Right now, sitting on couch, feet on coffee table, Thinkpad on lap (wireless, but AC powered). Tivo remote to left (go Tennessee), wife talking on phone to right. Glass of KoolAid on end table.
Sometimes I opt for a lap desk, one of those hard flat surfaces attached to a pillow. Primary reason? To avoid toasting my crotch. Seriously, I mean how can they call this thing a laptop if actually keeping it on your lap from crisping your bits? Yeouch.
Duane
Guy I work with who has 3 boys gave me this odd tip. Even if you're required to use all 4 wheels, just set them up so that only 3 touch the ground. He said he gets surprisingly good results without the extra friction/drag from the unneeded wheel. I would expect that he weights heavily to the middle/front so that the car's not constantly shifting its weight down onto the extra wheel.
This might sound trivial, but one of the obstacles that I've found to buddy programming is the simple question of access to the machine. Inevitably in our space somebody gets to 'drive' and somebody else has to pull up a chair. If the driver wants to hand off the keyboard to his buddy, then the buddy will stretch and suffer and type poorly with the keyboard in his lap until it becomes obvious that he has alot to type, at which point he'll say "Can I drive?" and they switch seats. It's even worse when it comes to the mouse, since often you can't reach both without getting into your buddy's face as you reach across so you'll end up telling him "Ok, go click here..." which isn't exactly the best use of either geek's time.
If somebody could tell me a way of optimizing this exchange, I'd love it. Simply getting big lab space isn't really an option -- in the one lab we do have the tables are so small that you can't even fit the keyboard in front of the monitor and often end up with it next to, or in your lap anyway.
Ya know, I'll take goofy comments over no comments anyday. As long as somebody can come along later and understand what you meant, it's fine. If having fun with it causes you to write a small explanatory paragraph rather than just writing things like "Added new feature", everybody wins.
Compare this to the boss I had that told me I wasn't allowed to call a variable "temp" (for temperature), because other programmers on the team might misunderstand and think that's a temporary variable.
char *dummy =... ;... free(dummy);// Because hey, free dummy.
History: Took out previous feature. I have no idea what I was smoking. I'm really very, very sorry.
And Lo, there came forth a Great Renaming, wherein the Lord did provide a mighty shellscript, and it did crunch upon the code for forty megs and forty bytes, and on the last day, all occurences of the expression "oldCompanyName" had become "newCompanyName", forever and ever, amen.
I started on Omnipoint because I liked two things - no contract, and "you just get a bunch of minutes, none of this primetime vs free weekend nonsense." Then they became Voicestream (i.e. the Jamie Lee Curtis Era), then T-Mobile (Catherine Zeta Jones).
Pro: $69.95 gets me the family plan, which is up to 5 phones sharing 800 minutes however we see fit. For small/normal family usage (i.e. no business, no teenagers) that's fine for us. An extra $3/month gives me email and net. There's a fair variety of phones available, most of which have the customizable ring tones and all the usual nonsense. Apparently they even have picture phones available. AND, I like their web site, where you can do everything from pay your bill to check your email to see a fullpage version of the customized content that's normally delivered to your phone (i.e. sports scores, horoscope,local weather, and so on).
They also have a variety of internet device options, if you want to go that route. There are a couple of Wince devices that are T-Mobile branded, but I can't anything about them one way or the other.
Con: Coverage sucks. If you're not very near a major highway, then you're pushing your luck. There are plenty of times when I'd expect roaming to kick in, but it doesn't and I just get no service.:( I can go to San Francisco or Chicago (from Boston) and get roaming no problem, but to go to the town 10 miles away where my in-laws live, I get nothing. Also, I think the "no contract" thing is no longer relevant. It's never been a question for me because I assume I was grandfathered in from Omnipoint, but I was recently told that T-Mobile has contracts for new customers.
That's my two cents. My wife was on Verizon when we got married but I switched her over to the T-Mobile family plan, but that was primarily for consistency in paying the bills, not because there was anything about Verizon that I didn't like. (Ok, their web site's a little weak.)
