They went for a Java model with no graphical layout tool instead of building in a VB-style GUI/code editor. I cannot hack a firefox extension easily, and I have a Ph.D in comp sci. No surprise that only the 3133T kiddies are doing it?
This reminds me of the famous Microsoft Halloween document on Linux: The MS guy *wrote a device driver * in a weekend for Linux, and then mailed his bosses that there is no such thing as a weekend device driver in NT. Well folks, for once the shoe is on the other foot !
So far, Intel has enforced market segmentation: You could get a laptop *or* a space-heater. This model is an indication that laptop processors will now be allowed to trickle into the general market. Ipod sized servers and child-pizza sized desktop comps are well within Intel's ability - just look at the size of the "computer" in your laptop.
Microsoft will doubtless resist the move: if it's not a "PC" then clients might not want "Windows", that clunky 19th century command center for a steam-powered computing box. Dell etc will also resist, because clients might get into the nasty habit of upgrading their CPUs only; even worse, some might dump laptops in favor of just taking their company "mini desktop" home in the backpack.
Summary - the Mac mini has broken Apple's hi-price policy, but it has also broken many of the unwritten laws of the PC cartel. Clearly, a form factor who's time has come !
I think parent was trying to be funny, not troll. Of course, with the IQ on/. getting diluted down to 100, this is being read as a straight karmawhore comment:)
That's just because Denmark is so small that M$ had forgotten to buy the Danish politicians. You shouldn't have said that in public, M$ read Slashdot too, the check is now in the mail.
From the response, I guess my comment needs clarification: 5 years to wait for a plot resolution seems overlong to me. 1 year seems reasonable.
Which is why I thought that Seasons might become Campaigns, say each beginning with an incident or a mission briefing, moving to a new locale, and (mostly) resolving at the end of the Campaign.
Am I the only one here having trouble making myself understood with terse Usenet style messages ?
Actually, Multics was deployed commercially, I used it at a university site and it was amazing how well it worked compared to the IBM timesharing systems that were the alternative then in scientific computation (no Vaxen at that time). I think there were some commercial issues rather, the system was mature and deployed.
I think the rings stem from Multics, a multiprocessor system which preceded Unix. (Unix is not Multics...) . Unix was simpler, but Multics had a lot of interesting stuff from the start, like many processors, disk-mapped processes that had persistent data from invocation to invocation etc. I don' really know why Multics went under, it was fun to use.
M$ and friends have vast amounts of money. By prolonging the process of debate the parliament keeps the meter running and members will get some real backhanders.
You raise many valid points; however, the point I was trying to make is that the original Xerox machines, and their successors (Xerox Documenter) had a richer variety of interface options (special cut paste keyboard buttons, rotatatble displays, multiple mouse keys) as standard *on every machine* not as buy-time options . Apple chose to simplify, and their choices make sense for the time, and made sense for a beginner's small-screen machine. When Jobs made NeXt he brought back the big screen, and the second non-modal mouse button. It is non-modal in the NeXT because *it does exactly the same thing at any time as the main menu*. You just get there bly click, rather than move to top and click. It is modal in Smalltalk, because it invokes a context menu. This is an improtant difference, as the Smalltalk three button model is a nightmare.
Actually, I spoke with one of the Xerox founders. He explained to me that he founded Adobe when he cracked the problem of displaying the fonts with a decent "look", a rasterisation trick which I forget. As we all know, the Xerox machines already came with Interpress (was that the name ?) as a page definition language, but the page quality was not that great. In fact as the writer of a laser driver in those days, I can certify that the display was often yucky when viewed up close.
As to the actual availability of the Xerox machines, I simply don't know how it went. We had a lab full of them in Cambridge, UK, and obviously there must have been people in the US who had them. My feeling is that anyone in CS at the time who was somebody (not the millions who are around today!) had seen them, played with them, and integrated some of their features into whatever they were doing. A good example is Wirth with Lilith, Turbo Pascal in its later incarnations, the Acorn Arm system, the Lisp machines of Weinreb and Moon, X, etc. All of these people got some features right, improved some stuff and made some "improvements" that should best be forgotten. And yes, I know it sounds wierd but Windows 1.0 actually beat the Mac to market. And, yes, I saw it run and it was worse than pitiable.
The Xerox machines existed well before the Mac - Xerox is where the original research on mice and windowed interfaces was done, and it was, I agree pretty confusing - depending on which third of the title bar of a window you clicked in, with which mouse chord, you'd get a different effect. This was before the time when you could patent cold water, so Apple and Microsoft ripped off the basic research on windows, blitting, MVC, the mouse, bitmapped fonts etc, and made the Lisa and Windows 1.0 fairly contemporaneously.
