The in-depth reviews of the new ultrasparc(s) I've seen have been rather less... flattering. A doubling of speed is not quite as impressive if you were way behind to begin with.
As for `Coming in 2005... will offer 15 times the performance' -- what was that you were saying about vaporware?
Although I'm not sure about the Game Cube in particular, consensus is that most tales of games being uncopyable because of some oddity of the CD/DVD (recorded outside to inside, spins counterclockwise,...) are false.
"The concensus" about what (since you say it's not about the "gamecube in particular")? PCs? Other gamesystems?
Since the gamecube intentionally uses non-standard hardware to avoid copying, applying general observations about other systems to it seems a bit suspect.
Oh, bullshit. I don't know about T.B., but Firebird certainly is `production quality' to the extent that it matters for most people.
There are always going to bugs, but most of them don't matter 99% of the time; compared to IE, or even better, something like netscape from 4 years ago, Firebird is a refreshing and painless experience.
I suspect you're right about Thunderbird, not least because a mail programs can cause a lot more damage if something goes wrong.
As for Firebird vs. Mozilla, I don't know, but I think from a typical user's point of view, they're basically in the same state; F.B. has a slightly more well-thought-out interface, but Mozilla feels a bit closer to netscape (maybe some people like that).
I prefer the simpler solution of just kicking people who complain about this in the head repeatedly. Perhaps one-billion (10^9) times (if their whine is particularly shrill, 2^30 should provide a thrilling excursion into the world of base 2).
After all, the only people to whom the difference actually matters, are also those who are clueful enough to know how things work. For the average joe, all that's really important is whether drive A has more space than drive B or not -- and since all the manufs use the same silly notation anyway, no problem doing this, right?
I haven't the faintest clue about XP (other than the many interesting comments in this story), but refactoring seems like just good common sense. Code evolves; help it do so cleanly.
An ideograph tends to be a complete word in itself
This is certainly not true in Japanese -- the majority of `chinese-derived' words consist of two kanji, and `japanese' words often consist of a single kanji plus enough hiragana to provide an important amount of context. I find that I can recognize many such words where I can't (or have a hard time to) recognize the individual kanji, and in fact if I'm trying to figure out what a kanji in isolation is, a typical strategy is to think `Oh, it's X from the word XY.'
The ideographs have to be learnt by rote, since they contain no phonetic information as an aid to pronunciation.
This is certainly true to some degree, but typical kanji in fact do contain pronounciation clues: in many kanji there's a `meaning' component (the radical), and a `pronounciation' component (no idea what you call this). Thus even though my ability to recognize more uncommon kanji is at best mediocre, I can almost always guess the on-yomi correctly (which helps immensely because this makes it much easier to quickly lookup the kanji in a dictionary!).
I find that when reading japanese text (in normal reading, not in `deciphering mode'), I rely mostly on the visual `shapes' of words; because of this, I'm sometimes confused by similar looking kanji, but context is almost always enough to resolve things (often without realizing it -- it's when I make a mistake doing this that I see what's going on!). When that sort of rough high-level recognition fails, I fall back to looking at individual features of the kanji -- radicals for meaning, and the other parts of the kanji for pronounciation; these things mushed together with both word-level and sentence-level context are often enough.
If you look up kanji in a dictionary, it often contains an explanation for the historical derivation of the kanji from simpler components.
Japanese handwriting recognition tends to be based on detecting the order in which the strokes for a character are laid down
Sure, but this doesn't work for human readers:-) (except in the rare case where you resort to actually writing stuff out in real time!)
Note that since I learned japanese as an adult, my methods may not be entirely similar to native speakers -- but I think the very existance of the features I talked about above are a pretty good clue that they're not entirely dis-similar either.
Take the scene where Neo and Trinity enter that building with bags full of guns.
It's a pretty straight-up cop from John Woo flicks...
And yeah, it is kinda clumsy; I mean they seemed to have the right idea, but there are many places in that scene where it just doesn't flow like a good fight scene should (that's something they did a lot better in Matrix Reloaded, BTW, I don't know if they got a new fight choreographer or just had a lot more time/money to spend).
the fight scenes in the Matrix movies are arguably the most beautiful ever shot. The ones in the first movie changed our perceptions of what such scenes could be like. They have changed the course of modern cinema,
Oh please, they have not.
