Did you ever read that bit in Tufte's Visual Explanations about the actual data that the Thiokol eng people sent to NASA warning them about launching the SRM? It's super interesting. Also, while the engineers at MT were initially nervous about launching, they eventually gave NASA their blessing, all because the data was poorly organized and hard to make sense of. When properly graphed, canceling the launch is a no-brainer. Also, there is a famous story about good ole Feynman being at a meeting and taking a piece of the O-ring material and putting it in cold water and showing how brittle it got. Interesting story.
If yer gettin' anal, I think you can technically count it as alliterative because linguists say that words starting with a vowel effectively start with a sort of "null consonant" that alliterates with all consonants. Apparently, this is supported by canonical english poetry (modern stuff gets whacky, what with it's breaking down of forms and such).
It's also not assonance. The words in question start with the letter "a", but sound-wise, "always" begins with a vowel that is sort of confusing in my dialect, because of the following [l]. I would pick alpha as its value, but maybe schwa. "Alliteration" starts with a schwa, which is also unstressed, so it's pretty much out of the running for assonance-type behavior. "Avoid" has that leading syllable stressed, and it's a schwa again. "Annoying" does has the unstressed schwa like "alliteration", so it can't use that sound to create the feeling of assonance. Assonance-wise, none of these words really work together, except possibly "always" and "avoid" if you pronounce "always" the same way you would pronounce "ulways".
I have no problem skipping stories. The stories themselves don't really bother me. What does bother me is that slashdot is essentially a news-filtering site. I come here for a manageable (read: small) amount of news that I will find interesting, as opposed to reading the boatloads of webpages out there. I know that hundreds and hundreds of stories are submitted that never get posted, every day. That's the way it has to be to keep the site useable. Some stories are more interesting to me than others. I'm going to assume this is true for everyone. The site should display the stories that interest the largest number of people. When I see a story like this, I can't help but think, "hmmm...I wonder what part of the readership cares about this. Surely there was something more interesting in the queue." The solution to this, then, would be to all the users to browse the incoming queue and rate the stories somehow, so that no one person would have to read too many stories, but everyone would get the benefit of having the stories scanned by a large number of people. Obviously, this wouldn't be perfect, because most, if not all, people's taste will not align perfectly with the aggregate taste of the/. community, but for a lot of us, it would be pretty good. For example, I know a lot of people that read/. get really excited about new Redhat releases and stuff, whereas I couldn't care less. I wouldn't mind seeing that modded up high, reflecting the broad interest of the piece, even if I personally don't care about it, but stories like this one...I don't think many people benefit from this post. I could be wrong, but these are the stories that make me think a moderation system for stories would be good.
5 years as a programmer (mostly consultant) in the corporate world gave me the following insight:
Everyone's slogan is "Acceptable is enough."
You're problem is with the slogan "Acceptable is enough"? That's the friggin' definition of "acceptable"! What is "acceptable" is "enough". How can you have a problem with this? That's like having a problem with "faster takes less time" or "bigger things take more space".
In the modern world it is cheaper to buy another server than to hire another couple of programmers; they just throw more iron into a problem to compensate for the lack of quality and efficiency.
So, the problem lies with the clueless managers and executives.
How is this a problem? Clueless managers and executives? If they've realized you can solve Problem A in two ways, either with more of thing X or with more of thing Y, and it's cheaper to do it with thing Y, that's what they should do! That's the point of managing! Those dollar signs are symbols for human work. If the work has already been done to design a faster system, and it can be leveraged via economies of scale in producing computer systems, than it should be. It's better for all of us. Why squander more money to get the same thing done? It's business, not art.
It's stories like this that make me think we should have a moderation system for submissions in the queue. This is little more than an ad for a not-that-interesting product. Who cares?
Life's not transmitted via sex. Your partner doesn't get life from sex. At least, unless your into some sort of weird franken-necro shit, not that I have any problem with that.
I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. It's been well and widely proven that people do discriminate on the basis of language, even on accents and dialects of the same language. Many people who consider themselves non-racist do this subconsciously. It's one of the last things in america that is culturally acceptable to mock.
There was some research done in Canada proved, to make a long story short (if you're interested I'll post the details and more info), that students, be they French-speaking Quebecois or English-speaking, stereotyped native French speaking english as shorter, poorer, and I think less kempt than english speakers. A lot of other research has confirmed these dialect biases.
Were you saying that this does not occur or that it will occur regardless of whether or not there is an official language?
Did you read the article yesterday about the scalability limit of the Gnutella network (at this point, determined largely by the modem links in the network)? If not, you should. It was pretty interesting. Matter of fact, there was some other interesting stuff on that dss.clip2.com. Anyway, the gyst (sp?) of it was that there is a certain overhead in just operating the network, the PING/PONG packets, the transmission of queries, the transmission of responses of queries, etc., that has nothing to do with the music data being transferred from machine to machine. What happens is at some point the amount of traffic it takes to just make the network work, in other words, carry the simple functional data of PING/PONG and query/response, at a given node eventually exceeds the bandwidth of the average modem connection. Now, chat may be a very light data stream, but for the network to be distributed, the packets would have to be carried over many nodes, once in and once out on each node, taking a bite of that node's bandwidth. In a large network (aren't there like 10 gazillion AIM users) that traffic would quickly outstrip the modem's bandwidth.
