Of all the possible behaviours listed above we have to determine which one, if any, is the most common and assume that as the default setting, with all others supported via flags.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that when people do an ls from the shell 90% of the time they mean to see a list of the files one screenfull at a time.
But then, it would make more sense to include such a "pause feature" into the terminal program instead.
For sure, I agree. The problem at the core is that the terminal program is too brain dead for today's technology. This is one of the reasons why some people use emacs as their main shell...
But I clearly would not want it to be automatically piped into less.
_You_ wouldn't want it. But keep in mind that the relevant question is does the average user likes to see files flying past faster than they can read them or would it be preferable to present them in a user readable format?
Of course such piping through less would be automatically disabled if the user selected a different pipe, just like ls currently displays in multicolumn format depending if the request is interactive and in single column format if not.
To paraphrase a comedian, it is likelier that the Pope will anounce tomorrow that he was wrong all along and the Buddha is the real prophet than an OSS advocate might admit that *nix is any less than perfect and that it can possibly be improved.
So everytime I do an ls and I see hundreds of files speed past my eyes, that is "a good thing". It is the "power of unix" and if I don't like it all I need to do is "edit the.xthingamajig.rc" file and set it up any way I like it. Both of which are clearly much better solutions than presenting the data to the user one screenfull at a time, starting from the beginning (gee there's a thought, I'll file for the patent).
I'm just supposed to assume that Free Software is better in all respects.
Actually *nix is particularly weak on making common things easy to use. For example think about:
ls | less
why do you need to explicitly state the "less" part? The OS nows that the command was issued interactively from a shell and that the sequence is longer than a screen full, so why not paginate by default with an option to turn the pagination off for those rare occasions when you don't need it?
Don't force me to wade through a dozen classes which must be carefully assembled to make a chart - just make a simple facade that I can use in a few lines.
Tcl/tk is like that, to a certain extent. All the fancy parameters are optional and you don't need to learn about them to draw a line or place text within a drawing panel.
I don't know where the 2 years ago figure in the article comes from: 4% is incorrect.
one thing that has remained constant throughout these reports is that it's adwindling market share and it's falling rapidly.
Apple's market share is no longer falling rapidly. Jobs stabilized the free fall and since he took over, a better description would be withering market share.
Apple won't listen. If Apple listened it would have never gotten itself in such a conundrum in the first place.
Apple's long history of being deaf to the market and rude to users is what got them to where they are in the first place, starting from when they moved from the Apple ][ to the Mac without providing a downward compatible option. The story continues from there: tiny screens nobody liked, b/w monitors only, no floppy support, overpriced Macs, single button mice nobody but Jobs likes and on and on.
Quite a while ago I saw a presentation from three competing teams for a hospital robot. The first team, lead by AI types had spent quite a bit of time trying to program intelligence into the robot so that it would be able to navigate through the hospital and go around people. That team was bested by another who simply painted a magnetic stripe on the floor and had the robot stop whenever there was movement within two feet ratio. The winner of the competition placed train tracks hanging from the ceiling and used a simple real time controller that handled electric toy locomotives delivering medicines to the rooms. The cost was that of a few tyco sets.
I first came across this book by accident, while browsing the otherwise dismal "computer books" section in a bookstore. It didn't take more than a few pages to realize that this book was a major accomplishment. I still recommend it to my programer friends and look forward to reading the update edition. Sure lots of the things covered are fairly straightforward, but is good to have them listed in a single place and in an orderly fashion. On top of that every so often it covers something that had escaped you which makes it even more valuable.
This was back in the day when HP made good printers rather than the cruddy consumer-level, guaranteed to break within three years junk boxes they sell today.
Actually their top end is still pretty decent. We have one of them here in continuous use 24x7 with very little downtime.
Funny, indeed, but somewhat childish. TMMM contains so many deep truths that it seems shallow to focus on the out-of-date parts of it. To quote the chinese proverb:
When the sage points to the sky, the idiot sees the finger.
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical,
I always thought that society was a direct result of nature, as exemplified by the complex relationships of wolf pack, a lion pride or a troop of macaques, but seemingly the geniuses at media lab have discovered that social systems are not from nature.
Skype is remarkable (I know them well) and will change the landscape radically.
Yet another "breakthrough" prediction from the people at Media Lab. They were richly endowed, with ready access to MIT students and living right at the time of the PC/Internet revolution. Yet, nothing has come out of them. It surely takes some talent to miss the boat this much.
So this leaves universities somewhat alone. This isn't meant to be self-serving,
Of course not. The MIT Media Lab would never hype a technology or situation for their own benefit (</sarcasm>).
