This reminds me of something I saw from a while back, the idea of an optical black hole.
Basically, it has nothing to do with gravitational black holes, but the semi-hysterical press stories didn't pick up on that at the time either.
I'd explain it, but follow the link, or try this one for something clearer and simpler. I got these links from this search, but not all the results look relevant. Still, you may be able to find more, at least starting there.
Interesting thought, and I had to think about it for a bit, but it'll never happen. Think about it: What's one of the first and strongest projects that would build on it?
That's right, VB6 for Linux.
Suddenly, a lot of VB programmers have a migration path to Linux, the last people Microsoft currently has to worry about.
It's not going to happen, and it's not going to happen precisely because Microsoft has its own best interests at heart, and not its customers.
OK, I'll handle the insightful commentary, and you shoot all the posters doing the automatic posting, and the moderators rewarding them.
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You know, there's this nagging voice in the back of my head saying there's something wrong with this plan, but I just don't see it. It's the only one that can work...
Hey, where's all the "people posting random stuff about their cat isn't journalism" posters? This is from a 'blog, after all.
Or maybe "people posting random stuff about their cat" isn't the total picture of the blog world?
Sometimes it's shockingly easy to scoop the "pros", when they can't understand the technical arguments enough to be comfortable making a fairly serious accusation like saying "CherryOS is a fraud", but a "blog" writer can understand things well enough to do so. (Actually, you can drop the word "blog" entirely; what matters is not the software running the website but the fact they can write and we can all read it.) Neither group is doing anything wrong; if Wired can't satisfy itself fully that CherryOS is a full-on fraud, they shouldn't report it that way. But it does definately leave room for others to get in there and do some real reporting and research.
(Mods: This is on topic, just one meta up, regarding the veracity of the source.)
"You say Sony lies are louder than Microsoft lies, but look, here's a Microsoft lie. Haha, that disproves your point!"
Back to logic school, Rousterfarian. You disproved the assertion that Microsoft doesn't lie at all, which is not only not one I made, but logically contradicts what I did say anyhow.
Your cited problem wasn't type checking. I've seen plenty of equal garbage in type-checked languages, therefore strong typing wasn't the solution, QED. Your problem was lack of unit testing and other good testing techniques.
You see a problem, but you've already decided on the solution. Dogma, dogma, dogma, threat, threat, threat, blah, blah, blah. My code doesn't crash, and I don't give a shit how somebody else managed to shoot themselves in the foot or your inaccurate diagnosis about "why". You keep at it, one less developer I'm competing against.
It would not work at the moment, because your personal data does not meet the creativity criterion of copyright. It is simply a fact.
It isn't a bad idea, even out of the domain of the techno-geek libertarian; I write somewhat more extensively about this here and some of the followup consequences, but the short version relevant to your post is that the necessary legal machinery can be built out of existing components that already exist; no truly novel law needs to be written, but no currently existing laws or protections work this way, nor can they feasibly be hacked (to name the ones I know, neither copyright, trademark, trade secret, nor (obviously) patent law can be twisted to work like this). Thus, I don't think it is hopeless that we'll end up with this someday.
I've been working in Perl and Python for years now, with large products running on very big scales, tens of thousands of users running mission-critical stuff, day in, day out, that sort of thing.
I will let you know when this is an actual problem, rather than stories to scare the kiddies with. So far, while I can clearly see the costs (which, if you have never left the 'safety' of variable-based typing languages behind, you can't), I'm yet to see the benefits on any but the most extreme jobs.
I've picked up quite a list of people I've made this promise to, but I don't bother actually keeping track, because it isn't going to happen. They keep promising doom, and I keep coding four or five times faster than they do, and that's just the linear speed-up, to say nothing of the improved re-factoring I get and the general benefits of flexibility. Fair trade, I suppose.
The author is probably referring to the way Scheme and LISP are "missing" static type checking, in much the same way I am "missing" a hole in the side of my head.
