I think you're correct. File descriptors like STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR, ideas like piping, 'infrastructure' programs like grep, etc. are what make *nix so powerful.
With all the talk about sound software recently,
this reminds me of signal flow, which is put through a patch bay in an analog setup.
So, imagine a *nix GUI that involved a CLI, but allowed you to visualize the "signal flow" as you typed. Look at this example from Symbolic Sound. This would allow very complex CLI commands, and you could modify them by moving around the blocks in the visualization (see above example). Something similar to "round trip" HTML editing in Macromedia Dreamweaver, but hopefully better implemented.
Actually, the PC can do what a Mac could do 10 years ago, what some rented analog gear could do 15 years ago, and what the punks started doing over 25 years ago.
Actually, this is totally wrong. Price out some of the lower end Digidesign or MOTU cards/racks, then tell me how far that amount would have gotten you 25 years ago (adjusted for inflation, of course). The big difference is that your home recorded music can end up on CD sounding good rather than a self released cassette. Remember those?
Since, the "near death" of Apple a couple years ago, most major third party hardware and software is available for both Windows and Mac OS, with the same functionality. And yes, you do need third party hardware, even on the Mac. To name a few of the major players: Steinberg, Emagic, Opcode, Sonic Foundry, etc.
A short history on music production and distribution:
blah, blah, blah
This amusingly myopic regurgitation of dated rock critic wisdom is so terrible that I'll bring up only the worst points of it and then point you to some good resources so you can get a better handle on things.
The major problem with your "history" is that it neglects to mention black people until Public Enemy and NWA. Don't forget that the black community has played a major role in the invention of every American music, from jazz to rap to techno. Furthermore, they've had their own distribution channels in the past, and still do today.
While perhaps making for convenient comparisons to Britney, et al. , your explanation of the differences between AM/FM and 33/45 are grossly exagerated and, in some cases, incorrect. A lot of this has to do with the fact that you forgot black people, whose music is often more appropriately presented in a singles format.
I say this because you mention "potential" users. If it was business, your users would probably be required to participate.
Even if I'm wrong, I'd bet that those "potential" (read: infrequent, inexperienced) users are after a very short list of features. Most questions probably center around permissions, html related things, network disk space, and email (Pine?). One thing that can be useful is setting up "joe user" accounts in way that forces them to use a specific sub-directory for their web documents. Then set the default permissions so that "joe" doesn't have to change them.
Does anyone know how they deal with emulators, differences in platform, etc.?
Besides the obvious possibility of using capabilities like flash saves to get high scores, how do they determine if a player has used technology in an unfair (unjust?) way?
If you set the world record for a game on a MAME cabinet, does it count?
What if you set the record for a Nintendo game using the "Advantage"?
It reminds of that scene in The Wizard where the Lucas character had a power glove...
It's important to remember that this article is discussing two separate species of wasp. Quoting from the article:
Bordenstein, O'Hara and Werren needed to look at the numerous genetic barriers that kept the species from interbreeding and determine which one came first. They found little difference in the mating rituals and preferences of the two species, suggesting that those were not enough in themselves to force speciation. Also, hybrids of the two species were not sterile--an early sign of speciation--and the hybrids were relatively healthy. In contrast, the presence of Wolbachia was the single highest barrier to the interbreeding of the two species, and thus, it is likely the oldest barrier.
hey!'s post:
Note that infected females can still breed with uninfected males, so the bacterium's "strategy" is to eliminate uninfected offspring. If speciation per se was beneficial to its strategy you'd expect infected females to be unable to breed with uninfected males.
The absence of a barrier between infected females and uninfected males is beneficial to Wolbachia and encourages speciation. Such a barrier would not be beneficial to host or parasite, because it would result in "instant" speciation and inbreeding. The scientists are trying to demonstrate that the "one-way" barrier does encourage gradual speciation by eliminating the possibility for certain males to breed with certain females. There's a difference between "engourage" and "cause".