Further, another reason that Gnutella works so well is that the data-reliability factor is not paramount. Britney Spears' "Oops I did it again" is probably very heavily mirrored throughout the network. You don't really care which node responds to your request. You'd prefer the one that is most networkologically close to you. So it doesn't really matter if your packets can reliably get across the full diameter of the network away from you, that is, it doesn't matter if your packets don't make it to the node which is separated from you by the most other nodes when only the shortest paths between nodes (in number of edges traversed) are considered. Does that make sense? It's a very intuitive concept but I can't explain it right. Anyway, the point is, that this would be a lot harder to work with chat, since that does matter. You need to be able to reach people that are 50 nodes away from you. You can't make everyone closer(fewer hops) because that would overstress the pipes (more data because the degree of the average node would be higher). To reach these far off nodes, you'd have to increase what the Gnutella people call the Time-To-Live of a message, which in gnutella, is capped at seven. Every time you increase this, the amount of data that must be carried by the network increases exponentially.
I imagine it would also be a lot harder to authenticate users, which is a serious issue for a chat system. I don't really know much about this, but I have an intuition that it would be more tractable than the other problems. Still something to deal with though.
I don't want to sound bitter - I used Macs for many years and was a virulent Mac supporter... but that was when everyone was using DOS and Win95... Is there a real reason to use MacOS today?
Don't forget about Apple's old guard - musicians, filmmakers, media types, basically. As a musician, I am very interested in this new incarnation of the MacOS. I use a PC now, running windows. It sucks, but it's a boatload better than any free unix for music. The free unices are just not viable as real music production systems at this stage of the game. The PC with win9x has a lot of software, but the architecture is such crap that it's always a huge battle to get everything to work. Windows music stuff doesn't work right with nt/2k in a lot of cases.
In addition to being a musician, I'm also a programmer. For programming, I love the unix-style environment. I hate The X-Window System, and all the gui-like stuff on the unices. I like the shells, the pipes, the tools, etc.
Being able to use this type of stuff, along with having a truly top-notch music production environment sounds like a great deal to me. Music is the only area in which my computer's CPU is stressed, so I'll appreciate the PowerPC for that. I'm seriously considering getting one if OS X comes out (still nervous after that whole Rhapsody debacle, and the Copeland debacle).
I know a lot of people who are buying Macs for similar reasons. The studios at my school just bought a bunch of new macs because the work best with all the Pro Tools gear, etc. A lot of people are doing digital video on their Macs. I know some people working on a movie that are working partly with 16mm film, but I think they are having the 16mm film digitized and are flying it into a G4 for editing, effects, post, foley/sound, etc. They wouldn't be able to get all this stuff done without a computer in their budget, and the mac is the best platform for it.
I'm as suspicious of Alphacom as the next guy, but I don't agree with the posts that basically amount to, "Shannon's law says it's not possible. Don't even think about it." What if everyone thought that way?
Physicists are showing it may be possible to send some information faster than the speed of light, which is impossible, mathematically proven I believe.
An old "law" of physics says that it's impossible to set up magnets passively, with no outside supports, that levitate. Recently, scientists unveiled a magnetic bearing that does just this.
Didn't engineers say it was physically impossible to have a feature size of less than something like twice what we are using now? Granted, that wasn't a mathematical proof, but they seemed pretty confident about it.
When Einstein was working on relativity, I'm sure people thought of all this dilation of time as being mathematically impossible, though I don't know what proof that would be violating.
Quantum physics is chock-full of logical impossibilities.
The point is, sometimes there are non-obvious ways to circumvent "laws" of nature. I'm not saying Alphacom has done this or anything, I'm just saying that we shouldn't brush off the possibility by saying that it would violate Shannon's law if they did.
either that or copyright/patent their full names, so they are paralyzed in signing checks, legal documents, etc. Probably cheaper. One-click shopping indeed. IBM patented the indent at the beginning of a paragraphs, I think.
Just so you know, I think the suits are largely bs, too, but the main difference with firearms and stuff is that firearms can be used for lawful purposes (hunting, target shooting, etc.) and mostly are. Napster is used mainly for piracy (along with Gnutella) and DeCSS, well, that's another story but suffice it to say that that doesn't have any uses which are lawful under the US's new Digital Millenium Copyright Act (pray you never get this in canada). In short, it says that it is illegal to reverse-engineer access to any copyrighted works the copyright holder took pains to protect technologically. IE - no reverse engineering DeCSS, even if it's for fair use, I think.
It's all BS, but that's the case they are making, just so you see how they are different from the firearms cases.
This Shannon guy has hurt technology a lot more than Gates ever could. That freakin' limit has held us back for decades! He's hurt technology more than anyone since Nyquist, or maybe Einstein.
We need more scientists like Moore, who ensured that chips would continue to get faster and cheaper, and they have. That's progress. That's a good guy.
All Shannon, Nyquist, and Einstein have done is limit the rates of communication we can attain and bloat our harddrives with 2F-sampled signals (Mp3z, pr0n). What jerks. Much worse than Gates.
