That's usually not an option. I wish it were... but most people don't really consider this when deciding which systems to use (or in this case, continuing using).
I did the "replace the icon" thing to my dad once and he couldn't get his hotmail.com account to "work right". It was a real long time ago and I forget the exact problem, so don't reply saying FF works fine with hotmail.com. Needless to say, I begrudgingly switched it back so that it'd work.
I thought Hulu.com was a joint venture between NBC and Fox to claim advertizing dollars that they were losing because of YouTube? Or to say it another way... General Electric and News Corp didn't like Google taking a piece of their pie.
If Verizon wanted to get in on the action, I'm sure they could, and then they'd raise the price for their FiOS package and offer "Basic" "Premium" and "Ulta Premium" levels of service to their subscribers. Then then they'd have made the internet a mirror image of cable television.
The install size also affects other things people might care about (e.g. how long it takes to do a drive image or backup; how long it takes to scan or seek on the drive;...).
Install size might effect how much you can actually do with an OS without putting much effort in.
I used to manage intranet servers that ran Fedora and would always choose to install every package on the DVD just to make sure I'd get full programming language support and full web server support out-of-the-box. To me, this more than made up for the 4 GB+ install size of a "full" Fedora distribution.
What struck me was the the blasted character was BLOODY ALONE! When they make this a multiplayer simulation that supports 500 users in such a way that people die from the bottlenecks of egress and dead ends then I'll believe that it's useful.
Also, modeling smoke would have been very useful, too.
Also, once kids pass this "fire drill simulation" they should do what they did on the episode of the Office that aired after the Super Bowl on Sunday.:)
rant about how I despise the Fisher Price interface
Ever since being confronted with the Blue Start Menu for the first time, the first thing I've always done to any Windows box that I had to use was switch it to "Classic Mode".
Incidentally, I hear Windows 7 is taking out this feature. Fuck them for that. I want my boring gray menubars!
you had transitions like going from the all-text world of MS-DOS to a whole new paradigm, found in Windows 3.x. Or again, the huge jump from that to Windows '95.
You mean that the PC evolved from being available for computer scientists to being available for everybody else?
For the most part, this evolution is hard to characterize, but I think MSFT has it backwards. They assume that each evolution changes the way the computer provides information to the user, when the real evolutionary changes are how the user provides information to the computer. Apple understands this. Nintendo understands this. Most other companies don't.
DOS? You get a keyboard. Win 3.1? You also get a mouse. Win 95? You get dial-up networking. Win98? You get broadband and USB support. Since then, the only things they've offered is prettier graphics, better stability, and incremental improvements to malware protection. I guess you could argue that they've made touchscreen Windows... but I've yet to see this implemented in a way where I'd prefer it over having a mouse. Though, the one exclusion that I'd add is that MSFT has changed the way people interact with their console gaming systems by making them network-centric.
drop of hours (and pay to equivalent) of 4 day weeks
If only the rest of the economy could adopt this change. Imagine a world of 3 day weekends EVERY WEEK! If this were a universal change made in America, I predict the 20% drop in salaries would be met by sharp 20% drops in the prices of things we need to buy. Meanwhile, I cannot imagine a corrorlary drop of 20% in productivity. Surely there will be less productivity, but industrial efficiencies developed in the last decade have enabled most businesses to empower their employees to create more products in less time (and businesses without these efficiencies should probably die off anyway).
Add that to the fact that the service and retail industries would boom with a Thurs-Sun workweek while manufacturing would thrive working Mon-Thurs and you'd have a happier nation!
I'd also be interested in architectures, does Ubuntu support anywhere near the same range?
I've got little experience with Debian, but can compare Ubuntu to Fedora and say that Ubuntu sacrifices bells and whistles that a "tinker" like yourself would prefer so that it can deliver ease-of-use. The most glaring difference that I've noticed is right at the very beginning while you're installing it... Fedora presents you with a list of hundreds of packages/application to install and Ubuntu (if I recall correctly) just sets you up with a system that's good for "most purposes" without giving you the same wide options.
As my choice for a computer that's doing anything besides web-browsing, word processing, picture editing, and music playing... I'd avoid Ubuntu. However, I'm proud to run Ubuntu on my laptop because that's all I use it for.
Imagine that distance as the size of a standard baseball bat. Alpha Centuri (4.3 ly away) would fall approximately where the end of where your grip would be if you were holding it with both hands.
That number of inches is actually (according to my calculation) 26.8 ly.
Wouldn't the term "x--" evaluate to FALSE when x equals 0? So if the compiler isn't smart enough to realize I was being stupid, then this strange coincidence *might* save my ass and provide the desired effect to exit when x is 0.
