For the analogy to work, you'd have to posit that the car company welded the radio to the dashboard, the transmission, and the trunk lid. You can't remove the $10 radio and replace it with that Alpine you've been dreaming of; you can buy any radio you want but you still have that junk radio occupying a privileged location.
Oh, and you're *not allowed* to disconnect the factory speakers and hook them to your aftermarket radio. By opening the driver's door you agreed to this.
I vote for Windows Improved Edition. They can add an exponent to Improved and increment it every time they remove another unnecessary feature. I'd even let them increment it twice when they remove IE.
"Formal programming languages are not as expressive or flexible as natural languages."
Notice that this is so, at least in part, because they were designed to be so. People argue, fume, fight, and even kill each other over disagreements as to the meaning of things someone said. A program, on the other hand, has a meaning on which all knowledgable people and all CPUs can agree.
You can drive nails with a cinder block or a tractor wheel, but most folk use a hammer because it pares away all sorts of unwanted properties presented by other objects. I really don't want to program in a language that winds up with me spending ten years in court arguing with the computer over whether my program means this or that.
Why are people always trying to take the edge off my tools???
Wow, do you suppose that Mr. Houlin has noticed that his example (government opposes the Internet == no Internet) is exactly the opposite of what he proposes (government must have a role in Internet governance if the Internet is to succeed)?
For that matter, are we so sure that such games don't also give at least a few players an opportunity to work out for themselves why such behavior is wrong?
Ya know, I'd be happy if all of the spammers *did* grow rich and retire, because to me hurting them is just a means to an end: I want the flow of junk email to stop.
Hmmm. Whether the lesser of evils being evil matters seems to depend on whether you are more concerned with reducing evil or avoiding contact with it. Besides, the combatants in this case are going at each other for their own reasons; they didn't wait for us to ask them or support them or cheer them on.
If a rat dies of plague before it can infect anyone, am I not allowed to feel good about that? Bah, I grant myself that permission; I don't need anyone else's.
I think I see my answer between the lines. I had a brief vision of xCFRy paragraph z: "no citizen may fly into space as a paying customer", right next to the one forbidding me to allow monkeys to fly out of my nose. But the actual regulation regulates what a licensed operator can do for hire, no? That I can believe. So, my guess is that I always did have (by omission) the right to hire someone to take me into space, but nobody was allowed to accept the deal.
For the longest time, my wife thought that she had to select the message in order to junk it, so even though she didn't actually read anything the spammer still heard his link bugs go off.
(I never had that problem. Chalk up another victory for Pine's superior style of interaction.:-)
That an entity which contributes patented, or patent-pending, technology to an open standard without clear formal notice to the standards body of the proprietary status thereof has constructively abandoned its patent, and any part of it so contributed passes immediately into the public domain.
Then maybe some entities would be a little less inclined to engage in such shenanigans.
Honestly, I didn't think that Mr. Gore was that old. Was he really a member of Congress in the 1960s? (I guess I should look it up.) I'm nearly 50, but I was just a little kid when the Internet began coming together.
Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
Access to Registry data is not enough; you need to be able to interpret them. Take a look at some of the horrible undocumented BLOBs that Explorer rams into the Registry, for example, or contemplate just how easy it would be for a new version of MSI to thoroughly change all of the rules without notice.
Look at the AT command, for instance, which still works on XP as it did originally, even though the data have been moved out of the Registry into an opaque file format. Programs which use the ancient, deprecated OS/2 LAN Manager compatibility APIs won't notice the difference; scripts which deal with the data directly will find that there are no data there anymore.
MKS may have supplied an AT-alike, and a zillion other adapters, but my point is that this stuff should have been scriptable from Day 1, and we have to go to third parties like MKS to give us what they can from what should have been a fundamental set of system administration tools. And as long as the attitude at MS is that there will always be one person per machine and he'll always be there to work the UI, that problem will persist and grow.
I used to have TOPS-10, TOPS20, and VMS systems that pretty much managed themselves after I'd built a few scripts to implement our local notions of good system administration, leaving me more time to work on special cases. I do as much and more today on Unix systems. But the MS Windows boxes around here consume incredible amounts of time even with all their "enterprise" features pushed to the limit, because the product wasn't designed for "fleet operations".
