Seriously though: sqrt() can be roughly approximated intuitively, and it can even be computed by hand to N significant digits by using O(lg(N)) additions, multiplications and comparisons, plus one final division to get the answer into decimal form if you used something other than base 10 (I personally prefer base 2).
If you are at al capable of drawing sin, cos and tan functions you can easily approximate them intuitively as well. You can compute them by hand fairly efficiently as well as the Taylor series for either converges surprisingly quickly.
Personally, I prefer to do everything in terms of complex numbers cis(x) = cos(x) + i * sin(x), which is the antilogarithm of the angle. Then everything becomes beautifully simple. cis(a+b) = cis(a)*cis(b).
Oh please, please don't use "cis" as it is a notational abomination. The easy way to do it is
e^{ix} = cos(x) + i*sin(x)
which is actually pretty easy to derive by looking at the Taylor series for cos, sin, and exp. Once you have that then your rule for cis(a+b)=cis(a)*cis(b) ends up being written
e^{i*(a+b)} = e^{ia}*e^{ib}
Yes, that's right, it's just a standard exponent law. In fact, all the standard exponent laws work and you can use this to derive all the double angle formulas and so on with ease. Hell even the cos^2 + sin^2 = 1 is easy enough:
...integration by trig substitution, and then a little later, to tie algebra and calculus together with the various definitions of vector dot-products and cross-products.
It's interesting that calculus with vector dot and cross products should com up in a discussion talking about simplifying things to core concepts - perhaps we should be teaching vector calculus in terms of differential forms from which all then rules of div, grad, and curl can be derived, as well as reducing the fundamental theorem of calculus, Green's theorem, Gauss' theorem, and Stokes theorem into a single very simple equation about integration of differential forms.
Realistically the answer is no - it would be asking the students to swallow far too much at once. Which is exactly the same reason we teach trig in terms of basic geometry first - it is a nice easy to swallow semi-self-contained introduction to the subject.
AND more importantly for students;), decent math teachers should give you full marks for an answer that's d1=sqrt(1400-525*sqrt(7)). Because you've done most of the brain stuff already.
And giving something in terms of an algebraic expression like d1=sqrt(1400-525*sqrt(7)) is different from giving a result like d1 = 1200*arctan(22/7) how exactly? What makes sqrt magically nicer than sin, cos, or other trig functions? You can do all the algebraic manipulations to arrive at an answer without ever having to calculate the values of the trig functions either. As a person that marks math papers I can assure you I won't take marks off if you have reduced down to a simple expression in terms of trig functions just as I wouldn't if you've reduced down to a simple expression in terms of roots. Well, to be fair, if you have things like sin(pi) or cos(pi) kicking around I might be a little annoyed the same way I would be curious/annoyed if you had sqrt(4) or sqrt(1).
You could apply this to pretty much any field with just as much stretching. The music scale works on logarithmic principles, and don't get started on how complex the calculations can be for what makes a good instrument, or good acoustics. That doesn't mean you average cello player need to know anything about sines and cosines.
Yes, but he said "you don't need math to use it, but you need math to come up with it. And what of musical scales. Well the older scales were called Pythagorean for a reason. And then modern even tempered scales were really started by Bach who while not strictly a mathematician is widely regared as having remarkable mathematical facility - there's a reason Bach's music is so popular amongst mathematicians and physicists. The finer adjustments to tuning and musical scales were indeed made by people doing the math.
If only he could redefine Calculus to use simple algebraic expressions.
You can actually. You can construct basic calculus algebraically via "derivations" which are essentially just mappings that obey the Leibniz rule , or you can go the route of differential forms from differential geometry which are pretty much the same but come at the problem a little differently.
To be honest though Calculus just using limits is actually a lot easier to understand for most people, particularly at a first year level, because it uses numbers rather than abstract spaces, and for some reaon people are generally happier with numbers.
I'm happy for GTK that it supports Cairo, but I suspect it's a matter of (long, torturous) debate as to whether the design philosophy behind Cairo is better, worse or just different than that behind Quartz.
The design philosophy of Cairo is exceptionally similar to that of Quartz, and in fact Cairo can render to Quartz (well, that backend is still labelled as "experimental" but it works). What does that mean? I means that when GTK is fully ported to Cairo (so that it draws by calling Cairo functions) then porting a GTK application to MacOS X won't require any X11 or other fooling around - just have the Cairo libraries installed and GTK will work fine on OS X (and Windows as well). Which is kind of nice really.
Because when you switch to PhotoShop or Gimp from another application on a Mac, ALL the pallette windows come with it. In Windows, every toolbar and pallette hangs there by itself and disappear behind your browser or other window, and you have to either bring them all to the front again, or hunt through them until you find the one you want. its a pain in the neck, and made me give up on Gimp on Windows at work.
Yeah, window management of Windows really sucks. Everyone seems to blame GIMP for this, but it works fine on systems withn decent window management, for which it was written. Yes the port over to windows has some issues because Windows lacks a number of basic features that are available for most other windowing systems...
