Re:available bandwidth?
on
Hamvention
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I shouldn't have implied that I was a Ham myself. I do find the hobby interesting, but there's a court order keeping me away from soldering irons....
Now that you explain it properly, letting lower-class Hams get licensed without making them learn CW makes sense. Give them a chance to catch the bug before you throw legacy protocols at them!
Re:available bandwidth?
on
Hamvention
·
· Score: 1
A pity that Hams are no longer required to be skilled with CW Operations. Not a lot of bandwidth for that!
Other posters have commented on the overlap between Computer nerdism and Ham nerdism. One important difference: Ham networks can remain operative long after all other communication technology is offline. Rather handy during major civil disasters. Which is why the feds allow so much radio spectrum to a "hobby".
Finding the oldest mainframe app still in use would be very difficult. I first learned to program on an IBM 360 mainframe, back in the 70s. (This platform still lives, both as backward-compatible IBM systems and as various emulators.) I seem to recall that the most widely used interpreter for the 360 was a program that emulated the IBM mainframe that dominated the business market before the 360 was introduced. Presumably there was a nested interpreter for the platform before that. It would not suprise me if some machine language program hand-coded by Grace Hand or Alan Turing is still running somewhere, in nested-nested-nested compatibility mode.
First, I needer a fuller explanation of the origin of the word "spam". I buy your explanation that it comes from the MUD community. But I still don't understand the connection between dataflooding and spiced meat. Are all MUD people Python fans?
Second, how does a Leading Computer Pioneer find time to hang out on Slashdot?
I've just figured out where I remember Brad Templeton from. Many years ago he started a business called ClariNet, which sold syndicated content over Usenet. On his site, Templeton boasts of ClariNet as the "first dot com company." I'm not sure this is something to be proud of. But ClariNet was the first company to use the Internet (or rather proto-Internet networks) to help connect obscure writers and cartoonists with a broader audience.
One of these was Scott Adams. Nowadays, every single paper in the U.S. seems to carry Dilbert. But when ClariNet picked up the strip, I don't think it appeared in more than a half-dozen papers. Of course, the geeks who read ClariNet were a prime audience for this kind of humor. Which resulted in a lot of buzz for the strip. Which resulted in Scott Adams hooking up with United Media. Who promptly pulled Dilbert from ClariNet!
That's incorrect. A cable system isn't a kind of publisher. They operate under a franchise from a public entity -- usually a city or county. And there are various federal rules governing what they carry. They must, for example, carry all local broadcast stations.
Though I doubt if any of this results in rules that require them to sell ads to their competitors. And presumably dish companies can still get access by buying time from the channels themselves. God knows I see plenty of dish commercials.
Still, the word "monopoly" is quite appropriate. Except that cable companies are actual monopolies, not potential ones. Few cable customers have a choice of providers, despite attempts to create a competitive market. If you consider how much Americans rely on their TV sets for information, you should be considered about anybody in a position to control that information.
What you need to do is reinvent GPS from scratch. You put transmitters at various cave entrances, and use the signal descrepancies to figure out where you are in relation to them -- which is exactly what satellite GPS does. Except I guess the lightspeed delay with be too small to measure. Sonar?
Hmm, I guess re-inventing GPS technology would be very expensive. Never mind!
Templeton makes a good case for the word "spam" starting out as MUD jargon. But he never really explains (at least to my satisfaction) why MUDers used the word that way. Were they all Python fans?
Amusing to discover that the earliest documented Spam message originated at cup.portal.com. That site was responsible for my first bout of Usenet addiction -- mercifully cut short when I acquired an obsessive stalker who took exception to my criticism of David Brin. The site was the only enterprise of a company called Portal Communications, which seemed to consist of one strange guy with a single Sun Workstation in an office in Cupertino. People who tried to visit him in meatspace were met with a locked door and shouted demands that they "go away".
For years I assumed that Portal simply went out of business. But it turns out they morphed into a software company that sold the billing software they originally developed for their "online service" business. They were in the news a few months ago, because so many of their execs have managed to cash out big, even though they've never turned a profit.
