There are different types of specs. Big, formal ones, done in a vacuum, and less rigid ones. I'm a big believer in properly defining "interfaces" between different chunks of code or modules, and effectively, that's a spec. Again, I'm sure Linus uses defined interfaces all the time.
Linus codes to specs every day; the Unix/Posix API was a useful one, certainly; he didn't just go inventing his own system calls, he used standards.
I can understand why he wouldn't want to be arbitrarily constrained in kernel development by being restricted by a spec. But perhaps if he applied a bit more of this, I wouldn't have a __foo_bar_blat when compiling and loading a module with a new kernel. (And after digging, finding out that the kernel system call is no longer present. Arrrrgh!!!) This, IMHO, is one of Linux's biggest weaknesses.
Does it strike anyone else as odd, that the scientist quoted in article mentions the DNA possibility almost in passing, but rambles on proudly, at length, about how he figure out how it died from being hit with "fast moving resin"? (wtf?) Nothing like breaking your leg from being hit by maple syrup.
There is/was a commercial product based upon a similar approach; it used a camera mounted above a custom circular mirror to achieve a 360 image on a standard camera.
I believe the company was based in Halifax, Nova Scotia; not sure if they're around any more; if anyone as a reference, I'd be curious in knowing if they've managed to commerialize it.
I found this quite interesting. I've been cranking out high volume net servers and custom systems for a decade or so, and only recently have I become enamoured enough with the ubiquity and utility of CSS, so that I am using it regularly in my daily design world.
I tend to code for the lowest common demoninator, and these days, that is high enough that pretty extensive CSS stuff can be done (and tested on IE, Firefox, and Opera).
The *one* thing I wish CSS had, was a little more of the Tk-ish packer behaviour when it came to layouts. I always cringe when I say "position: absolute", but in the end, I manage quite nicely regardless...
Congrats to Slashdot, glad to see we're progressing with our faith in the ubiquity of specific technologies at a similar pace:)
Well, I didn't RTFA because I wanted to give a fresh and unbiased consumer opinion on what ebooks neat (yeah, that's it, that's why i didn't read the article before spouting off, really...)
Two things in my mind: choice, and ruggedness, are the two main factors. I've been reading a whack of old classics on my iPaq lately, and it really does inspire me. I have a wealth of inspiring reading in my pocket, when I'm waiting in line, taking a coffee break, walking the beach, or otherwise have time on my hands. There are times I will read when I wouldn't before, because I didn't have the book on me. Now it's on my PDA (which I use for scheduling, reminders, work, etc.), I will read.
However, 1) the choice of books to load on the PDA is very limited still, and 2) there are places I wouldn't whip out my PDA, that I would whip out a paperback. With some more ruggedness, water (and sand/dust) proofing of the reading device, and better selection, I'd be all over it (and pay for the books).
You host the Wiki for (and presumably use) Cinerella? I'm amazed you'd have something as sluggish as a P400 anywhere in your house; Cinerella seems to require (or at least perfer) hardware many generations beyond that.:)
Heard these claims before, at lower speeds, but supposedly impressive ones.
The problem is with cellular wireless technology, is that there are dropouts. And TCP/IP deals very poorly with this level of retransmission. With IX technology, I get something like 2400 effective throughput, if it works at all, due to lost packets and such.
I would tend to assume the same will be the case with this wonderful new technology.
I'll *start* to believe these claims, when they can complete a voice call (a fairly low bandwidth application) without dropouts and dropped calls.
Never overestimate the abilities (likely due to limited resources) of law enforcement.
I worked with the police and FBI to help put a child molestor away (who happened to post child porn to a site I ran). I was quite underwhelmed at the technical abilities of the law enforcement; I had to do a lot of educating about some PC and Web basics.
But in the end, this creepy dude got life in federal prison, no chance of parole, due to the child porn charges related to my site. (Ironically, he received more limited sentences for the actual abuse of children; something a bit wrong there.)
Was also a bit wild talking with the state trooper who caught this fellow, stating in a deep drawl, "if I had known what this guy did, I could have saved us all a lot of trouble." Not that I would necessarily have been sad to see that happen, either. (Although I'm told he probably won't last long in prison, once the other inmates find out what he did.)
butter and ice cream are both essentially different forms of milk, but you don't see people walking around with cones full of butter do you?
