My point was that In the Beginning... Was the Command Line presents a semi-mystical view of the command line as The One True Way Of Interacting With The Computer, whereas in fact it's just another type of abstraction, and a pretty sophisticated one at that. IIRC, Stephenson acknowledges this at one point in the book, but then ignores it thereafter. The command line isn't the bare metal; it's not even close.
In the beginning... was the vacuum tube. These days, of course, logic gates are much too small to move around by hand, but the point remains.
I wonder why MS is working on a new command line at all. Do people buy Xserves so that they can use the OS X command line?
They buy Xserves so they have a choice -- use the nifty OS X Server GUI admin tools (which are really good, I have to say) if they fit the task, and use the command line if that fits the task. Choice is a Good Thing.
Do people run linux because they love staring at those grey characters on a black screen?
Very often, yes; (usually multicolored, these days) characters on a black (or whatever) screen may seem primitive to you, but to many people they represent an extraordinarily efficient way to get things done.
No one really likes the command line...
*falls over laughing*
plenty of people get by with it, but it's obviously the most primitive computer interface.
No, manually unplugging and plugging in vacuum tubes is the most primitive computer interface. It may not be obvious to you -- or to Neal Stephenson, for that matter -- but today's Unix shells represent an extraordinary level of abstraction from the underlying bare metal.
So why is Microsoft developing it? Do they really believe that *NIX users like their OS because of the command line?
In a word: yes.
Look, not everything is best done on the command line. GUI's are wonderful things, if they're done right. (Which pretty puts any flavor of Windows out of the running, but that's a whole 'nother argument.) But as I said above, they are not the right tool for every task. For power users, especially admins and developers, the command line is very often a better tool. And the best of both worlds, as in Apple's current OS, which Microsoft is again trying (and no doubt failing) to emulate, is being able to switch seamlessly between them as the task at hand demands.
Standard voltages and cycle times are open standards -- they're well known, well understood, and anyone can implement them without fear of getting sued. Microsoft's "standards" offer no such advantages, and as a result, tend to stifle innovation rather than encouraging it.
That doesn't prove Microsoft R&D is worth anything. All it proves is that their R&D section has a pretty website.
It seems like there are always apologists willing to defend Microsoft, or any other big company that makes shitty products and uses slick marketing to crush its better competitors, with the cry, "Look how much money they spend on $X!" So what? If $X sucks, it doesn't matter how much money the company that makes $X spent; it still sucks.
So Microsoft spends a ton of money on algorithms research? Their apps are still slow bloatware. HCI? Their interfaces are still painful to use. Security? Using Windows is still pretty much the equivalent of leaving your PC out on the front lawn with a sign saying, "Steal My Computer." They can tell us about their wonderful research all they want, but it has yet to show any meaningful results.
Re:Will the internet zone now stop "spinning" ?
on
Fox to Purchase Myspace
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· Score: 2, Funny
There's not a whole lot of contradiction between being pro-Chinese-communist-government and the kind of spin Fox News pushes in the US, actually.
I think it's pretty clear that, except for the "jumps," the BSG universe is Newtonian -- i.e., no starship battles at "Warp 2.3" or whatever. And I rather like that the writers seem to have at least some idea of the sheer scale of interstellar space. (As opposed to the old series; I still remember the line, "Sir, the Galactica hasn't been pushed to light speed for some time," after they'd been hopping around various star systems.) The "we've lost the fleet!" subplot in the season 2 premiere was a bit contrived from a plotting POV, IMO, but believable and scary in and of itself.
IOW, as another poster pointed out, "it" is a pronoun, and pronouns don't take the possessive apostrophe. I'm not saying it makes sense, but that's the way it is.
No, it's the other way around; if you have many users on one CPU, charging per CPU makes no sense (unless you charge a lot.) The idea, of course, is for the software company to maximize its revenue, so by charging per CPU for big multiprocessor systems built on cheap commodity processors (which, of course, describes the majority of server setups these days) they can make more money. The justification (other than "we want more money") is that roughly, they expect the number of CPU's to scale with the number of users.
AFAIK, Starbuck so far has been strictly hetero. Most of the "lesbian" half-jokes about the character seem to come from guys who are threatened by strong female characters.
Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, either. (Nor, BTW, did he invent the assembly line.) And the Model T wasn't the first car he produced. But when he did...