The claim that something is missing would be more compelling if they weren't "missing" it on purpose, and the trend wasn't swinging in the dynamically-typed (or, as I think of it, "value typed" as opposed to "variable typed"; whatever you do it's wrong to call it "weakly typed") language's favor anyhow.
(Variable-based-typing's only hope is that the type-inferencing languages penetrate into the mainstream before the recoginition that variable-based-typing isn't free does, that being the fundamental misconception keeping it afloat. (Once you ack. the obvious point that it is not free, and is in fact quite expensive, both in actual effort and in massively underestimated opportunity costs, you are suddenly able to consider it in terms of costs and benefits, and the cost/benefit analysis generally does not work out in its favor when done dispassionately, though there are exceptions.))
If blogs are journalism, they should have to follow the other laws that apply to journalism, namely, that they cannot be libelous or slander individuals.
Those laws don't apply to "journalists". They apply to everybody.
Therefore, they already apply to "bloggers", since they are members of the set of "everybody".
Actually, you're showing the exact same blindness that the GUI designers are showing.
You can test a GUI by reaching into the data structures and validating that they look like what you want them to look like. You can test a GUI by posting an event and making sure everything that is supposed to happen in response to that event does. For instance, test that the "submit" button actually changes values in your database, or that when they entered the negative number that the field that only applies to positive ones got disabled.
(This also flows you naturally into describing the GUI with metadata and building it to do what you want, rather than drawing an impenetrable "drawing" of the UI that can't be meaningfully manipulated; then you can rapidly alter the UI and still maintain its testability by testing based on the metadata with minimal effort over the long term. But that's the "static UIs and the tools to create them are for losers" rant, which would fill another post.)
Screen-scraping or HTML sniffing is a horribly broken hack, not a solution. While final compliance testing will require a human to double-check that the data structures of the GUI aren't lying to you (although the GUI ought to be unit tested too), that should be a last resort. The problem is, "eyeball time" is not and can not be an adequate testing procedure for any moderately capable program; the testing matrix rapidly exceeds what any human could do, let alone what any human would do.
So, you misunderstood my point. GUIs are not effectively testable today; there are a couple of hacks but they suck so much ass that it's a rare occasion that anyone uses them, and even rarer that they are maintained for more than the couple of days it takes for them to become completely unwieldy. Someday, I hope to use GUIs that can be tested, and it would only take a couple of small surface changes... but I have to admit not knowing how far those changes would go into the infrastructure as I am a GUI user, not developer.
I do a lot of programming with visual output. It is impossible to have a computer check that the font got outlined correctly in the PDF, say.
No, it's not. The problem is your API isn't built to include the ability to test.
It is true that you can not verify that once it is on the graphics card, it is correctly displayed on the screen, but everything up to that point is testable, if the underlying API is built for it.
GUIs have a similar problem; there is nothing fundamentally impossible about testing GUIs, but they are not designed for it. The two major flaws are the inability to run the GUI without the fully-fledged event loop running (I ought to be able to poke the GUI and say "Hey, run your event loop once now"), and the inability to completely transparently post events to the GUI as if the user did it. (I've managed to convince Tk (in Python) to do the former but I still can't say "pretend that the user just pressed the 'a' key correctly.)
Many people then claim that GUIs are untestable, when the problem is that all current existing GUIs are untestable; the class itself is not untestable. Similarly, if you had better support, it'd be easier to test the more interesting properties. I have to admit that that would probably require an even more fundamental re-design than in the GUI case, but it is still possible. Right now, though, too few people care about testing and even fewer people are actually good at it for us to end up with testable libraries. It has to be an explicit goal.
Another way is that Final Fantasy VI was two games, one a combat simulation and one a rather simple "move the drama forward" game. The combat game typically lasts about a minute, longer for boss fights, and I've never played VI through, but my experience with that generation of FF is that I spend a lot of time wishing the text speed went another three or four notches higher than the highest setting. Call the combat "one game" that repeats a lot and it ain't no 30 hours.
