...Said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also seriously: turn it into a one-stop-shop for all things FSF/Open source, etc., that users can just get, a la the Android and Apple app stores. Such an app store would include things like Blender, GCC, LibreOffice, Linux itself (multiple flavors), all the way down to code files.
The store could be configured so that it would be easy to donate to the projects, even if you don't actually download the program, with them taking a small cut (a la the Apple app store) to provide the exposure.
The key thing, in my mind, is that there are just so many awesome programs out there, and it's hard to keep track of them all; one simple site, structured well, would go, in my mind, so far to raising the visibility of many projects that are just as good, if not better, than commercial apps, but don't have any easy way to get their software in front of users.
What's interesting is that it seems Apple's product announcements are the only remaining tech that gets everyone talking, whether pro or against, people do talk about it. Dell might have released half a dozen new systems last week, but who'd know? I was in a tmobile store the other day and saw a number of Android-based handsets that I hadn't heard of. And even though I consider myself a geek, I have very little idea what the Xoom is, other than a Motorola tablet, and more to the point, why should I care?
I'm not saying that we should care about Apple product announcements, but Apple seems to be the only ones who can generate any significant buzz about whatever it is they're announcing.
What I mean is, what IBM products will be the beneficiary of the tech they developed to make Watson; DB/2? WebSphere? You've gotta think that the IBM execs only agreed to go forward with this whole thing with some thought to being able to leverage it in other products.
Personally, I've love to think this was a "pure research" thing, but I doubt anyone really does that anymore (though I hope I'm wrong).
As one of the two dozen people who got the "System going down now!!!" messages back in the late 80s, then waited for half an hour for the Vax running Ultrix to come back, I agree with the sentiment, especially since walking away from the terminal was essentially relinquishing it to the next person who was going to kick you off anyway.
The problem is that now you've got a box with relatively few actual logged-in users, but a whole lot of applications that can take awhile to start up. On one of the boxes we have, we have multiple instances of Oracle, WebLogic, and some other daemons, some home-grown, some from other software packages. And while it's not 30 minutes to get back to a running state, it's about 5-10 minutes, and those are very long minutes when you've got users screaming about the money being lost because the site isn't up.
Even on my Mac at home, I have to be careful about just rebooting because other family members may have been doing something important, and not everyone hits the 'save' button 30 times a minute like I do. I've gotten some angry looks at home that match the ones I get at work for exactly the same reason; I'm very very reluctant to reboot before asking everyone, anyway (and even then it doesn't always help...)
Given the $$$ for the boxed set, which was way more than a poor college/post college programmer could afford, I promised myself I'd get these books when volume 4 came out. Over the years I've read through and copied, a lot of times by hand, his algorithms while sitting at B&N or someplace, and I always would finish by saying "Why don't I just buy this and save me the trouble?" Then suddenly everything was on the internet, and I could refer back to my notes, and then I didn't need to look at my notes any longer, but I kept wanting to buy the books, if anything to show gratitude. Now that the 4th is out, I'm going to do it.
It must have been 10+ years ago since I last played a game on the PC, switching over to consoles. Damn right I'm gonna be picking this up. Think I'll break out my original copy of DN3D and give that a play-through as well. Hmm...wonder if it plays okay in DOSBox...
Funny enough, I was just thinking about this insofar as my backup disk died, while the main disk in the machine is still running fine. I've listened to enough TWiTs and the like to know about Drobo and checked out the site. I like that the size can be increased over time (up to whatever limit the firmware supports in the enclosure). I was thinking I could also justify it by getting the version that sits on the network as a NAS and use it for all my Time Machine backups, etc.
I also have a separate external disk (not a Drobo or NAS or anything fancy) that I do an overnight copy of all the important files using rsync with the disk plugged directly into the Firewire 800 port, then I take the disk with me to my folks house and let it sit there. After a week or two I bring it home and the whole process repeats.
I've also got a private vpn to a Linux machine I set up, but even though I did a full update on it for backup, rsync takes forever (many many hours) to determine what files need to be updated/added, and the machine gets pretty bogged down. Still working on a good solution for automatic offsite backups...
I'd be interested to know what others think of the Drobo before plunking down the $$$ for one.
After convincing my boss and *his* boss about the benefits of Skype, yesterday was the day I was going to demo it to show how it works, benefits, video, etc.
