I had the interesting experience of having my first-ever CS course when I was on a semester abroad in (then) West Germany.
The course was taught using Pascal, which gave me an advantage because, as the post mentions, it's basically English. Of course, the course was taught in German, which took that advantage away again...
I think that you'll find that it's the higher level languages that take the most content from the spoken language of their author. Assembler, while mneumonically based on English, is simple enough that that shouldn't be a problem. And, of course, machine language itself has no real influence from spoken language. Also, something highly mathematical (and abstract) like APL will probably have little language-related learning curve.
LISP is an interesting case as well. It's higher-level, but pretty abstract. It's reportedly impossible to learn if you come from a culture that doesn't have parenthesis, or one that pronounces them as a "click". -
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In the Grand Old American Justice System, you don't really need a good legal reason to sue someone. You can sue for "alienation of affection" in this country, or "causing emotional distress." You can sue whoever you want for whatever you want. You may not win, but you can sue.
What's really going on, is Apple has a big bunch of lawyers on retainer, and are using them to bully smaller parties into doing things their way.
The small guys can't afford the legal battle, so they capitulate. Apple doesn't have to win the lawsuits... in fact, they probably hope that they never make it to court. Lawyers count on the expenses being high enough that the other party will want to settle.
If the guys who published those pictures had a big cadre of lawyers (or really deep pockets), they would just thumb their noses back at Apple (and, maybe, countersue for restraint of trade or something).
The system sucks. (Even though, once in a while, one of those ridiculous things that people sue for is actually legitimate. Not in this case, as far as I can tell).
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At least with digital cameras (which have high current draw), you get a very significant benefit by using NiMH batteries. For example, my Nikon Coolpix gets over 100 shots per charge, as opposed to about 6[!] for a standard run-of-the-mill alkalines.
Anyone know if you get a similar benefit in low draw devices like the Palm? I've been looking at PDAs, but after having my old Velo I (WinCE) tune Channel One while I was on the way to an interview, I've been reluctant to make the investment. - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Because the electricity for batteries is reasonably cheap, but the batteries themselves are very expensive. Who pays for them?
OK, assume it's an investment on the part of the "electricity providers." They buy a couple tons of batteries, and you can go to any other station in their franchise, and swap out discharged battery for a charged one. They charge you for the service (forgive the pun), and put in some extra percentage to cover the price of the battery. Sounds great!
Except, the problem is, powerful, rechargable batteries don't last very long. And how do they know that the box you're bringing back as one of their discharged batteries really is? Powerful batteries tend to be a big case filled with smaller cells, sometimes with "smart" controllers that switch around bad sub-cells. You could be yanking out the insides, and returning them a battery case filled with gravel or something.
So the solution has to be some kind of internal security device. This drives the price up even higher.
OK, and what happens if you're driving through rural no-where, and there's no franchises of CityVoltageBatteriesInc? If the battery stations have exchange agreements, you're fine. But what that really means is that the Mega Battery Conglomerates will survive, and there will be no Mom'n'Pop battry stations.
And you know that they're gonna mess everything up in the name of competition. Bob's SuperCharge will tell you that Tina's ChargeYouUp doesn't fully charge the battery, and worse, smears some contact-cleaning paste on the terminals that'll shorten the life of your car. Tina, of course, will tell you that ChargeYouUp has a patented phased charge cycle that manages to put more high-energy electricity in your battery, yielding that extra few miles per charge.
All these problems have solutions, of course, but currently lack the political will and/or the price point incentive for anyone to implement the solution. - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
This is a bit long winded, but bear with me here. I actually have a point, not only about technology but also about privacy.
I used to work at a government related thing. One of the places had a very secure computing center.
They discontinued using retinal scanners when it turned out that an identical twin had a better than 10% possibility of fooling the system. That was just as well. No-one wanted to have access to the "retina room." The thinking was that if the Russians or Libyans wanted in, they'd just borrow what they needed to open the door. Obviously, borrowing just your eye wouldn't work very well (it would damage a lot of delicate blood vessels), so we figured they'd borrow your whole head if they really wanted in. Well, that probably wouldn't work either, but we wanted to avoid the risk just in case they'd try it.
