The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds some truth when it comes to memes and other concepts that are part of one culture but not another.
If one has a shortcut to refer to a phenomenon, such as Murphy's law, or a win-win situation, this makes such arguments more likely to come up on a discussion.
For example, if Al Gore has two unrelated proposals, and one of them can be summarized with "is a win-win situation" while the other requires a complicated Ricardian argument about the benefits of free trade, which one do you think he'll send to congress?
The main job of the OS is to facilitate protected inter-object communication.
Defining an operating system is similar to defining a car. Strictly speaking four wheels and an engine make a car. In practice, you wouldn't even consider purchasing something without air bags, seat belts, cup holders, padded seats, cargo space, windshield wipers... you get the point.
An OS has core functions such as memory management, process communication, interface with hardware, plus a large array of commonly used facilities or services such as an editor, a library, a compiler, a GUI, and yes, even games (btw, the original UNIX people got this one right).
Your examples of software projects that fail to have code reuse are mostly (or all, I'm not sure) propriatary non-free projects?!?
You miss the point, code reuse should be encouraged through common OS libraries.
Boy, Miguel has grown a lot. He's moved beyond the first initial love for *nix because it doesn't bluescreen you twice a day to see the finer details about *nix.
Before the linux-mania hit, OS researchers in academic circles routinely bashed many of its weaknesses.
Now according/.ers and other similar crowds, linux can do no wrong.
The fact that *nix has a retarded all-or-nothing security model is suddenly a feature to be envied.
The slow and moronic X-window model, suddenly should be the envy of all (with the notable exception of the Berlin project, which is aiming to junk the whole x-window mess).
UNIX got a lot of things right, and those should be preserved. It also got some things wrong plus it has aged quite a bit. We should all work on improving those.
The first step towards fixing them is admitting that some parts of *nix do suck and should be made not to suck.
Here's the relevant quote:
I have seen many times people defending the greatness of Unix by comparing the good things of Unix
against the bad things of other operating systems. I have done this myself in the past.
Here is a common problem: people focus on their strengths and ignore their flaws when it comes to
anything that is dear to them. Even worse, when comparing with another competing entity, they focus
on their weaknesses and ignore their strengths.
The problem with this approach at looking at things is that eventually the competition will catch up with
you. At the time you realize this, they already got your features, and you have none of theirs.
This is why it is very important to keep a self-critical approach and try to improve things before it is too
late.
I had this idea several years ago. My take on it is that over time, all programs should move over to a configuration library, something quite simple and based on XML.
I know of at least one company that was doing SGML config files back in 1995. A fellow that went by the name Tim Bray was working for them at the time.
A law firm (Oppedahl & Larson LLP) owns patents.com. There is actually some good stuff there.
Why are you surprised that there is good stuff there, as if all lawyers were uncapable of higher processes.
Carl Oppedahl has been active on the field of software patents and the internet since before the web was invented. When it comes to patents, I'd say 99% of us./ers could learn a lot from him, even if we might disagree with his personal views on the subject.
Hmm, according to the dynamic web size page Michael Sims has over at the Censorware Project, there currently are roughly 2,140,000,000 web pages.
The size of image data look completely wrong. Image data makes up for about 75% of the content of most pages (see for example Akamai's data). Assuming some duplication of images, the amount of image data should be around 1-1 with text (a 100K text file is huge, a 100K photograph is average size).
I would like to see you routinely solve register allocation optimization problems in your head (known to be NP-complete). On the other hand the compiler has no problem exhaustively searching a sample space of 2^10 possibilities.
At the present time a good assembler programmer will give the compiler a run for its money. Within five to ten years, the compiler will leave the programmer in the dust.
Languages such as C, C++ and to some extent Java are still mirred in the past. They still follow an closely mathematical style of programming created for numerical computations in Fortran.
However flawed, Perl is the first language extensively used in real life in many years to break away from that type of notation.
Python is moving in that direction as well.
To quote Rob Pike, the hardware we use didn't even exist as a dream ten years ago, yet the OS and programming language we use is 30+ years old!
People have access to the Internet, but the value of that is debatable.
Even if we agreed that the value is not yet there, how long will it be before the value is there?
I've been on the web since day one, content has steadily improved, starting from a few personal home pages; then technical netword documentation; later on all new research papers in CS were posted. Other scientific communities joined soon thereafter (physics is now a leader). Lately all questions that come up during the day are answered on the web, ranging from travel to politics to trivia to medical information.
Once most of knowledge is available on the internet we will see a revolution similar to the invention of the printing press.
