It's astonishing how many strange projects Roddenberry was involved in. I remember seeing a pilot for a half-hour lawyer drama he made, starring DeForest Kelley. Then there was this weird movie, populated by some major stars, some recycled Star Trek actors, and an unlikely number of miniskirted teenage girls. Then he came to UC Riverside to make a movie/tv pilot called Genesis II. (I was there at the time. Ever since, I can't look at a certain kind of campus architecture without wondering if it's specifically designed for making bad SF movies.) Then..., oh never mind.
I avoided Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict for years because I'd been Roddenberried out. When I finally got round to it, it was much better than I expected. So I was unsuprised to discover that Saint Gene's sole contribution to this project was a short memo describing in general terms a series that only vaguely resembles the show that actually got made.
Perhaps its childish for me to slam GR as much as I do. It's not so much that he was an overrated, shallow opportunist. But the way he is given all the credit for the original Star Trek blots out the story of all the minor players who did such a good job of rethinking the basic assumptions of movie/tv SF. I wish I could remember a name or two. When I have time, I'll have to re-read the original Star Trek book, which has a lot about how Star Fleet invented the paperless office, and how you make surgical tools out of salt shakers.
And this was why I never had any love for later iterations of Star Trek. All of which have lacked these little technical details, or had them done by people who were scientific and technical illiterates. So now we have hundreds of new Star Trek stories (movies, tv episodes, and those insufferable paperback tie-ins), all of them done by people out to recreate the original Star Trek, almost always without the least understanding of why the original Star Trek worked.
Star Trek has always been about merchandising. Leonard Nimoy's famous falling out with Saint Gene started when he wouldn't wear some Junior Star Fleet item they were merchandising. Even all that fancy philosophising is just marketing -- Roddenbery wanted to be studio mogul, not a Great Thinker. Alas, he had no talent for either.
Was Yahoo not one of the founding members of the IMUnified group, whose sole purpose was to unify with goliaths such as MSFT [yahoo.com] to fight the tyranny of AOL? Aforementioned tyranny being comprised of AOL blocking [com.com] outise clients from accessing their users.
You mean a major corporation has acted hypocritically? Rick, I shocked, shocked!
Yeah, yeah, there a bunch of assholes. But it's naive to think that accusing them of "filing false claims" settles the legal argument. Nuisance lawsuits are a very profitable business. The defendents always dismiss the claims as bogus, and indeed many of them are. But proving that a claim is filed in bad faith is never easy. (If it were, the claim wouldn't have been filed!) If SCO is ever punished for its misdeeds, it will only be after somebody has spent a lot of money on a civil or criminal prosecution. If you're planning on starting such a prosecution (perhaps a RICO suit, like the one filed against DirecTV), please post a Paypal link so I can contribute to your legal fund. Or if you belong to an organization that is trying to reform IP law and/or the civil tort system, please identify it so I can consider joining. But if you just want to sit and whine about how evil SCO is, then you need to get a life.
Sure, but not all plant species date back to the Jurassic age. Or animal species (thank god for that!). If somebody had used the term living fossil, perhaps it would be clearer.
... they stopped, and the current folks decided to pick legal fights with IBM and the open source community.
It's always seemed obvious to me that current SCO management sees these legal fights as an actual core business. They're certainly not going to make much money selling SCO Unix, or any of the software products Caldera was working on before they bought SCO. I won't say "I can't blame them", since we're all getting royally screwed by this game. But this kind of situation is more or less inevitable, when a company's only remaining asset is as a platform for launching profitable litigation.
Why is this so lousy? If you live in a state with a sales tax, you pay the tax every time you visit a brick-and-mortar store. There's no logical reason you should be able to avoid this tax just by buying from out-of-state.
You can argue that sales taxes are wrong. (They're unfair to low-income people; they discourage commerce; they encourage local government to zone for strip malls and superstores instead of badly-needed housing.) You might even convince me. But if you do, you have to come up with a fair plan for rolling back sales taxes, not one that affects some merchants and not others.
Which is a crucial detail. This isn't just about state and local governments needing more cash. This is also about local retailers (who have to collect the sales tax) being forced to compete with out-of-state retailers (who don't). Local merchants are important both economically and socially. Which doesn't mean they should have an unfair advantage -- but they shouldn't have an unfair disadvantage either.
