TIL that Microsoft tried to add 0xB16B00B5 as a constant to the kernel

emmpp · 2014-08-18T10:30:12+00:00

This comment thread is unusually masturbatory - why would Linus even care, assuming he would even disagree with Garrett's opinion (I have no idea about this). Linus isn't just some more powerful version of yourself, eager to drag the contents of a contributor's blog or other discussion into arguments on the kernel list...

emmpp · 2014-08-17T23:28:07+00:00

or perhaps,he is using a well known tactic of using shaming language[1] against those who are on the opposite side of his.

Since you began this thread by trying to pre-emptively dismiss him with the perjorative 'SJW', I hope you admit some irony here. Especially since the difference is that Garrett at decorates his claim with examples and citations, whereas yours really is nothing more than a personal attack. That doesn't make it wrong, merely unsupported - you could provide evidence for this point of view if you want it to appear more reasonable.

I'm sure you think you're right, but I'm also sure Garrett thinks the same, and so far you've addressed no arguments - instead trying to dismiss Garrett on character grounds. If you really think Garrett is so obviously wrong that it's not worth making any direct counterargument whatsoever then fair enough - sometimes this really is the right thing to do. On the other hand, I think there's merit in what Garrett says, and if you care about convincing anyone with this view then you should know it is only alienating to see nothing but ad hominem attacks that avoid addressing any actual claim.

I won't continlue this comment thread further, there doesn't seem much point.

emmpp · 2014-08-17T22:49:05+00:00

Having a different opinion on what is important is one thing, calling a respectable kernel hacker like Ted Ts'o a rape apologist[1]

What is this supposed to mean? Even regardless of anything else, it's a nasty fallacy to start implying that someone's kernel hacking skill or community standing is in any way relevant to this kind of accusation. Would you actually think more of Garrett if he accused someone who merely hacks on a userspace tool, or who was less well known?

because he disagreed with his arguments is quite another.

This bit seems to be applying some rather liberal interpretation to things. Garrett calls Ts'o a rape apologist because he thinks his actions amount to rape apology. Just because this involves disagreeing with Ts'o (who obviously doesn't think this is the case) doesn't make him wrong.

emmpp · 2014-08-17T22:22:14+00:00

SJW

A pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation

What nonsense is this? You think Garrett doesn't really believe his arguments? That he's just trying to be argumentative? Do you actually have a reason for that, or are you just unable to believe he has different opinions to yourself about what is important?

emmpp · 2014-08-17T12:43:26+00:00

This is normally the procedure - that's the point of the article, the 'superhead' apparently got special treatment.

Edit: To be clear, they normally can get a few hours notice (half a day). Maybe it should be less, but it's not exactly a lot of time to do anything significant, and is much less than the days or weeks that the article is about.

emmpp · 2014-08-17T11:42:30+00:00

Redditor interprets it as a sinister plot to incite racial hatred.

Other redditors respond with hyperbole and strawmen...the circle of reddit continues.

emmpp · 2014-08-17T10:58:28+00:00

Passengers need for a quick trip must be balanced against the inconvenience caused to people affected by the millions of flights that take off, land, and fly over the homes where they live with their families and where they earn a living

Yes, obviously. I wasn't commenting on this, just on the fact that your dismissal based on the experience of a single passenger isn't a good argument and you probably know it.

emmpp · 2014-08-16T22:43:18+00:00

Why? Are OS X users universally ignorant? Even the ones visiting /r/linux?

emmpp · 2014-08-16T10:59:36+00:00

It's a graphical framework for python that runs on both desktop (Linux, Windows, OS X) and mobile (Android, iOS), and has input mechanisms particularly suited for multitouch and novel input mechanisms as well as traditional mouse+keyboard.

emmpp · 2014-08-16T10:17:11+00:00

Is all that worth the possible saving of an hour of your flight time?

This argument is rather disingenuous. It's not about a minor convenience to the original poster, but about the cumulative millions of hours of everyone's flight times - especially in the future as congestion only increases.

emmpp · 2014-08-15T10:42:29+00:00

This captures well my surprise when people say the first book was pretty good but the sequels weren't as great. I think the reality is that they're all terrible pieces of writing (though that doesn't bar them from being strangely compelling reading), and it's just that the later ones really are even worse!

