Posts by FatGerman 416 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2012
@AC I know exactly how you feel. Get out. Don't think about it, don't question it, just get out. And If the next job is just as bad, then change your career completely. It's nowhere near as scary or difficult as it seems from where you are now. I did it, and I have never regretted it for one second.
> The behavior of Linus is the social norm.
Amongst people with no friends, yes. Anyone who spoke to me the way he speaks to people, professionally or otherwise, would get called a twat. To their face. Yes, I have done this in the workplace, to a senior, who was a twat.
> What people forget is that there are cultures and subcultures.
This is just another way of saying "You don't get me, I'm not a twat, you just don't understand me". To which I say, "No, you're being rude and obnoxious and there are far better, more constructive, more mature, more *respectful* ways to say what you need to say. And you'll find that if you use them people will both respect you and do what you ask. You're a twat".
Linus's problem is that he has no respect for anybody. He's a sociopath. I don't really think we want sociopaths in responsible positions... oh.... wait...
> There have been plane crashes where the same knob was used to set decent rate and heading, with the difference being a selection on a menu on another screen.
Abso-f***ing-lutely. One knob, one function. No, I'm not an old git, I'm a human being with hands and tactile responses in my brain.
If only I could fully remember the hilarious made-up anecdote I was once told about the drummer using a virtual drumkit with only one thing to hit, but a host of drop down menus.....
Wow! Just imagine, over the course of the rest of my life I might save.... an entire HOUR! Just think of all the things I can do in one whole second. I could sniff, or blink, or maybe burp or even perhaps fart. But wait, these are things I can do anyway, while I'm waiting that second for the page to load. In fact, they're things that are *better* done in dead time while waiting for a page to load.
Seriously though, are people really *that* busy that saving a second on a page that takes 3 seconds to load really makes a difference to them? They need to be forced to use 33K dialup for a month. In my day we used t'use a piece o' wet string wi' two plastic cups....
Er... RAW files still need to be imported into your copy of (insert name of RAW processing software here); Anybody wanting immediate upload in a studio will currently be using a tether, so this card introduces an extra step into the process. Now, instant WiFi import directly into Lightroom, via a plugin.. THAT would be useful. This is a gimmick looking for a mug.
... even though it didn't follow standards I can't hold that against it too much. The standards don't really help because they're open to interpretation. You can have a complex page that passes all the validation and it can still look different in Chrome/Firefox/Opera/IE/whatever-the-feck because some coder somewhere has made a slightly different decisions than some coder somewhere else. What we need, in fact, is ONE browser to RULE THEM ALL. I don't care which one it is. I just want to be able to write a web page and know it'll work for everybody who uses it without having to first test and tweak it in 18 bloody browsers.
You probably liked Poettering's Pulse Audio as well, correct? How many years did it take good coders to fix that clusterfuck?
Very pertinent point I think. Pulseaudio was, in theory, fantastic. It had all sorts of things that were very good and very useful. It was one of the things that made me decide I could realistically use a Linux desktop - It was about making Linux easier for the desktop users.
Unfortunately it was implemented so badly, by someone with no apparent ability to listen or take suggestions, and was so frequently broken that in the end it was one of the main reasons I shelled out for a Mac.
Good ideas poorly implemented and largely untested seems to be the story of Pulseaudio and possibly systemd, but then it seems to be the entire Gnome (and KDE for that matter) philosophy these days. I blame the parents.
Wine, or a VM, is OK if you're browsing the web or tapping away in a text editor. Not so good if I want to have Photoshop and Lightroom going with proper camera-to-screen-to-print colour management and access to the 16-bit printer driver, to quote just one problem. There are no native Linux alternatives. The Linux world doesn't seem to realise that it's Apps (in the modern parlance) that people want, not operating systems. (Don't get me started on the photography software in Linux, all of it falls well below what even a semi-amateur like me needs for productivity, sadly).
This sounds like another meaningless set of numbers to me. Define "launch". I only "launch" my email program once per day but then it keeps running all day and gets used several times an hour. Similarly my browser. If I was using TIFKAM I'd be registering about 3 "launches" per day (given that there aren't yet TIFKAM versions of code editors or photoshop or etc etc) but that doesn't mean I'm not using the interface* and it doesn't mean I won't use it more when TIFKAM versions of the apps I actually want to use are released.
