Now, granted, I don't have the latest space heaters from Intel or AMD, but still, I have to wonder about these new fanless iMacs. I've seen the demo machines in stores, and I have to tell you, those suckers are hot to the touch. Can any computer running that warm really be in good health?
One important point to remember is the fact that these are demo machines, which means that people are jostling their mice and tapping their keyboards j-u-s-t enough so that the power management software doesn't get to do its thing. And then you get an iToaster.
My iMac at home is in the kitchen, and gets intense but sporadic use, so that it's asleep well over half the day. That really does help a lot.
There's a lot of research directed at getting computers to mimic the human brain, but I think it could be equally useful to get them to mimic living metabolism.
This is waaaaay more true than you might realize. Almost every angle that we understand about metabolism in living things (and there's tons we don't know) has a potential application to the manufacture or pefection of human artifacts.
I could go on and on, but I'll point out one of my favorites: your computer probably has a honking big and noisy fan on it to dissipate heat. Not so for most animals and plants. Part of it is low wattage parts, part of it is beautiful heat distribution and exhaust apparatus, and part of it...well, we don't know yet.
Re:Amusing standards compliance related crash...
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In any case, I was amused that anything as boring as a www.w3.org page could slay the lizard.
And then I was pleasantly surprised to see the bug fixed in the June 15th nightly build. This one also seems to have better performance with type-in fields on forms (don't know why...). Things are definitely looking up.
Re:Amusing standards compliance related crash...
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hmm, bug 34520 isn't a crasher..
Perhaps not yet.:-)
But I think the eliciting condition matches perfectly; on the same www.w3.org page, the link to XML Signatures is similarly deadly, but everything else that doesn't have the <?xml?> line at the top works fine. This bug turns out to have an interesting history, by the way...
In any case, I was amused that anything as boring as a www.w3.org page could slay the lizard.
Amusing standards compliance related crash...
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OK, so the M16 release notes (did anybody else read these?;-)) pointed out some of the, um, Things That Don't Work Yet with Mozilla.
Under the heading about DOM issues, it pointed out that:
DOM Level 0
The JavaScript method handleEvent() is not implemented and wont be.
"Gee, is that a deprecated method? I can't remember...hmm, let's check the standard!"
So I surf on over to www.w3.org, click on the "DOM" topic, and BOOM
Crashed the browser, froze the iMac (running 9.04) and made me realize that one way to claim standards compliance is to refuse to let users see the standards.:-)
No, I have no clue why this bailed, but, if memory serves, this exact thing has happened to me before.
if quote is pronounced, the second line is 8 syllables:
Doh! That was a last second typo; I should have cut/pasted from my xterm.:-( So that should have been:
#!/bin/perl5
print 'sound of shebang' or '#!'
Thanks for pointing this out; sorry for the silly error.
The second line on this one has too many syllables already: [snip scansion] unless you're from the midwest and pronounce "fire" like "far".
Well, this is being *posted* from Missourah...but even though I'm not from the Midwest, "fire" is basically monosyllabic in my dialect. So I reject your criticism here. Hah!:-)
In any case, both are well-formed perl, and now also proper haiku. Thanks for your help.
Interesting... if "include season.h" is 5 syllables, does that mean that you don't pronounce the dot? I've always said it, "Include season DOT h", not "Include season h"...
I agree with you here, but for the sake of the Perl as Haiku Movement, I think we need a definitive ruling on the pronunciation of other punctuation. Especially #!, ', ", and;. I think it's only fair to suggest that perl as haiku be executable, like other perl poetry, but I'm less sure that we can all agree on how to pronounce it correctly.
So is this a haiku?
#!/bin/perl5 print 'the sound of shebang' or '#!'
Obviously, I pronounce the first line "shebang bin perl five", but I'm not an authority on this. I'm a bit squeamish about pronouncing "quote", though, although that would be consistent. If ' is silent, then the haiku could be:
#!/bin/perl5 print 'shebang! a firecracker?' or die 'like #!'
The seasonal reference is to midsummer fireworks (duh...).
Dang; where's Tom Christiansen when you really need him here.:-(
Once upon a time, not very long ago, we were about to cancel everything except basic cable having, well, nothing beyond very basic needs in this age of high-speed internet access.
Then, while clicking through one Friday evening of TV Wasteland, I stumbled upon this really bizarre cooking show. The name of it was Iron Something (I mean, am I allowed to use the trademarked name?). It was on the Food Network, which frankly wasn't a channel we ever watched much.
But the show was awesome. Seriously, my wife and I were stunned; there was finally a decent reason to get cable! An actual reason to bother to watch TV. Something easily worth the $18 per month difference between basic and expanded whatever that we were getting. And we spread the good word to everybody we knew. My sister-in-law got a satellite dish just so she could watch the show.
Despite my fairly dim view of television, the medium, I've always had the opinion that there were only two countries on earth where people had any idea about what to do with the medium. The first was the U.S., and the other, to my surprise, actually, was Japan. (I found this out while I was homesick for a week at a conference in Japan.) Of course, most Japanese programming is unknown in the U.S., so it was hard to tell people about it.
