What I don't understand is why scouring the web for Copyrighted material is considered being violated.
Well, I certainly don't consider it wrong for copyright holders to search the web for theft of their IP. Problem is, Cyveillance does it in an extremely disruptive manner. It's probably not reasonable to expect the cyveillancebot to honor robots.txt, as Chris Gulker thinks it should. But if it doesn't act nicer than it currently does, then web masters will just lock it out -- and it will defeat its own purpose.
Shouldn't there be a self-destruct device? I'd also suggest hiring a psychic to screen visitors. And all the guards should submit to body cavity search when they report to work!
You have me confused with someone who cares about the future of the auto industry. I'm a Radical Pedestrian! If I didn't have moral problems with terrorism, I'd be blowing up freeways.
I was just trotting up some old history about Henry Ford and the evolution of mass production. For all I care, the auto companies can all merge into one big conglomerate -- provided that conglomerate starts charging $100K base price!
Do you think for one instant this spirit survives? [rant] [rant] [rant]
Oh, get a life. I say one semi-positive thing about Henry Ford, and I'm an apologist for the entire auto industry. A lot you know. I happen to be an anti-car extremist who thinks those things have destroyed America as a community, and who'd like to see private vehicles banned from urban areas. And I do happen to know that Ford was an arrogant, ignorant, fascistic jerk who treated his workers badly and ran his company like a kind of Mafia.
None of which changes the fact that Ford did accomplish a thing or two. So fuck off, asshole.
Well, game consoles are hardly comparable. But yeah, you have a good point. All the parts that go into a Tivo are probably a lot cheaper than they used to be.
Except you'll never hear my praise, because you posted as an AC, you silly person!
The 1930s? You're referring to the birth of IBM? But that company just built on technology that was developed forty years earlier!
I always take it for granted that people who want you to give them money are going to be a little to0 creative in their arguments!
Strictly a bundled concept
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's always been my understanding that Tivo can't make money on the bare hardware, and has to sell subscriptions. Unless I'm wrong about that, they'll never sell this subscription-free Tivo, except as part of a bundle.
I find it a little weird that the first such bundle is a DVD/Tivo box. Presumably it won't include the ability to make disk copies of DVDs! Without this feature, what the point of buying these two devices together?
The subscription is both the greatest feature and the worst shortcoming of the Tivo. The ability to easily specify what you want to watch, and even have the Tivo find similar shows for you, is beautiful beyond words. On the other hand, there's something to be said for the simplicity of the VCR.
The problem is that so many shows start early and/or end late. Often by just a few seconds, but enough to be irritating. Tivo lets you tweak this, but only at the risk of causing overlap. And when it detects overlap, the Tivo just refuses to record one show or the other -- even if both shows are on the same channel! It ought to be possible for the Tivo to act more like a VCR in this respect, but so far it hasn't happened.
Clearly, the book is not banned, since it is being published directly by the author. However, from his site, the book was not picked up by a publisher for fear of lawsuits. That's somewhat alarming, but it's not equivalent to outlawing a book.
Well, in the strictest sense, there are no book bans in the U.S. The First Amendment doesn't allow them. (Well, mostly. There have always been exceptions. But these have gotten few and farther over the years.) But if you can make it impossible for people to buy something, you've banned that item, no matter how you go about it.
You refer to tort law. That's certainly a factor. But the DMCA provides for criminal prosecution of violators. If nobody is willing to publish, or even self-publish, books on hacking this or that because they don't want to go to jail -- well then, that kind of book is banned, whatever you call the process.
It amazes me that a book such as this could be banned, yet car service manuals can be sold in most bookstores.
If GM or Ford had an automotive equivalent of the DMCA, they certainly could ban service manuals. The fact that they don't have oen and don't want one should be a lesson for media and software companies.