Do I think private industry and individuals could have and would have stepped up a bit more had the government not waved money at them? Sure.
You must mean: surely not. Economics explains why certain goods such as defense, education and research are best financed by a tax-based system. Even the staunch pro-free market economists agree on that.
Moreover, having worked in industry research there is absolutely zero interest to embark in the type of long term research that takes place in universities. Research that may take 20 years to pan out, such as, lets see, the internet.
Were there a lot of failed investments? Sure. Public transit, social security, public education, welfare, most forms of recycling, etc etc etc.
Again, fiction vs reality. Public education with a literacy rate of nearly a 100% has to be considered a success. Is it perfect? of course not, but there is no reason to believe that it would be perfect if it were solely the realm of the private sector.
The vast majority of the technological breaktrhoughs since 1940 were tax funded government research, it seems like a pretty darn good investment to me... I'm typing this using a BSD computer using this thing called the web that runs over the internet (hint: all three government funded).
Seems to me that you should double-check your ideology against reality every now and then to verify to what extent your aversion for the government is supported by the facts.
It sounds like your definition of a "museum" has to be an art museum.
Not at all. My definition of museum is those things that are best displayed in large halls, whatever they are. For example, interactive science displays often work out well in this setting. But guess what Sherlock? A music "exhibition" works out best in a "jazz cafe"-like setting than in a "Louvre"-like EMP setting. You really have to be there to realize how dull it is to see jacket upon jacket of Jimmy Hendrix albums when what you really want to do is listen to his music.
Paul Allen doesn't get it. Museums have exhibits of objects made on a visual medium, like paintings and sculptures. How exactly is a museum setting appropriate for a music collection for Jimmy Hendrix? who wants to see a twenty feet high pile of electric guitars, all of which look pretty much like the other, but they just so happen to have been owned at some point in time by oldie band X?
Not content with all the EMP fiasco now he brings us a museum of science fiction! Not a library or a cinematheque of science fiction but a museum!
I know people like to say Allen was the smart one and Gates was not, but so far the record goes the other way. I take Bill's purchase of the Leonardo da Vinci documents over the EMP any time.
The Phd: an exercise in self-aggrandizing behavior with little application to the real world.
More like an exercise in persistence and determination (years of deprivations for unclear benefits).
In the event you actually research or do something worthwhile your expertise is basically a very tiny narrow slice of the pie in your discipline in which you possess astonishing depth, and you are likely no more knowledgeable about the rest of your field than a masters candidate.
Just like the PhDs who invented the Internet thirty years back in UCSD and UCLA, or the ones who started Sun.
1. A company offers them quite a bit of money to do the research that *they* love 2. *poof* Tenure track faculty position
Wow. They expect good jobs! The _gall_.
1. Teach as an adjunct.
More likely get a postdoc.
2. Try to convince private industry that you're okay taking that 60k a year position as a chemical engineer.. I'm not overqualified, HONEST!
Yes, if you are applying to a burger flipping job a PhD is considered a drawback. So if your career vocation is flipping burgers, do not enroll in grad school.
1. What OS(s) were they running before this happened?
This question has "newbie" written all over. Bank applications run on true and tested OSes written decades ago. They run on large mainframes with uptime that often goes back to the day the computer was turned on sometime in the 70s or 80s.
This problem is, in all likelihood, an application problem.
Neat idea, but I'd hate to even consider driving one of these on the highways. A normal car loses when it has an arguement with an 18-wheeler. I imagine this thing would lose just as badly if it encountered a normal car.
You been programmed by the Borg to believe that bigger cars equals safer cars.
For one, if you have an argument with an 18-wheeler you are pretty much dead no matter what you are driving.
Second, and most importantly, collisions are a very small part of dangerous road events. For every collision, one has hundreds of close calls. A small, low to the ground, highly stable and maneuverable car will get you out of those close calls safely, say for example with a sharp turn of the steering wheel. In the same circumstance an SUV will start swerving uncontrollably and eventually roll over, either that or you go for the collision and hope for the best.
Slashdot Mirror
Of all the possible behaviours listed above we have to determine which one, if any, is the most common and assume that as the default setting, with all others supported via flags.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that when people do an ls from the shell 90% of the time they mean to see a list of the files one screenfull at a time.
But then, it would make more sense to include such a "pause feature" into the terminal program instead.
For sure, I agree. The problem at the core is that the terminal program is too brain dead for today's technology. This is one of the reasons why some people use emacs as their main shell...
But I clearly would not want it to be automatically piped into less.
