Because for most people, Windows does just work. (Hate to burst your bubble.) I know where you're coming from, but for a lot of people, Linux just doesn't work. It's a lot better than it used to be, but if that Wifi adapter isn't recognized, they have no idea where to go from there.
Of course the operating system that is pre-installed on a PC has a huge advantage because the OEM has made sure all of the included hardware works with it. If you buy from one of the few vendors that supports an operating system other than Windows, the other operating system will enjoy the same advantage. For example, I'm using a MacBookPro. All of the hardware works well with OSX, but not all of it works with Linux because Apple's firmware doesn't set up the hardware completely correctly in PC BIOS mode and some of the Linux drivers are missing for the new devices (I'm looking at you Broadcom). Apple does provide some drivers for Windows, but not all of the hardware is fully functional, including the Intel GPU. When I buy a laptop from one of the Linux-supporting vendors like zareason or System76 all of the hardware will work fine with Linux. The reason far more people have trouble getting hardware to work with Linux than Windows is simply that they've bought PCs intended to run Windows and ones designed to run Linux are rare.
For most people, Windows just works until it doesn't. Quite often, that's because they were careless and got malware. I've seen and had to clean up many such machines. Very little of that malware relies on modifying bootloaders or Windows kernel, so UEFI secure boot won't do a lick of good against it. No machine running a desktop operating system can seriously be called an appliance like a fridge or car, least of all Windows. Phones and tablets can be appliances as long as no third-party apps are installed, but there's only so much complexity a machine can have before it ceases to be an appliance.
Why don't we see a drugs manufacturers killing themselves with an 'oval shaped pills' (or as they would put it 'an anatomically efficient vessel for introduction of effective chemicals into the gastro-intestinal system') patent?
What the hell is the department of the Patent Office responsible for SW doing?!
It may not be quite as bad as "oval shaped pills," but bad drug patents are common. It is the entire UPTO that's broken.
or SCTP, or TIPC, or RDS. There are lots of message-based protocols out there. Why use TCP if you don't want streams?
Industry standard for the past 20 years has been to try and run every freaking thing over TCP port 80, often thru a proxy and a NAT. Some scummy companies try to claim something that limited actually is "internet access". And everyone is loudly trying to bend over backwards to reimplement that in ipv6. Sometimes a bad idea just needs to get chopped but no one wants to admit it.
Let me get this straight. You're trying to blame poor service from "scummy" ISPs on the easiest to use Internet protocol built on IP? You need to revisit your history if you think that it has been industry standard to run everything over TCP port 80. Last time I checked, TCP port 80 is used for exactly HTTP. There are certainly plenty of bad ideas out there, but TCP wasn't one of them.
Streams are just as trivial to implement on top of messages as the other way around. In fact, that's exactly what TCP is. But it is slightly painful to implement either one on top of the other, and since 99% of the time people want messages, logically that should have been the default.
How can you say that messages aren't the default orientation, since IP is a message-based protocol? For implementing applications, TCP and UDP have equal footing. The fact that TCP is far more used implies that your 99% figure was pulled out of your ass.
In my opinion the biggest problem with TCP/IP is that TCP is a stream protocol. Everyone who uses it immediately creates some sort of scheme to divide the stream into messages. Making it a stream protocol is logically equivalent to making it a messaging protocol with messages of size 1 byte. Maybe someone somewhere uses it as a pure byte stream, but it's not very common (and can be easily simulated over a message-based protocol).
Not that I blame Vint Cerf for that.....he created it, he didn't decide which parts would become popular.
Yeah, the most commonly used Internet application protocols aren't stream protocols. That is, unless you count HTTP and SMTP. You also might want to study up on this new-fangled thing called UDP.
And enterprise is slow because they're worried about end-to-end connectivity for security reasons. NAT breaks that, so it's a nice secondary layer beyond the firewall at ensure they don't accidentally leave their customer database exposed (it might be protected on IPv4, but exposed on IPv6).
