Apple will likely make a laptop geared for Shake users (or at least tweak their line to keep them in consideration...)
They already have. It's called the PowerBook G4. Look at the specs, and you'll see that the TiBook is the closest thing you can get to a desktop G4 while staying within the bounds of laptop requirements for size, heat, and battery life.
My friend uses his TiBook for Final Cut Pro and Combustion. Not as a second machine, or something to use on the road; it's his primary platform. His opinion (which is more educated with respect to this video effects and editing stuff than mine) is that the TiBook is good enough to be his only workstation for those kinds of jobs.
Now, for doing Shake specifically, a better 3D graphics card will win big; according to one of the Nothing Real guys I talked to at NAB last month, everything-- right down to the UI buttons and stuff-- is drawn with OpenGL. So a faster 3D card will speed up everything in the program. But again, eventually you get to a point where even the pros say that the TiBook is good enough for full-time work.
Apple had a skin removed because the effect resembled an _internal research theme_??? This carries things a bit far.
The story is much larger than that. Back in the early 90s all the talk was about Copland, some of which would eventually become Mac OS 8. One of the technologies Apple was previewing was the Appearance Manager, which was intended to make OS-level look-n-feel themes available for the user.
(Incidentally, as far as I know, Apple was the first company to talk big about a customizable user interface. I am NOT certain, by any means, but I heard about Apple's Appearance Manager plans long before I ever heard of Windows Explorer themes, or Winamp skins, or any of that other stuff.)
Apple obviously spent some time working on appearance themes; there are three that I remember seeing in Apple marketing materials and prerelease documentation and all that: Gizmo, Hi-Tech, and Drawing Board. The pencil-sketch theme that the great grandparent referred to was based on Drawing Board.
Along the way, a couple of things happened. First of all, the Copland project simply went Tango Uniform. Enough things went bad that the project as a whole was cancelled, although some of the technology made it into Mac OS 8 and 8. One of the things on that list was the Appearance Manager, and appearance themes.
At the last minute, the themes were pulled. I don't have any inside info, but here's my speculation: Apple's reputation was founded on the consistency and user-friendliness of their OS. They spent years and years-- and tons of money, to be sure-- developing a great user interface. Themes would have made it possible-- nay, even easy-- for third parties to throw away all of that hard work, and to make the Mac OS ugly or difficult to use. It just didn't make sense. For the hardcore user out there who was into customization, there was still Kaleidoscope.
So, for whatever reason, built-in appearance themes never made it out the door in an OS release. But they did make it out the door in tons of marketing info and developer documentation. And the Gizmo, Hi-Tech, and Drawing Board themes were all over that documentation in dozens and dozens of screen shots.
Apple still owns Gizmo, Hi-Tech, and Drawing Board. The fact that those appearances were never included in a released product doesn't mean Apple should necessarily give up their exclusive rights to those ideas. We've talked about it before; if Apple doesn't protect their trademarks (of which the Mac desktop-- even an unreleased desktop-- is one), US law dictates that they lose the exclusive right to those trademarks.
So given the facts, Apple did the only thing that made sense: they asked the developers, politely, to go get their own ideas and quit stealing Apple's. And the developers of these various themes have, thus far, complied with that request. Who knows? Maybe if one of those guys found a lawyer willing to work on contingency, the courts would end up revising what a company can and can't protect as its own. But so far that hasn't happened.
Apple's still fairly hung up about form over function.
That's too much of an oversimplification. Apple's hung up on the overall user experience. See, a Mac is capable of more or less the same stuff as a PC with Windows, or one with Linux. There's not much that a PC can do that a Mac simply can't, or vice versa. Apple's focus is on one thing: let's make using our computers as easy and pleasant as possible. Let's take the common tasks and streamline them to the point where people enjoy using our computers. That's why we get things like iTunes and iPhoto and iMovie released for free. They're basically included in the price of your Mac, because Apple believes that most people will eventually be interested in messing around with digital music, pictures, or movies. So they tried to make it as easy as possible.
