Incidentally, how does one check GPS data? Against another GPS??
How quickly they forget! There used to be all kinds of primitive navigation devices before GPS was invented: street signs, house numbers, navigation beacons, other stone age stuff. Some of these might still be in useable form. You could check your GPS against them.
There may be physical machines called "Turing Machines", but they aren't what Turing had in mind, any more than he had a "test" in mind when he "invented" the "Turing Test". (To him it was just a thought experiment.) As for virtual memory (a) hey, I know about it already and (b) it's still finite.
Maybe finite calculations don't require infinite tape. But automaton theory covers infinite calculations as well.
What? Gaiman is a technical nitpicker? I only knew him as a writer of revisionist fairy tails. (Interesting the first time you read one, but it gets old fast.) Now I have to read some of his SF. Been avoiding it. He's too popular!
I should have realized that Disney was the culprit in the "rifle" business. Happens all the time. Goes back to the movie with the English title "Battleship Potempkin". I'm told the Russian title translates as "Light Cruiser Potempkin".
I still suspect Disney of using Gaiman and the others to put an American spin on the movie. You don't need to bring in an "adapter" to handle cultural references. Translators do stuff like that all the time. Terry Gross once did an interesting interview with the guy who did the French subtitles for Good Will Hunting. Turned out he had never heard the expression "How do you like them apples?" before he saw the movie!
Princess Mononoke is the only other Miyazaki film I've seen. I enjoyed it, but it didn't blow me away like Spirited Away. The latter impressed me with its elaborate art, its overall beauty, and it's thorough sense of place. (The last was really striking, for an animated movie. Most live action movies don't do such a good job creating an illusion of place, despite having a fundamental advantage!) PM had these things too, but less so. And it was more preachy, less focused. I mean the title character didn't even have a central role!
The weird thing about PM is the way Disney tried to "localise" the English version. Fortunately they didn't meddle with the story. But they hired a bunch of Name Actors to do the dubbing. Which was a waste of money, because none of the people they chose has a really distinctive voice!
Weirdest of all is hiring Neil Gaiman to "adapt" the script. God knows what that means. He didn't even make the obvious change: correcting the translators misnaming of various smoothbore weapons as "rifles".
Dvorak really is dumb enough to think that Apple would change to Intel; the change from the 68000 to the Power PC almost destroyed Apple.
You're basically right, but I have a bunch of quibbles.
First of all, the Mac is the last surviving proprietary desktop platform. That has more to do with its decline than all other factors combined.
Second, the big backward compatibility problem with Macs was not a change to the processor (68000s are not that hard to emulate) but to the bus. How many PowerPC early adopters felt burned when they discovered their systems couldn't run the latest Mac OS?
Third, the PowerPC was touted as being the ultimate in backward compatibility. Systems based on this chip were supposed to be able to emulate not just 680x0 systems, but also 80x86 systems. So this was supposed to be Apple big chance to compete directly with Intel boxes! Pity the numbers were bogus.
Finally, Apple just couldn't continue to rely on a chip that Motorola had specific plans to discontinue.
It's almost exactly 20 years since I decided that Dvorak was an idiot. Ironically enough, it was over this very issue.
Back in 1983 I was working for Convergent Technologies, a company that originally specialized in Intel-based workstations. (I think they may even have coined the word.) Dvorak reported a rumor that we we're working on a Motorola 68000-based portable computer. He discounted the rumor, since everybody knew that we only did Intel boxes.
Dvorak was wrong in two different ways. First he or his source combined two different rumors. There was a portable computer, but it was based on a Hitachi 6303. There was a 68000-based computer, but that was a completely separate project.
Which I was hired to help document. The MegaFrame actually used both 68000 and 80186 processors in its Unix config. (It could also be configured as a workstation server using only 80186 processors.) So in fact we were not only not committed to 80x86 architecutre, we were into two other architectures.
(The 6303 was also a Motorola architecture, being based on the Motorola 6800. But that's completely different from the 68000, because Motorola decided to make a clean break when then went from 8-bit to 16-bit processors. Unlike Intel, which made the 8086 vaguely backward compatible with the 8080. Which is part of the reason Intel's chips are standard and Motorola's are dead. But I digress.)
