It has been done. You can now write perl in Latin.
And this we owe that to the great Damian Conway. This is the Perl God who teaches CS in Australia, and who defied the skeptics (uh, that would be me) by soliciting and getting enough donors next year to hack perl rather than slay undergraduates. (Whoops! I meant "teach undergraduates"; guess I'm just projecting or something...) The note I got from Professor Conway thanking me for my contribution to his rescue^H^H^H^H^H^Hresearch leave would have been suitable for framing, except that it was sent via email.
I think that we may be able to conclude that the Internet/Tech Stocks bubble has finally deflated
I think we are not able to conclude anything. The Internet/Tech Stock 'bubble' may still be present, and can put the world economy in a recession cycle, when the averge john doe will understand that the money he borrowed to day-trade have disapeared. Or it may rise again, when all the stupid (pets.com) or badly managed (boo.com)
startups will all have failed and the few remaining will start trashing brick-and-mortar economy.
You cannot predict anything by looking at the stock market index. No matter how hard you try.
I agree with you that we might not be able to conclude that the tech stock bubble has completely
burst yet. But I am broadly skeptical of your idea that you cannot predict anything by looking at the stock market index. In particular, I would
draw your attention to this graph, which compares the overall returns of the NASDAQ composite and the S&P 500 since 1985. Observe how closely
one tracks the other, with a few interesting exceptions: tech stocks suffered more in the early
90s recession (no big surprise there), and seem to have benefitted more from the late 90s gold rush...except for that last dip there, which has actually dipped even further recently. Personally, I'm a strong believer in the efficient market hypothesis, so my guess is that the long-range performance of the NASDAQ will not be any better than the S&P 500. (Of course, part of this is self-fulfilling: as particular NASDAQ stocks get added to the S&P index, the two will grow closer together, but the other part is a belief that fair valuations for high-flying stocks with no earnings and iffy prospects will be found to be even lower than you see today.) The market
as a whole is so ruthless, in fact, that it's not clear to me that the long-term valuation of any given stock will outperform the index.
So let's choose a horrific example for my hypothesis:
compare Microsoft with the S&P 500 over the last 5 years. One of these has done waaaay better than the other over that span, and it ain't the S&P 500. But, once again, the two have been closing steadily over the last year or so, and anti-trust case or no anti-trust case, I fully expect MSFT to come closer and closer to the index as investors realize that there's no particular reason why MSFT should trade at a multiple of twice or more what the market trades at. This isn't to say that Microsoft is going to
do poorly or anything, only that their stock prices will start to resemble more closely that of any other company doing as well as they have as the meaning of the "tech" adjective is seen to be
empty, in and of itself.
Larry Wall, on the other hand, has no discernible background or ability in language design, and it shows in Perl.
But, since nobody uses Perl, due to its atrocious language design, this doesn't matter.:-)
Seriously, Perl the language has grown a lot since it was first released, and you can find yourself tripping (quite literally) over its roots. But an interesting part of Perl's design is that it's author, Larry Wall, has an academic background in Linguistics rather than CS, and had a pressing need to get something like perl working rather than a prime requirement that everything be perfect at the start.
But today's perl has lexical scoping and closures and many of the nice things people wish other scripting languages had (or had had sooner). Now
that Perl6 is really going to happen (since Damian Conway is motivated to get all his language features implemented before the magic spell wears off:-)), I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the dubious stuff finally go away.
And there will be much rejoicing. But the claim
that Perl's non-CS roots have somehow doomed it to obscurity or uselessness really seems quite far-fetched.
Please note that this benchmark (and any benchmark, for that matter) applies only to the system and application that it's testing. Database applications vary so widely that it's very difficult to get any meaningful numbers outside of very specific areas.
As an example, I recently ran some tests that came up with the exact opposite results. My application is a large message tracking database. Query speed is secondary; insertion speed is critical. MySQL handles my test data set in 20 minutes; PostgreSQL takes over 3 hours (!). For this application, PostgreSQL is Right Straight Out.
Well now, that information is completely useless, because you didn't mention anything that I would need to replicate your result. You didn't mention the versions (or the identities, really) of the databases you used, the hardware, the operating system, anything very interesting about the application...
So what exactly were we supposed to glean from this? In particular, the point of the target article, as I understand it, was really "PostrgeSQL used to be horribly slow for our application, but when we had some issues with our current set-up, we re-tested the very newest version of PostgreSQL and the latest mySQL we
could deal with, and, wow, things have changed."
Now, I don't personally either believe or disbelieve what you posted, but only because I have no idea what proposition I'm supposed to be
interested in here, because you didn't tell us.
Ok, what have we learned from Campaign 2000 - First, the media is irresponsible. The early projection of Florida was idiocy at its finest. This election was and is still too close to call, yet the media egos want to be the first one to call the winner, as if anyone cares who called it first. I think the media needs to examine the use of exit polls, and also needs to get back to reporting raw numbers.
I agree with you that exit polls are often used
unproductively, but I would like to point out that
in this particular case, the exit-polling data might actually re-inforce the notion that something went wrong in the actual vote tabulation.
In particular, we now know that 19,000+ ballots (out of about 450,000) were invalidated due to double voting in Palm Beach county. The strong presumption is that the huge number of invalid ballots was caused by the ergonomic problems the
ballot used presented to voters in practice. If
you're trying to project who will win Florida, your mathematical model for a Democratic victory almost certainly includes knowing how many votes
are coming out of a Democratic stronghold like Palm Beach, and what the ratio was like. If over 20,000 ballots are misvoted or invalid in the county, your numbers are
going to be screwed up, and your early projection
will be wrong. Now, 20K ballots is only.3% of the state total, and can't explain the rush to call the state all by itself, but it's clear that if there were an error of this magnitude, you would have expected a much rosier outlook for the Gore vote in Florida than what got counted.
