Some applications can be distributed, sure, but there will always be a need for interactive applications to run locally, on local data.
Well, it seemed to me like the article's point was to remove such decisions from the programmer's concern. So maybe Quake XXI will need better performance than 50ms. The system they're talking about would recognize this and run the processes in question locally. They termed this "Introspection." Quoting the article:
Introspection guarantees that the system should take responsibility for determining where a computation executes or data resides. The programmer should not have to decide whether code will execute at a "client" or "server." Instead the system's assessment of its hardware resources and usage patterns should determine the placement of computations and data. This would allow the operating system to provide fault tolerance, high availability, and self-tuning behavior for applications.
In my view, they see all future applications needing to be somewhat network aware, and believe that client/server interaction could be greatly optimized and abstracted through a system like the one they describe. It doesn't preclude local execution, it just decides when it's appropriate. The thinking is that the system can often make these decisions better, since it will have the benefit of looking back on previous usage records. You can test all you want, but the system will be aware of it's actually being used.
I didn't intend to imply that they were incompetent or that they had made the wrong choice in terms of development tools and languages. In fact, I think they made exactly the right choices, in the end. But most of those choices have to do with the skills of their staff, which appear to be quite impressive. It's just not news to me that a team with a bunch of python contributors ended up working best in python.
Also, it is not clear from the article that they had 2 tries in Java. It seems like they had one try in Java, ditched it for zope, and then finally switched to python.
You're right. It's not clear. The sentence
"The earliest version of the site was written using Java servlets, and the Run Builder used Zope..."
isn't clear at all, since they refer to an early "site", but the first run was a networked GUI app. Maybe they were using "site", "application server", and "backend" interchangeably (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Three of their developers are Python contributors. They also developed two previous versions in Java. It's unsurprising that they found success in Python on their third attempt.
I have a 4-port linksys firewall router, which worked fine... for two days. Then my roomate did something stupid (attached miswired ethernet cable). Now the device won't respond to anything, including attempts to reflash its firmware.
Support sucked from linksys, but thankfully the retailer I bought it from had no problem with a return.
It seems to me like you're pretty much screwed if something goes wrong. The device did work well before my roomate's mistake though. It even supported PPPoE flawlessly. It also seems that linksys adds capabilities quite frequently through firmware upgrades.
One of the beauties of Unix is that everything is a file, hence once the user knows how to handle files, they know how to handle everything. "Interacting with the file system" is just a long way of saying "using the computer".
Unix is beautifiul. I don't dispute that. However, "interacting with the file system" and "using the computer" are different things. Of course any program is interacting with the file system on some level, but the fact of the matter is that all large (in scope and/or people) creative projects benefit from content management systems that handle the actual manipulation of files. So while Unix often provides the underpinning for these systems, the user isn't required to where anything is, where to put it after an operation is performed, etc. None of that stuff is particularly complex, making it a perfect candidate for automation.
So, needless distraction from what?
Writing, composing, drawing, maybe even, dare I say, coding.
And a mouse and keyboard in a GUI is (IMO) a horrible tool to produce music. That's why we have MIDI keyboards and hardware mixing boards that interface to computers. And why we still sell guitars, violins and flutes in the age of computers. The slight nuances that I can add completely intuitively with a fretboard far outstrip the control you can have with a mouse interface.
I'm sure the "slight nuances" you can add on your fretboard are great, and no doubt difficult to model on a computer. But you seem to be ignoring the vast DSP possibilities of the computer. There are plenty of tools that benefit enormously from computer GUIs, I'm thinking of sound-visualisation tools and signal flow models. There's a whole world of sound that exists nowhere except the computer. I notice that you didn't advocate analog sequencers over Cubase, Logic, et al. Of course a computer is no substitute for an real violin, but a violin is no substitute for a computer either. There is no Drum and Bass violin music (I hope).