It's important to remember that this article is discussing two separate species of wasp. Quoting from the article:
Bordenstein, O'Hara and Werren needed to look at the numerous genetic barriers that kept the species from interbreeding and determine which one came first. They found little difference in the mating rituals and preferences of the two species, suggesting that those were not enough in themselves to force speciation. Also, hybrids of the two species were not sterile--an early sign of speciation--and the hybrids were relatively healthy. In contrast, the presence of Wolbachia was the single highest barrier to the interbreeding of the two species, and thus, it is likely the oldest barrierNote that infected females can still breed with uninfected males, so the bacterium's "strategy" is to eliminate uninfected offspring. If speciation per se was beneficial to its strategy you'd expect infected females to be unable to breed with uninfected males.
The absence of a barrier between infected females and uninfected males is beneficial to Wolbachia and encourages speciation. Such a barrier would not be beneficial to host
or parasite, because it would result in "instant" speciation and inbreeding. The scientists are trying to demonstrate that the "one-way" barrier does encourage gradual speciation by eliminating the possibility for certain males to breed with certain females. There's a difference between "engourage" and "cause".
Raskin just thinks that current OS designs require that the user mess with the filesystem too much. Basically, all current debates about which OS has the best UI for manipulating the filesystem, the digital equivalent of pencil pushing, or that guy's office in Brazil.
One thing that the original MacOS (for better or worse) tried to get away from was file-centric computing. The goal was to get a bird's eye view of your data, just pick up the thing you want.
The reason he refers to OS X as a throwback is that you can't get much more file-centric than *nix. While the readership of/. may enjoy finding the fastest way to copy all the files containing string "foo" into folder "bar", to most people that behavior reminds them of those people who drive 70 mph down backstreets in order to reach their destination one minute earlier.
Desktop shortcuts, start menus, apple menus, double-clicks, they're all ways of navigating faster through hierarchical file systems. I think he's mainly trying to point out that better product design could intuit what the user wanted to accomplish, starting with the first thing touched or said.
Think about when you're trying to teach your grandmother how to use email. After some time, the conversation will probably progress to this:
granny: "So I, what's the word, click on the green thing to write email?"
That conversation would probably go a lot faster if you could say "pick up the pen" instead.
Institutional holdings (including Intel): 14% of shares outstanding.
Other significant institutional/mutual fund shareholders include Barclays Bank, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Fidelity.
Welcome to the distributed responsibility of American capitalism.
That said, on the board you will find directors who currently/formerly work(ed) for AT&T, Intel,
Compaq (blue ribbon to wunderhorn1!:), and IBM.
Own any mutual funds? Have a bank account?
IRA? Pension fund? 401k?
If you answer yes to any of the above, your money pays for CMGI.
CMGI owns a majority of Alta Vista. The patents in question are owned by CMGI. Check out the Alta Vista Company Background for more info. I'll even paste a relevant part of the document to speed your fact checking.
Since AltaVista's founding in 1995 our company has evolved impressively. In January 1999, we became a wholly owned subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ). Compaq purchased Shopping.com in March and Zip2 Corporation in April of that year. Then in August of 1999, CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI) acquired 83% of our outstanding stock from Compaq, and Shopping.com and Zip2 became wholly owned subsidiaries of AltaVista. Later that same year, AltaVista acquired Raging Bull, bolstering our financial expertise while adding a new community element to the AltaVista network. With this combination, AltaVista has integrated a broad range of commerce, content and search services under the AltaVista domain.
Today, we are expanding our services even further through strategic partnerships with leading best-of-breed content providers and aggressive international expansion. As always, AltaVista remains committed to providing our users with the best of the Web from a single, trusted source. As AltaVista continues to develop new and greater ways to reach our objectives and fulfill users' needs, our view from above promises to look ever more comprehensive and accessible.
AltaVista is a majority owned company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI).
For a good laugh, check out CMGI's company profile on yahoo.
Creating a fast website with lots of server-side computing with a stateless transaction model is tricky, and some description of how to introduce caching of any kind into a load-balanced world seems like the most important single contribution a book like this would make to my library.