How do other windowing systems handle this? Well, they have several methods. They can do it like the Mac and automatically group application windows by application, they can do it like a lot of X11 WMs and allow multiple/virtual desktops so you can have 1 desktop per task, or you can go with the method taken by some of the fancier X11 WMs and do window groups.
I think the key point that this controller offers is the degree of physicality, the amount of actual physical movement you get to do in controlling on screen events. In moves away from thumb twiddling and let's you move and swing your arms. This is fantastic for any sort of game that has real life simulation - sports games, FPS, etc. because as the poster mentions you can swing your golf club or baseball bat, or sword, or gun, rather than relying on wrist and finger twitches acting through a complex interface.
Swinging the controller like a bat is both natural and allows the user to immediately have remarkably subtle and complex control over the dynamics of their swing. The same level of complex swing options with a thumb twiddling interface is going to involve all manner of little things and multibutton combinations to master. Moving your hands to catch a ball, pick something up, or make your character push a button is much the same, natural and obvious and allowing a complexity of control that is simply not easily reproducible via thumb twiddling.
Of course more physical movement oriented interfaces have been tried before, in some areas (DDR for instance) they have been quite successful (at least within their niche). Those interfaces that failed, or at least failed to to be too much more than a passing fad (light guns, "power gloves", the recent camera based games) generally all have the same failing: The accuracy with which they detect and translate your physical movements to action on screen has been very poor. What this Nintendo controller seem to be offering, at least from the descriptions of the reviewers, is sufficient accuracy in reading and interpreting your movements to allow the interface to finally feel natural. If it actually works as promised I expect it will indeed bve quite revolutionary.
or even, saw a bow an arrow: you'd aim with one controller and pull back on the string with the other.
Except from the descriptions given in the article you don't need two controllers for that: they imply full 3D motion is detected. Try reading about the fishing game again. In theory you can aim the bow and arrow in the vertical planeand simply pull the controller back to draw the arrow. Click to fire.
This is a 3D mouse folks, that opens up a lot of interesting opportunities for interesting and fun interfaces to games. Of course how well it detects you movement in average living room conditions will be important - it needs to be both accurate and responsive - but the article implies, at least in controlled conditions at Nintendo, the wuthor found the controller both accurate and sufficiently responsive to feel very natural.
It means an artist can use an artist's toolset to create a beautiful fully functional front end, then pass it off to the developer to do the backend. No more mockups that can't be translated into a real application front end.
That's right folks, no more of that annoying consistency between GUI applications, now anything that the guy down in marketing can draw is a workable GUI - just think of the possibilities. Microsoft is not a believer in consistent elegant or intuitive GUIs, Micorosoft is all about empowering developers, and graphic designers, and wackjobs with no aesthetic sense. You too can finally design and implement that stunning piece of GUI genius you always imagined.
Have you ever noticed how everybody is a GUI design expert and always know better than everyone else how a GUI should look and function? Well maybe we'll finally find out what the world would be like if all those self taught HCI geniuses could simply create whatever they could draw. I'm sure it will be wonderful.
(I can see that the Sparkle concept is both quite interesting and has some potential for good application, I just don't think having random arrogant artists all designing their own GUIs is one of those good applications Sparkle.)
Sparkle is a new way to deal with winforms that allows custom UI design without coders running into the traditional limitations of development platforms. Think of it as a flash front-end to a full Win32 API and data-access.
Wow is that ever ripe for abuse. People complain about Linux and X applications for their disparity in loo and feel - but that's simply because of a few different toolkits, we're talking about letting GUI designers loose with a vector drawing program to draw whatever "cool" GUI they feel like.
The fear I have is that Windows programs have always had a "consistant" look at feel.
Well, not really, even Microsoft has used a variety of different looks and feel for their own applications (Office compared to IE and notepad etc.) sure, they're all the same shade of gray with roughly similar looking buttons, but in practice they were actually quite different.
These days more and more applications are starting to forego Microsoft UI guidelines for their own 3l33t designs which can be a pain to learn and a pain to script to. I hope it doesn't happen here but I would certainly
I would deeply fear the insane inconsistency of third party Windows applications in the future if this thing does all they claim. If designing the new GUI is a matter of sitting the designer in front of something like Illustrator and then having the coder fill in the back end you can be sure there will be plenty of wild and wacky and otherwise unskinnable application GUIs arriving.
Sure the really major applications will probably hew pretty close to the current look and feel, but then the major applications on Linux do that to. Expect every little third party shareware app to have it's own unique GUI style, some of the designed by the sort of people who make themes like this.
Though I disagree with his take on tabs. I love having a blank tab, because I often prefer typing a URL (or at leat the first few characters) to using the mouse for drop down in my bookmarks.
