Yeah, often tech writers don't understand the significance of what they're saying. Writing "click the mouse button" is not good enough any more. WHICH mouse button?
A good writer can help a good interface better or really, really bad. Maybe what the open-source user interfaces need are better tech writers:-)
It's a chicken and egg problem. Text mode interfaces are very user friendly... if you know how to use them. How do you find out what how do look for things in files? How do you even know that "grep" is the tool that does the job, much less how to use it? Well, you use the man pages. How do you find out more about the man pages? Type "$ man man" of course...:-)
I think vi has a great interface. Want to delete 5 lines? Type 5dd. No menu to find, and very efficient and intuitive, but only if you already know how vi works.
The point of a good user interface in the "usual" sense is to reduce the learning curve for new users while providing fast, powerful functionality.
Yeah, I agree they still have a long way to go before they get to be completely brilliant interfaces. The point is, they are getting better. And they're getting better because they are open source, not in spite of it.
And how many of them are easy to use? How many of them are have interfaces that are just evil?*
But hope is looking up. Look at these newer open source projects:
GNOME KDE Mozilla GIMP
So, I think the community is doing pretty well giving geek-interfaces for geek tools. The user-interfaces on user tools aren't doing to badly either. They're not excellent yet, but even interfaces benefit from the open source model.
* Trick question. Just sendmail's interface is evil, the rest are just difficult.
Oh... my.... god. I can either spend the rest of my life trying to escape the dungeon or I can spend an hour hacking the source to be 50/10 levels. It's tempting, but I think I'll do it the hard way, even if it means little sleep.
We still have Nethack, it still runs in text mode if you want, and it's still wayyyy to addicting.
I wish I never found it year ago on the Amiga. Every couple of months I come back to it only to find it consumes more of my time than I shoudl let it. I WILL get that stupid Amulet if it's the last thing my character ever does! Oh, wait...
A less than 50MhZ Sun IPX with 32MB of RAM ran NeWS just fine. A 70MhZ Sun SPARCstation 5 ran Display PostScript well. Vector graphics and transparencies just don't consume a lot of CPU power unless implemented badly.
3rd generation my butt. NeWS, Display PostScript, etc. have been primarily vector-based for a long time. And transparencies and mouse-overs aren't new technology either.
I prefer vector-based interfaces in general, but don't believe the hype when they claim it's great new next-generation stuff. It's really just what the motorcycle crowd call the BNG models (where the only real change is Bold New Graphics). It still works the same, just prettier.
It's that creation of the "virtual body" that will take the extra time I mentioned. We haven't even begin learning to decode our sensor signals yet, much less feeding the brain any sensor signal we want.
Also, virtual worlds will can only be a reflection of what we already know. The real universe can teach us things we don't.
I think they still have problems to solve, more important than being able to convert neurons to bits.
There's a long way to go before they can solve the psychological problem. How will "you" emotionaly cope with not being a bag of mostly water? Will the transfered brains develop phantom body pain?
What about the emotional needs that are tied to physical needs, such as touch? Will you get hungry?
I'm sure all of these problems are solvable, because in the end a brain in a computer is still a Turing machine. I just think we'll see a workable transfer in the estimated 50 years. Maybe 500.
I agree. The cost of hardware is miniscule compared to the cost of software maintenance. I mean, almost insiginificant.
My machine at work is about $2000. There is a full time person paid at about $40,000 year to support about 25 such machines, and that doesn't count lost productivity due to buggy software, reboots, etc.
I want a programming language that will let me write:
Tim paints himself into an interesting corner. He argues faster machines should not be required, yet he years for more and more abstraction.
Abstraction is great for design and programming speed, and not good for executable speed. It's the trade off we make, and one of the biggest reasons applications are bigger and slower and better than ever.
His C=A+B argument is a good example. The function which adds an element of A to an element of B incurs overhead because it is a function. If you make special allowances for the list-of cases then you have just undid the abstraction. Yes, optimizers can do good things, but they only work so far.
For good software engineering practices to be adopted, I see one large hurdle. Everybody thinks Software Engineer == Programmer.
Programmers are the work-horses of the industry. They are the ones in the trench typing the code to get the daily jobs done. Perl is their friend.
Software Engineers are the ones who build large systems, they spend three-quarters of their time on design and review. This is the only acceptible way to build good large systems that aren't Crap. Perl is usually not their friend.