I've always seen the Unix way of doing things (small chainable components) as derived from patchboard/signal flow ideas that are used in music studios among other things. But that doesn't mean it 's the only way, or can't be improved upon. The GoodEasy solution to the interface pap from MS, Apple, KDE, Gnome, etc. is nostalgia. This may work quite well for math and word processing tasks (hurst's intented purpose), but productivity in many fields has nothing to do with anything of the sort. The main problem I see with creative tasks and the Unix way is that it constantly forces the user to interact with the file system, which can be a needless distraction.
ok, so this thread will now shoot further off topic. Since you're a mac tech, what do you think the chances are of my 8600/250 lasting another 4-5 years? Art At Home
I was really disappointed that there was no mention of Microsoft's Hailstorm intiative.
Then the astronauts could accomplish all of this
"The PSA would have a wireless network connection to the computers of the shuttle or space station, enabling it to access information about hardware, inventory, crew schedules, or science experiments -- then relay that information to crew members as needed."
Dear Jon,
Good try. In the interest of brevity, I will not remark on any misuse of the endash. Consider the colon, semi-colon, or rewording instead.
So I bolited, skipped illegally across the hallways of the megaplex to write a weekly wrap-up instead.
"Bolted" is spelled wrong. "Illegally" is misplaced. There should probably be an "and" after the comma.
What can you say about a week in which the most entertaining movie was Legally Blonde? Hang on for Planet of the Apes next Friday.
Well, you seemed to say quite a bit. If you were serious the article would have ended there. What can you say about a review that confirms its futility in the first paragraph?
We are deep into the summer doldrums, and to what is shaping up as a sub-par movie summer.
This sentence doesn't read well. Say it out loud. The phrase "sub-par movie summer" should not be used by a professional writer.
Score (Robert DeNiro, Edward Norton, Marlon Brando) is a stylish, genial, high-end crime saga, one of those old-style movies in which the good guys are classy, harm no one, have high ethical standards, and have the neatest tools in the world. The movie is a bit flat and predictable.
One sentence, three lists, eight commas. Following that ornate creation, we have the choppiest sentence in the article. Interesting juxtaposition.
The movie is worth seeing, if only to see these good actors, atmospheric scenes of Montreal, and an aging Brando do one or two neat scenes that suggest the great actor still has it.
"Seeing" or "see", one of them has to go. Professional writers generally don't use the adjective "neat", unless they mean "tidy."
Witherspoon plays a seemingly brainless but good-hearted Malibu-Barbie type who applies to Harvard Law School to pursue her snotty boyfriend (who dumps her once he's admitted because he needs someone more serious) and who, in the name of diversity, gets admitted.
Whoa.
But still, this is the most enjoyable movie I saw all week, which says something.
But we know not what.
The truth is, when push comes to shove, any film is often simply about the writing, something that did in Final Fantasy, and the writing in this one is just terrible.
Again, whoa. On of the first two prepositional phrases has to go. The rest of the sentence is terrible and should be srapped. Bad use of pronouns, undescriptive adjectives, and questionable sentence structure.
I hope I wasn't too hard on you. Your sentence structure would improve a great deal if you chose more appropriate adjectives.
"...please tell me why the human race is doomed to become extinct due to global warming? If we're affraid for the very existence of our race over adversely affecting the climate, then we need to be equally, if not more, concerned about the natural changes to our climate. "
The issue of air pollution is about more than global warming. All arguments that dismiss global warming gloss over the fact that the chemicals we put in the air are undeniably bad. At the very least, they seriously degrade the quality of human life. Quibbling about the accuracy or validity of climate models is missing the point. Scientists may disagree on the large-scale, long term effects of chemicals like CFCs, but how many studies have shown CFCs to be beneficial in any way? In what way is reducing our dependence on fossil fuels a bad thing?
Re:But I have a God Given Right to cheap gas!!
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
For a number of reasons, it's really not the same thing. The main difference is that many of the nations in the middle east were fabricated by the West after WWII. This includes Kuwait. That nation never existed previously in history, it was part of Iraq.
Imagine if some other nation decided that Washington was a separate country, and the Gates family was royalty. Art At Home
Basing your whole life and ideology around mistrust and paranoia isnt the way i, or many people choose to live. Questioning the media isnt elitism, but to out and out brand it the tool of evil, or to do the same with the government, or to think that somehow YOU have the inside track, *IS* elitism and pretty arrogant.
