Indeed... WHERE does Matthew Rothenberg say this? I followed the link, which just links to eWeek, and the only thing I found was a September 16th Matthew Rothenberg column reasserting that Macs after the January MacWorld will be single-boot only.
This subject is of considerable interest to my company and Macintouch is a reasonably reliable source--but I can't find the cited item. I've just spent twenty minutes searching for it--I tried searching on "Quark", "reprieve", "boot OS 9," etc. It's not in today's news and it doesn't seem to be in the last few days' news.
Aren't they going to create a bandwidth crunch with 90% of the video being "demanded" in prime time?
Why wouldn't it be very much more to their advantage to have "offpeak pricing" for customers with PVR's that were willing to record content at times convenient for the cable company? And have the PVR owner pay for the storage facility?
Seems to me that if video-on-demand takes off cable companies will be faced with either expensive infrastructure costs... OR ticked-off customers trying to explain to their kids why they can't watch "Lilo and Stitch" tonight.
Or are the cable companies planning to build special you-don't-control-it-we-do PVR's? In which case you'd think they wouldn't want to make the PVR companies angry, unless the cable companies want to do all their own R&D...
Or are the cable companies just planless and clueless?
I seem to recall that in the early nineties someone at Lotus complained that they were thought of as a "one-product company." Well, I always felt that naming the executable "lotus.exe" (rather than, say, 123.exe) WAS sort of asking for it.
Not being a Notes user, I don't know what the name of the Notes.exe is. I'm curious. If it's ALSO "lotus.exe" then we'd have a complete explanation.
If we use Mac OS X, the OS itself automatically informs us that the update is available.
If we don't use Mac OS X, we're probably not interested.
What is the intended audience for a story like this?
Presumably...people who have Mac OS X, have the Software Update feature completely turned off, never read Macintouch or MacFixit, but do read Slashdot regularly.
...otherwise there would be nobody challenging Microsoft in the spreadsheet arena, and we would probably all be forced to use Excel for want of a credible alternative.
I'm sure IBM's acquisition of Rational wlll be equally successful.
Subject line says all. I've been trying to see those Gates Brothers movies, but the site has always says "503 Service Unavailable The requested URL Bandwidth is temporarily unavailable." Did anyone mirror them?
"As a leading proponent of inexpensive and easy-to-use downloadable music, Gateway believes consumers should have lawful rights to encode, copy, collect, purchase and listen to their personal music collections in the MP3 format. We fully support an MP3 user's right to:
'Rip' and encode their own CD music collections into digital music files for their own personal use and enjoyment.
Make as many copies of their digital music files as they would like for their own personal use. This freely allows consumers to copy their MP3s on any number of their own computers in various locations, as well as on to their portable MP3 hardware players.
'Burn' their music files onto compact discs for their own personal use."
Yeah yeah yeah, now that I see Gateway's ACTIONS I can go back and re-read those words with the right slant. "Of course, we never expected you to think that the files you purchased as part of your Gateway Computer are YOUR files." Or perhaps, "Well, we only meant that for.mp3's. We don't feel that you have any rights for files whose names end in any other set of three letters."
My mother taught me that the essence of a lie was not whether or not the statement was technically true, but whether the speaker intended for the listener to misunderstand them. I'm afraid Gateway's fine talk about consumers' rights is just such a statement.
Whether you like Disney or not, you have to admit that for many decades they were a quality brand. This showed up in many ways. They have been far more punctilious than other studios about preserving their films (sure, it's paid off in endless re-releases, but it's still a "quality" move).
Richard Schickel, in "The Disney Version," says that even in the forties Disney kept a tight rein on Disney-character-merchandise licensees. Many parents have observed that--whether or not you think the stuff is any good, anything with Mickey Mouse on it has always been durable and well-made. (In the seventies when the kids were little the "word" was that "that Winnie-the-Pooh stuff (from Sears) wears like iron.")
The theme parks are, or used to be, so well maintained that after a day in one you started to ache for the sight of mashed chewing-gum or a candy wrapper. Perfect paint jobs on all the rides, painted scenery in the rides with dozens of subtle pastels like the background paintings in a classic Disney cartoon...
And the home videos were always of good quality, too. Not that you noticed it much--it's the sort of thing that you don't notice unless there's a problem.
This is very, very strange. It doesn't sound like Disney at all. They used to be very careful stewards of their brand.
UPenn Online Books: 17,000 total
on
Free Books on CD?