American auto manufacturing started out as a small, boutique industry. Henry Ford changed all that by assuming (correctly, as it happened) that ordinary people would buy cars if he made it practical for them to own them. Part of this was inventing more efficient manufacturing techniques, so he could sell cars more cheaply. But he also specifically encouraged the aftermarket car parts industry, even going so far as to choosing his own manufacturing techniques so that they'd be easy to copy. Thus somebody with a broken Model T didn't have to send away to Michigan for parts. This relationship extends to this day.
We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks?
Actually, all Moore did was predict that the complexity of integrated circuits would increase exponentially, without a corresponding increase in cost. (Here's the original paper.) This is usually cited as "Moore's Law" and cast something like, "The number of transistors on an average chip will double every 18 months." Which is more than Moore actually said, but a logical inference.
You hear people refer to the assumption that electronics will keep getting cheaper and and cheaper as "Moore's Law". Nit-pickers hate this, insisting that "Moore's Law" only refers to the number of transistors on a chip. But even casting Moore's predictions as a "Law" goes beyond what Moore actually said. So it makes just as much sense (or just as little) to speak of the whole economic trend as "Moore's Law". After all, the fact that transitor logic keeps getting cheaper and cheaper isn't obvious to most people. The resulting collapse in the cost of computing and electronics is.
Possibly everybody already knows this, but the web is a godsend for finding books your forgot to read when they were in print. I usually check alibris.com first, but there are plenty of good online sources.
When I go looking for an out-of-print Science Fiction title, I often end up with a volume discarded from a public library. Sometimes I remember seeing the very volume in my own public library, and passing it by. Gives one pause.
More ontopic: of all the SF writers I've read, the one who most deserves broader recognition is Richard McKenna. Not a towering literary talent, but still a imaginative and insightful storyteller. He's obscure mainly because he went and died just a few years after he began writing full time. His best-known work, The Sand Pebbles, is not Science Fiction, but nevertheless is the kind of story that will appeal to SF readers, full of technical detail, culture clash, and social speculation.
Your google skills are sorely lacking, the "Hacking Google" book would be a good investment for you. Eliminating the quotes and word "best" in your search string would help.
I don't think you need to read a book to understand that too many keywords eliminate all useful results. Also, the Yahoo engine is not quite the same as the Google engine, even though it's licensed from Google. Which is why it didn't catch the fact that "superscipts" is not the correct spelling!
I got a lot of interesting results Googling for "ocr superscripts symbols".
Here's my (non-copyrighted) strategy for doing a Google search. Google is fiendishly fast (which I find mind-boggling, given the size of the database!), so there's no reason not to play around. Start with an absolute minimum of keywords. If your results are too broad, add one or two keywords and search again. Iterate until you have useful results or you reach a dead end. If you do reach a dead end, the browser's "back" button is a convenient way to back out to a broader search.
I find the Google Toolbar indispensible. It has a lot of features, but only three that I ever use:
A handy search text/list box. Not only does this it save steps while entering a search string, it automatically syncs itself with any Google search you enter, even if you do it just by back-buttoning out to a previous Google page.
A "search this site only" button.
Automatically generated buttons that search the current page for your search terms. These are real time-and-aggravation savers on a lengthy search.
I also use the uplevel button, but that's really a patch for a missing Internet Explorer feature.
If you're a die-hard Netscape/Mozilla person, there's a Sidebar with most of these features. Notably missing are the automatic term buttons -- main reason I still use Internet Explorer.
But you don't need an Apple to play with a 6502. I have a friend who teaches 6502 assembly programming at a community college. He started out using Apple IIs, but eventually the college couldn't spare the space for them. So now he uses PCs running Apple II emulators.
Which is also how I play Apple II games, even though I have a IIe stuck away somewhere.
Wozniak designed this system not for software people, but for hardware hackers like himself. Hardly suprising that this aspect of the platform is still of interest, especially when you can buy a II for pocket change.
Well, OK, the AWT thing was a cheap shot. Still, you have to admit that Sun cut a lot of corners in early versions of the JDK, and that this still haunts Java developent Even serious Java programmers have many issues with the libraries.
