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gfour's comments

gfour | 4 years ago | on: Rack 2 (Virtual Eurorack)

This isn't just skeuomorphism as found in e.g. a VST plugin with a sci-fi UI or a patching language with a UI resembling studio-like effect chains. This is a simulator of a real implementation of modular patching (Eurorack), for example signals mimic real Volt scaling and the dark mode is like actually dimming your room lights. So, questions of how to "develop" in this mindset can also be directed to users of the actual hardware, who do not go through a computer UI.

gfour | 5 years ago | on: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

> I'd love to hear more about how a culture that doesn't name children under 5, do their child rearing and generally go about their life.

(Christian Orthodox, majority) Greeks don't name babies when born, only when baptized (usually during the first year, but could be later). Until then, they appear on formal documents as either "male"/"female" or as "AKO" ("no first name"). In practice, people either call a baby "the baby" or may sometimes use the (future) name informally.

gfour | 11 years ago | on: Anthropomorphism Gone Wrong: OOP

This confuses OOP/procedural semantics with low-level "CPU" work. The argument seems to be that the programming model of a language does not always expose the efficiency of the underlying implementation. And this is also true for "anthropomorphic" models.

gfour | 11 years ago | on: FreeBSD: the next 10 years

> The trick was that when Gtk/Gnome came out there was no existing solution. So, even a bad one was okay.

There were existing solutions, e.g. Motif or Athena widgets if you wanted a GUI library, or FVWM if you wanted a desktop environment. Of course, GTK/GNOME was a significant improvement.

gfour | 11 years ago | on: The peculiar status of PhD-employees

True. By "competitive" I didn't mean "same money", but "an equally good choice for enough people to fill the PhD ranks". Bad or non-existent wages are almost never an easy choice, no matter how much one wants to do research or become a professor (unless they already have money and can be self-funded during the PhD). Lack of funding can lead to part-time PhDs or extra day jobs, making it more taxing, lowering the quality of the research, and even leading to failure to complete the degree (in which case, the person just wasted their time).

A PhD student should get a "living wage" as you say -- enough compensation to be able to continue and finish. Industry wages and research wages are different: being paid to work on a product which has a financial plan behind it works differently from trying to improve the state of the art, which can lead to small contributions or even a mathematical proof that it cannot be done :-)

gfour | 11 years ago | on: The peculiar status of PhD-employees

Starting a PhD means someone has already mastered the basics of a profession, and is at an age that could work productively in the industry. At this point, doing a PhD is a choice between academia and industry for the next 4-5 years. If an industry really exists (e.g. STEM fields), PhD programs must be competitive with it; they must offer something like a job. Of course, there are fields where PhD programs have less funding and the status of PhD employees is less frequent: a PhD in literature may have less funding available compared to a PhD in bioinformatics and will attract people that have different expectations.

About the freedom of choosing a thesis topic, I think this depends on both the style of supervision (controlling boss vs. laissez-faire situation) and the funding project (some have vague goals and can accept a wide range of topics, while others are very focused on mini areas).

And I think danieldk is right about the money: you are welcome to accept less of it, this doesn't mean that the money saved by the state is really going where you want it to go...

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