I want an interface. If I get lost, I want to be able to use it. I'm not interested if Joe Schmoe can find me if I can't find myself...
Then again, it would be a great device for tracking the elderly when they wander off in a fog. I have an ancient and venerable mother whose hippocampus and therefore her ability to process short-term memory is "flambayed".
Why is Jobs suddenly everybody's savior?
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Check out CNN
for drivel about how Jobs should save Tivo because Apple figured out what the record companies couldn't: How to make a buck on-line!
Lets be honest. Apple is for content creators, Tivo is for media consumers. Yeah there is some commonality but...
Its NOT about churning out a first rate product. First rate products are hard to build take time and don't make you very rich very quickly.
GM, Ford and AMC don't churn out great cars. No Lamborghini's, no Roll's Royces, not even a Beamer. But they churn out a lot of crappy ones and make some money on each one.
Its all about the Benjamins. M$ would churn out Goethes, Bachs, Rembrants and Piranene's if anybody figured out a way to make a buck doing that.
But that's not likely is it? So you get "wanna-be" "rip-off" crap that doesn't work well, look good or last long because there's more money in churning crap.
Given the paucity of topologists (the study of deep structure and relationships,) you can imagine how frustrating it is to try to get people to understand the structure under the covers when most CS/IT/MIS people don't even understand that information has topography (the study of the surface.)
They're thrilled to discover and use 2D tables in relational databases (when they don't turn relational integrity off.) Hey, its a step up from flat files, right?
Computing is fundamentally based on exploring the structure of and resolving the problems of expressing some mimetic subset of the universe using Boolean logic state machines.
That's all it can ever possibly be. You're using a computer, a fundamentally finite state machine with prescribed limits (remember the Y2K debacle, that's what it was really about,) you're NOT carving reality out of the ether.
There is no "magic" to it at all.
Anybody who tells you otherwise is the same kind of fool who says "At our company, our people are our biggest ASSET" when any accountant can tell you that, barring slavery, people are expenses paid from the LIABILITY side of a balance sheet.
People hack because its fun (a worthy pursuit.) Hacking creates new paradigms or algorithms for the presentation, storage and manipulation of data and possibly of information.
But the underlying structure will always be the definition and manipulation of objects and relationships in N-Dimensional topology.
I don't own a TV anymore. I got off the channel merry-go-round and have a LIFE now.
That's one more reason to like Apple.
on
The Costs of Patching
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Apart from the Music dowload, uh, stuffff, at their web-store, SoftwareUpdate is the right way to do it.
The download sites are controlled by Apple (and Akamai for all I know) but Apple really serves up the content.
Also they have a better, more secure OS that's conservatively designed and carefullly implemented so viri scouring and bug fixes aren't quite so desperately required by the system owners.
M$ may be too anal-retentive for their client base's own good. The only thing they want to conserve is their cash flow.
Back in 1984 I was working on a source store that I tied into the project management and then I was able to restrict the mainframe's compiler to only accept source from the machines of the guy who was supposed to be working on it.
Even then it went to UT, QA, SIT and finally production. The source and destination environments were set by the workflow NOT developer and depended on who was requesting the compile.
If you weren't supposed to be working on a program, and it didn't have a migration path, you couldn't compile it. BUT you could compile anything you wanted on your own VM (This was on a mainframe. It was in 1984)
The business HAS to change from its current cottage industry "hand-crafting little, very expensive, little gems" basis into a mass-production, "art by the yard" here's the object model, generate it, object (structure, transaction logic, business logic, persistance, state transition, presentation) factory basis.
Smalltalk is extremely SIMPLE but its extremely reflexive. You can ADD statements to the language not just churn out code using it. (I added case: and cases: statements to Smalltalk because I had tosolve a problem with some state machines where it was the best solution. Try doing that in C++ or Java.)
Class libraries, object frameworks, meta data, meta level programming, class and instance behavior (even down to that of and for a single instance,) its all available in Smalltalk.
You start with specs. Then test scripts. Then you write code. IN THAT ORDER.
If I can't tell you want I want, then I'm an incoherent butt-head and I have no business being in business.
If I have no way of checking the specs and what you code against the specs then I'm a disorganized butt-head and I have no business being in business.
If YOU can't tell me what your code is, tell me how it implements whatever feature was in the specs, what its APIs are and what it does (method patterns and parameters) then you have no code.
And if you haven't generated any code then I'm NOT paying you.
"And I bet you wanted to be a rock star when you were a kid..." Yeah sure. I only played my guts out twelve hours a day, day in, day out until I got REALLY good. (I once played a gig and had an audience of mostly other guitarists and their girl friends LISTENING [you could have a hear a pin drop, even the waiters weren't making any noise,] scared the living crap outta me. I was GOOD!)