But in case you were wondering... I checked and it doesn't compile with GCC 3.4.4 when compiled as C language code:
Now... once I fixed the Language dependent error with declaring my variable within the for loop, it compiled fine and I was able to run it through the debugger and verify that it does IN FACT work as intended.:)
So why not just bring human-edible food instead of silk worm food?
"Human-edible food" is like this simple loop that most people here should understand:
---> for (int x=100; x--; x>0)
After the function ends, the astronaunts die. I think I've read that astronauts "consume" 10kg of materials (air,water,food) per day so that it would cost 300kg to support somebody for a month if nothing ever got recycled. What space colonists need is a simple food-chain like this:
----> while (1) { plants(Sun, Fertiziler); silkworm(Plants); humans(Silkworm); }
In this way, you can recycle the processed waste from the silkworm and the humans (i.e. the "Fertilizer") and combine that with available Sunlight to generate a continuous cycle of food. And when "not dying" is the goal, it really won't matter how it tastes.
If I could report that I make $10-20k less per year for doing 10 hrs of development each week in my spare time, I'd be just as inclined to contribute as if they were paying me a wage of $30k per year.
If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.
My preference to "paying the salaries of Open Source writers" would be a system for giving people income deductions if they contribute meaningfully to unfunded public projects (be they GPL development or be they performing free concerts in a public park).
If that's the case, why the big push for video? Full lecture notes should be just as valuable.
I'm in the minority that thinks lectures are more valuable then reading the book. Personally, I went through an undergraduate program at MIT's lesser known but equally capable northeast rival... RPI. The professors (except where you got somebody who it was only their first or second year teaching) did an exceptional job and in a lot of cases I found they could pack a whole lot more knowledge into 2 hours of lecture/discussion then into 50-100 PowerPoint slides. And be that as it may, but the slides were often just the stuff you needed to memorize to pass the test but the lectures helped reinforced all that stuff. And if you'd ask me... the reason that colleges exist is to preserve knowledge and understanding in ways that can't easily be disseminated in books or lecture slides.
To put it another way, you could go an read "the jargon file" and get a good laugh or you could sit down with a couple of the people who were around while it was being written and get a whole new perspective of how things came to be. This isn't exactly a parallel because many of the men and women who developed the math, science, art, history, and literature that is taught in college have long since past away -- but supposedly (if they are doing their jobs right) the professors are experts who have deep knowledge to pass around on the topics that they teach.
MIT's Open Courseware is lacking in the fact that (a) the classes don't count for credit, (b) nobody's there to grade any work you do, and (c) many classes are not posted in the entirety (video lectures are IFAIK non-existent, answer sheets to the assigned HW questions are never there, and entire slideshow lectures are occasionally missing).
what I learnt on my university days about NFS, X Window, DNS, SMTP, Vi... is still serving me now almost word by word about fifteen years later
Yes... this is the "get it right and then move onto something else" approach to designing complex systems. It's popular amongst designers who are thinking 20, 30, and 40 years ahead for projects they are building today.
With forethought, you can do great things. Without it, you (or somebody else) can earn a shit-ton of money doing maintenance work fixing your crappy systems. It's the "slapstick method" that keep capitalism running, forcing consumers to re-buy and continuously upgrade their broken systems because they're convinced by the idea that things that are "shiny" and "new" are better than things that "work right".
I'm 26. I got a Master's Degree in CS without knowing about the specifics of linkers. In the past year I've had to learn about them due to the need to maintain a set of linker scripts for an embedded project.
Now, I'm not sure what linker programs the original post was talking about, but the one that I'm working with is "ld". From what I've seen, it's default options do a pretty good job of arranging the memory/sections of the final executable without any user intervention and when this isn't enough it provides a highly capable system that lets you feed it a customized script with the options you want. However, learning the cryptic markings that control the flow of the customized linker script was one of the harder GNU-based projects to understand because of poor documentation and once I really got going with the customized script platform it took about 5 minutes for me to discover that there's no way to feed any sort of variable into the linker file at buildtime, a feature that I'd have thought would be extremely nice to have.
But anyway, I think the real gripe of the original post was that few programmers truly understand how to setup and configure the tools that comprise their applications "build system", and that is for good reason. The customizations within a "build system" are crucial to "just work" and should be maintained by an expert who truly understands what changing small details will do so that all the rest of the developers on the project can get away with "just clicking the build button". I think Brooks called this role the "Architect", though its been a while since I've read Mythical Man Month. Anyway, expecting students who are fresh out of school to understand these details that they can get by without needing is kind of a joke. As much as you'd like to assess people based on knowledge of these minor details, the details aren't the big picture and an inexperienced programmer should only be expected to know "Big Picture" things (which I'd include Big-O Notion referenced in the summary as a part of).