They were pretty cool, but hardly something revolutionary. Indeed, while watching the matrix 1, I was pretty disappointed (after having heard so much hype), and remember thinking that the the fight scenes were (a) derivative, and (b) generally rather clumsy. Matrix Reloaded had much better fight choreography, presumably because they had a lot more money to throw at it. But again, they weren't particularly innovative, they just benefitted the sort of attention to detail that american movies rarely devote to fight scenes (but it's always nice to see a movie where someone actually does care about such things).
Actually if you ask me, the absolute number one cool thing about the matrix movies is the costumes -- some of those fabrics had me drooling...
In addition, they appear to have fixed many of the case/key/display problems which plagued the 49G
It's a shame, but according to the pictures/reviews on hpcalc.org, the new calculators still appear to have pretty crappy industrial design. They have the same sort of `look at me!' appearance that a lot of cell-phones do (especially the one with `skewed' buttons looks like a particularly sad Nokia reject), and a tiiiiiny little enter key in the corner. Absolutely not up to the standards of old.
Christ, when is HP going to figure out that a big appeal of their old calcs (and one reason people were willing to pay a lot of money for them) was the great design...?
It seems kind of silly to moan about the PS/2 ports; they're simple, low speed, and have small connectors, so they're hardly a burden to support. More importantly, there have been lots of great keyboards/mice produced over the years using PS/2 connectors which there's absolutely no reason to obsolete.
For instance, I have a `Happy-Hacking Keyboard Lite' that I bought (well my company bought) 5 years ago, and it still murders every usb keyboard that I've seen (though I actually also have a usb HHK Lite 2:-). My boss bought the original HH Keyboard even earlier, which cost some absurd price like $250 -- and it's built like it; it's probably going to be going strong 10 years from now. Another example is that people are still using the great keyboards IBM produced in the 80s.
Anyway, the point is that there's still a very good reason to retain PS/2 port support. Apple can strut and preen all it wants about being modern and edgy, and sometimes they have a point -- but sometimes it's just hot air.
Actually, it's `Happy Hacking,' but yeah, they're great -- I've got two of them!
The original HH keyboard and the `HH Keyboard Lite' (basically, the Lite reduced the price so that mortals can enjoy it too) were the best; the `HH Keyboard Lite 2' is still great, but they compromised slightly on their principles, and added (tiny) cursor keys -- unfortunately these cursor keys resulted in a little 10mm lip being added to the bottom edge of the keyboard, which makes it rather uglier than the original HHK Lite (which was, like the HHK, essentially `frameless').
Actually I've found that coffee tastes significantly better if I let the water cool a little bit from boiling before I make the coffee. My ad-hoc timing method is that I always turn off of the boiling water and then grind the beans; the little time that grinding takes seems to make a big difference.
I don't know if there's any scientific basis for this (I can't imagine that it cools more than a degree or two in that time), but I definitely notice the difference.
It's not that they have a soul, it's just that they have a certain image of their company (which they apparently think will help them with profits in either the short or long run)
And you know this how?
If they act like they `have a soul', then I seen no reason not to think they do, unless they've done something to make us doubt it.
Remember, companies are run by people, and strongly affected by the nature of those who run them (this is especially true of Google, which is privately owned). Even people who run companies can be ethical, responsible, and cool:-). Certainly the practical difficulties of maintaining a company can be trying, but that's just one influence among many (including, as you said, the practical benefits of having a good image).
Similarly, a company like Microsoft's tendency towards cynical amorality likely has much to do with the character of its principals and the company culture which they created.
Gee, I never really thought about it very much, but I pay (in Japan) about 500yen/100g, which works out to about $20/lb!!!! Gah... (and that's nowhere near the most expensive)
If you thought it was worthwhile to send me an e-mail in the first place, then you'll probably click the respond button for the bounce message.
That's the theory, but in fact this sort of thing annoys many people, to the extent that they'll just give up on the idea of sending you mail (even if it was easy to `click the button').
If not, then I probably don't want to hear from you anyway.
Well I suppose that works if you only ever correspond with a small circle of friends...
Good luck if you ever actually try to interact with a wider audience though.