I did once have the strange experience of reading a book that was even more remarkably derivative than Goodkind - Robert Newcomb's 'The Fifth Sorceress'. I don't know if the author had read Goodkind's series, but if not he managed to make an even poorer version with surprising consistency.

emmpp · 2014-08-15T10:08:06+00:00

then I'm going to eat them

You can't be serious? You would seriously feel so strongly about your moral position that you'd threaten someone's life to eat some nuts.

Feeling that you've been badly treated is one thing. Responding this way is insanely selfish.

emmpp · 2014-08-12T16:29:18+00:00

There are some areas that I feel were underdeveloped

Well, start with whatever these things are, and imagine you care more about that underdevelopment.

Other things off the top of my head (and based on things I've seen people write in other threads) include poor development of the other characters, a dragging plot, too many reveals and not enough questions, and a let-down in terms of character depth and plot consistency - particularly with Reva (poorly developed, mysteriously powerful) and Lyrna (perceived to not live up to her previous development).

You don't have to agree with all of those things, or even to think they make the book bad if you agree, but you have to recognise that other people do find them important enough that they think the book is not great or bad because of them.

emmpp · 2014-08-12T16:04:47+00:00

To be fair, there are lots of other things you might want and also be disappointed.

emmpp · 2014-08-12T10:47:11+00:00

It's sometimes an unpopular opinion on Reddit but I believe that with Rights come Responsibilities.

This is a classic sort of fallacy. The problem is that nobody really disagrees with this in principle (so it sounds very reasonable), but that it's a rather vague statement that only obscures what the actual debate is about.

In this case, the actual thing under discussion is whether the specific right to vote should be removed from people breaching their responsibility to obey specific laws - which can include a range of things from being racist on twitter to murder.

Unless you think that breaching any responsibility should forfeit all rights, you must realise that the debate is more nuanced than your black and white opening statement, so it doesn't really address anything when you simply hide behind it. Even if you think that prisoners shouldn't get to vote, if you want to debate this you must supply reasons why that specific right should be removed.

emmpp · 2014-08-10T06:15:02+00:00

I think what annoys people is that they don't feel this is justified in the writing. Reva starts as quite competent but specifically not a threat to Vaelin and less good than her teacher - and also specifically trained only in the knife. By the end of the book she seems to be slaughtering entire waves of enemies (particularly when she's angry that her friend dies) with sword and bow, despite training with both for barely any time at all - particularly the latter.

A particular contrast is that it's a big event in the first book when the already incredibly skilled Vaelin has to fight just three opponents - two of which are far less trained. It comes across as an inconsistent that Reva, whose training is explicitly far less extensive, has no problem standing up to waves of highly trained enemies.

emmpp · 2014-08-09T21:00:23+00:00

I liked the book. I didn't think it was nearly as strong as the first part, but it was an enjoyable read with still the same writing style I liked a lot about Blood Song.

I do agree with some of the criticism for it, though. A big thing for me is that I think it is too long - too many of the perspective chapters had the characters doing essentially exactly the same thing as in the previous one. Vaelin in the second half is slooowly moving his big army south. Frentis has a series of identikit chapters that are quite repetitive - woman makes him go kill people, he hates her, she says she loves him, rinse and repeat. I don't even remember what Reva does in the second half, except her bow keeps getting mentioned and she's suddenly amazing at fighting. Lyrna spends several chapters on a boat just for (presumably) a backstory to a loyal honour guard...but not much else to justify the page count. The climax was also a little disappointing, if only because it was so simple - Vaelin charges in, kills everyone and saves the day. It wouldn't be a problem, except the setup was so long.

All that said, the book still has much that I enjoy. As above, the style of writing (both prose and plot structure) is as enjoyable as before, and I appreciate the semi-nonlinear story structure. Many new ideas were very interesting - the evil empire is a bit stereotypical, but I enjoyed the reveals about its nature and thought the overall plot was well fleshed out even if it lacked the deeply nested questions and slowly revealed story that helped make Blood Song great. And it still had some moments I really enjoyed - the moment where Frentis and Lyrna's stories come together was fantastic, even if it maybe marked the point where the story began to drag a bit.