Incidentally, buying from an out-of-state retailer doesn't mean your purchase isn't subject to local sales tax. It's just that there's no practical way for the state government to collect it. Some states used to try to force out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes. But the Supreme Court ruled that this violated the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Here's my favorite example of how absurd this is. Amazon.com does roughly 20% of their business in California. Most of their California orders come from a huge regional warehouse. It might seem logical to put this warehouse in California. But if they did that, they'd have a "California presence" and thus be required to collect California sales taxes. Instead, the warehouse is just over the Nevada border! Which might not continue to be practical, if fuel prices keep going up...
olutions I've come up with are (1) to get a pocket MP3 player that can also record, like the MPIO DMG MP3 Player (expensive for my task, though, at $200);
OK, two quibbles with that. First, if you're intent on going digital, you're going to have to accept that it's more expensive than analog technology. A lot more. If your budget is tight, stick with old-fashioned technology.
Second, just because an MP3 device happens to have a record function and a cheap built-in mic, doesn't mean it's a decent voice recorder. How good is the encoding firmware? What's the sampling rate? Is the mic a decent one that won't break down, or just some piece of crap they threw in to make the product more marketable?
As for Linux compatibility: Sony makes a couple of voice recorders that record to a memory stick. If you have a memory stick reader supported by Linux (there are several), you can mount the stick as a VFAT disk, and access the individual voice files directly. But that still leaves you with the problem of decoding Sony's proprietary LPEC format.
I'm not sure you can avoid the proprietary format problem, not if you want decent recording quality. Now, getting proprietary-format voice files into a standard format is a pain even under Windows. The problem is that vendors seem to like to embed the conversion software in the device driver -- which never seems to have been fully tested on all likely system configurations.
But in Sony devices, the conversion is embedded in a user-level playback program, which doesn't have all the low-level dependencies of a device driver. Possibly that program will run under Wine.
You seem to think that "open source" is just shorthand for "free source code." Giving people access to a product's source code (all its source code) is only part what you have to do to make the product open source. You might want to read the OSI's official definition.
Either I'm missing something or you are. When Love says that Unix is "full of other companies' copyrights" he means code that says, "copyright xyz, used by permission." Caldera/SCO has the right to use this code, but not the right to give away the right to use it. To do that, they'd have to get permission of every copyright holder. Even if they could get everybody's permission, doing it would cost a fortune in legal fees. Another reason to regret the death of fixed-term copyrights.
This is different from Linux, where SCO is claiming that copyrighted code was used without permission. So the paper trail consists not of a bunch of copyright notices, but of alleged similarity between the two code bases.
Incidentally, lot of that third party code was contributed by Microsoft, during their brief flirtation with Unix. Somehow I doubt if they'd cooperate in any attempt to make Unix open-source!
Yeah, it's great fun to sneer at all those idiots in their SUVs. I just hope I never collide with one. Or am driving nearby when they decide to show off their acrobatic capabilities.
OK, this yuppie-SUV-bashing thread is pretty long by now, and we havent' gotten flamed by any SUV lovers yet. Chicken?
Another sad thought: the next governor of California may be the idiot who started the whole SUV thing, when he decided that a HUMV made a good city car!
OK, on x86 processors, it's better to hand-optimize your loops. If I wanted to start a CPU flame war, I might suggest that this says something about this series of processors...
In any case, the truisms about "good programmers" that JS and people like him love to talk are kind of on the trivial side. OK, you save a few cycles by saying !x[0] (though isn't x[0] != '\0' clearer? if properly optimized, it will be just as efficient). And you can maybe catch more errors if you put constants first in your == expressions. But I can't take seriously anybody who would focus on this kind of trivia as identifying a "top 0.1%" programmer!
I find your post, and the many others like it, extremely refreshing. When this story came up, I thought it'd be deluged with naive "Kewl!" comments. Very nice to be wrong. And to see that people have some sense of where the 90s went wrong.
I used to know more about machine code, but haven't worked with it for years. So don't flame me if this is lame.
Don't most modern processors have a hard-wired operation that returns the first byte past an index that matches a value? Even if not, this strikes me as such a simple optimization (an inline function with a constant argument!) that any optimizing compiler that couldn't spot it would have to be considered crap.
(Such a compiler would also issue a warning for another of Joel's pet mistakes: an assignment statement inside a boolean expression. Although I've never understood why programmers who are that nitpicky can't simply spot an "=" where a "==" should be.)
Then again, I suppose people who are still programming in C would have a prejudice for manual optimization. Trust in abstraction is for C++ programers.
Then again again: A long time ago, I was working with some people who were porting Unix (system 5 with some BSD features) to the 68010. One of them mentioned being suprised by the code generated by their fancy optimizing C compiler. But when he examined the code very closely, he said to himself, "Yes, that's what I meant to do, only better!"
