Shakespeare et al were pretty good for their time, but they're outdated and superseded now. Their legendary status is mostly due to excessive reverence for the past on the part of academics, slavishly copied and propagated by laypeople, especially educators, with literary pretensions.
An analogy would be to compare primitive Mesopotamian clay sculptures to more modern artwork. No-one goes around claiming that the Venus of Willendorf is immeasurably superior to, say, Henry Moore's work - although for their time, those Venuses were pretty cutting-edge.
And in defense of science fiction, it's one of the only genres which allows themes to be explored that go beyond the mundane and boring details of current human existence. If it weren't for the pretensions of the aforementioned individuals, this would be more recognized. Some amazing work of great literary significance has been done in SF, but often has not received the recognition it deserves because of the limited perspective of those literary critics who believe that if it's not dealing with the petty trivia that fills their dreary existence, it's not relevant to their lives.
Don't allow yourself to be constrained by the tunnel-visioned, small-minded parrots who can only repeat how great someone who lived hundreds of years ago was, and how everything that's new and that's now pales in comparison! What we create in our time will become the legends and greatness of the future - appreciate our creations for the human genius that they embody, the equal or better of anything that has come before!
A lot of people can't get into Lessing, but if you can, she can be a joy. A lot of her non-SF is also very good.
Shikasta also provides a perfect explanation for the stupidity and short-sightedness of humanity, although I think it might a spoiler to say what that explanation is.
Except that the linguistic theory behind the Sumerian in Snow Crash is complete crap.
Why does that matter? It doesn't require too much suspension of disbelief. I think Stephenson does a masterful job of providing a plausible-for-fiction explanation of mythic/historical events such as Babel.
Now if you rushed off after reading Snow Crash to look for papers about the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and found out that there was no such thing and were disappointed, that would just prove that Stephenson did a good job!
Sure, if the russians had developed the Space Pen, they wouldn't need "outside help" (in the fom of money, not technology), but could have made the money by selling it on Sharper Image instead.
Hey, you need to learn to extrapolate. The Space Pen is an example, even a metaphor. Extrapolated, your statement is absolutely correct: if the Russians had commercialized their space technology, and other technology, and sold it on an open market, they would have had a stronger economy and might have been able to fund their version of communism for longer - although with nice open markets, it soon would have turned into capitalism. So lack of a Space Pen led to unnecessary anarchy and turmoil that could have been avoided!
As for California, everything's relative. California still manages to survive earthquakes that would kill tens of thousands of people if they occurred elsewhere in the world (Turkey comes to mind). Same principle in action.
Enormous, huge problem with your argument: software is not a single-purpose product, like a car. The software field as a whole represents a potentially infinite family of products, most of which have nothing to do with each other. You might apply your logic to a particular type of program - accounting programs, for example - and then it might be relevant. But businesses are continually developing requirements for new, custom products. The day this becomes static is the day that all progress stops.
The point is that requirements are not some fixed and absolute thing - they have to be chosen subjectively. My argument is that having high standards for requirements can have benefits that aren't always obvious from a superficial examination of the situation.
In this particular example, I don't have enough facts to compare the two cases: for example, did the Russians experience any direct problems from using pencils and crayons, such as written material becoming smudged? If not, then it might be argued that developing a space pen was overkill, in that limited scenario. But I'm arguing that the ramifications of such decisions can go far beyond the context in which they're made. That's why architects and designers with vision can often make a big difference - because they look at the "requirements" in a much broader context, and end up creating something that provides far greater benefits in the long run.
Kennedy did this when he started the moon program - the spinoffs from space research have always been a major benefit. I often do design work on a pad while lying down, for example, where the pen ends up upside down - and guess which pen works best in this situation? The Fisher Space Pen. According to the Fisher site, these pens are now used on Russian space missions, too. So the space pen seems to have been a good investment - after all, if the pencils and crayons were good enough, why would the Russians have switched? Besides, the Fisher company creates economic value, providing jobs and a useful product.
So it isn't really about whether a device to deposit arbitrarily liquids was needed. It's about the benefits that fully addressing a problem can bring, and thinking of wider applications and benefits, as opposed to coming up with something that's simply minimally acceptable. If you always only produce what's minimally acceptable, your progress will ultimately be self-limiting.
