And if only Apple weren't so resistant to copying back from MS.....
MS doesn't care who came up with an idea. If customers like it, they'll absorb it. If Apple popularized it, then fine, it's popular, and MS will accept it on that basis.
Apple seems to be the opposite. If MS popularized it, they don't want it, no matter how well-liked it is. It seems to offend their sense of being the ones with all the best UI ideas to acknowledge that a different UI approach from Microsoft(!) might actually be better.
Terrific ideas like the task bar, 2-button mice, scroll wheels, quitting an app when you close its document window, etc., have proven themselves in the mass market, but it took Apple forever to add a task bar (they probably couldn't release it until it looked sufficiently different from MS's) and "the mouse you can operate with your foot" is still the standard despite the fact that every seven-year-old in the US is handling a two-button mouse without confusion.
I've always admired Steve Jobs' passion for creating insanely great products, and innovation is a big part of it. But, I think the products could be even better if Apple had the humility to do a little more copying from less innovative sources that still manage to come up with some good ideas every now and then.
I usually tell beginners to buy a Wordtank, and advanced students to get a Zaurus.
In what ways is the Zaurus better for advanced students than the WordTank? (I've never used a Japanese Zaurus, so I'm not arguing, I'm asking.)
I rarely have trouble with stroke order, BTW, but I still frequently need to look up Japanese words and kanji or find a good translation for an English word. The easier and faster, and the more info, hypertexting between dictionaries, examples, jukugo, furigana, etc., the better.
If I had to specify a single cultural difference, it would be the difference between mass markets and customization. In the Windows and Mac worlds, great effort is made to keep everyone's machines similar so they're easier to learn, use, maintain, write mass market software for, install software on, upgrade, etc.
In the Unix world, the emphasis is on creating something that's maximally useful to an individual by allowing everything to be customized. This creates horrendous fragmentation, which can only be reasonably dealt with if each user is very computer-savvy and mostly takes care of his own problems.
The latter appeals more to power users, because they are interested in putting the time in and getting extra power as a result.
The former is more appropriate for most people who just want the easiest way to accomplish certain tasks and would rather spend their time and effort on things other than computers.
The problem that Mr. Sposky doesn't address is this: 2/3 of the problems addressed with computers today (even so-called personal computers) are data processing problems, and there is absolutely no evidence that a GUI is an efficient way to handle those problems.
I think that 2/3rds data processing figure is wildly inaccurate. On personal computers, what people do is they do their email with an email client, they browse the Web with a Web browsers, they write documents with Word, use Excel for some simple "data processing", prepare presentations with PowerPoint, listen to music with their music player app, and maybe use one or two specialty apps for their field.
That's about it for 99% of computer users.
As a programmer with tools like Perl and the Unix command line utilities available to me on all of my platforms (Linux, Mac, Win w/Cygwin), I find myself doing "data processing" tasks all the time. You may be like me, but that doesn't represent the ordinary computer user. The ordinary computer user does the same tasks over and over again using GUI tools that are optimized for those tasks, while you and I get extra value from out machines by going beyond the prepackaged functionality and doing custom "data processing" that isn't easily done with the standard MS Office-type apps.
Thank goodness their are tools like Linux, Perl, Python, grep, cron, etc., for us, but the Windows/Mac GUI way is a better way for most people.
I'll start with the no. No, it's not a CYA mentality. If you're creating an app for your end users, your end users will blame *you*, not MS, if your apps has bugs. You have not C'edYA by installing the service pack. What you've done is you've kept your machine standard, which is very important in the Windows and Mac worlds. Now your machine is more likely to resemble your customers' machines, or a form that you can easily get your customers' machines into (tech support will tell them to install the same service pack). So, if you can make things work on your machine, even if it requires bug workarounds, things should work just the same on your customers' machines.
And now for the yes. "Blind obedience to the people who have the source" is putting a silly spin on it, but the fact is that both MS and Apple have roadmaps for evolving their entire platforms, and following their advice regarding how to do various things is the way to maximize the chances that your app will continue to work correctly as the platform underneath it evolves.
cousin of spam?
on
Spidering Hacks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The easier and more widespread the techniques for spidering become, the more websites will get hammered with the unintended equivalent of DOS attacks, the way spam is the equivalent of a DOS attack on your email account.
I don't have any solutions in mind. I don't want anti-spidering legislation, for example, because *I* want to be able to spider. I just don't want *you* to do it.;-)
Really, I'm just observing that as the Web evolves we could see another spam-like problem emerge, at least for the more interesting sites.