Relying on NAT rather than a stateful firewall for security is a rookie mistake. NAT provides absolutely no security benefits beyond a properly configured stateful firewall. If you don't want to allow any incoming connections, configure that on the firewall and NAT is irrelevant. OTOH, many of the increasingly common peer to peer protocols, such as those used for VoIP are made less reliable and harder to diagnose by NAT.
NAT decouples the internal private network from the external network - and I'm sure any IT admin who has had to renumber their internal network would agree it's a huge PITA on IPv4. Luckily though they don't have to do it when their ISP gives them a new range of IPv4 addresses except for the few machines that are using them (DNS servers mostly - other servers can often hide behind NAT).
Why should it be necessary to ever change statically-allocated network addresses? The only reason that's necessary for IPv4 is that the addresses are scarce.
Even worse - home users, who most likely do NOT have a working DNS setup and have to type the damn things in. And just when my parents have gotten used to typing the long string of nonsense garbage to hit the printer, the ISP changes their prefix and they have to learn a new set of IPs.
As you say, the problem is the lack of a working DNS setup. Few people should ever have to be aware of IP addresses, including your parents. Multicast DNS already works great today with IPv4 and IPv6.
If we break the concept of true-end-to-end connectivity (already broken thanks to firewalls), the IPv6 transition could've been done years ago - everyone replaces their Linksys or Cisco router and go on their way, while the router does NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT as appropriate. It just works, my parents don't have to learn anything new (and I don't have to fiddle with their machines and everything), etc. etc.
The simplicity you want is already provided by the end-to-end model of IP (both versions) and broken by NAT. The only reason we must use NAT for IPv4 is the scarcity of addresses.
IPv6 is sorely needed, yes. But the assumptions made 20 years ago when it was designed just aren't true today and no one wants to play network admin for their entire extended family and neighbourhood. And enterprise is slow because they're worried about end-to-end connectivity for security reasons. NAT breaks that, so it's a nice secondary layer beyond the firewall at ensure they don't accidentally leave their customer database exposed (it might be protected on IPv4, but exposed on IPv6).
We can probably switch a good chunk of the Internet to IPv6 by haivng a transition plan of home users replacing their routers with ones that do NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT - they're used to stuff like that and it makes life easy. Ditto enterprise customers - most businesses will probably just switch if they only have to replace one box and not have to learn the ins and outs of IPv6 and getting every PC to have a routable address it doesn't need.
You're proposing something fundamentally different from IP. What would it look like and what rationale do you have that it would be better?
Hence the backronym Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
So, which full-featured editor or IDE uses less than 8MiB today and what programmer uses a machine with less RAM than that? I'd be very impressed if my Emacs (or any powerful editor) used only that much.
Although there is a lot of software in use written in Lisp, McCarthy's discovery has influenced programming far beyond that written in Lisp itself. This isn't surprising, since he set out to describe programs mathematically rather than simply create a new programming language. Paul Graham has enumerated the language features that originally made Lisp different. Most of them, including conditionals, recursion, and garbage collection are now commonly used by programmers who know nothing about Lisp itself.
Soon in Slashdot, and following the previous topic of why so many bee trucks crashing or whatever:
Why so many programming language creators are dying these days?
Maybe people are missing their life-sustaining honey shipments. But seriously, while it is sad that such important people have died I'm not sure two programming language creators constitute "so many."
According to Paul Graham, McCarthy discovered underlying principles of computing. If he's right, it would make just as much sense to say that McCarthy invented Lisp as to say that ancient people invented numbers. People gave names and symbols to numbers, but the concept is much more basic than an invention.
So, who are you expecting to be the third? I guess Knuth is getting up there in years, but he can't die until he finishes The Art of Computer Programming.
I think you mean creator or inventor. It's not like the Lisp programming language was just sat out in the wilds of Chile under a rock waiting to be found by an archaeologist.