In hindsight, there was a requirement to create a space pen. The smart people are the ones who could tell that ahead of time, instead of simply saying "we'll use pencils".
The point about the "London in two hours" thing is that it gives you a frame of reference. This is mass media we're talking about, not The Journal of Astrophysics. An enormous point about the scramjet is that if it worked, it would allow vehicles to exit the atmosphere without the heavy multiple stage disposable rockets and large amount of fuel that is currently required. In theory, this could turn space travel into a commute.
The interesting thing is that the "we're going to build a space pen that works, no matter what it takes" attitude is what results in long-term and sustainable success, since it allows you to build on your achievements and make progress, rather than constantly battling the limitations of your tools.
This reminds me a little of what happens in third-world countries (I've spent many years in a couple of them). You don't need a drain system if your town is on a hillside leading down to the ocean. But every time it rains hard, the streets flood and you can't get around. No town in most developed nations would be built without a drain system, no matter how convenient the local geography. And the result, in the end, is that more gets done, in a more sustainable way.
Extrapolate that attitude, and you've got the space pen. The people using the pencils and crayons are no longer able to mount space missions without outside help.
These articles were light on facts, weren't they? Are they worried people are going to try repeating this at home, with parts scrounged from auto stores??
"A ramjet has no moving parts and achieves compression of intake air by the forward speed of the air vehicle. Air entering the intake of a supersonic aircraft is slowed by aerodynamic diffusion created by the inlet and diffuser to velocities comparable to those in a turbojet augmentor. The expansion of hot gases after fuel injection and combustion accelerates the exhaust air to a velocity higher than that at the inlet and creates positive push."
"Scramjet is an acronym for Supersonic Combustion Ramjet. The scramjet differs from the ramjet in that combustion takes place at supersonic air velocities through the engine. It is mechanically simple, but vastly more complex aerodynamically than a jet engine. Hydrogen is normally the fuel used."
Scramjet research seems to be a hot topic in the aerospace world - I saw references to projects underway in the UK, in the US Defense Department, at NASA, and of course Australia, all of which have claimed some or other big advances in the past year or so.
Finally, here's Scientific American article that gives a bit more technical detail.
Not only is this the chance for open source systems to shine, open source systems may end up being our only defense and salvation from enormous, monopolistic corporations that have completely lost touch with their customers, and seem for the moment to be beyond the control of governments.
(For the record, the issue under discussion has nothing to do with terrorist attacks, as the other AC troll reply implies.)
This trust argument would make perfect sense, if Verisign et al were actually doing anything to check that you are who you say you are.
But it wasn't that long ago that Verisign issued some certs in Microsoft's name to an unknown perpetrator. The bottom line is, Verisign runs a con game which exploits people's ignorance about the service really being provided, which is basically a cozy relationship with the biggest browser maker, i.e. Microsoft.
I don't think I did a good job of explaining what "metacircular" usually implies. There's a little more to it than simply bootstrapping. Certainly any metacircular language has to be bootstrapped at some level, but that's an implementation detail that has little to do with the nature of the language being implemented.
In interpreted languages that allow procedures to be treated as data values, it is very easy to write an interpreter for those languages in the language itself, because the language has features that make it easy to write code that manipulates other code, evaluate expressions, and so on. The same is not true for writing a language like, say, C, since C itself doesn't contain any particular features oriented towards such tasks. Writing a C compiler in C has to be done "the hard way". Writing a Lisp interpreter in Lisp is trivial by comparison.
Saying that a language is capable of implementing itself in a metacircular fashion implies that the language has capabilities which go beyond those in traditional languages like C, Basic, or Java, none of which can really be said to be metacircular. An important implication is the ability of a language to operate on its own code at runtime, which is why metacircular languages usually support higher order functions. Metacircular languages are also good at implementing other languages with minimum effort.
Smalltalk is another language with metacircular features. For something more unusual, here's a brief mention of an implementation of Postscript in Postscript. I picked this link because it contains some clues to some of what a metacircular interpreter can buy you; I'm not sure I can explain it any better without getting into code samples in Scheme, and SICP does that better than I could.
Based on Sassenrath's description, it sounds as though REBOL has some features which can validly be described as metacircular. If he's trying to dazzle people with his language, he's at least doing so in a way which communicates something meaningful to those familiar with the terminology, as opposed to making completely gratuitous claims.