I have to agree, if I ask for a "new" tab, I expect a lank tab that I can fill as desired. He was also talking about "bringing the history" into the new tab though, and this raises a point that does bug me a little with firefox: when I open a link in a new tab the tab has no history - the back button is disabled. After using Galeon quite a bit, which does import the history into a new tab if you use "open link in new tab" I've gotten kind of used to having the history there. I expect other browsers than Galeon do this, its quite a nice feature and simple enough to do, but Firefox is one that doesn't do it.
If you do a Google Search for "Google's Slogan", all you get is "Don't be Evil".
More importantly a search for "google slogan" on MSN search turns up mostly results with "Don't be evil" - in fact that's pretty much all the results on the first page say. Of course this is third parties usually talking about "Google's unofficial slogan", but the point is, in terms of popular perception "Don't be evil" is Google's slogan, regardless of what their official slogan actually is.
Sounds like an excellent plan of attack. And it is even somewhat feasible on some level - doing the whole software stack is probably going to be far too much to bite off in one go, but the problem can be broken down and attcked in pieces. Just securing the kernel itself to this degree would be a significant benefit, and worth doing. Equally you can break that project down to some extent: just having a side project in the kernel performing steps 1 and 2, probably just in core functions at first, is quite feasible, and could have sufficient benefits to make it worthwhile. It is the sort of thing you can, at least to some extent, chip away at with a fairly long term time frame. It will be interestin to see if any such thing actually occurs. In practice I expect it will need some impetus, some decently sized group stepping ap and getting things started, much like the NSA adding MAC for SELinux. Once underway I suspect it could easily take on a momentum of it's own and become self sustaining. We cna but hope.
You are wrong. Perhaps a provably secure Linux is impossible. But Alan Cox didn't say "operating system." He said, "system." Always pause (at least briefly) before suggesting that you have a better understanding of operating systems than Alan Cox.
These guys are working on just such a concept, attempting to write a microkernel OS in a language that supports formal semantics amenable to verification and correctness proofs. It seems they are still just getting underway, but it looks like an interesting project.
Of course this will not guarantee 100% security because "secure" is a rather loose term and will mean more than just a kernel that doesn't have any buffer overflows or other bugs. They will be able to, however, tell you very precisely what exploits and attacks the system is definitely secure from, which would be quite a significant step forward.
Oh, and if that interests you at all, I'd HIGHLY RECOMMEND reading some of Dr. Kaku.
His is a genius, as I said. And he puts things in a very eloquent... non-physicist sort of way.
I haven't read any of his popular science work so maybe he's good at explaining things in that manner, but what I have read of his work was intolerable. I tried working my way through "Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory". It didn't seem especially introductory, even at a graduate level, but I slogged through what I could figuring things would become clearer and that the issues I was having was my lack of physics background (I'm a mathematician). I ended up flicking to the appendices which was supposed contain short intro's to the various mathematical fields used in the book (most of which I was quite familiar with) in the hopes that this would help outline some of the connections between the mathematics (which I can understand) and the physics (which I was much more shaky on). What I found was a section riddled with notational errors and a exceptionally poor explanation of the subject matter (in this case, group theory). This time I was firmly in mathematical territory, so I'm quite confident in stating that his exposition was both sloppy and poorly explained.
Static typing allows static checking, and allows you to reason about information flow, dynamic typing allows only runtime checking and doesn't allow you to reason about the code, thus it tends to rely on testing (runtime checking) which can only cover a sampling of specific cases as opposed to being able to reason about the general case. If you want to be sure, static types are better. Strong dynamic types have their value too of course, especially in research or prototyping code where its beneficial to be more flexible about your data structures. I wouldn't reccommend it for security critical code though - for that you are supposed to be implementing a more finalised design (sure, you can research and protoype that in a dynamic language, but the final product should probably use static types).
The tools and methods are getting better though, and these days you can do some level of formal specification, signifiantly reducing bugs, for little extra cost - most of the extra costs that may be occurred at design and coding time get saved in the testing and debugging phase. Formal specification can work for a great many projects. Sure, some things don't require it, but if e're talking about software where security is a concern then these days the extra cost is neglible when compared with cost of maintenance and patching for something that didn't go to the trouble.
One of the points basically comes down to "write perfect code". Well, duh, why didn't I think of that before? Jeez. Patching is bad because your code should have been perfect in the first place? That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.
There are things you can do to make your code a lot better at the outset, and have a lot more assurance than you can gain by just testing. Would you use statically typed language for security critical software? Most likely you would because static type checking helps catch a lot of small errors, and if you've got a large codebase it can be significant. There are other thangs you can specify about code beyond just staic types and type sgnatures for functions. If you bother to be a little more detailed there are static checking tools that can catch a whole range of other errors. Go for a little more detail in your specification again and you do correctness proofs for critical properties of the code. Yes it's more work, but then if your code is security critical you save a lot of work in testing and patching down the line. A bug/error found after release can be very expensive indeed if it represents a significant security issue, so catching it before hand can well be worth the extra work.