Then I was led to the same conculsion as Gary Numan. The music industry is first about profits and then about product. YOU don't even enter into the calculations.
If you love music, do not try making any kind of recording. Just play... Live music performing is the only way...
Otherwise you'll end up running a placement agency in some god forsaken little town (okay Montreal ain't so small,) if you were smart enough and hung on to what ever cash you managed to squeeze out of the pipe and remembering your glory days.
I chucked it all in and went into software development (yeah... big mistake,) and now I'm into getting drunk, smoking my brains out and bleeding my life out my ass-hole.
Same ol' same ol'...
Wow! That was really pointless and boring
on
New Dual System PC
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· Score: 1
Dudes, it must suck to be you...
That brought zero to the state of the art. Talk about being stuck on/in a case.
How about improving component accessibility next time. Your case looked like it was filled with flatulent intestines.
It'll take longer to clear security than ever.
on
Building the A380
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· Score: 0
It already takes longer to go through the airport security than to fly between airports. (Just because the stupid idiot airlines INSIST on having unsecured cabin doors, [wrap the pilots in a kevlar cage and we could run a turkey shoot in steerage, uh, economy class.])
I definitely __never__ want to fly in one of those bloated turkeys. (I know turkeys don't fly.) With any (bad) luck they'll be running some M$ software.
I can't believe that A) the USPO awarded this B) that any court in the country could believe that this is more than an IP grab (on par with the misquoted Gore claiming he inverted the internet) c) that anybody's actually given them a dime.
All money willl belong to Bill Gates's daughter.
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 0, Troll
She will suffer for you to use it but only at a ususious rate, (like father, like daughter.)
If its purely internal then they should use a VPN and/or intranet and keep their stuff OFF the web.
The web is about as private as yelling at the top of your lungs at a karaoke competition. Anybody who thinks they can tell you to listen with one ear or the other is dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
I want an interface. If I get lost, I want to be able to use it. I'm not interested if Joe Schmoe can find me if I can't find myself...
Then again, it would be a great device for tracking the elderly when they wander off in a fog. I have an ancient and venerable mother whose hippocampus and therefore her ability to process short-term memory is "flambayed".
Lets be honest. Apple is for content creators, Tivo is for media consumers. Yeah there is some commonality but...
Its NOT about churning out a first rate product. First rate products are hard to build take time and don't make you very rich very quickly.
GM, Ford and AMC don't churn out great cars. No Lamborghini's, no Roll's Royces, not even a Beamer. But they churn out a lot of crappy ones and make some money on each one.
Its all about the Benjamins. M$ would churn out Goethes, Bachs, Rembrants and Piranene's if anybody figured out a way to make a buck doing that.
But that's not likely is it? So you get "wanna-be" "rip-off" crap that doesn't work well, look good or last long because there's more money in churning crap.
Given the paucity of topologists (the study of deep structure and relationships,) you can imagine how frustrating it is to try to get people to understand the structure under the covers when most CS/IT/MIS people don't even understand that information has topography (the study of the surface.)
They're thrilled to discover and use 2D tables in relational databases (when they don't turn relational integrity off.) Hey, its a step up from flat files, right?
Computing is fundamentally based on exploring the structure of and resolving the problems of expressing some mimetic subset of the universe using Boolean logic state machines.
That's all it can ever possibly be. You're using a computer, a fundamentally finite state machine with prescribed limits (remember the Y2K debacle, that's what it was really about,) you're NOT carving reality out of the ether.
There is no "magic" to it at all.
Anybody who tells you otherwise is the same kind of fool who says "At our company, our people are our biggest ASSET" when any accountant can tell you that, barring slavery, people are expenses paid from the LIABILITY side of a balance sheet.
People hack because its fun (a worthy pursuit.) Hacking creates new paradigms or algorithms for the presentation, storage and manipulation of data and possibly of information.
But the underlying structure will always be the definition and manipulation of objects and relationships in N-Dimensional topology.
I don't own a TV anymore. I got off the channel merry-go-round and have a LIFE now.
Apart from the Music dowload, uh, stuffff, at their web-store, SoftwareUpdate is the right way to do it.
The download sites are controlled by Apple (and Akamai for all I know) but Apple really serves up the content.
Also they have a better, more secure OS that's conservatively designed and carefullly implemented so viri scouring and bug fixes aren't quite so desperately required by the system owners.
M$ may be too anal-retentive for their client base's own good. The only thing they want to conserve is their cash flow.
There's no need to screw with the compilers.
Back in 1984 I was working on a source store that I tied into the project management and then I was able to restrict the mainframe's compiler to only accept source from the machines of the guy who was supposed to be working on it.