The school described in the article sounds excellent to me in general. I don't have any problem with the things they do do. It's the negative attitude that computers are harmful to learning that seems a little nutty. Perhaps it makes sense that kids of techy people go to such schools, since they have more exposure to computers outside of school than the average.
I was able to use computers at home from about the age of seven, even before I went to school. I played some games, educational and otherwise, as well as learned BASIC programming and wrote school assignments in a word processor. I suspect that kids who don't have much access to computers at home could benefit from learning how to write simple programs and make web pages at school. Eighth grade is very late for computer exposure to begin, today far more so than when I was in school.
Oh pooh. Real life problems don't come with pre-programmed immediate answers. Immediate feedback encourages trail and error problem solving rather than thinking through the answers, and is very harmful.
Real life problems require planning, critical thinking and experimentation to solve. Immediate feedback is often extremely helpful. As a programmer, I rely on it all the time. I certainly don't miss the era when programs had to be submitted on stacks of punch cards and the result would come back hours later. Then, it was necessary to consider everything the computer was doing. Today, they're far too complex for that to be practical.
I also have yet to meet a piece of paper that gives immediate feedback. However, I have met teachers who can give better targeted and more useful feedback than any computer program. Learning tools are great, but perhaps a bit more emphasis should be given to inspiring and training more good teachers.
It is certainly deeply flawed thinking to think computers can replace quality human teachers. It's just as misguided to think that because a good teacher doesn't need computers to teach reading and arithmetic that computers can't be effective tools in the classroom. Even if computers aren't particularly effective tools for teaching arithmetic and reading, they are pretty nice for posting things on the web and learning how to write programs. The web didn't exist when I was in elementary school, but I did learn to write programs from a young age and wrote school assignments using word processors at home. I didn't have access to computers in my classrooms, so I would have been at a disadvantage if I didn't have it at home.
Disclaimer: I don't have hg installed here at work so I can't verify that it really is version 1.3.
Its odd how difficult it is to find . There used to be links to source on the download page, but now there are not. All of this controversy could have been avoided if the Mercurial repository had been easier to find. The actual hg repository appears to be at https://code.google.com/p/growl/ . I do have hg installed, and it appears that 1.3 is in that repository. I'm not sure how long it's been there, but if it's been there all along, the developers could have simply pointed to it to allay any fears about Growl going proprietary.
Lisp was there first in many cases, yet to the majority of the programming world, it's just a bunch silly parenthesis (nevermind that semicolons and curly braces everywhere are just as bad if not worse).
I'm fully aware that most programmers are unaware of the significance of Lisp, which is why I also gave mentioned Python, which is far more mainstream. Lisps were only the first to implement the features described in TFA; they've been implemented in many other languages since then.
On one hand, yes, the features probably are largely stolen.
Yeah, because once those features were implemented in Android, they disappeared from iOS
On the other hand, that’s kind of how technology evolves.
Locking down products and ideas to the person who originally introduced them doesn’t work patents don’t work and I don’t think a free for all would either (copying something is always cheaper than development). So what is the solution here?
It's entirely how technology evolves. Even patents are supposed to be granted to help technology advance overall rather than give anyone one person or company the edge over all others.
I'm wondering if my programming skills have fallen away so much through lack of use that I don't understand this as well anymore, or if the summary/article is just full of buzzwords and impressive sounding jargon.
It's entirely the latter. What they're describing is nothing Lisps haven't been doing for decades. Although I don't need to use in my everyday programming, standard Python also exposes APIs for compiling source and manipulating syntax trees.
Slashdot Mirror
Because for most people, Windows does just work. (Hate to burst your bubble.) I know where you're coming from, but for a lot of people, Linux just doesn't work. It's a lot better than it used to be, but if that Wifi adapter isn't recognized, they have no idea where to go from there.
