Comment Re:why? (Score 1) 67
Possibly a discoverable interface? I mean I'm pretty technically inclined, and I liked Blender once I got decent with it, but go few months without using it and I'm practically back to square one.
Possibly a discoverable interface? I mean I'm pretty technically inclined, and I liked Blender once I got decent with it, but go few months without using it and I'm practically back to square one.
And if I die before I wake, I pray the lord my toys to break, so none other kids can use them.
-- Prayer of a Selfish Child
Volcanoes are just God's way of fracking for magma!
http://www.alibaba.com/product...
"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed. (William Gibson)"
What a revolution for global education (similar to the OLPC hope)!
to get more fiber and micronutrients: In practice, it is what we're eating. Exercise just makes us want to eat more afterwards. Enough fiber and micronutrients shuts off our "appestat" and we feel full on less calories. See, for one example, Dr. Fuhrman's approach, which suggests people aspire to one pound cooked and one pound raw veggies every day (hard to do, but even getting close yields great benefits):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
That said, exercise is generally *great* for your overall health, including boosting immune function by getting the lymph moving. And outdoors exercise in sunlight under the right conditions can help with vitamin D deficiency.
See also:
http://fuhrmaneattolivereview....
"Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, MediFast and Weightwatchers offer only traditional foods from the Standard American Diet that are known to be the root cause of obesity and other common diseases. The portions may be smaller in size and in the number of calories but their nutrition is negligible and too low as confirmed by the Aggregate Nutrition Density Index."
Getting back to the main topic, in the same way, if we were producing power locally-to-the-neighborhood like via Solar PV or maybe someday hot/cold fusion, we would be less likely to have unpaid-up-front external costs like cross-country pollution, economic risks, or maintaining the US military in the middle east. Then our economy and society would be a lot healthier. Energy efficiency also works like local energy production and so generally is a great thing. Consuming foreign il is an invitation to disaster, like the USA has not learned its lesson from the 1970s!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
Sadly, the USA took the wrong path to the feel-good-in-the-short-term Reagan years back then... But thankfully some people did not give up, and the cost of solar PV continues to fall and energy efficiency improvement continue to be made despite it not being a level playing field because the price of fossil fuels and nukes don't account for many negative externalities. But we could have been there in the 1980s, and saved decades of military costs and health costs and pollution remediation costs incurred since then.
That would depend very much on the details. I would much rather live in a country where anyone could legally kill anyone else, that one where an elite 0.1% could go on murdering sprees without legal repercussions, but anyone who lifted a weapon against them went to prison.
Are you seriously using ozone depletion as an example of government hoaxes? A case where the science was so strong that we had essentially no problem arranging global cooperation to radically reduce industrial scale usage of ozone-destroying compounds? The reason we don't have that major crisis on our hands is because we all got together and bandaged a major problem we were creating. After years of rapid growth the Antarctic ozone hole has now been stabilized for years.
But man, what a price we paid - having to pay 3% more for refrigerants and propellants that don't destroy our planet's protective shield against being cooked by ultraviolet light. And just think of all the lost profits to the sunscreen and umbrella industries! Clearly this is all the result of a conspiracy funded by the swimsuit lobby.
Easily fixed. Obviously it's the democracy that's causing the problem, we'll just overthrow the government and install a puppet dictator. It won't actually solve the problem, but why pass up the opportunity?
I'd say dancing, of any type, is a far more valid expression of free speech than anonymous corporate campaign spending.
In fairness, publicly accusing your superiors in the secret service of grossly inappropriate behavior probably counts as receiving warning of their displeasure.
Good points. How is copyright for any computer software then justified, at least for most software that is intended to be a "useful" tool, like Microsoft Word?
>Sadly, liberty and democracy have been on the losing end throughout history..
And yet, somehow, when seen over the course of centuries they seem to be gradually winning. Do you suppose that's modern propaganda, or is the apparent contradiction the result of a sawtoothed advance, where liberty and democracy are bought with often bloody rebellion and then lost to creeping corruption until it gets bad enough that something triggers the next uprising?
From what I read here, systemd is a lot less modular by bundling in a lot of services. Linux has had the virtue of modularity at is core, as exemplified by narrow-focus command line tools piped together to get work done. Modularity is something like cleanliness. If you leave crumbs all over your kitchen all the time, it generally isn't itself the problem. The problem is when roaches and mice move in and you can't get rid of them due to the crumbs you still leave everywhere. Granted, cleanliness (and modularity) can perhaps go too far (the person who scrubs the kitchen flour every five minutes). So, what is a healthy balance here? I don't know enough about the details to weigh in on that. You ask for specific problems, and while a reasonable sounding request, that is also a bit like asking people to send pictures in of specific roaches and mice. The specific problems are important of course, but what is at stake is the bigger picture, not stamping out each individual roach. What matters is increased risk. The more general issue is the management of risks from complexity, whereas modularity is one of the best (but not the only) approach for doing that.