It was "figured out" by the rep for the district who said something along the lines of "There's no way that many people here voted for Buchanan, something must be wrong". Even though a similar amoung of votes for the Reform party came from there last election...
This is disingenous. In 1996, the Reform party
wasn't running Pat Buchanan, and the proportion
of Reform vote to Republican vote (*do* look at
the URL mentioned in the article header) wasn't
anything like this.
Furthermore, your hypothesis doesn't explain why
over 19,000 ballots were ruled invalid for the
selection of two presidential candidates, which
is five times the mis-voting rate
of the senate race in that county.
And the final, crushing blow to your argument is
that this same confusion happened up and
down the ballot. So, Socialist Party
candidate McReynolds gets 302 votes in Palm Beach,
almost half of his vote in the entire state, while Harry Browne, whose actual dot was in the same relative position as the Gore dot turned in a suprisingly poor showing in Palm Beach, as near as I can tell. (And, of course,
the McReynolds dot is also one away from Gore's
as well.)
And then there's the Constitution Party's extremely high showing in Palm Beach, when their dot is...yup, one up from Ralph Nader's.
The ballot was clearly an ergonomic nightmare
that caused a significant number of votes to be
spoiled or misrecorded. But, having said that,
I'm not sure if there's any obvious legal remedy
for this at all.
It seems to me that the real story of this election is the turnout. I had to wait in line for nearly two hours to vote, and there are similar stories from around the country. In my state (Georgia), voter turnout is expected to approach the all time record.
For years now, we've been told that American voters are apathetic. Turnouts have been approaching record lows, and the pundits have chalked this up to our being disenchanted with the process.
How then to explain what happened yesterday? If we're so disenchanted, why did we turn out in droves?
What pundits say, interestingly, sometimes does not bear close scrutiny. On Monday, during my regular lecture, I made an attempt to explain how
the so-called "margins of error" for polls are constructed, that they usually correspond to a 95% confidence interval, and that, at least if you're
a Bayesian, you are perfectly able to interpret differences with this interval. Especially if you have multiple polls. Interestingly, the Hotline Scoop electoral summary turned out to be mind-bogglingly accurate on its calls for various states, which were based on on who was leading the state by any margin whatsoever, unless two reputable polls conflicted, in which case the state was considered a toss-up.
Now, the big difference between the polls and the actual vote wasn't in the statistics of the polling itself, but in the selection bias of the samples. The problem was that while we had pretty good information on the preferences of voters who were most likely to vote according to the likely voter models used, very little if any weight was assigned to the votes of voters who fell short of the likely voter threshold. As it happens, one key predictor of whether somebody will vote is whether they voted last time. This works fairly well, except that it can lead to gross errors when you try to predict the voting probality of, e.g., college students who have no voting track record, or the votes of voters who only turn out in close elections. These days, people have realized that advance and exit polling do a
really good job of predicting outcomes, and can choose to vote or not based on how likely it is that their vote will be "important". So the problem in the likely voter models for the 2000 election might be partly due to the fact that there was very little if any doubt about the outcome of the 1996 election, so that many "likely" voters decided not to bother. Now, this
was clearly not the case in the 2000 election, but the likely voter models were partially blind to the new voting "strategies".
You could call this voter apathy, but some would call it voter strategy, and a few might even call it voter rationality. It's a close call.:-)
Re:Haven't I seen all this before?
on
Perl 6 Showcase
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· Score: 2
20 years ago, there was a great programming language called "Lisp". It had lexical scoping, was both interpreted and compiled, allowed its syntax to be extended arbitrarily, had optional type declarations, and had multiple syntactic front-ends written in itself.
I'm afraid there is a bit of wish-casting going
on here. Some dialects of Lisp
had lexical scoping, some dialects had good compilers, world-beating macros
eventually became the norm...
The problem with lisp is that when it had its best chance to take over, it was twisty little maze of dialects, all different, most at least somewhat
proprietary, and few of them had execution speeds
anything like the then conventional languages.
Then Common Lisp started to happen, but that took years, and the eventual product was a language so large and complex that many companies died trying to get it up, fast, and on stock hardware. The lisp community, if you remember, was deeply into the specialized hardware game, which meant that they had a built-in price disadvantage and couldn't free-ride as easily on the advances in stock microprocessors.
Don't get me wrong, LISP is beautiful. But we know all the reasons why it never took over back then. Some things are different now, and there are some very nice, free Common Lisp implementations out there these days. Moreover, processing power has grown so much that
Lisp can go about as fast as most people care about for a wide variety of applications. What it doesn't have now, because it lost so spectacularly in the 80s, is developer mindshare, university teaching course space, and the kind of visibility that something like Perl has now.
Yes, it could have all been different, but it wasn't. Yes, lisp might come back, but it will
probably look and feel more like ML. Yes, people could and should learn a lot more of the lessons of lisp then they seem to have. But let's not fool ourselves: there were many reasons that Lisp
lost that have not very much to do with elegance or fine ideas. If Perl is now in a position to
adopt more of those good ideas, then I, for one, can only be happy about that fact.
The Perl 6 project is underway now, and Damian
has played a huge role already in the upcoming
language (re)-design, as you can tell by looking
through his contribution to the Perl 6 language RFCs. If he had his way and he most certainly should (in my opinion), Perl 6
would gain higher-order functions, a far more
useful function/method definition syntax, a ton
of cool object-oriented goodies that actually fit
in with the perl spirit, and so on.
I truly believe that if Damian Conway can be given a year to work on Perl 6 things and Perl in general, the community will be far better off. Now, please excuse me while I fork over my $50.:-)
Re:I have something different. Was:Right...
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 2
Ok, we prove that 0.999... (with an infinite number of nines) equals 1.
