That would be the best April-fools joke of all -- for the next 24 hours, only post interesting, well-researched, and insightful stories, complete with correct spelling and grammar and no dups.
Then as the slashdot hordes are in the midst of their rejoicing, intoxicated by the future that could be, CmdrTaco can post his `Ha Ha! April Fuls!' story 10 or 11 times.
You know, I don't think this criticism is correct. Look at games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, or even Nethack. They're all quick, short-attention-span games (get in, play a couple games, get out, you've only wasted 15 minutes).
Hmmm, it's clear you've never played nethack... (get in, play a couple of games, get out, and you've only wasted 6 months)
Now compare that to games like Half-Life, Max Payne, Halo, Deus Ex, the Thief series, the System Shock series, and so on. You're lucky if you can really get much done in an hour's play time with these games. They have story, they have plot, they have atmosphere, and they have action.
... just like nethack.:-)
[Really, I don't mean to sound obnoxious, but seeing nethack lumped in with pacman as a `twitch' game was almost surreal...]
One could just as much say that LA's streets are too big. And you'd be right, if driving a car weren't a given. Having european-style small streets and compact construction may make it hard to get around except on life-threatning scooters but it sure makes walking anywhere easy.
Amen to that.
Around here at least, the `humanness' of any given neighborhood is pretty much directly proportional to the narrowness of the streets: areas with very wide streets inevitably feel cold and lifeless, a decaying tacky shadow of some developer's glossy brochure, with all the inhabitants permanently encased in giant steel boxes zooming along at 40mph. Neighborhoods with narrow streets on the other hand, feel like exactly that -- neighborhoods.
[Of course some dim bulbs still insist on driving 10-foot high SUVs down super-narrow streets, but luckily for everybody else, they can't drive more than about 2 miles an hour for fear of scratching the chrome trim.... ]
um.i don't think that's anything to do with mobile phones - people don't talk to each other much on the train anyway. if they weren't using their phones they'd probably be either sleeping or staring out the window...
No you misunderstand -- I meant groups of friends, who are clearly hanging out together. The sort of group that would normally be talking loudly about inane subjects (hmmm, maybe there's an upside to all this...).
Maria Kalman referred to cell phones as "pacifiers for adults"
The analogy that comes to mind is cigarettes (which, thank god, are declining a bit, even in Japan), surely the original adult pacifier.
I live in Japan, and when I first came here I was all excited to get a cell-phone, since they seemed like a very cool gadget, and downright handy.
However, the way people interact with their phones here is so downright creepy that I now want no part of them. People no longer look around them if they're walking down the street, they stare down at their phone, and thumb the buttons. If there's a group of people on the train, much of the time they all stare at their phones instead of talking to each other. This sort of `idle' use seems far more prevalent than actually using the phone to talk! Sure there are lots of other such things gameboys, books, newspapers, etc., but nothing seems to keep people's eyes superglued like a cell-phone, and there's this distinct feeling like they're Not There (that you don't get when someone's just reading a newspaper).
I certainly recognize how handy they are, and I think most people have good reasons to have them, but I think this is going to be one of those technologies (like the TV) that goes down in history as both a blessing and a curse.
[Sure people `could' choose not to use them, but people are weak...]
Heh, once I had an HP system (not a PC clone, a wierd 68K monster with an IEEE-488 bus for peripherals, and I think 8-inch hard-drives; of course I ran NetBSD on it:-) at home with this really nice (but huge) Triniton monitor.
The monitor had a nice broad, flat, top, and Being Stupid, I would do things like leave glasses of water sitting on it. Of course one day my luck ran out, and I knocked a full glass into the well-ventilated top of the monitor.
There was a zapping sound, and the display on the monitor sort of warped, and `exploded'; it's hard to describe, but it went completely nuts, like a particularly impressive screensaver. The effect was really very cool.
I was momentarily stunned, so didn't do anything. Then I noticed that although the display was most certainly totally bizarre (there were no scan lines to speak of, more like spinning scan parabolas), it didn't seem to be getting any worse. So I decided that hell, if it's fried, it's fried, and it will probably dry out a lot faster if I leave it turned on...
So I just left the monitor turned on overnight. When I came to look at it in the morning, it was back to normal, looking very nice indeed.
HP had some really impressive hardware back in the day...:-)
The file dialog is not good, and is being fixed, but there is a lot of applications out there that just use GTK+ and not the rest of GNOME.
BTW, what is it about Gnome's file dialog that everybody hates so? It seems OK to me (it's certainly as good as the one in windows). Also, the fact that the TAB key works properly is a big point in Gnome's favor...
