If it comes to a real crunch where our government and mega-corporations aren't providing the service we need out of some need to gain extra power and money from the process, essentially destroying the Internet as we know it, then I think it won't be long before private citizens begin to form new businesses, non-profit groups, co-ops, etc to address the problem. It's a basic economic concept that where there is demand there will be suppliers. The technology involved isn't secret and there is nothing that can actually become a real shortage other than those created artificially by government and the current suppliers. If they don't want to be our suppliers then someone else will. There might be a hiccup as things transition but in the end the system would probably be stronger and healthier.
What if every city offered a choice of gigabit fiber connections to every home and business through a co-op or a high-speed wireless network woven together through citizen contributions (like FON maybe)? How long would it be before these groups started finding ways to connect their MANs together to form new Internet backbones? And after such a shakedown people would no doubt be more paranoid so they'd want to be connected by more than just a single means. This would create a lot of opportunity and competition for businesses to provide access to these MANs and would help keep these long hual providers from having so much control. If the long hualers didn't provide adequate choices it'd b very possible to see co-ops created that would create new choices. You might have nation-wide or even international co-ops created and managed by the people who actually used the service.
Maybe for once us Americans could get broadband that isn't lame. Blah 6Mb connections could be a thing of the past and we could actually get gigabit speeds. Corporations are playing russian roulette by denying us these speeds and trying to squeeze more cash out of us. P2P has shaken the foundations of media distribution. What do they think will happen if the Internet begins to take on a shape more like that? The layout of the network could be much more chaotic with fewer points where any corporation or government could enforce control or collect tolls. Such a happening would make tracking down individuals much more difficult (or impossible) so P2P would explode, people would be a lot less likely to report taxes, chasing child predators would be very hard, etc. I think that eventually this is a change that will happen. It's just a matter of when. An imaginary crisis could be the spark of life needed to push this evolution into hyperdrive. People are hooked on the Net. As long as they can get their fix they aren't motivated to make it better - many don't even realize it could be better - but if you pull the plug they'll be jumping at other options.
As a geek that's used Linux/Gnome as his primary desktop for several years, and has helped many newbies use it also, I can totally see where Linus is coming from. All desktops are pretty limited and annoying and nobody seems to really want to redefine the desktop environment. We have a way things are done and just because it works poorly isn't a good enough reason to do things better. Having tried to make bug reports and feature requests to the Gnome developers I also agree that they really act like they don't care about suggestions. It's great that they want to keep Gnome easy to use and free of bloat but as with Linus' suggestion you could actually make it easier to use and make the code cleaner by implementing some changes.
It doesn't really matter though. With the lack of vision by the developers of KDE and Gnome I don't see the Linux desktop ever becoming a staple of computing for non-geeks except in very special projects managed by geeks without any non-geek overlords selecting the platform. Sure using KDE or Gnome is easy enough but there is no benefit to using them compared to Windows or Mac OS. Nothing that non-geeks will understand and desire at least. I'm not talking eye candy - I mean real features that make Linux on the desktop easier to use and more powerful in a way that normal people find useful. To pull people away from Windows and Mac OS we need to be obviously better and not just reaching par.
I think there is still room for client-side scripting that is more powerful than Javascript but I don't know if Java is the answer. It's to heavy and it doesn't fit the rapid design needs of web development. I'd like to see a version of Python that is DOM aware, can do things (signed) Java can do that Javascript can't such as having full use of the network and the client computer, and that in general just does what Java tried to do but in a manner that is less bulky and better suited to the ever changing needs of web developers. I'd hope that W3Python could also replace Javascript by being able to be used either applet-style or similar to Javascript behaviors.
I like Python for it's strong oop and easy programming but I think some client-side version of PHP might be a winner too as so many web developers already know PHP.
I use MacOS on my 24" iMac and run other OSs using VMWare Fusion. I usually have several OSs open at a time. MacOS is actually pretty good at managing a few windows at a time but IMO it sucks for managing lots of windows at a time. So it's perfect for this role. I usually have Win2003 open to manage development and testing for our Windows server, Win2k to test things in IE6, and WinXP for testing in IE7 and running some basic office apps that run only in Windows (the software for interfacing with our phone system). Then I usually have a couple of Fedora Linux windows open. One for each system I'm developing and testing for our Linux servers and one which I actually do most of my work in. I'll also usually do my graphic work in OS X because Gimp runs just fine there as well as things like Illustrator and I like having the full size of the screen to do that kind of work and don't want to make my VM windows that big.
I've actually been encouraging, off and on for years, a shift in UI design in Gnome or KDE to make Linux work more like I'm using this setup. So that thre is a main tab bar that controls which project you're seeing (or if only one project is open, hides itself) and then each project is pretty much it's own little environment that could open as a window or full-screen (framed only by the projct menu bar) depending on what the user likes. Each project should see only it's own files and application windows (although in some cases projects might have the same files) and be able to be suspended and resumed without needing to do any special work. Each project would make it very easy to find the files and programs that project usually uses but other files and programs would of course still be available in them as well. It'd be very close to using VMWare. I might even suggest intergrating VMWare with the system so a project could be opened inside it's own OS when desired. Maybe certain applets, like IM and watching system usage, could be visible across projects by attaching themselves to the project menu bar or in Dashboard style. One of the biggst problems users have with their computer is that they have to many options. That doesn't mean they don't want all those options. They just don't want to see them all the time. That's why opening your web browsing project should open a screen that only shows programs and files related to your web experience. Maybe when you opened the project it'd automatically start your browser inside and if you looked at the desktop in that project all you'd see would be files you've downloaded and your bookmarks. A graphic editing project might show you Photoshop and Illustrator and show a desktop that shows all your images and your most recent graphics you'd worked on. Your game project might show all your game programs with the ones you've played most often at the top of the list and on the desktop you'd see your most recent save games (in an iTunes-like view) and maybe some available games you could join online. That sort of thing.