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· Score: 5, Informative
The UPenn Online Books Page is an index to a total of more 17,000 online books in various locations. This includes all of the 3000-plus Project Gutenberg texts.
(Note that the Project Gutenberg texts are nice because they're in a completely plain-vanilla ASCII format, each work is in a single file, and the formatting conventions are fairly uniform across the collection).
Oh, don't overlook Project Gutenberg of Australia, as they offer quite a few works from around 1920 to 1950 which are in copyright in the U. S. but not in Australia. Wait, forget I said that.
Pretty impressive: at 17,000 works, the Internet is finally starting to approach the capacity of a (small) physical library. A major university library still is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger, however...
A couple of years ago I was attending an Apple Computer conference and managed to spend an evening at the Palo Alto Theatre, which was having a 3D festival. I saw "Miss Sadie Thompson" and "Kiss Me, Kate." They were newly struck prints, the projection was good, I had a very good seat--I am sure what I experienced was as good as it would have been when the films were released.
And it seemed gimmicky, like looking into a Viewmaster.
Oh, it had its moments. In "Kiss Me, Kate" you had such a sense of the living presence of the performers that the audience applauded after each musical number. (The 3D process was VERY unflattering to actresses; in 2D, makeup can smooth the contours of the face but in 3D you see the actual contours, makeup or not). It was nice--but it was a gimmick.
In IMAX 3D, the screen looks perfeclty sharp, but it is SO BIG that the edges of the screen are almost out of your field of view. This is very important because ugly things happen at the screen edges in stereoscopic viewing, particularly if the objects you are viewing are "in front of" the screen.
I've now seen four movies in IMAX 3D--"Across the Sea of Time," "Space Station 3D," "Cirque Du Soleil: The Journey of Man," and "Into the Deep." They're fabulous. They give you more of a "you-are-there" feeling than anything else I've ever seen in a movie theatre (and I saw "This Is Cinerama" on its first run). The 3D feels natural. Objects closer than the screen seem comfortable.
Actually, the part of "Space Station 3D" I liked the very best were the scenes filmed on the earth at the Russian Cosmodrome. I was RIGHT there on the gritty pavement, on that walk where they planted a tree for every cosmonaut who had flown in space.
No eyestrain, no motion sickness, just this incredible sense of "really being there."
At least two of the films, "Across the Sea of Time" and "Cirque du Soleil" went beyond a simple travelogue. They weren't exactly narratives, but they were a genuine creative use of the medium.
I hope we see a lot more IMAX 3D. (I hope it isn't going to get killed off by cheap IMAX blowups of 2D 35mm films...)
In the eighties? Xerox PARC published a series of books edited/written by Adele Goldberg and others that were supposed to be the definitive description of Smalltalk. IIRC three volumes were published. Checking Amazon, I see "Smalltalk 80: The Interactive Programming Environment," "Smalltalk 80: The Language and its Implementation," not sure about the third.
Well, the fourth was supposed to describe the Model-View-Controller paradigm. IIRC the covers of the earlier volumes listed it as being fourth in the series, but it mysteriously just never appeared.
I heard that it had actually been suppressed by Xerox, which felt it was too proprietary to disclose, or something.
It's a pity, because all the descriptions of MVC I've seen have been sorta loosey-goosey and I've never seen a real technical description of MVC as the Xerox PARC envisioned and implemented it.
Anyone know anything more about this? Was the book ever published?
(Has anything about MVC been patented? THAT could get interesting... It's certainly a lot more worthy of patent protection than a lot of software patents...)
This sort of thing seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon--particularly cases in which big corporations go after small local companies in totally different businesses.
What has changed that suddenly makes it important for big companies to go around breaking butterflies on the wheel?
Is it just that the Internet makes it easier for big companies to search for and locate small companies with similar names?
(Anyone remember Infocom having to change the name of their game newsletter, "The New Zork Times" because the New York Times' lawyers said people could confuse the two?)
Driver: Car, how far to the next gas station? Car: Eight miles ahead at exit 37 there is a Chevron station. Driver: Is there a Mobil station there? Car: No. Driver: Are there any closer gas stations? Car: Yes. Driver: Where? Car: Six miles ahead at exit 36 there is a Citgo station. Driver: Are there any Mobil stations within the next twenty miles? Car: Yes, there is one four miles ahead at exit 35. Driver: Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? Car: To keep the costs of the service low to you, we present you with value-added featured placements first. By the way, wouldn't you like a larger penis?