Come on guys. I only had to stare at this story for a couple of seconds before I figured out that you're talking about the Linux kernel. But I shouldn't have to! Stop being so lazy!
Actually,the thing that annoys me most is that people associate Lisp with 80s AI,
What annoys me is that people refer to Lisp as a "fifth generation language", even though it's the second oldest high-level language (after Fortran). But that's not as annoying as calling Visual Basic a "fourth generation language" because of its database features.
All of which is a secondary result of another case of 80s hype. Declarative languages, such as SQL, were sold as "fourth generation" because they were supposed to make procedural languages ("third generation languages") obsolete. Which didn't happen of course. Declarative programming ended up supplementing older languages, not replacing them.
After a while the original meaning was forgotten. So now people call languages "4GLs" etc. to emphasize some vague claim that they're more advanced. Or because of a vague notion that 4GL has something to do with database programming. These are terms we should just stop using.
And while I'm on the subject, what the hell does the original poster mean "both sides"? As far as I am aware, the US and UK never sent anyone to a forced labour camp for daring to criticize the state.
The poster wasn't making a comprehensive comparison between Soviet Totalitarianism and Western Democracy. He was just talking about the "cold war mentality", the paranoia that comes from a long struggle with a poorly understood enemy.
It's perfectly true that the Soviet state mistreated and murdered its own citizens on a level that can't compare with any abuses in major democracies. But that doesn't change the fact that abuses did occur in the west. It's not enough to say, "Well, the Russkies were much worse." Every criminal can point to somebody else who's much worse. Doesn't excuse a thing.
It used to amuse me that the U.S. was #3 in the percentage of its populace that was incarcerated. The amusing thing was that #1 was the USSR, and #2 was South Africa, both countries engaged in brutal but ultimately futile suppression of dissent. Now both those countries are under new management, and The Land of the Free is uncontested for #1 on the list. Not so funny now.
...the best programmers seem to be Poli Sci majors. I guess my age is showing. I date from an ancient time when having anything to do with computers separated you from the rest of humanity. Once upon a time, the English Major was the stereotype of the technically clueless. Any suggestions as to an alternative?
You've reminded me of a conversation I had a very long time ago. I was going to a school that had no Computer Science or EE department. Programming was taught in various science departments (mostly Math and Statistics). I told somebody that taking Logic had helped a lot with my programming.
This would seem to be more of a reason to avoid modular doco. Creativity is not, shall we say, plentiful? at the typical workplace. And often, it isn't wanted when it is available.
Gawd, I wish I could say you were wrong. But you're not. Still, you have to ask why creativity is in such short supply. If you go out of your way to make a job (like document authoring and maintenance) pure drudge work, only dull stupid people will want to do it.
If you want to hack a computer together, visit your local nameless commdtity computer shop, go download some slackware or debian iso's, and get busy. Better yet, why not run Plan 9 on it?
Because OS X is as interesting as any of these, at least to me. And because some interesting developers just never get around to porting their Mac software to other platforms.
And especially people do this kind of stuff just to see if they can. I'm not that type -- but most Slashdotters are!
I assert that even well written documentation mostly gathers dust.
Absolutely right.
But also beside the point. Even users who ignore documentation refer to it when they can't figure stuff out for themselves. Or at least some of them do. And when a user gets desperate enough to actually RTFM, they really need well-written docs.
A couple more points I just thought of. First, documentation does more than help users use. It also tells potential users what the product can do. When I consider buying software (or any technical product, even a stereo), the first thing I want to see is the manual, so I know if the product can do things I need it to do. Bad manual, no sale.
Finally, suppose we stipulate that you're right, and that documentation is a mandatory but essentially useless part of the product. Then the documentation has to be maintained. Which is expensive. And all the more expensive if you try to ignore documentation production issues. Like single-sourcing.
Just because it doesn't have a pretty GUI doesn't mean it lacks value.