The appearance thing is the same deal: overall user experience. I suspect that Apple did the math and decided that customizable appearance themes would detract from the user experience more than they could add to it. So they canned the idea.
I still don't see a problem with the way Apple does business. Sorry.
I'm asking, how much of these Apple behavior it takes for people to realize that Apple is not on our side and Steve has not changed a bit?
Who the hell cares? If Apple files lawsuits when necessary to protect their intellectual property, then good for them. Stealing other people's ideas and using them yourself is wrong, wrong, wrong. As computer companies go, Apple seems to be one of the most socially responsible: they believe (rightly or wrongly) that they can't stay in business selling open-source software, but that the many-eyes effect is real and good. So they compromised: they released the really important part (Darwin, the core OS), and kept the really valuable part (Aqua, the user experience).
What the hell, exactly, is wrong with Apple? Sounds to me like they're doing everything right!
IANAL, but I have done a lot of datasheets and other marketing materials for my company. I believe the use of "TM" or the registered trademark symbol ("circle-R") is optional. You can also acknowledge trademark ownership with small print: "J2EE, JMS, CMP, JNDI, ETC, ASAP are trademarks of Sun Microsystems" or something like that.
This interview is worth reading if only to get a laugh out of the way Sun's marketroids obviously sanitized it. In at attempt to make the text of the interview (which is just a transcript of a spoken exchange, after all) comply with Sun's trademark guidelines, they ended up with sentences like this:
So, personally, you could delete [the] JDBC [API] from [the] J2SE [platform] and it would not affect any code that I've ever written.
And this:
That would make [the] Java [programming language] much more flexible.
And this:
Is it possible to submit the Java [technology] bytecode specification to a standards body like ECMA [and the like]?
Sheesh. This interview was brought to you by the letters "[" and "]".
(It's times like these that a good ol' "salt the earth" Free software project sounds like such fun!)
Er... did you mean "salt the earth" or "salt of the earth?"
Judges 9, verse 45: "And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt."
But note that a medical billing program "is a" billing program
No, it's much more. Medical coding and billing is a science in and of itself; they write textbooks on the subject. It's not practical to talk about adapting a general-purpose accounts receivable tool to use in health care.
It wouldn't take too much effort to throw a custom GUI and printing interface over a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend.
It's pretty clear that you don't know what you're talking about here. Just implementing an integrity checking scheme for the tens of thousands of medical codes would be a monumental effort. And that's just the very beginning.
I'm sorry that I don't have anything positive to say. I just didn't feel right about letting this kind of misinformation get out there unchallenged.
I don't agree. I have 256 MB in my iBook and I can't really tell much of a difference between it and my iMac. Both are G3s, same speed, but the iMac has 640 MB. I use 'em both pretty seriously, but I can't usually tell a difference.
So you mean if they only made 30 grand a year instead of 60 they would know how to manage the money and WOULD save for a rainy day?
I think it's safe to say that having more money than you need makes it easier to be less cautious in your spending.
(Did that make sense? I was lost in a maze of twisty little adverbs, all alike.)
I never meant to imply that blowing all your money is an okay thing. It's dumb. But there's a big difference between making a dumb mistake (which anybody can do, and lots and lots of people have done) and just plain being an idiot.
If pressed, I will admit that I was an idiot five years ago, and that I'm now digging myself out of it. But of course I won't admit to being an idiot today.;-)
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know that you're right, that tucking cash away for emergencies is the only way to go. But at the same time remember who we're talking about: high-tech professionals, almost all of whom are young and single. If you're married, you probably haven't been for long, and you probably don't have kids yet.
(Just the typical Slashdot demographic, ignoring the non-wage-earning segment. Also, I'm just guessing. No flames.)