I'm happy for all the third-party help I can get, but my problem is that the base system continues to evolve away from manageability, not toward it. MS have begun addressing this, as I've said, but right now it's frequently one step forward, two steps back, and changing that will require changing the way the company as a whole thinks about computer usage and users. Yet there's the company's top strategist chanting "personal, personal, personal". I expect a long wait.
Dubious, skeptical: pretty much the same thing. The phrase is about how those developers feel about Mono, not how others feel about them.
Maybe it would be even better to say, "still trying to figure out how Mono *or*.Net would have any effect, other than increased code size, on the types of projects I tackle." MS keeps telling me that.Net will improve *everything*, but I find that they have a very narrow notion of "everything".
Exactly. Don't ban useful technologies; ban the idiots who misuse them. "Misuse personal data: go to jail" will accomplish a lot more than trying to tell the tide to go back where it came from.
But what about just sampling all the tags in one's environment and playing the results as audio? It's got to be at least as good as many of the last century's attempts to redefine music. You could get some nice wind-chime or aeolian-harp effects, or something.
Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
Not a bad idea. CMD.EXE is a gigantic improvement over COMMAND.COM, but even the most featureless Unix shell can still run rings around it.
However, I haven't seen any shell that can, for example, peer into the Registry and enumerate all of the software products installed using MSI. Some stuff is done differently enough in MS Windows that shell scripting would at best be an all-thumbs solution.
MS is beginning to address this, but they're still years behind the curve and will be so for a while. And that's at least partially due to this attitude I'm talking about, that a computer should be something that belongs to one person, is used only by him, should never do anything unless he is sitting in front of it pushing buttons, and is nobody else's concern. Real businesses don't operate that way -- it's far too expensive and it slows everybody down.
(The other attitude problem they need to solve is the "what users need to do is what we have packaged for them" problem. Kinda like how the U.S. automakers felt just before Datsun and Toyota began eating their lunch. Visit the real world and you'll see people doing things never imagined on the MS campus. The customer also has a right, and need, to innovate.)
Re:And there is much of my quarrel with BillG
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
It's not someone else's PC; it's one of the fleet of servers for which I'm responsible. Or it might be the PC on someone else's desk, which belongs to the company, and for which I'm responsible (along with 199 other PCs). I had to figure out how to make all the workstations in the building boot at 04:00 daily, not so long ago, because our Client Support team asked for it.
It's the company's PC; it lives in the office allocated to you but it isn't your property.
If I want to have a weekly job to grub through the Windows event log, find interesting stuff, make a list, and email it to me (over on the Linux system in my office) I kind of think it's going to have to be done by the Windows box.
I could have that designed, built, tested, documented, packaged, and scheduled in an hour on Linux. I just spent the better part of *two days* figuring out how to do it on Windows. But now it's done and I can go do other stuff and just wait for the emails to arrive.
Morally they may be right, but legally what they're entitled to is spelled out in the contract they signed. If they agreed to do the same work and accept less, they should do that. The time to fix this is contract-renewal time.
"But that's the terms HP offered!" Well, what was your counteroffer?
And there is much of my quarrel with BillG
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Certainly some computing should be personal. But some is not and should not be. I have to work ten times as hard on Windows PeeCees as I do on other computers to get them to do impersonal things, like send me a summary of their own activity for the last week without my having to push a button.
Some very useful computation is not personal, interactive, exploratory, or "an experience". And Microsoft traditionally just didn't "get" this. Like the old robots in Asimov's "Runaround", supposedly automatic processes just won't go without a human in the saddle giving orders. They are getting better at this, but still have far to go in order to catch up with the 1960s, let alone the 21st century.
I often laugh bitterly when I hear about the "increased productivity" attributed to gadgets that make me do everything manually rather than just doing the work and sending me a note on how it went.
If you want my recommendation for your software product, ask yourself, "would there be any point in having this run automatically when nobody is around?" And if the answer is "yes", *make it easy to do so*.
"Only fifteen years ago, the USA and USSR were still poised on the brink of annihilating the human race. Why do so many still still subscribe to the religion of the perfectability of Man?"
Slashdot Mirror
For the analogy to work, you'd have to posit that the car company welded the radio to the dashboard, the transmission, and the trunk lid. You can't remove the $10 radio and replace it with that Alpine you've been dreaming of; you can buy any radio you want but you still have that junk radio occupying a privileged location.
