Uh? What edition of Hackers are you referring to? I read the 1994 paperback edition, and it doesn't mention anything about this at all. (*blinks, shakes head*)
I've been thinking about this for a while. For a long time, there have been foreign aid groups to help protect the dignity and rights of people in countries ruled by oppressive governments (viz. Albania, Chechnia (sp?), et cetera). Generally, this aid has come from the US, which has been traditionally considered the "bastion of justice and freedom in the civilised world".
However, if this trend towards big-brotherism in the US (and other places) continues to reinforce itself, it may come to the point where people will need protection from the oppressive US government and corporations. Furthermore, I think the first group to feel this in their skins is the American hacker community - the thousands of very misunderstood, freedom-loving tech workers, CS researchers and independent programmers who live and work in the US. The way of life of these people is at high risk, and it may come to a point where the only way to protect them from the grip of Big Brother will be mass evacuation to a country without extradition treaties.
Considering this, I propose the creation of Hacker Aid, a not-for-profit, privately funded NGO dedicated to the protection of the hacker class worldwide, by any means necessary. If the situation in the US (or in any other country) comes to the point described in the above paragraph, the members of Hacker Aid in other countries will organise the mass relocation of the oppressed hackers to other places in the world where they will be able to live and work freely. This may mean paying for the refugees' air fare, providing shelter and food, and helping them find jobs. In the extreme case that the US goes postal and decides to officially, once and for all, become the One World Government, Hacker Aid will be charged with the task of stopping them; and then we shall see if the corporate Powers That Be can stand up to a legion of techies. </rant>
Comments, criticism and suggestions are welcome, and can be sent to the email above.
(Notes: (1) I'm only half-joking, and will do my part if necessary; (2) as made painfully clear by my email address, I'm in Brazil.)
To be fair, Simula already had objects in the late 1960's, although its objects were conceptually more like coroutines than like the modern concept of an object. But otherwise, I agree with you that Smalltalk pretty much started it all in terms of OO, and calling him "the guy who invented overlapping windows" is ridiculous.
At this time (>400 comments posted and counting), it's very likely that no one will read this... but I shall chime in nonetheless. Here are the numbers:
And who do you think decided to ban it, then? Who do you think said "Look! He played violent video-games, and he went on a shooting spree, so we must stop people from buying violent video games, otherwise more people will go on shooting sprees"? That's right. The "children must be protected" fanatics. See my point?
Mental age is just that - mental age. It is a valid factor for classification. It doesn't have much to do with physical age, especially in our little fringe group. So your point is moot.
Someone else has probably said this by now, but I have to say it: it's South Africa, not South America. We're not much the Quake fans around here. (Selling Quake is illegal over here. Go figure.)
First, which PowerPC processor is this? What chipsets are we talking about? Any special chips? I want more technical specs.
Second, what Linux are they running? Is it a modified LinuxPPC? Or is it custom-built? Is it burned onto the ROM? Have they made any changes to the kernel? If so, do they intend to put them back into the code base?
Third, will I be able to telnet into it? To network it like a regular computer? To replace the OS? In short, what is its hack value?
Fourth and last (but not least), how would one go about setting up a Beowulf cluster of these things?:)
The Self page has moved to http://www.sun.com/research/self/index.html.
Thanks. I was looking for that URL.
The project is described as no longer being active, although the last release of Self, 4.1, was last month.
The Self project is still active, as is the associated self-interest mailing list. There'll also be a Self Hack Weekend in San Francisco later this year.
Slashdot is owned by Andover, which is owned by VA, which is corporate. It readily falls under at least three of these categories. (Four if you count the trolling Natalie Portman ACs.) Besides, Slashdot doesn't have much to do with the Net of "scientists and researchers"; in fact, most of the locals are mere Linux-hugging quasi-geeks.
