That 8M download only gives you the slides - pretty pictures but no text. The actual
phase I paper is here. It's a 15M download - and you can year the server creaking under the strain.
Bottom line is that there is no rational reason to use Objective-C. Clearly this is a case of Not Invented Here on Apple's part.
I'm not a particular fan of either language (C++ or Objective-C), but the NIH accusation is simply false.
Objective-C was invented by Brad Cox in the mid- or early- 80s, and was intended to bring Smalltalk-style capabilities to C. It was later adopted by Next. Since they now have tons of legacy code in Objective-C, they have a strong rationale to continue supporting it.
Actually, what came before both of them, I imagine, was Apple's long-lost *other* Cocoa.
Cocoa was a multimedia authoring environment for kids.
Yes, it did come first, but it's not lost! That project was spun off
from Apple into the company Stagecast.
Apple retained rights to the original name. Actually, the earlier
name for the project was KidSim. The prime
movers for KidSim were David Smith and Alan Cypher. Larry Tesler was Stagecast president. Both Smith and Tesler originally came from Xerox PARC.
You do know that Yosemitie National Park is on top of one the "super" volcano's. I mean if the thing blew again there is a chance it would cause massive loss of life, they are talking 3ft of ash 3000 miles away.
No. The 8088 was a "bus limited" version of the 8086, Intel's first generation of the x86 architecture.
Internally, the 8088 was identical to the 8086, same registers, same instruction set, but it had the advantage of working on all the 8-bit bus infrastructure.
One big problem with rewrites that he doesn't address is the "second
system effect" from The Mythical Man-Month.
Spot on. The key to successful rewrites is not to attempt to build the
"ultimate architecture" for the application, but to target the
actual problems in the code base. The ones that cause the code to
be riddled with patches and work-arounds because the original design simply
didn't meet the challenges of the real world.
I don't doubt that Mr. Spolsky has learned some valuable lessons in his
career, but in that article he certainly comes across as if he were saying
"I'm a manager now and I know everything there is to know about the
development process." When you start phrasing things in absolutes (never,
always) it's usually a sign of trouble.
I see you skipped math. Those 180 school days account for 36 weeks, or
nearly 3/4 of a year, not 1/2 of a year. (The rest of us word about 235
days.) It is true that teachers get three months off, and that needs to
be factored in to the equations. But you also have to allow that teacher
still have to feed their families, and they aren't very likely to be able
to find additional work during the time they are off.
I'm not going to argue about whether giving each teacher another $7500
is the "correct" course of action, but I will note that since the
average teacher's salary is about $40,000, that would be more than
an 18% raise. That is not an amount I would consider "measly."
According to this site, the first personal computer was Simon, c. 1950, a relay and paper-tape
affair. You can argue with their definitions, but it has a lot of interesting historical machines.
MITS Altair really started the PC revolution, in that it was readily available,
had a decent amount of compute power, and was affordable.
The IBM of today is different from the IBM at the time of Microsoft's founding. If you read their histories, that's the IBM they were afraid of becoming. A big, slow, lumbering corporation known not for innovative products but for being the "safe choice."
There was a business cliche at the time "No one ever got fired for buying an IBM product."
I would argue that this is evil. Not in the 1984/newspeak
sense described by some, since it's not really an attempt to control people
via language, it's a classic corporate lawyer thing to do. Corporate lawyers
get paid to think of all the ways that companies can get into trouble and
prevent it. We have seen in the past, when word processors offer stupid
[idiotic, moronic, asinine] suggestions for word replacements, some
smart-assed journalist writes a story and the company looks bad. Clearly,
from the lawyers point of view, the best solution is to simply eliminate
the possibility altogether.
If you've worked at a large corporation, you'll often discover that many
of the inanities of corporate life arise not from pointy-haired bosses directly,
but from "guidelines" that were created and put into place by
PHBs in consultation with risk-averse lawyers. One thing this shows is that
Microsoft is actually becoming IBM, the thing it has always feared and proof
that it too will eventually become a dinosaur and die of irrelevance.