Dvorak's other error seemd particularly stupid: the assumption that all programmers targeted specific CPUs. Which might have actually been true in the homebrew micro culture he came from, but was never true of programming in general.
Actually, Dvorak might be a very smart guy, behind all the stupid stuff he keeps saying. A lot of computer pundits are people who have some Big Insight that's either completely bogus or only valid in a certain context. They hold onto these ideas for years, against all logic. I guess they'd lose too much face by admitting they're wrong.
One example is Vernor Vinge, who used to be one of my favorite SF writers. But now he considers himself a computer expert, based on a lot of second hand knowledge, and some practical experience with things like client-server computing. The way his pseudo-knowledge dominates his stories completely destroys my ability to enjoy his work. Which is a shame -- in many ways he's grown a lot as a writer.
Another example is Neal Stephenson, who's still one of my favorites, despite all the non-sequiturs in books like Snowcrash. (Come on people, do you really think that you can design seriou VR in machine language???!!!) The Big Idea that really drives me crazy is Stephenson's belief that a Turing Machine is something you can actually build. (Neither Radio Shack nor CDW stock infinite-length tapes. I'll apologize if anybody can point me to a source.) So far, his work is original and creative enough to make me overlook crap like this. But give him time!
Some of the best classic SF has no GWF at all. Look at Heinlen, Clarke, that crowd. There's usually (not always) some fancy science or technology, but that's just part of the setting, not something you read the story just to groove on.
The GWF isn't an SF thing, it's a Hollywood thing. Most movies and tv shows are made by people (like Berman) who can't understand any genre without it.
You make me think of Sword of the Samurai. This gem made a virtue of its hardware limitations by making everything look like a Japanese painting. And the music wasn't simply good, it blended seamlessly into the action. Plot got a little predictable after a while, though.
I haven't the heart to read this interview, Enterprise being the series that finally cured me of my 35-year Star Trek fascination. Still I can't resist commenting.
There are many nasty things you can say about Rick Berman: lousy writer, assumes audience consists of morons, rips off actors and writers, etc. But even if he had none of these issues, he'd have no hope of producing a watchable SF series. 'Cause he has no idea what SF is.
He thinks SF is all about the Gee Whiz Factor. Fancy effects, pretentious pseudo-science, lots of gadgets. That's why he abandoned the Picard/Sisko/Janeway thread: it was getting to hard to top himself with fancier and sillier gadgets and effects. So he goes back a couple centuries, where he can derive GWF from the "this is where it came from" element.
Real SF has nothing to do with the GWF. It's about playing with ideas, fiddling with them, seeing where they will go. That's why Star Trek developed a serious following in the first place.
Enterprise has pro forma "ideas" of course. But they're lame, silly, invented by retarded people who don't even know Junior High science.
Ironically, absence of the GWF is also why Stargate SG1 is doing so well. Which is really weird, because the premise of SG1 has got to be the silliest ever. (The USAF is secretly involved in intergalactic exploration and warfare? Yeah, right.) But the better SG1 episodes do what Star Trek used to do -- find interesting ideas and use them to tell simple interesting stories.
Like all of Microsoft's more baroque products, WebDAV is an attempt to make life easier for the technically clueless. Its design reflects what I call the Wizard Fallacy: the assumption that you can make a complicated process easy by glossing it over with some hand-holding software. This never works well, but requires less imagination than inventing a new procedure that's easy to understand and use.
Not correct. Indianans all set their clocks to GMT minus 5 hours. Solar time for Indiana is closer to GMT minus 6 hours, with a 20 minute variation from east to west (unless I've screwed up the math, entirely possible). Like everybody else in this industrial age, Indianans ignore the sun and use a convenient time standard instead. The Indianan standard is just a little simpler than most.
Oh lord, there's a "developers" topic? Which is not on the topics page? And is different from "programming"?
Anyway, you seem to be saying that next time we get a story about Ruby or TCL, we should lump them together with all the "other" programming languages, despite their kinship to other scripting languages, such as Perl, Python, and PHP.
You make it sound as if "scripting language" is some kind of negative term. Hey, scripting languages have their strengths and weaknesses. You couldn't run the WWW without them, but I'd never use them to write CPU-intensive programs. And it's interesting to compare them to each other.