Hey, Randal. Y'know, since I came to Slashdot in late 1998, I seem to have been attacked by just about every Perl god around except Larry himself. It's quite a honor. So, heil sub schwtr { map { $_->[1] } sort { $_->[0] <=> $_->[0] } map { [$_[0]->($_), $_] } @$_[1] }!
Back to the subject at hand: the Self GUI does not rely on those annoying, subjectively meaningful, almost unintelligible little picture widgets at all. So you are safe.:)
CLIs only seem "powerful" by comparison because text provides context-free representation, i.e., anything can be expressed in the same way (because the text ontology is streamlined and meta-identical), whereas a graphical representation is by definition more complex and therefore different ontologies must be used for different purposes.
However, I think that most people's notion of GUIs come from their experience with "traditional" GUIs (Mac, NeXT, Windoze, and the UNIX windowing systems). Many fine people have been working to introduce new paradigms for graphical representation; one such group is the Self gang at Sun Labs and Stanford. Self is an extremely powerful classless, message-passing based OO language, designed around the concept of "programming as experience", which attempts to immerse the user/programmer in a homoiconic, consistent and all-around graspable "world"; according to this philosophy, the Self graphical environment (ported to Squeak Smalltalk as Morphic) is one in which all objects are graphically represented (by way of "morphs"), and in which any object can directly interact with the user in a number of standard ways, having its properties easily accessed or modified. What all this means is that the Self environment is radically different from the traditional GUI, and easily provides at least as much power and flexibility as a CLI.
Self can be found at http://self.sunlabs.com, IIRC.
Not very "nano", mind you
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Blah. Am I the only one who thinks at this very moment K. Eric Drexler is coming down from Cambridge to kick the asses of the whinies from UMass who are misusing his pet phrase, "nano"? This doesn't seem particularly useful or innovative. Especially considering that there already exists 0.11 micron etching technology, by traditional means. Now, the day I hear about an UMass logo 0.11 microns across, then I'll be impressed.
Re:It's just that fewer girls are religions loons
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First, I do spend five days a week programming in C++. I try to get around actually writing C++ code as much as I can, but what's left of it is still enough to make a grown man weep.
Second, I didn't mean to imply that you were a C++ zealot (like Sweeney is). I meant to imply that you were fooled into believing that C++ is widely used because of technical reasons, which is by and large not the case. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Third, you use the term "useful" a lot. I'd like to hear your definition of it, if you don't mind.
Fourth, the overhead argument doesn't hold up anymore. Just off the top of my head, Self and Squeak both have excellent optimising compilers that produce code that is, in most cases (and as far as one trusts any benchmarks at all), as fast as the equivalent C code. For all but the most low-level applications, the gain inherent in using real OO languages far exceeds any possible performance drops. (One might say that, for such a low-level application, or one that needed many low-level optimisations, one should just go ahead and write it in C with loads of inlined assembly code. I personally favour FORTH.)
Fifth, I am not a "true OOP zealot". I am, in fact, a FFP zealot, and a member of the TUNES project. We are aiming at an integrated computing system that blurs the line between the "user" and the "developer", with a free-form, reflective, open, extensible and intuitive programming language. However, such a beast still doesn't exist. True OOP, OTOH, does, and it's good - at least far better than what you get from C++.
You see, this is exactly the kind of prejudiced nonsense that pisses me off about Slashdot. No wonder one gets the feeling that this place is nothing but a haven for quasi-geek conformist Linux lusers who keep shouting "open the code!" but who have never written a single line of code in their lives. *sigh*
I Am Not A Linux User (IANALU), and neither are many of the people on Slashdot. Stop thinking you rule the world: you don't.
This is very much like the situation with Americans on the Internet. They are always so sure that they run the entire world. That pisses me off as well.
Electronic organizers have been around for decades, but they didn't really come into wide use until palm computing, where you could actually do something with them beyond what the designers envisioned.