So after the retina scanner went away, they put in a palm scanner. Evidently, early environment effects fingerprints sufficiently that a palm scanner (which gets prints from four fingers, and several different areas on the palm itself) has a higher discrimination, and can much more reliably detect tricks like identical twins. Of course, using the same logic we all used before, we tried to avoid having access. If we had to get signed up for that room, we'd ask if we could get our left hand keyed (at least those of us who are right handed).
Of course, the actual risk was probably infinitesimal. But just the same, why should we have taken those risks? If the "enemy" wants your password enough, they'll get it, whether it's a phrase, body-part, typing pattern, DNA sample, or whatever. They may have to kill you for it, or threaten someone you love. But if they want it enough, and they have the means to access you, they'll be able to get your password.
If we extrapolate out to music, it's a bit ridiculous. No-one's gonna cut your hand off so they can listen to your MP3s. But it's the wrong direction to be taking this. By emphasizing biometrics, we not only give credence to the idea that they're secure (which they're not), but we also start irrevocably linking our security to our selves.
Think about it. The Evil entity snags your computer: if the data is protected by a password, there's no way that they can prove that the data is *yours*. You might know how to decrypt it, but the ownership is not provable by that fact. You could plausibly argue that the file was placed on the server by someone else. Now, if that same file was encrypted by your palm-print, that defense is gone. Suddenly, they KNOW that they're your DeCSS sources, or Metalica MP3s, or $cientology documents... - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
The virtual machine / bytecode concept has existed for quite a while. Java's promise to write once run anywhere is not unique, just the most publicized. And if you look around in Sun's archives, you'll probably find info on the Java Processor, which was to have been a CPU that ran Java bytecodes in a truly native environment. As far as I know, that's been abandoned.
But a native compiler will beat a VM written in native code, if both are written by people who know what they are doing. A JIT will help some, but still will lose out to a native compiler.
Java's portability is great. The ease of use is great. But it will never perform as well in a VM as a native compile. That's why some people (e.g., TowerJ) write native compilers. It's not counterproductive. It's just solving a different problem.
The primary resistance to native compilers for Java is over portability and the fear of non-standard extensions or implementations. Java programmers don't want to worry about (or even know) how many bytes are in an int; it's specified in the standard, after all. A bad native compiler may end up introducing the need to worry about that kind of thing... - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Well, having ridden the rails extensively in India, I agree that this is a good way to link lots of places together, electronically or otherwise.
But the availability question is a different matter. Tracks are continuously under repair and/or conversion to standard gauge. I hope that the network users are willing to use UUCP or some non-realtime protocol with a reasonable retry threshhold. - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
We used to joke about it: NASA traffic vs MSN traffic.
The Clementine mission, was eventually a "failure" (due, possibly to "an excessively stressful mission-operations phase that was clearly exhausting to the team and may well have contributed to the ultimate demise of Clementine after the lunar portion of the mission had been completed but before insertion onto the asteroid flyby trajectory." -- Space Studies Board Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council).
Still, the pictures from the Clementine mission generated more hits than the Microsoft Network did (MSN in those days was probably still subscription-based). The Clementine mission cost a total of $98 Million. If you compared the costs, Microsoft could have saved millions of dollars and gotten better traffic by launching a space probe rather than an online network... - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Actually, some Hoagland followers staged a picket for a while when the Mars Observer went missing. They claimed that that too was a coverup to avoid getting the truth.
You know how it is. The absence of any evidence serves to show just how damn good the coverup is! - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
I think that it's important to start with the distinction between kinds of programming.
There's Systems programming. There's user-space programming ("applications"). There's tool programming. They all overlap in places, but they're different arts.
The more a programmer knows about the low level details, the closer they are to the metal, the better they'll be able to write good code. This philosophy pushes everyone towards writing assembler code. The more they know about systems programming, the better they'll be able to write good code. This philosophy drives people towards writing C code. But when you're building tools for others to implement user space programming, re-usability sometimes takes precedence over performance. Likewise, when writing applications, maintainability is key. This philosophy would drive people towards writing Java.
Only by satisfying some of each of the three constraints can one build a truly Krufty Hack.
The arrival at Elegance and Beauty (the "deep" goals of programming) is balancing these three disparate directions. The grail, of course, is highly-optimized, highly-flexible, extremely portable, outrageously maintainable, and Beautiful code that actually fulfills a needed function. - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Napster's usage for me and others is to find recordings that are rare, out of print, or unreleased.