Microsoft and Apple have both achieved an extraordinary reduction in platform fragmentation by making some form of Unicode the native system charset in all of their current OSes, and the native text handling APIs are richly internationalized.
If all users could take for granted that any standard Linux installation was as well equipped, by default, to handle their own language as it was to handle any other, then there wouldn't be so much pressure in various countries to produce local or regional variants (not just of OSes, but of things like protocols -- DNS hostnames, for example).
Insist on Unicode-based systems if you want to minimize the fragmentation, incompatibility, and confusion that will otherwise result as the Internet revolution sweeps over the non-Western world.
It's not just in their best interest, but in *yours* too.
There are really two issues: form and content, but they're related.
I think it's true that PowerPoint makes some forms (e.g., bulleted lists) easier than others (e.g., detailed blueprints), and that has an effect on the substance. You're more likely to come up with substance that fits easily into the form you imagine presenting in, and you're likely to imagine presenting in the form that's easiest to produce in your "presentation" software.
This is how the design of PowerPoint really does impact the actual substance of the message.
That being said, though, I think it's silly to put most of the blame on PowerPoint. I've made a lot of presentations to top execs in many industries in many countries over many years.
Since long before PowerPoint existed, I've noticed that top execs *demand* presentations in the form made easiest by PP. Their days are a non-stop parade of presentations designed to sell them on one idea after another. They want the minimum information necessary for them to be able to make what they (and NOT the presenters) consider a sufficiently well-informed decision to either take a next step or kill the project immediately. Once they feel they they have the info to make that decision, they'll stop your presentation in mid-slide, and you're done, so you'd better get your best ideas into the first two or three slides.
This is NOT the way scientists should make their presentations or decisions, and Tufte's work primarily focuses on presenting scientific information.
The blame then should not be on PP so much as on those who PP as the medium for all types of presentations. Unfortunately, the mechanics of putting information in front of a live audience are demanding, so the conveniences of PowerPoint make it seductive.
Of course, it's seductive to blame various bogeymen, such as MS, for all of the world's problems, too. That's another form of "dumbing down" an analysis.
if the machine's owner is monolingual in English, why should they have to install Bengali and Thai fonts so as to make your contrived webpage example work?
followed by this:
i recently found - through just such a web page example - that i have some number of SEAsian fonts installed by default. i hadn't known, and i *still* don't know why i have them - i certainly never told Mandrake to include them.
Where do I begin? You learned something by actually experiencing what you call my "contrived example" in real life. You learned that something that you claim should fail unless you go to a lot of effort "just worked" without any effort on your part. And that offended you.
...let it display a bunch of question marks unless the human has gone to the extra trouble of installing the fonts
Ah, I see. Corruption should be the default, requiring *each user* to "go to the extra trouble" for each exceptional case where he would prefer uncorrupted data. And when exchanging data with others or passing it thru a multistep process, the only data that should survive uncorrupted is the common denominator that *everyone* has made a special effort to not corrupt.
I get the feeling I've probably used software architected by you.;-)
You make the (very common) mistake of believing Unicode to be an encoding
I made no such mistake. I simply didn't advocate a specific encoding, or multiple encodings with rules for when to use or how to detect each, because I didn't want to get into that level of detail in this particular piece of advocacy.
It is sufficient that everyone agree that we work from the same "list of characters" as you rightly call it, and that sufficient standards be in place that it is always unambiguous which characters are meant as data passes along a chain of processes, preferably via protocols and defaults that make the choice something that your tools take care of so you rarely have to think about it.
While I do agree that a single encoding for everything would be easiest, that's not the only possibility.
How do you make something an abstract? Instead you should encourage the adoption of a specific encoding.
There's no need to limit ourselves to a single encoding of Unicode. It is sufficient that whatever we use be capable of handling any arbitrary sequence of Unicode ("UCS", but I didn't want to get into that) characters, and that any time data is interchanged, it is completely unambiguous what characters those are. Java, for example, uses two different forms of Unicode internally, and the only problem Java has is caused by the fact that they chose to expose one of those encodings explicitly to programmers.
For what it's worth, I would like to see UTF-8 everywhere. It is inefficient for non-Latin alphabets, but storage is cheap.
On Linux, which I agree is what we're discussing, I think UTF-8 is probably the only choice that makes sense for data that gets externalized for interchange, serialization, etc.
That's an implementation detail, though. I'd prefer that people first accept the idea of text as a known sequence of characters drawn from a universal pool, rather than from multiple, incompatible subsets of that pool that all *require* different encodings, tools, databases, etc. How the encoding of the Unicode character sequences is handled can be considered separately.