The Canadian production, Just for Laughs Gags, did a bit where they had an ice cream vendor serve up scoops of frozen butter to people. Was pretty funny watching the reactions...:)
As a side note - America's disdain for socialism is rooted in the innate distrust of government and a belief in the "American Dream." American's don't like taxes (ask the English about that)so establishing a broad social net funded by high tax rates is very unlikely.
And if you want that, just go a few hundred clicks north to Canada. We're taxed out the ying-yang, but unforseen medical bills won't make me lose my house (instead, I had an ex-wife take care of that, thank you very much).
For those looking for a similar approach, but to take their *Linux* environment with them anywhere, and run it on a Windows platform, I highly recommend coLinux.
Since Windows always has, and always will (well, for the forseeable future) have better and more timely hardware support, having the core OS be Windows tends to have advantages. Also, I can test on IE, and Windows versions of Firefox and Opera, all on the same box.
But my core work, developing on Linux, doesn't need all of that fancy hardware support, I just need the tools. CoLinux lets me run a virtual Linux session under Windows, with networking, and access via X (or VNC).
I take my virtual 2G partition with me between work, home, and elsewhere, with the coLinux binaries there as well, in case I need a quick install on some new Windoiws box.
I would love to see a Knoppix-like ISO for coLinux; plug it into your windows box, and be running a full Linux desktop virtually.
Oh yeah, and the real kicker for me, is performance. It vastly outperforms Linux running under VMWare. And it never has crashed on me (well, except when I removed the networking driver on the Windows side, while coLinux was still running).
Reminds me of a post I saw on Usenet (r.h.f.?) many years ago; I can't find a reference to it any more, but it was someone claiming to have a copy of the LISP source code to SDI (Reagan's Star Wars project, from way back). They proved it by showing the last page of the code:
Slashdot won't let me post it, but it was a solid page of ))))'s.
I love BSD in general, find it fast, solid, and so forth. However, in exploring it not that long ago, I found one glaring omission was journaling file system support. There was some incomplete early version, which was not under active development, and that was it.
Can anyone comment on this?
(It had kick-ass volume manager support in Vinum, long before Linux had it's volume manager; but it seems Linux has leapfrogged BSD in this area, too.)
Top tech I miss, is people putting top ten lists all on one page, rather than having to click "continue" ten times. Congrats to cNet for being concise on this one... Reminds me of the old days...
Good keyboards? I find bang for the buck for key boards has come a *long* way. I buy $7.95 Cicero keyboards at Future Shop (argh), which have an incredibly good feel to them. They way my kids (okay, okay, and I), go through keyboards, I'm glad I have have "disposable" keyboards with a great feel. Other than that, thought it was a cool article.
Rather an interesting history of the Theremin here.
One interesting snippet:
After rave reviews at Moscow electronics conferences, Theremin demonstrated the device to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin personally. Lenin was so impressed with the device that he began taking lessons in playing it, commissioned 600 of the instruments for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate the latest Soviet technology and the invention of electronic music.
The fact that humans have a blind spot and earlier "designs" of squids do not, hardly implies a common designer.
The metal panels on my Honda aren't as strong as earlier designs of other automobiles, which might protect someone better in a crash. But the lighter weight helps for fuel efficiency, lower cost (well, maybe not for Honda:P), and so forth.
In design, it's all about tradeoffs. Having a blind spot that the brain compensates for, and does not noticably reduce survival rates, might have been more than a fair trade for the simplicity in designing the eye with this limitation.
Generally, I'm a believer in evolution. There are times when I see things in nature that make me think "there's no way that genetic diversitivation and chance could have led to this." On the other hand, the mind-bogglingly large timeframes involved (insert Douglas Adams quote here, changing distance to time), make it seem slightly possible.
The biggest question is whether or not we will ever know for sure either way.
Slashdot Mirror
There are different types of specs. Big, formal ones, done in a vacuum, and less rigid ones. I'm a big believer in properly defining "interfaces" between different chunks of code or modules, and effectively, that's a spec. Again, I'm sure Linus uses defined interfaces all the time.
Linus codes to specs every day; the Unix/Posix API was a useful one, certainly; he didn't just go inventing his own system calls, he used standards.