Here's an article covering the load balancing problem.
Aside from the mouse button "debate", I'd be curious to know what/. readers thought about the differing approaches GUI mouse operation in *nix/MacOS/Windows.
As a disclaimer, I use a Mac everyday for work and play. However, I've been required to work on all manner of machines, including Sun, SGI, Linux, and Windows (of course). I have to say that I find MacOS the easiest to use as far as mouse operation. I think the main reason is the location of menus at the top of the screen. Refer to Fitt's Law.
Excuse the Tog link, I know he's a little arrogant, but I found the linked article rather enlightening.
I do enjoy the multiple desktop feature that I've used in various X windows systems, and I wish that MacOS did that.
Just thought I would point out that programming takes place in many environments that people who are into procedural languages would never touch.
Indeed, many people program in a realm so abstract they may not realize they're programming.
The example I'm about to offer is pretty much flamebait, but here it goes. One of the stranger examples of an OO language that I can think of is Macromedia Flash Actionscript, which uses syntax largely borrowed from Javascript . Many OOP concepts are absent or hidden from the programmer, but I have to say that it's a strange feeling to set the attributes of an object drawn with a paint brush tool. Especially when you do that from a database or user input.
It's probably obvious that I'm not exactly a professional programmer (assembly is indistinguishable from magic to me:), but I am familiar with more than the kind of programming I described above. I've worked in C and C++, LISP, and JAVA, but have never done anything substantial in any of those languages. Once I took a class in OpenGL (mandated by CG department in college), and let's just say I found it... counter-intuitive. That doesn't make me stupid.
In the interest of keeping any responses on topic, let's leave a few concerns out of this:
1.)Flash is hated as closed source tool
2.)It's often used in very poor taste.
3.)It's not something professional programmers use.
I can't say I know much about what the underlying code of Flash is like, but I do know that programming in a context of hierarchical timelines, layers of graphic objects, and interactivity brings about many possibilities that would otherwise be unexplored. You also get people who can program and draw towards one goal. It's fresh.
This guy thinks the WWW is the only way to use the Internet. Does this guy want to regulate email? What about Gopher? What about sites with user generated content (I can think of at least one:).
He does mention Napster (which is one-to-many communication IMHO, in the form of telling you the IP address for the file you're after), but let's face it: the Internet often blurs the lines between public and private communcation.
Where does the Constitution allow for regulation of conversations between friends?
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? ADC is just an interface combining power, DVI, and USB in one cable/port. It's only purpose is to eliminate cable clutter.
Macs have been known for color consistency for years because of ColorSync. This has nothing to do with ADC, which is based on a 3 year old IBM technology and was introduced only 6 months ago with the CP machines.
Well, these are all true facts... except for the part about ADC only being about cable clutter. I'm well aware of the fact that ADC is a new inclusion in Apple boxes, and I didn't mean to imply that it was one of those hyped up Revolutionary Apple Innovations.
The nice thing is that they put this (still new to consumers) technology in without requiring the purchase of a flat panel monitor.
Colorsync is good... but not that great. Even Apple admits that a correctly configured colorsync workflow will not be perfect. The only real solution is to manually (w/ colorsync on) tweak your display & output device to match each other. Color management is not a plug-and-play operation. Besides, PCs aren't much different anymore, are they?
I hope you're referring to DVI as that 3 yr old technology, and not that sucky aptiva thing.
I will admit that, for reasons unknown even to myself, I thought that the CRT monitors were using the DVI also. So that was stupid.
Anyway, the whole reason I got into this discussion was to point out that Apple often includes slightly ahead of the (consumer) curve technology, which makes the box a good purchase over the long haul. Let's just say there are probably a lot of parallel port zip drives hanging around unused these days.
Well, those "cool looking boxes" have quite a few advantages over your average Wintel box, albeit at somewhat of a price premium.
1.)Have you ever worked anywhere that required working with colors and shapes? What if those colors and shapes needed to look the same on every monitor in the shop? Well, that new Apple Display Connector should help.