*I actually use a Mac, but from what I've seen of Win8, it looks like a pretty nice touch interface with some nice features. Shame that touch interfaces are useless for real work, but hey....
Looks like, sadly, Microsoft may have banged the first nail in the coffin of the traditional computer. From now on the mass market will be phones and tablets and any of us that want to do real work will have to buy one of them specialised gizmos with a keyboard, and pay the associated premium for specialised hardware.
Quite. That amount of code churn implies one or both of two things:
Firstly, it ain't finished and certainly isn't well tested. Secondly, the people working on it are too keen on playing with it.
The upshot of one or both of these things is instability and uncertainty over whether something that works today will work tomorrow when you apply those updates.
I speak as a Linux user of 6 years. I quickly learned my lesson not to use it for anything important unless updates were banned.
It's a Canonical product, therefore it will *always* be of alpha quality. It's nice to see new concepts and new people doing stuff, but Canonical don't appear to understand the notion of testing or quality control so even if it did make it into a phone I'd predict a 90% returns rate.
"How about this: our models are wrong."
That's odd, because they've been working and predicting things for literally decades!
*Incomplete* is the word you are looking for. If they were 'wrong' we wouldn't have managed to build all these neat toys that let us bicker from miles away.
There does seem to be a habit in modern physics of inventing new stuff to keep the old theories working. As a scientist I was taught that if the evidence doesn't fit the theory, then the theory is wrong (I'll accept "incomplete"). The trend with physics these days seems to be that if the evidence doesn't fit the theory, speculate about what evidence we must be missing. It's almost a religious mindset, clinging to the Standard Model, since if if that's proven wrong then cosmologists (at least) have to start again, and many of them will have wasted their entire lives. Vested interests are as powerful in theoretical physics as they are in any other area of life.
Oh please. The units aren't important in an article, it's getting the meaning of them across that matters. I'm British and I use pounds, miles, feet, and inches because they mean something to me. I have to convert metric to imperial so I can get a sense of what it means. Bloody SI Nazis, you'll have us all going into pubs and asking for a 0.56826125 litre of beer.
"...because the only way to learn what's not perfect is to have other people - real people - use it."
This is true. So why not, before dumping yet another load of half-finished shit into a release, spend some real time beta testing it. And then actually fix some of the bugs that get reported. Ubuntu's current strategy is to release a beta about 3 weeks before the release, let about 2 people use it, then release it anyway. This is why fewer and fewer people are using it, because they're utterly beholden to their release schedule, and making things actually work is secondary.
"While this has been the case up till now, I think that 4g mobile Internet could provide a fairly cost-effective solution for many rural areas where land line coverage is poor or non-existent."
There are plenty of us living in rural areas who are still waiting for decent 2G coverage on the 1800MHz band that 4G will run on. I agree that 4G mobile would be better than the "broadband" provided by BT out here, but the chances of them building an antenna to cover the 14 people on this side of the hill are nil.
"(*often the landline broadband is so awful that you can't stream YouTube or do video skyping)"
Oh one shudders at the hardships you poor, poor foreigners have to suffer. I'm in rural Wales. I struggle to post this. A mobile phone signal would be nice too. But you know what? I manage. Go outside.
I don't count myself as an atheist, but I am most definitely not religious. I don't come from the angle that "there is definitely no God", rather I come from the angle of "oh yeah, some people think there's a god, well it really doesn't bother me one way or the other". Religion, or the absence of it, simply has no relevance in my life.
So, how do I know what's right and wrong you seem to be asking. Simple. I was taught right and wrong by my parents, by growing up in a society where there is not just right and wrong - good and evil - but a whole spectrum of middle ground, and from my empathy with others and my humanity.
From this point of view I can see quite clearly that while making a film that mocks someone's beloved Prophet may be insensitive (this is the middle ground I spoke of), reacting to that by rioting, attacking foreign embassies, and murdering ambassadors is most definitely wrong, no matter how offensive the film is perceived to be. You talk of knee jerk reactions, well I wonder which group is having the biggest jerk.
The best thing about that post is that it makes me realise that, when I see something I think might be a huge conspiracy, I should stand back, examine the evidence, and take a rational view of it instead of immediately sounding off like a ranting moron with his head up his arse.
You, sir, are an example to us all.
