of the network and that they are, in effect, 'burst' speeds or 'maximum when no one else in your neighbourhood is using anything" but not everyone else is aware of this.
Similarly, if I am told "unlimited" and X mbps, why shouldn't I do whatever the hell I want? Thats what I bought on to. As someone else said, it's okay to have limits - you just need to tell everyone else about them.
Well, it's prolly not that bad.
on
Groovy in Action
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Here's the interesting thing: it does not really matter anymore, if all we care about are other interpreted, programmer-friendly scripting languages.
My understanding of the jvm, which may be flawed, is that it first interprets the bytecode and eventually gets around to compiling it into native machine code - meaning that over the life time of large apps it has a negligible performance hit. So, in theory, Java can only ever be, at worst, as slow as any other interpreted language.
This is something we've come to accept; linux installers are built on python, large websites on ruby and we constantly call perl scripts from our command lines. It's not really that terrible as for the majority of apps these languages are fast enough.
The same should apply to groovy. It also seems that groovy is intended for current Java devs for quick prototyping, so it's not like they don't have to load the jvm constantly anyways.
Finally, as far web apps are concerned, I know for a fact that Java is used all over the place in companies for stuff like that, and that it's a popular backend language. I can only imagine that all of these apps find *someway* of keeping the JVM alive long enough to get that amortized reduced performance cost. It'd just be silly not to.
*disregarding, of course, all of the obvious problems with using that benchmark. We're doing back of the envelop stuff here, nothing too serious.
2. You're only in it for the money and could care less about what we're doing.
Why is it so bad to only be in it for the money? The vast majority of jobs out there, even if challenging or non trivial, are horrifically menial and unexciting.
You, the average IT coder/admin-person, are not cutting edge. You might write mainframe control scripts or think out test cases for the intranet support web app or code out bussiness logic or write requirements all day. You don't have to be an expert in the field to do your job, although it would undoubtedly help.
Very little of what the vast majority of people in this industry, be they developers or support minions, can be accurately described as "eventful" or "exciting". Only in companies inside the tech industry (and possibly only 'Industry Leader' companies like GOOG or MSFT) and academia will you probably produce anything tangible and worth getting worked up about. If no one working on the same project as you are is writing whitepapers or presenting at conferences or even discussing it at length with an entrenched and involved user community, well, chances are you are probably part of the 90%* of the industry whose work will never be seen outside of your company's intranet.
I used to think that way, too. I was mildly shocked when the manager who was interviewing me for a co-op/junior sort-of-dev position at Large Retailer replied "Well, the money. And I get to see my family" when I asked him the same question. But then I realised, so what? That's perfectly valid. I know very, very few people who work for their self enjoyment first and to pay their bills second. I'd go as far as to say that outside of satisfaction in a job well done, which many people have and share, virtually no one is in a position of actively caring about the Job Itself.
Ideally, I'd love to do something exciting and stay late at work with a smile on my face. However, I know that this is very unlikely unless I start my own company. To that extent, I'm happy to get my self fulfillment through my own free time - my own projects, the girlfriend, etc.
Why is it not enough to be competent and capable? Why demand an unrealistic level of commitment from your employees? Why must we define our life by what we do in our day jobs?
Disclaimer: I'm a young pup who is about to embark on his very first, over-compensated job in Large Bank, still halfway through university.
Quite honestly, I'd say you're in the perfect position. With global commerce, you can get the DVD, rip it to disc, and watch the whole thing before the theatrical release even get to Australia! Of course, that's 6 months after you could have downloaded it of oosnet-yay (the first rule of...) as a screener or cam-capture (they're getting better you know, thanks to the Canadians).
Bzzt! Wrong! Or at least, it would be wrong if there weren't some less scrupulous DVD manufacturers that sell players with all regions (I'm almost certain it breaks SOME contract they signed up to or SOME standard).
If it were up to our media overlords, our aussie friend would be stuck waiting 'till there were Region 4 releases of everything, given that distribution rights are sold regionally over the world.