Apple deserves a lot of the credit for cleaning up the interface concepts, but not for inventing them. The original Xerox machines had more ideas; for instance any screen could be turned from Landscape Portrait depending how the user wanted to work. The screen was HUGE from the outset, allowing fullpage text layout. The keyboard had cut, paste, copy keys. Apple dumped a lot of these useful ideas when they made the Mac (rotating displays would be useful to this day). The multi-buttoned mouse was one of the unwarranted casualties of this simplification, as well as the tiny screen which though an economical necessity changed the character of the whole interface.
When Jobs went off to found NeXT he fixed many of the Mac's problems - instability of the base OS, lack of easy development tools, excessively small screen. And he put the second mouse button back.
I used to own a NeXT, and used the old Xerox machines, which believe it or not existed before the Mac. The nice thing about pulldown menus is that they appear wherever your mouse already is - click the right button, get a menu. On the NeXT all the apps could generate a menu anywhere with the right button, this meant you could avoid going to the screen menu and made life much faster.
I just wish there were a second *hardware* button on the machine, bound to the same action, and an OS preference to activate it to generate the pulldown menu which is still buried somewhere in the Mac OS if I remember rightly. That way noone gets confused, and power users get the second button.
This is not a troll, if Apple is not made aware that their target audience want improvements to the already excellent machines, the machines won't get better. Ah, yes, I also would like better battery life.
Congrats for being the first. Now, for the funny bit.
Maybe it would be easier for LeNovo to purchase Dell or HP, they have all their Turing human-equivalent english speakers (sales, support) located in India, and Lenovo does manufacturing anyway in China.
Well, I don't know whether rule of the law means making a different law every 3 years as they're doing in the US or Europe ? No one has the slightest idea how to interpret these "laws" anyway.
In your infinite bounty, you have brought down our server.
Please check back once the/. effect has subsided. Here's the URL to bookmark: http://intelligence.visitorville.com
Thanks for your interest!
Robert Savage, Mayor, VisitorVille
Re:Comprehensive interviews are very important.
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
No, in fact I had a much earlier account but forgot the id I was using then, when my neuron count descended to that of a Blonde C Programerette.
Re:All languages are not the same
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
I personally hate the C syntax, although I can see that people around me like it. However, I think one of the worse decisions that the Java team made was the C syntax, that then got copied into a really bad place, namely Javascript. As a result, coders feel comfortable with Java and Javascript, but non-coders won't touch them.
Apple's HyperCard showed how a huge fragment of the non-coding user community can embrace a carefully designed scripting language. However it is a telling fact that Apple third-party developers actually staged a protest against HyperTalk and HyperCard at the time, because they thought enabling users to script would deprive them of income !
How to find a programmer on Slashdot
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
By the way - if a person has a low id number (s)he usually knows something about coding.
Re:All languages are not the same
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
ROTFL - Lisp has no looping ? Lisp as I remember it, had an "anything and the kitchen sink" loop macro of tremendous power - and complexity. I only programmed full-time in Lisp for two years so I probably don't know it as well as you I taught Prolog at university for 4 years so I certainly don't know it as well as you either.
Your remark about non-intuitive makes my point - these languages are non-intuitive to the C prpgrammer, because they require a different (not necessarily better) skill-set. I am hopeless at C, whose syntax frustrates me. I watch the kids today and they easily throw together apps in 5 different environments (Perl, SQL, shell etc) with no problems, again a different skill.
Yes, Sir, any language which seems counter-intutive to you is useless.
All languages are not the same
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
No, all languages are not the same. A C programmer and a Prolog programmer bring different skills to bear. Which is why all of the better languages (Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk) get thrown on the scrap-heap, because you cannot retrofit the necessary skills on the "normal" majority of the programming population. Some time ago,the majority of that population had the skills and mindset needed for C. now I think it's mostly windows scripting tools.
Re:Comprehensive interviews are very important.
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Quote: A company filled with 'A' players will win every time.
This is the obvious posiiton, like most obvious positions it does not match competitive reality: Look at the sports arena which allows fast-paced testing of such hypotheses. Real Madrid has the world's best soccer players, including Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo *and* David Beckham. But the team as a whole has been underperforming. I see no reason why a company should not be subject to the same phenomena.
It would be nice if people on slashdot did not say the obvious thing, or at least did not mod up the obvious thing - otherwise Slashdot will in the end just model the most commonly held assumptions which are often also the dumbest ones:) Go ahead and mod this post down, I know you will anyway - anyone smart is now surfing at ground level here.
One of these days, everything will be on Google and firms will get paid by he number of cycles run in their apps, from a pool of moneys levied by bandwithtax - yuck.
Slashdot Mirror
They went for a Java model with no graphical layout tool instead of building in a VB-style GUI/code editor. I cannot hack a firefox extension easily, and I have a Ph.D in comp sci. No surprise that only the 3133T kiddies are doing it?