On the same theme: when I was trying to become a programmer (I know the tech, but I don't have the right kind of brain for software development) I was indoctrinated to not worry about saving cycles unless I was coding a tight loop. Otherwise you risk creating brittle, bug-prone, hard-to-maintain code without any real benefit.
But I have to tell this story. My mother, who's being using office machine since FDR's day, learned to use pre-electronic calculators, with purely mechanical logic. For obvious reasons, these were all RPN. (If you can call simple strings of very basic arithmetic functions "notation".) When she got her first electronic calculator, I had to explain to her what algebraic notation was!
I'd love to get another HP 48, but I'm not even sure if HP even makes calculators like that any longer...
They no longer make calculators at all. I'm suprised there are still any for sale on the web site. When I mentioned this business change to a calculator geek I know (he was just out of physics grad school), he got this pained look on his face, as if his favorite rock star had been killed or arrested for pedophilia, or both.
This is why I couldn't take any interest in that HP-Compaq soap opera. The dissidents said they wanted to preserve "the HP way". But all that went away when they outgrew the "strolling manager" culture, spun off their original core business, and stopped doing the electronic wizardry that besotted several generations of geeks. Now they're just another computer manufacturer, so who cares?
If you can live with that buzzing sound, you should just get some rechargables and change them every day.
Oh wait, Google is your friend. A couple of stores still have them in stock. Maybe you should get more than one -- when they're gone, they're gone.
The Programmer Pedestal
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, it's my own damn company and I can do something about it, so I did.
Oh gawd. I used to work for this guy. Well, no, not this guy, but one like him. And not for the guy himself, but for the company he founded. The guy himself got canned because he spent too much investor money on his dream office.
Let me tell you what's going to happen. All that fancy cable-routing, pseudo-ergonomic office furniture is not gonna wear well, 'cause it's designed by idiots. It looks so cool in the catalog, but after a year or two the parts freeze in place (maybe you're supposed to oil them every month or something), and they stop being ergnomic and routing.
Windows. Yeah, I love a window office. Natural light cheers me up. But most geeks seem to have glare issues, which they deal with by minimizing background light. So our fancy everybody-gets-a-private-window building had 3/4 of its blinds closed at any given time.
And what do we do with the other people that help a software firm make money? Yeah, developers are key, but so are QA people, integrators, tech writers, sales people, marketeers, and of course the customer service people. But we can't afford to give all those bozos fancy private offices, so we'll just put them in cubes. Yeah, that's really great for promoting friendship and communication between the developer-gods and lesser mortals.
Actually Spolsky avoided one mistake our own deity made -- he didn't put the developer-gods on a different floor, behind a separate set of keycard doors. (Of course if his company had more than two products...) Then again, sitting in one's cube, watching the "key" employes hang out behind their translucent walls, watching the plasma TV and doing other geek stuff, might be even more detrimental to morale.
Here's the nasty thing about us geeks: give us a little money or power, and we turn into the stupidist, most arrogant assholes!
Basically, mail is only considered spam if it contains false information in the headers.
Including SUBJECT:, which must not contain any misleading information. So you should be able to filter out a lot by searching for common spam subjects. Given the non-creativity of spammers, those shouldn't be hard to identify. Not 100% effective, but not useless either.
Silicon Valley pansies like serious SUVs because all that metal gives them the illusion that they're protected from "all those bad drivers" (a class nobody will admit to actually belonging to, no matter how much they speed or jump lanes). Of course, the tendency of any truck-like vehicle to tip at high speeds kind of wipes out any safety advantage -- but it's the feeling of safety that counts. You can't get that illusion from a fake SUV like the Tracker or Rio.
Slashdot Mirror
I avoided Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict for years because I'd been Roddenberried out. When I finally got round to it, it was much better than I expected. So I was unsuprised to discover that Saint Gene's sole contribution to this project was a short memo describing in general terms a series that only vaguely resembles the show that actually got made.
Perhaps its childish for me to slam GR as much as I do. It's not so much that he was an overrated, shallow opportunist. But the way he is given all the credit for the original Star Trek blots out the story of all the minor players who did such a good job of rethinking the basic assumptions of movie/tv SF. I wish I could remember a name or two. When I have time, I'll have to re-read the original Star Trek book, which has a lot about how Star Fleet invented the paperless office, and how you make surgical tools out of salt shakers.
And this was why I never had any love for later iterations of Star Trek. All of which have lacked these little technical details, or had them done by people who were scientific and technical illiterates. So now we have hundreds of new Star Trek stories (movies, tv episodes, and those insufferable paperback tie-ins), all of them done by people out to recreate the original Star Trek, almost always without the least understanding of why the original Star Trek worked.