But of course, Napster's promise is unfulfilled in this regard. It's damn hard to find really obscure music. Top 40 and the rock'n'roll / metal / altur-nuh-tive equivalent are easy enough to find, though.
It kind of reminds me of Hotline. It has the potential of being a great tool for exchanging obscure or unpopular information (legally, I might add), but turns out to be primarily a vehicle for the exchange of popular stuff (illegally). - bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
These comments apply to the current standard graphical user interface we see on computers, PDAs, VCRs, etc, but should not be construed to apply to ALL user interfaces.
I've been watching my grandmother learn to use Windows 98. It's painful. First of all, her motor control is not perfect. Second of all, Windows is highly inconsistent in how you approach actions. It's been very instructive, though. These observations are based on what I've seen:
1. Consistency. There should be a standard "meaning" for each action. These should not change unless the context is really significantly different.
2. Clarity. Controls and Widgets of all kinds should emphasize comprehensibility over coolness.
3. Feedback. When something's happening, I should know what's going on.
4. Performance. If the interface is going to stall while something is happening, it should provide feedback immediately, rather than waiting and then presenting a progress bar or the equivalent.
5. Safety. Any destructive action should have at least one warning and a chance to cancel. These safety warnings should be set up so a pro can de-activate them if they want to live risky.
6. Configurability. If I have a way I like to work, I should be able to streamline the process. If applicable, I should be able to script common tasks as well.
- bukra fil mish mish - Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
What defines a benchmark? Is it not a measurement of the performance of one aspect of a system? Benchmarks should be open sourced, the community that uses the system(s) at large should define what the tests (torturous as they should be) actually test. That will determine the difference between fluff and actual fact.
Of course, it's also Standard Operating Procedure to optimize products to perform well on Benchmarks specifically (I hear stories about compilers that seek out "Whetstones" or "Dhrystones" and will substitute hand-optimized machine code for 'em rather than just compile the code).
Bottom line, is you can't trust 3rd party benchmarks. You need to test a system for your specific application. This, though, is prohibitively expensive for most applications. So you gotta rely on benchmarks.
Therefore, make your benchmark as close to real-world use as possible! Especially if you're open-sourcing it. Then, optimizing for the benchmark is actually optimizing for real-world use.
(The problem with this, of course, is that your real-world use may be dramatically different than mine. If I'm rendering 3D graphics, I have different needs than someone running, say, a web server. So this then requires a family of benchmarks, reflecting real-world usage in different domains of endeavor.)
Hell, with modern cars, you gotta be able to overclock your car, too.
Why, when I supercharged the boxster, the fly-by-wire controls were undersampling at a paltry 60Hz, so I overclocked the Motronic. That pup's cranked up to 87.5Hz. A real driver can feel the difference in responsiveness.
Then there's the traction control. When you're cornering at 25 MPH over stock capability, you need the active suspension and tracking controls to be just that smidge faster. So I overclocked the suspension subcomputer from 40kHz to 50kHz, just to get that extra edge.
Of course, with all this improved speed and handling, I need the Antilock Brakes to be smarter. I upgraded them to 16 M of memory (for performance history checking), and upped the skid detection frequency to 36 Hz.
This is all pretty kRad and all. So I put on fat headers, a mega tail pipe, and a dual-GPS navigation assistance system. It's PHAT!
Now, if I could just debug the device drivers (/dev/car), I'd port it to Linux, 'cause these BSoDs (Blue Skids of Death) are drivin' me nuts!
It'll be using the new character, Angry Kid, who will/not/ be at all like Wallace and Gromit. May 7 is the first release date.
Actually, Aardman has a whole history of great characters from before Wallace & Grommit. They did a series of claymation lip-synch portraits of people telling their stories or of office scenes, including an incredible one of this rough kid who'd just been released from jail ("Going Equipped," from 1985). There was also the one of the social security office ("Down and Out," 1977) which was an early one but really incredible.
Their homepage http://www.aardman.com has details on these and many other great shorts. Well worth the visit!
The unix that I use at home for the most basic things probably has not changed terribly from what a person in earlier times thought of.
I won't go into the idea of what was thought of before! That's a whole 'nuther can of worms.