The problem here is that this is generally accepted as true, unless you're an extremely
cantankerous constructivist by the name of Fred Richman.:-)
Actually, reading the above-linked text is guaranteed to cause 9 out of 10 mathematicians to be blinded with rage...but the guy is really a
math prof.
As for testing in small group, I do think it is important, in moderation. I've seen products that have been UI-tested to death and they come out looking like Frankenstein. When a problem arises, for some reason, corrections focus on that one issue (hack is probably too strong of a word), rather than considering the interface as a whole.
What you say is true, which is why it is so important to have a set of global interface guidelines in the first place.
It keeps you from hacking away at specific situations that probably shouldn't have ever arisen in the first place. As far as testing in small groups goes, Apple used to do controlled experiments to find out what really did work best. Now, the biggest gripe I've heard with that is that the initial Mac interface was optimized for a novice who wasn't an especially good typist, which is why older versions of the OS could get a bit tedious (and why Anti-Mac can make almost as much sense). The situation did improve, of course, and some OS X features (like sheets) really will reward an expert user. But the "this window is too tall to resize" problem...words fail me.:-(
[Price is] a complex issue. Since they don't have the volume of say a Dell, they don't get all the discounts on the components.
Wow. Now *that* I don't buy. Apple's volumes are still pretty huge, they don't tend to offer bleeding edge anything, and the platform is now so standardized that for some things, I suspect their volumes and discounts are better than Dell's.
Plus there's just the issue of pure revenue. If they lower the prices, will that actually bring in
significantly more buyers, or will it just reduce total revenue. I think the $799 iMac is a good test bed.
It could be, except that they "under-RAMed" that
box in a serious way. I think there is now one too many levels of iMac, and the cheap box threatens to cannibalize sales on the basic iMac DV.
The Cube is probably too expensive, and poorly positioned, though. I'm not sure who's supposed to by it, except people with extra cash laying around.
The cube is a beautiful thing, and a quintessential Jobs creation. I mean, The Cube is so obviously Jobs' ultimate vision for the NeXT cube that never was. It's an aesthetic statement more than it is a product at this point. The real product based on the Cube is the Cube plus the 15" LCD; the problem is that won't sell very well unless the cost is $2000 or less.
In a perverse way, I'm glad that this is a disappointment so far, since it will return Apple's attention to being a bit more in tune with the market again.
If my memory serves, menus in Windows 2000 fade in and then pop away. This creates an irritating delay between the time you request a menu and the time you can use it.
Menus in MacOS X pop in and fade away. No irritating delay, and the fade serves as a way of highlighting the selection you made in the menu.
The menu behavior you mention was always a pet peeve of mine in the Win98 version; guess some bad things don't change. But I think there was some "justification" for this in navigating hierarchical or cascading menus when a slightly sloppy mouse down event would lead to you getting "stuck" in a cascading menu you hadn't meant to select. With the delay, this doesn't happen as much. Of course, this is the downside of forcing the cascade on the user in the first place in some situations, especially ones where you have to "push up" the menu rather than pull it down...but that's another story.
Wow, they must have really improved it. I only tried it once, and that was a couple of months ago. It screwed things up so badly I had to scratch-install everything all over again.
Be careful. The netscape problem I mentioned is due to an absolute path problem. OS X Beta (and I think the DP versions, too) puts all of your OS 9 stuff in a folder, which will systematically break anything that hardcodes an absolute path. (I believe the correct way to do it is to put preferences type stuff into a directory in the "blessed" (system) folder; any app can reliably find that folder, so there's no problem. IE 5 does this, so it worked just fine after the upgrade.) If you're a victim of this, you're still going to have to fish around at best to "teach" the applications where these files now are.
I'm so very sick of hearing this. Enough. 1984 is done. Let's move on.
I know some people feel that the Mac OS 9 is "their" OS (mostly due to nostalgia), but unfortunately, this doesn't translate into broader acceptance of Mac OS X. You should have seen the look of the faces of my family members when I showed them Mac OS X. They instantly wanted it. All the nostalgia-induced love of the same
UI is useless if Apple isn't growing marketshare.
No, it's not 1984, but nobody repealed Fitt's Law
since then. And there is little evidence that most of the UI "enhancements" added into Mac OS X had anything like the thorough interface testing that went into the original Mac. I mean, the "this window is too tall to resize" stuff is just
absurd. And you'd be pissed too if you'd been missing the "e" icon for explorer because you were a few pixels off on the click in a region of the screen that *can't* be used for anything else.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with liking a UI for it's looks. That's very important. Mac OS X does look better than Mac OS 9, and some of those good looks (e.g., anti-aliased fonts) have a direct and positive effect on the way people will work with their computer. And some of it is just cool. But, really, some of it is just weird.
As far as increasing market share goes, that is really going to have to depend on factors that go way beyond a cool-looking UI. Given a world where Windows 98 looks good enough to most people, you're not doubling market share by doubling the aesthetics of the user experience, or even the aesthetics of the computer casing itself. (Although the latter is an extremely under-rated factor.) Price plays a huge role, and this is where Apple still has a real problem in some segments, especially people new to the brand.
If by "over" you mean installing both OSes on the same partition, I wouldn't recommend it, even if you have the latest revision of MacOS 9. There will be many instances of conflicting file and path names. This problem is being worked on for the final release, but for now separate partitions are the way to go.
Hmm...I haven't noticed anything really bad yet. I actually thought the overlay was remarkably clever. The only the truly annoying problem was Netscape "losing" profile information when the directory structure changes after the install. But that's not surprising because Netscape on the Mac is...sucky.
On the other hand, the Carbonized Mozilla (with a dorky punned up name) is apparently very close at hand.
I think his UI concerns are little more than personal taste, and not as objective as he would make it out to be.
There is no doubt that taste plays a role in this kind of thing, but that makes it especially strange for Apple to go against the very well-documented tastes of its current users. They had to work hard to change some of these UI details that really did not have to change, and for what gain?