2.)Want to add hardware? While you'll have fewer options than a Wintel user, your purchase is almost guaranteed not to conflict with any common configuration. And when you want to put it in, you open the door (no screws).
3.)Your purchase will last. I own a Power Mac 8600. I do all kinds of demanding work on it. To be fair, video is not one of them. But guess what? It's still really fast. Sure, I notice the difference during some Photoshop filters, and during sound file manipulations, but my machine was bought after the G3 came out. Let's see how those celeron boxes are doing in 4 years.
Well, although it has its own problems, a more stable (on the client) solution than a java applet might be a Macromedia Flash5 solution. Version 5 allows for realtime XML transfer, plus it's hard to beat vectors for drawing graphs. Also, the new printing features allow you to print things that aren't displayed on screen... which is great for graphs and things that are to long or complex to come across well in a browser window.
The downside is that your UI is locked into a Macromedia standard (at least for the dynamic content), but since your backend will be XML it will be easier to change that later (maybe SVG).
Slashdot Mirror
With all the talk about sound software recently, this reminds me of signal flow, which is put through a patch bay in an analog setup.
So, imagine a *nix GUI that involved a CLI, but allowed you to visualize the "signal flow" as you typed. Look at this example from Symbolic Sound. This would allow very complex CLI commands, and you could modify them by moving around the blocks in the visualization (see above example). Something similar to "round trip" HTML editing in Macromedia Dreamweaver, but hopefully better implemented.
Actually, this is totally wrong. Price out some of the lower end Digidesign or MOTU cards/racks, then tell me how far that amount would have gotten you 25 years ago (adjusted for inflation, of course). The big difference is that your home recorded music can end up on CD sounding good rather than a self released cassette. Remember those?
Since, the "near death" of Apple a couple years ago, most major third party hardware and software is available for both Windows and Mac OS, with the same functionality. And yes, you do need third party hardware, even on the Mac. To name a few of the major players: Steinberg, Emagic, Opcode, Sonic Foundry, etc.
A short history on music production and distribution:
blah, blah, blah
This amusingly myopic regurgitation of dated rock critic wisdom is so terrible that I'll bring up only the worst points of it and then point you to some good resources so you can get a better handle on things.
The major problem with your "history" is that it neglects to mention black people until Public Enemy and NWA. Don't forget that the black community has played a major role in the invention of every American music, from jazz to rap to techno. Furthermore, they've had their own distribution channels in the past, and still do today.
While perhaps making for convenient comparisons to Britney, et al. , your explanation of the differences between AM/FM and 33/45 are grossly exagerated and, in some cases, incorrect. A lot of this has to do with the fact that you forgot black people, whose music is often more appropriately presented in a singles format.
Perhaps you best check out these places:
All Music
The Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes and CDs
Home Recording at About.com
Even if I'm wrong, I'd bet that those "potential" (read: infrequent, inexperienced) users are after a very short list of features. Most questions probably center around permissions, html related things, network disk space, and email (Pine?). One thing that can be useful is setting up "joe user" accounts in way that forces them to use a specific sub-directory for their web documents. Then set the default permissions so that "joe" doesn't have to change them.
Also check out The HelpDesk Institute.
Besides the obvious possibility of using capabilities like flash saves to get high scores, how do they determine if a player has used technology in an unfair (unjust?) way?
If you set the world record for a game on a MAME cabinet, does it count?
What if you set the record for a Nintendo game using the "Advantage"?
It reminds of that scene in The Wizard where the Lucas character had a power glove...
It's important to remember that this article is discussing two separate species of wasp. Quoting from the article:
Bordenstein, O'Hara and Werren needed to look at the numerous genetic barriers that kept the species from interbreeding and determine which one came first. They found little difference in the mating rituals and preferences of the two species, suggesting that those were not enough in themselves to force speciation. Also, hybrids of the two species were not sterile--an early sign of speciation--and the hybrids were relatively healthy. In contrast, the presence of Wolbachia was the single highest barrier to the interbreeding of the two species, and thus, it is likely the oldest barrier.
hey!'s post:
Note that infected females can still breed with uninfected males, so the bacterium's "strategy" is to eliminate uninfected offspring. If speciation per se was beneficial to its strategy you'd expect infected females to be unable to breed with uninfected males.