I don't see where you're getting this information on my personal life and attitude. I'm not a paranoid conspiracy freak. If you got that impression from visiting my page, you missed the joke. My favorite humor has to do with black helicopters and UFOs.
I don't believe the media is a tool of evil, but I don't harbor the illusion that the NY Times, Reuters, or CNN are any different from MSNBC. The value system they reflect is inseparable from their ownership. There's a great article over on plastic about the Stalin-esque propaganda vocabulary that our government uses today, on the right and left. Terms like "pro-life", "faith-based", "affirmative action", etc. Terms that the mainstream media repeat like parrots. And what's with the 'elitism' thing? So it's OK to question the media, but voicing your opinion when you disagree isn't? Does pointing out their glaring conflicts of interest imply that I have some sort of 'inside-track'?
I'm no friend of massive Lexus SUV's, I assure you, but people should have a choice. We live in a capitalist system, whether you like it or not, and there is a market for large SUV-type cars...I don't feel 'enslaved' by corporations. I dont feel that Nike is my master. I have a brain. If i like a nike product, and its the right price, i'll buy it.
I think you're equating consumer choice with freedom. People want SUVs and the companies are building them, but that doesn't mean that the consumers are running the show. You're not allowed to sell anything you want in America, and there's nothing inherently anti-capitalist about adding to that list. Maybe anti-libertarian, but that's different. The right wing in America has created a false dichotomy between near total laissez-faire economics and socialism, which is ridiculous. Even Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) advocated fairly extensive market regulation.
It's not that I feel enslaved, people do have to work somewhere, right? Corporations have the same rights as individuals under US law, which is OK. But when it comes to responsibility, they revert to amorphous entities with no one responsible. You can't send a corporation to jail, or do anything remotely near to it. I think (some) people feel that the legal system is an ineffective way to deal with Corporate America. That won't change until they're made more accountable. When I wrote "wake the fuck up", I should have followed it with "this is not a level playing field."
Why is it that the entire slashdot community is coming off like a bunch of spoiled brats? Well, it could be because they are. All this fucking irresponsible "I have a right to do what I want" crap. The Constitution doesn't say that. You don't have to care what anyone thinks, but you don't get to do whatever you want.
Also, the status quo is not a without a value system. Is it wrong to propose a different one? The current value system in America has very little to do with what it's architects envisioned. Especially with regard to the economy. Even Adam Smith advocated market supervision by the government.
Re:But I have a God Given Right to cheap gas!!
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Wow. That's shockingly ignorant. We use our military power to hold down gas prices. It's basically a divide and conquer thing. We keep the middle east fucked up because we want it that way.
Art At Home
Re:What's really wrong with it?
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
yeah, if it'll fucking squash me like a bug. Art At Home
Re: Why is it OK for Ford to make Excursions?
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 2
1. This is the United States, and people and corporations are free to make what they want unless for some reason it's being legislated/outlawed.
2. There is a demand for Excursions and demand drives the market.
3. Consumers have the right to buy what they want.
Why is it legal to make them? Your concept of your rights and freedoms fails to take into account the right of others to a clean environment. This is indeed the United States, and all of your rights are balanced with the rights of others, unless of course you happen to be a large corporation. You could take a broader view of safety, like the safety of other drivers. Would you want to die because an Excursion is the only thing that their sedentary, obese family will fit in?
Dude, come on. That guy's post said to keep quiet or carnivore will get you. My post wasn't meant to look down on people, but the poster just seemed so reverent towards our corporate masters.
I'm from Oregon, too by the way. I feel your pain about bicycle protests and tree-ins. I had to move to NYC to get away from that crap. But this doesn't change what I said about corporate responsibility. Typically this issue is countered with the "red-tape" boogy man. To question the way our media presents issues to us is not elitism. Try reading a foreign paper about US issues in parallel with a local one. Ra Ra America!
Answer me this. Why is it OK for Ford to make Excursions?
Before spouting your moronic bile, you may want to do a reality check. First, check out lawful (and moral) ways to make your voice heard & effect corporate decisions and government policy. Second, check the facts before you jump to conclusions.