Is it just me, or is this guy's choice of what to actually do with the teletype kind of stupid? `Weather reports'? `News Headlines?' Gah, how boring.
If you got a teletype, geez man, just put a login prompt on it, and let people do their hacking with ed or whatever, now that's how a tty is supposed to be used on a computer system!
BTW, the original emacs (on ITS/tops20/etc) had a line mode! I very occasionally used it in college when all the video terminals were taken... it sucked, but was nicer than raw teco. Actually I guess vi has/had a line-mode too, in addition to the ed/ex level (I think it was called `open mode'); do modern variants like vim still have this?
Actually most not-completely-ancient terminals are far nicer than a PC running equivalent terminal-emulation software, as long as you only care about seeing text. They usually had lovely readable displays, with a monitor optimized for the job, and just generally felt good. Unfortunately, DEC did manage to fuck up the keyboard in their later models (vt220 etc).
Terminals from the end of the terminal era are usually also much more svelte than a typical PC (especially a PC contemporary with the terminal), being little bigger than than the space required for the CRT tube...
I'm not `vigorously advocating' anything, just pointing out that your (and bernstein's) pet approach has some glaring flaws which you're glossing over.
[ List of random bookmark/shortcut features deleted ]
Users happily use these features. The indirection layer you are so worried about already exists and is in common use. We're just not fully exploiting the functionality we already have.
Do you really believe what you just said constitutes a solution? (1) It's not acceptable to just say `Use the GUI version.' No. (2) If hostnames really disappear, and users are forced to use all of these disparate facilities, they're going to go nuts; it's really a pain having to enter the same damn information in 10 different forms because there's no central (user/machine/whatever) list.
This problem is (obviously) soluble, but it's not a minor little change, it's going to require a fair amount of work, and changing a lot of existing tools.
No, that's not what DNSSEC is. DNSSEC is another instantiation of a PKI hierarchy. PKI does not use self-authenticating identifiers.
Huh? I never said DNSSEC used `self-authenticating' identiers, merely that it could be thought of as a solution to the global-keyword -> self-authenticating identifiers mapping problem (that is, it can return them).
Maybe there is some benefit to separating the namespace into two sorts, `global keywords' and `self-authenticating identifiers,' and using each where appropriate (keywords on your business card, s.a.i. for internal web links) -- but none-the-less, the `global keywords are important' problem still exists.
Your issue is easily handled by the bookmark file keywords provided by Mozilla Firebird. After you've bookmarked a page, you can return to it by typing in your personally chosen keyword.
I think you're kind of missing the point.
The obvious implementation burdens extend beyond the web-browser. There are many programs out there which need host names -- ssh, telnet, ftp, my mail reading program (for pop3), etc -- all of which need an extra indirection layer added, plus the infrastructure need to populate it without driving users nuts.
More importantly, people often use hostnames gathered from non-electronic sources. They're written on business cards and letterheads, displayed in advertisements, included in magazine articles, and mentioned by friends in conversation; in Korea they even put them on the side of buildingsin place of a company's logo. All of these are basically global names. Sure you can add a new system to translate between such global names and your obfuscated `hostnames' in a secure manner -- but isn't that what DNSSEC is?!?
Re:dan bernstein's position on this
on
DNSSEC: Good Enough?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Um, I hate to break it to you, but we -- you and me -- are end-users. I'm certainly not going to accept a `standard' that works only for the mouth-breathing (and windows-using) set.
Slashdot Mirror
The in-depth reviews of the new ultrasparc(s) I've seen have been rather less ... flattering. A doubling of speed is not quite as impressive if you were way behind to begin with.
... will offer 15 times the performance' -- what was that you were saying about vaporware?
As for `Coming in 2005
Although I'm not sure about the Game Cube in particular, consensus is that most tales of games being uncopyable because of some oddity of the CD/DVD (recorded outside to inside, spins counterclockwise, ...) are false.
"The concensus" about what (since you say it's not about the "gamecube in particular")? PCs? Other gamesystems?
Since the gamecube intentionally uses non-standard hardware to avoid copying, applying general observations about other systems to it seems a bit suspect.
Why have an x-box?
Oh, bullshit. I don't know about T.B., but Firebird certainly is `production quality' to the extent that it matters for most people.
