After reading through this article about the fall of the Win32 API, I think Google may be doing something a bit more clever than simply 'giving back'.
The article discusses how the plethora of APIs Microsoft is shipping and uncertainty of just when the APIs will be on real hardware have caused new development to move to the web (for example, building a new email client). It also mentions there are several drawbacks to web programming, but the author expects them to be overcome soon, further sapping the appeal of the Win32 API.
Perhaps this is exactly Google's strategy. How better to further enhance the desireability of web programming versus desktop programming than by demonstraiting in source how to perform some really compelling features? How many developers will take these techniques and use them at the heart of new killer apps; apps that run on any web browser rather than locked to a specific API?
Google may be giving a small bit away, but the potential gains in mindshare among developers may be much, much greater than the loss of this already paid for source code. Further, if the code in question relies on a particular technology, protocol or standard they are well versed in, they have succeeded in enticing developers to play in their sandbox.
He also seems to have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. The two are similar only in that they both rely on nuclear fission at some point. By the same token, we should not use internal combustion engines because of the exisitance of fuel-air bombs. Both rely on chemical combustion at some point.
A modern, well designed nuclear reactor is a very safe way of producing power. The difficulty is in getting rid of the waste products. However, unlike coal or natural gas power plants, it is very difficult for nuclear waste to escape the plant unnoticed.
Personally, I'd rather have a few hundred metric tonnes of radioacive waste to deal with and be able to eat tuna again. (Mecury buildup in seafood is primarly due to coal burning power plants).
Re:Dunno - newbie pack is formidible
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 1
Then make them pay for it. If everyone is playing no-fold'em hold'em, you must play a different game than against decent players. Most likely, there will be very few raises pre-flop. Take advantage of this and see more flops. Stop looking for high pairs and start playing suited connectors and suited one offs.
Remember the maxim: Fit or fold. If the fold helps you and you have a hand or one card to it, keep playing. If the flop doesn't help you, fold.
When you hit, you will hit big. Straights and flushes are less likely to be beaten than pocket cowboys. Once you have a hand, play straightforward. No check raises, nothing to annoy the fish. Bet strong, play strong. They will not fold, they will just call along.
And I can say that the mileage, while not at the sticker level, is very good. For the last two months, I've been averageing 53 MPG. That is measured both by the onboard computer and hand calculations based on gallons of gas input and miles traveled. With the arrival of 100 degree weather here in Tucson, mileage has dropped to 50 MPG.
In my experience, it is gone. Driving from Phoenix to Tucson or from Tucson to Wilcox, non-stop with two passengers, I had no problem maintaining 80 MPH. The battery got low (1/3 charge), but did not discharge. Mileage was about 40 MPG.
Going back down hill was another story. The batttery topped off within a mile and the car achieved a stunning 82 MPG from Wilcox to Tucson.
Re:Some classic Christian D&D FUD
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
No worries. A D&D geek can't even score *that* way.
I'd guess that as populations increase and energy, especially oil, becomes more expensive (primarily due to the increasing need to generate power in an environmentally friendly and self-sufficient manner), both airplanes and cars will gradually be phased out.
Private cars have an inherent problem in the sheer space required to store them and allow them transit through a city. Pure pedestrian cities probably will not be the way of the future, as we will still need the ability to have large amounts of goods delivered to our houses. But cars won't be the answer. Anyone living in Phoenix, AZ can attest to the fact that car based cities have scaling problems. In Phoenix, it takes an hour to get anywhere, due to traffic, grid navigation and parking hassles. If you could, in theory, remove all the cars from Phoenix, it would probably occupy about half its current foot print. This is unsustainable and will most likely be replaced, though it will probably take 50 years or so.
As for airplanes, they are limited by the speed of sound. It is unlikely we will get continental transonic flights ever. Even the current level of airline activity is causing noise complaints in many cities. Plus, there are practical limitations on how large the airplane can get, and how efficient.
Rail travel, as its speeds approach that of airplanes (think mag-lev), become an attractive alternative to airplanes.
However, all this requires R&D costs, plus outlay for the initial system. This financial roadblock, more than any technical challenge, will delay the arrival of new solutions.
Until then, you can pry the keys to my Prius from my cold, dead fingers. As of today, I'm getting 53 MPG around town.