People like me^H^H^H that typically found themselves over the past five years or so with more money than they were capable of managing. Consequently, most of us drive nicer cars than we need to, and live in bigger homes than we need to, and have too many DVDs. The half million bucks, gross, I^H^H they've earned over the past few years is gone, gone, gone.
That doesn't mean we^H^H^H they're idiots. Just that they're still figuring this whole "money" thing out. In a situation like that, it's harder than you'd think to save for a rainy day.
Not exactly.. a modern dead tree book is a derivative of an electronic manuscript.
You can draw all the distinctions you want. It doesn't change the fact that a book is a physical object, and when you buy one, all you're entitled to by virtue of that transaction is the object itself.
I have no problem at all with publishers selling electronic copies of books separately, or not at all. To me, it's no different from publishers' selling paperbacks and hardcovers separately. The paper book is one thing, and the electronic copy is another thing. Sell 'em separately.
Note carefully: TechTV is owned by Vulcan, not by Microsoft or any of its subsidiaries. Vulcan is basically Paul Allen's sandbox. They do some amazing things. I don't know if it's complete or in progress or abandoned or what, but at one point they were working on a HDTV video-on-demand system for Allen's estate. Storing uncompressed HD and distributing it as 19 Mbit MPEG-2 via DVB-ASI throughout the facility. Amazing.
So yeah, I'd say if it's owned by Vulcan, it's about as objective as any media outlet could reasonably be expected to be.
I have nothing personal against mblase. I don't even necessarily disagree with what he/she/whatever said here.
But I have to just butt in and say that I long for the days before every single story that got posted to Slashdot had one or more highly moderated comments like this one.
Some people prefer to download music rather than buying CDs. Some people prefer to download movies rather than attending them or buying DVDs. Some people prefer to download books rather than buying them or borrowing them from their local library. There are evidently people out there-- although I don't mean to imply that mblase is one of them-- who believe they're entitled to free music, movies, books, and software.
I prefer to believe that these people are in the minority. I prefer to think that the vast majority of people out there believe in working for a living. I prefer to think that most people take pride in their hard work, and reject the ethics of entitlement.
But you wouldn't know it from reading Slashdot. Every damn day we see comments like this one: "It's nice to know that professional literature can still be free."
How about we rephrase this comment. Will all due respect to mblase, I think what you really meant to say was: It's nice to know that these authors have been so generous and cool to release their stories for free on the Internet. They did not have to do this, but they were cool enough to do it anyway. Everybody go download them, and if you like them, buy the author's book.
Motion picture projectors use a two-bladed shutter. So for every frame of film, the screen is illuminated two times. This site has some cool background information on early film projection, and how it influenced television standards in the Olde Dayes.
I saw both Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. on the DLP at the Cinemark Legacy in Plano. Three things really blew me away.
First, it's bright! When the green "the following preview has been approved..." slate goes up, the sheer amount of light coming back off that screen is just amazing.
The next thing that surprised me is the noise: there isn't any. You don't notice the sound of the projector (that "tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh" sound of the gate opening and closing) until it's gone. When the house lights go down before the movie starts, it's completely silent in the theater, which is pretty cool.
Finally, there's no flicker. That's another thing you don't notice until it's gone. Despite the fact that the image is being shown to you at 24 frames per second, there's either no refresh effect in the DLP at all, or so little that your eye doesn't see it. A traditional screen, lit by a film projector, goes dark 48 times per second, and your eye picks up on that. A DLP screen doesn't. I guess that also contributes to the overall brightness; you're getting something like a third more lumens to the screen just because you're not closing a gate twice per frame.
Oh, and in case you're wondering why there's a DLP cinema in Plano, TX, I think it's because this theater is right across the street from the TI facility where they invented DLP. At least that's the story.
Hmm. I write and I write, but no one seems to read.
Not all of us are writing software for the space shuttle. I'll bet you aren't, either.