Is such specification useful for everything? No, no more than static typed languages are a requirement for all projects. The point is that if security is important then the value of errors caught prior to release can easily offset any extra costs in engineering the code. And there's a sliding scale for how much specification you do, everything from static types, through contracts, all the way up to top down design via formal methods - you only need to do as much as you need.
the purpose of an education. Some would argue that it is to prepare you for a job through the acculumation of a set of skills or a knowlege set. Others would argue that it is to prepare you for a lifetime of learning. In this day and age, odds are unless you're in a position where you can call in rich, you'll take more than one career zig or zag in your lifetime.
The issue I have with evaluating everything in terms of "but will it get me a job?" is that, as you say, over your lifetime you'll probably make a few jumps in career path, so the skills you invest in now might not be what you find yourself doing in 5 or 10 years time. Add to that the fact that, especially in the IT field, there is a lot of churn in what are considered the "right skills" and you could easily find that the job skills you spent time learning are not much in demand by the time you've finished learning them.
That's not to knock vocational courses - they can be very useful and help give you the skills to get things done. Your life shouldn't revolve around your job however, and not everything should be devoted to that end. The best vocational courses are the ones that are unashamedly so, are usually short (a few weeks or months for the whole course) and something you can pursue when you need it. University courses are supposed to be about learning because you want to know and understand. Some of that may be useful for finding a job simply because people who understand some concepts may well be rare, and in demand. Some of that may be useful in a job because you have a good grasp of underlying concepts and understand what you're doing rather than just mechanistically repeating a process. Employment is shouldn't be the point of learning such things however, it should be a small side benefit. If you want a job, take some vocational training. If the job you want requires you to understand things for which you need a university degree then either that's something you want to learn regardless just so you can understand it yourself, or you need to seriously consider your career goals.
In the end the ability to learn new things efficiently, and the skills involved in such learning are the most valuable job skills you'll get. You'll rarely end up doing a job that is precisely what you trained for, so the ability to learn and adapt is highly beneficial. Those are things no university, trade school, college, or otherwise will teach you, it's something you have to learn for yourself. Of course any sort of education can give you practice.
I wasn't really suggesting that the system without us is particularly stable or balanced, just that tipping or pushing it can have unpredictable results. In fact if it were some stable or balanced system then the tipping would have predictable results. It is precisely because the whole things is a wobbly mess that our actions upon it are so unpredictable.
I think it is a safe assumption, however, that unbalancing a natural system (as we are - burning coal and oil is messing with and unbalancing the carbon cycle) can have unpredictable results, and probably isn't wise if we can help it. The sensible course of action is to move toward a minimum footprint option where possible. That doesn't mean giving up technology and going back to living in the trees, that means trying to move forward technologoically toward lower impact systems. We're not talking about giving up our present lifestyle, just working to shift the means of how we achieve it.
Reducing our need for carbon emissions for energy is a sensible option in those areas where it can be replaced with lower impact energy generation systems. Providing some incentive in that direction to encourage a swifter hange makes sense too. Now that doesn't mean I agree with the particulars and mechanics of the Kyoto Treaty, but I that I think the spirit of the idea is a good one. Moving away from an unbalanced unsustainable system as effiiently as possible is surely a sensible option, regardless of whether and to what degree we are effecting climate change. It simply makes sense as an effective form of progress: toward more balanced sustainability.
I would put it to anyone to find more than 5 people in the entire world that *seriously* believe any of those theories, and not merely claim to as a response to somehow satirize or ridicule another person or group of people's sincere beliefs.
Don't be so hasty, you can make a very rational and scientific sounding case for "Intelligent Falling" such as Uncaused Force. It sounds every bit serious and believable as any Intelligent Design piece, and I'm sure you could find plenty of people in the US who, presented with the article, would more than happily sign on for Uncaused Force and the belief that gravity is a lie.
Equally you could look at something like Time Cube which looks like a load of crap, but then there are people like this guy who seriously believe it, and try to make arguments as to why -1 * -1 = 1 is stupid and evil.
hiring a programmer (or for that matter just "someone skilled with computers") that person may be helped by it, and can certainly develop some simple "how to find where Firefox puts stuff" training for them.
If they can hire a programmer who has a clue then just get him to write a script for Encase that automatically searches out and displays Firefox, Opera, Safari, and other browser caches and logs. It would not be very hard at all. Distribute said script to all the police departments, and have the forensics monkeys click a menu item to find all the web caches and logs regardless of the browser used.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though: sqrt() can be roughly approximated intuitively, and it can even be computed by hand to N significant digits by using O(lg(N)) additions, multiplications and comparisons, plus one final division to get the answer into decimal form if you used something other than base 10 (I personally prefer base 2).
If you are at al capable of drawing sin, cos and tan functions you can easily approximate them intuitively as well. You can compute them by hand fairly efficiently as well as the Taylor series for either converges surprisingly quickly.