Java is a programming language, much like C (which Gnome is written in) and C++ (which I think is what KDE prefers). You could write a file manager that every Desktop Environment uses without a problem in any language. It's not because of any lacking in programming languages that no one has settled for the same file manager.
What does it matter if they don't know about KDE a priori? They'll find out about it, and in due time try it out. In the meanwhile, those of us who prefer Gnome can go on with their lives, and those who prefer KDE can just click a checkbox - and vice versa in distros that prefer KDE.
And that's a shitty argument, and obviously just your opinion.
I personally dislike KDE, but it doesn't matter what I like or do, or what Torvalds does or likes. We're all still free to use whatever Desktop Environment we prefer best, and that's that. Similarly, Ubuntu has finite resources; if Shuttleworth prefers Gnome for whatever reasons, well, tough shit. Use a different distro or adapt Ubuntu to fit your needs.
I think it's incredibly ridiculous that a kernel developer feels entitled to tell a bunch of DE devs what to do with THEIR project. If he thinks it's so "stupid", he can either submit patches (through the formal process, like everyone else), fork it, or shut the fuck up and use something else.
It seems that Torvalds is just used to being the ultimate authority, cos he's a poster child of the FLOSS movement, and as such is behaving INCREDIBLY childish. To hell with him.
Presumably, you should have the right to get lost, which does not exist if every corner of every street is under surveillance. Insert some extra stuff about being able to do things anonymously, which is kind of crucial if you're planning on overthrowing governments.
My issue revolves around that very same aspect, preventing illegal copies.
The intent of copyright, as far as I know, is to provide an incentive for others to create content or ideas by giving them a monopoly on their use for a given time period. After this time period, whatever that may be, it reverts to the public domain upon which these ideas can now benefit society as a whole. We want these ideas in the first place.
However, any remotely useful DRM scheme would go against this. Think about it; say I make a culturally significant CD or article or book tomorrow and sell it only via iTunes or some other DRM-only scheme. I die the day after it is published. Under the law, some 50 or 90 years later, depending on your country, you should be able to use my content in any which way your heart so desires. How do we unlock the content?
In effect, we're placing control of our media and "intellectual property" in the hands of publishing companies whom we are forced to hope that they will still around by the time the copyright expires. Some might even try to fight releasing it back to the public (why should they host the unemcumbered copies, or the keys?) See the american sonny bono copyright extension act.
We can still read books, we can still read CDs and records. Even if we lose that technology in particular, we do not have to face a mathematical challenge trying to prevent us from reverse engineering it when we try to do so.
Finally, illegal copies are already, well, illegal. Prosecute those whom you find to be breaking the law. Copyright affords you that right; DRM is not required for this. In the end, DRM seems to be a race to effectively control and/or lock up what should eventually be our collective "intellectual property" (I am actually not fond of that term). Of course many of these schemes will be broken over time - but keep in mind that none of them are designed to allow unauthorised access once the copyright expires.
Dude, most people I know get a new cell phone or accidentally destroy their old phone long before their battery runs out to a miserable length. I've gone through one like that, and my dad's gone through four or five.
Well, that's why you make it impossible for buffer overruns to occur in the first place.
In any sufficiently important program, crashing and then throwing up in your lap (assuming the version crashing even was compiled with debugging info) is or should be completely unacceptable. Much better if the program can realize what's going wrong and work around it - whether that means re-asking the user for that input again, retrying reading the IO buffers or emailing a developer.
The beauty about exceptions and error codes is that when they occur, you know something is wrong and can do something about it while the program is still running. Thats what they are for. No more of this silent, absurdly hard to find corruption of memory going on. If I don't have to manipulate memory directly, there is just should be no reason for me to have to worry about whether malloc is returning null or to have arrays allow me to access memory past their bounds anymore -- goddamnit, the compiler/interpreter can do that just fine, thank you.