I like YI.ORG because they don't do any of that spamming crap, they have a direct itnerface that lets you do anything you want (even if you have to know what you want to do - ie it's for geeks), and the guy that runs it is good about fixing any problems you have if you IM him. I use YI for most of my long-term domains whereas I use 1&1 for short-term domains that I'm going to throw away in a year. 1&1 is cheap but don't allow much flexibility and have bad customer service.
I'd still consider myself a webmaster although I'm not sure I'd put that title on my resume. Now I'm more the 'Manager of Web Business' or some such glossy new term. Still breaks down to the same basic thing though. I identify the proper way to manage the websites and related technology and then either do the work myself or hire someone else to do it and make sure they get the work done. I can build the computers and networks needed, compile and install all needed software, do the coding and database work, handle the layout and some of the graphic work, write content, market and search engine optimize the websites, integrate with other companies, find business partners, etc. It's a field that is sort of rough as companies that throw all that stuff on a single person tend to be smaller and less stable and there is a lot to know and keep learning about. It's interesting though.
This week I get to figure out how to hook our Intuit Eclipse systems up to a workable e-comm website. I always figured that just because Quicken and Quickbooks sucked didn't mean Intuit sucked but having now dealt with their expensive high-end products I think I can really say that they just don't know what the heck they are doing. At least going by the manuals, online help, and their tech support. They've actually told me this week that websites don't need to be easy to use or friendly to being indexed by search engines. Umm yeah. Oh well, as always I'll find a way to make it work.
I won't be buying Vista either.:) Bootcamp doesn't work very well anyway. I ended up having to use third-party tools to setup a tri-boot box of OS X, Windows, and Linux so Bootcamp really didn't impress me much.
Being proprietary is a major concern especially for businesses. Not having access to source code and open formats and protocols commits them to hoping that the company producing the software stays in business, continues to do what benefits the users of the software, etc and keeps them from having any control over their situation. To home users this may only be a mild annoyance that they don't even recognize there is an alternative to but for a business it's a serious consideration. It is also a serious consideration for expert-level users that may want to do things with their systems that will be much more difficult using proprietary software.
I have to agree that I don't like having the eject button on my keyboard instead of on the drives themselves. I've had situations where Mac OS was crashing and the software-eject functions didn't work and also I find it confussing on systems with more than one ejectable drive. In most cases I just right-click the device icon and pick eject though which works fine so long as the OS isn't being weird. Also I don't like being able to accidently bump a key on my keyboard and eject drives, turn off the computer, etc.
All platforms have problems with them and no platform is going to be best for all possible situations. I love the screen on my 24" iMac but don't like to do serious coding work in OS X. It works fine for booting up and managing virtual machines (VMWare Fusion works pretty well despite being in beta) though. I do most of my coding and geek stuff in a Linux window, my graphic work in OS X, and keep Windows XP w/ IE7 and Windows 2k w/ IE6 open in windows so that I can test all major platforms easily. I wish they'd put more powerful processors in iMacs though. I love the Core 2 Duo CPUs and they work well enough but my PCs have much more powerful processors than are available in the iMacs right now and I do use the power. Most of the time it isn't an issue though and the screen makes it worth while.
I have to disagree with Carmack about multi-threaded coding being significantly harder. It's really easy to let different subsystems do their own thing and just share data as needed so long as those systems don't need to be tightly linked. It only becomes tricky if you're trying to split a single system down in unnatural ways. At some point maybe that'll be needed but games, and most real world apps, are so complex anyway that they naturally have several systems running at once. If you can put your graphics system on a core, your physics system on another core, your AI on it's own core, and all the nitty gritty logic that ties things together on a core then you've simplified your code (as you don't need to try to make time for each system on a single core as much) and made things quite a bit faster without needing to do anything very hard.
Possibly JC is being to ambitious with how he is using the multi-core design and that is why he considers it hard? You can squeeze more performance out that way but once we get into eight core systems I don't know how much benefit we'll actually see from that little extra speed. Is it worth the added complexity? I think I'd wait for compilers and programming languages to evolve to handle those details for me. Or sit down and make them evolve myself - it's easier than writing a bunch of really complex app code for every app I write.
Of course most programmers are bad about properly designing their code. One that has always bugged me is apps where the UI freezes up while working with data or the network. Y'know you don't have to stop updating the UI while you load that 5GB file. Just read a block of the file, update the UI, read the next block, and so on. So many apps do that wrong and I just hate it.
I've always been amazed in how abussive guys always have more women. A woman will admit that he is mean to her and possibly even violent towards her but she still comes back to him. If she can't be with him anymore she seeks out someone else like him. It's really incredible. It all comes down to the fact that assholes aren't afraid of being shot down so they're a lot bolder than most nice guys and that often assholes come across as being stronger which causes women to want them more. It's like putting out a bug light and watching bugs fly to it over and over again knowing it's going to destroy them all.
I can't imagine why intelligent women do this. They have to see through it to know they're making a mistake but they still do it. Not all of them of course - but a significant number. I guess though that it's just some kind of addiction and habit. You tend to do what you're familair with again and we seek pleasure now despite the cost later. People know that excessive drinking is going to make them puke in the morning but they do it anyway.
Of course then you have to wonder what makes men want to be mean or violent towards women and children. What kind of wuss takes out their anger and frustration on those that are weaker than them? Learn some freaking anger management.