Nope. I'm writing software for customers to buy. Nobody will die if it fails, but my customers will get annoyed. Annoy 'em enough and they'll go elsewhere. My company will go out of business. My family-- and the families of all of my employees-- will suffer. While that's not the space shuttle, it's important to me.
See? It's that spectrum thing that I wrote about in my post that you evidently didn't read. At one end, we have hobbyists; it doesn't matter to anybody but them if their software fails. At the other end, we have stuff like the space shuttle and nuclear power plants: life and death stuff. My company considers our work to be closer to the space-shuttle end than the hobbyist end.
Jesus, don't you people work for a living? I can't believe you don't take your jobs more seriously!
As for the whole "software built like a bridge" crap...
If architects built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Lets face it, Software Engineering is not (in most cases) like bridge engineering. Trying to build software like you build bridges just doesn't work.
I think you're only right if you look at a special subset of software: those software projects where failure and loss are acceptable.
Read this article from the December '96 issue of Fast Company. It's about the the team that writes the software for the space shuttle's on-board computer systems.
Interesting stats: at the time the article was written, the previous 11 releases of the software had had a total of 17 bugs. Not each; total. In 400,000+ lines of code.
Great quote, from one of the team members: "If the software isn't perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."
There's a big difference between computer programming and software engineering. Techniques like extreme programming may work well in a pure programming environment, in which the results of your work just don't matter all that much. So you software crashed; nobody got hurt, right? Just re-launch it, and remember to save often!
At the opposite end of the spectrum, though, software engineering is just like civil engineering, or mechanical engineering, or aerospace engineering. If you f*ck up, somebody may die.
Commercial software development is somewhere in between. If you don't have any discipline or oversight, your software will be so bad that your company will go out of business. On the other hand, if you institute military-grade processes, you'll never deliver a product in a reasonable time. So you have to compromise.
But people who say that software is totally different are just fooling themselves. In software, like everything else, there's good work and there's shoddy work. Putting a label on shoddy work and calling it a "technique" doesn't make it less shoddy; it's just gilding the lily.
Think about that and perhaps you could explain the "Rite = Right" or "Lite = Light" trend.
"Light" versus "lite" actually has a pretty interesting back-story. The FDA mandates terms like "low fat," "fat free," and "light." But there's no such regulation of the pseudo-term "lite." So it's "lite" ice cream even though it's 43% butterfat. That's a marketing thing.
Ah, but you forget the cardinal rule of the English language: "If enough people use it - even though incorrect - it becomes a word by sheer force of numbers."
But you forget the cardinal rule of language: linguistic drift happens over centuries, not decades or years. Find me a use of "virii" in English that dates to 1890 or earlier and we'll talk. Until we do, "virii" is still wrong, wrong, wrong.
"Correctness and accuracy" would be redundant, at least in this context. "Correctness and precision" isn't. Other posters have used the mathematical example to delineate accuracy from precision; the verbal example is also appropriate. If I pointed over in the corner and said, "That is an object," my statement would be completely accurate. If I said, "That is a piece of furniture," it would be equally accurate, but more precise. If I said, "That is a chair," it would be both accurate and fairly precise. If I said, "That is the chair that I bought last summer at that garage sale," it would be very precise... but inaccurate. Because while it is a chair, I didn't buy it at a garage sale.
So precision and accuracy are related ideas, but kind of orthogonal to one another.
In my case, I was trying to say that geeks-- like us-- tend to try to speak both correctly (i.e., accurately) and precisely. So I think my statement was just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple will likely make a laptop geared for Shake users (or at least tweak their line to keep them in consideration...)
They already have. It's called the PowerBook G4. Look at the specs, and you'll see that the TiBook is the closest thing you can get to a desktop G4 while staying within the bounds of laptop requirements for size, heat, and battery life.
My friend uses his TiBook for Final Cut Pro and Combustion. Not as a second machine, or something to use on the road; it's his primary platform. His opinion (which is more educated with respect to this video effects and editing stuff than mine) is that the TiBook is good enough to be his only workstation for those kinds of jobs.