I don't really understand this stuff (not an EE), so I'm asking this not too say that you are wrong but for clarification.
I understand that nudging the duty-cycle would cause spreading in the frequency domain (at least, I think I do) but didn't the article say that the signal is then run through some narrow bandpass filters or something? So then wouldn't the nudging sort of degrade to a phase shift or something? Oh, man...freakin' electronical things, hurtin' my brainez.
I think we basically agree on most important points, then. I agree that excessive dumbification of computers has held back the development of computers and their usefulness to humans.
That's my exact point. What I'm saying is that the most powerful effective mechanism for humans to tell computers what to do is through language.
By language here, what do you mean? I thought from your previous post you meant exclusively command-line/textual-programming interfaces. I agree that language is the most effective way to communicate, I just think the mode of linguistic communication should be adapted to the problem domain and that for a large number of problem domains, typing text is not the optimal language mode. Personally, I don't even think it's optimal for all forms of programming. I think programming, for me at least, could be a very visual-spatial process, especially functional or object-oriented programming ( I don't like procedural programming anyway. ).
I disagree about the cars/driving computers/programming thing, but I don't think either of us is going to succeed at convincing the other, so I'll leave it at that.
The emphasis on GUIs allows people to stay comfortably in a semi-conscious trance relying on their mechanistic mental facilities to get them through the day - using language effectively requires a capacity for inductive thought which many people prefer to leave dormant.
Strangely, we seem to see the same problems with totally different solutions. I agree that using language effectively requires a capacity for inductive thought, however, I think that textual interfaces are the most effective way to discourage it. What is inductive about CLIs? GUIs, in the non-unix world, at least, are built on the principle that users should be able to apply inductive reasoning to the language of the GUI: "if 'copy' is on the 'edit' menu in App A, and in the 'edit' menu on app B, then it should be there in App C." That's induction. That thought process seems fairly absent from the current crop of command line tools. Where command line tools seem highly effective (I don't hate CLIs. I rely on them. I don't use IDEs to code, just shells, vim, and xemacs (ok, one gui app) is when inductive reasoning is not necessary, because the user can be reasonably expected to learn a large portion of the functionality by rote. I went through VILEARN and memorized a bunch of stuff. There is no inductive way to determine that ZZ saves and exits from knowing that:w saves and:q exits.
I agree that users have brains, and with encouragement, they will use them, but I think that brain time is a limited resource and should be applied as non-reduntantly as possible. Look at programming. Do we expect every programmer to learn systems programming and write their apps on on the metal? No. We could, they would get better performance, more direct control of things, more flexibility, and they'd probably be capable. But we don't do that. It's not an efficient use of brain resources when an interface, in this case, the ones provided by the OS, standard libraries and any toolkits the developer uses, can abstract that functionality and allow the user to focus on new problem domains. I don't think textual interfaces maximize the efficient allocation of brain resources. If you are not talking about CLIs, textual programming languages, etc., when you say "language", then forgive me. It sounded to me like you were.
I think the GUI is weak, though, it could be a lot better. Personally, I think speech recognition is not that exciting of an interface technology. The instructions I give my computer are so different from those I give a human, even when they are dressed up to look the same in a CLI or programmming language. One thing I think that might be interesting for human->computer interaction is something built on gestures like American Sign Language.
ASL is fascinating. It has a very interesting spatial system of grammar. Different positions in space make pronouns, give tense information, etc. Different articulations in gestures perform the functions of adverbs.
I think some combination of ASL, keyboarding(maybe one-handed chording), and typing could make a good interface (maybe a mouse, too). I don't really know, I guess I'd have to play with it.
I think if "words" could be gesturally defined, then structuring commands like "open new email message" could be fairly intuitive to put together and super fast to do for the expert user. It wouldn't be as dumbed-down as a WIMP interface. There would have to be some standard system of text entry, cause that's still the main "content" carried by the computer, but the commands, all the metadata, I think maybe could be gestured in some way. Text entry could even be hybrid and customizable, which would speed things like programming in regular text languages cause you'd be able to push things around and gesture the symbolic markup necessary for programming, like open-curly-brace and stuff, maybe a movement of the hand brings up a list of all class methods to jump to or to insert a call to, depending on the movement.
It's also a powerful paradigm for visual programming languages, but I'll leave that for another post...
"A picture is worth a thousand words" - it's a myth. Draw me a picture of "love".
Not a big appreciator of art, are we? I've seen a lot of pictures that convey love in a lot of ways better than any number of words. I particularly like Klimt's "Fulfilment".
Your message reads like flamebait, but you hit a nerve with me, so I'll take it.
Language is a very powerful medium for communication. I'll give you that. However, language was designed to work with certain hardware limitations: humans can't display imagery as complex as a computer in real time. They can talk, write, or wave their hands; all relatively light data streams. Furthermore, computers, while they do posess very wide information bandwidth, cannot understand human language in any meaningful way. They can be set up to recognize certain character streams in a certain way, but in no way does their use of text streams approximate the power and flexibility of language.