But that's all beside the point. Which is that Java is too well-entrenched to be displaced by.NET. The same Java programmers who complain about its shortcomings are very reluctant to switch over. Not the mention management, which will not easily abandon its huge investment in Java technology.
Actually, it turns out you're completely right. Did some browsing and found a bunch of JavaSoft documents where they attack delegates as "syntactic sugar". But as you yourself point out, this is just a red herring. There's more to delegates than syntax! So this isn't an argument about syntactic sugar. Sun's spin artists are just trying to cast it as one.
Commerce is cool. It creates lots of toys and pays me lots of money for doing stuff I enjoy.
Getting rich is cool too. I'd do it if I could, and I don't mind those who manage to do it. Getting rich is a motivation for engaging in commerce.
But abusing your power is wrong whether your power comes from money, politics, or whatever. And Microsoft does abuse its power.
I never write "M$" because it's too pat an insult. But pat or not, accusing Microsoft of greed has some basis in reality, and isn't an assault on the capitalist system.
Anyway, this is the wrong time to be oversensitive about capitalism. People who care about the capitalist system should worry less about people saying rude things about it, and more about people who abuse it. Ken Lay is probably not a Marxist, but he's done more to damage free enterprise than all the commies in Bezerkly combined.
The original message didn't characterize anything as syntactic sugar. It only said that C#-style delegates never got into Java because JavaSoft thought they were "syntactic sugar". And it sounds like this version of history comes from Anders Hejlsberg, the inventor of delegates. Given the long standing feud betwee Hejlsberg and JavaSoft both when he was at Borland and later at Microsoft, I doubt if the argument was as simple as that.
I think you're really distorting the SS debate and the role of Cobol and C in that debate.
The big mistake with Cobol is not that its syntax is too complex. Most early languages had that problem. But in Cobol's case, they made the silly assumption that a language with a superficial resemblance to ordinary English is somehow easier to learn. Thus in Cobol you can write:
DIVIDE TOTAL BY NUMBER GIVING PRO-RATA REMAINDER RESIDUE.
The problem is that Cobol is not a subset of English, it just looks like one. Cobol uses ordinary human constructs, but doesn't save the human from having to learn any abstractions.
Detractors of C are fond of calling it "high level assembly language". I think that mostly comes from the use in C of pointers, which seem much too similar to machine language memory pointers. Now it's true that C pointers are not as sophisticated or foolproof as object references (Java and most other OOP languages), but they're still more than memory values. Consider,
BIGDUDEDATASTRUCTURE d[DSIZE]; for (i:= 0; i < DSIZE; i++) chompchompchomp(d[i]);
If you translate that to assembly, you'll see a difference that's a lot more than syntactic sugar.
The basic issue between C++ and Java is not SS, but general complexity. So Java leaves out default parameters, operator overloads, and multiple inheritance, some other stuff.
The meaningful comparisons I've seen come out in.NET's favor. The.NET VM is rather more robust. The libraries are more carefully thought out. (Can anyone consider AWT without nausea?) And C# is much more expressive than Java, without falling into the feature pit of C++.
Still, I think.NET is going to be a disaster. Microsoft is trying to make it do too many things at once. To them, it's not just a new enterprise software platform. It's a fix for all the shortcomings of the NT API. It introduces all the new programming features they never tire of dreaming up. And it does all this while retaining support for legacy languages, such as C++. AND.NET is supposed to maintain an easy migration path for Java programmers -- one that will make it impossible for them not to switch.
It just won't fly. They're trying to do too much, and they're making the same mistakes they made with NT and Win16.
And even if they went at it right,.NET could never hope to make more than modest inroads into the Java marketplace. Too much investment in an established technology. (Microsoft ought to know better, given the way they've benefited from that same principle.) The best they can really hope for is to find a niche where.NET excels, such as Web Services. This would parallel the career of other technologies (Cobol, PL/1, SQL, and of course Java itself) that were supposed to take over the world, and ended up just finding their own place in it.