You mean the guy that actually has the balls to stick out an entire war without whining and giving up because we could be hurting the bad guys' feelings? Or the guy that listened to the American people screaming for vengence after 9/11 and actually did something about it?
I'm not a Bush fan. His domestic policies tend to really suck. But at least he'll follow through with what he starts and not listen to all the wusses out there who have the retarded belief that the bad guys are just like us and can be reasoned with over coffee and donuts. The same people totally disregard what the civilians in the areas we're freeing tell them, namely had much they appreciate us, so that they can listen to the professional pull-it-out-of-your-ass opinions of their choice political ranting jerk off tell them that we're hurting these people. Sure pull out of the war effort so that thousands of innocent civilians are left to sort out a civil war for themselves while trying to keep any other evil dictators from taking over. We're Americans so we don't give a damn right? Just let the innocents die so that we don't have to hurt the feelings of the bad guys or take any kind of a moral position.
The war is the number one issue for me in the next election. I will not vote for anyone that is going to pull the troops out or otherwise undermine the war effort. We've spent time, money, and lives on this effort and I want to actually see results and not giving up. If anything, we need to step up and do something about Iran next. Clean that whole area out and occupy them for the next fifty years until we've finished resocializing their children and grandchildren.
A President that had the balls to win the war and the brains to create good domestic policy would be awesome. If any party can produce such a canidate I'll probably vote for them. Manage to find a canidate that is a good natural leader that can pull the parties together to get good things done and you'd have something pretty damn good. To bad the chances of that happening are almost nil. It seems only very polarized people can make it very high in office. People like me that are center don't have many options we like.
Snow Crash or The Diamond age could be great movies but only if allowed to be as long as needed and if they don't chop out the interesting hard to film bits like your namshubs. A mini series is probably the right format for such movies as I can easily see them needing to be several hours long.
The Diamond Age is my favorite book so I can't wait to see it. I hope they don't wreck it. I think it'll be harder to translate to film than Snow Crash because you have to explain nanotech, computing, etc so much. If they can pull it off though it'll be awesome.
I can see Snow Crash being a very cool movie with all the interaction of VR (please don't make it cheesy!), swords, motorcycles, gun fights, pizza deliver by mob owned tanks, skateboarders, freelance spys, drugs, evil corporations, hackers, etc.
Bruce Sterling's Distraction would also make a cool mini series. Science, politics, nomads, a crazy governor, a genetic mutant consultant, and a mock war against the Dutch. Sounds like good tv to me.
All you really need is a BT client designed to hide all the complexity of finding content and downloading with BT, an associated server farm that makes sure the torrent is always well seeded by fast machines (for paying clients), and some tweaks to make BT favor sending files start to end in case of media files that can be streamed.
My solution is a BT client implemented as a signed Java applet. You don't even have to install special software on your computer - just visit my website. I cheat and don't make it easy for people to stop sharing files they've downloaded and I do things to make them want to stay hooked up so that as much as possible the users foot the bandwidth needs. Now if only I had funding.;)
The worst thing about most website design is that people have no idea how to make anything usable. People present way to many options on a single page. Or the opposite problem where you have twenty pages each with two links and a lot of artsy graphic crap. What's the worst though is when you have a PHB that thinks they know best how a site should be designed so you end up with something pretty lame.
Don't learn web design from either programmers or graphic artists because both typically do a shitty job and definately don't learn from PHBs.
The first thing to do is to read everything you shouldn't do. There are lots of books and online resources for this and while some of them will conflict they will at least give you a good idea what things don't work. Realize that not all websites have the same purpose so not all rules will apply to every site and some people just plain have different ideas about what is good and bad. Knowing your audience is very important. Then you should study some basics of art like how to proportion and layout graphics and what colors work well with each other and to learn some styles that might work for you. Figure out which parts you can do well and which you can't. I typically hire someone to do logos and major artwork for me but I do the page elements such as borders, backgrounds, buttons, menu options, etc and I do the HTML and stylesheets that make it all work. Ask the opinion of other people, that aren't all like you, from time to time to get an idea what works and what doesn't. Geeks like things very orderly usually and graphic artists like things with over-the-top flair but most users like something in between. Even simple things like removing the line under links can greatly confuse your average user even if it does look a lot better and if you mark the links in some other way.
IMO 13 still hasn't been done. Credit cards suck. They aren't especially secure, they aren't especially easy to use, they're expensive for retailers which of course pass the fees on to customers, and they give massive control of all commerce to a few central companies that control everything. PayPal is even worse although they do at least allow consumer to consumer transactions.
The two big markets for online business is still in digital cash and shipping/fulfillment. Yes, pre-net companies have expanded a little to fill these gaps but they are really bandaid solutions. Someone that does either of these better and in a more net-friendly way stands to make huge amounts of money. Provide these key backend business services, and make them easier, faster, and cheaper, and you can own the keys to eBay, Amazon, Google, and damn near every major web company of the present or future. Sadly, I've never found an investor that could see that simple fact. Short-sighted rats!:)
Really these are things the government probably should provide but since they're not interested it leaves two big goldmines open to anyone with deep enough pockets and enough brains to do it better.
HTML was never a well designed markup language. Mixing structure with layout was a mistake made with HTML almost from the first. The only real innovation in HTML that was well designed was keeping things simple yet flexible. Before HTML hyperlinking systems tended to be either overly complex or to rigid of design.
The bad thing about HTML is that while it started off simple, the poorly conceived mixing of structure and layout, that kept getting crapped more and more into it's design, have kept making it more and more complex which of course is killing it's original advantage. It's largely this effect, combined with the influx of less intelligent people, that required the conception of the blog. That and the fact that 'home page' sounds lame while 'blog' sounds like nothing whatesoever so it can be a more popular buzzword.