There are always going to bugs, but most of them don't matter 99% of the time; compared to IE, or even better, something like netscape from 4 years ago, Firebird is a refreshing and painless experience.
I suspect you're right about Thunderbird, not least because a mail programs can cause a lot more damage if something goes wrong.
As for Firebird vs. Mozilla, I don't know, but I think from a typical user's point of view, they're basically in the same state; F.B. has a slightly more well-thought-out interface, but Mozilla feels a bit closer to netscape (maybe some people like that).
I prefer the simpler solution of just kicking people who complain about this in the head repeatedly. Perhaps one-billion (10^9) times (if their whine is particularly shrill, 2^30 should provide a thrilling excursion into the world of base 2).
After all, the only people to whom the difference actually matters, are also those who are clueful enough to know how things work. For the average joe, all that's really important is whether drive A has more space than drive B or not -- and since all the manufs use the same silly notation anyway, no problem doing this, right?
I haven't the faintest clue about XP (other than the many interesting comments in this story), but refactoring seems like just good common sense. Code evolves; help it do so cleanly.
Any company that pays that much attention to job titles is probably already beyond hope...
This is a timed version of my kernel boot sequence on an RTE-V850E/ME2-CB board (a rather pokey processor -- 80MHz); the first column is seconds:
[ 0.002619 ] Linux version 2.4.21-uc0 (miles@mcspd15) (gcc version 2.9-v850ice-000414-nmit-20010327) #62 Wed Jul 16 16:03:57 JST 2003
[ 0.009299 ] On node 0 totalpages: 8192
[ 0.019597 ] zone(0): 8192 pages.
[ 0.030390 ] zone(1): 0 pages.
[ 0.030635 ] zone(2): 0 pages.
[ 0.030891 ] CPU: NEC V850E/ME2
[ 0.031065 ] Platform: Midas lab RTE-V850E/ME2-CB
[ 0.031322 ] Kernel command line:
[ 0.031869 ] 50 BogoMIPS (precomputed)
[ 0.067024 ] Memory: 24388K/32768K available (291K kernel code, 150K data)
[ 0.068884 ] Dentry cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
[ 0.069639 ] Inode cache hash table entries: 2048 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
[ 0.070279 ] Mount cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[ 0.071467 ] Buffer-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[ 0.072234 ] Page-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
[ 0.073991 ] POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
[ 0.074414 ] Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
[ 0.074663 ] Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
[ 0.075648 ] Starting kswapd
[ 0.078020 ] Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with no serial options enabled
[ 0.078538 ] ttyS00 at 0xfe08000 (irq = 90) is a 16550A
[ 0.079150 ] Blkmem copyright 1998,1999 D. Jeff Dionne
[ 0.079349 ] Blkmem copyright 1998 Kenneth Albanowski
[ 0.079544 ] Blkmem 1 disk images:
[ 0.079889 ] 0: 876000-FCE7FF [VIRTUAL 876000-FCE7FF] (RW)
[ 0.084282 ] VFS: Mounted root (romfs filesystem) readonly.
[ 0.085781 ] Freeing unused kernel memory: 20K freed
Whoo, 80ms!
Not that useful though (no network devices; network devices seem to take forever to start)...
An ideograph tends to be a complete word in itself
:-) (except in the rare case where you resort to actually writing stuff out in real time!)
This is certainly not true in Japanese -- the majority of `chinese-derived' words consist of two kanji, and `japanese' words often consist of a single kanji plus enough hiragana to provide an important amount of context. I find that I can recognize many such words where I can't (or have a hard time to) recognize the individual kanji, and in fact if I'm trying to figure out what a kanji in isolation is, a typical strategy is to think `Oh, it's X from the word XY.'
The ideographs have to be learnt by rote, since they contain no phonetic information as an aid to pronunciation.
This is certainly true to some degree, but typical kanji in fact do contain pronounciation clues: in many kanji there's a `meaning' component (the radical), and a `pronounciation' component (no idea what you call this). Thus even though my ability to recognize more uncommon kanji is at best mediocre, I can almost always guess the on-yomi correctly (which helps immensely because this makes it much easier to quickly lookup the kanji in a dictionary!).