If there's anything Hollywood fears more than piracy, it's the possibility that their audience might develop the ability to delay gratification.
Star Trek has always been about merchandising. Leonard Nimoy's famous falling out with Saint Gene started when he wouldn't wear some Junior Star Fleet item they were merchandising. Even all that fancy philosophising is just marketing -- Roddenbery wanted to be studio mogul, not a Great Thinker. Alas, he had no talent for either.
Yeah, yeah, there a bunch of assholes. But it's naive to think that accusing them of "filing false claims" settles the legal argument. Nuisance lawsuits are a very profitable business. The defendents always dismiss the claims as bogus, and indeed many of them are. But proving that a claim is filed in bad faith is never easy. (If it were, the claim wouldn't have been filed!) If SCO is ever punished for its misdeeds, it will only be after somebody has spent a lot of money on a civil or criminal prosecution. If you're planning on starting such a prosecution (perhaps a RICO suit, like the one filed against DirecTV), please post a Paypal link so I can contribute to your legal fund. Or if you belong to an organization that is trying to reform IP law and/or the civil tort system, please identify it so I can consider joining. But if you just want to sit and whine about how evil SCO is, then you need to get a life.
Sure, but not all plant species date back to the Jurassic age. Or animal species (thank god for that!). If somebody had used the term living fossil, perhaps it would be clearer.
You can argue that sales taxes are wrong. (They're unfair to low-income people; they discourage commerce; they encourage local government to zone for strip malls and superstores instead of badly-needed housing.) You might even convince me. But if you do, you have to come up with a fair plan for rolling back sales taxes, not one that affects some merchants and not others.
Which is a crucial detail. This isn't just about state and local governments needing more cash. This is also about local retailers (who have to collect the sales tax) being forced to compete with out-of-state retailers (who don't). Local merchants are important both economically and socially. Which doesn't mean they should have an unfair advantage -- but they shouldn't have an unfair disadvantage either.
Incidentally, buying from an out-of-state retailer doesn't mean your purchase isn't subject to local sales tax. It's just that there's no practical way for the state government to collect it. Some states used to try to force out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes. But the Supreme Court ruled that this violated the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Here's my favorite example of how absurd this is. Amazon.com does roughly 20% of their business in California. Most of their California orders come from a huge regional warehouse. It might seem logical to put this warehouse in California. But if they did that, they'd have a "California presence" and thus be required to collect California sales taxes. Instead, the warehouse is just over the Nevada border! Which might not continue to be practical, if fuel prices keep going up...
Second, just because an MP3 device happens to have a record function and a cheap built-in mic, doesn't mean it's a decent voice recorder. How good is the encoding firmware? What's the sampling rate? Is the mic a decent one that won't break down, or just some piece of crap they threw in to make the product more marketable?
As for Linux compatibility: Sony makes a couple of voice recorders that record to a memory stick. If you have a memory stick reader supported by Linux (there are several), you can mount the stick as a VFAT disk, and access the individual voice files directly. But that still leaves you with the problem of decoding Sony's proprietary LPEC format.
I'm not sure you can avoid the proprietary format problem, not if you want decent recording quality. Now, getting proprietary-format voice files into a standard format is a pain even under Windows. The problem is that vendors seem to like to embed the conversion software in the device driver -- which never seems to have been fully tested on all likely system configurations.
But in Sony devices, the conversion is embedded in a user-level playback program, which doesn't have all the low-level dependencies of a device driver. Possibly that program will run under Wine.
You seem to think that "open source" is just shorthand for "free source code." Giving people access to a product's source code (all its source code) is only part what you have to do to make the product open source. You might want to read the OSI's official definition.
This is different from Linux, where SCO is claiming that copyrighted code was used without permission. So the paper trail consists not of a bunch of copyright notices, but of alleged similarity between the two code bases.
Incidentally, lot of that third party code was contributed by Microsoft, during their brief flirtation with Unix. Somehow I doubt if they'd cooperate in any attempt to make Unix open-source!
OK, this yuppie-SUV-bashing thread is pretty long by now, and we havent' gotten flamed by any SUV lovers yet. Chicken?
Another sad thought: the next governor of California may be the idiot who started the whole SUV thing, when he decided that a HUMV made a good city car!