Who needs this? As one poster put it, isnt the path the only real piece of meta data you need to find a file? Think about mom and dad. What do they want to know? "Where are the christmas pictures of the baby from last year?" "What happened to that email I sent my brother last week?" "Where's the latest copy of my resume?" and so on. Natural language aside, these are all metadata-type queries (mostly dealing with time and filetype data, both of which can be extracted without any additional effort by the user). I think that if such a system of searching files is ever perfected, we'd have a serious killer app on our hands. Isn't this part of what the "semantic web" is all about? Isn't it frustrating to everybody that even the best search engine in the world still can't understand "find me all books whose author is mark twain"? It seems like a logical progression to expect that. Just like most of us aren't searching the web for *pages*, but rather particular *informatin* on those pages, I think that Joe User doesn't care about looking for *files*, but rather the information contained in those files. Thus it's only reasonable that if you give a user a way of easily describing those files by something more than just a filepath, that it will then be easier to find the information later.
When I've talked to people about career choice, I say it comes down to three things: Do you love it? Are you good at it? And can you make a living at it?
The ratio of importance of the three is a personal decision. Many people want to follow the arts, be it singing, painting, writing, or whatever. They love it. They might even find that they're good at it. It's that whole "make a living at it" thing that's the deal breaker for lots of people. There's a whole different group who might love it, but just plain stink at it. On the other hand, there are many people in the world who look *only* at the third one and say "Well, I only need to be as good at it as the next guy, and who cares if I love it, because I love the money I make."
One way to win this game is to work on your own definition of the first thing. For instance, many geeks out there say "I love video games, therefore my dream job is to hack video games." Well, hey, more power to you if you find your dream job, but you're setting your sights pretty narrow. Personally I define my own "passion" more like this -- "I love existing at the place where people and technology meet." It doesn't matter if you don't really know what I mean, or want to debate it with me -- I know what I mean. And, with that definition working for me, I can be happy coding for the web, or teaching night school, or writing a text book on technology X, or convincing a client to buy a new technology product...and so on.
I was going to write something in a different post about having to overcome the hurdle of "giving it all up in order to find happiness", but I think that's been done to death. At this point in my life I'm in my mid 30's, a nice house, and a wife who has the luxury of being able to stay at home with our 6month old daughter. With that life comes a variety of responsibilities, both fiscal as well as time (i can't just say "Going to the office to hack for 12 hours, honey! Take care of the baby!"). Do I love the job I have right now? Not as much as I used to. Will I give everything up to go start my own company and risk everything in order to do something I really do love? Nope. I'll just keep meditating on what it is that I really want out of my career and be on the lookout for the close matches.
ROTT was the first game I experienced where a bad guy could go down but only be wounded, and get back up again. I remember that as a real universe-changing experience. Shoot shoot shoot, bad guy goes down, walk forward into room....oh shit! Guy gets up! WHAT THE FUCK!? Truly a panic-inducing moment.
I think popular thought on burn in was that rotating screen savers made the problem go away because the pattern never stayed in one place. This is why ATM's usually suffer from the problem, because they show the same screen all day long.
My company recently went over to big-brother-esque screen savers that rotate through the company mission statement. The funny thing is that they decided to put the company logo in the exact same spot on every slide, so it's now burned into my screen. Lovely.
I read "Demolished Man" a few months ago. One of the major plot points involves the bad guy hiding his bad thoughts from the thought readers by covering it with that jingle.
The idea is also used similarly in "The Truth Machine", a lesser known more recent novel about a boy genius who perfects the lie detector. Of course, he kills somebody in the process, otherwise there would be no plot:). So he memorizes that "O Captain my captain" poem and uses it as a trigger in the device to let him slip by when the machine is pointed at him.
A company called Ceiva makes one for $150, but it is the one that only has a modem, no memory card or ethernet. I am assuming that the frame itself is a loss leader to the subscription service. But it gives me hope that the screen is not that outrageous a cost.
Kodak makes one similar to what I'm thinking of, for $350. So that could be considered a straightforward competitor and a good market price point. Make it cheaper.