I find that when reading japanese text (in normal reading, not in `deciphering mode'), I rely mostly on the visual `shapes' of words; because of this, I'm sometimes confused by similar looking kanji, but context is almost always enough to resolve things (often without realizing it -- it's when I make a mistake doing this that I see what's going on!). When that sort of rough high-level recognition fails, I fall back to looking at individual features of the kanji -- radicals for meaning, and the other parts of the kanji for pronounciation; these things mushed together with both word-level and sentence-level context are often enough.
If you look up kanji in a dictionary, it often contains an explanation for the historical derivation of the kanji from simpler components.
Japanese handwriting recognition tends to be based on detecting the order in which the strokes for a character are laid down
Sure, but this doesn't work for human readers
Note that since I learned japanese as an adult, my methods may not be entirely similar to native speakers -- but I think the very existance of the features I talked about above are a pretty good clue that they're not entirely dis-similar either.
Take the scene where Neo and Trinity enter that building with bags full of guns.
It's a pretty straight-up cop from John Woo flicks...
And yeah, it is kinda clumsy; I mean they seemed to have the right idea, but there are many places in that scene where it just doesn't flow like a good fight scene should (that's something they did a lot better in Matrix Reloaded, BTW, I don't know if they got a new fight choreographer or just had a lot more time/money to spend).
the fight scenes in the Matrix movies are arguably the most beautiful ever shot. The ones in the first movie changed our perceptions of what such scenes could be like. They have changed the course of modern cinema,
Oh please, they have not.
They were pretty cool, but hardly something revolutionary. Indeed, while watching the matrix 1, I was pretty disappointed (after having heard so much hype), and remember thinking that the the fight scenes were (a) derivative, and (b) generally rather clumsy. Matrix Reloaded had much better fight choreography, presumably because they had a lot more money to throw at it. But again, they weren't particularly innovative, they just benefitted the sort of attention to detail that american movies rarely devote to fight scenes (but it's always nice to see a movie where someone actually does care about such things).
Actually if you ask me, the absolute number one cool thing about the matrix movies is the costumes -- some of those fabrics had me drooling...
In addition, they appear to have fixed many of the case/key/display problems which plagued the 49G
It's a shame, but according to the pictures/reviews on hpcalc.org, the new calculators still appear to have pretty crappy industrial design. They have the same sort of `look at me!' appearance that a lot of cell-phones do (especially the one with `skewed' buttons looks like a particularly sad Nokia reject), and a tiiiiiny little enter key in the corner. Absolutely not up to the standards of old.
Christ, when is HP going to figure out that a big appeal of their old calcs (and one reason people were willing to pay a lot of money for them) was the great design...?
It seems kind of silly to moan about the PS/2 ports; they're simple, low speed, and have small connectors, so they're hardly a burden to support. More importantly, there have been lots of great keyboards/mice produced over the years using PS/2 connectors which there's absolutely no reason to obsolete.
:-). My boss bought the original HH Keyboard even earlier, which cost some absurd price like $250 -- and it's built like it; it's probably going to be going strong 10 years from now. Another example is that people are still using the great keyboards IBM produced in the 80s.
For instance, I have a `Happy-Hacking Keyboard Lite' that I bought (well my company bought) 5 years ago, and it still murders every usb keyboard that I've seen (though I actually also have a usb HHK Lite 2
Anyway, the point is that there's still a very good reason to retain PS/2 port support. Apple can strut and preen all it wants about being modern and edgy, and sometimes they have a point -- but sometimes it's just hot air.
Actually, it's `Happy Hacking,' but yeah, they're great -- I've got two of them!
The original HH keyboard and the `HH Keyboard Lite' (basically, the Lite reduced the price so that mortals can enjoy it too) were the best; the `HH Keyboard Lite 2' is still great, but they compromised slightly on their principles, and added (tiny) cursor keys -- unfortunately these cursor keys resulted in a little 10mm lip being added to the bottom edge of the keyboard, which makes it rather uglier than the original HHK Lite (which was, like the HHK, essentially `frameless').
Here's a place where you can buy them, and a link to the manufacturer's japanese page (can't find an english page, sorry).
To be honest, I'm not sure how anybody except a marketing executive could think the n-gage even looks cool... I think it's downright ugly.