I can understand why he wouldn't want to be arbitrarily constrained in kernel development by being restricted by a spec. But perhaps if he applied a bit more of this, I wouldn't have a __foo_bar_blat when compiling and loading a module with a new kernel. (And after digging, finding out that the kernel system call is no longer present. Arrrrgh!!!) This, IMHO, is one of Linux's biggest weaknesses.
Does it strike anyone else as odd, that the scientist quoted in article mentions the DNA possibility almost in passing, but rambles on proudly, at length, about how he figure out how it died from being hit with "fast moving resin"? (wtf?) Nothing like breaking your leg from being hit by maple syrup.
Anyone else think this was about a roller coaster with some smarts to keep you from spilling your beer?
Yes, we all knokw what Baldy thinks of Google. One thing I haven't seen in the press, is what Bowl Job's opinion of google might be.
There is/was a commercial product based upon a similar approach; it used a camera mounted above a custom circular mirror to achieve a 360 image on a standard camera.
I believe the company was based in Halifax, Nova Scotia; not sure if they're around any more; if anyone as a reference, I'd be curious in knowing if they've managed to commerialize it.
I found this quite interesting. I've been cranking out high volume net servers and custom systems for a decade or so, and only recently have I become enamoured enough with the ubiquity and utility of CSS, so that I am using it regularly in my daily design world.
:)
I tend to code for the lowest common demoninator, and these days, that is high enough that pretty extensive CSS stuff can be done (and tested on IE, Firefox, and Opera).
The *one* thing I wish CSS had, was a little more of the Tk-ish packer behaviour when it came to layouts. I always cringe when I say "position: absolute", but in the end, I manage quite nicely regardless...
Congrats to Slashdot, glad to see we're progressing with our faith in the ubiquity of specific technologies at a similar pace
Well, I didn't RTFA because I wanted to give a fresh and unbiased consumer opinion on what ebooks neat (yeah, that's it, that's why i didn't read the article before spouting off, really...)
Two things in my mind: choice, and ruggedness, are the two main factors. I've been reading a whack of old classics on my iPaq lately, and it really does inspire me. I have a wealth of inspiring reading in my pocket, when I'm waiting in line, taking a coffee break, walking the beach, or otherwise have time on my hands. There are times I will read when I wouldn't before, because I didn't have the book on me. Now it's on my PDA (which I use for scheduling, reminders, work, etc.), I will read.
However, 1) the choice of books to load on the PDA is very limited still, and 2) there are places I wouldn't whip out my PDA, that I would whip out a paperback. With some more ruggedness, water (and sand/dust) proofing of the reading device, and better selection, I'd be all over it (and pay for the books).
A static electricity field meter is something firefighters bring with them? That sounds awfully suspect.
You host the Wiki for (and presumably use) Cinerella? I'm amazed you'd have something as sluggish as a P400 anywhere in your house; Cinerella seems to require (or at least perfer) hardware many generations beyond that. :)
Wholy crap! I'm glad there's only one version of Linux to choose from. Whew...
Heard these claims before, at lower speeds, but supposedly impressive ones.
The problem is with cellular wireless technology, is that there are dropouts. And TCP/IP deals very poorly with this level of retransmission. With IX technology, I get something like 2400 effective throughput, if it works at all, due to lost packets and such.
I would tend to assume the same will be the case with this wonderful new technology.
I'll *start* to believe these claims, when they can complete a voice call (a fairly low bandwidth application) without dropouts and dropped calls.
Never overestimate the abilities (likely due to limited resources) of law enforcement.
I worked with the police and FBI to help put a child molestor away (who happened to post child porn to a site I ran). I was quite underwhelmed at the technical abilities of the law enforcement; I had to do a lot of educating about some PC and Web basics.
But in the end, this creepy dude got life in federal prison, no chance of parole, due to the child porn charges related to my site. (Ironically, he received more limited sentences for the actual abuse of children; something a bit wrong there.)
Was also a bit wild talking with the state trooper who caught this fellow, stating in a deep drawl, "if I had known what this guy did, I could have saved us all a lot of trouble." Not that I would necessarily have been sad to see that happen, either. (Although I'm told he probably won't last long in prison, once the other inmates find out what he did.)