I looked everywhere for these things for christmas, but of the few that exist, most are over $400. I think this is the most popular thing I've seen on slashdot for geeks to make from scratch (not counting beowulf clusters yadda yadda). All you really need is a cheap source for a flat panel display. Here, I'll give you the whole plan, since my boss and I just discussed this an hour ago:
Must have a memory card as primary source. Networking optional. Given the potential audience for the thing, it's must more likely that they will have access to a digital camera (such as an uncle who comes by on christmas to take pictures) than a network source (who wants a picture frame that ties up the phone line?)
Simple battery source w/AC backup. Normally the thing should plug into the wall, like when it is standing up on the mantle. But you should be able eto take it down and sit it in your lap when people come over and you want to walk through it like an album.
No syncing or USB. Why? Make it a straight player. Put the card in, play the pictures. Done. Change the card, change the pictures.
The whole thing can be operated with three buttons, BACK, PAUSE/PLAY, and NEXT. Normally it runs in random slide show mode, unless you hit PAUSE to freeze the picture you like. You can then hit BACK/NEXT to move around like pages of an album. Press PAUSE/PLAY again to return to slide show mode.
That's IT for options. Sure, you could add stuff like deleting pictures from the card, or adding captions, or doing random swipe transitions between pictures. But if it pushes the price point too high, no one will care. You could do all those things with a computer and THEN give the flash card to gramma to put on the mantle.
Get the price point down under $150 and you'd sell a million of em. Grammie won't necessarily buy one but Uncle Bill with the digital camera will get her one for Christmas, and he'll also get his wife one so that she can see the pictures in the living room instead of on the computer, and they'll send one to their boy Tommy off at college (who will load his up with porn and take it to classes when he is bored)...
If you actually do it, send me a couple of free ones for Grammie and Uncle Bill.
You can do conditional logic in FSM's (my statement was a little too broad), you just have to plan it out ahead of time. Base it on what you know. The only communication you have with N-1 or N+1 is the pulse they send you. As far as I know, an FSM isn't even allowed to have a state called "Waiting for pulse" which then turns into a "If pulse is type 1 go here, else go here" node. Instead you have to put yourself into "Waiting for pulse type 2" state, and then when a pulse comes in, you have toa ssume that's what you got. So you have to know ahead of time what state to put yourself in, you can't be surprised by anything.
This is why this is such a good problem -- because a giant FSM has the overlying assumption that there are no unknowns, but the problem definition seems to have an unknown in N. It's not really unknown once the system is running, though. The problem is just to build the smaller pieces in such a way that when stuck together, they work correctly regardless of what N is. That's different from saying "they work correctly *because* they know what N is, or can otherwise predict it."
Finite state machines are not allowed to have counters, or do conditional logic (you need a Turing machine for that).
At least, that is a condition I understood to be correct in the problem. Otherwise you're right, it is a little easy.
This is probably off topic, but I just got off the phone with somebody talking about MVC. In my experience thus far, MVC often falls victim to "Yeah, it's a good pattern in theory, but in implementation it's going to make my life harder by forcing me to separate things that I don't technically have to separate." When people create their own stuff from scratch I think that they often get close to MVC but don't fully realize it. We had this problem with Struts in our platform. We have a homegrown forms library on top of a proprietary app server. When the time came to rewrite it in open source we started by looking at Struts and decided that Struts added too much complexity, that we could port what we had more directly and get running faster. Of course, after doing that, we all knew that Struts was where we wanted to be long term so we started designing a plan for getting it in there.
Random MVC joke. Saw a cartoon in a Java mag once where a project manager is saying to his engineers, "For this part of the user interface we can either go with a Swing applet, or ActiveX control." Engineers all chant "Swing!Swing!Swing!" Project manager says, "If we go with Swing, it will require substantial work with JTree." Engineers all chant "ActiveX! ActiveX! ActiveX!"
One day I came home from work to discover that Tivo had spent the night recording game shows. Like 10 of them. I have no clue why. I think it was bored and decided to try something new.
