Something that's been bothering me ever since I was bitten by my first compiler bug several decades ago. (And couldn't get the bug acknowledged by the vendor because I couldn't get it to occur in a short code fragment).
WHY does every vendor have optimization on by default all the time? Optimization routines in compilers are the most likely places to have bugs, and they are often extraordinarily subtle bugs that are hard to reproduce. I have personally encountered bugs in which the insertion of deletion of a COMMENT affected the code, and certainly many of us have encountered bugs that could not be demonstrated in a short fragment because they only occurred when things got deeply nested and the compiler ran out of temporary registers.
Optimization also interferes with debuggers. I know that YOU are capable of doing up-front planning and writing bug-free code, but _I_ am not, and forcing me to recompile in order to use the debugger is one more hurdle in the way of getting the bugs out of the code.
Why isn't optimization off by default, and turned on only in specific modules, or certain SECTIONS of the code (with pragmas)--those specific sections that can be demonstrated to be time-critical?
The authors obsess over UI and user-mental-model issues, which to be sure are real enough. But those are not the biggest issues with the BACK button.
First, an extraordinary number of commercial web sites misbehave when the back button is used, probably due to handling of posted form data, passing along nontransient data as strings in URLS, etc. etc. Try a Google search on the exact phrase "Do not use your browser's back button" for examples of a few thousand sites that at least WARN you of problems. For every one that does, there are many that do not. The problems can be very serious, including double-shipped items, items ordered but never shipped, incorrect charges, etc.
Second, the back button seems to painfully and slowly reload pages over the Net. This may be a function of cache settings, but this is a function that should return to a locally cached state by default. Possible even a cached bitmap... (Yes, I know it would be difficult to get this just right without increasing the amount of function misbehavior).
It's actually a famous puzzle. You're shown a diagram of a three by three array of dots. You're given a pencil and asked to draw four straight lines that will cross every one of the dots without lifting your pencil from the paper.
When properly presented, there's plenty of white space around the array of dots, but people tend to only consider lines that lie within an imaginary square bounding the dots. That is, they assume that there's an unstated condition that the lines have to stay "within the box." The solution, of course, involves lines that extend beyond the boundaries of the box.
Not that it matters, but that's the original referent of the phrase. To solve this particularly puzzle, you need to think outside the box.
It's a goofy idea. Until the electrical code and industry standards define the signal-transmission characteristics for AC power lines, this will be one of these "it works except when it doesn't" deals. X-10 barely works inside one house. Carrier-current AM radio used to be popular on campuses during the fifties: it didn't really work.
Some of the circuits in my house are still the kind in which the current is carried by two separate insulated wires about a foot a part, mounted on insulated standoffs. I think this kind of wiring was common in the twenties. More wiring has been added, but nobody every removes old wiring that's working perfectly well.
Even DSL is iffy and THAT'S on wires that are DESIGNED to carry signals.
What we need is more standardization and better engineering, not less.
None of the explanations put forward so far (it's an encryption device... it's an IFF device, etc.) would explain WHY NASA won't say what it is.
What is there about "it's an encryption device and we're afraid that it would compromise security if it fell into the wrong hands" that is any MORE dangerous than saying "we're conducting a very, very, very intense search for it and we won't tell you what it is?"
The assumption is that if the Bad Guys don't know what it is they won't be interested in looking for it????
It's not like saying "It's a Mark XIV Syzygy Convolver just like the ones we use on our missiles--and Moammar Khaddafi has an outstanding offer of one hundred million dinars to the first person who gets him one in working condition."
Jack London, "The Shadow and the Flash"
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There's an amusing story by Jack ("Call of the Wild") London entitled "The Shadow and the Flash." It's one of about a dozen stories he wrote that would be categorized as science fiction had the genre existed then.
Two competitive brothers both seek the secret of personal invisibility via divergent, and completely bogus methods. One of them finds some way to make his entire body perfectly transparent (!) in the belief the perfect transparency equals invisibility, and apparently gets his index of refraction close to unity but still has some dispersion, because although he is invisible, he produces telltale rainbow-colored flashes.