Arguing that a broader education is necessary to be a good programmer in your case boiled down to supporting people learning part-time programming while getting a liberal arts degree.
That's nothing like what I said. Like all bigots, you don't see people, you see stereotypes.
"Cavelier"? You really are a bigot. I started this thread by arguing for education. Just a broader one than you seem to feel is necessary. Your selective reading of my arguments tells me that you find it convenient to ignore facts that don't fit your preconceptions. So it's hardly suprising that you think that programming can only be learned in a C.S. program -- you just edit out any evidence to the contrary.
Since there's no law against discriminating against people with the wrong degrees, you're probably safe there. But if I were you, I'd be careful with prejudices in general. If you have any issues with co-workers or job applicants who happen to have dark skins or funny accents, I suggest you step very carefully.
They also made unsuccessful PC clones at one point. Tramiel's Atari tried lots of things that ultimately failed. They didn't have the resources to pull them off.
It's not just resources. Selling brand-name clones requires huge economies of scale and strong marketting savvy. Every proprietary system maker has tried to switch over at one point or another. (The latest was SGI, just a couple years ago.) The only successes I can think of are HP and of course IBM itself.
Also, in the Warner days, Atari was rumored to be developing a system and games that could be controlled by "thought" power. I kid you not. You attached sensors to your forehead, and positive thoughts caused the system to do one thing, and negative thoughts, something else.
Not the most suprising development. In those days electronic biofeedback was all the rage. People were using home-brew EEG machines to control their alpha rhythms, supposedly achieving a chemical-free high in the process. Actually kind of dangerous -- glitches in your hardware could induce seisures. And of course, every geek knows about the electronically-induced hallucination/user interface in Gibson's Neuromancer.
I once saw an in-store demo of a really intriguing biofeedback device. Never got the full technical details, but it seemed to be a simple skin conductivity device, like on a polygraph, only less complicated -- just a small metal pad. In the demo I saw, you put a finger tip on the pad, and controlled a skiing game by thinking "right" or "left". It actually worked, but felt weird in some strange, incomprehensible way.
So the iPod remembers exactly where you were when you pushed "pause", even after a power cycle? Not just the track, the position on the track? Even for hour-long tracks? If so, you just sold me an iPod!
Too bad I'm broke and unemployed. Oh well, something to look forward to.
Either you're severely bigoted, or all those companies were really bad at finding good people. Given your simplistic view of the educational process, I vote "bigot".
I've worked with first rate programmers from all kinds of backgrounds. I've also worked with total idiots who somehow managed to get CS degrees. Education is important, but in the end, it's the person that matters. If you can't see the person for the paper trail, you're gonna be lucky to hire a competant janitor, never mind a programmer.
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Shouldn't there be a self-destruct device? I'd also suggest hiring a psychic to screen visitors. And all the guards should submit to body cavity search when they report to work!
I was just trotting up some old history about Henry Ford and the evolution of mass production. For all I care, the auto companies can all merge into one big conglomerate -- provided that conglomerate starts charging $100K base price!
None of which changes the fact that Ford did accomplish a thing or two. So fuck off, asshole.
Except you'll never hear my praise, because you posted as an AC, you silly person!
I always take it for granted that people who want you to give them money are going to be a little to0 creative in their arguments!
I find it a little weird that the first such bundle is a DVD/Tivo box. Presumably it won't include the ability to make disk copies of DVDs! Without this feature, what the point of buying these two devices together?
The subscription is both the greatest feature and the worst shortcoming of the Tivo. The ability to easily specify what you want to watch, and even have the Tivo find similar shows for you, is beautiful beyond words. On the other hand, there's something to be said for the simplicity of the VCR.