That's interesting. At least where I am (Rio de Janeiro), quite a few people have organisers (I do as well, but I don't like to use; it's to intrusive), whereas very few people own palmtops. Both cost (at least R$700 = +- US$350 for the cheapest PDAs) and the novelty factor (they haven't been around for very long here) are relevant, I guess.
Regarding flexibility: as someone on Slashdot has recently reminded me, computers are tools that should work according to the needs of the owner. And amongst these owners, few need anything too sophisticated out of a computing environment; our class is amongst the few who require a rich and wildly-customizable system. Comparatively, many more people need exactly that: an appliance; anything over and above is just wasted on them. (That's not to say that they shouldn't be flexible, in the sense that they should be able to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, within the constrains imposed by size, speed and the purpose of the appliance. But that's another matter.)
Re:It's just that fewer girls are religions loons
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virtually none of the languages you mention has turned out be nearly as useful and practical as C++
*pfffffft*
Oh man. See what you've done? Now I'll have to drink another glass of water, or I'll get dehydrated. I'm sorry, but that just cracked me up.
Y'know, I'd really like to see you justify the underlying assumptions you make about the reasons behind C++'s widespread adoption. I bet it'll be kind of akin to watching some Microserf explain how Microsoft won the OS war because of the superiority of its product. *snicker*
"But," one says, "Microsoft's propaganda tactics only worked on the uncultured masses! We, however are The Programmers: we are cultured, we are intelligent and we care not about appearances! That couldn't happen to us, right?
"Right?"
(One might want to educate oneself on what really goes on in the world of programming language R&D, and then take another look, from a fresh perspective, at an article such as that of C++-pusher Tim "functional languages are for theorists" Sweeney on Gamespy. It's an enlightening experience indeed.)
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Of course Bjarne should be shot on site -- any one who tries to put OOP as assembler macros should be shot on site.
It's not so much that he tried to do that, which I can almost understand, given the track record of Bell Labs when it comes to programming languages... as much as the fact that it has been forced down the collective throat of the programmer class.
I'm kind of sad that you didn't mention Python (http://www.python.org) as an OO language. One advantage of Python is that you can actually *do* things with it.
Sorry. Python's nice too.
__import__('SimpleHTTPServer').test()-ly y'rs. (if you're wondering, that's an HTTP server in standard Python. Yes. That's it.)
WinXX is good for someone who wants to use a computer as an appliance, while Linux is great for someone who wants to learn what makes a computer tick, and how to use it effectively.
If that's the case, then I'm afraid that Linux will never be popular - nor should it! Computers are supposed to be appliances; the fact of the matter is that most people want to get stuff done, not to go diving into technical swamps. (There's a word for those who do want to go diving into technical swamps: it's "geek". I'm one of those myself, and there's nothing wrong with being one, but suggesting that everyone should be like that is preposterous.) If you ask me (and I know you didn't), it's precisely the fact that our community insists on sticking with the PC-era mentality of "more power^H^H^H^H^Hwork to the user" - and it shows in everything, from hardware to programming languages to user interfaces - that is hindering the arrival of the age of ubiquitous computing. We should learn from Microsoft's attempts, however failed, to make a computer into a thing you can use like an appliance, not shun them.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh? What edition of Hackers are you referring to? I read the 1994 paperback edition, and it doesn't mention anything about this at all. (*blinks, shakes head*)
I've been thinking about this for a while. For a long time, there have been foreign aid groups to help protect the dignity and rights of people in countries ruled by oppressive governments (viz. Albania, Chechnia (sp?), et cetera). Generally, this aid has come from the US, which has been traditionally considered the "bastion of justice and freedom in the civilised world".
However, if this trend towards big-brotherism in the US (and other places) continues to reinforce itself, it may come to the point where people will need protection from the oppressive US government and corporations. Furthermore, I think the first group to feel this in their skins is the American hacker community - the thousands of very misunderstood, freedom-loving tech workers, CS researchers and independent programmers who live and work in the US. The way of life of these people is at high risk, and it may come to a point where the only way to protect them from the grip of Big Brother will be mass evacuation to a country without extradition treaties.