If you don't like GUIs, that's fine, don't use them, but please don't make it sound like GUIs are somehow starving users of information. People can take in more data in image form than in straight-line text. The coded metaphor of visual interface is highly effective for communicating functionality of objects without explicit enumeration. For example, when I'm using a programming language, say C++, I spend a lot of time checking the STL docs: "What operations exactly does a map support?" Sometimes, simple, language-based, but ultimately visual metaphors help: the difference between a stack and a queue is fairly intuitive from their names. However, in a more complex functionality space, or in a situation where time resources do not lend themselves to such intense study of documentation, a simple picture may help a lot. Take, for example, the VCR-like controls on most GUI media playback applications. Have I ever had to look up how to play, stop, rewind, or fast-forward a media stream in any sort of resource with a GUI tool? No. I just know, because the image of the buttons serves as a pointer to media-playback knowledge I already have. It hashes into the part of my brain where information about how to work stuff is stored. On the other hand, lets look at something like say, mpg123. Playing a file with mpg123 is obvious only from my experience with similar crappy command line tools: "mpg123 ". But how do I interact with it when playing? How do I play multiple files? How do I skip over the files when playing through a bunch of files? How do I rewind to something? None of this is obvious, if it is even possible. If I ever want to know how to do this, my workflow is broken, I must look up mpg123 in the manual. There is nothing inherently wrong with learning how to use all of your tools extraordinarily well, it's just that often, time resources are not sufficient to allow such intense study of documentation for all the tools that must be used. The first time I used xmms, I was playing files and manipulating playlists instantly, with no documentation study at all, the time saved gets me back to code.
Let's take another example: GUI configuration. I run fvwm2. Whenever I want to change something simple, like a color of something in fvwm2, I need to go through a long textual configuration file and hope I can judge from context what line sets the color. Often, the color is not explicitly set, it's a default, so I need to start paging through some documentation to find out how to do it. Now, fvwm2 is incredibly flexible, in part because of these files, but for certain simple tasks, it is a huge pain. In windows, on the other hand, when I want to change a color, I go to the "Colors" dialog box. There is a miniature image of the window interface. I click on the part I want to change, then I click on a color to change it. How intuitive is that? There is no need for documentation because the picture of the windows exactly communicates what I am changing. There is no wondering what "inactive child area" is. Is it the area in the focused program that isn't being used? Is it the area unfocused windows? Not obvious. With a GUI, I click on what looks like what I want to change. Faster, easier, no studying needed, I'm back to work.
Funny you should bring up autocad. Most of the people in the place I work spend their whole day in autocad, much like I spend my whole day in xemacs and some shells. In this situation, extreme customizability and speed of textual interaction easily triumphs over intuitiveness of use. Autocad is hard, like vi/xemacs is hard. It's for experts. There are no casual autocad users. That's fine. However, in the majority of computer usage domains, the visual knowledgebase that a GUI leverages greatly increases usability. Most users don't have time to read all the manpages for mpg123 or fvwm2, using them is not their full-time job.
Furthermore, the fact that autocad uses a programming language internally is another special case. Autocad users are generally engineers. They have probably had some programming in school (my college required it), and probably think in a mathematical way, anyhow. Making them learn to use a programmming language in this situation is a lot different than making my mom learn the fvwm2 config file structure so she can change the colors of things.
Furthermore, why should everyone have to be a programmer if it is possible to allow them to get their work done without forcing them to invest the time in learning to program? I have been programming for years and I still feel like a novice. Forcing users to become programmers is not a manifestation of respect for users, it is a sign of laziness. The programmers should figure out how to allow the users to do what they want to do without learning the programmers' skill set. That's like saying that when you buy a house, you should be handy with carpentry, cause the walls may come apart and you should be able to fix them. Or if you buy a car, you should be able to fix it when it breaks on the road. That's absurd! We expect carpenters and car engineers to provide total solutions that present the user with a manageable interface. It may be true that I could wring more performance from my car if I could adjust ignition timing, fuel/air mixture, cooling rate, etc., as I drove, but it would be a huge pain in the ass. I don't want to do that. I want to get from my house to work so I can program.
The GUI is, in effect, as much of a "language" as shell commands. It has nouns (windows, files, etc.) and verbs (click, drag, select). The user can state things to the computer by clicking on things, etc., and the computer can communicate back via these same visual elements and some text. The difference is that instead of requiring the user to go all the way and learn a whole new computer-oriented language, the GUI attempts to first of all build on the visual language the user already has (photo-editing suites contain dodge/burn and crop tools, cad suites contain rulers) and to leverage a common set of linguistic ideas between programs so the user only has to learn them once (the maximize and minimize buttons always do the same thing. Unfortunately, this idea is largely ignored in unix GUIs).
I don't know about Open/Trusted/SecureBSD, but I honestly think FreeBSD is a little easier to use in some areas than linux. Like the ports tree. I love the whole ports tree. I'm no unix guru at all, but I actually tend towards FreeBSD in some ways, ease-of-use-wise. I dunno...just an opinion, and honestly, not a very well informed one.
IE for solaris is the best browser on solaris. Netscape blows, and so does Mozilla. I guess w3m is great if you want to use a text-mode browser, but I use IE for solaris all the time, simply cause Netscape crashes all the fscking time on solaris. It's worse on the BSDs. A few months ago, when I was still running FreeBSD, the most recent version of netscape in the ports tree would crash about 70% of the time HITTING SLASHDOT!