Close, but no cigar. The first Lisp interpreter was written in Lisp. Before that, humans used to take Lisp code and convert it into machine code. Then McCarthy put out an exercise for his students to write a Lisp interpreter in Lisp itself. Then, one of the "human compilers" compiled this piece of Lisp code, and voila! You now had the ability to compile Lisp code.
The Lisp-like language I was referring to is the one listed on this page - look for the heading "The First Known Interpreter". This language is not Lisp as we know it - it used McCarthy's M-expression syntax - and syntactically, it is not the S-expression language that the first interpreter was capable of interpreting. Hence my statement that "the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language".
I decided to write a paper describing LISP both as a programming language and as a formalism for doing recursive function theory. The paper was "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, part I".
...
Another way to show that LISP was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal LISP function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the LISP function eval[e,a],...
...
S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.
This was why I said McCarthy wrote the interpreter as something of a mathematical exercise. He was writing his "universal Lisp function" to illustrate a point in a paper, and
didn't even consider that he was writing an interpreter - apparently Steve Russell noticed that. So that's why I said it was written as "something of a mathematical exercise".
was designed from a meta-circular view of language semantics
He didn't just make that term up, if that's what you're thinking. A "metacircular" language is a language which is implemented in itself. The most common example of this is Lisp - in fact, the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language as something of a mathematical exercise, by John McCarthy around 1958. This approach has proved very powerful, and some good language implementations have been written this way.
Of course, none of this implies that REBOL is any good, but the fact that Sassenrath is aware of such things is probably a good sign. If you read the rest of the paragraph after the term "meta-circular", you'll see that he is actually referring to a relevant aspect of REBOL, namely that the GUI system is implemented in a dialect of REBOL. So it isn't quite as bad as if he'd said that the language runs on free tachyon energy...
Could you elaborate on the Lisp-ish options with GUI's that you claim are available.
Check out DrScheme from the PLT group. It's "an interactive, integrated, graphical programming environment for the Scheme programming language". It's cross-platform, released under the GPL, and includes cross-platform GUI support (*nix & Windows), a comprehensive help system, a bunch of useful libraries for graphics, Internet, COM access on Windows, etc., as well as some useful applications like a web server, web browser, Gtk interface, a graphical IMAP mail client, and some graphical games.
The underlying Scheme implementation, known as MzScheme, includes a fast interpreter as well as a compiler that can compile to bytecode or native code.
Forget the advanced search. Try using stragically placed + and - to force presence or absence of terms. E.g. the following:
+Signetics +"write only memory" -antonym
returns a bogus press release as it's first result, which may be what you're looking for. (I used "antonym" because many jargon file copies don't explicitly say they're from the jargon file.)
I agree with the person who said you may be overspecifying your searches. The point is to find the stuff you want - as long as it lets you do that without much difficulty, does it really matter if you can't explicitly specify a true boolean search? You'd have to show me a case where Altavista really can find something that Google can't before I'd be convinced. All you've done is show that you weren't that familiar with Google.
All of your arguments seem to be aimed at "Linux on the desktop", as were Jamie Love's comments. I think the saner Linux advocates agree that Linux is not ready for mass-market acceptance on the desktop, and may still take a long time to get there. Some think it never will, but the reason that's not true is simple: almost every kind of software eventually reaches a point of maturity where it essentially becomes a commodity. At this point, open source is a viable competitor.
Linux has reached that stage in many areas: as a server OS and as an embedded OS, for example. It hasn't reached that stage on the desktop, partly because desktops themselves are not yet at that commodified stage. Part of this is Microsoft's control of the standards (MS Office file formats). Another aspect is the complexity of GUI programming, which is still very primitive, regardless of all the technology that gets thrown at it (X, OpenDoc, Display Postscript, Qt/GTK, Win32/MFC, OLE, ActiveX, CORBA/Bonobo/Berlin, Java/AWT/Swing, HTML, DHTML...)
But this is simply a game of catchup in which the commercial products only have so many innovations that can be added to a word processor or spreadsheet. There are few ways they can be differentiated, in other words, the office products themselves are ready for commodification, even if it hasn't actually happened yet (although StarOffice et al are a good start). Open source products will catch up, and eventually rival their commercial counterparts.