Of course the operating system that is pre-installed on a PC has a huge advantage because the OEM has made sure all of the included hardware works with it. If you buy from one of the few vendors that supports an operating system other than Windows, the other operating system will enjoy the same advantage. For example, I'm using a MacBookPro. All of the hardware works well with OSX, but not all of it works with Linux because Apple's firmware doesn't set up the hardware completely correctly in PC BIOS mode and some of the Linux drivers are missing for the new devices (I'm looking at you Broadcom). Apple does provide some drivers for Windows, but not all of the hardware is fully functional, including the Intel GPU. When I buy a laptop from one of the Linux-supporting vendors like zareason or System76 all of the hardware will work fine with Linux. The reason far more people have trouble getting hardware to work with Linux than Windows is simply that they've bought PCs intended to run Windows and ones designed to run Linux are rare.
For most people, Windows just works until it doesn't. Quite often, that's because they were careless and got malware. I've seen and had to clean up many such machines. Very little of that malware relies on modifying bootloaders or Windows kernel, so UEFI secure boot won't do a lick of good against it. No machine running a desktop operating system can seriously be called an appliance like a fridge or car, least of all Windows. Phones and tablets can be appliances as long as no third-party apps are installed, but there's only so much complexity a machine can have before it ceases to be an appliance.
Why don't we see a drugs manufacturers killing themselves with an 'oval shaped pills' (or as they would put it 'an anatomically efficient vessel for introduction of effective chemicals into the gastro-intestinal system') patent?
What the hell is the department of the Patent Office responsible for SW doing?!
It may not be quite as bad as "oval shaped pills," but bad drug patents are common. It is the entire UPTO that's broken.
or SCTP, or TIPC, or RDS. There are lots of message-based protocols out there. Why use TCP if you don't want streams?
Industry standard for the past 20 years has been to try and run every freaking thing over TCP port 80, often thru a proxy and a NAT. Some scummy companies try to claim something that limited actually is "internet access". And everyone is loudly trying to bend over backwards to reimplement that in ipv6. Sometimes a bad idea just needs to get chopped but no one wants to admit it.
Let me get this straight. You're trying to blame poor service from "scummy" ISPs on the easiest to use Internet protocol built on IP? You need to revisit your history if you think that it has been industry standard to run everything over TCP port 80. Last time I checked, TCP port 80 is used for exactly HTTP. There are certainly plenty of bad ideas out there, but TCP wasn't one of them.
Streams are just as trivial to implement on top of messages as the other way around. In fact, that's exactly what TCP is. But it is slightly painful to implement either one on top of the other, and since 99% of the time people want messages, logically that should have been the default.
How can you say that messages aren't the default orientation, since IP is a message-based protocol? For implementing applications, TCP and UDP have equal footing. The fact that TCP is far more used implies that your 99% figure was pulled out of your ass.
In my opinion the biggest problem with TCP/IP is that TCP is a stream protocol. Everyone who uses it immediately creates some sort of scheme to divide the stream into messages. Making it a stream protocol is logically equivalent to making it a messaging protocol with messages of size 1 byte. Maybe someone somewhere uses it as a pure byte stream, but it's not very common (and can be easily simulated over a message-based protocol).
Not that I blame Vint Cerf for that.....he created it, he didn't decide which parts would become popular.
Yeah, the most commonly used Internet application protocols aren't stream protocols. That is, unless you count HTTP and SMTP. You also might want to study up on this new-fangled thing called UDP.
And enterprise is slow because they're worried about end-to-end connectivity for security reasons. NAT breaks that, so it's a nice secondary layer beyond the firewall at ensure they don't accidentally leave their customer database exposed (it might be protected on IPv4, but exposed on IPv6).
Relying on NAT rather than a stateful firewall for security is a rookie mistake. NAT provides absolutely no security benefits beyond a properly configured stateful firewall. If you don't want to allow any incoming connections, configure that on the firewall and NAT is irrelevant. OTOH, many of the increasingly common peer to peer protocols, such as those used for VoIP are made less reliable and harder to diagnose by NAT.