The main impediment to *nix at this point is that the browsers suck. The office apps suck, too. I don't like outlook, but how could you even cite pine as competition? Pine is crap!
I don't believe this story, but it would be a freakin' blessing from on high if IE was ported to any unix in an up-to-date, high-quality form. IE is about 10,000 times better than any other browser, including Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and the texties. I haven't used Konqueror yet, but I'd be damn surprised if it was nearly as stable, fast, and compatible as IE.
Sure, when I'm at work, windows needs to be rebooted every 2-3 days, but IE has only crashed about 6 times in the past three months. When I'm at home or school running a unix (solaris or FreeBSD) netscape crashes several times a day. Some pages it won't even read without crashing, so I end up using w3m. That's what originally brought me over to IE. IE/Solaris does suck compared to IE/Win or IE/Mac, but it's pretty good in a lot of ways compared to any version of Netscape or Mozilla. Allow me to point out that I haven't used Mozilla since Milestone 15, I think, maybe 16, but definitely not the latest milestone build.
Also, you may have inadvertantly touched on the most effective way of shutting down a major web site such as Yahoo! If the French army invaded the corporate and technical offices of Yahoo! the administrative staff would be overwhealmed by the droves of surrendering French, unable to continue their duties the entire organization would grind to a hault from the bottom up.
ah, nothing like busting on the French...
That gambling case is surprising, or not, considering that it is the US after all. Any more info?
First of all, if the US tried something like this, these boards would be full of angry euros saying stuff like,"Here in europe, we are far cooler than the US, so the US should just leave our cool asses alone. Each and every american citizen is a fat, uneducated sloth that lives only to harvest the perfection of Europe. They have no right to police the world!"
What I want to know is, what would France do if Yahoo said, "erm...no, monsieur judge." I mean, isn't it France's responsibility to handle this kind of thing? Are they gonna send the French army to Yahoo! headquarters? Make Jerry Yang an international fugitive?
The more general question is, "what powers to countries have over the behavior of corporations that are doing business in other countries?" In the us, we face this all the time: insurance companies based in Bermuda, Swiss bank accounts, etc., and we don't seem to be able to do anything, even when their activities violate our laws.
If the judge decides, "yup, that's against french law. You're gonna have to cut that out." How in hell is he going to enforce it? I would think the only thing you could do is make it france's responsibility to filter out all the content they don't like, but what do I know?
Slashdot Mirror
jeb.
It's also not assonance. The words in question start with the letter "a", but sound-wise, "always" begins with a vowel that is sort of confusing in my dialect, because of the following [l]. I would pick alpha as its value, but maybe schwa. "Alliteration" starts with a schwa, which is also unstressed, so it's pretty much out of the running for assonance-type behavior. "Avoid" has that leading syllable stressed, and it's a schwa again. "Annoying" does has the unstressed schwa like "alliteration", so it can't use that sound to create the feeling of assonance. Assonance-wise, none of these words really work together, except possibly "always" and "avoid" if you pronounce "always" the same way you would pronounce "ulways".
This only holds for speakers of american english.
Taking anality to a new level,
jeb
jeb.
You're problem is with the slogan "Acceptable is enough"? That's the friggin' definition of "acceptable"! What is "acceptable" is "enough". How can you have a problem with this? That's like having a problem with "faster takes less time" or "bigger things take more space".
In the modern world it is cheaper to buy another server than to hire another couple of programmers; they just throw more iron into a problem to compensate for the lack of quality and efficiency.
So, the problem lies with the clueless managers and executives.
How is this a problem? Clueless managers and executives? If they've realized you can solve Problem A in two ways, either with more of thing X or with more of thing Y, and it's cheaper to do it with thing Y, that's what they should do! That's the point of managing! Those dollar signs are symbols for human work. If the work has already been done to design a faster system, and it can be leveraged via economies of scale in producing computer systems, than it should be. It's better for all of us. Why squander more money to get the same thing done? It's business, not art.
jeb.
jeb.
Don't you love when that happens?
jeb.
Life's not transmitted via sex. Your partner doesn't get life from sex. At least, unless your into some sort of weird franken-necro shit, not that I have any problem with that.
There was some research done in Canada proved, to make a long story short (if you're interested I'll post the details and more info), that students, be they French-speaking Quebecois or English-speaking, stereotyped native French speaking english as shorter, poorer, and I think less kempt than english speakers. A lot of other research has confirmed these dialect biases.
Were you saying that this does not occur or that it will occur regardless of whether or not there is an official language?
jeb.
yer sigblock makes no sense.
Did you read the article yesterday about the scalability limit of the Gnutella network (at this point, determined largely by the modem links in the network)? If not, you should. It was pretty interesting. Matter of fact, there was some other interesting stuff on that dss.clip2.com. Anyway, the gyst (sp?) of it was that there is a certain overhead in just operating the network, the PING/PONG packets, the transmission of queries, the transmission of responses of queries, etc., that has nothing to do with the music data being transferred from machine to machine. What happens is at some point the amount of traffic it takes to just make the network work, in other words, carry the simple functional data of PING/PONG and query/response, at a given node eventually exceeds the bandwidth of the average modem connection. Now, chat may be a very light data stream, but for the network to be distributed, the packets would have to be carried over many nodes, once in and once out on each node, taking a bite of that node's bandwidth. In a large network (aren't there like 10 gazillion AIM users) that traffic would quickly outstrip the modem's bandwidth.