Why is it so difficult to choose a sensible level of "standard" options, well-thought-out and well presented, and hide more advanced options behind an "advanced" button in the appropriate dialogs?
I share your opinion of Gnome's `new style' -- I think it sucks, and wish they had kept more options that I used in older Gnome versions.
However, as much as I'd like to complain, I've seen the Gnome team point out that any option, even if hidden by default, makes the software more complex, requires support, and will contribute to the overall number of bugs.
Given this, I've bitten my tongue with regards to all the obscure options I want, and only bitch when I can make a good case for something...:-)
I think December 1982 is close enough that tagging `1983' as the start of MIDI is fair; clearly it didn't really get going until 1983.
Saying the DX7 was `unprecented' is a bit of hyperbole, but as far as the mass-market is concerned, it's not far from the truth. Certainly it's the DX7 that had the impact.
Anyway, I think the point is that the article basically got it right on those two points, even if it's possible to quibble over the fine print.
I used to work at the FSF, and I can promise that RMS showered regularly -- I know because I would often see him going off to the showers wearing nothing but a towel (pause to shudder). Anyway, I never noticed that he smelled bad (and it's not my nose because I certainly met many people there who did reek!).
[I've heard the used condom story too; it was supposedly the cleaning people that complained about it...]
Yeah I agree with that, those mini-trackballs seemed much better than either the trackpad or the eraserhead controllers.
Odd that what I find to the absolute worst controller -- the trackpad -- has become the most widely used. I guess it must be the cheapest to manufacture...
The PC/mac bit is obviously wrong, but the DX7 and MIDI bits seem correct.
According to this midi history, the first midi instrument showed up in december 1982, and the official midi spec was published in 1983.
BTW, Dave Smith, one of the fathers of MIDI (and creator of the famous Prophet 5), is still at it -- check out his latest synth, the Evolver, which is a wonderful combination of digital and analogue, and an utterly inspiring little box. Affordable too!
Salon's staff is amateurish to the point that they make K5 look professional.
I'm quite liberal, but I'll agree with that. With occasional exceptions (which I know someone will post about to slashdot!) the writers at salon really don't seem worth the 80mil. Sometimes it's like reading an entire site written by Jon Katz...
I wonder if the people who write press-releases are ever embarrassed by what they do. It's got to go against the instincts of even the worst writers to have a 100:1 meaningless formulaic fluff to useful information ratio, and surely they don't think that potential customers are impressed by all the crap?
Maybe it's all a game between rival press-release writers to see who can write the longest press-release without actually saying anything...
Really good design also involves art, it's not something you can just pick up by reading Dirk Blowhard's Design Methodology of the Week.
Design is not enough. Sometimes you simply don't know, and can't know unless you stop `designing' and start doing something; maybe you'll find out that you've screwed up, but that's the risk you take (like anything, writing software involves some risk), and it's better you find that out earlier rather than later!
I'm sick to fuck of hearing people talk about coding as art when software is damn near the least artistic thing on the planet if it's done right.
Good design and good code are orthogonal (`good code' in my mind, roughly refers to the `tactical level'), and both can be done artistically or not.
Artistic code (and design) is clear, straight-forward, and insightful; it's a pleasure to read, and easy to maintain. Such code is not that common, of course -- not everybody who aspires to be an artist is one! [I suspect the latter point is one reason that many people and organizations don't like the notion of `code as art' -- it doesn't work well with the typical big-business `legions of rather dim programmers' model.]
Code mechanically produced using `engineering methods,' but without art, in my experience is in fact harder to maintain, and far more brittle. It follows all the rules, and yet manages to still miss the point.
I guess the point is that you can't ignore either aspect; if you want really good software, both are necessary.
You seem to be making the mistake of thinking that there's just one sort of embedded application.
Sure there are embedded applications and devices for which linux is probably inappropriate, but so what? Linux won't get used there. However, the word `embedded' covers a lot of ground, and there are many embedded applications and devices for which linux is a perfectly fine solution -- and that's where linux will be (and is) used.
[Morever, as another post pointed out, the hardware used for embedded devices is continually getting more powerful, for any given application, making linux more and more practical.]
Have you looked into RiscOS? It fits into something like a 4meg (yes four megabyte) rom, boots in two seconds, and screams on any old piece of junk processor.
Um, linux can quite easily fit into a 4 megabyte rom, boot in about half a second, and scream on any old piece of junk processor.
[I know because my job involves fitting linux into very small roms that must boot quickly on very slow processors...]