A phone is for talking to someone else. Simple concept, simple operation (with additional features). What does a computer do? You cannot answer that with a single answer. I avoided the computer/phone analogy for that reason.
You're starting with the premise that people want a computer, and defending the fact that the ideal computer should do many things, which I personally agree with. The thing is, I'm taking the stance that people want to be able to do X, Y and Z and don't really care about general purpose devices. More specifically, they only care about general purpose devices to the point where it saves them money and they can buy one thing that will do several functions instead of buying several things.
Remember when the big selling point on computers was using word processors to write letters? Or to keep recipes in? Do you know anybody that did that? I don't. That was when computing was "Here's a solution looking for a problem."
Now look at email, or chat (which, to your original point, "is for talking to someone else. Simple concept, simple operation"). People indeed said "Yes, I want to do that." I don't think that email stations failed because the concept was bad, but rather their positioning in the market sucked (i.e. they were too expensive for what they offered). I think I have a relative or two who still uses WebTV, by the way.
But then, I'm not arguing that any given model must work in the abstract -- if the audience doesn't want it, we try another one. Thus far the general purpose computer works, you're right. Good. Keep it. But who says we've perfected it?
Here's a view of an ideal machine: turn it on, it instantly boots up to a main menu that says "Email", "Web", Phone", "Other". If you press or say Email (forget clicking), for all intents and purposes your general purpose computer is now an email station for this session. But if you say "Other" then you fall through to a development workstation or something else. See what I'm getting at? Maybe there's a next level we can take general purpose computers to that will bridge the gap between simplistic devices and complex ones.
(Coming full circle, Gelernter actually describes computers in his book as virtual machines, because you can make them into any other machine depending on what software you put in there. The disconnect comes due to the fact that our paradigm says "You are running app X on op sys Y on computer hardware Z" rather than "You are running the email machine" and having the rest be irrelevant to the user.
Back to Gelernter's concept of machine beauty. As engineers we don't see simplicity the same way that mere mortals do. The question is, do you care? Some don't. Some say "technology is for making my own life easier." That's ok. Personally that's not my philosophy. I think the bigger market is always in getting Joe Nobody to use your product, because there will always be 100x as many of him as there are of me. And the only way to get the everyday user to adopt your technology is to make it simple yet powerful. I can't believe that anyone thinks that Windows or Linux are "it".
Again, computers are complex machines, and are configurable. There is a reason there are many variations of programs out there, because none of them satisfy everyone's requirements.
But yet you can't say that of, say, a telephone. Sure, they have extra features, but go to any phone in the world and the general concept of pick up, get tone, dial numbers 0-9, still pretty much works. I know people that still forget to hit "send" on the cell phone. Why? Because you never had to do that before. It's a new thing, it made the concept of dialing the phone more complex. But at the same time it added the ability to backup and correct mistakes, something most traditional phones never had.
You point out that kids can grasp the mouse -- I agree. But yet you have no idea whether you're expected to click or doubleclick until you know what the app is. I still have to tell my wife "Click that icon. Again. Doubleclick." because the words are meaningless to her. She doesn't know *why* sometimes you click once and sometimes you click twice (and I challenge anybody to give me a universal rule for that one). And forget it when you doubleclick too slow and accidentally move the mouse in between? And she gets into rename mode? Oy. Let's not even talk about "right click", since she's left handed.
Simplicity comes when you find opportunity to say "this is the way it works. Always." People can understand that. We geeks have this Utopian vision in mind where everything at our fingertips is infinitely customizable, but where did we get that? I don't have 12 different ways of playing media on my television, but I'm not whining about it. My car's transmission comes in automatic or manual. I'm thankful for that choice, I'm not encouraging people to come up with more choices for me. Sometimes you just settle with what you're given. If it's really *that* bad, another choice will almost always surface. But if the existing choices work for most users in most cases, why keep adding new choices unless you're demonstrating that they're better?
The past? Idiot. Idiot! Fool. If we don't look at our past and learn from it, we are gonna repeat it, and make the same damn mistakes in the future.