_You_ wouldn't want it. But keep in mind that the relevant question is does the average user likes to see files flying past faster than they can read them or would it be preferable to present them in a user readable format?
Of course such piping through less would be automatically disabled if the user selected a different pipe, just like ls currently displays in multicolumn format depending if the request is interactive and in single column format if not.
To paraphrase a comedian, it is likelier that the Pope will anounce tomorrow that he was wrong all along and the Buddha is the real prophet than an OSS advocate might admit that *nix is any less than perfect and that it can possibly be improved.
.xthingamajig.rc" file and set it up any way I like it. Both of which are clearly much better solutions than presenting the data to the user one screenfull at a time, starting from the beginning (gee there's a thought, I'll file for the patent).
So everytime I do an ls and I see hundreds of files speed past my eyes, that is "a good thing". It is the "power of unix" and if I don't like it all I need to do is "edit the
No, *nix is not weak in this regard, it is actually the power of *nix!
The old "it ain't a bug, it's a feature" excuse.
You don't ever want software to guess what the user is thinking,
Only problem with that is that ls already guesses what the user is thinking and will produce different output for the commands
ls vs. ls >/tmp/ls.out
it is just that the guess does not go far enough...
I'm just supposed to assume that Free Software is better in all respects.
Actually *nix is particularly weak on making common things easy to use. For example think about:
ls | less
why do you need to explicitly state the "less" part? The OS nows that the command was issued interactively from a shell and that the sequence is longer than a screen full, so why not paginate by default with an option to turn the pagination off for those rare occasions when you don't need it?
Don't force me to wade through a dozen classes which must be carefully assembled to make a chart - just make a simple facade that I can use in a few lines.
Tcl/tk is like that, to a certain extent. All the fancy parameters are optional and you don't need to learn about them to draw a line or place text within a drawing panel.
This was as good as keeping your old Apple ][ around. Read up in Wintel backward compatibility to see how it is properly done.
I don't know where the 2 years ago figure in the article comes from: 4% is incorrect.
one thing that has remained constant throughout these reports is that it's adwindling market share and it's falling rapidly.
Apple's market share is no longer falling rapidly. Jobs stabilized the free fall and since he took over, a better description would be withering market share.
Apple: Proudly going out of business for over 20 years.
I don't know about going out of business, but certainly their market share has gone only one way (down) since the introduction of the Mac...
Apple won't listen. If Apple listened it would have never gotten itself in such a conundrum in the first place.
Apple's long history of being deaf to the market and rude to users is what got them to where they are in the first place, starting from when they moved from the Apple ][ to the Mac without providing a downward compatible option. The story continues from there: tiny screens nobody liked, b/w monitors only, no floppy support, overpriced Macs, single button mice nobody but Jobs likes and on and on.
Quite a while ago I saw a presentation from three competing teams for a hospital robot. The first team, lead by AI types had spent quite a bit of time trying to program intelligence into the robot so that it would be able to navigate through the hospital and go around people. That team was bested by another who simply painted a magnetic stripe on the floor and had the robot stop whenever there was movement within two feet ratio. The winner of the competition placed train tracks hanging from the ceiling and used a simple real time controller that handled electric toy locomotives delivering medicines to the rooms. The cost was that of a few tyco sets.
I first came across this book by accident, while browsing the otherwise dismal "computer books" section in a bookstore. It didn't take more than a few pages to realize that this book was a major accomplishment. I still recommend it to my programer friends and look forward to reading the update edition. Sure lots of the things covered are fairly straightforward, but is good to have them listed in a single place and in an orderly fashion. On top of that every so often it covers something that had escaped you which makes it even more valuable.
This was back in the day when HP made good printers rather than the cruddy consumer-level, guaranteed to break within three years junk boxes they sell today.
Actually their top end is still pretty decent. We have one of them here in continuous use 24x7 with very little downtime.
In the examples above, 2-way communication via anonymous email between the authors and reviewers might solve this particular problem;
Actually all the journals I know of in computer science allow two-way communication anonymized via the editor.
Funny, indeed, but somewhat childish. TMMM contains so many deep truths that it seems shallow to focus on the out-of-date parts of it. To quote the chinese proverb:
When the sage points to the sky, the idiot sees the finger.
sharing leftover food
Page me your chalupa...
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical,
I always thought that society was a direct result of nature, as exemplified by the complex relationships of wolf pack, a lion pride or a troop of macaques, but seemingly the geniuses at media lab have discovered that social systems are not from nature.
Skype is remarkable (I know them well) and will change the landscape radically.