And there are some real problems. It didn't take me 20 minutes to run into the truly bizarre "can't resize this window easily because the dock is in the way and I can't push the window 'up' any higher" problem. This will piss off a lot of iMac users. And there is really no reason not to tolerate more slop in click locations in the dock.
The one that stands out the most, is that he wants a equalivent replacement for the Apple Menu. Why?
Well, he actually does go on for a page or more about this. The Apple Menu plays a very key role
in the interface, in that it's always there, and can be much quicker and easier to use than the Finder (or the dock, in OS X) especially for the more experienced user.
The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu, it is NOT obvious how to add things to it and quite frankly
a clear majority of users (both Mac and Windows) I know just put alias' on their desktops.
Again, I have to disagree. It takes a Mac novice
about two minutes to realize that, like everything else in the menubar, the Apple is a menu. (In fact, clicking on the dorky blue apple in Mac OS X and getting nothing is just a sick joke for many
Mac users...) As for putting aliases on the desktop, there's no problem with this up to a point, but, in my mind, if you ever find yourself fiddling with a lot of windows to uncover that third column of icons...then you begin to appreciate the limits to the approach. The apple menu, being essentially text-based, is capable of holding a lot more stuff, especially if you take good advantage of the hierarchical possibilities.
The "solution" to the (non-)problem of the Apple menu and icon triple parking is the dock. But because the dock is (aggressively) more graphical than the apple menu (or even the desktop), you don't really get a full replacement for either thing, and then you begin to wonder what the real use of this is. Ooh--maybe it save screen real estate for minimized windows. But that then points out another, possibly better solution to the problem of where to put all those windows: the
virtual window manager solution. Honestly, Mac users are the kind of people who would always park their browser in the lower left corner of the virtual space, their word processor in the lower left, their "true finder" stuff in the upper left, and odds and ends in the upper right. Or do something completely different, but that's okay. The dock, on the other hand, arbitrarily enforces certain constraints on where things should be, and
makes a big deal about apps that are running but not currently "out", when they could just as easily be "out there" on the larger desktop. (Yes, I'm completely serious about this, but I'll accept the fact that I'm probably fairly alone in this preference...)
But enough crabbing. There really is an awful lot to like about Mac OS X, which is why I suspect the
flaws and weird parts seem the more striking: this really could have been almost perfect. And there's nothing that upsets a geek more than that.
Okay, so let's say that Amazon gets 1-Click shopping. B&N turns around and patents 2-Click shopping. Buy.com patents 3-click shopping...
This is ridiculous! How many clicks does it take to get to the checkout page? (The world may never know.):P
Ah, but that's because you don't have my new (and probably patentable) device: RoboClick 2000.
RoboClick 2000 works by automatically detecting the "depth-of-click"-ness for your current shopping experience, and then emitting the appropriate click and keystroke sequence to get
you as deeply into web-related credit card debt as you please. Of course, you can't invoke RoboClick 2000 itself via a mouse click, since that would violate Amazon's patent. Instead, you just circle
the item with your mouse pointer as you hold down
the shift key. This then pops up a window with
a bar code in it, which you scan with your CueCat,
and, voila! You're throught the check out line.
Analyst predicted (if I remember right) $0.45/share earnings...Thursday, Apple announced $0.33 to $0.35/earnings.
Not quite. Apple announced that they expected to
be significantly short of analyst's expectations (I think your figures are correct) when they announce earnings on October 18th. The actual news might be somewhat better or worse than this. Now, the strange thing is the 50% fall in the stock price
leaves the company with a P/E ratio of 13 or so,
which is just bizarre in the current market situation. So either Apple is oversold, or life
is about to get waaaaay too interesting for my
taste.
I guess it would be too much to ask for
Mac OS X to use rpm (although I'm not
sure why), but I would be thrilled to hear
that there is a real package management scheme
built into Mac OS X. Is there? A real problem
with the Mac OS X of old is that it's waaay to
easy to scatter installed software all over the
place. And I'd like a dollar for every *extra* copy of telnet or Word I've seen installed on a publicly available Mac through the years...
A real package system would also make
it so convenient to upgrade the system,
especially during the beta cycle. Right now,
there is apparently significant missing functionality in the beta (no airport, no USB printing) that could presumably be "dropped in"
as it arrives.
You see, although the CERN facility is scheduled for closure, the REASON is that it is being REPLACED by a bigger and better facility.
Yes, really.
The CERN facility is being replaced, but the full replacement will take years. Many of the people whose careers or career advancement depend on results from an "obsolete" facility like the LEP will be adversely affected when the instrument is taken down. Yes, some of them will be among the best and brightest on the new project, the LHC, but others...won't.
Now, further progress demands the building of the LHC, while limited resources require the shutdown of the LEP, and people will get caught in the middle. This is exactly how Big Science works, and why people have long felt uneasy about the entire process. Scientists are, thankfully, only human. Their careers are of finite duration, and their specialized knowledge can become obsolete in the wake of further progress.
And, it goes without saying, this is just as true
in genomics, neuroscience, geoscience, computer science, or any other rapidly advancing field.
Radio Shak is already well positioned to do this (With batteries, not milk) since they already know your name, address and phone number as well as what you bought and when.
Uh...no they don't. I only buy knicknacky stuff
at Radio Shack with cash, and every time they (or anybody else) says "Can I have your fleem number?" I say "Of course not." This usually freezes them for about 3 seconds, after which they go ahead and
finish the sale.
Apparently, this is kind of rare, but I suspect it is more common in the geek community. So, does anybody out there really hand over this kind
of info any more?
The NeXT, which originally came out in the 80s,
had a nice database kit (DBKit) that could be
used to write apps for relational databases.