So there's a difference between vigilante justice and corporate decisions? Wake the fuck up. Our country has a system in place that gives corporations all the rights of individuals but not all the responsibilities. What would happen to you if you built 100 engines that spewed the equibvalent of 100 Ford Excursions? Nothing nice. But we reward Ford for it.
Personally, I would never kill anyone unless I had to. But torching an SUV dealership does far less damage than SUV's themselves cause.
Carnivore are in operation on the Internet, you just moved way up on a couple of watch lists.
...start with yourself & ride your bike to work a couple times a week.. Take the train or bus once in a while.
Yeah, be a good little worker bee. Otherwise Uncle Sam will have to give you a spanking.
Art At Home
After the large entities had done the serious R&D in aerodynamics, citizens began building their own planes and flying them around. Granted, there is quite a leap between Orville and Wilbur Wright and NASA, but I totally believe that space flight is now within reach of the common man (like me!).
His capsule is a cement mixer. I'm with Taco. I'm waiting until I can use my miles to upgrade to a first class cement mixer.
I think this cat is overlooking how much M$ has done make the idea of NC-type operations palatable to consumers. I'm not a big fan, but they've done a couple useful things.
1.) They make great web browsers. Sure, they've got privacy issues and they're closed, but they work pretty damn well. I type this from IE5 mac, which is a pleasure to use. Making web pages look as good as MS Word documents gives consumers confidence.
2.) They run Hotmail. Everybody's used this at least once. It's a great example of data accessibility. Another great examlpe is Corbis.
Another factor here is connectivity. There's much better and faster Net access now than there used to be. People couldn't see the benefit of NCs when all they had was 10base-T at work and modem everywhere else. At that time, NCs offered little benefit over carrying a floppy over to your co-worker's desk. With the spread of broadband, 802.11b, and faster ethernet, NCs are a much more practical idea.
M$ is also launching services, rather than trying sell you what appears to be a shitty computer. I think this is pretty key. The problem with previous NC initiatives is that they were hardware based. A guiding principle of NC thought should be that "hardware matters little". So why in the world would Sun be interested?
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't read the article. Read first, post second. thanks.
Well, it seemed to me like the article's point was to remove such decisions from the programmer's concern. So maybe Quake XXI will need better performance than 50ms. The system they're talking about would recognize this and run the processes in question locally. They termed this "Introspection." Quoting the article:
In my view, they see all future applications needing to be somewhat network aware, and believe that client/server interaction could be greatly optimized and abstracted through a system like the one they describe. It doesn't preclude local execution, it just decides when it's appropriate. The thinking is that the system can often make these decisions better, since it will have the benefit of looking back on previous usage records. You can test all you want, but the system will be aware of it's actually being used.
Future M$ advertisement:
"We already know where you want to go today."
Also, it is not clear from the article that they had 2 tries in Java. It seems like they had one try in Java, ditched it for zope, and then finally switched to python.
You're right. It's not clear. The sentence
"The earliest version of the site was written using Java servlets, and the Run Builder used Zope..."
isn't clear at all, since they refer to an early "site", but the first run was a networked GUI app. Maybe they were using "site", "application server", and "backend" interchangeably (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Three of their developers are Python contributors. They also developed two previous versions in Java. It's unsurprising that they found success in Python on their third attempt.
Support sucked from linksys, but thankfully the retailer I bought it from had no problem with a return.
It seems to me like you're pretty much screwed if something goes wrong. The device did work well before my roomate's mistake though. It even supported PPPoE flawlessly. It also seems that linksys adds capabilities quite frequently through firmware upgrades.
Unix is beautifiul. I don't dispute that. However, "interacting with the file system" and "using the computer" are different things. Of course any program is interacting with the file system on some level, but the fact of the matter is that all large (in scope and/or people) creative projects benefit from content management systems that handle the actual manipulation of files. So while Unix often provides the underpinning for these systems, the user isn't required to where anything is, where to put it after an operation is performed, etc. None of that stuff is particularly complex, making it a perfect candidate for automation.
So, needless distraction from what?
Writing, composing, drawing, maybe even, dare I say, coding.