The problem I see is that most of Management assumes a Programmer can product a beyond-small sized program as good as a Software Engineer in less time. The Engineer will take 6 months to build a elegant system that scales well, and requires little maintenance in the future. The Programmer can do it in 4 month, but it will require a lot of maintenance and shoe-horning in the future.
Which one is better for the job? It depends, but in general Programmers are great at small one-off systems. The Software Engineer knows that true small one-off systems are very rare.
The Kernel Hacker is curiuos mix of Software Engineer and Programmer.
Re:What's up with Sun's attitude toward Linux?
on
Free Solaris 8
·
· Score: 2
It's one suit among thousands. Ignore the moron that doesn't have a clue what Suns position on Linux is.
From http://execpc.com/~mhallign/intern.html There are three essential elements to prove the existence of a trade secret: (1) it must be commercially valuable information, (2) not in the public domain, and (3) the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy. Further, liability for trade secret misappropriation, to be effective, must extend not only to the actual misappropriator but also to all other persons who know or should know that they are the recipients of such information obtained by unauthorized acquisition, disclosure or use (third-party liability). Finally, there must be effective remedies including injunctive relief, damages, and ex parte seizure orders to prevent infringement and to preserve evidence.
I contest there have not been reasonable efforts taken to maintain it's secrecy according to #3 above. Reasonable efforts would have consisted of using any of the widely available strong encryption algorithms.
What they did would be equivalent to Pepsi including their ingredients list in the can, then telling you not to look. Just SAYING not to do it doesn't mean reasonable measure have been taken.
If any thing, the should be suing Xing.
You can maybe even argue that it's not even commercially valuable information according to #1. Producers of standalone players and DVD publishers still need to license the technology. They have not "lost" anything.
After a long period of secrecy TransMetaTag Corp. finally announced the new Gilligan processor.
The new revolutionary processor uses nanites as it's core, translating Itanium instructions on the fly through a process known as "Gene Morphing". The nanites reorder and translate the instructions by pushing electrons through the right Gates at amazing speed.
"It was a breakthrough in nanotechnology that made this new design possible", says Linus Torvald Jr., "without the ability to turn them off, we could have never achieved our amazingly low power requirements".
You probably can't just remove the coating to reuse the disks because they would get scratched during normal use.
Even if you could reuse the disks (so The Matrix stays The Matrix until it's recycled) the logistics of collecting them with normal recycling would be a nightmare unless everybody took them back to the video store...
What about animals that injest the plastic (birds eat stones to digest, could easily get a chunk of disk)?
Also, I bet there's a lot more petroleum in the disk you're throwing away than the gas to burn to drive to the video store. Or you can walk or take a bike.
If they can be recycled and if the ARE recycled by the public, then the choice isn't so clear.
... I can't help but think that this ranting about The Simpsons degrading in quality is because our standards have been pushed so high. I'm mean who can top:
-car crash- Homer: D'oh! Marge: A dear! Lisa: A female dear!
Ethics also asks the question about who is fit to judge what is right or wrong. The viewers? Other companies whos adds are edited? The courts? CmdrTaco?
I am pessimistic about the media, I thing they just barely manage to predent it's reality. The fact is, it's ALL edited, not just some little ad. They edit it by chosing what (not) to show, how to present it, in what order, during what times of days, and with what sort of commentary.
They could avoid showing the competitors ad by just not putting it in the camera shots. Now, I personally would prefer my Live programs to be as Real as possible, but I don't think they have any responsability to present it to me.
There is not ethical deliemma. They have no obligation or right to provide unaltered representation of live events. They can even make it look like there's a riot.
It's their signal and they have no more responsability to show the Real World than the Weekly World News.
It sucks, but it's true. Who knows, it might even be a good thing - it could be the end of 2.5 minutes of commercials every 15 minutes by replacing them with more subtle in-the-picture ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, often tech writers don't understand the significance of what they're saying. Writing "click the mouse button" is not good enough any more. WHICH mouse button?
:-)
A good writer can help a good interface better or really, really bad. Maybe what the open-source user interfaces need are better tech writers
It's a chicken and egg problem. Text mode interfaces are very user friendly... if you know how to use them. How do you find out what how do look for things in files? How do you even know that "grep" is the tool that does the job, much less how to use it? Well, you use the man pages. How do you find out more about the man pages? Type "$ man man" of course... :-)
I think vi has a great interface. Want to delete 5 lines? Type 5dd. No menu to find, and very efficient and intuitive, but only if you already know how vi works.