I use GWT. It's a pretty nice toolkit for web pages that is all Java; it compiles the Java to Javascript so there are some classes that you can't use (AWT, Swing, etc.). I've found the performance to be good (certainly better than the big Flex apps I'm using it to replace) and being able to stick with one language through everything is a big plus. You can still use CSS to format the output, so you don't have to stick with a single look or have to dive into the html/javascript to change it.
It's definitely an interesting take on an idea dominated by things like JQuery, Delicious, etc.
Cobol might be a pretty easy joke for obsolescence, but remember that Cobol was written by a woman in a time where the industry was far more male dominated than it is today.
Though I've never programmed in Cobol, it made a big impression on me as a kid to show that anybody could program a computer, or use a computer to create something cool.
I got "lucky" to solve a problem for someone back in college: she had written her thesis on a 3.5 floppy, had no backup (this is when you had to go to the "computing center" to work, as practically no one had a machine of their own, so you had to take all your stuff with you), and had run the disk through the washing machine.
She came in, crying hysterically (it actually took a few tries just to figure out what was wrong), and realized what had happened. I had one of the few "eureka!" moments of my life, and grabbed another floppy, carefully cut it open, did the same with her disk, then air-dried it. I put the platter in the "new" disk, with its dry fabric covering (whatever that stuff was...), taped it shut, and put it in the Mac (SE...no hd) and yep, the disk was readable and I was able to get her thesis off and onto a network drive, then we copied it back onto a new disk and assured her I'd hold onto the thesis on the network drive until the end of the semester.
Funny thing, she kept the disk I had used, taped around the edges, and the next year I saw her again and asked how things were, and she was still using it. Go figure.
Wow...from the Wikipedia article I went to the product's homepage, and most of it is filled up with a big blue box that has a two sentence blurb that invites you to click more to get... a few more sentences, emphasizing its ODBC and JDBC connections. The rest of the page seems to be general support and contact stuff. Pretty sad product homepage.
So the article itself is/.'ed, but using Google, I can't seem to figure out what database CA has that everyone is theoretically migrating off of. I knew CA had a lot of products, mostly related to the mainframe, but an actual honest-to-goodness "select * from table" database? News to me.
I have a compact camera that fits in my pocket that takes *better* pictures than my big DSLR did; I have a (sadly, no longer working) Nikon D1X that is exactly what a professional camera looks like; big body, takes all Nikon lenses, but only shoots 5mp. Compact cameras can shoot up to 14mp, last time I looked. Say what you will about the lens, compact cameras can produce spy-agency-worthy images of... uh... whatever is spy-agency-worthy in Kuwait.
I read the headline and my first thought was "wait...the company that wrote Extra? They're still around?" Then all those nightmares of HLLAPI programing came back and I sat under my desk and cried.
...and watch me through the window as I play Crazy Taxi and Jet Set (Grind) Radio on my Dreamcast. After that, I'm going to bring it down a little with some Shenmue.
Sigh, even if I'm modded down to oblivion, I've got to say it: the Dreamcast was probably the best console ever created, in terms of graphics quality (Soul Calibur just like it played in the arcade!), awesome games (see above, plus Marvel vs Capcom), and experimental "what were you smoking when you came up with that???" games (Pen Pen Trilcelon, Seaman, Space Chanel 5). It was the console that really breached the chasm between the old school Nintendo-era sprite games and the $50 million mega sequels of today. It was the last console where big publishers could take a risk insofar as they were going to have to actually put it on a disc and sell it in the stores, as opposed to just downloading it to the console today. Plus not only did it have the modem/nic attachment, it also had those mini games that doubled as memory carts. I remember playing Tetris on one waiting for the train.
From the description above, it sounds like going home to discover main street's all boarded up and tumble weeds roll down the sidewalk. Sigh...you can't go home again, even with video games.
Oh, wait, yes you can....I'll just fire up my Dreamcast!
The Beatles on iTMS is a great example of holding out too long for some unknown reason; as others have said, anyone who wanted Beatles music on their ripped it long ago from the CDs they waited in line to buy because "the Beatles records are now available on CD!!!!!!!"
From everything I've heard, it was EMI and the Beatles themselves who apparently either saw no need to have their music available for download, or wanted some insane amount of money that it made it a non-starter. This was probably one of the rare moments where Steve Jobs was chasing *them* to do a deal, and they still held off.
I fired up iTunes and looked through the albums, mentally checking off the tunes I've been listening to for years on my computer from ripping them from my CDs, and I realize I have no need to purchase anything. Thanks guys, day late and a dollar short.