Slashdot icons are just designators for Slashdot topics, and these desperately need an overhaul. There are topics for companies that no longer exist (Digital, Compaq, LinuxCare; Be should probably be renamed "BeOS"); topics that are extremely low volume and should really be folded into other topics (Comdex, E+, Englightenment), topics that are just plain redundant (Bugs, Linux Business), topics that we need only because they're part of a more general topic we don't have (we have America Online, but no ISP topic; topics for various Desktops, but no general Desktop topic; topics for specific Linux distros, but no Distro topic). And why on earth do we have ten specialized Apple topics?
Rather than a new topic for Python, I'd rather see a Scripting topic. So, yeah, that means no cute Python icon, but it does put all the scripting issues in one place for people to select or ignore.
The problem with Java specification is the same as with so many other aspects of Java. It's a question of ownership. Sun wants to own Java, period. Their feud with Microsoft is as much about not wanting to accept criticism of AWT as anything. Oh yeah, they have a "community process" that's supposed to make for non-Sun involvement in the product. It even succeeds to some extent. But mostly, the process is dominated by Sun's culture of possesion.
This is not just a matter of corporate policy. When I worked at JavaSoft, I actually met people who would not distribute their specifications in editable format, for fear of losing control of same.
Sounds like you're into Linux for the intellectual growth than anything. Which means there is no right way. Or rather, the right way is to just go crazy. Because if you try LFS and screw up, what's the big deal? Indeed, the whole point of this kind of project is to screw up, because you learn more from screwing up than doing things right.
The right time to try LFS is when you feel you've learned everything you're likely to learn from playing with SuSE. Or maybe when you just have an overwealming LFS itch you need to scratch. Or maybe there's just not anything on TV.
But what if there's something in LFS I need to know and don't? Well, the LFS text is pretty good at specifying what you need to know. So if you get stuck, just go back to playing with SuSE until you feel ready for another pass. But you're probably smarter about that kind of basic stuff than you think.
I've heard popular distros like Red Hat criticized because they do too much hand-holding. The theory is that you'll learn more about how Linux works if you use a less user-friendly distro, such as Slackware.
But if you need handholding, you really need it. On the other hand, if you're comfortable with using Linux, but want to know more about how it's put together, even Slackware is too high-level. LFS, on the other hand, is the ultimate Linux-learners tool, because it doesn't automate anything.
There are a couple [anypay.com] of alternatives [e-gold.com] that may still unseat PayPal as the major player in the space, but now that eBay has them I doubt it.
No, these competitors were out of luck even before eBay bought PayPal. Remember, eBay decided to buy PayPal only after spending millions on their own unsuccessful payment service, Billpoint. Which failed to displace PayPal even on eBay itself, where the deck was solidly stacked in Billpoint's favor.
The name of the game for online transactions is building a critical mass of transactors. That's why eBay has no real competition in the online auction game, despite well engineered attempts by players with deep pockets, like Yahoo and Microsoft.
The same goes for PayPal. They realized they had to build a critical mass of customers quickly, so they made it easy to sign up and offerred cash incentives. By the time anybody else discovered this market, it was just too late.
I agree the absence of competition is a Bad Thing. But side-by-side transaction systems isn't going to create competition -- nobody has any incentive to sign up with the minor players. If you want a transaction monopoly to give up being a monopoly, you have to force it to open up its system.
Which is pretty suprising. This is the first Lindows buzz I've heard that wan't primarily negative. The main culprit seems to be Lindows.com management and its missing business ethics filter. Perhaps the company has a first-rate engineering staff that being dragged down by nitwitted suits. Not exactly unprecedented.
The review is pretty intelligent, but I can't believe the writer is so dense about the economic issues. Maybe most newbies won't understand apt, but a $99 annual Lindows.com subscription is strong motivation to learn. And people who look at $200 computers are not going to buy expensive apps like VMWare if they can avoid it. Perhaps he's gotten too used to getting review products for free.
However, since SGI announced that they wouldn't support IRIX anymore, everyone has concluded that they need to shift over to Linux machines.
I must have missed that announcement. I do recall SGI announcing that they would not port IRIX to IA32 or IA64 -- instead they're using Windows or Linux. Somehow, people keep interpreting that as "abandoning IRIX", but SGI can't do that as long as they keep selling MIPS-based systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Suspension of disbelief? You're the one who's ignorant about where Stephenson is coming from. SoD is for grand opera, not "hard" SF.