The other one searches for a perfect black, in the even stranger belief that an object covered in perfect black reflects no light and is therefore invisible. According to the story, this works except that, of course, he casts a shadow--and when he's present, even when not casting a shadow his presence creates an ill-defined sense of darkness or gloom.
Drives fail because the interactions of the marketplace and the technology seem to have equilibrated on drives that are cheap and unreliable. The failures occur for a variety of reasons. Some are known to the manufacturer but won't be disclosed to you. Some are _discovered_ by the manufacturer (bad batches of parts) and _certainly_ won't be disclosed to you until so many fail that it becomes a public scandal.
From the end-user's point of view, it's all random and there's not much that can be done about it.
You can't convince me that a well-engineered drive has such a thin margin of safety that it will have a long life at 70 degrees and fail frequently at 80 degrees. (If temperature is that much MORE critical for drives than for other components, then why don't PC's have better cooling systems and overtemperature warnings? And why are they designed to let drives be mounted in close proximity to each other?)
You can't convince me that a drive that is doing so many seeks that it is making fizzing, buzzing head-seeking noises most of the day, creating its OWN vibrations) is going to drop dead because the fan next to it isn't vibration-free.
Because the mind abhors a knowledge vacuum, we all create our own superstitions about drive life. OUR drives won't fail because WE (pick one) a) keep our systems powered 24 hours a day to prevent power-on stress, b) religiously turn off our systems when not in use to keep down operating hours, c) open the case and vacuum out dust and clean air filters every 60 days, d) NEVER open the case because it's human handling that does the mischief, etc. etc.
Don't blame the victim. Drives just fail and it's not your fault.
...Something that could assemble stock phrases and paragraphs in different orders, so as to generate thousands of emails that all make the same point, but with creative variations in wording so that it doesn't look like an organized letter-writing campaign?
With, of course, creative but convincing variations in the writer's name and email address.
It shouldn't be much harder than Eliza, or one of those joke "buzzword generation" tables where you select a phrase from each of three columns....
... killed off by FM. And then all radio died, killed off by television. And then both the movies and television were killed off by people home-taping movies on their VCR's. And then books died, killed off by eBooks and photocopiers.
Oh, wait, none of that happened, did it?
The existing recording industry power structure may be in for a rough time, and the Deccas and Polygrams and Capitols may join the likes of Studebaker and Eastern Airlines and Crossley, but people will be recording CD's and selling them to other people for quite some time.
Java applications I've SEEN are unimpressive...
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 1, Informative
We have an OEM who delivers certain applications to us that are developed in Java. These are ordinary-looking, double-clickable Windows and Mac applications. What can I say? There's nothing TERRIBLY wrong with them, but they're slow to start up, clunky-feeling, sometimes don't refresh the screen properly, have various minor UI inconsistencies with the underlying platform, and so on. They simply do not look or feel like first-class native applications.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that theoretically these problems could all be solved, and that no doubt it's because they're not using version the latest version X.0165 of Java GUI technology flavor Y... and it's all Microsoft's fault... and so forth......but, still, in practice the actual cross-platform Java applications I've seen are very unimpressive and are not good advertisements for Java as a cross-platform GUI development methodology.
And I still experience a feeling of dread whenever I go to a web page and see "Applet loading..."
It's bad enough that PC users are seeing their neighbor's keystrokes on their own screen due to imperfectly-designed wireless keyboards... it's bad enough that Fast Lane toll transponders are going dead because certain digital cell phones activate them and run down the batteries...
The possible unintended consequences of allowing components within an automobile to perform wireless communication boggle the mind. Backseat driving is one thing... accidentally driving a car next to you in an adjacent lane is another.
When Palladium was announced, Microsoft was at great pains to say, over and over, that Palladium had nothing to do with digital restrictions management. For example, here's Microsoft interviewing Microsoft on the topic:
"PressPass: How will Palladium differ from digital rights management (DRM)? Manferdelli: First off, Palladium will not require DRM, and DRM will not require Palladium. Palladium is a great complementary technology to the DRM solutions of tomorrow, but the two are separate technologies."