Considering this, I propose the creation of Hacker Aid, a not-for-profit, privately funded NGO dedicated to the protection of the hacker class worldwide, by any means necessary. If the situation in the US (or in any other country) comes to the point described in the above paragraph, the members of Hacker Aid in other countries will organise the mass relocation of the oppressed hackers to other places in the world where they will be able to live and work freely. This may mean paying for the refugees' air fare, providing shelter and food, and helping them find jobs. In the extreme case that the US goes postal and decides to officially, once and for all, become the One World Government, Hacker Aid will be charged with the task of stopping them; and then we shall see if the corporate Powers That Be can stand up to a legion of techies.
</rant>
Comments, criticism and suggestions are welcome, and can be sent to the email above.
(Notes: (1) I'm only half-joking, and will do my part if necessary; (2) as made painfully clear by my email address, I'm in Brazil.)
To be fair, Simula already had objects in the late 1960's, although its objects were conceptually more like coroutines than like the modern concept of an object. But otherwise, I agree with you that Smalltalk pretty much started it all in terms of OO, and calling him "the guy who invented overlapping windows" is ridiculous.
At this time (>400 comments posted and counting), it's very likely that no one will read this... but I shall chime in nonetheless. Here are the numbers:
"Official" work (hours/week, avg):
Classes (school)......33
Classes (IMPA)........12
Lab/programming.......10
Study.................15
------------------------
TOTAL.................70
Pay (R$/week; R$ 1 =~ US$ 1.7):
Scholarship.........80.00
Odd jobs, avg.......50.00
------------------------
TOTAL..............130.00
Grand total: R$ 1.85/hour
If it seems crappy, it is - even for Brazil. But at least I've got free housing, food and bus fare. Ah well.
Perhaps I expressed myself poorly. Quake is illegal where _I_ live - that is, in Brazil.
And who do you think decided to ban it, then? Who do you think said "Look! He played violent video-games, and he went on a shooting spree, so we must stop people from buying violent video games, otherwise more people will go on shooting sprees"? That's right. The "children must be protected" fanatics. See my point?
Selling quake is illegal?
Yep.
How'd they manage that?
A lot of misinformation, backroom deals and just general disregard for personal freedom.
And why??
Because everywhere you go, there are assholes who feel that "the children must be protected". At any and all cost. Here, they are winning.
Why are these questions obligatory?
Because I care about them.
I don't understand why people on Slashdot expect a device to be super-hackable just because it is based on Linux.
I don't expect it to be super-hackable. I just wanted to know whether it was super-hackable.
Sheesh. Calm down, dude.
Mental age is just that - mental age. It is a valid factor for classification. It doesn't have much to do with physical age, especially in our little fringe group. So your point is moot.
Someone else has probably said this by now, but I have to say it: it's South Africa, not South America. We're not much the Quake fans around here. (Selling Quake is illegal over here. Go figure.)
Is the partitioner able to reorganise existing partitions without requiring them to be removed, like PartitionMagic?
First, which PowerPC processor is this? What chipsets are we talking about? Any special chips? I want more technical specs.
:)
Second, what Linux are they running? Is it a modified LinuxPPC? Or is it custom-built? Is it burned onto the ROM? Have they made any changes to the kernel? If so, do they intend to put them back into the code base?
Third, will I be able to telnet into it? To network it like a regular computer? To replace the OS? In short, what is its hack value?
Fourth and last (but not least), how would one go about setting up a Beowulf cluster of these things?
Well, then you are old - relatively, that is. Most of the local dimwits are either in the 13-18 year range or have about that same mental age.
The Self page has moved to http://www.sun.com/research/self/index.html.
Thanks. I was looking for that URL.
The project is described as no longer being active, although the last release of Self, 4.1, was last month.