So it seems kind of like that. Before Netscape, the Web was an interesting idea, with some modest success, but basically the domain of hobbyists with a high tolerance for quirks. And the first release of the Netscape browser (the "Navigator" name didn't come until a couple years later, IIRC, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong) wasn't all that much of an improvement over Mosaic. But with a little refinement, they hit the sweet spot, in much the same way Ford did, with a product that worked for damn near everybody.
Aaargh. Comments like this turn up in droves in every story that mentions statistics (in any light, whether good or bad) and... wait for it... they're always wrong. 100% of the time. I can state that with absolute certainty. No margin of error.
The fact is, yes, statistics can be misused. So can every other field of study. But used right, statistics are a tremendously powerful way to understand our world, and often reveal information that can't be obtained any other way. And believe me, nobody gets more peeved at statistics abuse than statisticians do.
But that's okay, pal. Just keep on making fun of things you don't understand. The smart people of the world will keep on working, keep doing things that make your and everyone else's life better, whether you know it or not.
HELL NO!!! Are you insane!?!? School sports is a way to unite the student body. It promotes (this may sound corny) school spirit where you have a sense of belonging and pride. This is crucial to any school to mark its place! Please, keep sports in. It also gives motivation for some people to actually go to school.
Are you insane? The only people who are "united" in "school spirit" by high school athletics are the jocks and cheerleaders, or the wannabes. For everyone else, school sports are a source of division, not unity.
On activity: a lot of posts to this story, yours among them are conflating PE with sports. I'm all for more PE -- by all means, keep students active. But organized athletics aren't PE; they're a very specialized activity for a priveleged few. They do nothing to improve the fitness of the overall student, um, body.
As for the people whose sole motivation for going to school is sports... except for the 0.00015% of them who have future careers in the big leagues, how do you think they fare after graduation? They need to be taught skills that will actually help them succeed in life, and as much as I hate to break it to every high school quarterback measuring his finger for the Super Bowl ring, the NFL doesn't actually have that many jobs open.
Yawn. Maybe the submitter actually wants to do something new and significant instead of being a code monkey gluing together other people's innovations?
Clearly he understands the financial side just fine. Just as clearly, he has no understanding of the programming side: why people write "FLOSS" in the first place. The key point I think he misses is that people who write the software do get back -- in prestige, sometimes in money, and by helping keep open source software alive and thus ensuring that they'll get the next generation of cool tools to help them with their own work. That's not enough for everybody, of course, but it's more than enough for a hell of a lot of developers.
Okay, let's put it this way: any degree of technological advancement that makes it possible to produce antimatter efficiently, and store and transport it safely*, would probably create such revolutionary change in our society that terrorism would be the least of our concerns. It would be an upheaval on the order of the Industrial Revolution, only it would happen over months or maybe years, not decades.
*Yes, I know that terrorists are, pretty much by definition, not worried about safety. By "safely" in this context, I mean, "without blowing yourself up before you even get the chance to deliver it to the target."
Honestly, antimatter is no more an "ultimate" WMD than nukes are -- if you blow up a city, it really doesn't matter to the inhabitants of that city that someone did it with antimatter rather than, say, an unaccounted-for Soviet-era nuclear weapon. The reason I'm not terribly worried about antimatter-toting terrorists is the same reason I'm a lot more worried about terrorists getting pre-made nukes than I am about them building one from scratch: it takes a tremendous knowledge base and industrial infrastructure that is beyond the capacity of even the biggest and best-funded terrorist group.
Worrying about terrorists with WMD's makes sense. Worrying about antimatter research in that context is just silly.
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My point was that In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line presents a semi-mystical view of the command line as The One True Way Of Interacting With The Computer, whereas in fact it's just another type of abstraction, and a pretty sophisticated one at that. IIRC, Stephenson acknowledges this at one point in the book, but then ignores it thereafter. The command line isn't the bare metal; it's not even close.
... was the vacuum tube. These days, of course, logic gates are much too small to move around by hand, but the point remains.
In the beginning
I wonder why MS is working on a new command line at all. Do people buy Xserves so that they can use the OS X command line?
They buy Xserves so they have a choice -- use the nifty OS X Server GUI admin tools (which are really good, I have to say) if they fit the task, and use the command line if that fits the task. Choice is a Good Thing.