The Canadian production, Just for Laughs Gags, did a bit where they had an ice cream vendor serve up scoops of frozen butter to people. Was pretty funny watching the reactions...
While this is technically feasible, along with line-printer-music, and other cool hacks, this story smells a bit.
A postscript dot matrix printer? Has there ever been such a beast?
And if you want that, just go a few hundred clicks north to Canada. We're taxed out the ying-yang, but unforseen medical bills won't make me lose my house (instead, I had an ex-wife take care of that, thank you very much).
Insightful post, BTW.
For those looking for a similar approach, but to take their *Linux* environment with them anywhere, and run it on a Windows platform, I highly recommend coLinux.
Since Windows always has, and always will (well, for the forseeable future) have better and more timely hardware support, having the core OS be Windows tends to have advantages. Also, I can test on IE, and Windows versions of Firefox and Opera, all on the same box.
But my core work, developing on Linux, doesn't need all of that fancy hardware support, I just need the tools. CoLinux lets me run a virtual Linux session under Windows, with networking, and access via X (or VNC).
I take my virtual 2G partition with me between work, home, and elsewhere, with the coLinux binaries there as well, in case I need a quick install on some new Windoiws box.
I would love to see a Knoppix-like ISO for coLinux; plug it into your windows box, and be running a full Linux desktop virtually.
Oh yeah, and the real kicker for me, is performance. It vastly outperforms Linux running under VMWare. And it never has crashed on me (well, except when I removed the networking driver on the Windows side, while coLinux was still running).
Definitely worth checking out.
Reminds me of a post I saw on Usenet (r.h.f.?) many years ago; I can't find a reference to it any more, but it was someone claiming to have a copy of the LISP source code to SDI (Reagan's Star Wars project, from way back). They proved it by showing the last page of the code:
Slashdot won't let me post it, but it was a solid page of ))))'s.
I love BSD in general, find it fast, solid, and so forth. However, in exploring it not that long ago, I found one glaring omission was journaling file system support. There was some incomplete early version, which was not under active development, and that was it.
Can anyone comment on this?
(It had kick-ass volume manager support in Vinum, long before Linux had it's volume manager; but it seems Linux has leapfrogged BSD in this area, too.)
Top tech I miss, is people putting top ten lists all on one page, rather than having to click "continue" ten times. Congrats to cNet for being concise on this one... Reminds me of the old days...
Good keyboards? I find bang for the buck for key boards has come a *long* way. I buy $7.95 Cicero keyboards at Future Shop (argh), which have an incredibly good feel to them. They way my kids (okay, okay, and I), go through keyboards, I'm glad I have have "disposable" keyboards with a great feel. Other than that, thought it was a cool article.
No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.
Yeah, it hates it when you do that.
Funniest... comment... ever...
How much time did you have, and what was your budget?
Rather an interesting history of the Theremin here.
One interesting snippet:
After rave reviews at Moscow electronics conferences, Theremin demonstrated the device to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin personally. Lenin was so impressed with the device that he began taking lessons in playing it, commissioned 600 of the instruments for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate the latest Soviet technology and the invention of electronic music.
The fact that humans have a blind spot and earlier "designs" of squids do not, hardly implies a common designer.
:P), and so forth.
The metal panels on my Honda aren't as strong as earlier designs of other automobiles, which might protect someone better in a crash. But the lighter weight helps for fuel efficiency, lower cost (well, maybe not for Honda
In design, it's all about tradeoffs. Having a blind spot that the brain compensates for, and does not noticably reduce survival rates, might have been more than a fair trade for the simplicity in designing the eye with this limitation.
Generally, I'm a believer in evolution. There are times when I see things in nature that make me think "there's no way that genetic diversitivation and chance could have led to this." On the other hand, the mind-bogglingly large timeframes involved (insert Douglas Adams quote here, changing distance to time), make it seem slightly possible.
The biggest question is whether or not we will ever know for sure either way.
But I thought...?
(Come on folks, eventually I'm going at least get at +1 Funny for that line...)
This is a fairly common and unremarkable occurrence, really; I guess the fact journalists were involved might make it silghtly more newsworthy. Maybe.
What is far more interesting is the history of the word Snafu and it's related kin.