I totally agree that other than some cute interfaces to make it easier to edit your home page there is nothing very different from a 1994 home page and today's blog. There was even the same ranting back then about how citizen journalism was going to kill corporate journalism - yada yada yada.
MySpace reeks in the same way GeoCities did. The lack of design skill on either is so bad as to be frightening. The sad thing is that most users don't even notice. You could offer free upgrades that looked nice and were easy to use and most users wouldn't use them. The whole mess looks like a Lisa Frank nightmare from hell. Even Lisa Frank's own website doesn't look that way as much as MySpace.
But then nothing is ever really new. It's just minor updates to what came before. Amazon wasn't the first to sell stuff online. eBay wasn't the first to auction stuff online. Flickr wasn't the first photo sharing site. WoW isn't any different than the graphical MUDs of the 90's. They just provided minor improvements to the interfaces, had cute names and some advertising money, and were in the right place at the right time.
It all just goes to prove that if you miss out on one wave to keep your idea around, spruce it up, give it a better name, get some advertising money, and try again on the next wave.
Probably the only thing besides swap and logs would be if a file is recording access times on frequently used files. I do a lot of data processing (copying files, rewriting files, etc at about 100,000 files a day) which is also pretty intensive on disk writes so I don't do that on flash either.
I've been considering getting a RAM drive for use of temp files and such but I haven't yet seen any quite big enough. I use a RAM disk anyway for/tmp but I'd like to have something a little more static, and with more space, for the large files I'm actively processing. Something of about 32-64GB would probably be pretty good. I'm also interested to see how much these hybrid drives we've been hearing about are going to help. 1GB of cache seems like it'd help but I often deal with files larger than that so I wonder if that is enough. They should just sell hdd's with normal RAM slots on the back so you could add RAM to them.
I have a 4GB CF and it easily stores my Linux kernel, libraries, apps, and config files. I've heard Windows has issues with running on flash media mostly because there is no easy way to tell it the media should be read-only meaning that it quickly wears the media out with frivilous disk writing. I'd suspect you could fix this just be getting a CF to IDE adapter that supports making the drive read-only in hardware. Or you could just ignore it and buy new flash media every now and then.
The CF to IDE adapters I mostly use I picked up for $8 each including S&H and they work great. My only real complaint about such adapters is that they usually have no easy way to mount them to your case. I'd like to see an adapter that could hold several CF cards that was made to mount in the space of a 3.5" hdd.
I wouldn't suggest with going with the cheapest per meg flash media you can get as usually these are buggier and slower than the more expensive media. The difference in price is usually not huge so it's better to go with the faster media if you can.
My Linux systems have a 4GB CF card that stores all static files such as programs, libraries, and config files. I have the partition with these files (yes it's/) made read-only and noatime. You really only want to use it for these files because flash media has a limited number of writes it can handle.
It does speed the system up though and it makes it a lot less likely to suffer an unbootable situation which is really the reason I switched to flash. I got sick of needing to rebuild or restore my whole system every time the drives wore out. Yes, you can use RAID but it's still seems wrong to store my data on the same drive(s) as my OS and applications.
Add RAM and get rid of swap/virtual memory too as it'll greatly speed your system up and prolong it's life. If switching to such a system make sure you buy actual flash media and not a micro-drive in the form factor of flash media. It doesn't do you any good to try to switch to flash if you're actually using a wee hdd. Also I suggest carefully checking the speed and compatibility of the flash media before you buy it because some brands and lines work a hell of a lot better and faster than others.
I agree - a mature rating should be fine for GTA. It doesn't need an adult rating and there should be no problem with normal stores like Walmart or EB selling GTA. It just needs to not be sold to anyone that can't buy an R rated movie. Walmart checks my id to buy spray paint and cold medicine so it shouldn't be hard for them to check for mature or adult rated games. Then it's up to the parents as to if their kid can play GTA. I wouldn't care if my kid played GTA but for parents who think it's important it should be up to them to enforce their morals.
I hate the unemployment benefits we receive. They are such a joke and rarely actually provide any benefit to the people who actually need them.
Unemployment should be based on the amount of money earned since the last time your unemployment insurance was used up and nothing else. It shouldn't matter if you quit, were fired, the company went broke, or whatever. Why am I paying taxes to supposedly take care of me when I'm old when I can't pay my rent now. Let me put my money into savings instead so I can use it when I need it or at least make all those benefits available to me now. Damn the government and their half assed, red taped, backwards social programs.
Okay - maybe I'm annoyed since it took them like two months to tell me I wasn't going to get unemployment, after first sending me a letter telling me I was, and in the meantime I've used my savings up and still haven't found a job. Of course I could go into a whole other rant over how it should be illegal to discriminate against job applicants with to much experience or education. I'd work at Burger King while looking fo another decent job if only the rats would hire me.;)
I quit my last job, which I liked quite a bit, because my manager quit which put me directly under the owners control. He micro-managed everything, including stuff he knew nothing about, was paranoid of all the wrong people, always made inappropiate comments to employees and customers, and did nothing to actually keep the company running. There was nobody higher to go to. Unfortunately I found out that having an employer that acts like a pervert, doesn't pay the required overtime, threatens not to pay you at all, wants you to help cheat on taxes, etc is not a good enough reason to quit your job in California as the state denied my unemployment benefits. I'm not sure what an acceptable reason to leave a job would be in their opinion if all that mess didn't qualify.
It's really to bad though because I liked the job, I was good at the job, and I enjoyed living in San Diego.