Maybe finite calculations don't require infinite tape. But automaton theory covers infinite calculations as well.
I should have realized that Disney was the culprit in the "rifle" business. Happens all the time. Goes back to the movie with the English title "Battleship Potempkin". I'm told the Russian title translates as "Light Cruiser Potempkin".
I still suspect Disney of using Gaiman and the others to put an American spin on the movie. You don't need to bring in an "adapter" to handle cultural references. Translators do stuff like that all the time. Terry Gross once did an interesting interview with the guy who did the French subtitles for Good Will Hunting. Turned out he had never heard the expression "How do you like them apples?" before he saw the movie!
The weird thing about PM is the way Disney tried to "localise" the English version. Fortunately they didn't meddle with the story. But they hired a bunch of Name Actors to do the dubbing. Which was a waste of money, because none of the people they chose has a really distinctive voice!
Weirdest of all is hiring Neil Gaiman to "adapt" the script. God knows what that means. He didn't even make the obvious change: correcting the translators misnaming of various smoothbore weapons as "rifles".
First of all, the Mac is the last surviving proprietary desktop platform. That has more to do with its decline than all other factors combined.
Second, the big backward compatibility problem with Macs was not a change to the processor (68000s are not that hard to emulate) but to the bus. How many PowerPC early adopters felt burned when they discovered their systems couldn't run the latest Mac OS?
Third, the PowerPC was touted as being the ultimate in backward compatibility. Systems based on this chip were supposed to be able to emulate not just 680x0 systems, but also 80x86 systems. So this was supposed to be Apple big chance to compete directly with Intel boxes! Pity the numbers were bogus.
Finally, Apple just couldn't continue to rely on a chip that Motorola had specific plans to discontinue.
Back in 1983 I was working for Convergent Technologies, a company that originally specialized in Intel-based workstations. (I think they may even have coined the word.) Dvorak reported a rumor that we we're working on a Motorola 68000-based portable computer. He discounted the rumor, since everybody knew that we only did Intel boxes.
Dvorak was wrong in two different ways. First he or his source combined two different rumors. There was a portable computer, but it was based on a Hitachi 6303. There was a 68000-based computer, but that was a completely separate project.
Which I was hired to help document. The MegaFrame actually used both 68000 and 80186 processors in its Unix config. (It could also be configured as a workstation server using only 80186 processors.) So in fact we were not only not committed to 80x86 architecutre, we were into two other architectures.
(The 6303 was also a Motorola architecture, being based on the Motorola 6800. But that's completely different from the 68000, because Motorola decided to make a clean break when then went from 8-bit to 16-bit processors. Unlike Intel, which made the 8086 vaguely backward compatible with the 8080. Which is part of the reason Intel's chips are standard and Motorola's are dead. But I digress.)
Dvorak's other error seemd particularly stupid: the assumption that all programmers targeted specific CPUs. Which might have actually been true in the homebrew micro culture he came from, but was never true of programming in general.
Actually, Dvorak might be a very smart guy, behind all the stupid stuff he keeps saying. A lot of computer pundits are people who have some Big Insight that's either completely bogus or only valid in a certain context. They hold onto these ideas for years, against all logic. I guess they'd lose too much face by admitting they're wrong.
One example is Vernor Vinge, who used to be one of my favorite SF writers. But now he considers himself a computer expert, based on a lot of second hand knowledge, and some practical experience with things like client-server computing. The way his pseudo-knowledge dominates his stories completely destroys my ability to enjoy his work. Which is a shame -- in many ways he's grown a lot as a writer.
Another example is Neal Stephenson, who's still one of my favorites, despite all the non-sequiturs in books like Snowcrash. (Come on people, do you really think that you can design seriou VR in machine language???!!!) The Big Idea that really drives me crazy is Stephenson's belief that a Turing Machine is something you can actually build. (Neither Radio Shack nor CDW stock infinite-length tapes. I'll apologize if anybody can point me to a source.) So far, his work is original and creative enough to make me overlook crap like this. But give him time!
The GWF isn't an SF thing, it's a Hollywood thing. Most movies and tv shows are made by people (like Berman) who can't understand any genre without it.