The point of a good user interface in the "usual" sense is to reduce the learning curve for new users while providing fast, powerful functionality.
Yeah, I agree they still have a long way to go before they get to be completely brilliant interfaces. The point is, they are getting better. And they're getting better because they are open source, not in spite of it.
Some of open sources greatest successes:
vi
Emacs
Apache
sendmail
bind
TeX
X11
And how many of them are easy to use? How many of them are have interfaces that are just evil?*
But hope is looking up. Look at these newer open source projects:
GNOME
KDE
Mozilla
GIMP
So, I think the community is doing pretty well giving geek-interfaces for geek tools. The user-interfaces on user tools aren't doing to badly either. They're not excellent yet, but even interfaces benefit from the open source model.
* Trick question. Just sendmail's interface is evil, the rest are just difficult.
Oh... my.... god. I can either spend the rest of my life trying to escape the dungeon or I can spend an hour hacking the source to be 50/10 levels. It's tempting, but I think I'll do it the hard way, even if it means little sleep.
Stupid freakin' addictive games!
I wish I never found it year ago on the Amiga. Every couple of months I come back to it only to find it consumes more of my time than I shoudl let it. I WILL get that stupid Amulet if it's the last thing my character ever does! Oh, wait...
A less than 50MhZ Sun IPX with 32MB of RAM ran NeWS just fine. A 70MhZ Sun SPARCstation 5 ran Display PostScript well. Vector graphics and transparencies just don't consume a lot of CPU power unless implemented badly.
3rd generation my butt. NeWS, Display PostScript, etc. have been primarily vector-based for a long time. And transparencies and mouse-overs aren't new technology either.
I prefer vector-based interfaces in general, but don't believe the hype when they claim it's great new next-generation stuff. It's really just what the motorcycle crowd call the BNG models (where the only real change is Bold New Graphics). It still works the same, just prettier.
It's that creation of the "virtual body" that will take the extra time I mentioned. We haven't even begin learning to decode our sensor signals yet, much less feeding the brain any sensor signal we want.
Also, virtual worlds will can only be a reflection of what we already know. The real universe can teach us things we don't.
I think they still have problems to solve, more important than being able to convert neurons to bits.
There's a long way to go before they can solve the psychological problem. How will "you" emotionaly cope with not being a bag of mostly water? Will the transfered brains develop phantom body pain?
What about the emotional needs that are tied to physical needs, such as touch? Will you get hungry?
I'm sure all of these problems are solvable, because in the end a brain in a computer is still a Turing machine. I just think we'll see a workable transfer in the estimated 50 years. Maybe 500.
I agree. The cost of hardware is miniscule compared to the cost of software maintenance. I mean, almost insiginificant.
My machine at work is about $2000. There is a full time person paid at about $40,000 year to support about 25 such machines, and that doesn't count lost productivity due to buggy software, reboots, etc.
I want a programming language that will let me write:
DoTheRightThing().
And I won't care how slow it is.
Tim paints himself into an interesting corner. He argues faster machines should not be required, yet he years for more and more abstraction.
Abstraction is great for design and programming speed, and not good for executable speed. It's the trade off we make, and one of the biggest reasons applications are bigger and slower and better than ever.
His C=A+B argument is a good example. The function which adds an element of A to an element of B incurs overhead because it is a function. If you make special allowances for the list-of cases then you have just undid the abstraction. Yes, optimizers can do good things, but they only work so far.
For good software engineering practices to be adopted, I see one large hurdle. Everybody thinks Software Engineer == Programmer.
Programmers are the work-horses of the industry. They are the ones in the trench typing the code to get the daily jobs done. Perl is their friend.
Software Engineers are the ones who build large systems, they spend three-quarters of their time on design and review. This is the only acceptible way to build good large systems that aren't Crap. Perl is usually not their friend.
The problem I see is that most of Management assumes a Programmer can product a beyond-small sized program as good as a Software Engineer in less time. The Engineer will take 6 months to build a elegant system that scales well, and requires little maintenance in the future. The Programmer can do it in 4 month, but it will require a lot of maintenance and shoe-horning in the future.
Which one is better for the job? It depends, but in general Programmers are great at small one-off systems. The Software Engineer knows that true small one-off systems are very rare.
The Kernel Hacker is curiuos mix of Software Engineer and Programmer.
It's one suit among thousands. Ignore the moron that doesn't have a clue what Suns position on Linux is.