Although on the face of it this appears to be a very positive article, what strikes me is the very TEPID level of enthusiasm he exhibits.
It's hard to believe this is the wave of the future when the first kid on the block to have one can barely say more than "When I write in a way that my ink is readable (slowly and big), the recognition is surprisingly good, but not wonderful" and "[I was struck' with how little advance there had been since the last try for pen computers... the pen/tablet software and hardware aspects appear just a bit better..."
He keeps SAYING that what's been done is just great and important and bound to be the wave of the future, but it sure doesn't sound to me as if his heart is in it.
A few decades ago, shrewd customers made sure there was always an Amdahl mug sitting somewhere in the room when IBM came to call.
Seems as if there is, at the very least, an opportunity to sell some Linux Journal subscriptions and Tux merchandise to Microsoft shops, if for no other reason than to have strategically visible when Microsoft comes around to negotiate license terms.
It's just a phone, dammit. You use it to make calls.
All these companies had better take a look at Donald Norman's "Psychology of Everyday Things." He talks quite a lot about telephones. In the fifties and sixties, nobody had any trouble using them. In the seventies and eighties, people started to have serious trouble using their office phones. (Do YOU know how to transfer a call on yours without dropping the connection?)
Now this crapola is spreading. When my wife and I went to buy cell phones we decided that even though our needs were significantly different, we needed to buy identical models so we could be a little user group of two and get technical support from each other (honey, how do I get this thing out of silent operation and turn the ring back on? sweetie, why is it saying "EXT-ROAM" when I'm supposed to be within my home area?)
On getting back from my high school reunion, I put some snapshots up on my web site and sent the URL to four classmates. Although they all have email, three of the four don't seem to know what a URL or a website is ("Did you really send pictures in that email? I'd like to see them but I can't figure out how... I'm not very good at this computer stuff"). Don't assume that everyone wants to run spreadsheets on their cellphones.
Please, guys, read Norman, and KEEP IT SIMPLE, will you? If you know how.
The Globe was indeed short on technical details. What puzzles me is that they say the network was down for four days.
NOT a rhetorical question:
Why didn't they power-cycle the whole complex? Maybe even literally? Presumably a hospital should be able to handle a short interruption in AC power... and presumably the network equipment wouldn't preserve the "I'm-broken-state" in nonvolatile memory. Why wouldn't a scheduled power outage for 10 minutes at 2 a.m. in the morning have been less disruptive than the network being down for four days?
Less drastically, couldn't they have called every operator and system administrator in and said "Synchronize your watches... at 2. a.m. power off every piece of computer gear within a hundred feet of your chair off, then at 2:10 a.m. power them on again?"
...My, those sample pictures have a wonderful old-timey look to them.
For many decades, stippling was the standard technique used for rendering biological or medical illustrations. I suppose it has something to do with the printing processes used for line art being cheaper than those for half-tones.
Indeed, I see that this journal and perhaps others still say "Use 'stippling' and 'hatching' techniques to achieve tonal quality. Avoid the use of shading (pencil, wash, or airbrush) for a tonal effect..."
Now, if we just had a font that reproduces the look of Leroy lettering?*
*(OK, OK, a Leroy lettering set consisted of a sort of stencil, in which the letters were merely engraved deeply rather than perforating all the way through, and a little pantograph device. The pantograph had a technical pen and a tracing point. As you followed the stencilled letters with the tracing point, the technical pen would make corresponding motions on the paper. Very common for captions in technical illustrations in research papers, museum displays, etc. Obviously too neat to be handwritten, yet obviously not typeset...)
There's a big piece of self-deception that's been with us in various forms for, um, five decades.
An early phrasing of this deceptive might be: "Every FORTRAN statement generates ten machine instructions, so you will be ten times as productive writing in FORTRAN than writing in assembly language."
The problem is that when you're doing it right, programming progress is exponential, not linear. Every time you do something as simple as calling a subroutine, you're writing one line of code that is the equivalent of ten (a hundred, whatever). If you're doing it right, you write subroutines, then subroutines that call subroutines, always leveraging what you've done before.
So something that seemingly gives you a multiplier (in terms of instructions executed at run time per unit of programmer work time) is really only additive (in terms of project progress).
For example, what's the effect on productivity of being able to call strcat? Let's suppose the implementation of strncat is twenty lines of code. Every time you use it, strncat does NOT give you a twenty-fold multiplier. All it does is save you the time it would have taken to write strncat ONCE yourself. (And test it, and document it--but still, only ONCE).