Jedidiah.
Personally, I prefer to do everything in terms of complex numbers cis(x) = cos(x) + i * sin(x), which is the antilogarithm of the angle. Then everything becomes beautifully simple. cis(a+b) = cis(a)*cis(b).
Oh please, please don't use "cis" as it is a notational abomination. The easy way to do it is
e^{ix} = cos(x) + i*sin(x)
which is actually pretty easy to derive by looking at the Taylor series for cos, sin, and exp. Once you have that then your rule for cis(a+b)=cis(a)*cis(b) ends up being written
e^{i*(a+b)} = e^{ia}*e^{ib}
Yes, that's right, it's just a standard exponent law. In fact, all the standard exponent laws work and you can use this to derive all the double angle formulas and so on with ease. Hell even the cos^2 + sin^2 = 1 is easy enough:
1 = e^0 = e^{i*(x-x)} = e^{ix}*e^{-ix}
= (cos(x) + i*sin(x))*(cos(-x) + i*sin(-x))
= (cos(x) + i*sin(x))*(cos(x) - i*sin(x))
= cos^2(x) + sin^2(x)
Jedidiah.
...integration by trig substitution, and then a little later, to tie algebra and calculus together with the various definitions of vector dot-products and cross-products.
It's interesting that calculus with vector dot and cross products should com up in a discussion talking about simplifying things to core concepts - perhaps we should be teaching vector calculus in terms of differential forms from which all then rules of div, grad, and curl can be derived, as well as reducing the fundamental theorem of calculus, Green's theorem, Gauss' theorem, and Stokes theorem into a single very simple equation about integration of differential forms.
Realistically the answer is no - it would be asking the students to swallow far too much at once. Which is exactly the same reason we teach trig in terms of basic geometry first - it is a nice easy to swallow semi-self-contained introduction to the subject.
Jedidiah.
AND more importantly for students ;), decent math teachers should give you full marks for an answer that's d1=sqrt(1400-525*sqrt(7)). Because you've done most of the brain stuff already.
And giving something in terms of an algebraic expression like d1=sqrt(1400-525*sqrt(7)) is different from giving a result like d1 = 1200*arctan(22/7) how exactly? What makes sqrt magically nicer than sin, cos, or other trig functions? You can do all the algebraic manipulations to arrive at an answer without ever having to calculate the values of the trig functions either. As a person that marks math papers I can assure you I won't take marks off if you have reduced down to a simple expression in terms of trig functions just as I wouldn't if you've reduced down to a simple expression in terms of roots. Well, to be fair, if you have things like sin(pi) or cos(pi) kicking around I might be a little annoyed the same way I would be curious/annoyed if you had sqrt(4) or sqrt(1).
Jedidiah.
You could apply this to pretty much any field with just as much stretching. The music scale works on logarithmic principles, and don't get started on how complex the calculations can be for what makes a good instrument, or good acoustics. That doesn't mean you average cello player need to know anything about sines and cosines.
Yes, but he said "you don't need math to use it, but you need math to come up with it. And what of musical scales. Well the older scales were called Pythagorean for a reason. And then modern even tempered scales were really started by Bach who while not strictly a mathematician is widely regared as having remarkable mathematical facility - there's a reason Bach's music is so popular amongst mathematicians and physicists. The finer adjustments to tuning and musical scales were indeed made by people doing the math.
Jedidiah.
If only he could redefine Calculus to use simple algebraic expressions.
You can actually. You can construct basic calculus algebraically via "derivations" which are essentially just mappings that obey the Leibniz rule , or you can go the route of differential forms from differential geometry which are pretty much the same but come at the problem a little differently.
To be honest though Calculus just using limits is actually a lot easier to understand for most people, particularly at a first year level, because it uses numbers rather than abstract spaces, and for some reaon people are generally happier with numbers.
Jedidiah.
I'm happy for GTK that it supports Cairo, but I suspect it's a matter of (long, torturous) debate as to whether the design philosophy behind Cairo is better, worse or just different than that behind Quartz.
The design philosophy of Cairo is exceptionally similar to that of Quartz, and in fact Cairo can render to Quartz (well, that backend is still labelled as "experimental" but it works). What does that mean? I means that when GTK is fully ported to Cairo (so that it draws by calling Cairo functions) then porting a GTK application to MacOS X won't require any X11 or other fooling around - just have the Cairo libraries installed and GTK will work fine on OS X (and Windows as well). Which is kind of nice really.
Jedidiah.
Because when you switch to PhotoShop or Gimp from another application on a Mac, ALL the pallette windows come with it. In Windows, every toolbar and pallette hangs there by itself and disappear behind your browser or other window, and you have to either bring them all to the front again, or hunt through them until you find the one you want. its a pain in the neck, and made me give up on Gimp on Windows at work.