Now, for doing Shake specifically, a better 3D graphics card will win big; according to one of the Nothing Real guys I talked to at NAB last month, everything-- right down to the UI buttons and stuff-- is drawn with OpenGL. So a faster 3D card will speed up everything in the program. But again, eventually you get to a point where even the pros say that the TiBook is good enough for full-time work.
Great review. Now you've just got to work on not verbing your nouns. ;-)
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Apple had a skin removed because the effect resembled an _internal research theme_??? This carries things a bit far.
The story is much larger than that. Back in the early 90s all the talk was about Copland, some of which would eventually become Mac OS 8. One of the technologies Apple was previewing was the Appearance Manager, which was intended to make OS-level look-n-feel themes available for the user.
(Incidentally, as far as I know, Apple was the first company to talk big about a customizable user interface. I am NOT certain, by any means, but I heard about Apple's Appearance Manager plans long before I ever heard of Windows Explorer themes, or Winamp skins, or any of that other stuff.)
Apple obviously spent some time working on appearance themes; there are three that I remember seeing in Apple marketing materials and prerelease documentation and all that: Gizmo, Hi-Tech, and Drawing Board. The pencil-sketch theme that the great grandparent referred to was based on Drawing Board.
Along the way, a couple of things happened. First of all, the Copland project simply went Tango Uniform. Enough things went bad that the project as a whole was cancelled, although some of the technology made it into Mac OS 8 and 8. One of the things on that list was the Appearance Manager, and appearance themes.
At the last minute, the themes were pulled. I don't have any inside info, but here's my speculation: Apple's reputation was founded on the consistency and user-friendliness of their OS. They spent years and years-- and tons of money, to be sure-- developing a great user interface. Themes would have made it possible-- nay, even easy-- for third parties to throw away all of that hard work, and to make the Mac OS ugly or difficult to use. It just didn't make sense. For the hardcore user out there who was into customization, there was still Kaleidoscope.
So, for whatever reason, built-in appearance themes never made it out the door in an OS release. But they did make it out the door in tons of marketing info and developer documentation. And the Gizmo, Hi-Tech, and Drawing Board themes were all over that documentation in dozens and dozens of screen shots.
Apple still owns Gizmo, Hi-Tech, and Drawing Board. The fact that those appearances were never included in a released product doesn't mean Apple should necessarily give up their exclusive rights to those ideas. We've talked about it before; if Apple doesn't protect their trademarks (of which the Mac desktop-- even an unreleased desktop-- is one), US law dictates that they lose the exclusive right to those trademarks.
So given the facts, Apple did the only thing that made sense: they asked the developers, politely, to go get their own ideas and quit stealing Apple's. And the developers of these various themes have, thus far, complied with that request. Who knows? Maybe if one of those guys found a lawyer willing to work on contingency, the courts would end up revising what a company can and can't protect as its own. But so far that hasn't happened.
Apple's still fairly hung up about form over function.
That's too much of an oversimplification. Apple's hung up on the overall user experience. See, a Mac is capable of more or less the same stuff as a PC with Windows, or one with Linux. There's not much that a PC can do that a Mac simply can't, or vice versa. Apple's focus is on one thing: let's make using our computers as easy and pleasant as possible. Let's take the common tasks and streamline them to the point where people enjoy using our computers. That's why we get things like iTunes and iPhoto and iMovie released for free. They're basically included in the price of your Mac, because Apple believes that most people will eventually be interested in messing around with digital music, pictures, or movies. So they tried to make it as easy as possible.
The appearance thing is the same deal: overall user experience. I suspect that Apple did the math and decided that customizable appearance themes would detract from the user experience more than they could add to it. So they canned the idea.
I still don't see a problem with the way Apple does business. Sorry.
I'm asking, how much of these Apple behavior it takes for people to realize that Apple is not on our side and Steve has not changed a bit?