But this cooking show was something you could point them to. Really, it was the first thing I could point at and say, "See? The Japanese have really done something excellent and new with TV."
Almost everybody I preached to ended up loving the show. To one unlucky soul in a non-cable-possible household, I even made weekly tapes of the shows (commericals included, of course). We live in a small Midwestern university town, and we don't really get out very much. But I didn't care that much, as long as I could stretch out on the couch with the family on Friday and Saturday nights and watch the Theme Ingredient be revealed. My four year-old son can name all four chefs. He thinks that peanut butter "matches well" with chocolate milk.
At some point early on in the craze, we did turn to the net for more info. And I did try out the food network site on the show. Alas, nothing much to see there (at that time). So I fired up the Good Old Search Engine and found the URL to ironchef.com. Like, wow. What a truly amazing site; what an awesome labor of love. Of course there isn't much to see there now; Ironstef (really, that's what she calls herself) has had to shut the thing down.
I actually understand trademarks. I have sympathy for intellectual property laws, even if I don't always seek the same level of protection for my work. Intellectually, I completely understand why Fuji set their lawyers against the show's most enthusiastic fans. Some day, I might even be able to explain this to the four-year-old.
More emotionally, of course, I wish I could tell Fuji to take their Iron-Fisted lawyers and put them in a tight warm smelly place. This new technique matches well with greediness. It probably won't kill the fishy smell. It really has killed any interest I had in the show.
I think people here have under-estimated the degree to which true innovation (rather than better packaging) has been slowed in the field of operating systems.
But Pike does make a very important point about the current limitations on possible innovation: most of them are the result of the need to interoperate with existing standards. What is perhaps not very clear from his argument is that the constraint of existing standards is universal. And it does indeed limit innovation, at least at a given level of system complexity.
But how universal a constraint is this, really? I think the most telling example is that of biology. Life has been around for something like 3 billion years, and we now know that there has been exceedingly little innovation in some of its aspects; the basic principles (and most of the exact codes) of encoding genes into DNA, of transcribing them using RNA, and expressing them to do the real work of the organism are stunningly conserved. Almost no innovation there. And I could go on up the various levels of complexity and make similar arguments. But I won't, except to point out that in biology, innovation has almost always emerged in the form of additional (internal) complexity.
Getting back to the world of operating systems, then, Pike is possibly quite correct that the lowest layers of the operating system architecture are now essentially fossilized, permanent, and profoundly resistant to change. But the argument that this means that innovation now has no place is, I believe, profoundly wrong. Innovation will just have to occur at higher levels of abstraction.
So take one example: the idea of users and user authentication. This is a very basic concept, and one which at its heart seems to be very resistant to change. (But, interestingly, one where Plan Nine was conspicuously innovative; hmm...) But I think it should be very clear that there has been and will be lots of innovation in this aspect of operating systems. The problem, of course, is that users are no longer welded to the console of the machine, nor even to a local network including a particular machine, nor even to the same kind of machine on the same kind of network...and yet people do have this notion that they should be able to "log on" from anywhere with strong security and access to whatever resources they had both "there" and "here", wherever "here" is. As many slashdotters know, this gets pretty hairy pretty quickly, and there are many possible solutions that are being worked on. (And of course, the problem is not a completely novel one; the analogy is a bit rough, but the immune system is an interesting solution to a similar problem.)
In any case, there is lots of room for innovation for certain kinds of problems, and very little room for others. I think Pike really does know this, and was worrying more about how we can get funding and support to the people who are trying to solve the problems where there is still lots of room for innovation. Academia does not seem to be the answer, nor do most corporate cultures. But what is the answer?
The only innovation between 1990 and 2000 was at Microsoft? Wasn't there a little thing called a "browser" invented somewhere around there outside of Microsoft?
Now, this is amusing.
Pike was talking abouty innovation in operating system design, and I think we can all agree that a browser is not an integral part of any OS.
Well, except for Microsoft, who argue explicitly that the browser is part of the OS. Now, you might claim that the argument that "the browser is the OS" is innovative, except that then it's not clear that Sun (with the HotJava browser, and the idea that Java was a platform) wasn't the first to make that claim.
On the other hand, I have to agree with Pike that there has been relatively little innovation on the operating systems research front, or at least innovation that has had any commercial success. I'm not an expert on the topic, but it's very possible that things like COM, maligned as much as they may be around here, are about as innovative as anything else. (Or not, but that will be a separate post from me...)
I'm not certain that the various free systems are such a clear win for the PRC. Free software may look like communism to radical capitalists like tchrist and whatnot, but ideologically it's about liberating the user with regards to information [...]
tchrist? You mean Tom Christiansen? Man, I hope not, because I'm not sure I've ever seen or heard of anybody who was more interested in "liberating the user with regards to information [sic]". Of course, I'm not sure I've read many people who felt more free to tell you exactly what they thought, and I was sad to see the day when as free a thinker as tchrist found slashdot an unreceptive forum for his contributions.