This reminds me of the famous Microsoft Halloween document on Linux: The MS guy *wrote a device driver * in a weekend for Linux, and then mailed his bosses that there is no such thing as a weekend device driver in NT. Well folks, for once the shoe is on the other foot !
So far, Intel has enforced market segmentation: You could get a laptop *or* a space-heater. This model is an indication that laptop processors will now be allowed to trickle into the general market. Ipod sized servers and child-pizza sized desktop comps are well within Intel's ability - just look at the size of the "computer" in your laptop.
Microsoft will doubtless resist the move: if it's not a "PC" then clients might not want "Windows", that clunky 19th century command center for a steam-powered computing box. Dell etc will also resist, because clients might get into the nasty habit of upgrading their CPUs only; even worse, some might dump laptops in favor of just taking their company "mini desktop" home in the backpack.
Summary - the Mac mini has broken Apple's hi-price policy, but it has also broken many of the unwritten laws of the PC cartel. Clearly, a form factor who's time has come !
Glad to see that my core target audience is grokking my message :)
I think parent was trying to be funny, not troll. Of course, with the IQ on /. getting diluted down to 100, this is being read as a straight karmawhore comment :)
That's just because Denmark is so small that M$ had forgotten to buy the Danish politicians. You shouldn't have said that in public, M$ read Slashdot too, the check is now in the mail.
From the response, I guess my comment needs clarification: 5 years to wait for a plot resolution seems overlong to me. 1 year seems reasonable.
Which is why I thought that Seasons might become Campaigns, say each beginning with an incident or a mission briefing, moving to a new locale, and (mostly) resolving at the end of the Campaign.
Am I the only one here having trouble making myself understood with terse Usenet style messages ?
Maybe JMS can sell one-year long mini-series or something ? Bab5 was overlong, although the idea of a multi-episode script was nicely exercised .
Actually, Multics was deployed commercially, I used it at a university site and it was amazing how well it worked compared to the IBM timesharing systems that were the alternative then in scientific computation (no Vaxen at that time). I think there were some commercial issues rather, the system was mature and deployed.
Yes; we need more accurate data here, if this should not be taken for a troll
I think the rings stem from Multics, a multiprocessor system which preceded Unix. (Unix is not Multics...) . Unix was simpler, but Multics had a lot of interesting stuff from the start, like many processors, disk-mapped processes that had persistent data from invocation to invocation etc. I don' really know why Multics went under, it was fun to use.
M$ and friends have vast amounts of money. By prolonging the process of debate the parliament keeps the meter running and members will get some real backhanders.
You raise many valid points; however, the point I was trying to make is that the original Xerox machines, and their successors (Xerox Documenter) had a richer variety of interface options (special cut paste keyboard buttons, rotatatble displays, multiple mouse keys) as standard *on every machine* not as buy-time options . Apple chose to simplify, and their choices make sense for the time, and made sense for a beginner's small-screen machine. When Jobs made NeXt he brought back the big screen, and the second non-modal mouse button. It is non-modal in the NeXT because *it does exactly the same thing at any time as the main menu*. You just get there bly click, rather than move to top and click. It is modal in Smalltalk, because it invokes a context menu. This is an improtant difference, as the Smalltalk three button model is a nightmare.
Actually, I spoke with one of the Xerox founders. He explained to me that he founded Adobe when he cracked the problem of displaying the fonts with a decent "look", a rasterisation trick which I forget. As we all know, the Xerox machines already came with Interpress (was that the name ?) as a page definition language, but the page quality was not that great. In fact as the writer of a laser driver in those days, I can certify that the display was often yucky when viewed up close.
As to the actual availability of the Xerox machines, I simply don't know how it went. We had a lab full of them in Cambridge, UK, and obviously there must have been people in the US who had them. My feeling is that anyone in CS at the time who was somebody (not the millions who are around today!) had seen them, played with them, and integrated some of their features into whatever they were doing. A good example is Wirth with Lilith, Turbo Pascal in its later incarnations, the Acorn Arm system, the Lisp machines of Weinreb and Moon, X, etc. All of these people got some features right, improved some stuff and made some "improvements" that should best be forgotten. And yes, I know it sounds wierd but Windows 1.0 actually beat the Mac to market. And, yes, I saw it run and it was worse than pitiable.
The Xerox machines existed well before the Mac - Xerox is where the original research on mice and windowed interfaces was done, and it was, I agree pretty confusing - depending on which third of the title bar of a window you clicked in, with which mouse chord, you'd get a different effect. This was before the time when you could patent cold water, so Apple and Microsoft ripped off the basic research on windows, blitting, MVC, the mouse, bitmapped fonts etc, and made the Lisa and Windows 1.0 fairly contemporaneously.