The MS trial was about business and politics. From a technology standpoint it was, indeed, pointless. One of the key points was whether it's ok to bundle an internet browser in the OS. If that is the thing to do logically from a technology standpoint, somebody should do it and move on. Even the distinction between the two is a pointless one to make, technologically speaking. It ground you in the concepts of "this is an OS, these are the functions of an OS...this is an app, these are the functions of an app...." when in reality, technology should be free to stand all that on its head if it makes sense.
And how is the OS irrelevant? Maybe to him it is, and to the home user
I think that was his point -- that it *should* be irrelevant to the user, but isn't.
I just recently read his book "Machine Beauty" which had a great premise that any geek will understand -- that technical/machine/engineering/science can be just as beautiful as any piece of art. He goes on to define machine beauty as "power through simplicity" and cites examples of recursion, object oriented programming (in concept, not a specific language), and the Turing Machine as good examples. Much of the book is about why Windows won out over the Mac, even though the Mac had more beauty. (In short summary, his argument is that people flat out did not trust the beauty of the Mac, they *wanted* their machines to be scary and complex, and thus Windows actually made them feel better about using the computer.)
The thing about his style is that he seems to believe that the way to get people to listen to him is to say something radical that can be wildly misinterpreted, and then get on the soapbox. He's also well known for saying things like the entire educational system in this country sucks and has to be rebuilt from scratch. So it's no surprise to me that he says the OS is irrelevant. In theory it's his way of getting people to at least look at their assumptions and question them. I mean, come on, how many people do you run into every day that tell you "Yes, I agree, Windows sucks, but why fight it?" WHY FIGHT IT? Because it sucks. Gelernter's point is that you should always be on the quest for the "powerful yet simple" solution to the problem.
In a rather interesting chapter of the book, he offers a variety of drawings for new desks. After all, who said that the traditional setup is the best one? So he creates a variety of stacks, slants, and other combinations that might work better for people.
I think the OS *should* be irrelevant. Awareness of it makes things complicated. Imagine if the rules of a Turing machine were different depending on what computer you ran it on, and on some computers its rules just didn't hold at all. Computers will be simpler when somebody can just say "Email" and not have to worry about Outlook, or POP, or any of that nonsense. That's my two bits.
duane, listening to old dr. dobbs mp3's he found referenced on slashdot last week
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, sitting on couch, feet on coffee table, Thinkpad on lap (wireless, but AC powered). Tivo remote to left (go Tennessee), wife talking on phone to right. Glass of KoolAid on end table. Sometimes I opt for a lap desk, one of those hard flat surfaces attached to a pillow. Primary reason? To avoid toasting my crotch. Seriously, I mean how can they call this thing a laptop if actually keeping it on your lap from crisping your bits? Yeouch. Duane
Guy I work with who has 3 boys gave me this odd tip. Even if you're required to use all 4 wheels, just set them up so that only 3 touch the ground. He said he gets surprisingly good results without the extra friction/drag from the unneeded wheel. I would expect that he weights heavily to the middle/front so that the car's not constantly shifting its weight down onto the extra wheel.
If somebody could tell me a way of optimizing this exchange, I'd love it. Simply getting big lab space isn't really an option -- in the one lab we do have the tables are so small that you can't even fit the keyboard in front of the monitor and often end up with it next to, or in your lap anyway.
Compare this to the boss I had that told me I wasn't allowed to call a variable "temp" (for temperature), because other programmers on the team might misunderstand and think that's a temporary variable.
Pro: $69.95 gets me the family plan, which is up to 5 phones sharing 800 minutes however we see fit. For small/normal family usage (i.e. no business, no teenagers) that's fine for us. An extra $3/month gives me email and net. There's a fair variety of phones available, most of which have the customizable ring tones and all the usual nonsense. Apparently they even have picture phones available. AND, I like their web site, where you can do everything from pay your bill to check your email to see a fullpage version of the customized content that's normally delivered to your phone (i.e. sports scores, horoscope,local weather, and so on).