I won't be fully satisfied with Linux until you can take for granted that text in the Linux world can be assumed to be Unicode, and that non-Unicode would be considered the exceptional case -- the opposite of what we have today. It's coming, but very slowly.
You should be able to use any standard terminal program on any mainstream Linux box to telnet to a Web server and view the source of any Web page, even if the page happens to be a Bengali-Thai dictionary and the Linux box's owner is a monolingual English (or Japanese or Chinese) speaker. Text is text -- or at least it can be in many more cases than it is now if people would let go of legacy technologies and insist on it.
Your text handling apps, tools, and libs should should all be as language independent as possible. There shouldn't be any cases where you have to treat different languages differently except those that are the result of actual linguistic issues. Crippled legacy technologies that create artificial linguistic distinctions should be pushed out of the core and relegated to special case handling.
There are many sharp people moving Linux in this direction, I'm happy to say, but the legacy mindset they have to work against in the Linux community is every bit as stubborn as anything in the Windows world.
Which makes me wonder how many pixels would be necessary to reach a point where no additional sharpness could be obtained by additional pixels.
The definition in this case is completely filling my field of view (wrap around screen or retinal scanner), allowing me to move my eyes without redrawing, so every point would have to be as sharp as my full center of view (foveal) vision, but without allowing me to move my head (either changing its angle or moving closer to the image).
I can imagine many uses for an even higher resolution image that would allow you to zoom in on interesting spots, but I'm curious about how many pixels the full view scenario above would require. If we just had that, then we could refresh the screen in response to head movements (I wouldn't want to do it for eye movements) and cover pretty much everything, I would think.
The point is not to extend the time it takes to reach the 5nm limit, beyond which no material will allow further shrinkage. If we don't reach that limit as fast as Moore's Law predicts -- if it takes several more decades to reach 5nm as you suggest -- then Moore's Law will have already failed.
In other words, Moore's Law says that progress will occur at a certain (very fast) rate, not just that progress will occur. If you take longer to make progress than Moore's Law predicts it should take, then Moore's Law has failed.
They have one of the lowest crime rates, and with the economic and democratic reforms in the works they will far outshine the US (or so the WTO perdicts).
Nonsense. Crime in China is blood curdling. The government statistics lie about it for the same reason they lied about SARS: to save face. To show that the gov't has things under control. There are mass migrations of people coming in to the major cities looking for work. Many of them don't find it in the legitimate sectors. The government says the crime rate is similar to Japan's. In Japan they don't have bars on the windows or broken glass and barbed wire on top of the walls, so apparently the Chinese people don't believe they're as safe as the gov't claims.
The Chinese government is far weaker than most in the West realise, and when they focus so much of their limited resources on simply maintaining their own monopoly on political power, it doesn't leave much left over for fighting actual crime.
As a result, they have to make a real show of it when they are able to capture real criminals, or if they can't punish the real culprit they'll just pick someone they don't like and put a bullet in his head, to try to demonstrate to The People that they have things under control.
As for the democratic reforms far outshining the US, why don't you go start a new political party in China and show us. Those democratic reforms you speak of recently made it legal to do so. All of those who believed it and started parties are now in prison. Nice sting operation. Declare competitive political parties legal, wait for your competitors to show themselves, then arrest them. US Democrats and Republicans get pretty silly at times, but they don't have to win a war or risk going to prison to put each other out of office.
None of you stupid ass clowns know anything about China or the Chinese people or Chinese history now fuck off and go talk about Linux or something
When the Chinese are criticised by people who know what they're talking about, they react violently, like this AC. Saving face has always mattered more than freedom of speech in Chinese culture, so it's no surprise that the most powerful people in China -- soldiers, communists, nationalists, imperial officials, or just rich people -- have always felt it was perfectly reasonable to imprison, torture, or murder their critics.
When they're not able to shut you up forcibly, it often drives them into a rage like this one where amusingly, between the profanities, he is essentially demanding that we change the subject and stop hurting his ethnic pride. "...go talk about Linux or something...."
You can't think of a better way to govern that many people than an authoritarian regime with no elections that proclaims itself to be the "People's Government" and has imprisoned and murdered tens of millions of people for disagreeing?
Not a very deep thinker are you? The US and EU combined are about half the population of China. Do you mean to say that if our populations were simply to double, our best option would be to abandon democracy, rule of law, elections, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc., and demonstrate that anyone who disagreed would end up dead? That's really the best you can come up with?
You sound like a product of Chinese (re)education.