But MSNBC certainly thinks Palladium IS DRM:
"Microsoft has invested $500 million in digital rights management, or DRM, for music, Fester said....Microsoft is making a concerted push into DRM, a hotly contested new field.... Micrososft has discussed plans for an upcoming operating system, code-named 'Palladium,' that will seek to put user controls on all bits of information they store on a computer document, from medical records to billing information."
...the partitioning of computer environments into applications, OS, "drivers," "libraries," etc. etc. is arbitrary, cultural, traditional, etc. To some extent it's also based on modularity considerations, and to some extent on marketing/commercial considerations. There's no fundamental logic to "the way things are."
A few decades ago, MANY environments blurred the distinction between OS and language: FORTH, MUMPS, SMALLTALK, and, indeed, most early versions of BASIC, to name four.
The traditional textbook discussion of an OS ("provides four interfaces, to the filesystem, to devices, to applications, and to users") is just a discussion of what IBM evolved in the sixties or thereabouts.
Incidentally, the very name "operating system" indicates the original rationale and function of these pieces of software. They were intended to automate the functions that previously required the manual services of an "operator," thus increasing utilization and decreasing payroll.
Another example of the arbitrariness of the term "OS" is the way in which various applications programs are now considered to somehow be part of the OS. In Digital's glory days, these were sometimes referred to as "CUSPS"--Commonly Used System Programs. Is grep "part" of UNIX? Is Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer, but Windows Explorer--the application that displays directory contents and that "start" button at the bottom of your screen--Windows' graphical "shell") part of Windows?
At one point Apple said Hypercard was "systems software." Perhaps iTunes is "part of" OS X?
As usual, the product spec sheet says nothing about what kinds of digital restrictions management are presently in the product, or might be enabled by future firmware "upgrades."
We really need to lobby our congressional representatives for a law that would require simple, plain-language disclosure of any restrictions that consumers ought to know about. And assurances that the functionality we get when we buy the product will be maintained for the period of time we own the product (and will not vanish in stealth firmware upgrades).
This is at LEAST as important as knowing the true size of a "17 inch" screen.
Whether you favor or oppose DRM, there is no reason in the world why we shouldn't know what we're buying. In fact, the marketplace can't operate properly if we don't.
Plus, it's always possible that "the first of these" will come out running any OS; then the upgrade that is necessary to correct serious bugs will turn out to have the unadvertised side effect of locking out other OS'es; and only then will people notice that it said that might happen in fine-print legalese twenty pages down in the EULA.
There's a lot of precedent for this. (Ask anyone who took advantage of the upgrade deal on their REB1100 eBook device, for example). Its predecessor, the Rocket eBook let you download your own content into the device. The REB1100 was only advertised as allowing the download of purchased content, but actually permitted download of personal content too. Then a "stealth" upgrade removed that feature.
So, if we aren't going to encourage our own students to become scientists and engineers, AND we aren't going to encourage foreign students to become scientists and engineers... yes, I'd say that in a few years we'll be facing a shortage of scientists and engineers.
But it won't matter as long as we have plenty of skillful marketers.
I remember a rudimentary CAD program for the Apple ][+, circa 1982 or 1983. I wish I could remember the name...
I personally first encountered "Undo" on the Mac in 1984. But this CAD program had a function... they didn't call it "commit." I don't remember the exact language they DID use.
The idea was that you never had to worry about making mistakes, because every action you took was tentative, and would be shown to you as a preview before taking effect.
So you'd give a command to draw a line, you'd see the line onscreen, and you could either accept it (in which case it became part of the drawing) or reject it (in which case it disappeared).
The weird thing about all this is that logically, it is exactly equivalent to an "undo" function.
And the even weirder thing is that while an "undo" function feels empowering and liberating... when the exact same function was presented as "tentative action, preview, accept/reject" it felt clumsy and laborious.
There's been some discussion about this in MacFixit.