Further, another reason that Gnutella works so well is that the data-reliability factor is not paramount. Britney Spears' "Oops I did it again" is probably very heavily mirrored throughout the network. You don't really care which node responds to your request. You'd prefer the one that is most networkologically close to you. So it doesn't really matter if your packets can reliably get across the full diameter of the network away from you, that is, it doesn't matter if your packets don't make it to the node which is separated from you by the most other nodes when only the shortest paths between nodes (in number of edges traversed) are considered. Does that make sense? It's a very intuitive concept but I can't explain it right. Anyway, the point is, that this would be a lot harder to work with chat, since that does matter. You need to be able to reach people that are 50 nodes away from you. You can't make everyone closer(fewer hops) because that would overstress the pipes (more data because the degree of the average node would be higher). To reach these far off nodes, you'd have to increase what the Gnutella people call the Time-To-Live of a message, which in gnutella, is capped at seven. Every time you increase this, the amount of data that must be carried by the network increases exponentially.
I imagine it would also be a lot harder to authenticate users, which is a serious issue for a chat system. I don't really know much about this, but I have an intuition that it would be more tractable than the other problems. Still something to deal with though.
jeb.
Don't forget about Apple's old guard - musicians, filmmakers, media types, basically. As a musician, I am very interested in this new incarnation of the MacOS. I use a PC now, running windows. It sucks, but it's a boatload better than any free unix for music. The free unices are just not viable as real music production systems at this stage of the game. The PC with win9x has a lot of software, but the architecture is such crap that it's always a huge battle to get everything to work. Windows music stuff doesn't work right with nt/2k in a lot of cases.
In addition to being a musician, I'm also a programmer. For programming, I love the unix-style environment. I hate The X-Window System, and all the gui-like stuff on the unices. I like the shells, the pipes, the tools, etc.
Being able to use this type of stuff, along with having a truly top-notch music production environment sounds like a great deal to me. Music is the only area in which my computer's CPU is stressed, so I'll appreciate the PowerPC for that. I'm seriously considering getting one if OS X comes out (still nervous after that whole Rhapsody debacle, and the Copeland debacle).
I know a lot of people who are buying Macs for similar reasons. The studios at my school just bought a bunch of new macs because the work best with all the Pro Tools gear, etc. A lot of people are doing digital video on their Macs. I know some people working on a movie that are working partly with 16mm film, but I think they are having the 16mm film digitized and are flying it into a G4 for editing, effects, post, foley/sound, etc. They wouldn't be able to get all this stuff done without a computer in their budget, and the mac is the best platform for it.
jeb.
Physicists are showing it may be possible to send some information faster than the speed of light, which is impossible, mathematically proven I believe.
An old "law" of physics says that it's impossible to set up magnets passively, with no outside supports, that levitate. Recently, scientists unveiled a magnetic bearing that does just this.
Didn't engineers say it was physically impossible to have a feature size of less than something like twice what we are using now? Granted, that wasn't a mathematical proof, but they seemed pretty confident about it.
When Einstein was working on relativity, I'm sure people thought of all this dilation of time as being mathematically impossible, though I don't know what proof that would be violating.
Quantum physics is chock-full of logical impossibilities.
The point is, sometimes there are non-obvious ways to circumvent "laws" of nature. I'm not saying Alphacom has done this or anything, I'm just saying that we shouldn't brush off the possibility by saying that it would violate Shannon's law if they did.
jeb
jeb.
It's all BS, but that's the case they are making, just so you see how they are different from the firearms cases.
jeb.
We need more scientists like Moore, who ensured that chips would continue to get faster and cheaper, and they have. That's progress. That's a good guy.
All Shannon, Nyquist, and Einstein have done is limit the rates of communication we can attain and bloat our harddrives with 2F-sampled signals (Mp3z, pr0n). What jerks. Much worse than Gates.
jeb
I understand that nudging the duty-cycle would cause spreading in the frequency domain (at least, I think I do) but didn't the article say that the signal is then run through some narrow bandpass filters or something? So then wouldn't the nudging sort of degrade to a phase shift or something? Oh, man...freakin' electronical things, hurtin' my brainez.
jeb.
That's my exact point. What I'm saying is that the most powerful effective mechanism for humans to tell computers what to do is through language.
By language here, what do you mean? I thought from your previous post you meant exclusively command-line/textual-programming interfaces. I agree that language is the most effective way to communicate, I just think the mode of linguistic communication should be adapted to the problem domain and that for a large number of problem domains, typing text is not the optimal language mode. Personally, I don't even think it's optimal for all forms of programming. I think programming, for me at least, could be a very visual-spatial process, especially functional or object-oriented programming ( I don't like procedural programming anyway. ).
I disagree about the cars/driving computers/programming thing, but I don't think either of us is going to succeed at convincing the other, so I'll leave it at that.