Of course, you could argue that we can do it because we don't have to have one government controlling all of those people. We have several governments, each covering only a portion of those people, each subject to independent replacement every election day.
Of course China doesn't have to do it all with one government either. The Tibetans, Uighurs, Taiwanese, Hong Kongese...would love to take some of the "burden" off those poor overworked murderers in Beijing. But Beijing is just like you. They can't think of a better way for them to keep governing than by doing what they're doing, either.
Ah, now if only it had a Common Lisp "mode". All I've ever seen mentioned on the Eclipse website are "programming" and "C++ programming". (Apparently "programming" is Eclipse-speak for "Java programming", so "programming tools" means "Java programming tools", etc.)
It does look like a nice system, and I hope it will expand beyond just "programming" to include things like Lisp, Python, etc., too.;-)
Nice conclusion. The poster you're responding to is a condescending jackass. Someone asks for help and he turns it into an opportunity to insult Americans. "USians"? What an idiot.
Keeping a travel journal is a long tradition among travelers from many cultures. Some of the greatest travelers of the 19th century mailed copies of journal entries back to correspondents at home. Making that journal available to ones family and friends in real time is something they would have appreciated. I can tell you from personal experience that parents definitely appreciate it.
I've used a mailing list instead of a website to keep family and friends up to date as I traveled. Even in places like Tibet, you'll occasionally come across machines with a Net connection and a browser that you can use to reach a web-based mail system. And, as someone else pointed out, these days you could post to a blog via email instead of using a mailing list. Getting your photos up there might need to wait until you get home, though. Lower tech is more reliable when traveling, even domestically.
Flash is available for Win, Mac, Linux, several "devices", and probably being ramped up for many more.
Flash has swarms of developers with years of experience who won't switch platforms without a *major* reason for doing so. Microsoft has shown how you can keep the installed base of developers in your camp by responding to every competitor's every move with "we'll have that in the next version". Macromedia can do that, too.
Developers already know that Macromedia has no deeper platform agenda. Instead of trying to make Windows PCs and devices look good and all others look bad, Macromedia offers its developers the promise of being able to cash in, no matter which OSes and devices become popular. That's the promise of Dreamweaver vs. Front Page, too.
I can see Windows developers using these technologies in-house within a Windows company. (I'm doing something similar right now with C#.) But no external Web developer would use something like this unless it offered such enormous advantages over Flash that Macromedia couldn't even *claim* to match them in an upcoming version. I don't see that happening.
I think it's great for them to pursue tools that make it easier for non-programmers to do more useful things for themselves.
I'm not too concerned that this will replace the current type of programming, though. The biggest problem is that the real-world problem being solved is almost always more complicated than the domain experts themselves realize.
When I sit down with a client domain expert to write a program for them, they are invariably surprised by what I uncover. I gradually tease out a huge variety of scenarios that they've never thought through or decisions that they make on the basis of "experience" whose rules they can't possibly express explicitly, comprehensively, unambiguously, and without contradiction -- on their own.
It just doesn't matter how easy it is to explain the rules to a computer if you don't have the skill that experienced programmers have: to completely specify the problem. Fully explaining how to solve a problem to something other than another intelligent and experienced human is harder than most non-programmers realize. (Of course Simonyi knows this, but the journalists who cover his work probably don't.)
I don't know who you are, but the chance that you're qualified to call Simonyi "stupid" is statistically insignificant.
Hungarian notation is a means for overcoming a critical flaw in the C language: the lack of type safety. There are about a million different "abstractions" that look to your C compiler like just a sequence of bytes. C code collects bugs like a porch light every time you try to evolve your code by changing abstractions. Hungarian notation, macros, other coding conventions, special "lint" tools, etc., are pretty much all designed to reduce the problems caused by the poor design of C itself.
Simonyi contributed a workaround that's useful to those who know when and how much to use it.
Seems like most small companies will just install Suse or Mandrake now
Seems to me that Suse and Mandrake are pretty sick puppies themselves. Why wouldn't the Red Hat experience hurt Suse and Mandrake as much as it helps?
I'm not saying this to promote any other distribution. It's just that the world of Linux distributions is going to experience a lot of shaking out, and it's anybody's guess what will eventually emerge from the primordial soup we're still floating in.
Slashdot Mirror
And if only Apple weren't so resistant to copying back from MS.....
MS doesn't care who came up with an idea. If customers like it, they'll absorb it. If Apple popularized it, then fine, it's popular, and MS will accept it on that basis.
Apple seems to be the opposite. If MS popularized it, they don't want it, no matter how well-liked it is. It seems to offend their sense of being the ones with all the best UI ideas to acknowledge that a different UI approach from Microsoft(!) might actually be better.