(And before you scream bloody murder about how unfair that is, consider the full implication of the phrase "another way to look at it", as opposed to, say, "you're an idiot for thinking that, here's the God-given truth". Folks, there is a difference!)
I like RPGs. I really like RPGs. But rationally speaking, I still can't figure out how two rather crappy games, a combat simulator that is usually pathetically simple (excepting boss fights, average fights are about a minute-ish), and a rather simple, often flat-out linear drama adds up to be such good fun. I wouldn't play either one alone. (I do really like Tactics style games, but note they tend to have more meat in the combat system, although not as much as I'd like so far, and I do rather find myself wishing they'd speed up, too, so animations don't eat so much f'ing time. Advance Wars with all the animations turned off royally kicks ass, though.)
In 2005, you should not have a perceptible delay between keypress and a simple ack. response like putting up an asterisk.
The problem, of course, is not technology. It's this god-damned "save every fraction of a penny at all costs, and fuck the customer/user!" mentality. A couple of cents more per terminal is probably all it would take to eliminate the delay, but, well, like I said, fuck the user.
I can't use Comcast digital cable boxes because of the multi-second delay before button presses react. (That one boggles the mind, I think they had to work to make it suck that bad.) It pisses me off that in the time it takes to navigate to one On Demand movie, the value of my time for the time it took to do the navigation would have been sufficient to make a snappy, responsive system. You could quite literally rack up hours spent just waiting for their interface to update in a year if you actually tried to use it (from what I gather from the way they keep dropping the price on On-Demand things, nobody does), and that says they care so little about my time that they'd rather save 5 cents.
Normally, I don't much care about "bloat" in desktop computers, I think most people bitching about it don't really understand what that "bloat" is buying them. But in the embedded space, fire away with your "bloat" accusations. The work it takes to make a machine in 2005 react more slowly than a machine from 1970, no exaggeration, boggles the mind.
avoiding carbs is basically the same thing as starving. carbohydrates should be your main source of energy - fat and protein don't work anywhere near as well (hence the atkins diet being so bad).
If this is true, why don't Atkins dieters drop dead due to (energy) starvation, and why do so many of them report increases in energy levels, in ways that can't just be their imagination?
I've heard theories like yours, but they predict things that don't happen in reality. Therefore, I find myself unable to put much stock in them. Given the experiences I have and the experiences of others, like I said, you're darned near going to have to produce corpses to back up your claims, or one hell of a lot of studies that I'm quite confident don't exist, as I've looked for them.
Quit and find a new job, because if your current job is taking your health, you're actually working 168 hours a week.
And I bet your hourly pay sucks.
And it could be worse than that... if it takes years off your life, you could be "working" more than 168 hours a week.... arbitrarily more.
What you are doing is something that you are simply not designed to do. Some people may be able to do it, neither you nor I are one of them. Stop it, or pay the penalty, collected by Reality, the least lenient loan shark of them all.
The legislature can pass what laws it likes. The courts can then strike them down when they are challenged.
Given the rulings of the Supreme Court, this would be a trivial case for even the lowest courts to strike down, barring an "activist judge".
The system is working as it is intended to. Panic when the Supremem Court (or even the relevant Circuit Court) upholds it, which won't happen. You can't keep stupidity out of the system, you can only build a system robust enough to handle it when it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Things get pretty wierd in the Singularity... I wouldn't consider it completely out of the question.
This reminds me of something I saw from a while back, the idea of an optical black hole.
Basically, it has nothing to do with gravitational black holes, but the semi-hysterical press stories didn't pick up on that at the time either.
I'd explain it, but follow the link, or try this one for something clearer and simpler. I got these links from this search, but not all the results look relevant. Still, you may be able to find more, at least starting there.
RealBasic is neither Open Source, nor the current VB from Microsoft that has been Open Sourced.
While interesting, it doesn't really affect my point either way; Microsoft is hardly going to open source their own VB.
