Lisp prehistory details its invention of the logical IF expression which conditionally evaluates one side or another depending on an evaluated result. Fortran featured computed gotos, but they were awkward to use by comparison.
Don't forget the even bigger "modern" feature people rely on: if-then-else structures.
Such a trivial thing we all take for granted, but Lisp invented the "if" expression as a more specialized version of "cond". Algol copied it and the rest is history.
The idea is that he discovered Lisp could be assembled from seven primitive operators, from which the rest of the language could be built. Though I agree that "discoverer" is a bit of a stretch.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I simply couldn't figure out what problems Google+ solves. The main area is labeled "Stream" and invites me to "Share what's new...", and that's about it. I gather it's similar to the mailing lists of old where people can sign up and receive common messages, but what's the subject? Myself? What I had for lunch? Maybe it's aimed at Facebook people who know what these things are for. But for me, a few use cases would go a long way.
If Amazon is based in state A, takes an order from a customer in state B, and ships the item out of state C, who collects the tax? Collecting on a federal level takes care of that problem, and gets around the constitutional problem of taxing articles exported from any state.
Both Ocaml and Haskell can compile directly to native machine code and aren't tied to decrepit virtual machines. In particular, Haskell's compiler is written in Haskell for optimal bootstrappy fun.
The ethos surrounding HTML5 is that well, lots of old sites didn't follow newer standards, so lets make those web sites standard by taking everything they did shit, and making that standard. So great, yes, let's make shit, the standard. No, that's not how standards work- standards define a high quality that allows maximum compatibility which developers should strive to adhere to, if some don't then don't cater to them- just point out they're shit because they're not standards compliant.
Features browsers implement and people use are the standard. If browsers add the <foo> tag and sites decide it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, then it should be folded into the standard. That way the next guy who writes a browser or a site can know how the tag is supposed to behave. Rough consensus and running code.
Trying to define a "high quality" standard first and handing it down from the ivory tower for browsers to implement isn't going to work. It'll be XHTML or Perl 6 all over again.
At the time, the embarrassment to Microsoft was both deserved and damning. The somewhat sad thing is that I see Apple falling into the exact same position as Microsoft following XP, as Microsoft readies Windows 8, and with Apple having just released Lion, which offers only a few features of merit (Mission Control being the top pick even though it's just an improved version of existing features).
The problem Microsoft has with XP is that by letting it sit and fester for so long, it became very entrenched. Vista and 7 now have to compete with it. And, due to lack of updated software/drivers, some organizations are going to be stuck with it for a long time to come because the migration is painful.
By contrast, Apple's consistently made relatively minor updates to its OS every 18 months or so. Having more predictable OS churn means each release isn't so entrenched, people tend to upgrade relatively quickly and with fewer hassles. A bit like a lot of Linux distros.
So in that respect, I don't think they're in the same position at all.
Hop into Apple's Mac OS App Store and head over to "Categories" -> "Developer Tools" -> "Xcode" and read the reviews for yourself. Minor updates currently require re-downloading the whole 4GB+ application, and people really do care. That's why Apple promised delta updates in the future.
The point is that Linux is still trailing Mac OS in some respects, while Mac OS is still catching up to Linux in others. There's no need to get so offended at such a simple observation.
And Apple has finally introduced downloadable apps to its core OS, like Debian's had since 1999 via apt. But we're still waiting for delta updates to those apps, like Fedora has supported for years via delta RPM.
If you're developing some flash game out of your basement, it's easy to take risks and try something new. But if you've got a budget in the millions of dollars - where a sales disaster could put the company under - it's a lot harder to stray too far from the audience's expectations. Much like the movie industry.
It's more like you have a guarantee to be impoverished if you don't go, and are less likely to be impoverished if you do go.
That's the crux of the college bubble. A lot of people believe that the massive investment in college education (both in time and money) is almost certain to pay off in the long run with higher paying jobs. Just like they believed that an investment in housing or tech stocks was a "sure thing".
But if that belief falters, the students will find themselves "upside-down" on their education expenses and colleges will pay a heavy price as alternatives for high school grads become more mainstream.
There's got to be some way to install it to disk or USB drive (presumably via the disk utility). Otherwise there's no way to restore from a dead hard drive. It'd be madness to have the App Store as the only install option.
Odds are that community doesn't include your local grocer or gas station. You'll still need to transform those Bitcoins back into dollars to get any use out of them, and that dollar value is whatever those traders decide it's worth. That puts Bitcoin somewhere between stone wheels and live chickens in terms of liquidity. That is, it's low-demand commodity rather than any sort of useful currency.
Seems like the premise of Bitcoin is based on a fallacy that they are valuable because they are scarce. Just because all valuable things have some measure of scarcity doesn't imply that the converse is true. If nobody wants to bother trading these things back and forth for goods/services, they're worthless - no matter how many or few of them there are.