Terrific ideas like the task bar, 2-button mice, scroll wheels, quitting an app when you close its document window, etc., have proven themselves in the mass market, but it took Apple forever to add a task bar (they probably couldn't release it until it looked sufficiently different from MS's) and "the mouse you can operate with your foot" is still the standard despite the fact that every seven-year-old in the US is handling a two-button mouse without confusion.
I've always admired Steve Jobs' passion for creating insanely great products, and innovation is a big part of it. But, I think the products could be even better if Apple had the humility to do a little more copying from less innovative sources that still manage to come up with some good ideas every now and then.
I usually tell beginners to buy a Wordtank, and advanced students to get a Zaurus.
In what ways is the Zaurus better for advanced students than the WordTank? (I've never used a Japanese Zaurus, so I'm not arguing, I'm asking.)
I rarely have trouble with stroke order, BTW, but I still frequently need to look up Japanese words and kanji or find a good translation for an English word. The easier and faster, and the more info, hypertexting between dictionaries, examples, jukugo, furigana, etc., the better.
If I had to specify a single cultural difference, it would be the difference between mass markets and customization. In the Windows and Mac worlds, great effort is made to keep everyone's machines similar so they're easier to learn, use, maintain, write mass market software for, install software on, upgrade, etc.
In the Unix world, the emphasis is on creating something that's maximally useful to an individual by allowing everything to be customized. This creates horrendous fragmentation, which can only be reasonably dealt with if each user is very computer-savvy and mostly takes care of his own problems.
The latter appeals more to power users, because they are interested in putting the time in and getting extra power as a result.
The former is more appropriate for most people who just want the easiest way to accomplish certain tasks and would rather spend their time and effort on things other than computers.
The problem that Mr. Sposky doesn't address is this: 2/3 of the problems addressed with computers today (even so-called personal computers) are data processing problems, and there is absolutely no evidence that a GUI is an efficient way to handle those problems.
I think that 2/3rds data processing figure is wildly inaccurate. On personal computers, what people do is they do their email with an email client, they browse the Web with a Web browsers, they write documents with Word, use Excel for some simple "data processing", prepare presentations with PowerPoint, listen to music with their music player app, and maybe use one or two specialty apps for their field.
That's about it for 99% of computer users.
As a programmer with tools like Perl and the Unix command line utilities available to me on all of my platforms (Linux, Mac, Win w/Cygwin), I find myself doing "data processing" tasks all the time. You may be like me, but that doesn't represent the ordinary computer user. The ordinary computer user does the same tasks over and over again using GUI tools that are optimized for those tasks, while you and I get extra value from out machines by going beyond the prepackaged functionality and doing custom "data processing" that isn't easily done with the standard MS Office-type apps.
Thank goodness their are tools like Linux, Perl, Python, grep, cron, etc., for us, but the Windows/Mac GUI way is a better way for most people.
I'll start with the no. No, it's not a CYA mentality. If you're creating an app for your end users, your end users will blame *you*, not MS, if your apps has bugs. You have not C'edYA by installing the service pack. What you've done is you've kept your machine standard, which is very important in the Windows and Mac worlds. Now your machine is more likely to resemble your customers' machines, or a form that you can easily get your customers' machines into (tech support will tell them to install the same service pack). So, if you can make things work on your machine, even if it requires bug workarounds, things should work just the same on your customers' machines.
And now for the yes. "Blind obedience to the people who have the source" is putting a silly spin on it, but the fact is that both MS and Apple have roadmaps for evolving their entire platforms, and following their advice regarding how to do various things is the way to maximize the chances that your app will continue to work correctly as the platform underneath it evolves.
The easier and more widespread the techniques for spidering become, the more websites will get hammered with the unintended equivalent of DOS attacks, the way spam is the equivalent of a DOS attack on your email account.
;-)
I don't have any solutions in mind. I don't want anti-spidering legislation, for example, because *I* want to be able to spider. I just don't want *you* to do it.
Really, I'm just observing that as the Web evolves we could see another spam-like problem emerge, at least for the more interesting sites.
Microsoft and Apple have both achieved an extraordinary reduction in platform fragmentation by making some form of Unicode the native system charset in all of their current OSes, and the native text handling APIs are richly internationalized.
If all users could take for granted that any standard Linux installation was as well equipped, by default, to handle their own language as it was to handle any other, then there wouldn't be so much pressure in various countries to produce local or regional variants (not just of OSes, but of things like protocols -- DNS hostnames, for example).