Even then it went to UT, QA, SIT and finally production. The source and destination environments were set by the workflow NOT developer and depended on who was requesting the compile.
If you weren't supposed to be working on a program, and it didn't have a migration path, you couldn't compile it. BUT you could compile anything you wanted on your own VM (This was on a mainframe. It was in 1984)
couldn't any atom in the valence group do as well? (I'm remembering my old chart of the elements and we could have silicon nanotubes too.)
Smalltalk.
The business HAS to change from its current cottage industry "hand-crafting little, very expensive, little gems" basis into a mass-production, "art by the yard" here's the object model, generate it, object (structure, transaction logic, business logic, persistance, state transition, presentation) factory basis.
Smalltalk is extremely SIMPLE but its extremely reflexive. You can ADD statements to the language not just churn out code using it. (I added case: and cases: statements to Smalltalk because I had tosolve a problem with some state machines where it was the best solution. Try doing that in C++ or Java.)
Class libraries, object frameworks, meta data, meta level programming, class and instance behavior (even down to that of and for a single instance,) its all available in Smalltalk.
This might lead to a resurgence of the language. It can be retooled to be object oriented (anybody remember Neon?)
...
Smalltalk might be another IDE for FPGAs as objects can be defined which represent gates and
I think I'll shut up now and find a Xylinx manual on the web somewhere.
Anybody remember the gem that was the wearable computer in the movie Zardoz?
I'd laugh my ass off if it was scientifically sound.
Nature imitating art indeed.
STARVE the RIAA.
Now... How do I get it onto a laptop LCD?
You start with specs. Then test scripts. Then you write code. IN THAT ORDER.
If I can't tell you want I want, then I'm an incoherent butt-head and I have no business being in business.
If I have no way of checking the specs and what you code against the specs then I'm a disorganized butt-head and I have no business being in business.
If YOU can't tell me what your code is, tell me how it implements whatever feature was in the specs, what its APIs are and what it does (method patterns and parameters) then you have no code.
And if you haven't generated any code then I'm NOT paying you.
THAT's why you want to write docs.
"And I bet you wanted to be a rock star when you were a kid..." Yeah sure. I only played my guts out twelve hours a day, day in, day out until I got REALLY good. (I once played a gig and had an audience of mostly other guitarists and their girl friends LISTENING [you could have a hear a pin drop, even the waiters weren't making any noise,] scared the living crap outta me. I was GOOD!)
Then I was led to the same conculsion as Gary Numan. The music industry is first about profits and then about product. YOU don't even enter into the calculations.
If you love music, do not try making any kind of recording. Just play... Live music performing is the only way...
Otherwise you'll end up running a placement agency in some god forsaken little town (okay Montreal ain't so small,) if you were smart enough and hung on to what ever cash you managed to squeeze out of the pipe and remembering your glory days.
I chucked it all in and went into software development (yeah... big mistake,) and now I'm into getting drunk, smoking my brains out and bleeding my life out my ass-hole.
Same ol' same ol'...
Dudes, it must suck to be you...
That brought zero to the state of the art. Talk about being stuck on/in a case.
How about improving component accessibility next time. Your case looked like it was filled with flatulent intestines.
It already takes longer to go through the airport security than to fly between airports. (Just because the stupid idiot airlines INSIST on having unsecured cabin doors, [wrap the pilots in a kevlar cage and we could run a turkey shoot in steerage, uh, economy class.])
I definitely __never__ want to fly in one of those bloated turkeys. (I know turkeys don't fly.) With any (bad) luck they'll be running some M$ software.
Lots of people use Virtual PC to run essential Windows business software because there's no Mca PowerPC implementation.
Now that option is at risk. And is likely to just dry up and blow away as M$ "leverages" its OS across platforms.
Go to a show instead or just listen to the wind whistling between your classmates' ears.
Watch the fuckers crumble when their cash flow flat-lines.
Using the employer's boxen to have fun has ALWAYS been a nono.
What is this folly? Do the chemistry and the physics. CO2 behaves the same on Alpha-Centauri as it does on the moon.
I can't believe that
A) the USPO awarded this
B) that any court in the country could believe that this is more than an IP grab (on par with the misquoted Gore claiming he inverted the internet)
c) that anybody's actually given them a dime.
She will suffer for you to use it but only at a ususious rate, (like father, like daughter.)
If its purely internal then they should use a VPN and/or intranet and keep their stuff OFF the web.
The web is about as private as yelling at the top of your lungs at a karaoke competition. Anybody who thinks they can tell you to listen with one ear or the other is dumb.
Most systems are badly designed, when they're not just thrown together without a thought to the poor schmuck who's got to use it.
We keep finding new ways to screw up and the user gets to pay us and bite the bullet.
Ain't modern technology grand?