They also have a variety of internet device options, if you want to go that route. There are a couple of Wince devices that are T-Mobile branded, but I can't anything about them one way or the other.
Con: Coverage sucks. If you're not very near a major highway, then you're pushing your luck. There are plenty of times when I'd expect roaming to kick in, but it doesn't and I just get no service. :( I can go to San Francisco or Chicago (from Boston) and get roaming no problem, but to go to the town 10 miles away where my in-laws live, I get nothing. Also, I think the "no contract" thing is no longer relevant. It's never been a question for me because I assume I was grandfathered in from Omnipoint, but I was recently told that T-Mobile has contracts for new customers.
That's my two cents. My wife was on Verizon when we got married but I switched her over to the T-Mobile family plan, but that was primarily for consistency in paying the bills, not because there was anything about Verizon that I didn't like. (Ok, their web site's a little weak.)
Who needs this? As one poster put it, isnt the path the only real piece of meta data you need to find a file? Think about mom and dad. What do they want to know? "Where are the christmas pictures of the baby from last year?" "What happened to that email I sent my brother last week?" "Where's the latest copy of my resume?" and so on. Natural language aside, these are all metadata-type queries (mostly dealing with time and filetype data, both of which can be extracted without any additional effort by the user). I think that if such a system of searching files is ever perfected, we'd have a serious killer app on our hands. Isn't this part of what the "semantic web" is all about? Isn't it frustrating to everybody that even the best search engine in the world still can't understand "find me all books whose author is mark twain"? It seems like a logical progression to expect that. Just like most of us aren't searching the web for *pages*, but rather particular *informatin* on those pages, I think that Joe User doesn't care about looking for *files*, but rather the information contained in those files. Thus it's only reasonable that if you give a user a way of easily describing those files by something more than just a filepath, that it will then be easier to find the information later.
The ratio of importance of the three is a personal decision. Many people want to follow the arts, be it singing, painting, writing, or whatever. They love it. They might even find that they're good at it. It's that whole "make a living at it" thing that's the deal breaker for lots of people. There's a whole different group who might love it, but just plain stink at it. On the other hand, there are many people in the world who look *only* at the third one and say "Well, I only need to be as good at it as the next guy, and who cares if I love it, because I love the money I make."
One way to win this game is to work on your own definition of the first thing. For instance, many geeks out there say "I love video games, therefore my dream job is to hack video games." Well, hey, more power to you if you find your dream job, but you're setting your sights pretty narrow. Personally I define my own "passion" more like this -- "I love existing at the place where people and technology meet." It doesn't matter if you don't really know what I mean, or want to debate it with me -- I know what I mean. And, with that definition working for me, I can be happy coding for the web, or teaching night school, or writing a text book on technology X, or convincing a client to buy a new technology product...and so on.
I was going to write something in a different post about having to overcome the hurdle of "giving it all up in order to find happiness", but I think that's been done to death. At this point in my life I'm in my mid 30's, a nice house, and a wife who has the luxury of being able to stay at home with our 6month old daughter. With that life comes a variety of responsibilities, both fiscal as well as time (i can't just say "Going to the office to hack for 12 hours, honey! Take care of the baby!"). Do I love the job I have right now? Not as much as I used to. Will I give everything up to go start my own company and risk everything in order to do something I really do love? Nope. I'll just keep meditating on what it is that I really want out of my career and be on the lookout for the close matches.
ROTT was the first game I experienced where a bad guy could go down but only be wounded, and get back up again. I remember that as a real universe-changing experience. Shoot shoot shoot, bad guy goes down, walk forward into room....oh shit! Guy gets up! WHAT THE FUCK!? Truly a panic-inducing moment.
My company recently went over to big-brother-esque screen savers that rotate through the company mission statement. The funny thing is that they decided to put the company logo in the exact same spot on every slide, so it's now burned into my screen. Lovely.
Skip the stupid final. What kind of geek are you?