That's the big problem.
NAT decouples the internal private network from the external network - and I'm sure any IT admin who has had to renumber their internal network would agree it's a huge PITA on IPv4. Luckily though they don't have to do it when their ISP gives them a new range of IPv4 addresses except for the few machines that are using them (DNS servers mostly - other servers can often hide behind NAT).
Why should it be necessary to ever change statically-allocated network addresses? The only reason that's necessary for IPv4 is that the addresses are scarce.
Even worse - home users, who most likely do NOT have a working DNS setup and have to type the damn things in. And just when my parents have gotten used to typing the long string of nonsense garbage to hit the printer, the ISP changes their prefix and they have to learn a new set of IPs.
As you say, the problem is the lack of a working DNS setup. Few people should ever have to be aware of IP addresses, including your parents. Multicast DNS already works great today with IPv4 and IPv6.
If we break the concept of true-end-to-end connectivity (already broken thanks to firewalls), the IPv6 transition could've been done years ago - everyone replaces their Linksys or Cisco router and go on their way, while the router does NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT as appropriate. It just works, my parents don't have to learn anything new (and I don't have to fiddle with their machines and everything), etc. etc.
The simplicity you want is already provided by the end-to-end model of IP (both versions) and broken by NAT. The only reason we must use NAT for IPv4 is the scarcity of addresses.
IPv6 is sorely needed, yes. But the assumptions made 20 years ago when it was designed just aren't true today and no one wants to play network admin for their entire extended family and neighbourhood. And enterprise is slow because they're worried about end-to-end connectivity for security reasons. NAT breaks that, so it's a nice secondary layer beyond the firewall at ensure they don't accidentally leave their customer database exposed (it might be protected on IPv4, but exposed on IPv6).
We can probably switch a good chunk of the Internet to IPv6 by haivng a transition plan of home users replacing their routers with ones that do NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT - they're used to stuff like that and it makes life easy. Ditto enterprise customers - most businesses will probably just switch if they only have to replace one box and not have to learn the ins and outs of IPv6 and getting every PC to have a routable address it doesn't need.
You're proposing something fundamentally different from IP. What would it look like and what rationale do you have that it would be better?
Hence the backronym Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
So, which full-featured editor or IDE uses less than 8MiB today and what programmer uses a machine with less RAM than that? I'd be very impressed if my Emacs (or any powerful editor) used only that much.
Although there is a lot of software in use written in Lisp, McCarthy's discovery has influenced programming far beyond that written in Lisp itself. This isn't surprising, since he set out to describe programs mathematically rather than simply create a new programming language. Paul Graham has enumerated the language features that originally made Lisp different. Most of them, including conditionals, recursion, and garbage collection are now commonly used by programmers who know nothing about Lisp itself.
Soon in Slashdot, and following the previous topic of why so many bee trucks crashing or whatever:
Why so many programming language creators are dying these days?
Maybe people are missing their life-sustaining honey shipments. But seriously, while it is sad that such important people have died I'm not sure two programming language creators constitute "so many."
According to Paul Graham, McCarthy discovered underlying principles of computing. If he's right, it would make just as much sense to say that McCarthy invented Lisp as to say that ancient people invented numbers. People gave names and symbols to numbers, but the concept is much more basic than an invention.
Does that mean that Ballmer is next? I shudder to think who'd have to go to offset him.
No, actually, McCarthy did discover Lisp, at least according to Paul Graham.
So Dennis Ritchie and now John McCarthy....
So, who are you expecting to be the third? I guess Knuth is getting up there in years, but he can't die until he finishes The Art of Computer Programming.
I think you mean creator or inventor. It's not like the Lisp programming language was just sat out in the wilds of Chile under a rock waiting to be found by an archaeologist.
No, actually, McCarthy did discover Lisp, at least according to Paul Graham.