Insist on Unicode-based systems if you want to minimize the fragmentation, incompatibility, and confusion that will otherwise result as the Internet revolution sweeps over the non-Western world.
It's not just in their best interest, but in *yours* too.
There are really two issues: form and content, but they're related.
I think it's true that PowerPoint makes some forms (e.g., bulleted lists) easier than others (e.g., detailed blueprints), and that has an effect on the substance. You're more likely to come up with substance that fits easily into the form you imagine presenting in, and you're likely to imagine presenting in the form that's easiest to produce in your "presentation" software.
This is how the design of PowerPoint really does impact the actual substance of the message.
That being said, though, I think it's silly to put most of the blame on PowerPoint. I've made a lot of presentations to top execs in many industries in many countries over many years.
Since long before PowerPoint existed, I've noticed that top execs *demand* presentations in the form made easiest by PP. Their days are a non-stop parade of presentations designed to sell them on one idea after another. They want the minimum information necessary for them to be able to make what they (and NOT the presenters) consider a sufficiently well-informed decision to either take a next step or kill the project immediately. Once they feel they they have the info to make that decision, they'll stop your presentation in mid-slide, and you're done, so you'd better get your best ideas into the first two or three slides.
This is NOT the way scientists should make their presentations or decisions, and Tufte's work primarily focuses on presenting scientific information.
The blame then should not be on PP so much as on those who PP as the medium for all types of presentations. Unfortunately, the mechanics of putting information in front of a live audience are demanding, so the conveniences of PowerPoint make it seductive.
Of course, it's seductive to blame various bogeymen, such as MS, for all of the world's problems, too. That's another form of "dumbing down" an analysis.
If you want stereotyping, just listen to any "englightened" "progressive" spout off about how
-- every successful company is an example of "Corporate Greed",
-- every white person who disagrees with a non-white person is a "Racist",
-- anyone who makes things but doesn't give them away for free is an "Oppressor",
-- anyone who thinks that what he makes should not be open to forced confiscation by those who don't make things is "Mean Spirited",
-- and every argument that even questions leftist dogma is "Hate Speech".
And you thought "name calling and stereotyping was primarily the tactic of the conservative[s]".
Think again.
Funny that you would say this:
...let it display a bunch of question marks unless the human has gone to the extra trouble of installing the fonts
;-)
if the machine's owner is monolingual in English, why should they have to install Bengali and Thai fonts so as to make your contrived webpage example work?
followed by this:
i recently found - through just such a web page example - that i have some number of SEAsian fonts installed by default. i hadn't known, and i *still* don't know why i have them - i certainly never told Mandrake to include them.
Where do I begin? You learned something by actually experiencing what you call my "contrived example" in real life. You learned that something that you claim should fail unless you go to a lot of effort "just worked" without any effort on your part. And that offended you.
Ah, I see. Corruption should be the default, requiring *each user* to "go to the extra trouble" for each exceptional case where he would prefer uncorrupted data. And when exchanging data with others or passing it thru a multistep process, the only data that should survive uncorrupted is the common denominator that *everyone* has made a special effort to not corrupt.
I get the feeling I've probably used software architected by you.
You make the (very common) mistake of believing Unicode to be an encoding
I made no such mistake. I simply didn't advocate a specific encoding, or multiple encodings with rules for when to use or how to detect each, because I didn't want to get into that level of detail in this particular piece of advocacy.
It is sufficient that everyone agree that we work from the same "list of characters" as you rightly call it, and that sufficient standards be in place that it is always unambiguous which characters are meant as data passes along a chain of processes, preferably via protocols and defaults that make the choice something that your tools take care of so you rarely have to think about it.
While I do agree that a single encoding for everything would be easiest, that's not the only possibility.
How do you make something an abstract? Instead you should encourage the adoption of a specific encoding.
There's no need to limit ourselves to a single encoding of Unicode. It is sufficient that whatever we use be capable of handling any arbitrary sequence of Unicode ("UCS", but I didn't want to get into that) characters, and that any time data is interchanged, it is completely unambiguous what characters those are. Java, for example, uses two different forms of Unicode internally, and the only problem Java has is caused by the fact that they chose to expose one of those encodings explicitly to programmers.
For what it's worth, I would like to see UTF-8 everywhere. It is inefficient for non-Latin alphabets, but storage is cheap.
On Linux, which I agree is what we're discussing, I think UTF-8 is probably the only choice that makes sense for data that gets externalized for interchange, serialization, etc.