Your point is well taken; a lot of the changes are incremental on what came before. That was also kind of what i was getting at as well. Evolution...
But I would argue that there have been some significant changes as well. Look at the journalling filesystems, look at the evolution of distributed computing within the Unix environment. Look at dirstibuted filesystems like tilde, andrew, and nfs. It's all incremental growth, but taken as a whole, it's a "new" Unix.
You can argue it's just new services and daemons. But that's my point. It's the new Unix, same as the old Unix, only it's more capable and has more options. I think it goes well beyond just bells & whistles.
Unix will be replaced, but it'll be replaced by more Unix.
Yes, but it won't be exactly Unix. Think evolution.
I remember when Unix was a terminal-based OS. X-Windows and the Athena project seemed like a totally new world and a new way of doing things. Sure, it was still Unix, but it wasn't the same Unix.
GNU has likewise changed what was Unix, and, despite it's acronymic denial, has become Unix. But not the Unix from before.
The next Unix will not be today's Unix. But it will be Unix!
Reducing it to an argument of price/competition is a short-sighted view of the Market economy. Large corporations will always win in the price domain when they have to....
I agree that the traditional argument that "the market will take care of it" is much too simplistic for real-world analysis. I don't think the examples you picked are very good though. Well, DeCSS might be, since the real fear of the MPAA is in defeating of the region code trap.
In any case, big corporations are beholden to their shareholders. In the real world, this means that they try to maximize profits. This precludes any view but the zero-sum game, where competition must be destroyed or co-opted. This is where it gets fuzzy, because they bring in lobbyists and lawyers to create, twist, and subvert legislation (and legislators) to their advantage. This inherently prevents a free market from performing any corrections, since it's not technically free any longer.
Bringing this back on topic, eBooks will only succeed when and if the big corporate publishers feel that they have adequate protection against these books being copied. Obviously, they feel that they're at this point -- although I'm curious about the PDF formatted ones. Do they have some security built in? What's to keep me from copying 'em? Do you have to be network connected to read them?
Slashdot Mirror
I had the interesting experience of having my first-ever CS course when I was on a semester abroad in (then) West Germany.
The course was taught using Pascal, which gave me an advantage because, as the post mentions, it's basically English. Of course, the course was taught in German, which took that advantage away again...
I think that you'll find that it's the higher level languages that take the most content from the spoken language of their author. Assembler, while mneumonically based on English, is simple enough that that shouldn't be a problem. And, of course, machine language itself has no real influence from spoken language. Also, something highly mathematical (and abstract) like APL will probably have little language-related learning curve.
LISP is an interesting case as well. It's higher-level, but pretty abstract. It's reportedly impossible to learn if you come from a culture that doesn't have parenthesis, or one that pronounces them as a "click".
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Doesn't this seem like it'll trigger one or more anti-racketeering lawsuits?
Think about it. A bunch of companies joining together to specifically target the a product of another company...
Of course, IANAL and other disclaimers apply.
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Cocktothorpe (C-Octothorpe).
With apologies to Don Macpherson at Bell Labs, originator of the word "octothorpe."
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In the Grand Old American Justice System, you don't really need a good legal reason to sue someone. You can sue for "alienation of affection" in this country, or "causing emotional distress." You can sue whoever you want for whatever you want. You may not win, but you can sue.
... in fact, they probably hope that they never make it to court. Lawyers count on the expenses being high enough that the other party will want to settle.
What's really going on, is Apple has a big bunch of lawyers on retainer, and are using them to bully smaller parties into doing things their way.
The small guys can't afford the legal battle, so they capitulate. Apple doesn't have to win the lawsuits
If the guys who published those pictures had a big cadre of lawyers (or really deep pockets), they would just thumb their noses back at Apple (and, maybe, countersue for restraint of trade or something).
The system sucks. (Even though, once in a while, one of those ridiculous things that people sue for is actually legitimate. Not in this case, as far as I can tell).
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At least with digital cameras (which have high current draw), you get a very significant benefit by using NiMH batteries. For example, my Nikon Coolpix gets over 100 shots per charge, as opposed to about 6[!] for a standard run-of-the-mill alkalines.
Anyone know if you get a similar benefit in low draw devices like the Palm? I've been looking at PDAs, but after having my old Velo I (WinCE) tune Channel One while I was on the way to an interview, I've been reluctant to make the investment.