You do not allow my trademark, King Babar(tm) to fall into disrepute.
You do not make any false representations as to the origin of the quoted phrase.
You do not name me or any of my agents or appointees in any lawsuit, domestic or foreign.
You promise to dress up like a lumberjack and attempt to get dates with anybody driving by in a jacked-up pickup.
You do not change any of the words in the phrase, even to the point of pluralizing, adding normal hyphenation, or making one word into two.
You promise not to assign copyright or grant permission to use said phrase, to anybody else without express written consent of Major League Baseball(tm).
How long until I can be legally protected from negative moderation on Slashdot?
Are you a trademark?:-)
Seriously, I thought this would only apply to a trademark like jabber(tm) or restricted phrases like "When jabber jibbers, the jive jibes!" (r). Can't say anything nasty about those!
But you, on the other hand, are not protected. So I can say anything about you that I like. So, for the sake of argument, I could say:
What a snotty-faced evil pan of droppings you are! Shut up you festering gob, you tit! Your type makes me puke, you vacuous stuffy-nosed malodororous pervert!
Oh wait--that stuff back there was abuse of copyright, part of an argument about trademark violation. Guess I'd better take that back, then. Heh, heh.
Actually the original poster was wrong. Client-side scripting, including DOM access, IS one of the goals of this project; you can read about it in netscape.public.mozilla.xpcom.
Thanks for the tip; the official press release was far from clear on this point.:-)
Basically Activestate are going to go through the code and rip out all the Javascript-specific assumptions. It's going to rock!
I wish them luck. I guess one complicating factor here, though, might be the fact that there is a lot of DOM stuff in particular where the Javascript interface is essentially the de facto one (even if the W3C admits the possibility of other scripting language bindings). Which will make this all very interesting come upgrade time...
...but I suspect that all their old LaserJets were still on-line, cranking out pages like they did 10-15 years ago.
A year ago, the sysadmin in our department wound up with a couple of HP LJ III-somethings that somebody was actually trying to surplus. He offered them to the department via a mailing list, and they were gone in about a minute.
We may never know if they really could survive gunfire, but I know I feel more comfortable in a room that has a LaserJet around so I can duck and cover.:-)
Everybody knows that Al Gore invented the Internet back in the 80s, so it should be pretty obvious that you should look in his collected writings for the best evidence of prior art. I'm thinking it's somewhere in the "Electronic Protocols" chapter of Earth in the Balance.
It's an ugly job, but I think that somebody out there has to read the collected works of Albert Gore to find that prior art. The future of the Internet, and our children, depend on it.
If anyone could tell for sure they could make a huge amount of money from buying and selling futures on RAM. Hmmm, I can't find DRAM futures at CBOE (which has other futures and options), anyone know where they might be?
I know that open futures and options markets in DRAM have been contemplated on several occasions, but I don't believe there are any "real" ones, yet. Part of the reason is technological; a troy ounce of gold is, was, and forever shall be the same thing; same goes for a bushel of wheat or most other commodities. But memory technology is changing very fast; a 1 meg SIMM might have looked like a really good benchmark at one time, but certainly not now. In that sense, RAM is a very strange commodity, and an exceedingly risky one; RAMBUS memory futures, anyone?
Other oddities include the facts that RAM markets have a relatively large proportion of foreign corporatoins involved, and that they have proven to be really easily manipulated in the past.
But one of the biggest factors behind a lack of RAM-based securities might be the simple point that large consumers of RAM, unlike large consumers in many other industries, can and do make huge contracts directly with producers (which can be themselves!), and this might reduce the need for then to do hedging in the markets.
The downside of XML, is that it's compatible with nothing out there browser-wise and so you'd inevitably fall back to a two-formats legacy position, probably involving HTML 3.2 for the lesser stream.
Two points about this.
First, I think there is better XML display support than you might think. Given that you're realistically looking something like a year ahead on this, I don't see why you shouldn't go for the gusto.
You also suggest that going with just XHTML won't require any fall-back position. I'm really not sure that's true. And even if it were true, you could turn an internal XML representation into the traditional, cruftified Slashdot HTML that we and our browsers know and love.
But, having said that, I agree that XHTML (with full CSS) is waaaay better than nothing. Given that Slashdot is News for Nerds, I see no reason why it shouldn't be at least closer to the leading edge with respect to style sheets and standards compliance.
(Although your *'d sentences in the look examples are not at all ungrammatical):
You're probably right. Some of them sound really horrible for their intended meaning, though. To the point where a star might be warranted.
But now let's get to your example.:-)
This AIBO uses a CCD camera for its vision. That one looks differently...
Now, that's a whole new kettle of fish. Here, you're using "look" in a way where the subject is an agent/experiencer rather than a patient/theme/whatever. In a case like that, the modification really is to the verb (phrase) itself.