"Due to a lack of functionality in native Mac Intuit products, several users have purchased the Windows release, and now find themselves unable to complete 2002 tax forms."
Of course, TurboTax always worked fine with Virtual PC until this year. Of course, Intuit gave users no advance warning. Scott Gulbransen of Intuit is quoted as saying "It's not that we don't trust our customers." He then immediately contradicts that by saying "Still, we need to protect our business." He then contradicts THAT by observing "Also, our Mac products do not have product activation... only Windows."
Reminds me of the bad old days of copy protection when users of any computer configuration that was even slightly out of the mainstream would find that copy-protected diskettes wouldn't read properly...
The article refers to "Norwegian laws that protect what a consumer can do with his or her own property."
We need some laws like this in the United States.
Laws that say "I bought it, I own it, it's MINE."
More and more, corporations are attempting to retain control of their products after consumers have purchased them. This is not only unfair to consumers, it is profoundly contrary to the American tradition of property ownership.
(And, yes, I understand the distinction between "purchasing" and "licensing." I object to the imposition of legal fictions that assumes "licensing" in situations where the commonsense reality is that the transaction is a purchase).
--at least, not in the sense of building it the same way, even approximately the same way, as it was before.
Why does anyone think that we would try to rebuild exact copies of any other monument?
Surely the emotional resonance of these monuments comes from the knowledge that they ARE original to the time in which they were built. How could a replica arouse any more genuine feeling than those in Las Vegas or Japan?
Slashdot Mirror
Something that's been bothering me ever since I was bitten by my first compiler bug several decades ago. (And couldn't get the bug acknowledged by the vendor because I couldn't get it to occur in a short code fragment).
WHY does every vendor have optimization on by default all the time? Optimization routines in compilers are the most likely places to have bugs, and they are often extraordinarily subtle bugs that are hard to reproduce. I have personally encountered bugs in which the insertion of deletion of a COMMENT affected the code, and certainly many of us have encountered bugs that could not be demonstrated in a short fragment because they only occurred when things got deeply nested and the compiler ran out of temporary registers.
Optimization also interferes with debuggers. I know that YOU are capable of doing up-front planning and writing bug-free code, but _I_ am not, and forcing me to recompile in order to use the debugger is one more hurdle in the way of getting the bugs out of the code.
Why isn't optimization off by default, and turned on only in specific modules, or certain SECTIONS of the code (with pragmas)--those specific sections that can be demonstrated to be time-critical?
You're right.
(It HADN'T BEEN expected to pass the Senate but apparently they worked out a deal yesterday).
The authors obsess over UI and user-mental-model issues, which to be sure are real enough. But those are not the biggest issues with the BACK button.
First, an extraordinary number of commercial web sites misbehave when the back button is used, probably due to handling of posted form data, passing along nontransient data as strings in URLS, etc. etc. Try a Google search on the exact phrase "Do not use your browser's back button" for examples of a few thousand sites that at least WARN you of problems. For every one that does, there are many that do not. The problems can be very serious, including double-shipped items, items ordered but never shipped, incorrect charges, etc.
Second, the back button seems to painfully and slowly reload pages over the Net. This may be a function of cache settings, but this is a function that should return to a locally cached state by default. Possible even a cached bitmap... (Yes, I know it would be difficult to get this just right without increasing the amount of function misbehavior).
NPR said this morning that it's NOT expected to pass the Senate.
It's actually a famous puzzle. You're shown a diagram of a three by three array of dots. You're given a pencil and asked to draw four straight lines that will cross every one of the dots without lifting your pencil from the paper.
When properly presented, there's plenty of white space around the array of dots, but people tend to only consider lines that lie within an imaginary square bounding the dots. That is, they assume that there's an unstated condition that the lines have to stay "within the box." The solution, of course, involves lines that extend beyond the boundaries of the box.
Not that it matters, but that's the original referent of the phrase. To solve this particularly puzzle, you need to think outside the box.