Who the hell cares? If Apple files lawsuits when necessary to protect their intellectual property, then good for them. Stealing other people's ideas and using them yourself is wrong, wrong, wrong. As computer companies go, Apple seems to be one of the most socially responsible: they believe (rightly or wrongly) that they can't stay in business selling open-source software, but that the many-eyes effect is real and good. So they compromised: they released the really important part (Darwin, the core OS), and kept the really valuable part (Aqua, the user experience).
What the hell, exactly, is wrong with Apple? Sounds to me like they're doing everything right!
IANAL, but I have done a lot of datasheets and other marketing materials for my company. I believe the use of "TM" or the registered trademark symbol ("circle-R") is optional. You can also acknowledge trademark ownership with small print: "J2EE, JMS, CMP, JNDI, ETC, ASAP are trademarks of Sun Microsystems" or something like that.
That's how we do it, anyway.
This interview is worth reading if only to get a laugh out of the way Sun's marketroids obviously sanitized it. In at attempt to make the text of the interview (which is just a transcript of a spoken exchange, after all) comply with Sun's trademark guidelines, they ended up with sentences like this:
So, personally, you could delete [the] JDBC [API] from [the] J2SE [platform] and it would not affect any code that I've ever written.
And this:
That would make [the] Java [programming language] much more flexible.
And this:
Is it possible to submit the Java [technology] bytecode specification to a standards body like ECMA [and the like]?
Sheesh. This interview was brought to you by the letters "[" and "]".
(It's times like these that a good ol' "salt the earth" Free software project sounds like such fun!)
Er... did you mean "salt the earth" or "salt of the earth?"
Judges 9, verse 45: "And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt."
But note that a medical billing program "is a" billing program
No, it's much more. Medical coding and billing is a science in and of itself; they write textbooks on the subject. It's not practical to talk about adapting a general-purpose accounts receivable tool to use in health care.
It wouldn't take too much effort to throw a custom GUI and printing interface over a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend.
It's pretty clear that you don't know what you're talking about here. Just implementing an integrity checking scheme for the tens of thousands of medical codes would be a monumental effort. And that's just the very beginning.
I'm sorry that I don't have anything positive to say. I just didn't feel right about letting this kind of misinformation get out there unchallenged.
I don't agree. I have 256 MB in my iBook and I can't really tell much of a difference between it and my iMac. Both are G3s, same speed, but the iMac has 640 MB. I use 'em both pretty seriously, but I can't usually tell a difference.
So you mean if they only made 30 grand a year instead of 60 they would know how to manage the money and WOULD save for a rainy day?
;-)
I think it's safe to say that having more money than you need makes it easier to be less cautious in your spending.
(Did that make sense? I was lost in a maze of twisty little adverbs, all alike.)
I never meant to imply that blowing all your money is an okay thing. It's dumb. But there's a big difference between making a dumb mistake (which anybody can do, and lots and lots of people have done) and just plain being an idiot.
If pressed, I will admit that I was an idiot five years ago, and that I'm now digging myself out of it. But of course I won't admit to being an idiot today.
Those are some mighty big rocks to be chunkin' around from inside your glass house.
Thank you, mister financial planner. ;-)
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know that you're right, that tucking cash away for emergencies is the only way to go. But at the same time remember who we're talking about: high-tech professionals, almost all of whom are young and single. If you're married, you probably haven't been for long, and you probably don't have kids yet.
(Just the typical Slashdot demographic, ignoring the non-wage-earning segment. Also, I'm just guessing. No flames.)
People like me^H^H^H that typically found themselves over the past five years or so with more money than they were capable of managing. Consequently, most of us drive nicer cars than we need to, and live in bigger homes than we need to, and have too many DVDs. The half million bucks, gross, I^H^H they've earned over the past few years is gone, gone, gone.
That doesn't mean we^H^H^H they're idiots. Just that they're still figuring this whole "money" thing out. In a situation like that, it's harder than you'd think to save for a rainy day.
