Back in the days that MCC I mean Netscape was hunting around for a scripting language, Lua was far less attractive. Without straightforward imperative iteration over tables, it would have been a hard sell, and for good reason. foreach() had significantly less power before closures started getting real. Lua 3.2 was the first release that should have made me take notice; a shame I waited until late 4.0, or else my career would have taken a different path.
IMO Tcl would have seemed a reasonable choice for Netscape at the time (and BSD-licensed too), but every now and then I sacrifice a cpio archive to Eris to thank her for preventing that disaster.
GST isn't even funny these days. The standard library is GPL'd, which means any code you write in it is also GPL'd. Game over, man! I wonder why nobody is working on its performance....
But yeah, it's lots of fun beating up on people with Lua benchmarks. I'm usually not happy until I get 3x the performance of Perl, or 20x PHP.
Jay (i'm mostly glad our 40kloc Tk app died)
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
·
· Score: 1
% ls --help ls: illegal option -- - usage: ls [-ABCFGHLPRSTWZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file...]
The first sign that you were in a state of sin should have been that "%" prompt. So get a real shell, and get a real operating system. Now, I'm not going to say that what follows is all that much better as far as graceful revelation of interface goes. It sucks too. But since before 1990 or so, there has been a better way. And believe me, installing this stuff on a AT&T 3B2 was worth the hassle, even back then.
By the way, since it's obvious that you're using some lame vendor ls, you have no reason to complain about GNU info pages; your ls won't be documented there. In any case, Debian has a reasonable manpage for ls. The info page for ls is harder to find, shamefully, but it's only twice as long because it has a lot of implicit background information on how Unix directories work.
Oh yeah: I'm really good at driving Windows from the keyboard only, and I don't know if I would have gotten there without the menus to teach me. A lot of the time I reach for Linux file browsers (say) and am frustrated at how unsophisticated they are as keyboard-only tools. But I still have cygwin on all the Windows boxes I care about, because there are many operations that this 18-year Unix veteran can imagine how to do from the shell that are beyond the model exposed in the GUI....of course about half of them involve pipelines containing "perl -n -e":-)
117-line spammy transcript follows; this post measured by weight, not volume.
nop@nop-desktop:~$ ls --help Usage: ls [OPTION]... [FILE]... List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default). Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuSUX nor --sort.
Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
-a, --all do not ignore entries starting with.
-A, --almost-all do not list implied . and..
--author with -l, print the author of each file
-b, --escape print octal escapes for nongraphic characters
--block-size=SIZE use SIZE-byte blocks
-B, --ignore-backups do not list implied entries ending with ~
-c with -lt: sort by, and show, ctime (time of last
modification of file status information)
with -l: show ctime and sort by name
otherwise: sort by ctime
-C list entries by columns
--color[=WHEN] control whether color is used to distinguish file
types. WHEN may be `never', `always', or `auto'
-d, --directory list directory entries instead of contents,
and do not dereference symbolic links
-D, --dired generate output designed for Emacs' dired mode
-f do not sort, enable -aU, disable -lst
-F, --classify append indicator (one of */=>@|) to entries
--file-type likewise, except do not append `*'
--format=WORD across -x, commas -m, horizontal -x, long -l,
single-column -1, verbose -l, vertical -C
--
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
·
· Score: 1
In 2006, isn't criticizing csh syntax a strawman?
I mean, I hope it's a strawman....
But it's true. Unix *and* GNU never got very serious about allowing commands to communicate their interface surface back to a shell before execution. "These are my arguments, these are my options, and here are the classes of things that make sense as arguments for options. When you complete on them, use that information, dammit."
Instead we have external kludges:
nop@nop-desktop:~$ wc -l/etc/bash_completion/etc/bash_completion.d/* | tail -1 8819 total
Depending on audience I tell people that Lua is JavaScript as designed by Scheme people. (Partially true; at least one R5RS author was involved in design discussions.) For an older audience, I say "imagine Algol crossed with Self"...
Speaking of WoW, the Natural Selection mod for Half-Life has been using pie menus in combat for a few years now. Mostly works, although they never really tweaked the timing between pops as well as you've done for your stuff.
I build a small fire in the case to get it going - call it ironic cooling.
You didn't own a CRT iMac then, or you wouldn't be laughing. The CRT never went into full powersave mode. The conventional wisdom was that Apple designed it that way so that the tube heater convection would pull cool air through the bottom of the case, cooling the motherboard underneath it.
First-recorded is bullshit in the present debate, and you know it.