It's a goofy idea. Until the electrical code and industry standards define the signal-transmission characteristics for AC power lines, this will be one of these "it works except when it doesn't" deals. X-10 barely works inside one house. Carrier-current AM radio used to be popular on campuses during the fifties: it didn't really work.
Some of the circuits in my house are still the kind in which the current is carried by two separate insulated wires about a foot a part, mounted on insulated standoffs. I think this kind of wiring was common in the twenties. More wiring has been added, but nobody every removes old wiring that's working perfectly well.
Even DSL is iffy and THAT'S on wires that are DESIGNED to carry signals.
What we need is more standardization and better engineering, not less.
OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" indeed has subpixel rendering.
It doesn't have "ClearType" because "ClearType" is Microsoft's trademark for their own specific subpixel rendering technology.
If people are indeed complaining about the lack of ClearType in OS X, then Microsoft marketing has won yet again.
None of the explanations put forward so far (it's an encryption device... it's an IFF device, etc.) would explain WHY NASA won't say what it is.
What is there about "it's an encryption device and we're afraid that it would compromise security if it fell into the wrong hands" that is any MORE dangerous than saying "we're conducting a very, very, very intense search for it and we won't tell you what it is?"
The assumption is that if the Bad Guys don't know what it is they won't be interested in looking for it????
It's not like saying "It's a Mark XIV Syzygy Convolver just like the ones we use on our missiles--and Moammar Khaddafi has an outstanding offer of one hundred million dinars to the first person who gets him one in working condition."
There's an amusing story by Jack ("Call of the Wild") London entitled "The Shadow and the Flash." It's one of about a dozen stories he wrote that would be categorized as science fiction had the genre existed then.
Two competitive brothers both seek the secret of personal invisibility via divergent, and completely bogus methods. One of them finds some way to make his entire body perfectly transparent (!) in the belief the perfect transparency equals invisibility, and apparently gets his index of refraction close to unity but still has some dispersion, because although he is invisible, he produces telltale rainbow-colored flashes.
The other one searches for a perfect black, in the even stranger belief that an object covered in perfect black reflects no light and is therefore invisible. According to the story, this works except that, of course, he casts a shadow--and when he's present, even when not casting a shadow his presence creates an ill-defined sense of darkness or gloom.
Drives fail because the interactions of the marketplace and the technology seem to have equilibrated on drives that are cheap and unreliable. The failures occur for a variety of reasons. Some are known to the manufacturer but won't be disclosed to you. Some are _discovered_ by the manufacturer (bad batches of parts) and _certainly_ won't be disclosed to you until so many fail that it becomes a public scandal.
From the end-user's point of view, it's all random and there's not much that can be done about it.
You can't convince me that a well-engineered drive has such a thin margin of safety that it will have a long life at 70 degrees and fail frequently at 80 degrees. (If temperature is that much MORE critical for drives than for other components, then why don't PC's have better cooling systems and overtemperature warnings? And why are they designed to let drives be mounted in close proximity to each other?)
You can't convince me that a drive that is doing so many seeks that it is making fizzing, buzzing head-seeking noises most of the day, creating its OWN vibrations) is going to drop dead because the fan next to it isn't vibration-free.
Because the mind abhors a knowledge vacuum, we all create our own superstitions about drive life. OUR drives won't fail because WE (pick one) a) keep our systems powered 24 hours a day to prevent power-on stress, b) religiously turn off our systems when not in use to keep down operating hours, c) open the case and vacuum out dust and clean air filters every 60 days, d) NEVER open the case because it's human handling that does the mischief, etc. etc.
Don't blame the victim. Drives just fail and it's not your fault.
When I went to athe Moller website and clicked on Purchase Skycar, I got this response:
/purchase was not found on this server.
"Not Found
The requested URL
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.27 Server at www.moller.com Port 80"
I think I'll be watching the eBay auction with interest... and I'm certainly going to check out the feedback the buyer leaves for the seller.
...Something that could assemble stock phrases and paragraphs in different orders, so as to generate thousands of emails that all make the same point, but with creative variations in wording so that it doesn't look like an organized letter-writing campaign?