I don't think client-side scripting is the goal here; instead, they're more likely to work on making it possible to write XPCOM components in Python and Perl. Client-side is apparently a problem because there are various sections of code in Mozilla that are really JavaScript-specific. It's possible to fix this, but it's too big a job to do before Mozilla 1.0.
I've heard about the JavaScript-specificness before. So help me, this has to be the silliest limitation in the whole Mozilla project. I mean, it's not as if they didn't bother abstracting away from the {user interface, rendering engine, networking code, fill-in-the-blank}. But Ecmascript was holy? It's a bit depressing when Microsoft, who probably had every reason to push VBscript as hard as possible, actually offer more choices for client-side scripting (by a lot) than Netscape/Mozilla/anything else.
That said, it will be pretty awesome to write XPCom stuff in the language of your choice. And the ActiveState people have a pretty good record for providing what they say they will.
OK, let's look at this more closely. Shoeboy seems to suggest that Apple marketeers are morons because they are using an adjective ("different") to modify a verb ("think"). The other possibility is that the construction "Think different" is, in fact, different from what Shoeboy thinks it is. Or, maybe it is a pun. Or, a more figurative use of language.
Consider the following examples:
That looks different.
*That looks differently.
If I were you, I would look different.
?If I were you, I would look differently.
Look different, if you want to attract attention.
*Look differently, if you want to attract attention.
In the above, I have marked with an asterisk those sentences that I think are actually ungrammatical in English. A question mark denotes a sentence that is either dubious, or is unlikely to mean the same thing as the unmarked version.
Shoeboy might notice that the "adverb" versions of these sentences look strange (not "look strangely"). They seem pretty weird. I don't have time to provide a full lesson on the syntax of the "look" construction and its friends. Suffice it to say that the rules for when and where you use adjectives and adverbs with verbs that can take fuller complements concerning the state or existence of the subject are not as clear as Schoolboy might wish to believe.
Now, what that has to do with "Think different" is that "think" is a verb that often takes a complement that expresses the existence or state of some entity. Also note that in a sentence involving ellipsis, that you can get non-imperative sentences with phrases like "think different" in them pretty easily, and even imperative versions with a little bit more effort:
Compared to other Wintel offerings, do you think Apples' products are the same or different?
A: I think that they are different.
B: I think the same.
A: Well, you really should think different.
B: But I don't.
A: Try and think different.
B: I can't.
A: Just think different.
So, I maintain that Apple's slogan really doesn't stretch current American usage much beyond (if at all beyond) it's current state. Now, you might argue that most readers are not likely to come up with the above dialogue at the drop of a hat. And I agree. But the whole point of advertising is to make a striking statement that gets people to pay attention to you. Now, some people try to do this just by being provocative for no obvious reason. Shoeboy does this, for example, by using repetitive obscenities:
Think differently and use a fucking adverb you fucking morons.
More sophisticated people might use some kind of verbal trick, pun, or game to achieve the same effect. And it is usually more effective.
Does anybody think Apple's ad writers are just the same as the drones who write, say, Dell's ad copy? Think different.
Does Mozilla handle client-side XML yet ? And NO I don't mean the piss-poor CSS implementation that the earlier builds had.
CSS on Mozilla is actually getting quite good. Last I checked, it was like 99% compliant with CSS1. To give credit where credit is due, IE 5 for the Mac is apparently fully compliant (but IE 5.5 for Windows isn't...the irony.)
Anyway, the most recent table of client-side XML performance I've seen is this one on xml.com, by Simon St. Laurent. In brief, Mozilla looks pretty good in this comparison. It's the only browser with XLink support of any kind, and handles a few other small things better than IE. Other than that, it's basically right up there. You mention XSL, but no browser has a standards-conforming XSLT at this point.
More interesting to see will be how well things shape up for CSS2 and DOM support, assuming DOM Level 2 ever gets unwedged. You mention SMIL, but I would have to argue that full CSS2 and W3C-compliant DOM are much more important.
Re:"Downturn in Linux stocks" ? Heh...
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Its not surprising, really. VA Linux Systems is barely a blip on the radar when you look at the facts. It has the second-worst sales record among Linux vendors, weighing in at a measly 5% marketshare.
Not really. If memory serves, you don't break out the "other vendors" category that's below Fujitsu in that chart of yours. But anyway, the real point is that VA Linux isn't Dell Computer, and it's sales, even in the variously defined Linux niche, are unlikely to look anything like Dell's. Yet. One of the few relevant things in the last VA Linux quarterly report was the fact that VA Linux had over 500% revenue growth on a year-over-year basis. Now, that's almost certainly unsustainable, but it's all anybody could reasonably expect, and two or three years of revenue growth even 1/5 that good would put them into the black. It might not happen, but that's the business plan, I suspet.
I still think the stock is pricey, but it's getting to the point where the valuation is only "wishful" instead of "completely friggin' insane".
t could be worse, however. You could own some Red Hat stock, which has plummeted to $19 (as of the time of this writing) with no indication of stopping. Not a big surprise here either. Red Hat has no product. Whatever they try to sell for a couple hundred dollars can be bought at LinuxMall or CheapBytes for 99 cents.