What does the user interface have to do with anything? We're not discussing newsreader software (some of which actually have pretty nice GUIs). We're talking about Usenet as an electronic neighborhood. It started out as a venue for sharing information and opinion. Now there's just so much random noise, you can't find the interesting stuff. Assuming there actually is any -- Spaf's sense of futility is pretty much the norm among serious posters.
Maybe if you like porn (though even the porn is drowned out by the spam!) or trading insults or arguing at length about nothing or writing long diatribes nobody reads -- then yeah, I guess Usenet has value. But those of us with a life have long since moved on.
Besides which, the basic concept is out of date. In 1982, connecting to a non-local computer was expensive and/or complicated for most people. So it made since to organize an ad-hoc modem network for online conversations. Now, most people can connect to a server on the other side of the planet more easily than they can connect to a local BBS. The place for online conversations is web servers. Not because web pages are prettier than Usenet posts. But because web applications can help you manage all that noise. That's why Slashdot has so many users. It's certainly not because of good user interface design!
Literate programming has its place. Encouraging programmers to describe and implement in one pass is definitely a good thing. It makes for products that are better thought out and easy to maintain.
But embedding all your documentation in your source code is a very bad idea. That's the concept behind JavaDoc, and I have the bruises to show how badly this works in practice. Writers and programmers tripping over each other. Programmers that don't know how to write markup or even prose. Writers that have to branch the source code tree because the main tree is frozen. There's more, but I'm beginning the have post-traumatic flashes!
The solution I'd love to see is a tool that merges the embeded-comment docs with the full user docs. This would not only eliminate the problems of JavaDoc, it would flag inconstencies that happen when programmers don't keep the writers up to date.
DocBook is cool. I'm writing a book using it. But it's not the format for all technical content. If you're writing your basic mass-market computer book, or the web equivalent, DocBook probably has everything you need. (Though the markup for the official DocBook reference is forced to use generic tables to list element parameters -- there's no specialized element!) But I'd hate to use DocBook for a big API document base, especially one where single-sourcing is an issue. IBM's DITA framework is immature, but looks promising.
Yeah, XML is da bomb. I wouldn't use any other format to maintain a non-trival document base. Especially one where single-sourcing is important. But "no big deal"? Guess again.
There are no affordable off-the-shelf content managment for most technical documentation apps. Yes, there's a lot of content management software out there, but it's either specialized in some other area (mainly web applications, 'cause there's a lot of money to be made there) or it's a general-purpose CMS platform that takes a lot of work to adapt to a particular purpose.
XML-specific databases are very intriquing. Many have impressive feature sets. But it's still a work in progress. There's nothing out there you can buy and use without spending a lot of time adapting it to your specific project. Even without license fees (usually pretty high) the up-front costs are huge. Try getting your boss to approve spending a lot of bucks on a product with no track record!
There are lots of XML editing products out there, but few of them are serious products. Some dweeb combines a Java editor component with an XML parsing engine, and behold! A collaborative documentation tool! Not that easy.
A few solid products are beginning to appear, but they all have serious limitations. I'm really taken with XMetal, but it only runs on Windows. (Even if you're not an open source zealot, you have to be cautious about a product that won't run on the platform your engineers use. Anyway, XMetal now belongs to Corel, which is busy imploding.) XMLSpy is powerful and cross-platform, but its editign features are clunky. FrameMaker 7 is OK (assuming you don't totally hate FrameMaker's primitive GUI), but creating or modifying an XML application for it is a nightmare. And there's really nothing else.
Retraining writers to think in XML terms is a bitch.
XML production tools are still pretty immature. XSL-FO will probably stabilize soon, but I wouldn't rely on it yet.
Eventually, XML will take over. But it's gonna be a long, painful transition.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you explain it properly, letting lower-class Hams get licensed without making them learn CW makes sense. Give them a chance to catch the bug before you throw legacy protocols at them!
Other posters have commented on the overlap between Computer nerdism and Ham nerdism. One important difference: Ham networks can remain operative long after all other communication technology is offline. Rather handy during major civil disasters. Which is why the feds allow so much radio spectrum to a "hobby".