Most "advances"--a good subroutine library, a good language, object-oriented programming, rapid application development tools (yes, Visual Basic--go ahead, flame me)--have the same effect, when they work. What they do is to start you further along in the development process.
But it's just a head start, it's not an increase in development speed.
And, of course, all of this is counterbalanced by the time it takes to learn the tools. (Is strncpy guaranteed to give you a terminating zero byte? How about strncat? How sure are you?)
'Actually it's fair to say that C was developed as a "high level assembly language" for the PDP-11, in other words you've got it slightly backwards.'
Quite right. I DID know that. Really I was making a joke. I should have put in a smiley.
Although I do think one of the things I like best about C was recognizing that "increment" and "decrement" are fundamental operations of their own that are NOT well represented by the assignment statement a = a + 1, and deserve a special notation.
I loved the PDP-8 but I'm not convinced...
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Bringing Back the PDP8
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Until I actually started programming a PDP-8 (in assembly language, of course), I would never have believed that you could program comfortably in such a seemingly restricted instruction set. And, conversely, when I moved to a PDP-11, I thought I was going to revel in the freedom and power of all those instructions, all those registers, those addressing modes, those index registers... and the ability to access 65536 bytes directly.
If C is "high-level assembly language," then the PDP-11 is "a computer that directly implements C."
To my surprise, though, I didn't really find that a lot was gained. Programming a PDP-11 didn't really FEEL much easier or more powerful than programming a PDP-8. And it was amazing how much every program expanded in size. It's been said that the PDP-8 instruction set was the most core-efficient ever devised, and I'd believe that.
On the other hand, when I tried programming a 6502, which on the face of it doesn't SEEM that much more restricted than a PDP-8, I just about went bananas.
Having said all that, I'm still not sure I see the point. The sweet design for a computer has to depend on the economics of the hardware around it. Who cares? Even IF the "core-efficiency" thing were true, and even IF you could use standard RAM with a 12-bit processor and not waste any bits, and even IF it turned out that the PDP-8 design were, say, 30% faster and used 30% less RAM for a given program than x86... how could it matter?
If the Alpha, which really WAS a superior design, wasn't superior enough to overcome Intel marketing, customer inertia, and only the normal amount of mismanagement, how can a PDP-8 be anything more than a curiosity?
If it is seriously intended to change anyone's mind, there needs to be a "chain of evidence" that involves the participation of the doubters.
Otherwise, it's just like a UFO photo. Someone pops up and says "Here's photographic proof! This picture of [a UFO][spacecraft on the surface of the Moon] was taken by [a Boy Scout leader][European scientists] on [precise time and date] and [experts] say it's authentic." To which I'd say "how do I really know where and how it was taken? Why couldn't this be a picture of [a garbage can lid tossed in the air and deliberately taken out of focus][a cleverly Photoshopped fake?]"
It all depends on whether you believe the [Boy Scout leader][European scientists].
No, it goes further than that. Unless you personally have INTERVIEWED the [Boy Scout leader][European scientists] it depends on whether you believe the REPORTERS...
There are things you know because you've seen them yourself, and there are things you know because you are told them by people you trust. There has to be a chain of trust. If the don't invite representatives of the doubters to eyewitness the procedures used, the final photograph doesn't mean a thing.
One of the aspects of scientific research that deserves to be taught better in the schools involves, not the use of the scientific method, but of the role played by citation and attribution and, in general, scholarship. That's the big difference between a journal article and an article in the popular press.
EVERY statement in the scientific literature can, in principle, be traced back to a specific person with a name and institutional affiliation (which constitutes a usable address), who says "This is what I did and this is what I saw." And you can ask them about it if you doubt it.
It will be very cool to see the pictures when they get them. But unless the doubters are closely involved in the process, there's no reason why it should change their minds.
(Actually, it will be even cooler if they CAN'T get them--which I think is quite possible, the Moon is a big place and the spacecraft are awfully small. Let's say it turns out that they can't. What do you think they will do?)
The Shaw's supermarket in my town has recently introduced shopping carts which carry a placard warning that they will "stop abruptly" and the wheels will lock if you take them outside "the yellow line." I'm very curious, but haven't had the courage to try pushing one past the yellow line to find out exactly what happens.
One of the four wheels in encased in a plastic housing--very compact, only slightly larger than the other wheels. I imagine this contains the locking mechanism.