Re:Huh??? Over the hill and can't code at 30???
on
Coder or Architect?
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· Score: 2
Don't worry, I can attest that one doesn't suddenly lose one's coding ability on one's 30th birthday. I suspect that what the original poster was referring to, when he said "But I just don't have the patience to fill in the boxes any more", is that he doesn't want to be the guy writing the code for the ten-zillionth data-input form or report. That definitely does get old after a while.
In a commercial environment, if you want to avoid that, you pretty much have to move up the ladder, which is ultimately going to mean team lead, project lead, architect, mentor, consultant, or something along those lines. If, however, you program for fun, none of this really applies.
I feel that at 28 my skills are better than they've ever been
Assuming you don't let yourself stagnate, you'll feel the same way at 38, and probably even at 48, as long as you don't suffer from any degenerative brain diseases. But observing some of my colleagues and even myself, stagnation is all too easy as time goes by. It's tempting to think that you know everything you need to know.
You have to challenge yourself. Don't just read the magazines and books you find in bookstores (you know, Dr. Dobbs and Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days), get hold of and work through some of the books that are famous in academic circles (e.g. SICP, to name just one obvious one), subscribe to some ACM journals, learn new languages, take some advanced courses. Take on projects that challenge you, that you don't understand how to do. Learn what you need to learn to do them. (Don't necessarily do this for projects that your career depends on, though!)
Not only will this be personally satisfying, but it'll make you more marketable, too.
I want to impress my friends by installing the most bad ass looking distro I can find.
Bad Ass Linux, I like it! You're a wealth of marketing ideas, thank you! You've inspired me - I've already also come up with Trenchcoat Linux,
Mothafscking Linux, and finally, my pride and joy:
I take your point, but of course it's more than just the README that's at issue.
I never used to care, but WinXP really pisses me off and I'd love to see M$ get reamed right now.
A lot of people are having this reaction, for obvious reasons, including quite a few diehard Windows-only users that I know. Some of them are IT managers, too.
I think if there's ever a big movement to desktop Linux, it'll happen in the corporate world first, not amongst retail/home users. IT managers can, to some extent, dictate what their users run. In my experience, what stops even Linux-friendly IT managers from switching to Linux on the desktop in their companies is the perceived user dependence on, or familiarity with, MS Office etc. The install program is not much of a concern in this environment.
BTW, if you want a good explanation of why we all hate Microsoft so much more now than we once might have, I noticed this in the Economist article referenced in another/. article today:
When Microsoft launched Windows 95 in mid-1995, it had annual revenues of about $6 billion. The blockbuster program drove sales up by almost 50% in the following fiscal year--a feat that Windows XP is unlikely to repeat, given that group revenues are now $25.3 billion.
Sucking four times more money out of the planet's pockets doesn't come without its own price. The tactics we all complain about are what has allowed them to achieve this. I can't see how it can be sustainable, though, so that reaming you're hoping for will happen, sooner or later.
Uh, wait. Without wishing to troll, have you read the list of "things you should know" above? At the retail / desktop/ even OEM level, this is not what people want to hear.
Have you read the list yourself? There's nothing there that anyone at "the retail / desktop" level is going to care about. The kernel just works, that comment was to warn/.ers against upgrading the kernel to 2.4.12 or something, if they want assured stability. The Gnome issue only applies to upgrading from 7.1 - how many retail/desktop people do you know who upgrade their own OS from one minor version to another?
Re:What makes you any different, Ars-Fartsica?[OT]
on
Coder or Architect?
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· Score: 2
False. Ars's comments are rarely self-descriptive at all, and thus bear little resemblance to slashdotter self-aggrandizement.
Logical error. Criticizing others implies that the criticizer does not suffer from the specified faults. It's self-aggrandizement by implication.
Slashdot Mirror
An analogy would be to compare primitive Mesopotamian clay sculptures to more modern artwork. No-one goes around claiming that the Venus of Willendorf is immeasurably superior to, say, Henry Moore's work - although for their time, those Venuses were pretty cutting-edge.
And in defense of science fiction, it's one of the only genres which allows themes to be explored that go beyond the mundane and boring details of current human existence. If it weren't for the pretensions of the aforementioned individuals, this would be more recognized. Some amazing work of great literary significance has been done in SF, but often has not received the recognition it deserves because of the limited perspective of those literary critics who believe that if it's not dealing with the petty trivia that fills their dreary existence, it's not relevant to their lives.