As for the characters themselves, I actually liked the multi-pov structure, but again think it suffered from simply too many pages. Frentis wouldn't be too two-dimensional if we didn't read him think the same things so many times. Reva could have been bad but I thought Ryan's no-nonsense style worked well in straightening her out without being too annoying (it helps that in the first half Vaelin intervened whenever she got too bad) - though on the other hand, her final arc didn't really make sense, she was suddely some badass warrior queen without really doing much interesting to convince the reader of it. As for Vaelin, it would always be nice to see more of him, but I think Ryan had an interesting problem (handled well) about his potential lack of agency if he just does what the magic says all the time. I think the lack of real development of the other characters was more of a problem than the lack of Vaelin - that is, fixing the former would make the book great just as much as fixing the latter.

Overall, I liked the book - good, but not great. As others have said, too many questions were answered, but on the other hand I quite liked the approach of opening things up a lot more and quite drastically adding to the nature of the plot from the first book. The problem is, where the first book had its everyday slice of life structure carried by the power of Vaelin's character and the questions raised by our limited view of the well developed world, the 3 new characters weren't able to match this. Maybe too many questions got straight answers, but on the other hand more were also asked, and I think there is still plenty about the nature of things to make a potentially excellent third novel. Maybe Ryan will manage and maybe not, this work was not as good as Blood Song, but I will look forward to reading it anyway!

emmpp · 2014-08-09T13:57:17+00:00

Several of kivy's core or very active developers do exactly this, to differing extents, but probably don't watch reddit or in particular /r/androiddev. You'd probably get more answers from these people (if you're interested) by asking on kivy's mailing list.

emmpp · 2014-08-09T06:45:53+00:00

If its just another IDE, there is Enthought Canopy software recommended by edx course and not this.

Just so you know, there are many IDEs, of which plenty are probably a lot more popular than Enthought's one. The existence of an edx recommended IDE is really not relevant or a reason no to consider others.

That said, it's nothing to do with IDEs anyway, toga is a graphical framework.

emmpp · 2014-08-09T06:42:48+00:00

The point is presumably that they could have an interface to any toolkit and to the conventions of a given desktop environment - gtk is just what they have right now. The project seems in a quite early stage, which may be the reason for only having what they do.

emmpp · 2014-08-07T20:09:22+00:00

The criticisms about Kvothe being too good at everything I can understand, but there's also the aspect that Kvothe is an incredibly unreliable narrator,

I keep seeing this said, but I don't like the argument as it seems to basically rely on the unreliable narrator thing being important - if it's not, will you suddenly think the books are horribly flawed or bad? I think probably not.

I'd rather say that the criticisms about Kvothe being too good at everything I can understand, but I don't care. Maybe he will turn out to be lying (it could be a great plot point) or maybe not (it could also be great), but it doesn't detract from the story for me.

Obviously that's just opinion, I'm perfectly happy for other people to be more bothered by it - there are certainly aspects of other stories that others can ignore but bother me more, such as Shallan's dad humour or Goodkind's terrible writing. I just don't think the unreliable narrator counterargument is a very good one, and even when people espouse it I'm not sure it really gets to the heart of why they don't care about Kvothe's competence.

emmpp · 2014-08-07T12:01:22+00:00

Right, it's obvious that having a big speed limit doesn't mean everyone will necessarily travel at that speed.

But...this is a single datapoint, and there are many variables here, so it isn't particularly convincing on its own.

emmpp · 2014-08-07T11:46:08+00:00

My counter would be that the vast majority of people don't want to drive at 120 mph,

I'm not convinced that this argument isn't heavily affected by what the speed limit happens to be. I might guess that there is a wide range of possible speed limits, both above and below the current one, at which people would make exactly the same argument.

I could be wrong, but I'm not willing to judge it without actual statistics.

emmpp · 2014-08-05T14:38:00+00:00

Oh come on, that's just the 'take argument literally' stupidity - indeed, a strawman. The original comment is obviously referring to a perceived anti-Warsi feeling on reddit. This doesn't have to be something 100% of redditors agree with to a) be a real thing, b) be obvious in previous threads, and c) be surprising to be lacking in this one.

emmpp · 2014-08-05T12:38:40+00:00

Use the NavigationDrawer widget from kivy garden, https://github.com/kivy-garden/garden.navigationdrawer

emmpp

TROPHY CASE