I recommend anybody who is interested reads: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Cambridge Press.
Once again, how could an article so wrong be considered "4 informative"??
Reply #493 already explains why traffic and cost of living are no real problems, at least compared to Seattle, but that well thought out reply is only "1 insightful" while the original posting has been moved up to 4??
Somebody should moderate down the parent of this posting.
First it claims: It wouldn't get them beyond the US legal system, unless they stopped selling their products in the US.
British Columbia wouldn't be making the offer if they didn't have reasons to believe they could pull it off.
Second it writes: And how many of those 20,000+ employees are on H1B Visas? They can't move to Canada.
All software workers can move to Canada. Currently, software workers have no restrictions to come to Canada. All they need is a job offer. (This is not the case for other occupations, such as sales or marketing, but those are easier to fill with locals).
The current UI model has very little state information across transactions. This results in unfriendly UIs. A friend of mine says it more succintly:
"No wonder people think apps are dumb. We lobotomize them every time we turn them off!"
Recently, a few apps have started to carry history info (netscape url completion, vi cursor positioning, MSWord completion). Adding to the list by seebs:
8. A good operating system will remember what I've done in the past and *ask* if I want to do the same at appropriate times.
Here's an example: You have eight files named grups.1, grups.2,..., grups 8. Open xterm
I'm running NT 4 SP 6 and it crashes, slows down to a crawl and complains about a missing dll at start up. It has no entry to uninstall in the Add/Remove program. Btw how do I change the default skin? It looks afwul!
That I'm not really contributing to mozilla by finding and reporting "bugs": security holes that have existed for several browser versions but are taken for granted, minor user-interface quirks, and requests for the interface to be more customizable and more friendly. At the same time, the slashdot community is frustrated by the lack of good user interfaces in open source software.
I don't know what the open-source community thinks, but speaking for myself as far as I can tell there is no shortage of good programmers there, yet there is a substantial shortage of good UI design (something that LUIGUI just started addressing). Moreover a lot of UI improvements are grunt work, that hackers are unlikely to tackle. So it is good to remind them about what needs to be done. Now, if on top of that you can yourself improve the interface, all the better.
But this is not as easy as it is made sound, particularly in issues relating to UI.
Say, for example, try to modify VIM (Vi IMproved) source code so that it understand by default that:W and:Q are the same as:w and:q, and you'll see how hard it is.
Rant: what *#&* # else could:W and:Q mean? and this is a likely typo as : requires you to press Shift.
Well, I'm a professor in CS and the grad class every year is snapped up, with job offers coming from all over North-America. Getting a job is never the issue, it's assumed you'll have one. The only question is how big is your salary, and every year the answer is 10% higher. In the mean time, we have bright people with a Master degree in Chemistry or PhD in physics transfering to CS because the couldn't find a job in their field. The same is true in all the other universities I'm familiar with.
Slashdot Mirror
If one has a shortcut to refer to a phenomenon, such as Murphy's law, or a win-win situation, this makes such arguments more likely to come up on a discussion.
For example, if Al Gore has two unrelated proposals, and one of them can be summarized with "is a win-win situation" while the other requires a complicated Ricardian argument about the benefits of free trade, which one do you think he'll send to congress?
Defining an operating system is similar to defining a car. Strictly speaking four wheels and an engine make a car. In practice, you wouldn't even consider purchasing something without air bags, seat belts, cup holders, padded seats, cargo space, windshield wipers... you get the point.
An OS has core functions such as memory management, process communication, interface with hardware, plus a large array of commonly used facilities or services such as an editor, a library, a compiler, a GUI, and yes, even games (btw, the original UNIX people got this one right).
You miss the point, code reuse should be encouraged through common OS libraries.
Boy, Miguel has grown a lot. He's moved beyond the first initial love for *nix because it doesn't bluescreen you twice a day to see the finer details about *nix .
Before the linux-mania hit, OS researchers in academic circles routinely bashed many of its weaknesses.
Now according /.ers and other similar crowds, linux can do no wrong.
The fact that *nix has a retarded all-or-nothing security model is suddenly a feature to be envied.
The slow and moronic X-window model, suddenly should be the envy of all (with the notable exception of the Berlin project, which is aiming to junk the whole x-window mess).
UNIX got a lot of things right, and those should be preserved. It also got some things wrong plus it has aged quite a bit. We should all work on improving those.
The first step towards fixing them is admitting that some parts of *nix do suck and should be made not to suck. Here's the relevant quote:
I have seen many times people defending the greatness of Unix by comparing the good things of Unix against the bad things of other operating systems. I have done this myself in the past.