Uh, you mean support contracts? I don't think so... The website? Ditto.
I mean, Red Hat has an amazing amount of revenue for a company that has no "product". On the other hand, their revenue growth was down to 30-something percent year-over-year, and gross profits were actually down from 1999. It ain't a completely rosy picture, but their ultimate cushion is that $240 million in cash and cash equivalents. They have two or three years to get stuff sorted out as well.
But, if I had to guess, I would bet that at least one of these firms will not be independent five years from now. That by itself should not hurt stockholders much. The big point here is that neither of these firms is going to be a flame-out in six months like many others you'll be hearing about: both have actual revenues, cash on hand, and burn rates that are at least vaguely rational.
Oh yeah; I don't own any positions in either of these stocks, although I might own a drop or two of these in a mutual fund.
Crashes are neither inevitable or regular on the average Mac OS 9 equipped machine. Tevanian's crew fixed a lot of stuff.
Well, they didn't fix Netscape, so I'm afraid I still have to claim that crashes are indeed inevitable and regular (Communicator 4.7; Mac OS 9.04 on an iMac DV.) Not especially frequent, mind you, but annoying none the less. As an amusement (and a test of my cable modem:-)), I 've been using lots of nightly builds of Mozilla. Recently, those have made NS 4.7 look stable. My favorite recent glitch is the "two quit items on the menu" problem. If you choose the wrong one (or the keyboard accelerator), it's reboot city.
This is not a flame, but I have to point out that it's still way too easy to take down the machine these days. When Mac OS X finally ships, having the browser not crash the box will be the killer app.:-)
Color is far more important than glyphs for recognition. Given a document, for example, the first thing the human brain will recognize and emphasize is color, which is why it is important not to splatter lots of colors allover documents and webpages - its confusing.
Uh...not quite. Abrupt color changes between regions are excellent cues that for image segmentation (into objects), but only weak cues as to the identity of the objects themselves. The splatter of color is most confusing when it makes the user think there are many (functional) objects on the screen when there usually really aren't.
In the case of the apple window controls, you might be able to make an argument for giving them distinctive colors, but no argument other than possibly aesthetics for making them identical shaped droplets until after the user had to focus on them with the mouse.
As others have noted, there are some decently useful "built-in" meanings for colors, especially "red" for "stop", "yellow" for "caution", and "green" for "go". But I'd argue these conventional meanings (with the exception of "red" for "close") are only poorly matched to the current interface.
Slashdot Mirror
One important point to remember is the fact that these are demo machines, which means that people are jostling their mice and tapping their keyboards j-u-s-t enough so that the power management software doesn't get to do its thing. And then you get an iToaster.
My iMac at home is in the kitchen, and gets intense but sporadic use, so that it's asleep well over half the day. That really does help a lot.
This is waaaaay more true than you might realize. Almost every angle that we understand about metabolism in living things (and there's tons we don't know) has a potential application to the manufacture or pefection of human artifacts.
I could go on and on, but I'll point out one of my favorites: your computer probably has a honking big and noisy fan on it to dissipate heat. Not so for most animals and plants. Part of it is low wattage parts, part of it is beautiful heat distribution and exhaust apparatus, and part of it...well, we don't know yet.
And then I was pleasantly surprised to see the bug fixed in the June 15th nightly build. This one also seems to have better performance with type-in fields on forms (don't know why...). Things are definitely looking up.
Perhaps not yet. :-)
But I think the eliciting condition matches perfectly; on the same www.w3.org page, the link to XML Signatures is similarly deadly, but everything else that doesn't have the <?xml?> line at the top works fine. This bug turns out to have an interesting history, by the way...
In any case, I was amused that anything as boring as a www.w3.org page could slay the lizard.
Under the heading about DOM issues, it pointed out that:
"Gee, is that a deprecated method? I can't remember...hmm, let's check the standard!"
So I surf on over to www.w3.org, click on the "DOM" topic, and BOOM
Crashed the browser, froze the iMac (running 9.04) and made me realize that one way to claim standards compliance is to refuse to let users see the standards. :-)
No, I have no clue why this bailed, but, if memory serves, this exact thing has happened to me before.
Doh! That was a last second typo; I should have cut/pasted from my xterm. :-( So that should have been:
Thanks for pointing this out; sorry for the silly error.
Well, this is being *posted* from Missourah...but even though I'm not from the Midwest, "fire" is basically monosyllabic in my dialect. So I reject your criticism here. Hah! :-)
In any case, both are well-formed perl, and now also proper haiku. Thanks for your help.
I agree with you here, but for the sake of the Perl as Haiku Movement, I think we need a definitive ruling on the pronunciation of other punctuation. Especially #!, ', ", and ;. I think it's only fair to suggest that perl as haiku be executable, like other perl poetry, but I'm less sure that we can all agree on how to pronounce it correctly.
So is this a haiku?