Do people run linux because they love staring at those grey characters on a black screen?
Very often, yes; (usually multicolored, these days) characters on a black (or whatever) screen may seem primitive to you, but to many people they represent an extraordinarily efficient way to get things done.
No one really likes the command line...
*falls over laughing*
plenty of people get by with it, but it's obviously the most primitive computer interface.
No, manually unplugging and plugging in vacuum tubes is the most primitive computer interface. It may not be obvious to you -- or to Neal Stephenson, for that matter -- but today's Unix shells represent an extraordinary level of abstraction from the underlying bare metal.
So why is Microsoft developing it? Do they really believe that *NIX users like their OS because of the command line?
In a word: yes.
Look, not everything is best done on the command line. GUI's are wonderful things, if they're done right. (Which pretty puts any flavor of Windows out of the running, but that's a whole 'nother argument.) But as I said above, they are not the right tool for every task. For power users, especially admins and developers, the command line is very often a better tool. And the best of both worlds, as in Apple's current OS, which Microsoft is again trying (and no doubt failing) to emulate, is being able to switch seamlessly between them as the task at hand demands.
You must not be on any of the waiting lists I've heard about in the vaunted Canadian healthcare system.
Shocker! -- most Canadians aren't. The waiting lists aren't quite an urban legend, but they're close.
Standard voltages and cycle times are open standards -- they're well known, well understood, and anyone can implement them without fear of getting sued. Microsoft's "standards" offer no such advantages, and as a result, tend to stifle innovation rather than encouraging it.
biologist, economist, statistician, or MBA
... o/~
o/~ One of these things is not like the others
Before badmouthing MS R&D... perhaps you should look into a bit of what they do: http://research.microsoft.com/.
That doesn't prove Microsoft R&D is worth anything. All it proves is that their R&D section has a pretty website.
It seems like there are always apologists willing to defend Microsoft, or any other big company that makes shitty products and uses slick marketing to crush its better competitors, with the cry, "Look how much money they spend on $X!" So what? If $X sucks, it doesn't matter how much money the company that makes $X spent; it still sucks.
So Microsoft spends a ton of money on algorithms research? Their apps are still slow bloatware. HCI? Their interfaces are still painful to use. Security? Using Windows is still pretty much the equivalent of leaving your PC out on the front lawn with a sign saying, "Steal My Computer." They can tell us about their wonderful research all they want, but it has yet to show any meaningful results.
There's not a whole lot of contradiction between being pro-Chinese-communist-government and the kind of spin Fox News pushes in the US, actually.
all the ATM machines that still use OS/2...releasing the code for a product that handles money is probably not the wisest of ideas...
... right?
...
Right, and security through obscurity works so well, which is why Windows is so much harder to hack than Linux.
Um
Oh, wait
it will be called MyPod
...
Leading to the inevitable MyPod vs. PostgrePod flamewars
I think it's pretty clear that, except for the "jumps," the BSG universe is Newtonian -- i.e., no starship battles at "Warp 2.3" or whatever. And I rather like that the writers seem to have at least some idea of the sheer scale of interstellar space. (As opposed to the old series; I still remember the line, "Sir, the Galactica hasn't been pushed to light speed for some time," after they'd been hopping around various star systems.) The "we've lost the fleet!" subplot in the season 2 premiere was a bit contrived from a plotting POV, IMO, but believable and scary in and of itself.
"His car."
"The house is hers."
Etc.
IOW, as another poster pointed out, "it" is a pronoun, and pronouns don't take the possessive apostrophe. I'm not saying it makes sense, but that's the way it is.
No, it's the other way around; if you have many users on one CPU, charging per CPU makes no sense (unless you charge a lot.) The idea, of course, is for the software company to maximize its revenue, so by charging per CPU for big multiprocessor systems built on cheap commodity processors (which, of course, describes the majority of server setups these days) they can make more money. The justification (other than "we want more money") is that roughly, they expect the number of CPU's to scale with the number of users.
I literally have no idea what you are talking about there. Can you please explain this "revanche", "ypres" and "verdun"?
A while back, in another thread, someone was asking "why does history matter?" I think comments like this are a perfect example.
Revanche
Ypres
Verdun
AFAIK, Starbuck so far has been strictly hetero. Most of the "lesbian" half-jokes about the character seem to come from guys who are threatened by strong female characters.
Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, either. (Nor, BTW, did he invent the assembly line.) And the Model T wasn't the first car he produced. But when he did ...
So it seems kind of like that. Before Netscape, the Web was an interesting idea, with some modest success, but basically the domain of hobbyists with a high tolerance for quirks. And the first release of the Netscape browser (the "Navigator" name didn't come until a couple years later, IIRC, but someone please tell me if I'm wrong) wasn't all that much of an improvement over Mosaic. But with a little refinement, they hit the sweet spot, in much the same way Ford did, with a product that worked for damn near everybody.
Aaargh. Comments like this turn up in droves in every story that mentions statistics (in any light, whether good or bad) and ... wait for it ... they're always wrong. 100% of the time. I can state that with absolute certainty. No margin of error.
The fact is, yes, statistics can be misused. So can every other field of study. But used right, statistics are a tremendously powerful way to understand our world, and often reveal information that can't be obtained any other way. And believe me, nobody gets more peeved at statistics abuse than statisticians do.
But that's okay, pal. Just keep on making fun of things you don't understand. The smart people of the world will keep on working, keep doing things that make your and everyone else's life better, whether you know it or not.
Ouch. Good point. Maybe I should have read the post more carefully.
[shrug] He could be 18, of course.
HELL NO!!! Are you insane!?!? School sports is a way to unite the student body. It promotes (this may sound corny) school spirit where you have a sense of belonging and pride. This is crucial to any school to mark its place! Please, keep sports in. It also gives motivation for some people to actually go to school.
... except for the 0.00015% of them who have future careers in the big leagues, how do you think they fare after graduation? They need to be taught skills that will actually help them succeed in life, and as much as I hate to break it to every high school quarterback measuring his finger for the Super Bowl ring, the NFL doesn't actually have that many jobs open.
Are you insane? The only people who are "united" in "school spirit" by high school athletics are the jocks and cheerleaders, or the wannabes. For everyone else, school sports are a source of division, not unity.
On activity: a lot of posts to this story, yours among them are conflating PE with sports. I'm all for more PE -- by all means, keep students active. But organized athletics aren't PE; they're a very specialized activity for a priveleged few. They do nothing to improve the fitness of the overall student, um, body.
As for the people whose sole motivation for going to school is sports
Though I do think kids need to read more, what *is* the point of teaching something that does not have a practical application in life?
Some applications are less obvious than others. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
I guess I'm one of those kids who "doesn't understand why history matters".
Do you vote?
Yawn. Maybe the submitter actually wants to do something new and significant instead of being a code monkey gluing together other people's innovations?
Just wait and see ... [twirls mustache]
Clearly he understands the financial side just fine. Just as clearly, he has no understanding of the programming side: why people write "FLOSS" in the first place. The key point I think he misses is that people who write the software do get back -- in prestige, sometimes in money, and by helping keep open source software alive and thus ensuring that they'll get the next generation of cool tools to help them with their own work. That's not enough for everybody, of course, but it's more than enough for a hell of a lot of developers.
Okay, let's put it this way: any degree of technological advancement that makes it possible to produce antimatter efficiently, and store and transport it safely*, would probably create such revolutionary change in our society that terrorism would be the least of our concerns. It would be an upheaval on the order of the Industrial Revolution, only it would happen over months or maybe years, not decades.
*Yes, I know that terrorists are, pretty much by definition, not worried about safety. By "safely" in this context, I mean, "without blowing yourself up before you even get the chance to deliver it to the target."
Honestly, antimatter is no more an "ultimate" WMD than nukes are -- if you blow up a city, it really doesn't matter to the inhabitants of that city that someone did it with antimatter rather than, say, an unaccounted-for Soviet-era nuclear weapon. The reason I'm not terribly worried about antimatter-toting terrorists is the same reason I'm a lot more worried about terrorists getting pre-made nukes than I am about them building one from scratch: it takes a tremendous knowledge base and industrial infrastructure that is beyond the capacity of even the biggest and best-funded terrorist group.
Worrying about terrorists with WMD's makes sense. Worrying about antimatter research in that context is just silly.
2005: "I predict that zzz1357 will die this year."
2006: "I predict that zzz1357 will die this year."
(...)
2077: "I predict that zzz1357 will die this year."
Sooner or later, the doomsayers are always right.