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Because the electricity for batteries is reasonably cheap, but the batteries themselves are very expensive. Who pays for them?
OK, assume it's an investment on the part of the "electricity providers." They buy a couple tons of batteries, and you can go to any other station in their franchise, and swap out discharged battery for a charged one. They charge you for the service (forgive the pun), and put in some extra percentage to cover the price of the battery. Sounds great!
Except, the problem is, powerful, rechargable batteries don't last very long. And how do they know that the box you're bringing back as one of their discharged batteries really is? Powerful batteries tend to be a big case filled with smaller cells, sometimes with "smart" controllers that switch around bad sub-cells. You could be yanking out the insides, and returning them a battery case filled with gravel or something.
So the solution has to be some kind of internal security device. This drives the price up even higher.
OK, and what happens if you're driving through rural no-where, and there's no franchises of CityVoltageBatteriesInc? If the battery stations have exchange agreements, you're fine. But what that really means is that the Mega Battery Conglomerates will survive, and there will be no Mom'n'Pop battry stations.
And you know that they're gonna mess everything up in the name of competition. Bob's SuperCharge will tell you that Tina's ChargeYouUp doesn't fully charge the battery, and worse, smears some contact-cleaning paste on the terminals that'll shorten the life of your car. Tina, of course, will tell you that ChargeYouUp has a patented phased charge cycle that manages to put more high-energy electricity in your battery, yielding that extra few miles per charge.
All these problems have solutions, of course, but currently lack the political will and/or the price point incentive for anyone to implement the solution.
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This is a bit long winded, but bear with me here. I actually have a point, not only about technology but also about privacy.
I used to work at a government related thing. One of the places had a very secure computing center.
They discontinued using retinal scanners when it turned out that an identical twin had a better than 10% possibility of fooling the system. That was just as well. No-one wanted to have access to the "retina room." The thinking was that if the Russians or Libyans wanted in, they'd just borrow what they needed to open the door. Obviously, borrowing just your eye wouldn't work very well (it would damage a lot of delicate blood vessels), so we figured they'd borrow your whole head if they really wanted in. Well, that probably wouldn't work either, but we wanted to avoid the risk just in case they'd try it.
So after the retina scanner went away, they put in a palm scanner. Evidently, early environment effects fingerprints sufficiently that a palm scanner (which gets prints from four fingers, and several different areas on the palm itself) has a higher discrimination, and can much more reliably detect tricks like identical twins. Of course, using the same logic we all used before, we tried to avoid having access. If we had to get signed up for that room, we'd ask if we could get our left hand keyed (at least those of us who are right handed).
Of course, the actual risk was probably infinitesimal. But just the same, why should we have taken those risks? If the "enemy" wants your password enough, they'll get it, whether it's a phrase, body-part, typing pattern, DNA sample, or whatever. They may have to kill you for it, or threaten someone you love. But if they want it enough, and they have the means to access you, they'll be able to get your password.
If we extrapolate out to music, it's a bit ridiculous. No-one's gonna cut your hand off so they can listen to your MP3s. But it's the wrong direction to be taking this. By emphasizing biometrics, we not only give credence to the idea that they're secure (which they're not), but we also start irrevocably linking our security to our selves.
Think about it. The Evil entity snags your computer: if the data is protected by a password, there's no way that they can prove that the data is *yours*. You might know how to decrypt it, but the ownership is not provable by that fact. You could plausibly argue that the file was placed on the server by someone else. Now, if that same file was encrypted by your palm-print, that defense is gone. Suddenly, they KNOW that they're your DeCSS sources, or Metalica MP3s, or $cientology documents...
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Yes, and no.
The virtual machine / bytecode concept has existed for quite a while. Java's promise to write once run anywhere is not unique, just the most publicized. And if you look around in Sun's archives, you'll probably find info on the Java Processor, which was to have been a CPU that ran Java bytecodes in a truly native environment. As far as I know, that's been abandoned.
But a native compiler will beat a VM written in native code, if both are written by people who know what they are doing. A JIT will help some, but still will lose out to a native compiler.
Java's portability is great. The ease of use is great. But it will never perform as well in a VM as a native compile. That's why some people (e.g., TowerJ) write native compilers. It's not counterproductive. It's just solving a different problem.