It's a trick, you see. Of course Clear Channel mainly just promotes interchangeable froth like 'N Sync and Britney. Since bands like these never actually sing, they always just lip-sync to their latest album, all they have to do is sell you that album -- and charge extra for it!
I'm in awe of such sneakiness...
[for that matter, they could probably sell a different band's album, and half the concert goers wouldn't realize it...]
An interesting aside is that Stallman, one time when he went to Japan, had a `hanko' made for himself (a hanko is a little name stamp that Japanese use instead of a signature). What's on his hanko? The formula for root-mean-squared!
Maybe you haven't noticed, but they have been at step 3 so long that they don't even remember step 2.
Ah, well, I really meant `business plan for this product.'
From further posts it seems that the N-gage has a much faster processor than the GBA, but I'm not sure if it has a special graphics co-processor like the GBA does (which handles a lot of the heavy lifting for games). Also it seems that the N-gage has the usual awful battery life (geez, it seems like this is the one lesson people should have learned by now!).
All in all, it doesn't really seem intended as a gaming machine at all, but rather just a phone for people that might occasionally like a game that's less horrid that the typical phone game.
[Perhaps that's all Nokia ever intended, but you'd never know it from the way people are running around screaming that Nintendo's finally got some competition...]
Hmmm, so according to what google turned up, the GBA SP's specs are:
Processor: ARM (can't find the speed)
Dimensions: 85mm x 82mm x 24mm (folded)
Weight: 143 g
Display: 240 x 160 pixels
Active Area: 61mm X 41mm
Color Depth: 32,768 colors
So it seems that the GBA SP is just about the same size and weight, has a better display (you can argue about backlit vs. frontlit, but the SP's screen is reputed to look really good, and it has better specs than the N-gage's), retains the gameboy's famously long battery life, is really cheap, and has thousands of games (some really good), massive industry support, and a huge installed base.
Sony products (at least in my experience) do tend to be rather reliable and hold up to heavy use longer than other brands.
It depends -- their cheaper stuff (`made in Malaysia'), like phones etc., is often junk (though it still usually looks good -- industrial design is Sony's real strength, I think). I've had quite a few such Sony products self-destruct on me, to the the point where I won't buy anything from Sony unless it's at least made in Japan.
It isn't controversial at all: reference counting is ridiculously inefficient for this purpose, and it is quite inefficient even relative to a GC.
I certainly agree that reference counting is inefficient -- but I didn't say `reference counting,' I said `reference-only' -- that is, pointers to objects, instead of the objects themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be the best April-fools joke of all -- for the next 24 hours, only post interesting, well-researched, and insightful stories, complete with correct spelling and grammar and no dups.
Then as the slashdot hordes are in the midst of their rejoicing, intoxicated by the future that could be, CmdrTaco can post his `Ha Ha! April Fuls!' story 10 or 11 times.
Hmmm, it's clear you've never played nethack... (get in, play a couple of games, get out, and you've only wasted 6 months)
Now compare that to games like Half-Life, Max Payne, Halo, Deus Ex, the Thief series, the System Shock series, and so on. You're lucky if you can really get much done in an hour's play time with these games. They have story, they have plot, they have atmosphere, and they have action.
[Really, I don't mean to sound obnoxious, but seeing nethack lumped in with pacman as a `twitch' game was almost surreal...]
One could just as much say that LA's streets are too big. And you'd be right, if driving a car weren't a given. Having european-style small streets and compact construction may make it hard to get around except on life-threatning scooters but it sure makes walking anywhere easy.
Amen to that.
Around here at least, the `humanness' of any given neighborhood is pretty much directly proportional to the narrowness of the streets: areas with very wide streets inevitably feel cold and lifeless, a decaying tacky shadow of some developer's glossy brochure, with all the inhabitants permanently encased in giant steel boxes zooming along at 40mph. Neighborhoods with narrow streets on the other hand, feel like exactly that -- neighborhoods.
[Of course some dim bulbs still insist on driving 10-foot high SUVs down super-narrow streets, but luckily for everybody else, they can't drive more than about 2 miles an hour for fear of scratching the chrome trim.... ]
um.i don't think that's anything to do with mobile phones - people don't talk to each other much on the train anyway. if they weren't using their phones they'd probably be either sleeping or staring out the window...
No you misunderstand -- I meant groups of friends, who are clearly hanging out together. The sort of group that would normally be talking loudly about inane subjects (hmmm, maybe there's an upside to all this...).