I've seen how lack of modularity can damage other software communities -- particularly the early Squeak community, like I wrote about here
http://lists.squeakfoundation....
"I sympathize. I think the biggest issue of Squeak is issues with modularity and managing complexity. These issues translate to frustration for maintainers (and users
There are several ways to manage complexity, which include:
* modularity (namespaces, packages like Java or GNU Smalltalk or Debian, letting someone else do that hard work by leveraging libraries or VMs or languages, like Squeak does by using a C compiler to generate the VM)
* cleverness (brilliant redesign, like traits was hopefully going to be)
* laissez faire, and also to each his or her own image (that is what we have now, and it is not that bad an idea, if the *core* is small and well thought out, like Spoon, so the *image* instance becomes the *module*. But alas, it is not, witness how confusing Morphic is to unravel).
Modularity is the one way to manage complexity which seems to work best in practice, although the others have their role. However, if Squeak images could easily talk to each other and share some state, and we had Spoon-like remote debugging and development, then we could have just one application per image, and that would be easier to maintain (it would be modular to a degree but in an unusual way). But I would still suggest such a system built on well-though out (clever) modules would be more powerful and easier to use than a mess of spaghetti code, even if we had only one application per image."
With roots back to here in 2000:
http://lists.squeakfoundation....
"Squeak complexity in 2.8 has become a complex cat from the simple kitten complexity of 1.13(?) in 1996. Back then, Dan Ingalls wrote on 10 Nov 1996 those prescient words: "The Squeak team has an interest in doing the world's simplest application construction framework, but I suspect that we will get sucked up with enough other things that this won't happen in the next two months (but who knows...)."
Squeak 2.8's complexity is now quiet (in terms of walkbacks) and stealthy (in terms of growing between releases without a complaint). And the complexity could be deadly. Witness the recent issue Stefan raised about some Squeak fonts possibly violating a Microsoft EULA. The question should never even arise of the legal integrity of the core release. We might as well just leap right into those jaws of complexity.
Granted, Squeak has finally much improved since those years -- but the cost to the community as enormous from all the missed opportunity... Squeak limps along, and is a better and better system, and spinoffs like Amber Smalltalk and Pharo are awesome, but so many other systems grabbed Squeak's mindshare that Sqeuak faces big uphill struggle at this point. It never got to be the Flash replacement it could have been in browsers, or the Java-killer, or lots of other thing it could have been (the alternative to Python...).
For its own flaws (including those inherent in JavaScript), NodeJS seems to have gotten modularity right and can support that picture I painted above for Squeak of special-purpose application-focused servers talking to each other:
http://www.futurealoof.com/pos...
"All you people who added node_modules to your gitignore, remove that shit, today, it's an artifact of an era we're all too happy to leave behind. The era of global modules is dead."
Maybe what frustrates so many Linux developers is to see such an obvious problem going ignored, like for a master chef to have a new restaurant owner come in who is intentionally throwing bread crumbs all over the floor because is "looks nice"? Or, for another analogy, like an experienced firefighter being forced to live in a wood house overflowing with years of un-recycled newspapers supposedly protected by some funky new smoke detector system that is unproven and behind the scenes is implemented using a rat's nest of unlabelled wires?
That said, again, I don't know enough about systemd to know if it does indeed make good overall tradeoffs. I'm just building on the complaints about it I've read here. Things can be too clean. Humans need bacteria to survive. Evolution tends to produce odd efficiencies of unexpectedly interacting systems. So, I'll continue to watch how this plays out...
But Joey's biggest complaint seems to be about the social process. It seems to me that all social systems tend to attract parasites and rent seekers eventually. It can be hard to manage that sometimes without moving on and just waiting for the inevitable collapse before recolonizing. As Clay Shirky says:
"A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
http://www.shirky.com/writings...
"What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.
The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."
Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn't been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.
This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
So, systemd sounds nice in practice -- let's bundle all the important services together and finally get all the bugs fixed *this* time -- but in practice, experienced developers worry that the bundling creates a big technical and social problem of maintenance and debugging and related discussions and management.
I might have succeeded in 2000 with rallying Squeakers to make a better system back then, sparing years of frustration and bit rot for so many people, but there were several people (including a "lawyer") who claimed Squeak was just fine as it was, that the quirky non-open-source-recognized license did not matter and that modularity was not an import priority and so on... I'm glad those issues have been mostly fixed for Squeak in something lie Pharo, but it took many years of painful reality for the community as a whole to wake up to them become priorities, losing many good people along the way -- even losing Dan Ingalls to JavaScript...
http://www.infoq.com/interview...
That would be a more dramatic claim if human trafficking wasn't alive and well within the US.
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson