There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft, and they do a lot of things well. My personal opinion is that a lot of the problems with their software comes from making a deliberate effort to lock competitors out. If MS took half the time, energy, and money it appears to devote to keeping its competitors down, and focused on simplifying their software and supporting open standards, they'd be producing a lot better products.
Never make a technical decision based upon the politics of the situation. Never make a political decision based upon technical issues. The only place these realms meet is in the mind of the unenlightened.
-- Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming
As time passes, manufacturing processes become cheaper. New, cutting-edge technologies drive down the price on older, almost-as-good, technologies. When these meter-cube computers first come out, yeah, they'll cost out the wazoo. But the refinements to the manufactuing processes needed to make them will have improved to the point of putting the 10 cm cube, which puts all the power of the Digital Domain Titanic rendering farm under your desk, well within reach of the average hobbyist.
I know I've read some really nasty post-Rapture fiction that had a tone of "Let's rejoice in the way them sinners are gonna suffer after us Real Christians are called up to Heaven," kind of like some of the more hateful Jack Chick tracts. I've read some excerpts of something recently that gave me the same feeling; if it wasn't Left Behind, I apologize.
This puts me in mind of a comment in some book I never did finish: Hocus Pocus, by Vonnegut, maybe (I'm not 100% sure of either). It was set just out of the turn of the century, and one of the first paragraphs had a line about the world not ending in 2000, which proved (only) that God doesn't believe in numerology. I'm no biblical scholar, and belief is not an issue I'm going to get into here, but I seem to remember that "no one shall know the hour or the day" if Armageddon is for real. Also consider that the best current estimates of Christ's birth place it several years after the B.C. to A.D. changeover. All in all, I have to consider the idea that the end of the world is pencilled in for 2000 (or the belief that all Christians think so, or even that the Bible says so) are a bunch of hooey.
On the other hand, I do hope that the turn of the millenium will put an end to the gawdawful stream of exploitative pop media based on the idea of a religious or technological apocalypse. The "Y2K" movie (which has caused me to remove NBC from my TV channel scan, it was so inane) was just the latest idiocy, and far from the worst; what really disturbs me is the popularity of the "Left Behind" series of "Christian Science Fiction" novels. My biggest worry about the date changeover is that there seem to be a lot of people who want to bring the world to an end.
That being said, there is one "Armageddon" novel that I do like: Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett. I suspect that a lot of the people who enjoyed Dogma would enjoy this one. Very funny, and poses even more interesting questions about religion than Dogma does.
Most of the people I've met that call themselves "hippies" have been nothing more than kids who buy tie-dye shirts and Grateful Dead CD's at the mall with Daddy's gold card, sit around, watch TV, and tell each other how cool they are. Real activists I have some respect for (even if I don't agree with all their views), but if they were ever more than a tiny subset of the "hippie" movement, that time is long past. Why a modern protest movement would want to saddle itself with that kind of lame nostalgia is beyond me.
I swear that the first time I read this article, I scrolled past three or four identical copies of the paragraph with the "Fitts's Law" link, and it looked like a lot of other text was being repeated as well. I go back and look at it now, and I only find one iteration of the paragraph in question. Was I hallucinating, was my browser tripping out, or was the article text actually changed? If the last, an "Update" notice would have been nice.
Problem may have been fixed already
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 2
It looks like you're responding to the first couple of comments about the article repeating itself. I'm pretty sure that at the time the article truly had some repeated text. I swear that the first time I tried to read it, there were several paragraphs (the one with the link about Fitts's Law caught my eye) repeated, verbatim, at least four or five times. The article seems to have been quietly (perhaps too quietly; an "update" notice would have been nice) fixed to remove the truly redundant paragraphs. I still find the article a little longwinded, but Your Mileage May Vary.
I've lived in the StL area for about five years now; my first job here was right across the street from the Galleria. This action by the mall is stupid enough to offend me greatly. Personally, I prefer to do product research online and purchase from local merchants; most of my online purchases have been for things I couldn't find locally. Hell, a week ago, I used the web to find a local source for a product I could have ordered online (Penguin Peppermints at Goths 'R' Us -- oops, Hot Topic). I do not want to support this idiotic policy by shopping at the Galleria. My parents, however, are in town for the holiday, and traditionally join the post-Thanksgiving mall rush. My mother (who is aware of the issue, but doesn't care as much as I do) likes to go to the Galleria, and probably will in the next few days while she's here. I don't want to go at all (and my Mother is quite capable of going on her own); she thinks I should go, do a little window shopping (without spending anything) and register a protest at the information center while I'm there. So, what do folks here think I should do? P.S. If there's one place this mall has lost money on me, it's been by letting stores give away their mail-order catalogs. There is at least one chain there from which I've bought more by mail order than through their retail outlet. Do these jokers want to ban catalogs as well?
So, does this pen support variable pressure sensitivity? Doesn't look like it. For most operations, I prefer a mouse, but I do like my Wacom tablet for graphics applications, especially those that support variable-pressure input. In fact, I'd hate to try using a natural-media paint program without a pressure-sensitive device.
Slightly off-topic, but: How much support is there for variable-pressure devices in the Gimp? All my graphics experience has been in Windows (I know -- boo, hiss -- get over it), but I'm starting to take an interest in the Gimp as well. For that matter, does the Gimp (or any other Linux graphics software) have any type of natural-media functionality?
I did a little work with touchscreens for some kiosk development a few years ago. Touch screens are really cool -- for a few minutes. You don't want to hold your arm straight out in front of you for any significant length of time. I will agree that sticks are better than rocks for drawing. And when I'm drawing, I do prefer to use my graphics tablet. However, most of the things that I do with my pointing device aren't very much like drawing. I pick things up. I put them down somewhere else. I slide things around. For these actions, I'm more comfortable handling a rock than a stick. Rocks are, as someone else said in another thread, better for switching back and forth with a keyboard; I'd rather grab a rock that's right where I left it than pick up my stick again every couple of minutes. I'd rather tap a button with my finger (even after moving the image of my hand around for a second) than with the end of a stick. And I like the little wheel on my rock; I don't know where you could comfortably and safely place such a control on a stick. Also, button placement on a stick seems much more personal, depending more on hand size, on a stick than on a rock. Maybe the stick and touchscreen interfaces would work a little better for a horizontal display/input surface than our current vertical ones as a sole interface. The desktop-style panels on Trek don't look to bad, but just thinking about the wall-mounts make my shoulder ache. I have never been as comfortable writing on a wallboard as a desktop. Besides, even as the last of the hunt-and-peck programmers, I am more comfortable with a keyboard than with a pen for long stretches of text, and I want tactile feedback from my keyboard while I'm at it. I'd love to see a keyboard that integrates well with a horizontal LCARS panel, but can't imagine a layout where one wouldn't get in the way of the other.
Yeesh, this is almost as bad as the time everybody wigged out over the story about using bacterial proteins in thin displays. "Oh no! I'm gonna catch a disease from my laptop!" As far as I can tell, these guys are talking about using nanotech principles in the manufacturing pricess, not putting active nanomachines in the finished process. As much as I like Star Trek for stirring people to take an interest in the sciences, I could cry when they start taking Trek's rubber physics too seriously.
There is a story (of Urban Legend quality) that Robert A. Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard made a bet about who could come up with s wierd religion and get people to follow it. Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, Hubbard wrote Dianetics. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Eve just XOR's the three transmitted messages to get the original message. For proof: Transmission 1 (T1) = A XOR M. Transmission 2 (T2) = A XOR M XOR B Transmission 2 (T3) = A XOR M XOR B XOR A = M XOR B T1 XOR T2 XOR T3 = (A XOR M) XOR (A XOR M XOR B) XOR (M XOR B) = (A XOR A) XOR (B XOR B) XOR (M XOR M) XOR M = M Why, yes, I am bored today.
Re:Can anyone provide a link to the full text?
on
Using Samba
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· Score: 1
The book is out. I flipped through it at the computer shop a couple of days ago. The reviewer may have had an early preview copy long enough to review it, but that doesn't mean the book hasn't reached shelves in the meantime.
Isn't this the same thing that Larry Wall has been doing with Perl for years? As I understand it, you can license Perl under either the GPL or Larry's own Artistic License.
The last time I went to Disney World, there was a neat exhibit at EPCOT (which was only a few years old at the time) in the central pavilion, not big enough for a pavilion of its own. It was sponsored by Sperry. No, not Unisys (the bastard child of the Sperry-Burroughs merger), the mid-80's mainframe Sperry. At the time, a significant amount of Disney World's computing power ran on Sperry hardware, and my father (a Field Engineer who had been with the company since it was Sperry-Univac) got us VIP access. The exhibit was literally a window into one of the computer rooms that controlled Disney's technology.
Walt Disney World is like an iceberg in that the vast majority of it lies underneath the surface, where few people ever get to see. Personnel facilities, changing rooms for the "actors", maintenance tunnels, and the computers that operate the rides, shows, and everything else. I've heard that Disney took great pains to hide the underlying workings of his "Magic Kingdom" in order to avoid breaking the illusion he worked so hard to create.
I don't know how much Sperry hardware still exists in the warrens beneath central Florida (there may still be quite a bit of legacy hardware). I wonder if there is still an exhibit like Sperry's anywhere at WDW, that gives visitors a glimpse of that strange underworld. I also wonder how Disney would have felt about letting outsiders see the technological underpinnings of his magic.
Did it ever occur to you that this might be more of a reason for your "clandestine" meeting than any real monitoring by "The Mouse"? It sounds more like a couple of middle-aged guys who want an excuse to play spy (NTTAWWT).
Please note that the questions were about how to accomplish these goals, not about whether to accomplish these goals. Yes, the phrasing of these questions may imply that Mr. Stiegler considers them worthwhile goals, and may expect others to do so. However, you can discuss the feasability of solutions to these questions as an entirely separate issue from whether these sort of things should be done.
So now we can build a user interface much like the one we all made fun of in Jurassic Park. Yay. With stuff like this, skinnable windowing systems, web-based interfaces and the like, we can finaly produce user interfaces just as silly as the ones Hollywood has been cranking out for years. Makes me want to enter "WHY?" on a keyboard and crash the entire network.
Is this really the same Jon Katz who wrote an article condemning "ShutUp Software" less than six months ago? The same one who promised that he would never use filtering software, and discouraged others from doing so? Katz has really lost it this time.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft, and they do a lot of things well. My personal opinion is that a lot of the problems with their software comes from making a deliberate effort to lock competitors out. If MS took half the time, energy, and money it appears to devote to keeping its competitors down, and focused on simplifying their software and supporting open standards, they'd be producing a lot better products.
As time passes, manufacturing processes become cheaper. New, cutting-edge technologies drive down the price on older, almost-as-good, technologies. When these meter-cube computers first come out, yeah, they'll cost out the wazoo. But the refinements to the manufactuing processes needed to make them will have improved to the point of putting the 10 cm cube, which puts all the power of the Digital Domain Titanic rendering farm under your desk, well within reach of the average hobbyist.
I know I've read some really nasty post-Rapture fiction that had a tone of "Let's rejoice in the way them sinners are gonna suffer after us Real Christians are called up to Heaven," kind of like some of the more hateful Jack Chick tracts. I've read some excerpts of something recently that gave me the same feeling; if it wasn't Left Behind, I apologize.
And I Feel Fine.
This puts me in mind of a comment in some book I never did finish: Hocus Pocus, by Vonnegut, maybe (I'm not 100% sure of either). It was set just out of the turn of the century, and one of the first paragraphs had a line about the world not ending in 2000, which proved (only) that God doesn't believe in numerology. I'm no biblical scholar, and belief is not an issue I'm going to get into here, but I seem to remember that "no one shall know the hour or the day" if Armageddon is for real. Also consider that the best current estimates of Christ's birth place it several years after the B.C. to A.D. changeover. All in all, I have to consider the idea that the end of the world is pencilled in for 2000 (or the belief that all Christians think so, or even that the Bible says so) are a bunch of hooey.
On the other hand, I do hope that the turn of the millenium will put an end to the gawdawful stream of exploitative pop media based on the idea of a religious or technological apocalypse. The "Y2K" movie (which has caused me to remove NBC from my TV channel scan, it was so inane) was just the latest idiocy, and far from the worst; what really disturbs me is the popularity of the "Left Behind" series of "Christian Science Fiction" novels. My biggest worry about the date changeover is that there seem to be a lot of people who want to bring the world to an end.
That being said, there is one "Armageddon" novel that I do like: Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett. I suspect that a lot of the people who enjoyed Dogma would enjoy this one. Very funny, and poses even more interesting questions about religion than Dogma does.
Told you so.
Judging by some of the "Anonymous Coward" posts I've seen lately, it's already happened.
Most of the people I've met that call themselves "hippies" have been nothing more than kids who buy tie-dye shirts and Grateful Dead CD's at the mall with Daddy's gold card, sit around, watch TV, and tell each other how cool they are. Real activists I have some respect for (even if I don't agree with all their views), but if they were ever more than a tiny subset of the "hippie" movement, that time is long past. Why a modern protest movement would want to saddle itself with that kind of lame nostalgia is beyond me.
Well, give the damn thing a bagel so it'll do taxes.
I swear that the first time I read this article, I scrolled past three or four identical copies of the paragraph with the "Fitts's Law" link, and it looked like a lot of other text was being repeated as well. I go back and look at it now, and I only find one iteration of the paragraph in question. Was I hallucinating, was my browser tripping out, or was the article text actually changed? If the last, an "Update" notice would have been nice.
It looks like you're responding to the first couple of comments about the article repeating itself. I'm pretty sure that at the time the article truly had some repeated text. I swear that the first time I tried to read it, there were several paragraphs (the one with the link about Fitts's Law caught my eye) repeated, verbatim, at least four or five times. The article seems to have been quietly (perhaps too quietly; an "update" notice would have been nice) fixed to remove the truly redundant paragraphs. I still find the article a little longwinded, but Your Mileage May Vary.
I've lived in the StL area for about five years now; my first job here was right across the street from the Galleria. This action by the mall is stupid enough to offend me greatly. Personally, I prefer to do product research online and purchase from local merchants; most of my online purchases have been for things I couldn't find locally. Hell, a week ago, I used the web to find a local source for a product I could have ordered online (Penguin Peppermints at Goths 'R' Us -- oops, Hot Topic). I do not want to support this idiotic policy by shopping at the Galleria. My parents, however, are in town for the holiday, and traditionally join the post-Thanksgiving mall rush. My mother (who is aware of the issue, but doesn't care as much as I do) likes to go to the Galleria, and probably will in the next few days while she's here. I don't want to go at all (and my Mother is quite capable of going on her own); she thinks I should go, do a little window shopping (without spending anything) and register a protest at the information center while I'm there. So, what do folks here think I should do?
P.S. If there's one place this mall has lost money on me, it's been by letting stores give away their mail-order catalogs. There is at least one chain there from which I've bought more by mail order than through their retail outlet. Do these jokers want to ban catalogs as well?
So, does this pen support variable pressure sensitivity? Doesn't look like it. For most operations, I prefer a mouse, but I do like my Wacom tablet for graphics applications, especially those that support variable-pressure input. In fact, I'd hate to try using a natural-media paint program without a pressure-sensitive device.
Slightly off-topic, but: How much support is there for variable-pressure devices in the Gimp? All my graphics experience has been in Windows (I know -- boo, hiss -- get over it), but I'm starting to take an interest in the Gimp as well. For that matter, does the Gimp (or any other Linux graphics software) have any type of natural-media functionality?
I did a little work with touchscreens for some kiosk development a few years ago. Touch screens are really cool -- for a few minutes. You don't want to hold your arm straight out in front of you for any significant length of time. I will agree that sticks are better than rocks for drawing. And when I'm drawing, I do prefer to use my graphics tablet. However, most of the things that I do with my pointing device aren't very much like drawing. I pick things up. I put them down somewhere else. I slide things around. For these actions, I'm more comfortable handling a rock than a stick. Rocks are, as someone else said in another thread, better for switching back and forth with a keyboard; I'd rather grab a rock that's right where I left it than pick up my stick again every couple of minutes. I'd rather tap a button with my finger (even after moving the image of my hand around for a second) than with the end of a stick. And I like the little wheel on my rock; I don't know where you could comfortably and safely place such a control on a stick. Also, button placement on a stick seems much more personal, depending more on hand size, on a stick than on a rock. Maybe the stick and touchscreen interfaces would work a little better for a horizontal display/input surface than our current vertical ones as a sole interface. The desktop-style panels on Trek don't look to bad, but just thinking about the wall-mounts make my shoulder ache. I have never been as comfortable writing on a wallboard as a desktop. Besides, even as the last of the hunt-and-peck programmers, I am more comfortable with a keyboard than with a pen for long stretches of text, and I want tactile feedback from my keyboard while I'm at it. I'd love to see a keyboard that integrates well with a horizontal LCARS panel, but can't imagine a layout where one wouldn't get in the way of the other.
That might be a good idea, even for those of us who don't find a lot of this stuff particularly funny, to help give it a bit of historical context.
Yeesh, this is almost as bad as the time everybody wigged out over the story about using bacterial proteins in thin displays. "Oh no! I'm gonna catch a disease from my laptop!" As far as I can tell, these guys are talking about using nanotech principles in the manufacturing pricess, not putting active nanomachines in the finished process.
As much as I like Star Trek for stirring people to take an interest in the sciences, I could cry when they start taking Trek's rubber physics too seriously.
There is a story (of Urban Legend quality) that Robert A. Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard made a bet about who could come up with s wierd religion and get people to follow it. Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, Hubbard wrote Dianetics. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Eve just XOR's the three transmitted messages to get the original message. For proof:
Transmission 1 (T1) = A XOR M.
Transmission 2 (T2) = A XOR M XOR B
Transmission 2 (T3) = A XOR M XOR B XOR A = M XOR B
T1 XOR T2 XOR T3 = (A XOR M) XOR (A XOR M XOR B) XOR (M XOR B) = (A XOR A) XOR (B XOR B) XOR (M XOR M) XOR M = M
Why, yes, I am bored today.
The book is out. I flipped through it at the computer shop a couple of days ago. The reviewer may have had an early preview copy long enough to review it, but that doesn't mean the book hasn't reached shelves in the meantime.
Isn't this the same thing that Larry Wall has been doing with Perl for years? As I understand it, you can license Perl under either the GPL or Larry's own Artistic License.
...and I do mean "underlying".
The last time I went to Disney World, there was a neat exhibit at EPCOT (which was only a few years old at the time) in the central pavilion, not big enough for a pavilion of its own. It was sponsored by Sperry. No, not Unisys (the bastard child of the Sperry-Burroughs merger), the mid-80's mainframe Sperry. At the time, a significant amount of Disney World's computing power ran on Sperry hardware, and my father (a Field Engineer who had been with the company since it was Sperry-Univac) got us VIP access. The exhibit was literally a window into one of the computer rooms that controlled Disney's technology.
Walt Disney World is like an iceberg in that the vast majority of it lies underneath the surface, where few people ever get to see. Personnel facilities, changing rooms for the "actors", maintenance tunnels, and the computers that operate the rides, shows, and everything else. I've heard that Disney took great pains to hide the underlying workings of his "Magic Kingdom" in order to avoid breaking the illusion he worked so hard to create.
I don't know how much Sperry hardware still exists in the warrens beneath central Florida (there may still be quite a bit of legacy hardware). I wonder if there is still an exhibit like Sperry's anywhere at WDW, that gives visitors a glimpse of that strange underworld. I also wonder how Disney would have felt about letting outsiders see the technological underpinnings of his magic.
Did it ever occur to you that this might be more of a reason for your "clandestine" meeting than any real monitoring by "The Mouse"? It sounds more like a couple of middle-aged guys who want an excuse to play spy (NTTAWWT).
Piltdown Man
Please note that the questions were about how to accomplish these goals, not about whether to accomplish these goals. Yes, the phrasing of these questions may imply that Mr. Stiegler considers them worthwhile goals, and may expect others to do so. However, you can discuss the feasability of solutions to these questions as an entirely separate issue from whether these sort of things should be done.
So now we can build a user interface much like the one we all made fun of in Jurassic Park. Yay. With stuff like this, skinnable windowing systems, web-based interfaces and the like, we can finaly produce user interfaces just as silly as the ones Hollywood has been cranking out for years. Makes me want to enter "WHY?" on a keyboard and crash the entire network.
Is this really the same Jon Katz who wrote an article condemning "ShutUp Software" less than six months ago? The same one who promised that he would never use filtering software, and discouraged others from doing so? Katz has really lost it this time.