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If it comes to a real crunch where our government and mega-corporations aren't providing the service we need out of some need to gain extra power and money from the process, essentially destroying the Internet as we know it, then I think it won't be long before private citizens begin to form new businesses, non-profit groups, co-ops, etc to address the problem. It's a basic economic concept that where there is demand there will be suppliers. The technology involved isn't secret and there is nothing that can actually become a real shortage other than those created artificially by government and the current suppliers. If they don't want to be our suppliers then someone else will. There might be a hiccup as things transition but in the end the system would probably be stronger and healthier.
What if every city offered a choice of gigabit fiber connections to every home and business through a co-op or a high-speed wireless network woven together through citizen contributions (like FON maybe)? How long would it be before these groups started finding ways to connect their MANs together to form new Internet backbones? And after such a shakedown people would no doubt be more paranoid so they'd want to be connected by more than just a single means. This would create a lot of opportunity and competition for businesses to provide access to these MANs and would help keep these long hual providers from having so much control. If the long hualers didn't provide adequate choices it'd b very possible to see co-ops created that would create new choices. You might have nation-wide or even international co-ops created and managed by the people who actually used the service.
Maybe for once us Americans could get broadband that isn't lame. Blah 6Mb connections could be a thing of the past and we could actually get gigabit speeds. Corporations are playing russian roulette by denying us these speeds and trying to squeeze more cash out of us. P2P has shaken the foundations of media distribution. What do they think will happen if the Internet begins to take on a shape more like that? The layout of the network could be much more chaotic with fewer points where any corporation or government could enforce control or collect tolls. Such a happening would make tracking down individuals much more difficult (or impossible) so P2P would explode, people would be a lot less likely to report taxes, chasing child predators would be very hard, etc. I think that eventually this is a change that will happen. It's just a matter of when. An imaginary crisis could be the spark of life needed to push this evolution into hyperdrive. People are hooked on the Net. As long as they can get their fix they aren't motivated to make it better - many don't even realize it could be better - but if you pull the plug they'll be jumping at other options.
As a geek that's used Linux/Gnome as his primary desktop for several years, and has helped many newbies use it also, I can totally see where Linus is coming from. All desktops are pretty limited and annoying and nobody seems to really want to redefine the desktop environment. We have a way things are done and just because it works poorly isn't a good enough reason to do things better. Having tried to make bug reports and feature requests to the Gnome developers I also agree that they really act like they don't care about suggestions. It's great that they want to keep Gnome easy to use and free of bloat but as with Linus' suggestion you could actually make it easier to use and make the code cleaner by implementing some changes.
It doesn't really matter though. With the lack of vision by the developers of KDE and Gnome I don't see the Linux desktop ever becoming a staple of computing for non-geeks except in very special projects managed by geeks without any non-geek overlords selecting the platform. Sure using KDE or Gnome is easy enough but there is no benefit to using them compared to Windows or Mac OS. Nothing that non-geeks will understand and desire at least. I'm not talking eye candy - I mean real features that make Linux on the desktop easier to use and more powerful in a way that normal people find useful. To pull people away from Windows and Mac OS we need to be obviously better and not just reaching par.
I think there is still room for client-side scripting that is more powerful than Javascript but I don't know if Java is the answer. It's to heavy and it doesn't fit the rapid design needs of web development. I'd like to see a version of Python that is DOM aware, can do things (signed) Java can do that Javascript can't such as having full use of the network and the client computer, and that in general just does what Java tried to do but in a manner that is less bulky and better suited to the ever changing needs of web developers. I'd hope that W3Python could also replace Javascript by being able to be used either applet-style or similar to Javascript behaviors.
I like Python for it's strong oop and easy programming but I think some client-side version of PHP might be a winner too as so many web developers already know PHP.
I use MacOS on my 24" iMac and run other OSs using VMWare Fusion. I usually have several OSs open at a time. MacOS is actually pretty good at managing a few windows at a time but IMO it sucks for managing lots of windows at a time. So it's perfect for this role. I usually have Win2003 open to manage development and testing for our Windows server, Win2k to test things in IE6, and WinXP for testing in IE7 and running some basic office apps that run only in Windows (the software for interfacing with our phone system). Then I usually have a couple of Fedora Linux windows open. One for each system I'm developing and testing for our Linux servers and one which I actually do most of my work in. I'll also usually do my graphic work in OS X because Gimp runs just fine there as well as things like Illustrator and I like having the full size of the screen to do that kind of work and don't want to make my VM windows that big.
I've actually been encouraging, off and on for years, a shift in UI design in Gnome or KDE to make Linux work more like I'm using this setup. So that thre is a main tab bar that controls which project you're seeing (or if only one project is open, hides itself) and then each project is pretty much it's own little environment that could open as a window or full-screen (framed only by the projct menu bar) depending on what the user likes. Each project should see only it's own files and application windows (although in some cases projects might have the same files) and be able to be suspended and resumed without needing to do any special work. Each project would make it very easy to find the files and programs that project usually uses but other files and programs would of course still be available in them as well. It'd be very close to using VMWare. I might even suggest intergrating VMWare with the system so a project could be opened inside it's own OS when desired. Maybe certain applets, like IM and watching system usage, could be visible across projects by attaching themselves to the project menu bar or in Dashboard style. One of the biggst problems users have with their computer is that they have to many options. That doesn't mean they don't want all those options. They just don't want to see them all the time. That's why opening your web browsing project should open a screen that only shows programs and files related to your web experience. Maybe when you opened the project it'd automatically start your browser inside and if you looked at the desktop in that project all you'd see would be files you've downloaded and your bookmarks. A graphic editing project might show you Photoshop and Illustrator and show a desktop that shows all your images and your most recent graphics you'd worked on. Your game project might show all your game programs with the ones you've played most often at the top of the list and on the desktop you'd see your most recent save games (in an iTunes-like view) and maybe some available games you could join online. That sort of thing.