I think you're right; the tech world is full of weirdness right now. Everyone was familiar with the whole "windows on the desktop, unix on server, mac for graphics" paradigms, but with the rise of the smart phones, cloud, social-media-everything, it really is a new world, but not new enough that you can't read the billboards.
Awesome times if you embrace the weirdness; people who hold fast to the way it used to be will....HEY GET OFF MY LAWN!
I really wish I still had all my green-bar output from the decwriter I used to play adventure, tic-tac-toe, and even Star Trek. I think one game of that generated more than 100 pages (and took about 8 hours to play).
More than that, I can't for the life of me remember how exactly I *got* to the games, being a little kid; I remember it was a PDP-something, but no idea what the OS was.
Regardless, this looks like an awesome hack and makes me wish I'd kept that old IBM Selectric I had for years and years....it hadn't even occurred to me to do something like this (much to my dismay), even though that *was* the interface to a system like the IBM 7090 or somesuch.
I read TFA and it seems more focused on the excitement that the bees can solve the TSP, but the researchers never seem to indicate how the bees are doing it, and given the nature of the problem, how do they know it really is the "optimum" solution. Based on my limited work with the TSP, the only algorithm that, for my purposes, has worked the best is Nearest Neighbor, which is also, I believe, the simplest but also most naive.
Would be interesting to know what the bees' algorithm is.
On a Mac running OSX, click the apple menu and there is an item called "Mac OS X software..." which launches the browser and brings you to essentially as what's been described as the Apple store. You can buy software, download trials, etc. Sure it's not the same as the App Store way of doing things, but it's not like the Mac didn't have a similar concept.
As far as installing stuff, I personally am not worried because the Mac is meant to be a general purpose tool that, since it has a command-line interface as part of the base OS, you have a guaranteed way to get into the guts of the OS and do all sorts of nice things.
If they announce that the terminal would not be an app available on the Mac, and that software can only be developed with "development" machines, then yes, I'm hanging it up and switching to a straight Linux machine. Until then, the Mac is still my choice for developing Unix software, as well as anything else I darn well please.
Slashdot Mirror
...Said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also seriously: turn it into a one-stop-shop for all things FSF/Open source, etc., that users can just get, a la the Android and Apple app stores. Such an app store would include things like Blender, GCC, LibreOffice, Linux itself (multiple flavors), all the way down to code files.
The store could be configured so that it would be easy to donate to the projects, even if you don't actually download the program, with them taking a small cut (a la the Apple app store) to provide the exposure.
The key thing, in my mind, is that there are just so many awesome programs out there, and it's hard to keep track of them all; one simple site, structured well, would go, in my mind, so far to raising the visibility of many projects that are just as good, if not better, than commercial apps, but don't have any easy way to get their software in front of users.
What's interesting is that it seems Apple's product announcements are the only remaining tech that gets everyone talking, whether pro or against, people do talk about it. Dell might have released half a dozen new systems last week, but who'd know? I was in a tmobile store the other day and saw a number of Android-based handsets that I hadn't heard of. And even though I consider myself a geek, I have very little idea what the Xoom is, other than a Motorola tablet, and more to the point, why should I care?
I'm not saying that we should care about Apple product announcements, but Apple seems to be the only ones who can generate any significant buzz about whatever it is they're announcing.
What I mean is, what IBM products will be the beneficiary of the tech they developed to make Watson; DB/2? WebSphere? You've gotta think that the IBM execs only agreed to go forward with this whole thing with some thought to being able to leverage it in other products.
Personally, I've love to think this was a "pure research" thing, but I doubt anyone really does that anymore (though I hope I'm wrong).
As one of the two dozen people who got the "System going down now!!!" messages back in the late 80s, then waited for half an hour for the Vax running Ultrix to come back, I agree with the sentiment, especially since walking away from the terminal was essentially relinquishing it to the next person who was going to kick you off anyway.
The problem is that now you've got a box with relatively few actual logged-in users, but a whole lot of applications that can take awhile to start up. On one of the boxes we have, we have multiple instances of Oracle, WebLogic, and some other daemons, some home-grown, some from other software packages. And while it's not 30 minutes to get back to a running state, it's about 5-10 minutes, and those are very long minutes when you've got users screaming about the money being lost because the site isn't up.
Even on my Mac at home, I have to be careful about just rebooting because other family members may have been doing something important, and not everyone hits the 'save' button 30 times a minute like I do. I've gotten some angry looks at home that match the ones I get at work for exactly the same reason; I'm very very reluctant to reboot before asking everyone, anyway (and even then it doesn't always help...)