The primary resistance to native compilers for Java is over portability and the fear of non-standard extensions or implementations. Java programmers don't want to worry about (or even know) how many bytes are in an int; it's specified in the standard, after all. A bad native compiler may end up introducing the need to worry about that kind of thing...
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Sing it!
. html
And if you want more, visit:
http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/hill
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Well, having ridden the rails extensively in India, I agree that this is a good way to link lots of places together, electronically or otherwise.
But the availability question is a different matter. Tracks are continuously under repair and/or conversion to standard gauge. I hope that the network users are willing to use UUCP or some non-realtime protocol with a reasonable retry threshhold.
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We used to joke about it: NASA traffic vs MSN traffic.
The Clementine mission, was eventually a "failure" (due, possibly to "an excessively stressful mission-operations phase that was clearly exhausting to the team and may well have contributed to the ultimate demise of Clementine after the lunar portion of the mission had been completed but before insertion onto the asteroid flyby trajectory." -- Space Studies Board Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council).
Still, the pictures from the Clementine mission generated more hits than the Microsoft Network did (MSN in those days was probably still subscription-based). The Clementine mission cost a total of $98 Million. If you compared the costs, Microsoft could have saved millions of dollars and gotten better traffic by launching a space probe rather than an online network...
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Actually, some Hoagland followers staged a picket for a while when the Mars Observer went missing. They claimed that that too was a coverup to avoid getting the truth.
You know how it is. The absence of any evidence serves to show just how damn good the coverup is!
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I think that it's important to start with the distinction between kinds of programming.
There's Systems programming. There's user-space programming ("applications"). There's tool programming. They all overlap in places, but they're different arts.
The more a programmer knows about the low level details, the closer they are to the metal, the better they'll be able to write good code. This philosophy pushes everyone towards writing assembler code. The more they know about systems programming, the better they'll be able to write good code. This philosophy drives people towards writing C code. But when you're building tools for others to implement user space programming, re-usability sometimes takes precedence over performance. Likewise, when writing applications, maintainability is key. This philosophy would drive people towards writing Java.
Only by satisfying some of each of the three constraints can one build a truly Krufty Hack.
The arrival at Elegance and Beauty (the "deep" goals of programming) is balancing these three disparate directions. The grail, of course, is highly-optimized, highly-flexible, extremely portable, outrageously maintainable, and Beautiful code that actually fulfills a needed function.
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But of course, Napster's promise is unfulfilled in this regard. It's damn hard to find really obscure music. Top 40 and the rock'n'roll / metal / altur-nuh-tive equivalent are easy enough to find, though.
It kind of reminds me of Hotline. It has the potential of being a great tool for exchanging obscure or unpopular information (legally, I might add), but turns out to be primarily a vehicle for the exchange of popular stuff (illegally).
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These comments apply to the current standard graphical user interface we see on computers, PDAs, VCRs, etc, but should not be construed to apply to ALL user interfaces.
I've been watching my grandmother learn to use Windows 98. It's painful. First of all, her motor control is not perfect. Second of all, Windows is highly inconsistent in how you approach actions. It's been very instructive, though. These observations are based on what I've seen:
1. Consistency. There should be a standard "meaning" for each action. These should not change unless the context is really significantly different.
2. Clarity. Controls and Widgets of all kinds should emphasize comprehensibility over coolness.
3. Feedback. When something's happening, I should know what's going on.
4. Performance. If the interface is going to stall while something is happening, it should provide feedback immediately, rather than waiting and then presenting a progress bar or the equivalent.
5. Safety. Any destructive action should have at least one warning and a chance to cancel. These safety warnings should be set up so a pro can de-activate them if they want to live risky.
6. Configurability. If I have a way I like to work, I should be able to streamline the process. If applicable, I should be able to script common tasks as well.
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All jokes about the name Win CE (a.k.a. "wince") aside, I was surprised that CE didn't do better in the market.
Now we see it resurrected with a new name. It'll be interesting to see how it does, especially with Palm's extensive user base.
Benchmarks should be open sourced, the community that uses the system(s) at large should define what the tests
(torturous as they should be) actually test. That will determine the difference between fluff and actual fact.