Does anyone happen to know what the mechanism is or how it works?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed... WHERE does Matthew Rothenberg say this? I followed the link, which just links to eWeek, and the only thing I found was a September 16th Matthew Rothenberg column reasserting that Macs after the January MacWorld will be single-boot only.
This subject is of considerable interest to my company and Macintouch is a reasonably reliable source--but I can't find the cited item. I've just spent twenty minutes searching for it--I tried searching on "Quark", "reprieve", "boot OS 9," etc. It's not in today's news and it doesn't seem to be in the last few days' news.
Aren't they going to create a bandwidth crunch with 90% of the video being "demanded" in prime time?
Why wouldn't it be very much more to their advantage to have "offpeak pricing" for customers with PVR's that were willing to record content at times convenient for the cable company? And have the PVR owner pay for the storage facility?
Seems to me that if video-on-demand takes off cable companies will be faced with either expensive infrastructure costs... OR ticked-off customers trying to explain to their kids why they can't watch "Lilo and Stitch" tonight.
Or are the cable companies planning to build special you-don't-control-it-we-do PVR's? In which case you'd think they wouldn't want to make the PVR companies angry, unless the cable companies want to do all their own R&D...
Or are the cable companies just planless and clueless?
I agree with you.
.exe is. I'm curious. If it's ALSO "lotus.exe" then we'd have a complete explanation.
I seem to recall that in the early nineties someone at Lotus complained that they were thought of as a "one-product company." Well, I always felt that naming the executable "lotus.exe" (rather than, say, 123.exe) WAS sort of asking for it.
Not being a Notes user, I don't know what the name of the Notes
If we use Mac OS X, the OS itself automatically informs us that the update is available.
If we don't use Mac OS X, we're probably not interested.
What is the intended audience for a story like this?
Presumably...people who have Mac OS X, have the Software Update feature completely turned off, never read Macintouch or MacFixit, but do read Slashdot regularly.
That's probably not a null set, but still...
...otherwise there would be nobody challenging Microsoft in the spreadsheet arena, and we would probably all be forced to use Excel for want of a credible alternative.
I'm sure IBM's acquisition of Rational wlll be equally successful.
Subject line says all. I've been trying to see those Gates Brothers movies, but the site has always says "503 Service Unavailable
The requested URL Bandwidth is temporarily unavailable." Did anyone mirror them?
Gateway says here:
.mp3's. We don't feel that you have any rights for files whose names end in any other set of three letters."
"As a leading proponent of inexpensive and easy-to-use downloadable music, Gateway believes consumers should have lawful rights to encode, copy, collect, purchase and listen to their personal music collections in the MP3 format. We fully support an MP3 user's right to:
'Rip' and encode their own CD music collections into digital music files for their own personal use and enjoyment.
Make as many copies of their digital music files as they would like for their own personal use. This freely allows consumers to copy their MP3s on any number of their own computers in various locations, as well as on to their portable MP3 hardware players.
'Burn' their music files onto compact discs for their own personal use."
Yeah yeah yeah, now that I see Gateway's ACTIONS I can go back and re-read those words with the right slant. "Of course, we never expected you to think that the files you purchased as part of your Gateway Computer are YOUR files." Or perhaps, "Well, we only meant that for
My mother taught me that the essence of a lie was not whether or not the statement was technically true, but whether the speaker intended for the listener to misunderstand them. I'm afraid Gateway's fine talk about consumers' rights is just such a statement.
Whether you like Disney or not, you have to admit that for many decades they were a quality brand. This showed up in many ways. They have been far more punctilious than other studios about preserving their films (sure, it's paid off in endless re-releases, but it's still a "quality" move).
Richard Schickel, in "The Disney Version," says that even in the forties Disney kept a tight rein on Disney-character-merchandise licensees. Many parents have observed that--whether or not you think the stuff is any good, anything with Mickey Mouse on it has always been durable and well-made. (In the seventies when the kids were little the "word" was that "that Winnie-the-Pooh stuff (from Sears) wears like iron.")
The theme parks are, or used to be, so well maintained that after a day in one you started to ache for the sight of mashed chewing-gum or a candy wrapper. Perfect paint jobs on all the rides, painted scenery in the rides with dozens of subtle pastels like the background paintings in a classic Disney cartoon...
And the home videos were always of good quality, too. Not that you noticed it much--it's the sort of thing that you don't notice unless there's a problem.
This is very, very strange. It doesn't sound like Disney at all. They used to be very careful stewards of their brand.
The UPenn Online Books Page is an index to a total of more 17,000 online books in various locations. This includes all of the 3000-plus Project Gutenberg texts.