Apple deserves a lot of the credit for cleaning up the interface concepts, but not for inventing them. The original Xerox machines had more ideas; for instance any screen could be turned from Landscape Portrait depending how the user wanted to work. The screen was HUGE from the outset, allowing fullpage text layout. The keyboard had cut, paste, copy keys. Apple dumped a lot of these useful ideas when they made the Mac (rotating displays would be useful to this day). The multi-buttoned mouse was one of the unwarranted casualties of this simplification, as well as the tiny screen which though an economical necessity changed the character of the whole interface.
When Jobs went off to found NeXT he fixed many of the Mac's problems - instability of the base OS, lack of easy development tools, excessively small screen. And he put the second mouse button back.
I hope this is enough clarification.
I used to own a NeXT, and used the old Xerox machines, which believe it or not existed before the Mac. The nice thing about pulldown menus is that they appear wherever your mouse already is - click the right button, get a menu. On the NeXT all the apps could generate a menu anywhere with the right button, this meant you could avoid going to the screen menu and made life much faster.
I just wish there were a second *hardware* button on the machine, bound to the same action, and an OS preference to activate it to generate the pulldown menu which is still buried somewhere in the Mac OS if I remember rightly. That way noone gets confused, and power users get the second button.
This is not a troll, if Apple is not made aware that their target audience want improvements to the already excellent machines, the machines won't get better. Ah, yes, I also would like better battery life.
Congrats for being the first. Now, for the funny bit.
Maybe it would be easier for LeNovo to purchase Dell or HP, they have all their Turing human-equivalent english speakers (sales, support) located in India, and Lenovo does manufacturing anyway in China.
Well, I don't know whether rule of the law means making a different law every 3 years as they're doing in the US or Europe ? No one has the slightest idea how to interpret these "laws" anyway.
If you can't be bothered with an installation, and want auto-security update, then you could do worse than buy one of these as a web or file server.
:)
Even more so for those who need a web server and have no command-line experience. BSD stability, at a Windows price point
Nyahahahahaha:
/. effect has subsided. Here's the URL to bookmark: http://intelligence.visitorville.com
Dear Slashdotter,
We're sorry we missed you.
In your infinite bounty, you have brought down our server.
Please check back once the
Thanks for your interest!
Robert Savage, Mayor, VisitorVille
No, in fact I had a much earlier account but forgot the id I was using then, when my neuron count descended to that of a Blonde C Programerette.
I personally hate the C syntax, although I can see that people around me like it. However, I think one of the worse decisions that the Java team made was the C syntax, that then got copied into a really bad place, namely Javascript. As a result, coders feel comfortable with Java and Javascript, but non-coders won't touch them.
Apple's HyperCard showed how a huge fragment of the non-coding user community can embrace a carefully designed scripting language. However it is a telling fact that Apple third-party developers actually staged a protest against HyperTalk and HyperCard at the time, because they thought enabling users to script would deprive them of income !
By the way - if a person has a low id number (s)he usually knows something about coding.
ROTFL - Lisp has no looping ? Lisp as I remember it, had an "anything and the kitchen sink" loop macro of tremendous power - and complexity. I only programmed full-time in Lisp for two years so I probably don't know it as well as you I taught Prolog at university for 4 years so I certainly don't know it as well as you either.
Your remark about non-intuitive makes my point - these languages are non-intuitive to the C prpgrammer, because they require a different (not necessarily better) skill-set. I am hopeless at C, whose syntax frustrates me. I watch the kids today and they easily throw together apps in 5 different environments (Perl, SQL, shell etc) with no problems, again a different skill.
Yes, Sir, any language which seems counter-intutive to you is useless.
No, all languages are not the same. A C programmer and a Prolog programmer bring different skills to bear. Which is why all of the better languages (Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk) get thrown on the scrap-heap, because you cannot retrofit the necessary skills on the "normal" majority of the programming population. Some time ago,the majority of that population had the skills and mindset needed for C. now I think it's mostly windows scripting tools.
Quote: A company filled with 'A' players will win every time.
:) Go ahead and mod this post down, I know you will anyway - anyone smart is now surfing at ground level here.
This is the obvious posiiton, like most obvious positions it does not match competitive reality: Look at the sports arena which allows fast-paced testing of such hypotheses. Real Madrid has the world's best soccer players, including Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo *and* David Beckham. But the team as a whole has been underperforming. I see no reason why a company should not be subject to the same phenomena.
It would be nice if people on slashdot did not say the obvious thing, or at least did not mod up the obvious thing - otherwise Slashdot will in the end just model the most commonly held assumptions which are often also the dumbest ones
One of these days, everything will be on Google and firms will get paid by he number of cycles run in their apps, from a pool of moneys levied by bandwithtax - yuck.