Here is a common problem: people focus on their strengths and ignore their flaws when it comes to anything that is dear to them. Even worse, when comparing with another competing entity, they focus on their weaknesses and ignore their strengths.
The problem with this approach at looking at things is that eventually the competition will catch up with you. At the time you realize this, they already got your features, and you have none of theirs.
This is why it is very important to keep a self-critical approach and try to improve things before it is too late.
I know of at least one company that was doing SGML config files back in 1995. A fellow that went by the name Tim Bray was working for them at the time.
Why are you surprised that there is good stuff there, as if all lawyers were uncapable of higher processes.
Carl Oppedahl has been active on the field of software patents and the internet since before the web was invented. When it comes to patents, I'd say 99% of us ./ers could learn a lot from him, even if we might disagree with his personal views on the subject.
Actually 512K according to the original Mac designers.
The size of image data look completely wrong. Image data makes up for about 75% of the content of most pages (see for example Akamai's data). Assuming some duplication of images, the amount of image data should be around 1-1 with text (a 100K text file is huge, a 100K photograph is average size).
At the present time a good assembler programmer will give the compiler a run for its money. Within five to ten years, the compiler will leave the programmer in the dust.
However flawed, Perl is the first language extensively used in real life in many years to break away from that type of notation.
Python is moving in that direction as well.
To quote Rob Pike, the hardware we use didn't even exist as a dream ten years ago, yet the OS and programming language we use is 30+ years old!
Even if we agreed that the value is not yet there, how long will it be before the value is there?
I've been on the web since day one, content has steadily improved, starting from a few personal home pages; then technical netword documentation; later on all new research papers in CS were posted. Other scientific communities joined soon thereafter (physics is now a leader). Lately all questions that come up during the day are answered on the web, ranging from travel to politics to trivia to medical information.
Once most of knowledge is available on the internet we will see a revolution similar to the invention of the printing press.
I recommend anybody who is interested reads: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Cambridge Press.
erhh. Went to google, typed:
painting exterior house siding
All the links I clicked on looked relevant and useful.
You will never see IAAL, at least not from a good one, as they know they could be liable for providing erroneous legal advice.
Reply #493 already explains why traffic and cost of living are no real problems, at least compared to Seattle, but that well thought out reply is only "1 insightful" while the original posting has been moved up to 4??
First it claims: It wouldn't get them beyond the US legal system, unless they stopped selling their products in the US.
British Columbia wouldn't be making the offer if they didn't have reasons to believe they could pull it off.
Second it writes: And how many of those 20,000+ employees are on H1B Visas? They can't move to Canada.
All software workers can move to Canada. Currently, software workers have no restrictions to come to Canada. All they need is a job offer. (This is not the case for other occupations, such as sales or marketing, but those are easier to fill with locals).
8. A good operating system will remember what I've done in the past and *ask* if I want to do the same at appropriate times.
Here's an example: You have eight files named grups.1, grups.2, ..., grups 8.
Open xterm
% mv grups.1 groups.1
% mv grups.2 groups.2
% mv grups.3 groups.3
***Right about here I expect an intelligent OS to butt in and ask: rename grups.4 groups.4 (y/n)? ***
The same principle can be extended to any other number of situtations.
I'm running NT 4 SP 6 and it crashes, slows down to a crawl and complains about a missing dll at start up. It has no entry to uninstall in the Add/Remove program. Btw how do I change the default skin? It looks afwul!
I don't know what the open-source community thinks, but speaking for myself as far as I can tell there is no shortage of good programmers there, yet there is a substantial shortage of good UI design (something that LUIGUI just started addressing). Moreover a lot of UI improvements are grunt work, that hackers are unlikely to tackle. So it is good to remind them about what needs to be done. Now, if on top of that you can yourself improve the interface, all the better.
But this is not as easy as it is made sound, particularly in issues relating to UI.
Say, for example, try to modify VIM (Vi IMproved) source code so that it understand by default that :W and :Q are the same as :w and :q, and you'll see how hard it is.
Rant: what *#&* # else could :W and :Q mean? and this is a likely typo as : requires you to press Shift.
Well, I'm a professor in CS and the grad class every year is snapped up, with job offers coming from all over North-America. Getting a job is never the issue, it's assumed you'll have one. The only question is how big is your salary, and every year the answer is 10% higher. In the mean time, we have bright people with a Master degree in Chemistry or PhD in physics transfering to CS because the couldn't find a job in their field. The same is true in all the other universities I'm familiar with.