I haven't been programming for very long, but I can't think of too many situations where you absolutely *NEED* to be able to perform pointer arithmetic. And in those situations you probably can't or shouldn't use an interpreted, object oriented language to begin with.
All of this is much, much better than spending time reinventing garbage collection with fewer features.
You sort of lost me when you implied that neither Women's or studies are 'lefty' and thus unworthy of study. (never mind that they are often in different and unrelated faculties altogether; you would probably have a hard time finding an Literature grad talking regularly to a Cultural Studies grad and extremely unlikely that either had made small talk with, let alone confronted, a Chemistry grad in recent memory)
While there might be a certain pressure to conform to ANY prevalent culture, I'm just not sure how that exactly comes up in frequently in respected peer reviewed journals. I don't know how many you've read, but in my experience papers tend to be rather narrow in scope (partly, I imagine, because of the sheer quantity they are forced to produce every year - the main source of blocked academic promotions stem not from political infighting but from a lack of published papers).
You will have one paper discussing how increased CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing the greenhouse effect because of $reason, and then you will prolly have someone else in a separate paper pointing out that oh will you look at that, we have more CO2 in our atmosphere than ever before, based on $another_reason. And then you will have a substantial part of those papers devoted to referencing all of the other papers they base some of their investigation and conclusions on.
The following conversation, subconsciously or not, probably very rarely occurs in the sciences: "Oh noes, my fellow communist climatologist Sven, here lies a paper that, despite its valid scientific links, methodology and constant referencing of other valid and respected research, has reached a logical conclusion that goes against our adored ideals of Lefty Socialism Utopia! Quickly, we must do all that is in our power to discredit it, lest it harm our agenda!"
While there certainly is a potential for abuse and bias, do remember, these people all produce stuff you can reproduce and evaluate rather objectively; it's called the scientific method, after all. If you have a problem with their studies, simply point out the flaws in their argument. If you can't do that, well, maybe it's not their studies that are at fault.
Finally, from your link, I just can't believe that there are people out there trying to downplay goddamn mercury with a straight face.
4. The people who run customised, in house, windows only apps that run a large portion of the gov'ts bussiness logic (be it Excel macros, Acess databases with VB frontends, the whole nine yards). This turns out to be a very large amount of people, if not a mild majority of them, and porting these would prolly cost more than switching over to Linux in the first place.
5. The overworked-as-it-is IT staff who currently manage ten thousand desktops using and wouldn't have any way to currently undergo the switch, even if they could find time and money for it in their budget (which they prolly can't).
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Yes, that's a fucking awesome solution.
I thought we all stopped accepting crap like that in 1999.
Of course we're all speaking from wild generalisations, but there is one thing from the techn-only techies I'd like to defend:
It's ridiculously difficult to correctly estimate how long a certain coding project will take. There are simply too many unknown variables to always get it right, all the time - not to mention changing requirements. I agree that it's not crazy to expect a reasonable estimate, but it might never get to the point where you can actually ship on a preset, specific day ages ahead of time (well, unless you seriously overestimate).
So yeah.
That's a pretty selfish point of view, tho I suppose you are somewhat self righteous when you are annoyed at Al Gore not being the greatest example.
I'd just like to say that, as far as Global Warming goes, it's pretty much Going To Happen (TM). Ignoring that is tantamount to ignoring the consensus of our scientific community, academic-chasing-grants or not. If you want to classify that as mere statistical noise, you might as well start ignoring all the other things that community has pretty-much-reached a consensus on - why not start drinking pesticides, forego sun block cremes at all times, offer your backyard as a nuclear waste disposal site. I mean, any such prediction can also be classified as 'mere statistical noise' if you draw your histograms just right. Let's be be consistent! Science is Satan spelled backwards, afterall.
So, assuming you trust scientists most of the time, even if you wish to continue to disregard Global Warming, you still can't argue that cutting back our pollution is going to somehow fundamentally hurt us. It just can't possibly hurt to cut back on the amount of crap we dump into our environment. There are thousands of carcinogens and heavy metals in the air of our cities all put there by the internal combustion engine or industry.