Interesting thought, and I had to think about it for a bit, but it'll never happen. Think about it: What's one of the first and strongest projects that would build on it?
That's right, VB6 for Linux.
Suddenly, a lot of VB programmers have a migration path to Linux, the last people Microsoft currently has to worry about.
It's not going to happen, and it's not going to happen precisely because Microsoft has its own best interests at heart, and not its customers.
The Slashdot crowd is about half as bright as it thinks it is, but come on, even we can tell you're shilling. With marketing lies, to boot.
OK, I'll handle the insightful commentary, and you shoot all the posters doing the automatic posting, and the moderators rewarding them.
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You know, there's this nagging voice in the back of my head saying there's something wrong with this plan, but I just don't see it. It's the only one that can work...
Uh-huh.
And you're not allowed to produce any sound that can be heard from outside of your room, either.
And the yearly snow sculpture... nay, monument... to male genitalia wasn't just against the rules, it was probably outright illegal.
How fortunate those things never happened, because University students are really big on following the rules.
Hey, where's all the "people posting random stuff about their cat isn't journalism" posters? This is from a 'blog, after all.
Or maybe "people posting random stuff about their cat" isn't the total picture of the blog world?
Sometimes it's shockingly easy to scoop the "pros", when they can't understand the technical arguments enough to be comfortable making a fairly serious accusation like saying "CherryOS is a fraud", but a "blog" writer can understand things well enough to do so. (Actually, you can drop the word "blog" entirely; what matters is not the software running the website but the fact they can write and we can all read it.) Neither group is doing anything wrong; if Wired can't satisfy itself fully that CherryOS is a full-on fraud, they shouldn't report it that way. But it does definately leave room for others to get in there and do some real reporting and research.
(Mods: This is on topic, just one meta up, regarding the veracity of the source.)
"You say Sony lies are louder than Microsoft lies, but look, here's a Microsoft lie. Haha, that disproves your point!"
Back to logic school, Rousterfarian. You disproved the assertion that Microsoft doesn't lie at all, which is not only not one I made, but logically contradicts what I did say anyhow.
Needless to say, you've failed to convince me.
Microsoft's lies don't negate Sony lies... and Sony's lies were MUCH, MUCH louder.
you end up with a Turing machine. If only it were true...
You want a Turing Machine in your laptop?
Me, I find lugging that infinite tape around a real bitch.
Idiots write code in any language.
Your cited problem wasn't type checking. I've seen plenty of equal garbage in type-checked languages, therefore strong typing wasn't the solution, QED. Your problem was lack of unit testing and other good testing techniques.
You see a problem, but you've already decided on the solution. Dogma, dogma, dogma, threat, threat, threat, blah, blah, blah. My code doesn't crash, and I don't give a shit how somebody else managed to shoot themselves in the foot or your inaccurate diagnosis about "why". You keep at it, one less developer I'm competing against.
It would not work at the moment, because your personal data does not meet the creativity criterion of copyright. It is simply a fact.
It isn't a bad idea, even out of the domain of the techno-geek libertarian; I write somewhat more extensively about this here and some of the followup consequences, but the short version relevant to your post is that the necessary legal machinery can be built out of existing components that already exist; no truly novel law needs to be written, but no currently existing laws or protections work this way, nor can they feasibly be hacked (to name the ones I know, neither copyright, trademark, trade secret, nor (obviously) patent law can be twisted to work like this). Thus, I don't think it is hopeless that we'll end up with this someday.
I've been working in Perl and Python for years now, with large products running on very big scales, tens of thousands of users running mission-critical stuff, day in, day out, that sort of thing.
I will let you know when this is an actual problem, rather than stories to scare the kiddies with. So far, while I can clearly see the costs (which, if you have never left the 'safety' of variable-based typing languages behind, you can't), I'm yet to see the benefits on any but the most extreme jobs.
I've picked up quite a list of people I've made this promise to, but I don't bother actually keeping track, because it isn't going to happen. They keep promising doom, and I keep coding four or five times faster than they do, and that's just the linear speed-up, to say nothing of the improved re-factoring I get and the general benefits of flexibility. Fair trade, I suppose.
