Your description is as I intended. But, for the average computer user, the emacs analogy won't work. But I'm not speaking to regular Windows and Mac users- this is Slashdot. Most folks on Slashdot know what emacs is, and as such, makes for an OK basis of comparison. Thanks for speaking my thoughts more clearly.:)
I'm not talking about Smalltalk. I'm talking about Squeak. RTA.
I've no acronym for this, but Know What You're Talking About (KWYTA?). Squeak *is* Smalltalk. It's not the only Smalltalk dialect there is, but it the fastest growing Smalltalk, the Smalltalk with the biggest online community around it.
If you run a LOGO implementation, written in C, on top of your Linux/X11 box, you don't say that "C is nothing but LOGO," or "Man, leenux suxors, all you can do is play with LOGO" do you? You can use Squeak in a number of ways. You can use the eToys scripting system, which is what I assume you are thinking of as modernized LOGO. Or, if for some reason you feel more "adult" doing so, you can write the GUI in all of your apps in a purely programmatic way. Or, you could do what most Squeakers do- just get the job done in the way that makes sense.
Another computer visionary with vague promises and criticisms. Instead of doing [insert clearly-defined practical thing here], you should be doing [insert vague semi-buzzword here, like "education", or "object"] and you should be using [insert visionary's product here] to do it.
Not quite...
While people are certainly welcome to disagree with Kay's vision, he's not in the same barrel of monkey that most so-called visionarise and pundits live. Unlike most of those, he's implemented those ideas, and has been spent implementing those- in real, live, usable code- for the last 30-some years. Kay doesn't have a product, he's got nothing in a box to sell. He does have an idea to sell, though you don't pay for it with your money. He's been doing it in a very practical way for 30 years, not just making vague promises.
Anyone who has spoken with him personally- in person or via email- or read his words, seen his vision knows this. Alan is *the* man.
There's a great XEROX Video we've here at our uni library- "Doing with images makes symbols [videorecording] : communicating with computers," released in 1987 while Kay was a fellow with Apple. For an enthusiastic and engrossing view of what Kay thinks computers *should* be (and I'm 100% with him!) should check it out.
Also, look into Smalltalk. Alan works on SqueakSmalltalk- rather than C++ or Java- and there's a good reason for it. Smalltalk has the tendency to empower both end user and programmer. It's "open source" in a way that most slashdotters have never imagined. It's kind of like having your whole computer run Emacs, but without being stuck with some funky half-GUI half-terminal app with nothing but key commands to drive it. Squeak gives us the power to control our computing environment in a way similar to emacs, although Squeak is a lot closer to a "conventional" GUI environment than Emacs. That said, there are a lot of things about Squeak's GUI toolkit - Morphic- that are highly unconventional, but quite great to have around.
I'm not claiming it's not a hoax or anything, but your grounds for declaring it's a hoax really don't fly. There are lots others in this thread that are more compelling.
Other than C++, the primary development language for the Psion EPOC32 OS was OPL, a basic-like language that could be development on the PC w/ a simulator, or on the device itself, though the Psions had real keyboards, not just an on screen one.
You really couldn't code Java apps on the Jackito. With those hardware specs, a Java compiler would not fly. Simple as that. Hell, even a semi-standard JVM would be rough going on it. But a decent BASIC interpreter? Yup. Again, OPL on the Psion. Apps run faster than most Java apps do on PCs, even.
The photos of the device on the website are of an Apple Newton.
Which photos, exactly? I see a lot of renderings, but no straight up photos. And the images I see aren't of any Newton. What model? I'm a long time Newton user and developer, and there is no Newton that looks like that. It looks more like a Newton than most other PDAs, but as far as I can tell, that's mostly to do with the fact that it is big and has some curves...
Actually, there was a PDA once somewhat long these lines. It didn't have 7, but I believe 3-5 CPUs, each was a z80. One was dedicated to character recognition, one to the OS, one to the application running, and one to sound. Or something along those lines. I cannot recall the name of the PDA I'm thinking of, it was a very small-timer, something even 99% of PDA hobbyists/proponents/historians/developers like myself haven't even heard of. The company that made them was a british company whose name started with an "A". Not Acorn, alas. The name of the PDA itself was Pen.