If real scientists were better writers then it'd be easier for the science journalists to copy-and-paste from their technical papers and conference presentations to tell the real story. There would be more appreciation for science if those conducting it could espouse their hypothesis and experiment results with the eloquence and clarity of professional writers, but the fact is that writing and science are two different proficiencies that are rare to be found within a single individual (both require time and energy to learn how to do well) so the result is that real science writing is plagued by the miss-communication that results when two professionals that don't understand what each other do have to deal with each other.
If goods and services normally bought on "credit" would be 2% cheaper if the evil credit cards companies weren't taking an unfair share of each transaction, then we should lobby the government to impose rules on the credit card companies.
It seems like each transaction could be made for free as long as they can still collect the 15-20% interest charges from fools who don't pay off their bill in full each month.
The more I hear about Mars, the more the analogy between the 1400-1700s exploration of America seems fit.
Whereas previously it had seemed (at least within my worldview) that USA was the only entity even considering Martian missions. Now it seems that USA, China, Russia, the EU, and India are in the same sort of colonization race that England, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands were in hundreds of year ago.
And what did that accomplish? Well, the host nations managed to spread their languages and gene pools to their "New World" destinations, but 300 years later the "mighty conquests" have all but melted into air as almost all of America's nations have attained independence.
Probably the biggest problem I see with open source is the lack of critical review. Without this someone that turns out garbage code will continue to do so forever.
Critical review? Like how Microsoft releases a new version of their operating system upon millions of "test users" and then takes 3 or 4 Services Packs to "get it right"?
Just as in the Propritary front, Open Source Software gets vetted by users. Shitty programs doesn't get adopted and good stuff ends up at the top of lists for "the best free software of 2008". Eventually, like Firefox, the software has gotten so much review that users jump on major distributions within the first week after they've been released. Meanwhile, each iteration of proprietary software has to be viewed critically... how many of the features that I like did they remove and how much cruft that I don't care about did they add?
No sir, I think "Critical Review" is not an issue for Open Source Software.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell, this is the source of that rant. Dated March 14, 2007.
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806
That's usually not an option. I wish it were... but most people don't really consider this when deciding which systems to use (or in this case, continuing using).
I did the "replace the icon" thing to my dad once and he couldn't get his hotmail.com account to "work right". It was a real long time ago and I forget the exact problem, so don't reply saying FF works fine with hotmail.com. Needless to say, I begrudgingly switched it back so that it'd work.
I thought Hulu.com was a joint venture between NBC and Fox to claim advertizing dollars that they were losing because of YouTube? Or to say it another way... General Electric and News Corp didn't like Google taking a piece of their pie.
If Verizon wanted to get in on the action, I'm sure they could, and then they'd raise the price for their FiOS package and offer "Basic" "Premium" and "Ulta Premium" levels of service to their subscribers. Then then they'd have made the internet a mirror image of cable television.
The install size also affects other things people might care about (e.g. how long it takes to do a drive image or backup; how long it takes to scan or seek on the drive; ...).
Install size might effect how much you can actually do with an OS without putting much effort in.
I used to manage intranet servers that ran Fedora and would always choose to install every package on the DVD just to make sure I'd get full programming language support and full web server support out-of-the-box. To me, this more than made up for the 4 GB+ install size of a "full" Fedora distribution.
What struck me was the the blasted character was BLOODY ALONE! When they make this a multiplayer simulation that supports 500 users in such a way that people die from the bottlenecks of egress and dead ends then I'll believe that it's useful.
Also, modeling smoke would have been very useful, too.
Also, once kids pass this "fire drill simulation" they should do what they did on the episode of the Office that aired after the Super Bowl on Sunday. :)
rant about how I despise the Fisher Price interface
Ever since being confronted with the Blue Start Menu for the first time, the first thing I've always done to any Windows box that I had to use was switch it to "Classic Mode".
Incidentally, I hear Windows 7 is taking out this feature. Fuck them for that. I want my boring gray menubars!
you had transitions like going from the all-text world of MS-DOS to a whole new paradigm, found in Windows 3.x. Or again, the huge jump from that to Windows '95.
You mean that the PC evolved from being available for computer scientists to being available for everybody else?
For the most part, this evolution is hard to characterize, but I think MSFT has it backwards. They assume that each evolution changes the way the computer provides information to the user, when the real evolutionary changes are how the user provides information to the computer. Apple understands this. Nintendo understands this. Most other companies don't.