Of course, it's also Standard Operating Procedure to optimize products to perform well on Benchmarks specifically (I hear stories about compilers that seek out "Whetstones" or "Dhrystones" and will substitute hand-optimized machine code for 'em rather than just compile the code).
Bottom line, is you can't trust 3rd party benchmarks. You need to test a system for your specific application. This, though, is prohibitively expensive for most applications. So you gotta rely on benchmarks.
Therefore, make your benchmark as close to real-world use as possible! Especially if you're open-sourcing it. Then, optimizing for the benchmark is actually optimizing for real-world use.
(The problem with this, of course, is that your real-world use may be dramatically different than mine. If I'm rendering 3D graphics, I have different needs than someone running, say, a web server. So this then requires a family of benchmarks, reflecting real-world usage in different domains of endeavor.)
Why, when I supercharged the boxster, the fly-by-wire controls were undersampling at a paltry 60Hz, so I overclocked the Motronic. That pup's cranked up to 87.5Hz. A real driver can feel the difference in responsiveness.
Then there's the traction control. When you're cornering at 25 MPH over stock capability, you need the active suspension and tracking controls to be just that smidge faster. So I overclocked the suspension subcomputer from 40kHz to 50kHz, just to get that extra edge.
Of course, with all this improved speed and handling, I need the Antilock Brakes to be smarter. I upgraded them to 16 M of memory (for performance history checking), and upped the skid detection frequency to 36 Hz.
This is all pretty kRad and all. So I put on fat headers, a mega tail pipe, and a dual-GPS navigation assistance system. It's PHAT!
Now, if I could just debug the device drivers (/dev/car), I'd port it to Linux, 'cause these BSoDs (Blue Skids of Death) are drivin' me nuts!
Actually, Aardman has a whole history of great characters from before Wallace & Grommit. They did a series of claymation lip-synch portraits of people telling their stories or of office scenes, including an incredible one of this rough kid who'd just been released from jail ("Going Equipped," from 1985). There was also the one of the social security office ("Down and Out," 1977) which was an early one but really incredible.
Their homepage http://www.aardman.com has details on these and many other great shorts. Well worth the visit!
I had the name wrong. It was the West Ford project, back in 1961 and 1963.
For information on it, either do this google search, or visit the following direct reference.
Curiously, this article on news.com, written within ten minutes of the article referenced, makes it seem that there may be a savior for Iridium.
...you might wish to get your money back for that Iridium phone you bought!
I won't go into the idea of what was thought of before! That's a whole 'nuther can of worms.
Your point is well taken; a lot of the changes are incremental on what came before. That was also kind of what i was getting at as well. Evolution...
But I would argue that there have been some significant changes as well. Look at the journalling filesystems, look at the evolution of distributed computing within the Unix environment. Look at dirstibuted filesystems like tilde, andrew, and nfs. It's all incremental growth, but taken as a whole, it's a "new" Unix.
You can argue it's just new services and daemons. But that's my point. It's the new Unix, same as the old Unix, only it's more capable and has more options. I think it goes well beyond just bells & whistles.
Yes, but it won't be exactly Unix. Think evolution.
I remember when Unix was a terminal-based OS. X-Windows and the Athena project seemed like a totally new world and a new way of doing things. Sure, it was still Unix, but it wasn't the same Unix.
GNU has likewise changed what was Unix, and, despite it's acronymic denial, has become Unix. But not the Unix from before.
The next Unix will not be today's Unix. But it will be Unix!
I agree that the traditional argument that "the market will take care of it" is much too simplistic for real-world analysis. I don't think the examples you picked are very good though. Well, DeCSS might be, since the real fear of the MPAA is in defeating of the region code trap.
In any case, big corporations are beholden to their shareholders. In the real world, this means that they try to maximize profits. This precludes any view but the zero-sum game, where competition must be destroyed or co-opted. This is where it gets fuzzy, because they bring in lobbyists and lawyers to create, twist, and subvert legislation (and legislators) to their advantage. This inherently prevents a free market from performing any corrections, since it's not technically free any longer.
Bringing this back on topic, eBooks will only succeed when and if the big corporate publishers feel that they have adequate protection against these books being copied. Obviously, they feel that they're at this point -- although I'm curious about the PDF formatted ones. Do they have some security built in? What's to keep me from copying 'em? Do you have to be network connected to read them?