What other PDA do you know of that comes with a built-in BASIC interpreter for app development? There's Psion's OPL, which is certainly BASIC-like. But since that was officially dropped, I suppose they can claim to be the only one. Common business schtick.
The jackito really seems like a step back in PDA development, you can control any other touchscreen PDA with a single finger or the stylus, having 2 finger control doesn't really sound all that innovative.
Indeed. But, since it is a potentailly handy feature, it wouldn't hurt for real PDAs to have a touch screen with this ability. While it's something I'd never use (and I use PDAs a lot, my primary computer is one), there are people and situations when it would be.
So while you might see an otherwise unejoyable tv miniseries get acclaimed for discussing some kind of social issue like pedophilia or AIDS
Yeah, that's because everyone knows that only homos molest kids and get AIDS. Right? Not just do only homos perpetuate these aweful crimes, most homos are involved with them. Right?
pfft, yeah. right.
There is a market for "artistic" games, though whether or not gay people/bunnies/monsters are part of the plot. I suppose part of this is what you consider "artistic" to mean; a lot of people use it as a blanket insult to just mean anything they don't like. Not saying you are using it this way, but it's good to point out that "artistic" is often a word with strong connotations.
There is a market for so-posed artistic games in similar kinds of people who like "artistic" books, film and television. That is, people who like to think, be challenged. I'd say a lot of good adventure games are artistic- Myst is a great example. Mind you, anything that requires thought usually isn't big with today's core gamer market, the 10-30 year old American male. They just wanna have fun, and that's fine. As the video game generation gets old, I think more of these so-called "artistic" games will come out, be popular and gain acceptance by the larger community. As the generation that is 6-13 years old now grows old and becomes bored with mindless shooters of all shapes and sizes, they will bring the "artistic" game to the level beyond my generation, the generation that grew up with Sega Master System, NES and Genesis. I don't doubt this one bit.
Hell, there will probably even be a genre, "arty games" or something. But I imagine a lot of those will be lame, just like most "art films." While there are a lot of good arty films in other genres, anything that seems to bill itself as art off the bat seems to have something to prove in a silly way. At least to me. *shrug*
Quite. Some even consider premature/early optimization to be a bit of a curse, or at least not a very good idea. In software development in general, definately not just limited to games.
The reality is, Trek is actually a modern soap opera cleverly disguised as futuristic sci fi.
What regular modern soap operas deal with similar issues? While the philosophy of Rodenberry as spout'd by TOS can be at times deep and interesting and have bearing on how I live my life, the kind of crap most modern soap operas deal with aren't any of those things. I guess I've not run into the problem of "my sister is dating my former girlfriend's now-gay uncle, who wants to have my sister's baby in his artificial womb." Maybe other folks do, but not me.
Things have been pretty corny, and often just downright stupid, the last 8 years or so, but Trek has always been fundamentally about human relationships and difficulties, not science fiction.
If that isn't science fiction, then you're reading/watching the wrong stuff. Most good sci-fi is about humans and humanity, what we do in extreme situations in especial. Oftentimes, a lot of these extreme situations are most easily explored within a science fiction setting. Sure, there is a lot of crappy sci fi that may just be about ships and lasers, but pfft. Who needs that kind of stuff.
I am totally with you there. There was a lot of JMS-ish setup for future threads, future details about the universe, etc. Nothing but unresolved. *sigh*
Ouch! What a sleezeball that guy is. Wish I still had the article, the asswhipe had a great quote, something along the lines of: "I think I was a great husband. Most women wish they would be as lucky as she to have a husband who, in 7 years of marriage, did little wrong. And the wrong he did was just to just make her uncomfortable by propositioning her a few times in innappropriate places for sex she didn't want to have." HA!
I especially like the part about bringing back Marcus. Perhaps a mishap that Q caused whilst playing with time travel makes Marcus Star Fleet fleet commander. Except JMS writes it. And Marcus speeks Minbari most of the time, mostly kicking people's asses with his Minbari fighting pike. All the existing Starfleet personell are like- how'd this ol' Anla'shok duder get here? BUT WHO CARES! It'd still be better than Enterprise.