DOS? You get a keyboard. Win 3.1? You also get a mouse. Win 95? You get dial-up networking. Win98? You get broadband and USB support. Since then, the only things they've offered is prettier graphics, better stability, and incremental improvements to malware protection. I guess you could argue that they've made touchscreen Windows... but I've yet to see this implemented in a way where I'd prefer it over having a mouse. Though, the one exclusion that I'd add is that MSFT has changed the way people interact with their console gaming systems by making them network-centric.
drop of hours (and pay to equivalent) of 4 day weeks
If only the rest of the economy could adopt this change. Imagine a world of 3 day weekends EVERY WEEK! If this were a universal change made in America, I predict the 20% drop in salaries would be met by sharp 20% drops in the prices of things we need to buy. Meanwhile, I cannot imagine a corrorlary drop of 20% in productivity. Surely there will be less productivity, but industrial efficiencies developed in the last decade have enabled most businesses to empower their employees to create more products in less time (and businesses without these efficiencies should probably die off anyway).
Add that to the fact that the service and retail industries would boom with a Thurs-Sun workweek while manufacturing would thrive working Mon-Thurs and you'd have a happier nation!
I'd also be interested in architectures, does Ubuntu support anywhere near the same range?
I've got little experience with Debian, but can compare Ubuntu to Fedora and say that Ubuntu sacrifices bells and whistles that a "tinker" like yourself would prefer so that it can deliver ease-of-use. The most glaring difference that I've noticed is right at the very beginning while you're installing it... Fedora presents you with a list of hundreds of packages/application to install and Ubuntu (if I recall correctly) just sets you up with a system that's good for "most purposes" without giving you the same wide options.
As my choice for a computer that's doing anything besides web-browsing, word processing, picture editing, and music playing... I'd avoid Ubuntu. However, I'm proud to run Ubuntu on my laptop because that's all I use it for.
Imagine that distance as the size of a standard baseball bat. Alpha Centuri (4.3 ly away) would fall approximately where the end of where your grip would be if you were holding it with both hands.
That number of inches is actually (according to my calculation) 26.8 ly.
Leave it to the community to nit-pick the details a some bad code while glazing over the original point about the need for a simple food-chain. :)
Wouldn't the term "x--" evaluate to FALSE when x equals 0? So if the compiler isn't smart enough to realize I was being stupid, then this strange coincidence *might* save my ass and provide the desired effect to exit when x is 0.
But in case you were wondering... I checked and it doesn't compile with GCC 3.4.4 when compiled as C language code:
----> error-loop-initial-declaration-used-outside-c99-mode
Now... once I fixed the Language dependent error with declaring my variable within the for loop, it compiled fine and I was able to run it through the debugger and verify that it does IN FACT work as intended. :)
So why not just bring human-edible food instead of silk worm food?
"Human-edible food" is like this simple loop that most people here should understand:
---> for (int x=100; x--; x>0)
After the function ends, the astronaunts die. I think I've read that astronauts "consume" 10kg of materials (air,water,food) per day so that it would cost 300kg to support somebody for a month if nothing ever got recycled. What space colonists need is a simple food-chain like this:
----> while (1) { plants(Sun, Fertiziler); silkworm(Plants); humans(Silkworm); }
In this way, you can recycle the processed waste from the silkworm and the humans (i.e. the "Fertilizer") and combine that with available Sunlight to generate a continuous cycle of food. And when "not dying" is the goal, it really won't matter how it tastes.
Income *tax* deductions... smart guy.
If I could report that I make $10-20k less per year for doing 10 hrs of development each week in my spare time, I'd be just as inclined to contribute as if they were paying me a wage of $30k per year.
If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.
My preference to "paying the salaries of Open Source writers" would be a system for giving people income deductions if they contribute meaningfully to unfunded public projects (be they GPL development or be they performing free concerts in a public park).
I've written about this in more detail here.
If that's the case, why the big push for video? Full lecture notes should be just as valuable.
I'm in the minority that thinks lectures are more valuable then reading the book. Personally, I went through an undergraduate program at MIT's lesser known but equally capable northeast rival... RPI. The professors (except where you got somebody who it was only their first or second year teaching) did an exceptional job and in a lot of cases I found they could pack a whole lot more knowledge into 2 hours of lecture/discussion then into 50-100 PowerPoint slides. And be that as it may, but the slides were often just the stuff you needed to memorize to pass the test but the lectures helped reinforced all that stuff. And if you'd ask me... the reason that colleges exist is to preserve knowledge and understanding in ways that can't easily be disseminated in books or lecture slides.