The idea is also used similarly in "The Truth Machine", a lesser known more recent novel about a boy genius who perfects the lie detector. Of course, he kills somebody in the process, otherwise there would be no plot :). So he memorizes that "O Captain my captain" poem and uses it as a trigger in the device to let him slip by when the machine is pointed at him.
Kodak makes one similar to what I'm thinking of, for $350. So that could be considered a straightforward competitor and a good market price point. Make it cheaper.
- Must have a memory card as primary source. Networking optional. Given the potential audience for the thing, it's must more likely that they will have access to a digital camera (such as an uncle who comes by on christmas to take pictures) than a network source (who wants a picture frame that ties up the phone line?)
- Simple battery source w/AC backup. Normally the thing should plug into the wall, like when it is standing up on the mantle. But you should be able eto take it down and sit it in your lap when people come over and you want to walk through it like an album.
- No syncing or USB. Why? Make it a straight player. Put the card in, play the pictures. Done. Change the card, change the pictures.
- The whole thing can be operated with three buttons, BACK, PAUSE/PLAY, and NEXT. Normally it runs in random slide show mode, unless you hit PAUSE to freeze the picture you like. You can then hit BACK/NEXT to move around like pages of an album. Press PAUSE/PLAY again to return to slide show mode.
- That's IT for options. Sure, you could add stuff like deleting pictures from the card, or adding captions, or doing random swipe transitions between pictures. But if it pushes the price point too high, no one will care. You could do all those things with a computer and THEN give the flash card to gramma to put on the mantle.
Get the price point down under $150 and you'd sell a million of em. Grammie won't necessarily buy one but Uncle Bill with the digital camera will get her one for Christmas, and he'll also get his wife one so that she can see the pictures in the living room instead of on the computer, and they'll send one to their boy Tommy off at college (who will load his up with porn and take it to classes when he is bored)...If you actually do it, send me a couple of free ones for Grammie and Uncle Bill.
The Windows license?
:)!
This is why this is such a good problem -- because a giant FSM has the overlying assumption that there are no unknowns, but the problem definition seems to have an unknown in N. It's not really unknown once the system is running, though. The problem is just to build the smaller pieces in such a way that when stuck together, they work correctly regardless of what N is. That's different from saying "they work correctly *because* they know what N is, or can otherwise predict it."
:)
Finite state machines are not allowed to have counters, or do conditional logic (you need a Turing machine for that). At least, that is a condition I understood to be correct in the problem. Otherwise you're right, it is a little easy.
Random MVC joke. Saw a cartoon in a Java mag once where a project manager is saying to his engineers, "For this part of the user interface we can either go with a Swing applet, or ActiveX control." Engineers all chant "Swing!Swing!Swing!" Project manager says, "If we go with Swing, it will require substantial work with JTree." Engineers all chant "ActiveX! ActiveX! ActiveX!"
:) Duane
How about the entire Baen library on CD? Priced right!
www.kleinbottle.com is pretty cool, but I'm sure it's too expensive for what you want to do.
One day I came home from work to discover that Tivo had spent the night recording game shows. Like 10 of them. I have no clue why. I think it was bored and decided to try something new.
You're starting with the premise that people want a computer, and defending the fact that the ideal computer should do many things, which I personally agree with. The thing is, I'm taking the stance that people want to be able to do X, Y and Z and don't really care about general purpose devices. More specifically, they only care about general purpose devices to the point where it saves them money and they can buy one thing that will do several functions instead of buying several things. Remember when the big selling point on computers was using word processors to write letters? Or to keep recipes in? Do you know anybody that did that? I don't. That was when computing was "Here's a solution looking for a problem."
Now look at email, or chat (which, to your original point, "is for talking to someone else. Simple concept, simple operation"). People indeed said "Yes, I want to do that." I don't think that email stations failed because the concept was bad, but rather their positioning in the market sucked (i.e. they were too expensive for what they offered). I think I have a relative or two who still uses WebTV, by the way.