Yet another "breakthrough" prediction from the people at Media Lab. They were richly endowed, with ready access to MIT students and living right at the time of the PC/Internet revolution. Yet, nothing has come out of them. It surely takes some talent to miss the boat this much.
So this leaves universities somewhat alone. This isn't meant to be self-serving,
Of course not. The MIT Media Lab would never hype a technology or situation for their own benefit (</sarcasm>).
Do I think private industry and individuals could have and would have stepped up a bit more had the government not waved money at them? Sure.
You must mean: surely not. Economics explains why certain goods such as defense, education and research are best financed by a tax-based system. Even the staunch pro-free market economists agree on that.
Moreover, having worked in industry research there is absolutely zero interest to embark in the type of long term research that takes place in universities. Research that may take 20 years to pan out, such as, lets see, the internet.
Were there a lot of failed investments? Sure. Public transit, social security, public education, welfare, most forms of recycling, etc etc etc.
Again, fiction vs reality. Public education with a literacy rate of nearly a 100% has to be considered a success. Is it perfect? of course not, but there is no reason to believe that it would be perfect if it were solely the realm of the private sector.
and tax funded government research?
The vast majority of the technological breaktrhoughs since 1940 were tax funded government research, it seems like a pretty darn good investment to me... I'm typing this using a BSD computer using this thing called the web that runs over the internet (hint: all three government funded).
Seems to me that you should double-check your ideology against reality every now and then to verify to what extent your aversion for the government is supported by the facts.
It sounds like your definition of a "museum" has to be an art museum.
Not at all. My definition of museum is those things that are best displayed in large halls, whatever they are. For example, interactive science displays often work out well in this setting. But guess what Sherlock? A music "exhibition" works out best in a "jazz cafe"-like setting than in a "Louvre"-like EMP setting. You really have to be there to realize how dull it is to see jacket upon jacket of Jimmy Hendrix albums when what you really want to do is listen to his music.
Paul Allen doesn't get it. Museums have exhibits of objects made on a visual medium, like paintings and sculptures. How exactly is a museum setting appropriate for a music collection for Jimmy Hendrix? who wants to see a twenty feet high pile of electric guitars, all of which look pretty much like the other, but they just so happen to have been owned at some point in time by oldie band X?
Not content with all the EMP fiasco now he brings us a museum of science fiction! Not a library or a cinematheque of science fiction but a museum!
I know people like to say Allen was the smart one and Gates was not, but so far the record goes the other way. I take Bill's purchase of the Leonardo da Vinci documents over the EMP any time.
The Phd: an exercise in self-aggrandizing behavior with little application to the real world.
More like an exercise in persistence and determination (years of deprivations for unclear benefits).
In the event you actually research or do something worthwhile your expertise is basically a very tiny narrow slice of the pie in your discipline in which you possess astonishing depth, and you are likely no more knowledgeable about the rest of your field than a masters candidate.
Just like the PhDs who invented the Internet thirty years back in UCSD and UCLA, or the ones who started Sun.
1. A company offers them quite a bit of money to do the research that *they* love
2. *poof* Tenure track faculty position
Wow. They expect good jobs! The _gall_.
1. Teach as an adjunct.
More likely get a postdoc.
2. Try to convince private industry that you're okay taking that 60k a year position as a chemical engineer.. I'm not overqualified, HONEST!
Yes, if you are applying to a burger flipping job a PhD is considered a drawback. So if your career vocation is flipping burgers, do not enroll in grad school.
That was the OSes fault. It shouldn't be that easy to delete critical data in an OS. Just like it shouldn't be easy to set a Ford Pinto on fire.
1. What OS(s) were they running before this happened?
This question has "newbie" written all over. Bank applications run on true and tested OSes written decades ago. They run on large mainframes with uptime that often goes back to the day the computer was turned on sometime in the 70s or 80s.
This problem is, in all likelihood, an application problem.
Neat idea, but I'd hate to even consider driving one of these on the highways. A normal car loses when it has an arguement with an 18-wheeler. I imagine this thing would lose just as badly if it encountered a normal car.
You been programmed by the Borg to believe that bigger cars equals safer cars.
For one, if you have an argument with an 18-wheeler you are pretty much dead no matter what you are driving.
Second, and most importantly, collisions are a very small part of dangerous road events. For every collision, one has hundreds of close calls. A small, low to the ground, highly stable and maneuverable car will get you out of those close calls safely, say for example with a sharp turn of the steering wheel. In the same circumstance an SUV will start swerving uncontrollably and eventually roll over, either that or you go for the collision and hope for the best.