The problem is that so many shows start early and/or end late. Often by just a few seconds, but enough to be irritating. Tivo lets you tweak this, but only at the risk of causing overlap. And when it detects overlap, the Tivo just refuses to record one show or the other -- even if both shows are on the same channel! It ought to be possible for the Tivo to act more like a VCR in this respect, but so far it hasn't happened.
You refer to tort law. That's certainly a factor. But the DMCA provides for criminal prosecution of violators. If nobody is willing to publish, or even self-publish, books on hacking this or that because they don't want to go to jail -- well then, that kind of book is banned, whatever you call the process.
American auto manufacturing started out as a small, boutique industry. Henry Ford changed all that by assuming (correctly, as it happened) that ordinary people would buy cars if he made it practical for them to own them. Part of this was inventing more efficient manufacturing techniques, so he could sell cars more cheaply. But he also specifically encouraged the aftermarket car parts industry, even going so far as to choosing his own manufacturing techniques so that they'd be easy to copy. Thus somebody with a broken Model T didn't have to send away to Michigan for parts. This relationship extends to this day.
You hear people refer to the assumption that electronics will keep getting cheaper and and cheaper as "Moore's Law". Nit-pickers hate this, insisting that "Moore's Law" only refers to the number of transistors on a chip. But even casting Moore's predictions as a "Law" goes beyond what Moore actually said. So it makes just as much sense (or just as little) to speak of the whole economic trend as "Moore's Law". After all, the fact that transitor logic keeps getting cheaper and cheaper isn't obvious to most people. The resulting collapse in the cost of computing and electronics is.
When I go looking for an out-of-print Science Fiction title, I often end up with a volume discarded from a public library. Sometimes I remember seeing the very volume in my own public library, and passing it by. Gives one pause.
More ontopic: of all the SF writers I've read, the one who most deserves broader recognition is Richard McKenna. Not a towering literary talent, but still a imaginative and insightful storyteller. He's obscure mainly because he went and died just a few years after he began writing full time. His best-known work, The Sand Pebbles, is not Science Fiction, but nevertheless is the kind of story that will appeal to SF readers, full of technical detail, culture clash, and social speculation.
I got a lot of interesting results Googling for "ocr superscripts symbols".
Here's my (non-copyrighted) strategy for doing a Google search. Google is fiendishly fast (which I find mind-boggling, given the size of the database!), so there's no reason not to play around. Start with an absolute minimum of keywords. If your results are too broad, add one or two keywords and search again. Iterate until you have useful results or you reach a dead end. If you do reach a dead end, the browser's "back" button is a convenient way to back out to a broader search.
I find the Google Toolbar indispensible. It has a lot of features, but only three that I ever use:
- A handy search text/list box. Not only does this it save steps while entering a search string, it automatically syncs itself with any Google search you enter, even if you do it just by back-buttoning out to a previous Google page.
- A "search this site only" button.
- Automatically generated buttons that search the current page for your search terms. These are real time-and-aggravation savers on a lengthy search.
I also use the uplevel button, but that's really a patch for a missing Internet Explorer feature.If you're a die-hard Netscape/Mozilla person, there's a Sidebar with most of these features. Notably missing are the automatic term buttons -- main reason I still use Internet Explorer.
Which is also how I play Apple II games, even though I have a IIe stuck away somewhere.
Wozniak designed this system not for software people, but for hardware hackers like himself. Hardly suprising that this aspect of the platform is still of interest, especially when you can buy a II for pocket change.
But that's all beside the point. Which is that Java is too well-entrenched to be displaced by .NET. The same Java programmers who complain about its shortcomings are very reluctant to switch over. Not the mention management, which will not easily abandon its huge investment in Java technology.
Actually, it turns out you're completely right. Did some browsing and found a bunch of JavaSoft documents where they attack delegates as "syntactic sugar". But as you yourself point out, this is just a red herring. There's more to delegates than syntax! So this isn't an argument about syntactic sugar. Sun's spin artists are just trying to cast it as one.