Also, the Hubble's replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope isn't quite a replacement for Hubble. It won't be launched until 2012, does not see in quite the same region of the spectrum and will be sitting at L2, well out of the range for servicing.
One of the things that has made the Hubble truely unique is the ability to be serviced. Each service mission has improved the telescope's capabilities tremendously. The Webb, for all its grandure, once it is up, it is up. No serviceing mission to bolt on a new camera, no trips to fix the optics. What we get day 1 is what we get day 100 and day 1000.
In the meantime, we will have at least six years without an optical range space telescope. That's six years of supernovae, six years of gamma ray bursts, six years of star formation, six years of light echos and six years of deep field astronomy that simply WILL NOT HAPPEN.
And, of course, the Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy. And both galaxies are hurtling towards the Great Attractor in the Virgo cluster.
So, no matter how you look at it, progress has been made towards some sort of calamity.
I wonder what the magetic fields from my '04 Prius' electric motor is doing? Also, has anyone else noticed their cassette tapes have a 2 week half life?
The problem with Moby Dick is editing. Sure it had a plot - Ahab and his quest for the White Whale. It even had a few subplots involving the relationships between Starbuck and Ahab, Ishmail and Queequig.
The problem was this took all of about six chapters to cover. The remainder and bulk of the book was an in depth description of the art and process of whaling. The middle of the book read like a ninteenth century Tom Clancy techie lovefest for whaling.
At the time, this was an important part of literature. One couldn't just flip on a Discovery Channel documentary on life at sea, you had to read about it. So novels had strong travelog feels to them (compare - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). To a modern eye, all this feels like so much filler material between the plot related chapters.
Overall, I was very disappointed with the book. I expected a story about a tortured sould hell bent on a doomed and futile quest for meaningless revenge. What I got was a technical manual on hunting and buchering whales followed by a novella about doomed and futile quest for meaningless revenge.
Eco's description of the church door near the beginning of _The Name of the Rose_ is one of my all-time favorite pieces of descriptive writing. It simultaneously serves to describe a door, comment on the state of theology at the time of the story, create the atmosphere and character of the monestary and demonstrait the character of the observer.
I agree. I found "The Da Vinci Code" very poorly written. The characters were dull, rather unbelievable and seemed more concerned with moving the plot along than rational, consistent behavior. Your comments on the technology and geography are spot on. The start of most chapters read like Fodor's guide to Foo, by Tom Clancy. The villains were laughably diabolic. Had one had a moustache, he would have twirled it.
The star clearly was the theory about Grail. That kept me turning pages and re-examining old art books to see if what the author claimed was accurate. But in the end, I felt like this was a sort of Cliff Notes rewrite of "Foucault's Pendulum".
By the way, if one has not read "Foucault's Pendulum" or "The Name of the Rose", do so immediately. Yes, they're dense, complex and a bit tricky, but far more rewarding books that "The Da Vinci Code".
Right now, I'm plowing through Patrick O'Brian's Aubry-Maurtain books, made famous recently by the movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World". The books are a bit difficult, as the style is deliberately anachronistic, but the stories are fantastic - well drawn characters, interesting plots and a real sense of 'being there' so difficult to achieve in historical novels.
BM scored a surprise legal victory in that court case when a judge ruled on Friday in favour of IBM in SCO's trade-secret violation lawsuit against the computing giant.
SCO had been pressuring the courts to force IBM to reveal its Unix and Linux source code so SCO could prove that IBM was using stolen code. But the judge ruled that SCO would have to present its own Unix source code first and identify which software code had been stolen.
This was a surprise? Are these people paying attention? Do they have any understanding of the law? Do they do any research outside of the SCO press releases?
How long has this issue been discussed on Slashdot and Groklaw? How long has IBM's motion been out? And this is a surprise?
Frankly, the only surprise here is that anyone trusts these bozos with their money.
d) Chronology. Much of book 4 overlaps with book 5 chronologically. Since Jackson is cutting back and forth between characters in approximate realtime, it would be difficult to have Frodo and Sam get too much beyond their encounter with Farimir without getting into the events of the third movie. In particular, the sunset at the crossroads and certain activities at Minus Morgul would be very difficult to cut together.
e) Pacing the third movie. Frodo and Sam have very little to do in book six before the climax of the quest (chapter 3).
All in all, it makes sense to end the second movie where it did.
I'm glad to see the new Prius made the list. I took delivery of mine last month (first in Tucson!) and am still amazed by the car. I'm averaging 48.5 MPG right now, due to engine break-in and having to run the air conditioner for most of that time due to a recent warm spell.
What's so amazing is that, after the car has started, it's just like any other well-built japanese car. It accelerates smartly, stops easily, and handles well. All that technology and the user interface is more or less that of a standard car (UI designers take note!).
The only down side I've seen is backing up. Since the internal combustion engine does not start in reverse, the car is dead quiet. I've had to honk to get people out of the way of the car. They're so used to hearing a car before seeing it move they don't realize the car is rolling.
Oh, as for speed, it's no BMW, but I did catch a Z28 Camaro with its pants down a couple weeks back. Every time the poor guy shifted, the Prius would pull a few more feet ahead.
And, unlike some of the other technology mentioned, this one is avalilable (more or less) right now.
Suprisingly, a corporation's right to free speech is not on as solid a legal ground as the telemarketers think. It seems that the interpretation of the 14th Amendment as granting corporations the same rights as flesh and blood people is actually only found in the headnotes of a Supreme Court decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, not in the decision itself. The courts have built upon this shaky foundation, expanding corporate rights to include freedom of speech and rights to privacy. Unfortunately, it has never really been decided that corporations are entitled to those rights.
Oops.
Let's hope they sue. It should provide quite a bit of entertainment watching the courts try to uphold the wildly popular telemarketing bill while not accidentally stripping corporations of their rights of free speech. Remember, if corporations do not have freedom of speech, their political contributions would not be protected.
Slashdot Mirror
After reading through this article about the fall of the Win32 API, I think Google may be doing something a bit more clever than simply 'giving back'.
The article discusses how the plethora of APIs Microsoft is shipping and uncertainty of just when the APIs will be on real hardware have caused new development to move to the web (for example, building a new email client). It also mentions there are several drawbacks to web programming, but the author expects them to be overcome soon, further sapping the appeal of the Win32 API.
Perhaps this is exactly Google's strategy. How better to further enhance the desireability of web programming versus desktop programming than by demonstraiting in source how to perform some really compelling features? How many developers will take these techniques and use them at the heart of new killer apps; apps that run on any web browser rather than locked to a specific API?
Google may be giving a small bit away, but the potential gains in mindshare among developers may be much, much greater than the loss of this already paid for source code. Further, if the code in question relies on a particular technology, protocol or standard they are well versed in, they have succeeded in enticing developers to play in their sandbox.
Quite clever, really.
Original TOS Enterprise (NCC-1701 without any suffix)
I believe you meant to say:
The Original Enterprise. No bloody 'A', 'B', 'C' *or* 'D'.
He also seems to have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. The two are similar only in that they both rely on nuclear fission at some point. By the same token, we should not use internal combustion engines because of the exisitance of fuel-air bombs. Both rely on chemical combustion at some point.
A modern, well designed nuclear reactor is a very safe way of producing power. The difficulty is in getting rid of the waste products. However, unlike coal or natural gas power plants, it is very difficult for nuclear waste to escape the plant unnoticed.
Personally, I'd rather have a few hundred metric tonnes of radioacive waste to deal with and be able to eat tuna again. (Mecury buildup in seafood is primarly due to coal burning power plants).
Then make them pay for it. If everyone is playing no-fold'em hold'em, you must play a different game than against decent players. Most likely, there will be very few raises pre-flop. Take advantage of this and see more flops. Stop looking for high pairs and start playing suited connectors and suited one offs.
Remember the maxim: Fit or fold. If the fold helps you and you have a hand or one card to it, keep playing. If the flop doesn't help you, fold.
When you hit, you will hit big. Straights and flushes are less likely to be beaten than pocket cowboys. Once you have a hand, play straightforward. No check raises, nothing to annoy the fish. Bet strong, play strong. They will not fold, they will just call along.
You can, and will, make money.
Last Christmas, I put a 10' Christmas tree inside my Prius. Granted, there was no room for passengers, but its still pretty impressive.
And I can say that the mileage, while not at the sticker level, is very good. For the last two months, I've been averageing 53 MPG. That is measured both by the onboard computer and hand calculations based on gallons of gas input and miles traveled. With the arrival of 100 degree weather here in Tucson, mileage has dropped to 50 MPG.