To put it another way, you could go an read "the jargon file" and get a good laugh or you could sit down with a couple of the people who were around while it was being written and get a whole new perspective of how things came to be. This isn't exactly a parallel because many of the men and women who developed the math, science, art, history, and literature that is taught in college have long since past away -- but supposedly (if they are doing their jobs right) the professors are experts who have deep knowledge to pass around on the topics that they teach.
MIT's Open Courseware is lacking in the fact that (a) the classes don't count for credit, (b) nobody's there to grade any work you do, and (c) many classes are not posted in the entirety (video lectures are IFAIK non-existent, answer sheets to the assigned HW questions are never there, and entire slideshow lectures are occasionally missing).
what I learnt on my university days about NFS, X Window, DNS, SMTP, Vi... is still serving me now almost word by word about fifteen years later
Yes... this is the "get it right and then move onto something else" approach to designing complex systems. It's popular amongst designers who are thinking 20, 30, and 40 years ahead for projects they are building today.
With forethought, you can do great things. Without it, you (or somebody else) can earn a shit-ton of money doing maintenance work fixing your crappy systems. It's the "slapstick method" that keep capitalism running, forcing consumers to re-buy and continuously upgrade their broken systems because they're convinced by the idea that things that are "shiny" and "new" are better than things that "work right".
I'm 26. I got a Master's Degree in CS without knowing about the specifics of linkers. In the past year I've had to learn about them due to the need to maintain a set of linker scripts for an embedded project.
Now, I'm not sure what linker programs the original post was talking about, but the one that I'm working with is "ld". From what I've seen, it's default options do a pretty good job of arranging the memory/sections of the final executable without any user intervention and when this isn't enough it provides a highly capable system that lets you feed it a customized script with the options you want. However, learning the cryptic markings that control the flow of the customized linker script was one of the harder GNU-based projects to understand because of poor documentation and once I really got going with the customized script platform it took about 5 minutes for me to discover that there's no way to feed any sort of variable into the linker file at buildtime, a feature that I'd have thought would be extremely nice to have.
But anyway, I think the real gripe of the original post was that few programmers truly understand how to setup and configure the tools that comprise their applications "build system", and that is for good reason. The customizations within a "build system" are crucial to "just work" and should be maintained by an expert who truly understands what changing small details will do so that all the rest of the developers on the project can get away with "just clicking the build button". I think Brooks called this role the "Architect", though its been a while since I've read Mythical Man Month. Anyway, expecting students who are fresh out of school to understand these details that they can get by without needing is kind of a joke. As much as you'd like to assess people based on knowledge of these minor details, the details aren't the big picture and an inexperienced programmer should only be expected to know "Big Picture" things (which I'd include Big-O Notion referenced in the summary as a part of).
If real scientists were better writers then it'd be easier for the science journalists to copy-and-paste from their technical papers and conference presentations to tell the real story. There would be more appreciation for science if those conducting it could espouse their hypothesis and experiment results with the eloquence and clarity of professional writers, but the fact is that writing and science are two different proficiencies that are rare to be found within a single individual (both require time and energy to learn how to do well) so the result is that real science writing is plagued by the miss-communication that results when two professionals that don't understand what each other do have to deal with each other.
If goods and services normally bought on "credit" would be 2% cheaper if the evil credit cards companies weren't taking an unfair share of each transaction, then we should lobby the government to impose rules on the credit card companies.
It seems like each transaction could be made for free as long as they can still collect the 15-20% interest charges from fools who don't pay off their bill in full each month.
Also, Aruba is still filed under the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The more I hear about Mars, the more the analogy between the 1400-1700s exploration of America seems fit.
Whereas previously it had seemed (at least within my worldview) that USA was the only entity even considering Martian missions. Now it seems that USA, China, Russia, the EU, and India are in the same sort of colonization race that England, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands were in hundreds of year ago.
And what did that accomplish? Well, the host nations managed to spread their languages and gene pools to their "New World" destinations, but 300 years later the "mighty conquests" have all but melted into air as almost all of America's nations have attained independence.
Probably the biggest problem I see with open source is the lack of critical review. Without this someone that turns out garbage code will continue to do so forever.
Critical review? Like how Microsoft releases a new version of their operating system upon millions of "test users" and then takes 3 or 4 Services Packs to "get it right"?
Just as in the Propritary front, Open Source Software gets vetted by users. Shitty programs doesn't get adopted and good stuff ends up at the top of lists for "the best free software of 2008". Eventually, like Firefox, the software has gotten so much review that users jump on major distributions within the first week after they've been released. Meanwhile, each iteration of proprietary software has to be viewed critically... how many of the features that I like did they remove and how much cruft that I don't care about did they add?
No sir, I think "Critical Review" is not an issue for Open Source Software.