The question is why do they need to learn all these things for only a small piece of functionality that they want? If I'm learning to drive a car, I need to understand the rules of the road because I'm piloting several tons of steel that could kill someone if I do it wrong. But if all I want to do is look at somebody's web page, why do I need to learn what windows aren't safe to click on, what the "Start" menu is for, or any of the other required maintenance tasks needed to keep a modern PC going?
For people who only need to do simple things, there should be simple alternatives to full-blown OSes loaded onto full-blown computers. It'll make their lives easier - and mine also since I won't have to field so many calls for help from relatives.
You might need a car with a manual transmission, adjustable ride height, turbocharger and capable of towing X amount of tons. But for a lot of people, they just want something that's easy to drive and gets them to the grocery store.
In computer terms, I'm more in the former camp than the latter. But watching computer illiterates struggle with Windows makes me appreciate just how ill-suited these sorts of OSes are for a large segment of the population and understand the need for an alternative.
I'm also not sure, even on a browser based setup, how you are going to avoid some sort of hierarchical folder / file structure for organizing your mail / bookmarks / photos / videos / documents / whatever. If people are confused by files & folders in Windows, they are still going to be confused by that in Chrome.
Computer illiterates don't organize things hierarchically, at all. Look at their desktops. Once in awhile they'll put things of value in a particular folder, but most of the time everything's just spread out all over until their screen is filled with icons. Or their email box is one giant list of messages they'll either scroll through, or use the search box to sort out.
For these folks, that sort of organization isn't something they understand the value of, or would be able to accomplish if they did. It's "computer maintenance" stuff which is taking time away from the other things they'd rather be doing.
If you've been using Windows for 20 years, naturally it's not going to seem very hard to manage. But for computer illiterates, stuff like files and folders are baffling - not to mention what happens when they're faced with the control panel.
A lot of people just want some appliance that lets them read email and browse the web with a minimum amount of maintenance. That's why they're out buying iPads and that's where this CromeOS thing is aiming for also.
It's probably more a matter of neither of them being willing (or able) to lose a lot of money on each unit of new hardware while they're still paying off the losses of the current generation's launch. That's why they've been trying to encourage this generation to last longer than usual.
Nintendo, on the other hand, generally sells hardware at a profit. This puts them in a good position to bring in a lot of 3rd party development and expand their dominance from the current generation.
CD-Text was invented to fix that problem. But when CDs were first developed, the notion of playback devices that could display such information probably didn't occur to them so it wasn't in the standard.
Sony could hype the Dreamcast to death because it was easy to get everyone to transition from the previous generation's most successful system (the PS1) to its successor (the PS2) and bypass Sega's entry entirely.
They won't necessarily be able to get everyone to transition from this generation's most successful system (the Wii) to the PS4 in such an automatic way.
35mm film has higher resolution than DVD or BD. Thus, most of them are already "high def". Whether people notice the increase in resolution is another matter entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Lisp prehistory details its invention of the logical IF expression which conditionally evaluates one side or another depending on an evaluated result. Fortran featured computed gotos, but they were awkward to use by comparison.
Don't forget the even bigger "modern" feature people rely on: if-then-else structures.
Such a trivial thing we all take for granted, but Lisp invented the "if" expression as a more specialized version of "cond". Algol copied it and the rest is history.
The idea is that he discovered Lisp could be assembled from seven primitive operators, from which the rest of the language could be built. Though I agree that "discoverer" is a bit of a stretch.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but I simply couldn't figure out what problems Google+ solves. The main area is labeled "Stream" and invites me to "Share what's new...", and that's about it. I gather it's similar to the mailing lists of old where people can sign up and receive common messages, but what's the subject? Myself? What I had for lunch? Maybe it's aimed at Facebook people who know what these things are for. But for me, a few use cases would go a long way.
In the meantime, I'll go on ignoring it.
If Amazon is based in state A, takes an order from a customer in state B, and ships the item out of state C, who collects the tax? Collecting on a federal level takes care of that problem, and gets around the constitutional problem of taxing articles exported from any state.
Both Ocaml and Haskell can compile directly to native machine code and aren't tied to decrepit virtual machines. In particular, Haskell's compiler is written in Haskell for optimal bootstrappy fun.
It's weakly typed in the sense that you can add 1 + 'a' and get a valid result. Whereas strongly typed Python or Haskell will raise an error.
+ typically takes more than 2 arguments, such as (+ 1 2 3)
No need to make more calls to it than necessary.
Features browsers implement and people use are the standard. If browsers add the <foo> tag and sites decide it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, then it should be folded into the standard. That way the next guy who writes a browser or a site can know how the tag is supposed to behave. Rough consensus and running code.
Trying to define a "high quality" standard first and handing it down from the ivory tower for browsers to implement isn't going to work. It'll be XHTML or Perl 6 all over again.
The problem Microsoft has with XP is that by letting it sit and fester for so long, it became very entrenched. Vista and 7 now have to compete with it. And, due to lack of updated software/drivers, some organizations are going to be stuck with it for a long time to come because the migration is painful.