(Note that the Project Gutenberg texts are nice because they're in a completely plain-vanilla ASCII format, each work is in a single file, and the formatting conventions are fairly uniform across the collection).
Oh, don't overlook Project Gutenberg of Australia, as they offer quite a few works from around 1920 to 1950 which are in copyright in the U. S. but not in Australia. Wait, forget I said that.
Pretty impressive: at 17,000 works, the Internet is finally starting to approach the capacity of a (small) physical library. A major university library still is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger, however...
A couple of years ago I was attending an Apple Computer conference and managed to spend an evening at the Palo Alto Theatre, which was having a 3D festival. I saw "Miss Sadie Thompson" and "Kiss Me, Kate." They were newly struck prints, the projection was good, I had a very good seat--I am sure what I experienced was as good as it would have been when the films were released.
And it seemed gimmicky, like looking into a Viewmaster.
Oh, it had its moments. In "Kiss Me, Kate" you had such a sense of the living presence of the performers that the audience applauded after each musical number. (The 3D process was VERY unflattering to actresses; in 2D, makeup can smooth the contours of the face but in 3D you see the actual contours, makeup or not). It was nice--but it was a gimmick.
In IMAX 3D, the screen looks perfeclty sharp, but it is SO BIG that the edges of the screen are almost out of your field of view. This is very important because ugly things happen at the screen edges in stereoscopic viewing, particularly if the objects you are viewing are "in front of" the screen.
I've now seen four movies in IMAX 3D--"Across the Sea of Time," "Space Station 3D," "Cirque Du Soleil: The Journey of Man," and "Into the Deep." They're fabulous. They give you more of a "you-are-there" feeling than anything else I've ever seen in a movie theatre (and I saw "This Is Cinerama" on its first run). The 3D feels natural. Objects closer than the screen seem comfortable.
Actually, the part of "Space Station 3D" I liked the very best were the scenes filmed on the earth at the Russian Cosmodrome. I was RIGHT there on the gritty pavement, on that walk where they planted a tree for every cosmonaut who had flown in space.
No eyestrain, no motion sickness, just this incredible sense of "really being there."
At least two of the films, "Across the Sea of Time" and "Cirque du Soleil" went beyond a simple travelogue. They weren't exactly narratives, but they were a genuine creative use of the medium.
I hope we see a lot more IMAX 3D. (I hope it isn't going to get killed off by cheap IMAX blowups of 2D 35mm films...)
In the eighties? Xerox PARC published a series of books edited/written by Adele Goldberg and others that were supposed to be the definitive description of Smalltalk. IIRC three volumes were published. Checking Amazon, I see "Smalltalk 80: The Interactive Programming Environment," "Smalltalk 80: The Language and its Implementation," not sure about the third.
Well, the fourth was supposed to describe the Model-View-Controller paradigm. IIRC the covers of the earlier volumes listed it as being fourth in the series, but it mysteriously just never appeared.
I heard that it had actually been suppressed by Xerox, which felt it was too proprietary to disclose, or something.
It's a pity, because all the descriptions of MVC I've seen have been sorta loosey-goosey and I've never seen a real technical description of MVC as the Xerox PARC envisioned and implemented it.
Anyone know anything more about this? Was the book ever published?
(Has anything about MVC been patented? THAT could get interesting... It's certainly a lot more worthy of patent protection than a lot of software patents...)
This sort of thing seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon--particularly cases in which big corporations go after small local companies in totally different businesses.
What has changed that suddenly makes it important for big companies to go around breaking butterflies on the wheel?
Is it just that the Internet makes it easier for big companies to search for and locate small companies with similar names?
(Anyone remember Infocom having to change the name of their game newsletter, "The New Zork Times" because the New York Times' lawyers said people could confuse the two?)
Driver: Car, how far to the next gas station?
Car: Eight miles ahead at exit 37 there is a Chevron station.
Driver: Is there a Mobil station there?
Car: No.
Driver: Are there any closer gas stations?
Car: Yes.
Driver: Where?
Car: Six miles ahead at exit 36 there is a Citgo station.
Driver: Are there any Mobil stations within the next twenty miles?
Car: Yes, there is one four miles ahead at exit 35.
Driver: Why didn't you tell me that in the first place?
Car: To keep the costs of the service low to you, we present you with value-added featured placements first. By the way, wouldn't you like a larger penis?
Although on the face of it this appears to be a very positive article, what strikes me is the very TEPID level of enthusiasm he exhibits.