The emphasis on GUIs allows people to stay comfortably in a semi-conscious trance relying on their mechanistic mental facilities to get them through the day - using language effectively requires a capacity for inductive thought which many people prefer to leave dormant.
Strangely, we seem to see the same problems with totally different solutions. I agree that using language effectively requires a capacity for inductive thought, however, I think that textual interfaces are the most effective way to discourage it. What is inductive about CLIs? GUIs, in the non-unix world, at least, are built on the principle that users should be able to apply inductive reasoning to the language of the GUI: "if 'copy' is on the 'edit' menu in App A, and in the 'edit' menu on app B, then it should be there in App C." That's induction. That thought process seems fairly absent from the current crop of command line tools. Where command line tools seem highly effective (I don't hate CLIs. I rely on them. I don't use IDEs to code, just shells, vim, and xemacs (ok, one gui app) is when inductive reasoning is not necessary, because the user can be reasonably expected to learn a large portion of the functionality by rote. I went through VILEARN and memorized a bunch of stuff. There is no inductive way to determine that ZZ saves and exits from knowing that :w saves and :q exits.
I agree that users have brains, and with encouragement, they will use them, but I think that brain time is a limited resource and should be applied as non-reduntantly as possible. Look at programming. Do we expect every programmer to learn systems programming and write their apps on on the metal? No. We could, they would get better performance, more direct control of things, more flexibility, and they'd probably be capable. But we don't do that. It's not an efficient use of brain resources when an interface, in this case, the ones provided by the OS, standard libraries and any toolkits the developer uses, can abstract that functionality and allow the user to focus on new problem domains. I don't think textual interfaces maximize the efficient allocation of brain resources. If you are not talking about CLIs, textual programming languages, etc., when you say "language", then forgive me. It sounded to me like you were.
I think the GUI is weak, though, it could be a lot better. Personally, I think speech recognition is not that exciting of an interface technology. The instructions I give my computer are so different from those I give a human, even when they are dressed up to look the same in a CLI or programmming language. One thing I think that might be interesting for human->computer interaction is something built on gestures like American Sign Language.
ASL is fascinating. It has a very interesting spatial system of grammar. Different positions in space make pronouns, give tense information, etc. Different articulations in gestures perform the functions of adverbs.
I think some combination of ASL, keyboarding(maybe one-handed chording), and typing could make a good interface (maybe a mouse, too). I don't really know, I guess I'd have to play with it.
I think if "words" could be gesturally defined, then structuring commands like "open new email message" could be fairly intuitive to put together and super fast to do for the expert user. It wouldn't be as dumbed-down as a WIMP interface. There would have to be some standard system of text entry, cause that's still the main "content" carried by the computer, but the commands, all the metadata, I think maybe could be gestured in some way. Text entry could even be hybrid and customizable, which would speed things like programming in regular text languages cause you'd be able to push things around and gesture the symbolic markup necessary for programming, like open-curly-brace and stuff, maybe a movement of the hand brings up a list of all class methods to jump to or to insert a call to, depending on the movement.
It's also a powerful paradigm for visual programming languages, but I'll leave that for another post...
jeb.
jeb.
Not a big appreciator of art, are we? I've seen a lot of pictures that convey love in a lot of ways better than any number of words. I particularly like Klimt's "Fulfilment".
Your message reads like flamebait, but you hit a nerve with me, so I'll take it.
Language is a very powerful medium for communication. I'll give you that. However, language was designed to work with certain hardware limitations: humans can't display imagery as complex as a computer in real time. They can talk, write, or wave their hands; all relatively light data streams. Furthermore, computers, while they do posess very wide information bandwidth, cannot understand human language in any meaningful way. They can be set up to recognize certain character streams in a certain way, but in no way does their use of text streams approximate the power and flexibility of language.
If you don't like GUIs, that's fine, don't use them, but please don't make it sound like GUIs are somehow starving users of information. People can take in more data in image form than in straight-line text. The coded metaphor of visual interface is highly effective for communicating functionality of objects without explicit enumeration. For example, when I'm using a programming language, say C++, I spend a lot of time checking the STL docs: "What operations exactly does a map support?" Sometimes, simple, language-based, but ultimately visual metaphors help: the difference between a stack and a queue is fairly intuitive from their names. However, in a more complex functionality space, or in a situation where time resources do not lend themselves to such intense study of documentation, a simple picture may help a lot. Take, for example, the VCR-like controls on most GUI media playback applications. Have I ever had to look up how to play, stop, rewind, or fast-forward a media stream in any sort of resource with a GUI tool? No. I just know, because the image of the buttons serves as a pointer to media-playback knowledge I already have. It hashes into the part of my brain where information about how to work stuff is stored. On the other hand, lets look at something like say, mpg123. Playing a file with mpg123 is obvious only from my experience with similar crappy command line tools: "mpg123 ". But how do I interact with it when playing? How do I play multiple files? How do I skip over the files when playing through a bunch of files? How do I rewind to something? None of this is obvious, if it is even possible. If I ever want to know how to do this, my workflow is broken, I must look up mpg123 in the manual. There is nothing inherently wrong with learning how to use all of your tools extraordinarily well, it's just that often, time resources are not sufficient to allow such intense study of documentation for all the tools that must be used. The first time I used xmms, I was playing files and manipulating playlists instantly, with no documentation study at all, the time saved gets me back to code.