So any NeXT station running such an app remotely
could be of note for this search. (Although, alas, that app might not be X-based...this was the
NeXT). The announcement of an Ingres tool for the
NeXT appears here.
If this doesn't fit the bill, I really think the possibility of an Ingres-related application fitting your requirements is pretty high. Ingres was widely available in the academic/university community, supported remote connections from Unix, and almost certainly sported at least one X-based
app.
As a platform, we have LinuxPPC, which totally blows away the x86 platform in terms of performance.
Cite? I keep hearing this, but I haven't seen any real numbers. Sure, there are rc5 blocks/sec and SETI rates, but that's not why I buy computers. So who has task-specific numbers comparing LinuxPPC and x86? Like kernel rebuilds, X benchmarks, TPC,
etc.
Well, you might not like this one much better, and it's a bit beside the point, but I swear that it's true...
I've got a dual-booting iMac (MacOS 9 and PPCLinux). For reasons that I do *not* understand well, Netscape under PPCLinux is *significantly* zippier than it is under Mac OS 9. With 128 megs of RAM, I doubt that's an issue. Moreover, again, for reasons I can't speculate much about), Netscape under PPC Linux feels as fast or faster as fast as any set-up I've ever seen at any clockspeed whatsoever.
Has anybody else ever noticed this?
Re:The Author Doesn't Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
You have hit the nail on the head. You are exactly right about what an operating system is.
From the book "Operating System Concepts, 4th ed." by Silberschatz Galvin:
'The purpose of an operating system is to provide an environment in which a user can execute programs.'
So I would classify as an OS that minimum amount of code that is needed to execute a program.
Actually, I think this definition of OS (which I like) does point out some tricky issues with talking about the OS. The problem is that once you go with the kind of definition that states the OS is the necessary environment needed for a program to execute, then
you set up the distinct possibility that we could
look at program A executing on OS Y, and then program B that executes on OS Y but also
requires a service provided by A and decide that the "OS" for A is Y, but the "OS" for B is Y+A. That, of course, bothers some people a lot.
Another way to go, which is implied by what some have called the "purist" definition, is that the
OS would be software that satisfies the greatest common requirements for
all of the programs that are running; that would probably end up being the traditional kernel plus shell.
But the problem there is that you can (and Linux certainly has) stick a lot of stuff directly into the kernel that is not (strictly speaking) needed
by all other programs. So in the Y+A situation above, if Linux kernel version 2.71828 now includes the service provided by A, we might argue
that B now only depends on Y (the kernel), but then A has disappeared completely, so you might decide to carve up the kernel into "truly OS" and
"not truly OS" parts and then...
I think you see the problem. Myself, I'm not that interested in arriving at "the" answer to this question, but this is Slashdot, so...
Is that the movies listed aren't just obscure movies, they are movies that had reasonably large budgets and which were well hyped in advertisements when they came out, but flopped horribly.
I'm afraid that's not quite true. Spirit of '76 had a stupendously small budget,
opened to no fanfare, and then basically went straight to the Rep joints and video stores. Something like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is more what you're describing. Frankly, I'm not sure why the Spirit of '76 makes this list at all, since it
actually has some decent scenes, and didn't aim high enough to have failed expectations.
One other bizarre inclusion on this list is Zardoz. Now, Zardoz isn't "a masterpiece" as some weirdos have believed, but it is one of the most hilarious movies ever made. Oh, wait: I forgot that it wasn't supposed to be a comedy. Never mind.:-)
Two movies not on this list which should be, though, were the early 70s remake of Lost Horizon and the first picture that Joan Rivers directed, Rabbit Test. The fact that you just said "Huh?" twice is strong evidence for my position.:-)
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And this we owe that to the great Damian Conway. This is the Perl God who teaches CS in Australia, and who defied the skeptics (uh, that would be me) by soliciting and getting enough donors next year to hack perl rather than slay undergraduates. (Whoops! I meant "teach undergraduates"; guess I'm just projecting or something...) The note I got from Professor Conway thanking me for my contribution to his rescue^H^H^H^H^H^Hresearch leave would have been suitable for framing, except that it was sent via email.
I agree with you that we might not be able to conclude that the tech stock bubble has completely burst yet. But I am broadly skeptical of your idea that you cannot predict anything by looking at the stock market index. In particular, I would draw your attention to this graph, which compares the overall returns of the NASDAQ composite and the S&P 500 since 1985. Observe how closely one tracks the other, with a few interesting exceptions: tech stocks suffered more in the early 90s recession (no big surprise there), and seem to have benefitted more from the late 90s gold rush...except for that last dip there, which has actually dipped even further recently. Personally, I'm a strong believer in the efficient market hypothesis, so my guess is that the long-range performance of the NASDAQ will not be any better than the S&P 500. (Of course, part of this is self-fulfilling: as particular NASDAQ stocks get added to the S&P index, the two will grow closer together, but the other part is a belief that fair valuations for high-flying stocks with no earnings and iffy prospects will be found to be even lower than you see today.) The market as a whole is so ruthless, in fact, that it's not clear to me that the long-term valuation of any given stock will outperform the index.
So let's choose a horrific example for my hypothesis: compare Microsoft with the S&P 500 over the last 5 years. One of these has done waaaay better than the other over that span, and it ain't the S&P 500. But, once again, the two have been closing steadily over the last year or so, and anti-trust case or no anti-trust case, I fully expect MSFT to come closer and closer to the index as investors realize that there's no particular reason why MSFT should trade at a multiple of twice or more what the market trades at. This isn't to say that Microsoft is going to do poorly or anything, only that their stock prices will start to resemble more closely that of any other company doing as well as they have as the meaning of the "tech" adjective is seen to be empty, in and of itself.
But, since nobody uses Perl, due to its atrocious language design, this doesn't matter. :-)
Seriously, Perl the language has grown a lot since it was first released, and you can find yourself tripping (quite literally) over its roots. But an interesting part of Perl's design is that it's author, Larry Wall, has an academic background in Linguistics rather than CS, and had a pressing need to get something like perl working rather than a prime requirement that everything be perfect at the start.