Finding the oldest mainframe app still in use would be very difficult. I first learned to program on an IBM 360 mainframe, back in the 70s. (This platform still lives, both as backward-compatible IBM systems and as various emulators.) I seem to recall that the most widely used interpreter for the 360 was a program that emulated the IBM mainframe that dominated the business market before the 360 was introduced. Presumably there was a nested interpreter for the platform before that. It would not suprise me if some machine language program hand-coded by Grace Hand or Alan Turing is still running somewhere, in nested-nested-nested compatibility mode.
First, I needer a fuller explanation of the origin of the word "spam". I buy your explanation that it comes from the MUD community. But I still don't understand the connection between dataflooding and spiced meat. Are all MUD people Python fans?
Second, how does a Leading Computer Pioneer find time to hang out on Slashdot?
One of these was Scott Adams. Nowadays, every single paper in the U.S. seems to carry Dilbert. But when ClariNet picked up the strip, I don't think it appeared in more than a half-dozen papers. Of course, the geeks who read ClariNet were a prime audience for this kind of humor. Which resulted in a lot of buzz for the strip. Which resulted in Scott Adams hooking up with United Media. Who promptly pulled Dilbert from ClariNet!
You still haven't answered my question. What does verbosity or a full screen have to do with salty canned meat?
Though I doubt if any of this results in rules that require them to sell ads to their competitors. And presumably dish companies can still get access by buying time from the channels themselves. God knows I see plenty of dish commercials.
Still, the word "monopoly" is quite appropriate. Except that cable companies are actual monopolies, not potential ones. Few cable customers have a choice of providers, despite attempts to create a competitive market. If you consider how much Americans rely on their TV sets for information, you should be considered about anybody in a position to control that information.
Hmm, I guess re-inventing GPS technology would be very expensive. Never mind!
Amusing to discover that the earliest documented Spam message originated at cup.portal.com. That site was responsible for my first bout of Usenet addiction -- mercifully cut short when I acquired an obsessive stalker who took exception to my criticism of David Brin. The site was the only enterprise of a company called Portal Communications, which seemed to consist of one strange guy with a single Sun Workstation in an office in Cupertino. People who tried to visit him in meatspace were met with a locked door and shouted demands that they "go away".
For years I assumed that Portal simply went out of business. But it turns out they morphed into a software company that sold the billing software they originally developed for their "online service" business. They were in the news a few months ago, because so many of their execs have managed to cash out big, even though they've never turned a profit.
Oh wait, if you're you're kewl, you know that "Linux" really means just the Linux kernel. Sorry for being so (--kewl).
Come on guys. I only had to stare at this story for a couple of seconds before I figured out that you're talking about the Linux kernel. But I shouldn't have to! Stop being so lazy!
All of which is a secondary result of another case of 80s hype. Declarative languages, such as SQL, were sold as "fourth generation" because they were supposed to make procedural languages ("third generation languages") obsolete. Which didn't happen of course. Declarative programming ended up supplementing older languages, not replacing them.
After a while the original meaning was forgotten. So now people call languages "4GLs" etc. to emphasize some vague claim that they're more advanced. Or because of a vague notion that 4GL has something to do with database programming. These are terms we should just stop using.
It's perfectly true that the Soviet state mistreated and murdered its own citizens on a level that can't compare with any abuses in major democracies. But that doesn't change the fact that abuses did occur in the west. It's not enough to say, "Well, the Russkies were much worse." Every criminal can point to somebody else who's much worse. Doesn't excuse a thing.
It used to amuse me that the U.S. was #3 in the percentage of its populace that was incarcerated. The amusing thing was that #1 was the USSR, and #2 was South Africa, both countries engaged in brutal but ultimately futile suppression of dissent. Now both those countries are under new management, and The Land of the Free is uncontested for #1 on the list. Not so funny now.
Perhaps. But I tend to buy stuff with obscure features, like timed off-air recording. Am I a geek or what?