Oh, and you're *not allowed* to disconnect the factory speakers and hook them to your aftermarket radio. By opening the driver's door you agreed to this.
I vote for Windows Improved Edition. They can add an exponent to Improved and increment it every time they remove another unnecessary feature. I'd even let them increment it twice when they remove IE.
"Formal programming languages are not as expressive or flexible as natural languages."
Notice that this is so, at least in part, because they were designed to be so. People argue, fume, fight, and even kill each other over disagreements as to the meaning of things someone said. A program, on the other hand, has a meaning on which all knowledgable people and all CPUs can agree.
You can drive nails with a cinder block or a tractor wheel, but most folk use a hammer because it pares away all sorts of unwanted properties presented by other objects. I really don't want to program in a language that winds up with me spending ten years in court arguing with the computer over whether my program means this or that.
Why are people always trying to take the edge off my tools???
Wow, do you suppose that Mr. Houlin has noticed that his example (government opposes the Internet == no Internet) is exactly the opposite of what he proposes (government must have a role in Internet governance if the Internet is to succeed)?
For that matter, are we so sure that such games don't also give at least a few players an opportunity to work out for themselves why such behavior is wrong?
Really? I missed the part about Microsoft suing Mr. Richter in Microsoft Court under the Microsoft Civil Code.
Since when is it "taking the law into your own hands" to ask the government to enforce the law?
Ya know, I'd be happy if all of the spammers *did* grow rich and retire, because to me hurting them is just a means to an end: I want the flow of junk email to stop.
Hmmm. Whether the lesser of evils being evil matters seems to depend on whether you are more concerned with reducing evil or avoiding contact with it. Besides, the combatants in this case are going at each other for their own reasons; they didn't wait for us to ask them or support them or cheer them on.
If a rat dies of plague before it can infect anyone, am I not allowed to feel good about that? Bah, I grant myself that permission; I don't need anyone else's.
Maybe it's because MS' single suit accounts for 98% of the money he could be asked to pay. Hmmm?
I think I see my answer between the lines. I had a brief vision of xCFRy paragraph z: "no citizen may fly into space as a paying customer", right next to the one forbidding me to allow monkeys to fly out of my nose. But the actual regulation regulates what a licensed operator can do for hire, no? That I can believe. So, my guess is that I always did have (by omission) the right to hire someone to take me into space, but nobody was allowed to accept the deal.
What was preventing us doing that before?
For the longest time, my wife thought that she had to select the message in order to junk it, so even though she didn't actually read anything the spammer still heard his link bugs go off.
:-)
(I never had that problem. Chalk up another victory for Pine's superior style of interaction.
That an entity which contributes patented, or patent-pending, technology to an open standard without clear formal notice to the standards body of the proprietary status thereof has constructively abandoned its patent, and any part of it so contributed passes immediately into the public domain.
Then maybe some entities would be a little less inclined to engage in such shenanigans.
Honestly, I didn't think that Mr. Gore was that old. Was he really a member of Congress in the 1960s? (I guess I should look it up.) I'm nearly 50, but I was just a little kid when the Internet began coming together.
Access to Registry data is not enough; you need to be able to interpret them. Take a look at some of the horrible undocumented BLOBs that Explorer rams into the Registry, for example, or contemplate just how easy it would be for a new version of MSI to thoroughly change all of the rules without notice.
Look at the AT command, for instance, which still works on XP as it did originally, even though the data have been moved out of the Registry into an opaque file format. Programs which use the ancient, deprecated OS/2 LAN Manager compatibility APIs won't notice the difference; scripts which deal with the data directly will find that there are no data there anymore.
MKS may have supplied an AT-alike, and a zillion other adapters, but my point is that this stuff should have been scriptable from Day 1, and we have to go to third parties like MKS to give us what they can from what should have been a fundamental set of system administration tools. And as long as the attitude at MS is that there will always be one person per machine and he'll always be there to work the UI, that problem will persist and grow.
I used to have TOPS-10, TOPS20, and VMS systems that pretty much managed themselves after I'd built a few scripts to implement our local notions of good system administration, leaving me more time to work on special cases. I do as much and more today on Unix systems. But the MS Windows boxes around here consume incredible amounts of time even with all their "enterprise" features pushed to the limit, because the product wasn't designed for "fleet operations".