The reason that this is evil, however, is that until Microsoft dies,
they are still a monopoly, and most non-technicalusers are not aware
of choices other than Windows, Word, Excel, etc. on the desktop. Or, just
as likely, I need to use them for compatibility with others. Therefore,
these people are now going to find that computers and technology are less
useful to them. There's no reason I should have to have a paper dictionary
and thesarus by my desk, but if I use Word, it appears that I will have
to anyway. That makes the computer less useful and is therefor evil.
Whatever it is they've got over there, by definition it isn't the
web if it can't be viewed with a generic web browser.
By your definition today, that may be true. But if you know anything
about language, you know that definitions change. If Microsoft has it's
way, in five years "the web" might be defined as "what's
viewable by Explorer."
You know how they negotiate. Imagine the next time Macromedia goes to
Microsoft with an update to Flash. MS says, yeah, we'll distribute that
plug-in for you, just do this one thing for us, make sure Dreamweaver inserts
this little script that tests for "browser compatibility" or maybe
maybe we'll distribute our ActiveFlash (tm) plugin instead.. W'ere
not furcing you, you understand, just a business deal, you help us, we help
you.
Now imaging the same thing with Adobe, and the HTML tools are all enforcing
browser checks by default. All of a sudden it's a Microsoft Web.
Even if the Sun hardware handles the load under the "average case," I think it's a bad idea to use SunRays. Use servers for serving, for multiple users, give them each their own CPU.
For one thing, there's always a few people who are going to run some weird program that sucks cycles like made, degading performance for everyone. For another, students don't work under average load conditions. Everybody is slacking off until two weeks before finals and then trying to get it all done at once. If system performance goes to hell under the excess load, you're going to have a lot of unhappy students.
It discusses in scientific detail what is wrong with the radioactive
dating methods
The Creationists like to point out so-called "flaws" in dating
techniques that are based on "assumptions." While they can sometimes
confuse the scientifically illiterate with this terminology, there is now
a dating technique that doesn't rely on knowledge of radioisotopes that
is very effective in showing the foolishness of their arguments.
Dendrochronology
is the science of dating by the use of annular tree rings. Nothing too confusing
here, it's school kid stuff. However, by piecing together the "fingerprint"
of a sequence of years, we can put overlapping material from live trees
and trees used in construction or preserved in peat bogs, etc. to create
a calendar of the
past 9000 years, well beyond the Creationist "age of the earth."
I find the idea of being constantly watched rather creepy, though I guess the article claims that the camera monitors focus on good-looking girls so maybe it's not an issue.
Anyway, I have less of a reaction to cameras in general, and wonder what people would think of this: The cameras exist, but there are no humans scanning, they simply go into a N-day archive that may only be viewed with a warrant, i.e., when police know something illegal happened in the vicinity of the camera.
I personally would have less of a problem with that kind of surveillance.
For another excellent, and far more detailed summary, an Iranian filmmaker has written
about his experiences in Afghanistan. The site does not always seem
to be up, and if you have problems, there is a mirror
of the article available as well.
I think the US goverment is getting ample warning about the problems
of fighting in Afghanistan, we'll have to see what they make of them. Clearly,
the poverty and horrible living conditions there suggest that sending food rather
than bombs might be far more effective with regard to the general populace.
Catching the terrorist is likely be better done by spies and intelligence
than simply sending in the Marines.
It seems odd that they haven't noticed the trend for computing devices
to change size, shape, and function. Postulating a single universal "Millenium"
system seems exactly backward to me. I'd rather see the research done more
on the Jini model, where many disparate
devices intercommunicate. Surely that is more open to scaling and fault
tolerance than the idea of one monolithic OS to meet all needs.
Microsoft appears to be becoming like the old Soviet union, where everyone
has to buy in to the official ideology rather than venture out in new directions.