You've reminded me of a conversation I had a very long time ago. I was going to a school that had no Computer Science or EE department. Programming was taught in various science departments (mostly Math and Statistics). I told somebody that taking Logic had helped a lot with my programming.
"What department is that in? Math?"
"No, Philosophy."
"We have a Philosophy department?"
And especially people do this kind of stuff just to see if they can. I'm not that type -- but most Slashdotters are!
A couple more points I just thought of. First, documentation does more than help users use. It also tells potential users what the product can do. When I consider buying software (or any technical product, even a stereo), the first thing I want to see is the manual, so I know if the product can do things I need it to do. Bad manual, no sale.
Finally, suppose we stipulate that you're right, and that documentation is a mandatory but essentially useless part of the product. Then the documentation has to be maintained. Which is expensive. And all the more expensive if you try to ignore documentation production issues. Like single-sourcing.
Maybe if you like porn (though even the porn is drowned out by the spam!) or trading insults or arguing at length about nothing or writing long diatribes nobody reads -- then yeah, I guess Usenet has value. But those of us with a life have long since moved on.
Besides which, the basic concept is out of date. In 1982, connecting to a non-local computer was expensive and/or complicated for most people. So it made since to organize an ad-hoc modem network for online conversations. Now, most people can connect to a server on the other side of the planet more easily than they can connect to a local BBS. The place for online conversations is web servers. Not because web pages are prettier than Usenet posts. But because web applications can help you manage all that noise. That's why Slashdot has so many users. It's certainly not because of good user interface design!
Always nice to hear from you!
But embedding all your documentation in your source code is a very bad idea. That's the concept behind JavaDoc, and I have the bruises to show how badly this works in practice. Writers and programmers tripping over each other. Programmers that don't know how to write markup or even prose. Writers that have to branch the source code tree because the main tree is frozen. There's more, but I'm beginning the have post-traumatic flashes!
The solution I'd love to see is a tool that merges the embeded-comment docs with the full user docs. This would not only eliminate the problems of JavaDoc, it would flag inconstencies that happen when programmers don't keep the writers up to date.
DocBook is cool. I'm writing a book using it. But it's not the format for all technical content. If you're writing your basic mass-market computer book, or the web equivalent, DocBook probably has everything you need. (Though the markup for the official DocBook reference is forced to use generic tables to list element parameters -- there's no specialized element!) But I'd hate to use DocBook for a big API document base, especially one where single-sourcing is an issue. IBM's DITA framework is immature, but looks promising.
- There are no affordable off-the-shelf content managment for most technical documentation apps. Yes, there's a lot of content management software out there, but it's either specialized in some other area (mainly web applications, 'cause there's a lot of money to be made there) or it's a general-purpose CMS platform that takes a lot of work to adapt to a particular purpose.
- There are lots of XML editing products out there, but few of them are serious products. Some dweeb combines a Java editor component with an XML parsing engine, and behold! A collaborative documentation tool! Not that easy.
- Retraining writers to think in XML terms is a bitch.
- XML production tools are still pretty immature. XSL-FO will probably stabilize soon, but I wouldn't rely on it yet.
Eventually, XML will take over. But it's gonna be a long, painful transition.XML-specific databases are very intriquing. Many have impressive feature sets. But it's still a work in progress. There's nothing out there you can buy and use without spending a lot of time adapting it to your specific project. Even without license fees (usually pretty high) the up-front costs are huge. Try getting your boss to approve spending a lot of bucks on a product with no track record!
A few solid products are beginning to appear, but they all have serious limitations. I'm really taken with XMetal, but it only runs on Windows. (Even if you're not an open source zealot, you have to be cautious about a product that won't run on the platform your engineers use. Anyway, XMetal now belongs to Corel, which is busy imploding.) XMLSpy is powerful and cross-platform, but its editign features are clunky. FrameMaker 7 is OK (assuming you don't totally hate FrameMaker's primitive GUI), but creating or modifying an XML application for it is a nightmare. And there's really nothing else.