Yeah, window management of Windows really sucks. Everyone seems to blame GIMP for this, but it works fine on systems withn decent window management, for which it was written. Yes the port over to windows has some issues because Windows lacks a number of basic features that are available for most other windowing systems...
How do other windowing systems handle this? Well, they have several methods. They can do it like the Mac and automatically group application windows by application, they can do it like a lot of X11 WMs and allow multiple/virtual desktops so you can have 1 desktop per task, or you can go with the method taken by some of the fancier X11 WMs and do window groups.
Jedidiah.
I think the key point that this controller offers is the degree of physicality, the amount of actual physical movement you get to do in controlling on screen events. In moves away from thumb twiddling and let's you move and swing your arms. This is fantastic for any sort of game that has real life simulation - sports games, FPS, etc. because as the poster mentions you can swing your golf club or baseball bat, or sword, or gun, rather than relying on wrist and finger twitches acting through a complex interface.
Swinging the controller like a bat is both natural and allows the user to immediately have remarkably subtle and complex control over the dynamics of their swing. The same level of complex swing options with a thumb twiddling interface is going to involve all manner of little things and multibutton combinations to master. Moving your hands to catch a ball, pick something up, or make your character push a button is much the same, natural and obvious and allowing a complexity of control that is simply not easily reproducible via thumb twiddling.
Of course more physical movement oriented interfaces have been tried before, in some areas (DDR for instance) they have been quite successful (at least within their niche). Those interfaces that failed, or at least failed to to be too much more than a passing fad (light guns, "power gloves", the recent camera based games) generally all have the same failing: The accuracy with which they detect and translate your physical movements to action on screen has been very poor. What this Nintendo controller seem to be offering, at least from the descriptions of the reviewers, is sufficient accuracy in reading and interpreting your movements to allow the interface to finally feel natural. If it actually works as promised I expect it will indeed bve quite revolutionary.
Jedidiah.
or even, saw a bow an arrow: you'd aim with one controller and pull back on the string with the other.
Except from the descriptions given in the article you don't need two controllers for that: they imply full 3D motion is detected. Try reading about the fishing game again. In theory you can aim the bow and arrow in the vertical planeand simply pull the controller back to draw the arrow. Click to fire.
This is a 3D mouse folks, that opens up a lot of interesting opportunities for interesting and fun interfaces to games. Of course how well it detects you movement in average living room conditions will be important - it needs to be both accurate and responsive - but the article implies, at least in controlled conditions at Nintendo, the wuthor found the controller both accurate and sufficiently responsive to feel very natural.
Jedidiah.
It means an artist can use an artist's toolset to create a beautiful fully functional front end, then pass it off to the developer to do the backend. No more mockups that can't be translated into a real application front end.
That's right folks, no more of that annoying consistency between GUI applications, now anything that the guy down in marketing can draw is a workable GUI - just think of the possibilities. Microsoft is not a believer in consistent elegant or intuitive GUIs, Micorosoft is all about empowering developers, and graphic designers, and wackjobs with no aesthetic sense. You too can finally design and implement that stunning piece of GUI genius you always imagined.
Have you ever noticed how everybody is a GUI design expert and always know better than everyone else how a GUI should look and function? Well maybe we'll finally find out what the world would be like if all those self taught HCI geniuses could simply create whatever they could draw. I'm sure it will be wonderful.
(I can see that the Sparkle concept is both quite interesting and has some potential for good application, I just don't think having random arrogant artists all designing their own GUIs is one of those good applications Sparkle.)
Jedidiah.
Sparkle is a new way to deal with winforms that allows custom UI design without coders running into the traditional limitations of development platforms. Think of it as a flash front-end to a full Win32 API and data-access.
Wow is that ever ripe for abuse. People complain about Linux and X applications for their disparity in loo and feel - but that's simply because of a few different toolkits, we're talking about letting GUI designers loose with a vector drawing program to draw whatever "cool" GUI they feel like.
The fear I have is that Windows programs have always had a "consistant" look at feel.
Well, not really, even Microsoft has used a variety of different looks and feel for their own applications (Office compared to IE and notepad etc.) sure, they're all the same shade of gray with roughly similar looking buttons, but in practice they were actually quite different.
These days more and more applications are starting to forego Microsoft UI guidelines for their own 3l33t designs which can be a pain to learn and a pain to script to. I hope it doesn't happen here but I would certainly
I would deeply fear the insane inconsistency of third party Windows applications in the future if this thing does all they claim. If designing the new GUI is a matter of sitting the designer in front of something like Illustrator and then having the coder fill in the back end you can be sure there will be plenty of wild and wacky and otherwise unskinnable application GUIs arriving.
Sure the really major applications will probably hew pretty close to the current look and feel, but then the major applications on Linux do that to. Expect every little third party shareware app to have it's own unique GUI style, some of the designed by the sort of people who make themes like this.
Jedidiah
Though I disagree with his take on tabs. I love having a blank tab, because I often prefer typing a URL (or at leat the first few characters) to using the mouse for drop down in my bookmarks.