The Self project is still active, as is the associated self-interest mailing list. There'll also be a Self Hack Weekend in San Francisco later this year.
Slashdot is owned by Andover, which is owned by VA, which is corporate. It readily falls under at least three of these categories. (Four if you count the trolling Natalie Portman ACs.) Besides, Slashdot doesn't have much to do with the Net of "scientists and researchers"; in fact, most of the locals are mere Linux-hugging quasi-geeks.
Eeeeek! You're right!!! And to think I committed that huge gaffe in presence of the Master!!! I'm so ashamed! I deserve to be punished!!!!!!
(Thanks for the correction, Ed.)
Hey, Randal. Y'know, since I came to Slashdot in late 1998, I seem to have been attacked by just about every Perl god around except Larry himself. It's quite a honor. So, heil sub schwtr { map { $_->[1] } sort { $_->[0] <=> $_->[0] } map { [$_[0]->($_), $_] } @$_[1] }!
:)
Back to the subject at hand: the Self GUI does not rely on those annoying, subjectively meaningful, almost unintelligible little picture widgets at all. So you are safe.
CLIs only seem "powerful" by comparison because text provides context-free representation, i.e., anything can be expressed in the same way (because the text ontology is streamlined and meta-identical), whereas a graphical representation is by definition more complex and therefore different ontologies must be used for different purposes.
However, I think that most people's notion of GUIs come from their experience with "traditional" GUIs (Mac, NeXT, Windoze, and the UNIX windowing systems). Many fine people have been working to introduce new paradigms for graphical representation; one such group is the Self gang at Sun Labs and Stanford. Self is an extremely powerful classless, message-passing based OO language, designed around the concept of "programming as experience", which attempts to immerse the user/programmer in a homoiconic, consistent and all-around graspable "world"; according to this philosophy, the Self graphical environment (ported to Squeak Smalltalk as Morphic) is one in which all objects are graphically represented (by way of "morphs"), and in which any object can directly interact with the user in a number of standard ways, having its properties easily accessed or modified. What all this means is that the Self environment is radically different from the traditional GUI, and easily provides at least as much power and flexibility as a CLI.
Self can be found at http://self.sunlabs.com, IIRC.
Blah. Am I the only one who thinks at this very moment K. Eric Drexler is coming down from Cambridge to kick the asses of the whinies from UMass who are misusing his pet phrase, "nano"? This doesn't seem particularly useful or innovative. Especially considering that there already exists 0.11 micron etching technology, by traditional means. Now, the day I hear about an UMass logo 0.11 microns across, then I'll be impressed.
First, I do spend five days a week programming in C++. I try to get around actually writing C++ code as much as I can, but what's left of it is still enough to make a grown man weep.
Second, I didn't mean to imply that you were a C++ zealot (like Sweeney is). I meant to imply that you were fooled into believing that C++ is widely used because of technical reasons, which is by and large not the case. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Third, you use the term "useful" a lot. I'd like to hear your definition of it, if you don't mind.
Fourth, the overhead argument doesn't hold up anymore. Just off the top of my head, Self and Squeak both have excellent optimising compilers that produce code that is, in most cases (and as far as one trusts any benchmarks at all), as fast as the equivalent C code. For all but the most low-level applications, the gain inherent in using real OO languages far exceeds any possible performance drops. (One might say that, for such a low-level application, or one that needed many low-level optimisations, one should just go ahead and write it in C with loads of inlined assembly code. I personally favour FORTH.)
Fifth, I am not a "true OOP zealot". I am, in fact, a FFP zealot, and a member of the TUNES project. We are aiming at an integrated computing system that blurs the line between the "user" and the "developer", with a free-form, reflective, open, extensible and intuitive programming language. However, such a beast still doesn't exist. True OOP, OTOH, does, and it's good - at least far better than what you get from C++.
