3) I purchased an EEE PC thinking it would be great, I could use it everywhere, and for anything. Turns out, it's sitting in a drawer because I have no use for a limited PC that's too small and hard to type on to do anything of value.
You CANNOT tell me that typing on the iPad will be better. Typing on my iPhone is already the worst typing experience imaginable. I used to email all the time from my blackberry, now I don't even bother.
This is where we differ---the whole reason to get excited about the iPad is because it promises to make typing (and mouse wiggling, one of the most unnatural things to do ever!) a whole lot less relevant. That's something to be excited about, IMO.
This is not a "black and white" issue with one true answer. You have to see this in the historic context.
One of the reasons why the first German democracy (1918-1933) failed (and gave rise to Hitler) is because the German society was very much compartmentalized and split into "subcultures" at the time. In fact, large parts of the military chose to continue as "para-military" units after the end of WWI. These violent groups that saw themselves as above the law played a significant part in Hitler's ascent to power.
When the current Germany was designed after WWII, many safeguards were built into the system to ensure that there would be no more "parallel" societies. Two obvious examples are 1) the universal draft (flow all parts of society through the military to prevent the military from isolating itself) and 2) no home schooling (the public schools serve to promote democracy and western values; the public school system is designed to be the "melting pot" that integrates immigrants and fringe groups).
How would you feel about this case if the home schooling did not involve Christians (Note: I'm not religious myself.), but radical Moslems? What if it were about Nazis indoctrinating their kids with hate? What if it were about a sect that raises their kids to prepare for a collective suicide?
The German (mainstream) belief is that the government has to step in in these cases. It has to protect the kids from their own parents.
The family that was granted asylum may very well be fine parents and teachers (I don't know them), but for obvious reasons you can't have an effective law that says "you may only homeschool kids for Christian reasons, but other choices are not ok".
So, the German society, under consideration of its history, chooses to err on the safe side: no homeschooling. Period.
Of course, the particular circumstances may very much differ for other societies, so that other societies may reasonably come up with different rules (e.g., the US). But that does not invalidate the reasoning behind the German laws.
That doesn’t really sound like a convincing argument. Didn’t Hitler use state organs (such as public schools and public broadcast) to further his agenda?
> How would you feel about this case if the home schooling did not involve Christians (Note: I'm not religious myself.), but radical Moslems?
You are talking about hypothetical radical groups as a “scare tactic”. Most Muslims who go to religious schools end up as pretty responsible adults. I doubt that trying to send devoted Muslims to public school (and then trying to force them to not wear headscarves – such as in France) will help anything.
> What if it were about Nazis indoctrinating their kids with hate?
Again, this is extremely rare (if non-existent). Also, is it the state’s prerogative to teach children moral values and political values, or is it the parent’s duty?
Don’t you think that public schools will reflect the ruling party’s ideology? (This happens in many countries). So in effect, would you rather let the ruling party teach your kids moral and political values than the parent? (Take a look at the content of history books in many countries to see this).
The ultimate question is who is responsible for educating their children? Historically it's never been the state. Government run education went hand in hand with the industrial revolution-- it's designed to create a reliable (and pliable) workforce. By this point the public education complex is just one more oppressive power structure motivated primarily by self-preservation.
Historically, education was something for the elite because there was no need to educate the poor who would spend their lives performing unskilled labor; when it comes to education there is not a lot of historical precedent to fall back upon. In the US the concept of an educated citizenry was a core principle of the founders -- when you divest power to the masses you want them to be relatively smart about what they do with it. Public education predates the industrial revolution and while industrialists may have wanted a better-educated workforce that was not why public education was established. If a "pliable" workforce was desired then simple apprenticeship after basic literacy would have worked fine. Mass education gives a country more engineers, but is not required for simple factory work. It is in the interest of the state and it's citizens to seek the former and not just settle for the latter.
One argument is that in order to maintain a free state, quite ironically, you need state indoctrination of the civic ideals of liberty. That is, in order to keep people from voting for despotic leaders you need to convince them that liberty is good. Public compulsory education seems like the best way to do that.
Of course, that's failed (in my opinion). I think compulsory, public education teaches kids both implicitly and explicitly to do what their told by teachers and the state.
So yes, I support the right of people to homeschool their children. There's the inherent danger that they'll teach their kids values you disagree with, but I fear that less then the gov't forcing all kids to learn the same values. The probability that those values will perfectly match mine (or anyone else's, for that matter) are pretty slim.
Is this family part of a big movement that's actually a threat to the German way of life? I doubt it. It seems like a big overreaction to a minor threat.