In my experience, it is gone. Driving from Phoenix to Tucson or from Tucson to Wilcox, non-stop with two passengers, I had no problem maintaining 80 MPH. The battery got low (1/3 charge), but did not discharge. Mileage was about 40 MPG.
Going back down hill was another story. The batttery topped off within a mile and the car achieved a stunning 82 MPG from Wilcox to Tucson.
No worries. A D&D geek can't even score *that* way.
What I'm most curious to see is the ad campaign for the book.
I'd guess that as populations increase and energy, especially oil, becomes more expensive (primarily due to the increasing need to generate power in an environmentally friendly and self-sufficient manner), both airplanes and cars will gradually be phased out.
Private cars have an inherent problem in the sheer space required to store them and allow them transit through a city. Pure pedestrian cities probably will not be the way of the future, as we will still need the ability to have large amounts of goods delivered to our houses. But cars won't be the answer. Anyone living in Phoenix, AZ can attest to the fact that car based cities have scaling problems. In Phoenix, it takes an hour to get anywhere, due to traffic, grid navigation and parking hassles. If you could, in theory, remove all the cars from Phoenix, it would probably occupy about half its current foot print. This is unsustainable and will most likely be replaced, though it will probably take 50 years or so.
As for airplanes, they are limited by the speed of sound. It is unlikely we will get continental transonic flights ever. Even the current level of airline activity is causing noise complaints in many cities. Plus, there are practical limitations on how large the airplane can get, and how efficient.
Rail travel, as its speeds approach that of airplanes (think mag-lev), become an attractive alternative to airplanes.
However, all this requires R&D costs, plus outlay for the initial system. This financial roadblock, more than any technical challenge, will delay the arrival of new solutions.
Until then, you can pry the keys to my Prius from my cold, dead fingers. As of today, I'm getting 53 MPG around town.
ARGUMENT: Businesses need to exchange documents with other businesses.
Does anyone else see the irony in distributing this document as a pdf rather than a word doc?
Also, the Hubble's replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope isn't quite a replacement for Hubble. It won't be launched until 2012, does not see in quite the same region of the spectrum and will be sitting at L2, well out of the range for servicing.
One of the things that has made the Hubble truely unique is the ability to be serviced. Each service mission has improved the telescope's capabilities tremendously. The Webb, for all its grandure, once it is up, it is up. No serviceing mission to bolt on a new camera, no trips to fix the optics. What we get day 1 is what we get day 100 and day 1000.
In the meantime, we will have at least six years without an optical range space telescope. That's six years of supernovae, six years of gamma ray bursts, six years of star formation, six years of light echos and six years of deep field astronomy that simply WILL NOT HAPPEN.
This is rediculous. Fix the damned telescope.
And, of course, the Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy. And both galaxies are hurtling towards the Great Attractor in the Virgo cluster.
So, no matter how you look at it, progress has been made towards some sort of calamity.
I wonder what the magetic fields from my '04 Prius' electric motor is doing? Also, has anyone else noticed their cassette tapes have a 2 week half life?
The problem with Moby Dick is editing. Sure it had a plot - Ahab and his quest for the White Whale. It even had a few subplots involving the relationships between Starbuck and Ahab, Ishmail and Queequig.
The problem was this took all of about six chapters to cover. The remainder and bulk of the book was an in depth description of the art and process of whaling. The middle of the book read like a ninteenth century Tom Clancy techie lovefest for whaling.
At the time, this was an important part of literature. One couldn't just flip on a Discovery Channel documentary on life at sea, you had to read about it. So novels had strong travelog feels to them (compare - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). To a modern eye, all this feels like so much filler material between the plot related chapters.
Overall, I was very disappointed with the book. I expected a story about a tortured sould hell bent on a doomed and futile quest for meaningless revenge. What I got was a technical manual on hunting and buchering whales followed by a novella about doomed and futile quest for meaningless revenge.
Eco's description of the church door near the beginning of _The Name of the Rose_ is one of my all-time favorite pieces of descriptive writing. It simultaneously serves to describe a door, comment on the state of theology at the time of the story, create the atmosphere and character of the monestary and demonstrait the character of the observer.