More pertinently, we are not "being asked to overturn the very edifice of free-market capitalism". Jeez, guy. There are govermental regulations in EVERY industry, starting with establishing a minimum wage all the way to forbidding the usage of dangerous chemicals. You wouldn't suck on a car's tail pipe or inhale a factory's chimney's output; why are we okay with having millions of them flushing it all out, all the time? It's a basic fact that it eventually comes back to haunt us or others along the way. Why not extend the current regulations to curb excessive CO2 production? Presumably that so well regarded free market will just innovate around the new restrictions and we're all back to where we began.
Making this happen today is essentially hedging our bets. If GW happens, we don't fuck up the planet. If it doesn't, we presumably have a more efficient industry that shits out less carcinogens. Win-win, n'est pas?
At the very least our kids will live healthier, longer lives.
To a certain extent, yes. You ARE allowed to transfer copyright.
I suppose I do imply, in general, that non falsifiable questions are false. You're perfectly right that for non falsifiable questions all positions are equally valid. I also go after christianty more because I'm more familiar with it.
I guess what I'm trying to say when I act negatively to the unfalsifiable aspect is, why should we base our behaviour and lives around untestable or highly unlikely conclusions? We don't decide on anything else using other hypotheses that are either untestable or highly unlikely; any scientist would be hard pressed to publish a paper in a reputable journal that had conclusions with either of those qualities.
As for ceremonies, well, who cares? I'm more concerned as to why people think other people shoulnd't have gay sex or that women are inferior or that you must not receive blood transfusions or that other people and certain kinds of animals are unclean or etc.
1) Excellent. It is therefore a non falsiable hypothesis, which means that it (the hypothesis) should be disregarded. Kind of makes discussing it a moot point.
For the sake of argument, ignoring 1),
If such a being exists, then, yes, that is the definition of omnipotent.
That makes no sense. Just because we are predisposed to believe in a higher power does not automatically imply that it must therefore exist. You are begging the question. A more reasonable suggestion is that it is an evolutionary trait that confers some form of survival skill or advantage to those within early human societies - i.e. sacrificing yourself for the common good. However, I'll leave that for the anthropologists to answer. It is more reasonable because it doesn't automatically presuppose what it is trying implying.
You also seem to misunderstand the scientific method. It's a series of processes for evaulating hypotheses and determining, usually through some form of trial and error and evidence gathering, how likely it is that a event is true or false (i.e. you can make whatever you are testing occur predictably). I don't think anything is outside of it's scope, as long as it's a valid hypotheses (i.e. it is falsiable, or, it is capable of being proved wrong or right).
As such, making conjectures about things outside of our ability to detect them, while maintaining that we will never be able able to detect them, makes these conjectures unfalsiable (as we can thus never be able to gather evidence either way) and thus they too be disregarded, or relegated to dinner party conversations.
Finally, <pedantic>actually, divide by zero is undefined. It's not that there is no answer, it's more like there is no useful answer, given the definition of division.</pedantic>
I do! There is no way of telling who is right: the muslims, the jews, the christians, the hindus, the buddhists, the hindus or any of the thousands of sub sects and variations. Who is going to hell, exactly? You apparently need to be dead to confirm that one.
I don't understand this sentence. If what is put into a statistical model? What disappears? Subjective weightings are subjective? What?
As for the rest of your post,
The problem is that we have no grounds for believing anything that we can't prove, let alone anything we can't disprove. If you abide by the rules of logic and reasoning, there is no way you can accept anything you've just stated, because it either depends on accept facts 'just because', as most of them are unfalsiable or depend on
Er, so what?
A scientists eats and breathes logic and the scientific method. It's her job. She uses the scientific method as a way for confirming, with varying degrees of confidence, certain statements
or disproving (which, in turn, can be done with complete certainty) other statements. It is less of a tool and more of a way of thinking and it is in effect the best way we have for adquiring new and dependable knowledge.