> True to the spirit of Real Engineering:
> - if it doesn't fit, force it
> - If it can't be forced, use a bigger hammer
That's not engineering, that's proper British Bodging - a proud tradition.
Going by my experience as a 'software engineer' an engineering solution would be:
1. Try it again to see if it happens every time
2. Have lots of meetings in which nothing concrete is agreed but lots of managers tell you how important it is to fix it quickly
3. Under management pressure come up with some half assed bodge
4. Implement half-assed bodge
5. Spend the next 4 weeks explaining to various managers why the half-assed bodge doesn't work properly
Like you, I used to think that engineering was about making things. But eventually I came to realise that it's about dodging blame, writing powerpoint slides, and guessing how long things will take before you do them.
... but do you remember those 1MB Winchester disks that used to take up an entire tabletop and couldn't withstand a small nudge without crashing? Yes, that was only 30-odd years ago. It's called research and development. The emphasis here is now on the *development*.
Bloody journalists.
My Samsung 17" laptop, when using the oss nvidia driver, has no support for 3d acceleration or accelerated video playback. It overheats and shuts down after playing full screen 1080p H.264 video for 10 minutes, at very poor quality and with choppy playback if I so much as try running anything else.
When I install the proprietary driver, everything works wonderfully. CPU usage while playing that video is 4%. I can even compile code in the background while it plays.
So yes, the proprietary driver kicks the arse of the oss driver, and always has. After all, nvidia know how their hardware works. I have no problem with this, and nor does anybody who lives in the real world.
"There appears to be no disadvantage that the Surface has over a laptop or over a tablet - it is both"
Or it is neither, depending on your point of view.
Can I plug it into my 28 inch monitor and firewire audio interface so I can run Logic Audio on it in my studio? Thought not. That's what my laptop's for. I'm a creator of content, I need devices to get that content into the digital world. Poking at shiny things with my stubby fingers is of no interest to me.
So, the bug is: that there happens to be some code in there, accidentally one must assume, that is able to modify your contacts, specifically by doing a search and replace of email addresses. Erm, sorry.. how did code like that get in there by accident? Or if we assume the code is there on purpose but this is a bug in that code, then for what purpose is that code in there in the first place? Why do you want to mess with my contacts?
Or are you just spouting bollocks Mr Zuckerberg?
See, they know that it'll take a lot to make people stop using Facebook, since for many of us it has become something we like and use a lot, despite our better judgement. So they feel they can just do what they like and we'll put up with it. And apparently they can all sleep at night and live with the fact that they're devious, lying, morally repugnant pieces of slime.
I'm going now to post that on my wall.
*buntu is a permanent rolling beta. It always will be while they try and enforce a regular 6 month release cycle on software that's written mainly by people in their spare time.
If it's stability you want, use Debian, but then you don't get the benefit of the actual good stuff Canonical has done on installation and you may well end up with a bricked laptop, as I do every time I try Debian.
The year of Linux on the desktop - yes, that's how long it takes to get it to work. And I speak as someone who's been using it regularly for 4 years.
And there speaks a geek. The problem with your approach is that you have to talk to the computer in its own language. This simply doesn't work. You know what made Google so popular? It was by providing an interface that normal people could use. They don't have to get to grips with brackets and logic, they just type stuff into it in a way that makes sense to *them*. I remember being amazed by it when after some time of failing to get altavista to find what I wanted by 'narrowing down my search criteria', my mate simply went to Google (which I'd never used before) and typed in, in plain English, the question we wanted the answer to. The answer we needed was the first hit. I've never used another search engine since.
"Choice for its own sake leads to a very poor user experience. There is very solid science behind the "KISS" design philosophy the more successful consumer electronics companies apply to their products."
As a long-term Linux user, I simply couldn't agree more. I'm sick to death of having so much bloody choice. Especially when it's choice between 4 things that all don't quite work but in different ways. These days I just want stuff that works. I bought a Mac. Sorry.
Give them some credit. Some of the very best discoveries come about when people say "Well, I don't expect it'll work but it's the best idea I've got and if it does work the implications are enormous".
Your comment suggests a complete ignorance of the motivation for, and methodology behind, a large proportion of all useful scientific research. I, on the other hand, spent an entire year firing lasers at a solution of fairy liquid in a futile attempt to develop a new spectroscopic technique. It was the best idea I had at the time and I didn't get paid a fucking penny for it.
Just saying.