It's hard to believe this is the wave of the future when the first kid on the block to have one can barely say more than "When I write in a way that my ink is readable (slowly and big), the recognition is surprisingly good, but not wonderful" and "[I was struck' with how little advance there had been since the last try for pen computers... the pen/tablet software and hardware aspects appear just a bit better..."
He keeps SAYING that what's been done is just great and important and bound to be the wave of the future, but it sure doesn't sound to me as if his heart is in it.
A few decades ago, shrewd customers made sure there was always an Amdahl mug sitting somewhere in the room when IBM came to call.
Seems as if there is, at the very least, an opportunity to sell some Linux Journal subscriptions and Tux merchandise to Microsoft shops, if for no other reason than to have strategically visible when Microsoft comes around to negotiate license terms.
It's just a phone, dammit. You use it to make calls.
All these companies had better take a look at Donald Norman's "Psychology of Everyday Things." He talks quite a lot about telephones. In the fifties and sixties, nobody had any trouble using them. In the seventies and eighties, people started to have serious trouble using their office phones. (Do YOU know how to transfer a call on yours without dropping the connection?)
Now this crapola is spreading. When my wife and I went to buy cell phones we decided that even though our needs were significantly different, we needed to buy identical models so we could be a little user group of two and get technical support from each other (honey, how do I get this thing out of silent operation and turn the ring back on? sweetie, why is it saying "EXT-ROAM" when I'm supposed to be within my home area?)
On getting back from my high school reunion, I put some snapshots up on my web site and sent the URL to four classmates. Although they all have email, three of the four don't seem to know what a URL or a website is ("Did you really send pictures in that email? I'd like to see them but I can't figure out how... I'm not very good at this computer stuff"). Don't assume that everyone wants to run spreadsheets on their cellphones.
Please, guys, read Norman, and KEEP IT SIMPLE, will you? If you know how.
The Globe was indeed short on technical details. What puzzles me is that they say the network was down for four days.
NOT a rhetorical question:
Why didn't they power-cycle the whole complex? Maybe even literally? Presumably a hospital should be able to handle a short interruption in AC power... and presumably the network equipment wouldn't preserve the "I'm-broken-state" in nonvolatile memory. Why wouldn't a scheduled power outage for 10 minutes at 2 a.m. in the morning have been less disruptive than the network being down for four days?
Less drastically, couldn't they have called every operator and system administrator in and said "Synchronize your watches... at 2. a.m. power off every piece of computer gear within a hundred feet of your chair off, then at 2:10 a.m. power them on again?"
...My, those sample pictures have a wonderful old-timey look to them.
For many decades, stippling was the standard technique used for rendering biological or medical illustrations. I suppose it has something to do with the printing processes used for line art being cheaper than those for half-tones.
Indeed, I see that this journal and perhaps others still say "Use 'stippling' and 'hatching' techniques to achieve tonal quality. Avoid the use of shading (pencil, wash, or airbrush) for a tonal effect..."
Now, if we just had a font that reproduces the look of Leroy lettering?*
*(OK, OK, a Leroy lettering set consisted of a sort of stencil, in which the letters were merely engraved deeply rather than perforating all the way through, and a little pantograph device. The pantograph had a technical pen and a tracing point. As you followed the stencilled letters with the tracing point, the technical pen would make corresponding motions on the paper. Very common for captions in technical illustrations in research papers, museum displays, etc. Obviously too neat to be handwritten, yet obviously not typeset...)
There's a big piece of self-deception that's been with us in various forms for, um, five decades.
An early phrasing of this deceptive might be: "Every FORTRAN statement generates ten machine instructions, so you will be ten times as productive writing in FORTRAN than writing in assembly language."
The problem is that when you're doing it right, programming progress is exponential, not linear. Every time you do something as simple as calling a subroutine, you're writing one line of code that is the equivalent of ten (a hundred, whatever). If you're doing it right, you write subroutines, then subroutines that call subroutines, always leveraging what you've done before.
So something that seemingly gives you a multiplier (in terms of instructions executed at run time per unit of programmer work time) is really only additive (in terms of project progress).
For example, what's the effect on productivity of being able to call strcat? Let's suppose the implementation of strncat is twenty lines of code. Every time you use it, strncat does NOT give you a twenty-fold multiplier. All it does is save you the time it would have taken to write strncat ONCE yourself. (And test it, and document it--but still, only ONCE).