Let's take another example: GUI configuration. I run fvwm2. Whenever I want to change something simple, like a color of something in fvwm2, I need to go through a long textual configuration file and hope I can judge from context what line sets the color. Often, the color is not explicitly set, it's a default, so I need to start paging through some documentation to find out how to do it. Now, fvwm2 is incredibly flexible, in part because of these files, but for certain simple tasks, it is a huge pain. In windows, on the other hand, when I want to change a color, I go to the "Colors" dialog box. There is a miniature image of the window interface. I click on the part I want to change, then I click on a color to change it. How intuitive is that? There is no need for documentation because the picture of the windows exactly communicates what I am changing. There is no wondering what "inactive child area" is. Is it the area in the focused program that isn't being used? Is it the area unfocused windows? Not obvious. With a GUI, I click on what looks like what I want to change. Faster, easier, no studying needed, I'm back to work.
Funny you should bring up autocad. Most of the people in the place I work spend their whole day in autocad, much like I spend my whole day in xemacs and some shells. In this situation, extreme customizability and speed of textual interaction easily triumphs over intuitiveness of use. Autocad is hard, like vi/xemacs is hard. It's for experts. There are no casual autocad users. That's fine. However, in the majority of computer usage domains, the visual knowledgebase that a GUI leverages greatly increases usability. Most users don't have time to read all the manpages for mpg123 or fvwm2, using them is not their full-time job.
Furthermore, the fact that autocad uses a programming language internally is another special case. Autocad users are generally engineers. They have probably had some programming in school (my college required it), and probably think in a mathematical way, anyhow. Making them learn to use a programmming language in this situation is a lot different than making my mom learn the fvwm2 config file structure so she can change the colors of things.
Furthermore, why should everyone have to be a programmer if it is possible to allow them to get their work done without forcing them to invest the time in learning to program? I have been programming for years and I still feel like a novice. Forcing users to become programmers is not a manifestation of respect for users, it is a sign of laziness. The programmers should figure out how to allow the users to do what they want to do without learning the programmers' skill set. That's like saying that when you buy a house, you should be handy with carpentry, cause the walls may come apart and you should be able to fix them. Or if you buy a car, you should be able to fix it when it breaks on the road. That's absurd! We expect carpenters and car engineers to provide total solutions that present the user with a manageable interface. It may be true that I could wring more performance from my car if I could adjust ignition timing, fuel/air mixture, cooling rate, etc., as I drove, but it would be a huge pain in the ass. I don't want to do that. I want to get from my house to work so I can program.
The GUI is, in effect, as much of a "language" as shell commands. It has nouns (windows, files, etc.) and verbs (click, drag, select). The user can state things to the computer by clicking on things, etc., and the computer can communicate back via these same visual elements and some text. The difference is that instead of requiring the user to go all the way and learn a whole new computer-oriented language, the GUI attempts to first of all build on the visual language the user already has (photo-editing suites contain dodge/burn and crop tools, cad suites contain rulers) and to leverage a common set of linguistic ideas between programs so the user only has to learn them once (the maximize and minimize buttons always do the same thing. Unfortunately, this idea is largely ignored in unix GUIs).
jeb.
jeb.
jeb.
The main impediment to *nix at this point is that the browsers suck. The office apps suck, too. I don't like outlook, but how could you even cite pine as competition? Pine is crap!
I don't believe this story, but it would be a freakin' blessing from on high if IE was ported to any unix in an up-to-date, high-quality form. IE is about 10,000 times better than any other browser, including Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and the texties. I haven't used Konqueror yet, but I'd be damn surprised if it was nearly as stable, fast, and compatible as IE.
Sure, when I'm at work, windows needs to be rebooted every 2-3 days, but IE has only crashed about 6 times in the past three months. When I'm at home or school running a unix (solaris or FreeBSD) netscape crashes several times a day. Some pages it won't even read without crashing, so I end up using w3m. That's what originally brought me over to IE. IE/Solaris does suck compared to IE/Win or IE/Mac, but it's pretty good in a lot of ways compared to any version of Netscape or Mozilla. Allow me to point out that I haven't used Mozilla since Milestone 15, I think, maybe 16, but definitely not the latest milestone build.
jeb.
ah, nothing like busting on the French...
That gambling case is surprising, or not, considering that it is the US after all. Any more info?
jeb.
What I want to know is, what would France do if Yahoo said, "erm...no, monsieur judge." I mean, isn't it France's responsibility to handle this kind of thing? Are they gonna send the French army to Yahoo! headquarters? Make Jerry Yang an international fugitive?
The more general question is, "what powers to countries have over the behavior of corporations that are doing business in other countries?" In the us, we face this all the time: insurance companies based in Bermuda, Swiss bank accounts, etc., and we don't seem to be able to do anything, even when their activities violate our laws.
If the judge decides, "yup, that's against french law. You're gonna have to cut that out." How in hell is he going to enforce it? I would think the only thing you could do is make it france's responsibility to filter out all the content they don't like, but what do I know?
just asking.
jeb.
jeb.