Giving religion this free pass by not applying the scientific method to it because its "different", somehow (or, more often, "just because") undermines the validity of the scientific method, which in turn undermines the foundations of science and everything that depends on it.
Now, I'm not completely opposed to certain scientists who might gaze upon the stars and sigh, mystified, "I suppose I'd feel more comfortable sleeping at night if there were some form of higher power out there". That's more or less okay. It's kind of natural and I suppose healthy to have some form of intense, mystic curiosity about your work. However, scientists who actually believe in the importance of certain ceremonies and are certain about the whole virgin birth, afterlife et al aspects of certain religions are doing a disservice to themselves and their creed by not applying their personal beliefs to the same standards they apply to their professional ones.
Again, why shouldn't we weigh hypotheses and seek out evidence to support them in every facet of our lives? On what grounds should we accept that there are certain kinds of information that don't need any form of validation?
Then that should be distinguished in their advertising. You and I both understand the limitations of the network and that they are, in effect, 'burst' speeds or 'maximum when no one else in your neighbourhood is using anything" but not everyone else is aware of this.
Similarly, if I am told "unlimited" and X mbps, why shouldn't I do whatever the hell I want? Thats what I bought on to. As someone else said, it's okay to have limits - you just need to tell everyone else about them.
Here's the interesting thing: it does not really matter anymore, if all we care about are other interpreted, programmer-friendly scripting languages.
If we're concerned about using this against Perl, Python, PHP, Smalltalk or Ruby, using the great language shooutout benchmark*, Java is about on par, if not better overall based on CPU time alone.
My understanding of the jvm, which may be flawed, is that it first interprets the bytecode and eventually gets around to compiling it into native machine code - meaning that over the life time of large apps it has a negligible performance hit. So, in theory, Java can only ever be, at worst, as slow as any other interpreted language.
This is something we've come to accept; linux installers are built on python, large websites on ruby and we constantly call perl scripts from our command lines. It's not really that terrible as for the majority of apps these languages are fast enough.
The same should apply to groovy. It also seems that groovy is intended for current Java devs for quick prototyping, so it's not like they don't have to load the jvm constantly anyways.
Finally, as far web apps are concerned, I know for a fact that Java is used all over the place in companies for stuff like that, and that it's a popular backend language. I can only imagine that all of these apps find *someway* of keeping the JVM alive long enough to get that amortized reduced performance cost. It'd just be silly not to.
*disregarding, of course, all of the obvious problems with using that benchmark. We're doing back of the envelop stuff here, nothing too serious.
Why is it so bad to only be in it for the money? The vast majority of jobs out there, even if challenging or non trivial, are horrifically menial and unexciting.
You, the average IT coder/admin-person, are not cutting edge. You might write mainframe control scripts or think out test cases for the intranet support web app or code out bussiness logic or write requirements all day. You don't have to be an expert in the field to do your job, although it would undoubtedly help.
Very little of what the vast majority of people in this industry, be they developers or support minions, can be accurately described as "eventful" or "exciting". Only in companies inside the tech industry (and possibly only 'Industry Leader' companies like GOOG or MSFT) and academia will you probably produce anything tangible and worth getting worked up about. If no one working on the same project as you are is writing whitepapers or presenting at conferences or even discussing it at length with an entrenched and involved user community, well, chances are you are probably part of the 90%* of the industry whose work will never be seen outside of your company's intranet.
I used to think that way, too. I was mildly shocked when the manager who was interviewing me for a co-op/junior sort-of-dev position at Large Retailer replied "Well, the money. And I get to see my family" when I asked him the same question. But then I realised, so what? That's perfectly valid. I know very, very few people who work for their self enjoyment first and to pay their bills second. I'd go as far as to say that outside of satisfaction in a job well done, which many people have and share, virtually no one is in a position of actively caring about the Job Itself.