With, of course, creative but convincing variations in the writer's name and email address.
It shouldn't be much harder than Eliza, or one of those joke "buzzword generation" tables where you select a phrase from each of three columns....
... killed off by FM. And then all radio died, killed off by television. And then both the movies and television were killed off by people home-taping movies on their VCR's. And then books died, killed off by eBooks and photocopiers.
Oh, wait, none of that happened, did it?
The existing recording industry power structure may be in for a rough time, and the Deccas and Polygrams and Capitols may join the likes of Studebaker and Eastern Airlines and Crossley, but people will be recording CD's and selling them to other people for quite some time.
We have an OEM who delivers certain applications to us that are developed in Java. These are ordinary-looking, double-clickable Windows and Mac applications. What can I say? There's nothing TERRIBLY wrong with them, but they're slow to start up, clunky-feeling, sometimes don't refresh the screen properly, have various minor UI inconsistencies with the underlying platform, and so on. They simply do not look or feel like first-class native applications.
...but, still, in practice the actual cross-platform Java applications I've seen are very unimpressive and are not good advertisements for Java as a cross-platform GUI development methodology.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that theoretically these problems could all be solved, and that no doubt it's because they're not using version the latest version X.0165 of Java GUI technology flavor Y... and it's all Microsoft's fault... and so forth...
And I still experience a feeling of dread whenever I go to a web page and see "Applet loading..."
It's bad enough that PC users are seeing their neighbor's keystrokes on their own screen due to imperfectly-designed wireless keyboards... it's bad enough that Fast Lane toll transponders are going dead because certain digital cell phones activate them and run down the batteries...
The possible unintended consequences of allowing components within an automobile to perform wireless communication boggle the mind. Backseat driving is one thing... accidentally driving a car next to you in an adjacent lane is another.
When Palladium was announced, Microsoft was at great pains to say, over and over, that Palladium had nothing to do with digital restrictions management. For example, here's Microsoft interviewing Microsoft on the topic:
"PressPass: How will Palladium differ from digital rights management (DRM)? Manferdelli: First off, Palladium will not require DRM, and DRM will not require Palladium. Palladium is a great complementary technology to the DRM solutions of tomorrow, but the two are separate technologies."
But MSNBC certainly thinks Palladium IS DRM:
"Microsoft has invested $500 million in digital rights management, or DRM, for music, Fester said....Microsoft is making a concerted push into DRM, a hotly contested new field.... Micrososft has discussed plans for an upcoming operating system, code-named 'Palladium,' that will seek to put user controls on all bits of information they store on a computer document, from medical records to billing information."
...the partitioning of computer environments into applications, OS, "drivers," "libraries," etc. etc. is arbitrary, cultural, traditional, etc. To some extent it's also based on modularity considerations, and to some extent on marketing/commercial considerations. There's no fundamental logic to "the way things are."
A few decades ago, MANY environments blurred the distinction between OS and language: FORTH, MUMPS, SMALLTALK, and, indeed, most early versions of BASIC, to name four.
The traditional textbook discussion of an OS ("provides four interfaces, to the filesystem, to devices, to applications, and to users") is just a discussion of what IBM evolved in the sixties or thereabouts.
Incidentally, the very name "operating system" indicates the original rationale and function of these pieces of software. They were intended to automate the functions that previously required the manual services of an "operator," thus increasing utilization and decreasing payroll.
Another example of the arbitrariness of the term "OS" is the way in which various applications programs are now considered to somehow be part of the OS. In Digital's glory days, these were sometimes referred to as "CUSPS"--Commonly Used System Programs. Is grep "part" of UNIX? Is Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer, but Windows Explorer--the application that displays directory contents and that "start" button at the bottom of your screen--Windows' graphical "shell") part of Windows?
At one point Apple said Hypercard was "systems software." Perhaps iTunes is "part of" OS X?
Given that he has an entire website, I find it very odd that Googling on "J. Hutton Pulitzer" returns NO hits, while Googling on "Jovan Hutton Pulitzer" or just "Hutton Pulitzer" returns only one.