Obviously, I pronounce the first line "shebang bin perl five", but I'm not an authority on this. I'm a bit squeamish about pronouncing "quote", though, although that would be consistent. If ' is silent, then the haiku could be:
The seasonal reference is to midsummer fireworks (duh...).
Dang; where's Tom Christiansen when you really need him here. :-(
Once upon a time, not very long ago, we were about to cancel everything except basic cable having, well, nothing beyond very basic needs in this age of high-speed internet access.
Then, while clicking through one Friday evening of TV Wasteland, I stumbled upon this really bizarre cooking show. The name of it was Iron Something (I mean, am I allowed to use the trademarked name?). It was on the Food Network, which frankly wasn't a channel we ever watched much.
But the show was awesome. Seriously, my wife and I were stunned; there was finally a decent reason to get cable! An actual reason to bother to watch TV. Something easily worth the $18 per month difference between basic and expanded whatever that we were getting. And we spread the good word to everybody we knew. My sister-in-law got a satellite dish just so she could watch the show.
Despite my fairly dim view of television, the medium, I've always had the opinion that there were only two countries on earth where people had any idea about what to do with the medium. The first was the U.S., and the other, to my surprise, actually, was Japan. (I found this out while I was homesick for a week at a conference in Japan.) Of course, most Japanese programming is unknown in the U.S., so it was hard to tell people about it.
But this cooking show was something you could point them to. Really, it was the first thing I could point at and say, "See? The Japanese have really done something excellent and new with TV."
Almost everybody I preached to ended up loving the show. To one unlucky soul in a non-cable-possible household, I even made weekly tapes of the shows (commericals included, of course). We live in a small Midwestern university town, and we don't really get out very much. But I didn't care that much, as long as I could stretch out on the couch with the family on Friday and Saturday nights and watch the Theme Ingredient be revealed. My four year-old son can name all four chefs. He thinks that peanut butter "matches well" with chocolate milk.
At some point early on in the craze, we did turn to the net for more info. And I did try out the food network site on the show. Alas, nothing much to see there (at that time). So I fired up the Good Old Search Engine and found the URL to ironchef.com. Like, wow. What a truly amazing site; what an awesome labor of love. Of course there isn't much to see there now; Ironstef (really, that's what she calls herself) has had to shut the thing down.
I actually understand trademarks. I have sympathy for intellectual property laws, even if I don't always seek the same level of protection for my work. Intellectually, I completely understand why Fuji set their lawyers against the show's most enthusiastic fans. Some day, I might even be able to explain this to the four-year-old.
More emotionally, of course, I wish I could tell Fuji to take their Iron-Fisted lawyers and put them in a tight warm smelly place. This new technique matches well with greediness. It probably won't kill the fishy smell. It really has killed any interest I had in the show.
I think people here have under-estimated the degree to which true innovation (rather than better packaging) has been slowed in the field of operating systems.
But Pike does make a very important point about the current limitations on possible innovation: most of them are the result of the need to interoperate with existing standards. What is perhaps not very clear from his argument is that the constraint of existing standards is universal. And it does indeed limit innovation, at least at a given level of system complexity.
But how universal a constraint is this, really? I think the most telling example is that of biology. Life has been around for something like 3 billion years, and we now know that there has been exceedingly little innovation in some of its aspects; the basic principles (and most of the exact codes) of encoding genes into DNA, of transcribing them using RNA, and expressing them to do the real work of the organism are stunningly conserved. Almost no innovation there. And I could go on up the various levels of complexity and make similar arguments. But I won't, except to point out that in biology, innovation has almost always emerged in the form of additional (internal) complexity.
Getting back to the world of operating systems, then, Pike is possibly quite correct that the lowest layers of the operating system architecture are now essentially fossilized, permanent, and profoundly resistant to change. But the argument that this means that innovation now has no place is, I believe, profoundly wrong. Innovation will just have to occur at higher levels of abstraction.
So take one example: the idea of users and user authentication. This is a very basic concept, and one which at its heart seems to be very resistant to change. (But, interestingly, one where Plan Nine was conspicuously innovative; hmm...) But I think it should be very clear that there has been and will be lots of innovation in this aspect of operating systems. The problem, of course, is that users are no longer welded to the console of the machine, nor even to a local network including a particular machine, nor even to the same kind of machine on the same kind of network...and yet people do have this notion that they should be able to "log on" from anywhere with strong security and access to whatever resources they had both "there" and "here", wherever "here" is. As many slashdotters know, this gets pretty hairy pretty quickly, and there are many possible solutions that are being worked on. (And of course, the problem is not a completely novel one; the analogy is a bit rough, but the immune system is an interesting solution to a similar problem.)
In any case, there is lots of room for innovation for certain kinds of problems, and very little room for others. I think Pike really does know this, and was worrying more about how we can get funding and support to the people who are trying to solve the problems where there is still lots of room for innovation. Academia does not seem to be the answer, nor do most corporate cultures. But what is the answer?
Now, this is amusing.