But today's perl has lexical scoping and closures and many of the nice things people wish other scripting languages had (or had had sooner). Now that Perl6 is really going to happen (since Damian Conway is motivated to get all his language features implemented before the magic spell wears off :-)), I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the dubious stuff finally go away.
And there will be much rejoicing. But the claim that Perl's non-CS roots have somehow doomed it to obscurity or uselessness really seems quite far-fetched.
Well now, that information is completely useless, because you didn't mention anything that I would need to replicate your result. You didn't mention the versions (or the identities, really) of the databases you used, the hardware, the operating system, anything very interesting about the application...
So what exactly were we supposed to glean from this? In particular, the point of the target article, as I understand it, was really "PostrgeSQL used to be horribly slow for our application, but when we had some issues with our current set-up, we re-tested the very newest version of PostgreSQL and the latest mySQL we could deal with, and, wow, things have changed."
Now, I don't personally either believe or disbelieve what you posted, but only because I have no idea what proposition I'm supposed to be interested in here, because you didn't tell us.
I agree with you that exit polls are often used unproductively, but I would like to point out that in this particular case, the exit-polling data might actually re-inforce the notion that something went wrong in the actual vote tabulation.
In particular, we now know that 19,000+ ballots (out of about 450,000) were invalidated due to double voting in Palm Beach county. The strong presumption is that the huge number of invalid ballots was caused by the ergonomic problems the ballot used presented to voters in practice. If you're trying to project who will win Florida, your mathematical model for a Democratic victory almost certainly includes knowing how many votes are coming out of a Democratic stronghold like Palm Beach, and what the ratio was like. If over 20,000 ballots are misvoted or invalid in the county, your numbers are going to be screwed up, and your early projection will be wrong. Now, 20K ballots is only .3% of the state total, and can't explain the rush to call the state all by itself, but it's clear that if there were an error of this magnitude, you would have expected a much rosier outlook for the Gore vote in Florida than what got counted.
This is disingenous. In 1996, the Reform party wasn't running Pat Buchanan, and the proportion of Reform vote to Republican vote (*do* look at the URL mentioned in the article header) wasn't anything like this.
Furthermore, your hypothesis doesn't explain why over 19,000 ballots were ruled invalid for the selection of two presidential candidates, which is five times the mis-voting rate of the senate race in that county.
And the final, crushing blow to your argument is that this same confusion happened up and down the ballot. So, Socialist Party candidate McReynolds gets 302 votes in Palm Beach, almost half of his vote in the entire state, while Harry Browne, whose actual dot was in the same relative position as the Gore dot turned in a suprisingly poor showing in Palm Beach, as near as I can tell. (And, of course, the McReynolds dot is also one away from Gore's as well.)
And then there's the Constitution Party's extremely high showing in Palm Beach, when their dot is...yup, one up from Ralph Nader's.
The ballot was clearly an ergonomic nightmare that caused a significant number of votes to be spoiled or misrecorded. But, having said that, I'm not sure if there's any obvious legal remedy for this at all.
What pundits say, interestingly, sometimes does not bear close scrutiny. On Monday, during my regular lecture, I made an attempt to explain how the so-called "margins of error" for polls are constructed, that they usually correspond to a 95% confidence interval, and that, at least if you're a Bayesian, you are perfectly able to interpret differences with this interval. Especially if you have multiple polls. Interestingly, the Hotline Scoop electoral summary turned out to be mind-bogglingly accurate on its calls for various states, which were based on on who was leading the state by any margin whatsoever, unless two reputable polls conflicted, in which case the state was considered a toss-up.
Now, the big difference between the polls and the actual vote wasn't in the statistics of the polling itself, but in the selection bias of the samples. The problem was that while we had pretty good information on the preferences of voters who were most likely to vote according to the likely voter models used, very little if any weight was assigned to the votes of voters who fell short of the likely voter threshold. As it happens, one key predictor of whether somebody will vote is whether they voted last time. This works fairly well, except that it can lead to gross errors when you try to predict the voting probality of, e.g., college students who have no voting track record, or the votes of voters who only turn out in close elections. These days, people have realized that advance and exit polling do a really good job of predicting outcomes, and can choose to vote or not based on how likely it is that their vote will be "important". So the problem in the likely voter models for the 2000 election might be partly due to the fact that there was very little if any doubt about the outcome of the 1996 election, so that many "likely" voters decided not to bother. Now, this was clearly not the case in the 2000 election, but the likely voter models were partially blind to the new voting "strategies".
You could call this voter apathy, but some would call it voter strategy, and a few might even call it voter rationality. It's a close call. :-)
I'm afraid there is a bit of wish-casting going on here. Some dialects of Lisp had lexical scoping, some dialects had good compilers, world-beating macros eventually became the norm... The problem with lisp is that when it had its best chance to take over, it was twisty little maze of dialects, all different, most at least somewhat proprietary, and few of them had execution speeds anything like the then conventional languages.
Then Common Lisp started to happen, but that took years, and the eventual product was a language so large and complex that many companies died trying to get it up, fast, and on stock hardware. The lisp community, if you remember, was deeply into the specialized hardware game, which meant that they had a built-in price disadvantage and couldn't free-ride as easily on the advances in stock microprocessors.
Don't get me wrong, LISP is beautiful. But we know all the reasons why it never took over back then. Some things are different now, and there are some very nice, free Common Lisp implementations out there these days. Moreover, processing power has grown so much that Lisp can go about as fast as most people care about for a wide variety of applications. What it doesn't have now, because it lost so spectacularly in the 80s, is developer mindshare, university teaching course space, and the kind of visibility that something like Perl has now.