Maria Kalman referred to cell phones as "pacifiers for adults"
The analogy that comes to mind is cigarettes (which, thank god, are declining a bit, even in Japan), surely the original adult pacifier.
I live in Japan, and when I first came here I was all excited to get a cell-phone, since they seemed like a very cool gadget, and downright handy.
However, the way people interact with their phones here is so downright creepy that I now want no part of them. People no longer look around them if they're walking down the street, they stare down at their phone, and thumb the buttons. If there's a group of people on the train, much of the time they all stare at their phones instead of talking to each other. This sort of `idle' use seems far more prevalent than actually using the phone to talk! Sure there are lots of other such things gameboys, books, newspapers, etc., but nothing seems to keep people's eyes superglued like a cell-phone, and there's this distinct feeling like they're Not There (that you don't get when someone's just reading a newspaper).
I certainly recognize how handy they are, and I think most people have good reasons to have them, but I think this is going to be one of those technologies (like the TV) that goes down in history as both a blessing and a curse.
[Sure people `could' choose not to use them, but people are weak...]
Heh, once I had an HP system (not a PC clone, a wierd 68K monster with an IEEE-488 bus for peripherals, and I think 8-inch hard-drives; of course I ran NetBSD on it :-) at home with this really nice (but huge) Triniton monitor.
:-)
The monitor had a nice broad, flat, top, and Being Stupid, I would do things like leave glasses of water sitting on it. Of course one day my luck ran out, and I knocked a full glass into the well-ventilated top of the monitor.
There was a zapping sound, and the display on the monitor sort of warped, and `exploded'; it's hard to describe, but it went completely nuts, like a particularly impressive screensaver. The effect was really very cool.
I was momentarily stunned, so didn't do anything. Then I noticed that although the display was most certainly totally bizarre (there were no scan lines to speak of, more like spinning scan parabolas), it didn't seem to be getting any worse. So I decided that hell, if it's fried, it's fried, and it will probably dry out a lot faster if I leave it turned on...
So I just left the monitor turned on overnight. When I came to look at it in the morning, it was back to normal, looking very nice indeed.
HP had some really impressive hardware back in the day...
The file dialog is not good, and is being fixed, but there is a lot of applications out there that just use GTK+ and not the rest of GNOME.
BTW, what is it about Gnome's file dialog that everybody hates so? It seems OK to me (it's certainly as good as the one in windows). Also, the fact that the TAB key works properly is a big point in Gnome's favor...
Why is it so difficult to choose a sensible level of "standard" options, well-thought-out and well presented, and hide more advanced options behind an "advanced" button in the appropriate dialogs?
:-)
I share your opinion of Gnome's `new style' -- I think it sucks, and wish they had kept more options that I used in older Gnome versions.
However, as much as I'd like to complain, I've seen the Gnome team point out that any option, even if hidden by default, makes the software more complex, requires support, and will contribute to the overall number of bugs.
Given this, I've bitten my tongue with regards to all the obscure options I want, and only bitch when I can make a good case for something...
I think December 1982 is close enough that tagging `1983' as the start of MIDI is fair; clearly it didn't really get going until 1983.
Saying the DX7 was `unprecented' is a bit of hyperbole, but as far as the mass-market is concerned, it's not far from the truth. Certainly it's the DX7 that had the impact.
Anyway, I think the point is that the article basically got it right on those two points, even if it's possible to quibble over the fine print.
I used to work at the FSF, and I can promise that RMS showered regularly -- I know because I would often see him going off to the showers wearing nothing but a towel (pause to shudder). Anyway, I never noticed that he smelled bad (and it's not my nose because I certainly met many people there who did reek!).
[I've heard the used condom story too; it was supposedly the cleaning people that complained about it...]
Yeah I agree with that, those mini-trackballs seemed much better than either the trackpad or the eraserhead controllers.
Odd that what I find to the absolute worst controller -- the trackpad -- has become the most widely used. I guess it must be the cheapest to manufacture...
The PC/mac bit is obviously wrong, but the DX7 and MIDI bits seem correct.
According to this midi history, the first midi instrument showed up in december 1982, and the official midi spec was published in 1983.
BTW, Dave Smith, one of the fathers of MIDI (and creator of the famous Prophet 5), is still at it -- check out his latest synth, the Evolver, which is a wonderful combination of digital and analogue, and an utterly inspiring little box. Affordable too!
This is my week.
...
Oh, the inhumanity of it all...
Solution? Read slashdot!
Salon's staff is amateurish to the point that they make K5 look professional.