You make me think of Sword of the Samurai. This gem made a virtue of its hardware limitations by making everything look like a Japanese painting. And the music wasn't simply good, it blended seamlessly into the action. Plot got a little predictable after a while, though.
There are many nasty things you can say about Rick Berman: lousy writer, assumes audience consists of morons, rips off actors and writers, etc. But even if he had none of these issues, he'd have no hope of producing a watchable SF series. 'Cause he has no idea what SF is.
He thinks SF is all about the Gee Whiz Factor. Fancy effects, pretentious pseudo-science, lots of gadgets. That's why he abandoned the Picard/Sisko/Janeway thread: it was getting to hard to top himself with fancier and sillier gadgets and effects. So he goes back a couple centuries, where he can derive GWF from the "this is where it came from" element.
Real SF has nothing to do with the GWF. It's about playing with ideas, fiddling with them, seeing where they will go. That's why Star Trek developed a serious following in the first place.
Enterprise has pro forma "ideas" of course. But they're lame, silly, invented by retarded people who don't even know Junior High science.
Ironically, absence of the GWF is also why Stargate SG1 is doing so well. Which is really weird, because the premise of SG1 has got to be the silliest ever. (The USAF is secretly involved in intergalactic exploration and warfare? Yeah, right.) But the better SG1 episodes do what Star Trek used to do -- find interesting ideas and use them to tell simple interesting stories.
Like all of Microsoft's more baroque products, WebDAV is an attempt to make life easier for the technically clueless. Its design reflects what I call the Wizard Fallacy: the assumption that you can make a complicated process easy by glossing it over with some hand-holding software. This never works well, but requires less imagination than inventing a new procedure that's easy to understand and use.
Not correct. Indianans all set their clocks to GMT minus 5 hours. Solar time for Indiana is closer to GMT minus 6 hours, with a 20 minute variation from east to west (unless I've screwed up the math, entirely possible). Like everybody else in this industrial age, Indianans ignore the sun and use a convenient time standard instead. The Indianan standard is just a little simpler than most.
Anyway, you seem to be saying that next time we get a story about Ruby or TCL, we should lump them together with all the "other" programming languages, despite their kinship to other scripting languages, such as Perl, Python, and PHP.
You make it sound as if "scripting language" is some kind of negative term. Hey, scripting languages have their strengths and weaknesses. You couldn't run the WWW without them, but I'd never use them to write CPU-intensive programs. And it's interesting to compare them to each other.
Rather than a new topic for Python, I'd rather see a Scripting topic. So, yeah, that means no cute Python icon, but it does put all the scripting issues in one place for people to select or ignore.
All your bandwidth are belong to us! Ha ha ha!
This is not just a matter of corporate policy. When I worked at JavaSoft, I actually met people who would not distribute their specifications in editable format, for fear of losing control of same.
The right time to try LFS is when you feel you've learned everything you're likely to learn from playing with SuSE. Or maybe when you just have an overwealming LFS itch you need to scratch. Or maybe there's just not anything on TV.
But what if there's something in LFS I need to know and don't? Well, the LFS text is pretty good at specifying what you need to know. So if you get stuck, just go back to playing with SuSE until you feel ready for another pass. But you're probably smarter about that kind of basic stuff than you think.
But if you need handholding, you really need it. On the other hand, if you're comfortable with using Linux, but want to know more about how it's put together, even Slackware is too high-level. LFS, on the other hand, is the ultimate Linux-learners tool, because it doesn't automate anything.
The name of the game for online transactions is building a critical mass of transactors. That's why eBay has no real competition in the online auction game, despite well engineered attempts by players with deep pockets, like Yahoo and Microsoft.
The same goes for PayPal. They realized they had to build a critical mass of customers quickly, so they made it easy to sign up and offerred cash incentives. By the time anybody else discovered this market, it was just too late.
I agree the absence of competition is a Bad Thing. But side-by-side transaction systems isn't going to create competition -- nobody has any incentive to sign up with the minor players. If you want a transaction monopoly to give up being a monopoly, you have to force it to open up its system.
The review is pretty intelligent, but I can't believe the writer is so dense about the economic issues. Maybe most newbies won't understand apt, but a $99 annual Lindows.com subscription is strong motivation to learn. And people who look at $200 computers are not going to buy expensive apps like VMWare if they can avoid it. Perhaps he's gotten too used to getting review products for free.