I have to agree, if I ask for a "new" tab, I expect a lank tab that I can fill as desired. He was also talking about "bringing the history" into the new tab though, and this raises a point that does bug me a little with firefox: when I open a link in a new tab the tab has no history - the back button is disabled. After using Galeon quite a bit, which does import the history into a new tab if you use "open link in new tab" I've gotten kind of used to having the history there. I expect other browsers than Galeon do this, its quite a nice feature and simple enough to do, but Firefox is one that doesn't do it.
Jedidiah.
If you do a Google Search for "Google's Slogan", all you get is "Don't be Evil".
More importantly a search for "google slogan" on MSN search turns up mostly results with "Don't be evil" - in fact that's pretty much all the results on the first page say. Of course this is third parties usually talking about "Google's unofficial slogan", but the point is, in terms of popular perception "Don't be evil" is Google's slogan, regardless of what their official slogan actually is.
Jedidiah.
Sounds like an excellent plan of attack. And it is even somewhat feasible on some level - doing the whole software stack is probably going to be far too much to bite off in one go, but the problem can be broken down and attcked in pieces. Just securing the kernel itself to this degree would be a significant benefit, and worth doing. Equally you can break that project down to some extent: just having a side project in the kernel performing steps 1 and 2, probably just in core functions at first, is quite feasible, and could have sufficient benefits to make it worthwhile. It is the sort of thing you can, at least to some extent, chip away at with a fairly long term time frame. It will be interestin to see if any such thing actually occurs. In practice I expect it will need some impetus, some decently sized group stepping ap and getting things started, much like the NSA adding MAC for SELinux. Once underway I suspect it could easily take on a momentum of it's own and become self sustaining. We cna but hope.
Jedidiah,
You are wrong. Perhaps a provably secure Linux is impossible. But Alan Cox didn't say "operating system." He said, "system." Always pause (at least briefly) before suggesting that you have a better understanding of operating systems than Alan Cox.
These guys are working on just such a concept, attempting to write a microkernel OS in a language that supports formal semantics amenable to verification and correctness proofs. It seems they are still just getting underway, but it looks like an interesting project.
Of course this will not guarantee 100% security because "secure" is a rather loose term and will mean more than just a kernel that doesn't have any buffer overflows or other bugs. They will be able to, however, tell you very precisely what exploits and attacks the system is definitely secure from, which would be quite a significant step forward.
Jedidiah.
Oh, and if that interests you at all, I'd HIGHLY RECOMMEND reading some of Dr. Kaku.
His is a genius, as I said. And he puts things in a very eloquent... non-physicist sort of way.
I haven't read any of his popular science work so maybe he's good at explaining things in that manner, but what I have read of his work was intolerable. I tried working my way through "Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory". It didn't seem especially introductory, even at a graduate level, but I slogged through what I could figuring things would become clearer and that the issues I was having was my lack of physics background (I'm a mathematician). I ended up flicking to the appendices which was supposed contain short intro's to the various mathematical fields used in the book (most of which I was quite familiar with) in the hopes that this would help outline some of the connections between the mathematics (which I can understand) and the physics (which I was much more shaky on). What I found was a section riddled with notational errors and a exceptionally poor explanation of the subject matter (in this case, group theory). This time I was firmly in mathematical territory, so I'm quite confident in stating that his exposition was both sloppy and poorly explained.
Jedidiah.
Static typing allows static checking, and allows you to reason about information flow, dynamic typing allows only runtime checking and doesn't allow you to reason about the code, thus it tends to rely on testing (runtime checking) which can only cover a sampling of specific cases as opposed to being able to reason about the general case. If you want to be sure, static types are better. Strong dynamic types have their value too of course, especially in research or prototyping code where its beneficial to be more flexible about your data structures. I wouldn't reccommend it for security critical code though - for that you are supposed to be implementing a more finalised design (sure, you can research and protoype that in a dynamic language, but the final product should probably use static types).
Jedidiah.
The tools and methods are getting better though, and these days you can do some level of formal specification, signifiantly reducing bugs, for little extra cost - most of the extra costs that may be occurred at design and coding time get saved in the testing and debugging phase. Formal specification can work for a great many projects. Sure, some things don't require it, but if e're talking about software where security is a concern then these days the extra cost is neglible when compared with cost of maintenance and patching for something that didn't go to the trouble.
Jedidiah.
One of the points basically comes down to "write perfect code". Well, duh, why didn't I think of that before? Jeez. Patching is bad because your code should have been perfect in the first place? That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.
There are things you can do to make your code a lot better at the outset, and have a lot more assurance than you can gain by just testing. Would you use statically typed language for security critical software? Most likely you would because static type checking helps catch a lot of small errors, and if you've got a large codebase it can be significant. There are other thangs you can specify about code beyond just staic types and type sgnatures for functions. If you bother to be a little more detailed there are static checking tools that can catch a whole range of other errors. Go for a little more detail in your specification again and you do correctness proofs for critical properties of the code. Yes it's more work, but then if your code is security critical you save a lot of work in testing and patching down the line. A bug/error found after release can be very expensive indeed if it represents a significant security issue, so catching it before hand can well be worth the extra work.