The absence of a barrier between infected females and uninfected males is beneficial to Wolbachia and encourages speciation. Such a barrier would not be beneficial to host or parasite, because it would result in "instant" speciation and inbreeding. The scientists are trying to demonstrate that the "one-way" barrier does encourage gradual speciation by eliminating the possibility for certain males to breed with certain females. There's a difference between "engourage" and "cause".
Bordenstein, O'Hara and Werren needed to look at the numerous genetic barriers that kept the species from interbreeding and determine which one came first. They found little difference in the mating rituals and preferences of the two species, suggesting that those were not enough in themselves to force speciation. Also, hybrids of the two species were not sterile--an early sign of speciation--and the hybrids were relatively healthy. In contrast, the presence of Wolbachia was the single highest barrier to the interbreeding of the two species, and thus, it is likely the oldest barrier Note that infected females can still breed with uninfected males, so the bacterium's "strategy" is to eliminate uninfected offspring. If speciation per se was beneficial to its strategy you'd expect infected females to be unable to breed with uninfected males.
The absence of a barrier between infected females and uninfected males is beneficial to Wolbachia and encourages speciation. Such a barrier would not be beneficial to host or parasite, because it would result in "instant" speciation and inbreeding. The scientists are trying to demonstrate that the "one-way" barrier does encourage gradual speciation by eliminating the possibility for certain males to breed with certain females. There's a difference between "engourage" and "cause".
One thing that the original MacOS (for better or worse) tried to get away from was file-centric computing. The goal was to get a bird's eye view of your data, just pick up the thing you want.
The reason he refers to OS X as a throwback is that you can't get much more file-centric than *nix. While the readership of /. may enjoy finding the fastest way to copy all the files containing string "foo" into folder "bar", to most people that behavior reminds them of those people who drive 70 mph down backstreets in order to reach their destination one minute earlier.
Desktop shortcuts, start menus, apple menus, double-clicks, they're all ways of navigating faster through hierarchical file systems. I think he's mainly trying to point out that better product design could intuit what the user wanted to accomplish, starting with the first thing touched or said.
Think about when you're trying to teach your grandmother how to use email. After some time, the conversation will probably progress to this:
granny: "So I, what's the word, click on the green thing to write email?"
That conversation would probably go a lot faster if you could say "pick up the pen" instead.
Intel holdings: 1.25% of shares outstanding.
Institutional holdings (including Intel): 14% of shares outstanding.
Other significant institutional/mutual fund shareholders include Barclays Bank, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Fidelity.
Welcome to the distributed responsibility of American capitalism.
That said, on the board you will find directors who currently/formerly work(ed) for AT&T, Intel, Compaq (blue ribbon to wunderhorn1! :), and IBM.
Own any mutual funds? Have a bank account? IRA? Pension fund? 401k?
If you answer yes to any of the above, your money pays for CMGI.
Since AltaVista's founding in 1995 our company has evolved impressively. In January 1999, we became a wholly owned subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ). Compaq purchased Shopping.com in March and Zip2 Corporation in April of that year. Then in August of 1999, CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI) acquired 83% of our outstanding stock from Compaq, and Shopping.com and Zip2 became wholly owned subsidiaries of AltaVista. Later that same year, AltaVista acquired Raging Bull, bolstering our financial expertise while adding a new community element to the AltaVista network. With this combination, AltaVista has integrated a broad range of commerce, content and search services under the AltaVista domain.
Today, we are expanding our services even further through strategic partnerships with leading best-of-breed content providers and aggressive international expansion. As always, AltaVista remains committed to providing our users with the best of the Web from a single, trusted source. As AltaVista continues to develop new and greater ways to reach our objectives and fulfill users' needs, our view from above promises to look ever more comprehensive and accessible.
AltaVista is a majority owned company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI).