Getting rich is cool too. I'd do it if I could, and I don't mind those who manage to do it. Getting rich is a motivation for engaging in commerce.
But abusing your power is wrong whether your power comes from money, politics, or whatever. And Microsoft does abuse its power.
I never write "M$" because it's too pat an insult. But pat or not, accusing Microsoft of greed has some basis in reality, and isn't an assault on the capitalist system.
Anyway, this is the wrong time to be oversensitive about capitalism. People who care about the capitalist system should worry less about people saying rude things about it, and more about people who abuse it. Ken Lay is probably not a Marxist, but he's done more to damage free enterprise than all the commies in Bezerkly combined.
On top of which, I have to wonder how much of the AirPort is developed in-house at Apple. Isn't the AirPort based on technology licensed from Cisco?
The original message didn't characterize anything as syntactic sugar. It only said that C#-style delegates never got into Java because JavaSoft thought they were "syntactic sugar". And it sounds like this version of history comes from Anders Hejlsberg, the inventor of delegates. Given the long standing feud betwee Hejlsberg and JavaSoft both when he was at Borland and later at Microsoft, I doubt if the argument was as simple as that.
The big mistake with Cobol is not that its syntax is too complex. Most early languages had that problem. But in Cobol's case, they made the silly assumption that a language with a superficial resemblance to ordinary English is somehow easier to learn. Thus in Cobol you can write:
The problem is that Cobol is not a subset of English, it just looks like one. Cobol uses ordinary human constructs, but doesn't save the human from having to learn any abstractions.Detractors of C are fond of calling it "high level assembly language". I think that mostly comes from the use in C of pointers, which seem much too similar to machine language memory pointers. Now it's true that C pointers are not as sophisticated or foolproof as object references (Java and most other OOP languages), but they're still more than memory values. Consider,
If you translate that to assembly, you'll see a difference that's a lot more than syntactic sugar.The basic issue between C++ and Java is not SS, but general complexity. So Java leaves out default parameters, operator overloads, and multiple inheritance, some other stuff.
Still, I think .NET is going to be a disaster. Microsoft is trying to make it do too many things at once. To them, it's not just a new enterprise software platform. It's a fix for all the shortcomings of the NT API. It introduces all the new programming features they never tire of dreaming up. And it does all this while retaining support for legacy languages, such as C++. AND .NET is supposed to maintain an easy migration path for Java programmers -- one that will make it impossible for them not to switch.
It just won't fly. They're trying to do too much, and they're making the same mistakes they made with NT and Win16. And even if they went at it right, .NET could never hope to make more than modest inroads into the Java marketplace. Too much investment in an established technology. (Microsoft ought to know better, given the way they've benefited from that same principle.) The best they can really hope for is to find a niche where .NET excels, such as Web Services. This would parallel the career of other technologies (Cobol, PL/1, SQL, and of course Java itself) that were supposed to take over the world, and ended up just finding their own place in it.
Since there's no law against discriminating against people with the wrong degrees, you're probably safe there. But if I were you, I'd be careful with prejudices in general. If you have any issues with co-workers or job applicants who happen to have dark skins or funny accents, I suggest you step very carefully.
Incidentally, shrinks still do this stuff, but they prefer safer, non-gadget techniques, such as training patients to recognize and control their biological signs.
I once saw an in-store demo of a really intriguing biofeedback device. Never got the full technical details, but it seemed to be a simple skin conductivity device, like on a polygraph, only less complicated -- just a small metal pad. In the demo I saw, you put a finger tip on the pad, and controlled a skiing game by thinking "right" or "left". It actually worked, but felt weird in some strange, incomprehensible way.
Too bad I'm broke and unemployed. Oh well, something to look forward to.
I've worked with first rate programmers from all kinds of backgrounds. I've also worked with total idiots who somehow managed to get CS degrees. Education is important, but in the end, it's the person that matters. If you can't see the person for the paper trail, you're gonna be lucky to hire a competant janitor, never mind a programmer.