Presumably he has a robots.txt file set up, but why wouldn't he want Google to find his site easily?
Googlewhackers: just remember "Hutton Pulitzer"...
As usual, the product spec sheet says nothing about what kinds of digital restrictions management are presently in the product, or might be enabled by future firmware "upgrades."
We really need to lobby our congressional representatives for a law that would require simple, plain-language disclosure of any restrictions that consumers ought to know about. And assurances that the functionality we get when we buy the product will be maintained for the period of time we own the product (and will not vanish in stealth firmware upgrades).
This is at LEAST as important as knowing the true size of a "17 inch" screen.
Whether you favor or oppose DRM, there is no reason in the world why we shouldn't know what we're buying. In fact, the marketplace can't operate properly if we don't.
Plus, it's always possible that "the first of these" will come out running any OS; then the upgrade that is necessary to correct serious bugs will turn out to have the unadvertised side effect of locking out other OS'es; and only then will people notice that it said that might happen in fine-print legalese twenty pages down in the EULA.
There's a lot of precedent for this. (Ask anyone who took advantage of the upgrade deal on their REB1100 eBook device, for example). Its predecessor, the Rocket eBook let you download your own content into the device. The REB1100 was only advertised as allowing the download of purchased content, but actually permitted download of personal content too. Then a "stealth" upgrade removed that feature.
...or, at least, that's the message we're sending by actions like this.
So, if we aren't going to encourage our own students to become scientists and engineers, AND we aren't going to encourage foreign students to become scientists and engineers... yes, I'd say that in a few years we'll be facing a shortage of scientists and engineers.
But it won't matter as long as we have plenty of skillful marketers.
I remember a rudimentary CAD program for the Apple ][+, circa 1982 or 1983. I wish I could remember the name...
I personally first encountered "Undo" on the Mac in 1984. But this CAD program had a function... they didn't call it "commit." I don't remember the exact language they DID use.
The idea was that you never had to worry about making mistakes, because every action you took was tentative, and would be shown to you as a preview before taking effect.
So you'd give a command to draw a line, you'd see the line onscreen, and you could either accept it (in which case it became part of the drawing) or reject it (in which case it disappeared).
The weird thing about all this is that logically, it is exactly equivalent to an "undo" function.
And the even weirder thing is that while an "undo" function feels empowering and liberating... when the exact same function was presented as "tentative action, preview, accept/reject" it felt clumsy and laborious.
To me, anyway.
There's been some discussion about this in MacFixit.
"Due to a lack of functionality in native Mac Intuit products, several users have purchased the Windows release, and now find themselves unable to complete 2002 tax forms."
Of course, TurboTax always worked fine with Virtual PC until this year. Of course, Intuit gave users no advance warning. Scott Gulbransen of Intuit is quoted as saying "It's not that we don't trust our customers." He then immediately contradicts that by saying "Still, we need to protect our business." He then contradicts THAT by observing "Also, our Mac products do not have product activation... only Windows."
Reminds me of the bad old days of copy protection when users of any computer configuration that was even slightly out of the mainstream would find that copy-protected diskettes wouldn't read properly...
The article refers to "Norwegian laws that protect what a consumer can do with his or her own property."
We need some laws like this in the United States.
Laws that say "I bought it, I own it, it's MINE."
More and more, corporations are attempting to retain control of their products after consumers have purchased them. This is not only unfair to consumers, it is profoundly contrary to the American tradition of property ownership.
(And, yes, I understand the distinction between "purchasing" and "licensing." I object to the imposition of legal fictions that assumes "licensing" in situations where the commonsense reality is that the transaction is a purchase).
--at least, not in the sense of building it the same way, even approximately the same way, as it was before.
Why does anyone think that we would try to rebuild exact copies of any other monument?
Surely the emotional resonance of these monuments comes from the knowledge that they ARE original to the time in which they were built. How could a replica arouse any more genuine feeling than those in Las Vegas or Japan?