Is such specification useful for everything? No, no more than static typed languages are a requirement for all projects. The point is that if security is important then the value of errors caught prior to release can easily offset any extra costs in engineering the code. And there's a sliding scale for how much specification you do, everything from static types, through contracts, all the way up to top down design via formal methods - you only need to do as much as you need.
Jedidiah
the purpose of an education. Some would argue that it is to prepare you for a job through the acculumation of a set of skills or a knowlege set. Others would argue that it is to prepare you for a lifetime of learning. In this day and age, odds are unless you're in a position where you can call in rich, you'll take more than one career zig or zag in your lifetime.
The issue I have with evaluating everything in terms of "but will it get me a job?" is that, as you say, over your lifetime you'll probably make a few jumps in career path, so the skills you invest in now might not be what you find yourself doing in 5 or 10 years time. Add to that the fact that, especially in the IT field, there is a lot of churn in what are considered the "right skills" and you could easily find that the job skills you spent time learning are not much in demand by the time you've finished learning them.
That's not to knock vocational courses - they can be very useful and help give you the skills to get things done. Your life shouldn't revolve around your job however, and not everything should be devoted to that end. The best vocational courses are the ones that are unashamedly so, are usually short (a few weeks or months for the whole course) and something you can pursue when you need it. University courses are supposed to be about learning because you want to know and understand. Some of that may be useful for finding a job simply because people who understand some concepts may well be rare, and in demand. Some of that may be useful in a job because you have a good grasp of underlying concepts and understand what you're doing rather than just mechanistically repeating a process. Employment is shouldn't be the point of learning such things however, it should be a small side benefit. If you want a job, take some vocational training. If the job you want requires you to understand things for which you need a university degree then either that's something you want to learn regardless just so you can understand it yourself, or you need to seriously consider your career goals.
In the end the ability to learn new things efficiently, and the skills involved in such learning are the most valuable job skills you'll get. You'll rarely end up doing a job that is precisely what you trained for, so the ability to learn and adapt is highly beneficial. Those are things no university, trade school, college, or otherwise will teach you, it's something you have to learn for yourself. Of course any sort of education can give you practice.
Jedidiah.
I wasn't really suggesting that the system without us is particularly stable or balanced, just that tipping or pushing it can have unpredictable results. In fact if it were some stable or balanced system then the tipping would have predictable results. It is precisely because the whole things is a wobbly mess that our actions upon it are so unpredictable.
Jedidiah.
I think it is a safe assumption, however, that unbalancing a natural system (as we are - burning coal and oil is messing with and unbalancing the carbon cycle) can have unpredictable results, and probably isn't wise if we can help it. The sensible course of action is to move toward a minimum footprint option where possible. That doesn't mean giving up technology and going back to living in the trees, that means trying to move forward technologoically toward lower impact systems. We're not talking about giving up our present lifestyle, just working to shift the means of how we achieve it.
Reducing our need for carbon emissions for energy is a sensible option in those areas where it can be replaced with lower impact energy generation systems. Providing some incentive in that direction to encourage a swifter hange makes sense too. Now that doesn't mean I agree with the particulars and mechanics of the Kyoto Treaty, but I that I think the spirit of the idea is a good one. Moving away from an unbalanced unsustainable system as effiiently as possible is surely a sensible option, regardless of whether and to what degree we are effecting climate change. It simply makes sense as an effective form of progress: toward more balanced sustainability.
Jedidiah.
I would put it to anyone to find more than 5 people in the entire world that *seriously* believe any of those theories, and not merely claim to as a response to somehow satirize or ridicule another person or group of people's sincere beliefs.
Don't be so hasty, you can make a very rational and scientific sounding case for "Intelligent Falling" such as Uncaused Force. It sounds every bit serious and believable as any Intelligent Design piece, and I'm sure you could find plenty of people in the US who, presented with the article, would more than happily sign on for Uncaused Force and the belief that gravity is a lie.
Equally you could look at something like Time Cube which looks like a load of crap, but then there are people like this guy who seriously believe it, and try to make arguments as to why -1 * -1 = 1 is stupid and evil.
Jedidiah.
hiring a programmer (or for that matter just "someone skilled with computers") that person may be helped by it, and can certainly develop some simple "how to find where Firefox puts stuff" training for them.
If they can hire a programmer who has a clue then just get him to write a script for Encase that automatically searches out and displays Firefox, Opera, Safari, and other browser caches and logs. It would not be very hard at all. Distribute said script to all the police departments, and have the forensics monkeys click a menu item to find all the web caches and logs regardless of the browser used.
Jedidiah.