According to my clock, it's now 10:45 EST. I checked the links above but nobody as posted what the "big announcement" was all about.
Given the $$$ for the boxed set, which was way more than a poor college/post college programmer could afford, I promised myself I'd get these books when volume 4 came out. Over the years I've read through and copied, a lot of times by hand, his algorithms while sitting at B&N or someplace, and I always would finish by saying "Why don't I just buy this and save me the trouble?" Then suddenly everything was on the internet, and I could refer back to my notes, and then I didn't need to look at my notes any longer, but I kept wanting to buy the books, if anything to show gratitude. Now that the 4th is out, I'm going to do it.
It must have been 10+ years ago since I last played a game on the PC, switching over to consoles. Damn right I'm gonna be picking this up. Think I'll break out my original copy of DN3D and give that a play-through as well. Hmm...wonder if it plays okay in DOSBox...
Funny enough, I was just thinking about this insofar as my backup disk died, while the main disk in the machine is still running fine. I've listened to enough TWiTs and the like to know about Drobo and checked out the site. I like that the size can be increased over time (up to whatever limit the firmware supports in the enclosure). I was thinking I could also justify it by getting the version that sits on the network as a NAS and use it for all my Time Machine backups, etc.
I also have a separate external disk (not a Drobo or NAS or anything fancy) that I do an overnight copy of all the important files using rsync with the disk plugged directly into the Firewire 800 port, then I take the disk with me to my folks house and let it sit there. After a week or two I bring it home and the whole process repeats.
I've also got a private vpn to a Linux machine I set up, but even though I did a full update on it for backup, rsync takes forever (many many hours) to determine what files need to be updated/added, and the machine gets pretty bogged down. Still working on a good solution for automatic offsite backups...
I'd be interested to know what others think of the Drobo before plunking down the $$$ for one.
After convincing my boss and *his* boss about the benefits of Skype, yesterday was the day I was going to demo it to show how it works, benefits, video, etc.
Suffice to say, the demo did not go well.
I use GWT. It's a pretty nice toolkit for web pages that is all Java; it compiles the Java to Javascript so there are some classes that you can't use (AWT, Swing, etc.). I've found the performance to be good (certainly better than the big Flex apps I'm using it to replace) and being able to stick with one language through everything is a big plus. You can still use CSS to format the output, so you don't have to stick with a single look or have to dive into the html/javascript to change it.
It's definitely an interesting take on an idea dominated by things like JQuery, Delicious, etc.
Cobol might be a pretty easy joke for obsolescence, but remember that Cobol was written by a woman in a time where the industry was far more male dominated than it is today.
Though I've never programmed in Cobol, it made a big impression on me as a kid to show that anybody could program a computer, or use a computer to create something cool.
I got "lucky" to solve a problem for someone back in college: she had written her thesis on a 3.5 floppy, had no backup (this is when you had to go to the "computing center" to work, as practically no one had a machine of their own, so you had to take all your stuff with you), and had run the disk through the washing machine.
She came in, crying hysterically (it actually took a few tries just to figure out what was wrong), and realized what had happened. I had one of the few "eureka!" moments of my life, and grabbed another floppy, carefully cut it open, did the same with her disk, then air-dried it. I put the platter in the "new" disk, with its dry fabric covering (whatever that stuff was...), taped it shut, and put it in the Mac (SE...no hd) and yep, the disk was readable and I was able to get her thesis off and onto a network drive, then we copied it back onto a new disk and assured her I'd hold onto the thesis on the network drive until the end of the semester.
Funny thing, she kept the disk I had used, taped around the edges, and the next year I saw her again and asked how things were, and she was still using it. Go figure.
Wow...from the Wikipedia article I went to the product's homepage, and most of it is filled up with a big blue box that has a two sentence blurb that invites you to click more to get ... a few more sentences, emphasizing its ODBC and JDBC connections. The rest of the page seems to be general support and contact stuff. Pretty sad product homepage.
So the article itself is /.'ed, but using Google, I can't seem to figure out what database CA has that everyone is theoretically migrating off of. I knew CA had a lot of products, mostly related to the mainframe, but an actual honest-to-goodness "select * from table" database? News to me.
I have a compact camera that fits in my pocket that takes *better* pictures than my big DSLR did; I have a (sadly, no longer working) Nikon D1X that is exactly what a professional camera looks like; big body, takes all Nikon lenses, but only shoots 5mp. Compact cameras can shoot up to 14mp, last time I looked. Say what you will about the lens, compact cameras can produce spy-agency-worthy images of ... uh ... whatever is spy-agency-worthy in Kuwait.