Not exactly.. a modern dead tree book is a derivative of an electronic manuscript.
You can draw all the distinctions you want. It doesn't change the fact that a book is a physical object, and when you buy one, all you're entitled to by virtue of that transaction is the object itself.
I have no problem at all with publishers selling electronic copies of books separately, or not at all. To me, it's no different from publishers' selling paperbacks and hardcovers separately. The paper book is one thing, and the electronic copy is another thing. Sell 'em separately.
Hmmm... is TechTV objective?
Note carefully: TechTV is owned by Vulcan, not by Microsoft or any of its subsidiaries. Vulcan is basically Paul Allen's sandbox. They do some amazing things. I don't know if it's complete or in progress or abandoned or what, but at one point they were working on a HDTV video-on-demand system for Allen's estate. Storing uncompressed HD and distributing it as 19 Mbit MPEG-2 via DVB-ASI throughout the facility. Amazing.
So yeah, I'd say if it's owned by Vulcan, it's about as objective as any media outlet could reasonably be expected to be.
Talk about Crazy Eddie.
Show of hands: how many people actually got this joke? I can think of four: myself, the guy who posted it, and the two guys who moderated it up.
The obscure ones are the best ones.
After all I'm effectively buying a license when I buy a book aren't I?
Hm. That's kind of like saying you're entitled to the book-on-tape when you buy the printed book. Which is nuts.
When you're buying a book, you're buying... a book.
Then again, this may be the best object lesson I've ever heard in the absurdity of buying and selling licenses.
If anyone would like to claim my $9000 in Macs and Mac Equipment before I toss it all into a pile and burn it, get in touch.
Done, and done.
I have nothing personal against mblase. I don't even necessarily disagree with what he/she/whatever said here.
But I have to just butt in and say that I long for the days before every single story that got posted to Slashdot had one or more highly moderated comments like this one.
Some people prefer to download music rather than buying CDs. Some people prefer to download movies rather than attending them or buying DVDs. Some people prefer to download books rather than buying them or borrowing them from their local library. There are evidently people out there-- although I don't mean to imply that mblase is one of them-- who believe they're entitled to free music, movies, books, and software.
I prefer to believe that these people are in the minority. I prefer to think that the vast majority of people out there believe in working for a living. I prefer to think that most people take pride in their hard work, and reject the ethics of entitlement.
But you wouldn't know it from reading Slashdot. Every damn day we see comments like this one: "It's nice to know that professional literature can still be free."
How about we rephrase this comment. Will all due respect to mblase, I think what you really meant to say was: It's nice to know that these authors have been so generous and cool to release their stories for free on the Internet. They did not have to do this, but they were cool enough to do it anyway. Everybody go download them, and if you like them, buy the author's book.
How do you figure?
Motion picture projectors use a two-bladed shutter. So for every frame of film, the screen is illuminated two times. This site has some cool background information on early film projection, and how it influenced television standards in the Olde Dayes.
Call me picky
You're picky. I'm sure you're also right. Thanks for the clarification.
I saw both Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. on the DLP at the Cinemark Legacy in Plano. Three things really blew me away.
First, it's bright! When the green "the following preview has been approved..." slate goes up, the sheer amount of light coming back off that screen is just amazing.
The next thing that surprised me is the noise: there isn't any. You don't notice the sound of the projector (that "tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh" sound of the gate opening and closing) until it's gone. When the house lights go down before the movie starts, it's completely silent in the theater, which is pretty cool.
Finally, there's no flicker. That's another thing you don't notice until it's gone. Despite the fact that the image is being shown to you at 24 frames per second, there's either no refresh effect in the DLP at all, or so little that your eye doesn't see it. A traditional screen, lit by a film projector, goes dark 48 times per second, and your eye picks up on that. A DLP screen doesn't. I guess that also contributes to the overall brightness; you're getting something like a third more lumens to the screen just because you're not closing a gate twice per frame.