By contrast, Apple's consistently made relatively minor updates to its OS every 18 months or so. Having more predictable OS churn means each release isn't so entrenched, people tend to upgrade relatively quickly and with fewer hassles. A bit like a lot of Linux distros.
So in that respect, I don't think they're in the same position at all.
Hop into Apple's Mac OS App Store and head over to "Categories" -> "Developer Tools" -> "Xcode" and read the reviews for yourself. Minor updates currently require re-downloading the whole 4GB+ application, and people really do care. That's why Apple promised delta updates in the future.
The point is that Linux is still trailing Mac OS in some respects, while Mac OS is still catching up to Linux in others. There's no need to get so offended at such a simple observation.
And Apple has finally introduced downloadable apps to its core OS, like Debian's had since 1999 via apt. But we're still waiting for delta updates to those apps, like Fedora has supported for years via delta RPM.
Plenty of anachronisms to go around.
If you're developing some flash game out of your basement, it's easy to take risks and try something new. But if you've got a budget in the millions of dollars - where a sales disaster could put the company under - it's a lot harder to stray too far from the audience's expectations. Much like the movie industry.
That's the crux of the college bubble. A lot of people believe that the massive investment in college education (both in time and money) is almost certain to pay off in the long run with higher paying jobs. Just like they believed that an investment in housing or tech stocks was a "sure thing".
But if that belief falters, the students will find themselves "upside-down" on their education expenses and colleges will pay a heavy price as alternatives for high school grads become more mainstream.
There's got to be some way to install it to disk or USB drive (presumably via the disk utility). Otherwise there's no way to restore from a dead hard drive. It'd be madness to have the App Store as the only install option.
Odds are that community doesn't include your local grocer or gas station. You'll still need to transform those Bitcoins back into dollars to get any use out of them, and that dollar value is whatever those traders decide it's worth. That puts Bitcoin somewhere between stone wheels and live chickens in terms of liquidity. That is, it's low-demand commodity rather than any sort of useful currency.
Seems like the premise of Bitcoin is based on a fallacy that they are valuable because they are scarce. Just because all valuable things have some measure of scarcity doesn't imply that the converse is true. If nobody wants to bother trading these things back and forth for goods/services, they're worthless - no matter how many or few of them there are.
The question is why do they need to learn all these things for only a small piece of functionality that they want? If I'm learning to drive a car, I need to understand the rules of the road because I'm piloting several tons of steel that could kill someone if I do it wrong. But if all I want to do is look at somebody's web page, why do I need to learn what windows aren't safe to click on, what the "Start" menu is for, or any of the other required maintenance tasks needed to keep a modern PC going?
For people who only need to do simple things, there should be simple alternatives to full-blown OSes loaded onto full-blown computers. It'll make their lives easier - and mine also since I won't have to field so many calls for help from relatives.
You might need a car with a manual transmission, adjustable ride height, turbocharger and capable of towing X amount of tons. But for a lot of people, they just want something that's easy to drive and gets them to the grocery store.
In computer terms, I'm more in the former camp than the latter. But watching computer illiterates struggle with Windows makes me appreciate just how ill-suited these sorts of OSes are for a large segment of the population and understand the need for an alternative.
Computer illiterates don't organize things hierarchically, at all. Look at their desktops. Once in awhile they'll put things of value in a particular folder, but most of the time everything's just spread out all over until their screen is filled with icons. Or their email box is one giant list of messages they'll either scroll through, or use the search box to sort out.
For these folks, that sort of organization isn't something they understand the value of, or would be able to accomplish if they did. It's "computer maintenance" stuff which is taking time away from the other things they'd rather be doing.
If you've been using Windows for 20 years, naturally it's not going to seem very hard to manage. But for computer illiterates, stuff like files and folders are baffling - not to mention what happens when they're faced with the control panel.
A lot of people just want some appliance that lets them read email and browse the web with a minimum amount of maintenance. That's why they're out buying iPads and that's where this CromeOS thing is aiming for also.
It's probably more a matter of neither of them being willing (or able) to lose a lot of money on each unit of new hardware while they're still paying off the losses of the current generation's launch. That's why they've been trying to encourage this generation to last longer than usual.
Nintendo, on the other hand, generally sells hardware at a profit. This puts them in a good position to bring in a lot of 3rd party development and expand their dominance from the current generation.
CD-Text was invented to fix that problem. But when CDs were first developed, the notion of playback devices that could display such information probably didn't occur to them so it wasn't in the standard.
Sony could hype the Dreamcast to death because it was easy to get everyone to transition from the previous generation's most successful system (the PS1) to its successor (the PS2) and bypass Sega's entry entirely.
They won't necessarily be able to get everyone to transition from this generation's most successful system (the Wii) to the PS4 in such an automatic way.
35mm film has higher resolution than DVD or BD. Thus, most of them are already "high def". Whether people notice the increase in resolution is another matter entirely.