For a good laugh, check out CMGI's company profile on yahoo.
Here's an article covering the load balancing problem.
As a disclaimer, I use a Mac everyday for work and play. However, I've been required to work on all manner of machines, including Sun, SGI, Linux, and Windows (of course). I have to say that I find MacOS the easiest to use as far as mouse operation. I think the main reason is the location of menus at the top of the screen. Refer to Fitt's Law.
Excuse the Tog link, I know he's a little arrogant, but I found the linked article rather enlightening.
I do enjoy the multiple desktop feature that I've used in various X windows systems, and I wish that MacOS did that.
The example I'm about to offer is pretty much flamebait, but here it goes. One of the stranger examples of an OO language that I can think of is Macromedia Flash Actionscript, which uses syntax largely borrowed from Javascript . Many OOP concepts are absent or hidden from the programmer, but I have to say that it's a strange feeling to set the attributes of an object drawn with a paint brush tool. Especially when you do that from a database or user input.
It's probably obvious that I'm not exactly a professional programmer (assembly is indistinguishable from magic to me :), but I am familiar with more than the kind of programming I described above. I've worked in C and C++, LISP, and JAVA, but have never done anything substantial in any of those languages. Once I took a class in OpenGL (mandated by CG department in college), and let's just say I found it... counter-intuitive. That doesn't make me stupid.
In the interest of keeping any responses on topic, let's leave a few concerns out of this:
1.)Flash is hated as closed source tool
2.)It's often used in very poor taste.
3.)It's not something professional programmers use.
I can't say I know much about what the underlying code of Flash is like, but I do know that programming in a context of hierarchical timelines, layers of graphic objects, and interactivity brings about many possibilities that would otherwise be unexplored. You also get people who can program and draw towards one goal. It's fresh.
He does mention Napster (which is one-to-many communication IMHO, in the form of telling you the IP address for the file you're after), but let's face it: the Internet often blurs the lines between public and private communcation.
Where does the Constitution allow for regulation of conversations between friends?
Macs have been known for color consistency for years because of ColorSync. This has nothing to do with ADC, which is based on a 3 year old IBM technology and was introduced only 6 months ago with the CP machines.
Well, these are all true facts... except for the part about ADC only being about cable clutter. I'm well aware of the fact that ADC is a new inclusion in Apple boxes, and I didn't mean to imply that it was one of those hyped up Revolutionary Apple Innovations. The nice thing is that they put this (still new to consumers) technology in without requiring the purchase of a flat panel monitor.
Colorsync is good... but not that great. Even Apple admits that a correctly configured colorsync workflow will not be perfect. The only real solution is to manually (w/ colorsync on) tweak your display & output device to match each other. Color management is not a plug-and-play operation. Besides, PCs aren't much different anymore, are they?
I hope you're referring to DVI as that 3 yr old technology, and not that sucky aptiva thing.
I will admit that, for reasons unknown even to myself, I thought that the CRT monitors were using the DVI also. So that was stupid.
Anyway, the whole reason I got into this discussion was to point out that Apple often includes slightly ahead of the (consumer) curve technology, which makes the box a good purchase over the long haul. Let's just say there are probably a lot of parallel port zip drives hanging around unused these days.
1.)Have you ever worked anywhere that required working with colors and shapes? What if those colors and shapes needed to look the same on every monitor in the shop? Well, that new Apple Display Connector should help.
2.)Want to add hardware? While you'll have fewer options than a Wintel user, your purchase is almost guaranteed not to conflict with any common configuration. And when you want to put it in, you open the door (no screws).
3.)Your purchase will last. I own a Power Mac 8600. I do all kinds of demanding work on it. To be fair, video is not one of them. But guess what? It's still really fast. Sure, I notice the difference during some Photoshop filters, and during sound file manipulations, but my machine was bought after the G3 came out. Let's see how those celeron boxes are doing in 4 years.
4.).DLL? what's that?
The downside is that your UI is locked into a Macromedia standard (at least for the dynamic content), but since your backend will be XML it will be easier to change that later (maybe SVG).