I've always seen the Unix way of doing things (small chainable components) as derived from patchboard/signal flow ideas that are used in music studios among other things. But that doesn't mean it 's the only way, or can't be improved upon. The GoodEasy solution to the interface pap from MS, Apple, KDE, Gnome, etc. is nostalgia. This may work quite well for math and word processing tasks (hurst's intented purpose), but productivity in many fields has nothing to do with anything of the sort. The main problem I see with creative tasks and the Unix way is that it constantly forces the user to interact with the file system, which can be a needless distraction.
Thanks to relentless innovation from Redmond, the choice is clear. A team working in Visual Basic will clearly triumph.
Art At Home
ok, so this thread will now shoot further off topic. Since you're a mac tech, what do you think the chances are of my 8600/250 lasting another 4-5 years?
Art At Home
Check out Synphony for dot Matrix Printers by The User. It's really quite good, plus it comes on one of those cool little 3-inch CDs.
Art At Home
Then the astronauts could accomplish all of this
Art At Home
So I bolited, skipped illegally across the hallways of the megaplex to write a weekly wrap-up instead.
"Bolted" is spelled wrong. "Illegally" is misplaced. There should probably be an "and" after the comma.
What can you say about a week in which the most entertaining movie was Legally Blonde? Hang on for Planet of the Apes next Friday.
Well, you seemed to say quite a bit. If you were serious the article would have ended there. What can you say about a review that confirms its futility in the first paragraph?
We are deep into the summer doldrums, and to what is shaping up as a sub-par movie summer.
This sentence doesn't read well. Say it out loud. The phrase "sub-par movie summer" should not be used by a professional writer.
Score (Robert DeNiro, Edward Norton, Marlon Brando) is a stylish, genial, high-end crime saga, one of those old-style movies in which the good guys are classy, harm no one, have high ethical standards, and have the neatest tools in the world. The movie is a bit flat and predictable.
One sentence, three lists, eight commas. Following that ornate creation, we have the choppiest sentence in the article. Interesting juxtaposition.
The movie is worth seeing, if only to see these good actors, atmospheric scenes of Montreal, and an aging Brando do one or two neat scenes that suggest the great actor still has it.
"Seeing" or "see", one of them has to go. Professional writers generally don't use the adjective "neat", unless they mean "tidy."
Witherspoon plays a seemingly brainless but good-hearted Malibu-Barbie type who applies to Harvard Law School to pursue her snotty boyfriend (who dumps her once he's admitted because he needs someone more serious) and who, in the name of diversity, gets admitted.
Whoa.
But still, this is the most enjoyable movie I saw all week, which says something.
But we know not what.
The truth is, when push comes to shove, any film is often simply about the writing, something that did in Final Fantasy, and the writing in this one is just terrible.
Again, whoa. On of the first two prepositional phrases has to go. The rest of the sentence is terrible and should be srapped. Bad use of pronouns, undescriptive adjectives, and questionable sentence structure.
I hope I wasn't too hard on you. Your sentence structure would improve a great deal if you chose more appropriate adjectives.
Art At Home
Art At Home
well, that's kind of subjective, since the vast majority of people who live and work in Kuwait aren't citizens.
Art At Home
Imagine if some other nation decided that Washington was a separate country, and the Gates family was royalty.
Art At Home
I don't see where you're getting this information on my personal life and attitude. I'm not a paranoid conspiracy freak. If you got that impression from visiting my page, you missed the joke. My favorite humor has to do with black helicopters and UFOs.
I don't believe the media is a tool of evil, but I don't harbor the illusion that the NY Times, Reuters, or CNN are any different from MSNBC. The value system they reflect is inseparable from their ownership. There's a great article over on plastic about the Stalin-esque propaganda vocabulary that our government uses today, on the right and left. Terms like "pro-life", "faith-based", "affirmative action", etc. Terms that the mainstream media repeat like parrots. And what's with the 'elitism' thing? So it's OK to question the media, but voicing your opinion when you disagree isn't? Does pointing out their glaring conflicts of interest imply that I have some sort of 'inside-track'?