Don't allow yourself to be constrained by the tunnel-visioned, small-minded parrots who can only repeat how great someone who lived hundreds of years ago was, and how everything that's new and that's now pales in comparison! What we create in our time will become the legends and greatness of the future - appreciate our creations for the human genius that they embody, the equal or better of anything that has come before!
Shikasta also provides a perfect explanation for the stupidity and short-sightedness of humanity, although I think it might a spoiler to say what that explanation is.
Why does that matter? It doesn't require too much suspension of disbelief. I think Stephenson does a masterful job of providing a plausible-for-fiction explanation of mythic/historical events such as Babel.
Now if you rushed off after reading Snow Crash to look for papers about the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and found out that there was no such thing and were disappointed, that would just prove that Stephenson did a good job!
B351d3s, j00 r pr3d1c74bL3!
Hey, you need to learn to extrapolate. The Space Pen is an example, even a metaphor. Extrapolated, your statement is absolutely correct: if the Russians had commercialized their space technology, and other technology, and sold it on an open market, they would have had a stronger economy and might have been able to fund their version of communism for longer - although with nice open markets, it soon would have turned into capitalism. So lack of a Space Pen led to unnecessary anarchy and turmoil that could have been avoided!
As for California, everything's relative. California still manages to survive earthquakes that would kill tens of thousands of people if they occurred elsewhere in the world (Turkey comes to mind). Same principle in action.
Enormous, huge problem with your argument: software is not a single-purpose product, like a car. The software field as a whole represents a potentially infinite family of products, most of which have nothing to do with each other. You might apply your logic to a particular type of program - accounting programs, for example - and then it might be relevant. But businesses are continually developing requirements for new, custom products. The day this becomes static is the day that all progress stops.
In this particular example, I don't have enough facts to compare the two cases: for example, did the Russians experience any direct problems from using pencils and crayons, such as written material becoming smudged? If not, then it might be argued that developing a space pen was overkill, in that limited scenario. But I'm arguing that the ramifications of such decisions can go far beyond the context in which they're made. That's why architects and designers with vision can often make a big difference - because they look at the "requirements" in a much broader context, and end up creating something that provides far greater benefits in the long run.
Kennedy did this when he started the moon program - the spinoffs from space research have always been a major benefit. I often do design work on a pad while lying down, for example, where the pen ends up upside down - and guess which pen works best in this situation? The Fisher Space Pen. According to the Fisher site, these pens are now used on Russian space missions, too. So the space pen seems to have been a good investment - after all, if the pencils and crayons were good enough, why would the Russians have switched? Besides, the Fisher company creates economic value, providing jobs and a useful product.
So it isn't really about whether a device to deposit arbitrarily liquids was needed. It's about the benefits that fully addressing a problem can bring, and thinking of wider applications and benefits, as opposed to coming up with something that's simply minimally acceptable. If you always only produce what's minimally acceptable, your progress will ultimately be self-limiting.
In hindsight, there was a requirement to create a space pen. The smart people are the ones who could tell that ahead of time, instead of simply saying "we'll use pencils".
And yes, it shows. :)
The point about the "London in two hours" thing is that it gives you a frame of reference. This is mass media we're talking about, not The Journal of Astrophysics. An enormous point about the scramjet is that if it worked, it would allow vehicles to exit the atmosphere without the heavy multiple stage disposable rockets and large amount of fuel that is currently required. In theory, this could turn space travel into a commute.
This reminds me a little of what happens in third-world countries (I've spent many years in a couple of them). You don't need a drain system if your town is on a hillside leading down to the ocean. But every time it rains hard, the streets flood and you can't get around. No town in most developed nations would be built without a drain system, no matter how convenient the local geography. And the result, in the end, is that more gets done, in a more sustainable way.
Extrapolate that attitude, and you've got the space pen. The people using the pencils and crayons are no longer able to mount space missions without outside help.