Remember, these are the people that are loaning Debian a trio of UltraSPARCs to port to.
In every large organization there's a weenie who has his tie on too tight. And remember, most importantly (in big friendly letters): Don't Panic.
From http://execpc.com/~mhallign/intern.html
There are three essential elements to prove the existence of a trade secret: (1) it must be commercially
valuable information, (2) not in the public domain, and (3) the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain
its secrecy. Further, liability for trade secret misappropriation, to be effective, must extend not only to
the actual misappropriator but also to all other persons who know or should know that they are the
recipients of such information obtained by unauthorized acquisition, disclosure or use (third-party
liability). Finally, there must be effective remedies including injunctive relief, damages, and ex parte
seizure orders to prevent infringement and to preserve evidence.
I contest there have not been reasonable efforts taken to maintain it's secrecy according to #3 above. Reasonable efforts would have consisted of using any of the widely available strong encryption algorithms.
What they did would be equivalent to Pepsi including their ingredients list in the can, then telling you not to look. Just SAYING not to do it doesn't mean reasonable measure have been taken.
If any thing, the should be suing Xing.
You can maybe even argue that it's not even commercially valuable information according to #1. Producers of standalone players and DVD publishers still need to license the technology. They have not "lost" anything.
Press release
Subject: Gilligan Nanite Processor
Release Day: Jan 19, 2004
After a long period of secrecy TransMetaTag Corp. finally announced the new Gilligan processor.
The new revolutionary processor uses nanites as it's core, translating Itanium instructions on the fly through a process known as "Gene Morphing". The nanites reorder and translate the instructions by pushing electrons through the right Gates at amazing speed.
"It was a breakthrough in nanotechnology that made this new design possible", says Linus Torvald Jr., "without the ability to turn them off, we could have never achieved our amazingly low power requirements".
Hemos could not be reached for comment.
Take this with a grain of salt because it's word of mouth, but....
I believe in Canada it's legal to re-broadcast signals as long as the "signals" are unmodified.
You probably can't just remove the coating to reuse the disks because they would get scratched during normal use.
Even if you could reuse the disks (so The Matrix stays The Matrix until it's recycled) the logistics of collecting them with normal recycling would be a nightmare unless everybody took them back to the video store...
What about animals that injest the plastic (birds eat stones to digest, could easily get a chunk of disk)?
Also, I bet there's a lot more petroleum in the disk you're throwing away than the gas to burn to drive to the video store. Or you can walk or take a bike.
If they can be recycled and if the ARE recycled by the public, then the choice isn't so clear.
It's not absolute value that matters, it's the percentage of net worth.
100 billion net worth for Gates, donate 5 billion = 5%.
50000 net worth for this guy, donate 5k = 10%.
Also, doesn't Gates donations really go to a charity that is a thinly-disguised Microsoft promotion machine?
Ouch. While the comments were correct (as usual), they were a little harsh, Bruce.
Is there a FAQ for the GPL? If not, will someone PLEASE make one?
... I can't help but think that this ranting about The Simpsons degrading in quality is because our standards have been pushed so high. I'm mean who can top:
-car crash-
Homer: D'oh!
Marge: A dear!
Lisa: A female dear!
The basic premise is that Live does not mean Real. The Live episode of ER was not real.
Most people here seem to assume that Live means Factual and that if it isn't they should be required to post a disclaimer.
I say, assumptions are dangerous. Unless they say it's factual, don't assume it is.
Another point: Is it ethical for the competitor to hi-jack real-estate on the competitors images?
Ethics also asks the question about who is fit to judge what is right or wrong. The viewers? Other companies whos adds are edited? The courts? CmdrTaco?
I am pessimistic about the media, I thing they just barely manage to predent it's reality. The fact is, it's ALL edited, not just some little ad. They edit it by chosing what (not) to show, how to present it, in what order, during what times of days, and with what sort of commentary.
They could avoid showing the competitors ad by just not putting it in the camera shots. Now, I personally would prefer my Live programs to be as Real as possible, but I don't think they have any responsability to present it to me.
In the media I can't set my threshold to -1.
There is not ethical deliemma. They have no obligation or right to provide unaltered representation of live events. They can even make it look like there's a riot.
It's their signal and they have no more responsability to show the Real World than the Weekly World News.
It sucks, but it's true. Who knows, it might even be a good thing - it could be the end of 2.5 minutes of commercials every 15 minutes by replacing them with more subtle in-the-picture ads.