Ideally, I'd love to do something exciting and stay late at work with a smile on my face. However, I know that this is very unlikely unless I start my own company. To that extent, I'm happy to get my self fulfillment through my own free time - my own projects, the girlfriend, etc.
Why is it not enough to be competent and capable? Why demand an unrealistic level of commitment from your employees? Why must we define our life by what we do in our day jobs?
Disclaimer: I'm a young pup who is about to embark on his very first, over-compensated job in Large Bank, still halfway through university.
*Made-up-but-close-to-real-value
Bzzt! Wrong! Or at least, it would be wrong if there weren't some less scrupulous DVD manufacturers that sell players with all regions (I'm almost certain it breaks SOME contract they signed up to or SOME standard).
If it were up to our media overlords, our aussie friend would be stuck waiting 'till there were Region 4 releases of everything, given that distribution rights are sold regionally over the world.
Hurray for artificial markets!
I think you're confusing technologies.
Java is a programming language, much like C (which Gnome is written in) and C++ (which I think is what KDE prefers).
You could write a file manager that every Desktop Environment uses without a problem in any language. It's not because of any lacking in programming languages that no one has settled for the same file manager.
That misses the point entirely.
What does it matter if they don't know about KDE a priori? They'll find out about it, and in due time try it out. In the meanwhile, those of us who prefer Gnome can go on with their lives, and those who prefer KDE can just click a checkbox - and vice versa in distros that prefer KDE.
Honestly, it's not asking for much.
And that's a shitty argument, and obviously just your opinion.
I personally dislike KDE, but it doesn't matter what I like or do, or what Torvalds does or likes. We're all still free to use whatever Desktop Environment we prefer best, and that's that. Similarly, Ubuntu has finite resources; if Shuttleworth prefers Gnome for whatever reasons, well, tough shit. Use a different distro or adapt Ubuntu to fit your needs.
I think it's incredibly ridiculous that a kernel developer feels entitled to tell a bunch of DE devs what to do with THEIR project. If he thinks it's so "stupid", he can either submit patches (through the formal process, like everyone else), fork it, or shut the fuck up and use something else.
It seems that Torvalds is just used to being the ultimate authority, cos he's a poster child of the FLOSS movement, and as such is behaving INCREDIBLY childish. To hell with him.
I know DNS poisoning, but what's DSL poisoning?
I wouldn't be so quick with the neighbouring thing.
Well, we in Portugal have a saying:
"From Spain, neither good marriages nor good winds"
Presumably, you should have the right to get lost, which does not exist if every corner of every street is under surveillance.
Insert some extra stuff about being able to do things anonymously, which is kind of crucial if you're planning on overthrowing governments.
See: America's founding fathers, etc.
My issue revolves around that very same aspect, preventing illegal copies.
The intent of copyright, as far as I know, is to provide an incentive for others to create content or ideas by giving them a monopoly on their use for a given time period. After this time period, whatever that may be, it reverts to the public domain upon which these ideas can now benefit society as a whole. We want these ideas in the first place.
However, any remotely useful DRM scheme would go against this. Think about it; say I make a culturally significant CD or article or book tomorrow and sell it only via iTunes or some other DRM-only scheme. I die the day after it is published. Under the law, some 50 or 90 years later, depending on your country, you should be able to use my content in any which way your heart so desires. How do we unlock the content?
In effect, we're placing control of our media and "intellectual property" in the hands of publishing companies whom we are forced to hope that they will still around by the time the copyright expires. Some might even try to fight releasing it back to the public (why should they host the unemcumbered copies, or the keys?) See the american sonny bono copyright extension act.
We can still read books, we can still read CDs and records. Even if we lose that technology in particular, we do not have to face a mathematical challenge trying to prevent us from reverse engineering it when we try to do so.
Finally, illegal copies are already, well, illegal. Prosecute those whom you find to be breaking the law. Copyright affords you that right; DRM is not required for this. In the end, DRM seems to be a race to effectively control and/or lock up what should eventually be our collective "intellectual property" (I am actually not fond of that term). Of course many of these schemes will be broken over time - but keep in mind that none of them are designed to allow unauthorised access once the copyright expires.