A bit of Googling revealed the following:
From The Ramjet/Scramjet Engine:
- a scramjet is a kind of ramjet
- "A ramjet has no moving parts and achieves compression of intake air by the forward speed of the air vehicle. Air entering the intake of a supersonic aircraft is slowed by aerodynamic diffusion created by the inlet and diffuser to velocities comparable to those in a turbojet augmentor. The expansion of hot gases after fuel injection and combustion accelerates the exhaust air to a velocity higher than that at the inlet and creates positive push."
- "Scramjet is an acronym for Supersonic Combustion Ramjet. The scramjet differs from the ramjet in that combustion takes place at supersonic air velocities through the engine. It is mechanically simple, but vastly more complex aerodynamically than a jet engine. Hydrogen is normally the fuel used."
Scramjet research seems to be a hot topic in the aerospace world - I saw references to projects underway in the UK, in the US Defense Department, at NASA, and of course Australia, all of which have claimed some or other big advances in the past year or so.Finally, here's Scientific American article that gives a bit more technical detail.
(For the record, the issue under discussion has nothing to do with terrorist attacks, as the other AC troll reply implies.)
But it wasn't that long ago that Verisign issued some certs in Microsoft's name to an unknown perpetrator. The bottom line is, Verisign runs a con game which exploits people's ignorance about the service really being provided, which is basically a cozy relationship with the biggest browser maker, i.e. Microsoft.
In interpreted languages that allow procedures to be treated as data values, it is very easy to write an interpreter for those languages in the language itself, because the language has features that make it easy to write code that manipulates other code, evaluate expressions, and so on. The same is not true for writing a language like, say, C, since C itself doesn't contain any particular features oriented towards such tasks. Writing a C compiler in C has to be done "the hard way". Writing a Lisp interpreter in Lisp is trivial by comparison.
Saying that a language is capable of implementing itself in a metacircular fashion implies that the language has capabilities which go beyond those in traditional languages like C, Basic, or Java, none of which can really be said to be metacircular. An important implication is the ability of a language to operate on its own code at runtime, which is why metacircular languages usually support higher order functions. Metacircular languages are also good at implementing other languages with minimum effort.
Smalltalk is another language with metacircular features. For something more unusual, here's a brief mention of an implementation of Postscript in Postscript. I picked this link because it contains some clues to some of what a metacircular interpreter can buy you; I'm not sure I can explain it any better without getting into code samples in Scheme, and SICP does that better than I could.
Based on Sassenrath's description, it sounds as though REBOL has some features which can validly be described as metacircular. If he's trying to dazzle people with his language, he's at least doing so in a way which communicates something meaningful to those familiar with the terminology, as opposed to making completely gratuitous claims.
The Lisp-like language I was referring to is the one listed on this page - look for the heading "The First Known Interpreter". This language is not Lisp as we know it - it used McCarthy's M-expression syntax - and syntactically, it is not the S-expression language that the first interpreter was capable of interpreting. Hence my statement that "the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language".
In "The implementation of Lisp" by McCarthy himself, he describes the following:
This was why I said McCarthy wrote the interpreter as something of a mathematical exercise. He was writing his "universal Lisp function" to illustrate a point in a paper, and didn't even consider that he was writing an interpreter - apparently Steve Russell noticed that. So that's why I said it was written as "something of a mathematical exercise".Do I get that cigar now?
He didn't just make that term up, if that's what you're thinking. A "metacircular" language is a language which is implemented in itself. The most common example of this is Lisp - in fact, the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language as something of a mathematical exercise, by John McCarthy around 1958. This approach has proved very powerful, and some good language implementations have been written this way.
The term is probably most famously used in SICP, in a section entitled The Metacircular Evaluator.
Of course, none of this implies that REBOL is any good, but the fact that Sassenrath is aware of such things is probably a good sign. If you read the rest of the paragraph after the term "meta-circular", you'll see that he is actually referring to a relevant aspect of REBOL, namely that the GUI system is implemented in a dialect of REBOL. So it isn't quite as bad as if he'd said that the language runs on free tachyon energy...
Check out DrScheme from the PLT group. It's "an interactive, integrated, graphical programming environment for the Scheme programming language". It's cross-platform, released under the GPL, and includes cross-platform GUI support (*nix & Windows), a comprehensive help system, a bunch of useful libraries for graphics, Internet, COM access on Windows, etc., as well as some useful applications like a web server, web browser, Gtk interface, a graphical IMAP mail client, and some graphical games.