I dunno about you, but it's hard for me to have something so incomplete by my favorite TV series. It's like having the first 10 pages of a book being your favorite novel, which is kind of silly, even if those 10 pages are pretty good. Firefly is great, don't get me wrong, and I really wish it was still on- but only having a half a season of episodes, I find a hard time getting too attached to it.
It was shaping up to be quite good for a first-season of a sci-fi show, though.
Pretty recently, JMS said that it was still going ahead and was way past just talk. Money has changed hands, JMS has scheduled around it, and a couple drafts have been gone through. It apparently will be called B5: The Movement of Shadows, though it is unclear if that is to be the final name of the film, or just a working title.
I got the parody, I was just having a peasant's revolt against it.:) But speaking of Choosy Pervs and.GIFs- anyone else remember the special Zmodem and Ymodem plug-ins you could get for terminal apps in DOS that would show you interlaced GIFs as they downloaded? So you could be like- man, this porno sucks- next please. huh. BBSs owned me.
Firefox doesn't seem to support it, at least looking at this page. Nor does IE. If we're going to skip the vast majority of user's browsers, why don't we just assume everyone has QuickTime installed?
Man. Once of my 1990 13 year old pet peaves was when people pronounced.GIF as "jiff." SORRY! Come again! Better luck next time! There is another format- called jiff, the JPEG Interchange File Format. So pshaw!
Wtf- a troll? What numbskull mod'd that? Some LOTR freak? Look at the links- I'm not the one who decided Spider-Man 2 has 30 problems- or that LOTR has hundreds. Jeeee-zuz.
Pfffft. The old Omnibooks are an exception, something special. Sure, my old Newton with a keyboard- basically an old laptop- lasted for a long time, but it was something quite different from your average old PC lappy.
Slashdot Mirror
Your description is as I intended. But, for the average computer user, the emacs analogy won't work. But I'm not speaking to regular Windows and Mac users- this is Slashdot. Most folks on Slashdot know what emacs is, and as such, makes for an OK basis of comparison. Thanks for speaking my thoughts more clearly. :)
I'm not talking about Smalltalk. I'm talking about Squeak. RTA.
I've no acronym for this, but Know What You're Talking About (KWYTA?). Squeak *is* Smalltalk. It's not the only Smalltalk dialect there is, but it the fastest growing Smalltalk, the Smalltalk with the biggest online community around it.
If you run a LOGO implementation, written in C, on top of your Linux/X11 box, you don't say that "C is nothing but LOGO," or "Man, leenux suxors, all you can do is play with LOGO" do you? You can use Squeak in a number of ways. You can use the eToys scripting system, which is what I assume you are thinking of as modernized LOGO. Or, if for some reason you feel more "adult" doing so, you can write the GUI in all of your apps in a purely programmatic way. Or, you could do what most Squeakers do- just get the job done in the way that makes sense.
Another computer visionary with vague promises and criticisms.
Instead of doing [insert clearly-defined practical thing here], you should be doing [insert vague semi-buzzword here, like "education", or "object"] and you should be using [insert visionary's product here] to do it.
Not quite...
While people are certainly welcome to disagree with Kay's vision, he's not in the same barrel of monkey that most so-called visionarise and pundits live. Unlike most of those, he's implemented those ideas, and has been spent implementing those- in real, live, usable code- for the last 30-some years. Kay doesn't have a product, he's got nothing in a box to sell. He does have an idea to sell, though you don't pay for it with your money. He's been doing it in a very practical way for 30 years, not just making vague promises.
Anyone who has spoken with him personally- in person or via email- or read his words, seen his vision knows this. Alan is *the* man.
There's a great XEROX Video we've here at our uni library- "Doing with images makes symbols [videorecording] : communicating with computers," released in 1987 while Kay was a fellow with Apple. For an enthusiastic and engrossing view of what Kay thinks computers *should* be (and I'm 100% with him!) should check it out.
Also, look into Smalltalk. Alan works on Squeak Smalltalk- rather than C++ or Java- and there's a good reason for it. Smalltalk has the tendency to empower both end user and programmer. It's "open source" in a way that most slashdotters have never imagined. It's kind of like having your whole computer run Emacs, but without being stuck with some funky half-GUI half-terminal app with nothing but key commands to drive it. Squeak gives us the power to control our computing environment in a way similar to emacs, although Squeak is a lot closer to a "conventional" GUI environment than Emacs. That said, there are a lot of things about Squeak's GUI toolkit - Morphic- that are highly unconventional, but quite great to have around.