That's an implementation detail, though. I'd prefer that people first accept the idea of text as a known sequence of characters drawn from a universal pool, rather than from multiple, incompatible subsets of that pool that all *require* different encodings, tools, databases, etc. How the encoding of the Unicode character sequences is handled can be considered separately.
I won't be fully satisfied with Linux until you can take for granted that text in the Linux world can be assumed to be Unicode, and that non-Unicode would be considered the exceptional case -- the opposite of what we have today. It's coming, but very slowly.
You should be able to use any standard terminal program on any mainstream Linux box to telnet to a Web server and view the source of any Web page, even if the page happens to be a Bengali-Thai dictionary and the Linux box's owner is a monolingual English (or Japanese or Chinese) speaker. Text is text -- or at least it can be in many more cases than it is now if people would let go of legacy technologies and insist on it.
Your text handling apps, tools, and libs should should all be as language independent as possible. There shouldn't be any cases where you have to treat different languages differently except those that are the result of actual linguistic issues. Crippled legacy technologies that create artificial linguistic distinctions should be pushed out of the core and relegated to special case handling.
There are many sharp people moving Linux in this direction, I'm happy to say, but the legacy mindset they have to work against in the Linux community is every bit as stubborn as anything in the Windows world.
...that what was once biology (wiggled) eventually becomes chemistry (and ultimately physics?)
Which makes me wonder how many pixels would be necessary to reach a point where no additional sharpness could be obtained by additional pixels.
The definition in this case is completely filling my field of view (wrap around screen or retinal scanner), allowing me to move my eyes without redrawing, so every point would have to be as sharp as my full center of view (foveal) vision, but without allowing me to move my head (either changing its angle or moving closer to the image).
I can imagine many uses for an even higher resolution image that would allow you to zoom in on interesting spots, but I'm curious about how many pixels the full view scenario above would require. If we just had that, then we could refresh the screen in response to head movements (I wouldn't want to do it for eye movements) and cover pretty much everything, I would think.
The point is not to extend the time it takes to reach the 5nm limit, beyond which no material will allow further shrinkage. If we don't reach that limit as fast as Moore's Law predicts -- if it takes several more decades to reach 5nm as you suggest -- then Moore's Law will have already failed.
In other words, Moore's Law says that progress will occur at a certain (very fast) rate, not just that progress will occur. If you take longer to make progress than Moore's Law predicts it should take, then Moore's Law has failed.
As they say with buying these pirated products: caveat emptor!
Caveat emptor? Don't you mean caveat kleptor?
They have one of the lowest crime rates, and with the economic and democratic reforms in the works they will far outshine the US (or so the WTO perdicts).
Nonsense. Crime in China is blood curdling. The government statistics lie about it for the same reason they lied about SARS: to save face. To show that the gov't has things under control. There are mass migrations of people coming in to the major cities looking for work. Many of them don't find it in the legitimate sectors. The government says the crime rate is similar to Japan's. In Japan they don't have bars on the windows or broken glass and barbed wire on top of the walls, so apparently the Chinese people don't believe they're as safe as the gov't claims.
The Chinese government is far weaker than most in the West realise, and when they focus so much of their limited resources on simply maintaining their own monopoly on political power, it doesn't leave much left over for fighting actual crime.
As a result, they have to make a real show of it when they are able to capture real criminals, or if they can't punish the real culprit they'll just pick someone they don't like and put a bullet in his head, to try to demonstrate to The People that they have things under control.
As for the democratic reforms far outshining the US, why don't you go start a new political party in China and show us. Those democratic reforms you speak of recently made it legal to do so. All of those who believed it and started parties are now in prison. Nice sting operation. Declare competitive political parties legal, wait for your competitors to show themselves, then arrest them. US Democrats and Republicans get pretty silly at times, but they don't have to win a war or risk going to prison to put each other out of office.
None of you stupid ass clowns know anything about China or the Chinese people or Chinese history now fuck off and go talk about Linux or something
When the Chinese are criticised by people who know what they're talking about, they react violently, like this AC. Saving face has always mattered more than freedom of speech in Chinese culture, so it's no surprise that the most powerful people in China -- soldiers, communists, nationalists, imperial officials, or just rich people -- have always felt it was perfectly reasonable to imprison, torture, or murder their critics.
When they're not able to shut you up forcibly, it often drives them into a rage like this one where amusingly, between the profanities, he is essentially demanding that we change the subject and stop hurting his ethnic pride. "...go talk about Linux or something...."
You can't think of a better way to govern that many people than an authoritarian regime with no elections that proclaims itself to be the "People's Government" and has imprisoned and murdered tens of millions of people for disagreeing?