They wanted to improve 3270 terminal handling.
I read the headline and my first thought was "wait...the company that wrote Extra? They're still around?" Then all those nightmares of HLLAPI programing came back and I sat under my desk and cried.
...and watch me through the window as I play Crazy Taxi and Jet Set (Grind) Radio on my Dreamcast. After that, I'm going to bring it down a little with some Shenmue.
Sigh, even if I'm modded down to oblivion, I've got to say it: the Dreamcast was probably the best console ever created, in terms of graphics quality (Soul Calibur just like it played in the arcade!), awesome games (see above, plus Marvel vs Capcom), and experimental "what were you smoking when you came up with that???" games (Pen Pen Trilcelon, Seaman, Space Chanel 5). It was the console that really breached the chasm between the old school Nintendo-era sprite games and the $50 million mega sequels of today. It was the last console where big publishers could take a risk insofar as they were going to have to actually put it on a disc and sell it in the stores, as opposed to just downloading it to the console today. Plus not only did it have the modem/nic attachment, it also had those mini games that doubled as memory carts. I remember playing Tetris on one waiting for the train.
From the description above, it sounds like going home to discover main street's all boarded up and tumble weeds roll down the sidewalk. Sigh...you can't go home again, even with video games.
Oh, wait, yes you can....I'll just fire up my Dreamcast!
The Beatles on iTMS is a great example of holding out too long for some unknown reason; as others have said, anyone who wanted Beatles music on their ripped it long ago from the CDs they waited in line to buy because "the Beatles records are now available on CD!!!!!!!"
From everything I've heard, it was EMI and the Beatles themselves who apparently either saw no need to have their music available for download, or wanted some insane amount of money that it made it a non-starter. This was probably one of the rare moments where Steve Jobs was chasing *them* to do a deal, and they still held off.
I fired up iTunes and looked through the albums, mentally checking off the tunes I've been listening to for years on my computer from ripping them from my CDs, and I realize I have no need to purchase anything. Thanks guys, day late and a dollar short.
Check out the geek atlas. There's a lot of places that are very heavy on the geek factor, plus generally interesting to see.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
I think you're right; the tech world is full of weirdness right now. Everyone was familiar with the whole "windows on the desktop, unix on server, mac for graphics" paradigms, but with the rise of the smart phones, cloud, social-media-everything, it really is a new world, but not new enough that you can't read the billboards.
Awesome times if you embrace the weirdness; people who hold fast to the way it used to be will ....HEY GET OFF MY LAWN!
He's a ninja.
Or, at least, he can afford to hire a bunch of them.
I really wish I still had all my green-bar output from the decwriter I used to play adventure, tic-tac-toe, and even Star Trek. I think one game of that generated more than 100 pages (and took about 8 hours to play).
More than that, I can't for the life of me remember how exactly I *got* to the games, being a little kid; I remember it was a PDP-something, but no idea what the OS was.
Regardless, this looks like an awesome hack and makes me wish I'd kept that old IBM Selectric I had for years and years....it hadn't even occurred to me to do something like this (much to my dismay), even though that *was* the interface to a system like the IBM 7090 or somesuch.
I read TFA and it seems more focused on the excitement that the bees can solve the TSP, but the researchers never seem to indicate how the bees are doing it, and given the nature of the problem, how do they know it really is the "optimum" solution. Based on my limited work with the TSP, the only algorithm that, for my purposes, has worked the best is Nearest Neighbor, which is also, I believe, the simplest but also most naive.
Would be interesting to know what the bees' algorithm is.
On a Mac running OSX, click the apple menu and there is an item called "Mac OS X software..." which launches the browser and brings you to essentially as what's been described as the Apple store. You can buy software, download trials, etc. Sure it's not the same as the App Store way of doing things, but it's not like the Mac didn't have a similar concept.
As far as installing stuff, I personally am not worried because the Mac is meant to be a general purpose tool that, since it has a command-line interface as part of the base OS, you have a guaranteed way to get into the guts of the OS and do all sorts of nice things.
If they announce that the terminal would not be an app available on the Mac, and that software can only be developed with "development" machines, then yes, I'm hanging it up and switching to a straight Linux machine. Until then, the Mac is still my choice for developing Unix software, as well as anything else I darn well please.