Nonsense. You'd quite likely have to pay a bit more for non-factory food, since you'd be paying farmers a living wage, but the amount of food wouldn't be an issue.
You might actually come out ahead, since if the farmers used sustainable agricultural techniques, you wouldn't be turning arable land into chemical dumps.
The responses here show how much we've become factory farm zombies. Carrots
are orange, potatoes are white, apples and tomatoes are red, etc.
In fact, what we're used to is what's convenient to ship or grow. If
people were more concious of genetic diversity, we'd already have much more
color on our plates. Orange carrots date from the last few hundred years,
originally they were white or yellow or red. Apples came in various shades
an combinations of yellow, red, and green. Corn can be blue, as well as
potatoes. Tomatoes have a fantastically varied set of colors.
Some of these are now becoming known as "heirloom" varieties
as people begin to understand how bland and overprocessed our diets have
become.
While I, too, am concerned that there will be attempts to ride roughshod
over some of our civil rights, I think this piece is a rather inflammatory.
If you read the Constitution,
you will notice that above all, the framers worked at balance. Balance of
powers (executive/legislative/judiciary) and balance of rights. In the Bill
of Rights, the 4th Amendment says, in part
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
Note the word "unreasonable." This is a rather vague word;
intentionally so. It is up to society to determine unreasonable
search and seizures. There is no guarantee of absolute privacy. While
I feel we should set the bar as high as possible, the example RMS uses of
video recognition technology, especially in a public place, is certainly
not unreasonable, given of course, that such technology does not result
in hundreds of innocent people being held or detained inappropriately.
People are concerned about knee-jerk right wing reactions, lets not make
the same mistake in defense of civil liberties and oppose everything that
is suggested. Save energy for the battles that really matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's also bring out all the old Solstace carols
You mean like Give me that Old Time Religion?
He came up with a concept that's part Western, part space drama.
Now there's an original concept. (groan)
And the universe is a big, scary place just like high school.
So the villian is going to be called Vice Principal?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon
I guess the musical episode could be interesting, though...
That 8M download only gives you the slides - pretty pictures but no text. The actual phase I paper is here. It's a 15M download - and you can year the server creaking under the strain.
Bottom line is that there is no rational reason to use Objective-C. Clearly this is a case of Not Invented Here on Apple's part.
I'm not a particular fan of either language (C++ or Objective-C), but the NIH accusation is simply false.
Objective-C was invented by Brad Cox in the mid- or early- 80s, and was intended to bring Smalltalk-style capabilities to C. It was later adopted by Next. Since they now have tons of legacy code in Objective-C, they have a strong rationale to continue supporting it.
Actually, what came before both of them, I imagine, was Apple's long-lost *other* Cocoa. Cocoa was a multimedia authoring environment for kids.
Yes, it did come first, but it's not lost! That project was spun off from Apple into the company Stagecast. Apple retained rights to the original name. Actually, the earlier name for the project was KidSim. The prime movers for KidSim were David Smith and Alan Cypher. Larry Tesler was Stagecast president. Both Smith and Tesler originally came from Xerox PARC.
Actually, the text of the Guardian review is here.
You do know that Yosemitie National Park is on top of one the "super" volcano's. I mean if the thing blew again there is a chance it would cause massive loss of life, they are talking 3ft of ash 3000 miles away.
You misspelled Yellowstone.
No. The 8088 was a "bus limited" version of the 8086, Intel's first generation of the x86 architecture.
Internally, the 8088 was identical to the 8086, same registers, same instruction set, but it had the advantage of working on all the 8-bit bus infrastructure.
One big problem with rewrites that he doesn't address is the "second system effect" from The Mythical Man-Month.
Spot on. The key to successful rewrites is not to attempt to build the "ultimate architecture" for the application, but to target the actual problems in the code base. The ones that cause the code to be riddled with patches and work-arounds because the original design simply didn't meet the challenges of the real world.