I agree. I found "The Da Vinci Code" very poorly written. The characters were dull, rather unbelievable and seemed more concerned with moving the plot along than rational, consistent behavior. Your comments on the technology and geography are spot on. The start of most chapters read like Fodor's guide to Foo, by Tom Clancy. The villains were laughably diabolic. Had one had a moustache, he would have twirled it.
The star clearly was the theory about Grail. That kept me turning pages and re-examining old art books to see if what the author claimed was accurate. But in the end, I felt like this was a sort of Cliff Notes rewrite of "Foucault's Pendulum".
By the way, if one has not read "Foucault's Pendulum" or "The Name of the Rose", do so immediately. Yes, they're dense, complex and a bit tricky, but far more rewarding books that "The Da Vinci Code".
Right now, I'm plowing through Patrick O'Brian's Aubry-Maurtain books, made famous recently by the movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World". The books are a bit difficult, as the style is deliberately anachronistic, but the stories are fantastic - well drawn characters, interesting plots and a real sense of 'being there' so difficult to achieve in historical novels.
BM scored a surprise legal victory in that court case when a judge ruled on Friday in favour of IBM in SCO's trade-secret violation lawsuit against the computing giant.
SCO had been pressuring the courts to force IBM to reveal its Unix and Linux source code so SCO could prove that IBM was using stolen code. But the judge ruled that SCO would have to present its own Unix source code first and identify which software code had been stolen.
This was a surprise? Are these people paying attention? Do they have any understanding of the law? Do they do any research outside of the SCO press releases?
How long has this issue been discussed on Slashdot and Groklaw? How long has IBM's motion been out? And this is a surprise?
Frankly, the only surprise here is that anyone trusts these bozos with their money.
d) Chronology. Much of book 4 overlaps with book 5 chronologically. Since Jackson is cutting back and forth between characters in approximate realtime, it would be difficult to have Frodo and Sam get too much beyond their encounter with Farimir without getting into the events of the third movie. In particular, the sunset at the crossroads and certain activities at Minus Morgul would be very difficult to cut together.
e) Pacing the third movie. Frodo and Sam have very little to do in book six before the climax of the quest (chapter 3).
All in all, it makes sense to end the second movie where it did.
I'm glad to see the new Prius made the list. I took delivery of mine last month (first in Tucson!) and am still amazed by the car. I'm averaging 48.5 MPG right now, due to engine break-in and having to run the air conditioner for most of that time due to a recent warm spell.
What's so amazing is that, after the car has started, it's just like any other well-built japanese car. It accelerates smartly, stops easily, and handles well. All that technology and the user interface is more or less that of a standard car (UI designers take note!).
The only down side I've seen is backing up. Since the internal combustion engine does not start in reverse, the car is dead quiet. I've had to honk to get people out of the way of the car. They're so used to hearing a car before seeing it move they don't realize the car is rolling.
Oh, as for speed, it's no BMW, but I did catch a Z28 Camaro with its pants down a couple weeks back. Every time the poor guy shifted, the Prius would pull a few more feet ahead.
And, unlike some of the other technology mentioned, this one is avalilable (more or less) right now.
Look at the acutal numbers and you'll see it was fairly close:
Weaseliest Country
France 12739
USA 10761
Weaseliest Organization
RIAA 7950
White House 6322
Democratic Party 4470
To me, the number look like people voted party lines, but slightly more left of center voters were represented.
Here's a more apt quote:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
- Richard P. Feynman, from his appendix on the investigation of the Challenger's destruction.
Suprisingly, a corporation's right to free speech is not on as solid a legal ground as the telemarketers think. It seems that the interpretation of the 14th Amendment as granting corporations the same rights as flesh and blood people is actually only found in the headnotes of a Supreme Court decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, not in the decision itself. The courts have built upon this shaky foundation, expanding corporate rights to include freedom of speech and rights to privacy. Unfortunately, it has never really been decided that corporations are entitled to those rights.
Oops.
Let's hope they sue. It should provide quite a bit of entertainment watching the courts try to uphold the wildly popular telemarketing bill while not accidentally stripping corporations of their rights of free speech. Remember, if corporations do not have freedom of speech, their political contributions would not be protected.
ToDo List:
1. Short SCO for August.
2. Profit!!
"God, root, what is difference?"
-- Pitr, User Friendly