I like YI.ORG because they don't do any of that spamming crap, they have a direct itnerface that lets you do anything you want (even if you have to know what you want to do - ie it's for geeks), and the guy that runs it is good about fixing any problems you have if you IM him. I use YI for most of my long-term domains whereas I use 1&1 for short-term domains that I'm going to throw away in a year. 1&1 is cheap but don't allow much flexibility and have bad customer service.
I'd still consider myself a webmaster although I'm not sure I'd put that title on my resume. Now I'm more the 'Manager of Web Business' or some such glossy new term. Still breaks down to the same basic thing though. I identify the proper way to manage the websites and related technology and then either do the work myself or hire someone else to do it and make sure they get the work done. I can build the computers and networks needed, compile and install all needed software, do the coding and database work, handle the layout and some of the graphic work, write content, market and search engine optimize the websites, integrate with other companies, find business partners, etc. It's a field that is sort of rough as companies that throw all that stuff on a single person tend to be smaller and less stable and there is a lot to know and keep learning about. It's interesting though.
This week I get to figure out how to hook our Intuit Eclipse systems up to a workable e-comm website. I always figured that just because Quicken and Quickbooks sucked didn't mean Intuit sucked but having now dealt with their expensive high-end products I think I can really say that they just don't know what the heck they are doing. At least going by the manuals, online help, and their tech support. They've actually told me this week that websites don't need to be easy to use or friendly to being indexed by search engines. Umm yeah. Oh well, as always I'll find a way to make it work.
If England was ruled by an evil dictator that was violating human rights and encouraging terrorists then yes it would justify attacking England too.
I won't be buying Vista either. :) Bootcamp doesn't work very well anyway. I ended up having to use third-party tools to setup a tri-boot box of OS X, Windows, and Linux so Bootcamp really didn't impress me much.
Being proprietary is a major concern especially for businesses. Not having access to source code and open formats and protocols commits them to hoping that the company producing the software stays in business, continues to do what benefits the users of the software, etc and keeps them from having any control over their situation. To home users this may only be a mild annoyance that they don't even recognize there is an alternative to but for a business it's a serious consideration. It is also a serious consideration for expert-level users that may want to do things with their systems that will be much more difficult using proprietary software.
I have to agree that I don't like having the eject button on my keyboard instead of on the drives themselves. I've had situations where Mac OS was crashing and the software-eject functions didn't work and also I find it confussing on systems with more than one ejectable drive. In most cases I just right-click the device icon and pick eject though which works fine so long as the OS isn't being weird. Also I don't like being able to accidently bump a key on my keyboard and eject drives, turn off the computer, etc.
All platforms have problems with them and no platform is going to be best for all possible situations. I love the screen on my 24" iMac but don't like to do serious coding work in OS X. It works fine for booting up and managing virtual machines (VMWare Fusion works pretty well despite being in beta) though. I do most of my coding and geek stuff in a Linux window, my graphic work in OS X, and keep Windows XP w/ IE7 and Windows 2k w/ IE6 open in windows so that I can test all major platforms easily. I wish they'd put more powerful processors in iMacs though. I love the Core 2 Duo CPUs and they work well enough but my PCs have much more powerful processors than are available in the iMacs right now and I do use the power. Most of the time it isn't an issue though and the screen makes it worth while.
I have to disagree with Carmack about multi-threaded coding being significantly harder. It's really easy to let different subsystems do their own thing and just share data as needed so long as those systems don't need to be tightly linked. It only becomes tricky if you're trying to split a single system down in unnatural ways. At some point maybe that'll be needed but games, and most real world apps, are so complex anyway that they naturally have several systems running at once. If you can put your graphics system on a core, your physics system on another core, your AI on it's own core, and all the nitty gritty logic that ties things together on a core then you've simplified your code (as you don't need to try to make time for each system on a single core as much) and made things quite a bit faster without needing to do anything very hard.
Possibly JC is being to ambitious with how he is using the multi-core design and that is why he considers it hard? You can squeeze more performance out that way but once we get into eight core systems I don't know how much benefit we'll actually see from that little extra speed. Is it worth the added complexity? I think I'd wait for compilers and programming languages to evolve to handle those details for me. Or sit down and make them evolve myself - it's easier than writing a bunch of really complex app code for every app I write.
Of course most programmers are bad about properly designing their code. One that has always bugged me is apps where the UI freezes up while working with data or the network. Y'know you don't have to stop updating the UI while you load that 5GB file. Just read a block of the file, update the UI, read the next block, and so on. So many apps do that wrong and I just hate it.
I've always been amazed in how abussive guys always have more women. A woman will admit that he is mean to her and possibly even violent towards her but she still comes back to him. If she can't be with him anymore she seeks out someone else like him. It's really incredible. It all comes down to the fact that assholes aren't afraid of being shot down so they're a lot bolder than most nice guys and that often assholes come across as being stronger which causes women to want them more. It's like putting out a bug light and watching bugs fly to it over and over again knowing it's going to destroy them all.
I can't imagine why intelligent women do this. They have to see through it to know they're making a mistake but they still do it. Not all of them of course - but a significant number. I guess though that it's just some kind of addiction and habit. You tend to do what you're familair with again and we seek pleasure now despite the cost later. People know that excessive drinking is going to make them puke in the morning but they do it anyway.
Of course then you have to wonder what makes men want to be mean or violent towards women and children. What kind of wuss takes out their anger and frustration on those that are weaker than them? Learn some freaking anger management.
You mean the guy that actually has the balls to stick out an entire war without whining and giving up because we could be hurting the bad guys' feelings? Or the guy that listened to the American people screaming for vengence after 9/11 and actually did something about it?