The underlying Scheme implementation, known as MzScheme, includes a fast interpreter as well as a compiler that can compile to bytecode or native code.
I assumed the moderator was kidding around - kinda funny either way...
+Signetics +"write only memory" -antonym
returns a bogus press release as it's first result, which may be what you're looking for. (I used "antonym" because many jargon file copies don't explicitly say they're from the jargon file.)
I agree with the person who said you may be overspecifying your searches. The point is to find the stuff you want - as long as it lets you do that without much difficulty, does it really matter if you can't explicitly specify a true boolean search? You'd have to show me a case where Altavista really can find something that Google can't before I'd be convinced. All you've done is show that you weren't that familiar with Google.
I only blame people/companies for using illegal tactics to receive money, as Microsoft has done, as found by the courts.
Linux has reached that stage in many areas: as a server OS and as an embedded OS, for example. It hasn't reached that stage on the desktop, partly because desktops themselves are not yet at that commodified stage. Part of this is Microsoft's control of the standards (MS Office file formats). Another aspect is the complexity of GUI programming, which is still very primitive, regardless of all the technology that gets thrown at it (X, OpenDoc, Display Postscript, Qt/GTK, Win32/MFC, OLE, ActiveX, CORBA/Bonobo/Berlin, Java/AWT/Swing, HTML, DHTML...)
But this is simply a game of catchup in which the commercial products only have so many innovations that can be added to a word processor or spreadsheet. There are few ways they can be differentiated, in other words, the office products themselves are ready for commodification, even if it hasn't actually happened yet (although StarOffice et al are a good start). Open source products will catch up, and eventually rival their commercial counterparts.
In a commercial environment, if you want to avoid that, you pretty much have to move up the ladder, which is ultimately going to mean team lead, project lead, architect, mentor, consultant, or something along those lines. If, however, you program for fun, none of this really applies.
I feel that at 28 my skills are better than they've ever been
Assuming you don't let yourself stagnate, you'll feel the same way at 38, and probably even at 48, as long as you don't suffer from any degenerative brain diseases. But observing some of my colleagues and even myself, stagnation is all too easy as time goes by. It's tempting to think that you know everything you need to know.
You have to challenge yourself. Don't just read the magazines and books you find in bookstores (you know, Dr. Dobbs and Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days), get hold of and work through some of the books that are famous in academic circles (e.g. SICP, to name just one obvious one), subscribe to some ACM journals, learn new languages, take some advanced courses. Take on projects that challenge you, that you don't understand how to do. Learn what you need to learn to do them. (Don't necessarily do this for projects that your career depends on, though!)
Not only will this be personally satisfying, but it'll make you more marketable, too.
Bad Ass Linux, I like it! You're a wealth of marketing ideas, thank you! You've inspired me - I've already also come up with Trenchcoat Linux, Mothafscking Linux, and finally, my pride and joy:
Osama bin Linux!
I never used to care, but WinXP really pisses me off and I'd love to see M$ get reamed right now.
A lot of people are having this reaction, for obvious reasons, including quite a few diehard Windows-only users that I know. Some of them are IT managers, too.
I think if there's ever a big movement to desktop Linux, it'll happen in the corporate world first, not amongst retail/home users. IT managers can, to some extent, dictate what their users run. In my experience, what stops even Linux-friendly IT managers from switching to Linux on the desktop in their companies is the perceived user dependence on, or familiarity with, MS Office etc. The install program is not much of a concern in this environment.
BTW, if you want a good explanation of why we all hate Microsoft so much more now than we once might have, I noticed this in the Economist article referenced in another /. article today:
Sucking four times more money out of the planet's pockets doesn't come without its own price. The tactics we all complain about are what has allowed them to achieve this. I can't see how it can be sustainable, though, so that reaming you're hoping for will happen, sooner or later.Have you read the list yourself? There's nothing there that anyone at "the retail / desktop" level is going to care about. The kernel just works, that comment was to warn /.ers against upgrading the kernel to 2.4.12 or something, if they want assured stability. The Gnome issue only applies to upgrading from 7.1 - how many retail/desktop people do you know who upgrade their own OS from one minor version to another?
Logical error. Criticizing others implies that the criticizer does not suffer from the specified faults. It's self-aggrandizement by implication.