I'm no friend of massive Lexus SUV's, I assure you, but people should have a choice. We live in a capitalist system, whether you like it or not, and there is a market for large SUV-type cars ...I don't feel 'enslaved' by corporations. I dont feel that Nike is my master. I have a brain. If i like a nike product, and its the right price, i'll buy it.
I think you're equating consumer choice with freedom. People want SUVs and the companies are building them, but that doesn't mean that the consumers are running the show. You're not allowed to sell anything you want in America, and there's nothing inherently anti-capitalist about adding to that list. Maybe anti-libertarian, but that's different. The right wing in America has created a false dichotomy between near total laissez-faire economics and socialism, which is ridiculous. Even Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) advocated fairly extensive market regulation.
It's not that I feel enslaved, people do have to work somewhere, right? Corporations have the same rights as individuals under US law, which is OK. But when it comes to responsibility, they revert to amorphous entities with no one responsible. You can't send a corporation to jail, or do anything remotely near to it. I think (some) people feel that the legal system is an ineffective way to deal with Corporate America. That won't change until they're made more accountable. When I wrote "wake the fuck up", I should have followed it with "this is not a level playing field."
Art At Home
Also, the status quo is not a without a value system. Is it wrong to propose a different one? The current value system in America has very little to do with what it's architects envisioned. Especially with regard to the economy. Even Adam Smith advocated market supervision by the government.
Art At Home
Wow. That's shockingly ignorant. We use our military power to hold down gas prices. It's basically a divide and conquer thing. We keep the middle east fucked up because we want it that way.
Art At Home
yeah, if it'll fucking squash me like a bug.
Art At Home
2. There is a demand for Excursions and demand drives the market.
3. Consumers have the right to buy what they want.
Why is it legal to make them? Your concept of your rights and freedoms fails to take into account the right of others to a clean environment. This is indeed the United States, and all of your rights are balanced with the rights of others, unless of course you happen to be a large corporation. You could take a broader view of safety, like the safety of other drivers. Would you want to die because an Excursion is the only thing that their sedentary, obese family will fit in?
Art At Home
I'm from Oregon, too by the way. I feel your pain about bicycle protests and tree-ins. I had to move to NYC to get away from that crap. But this doesn't change what I said about corporate responsibility. Typically this issue is countered with the "red-tape" boogy man. To question the way our media presents issues to us is not elitism. Try reading a foreign paper about US issues in parallel with a local one. Ra Ra America!
Answer me this. Why is it OK for Ford to make Excursions?
Art At Home
So there's a difference between vigilante justice and corporate decisions? Wake the fuck up. Our country has a system in place that gives corporations all the rights of individuals but not all the responsibilities. What would happen to you if you built 100 engines that spewed the equibvalent of 100 Ford Excursions? Nothing nice. But we reward Ford for it.
Personally, I would never kill anyone unless I had to. But torching an SUV dealership does far less damage than SUV's themselves cause.
Carnivore are in operation on the Internet, you just moved way up on a couple of watch lists.
Yeah, be a good little worker bee. Otherwise Uncle Sam will have to give you a spanking.
Art At Home
It does stand for Digital Versatile Disc.
Art At Home
His capsule is a cement mixer. I'm with Taco. I'm waiting until I can use my miles to upgrade to a first class cement mixer.
Art At Home
1.) They make great web browsers. Sure, they've got privacy issues and they're closed, but they work pretty damn well. I type this from IE5 mac, which is a pleasure to use. Making web pages look as good as MS Word documents gives consumers confidence.
2.) They run Hotmail. Everybody's used this at least once. It's a great example of data accessibility. Another great examlpe is Corbis.
Another factor here is connectivity. There's much better and faster Net access now than there used to be. People couldn't see the benefit of NCs when all they had was 10base-T at work and modem everywhere else. At that time, NCs offered little benefit over carrying a floppy over to your co-worker's desk. With the spread of broadband, 802.11b, and faster ethernet, NCs are a much more practical idea.
M$ is also launching services, rather than trying sell you what appears to be a shitty computer. I think this is pretty key. The problem with previous NC initiatives is that they were hardware based. A guiding principle of NC thought should be that "hardware matters little". So why in the world would Sun be interested?
Art At Home