I'm not a Bush fan. His domestic policies tend to really suck. But at least he'll follow through with what he starts and not listen to all the wusses out there who have the retarded belief that the bad guys are just like us and can be reasoned with over coffee and donuts. The same people totally disregard what the civilians in the areas we're freeing tell them, namely had much they appreciate us, so that they can listen to the professional pull-it-out-of-your-ass opinions of their choice political ranting jerk off tell them that we're hurting these people. Sure pull out of the war effort so that thousands of innocent civilians are left to sort out a civil war for themselves while trying to keep any other evil dictators from taking over. We're Americans so we don't give a damn right? Just let the innocents die so that we don't have to hurt the feelings of the bad guys or take any kind of a moral position.
The war is the number one issue for me in the next election. I will not vote for anyone that is going to pull the troops out or otherwise undermine the war effort. We've spent time, money, and lives on this effort and I want to actually see results and not giving up. If anything, we need to step up and do something about Iran next. Clean that whole area out and occupy them for the next fifty years until we've finished resocializing their children and grandchildren.
A President that had the balls to win the war and the brains to create good domestic policy would be awesome. If any party can produce such a canidate I'll probably vote for them. Manage to find a canidate that is a good natural leader that can pull the parties together to get good things done and you'd have something pretty damn good. To bad the chances of that happening are almost nil. It seems only very polarized people can make it very high in office. People like me that are center don't have many options we like.
Snow Crash or The Diamond age could be great movies but only if allowed to be as long as needed and if they don't chop out the interesting hard to film bits like your namshubs. A mini series is probably the right format for such movies as I can easily see them needing to be several hours long.
The Diamond Age is my favorite book so I can't wait to see it. I hope they don't wreck it. I think it'll be harder to translate to film than Snow Crash because you have to explain nanotech, computing, etc so much. If they can pull it off though it'll be awesome.
I can see Snow Crash being a very cool movie with all the interaction of VR (please don't make it cheesy!), swords, motorcycles, gun fights, pizza deliver by mob owned tanks, skateboarders, freelance spys, drugs, evil corporations, hackers, etc.
Bruce Sterling's Distraction would also make a cool mini series. Science, politics, nomads, a crazy governor, a genetic mutant consultant, and a mock war against the Dutch. Sounds like good tv to me.
All you really need is a BT client designed to hide all the complexity of finding content and downloading with BT, an associated server farm that makes sure the torrent is always well seeded by fast machines (for paying clients), and some tweaks to make BT favor sending files start to end in case of media files that can be streamed.
;)
My solution is a BT client implemented as a signed Java applet. You don't even have to install special software on your computer - just visit my website. I cheat and don't make it easy for people to stop sharing files they've downloaded and I do things to make them want to stay hooked up so that as much as possible the users foot the bandwidth needs. Now if only I had funding.
The worst thing about most website design is that people have no idea how to make anything usable. People present way to many options on a single page. Or the opposite problem where you have twenty pages each with two links and a lot of artsy graphic crap. What's the worst though is when you have a PHB that thinks they know best how a site should be designed so you end up with something pretty lame.
Don't learn web design from either programmers or graphic artists because both typically do a shitty job and definately don't learn from PHBs.
The first thing to do is to read everything you shouldn't do. There are lots of books and online resources for this and while some of them will conflict they will at least give you a good idea what things don't work. Realize that not all websites have the same purpose so not all rules will apply to every site and some people just plain have different ideas about what is good and bad. Knowing your audience is very important. Then you should study some basics of art like how to proportion and layout graphics and what colors work well with each other and to learn some styles that might work for you. Figure out which parts you can do well and which you can't. I typically hire someone to do logos and major artwork for me but I do the page elements such as borders, backgrounds, buttons, menu options, etc and I do the HTML and stylesheets that make it all work. Ask the opinion of other people, that aren't all like you, from time to time to get an idea what works and what doesn't. Geeks like things very orderly usually and graphic artists like things with over-the-top flair but most users like something in between. Even simple things like removing the line under links can greatly confuse your average user even if it does look a lot better and if you mark the links in some other way.
They have a single unit that can be in all places and in all times at once. Sometimes it looks like a big scary black bird.
I remember a friend of mine being carded to buy fuel injector cleaner. Umm so if you're 17 and your car needs some what are you supposed to do? ;)
IMO 13 still hasn't been done. Credit cards suck. They aren't especially secure, they aren't especially easy to use, they're expensive for retailers which of course pass the fees on to customers, and they give massive control of all commerce to a few central companies that control everything. PayPal is even worse although they do at least allow consumer to consumer transactions.
:)
The two big markets for online business is still in digital cash and shipping/fulfillment. Yes, pre-net companies have expanded a little to fill these gaps but they are really bandaid solutions. Someone that does either of these better and in a more net-friendly way stands to make huge amounts of money. Provide these key backend business services, and make them easier, faster, and cheaper, and you can own the keys to eBay, Amazon, Google, and damn near every major web company of the present or future. Sadly, I've never found an investor that could see that simple fact. Short-sighted rats!
Really these are things the government probably should provide but since they're not interested it leaves two big goldmines open to anyone with deep enough pockets and enough brains to do it better.
HTML was never a well designed markup language. Mixing structure with layout was a mistake made with HTML almost from the first. The only real innovation in HTML that was well designed was keeping things simple yet flexible. Before HTML hyperlinking systems tended to be either overly complex or to rigid of design.
The bad thing about HTML is that while it started off simple, the poorly conceived mixing of structure and layout, that kept getting crapped more and more into it's design, have kept making it more and more complex which of course is killing it's original advantage. It's largely this effect, combined with the influx of less intelligent people, that required the conception of the blog. That and the fact that 'home page' sounds lame while 'blog' sounds like nothing whatesoever so it can be a more popular buzzword.