The author is probably referring to the way Scheme and LISP are "missing" static type checking, in much the same way I am "missing" a hole in the side of my head.
The claim that something is missing would be more compelling if they weren't "missing" it on purpose, and the trend wasn't swinging in the dynamically-typed (or, as I think of it, "value typed" as opposed to "variable typed"; whatever you do it's wrong to call it "weakly typed") language's favor anyhow.
(Variable-based-typing's only hope is that the type-inferencing languages penetrate into the mainstream before the recoginition that variable-based-typing isn't free does, that being the fundamental misconception keeping it afloat. (Once you ack. the obvious point that it is not free, and is in fact quite expensive, both in actual effort and in massively underestimated opportunity costs, you are suddenly able to consider it in terms of costs and benefits, and the cost/benefit analysis generally does not work out in its favor when done dispassionately, though there are exceptions.))
If blogs are journalism, they should have to follow the other laws that apply to journalism, namely, that they cannot be libelous or slander individuals.
Those laws don't apply to "journalists". They apply to everybody.
Therefore, they already apply to "bloggers", since they are members of the set of "everybody".
What is Libel?
Isn't the concept of something being Left, Right or Center biased completly subjective?
No.
But it is partially subjective.
Meditate upon that until you achieve enlightenment. (Semi-grin.)
Actually, you're showing the exact same blindness that the GUI designers are showing.
You can test a GUI by reaching into the data structures and validating that they look like what you want them to look like. You can test a GUI by posting an event and making sure everything that is supposed to happen in response to that event does. For instance, test that the "submit" button actually changes values in your database, or that when they entered the negative number that the field that only applies to positive ones got disabled.
(This also flows you naturally into describing the GUI with metadata and building it to do what you want, rather than drawing an impenetrable "drawing" of the UI that can't be meaningfully manipulated; then you can rapidly alter the UI and still maintain its testability by testing based on the metadata with minimal effort over the long term. But that's the "static UIs and the tools to create them are for losers" rant, which would fill another post.)
Screen-scraping or HTML sniffing is a horribly broken hack, not a solution. While final compliance testing will require a human to double-check that the data structures of the GUI aren't lying to you (although the GUI ought to be unit tested too), that should be a last resort. The problem is, "eyeball time" is not and can not be an adequate testing procedure for any moderately capable program; the testing matrix rapidly exceeds what any human could do, let alone what any human would do.
So, you misunderstood my point. GUIs are not effectively testable today; there are a couple of hacks but they suck so much ass that it's a rare occasion that anyone uses them, and even rarer that they are maintained for more than the couple of days it takes for them to become completely unwieldy. Someday, I hope to use GUIs that can be tested, and it would only take a couple of small surface changes... but I have to admit not knowing how far those changes would go into the infrastructure as I am a GUI user, not developer.
I do a lot of programming with visual output. It is impossible to have a computer check that the font got outlined correctly in the PDF, say.
No, it's not. The problem is your API isn't built to include the ability to test.
It is true that you can not verify that once it is on the graphics card, it is correctly displayed on the screen, but everything up to that point is testable, if the underlying API is built for it.
GUIs have a similar problem; there is nothing fundamentally impossible about testing GUIs, but they are not designed for it. The two major flaws are the inability to run the GUI without the fully-fledged event loop running (I ought to be able to poke the GUI and say "Hey, run your event loop once now"), and the inability to completely transparently post events to the GUI as if the user did it. (I've managed to convince Tk (in Python) to do the former but I still can't say "pretend that the user just pressed the 'a' key correctly.)