5. Any type of bit twiddling sucks. Take the time to do it in C and make the extension.
I recently had to do something like this and ended up using SWIG to generate the glue code. However, I noticed that my code had to spent considerable time (many iterations) in the C++ library to reduce overall execution time (but then it did by a factor of 20x-40x).
Do you happen to have some advice on how much speedup could be gained by replacing SWIG with handwritten wrappers?
My personal preferences are: Boost.python for C++[1], and Pyrex/Cython for C wrappers. Both make things pretty nice. I never really got into swig, so I'm not sure if there is noticable speedup betwen any of these. As for handwritten wrappers, I have not had any personal experience trying to eke the extra speed from not using a code generator type wrapper. hth
Swig solves a somewhat different problem than Boost.python/pyrex. Swig works better when you have an existing C++ codebase you want to call from python while making as few changes to the C++ side as possible, while Pyrex/Boost work better when you are writing a C or C++ module from scratch to be called from python.
Systems research is easy to criticize, but much harder to do right.
For starters, systems research deals with the real world. The real world is messy. How would you comprehensively represent every interesting workload in an analytical model? How would you derive it from real world applications? It is impossible in the general case (halting problem), and really, really hard to do even in specialized cases. If you think otherwise, the field of worst-case execution time analysis awaits your contribution eagerly (try modeling L1 and L2 instruction and data cache interactions in a multicore CPU).
Thus, in many cases evaluating different interesting workloads empirically is unavoidable. In such cases, 100 pages of setup, methodology, and analysis are a feature, and not necessarily a sign of mediocrity. There is a great danger of overlooking substantial flaws in brief descriptions.
So, yes, mediocrity can lead to inflated sections, but a good PhD committee will not led that slide. In your page cache example, I would absolutely expect to see significant experiments and analysis; I would probably not be convinced by just a few selected benchmarks. Presenting benchmarks well requires many more pages than a succinct proof might.
I'm probably biased because I do what might qualify as systems research for a living. It's hard to do right - much harder than a novice might think, but it's no rocket science. A reasonably intelligent person who has the stomach for rigor can be taught to do it well. However, I cannot easily get into computation theory - I tried my hand in it, and I just don't have the mathematical intuition. I could develop it to some degree with a lot of work, but I could never do first rate complexity research - that stuff requires real talent. I suppose it's common for people to slightly look down on what they do because they've experienced the mess first hand - the magic is always more spectacular on the other side of the fence :)
Saying you don't have a "talent" for something is another way of saying you don't enjoy doing it. If you don't enjoy it, you won't practice it, and if you won't practice it you won't be good at it.
I've known CS-theory people - who I know are very bright - say similar things about systems research.
Actually, I really enjoyed studying complexity theory. It just took far more effort than anything I've ever done before - it's really mind bending, and that's why I loved it. I just know that to get to the real meat, I'd have to work very hard for five years or so to develop the intuition and to get up to speed, and even then I'm not sure if I'd be able to cut it to do real first-rate work (a cop-out, I know).
I agree with you that people, especially laymen, tend to overrate talent - it's a good defense strategy that helps people avoid doing difficult things. But I disagree with you that there is no natural talent or inclination towards certain subjects in general. When it comes to hard math, I know people that just pick it much quicker and easier than I do, and it has been the case since I was very young (long story short, for a few years I went to school for gifted children, and some kids were just better than me no matter how hard I worked). I'm also convinced that some fields require more natural talent than others.
What kind of development process leads to such variety of sliders? Don't they have one GUI library team? Did they buy all the components from other companies that happened to have their own slider implementation?
I mean, sure, some specialized implementations are useful (e.g., picking a color/hue), but this is a bit excessive. Somebody must have written all these implementations. Somebody needs to maintain them. This costs real money... why would you want to do that?
Nope. They don't even have one string object or math library.
When I talked to a guy who worked on Mac stuff for Adobe, he said that pretty much anything that could be shared, isn't. Every flagship product is independent, and most were the result of at least one acquisition (some circular!). Pretty much every effort they've made to rationalize things into a coherent suite has just resulted in regressions, as none of the object models line up.
The engineers at Adobe know full well how shitty their flagship products are. Lightroom is what they can produce in green-field development, and it is awesome both in implementation (mostly Lua) and usability (no bloat). Apple's Aperture had a significant public first start, and was still quickly beaten with a superior product. Quite unexpected.
My experience with Photoshop leads me to believe that either its internals are a mess or they don't have a UI team at all or that that they're morbidly afraid of changing anything. Or all of those things.
Several different styles of sliders are the least of Photoshop's UI's problems. It still doesn't have some features we've been taking for granted even back in the 90s. I hope customizable toolbars and palettes finally made it into CS4 because in CS3 my screen is full of buttons that serve as nothing but a visual distraction. Also, looking my current PS layout, I can count FIVE different places where I can change the selected color and not all of them behave the same.