Please read TFA. The question is not over use of SSL, which the author of TFA "applauded."
The school described in the article sounds excellent to me in general. I don't have any problem with the things they do do. It's the negative attitude that computers are harmful to learning that seems a little nutty. Perhaps it makes sense that kids of techy people go to such schools, since they have more exposure to computers outside of school than the average.
I was able to use computers at home from about the age of seven, even before I went to school. I played some games, educational and otherwise, as well as learned BASIC programming and wrote school assignments in a word processor. I suspect that kids who don't have much access to computers at home could benefit from learning how to write simple programs and make web pages at school. Eighth grade is very late for computer exposure to begin, today far more so than when I was in school.
Oh pooh. Real life problems don't come with pre-programmed immediate answers. Immediate feedback encourages trail and error problem solving rather than thinking through the answers, and is very harmful.
Real life problems require planning, critical thinking and experimentation to solve. Immediate feedback is often extremely helpful. As a programmer, I rely on it all the time. I certainly don't miss the era when programs had to be submitted on stacks of punch cards and the result would come back hours later. Then, it was necessary to consider everything the computer was doing. Today, they're far too complex for that to be practical.
I also have yet to meet a piece of paper that gives immediate feedback. However, I have met teachers who can give better targeted and more useful feedback than any computer program. Learning tools are great, but perhaps a bit more emphasis should be given to inspiring and training more good teachers.
It is certainly deeply flawed thinking to think computers can replace quality human teachers. It's just as misguided to think that because a good teacher doesn't need computers to teach reading and arithmetic that computers can't be effective tools in the classroom. Even if computers aren't particularly effective tools for teaching arithmetic and reading, they are pretty nice for posting things on the web and learning how to write programs. The web didn't exist when I was in elementary school, but I did learn to write programs from a young age and wrote school assignments using word processors at home. I didn't have access to computers in my classrooms, so I would have been at a disadvantage if I didn't have it at home.
Growl source
Disclaimer: I don't have hg installed here at work so I can't verify that it really is version 1.3.
Its odd how difficult it is to find . There used to be links to source on the download page, but now there are not. All of this controversy could have been avoided if the Mercurial repository had been easier to find. The actual hg repository appears to be at https://code.google.com/p/growl/ . I do have hg installed, and it appears that 1.3 is in that repository. I'm not sure how long it's been there, but if it's been there all along, the developers could have simply pointed to it to allay any fears about Growl going proprietary.
Lisp was there first in many cases, yet to the majority of the programming world, it's just a bunch silly parenthesis (nevermind that semicolons and curly braces everywhere are just as bad if not worse).
I'm fully aware that most programmers are unaware of the significance of Lisp, which is why I also gave mentioned Python, which is far more mainstream. Lisps were only the first to implement the features described in TFA; they've been implemented in many other languages since then.
Can't make a phone, AAPL thought of it first?
Like the GUI and everything else, and Disney invented Snow White. It's all bullshit.
Maybe he really started believing his own hype after a while. It often happens to egomaniacs.
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
He clearly forgot his earlier quotation of Picasso that Good artists copy, but great artists steal.
On one hand, yes, the features probably are largely stolen.
Yeah, because once those features were implemented in Android, they disappeared from iOS
On the other hand, that’s kind of how technology evolves.
Locking down products and ideas to the person who originally introduced them doesn’t work patents don’t work and I don’t think a free for all would either (copying something is always cheaper than development). So what is the solution here?
It's entirely how technology evolves. Even patents are supposed to be granted to help technology advance overall rather than give anyone one person or company the edge over all others.
I'm wondering if my programming skills have fallen away so much through lack of use that I don't understand this as well anymore, or if the summary/article is just full of buzzwords and impressive sounding jargon.
It's entirely the latter. What they're describing is nothing Lisps haven't been doing for decades. Although I don't need to use in my everyday programming, standard Python also exposes APIs for compiling source and manipulating syntax trees.