Many people then claim that GUIs are untestable, when the problem is that all current existing GUIs are untestable; the class itself is not untestable. Similarly, if you had better support, it'd be easier to test the more interesting properties. I have to admit that that would probably require an even more fundamental re-design than in the GUI case, but it is still possible. Right now, though, too few people care about testing and even fewer people are actually good at it for us to end up with testable libraries. It has to be an explicit goal.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
Another way is that Final Fantasy VI was two games, one a combat simulation and one a rather simple "move the drama forward" game. The combat game typically lasts about a minute, longer for boss fights, and I've never played VI through, but my experience with that generation of FF is that I spend a lot of time wishing the text speed went another three or four notches higher than the highest setting. Call the combat "one game" that repeats a lot and it ain't no 30 hours.
(And before you scream bloody murder about how unfair that is, consider the full implication of the phrase "another way to look at it", as opposed to, say, "you're an idiot for thinking that, here's the God-given truth". Folks, there is a difference!)
I like RPGs. I really like RPGs. But rationally speaking, I still can't figure out how two rather crappy games, a combat simulator that is usually pathetically simple (excepting boss fights, average fights are about a minute-ish), and a rather simple, often flat-out linear drama adds up to be such good fun. I wouldn't play either one alone. (I do really like Tactics style games, but note they tend to have more meat in the combat system, although not as much as I'd like so far, and I do rather find myself wishing they'd speed up, too, so animations don't eat so much f'ing time. Advance Wars with all the animations turned off royally kicks ass, though.)
Oh god, not another one.
In 2005, you should not have a perceptible delay between keypress and a simple ack. response like putting up an asterisk.
The problem, of course, is not technology. It's this god-damned "save every fraction of a penny at all costs, and fuck the customer/user!" mentality. A couple of cents more per terminal is probably all it would take to eliminate the delay, but, well, like I said, fuck the user.
I can't use Comcast digital cable boxes because of the multi-second delay before button presses react. (That one boggles the mind, I think they had to work to make it suck that bad.) It pisses me off that in the time it takes to navigate to one On Demand movie, the value of my time for the time it took to do the navigation would have been sufficient to make a snappy, responsive system. You could quite literally rack up hours spent just waiting for their interface to update in a year if you actually tried to use it (from what I gather from the way they keep dropping the price on On-Demand things, nobody does), and that says they care so little about my time that they'd rather save 5 cents.
Normally, I don't much care about "bloat" in desktop computers, I think most people bitching about it don't really understand what that "bloat" is buying them. But in the embedded space, fire away with your "bloat" accusations. The work it takes to make a machine in 2005 react more slowly than a machine from 1970, no exaggeration, boggles the mind.
Fuckers.
avoiding carbs is basically the same thing as starving. carbohydrates should be your main source of energy - fat and protein don't work anywhere near as well (hence the atkins diet being so bad).
If this is true, why don't Atkins dieters drop dead due to (energy) starvation, and why do so many of them report increases in energy levels, in ways that can't just be their imagination?
I've heard theories like yours, but they predict things that don't happen in reality. Therefore, I find myself unable to put much stock in them. Given the experiences I have and the experiences of others, like I said, you're darned near going to have to produce corpses to back up your claims, or one hell of a lot of studies that I'm quite confident don't exist, as I've looked for them.
I think you're peddling psuedo-science.
Quit and find a new job, because if your current job is taking your health, you're actually working 168 hours a week.
And I bet your hourly pay sucks.
And it could be worse than that... if it takes years off your life, you could be "working" more than 168 hours a week.... arbitrarily more.
What you are doing is something that you are simply not designed to do. Some people may be able to do it, neither you nor I are one of them. Stop it, or pay the penalty, collected by Reality, the least lenient loan shark of them all.
Gonna go with the AC on this one. Only those who show they know the rules get leeway to break them.
The legislature can pass what laws it likes. The courts can then strike them down when they are challenged.
Given the rulings of the Supreme Court, this would be a trivial case for even the lowest courts to strike down, barring an "activist judge".
The system is working as it is intended to. Panic when the Supremem Court (or even the relevant Circuit Court) upholds it, which won't happen. You can't keep stupidity out of the system, you can only build a system robust enough to handle it when it happens.