I don't doubt that Mr. Spolsky has learned some valuable lessons in his career, but in that article he certainly comes across as if he were saying "I'm a manager now and I know everything there is to know about the development process." When you start phrasing things in absolutes (never, always) it's usually a sign of trouble.
Teachers work half the year (180 days or so)
I see you skipped math. Those 180 school days account for 36 weeks, or nearly 3/4 of a year, not 1/2 of a year. (The rest of us word about 235 days.) It is true that teachers get three months off, and that needs to be factored in to the equations. But you also have to allow that teacher still have to feed their families, and they aren't very likely to be able to find additional work during the time they are off.
I'm not going to argue about whether giving each teacher another $7500 is the "correct" course of action, but I will note that since the average teacher's salary is about $40,000, that would be more than an 18% raise. That is not an amount I would consider "measly."
Sir Humphrey Davy,
Abominated gravy,
He lived in the odium,
Of having discovered Sodium
-- Edmund Clerihew Bentley
According to this site, the first personal computer was Simon, c. 1950, a relay and paper-tape affair. You can argue with their definitions, but it has a lot of interesting historical machines.
MITS Altair really started the PC revolution, in that it was readily available, had a decent amount of compute power, and was affordable.The IBM of today is different from the IBM at the time of Microsoft's founding. If you read their histories, that's the IBM they were afraid of becoming. A big, slow, lumbering corporation known not for innovative products but for being the "safe choice."
There was a business cliche at the time "No one ever got fired for buying an IBM product."
I would argue that this is evil. Not in the 1984/newspeak sense described by some, since it's not really an attempt to control people via language, it's a classic corporate lawyer thing to do. Corporate lawyers get paid to think of all the ways that companies can get into trouble and prevent it. We have seen in the past, when word processors offer stupid [idiotic, moronic, asinine] suggestions for word replacements, some smart-assed journalist writes a story and the company looks bad. Clearly, from the lawyers point of view, the best solution is to simply eliminate the possibility altogether.
If you've worked at a large corporation, you'll often discover that many of the inanities of corporate life arise not from pointy-haired bosses directly, but from "guidelines" that were created and put into place by PHBs in consultation with risk-averse lawyers. One thing this shows is that Microsoft is actually becoming IBM, the thing it has always feared and proof that it too will eventually become a dinosaur and die of irrelevance.
The reason that this is evil, however, is that until Microsoft dies, they are still a monopoly, and most non-technicalusers are not aware of choices other than Windows, Word, Excel, etc. on the desktop. Or, just as likely, I need to use them for compatibility with others. Therefore, these people are now going to find that computers and technology are less useful to them. There's no reason I should have to have a paper dictionary and thesarus by my desk, but if I use Word, it appears that I will have to anyway. That makes the computer less useful and is therefor evil.
Whatever it is they've got over there, by definition it isn't the web if it can't be viewed with a generic web browser.
By your definition today, that may be true. But if you know anything about language, you know that definitions change. If Microsoft has it's way, in five years "the web" might be defined as "what's viewable by Explorer."
You know how they negotiate. Imagine the next time Macromedia goes to Microsoft with an update to Flash. MS says, yeah, we'll distribute that plug-in for you, just do this one thing for us, make sure Dreamweaver inserts this little script that tests for "browser compatibility" or maybe maybe we'll distribute our ActiveFlash (tm) plugin instead.. W'ere not furcing you, you understand, just a business deal, you help us, we help you.
Now imaging the same thing with Adobe, and the HTML tools are all enforcing browser checks by default. All of a sudden it's a Microsoft Web.
Even if the Sun hardware handles the load under the "average case," I think it's a bad idea to use SunRays. Use servers for serving, for multiple users, give them each their own CPU.
For one thing, there's always a few people who are going to run some weird program that sucks cycles like made, degading performance for everyone. For another, students don't work under average load conditions. Everybody is slacking off until two weeks before finals and then trying to get it all done at once. If system performance goes to hell under the excess load, you're going to have a lot of unhappy students.