Actually I've found that coffee tastes significantly better if I let the water cool a little bit from boiling before I make the coffee. My ad-hoc timing method is that I always turn off of the boiling water and then grind the beans; the little time that grinding takes seems to make a big difference.
I don't know if there's any scientific basis for this (I can't imagine that it cools more than a degree or two in that time), but I definitely notice the difference.
It's not that they have a soul, it's just that they have a certain image of their company (which they apparently think will help them with profits in either the short or long run)
:-). Certainly the practical difficulties of maintaining a company can be trying, but that's just one influence among many (including, as you said, the practical benefits of having a good image).
And you know this how?
If they act like they `have a soul', then I seen no reason not to think they do, unless they've done something to make us doubt it.
Remember, companies are run by people, and strongly affected by the nature of those who run them (this is especially true of Google, which is privately owned). Even people who run companies can be ethical, responsible, and cool
Similarly, a company like Microsoft's tendency towards cynical amorality likely has much to do with the character of its principals and the company culture which they created.
Gee, I never really thought about it very much, but I pay (in Japan) about 500yen/100g, which works out to about $20/lb!!!! Gah... (and that's nowhere near the most expensive)
Does taste good though.
If you thought it was worthwhile to send me an e-mail in the first place, then you'll probably click the respond button for the bounce message.
That's the theory, but in fact this sort of thing annoys many people, to the extent that they'll just give up on the idea of sending you mail (even if it was easy to `click the button').
If not, then I probably don't want to hear from you anyway.
Well I suppose that works if you only ever correspond with a small circle of friends...
Good luck if you ever actually try to interact with a wider audience though.
Is it just me, or is this guy's choice of what to actually do with the teletype kind of stupid? `Weather reports'? `News Headlines?' Gah, how boring.
If you got a teletype, geez man, just put a login prompt on it, and let people do their hacking with ed or whatever, now that's how a tty is supposed to be used on a computer system!
BTW, the original emacs (on ITS/tops20/etc) had a line mode! I very occasionally used it in college when all the video terminals were taken... it sucked, but was nicer than raw teco. Actually I guess vi has/had a line-mode too, in addition to the ed/ex level (I think it was called `open mode'); do modern variants like vim still have this?
Actually most not-completely-ancient terminals are far nicer than a PC running equivalent terminal-emulation software, as long as you only care about seeing text. They usually had lovely readable displays, with a monitor optimized for the job, and just generally felt good. Unfortunately, DEC did manage to fuck up the keyboard in their later models (vt220 etc).
Terminals from the end of the terminal era are usually also much more svelte than a typical PC (especially a PC contemporary with the terminal), being little bigger than than the space required for the CRT tube...
I'm not `vigorously advocating' anything, just pointing out that your (and bernstein's) pet approach has some glaring flaws which you're glossing over.
[ List of random bookmark/shortcut features deleted ]
Users happily use these features. The indirection layer you are so worried about already exists and is in common use. We're just not fully exploiting the functionality we already have.
Do you really believe what you just said constitutes a solution? (1) It's not acceptable to just say `Use the GUI version.' No. (2) If hostnames really disappear, and users are forced to use all of these disparate facilities, they're going to go nuts; it's really a pain having to enter the same damn information in 10 different forms because there's no central (user/machine/whatever) list.
This problem is (obviously) soluble, but it's not a minor little change, it's going to require a fair amount of work, and changing a lot of existing tools.
No, that's not what DNSSEC is. DNSSEC is another instantiation of a PKI hierarchy. PKI does not use self-authenticating identifiers.
Huh? I never said DNSSEC used `self-authenticating' identiers, merely that it could be thought of as a solution to the global-keyword -> self-authenticating identifiers mapping problem (that is, it can return them).
Maybe there is some benefit to separating the namespace into two sorts, `global keywords' and `self-authenticating identifiers,' and using each where appropriate (keywords on your business card, s.a.i. for internal web links) -- but none-the-less, the `global keywords are important' problem still exists.
I think you're kind of missing the point.
Um, I hate to break it to you, but we -- you and me -- are end-users. I'm certainly not going to accept a `standard' that works only for the mouth-breathing (and windows-using) set.