Yes, it could have all been different, but it wasn't. Yes, lisp might come back, but it will probably look and feel more like ML. Yes, people could and should learn a lot more of the lessons of lisp then they seem to have. But let's not fool ourselves: there were many reasons that Lisp lost that have not very much to do with elegance or fine ideas. If Perl is now in a position to adopt more of those good ideas, then I, for one, can only be happy about that fact.
I truly believe that if Damian Conway can be given a year to work on Perl 6 things and Perl in general, the community will be far better off. Now, please excuse me while I fork over my $50. :-)
The problem here is that this is generally accepted as true, unless you're an extremely cantankerous constructivist by the name of Fred Richman. :-)
Actually, reading the above-linked text is guaranteed to cause 9 out of 10 mathematicians to be blinded with rage...but the guy is really a math prof.
What you say is true, which is why it is so important to have a set of global interface guidelines in the first place. It keeps you from hacking away at specific situations that probably shouldn't have ever arisen in the first place. As far as testing in small groups goes, Apple used to do controlled experiments to find out what really did work best. Now, the biggest gripe I've heard with that is that the initial Mac interface was optimized for a novice who wasn't an especially good typist, which is why older versions of the OS could get a bit tedious (and why Anti-Mac can make almost as much sense). The situation did improve, of course, and some OS X features (like sheets) really will reward an expert user. But the "this window is too tall to resize" problem...words fail me. :-(
Wow. Now *that* I don't buy. Apple's volumes are still pretty huge, they don't tend to offer bleeding edge anything, and the platform is now so standardized that for some things, I suspect their volumes and discounts are better than Dell's.
It could be, except that they "under-RAMed" that box in a serious way. I think there is now one too many levels of iMac, and the cheap box threatens to cannibalize sales on the basic iMac DV.
The cube is a beautiful thing, and a quintessential Jobs creation. I mean, The Cube is so obviously Jobs' ultimate vision for the NeXT cube that never was. It's an aesthetic statement more than it is a product at this point. The real product based on the Cube is the Cube plus the 15" LCD; the problem is that won't sell very well unless the cost is $2000 or less.
In a perverse way, I'm glad that this is a disappointment so far, since it will return Apple's attention to being a bit more in tune with the market again.
The menu behavior you mention was always a pet peeve of mine in the Win98 version; guess some bad things don't change. But I think there was some "justification" for this in navigating hierarchical or cascading menus when a slightly sloppy mouse down event would lead to you getting "stuck" in a cascading menu you hadn't meant to select. With the delay, this doesn't happen as much. Of course, this is the downside of forcing the cascade on the user in the first place in some situations, especially ones where you have to "push up" the menu rather than pull it down...but that's another story.
Be careful. The netscape problem I mentioned is due to an absolute path problem. OS X Beta (and I think the DP versions, too) puts all of your OS 9 stuff in a folder, which will systematically break anything that hardcodes an absolute path. (I believe the correct way to do it is to put preferences type stuff into a directory in the "blessed" (system) folder; any app can reliably find that folder, so there's no problem. IE 5 does this, so it worked just fine after the upgrade.) If you're a victim of this, you're still going to have to fish around at best to "teach" the applications where these files now are.
No, it's not 1984, but nobody repealed Fitt's Law since then. And there is little evidence that most of the UI "enhancements" added into Mac OS X had anything like the thorough interface testing that went into the original Mac. I mean, the "this window is too tall to resize" stuff is just absurd. And you'd be pissed too if you'd been missing the "e" icon for explorer because you were a few pixels off on the click in a region of the screen that *can't* be used for anything else.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with liking a UI for it's looks. That's very important. Mac OS X does look better than Mac OS 9, and some of those good looks (e.g., anti-aliased fonts) have a direct and positive effect on the way people will work with their computer. And some of it is just cool. But, really, some of it is just weird.
As far as increasing market share goes, that is really going to have to depend on factors that go way beyond a cool-looking UI. Given a world where Windows 98 looks good enough to most people, you're not doubling market share by doubling the aesthetics of the user experience, or even the aesthetics of the computer casing itself. (Although the latter is an extremely under-rated factor.) Price plays a huge role, and this is where Apple still has a real problem in some segments, especially people new to the brand.
Hmm...I haven't noticed anything really bad yet. I actually thought the overlay was remarkably clever. The only the truly annoying problem was Netscape "losing" profile information when the directory structure changes after the install. But that's not surprising because Netscape on the Mac is...sucky.
On the other hand, the Carbonized Mozilla (with a dorky punned up name) is apparently very close at hand.
There is no doubt that taste plays a role in this kind of thing, but that makes it especially strange for Apple to go against the very well-documented tastes of its current users. They had to work hard to change some of these UI details that really did not have to change, and for what gain?
And there are some real problems. It didn't take me 20 minutes to run into the truly bizarre "can't resize this window easily because the dock is in the way and I can't push the window 'up' any higher" problem. This will piss off a lot of iMac users. And there is really no reason not to tolerate more slop in click locations in the dock.
Well, he actually does go on for a page or more about this. The Apple Menu plays a very key role in the interface, in that it's always there, and can be much quicker and easier to use than the Finder (or the dock, in OS X) especially for the more experienced user.
Again, I have to disagree. It takes a Mac novice about two minutes to realize that, like everything else in the menubar, the Apple is a menu. (In fact, clicking on the dorky blue apple in Mac OS X and getting nothing is just a sick joke for many Mac users...) As for putting aliases on the desktop, there's no problem with this up to a point, but, in my mind, if you ever find yourself fiddling with a lot of windows to uncover that third column of icons...then you begin to appreciate the limits to the approach. The apple menu, being essentially text-based, is capable of holding a lot more stuff, especially if you take good advantage of the hierarchical possibilities.