It discusses in scientific detail what is wrong with the radioactive dating methods
The Creationists like to point out so-called "flaws" in dating techniques that are based on "assumptions." While they can sometimes confuse the scientifically illiterate with this terminology, there is now a dating technique that doesn't rely on knowledge of radioisotopes that is very effective in showing the foolishness of their arguments.
Dendrochronology is the science of dating by the use of annular tree rings. Nothing too confusing here, it's school kid stuff. However, by piecing together the "fingerprint" of a sequence of years, we can put overlapping material from live trees and trees used in construction or preserved in peat bogs, etc. to create a calendar of the past 9000 years, well beyond the Creationist "age of the earth."
...the Greta Garbow of computer science?
I don't actually follow other operating systems much
See my answer about not caring
really couldn't care less
I simply don't care
I want to be left alone.
I find the idea of being constantly watched rather creepy, though I guess the article claims that the camera monitors focus on good-looking girls so maybe it's not an issue.
Anyway, I have less of a reaction to cameras in general, and wonder what people would think of this: The cameras exist, but there are no humans scanning, they simply go into a N-day archive that may only be viewed with a warrant, i.e., when police know something illegal happened in the vicinity of the camera.
I personally would have less of a problem with that kind of surveillance.
For another excellent, and far more detailed summary, an Iranian filmmaker has written about his experiences in Afghanistan. The site does not always seem to be up, and if you have problems, there is a mirror of the article available as well.
I think the US goverment is getting ample warning about the problems of fighting in Afghanistan, we'll have to see what they make of them. Clearly, the poverty and horrible living conditions there suggest that sending food rather than bombs might be far more effective with regard to the general populace. Catching the terrorist is likely be better done by spies and intelligence than simply sending in the Marines.
It seems odd that they haven't noticed the trend for computing devices to change size, shape, and function. Postulating a single universal "Millenium" system seems exactly backward to me. I'd rather see the research done more on the Jini model, where many disparate devices intercommunicate. Surely that is more open to scaling and fault tolerance than the idea of one monolithic OS to meet all needs.
Microsoft appears to be becoming like the old Soviet union, where everyone has to buy in to the official ideology rather than venture out in new directions.
Thanks. That's interesting.
"traditional" farms can't keep us fed
Nonsense. You'd quite likely have to pay a bit more for non-factory food, since you'd be paying farmers a living wage, but the amount of food wouldn't be an issue.
You might actually come out ahead, since if the farmers used sustainable agricultural techniques, you wouldn't be turning arable land into chemical dumps.
The responses here show how much we've become factory farm zombies. Carrots are orange, potatoes are white, apples and tomatoes are red, etc.
In fact, what we're used to is what's convenient to ship or grow. If people were more concious of genetic diversity, we'd already have much more color on our plates. Orange carrots date from the last few hundred years, originally they were white or yellow or red. Apples came in various shades an combinations of yellow, red, and green. Corn can be blue, as well as potatoes. Tomatoes have a fantastically varied set of colors.
Some of these are now becoming known as "heirloom" varieties as people begin to understand how bland and overprocessed our diets have become.
While I, too, am concerned that there will be attempts to ride roughshod over some of our civil rights, I think this piece is a rather inflammatory.
If you read the Constitution, you will notice that above all, the framers worked at balance. Balance of powers (executive/legislative/judiciary) and balance of rights. In the Bill of Rights, the 4th Amendment says, in part
Note the word "unreasonable." This is a rather vague word; intentionally so. It is up to society to determine unreasonable search and seizures. There is no guarantee of absolute privacy. While I feel we should set the bar as high as possible, the example RMS uses of video recognition technology, especially in a public place, is certainly not unreasonable, given of course, that such technology does not result in hundreds of innocent people being held or detained inappropriately.
People are concerned about knee-jerk right wing reactions, lets not make the same mistake in defense of civil liberties and oppose everything that is suggested. Save energy for the battles that really matter.