But then, I'm not arguing that any given model must work in the abstract -- if the audience doesn't want it, we try another one. Thus far the general purpose computer works, you're right. Good. Keep it. But who says we've perfected it? Here's a view of an ideal machine: turn it on, it instantly boots up to a main menu that says "Email", "Web", Phone", "Other". If you press or say Email (forget clicking), for all intents and purposes your general purpose computer is now an email station for this session. But if you say "Other" then you fall through to a development workstation or something else. See what I'm getting at? Maybe there's a next level we can take general purpose computers to that will bridge the gap between simplistic devices and complex ones. (Coming full circle, Gelernter actually describes computers in his book as virtual machines, because you can make them into any other machine depending on what software you put in there. The disconnect comes due to the fact that our paradigm says "You are running app X on op sys Y on computer hardware Z" rather than "You are running the email machine" and having the rest be irrelevant to the user.
Back to Gelernter's concept of machine beauty. As engineers we don't see simplicity the same way that mere mortals do. The question is, do you care? Some don't. Some say "technology is for making my own life easier." That's ok. Personally that's not my philosophy. I think the bigger market is always in getting Joe Nobody to use your product, because there will always be 100x as many of him as there are of me. And the only way to get the everyday user to adopt your technology is to make it simple yet powerful. I can't believe that anyone thinks that Windows or Linux are "it".
Duane
You point out that kids can grasp the mouse -- I agree. But yet you have no idea whether you're expected to click or doubleclick until you know what the app is. I still have to tell my wife "Click that icon. Again. Doubleclick." because the words are meaningless to her. She doesn't know *why* sometimes you click once and sometimes you click twice (and I challenge anybody to give me a universal rule for that one). And forget it when you doubleclick too slow and accidentally move the mouse in between? And she gets into rename mode? Oy. Let's not even talk about "right click", since she's left handed.
Simplicity comes when you find opportunity to say "this is the way it works. Always." People can understand that. We geeks have this Utopian vision in mind where everything at our fingertips is infinitely customizable, but where did we get that? I don't have 12 different ways of playing media on my television, but I'm not whining about it. My car's transmission comes in automatic or manual. I'm thankful for that choice, I'm not encouraging people to come up with more choices for me. Sometimes you just settle with what you're given. If it's really *that* bad, another choice will almost always surface. But if the existing choices work for most users in most cases, why keep adding new choices unless you're demonstrating that they're better?
The MS trial was about business and politics. From a technology standpoint it was, indeed, pointless. One of the key points was whether it's ok to bundle an internet browser in the OS. If that is the thing to do logically from a technology standpoint, somebody should do it and move on. Even the distinction between the two is a pointless one to make, technologically speaking. It ground you in the concepts of "this is an OS, these are the functions of an OS...this is an app, these are the functions of an app...." when in reality, technology should be free to stand all that on its head if it makes sense.
And how is the OS irrelevant? Maybe to him it is, and to the home user
I think that was his point -- that it *should* be irrelevant to the user, but isn't.
The thing about his style is that he seems to believe that the way to get people to listen to him is to say something radical that can be wildly misinterpreted, and then get on the soapbox. He's also well known for saying things like the entire educational system in this country sucks and has to be rebuilt from scratch. So it's no surprise to me that he says the OS is irrelevant. In theory it's his way of getting people to at least look at their assumptions and question them. I mean, come on, how many people do you run into every day that tell you "Yes, I agree, Windows sucks, but why fight it?" WHY FIGHT IT? Because it sucks. Gelernter's point is that you should always be on the quest for the "powerful yet simple" solution to the problem.
In a rather interesting chapter of the book, he offers a variety of drawings for new desks. After all, who said that the traditional setup is the best one? So he creates a variety of stacks, slants, and other combinations that might work better for people.
I think the OS *should* be irrelevant. Awareness of it makes things complicated. Imagine if the rules of a Turing machine were different depending on what computer you ran it on, and on some computers its rules just didn't hold at all. Computers will be simpler when somebody can just say "Email" and not have to worry about Outlook, or POP, or any of that nonsense. That's my two bits.
duane, listening to old dr. dobbs mp3's he found referenced on slashdot last week