Pike was talking abouty innovation in operating system design, and I think we can all agree that a browser is not an integral part of any OS.
Well, except for Microsoft, who argue explicitly that the browser is part of the OS. Now, you might claim that the argument that "the browser is the OS" is innovative, except that then it's not clear that Sun (with the HotJava browser, and the idea that Java was a platform) wasn't the first to make that claim.
On the other hand, I have to agree with Pike that there has been relatively little innovation on the operating systems research front, or at least innovation that has had any commercial success. I'm not an expert on the topic, but it's very possible that things like COM, maligned as much as they may be around here, are about as innovative as anything else. (Or not, but that will be a separate post from me...)
tchrist? You mean Tom Christiansen? Man, I hope not, because I'm not sure I've ever seen or heard of anybody who was more interested in "liberating the user with regards to information [sic]". Of course, I'm not sure I've read many people who felt more free to tell you exactly what they thought, and I was sad to see the day when as free a thinker as tchrist found slashdot an unreceptive forum for his contributions.
You may quote me, provided that:
jabber (tm) writes:
Are you a trademark? :-)
Seriously, I thought this would only apply to a trademark like jabber(tm) or restricted phrases like "When jabber jibbers, the jive jibes!" (r). Can't say anything nasty about those!
But you, on the other hand, are not protected. So I can say anything about you that I like. So, for the sake of argument, I could say:
Oh wait--that stuff back there was abuse of copyright, part of an argument about trademark violation. Guess I'd better take that back, then. Heh, heh.
stupid git
Thanks for the tip; the official press release was far from clear on this point. :-)
I wish them luck. I guess one complicating factor here, though, might be the fact that there is a lot of DOM stuff in particular where the Javascript interface is essentially the de facto one (even if the W3C admits the possibility of other scripting language bindings). Which will make this all very interesting come upgrade time...
A year ago, the sysadmin in our department wound up with a couple of HP LJ III-somethings that somebody was actually trying to surplus. He offered them to the department via a mailing list, and they were gone in about a minute.
We may never know if they really could survive gunfire, but I know I feel more comfortable in a room that has a LaserJet around so I can duck and cover. :-)
I knew this would come in handy someday...
Everybody knows that Al Gore invented the Internet back in the 80s, so it should be pretty obvious that you should look in his collected writings for the best evidence of prior art. I'm thinking it's somewhere in the "Electronic Protocols" chapter of Earth in the Balance.
It's an ugly job, but I think that somebody out there has to read the collected works of Albert Gore to find that prior art. The future of the Internet, and our children, depend on it.
I know that open futures and options markets in DRAM have been contemplated on several occasions, but I don't believe there are any "real" ones, yet. Part of the reason is technological; a troy ounce of gold is, was, and forever shall be the same thing; same goes for a bushel of wheat or most other commodities. But memory technology is changing very fast; a 1 meg SIMM might have looked like a really good benchmark at one time, but certainly not now. In that sense, RAM is a very strange commodity, and an exceedingly risky one; RAMBUS memory futures, anyone?
Other oddities include the facts that RAM markets have a relatively large proportion of foreign corporatoins involved, and that they have proven to be really easily manipulated in the past.
But one of the biggest factors behind a lack of RAM-based securities might be the simple point that large consumers of RAM, unlike large consumers in many other industries, can and do make huge contracts directly with producers (which can be themselves!), and this might reduce the need for then to do hedging in the markets.
Two points about this.
First, I think there is better XML display support than you might think. Given that you're realistically looking something like a year ahead on this, I don't see why you shouldn't go for the gusto.
You also suggest that going with just XHTML won't require any fall-back position. I'm really not sure that's true. And even if it were true, you could turn an internal XML representation into the traditional, cruftified Slashdot HTML that we and our browsers know and love.
But, having said that, I agree that XHTML (with full CSS) is waaaay better than nothing. Given that Slashdot is News for Nerds, I see no reason why it shouldn't be at least closer to the leading edge with respect to style sheets and standards compliance.
I've heard about the JavaScript-specificness before. So help me, this has to be the silliest limitation in the whole Mozilla project. I mean, it's not as if they didn't bother abstracting away from the {user interface, rendering engine, networking code, fill-in-the-blank}. But Ecmascript was holy? It's a bit depressing when Microsoft, who probably had every reason to push VBscript as hard as possible, actually offer more choices for client-side scripting (by a lot) than Netscape/Mozilla/anything else.
That said, it will be pretty awesome to write XPCom stuff in the language of your choice. And the ActiveState people have a pretty good record for providing what they say they will.
Can you say, "Comma splice?"
OK, let's look at this more closely. Shoeboy seems to suggest that Apple marketeers are morons because they are using an adjective ("different") to modify a verb ("think"). The other possibility is that the construction "Think different" is, in fact, different from what Shoeboy thinks it is. Or, maybe it is a pun. Or, a more figurative use of language.
Consider the following examples:
In the above, I have marked with an asterisk those sentences that I think are actually ungrammatical in English. A question mark denotes a sentence that is either dubious, or is unlikely to mean the same thing as the unmarked version.