The "solution" to the (non-)problem of the Apple menu and icon triple parking is the dock. But because the dock is (aggressively) more graphical than the apple menu (or even the desktop), you don't really get a full replacement for either thing, and then you begin to wonder what the real use of this is. Ooh--maybe it save screen real estate for minimized windows. But that then points out another, possibly better solution to the problem of where to put all those windows: the virtual window manager solution. Honestly, Mac users are the kind of people who would always park their browser in the lower left corner of the virtual space, their word processor in the lower left, their "true finder" stuff in the upper left, and odds and ends in the upper right. Or do something completely different, but that's okay. The dock, on the other hand, arbitrarily enforces certain constraints on where things should be, and makes a big deal about apps that are running but not currently "out", when they could just as easily be "out there" on the larger desktop. (Yes, I'm completely serious about this, but I'll accept the fact that I'm probably fairly alone in this preference...)
But enough crabbing. There really is an awful lot to like about Mac OS X, which is why I suspect the flaws and weird parts seem the more striking: this really could have been almost perfect. And there's nothing that upsets a geek more than that.
Ah, but that's because you don't have my new (and probably patentable) device: RoboClick 2000.
RoboClick 2000 works by automatically detecting the "depth-of-click"-ness for your current shopping experience, and then emitting the appropriate click and keystroke sequence to get you as deeply into web-related credit card debt as you please. Of course, you can't invoke RoboClick 2000 itself via a mouse click, since that would violate Amazon's patent. Instead, you just circle the item with your mouse pointer as you hold down the shift key. This then pops up a window with a bar code in it, which you scan with your CueCat, and, voila! You're throught the check out line.
Not quite. Apple announced that they expected to be significantly short of analyst's expectations (I think your figures are correct) when they announce earnings on October 18th. The actual news might be somewhat better or worse than this. Now, the strange thing is the 50% fall in the stock price leaves the company with a P/E ratio of 13 or so, which is just bizarre in the current market situation. So either Apple is oversold, or life is about to get waaaaay too interesting for my taste.
A real package system would also make it so convenient to upgrade the system, especially during the beta cycle. Right now, there is apparently significant missing functionality in the beta (no airport, no USB printing) that could presumably be "dropped in" as it arrives.
Yes, really.
The CERN facility is being replaced, but the full replacement will take years. Many of the people whose careers or career advancement depend on results from an "obsolete" facility like the LEP will be adversely affected when the instrument is taken down. Yes, some of them will be among the best and brightest on the new project, the LHC, but others...won't.
Now, further progress demands the building of the LHC, while limited resources require the shutdown of the LEP, and people will get caught in the middle. This is exactly how Big Science works, and why people have long felt uneasy about the entire process. Scientists are, thankfully, only human. Their careers are of finite duration, and their specialized knowledge can become obsolete in the wake of further progress.
And, it goes without saying, this is just as true in genomics, neuroscience, geoscience, computer science, or any other rapidly advancing field.
Uh...no they don't. I only buy knicknacky stuff at Radio Shack with cash, and every time they (or anybody else) says "Can I have your fleem number?" I say "Of course not." This usually freezes them for about 3 seconds, after which they go ahead and finish the sale.
Apparently, this is kind of rare, but I suspect it is more common in the geek community. So, does anybody out there really hand over this kind of info any more?
If this doesn't fit the bill, I really think the possibility of an Ingres-related application fitting your requirements is pretty high. Ingres was widely available in the academic/university community, supported remote connections from Unix, and almost certainly sported at least one X-based app.
Well, you might not like this one much better, and it's a bit beside the point, but I swear that it's true...
I've got a dual-booting iMac (MacOS 9 and PPCLinux). For reasons that I do *not* understand well, Netscape under PPCLinux is *significantly* zippier than it is under Mac OS 9. With 128 megs of RAM, I doubt that's an issue. Moreover, again, for reasons I can't speculate much about), Netscape under PPC Linux feels as fast or faster as fast as any set-up I've ever seen at any clockspeed whatsoever.
Has anybody else ever noticed this?
Actually, I think this definition of OS (which I like) does point out some tricky issues with talking about the OS. The problem is that once you go with the kind of definition that states the OS is the necessary environment needed for a program to execute, then you set up the distinct possibility that we could look at program A executing on OS Y, and then program B that executes on OS Y but also requires a service provided by A and decide that the "OS" for A is Y, but the "OS" for B is Y+A. That, of course, bothers some people a lot.
Another way to go, which is implied by what some have called the "purist" definition, is that the OS would be software that satisfies the greatest common requirements for all of the programs that are running; that would probably end up being the traditional kernel plus shell.
But the problem there is that you can (and Linux certainly has) stick a lot of stuff directly into the kernel that is not (strictly speaking) needed by all other programs. So in the Y+A situation above, if Linux kernel version 2.71828 now includes the service provided by A, we might argue that B now only depends on Y (the kernel), but then A has disappeared completely, so you might decide to carve up the kernel into "truly OS" and "not truly OS" parts and then...
I think you see the problem. Myself, I'm not that interested in arriving at "the" answer to this question, but this is Slashdot, so...
I'm afraid that's not quite true. Spirit of '76 had a stupendously small budget, opened to no fanfare, and then basically went straight to the Rep joints and video stores. Something like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is more what you're describing. Frankly, I'm not sure why the Spirit of '76 makes this list at all, since it actually has some decent scenes, and didn't aim high enough to have failed expectations.
One other bizarre inclusion on this list is Zardoz. Now, Zardoz isn't "a masterpiece" as some weirdos have believed, but it is one of the most hilarious movies ever made. Oh, wait: I forgot that it wasn't supposed to be a comedy. Never mind. :-)
Two movies not on this list which should be, though, were the early 70s remake of Lost Horizon and the first picture that Joan Rivers directed, Rabbit Test. The fact that you just said "Huh?" twice is strong evidence for my position. :-)