Not a very deep thinker are you? The US and EU combined are about half the population of China. Do you mean to say that if our populations were simply to double, our best option would be to abandon democracy, rule of law, elections, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc., and demonstrate that anyone who disagreed would end up dead? That's really the best you can come up with?
You sound like a product of Chinese (re)education.
Of course, you could argue that we can do it because we don't have to have one government controlling all of those people. We have several governments, each covering only a portion of those people, each subject to independent replacement every election day.
Of course China doesn't have to do it all with one government either. The Tibetans, Uighurs, Taiwanese, Hong Kongese...would love to take some of the "burden" off those poor overworked murderers in Beijing. But Beijing is just like you. They can't think of a better way for them to keep governing than by doing what they're doing, either.
Ah, now if only it had a Common Lisp "mode". All I've ever seen mentioned on the Eclipse website are "programming" and "C++ programming". (Apparently "programming" is Eclipse-speak for "Java programming", so "programming tools" means "Java programming tools", etc.)
;-)
It does look like a nice system, and I hope it will expand beyond just "programming" to include things like Lisp, Python, etc., too.
Nice conclusion. The poster you're responding to is a condescending jackass. Someone asks for help and he turns it into an opportunity to insult Americans. "USians"? What an idiot.
Keeping a travel journal is a long tradition among travelers from many cultures. Some of the greatest travelers of the 19th century mailed copies of journal entries back to correspondents at home. Making that journal available to ones family and friends in real time is something they would have appreciated. I can tell you from personal experience that parents definitely appreciate it.
I've used a mailing list instead of a website to keep family and friends up to date as I traveled. Even in places like Tibet, you'll occasionally come across machines with a Net connection and a browser that you can use to reach a web-based mail system. And, as someone else pointed out, these days you could post to a blog via email instead of using a mailing list. Getting your photos up there might need to wait until you get home, though. Lower tech is more reliable when traveling, even domestically.
Flash is available for Win, Mac, Linux, several "devices", and probably being ramped up for many more.
Flash has swarms of developers with years of experience who won't switch platforms without a *major* reason for doing so. Microsoft has shown how you can keep the installed base of developers in your camp by responding to every competitor's every move with "we'll have that in the next version". Macromedia can do that, too.
Developers already know that Macromedia has no deeper platform agenda. Instead of trying to make Windows PCs and devices look good and all others look bad, Macromedia offers its developers the promise of being able to cash in, no matter which OSes and devices become popular. That's the promise of Dreamweaver vs. Front Page, too.
I can see Windows developers using these technologies in-house within a Windows company. (I'm doing something similar right now with C#.) But no external Web developer would use something like this unless it offered such enormous advantages over Flash that Macromedia couldn't even *claim* to match them in an upcoming version. I don't see that happening.
I think it's great for them to pursue tools that make it easier for non-programmers to do more useful things for themselves.
I'm not too concerned that this will replace the current type of programming, though. The biggest problem is that the real-world problem being solved is almost always more complicated than the domain experts themselves realize.
When I sit down with a client domain expert to write a program for them, they are invariably surprised by what I uncover. I gradually tease out a huge variety of scenarios that they've never thought through or decisions that they make on the basis of "experience" whose rules they can't possibly express explicitly, comprehensively, unambiguously, and without contradiction -- on their own.
It just doesn't matter how easy it is to explain the rules to a computer if you don't have the skill that experienced programmers have: to completely specify the problem. Fully explaining how to solve a problem to something other than another intelligent and experienced human is harder than most non-programmers realize. (Of course Simonyi knows this, but the journalists who cover his work probably don't.)
I don't know who you are, but the chance that you're qualified to call Simonyi "stupid" is statistically insignificant.
Hungarian notation is a means for overcoming a critical flaw in the C language: the lack of type safety. There are about a million different "abstractions" that look to your C compiler like just a sequence of bytes. C code collects bugs like a porch light every time you try to evolve your code by changing abstractions. Hungarian notation, macros, other coding conventions, special "lint" tools, etc., are pretty much all designed to reduce the problems caused by the poor design of C itself.
Simonyi contributed a workaround that's useful to those who know when and how much to use it.
Seems like most small companies will just install Suse or Mandrake now
Seems to me that Suse and Mandrake are pretty sick puppies themselves. Why wouldn't the Red Hat experience hurt Suse and Mandrake as much as it helps?
I'm not saying this to promote any other distribution. It's just that the world of Linux distributions is going to experience a lot of shaking out, and it's anybody's guess what will eventually emerge from the primordial soup we're still floating in.