OK, enough early morning rambling from me...
I'm not claiming it's not a hoax or anything, but your grounds for declaring it's a hoax really don't fly. There are lots others in this thread that are more compelling.
Other than C++, the primary development language for the Psion EPOC32 OS was OPL, a basic-like language that could be development on the PC w/ a simulator, or on the device itself, though the Psions had real keyboards, not just an on screen one.
And this is coming from a person who has done a lot of coding directly on a PDA. First, using NewtonScript on various Newton 1.3 and 2.1 devices using the awesome NDE (NewtDevEnv); Squeak Smalltalk on Linux, CE and PocketPC; on CE and PPC; and finally now using Rexx and LispMe and Plua on PalmOS. Naturally, there's no way in hell you could code on this thing using that ABCDE kb layout, you'd need qwerty or dvorak. Or Fitaly. But anything other than abcd.
You really couldn't code Java apps on the Jackito. With those hardware specs, a Java compiler would not fly. Simple as that. Hell, even a semi-standard JVM would be rough going on it. But a decent BASIC interpreter? Yup. Again, OPL on the Psion. Apps run faster than most Java apps do on PCs, even.
The photos of the device on the website are of an Apple Newton.
Which photos, exactly? I see a lot of renderings, but no straight up photos. And the images I see aren't of any Newton. What model? I'm a long time Newton user and developer, and there is no Newton that looks like that. It looks more like a Newton than most other PDAs, but as far as I can tell, that's mostly to do with the fact that it is big and has some curves...
Actually, there was a PDA once somewhat long these lines. It didn't have 7, but I believe 3-5 CPUs, each was a z80. One was dedicated to character recognition, one to the OS, one to the application running, and one to sound. Or something along those lines. I cannot recall the name of the PDA I'm thinking of, it was a very small-timer, something even 99% of PDA hobbyists/proponents/historians/developers like myself haven't even heard of. The company that made them was a british company whose name started with an "A". Not Acorn, alas. The name of the PDA itself was Pen.
Anyone else know what the hell I'm talking about?
What other PDA do you know of that comes with a built-in BASIC interpreter for app development? There's Psion's OPL, which is certainly BASIC-like. But since that was officially dropped, I suppose they can claim to be the only one. Common business schtick.
The jackito really seems like a step back in PDA development, you can control any other touchscreen PDA with a single finger or the stylus, having 2 finger control doesn't really sound all that innovative.
Indeed. But, since it is a potentailly handy feature, it wouldn't hurt for real PDAs to have a touch screen with this ability. While it's something I'd never use (and I use PDAs a lot, my primary computer is one), there are people and situations when it would be.
So while you might see an otherwise unejoyable tv miniseries get acclaimed for discussing some kind of social issue like pedophilia or AIDS
Yeah, that's because everyone knows that only homos molest kids and get AIDS. Right? Not just do only homos perpetuate these aweful crimes, most homos are involved with them. Right?
pfft, yeah. right.
There is a market for "artistic" games, though whether or not gay people/bunnies/monsters are part of the plot. I suppose part of this is what you consider "artistic" to mean; a lot of people use it as a blanket insult to just mean anything they don't like. Not saying you are using it this way, but it's good to point out that "artistic" is often a word with strong connotations.
There is a market for so-posed artistic games in similar kinds of people who like "artistic" books, film and television. That is, people who like to think, be challenged. I'd say a lot of good adventure games are artistic- Myst is a great example. Mind you, anything that requires thought usually isn't big with today's core gamer market, the 10-30 year old American male. They just wanna have fun, and that's fine. As the video game generation gets old, I think more of these so-called "artistic" games will come out, be popular and gain acceptance by the larger community. As the generation that is 6-13 years old now grows old and becomes bored with mindless shooters of all shapes and sizes, they will bring the "artistic" game to the level beyond my generation, the generation that grew up with Sega Master System, NES and Genesis. I don't doubt this one bit.