Most "advances"--a good subroutine library, a good language, object-oriented programming, rapid application development tools (yes, Visual Basic--go ahead, flame me)--have the same effect, when they work. What they do is to start you further along in the development process.
But it's just a head start, it's not an increase in development speed.
And, of course, all of this is counterbalanced by the time it takes to learn the tools. (Is strncpy guaranteed to give you a terminating zero byte? How about strncat? How sure are you?)
'Actually it's fair to say that C was developed as a "high level assembly language" for the PDP-11, in other words you've got it slightly backwards.'
Quite right. I DID know that. Really I was making a joke. I should have put in a smiley.
Although I do think one of the things I like best about C was recognizing that "increment" and "decrement" are fundamental operations of their own that are NOT well represented by the assignment statement a = a + 1, and deserve a special notation.
Until I actually started programming a PDP-8 (in assembly language, of course), I would never have believed that you could program comfortably in such a seemingly restricted instruction set. And, conversely, when I moved to a PDP-11, I thought I was going to revel in the freedom and power of all those instructions, all those registers, those addressing modes, those index registers... and the ability to access 65536 bytes directly.
If C is "high-level assembly language," then the PDP-11 is "a computer that directly implements C."
To my surprise, though, I didn't really find that a lot was gained. Programming a PDP-11 didn't really FEEL much easier or more powerful than programming a PDP-8. And it was amazing how much every program expanded in size. It's been said that the PDP-8 instruction set was the most core-efficient ever devised, and I'd believe that.
On the other hand, when I tried programming a 6502, which on the face of it doesn't SEEM that much more restricted than a PDP-8, I just about went bananas.
Having said all that, I'm still not sure I see the point. The sweet design for a computer has to depend on the economics of the hardware around it. Who cares? Even IF the "core-efficiency" thing were true, and even IF you could use standard RAM with a 12-bit processor and not waste any bits, and even IF it turned out that the PDP-8 design were, say, 30% faster and used 30% less RAM for a given program than x86... how could it matter?
If the Alpha, which really WAS a superior design, wasn't superior enough to overcome Intel marketing, customer inertia, and only the normal amount of mismanagement, how can a PDP-8 be anything more than a curiosity?
If it is seriously intended to change anyone's mind, there needs to be a "chain of evidence" that involves the participation of the doubters.
Otherwise, it's just like a UFO photo. Someone pops up and says "Here's photographic proof! This picture of [a UFO][spacecraft on the surface of the Moon] was taken by [a Boy Scout leader][European scientists] on [precise time and date] and [experts] say it's authentic." To which I'd say "how do I really know where and how it was taken? Why couldn't this be a picture of [a garbage can lid tossed in the air and deliberately taken out of focus][a cleverly Photoshopped fake?]"
It all depends on whether you believe the [Boy Scout leader][European scientists].
No, it goes further than that. Unless you personally have INTERVIEWED the [Boy Scout leader][European scientists] it depends on whether you believe the REPORTERS...
There are things you know because you've seen them yourself, and there are things you know because you are told them by people you trust. There has to be a chain of trust. If the don't invite representatives of the doubters to eyewitness the procedures used, the final photograph doesn't mean a thing.
One of the aspects of scientific research that deserves to be taught better in the schools involves, not the use of the scientific method, but of the role played by citation and attribution and, in general, scholarship. That's the big difference between a journal article and an article in the popular press.
EVERY statement in the scientific literature can, in principle, be traced back to a specific person with a name and institutional affiliation (which constitutes a usable address), who says "This is what I did and this is what I saw." And you can ask them about it if you doubt it.
It will be very cool to see the pictures when they get them. But unless the doubters are closely involved in the process, there's no reason why it should change their minds.
(Actually, it will be even cooler if they CAN'T get them--which I think is quite possible, the Moon is a big place and the spacecraft are awfully small. Let's say it turns out that they can't. What do you think they will do?)
The Shaw's supermarket in my town has recently introduced shopping carts which carry a placard warning that they will "stop abruptly" and the wheels will lock if you take them outside "the yellow line." I'm very curious, but haven't had the courage to try pushing one past the yellow line to find out exactly what happens.
One of the four wheels in encased in a plastic housing--very compact, only slightly larger than the other wheels. I imagine this contains the locking mechanism.
Does anyone happen to know what the mechanism is or how it works?
Come on. Jack Valenti testified under oath in the eighties that the VCR would be "the Boston Strangler" to the movie industry.
And you know what? People copied movies off the air and the movie industry is still there and making billions.