Oh, and in case you're wondering why there's a DLP cinema in Plano, TX, I think it's because this theater is right across the street from the TI facility where they invented DLP. At least that's the story.
Hmm. I write and I write, but no one seems to read.
Not all of us are writing software for the space shuttle. I'll bet you aren't, either.
Nope. I'm writing software for customers to buy. Nobody will die if it fails, but my customers will get annoyed. Annoy 'em enough and they'll go elsewhere. My company will go out of business. My family-- and the families of all of my employees-- will suffer. While that's not the space shuttle, it's important to me.
See? It's that spectrum thing that I wrote about in my post that you evidently didn't read. At one end, we have hobbyists; it doesn't matter to anybody but them if their software fails. At the other end, we have stuff like the space shuttle and nuclear power plants: life and death stuff. My company considers our work to be closer to the space-shuttle end than the hobbyist end.
Jesus, don't you people work for a living? I can't believe you don't take your jobs more seriously!
As for the whole "software built like a bridge" crap...
If architects built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
-- Dave Baranec
Lets face it, Software Engineering is not (in most cases) like bridge engineering. Trying to build software like you build bridges just doesn't work.
I think you're only right if you look at a special subset of software: those software projects where failure and loss are acceptable.
Read this article from the December '96 issue of Fast Company. It's about the the team that writes the software for the space shuttle's on-board computer systems.
Interesting stats: at the time the article was written, the previous 11 releases of the software had had a total of 17 bugs. Not each; total. In 400,000+ lines of code.
Great quote, from one of the team members: "If the software isn't perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die."
There's a big difference between computer programming and software engineering. Techniques like extreme programming may work well in a pure programming environment, in which the results of your work just don't matter all that much. So you software crashed; nobody got hurt, right? Just re-launch it, and remember to save often!
At the opposite end of the spectrum, though, software engineering is just like civil engineering, or mechanical engineering, or aerospace engineering. If you f*ck up, somebody may die.
Commercial software development is somewhere in between. If you don't have any discipline or oversight, your software will be so bad that your company will go out of business. On the other hand, if you institute military-grade processes, you'll never deliver a product in a reasonable time. So you have to compromise.
But people who say that software is totally different are just fooling themselves. In software, like everything else, there's good work and there's shoddy work. Putting a label on shoddy work and calling it a "technique" doesn't make it less shoddy; it's just gilding the lily.
Think about that and perhaps you could explain the "Rite = Right" or "Lite = Light" trend.
"Light" versus "lite" actually has a pretty interesting back-story. The FDA mandates terms like "low fat," "fat free," and "light." But there's no such regulation of the pseudo-term "lite." So it's "lite" ice cream even though it's 43% butterfat. That's a marketing thing.
Ah, but you forget the cardinal rule of the English language: "If enough people use it - even though incorrect - it becomes a word by sheer force of numbers."
But you forget the cardinal rule of language: linguistic drift happens over centuries, not decades or years. Find me a use of "virii" in English that dates to 1890 or earlier and we'll talk. Until we do, "virii" is still wrong, wrong, wrong.
"Correctness and accuracy" would be redundant, at least in this context. "Correctness and precision" isn't. Other posters have used the mathematical example to delineate accuracy from precision; the verbal example is also appropriate. If I pointed over in the corner and said, "That is an object," my statement would be completely accurate. If I said, "That is a piece of furniture," it would be equally accurate, but more precise. If I said, "That is a chair," it would be both accurate and fairly precise. If I said, "That is the chair that I bought last summer at that garage sale," it would be very precise... but inaccurate. Because while it is a chair, I didn't buy it at a garage sale.
So precision and accuracy are related ideas, but kind of orthogonal to one another.
In my case, I was trying to say that geeks-- like us-- tend to try to speak both correctly (i.e., accurately) and precisely. So I think my statement was just fine.