You see, this is exactly the kind of prejudiced nonsense that pisses me off about Slashdot. No wonder one gets the feeling that this place is nothing but a haven for quasi-geek conformist Linux lusers who keep shouting "open the code!" but who have never written a single line of code in their lives. *sigh*
I Am Not A Linux User (IANALU), and neither are many of the people on Slashdot. Stop thinking you rule the world: you don't.
This is very much like the situation with Americans on the Internet. They are always so sure that they run the entire world. That pisses me off as well.
Electronic organizers have been around for decades, but they didn't really come into wide use until palm computing, where you could actually do something with them beyond what the designers envisioned.
That's interesting. At least where I am (Rio de Janeiro), quite a few people have organisers (I do as well, but I don't like to use; it's to intrusive), whereas very few people own palmtops. Both cost (at least R$700 = +- US$350 for the cheapest PDAs) and the novelty factor (they haven't been around for very long here) are relevant, I guess.
Regarding flexibility: as someone on Slashdot has recently reminded me, computers are tools that should work according to the needs of the owner. And amongst these owners, few need anything too sophisticated out of a computing environment; our class is amongst the few who require a rich and wildly-customizable system. Comparatively, many more people need exactly that: an appliance; anything over and above is just wasted on them. (That's not to say that they shouldn't be flexible, in the sense that they should be able to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, within the constrains imposed by size, speed and the purpose of the appliance. But that's another matter.)
virtually none of the languages you mention has turned out be nearly as useful and practical as C++
*pfffffft*
Oh man. See what you've done? Now I'll have to drink another glass of water, or I'll get dehydrated. I'm sorry, but that just cracked me up.
Y'know, I'd really like to see you justify the underlying assumptions you make about the reasons behind C++'s widespread adoption. I bet it'll be kind of akin to watching some Microserf explain how Microsoft won the OS war because of the superiority of its product. *snicker*
"But," one says, "Microsoft's propaganda tactics only worked on the uncultured masses! We, however are The Programmers: we are cultured, we are intelligent and we care not about appearances! That couldn't happen to us, right?
"Right?"
(One might want to educate oneself on what really goes on in the world of programming language R&D, and then take another look, from a fresh perspective, at an article such as that of C++-pusher Tim "functional languages are for theorists" Sweeney on Gamespy. It's an enlightening experience indeed.)
Of course Bjarne should be shot on site -- any one who tries to put OOP as assembler macros should be shot on site.
:from 'ai-libs :binding 'simple-doctor))
:)
It's not so much that he tried to do that, which I can almost understand, given the track record of Bell Labs when it comes to programming languages... as much as the fact that it has been forced down the collective throat of the programmer class.
I'm kind of sad that you didn't mention Python (http://www.python.org) as an OO language. One advantage of Python is that you can actually *do* things with it.
Sorry. Python's nice too.
__import__('SimpleHTTPServer').test()-ly y'rs. (if you're wondering, that's an HTTP server in standard Python. Yes. That's it.)
In that case...
(funcall (import
That's an ELIZA clone in Common Lisp. HA!
WinXX is good for someone who wants to use a computer as an appliance, while Linux is great for someone who wants to learn what makes a computer tick, and how to use it effectively.
If that's the case, then I'm afraid that Linux will never be popular - nor should it! Computers are supposed to be appliances; the fact of the matter is that most people want to get stuff done, not to go diving into technical swamps. (There's a word for those who do want to go diving into technical swamps: it's "geek". I'm one of those myself, and there's nothing wrong with being one, but suggesting that everyone should be like that is preposterous.) If you ask me (and I know you didn't), it's precisely the fact that our community insists on sticking with the PC-era mentality of "more power^H^H^H^H^Hwork to the user" - and it shows in everything, from hardware to programming languages to user interfaces - that is hindering the arrival of the age of ubiquitous computing. We should learn from Microsoft's attempts, however failed, to make a computer into a thing you can use like an appliance, not shun them.