It looked like things were getting better when they finally implemented Corel-style context sensitive toolbars a while back, but of course they got it wrong by hardcoding them and only including certain commands based on who knows what criteria. But my (least) favorite f*ckup was when they introduced customizable shortcuts but couldn't be bothered to remove all the hardcoded ones first. This meant that some of your custom shortcuts would do something completely unexpected, like launch the scripting window.
I really don't understand people who go on and on about how amazing Phostoshop's UI is. For me, using PS has always been a highly frustrating experience.
Many of these sliders have special behavior which is quite useful. For instance, the "blend if" sliders have two controllers, each one of which can be broken in half by option-clicking it, the threshold slider shows a histogram above it, and many of them have keyboard control of one sort or another (which is not always reasonable to completely homogenize).
It is true that having such a diversity of styles is a bit absurd. They could do certainly do with no more than 4 or 5 styles, all mostly visually similar. Still, the actual behavior of all these sliders is pretty solid, in my experience, and I'm not really bothered too much, as a long-time user, that consolidating widget appearance isn't Adobe's top priority.
I would guess it is a combination of too much other work, too much legacy, and no one really caring about the aesthetics.
Marketing guys pressuring devs for new features. Enough late nights and you just stop caring about those details. Unless you have an ethos of good design like Apple.
I'm thinking different parts might be owned by different teams, or they were written by the same team, but over a long period of time. We have a lot of UI issues like this, in a 100 person company. I imagine the bureaucracy of a place like Adobe could be hard to move.
Indeed. Saying 'QNX is sucks as a desktop OS' is like saying 'Windows 7 sucks because it doesn't run on my toaster'. Well, d'uh!
It's a classical case of wrong expectations. The author criticizes QNX for not automatically installing a SMP kernel. That is actually a good thing as multiprocessor real-time systems are very much different from uniprocessor real-time systems. People building real-time systems should consciously choose to allow SMP; the OS shouldn't do it behind the scenes in a dot update.
I use Open Office and iWork on a Mac, and Open Office on Linux. On the Mac, Open Office's GUI sticks out as ugly and buggy. I think it's ok, but not great, on Linux, though. (This probably reflects that the Open Office port to Mac is still relatively new.)
I prefer Open Office Writer to Word because the way that it handles styles and document hierarchy make more sense to me. Also, the document layout seems to be relatively stable; at least I haven't observed many cascading layout catastrophes in Open Office Writer yet (as opposed to Word).
A big downside of Open Office Writer is its inability to embed many file types as figures (for example, you can't embed PDF). Apple's Pages is much better in this regard.
I dont use spreadsheets much, but even my light use brings Apple's Numbers to its knees. Open Office Calc is much better in this regard. However, Open Office's charts looks like crap, and Excel's chart feature is powerful but a pain to use. Numbers' charts are easy to use and quite pretty, but Numbers breaks down in flames for even moderately-sized documents (as in click, click, draw chart, go get coffee, come back in 5min, Numbers still not responding). I now crunch my data in Open Office Calc or Python and render down-sampled graphs with Numbers.
Open Office Impress is terrible. You are pretty much limited to bullet points, images, and ugly transitions. I hate PowerPoint. Keynote is great; there is no way I am ever going back to a presentation package without a "magic move" transition.
Regarding impress, the transitions and effects are indeed pretty horrible, but I've never seen any serious presentation with bouncing words and spinny slides. It looks corny and unprofessional.
True, but that's true for any feature if you use it just for the feature's sake. You can use animations for so much more than that. For example, it can be very illustrative to animate a data structure manipulation.
I beg to differ. On a Mac, Open Office's export to PDF is broken in weird ways (line weight sometimes wrong, fonts rendered incorrectly, other glitches), but printing to PDF from Pages (or any other application that allows you to print, including Open Office itself) has not yet let me down so far (and I use it a lot). NeoOffice, when I was still using it, did not have this problem, but failed in other interesting ways.
Same thing happened to me; I had the Swiss Army knife in my backpack between a whole bunch of CDs. I wonder if the edges of the CDs somehow concealed the knife, or if the security person simply wasn't paying attention.
By the way, what's the likelihood of TWO people bringing a knife/bomb on board the same plane? Pretty small, huh? Hence, you should always bring your own bomb to fly safely! ;-)
This is where we differ---the whole reason to get excited about the iPad is because it promises to make typing (and mouse wiggling, one of the most unnatural things to do ever!) a whole lot less relevant. That's something to be excited about, IMO.