You might see things differently.
Dude, most people I know get a new cell phone or accidentally destroy their old phone long before their battery runs out to a miserable length. I've gone through one like that, and my dad's gone through four or five.
Well, that's why you make it impossible for buffer overruns to occur in the first place.
In any sufficiently important program, crashing and then throwing up in your lap (assuming the version crashing even was compiled with debugging info) is or should be completely unacceptable. Much better if the program can realize what's going wrong and work around it - whether that means re-asking the user for that input again, retrying reading the IO buffers or emailing a developer.
The beauty about exceptions and error codes is that when they occur, you know something is wrong and can do something about it while the program is still running. Thats what they are for. No more of this silent, absurdly hard to find corruption of memory going on. If I don't have to manipulate memory directly, there is just should be no reason for me to have to worry about whether malloc is returning null or to have arrays allow me to access memory past their bounds anymore -- goddamnit, the compiler/interpreter can do that just fine, thank you.
I haven't been programming for very long, but I can't think of too many situations where you absolutely *NEED* to be able to perform pointer arithmetic. And in those situations you probably can't or shouldn't use an interpreted, object oriented language to begin with.
All of this is much, much better than spending time reinventing garbage collection with fewer features.
I have heard that in the Soviet Union, every photocopier was serially numbered and registered.
You mean, unlike several brands of laser printers?
You sort of lost me when you implied that neither Women's or studies are 'lefty' and thus unworthy of study. (never mind that they are often in different and unrelated faculties altogether; you would probably have a hard time finding an Literature grad talking regularly to a Cultural Studies grad and extremely unlikely that either had made small talk with, let alone confronted, a Chemistry grad in recent memory)
While there might be a certain pressure to conform to ANY prevalent culture, I'm just not sure how that exactly comes up in frequently in respected peer reviewed journals. I don't know how many you've read, but in my experience papers tend to be rather narrow in scope (partly, I imagine, because of the sheer quantity they are forced to produce every year - the main source of blocked academic promotions stem not from political infighting but from a lack of published papers).
You will have one paper discussing how increased CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing the greenhouse effect because of $reason, and then you will prolly have someone else in a separate paper pointing out that oh will you look at that, we have more CO2 in our atmosphere than ever before, based on $another_reason. And then you will have a substantial part of those papers devoted to referencing all of the other papers they base some of their investigation and conclusions on.
The following conversation, subconsciously or not, probably very rarely occurs in the sciences:
"Oh noes, my fellow communist climatologist Sven, here lies a paper that, despite its valid scientific links, methodology and constant referencing of other valid and respected research, has reached a logical conclusion that goes against our adored ideals of Lefty Socialism Utopia! Quickly, we must do all that is in our power to discredit it, lest it harm our agenda!"
While there certainly is a potential for abuse and bias, do remember, these people all produce stuff you can reproduce and evaluate rather objectively; it's called the scientific method, after all. If you have a problem with their studies, simply point out the flaws in their argument. If you can't do that, well, maybe it's not their studies that are at fault.
Finally, from your link, I just can't believe that there are people out there trying to downplay goddamn mercury with a straight face.
You forgot special case number four and five:
4. The people who run customised, in house, windows only apps that run a large portion of the gov'ts bussiness logic (be it Excel macros, Acess databases with VB frontends, the whole nine yards).
This turns out to be a very large amount of people, if not a mild majority of them, and porting these would prolly cost more than switching over to Linux in the first place.
5. The overworked-as-it-is IT staff who currently manage ten thousand desktops using and wouldn't have any way to currently undergo the switch, even if they could find time and money for it in their budget (which they prolly can't).
Here's an easy line to draw:
If your language of choice is Turing complete, congrats!
You're in. You are a Programmer(TM).
I think he meant that it's not the circuitry so much as the software that processes the signal that can't be changed.
No point in having more visual data than what your brain can process.