I'm quite liberal, but I'll agree with that. With occasional exceptions (which I know someone will post about to slashdot!) the writers at salon really don't seem worth the 80mil. Sometimes it's like reading an entire site written by Jon Katz...
I wonder if the people who write press-releases are ever embarrassed by what they do. It's got to go against the instincts of even the worst writers to have a 100:1 meaningless formulaic fluff to useful information ratio, and surely they don't think that potential customers are impressed by all the crap?
Maybe it's all a game between rival press-release writers to see who can write the longest press-release without actually saying anything...
I'm sick to fuck of hearing people talk about coding as art when software is damn near the least artistic thing on the planet if it's done right.
Good design and good code are orthogonal (`good code' in my mind, roughly refers to the `tactical level'), and both can be done artistically or not.
Artistic code (and design) is clear, straight-forward, and insightful; it's a pleasure to read, and easy to maintain. Such code is not that common, of course -- not everybody who aspires to be an artist is one! [I suspect the latter point is one reason that many people and organizations don't like the notion of `code as art' -- it doesn't work well with the typical big-business `legions of rather dim programmers' model.]
Code mechanically produced using `engineering methods,' but without art, in my experience is in fact harder to maintain, and far more brittle. It follows all the rules, and yet manages to still miss the point.
I guess the point is that you can't ignore either aspect; if you want really good software, both are necessary.
You seem to be making the mistake of thinking that there's just one sort of embedded application.
Sure there are embedded applications and devices for which linux is probably inappropriate, but so what? Linux won't get used there. However, the word `embedded' covers a lot of ground, and there are many embedded applications and devices for which linux is a perfectly fine solution -- and that's where linux will be (and is) used.
[Morever, as another post pointed out, the hardware used for embedded devices is continually getting more powerful, for any given application, making linux more and more practical.]
Have you looked into RiscOS? It fits into something like a 4meg (yes four megabyte) rom, boots in two seconds, and screams on any old piece of junk processor.
Um, linux can quite easily fit into a 4 megabyte rom, boot in about half a second, and scream on any old piece of junk processor.
[I know because my job involves fitting linux into very small roms that must boot quickly on very slow processors...]
It's a trick, you see. Of course Clear Channel mainly just promotes interchangeable froth like 'N Sync and Britney. Since bands like these never actually sing, they always just lip-sync to their latest album, all they have to do is sell you that album -- and charge extra for it!
...]
I'm in awe of such sneakiness...
[for that matter, they could probably sell a different band's album, and half the concert goers wouldn't realize it
"RMS". No, not Stallman. "Root Mean Squared"
An interesting aside is that Stallman, one time when he went to Japan, had a `hanko' made for himself (a hanko is a little name stamp that Japanese use instead of a signature). What's on his hanko? The formula for root-mean-squared!
Maybe you haven't noticed, but they have been at step 3 so long that they don't even remember step 2.
Ah, well, I really meant `business plan for this product.'
From further posts it seems that the N-gage has a much faster processor than the GBA, but I'm not sure if it has a special graphics co-processor like the GBA does (which handles a lot of the heavy lifting for games). Also it seems that the N-gage has the usual awful battery life (geez, it seems like this is the one lesson people should have learned by now!).
All in all, it doesn't really seem intended as a gaming machine at all, but rather just a phone for people that might occasionally like a game that's less horrid that the typical phone game.
[Perhaps that's all Nokia ever intended, but you'd never know it from the way people are running around screaming that Nintendo's finally got some competition...]
So it seems that the GBA SP is just about the same size and weight, has a better display (you can argue about backlit vs. frontlit, but the SP's screen is reputed to look really good, and it has better specs than the N-gage's), retains the gameboy's famously long battery life, is really cheap, and has thousands of games (some really good), massive industry support, and a huge installed base.
The N-gage, on the other hand, has
To sum up Nokia's business plan:
(2) ???
(3) Profit!
Sony products (at least in my experience) do tend to be rather reliable and hold up to heavy use longer than other brands.
It depends -- their cheaper stuff (`made in Malaysia'), like phones etc., is often junk (though it still usually looks good -- industrial design is Sony's real strength, I think). I've had quite a few such Sony products self-destruct on me, to the the point where I won't buy anything from Sony unless it's at least made in Japan.
It isn't controversial at all: reference counting is ridiculously inefficient for this purpose, and it is quite inefficient even relative to a GC.
I certainly agree that reference counting is inefficient -- but I didn't say `reference counting,' I said `reference-only' -- that is, pointers to objects, instead of the objects themselves.