I'm happy for all the third-party help I can get, but my problem is that the base system continues to evolve away from manageability, not toward it. MS have begun addressing this, as I've said, but right now it's frequently one step forward, two steps back, and changing that will require changing the way the company as a whole thinks about computer usage and users. Yet there's the company's top strategist chanting "personal, personal, personal". I expect a long wait.
They won't "dump" it. MS hardly ever throws anything away. They'll just smear on another layer of frosting.
Inside every DVD-ROM of bloatware there is an 11kB program screaming to get out.
Dubious, skeptical: pretty much the same thing. The phrase is about how those developers feel about Mono, not how others feel about them.
.Net would have any effect, other than increased code size, on the types of projects I tackle." MS keeps telling me that .Net will improve *everything*, but I find that they have a very narrow notion of "everything".
Maybe it would be even better to say, "still trying to figure out how Mono *or*
Exactly. Don't ban useful technologies; ban the idiots who misuse them. "Misuse personal data: go to jail" will accomplish a lot more than trying to tell the tide to go back where it came from.
But what about just sampling all the tags in one's environment and playing the results as audio? It's got to be at least as good as many of the last century's attempts to redefine music. You could get some nice wind-chime or aeolian-harp effects, or something.
Not a bad idea. CMD.EXE is a gigantic improvement over COMMAND.COM, but even the most featureless Unix shell can still run rings around it.
However, I haven't seen any shell that can, for example, peer into the Registry and enumerate all of the software products installed using MSI. Some stuff is done differently enough in MS Windows that shell scripting would at best be an all-thumbs solution.
MS is beginning to address this, but they're still years behind the curve and will be so for a while. And that's at least partially due to this attitude I'm talking about, that a computer should be something that belongs to one person, is used only by him, should never do anything unless he is sitting in front of it pushing buttons, and is nobody else's concern. Real businesses don't operate that way -- it's far too expensive and it slows everybody down.
(The other attitude problem they need to solve is the "what users need to do is what we have packaged for them" problem. Kinda like how the U.S. automakers felt just before Datsun and Toyota began eating their lunch. Visit the real world and you'll see people doing things never imagined on the MS campus. The customer also has a right, and need, to innovate.)
It's not someone else's PC; it's one of the fleet of servers for which I'm responsible. Or it might be the PC on someone else's desk, which belongs to the company, and for which I'm responsible (along with 199 other PCs). I had to figure out how to make all the workstations in the building boot at 04:00 daily, not so long ago, because our Client Support team asked for it.
It's the company's PC; it lives in the office allocated to you but it isn't your property.
If I want to have a weekly job to grub through the Windows event log, find interesting stuff, make a list, and email it to me (over on the Linux system in my office) I kind of think it's going to have to be done by the Windows box.
I could have that designed, built, tested, documented, packaged, and scheduled in an hour on Linux. I just spent the better part of *two days* figuring out how to do it on Windows. But now it's done and I can go do other stuff and just wait for the emails to arrive.
Morally they may be right, but legally what they're entitled to is spelled out in the contract they signed. If they agreed to do the same work and accept less, they should do that. The time to fix this is contract-renewal time.
"But that's the terms HP offered!" Well, what was your counteroffer?
Certainly some computing should be personal. But some is not and should not be. I have to work ten times as hard on Windows PeeCees as I do on other computers to get them to do impersonal things, like send me a summary of their own activity for the last week without my having to push a button.
Some very useful computation is not personal, interactive, exploratory, or "an experience". And Microsoft traditionally just didn't "get" this. Like the old robots in Asimov's "Runaround", supposedly automatic processes just won't go without a human in the saddle giving orders. They are getting better at this, but still have far to go in order to catch up with the 1960s, let alone the 21st century.
I often laugh bitterly when I hear about the "increased productivity" attributed to gadgets that make me do everything manually rather than just doing the work and sending me a note on how it went.
If you want my recommendation for your software product, ask yourself, "would there be any point in having this run automatically when nobody is around?" And if the answer is "yes", *make it easy to do so*.
"Only fifteen years ago, the USA and USSR were still poised on the brink of annihilating the human race. Why do so many still still subscribe to the religion of the perfectability of Man?"
Possibly because we didn't do it.