I totally agree that other than some cute interfaces to make it easier to edit your home page there is nothing very different from a 1994 home page and today's blog. There was even the same ranting back then about how citizen journalism was going to kill corporate journalism - yada yada yada.
MySpace reeks in the same way GeoCities did. The lack of design skill on either is so bad as to be frightening. The sad thing is that most users don't even notice. You could offer free upgrades that looked nice and were easy to use and most users wouldn't use them. The whole mess looks like a Lisa Frank nightmare from hell. Even Lisa Frank's own website doesn't look that way as much as MySpace.
But then nothing is ever really new. It's just minor updates to what came before. Amazon wasn't the first to sell stuff online. eBay wasn't the first to auction stuff online. Flickr wasn't the first photo sharing site. WoW isn't any different than the graphical MUDs of the 90's. They just provided minor improvements to the interfaces, had cute names and some advertising money, and were in the right place at the right time.
It all just goes to prove that if you miss out on one wave to keep your idea around, spruce it up, give it a better name, get some advertising money, and try again on the next wave.
Probably the only thing besides swap and logs would be if a file is recording access times on frequently used files. I do a lot of data processing (copying files, rewriting files, etc at about 100,000 files a day) which is also pretty intensive on disk writes so I don't do that on flash either.
/tmp but I'd like to have something a little more static, and with more space, for the large files I'm actively processing. Something of about 32-64GB would probably be pretty good. I'm also interested to see how much these hybrid drives we've been hearing about are going to help. 1GB of cache seems like it'd help but I often deal with files larger than that so I wonder if that is enough. They should just sell hdd's with normal RAM slots on the back so you could add RAM to them.
I've been considering getting a RAM drive for use of temp files and such but I haven't yet seen any quite big enough. I use a RAM disk anyway for
I have a 4GB CF and it easily stores my Linux kernel, libraries, apps, and config files. I've heard Windows has issues with running on flash media mostly because there is no easy way to tell it the media should be read-only meaning that it quickly wears the media out with frivilous disk writing. I'd suspect you could fix this just be getting a CF to IDE adapter that supports making the drive read-only in hardware. Or you could just ignore it and buy new flash media every now and then.
The CF to IDE adapters I mostly use I picked up for $8 each including S&H and they work great. My only real complaint about such adapters is that they usually have no easy way to mount them to your case. I'd like to see an adapter that could hold several CF cards that was made to mount in the space of a 3.5" hdd.
I wouldn't suggest with going with the cheapest per meg flash media you can get as usually these are buggier and slower than the more expensive media. The difference in price is usually not huge so it's better to go with the faster media if you can.
My Linux systems have a 4GB CF card that stores all static files such as programs, libraries, and config files. I have the partition with these files (yes it's /) made read-only and noatime. You really only want to use it for these files because flash media has a limited number of writes it can handle.
It does speed the system up though and it makes it a lot less likely to suffer an unbootable situation which is really the reason I switched to flash. I got sick of needing to rebuild or restore my whole system every time the drives wore out. Yes, you can use RAID but it's still seems wrong to store my data on the same drive(s) as my OS and applications.
Add RAM and get rid of swap/virtual memory too as it'll greatly speed your system up and prolong it's life. If switching to such a system make sure you buy actual flash media and not a micro-drive in the form factor of flash media. It doesn't do you any good to try to switch to flash if you're actually using a wee hdd. Also I suggest carefully checking the speed and compatibility of the flash media before you buy it because some brands and lines work a hell of a lot better and faster than others.
I agree - a mature rating should be fine for GTA. It doesn't need an adult rating and there should be no problem with normal stores like Walmart or EB selling GTA. It just needs to not be sold to anyone that can't buy an R rated movie. Walmart checks my id to buy spray paint and cold medicine so it shouldn't be hard for them to check for mature or adult rated games. Then it's up to the parents as to if their kid can play GTA. I wouldn't care if my kid played GTA but for parents who think it's important it should be up to them to enforce their morals.
I hate the unemployment benefits we receive. They are such a joke and rarely actually provide any benefit to the people who actually need them.
;)
Unemployment should be based on the amount of money earned since the last time your unemployment insurance was used up and nothing else. It shouldn't matter if you quit, were fired, the company went broke, or whatever. Why am I paying taxes to supposedly take care of me when I'm old when I can't pay my rent now. Let me put my money into savings instead so I can use it when I need it or at least make all those benefits available to me now. Damn the government and their half assed, red taped, backwards social programs.
Okay - maybe I'm annoyed since it took them like two months to tell me I wasn't going to get unemployment, after first sending me a letter telling me I was, and in the meantime I've used my savings up and still haven't found a job. Of course I could go into a whole other rant over how it should be illegal to discriminate against job applicants with to much experience or education. I'd work at Burger King while looking fo another decent job if only the rats would hire me.
I quit my last job, which I liked quite a bit, because my manager quit which put me directly under the owners control. He micro-managed everything, including stuff he knew nothing about, was paranoid of all the wrong people, always made inappropiate comments to employees and customers, and did nothing to actually keep the company running. There was nobody higher to go to. Unfortunately I found out that having an employer that acts like a pervert, doesn't pay the required overtime, threatens not to pay you at all, wants you to help cheat on taxes, etc is not a good enough reason to quit your job in California as the state denied my unemployment benefits. I'm not sure what an acceptable reason to leave a job would be in their opinion if all that mess didn't qualify.
It's really to bad though because I liked the job, I was good at the job, and I enjoyed living in San Diego.