Shoeboy might notice that the "adverb" versions of these sentences look strange (not "look strangely"). They seem pretty weird. I don't have time to provide a full lesson on the syntax of the "look" construction and its friends. Suffice it to say that the rules for when and where you use adjectives and adverbs with verbs that can take fuller complements concerning the state or existence of the subject are not as clear as Schoolboy might wish to believe.
Now, what that has to do with "Think different" is that "think" is a verb that often takes a complement that expresses the existence or state of some entity. Also note that in a sentence involving ellipsis, that you can get non-imperative sentences with phrases like "think different" in them pretty easily, and even imperative versions with a little bit more effort:
Compared to other Wintel offerings, do you think Apples' products are the same or different?
So, I maintain that Apple's slogan really doesn't stretch current American usage much beyond (if at all beyond) it's current state. Now, you might argue that most readers are not likely to come up with the above dialogue at the drop of a hat. And I agree. But the whole point of advertising is to make a striking statement that gets people to pay attention to you. Now, some people try to do this just by being provocative for no obvious reason. Shoeboy does this, for example, by using repetitive obscenities:
More sophisticated people might use some kind of verbal trick, pun, or game to achieve the same effect. And it is usually more effective.
Does anybody think Apple's ad writers are just the same as the drones who write, say, Dell's ad copy? Think different.
CSS on Mozilla is actually getting quite good. Last I checked, it was like 99% compliant with CSS1. To give credit where credit is due, IE 5 for the Mac is apparently fully compliant (but IE 5.5 for Windows isn't...the irony.)
Anyway, the most recent table of client-side XML performance I've seen is this one on xml.com, by Simon St. Laurent. In brief, Mozilla looks pretty good in this comparison. It's the only browser with XLink support of any kind, and handles a few other small things better than IE. Other than that, it's basically right up there. You mention XSL, but no browser has a standards-conforming XSLT at this point.
More interesting to see will be how well things shape up for CSS2 and DOM support, assuming DOM Level 2 ever gets unwedged. You mention SMIL, but I would have to argue that full CSS2 and W3C-compliant DOM are much more important.
Not really. If memory serves, you don't break out the "other vendors" category that's below Fujitsu in that chart of yours. But anyway, the real point is that VA Linux isn't Dell Computer, and it's sales, even in the variously defined Linux niche, are unlikely to look anything like Dell's. Yet. One of the few relevant things in the last VA Linux quarterly report was the fact that VA Linux had over 500% revenue growth on a year-over-year basis. Now, that's almost certainly unsustainable, but it's all anybody could reasonably expect, and two or three years of revenue growth even 1/5 that good would put them into the black. It might not happen, but that's the business plan, I suspet.
I still think the stock is pricey, but it's getting to the point where the valuation is only "wishful" instead of "completely friggin' insane".
Uh, you mean support contracts? I don't think so... The website? Ditto.
I mean, Red Hat has an amazing amount of revenue for a company that has no "product". On the other hand, their revenue growth was down to 30-something percent year-over-year, and gross profits were actually down from 1999. It ain't a completely rosy picture, but their ultimate cushion is that $240 million in cash and cash equivalents. They have two or three years to get stuff sorted out as well.
But, if I had to guess, I would bet that at least one of these firms will not be independent five years from now. That by itself should not hurt stockholders much. The big point here is that neither of these firms is going to be a flame-out in six months like many others you'll be hearing about: both have actual revenues, cash on hand, and burn rates that are at least vaguely rational.
Oh yeah; I don't own any positions in either of these stocks, although I might own a drop or two of these in a mutual fund.
Well, they didn't fix Netscape, so I'm afraid I still have to claim that crashes are indeed inevitable and regular (Communicator 4.7; Mac OS 9.04 on an iMac DV.) Not especially frequent, mind you, but annoying none the less. As an amusement (and a test of my cable modem :-)), I 've been using lots of nightly builds of Mozilla. Recently, those have made NS 4.7 look stable. My favorite recent glitch is the "two quit items on the menu" problem. If you choose the wrong one (or the keyboard accelerator), it's reboot city.
This is not a flame, but I have to point out that it's still way too easy to take down the machine these days. When Mac OS X finally ships, having the browser not crash the box will be the killer app. :-)
Uh...not quite. Abrupt color changes between regions are excellent cues that for image segmentation (into objects), but only weak cues as to the identity of the objects themselves. The splatter of color is most confusing when it makes the user think there are many (functional) objects on the screen when there usually really aren't.
In the case of the apple window controls, you might be able to make an argument for giving them distinctive colors, but no argument other than possibly aesthetics for making them identical shaped droplets until after the user had to focus on them with the mouse.
As others have noted, there are some decently useful "built-in" meanings for colors, especially "red" for "stop", "yellow" for "caution", and "green" for "go". But I'd argue these conventional meanings (with the exception of "red" for "close") are only poorly matched to the current interface.