Hell, there will probably even be a genre, "arty games" or something. But I imagine a lot of those will be lame, just like most "art films." While there are a lot of good arty films in other genres, anything that seems to bill itself as art off the bat seems to have something to prove in a silly way. At least to me. *shrug*
Quite. Some even consider premature/early optimization to be a bit of a curse, or at least not a very good idea. In software development in general, definately not just limited to games.
A couple issues about this post:
The reality is, Trek is actually a modern soap opera cleverly disguised as futuristic sci fi.
What regular modern soap operas deal with similar issues? While the philosophy of Rodenberry as spout'd by TOS can be at times deep and interesting and have bearing on how I live my life, the kind of crap most modern soap operas deal with aren't any of those things. I guess I've not run into the problem of "my sister is dating my former girlfriend's now-gay uncle, who wants to have my sister's baby in his artificial womb." Maybe other folks do, but not me.
Things have been pretty corny, and often just downright stupid, the last 8 years or so, but Trek has always been fundamentally about human relationships and difficulties, not science fiction.
If that isn't science fiction, then you're reading/watching the wrong stuff. Most good sci-fi is about humans and humanity, what we do in extreme situations in especial. Oftentimes, a lot of these extreme situations are most easily explored within a science fiction setting. Sure, there is a lot of crappy sci fi that may just be about ships and lasers, but pfft. Who needs that kind of stuff.
I am totally with you there. There was a lot of JMS-ish setup for future threads, future details about the universe, etc. Nothing but unresolved. *sigh*
Ouch! What a sleezeball that guy is. Wish I still had the article, the asswhipe had a great quote, something along the lines of: "I think I was a great husband. Most women wish they would be as lucky as she to have a husband who, in 7 years of marriage, did little wrong. And the wrong he did was just to just make her uncomfortable by propositioning her a few times in innappropriate places for sex she didn't want to have." HA!
I especially like the part about bringing back Marcus. Perhaps a mishap that Q caused whilst playing with time travel makes Marcus Star Fleet fleet commander. Except JMS writes it. And Marcus speeks Minbari most of the time, mostly kicking people's asses with his Minbari fighting pike. All the existing Starfleet personell are like- how'd this ol' Anla'shok duder get here? BUT WHO CARES! It'd still be better than Enterprise.
I dunno about you, but it's hard for me to have something so incomplete by my favorite TV series. It's like having the first 10 pages of a book being your favorite novel, which is kind of silly, even if those 10 pages are pretty good. Firefly is great, don't get me wrong, and I really wish it was still on- but only having a half a season of episodes, I find a hard time getting too attached to it.
It was shaping up to be quite good for a first-season of a sci-fi show, though.
Pretty recently, JMS said that it was still going ahead and was way past just talk. Money has changed hands, JMS has scheduled around it, and a couple drafts have been gone through. It apparently will be called B5: The Movement of Shadows, though it is unclear if that is to be the final name of the film, or just a working title.
And my penis is a circumvention device. Ohhhh yeeeeahhhh.
Indeed. You can *make* animations with PNG files, but you just can't view them with any browser. Way to go!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
You lie. Bob is lying. He said it was GIF before, someone must've bought him off since I last looked it up in 95 or so. Yeah, that's it.
I got the parody, I was just having a peasant's revolt against it. :) But speaking of Choosy Pervs and .GIFs- anyone else remember the special Zmodem and Ymodem plug-ins you could get for terminal apps in DOS that would show you interlaced GIFs as they downloaded? So you could be like- man, this porno sucks- next please. huh. BBSs owned me.
Firefox doesn't seem to support it, at least looking at this page. Nor does IE. If we're going to skip the vast majority of user's browsers, why don't we just assume everyone has QuickTime installed?
Man. Once of my 1990 13 year old pet peaves was when people pronounced .GIF as "jiff." SORRY! Come again! Better luck next time! There is another format- called jiff, the JPEG Interchange File Format. So pshaw!
Good thing I'm over that, huh?
Wtf- a troll? What numbskull mod'd that? Some LOTR freak? Look at the links- I'm not the one who decided Spider-Man 2 has 30 problems- or that LOTR has hundreds. Jeeee-zuz.
Pfffft. The old Omnibooks are an exception, something special. Sure, my old Newton with a keyboard- basically an old laptop- lasted for a long time, but it was something quite different from your average old PC lappy.