In any case, the truisms about "good programmers" that JS and people like him love to talk are kind of on the trivial side. OK, you save a few cycles by saying !x[0] (though isn't x[0] != '\0' clearer? if properly optimized, it will be just as efficient). And you can maybe catch more errors if you put constants first in your == expressions. But I can't take seriously anybody who would focus on this kind of trivia as identifying a "top 0.1%" programmer!
I find your post, and the many others like it, extremely refreshing. When this story came up, I thought it'd be deluged with naive "Kewl!" comments. Very nice to be wrong. And to see that people have some sense of where the 90s went wrong.
GA! Jobs wanted one bathroom for everybody, in order to promote casual interactions. Yeah, everybody loves talking shop while they're defecating!
Don't most modern processors have a hard-wired operation that returns the first byte past an index that matches a value? Even if not, this strikes me as such a simple optimization (an inline function with a constant argument!) that any optimizing compiler that couldn't spot it would have to be considered crap.
(Such a compiler would also issue a warning for another of Joel's pet mistakes: an assignment statement inside a boolean expression. Although I've never understood why programmers who are that nitpicky can't simply spot an "=" where a "==" should be.)
Then again, I suppose people who are still programming in C would have a prejudice for manual optimization. Trust in abstraction is for C++ programers.
Then again again: A long time ago, I was working with some people who were porting Unix (system 5 with some BSD features) to the 68010. One of them mentioned being suprised by the code generated by their fancy optimizing C compiler. But when he examined the code very closely, he said to himself, "Yes, that's what I meant to do, only better!"
On the same theme: when I was trying to become a programmer (I know the tech, but I don't have the right kind of brain for software development) I was indoctrinated to not worry about saving cycles unless I was coding a tight loop. Otherwise you risk creating brittle, bug-prone, hard-to-maintain code without any real benefit.
But hey, what do I know?
This only works if the UPS guy isn't cixelsyd.
That people are still falling for the Steven King troll is pathetic -- but not as pathetic as the moderator who think the response is flamebait!
But I have to tell this story. My mother, who's being using office machine since FDR's day, learned to use pre-electronic calculators, with purely mechanical logic. For obvious reasons, these were all RPN. (If you can call simple strings of very basic arithmetic functions "notation".) When she got her first electronic calculator, I had to explain to her what algebraic notation was!
This is why I couldn't take any interest in that HP-Compaq soap opera. The dissidents said they wanted to preserve "the HP way". But all that went away when they outgrew the "strolling manager" culture, spun off their original core business, and stopped doing the electronic wizardry that besotted several generations of geeks. Now they're just another computer manufacturer, so who cares?
If you can live with that buzzing sound, you should just get some rechargables and change them every day.
Oh wait, Google is your friend. A couple of stores still have them in stock. Maybe you should get more than one -- when they're gone, they're gone.
Let me tell you what's going to happen. All that fancy cable-routing, pseudo-ergonomic office furniture is not gonna wear well, 'cause it's designed by idiots. It looks so cool in the catalog, but after a year or two the parts freeze in place (maybe you're supposed to oil them every month or something), and they stop being ergnomic and routing.
Windows. Yeah, I love a window office. Natural light cheers me up. But most geeks seem to have glare issues, which they deal with by minimizing background light. So our fancy everybody-gets-a-private-window building had 3/4 of its blinds closed at any given time.
And what do we do with the other people that help a software firm make money? Yeah, developers are key, but so are QA people, integrators, tech writers, sales people, marketeers, and of course the customer service people. But we can't afford to give all those bozos fancy private offices, so we'll just put them in cubes. Yeah, that's really great for promoting friendship and communication between the developer-gods and lesser mortals.
Actually Spolsky avoided one mistake our own deity made -- he didn't put the developer-gods on a different floor, behind a separate set of keycard doors. (Of course if his company had more than two products...) Then again, sitting in one's cube, watching the "key" employes hang out behind their translucent walls, watching the plasma TV and doing other geek stuff, might be even more detrimental to morale.
Here's the nasty thing about us geeks: give us a little money or power, and we turn into the stupidist, most arrogant assholes!
Troll? There should be a metamod that says, "Get a sense of humor, dude!"
Silicon Valley pansies like serious SUVs because all that metal gives them the illusion that they're protected from "all those bad drivers" (a class nobody will admit to actually belonging to, no matter how much they speed or jump lanes). Of course, the tendency of any truck-like vehicle to tip at high speeds kind of wipes out any safety advantage -- but it's the feeling of safety that counts. You can't get that illusion from a fake SUV like the Tracker or Rio.
No, there were several. I mean, this was a major software firm, it's practically mandatory. I guess nobody wanted to scratch their paint.