The interesting questions are:
How effective are these weapons against civilian populations? (Presently being litigated in Baghdad, yes.)
How effective are these weapons for military actions?
Frankly, fuel-air explosives are the only present reason I'm willing to tolerate the WMD acronym. Both of us could describe exactly how they work, in the primary, secondary, and tertiary stages of casualty production. (Most of these end with "in any case, the victim drowns in their own blood", but it would be a mistake to think this was not the intended result.) Oh, and I have nightmares about this. Overpressure alarm clock in the tent. "THIS SIDE FOR SCUD PROTECTION" indeed.
But the first time I saw the term "WMD" in the title of a report was in what we would now call a heavily politicized context.
First off: WMD was a term created to mean "something bad that isn't a nuke"
Sorry, that's not true. It is an internationally recognized arms control term that encompasses nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons,
Sounds like there was already a good description of this class of weapons that I had already trained for as a first responder. Why did the term "WMD" come up to describe what we were already calling "NBC"? Did it poll better or something?
Or was it just a trademark issue with NBC?
"NBC" does have one flaw: it does not distinguish between the massive weapons powered by nuclear fission and fusion, and those merely designed to use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive isotopes over mile-wide regions. In terms of military planning for maneuver, radiologic weapons are just silly, since nobody is going to be somewhere long enough to be hurt by them. But the dispersal of low-level radioactivity over large regions does have a significant effect on real estate prices.
Before you laugh too hard at this, consider what the costs to the United States would be if Long Beach were slightly radioactive.
I mostly agree with you. However, I came not to bury Mosaic, but to praise it.
We wouldn't be talking here today in this medium if Mosaic hadn't hacked in inline images. Previous verions and previous browsers were fine with images at the far end of links. They just weren't displayed as a part of the page.
Without the ability to show off cool pictures, the "commercial world" (yes, I mean that in two senses) would have ignored the Web, the same way they ignored Gopher. Maybe HyperG would have filled that niche, in which case things would look a bit different today.
As almost a direct result of Mosaic's complete hack of an IMG tag, I can sit in any airport in the world and read corporate brochureware from my chair. Oh, and sometimes I can get useful data too.
It would have been nice if HTML had been an SGML application from the beginning, and browsers would have rejected syntactically invalid docments. However, SGML cost you literally $100 for the book, and why would any browser, regardless of who sponsored it, not do some gross hacks to make a VIP's favorite web site work?
Sigh. I'm having horrific brainos if I'm forgetting where Interlisp ran. Forgive me, it's only a friend of a friend....
Yeah, from what I understand the Alto didn't have an OS itself. But like DOS, it hosted several interesting environments. Unfortunately for me, my sole involvement with them was drooling on blue-and-whites.
But you must admit that DWIM survives as an object lesson. Good story.
I'll agree with most of those. I'd change the last to:
Every OS project on the Alto. Smalltalk-80 ate the world. It also hosted an influential Lisp environment. (DWIM? Structure editors? Guess who...) And Java never would have existed without Modula-3, which grew out of Cedar, which grew out of...oh, that's your point.
QNX is perhaps the weakest on your list. There are plenty of other embedded operating systems out there with great influence.
I'm a little reminded of a claim that containerized shipping has had just as much of an impact on global production as IT, though.
Last night I posted this. Now I get to post it again, only now featuring new RTFA power:
[TimBL...] Interesting, he's going to go down in history with similar status as Gutenberg. One of the very very few people alive who will still be referenced in 500, 1000 years where even kings, prime ministers and presidents will be forgotten.
And a shame too. marca (or his bosses) were the ones who said "all this abstract chatter on www-talk about compound documents is interesting, but can we hack some shit into the next release to show pictures?" Behold, the IMG tag. Years later, we've just about recovered from the infrastructural mess this made.
The IMG tag allowed corporations to burn money on graphic designers to avoid competing on actual content. Wikipedia as an application was viable once we had TEXTAREA, and before if you count the TimBL's NextStep browser; myspace and toyota.com were not.
What really built out the net we still use is one core idea: the Web is "a badly animated TV with a buy button". And the Web would have gone the way of Gopher+ without that. So let me toast the IMG tag. I'll see you in hell.
[TimBL...] Interesting, he's going to go down in history with similar status as Gutenberg. One of the very very few people alive who will still be referenced in 500, 1000 years where even kings, prime ministers and presidents will be forgotten.
And a shame too. marca (or his bosses) were the ones who said "all this abstract chatter on www-talk about compound documents is interesting, but can we hack some shit into the next release to show pictures?" Behold, the IMG tag. Years later, we've just about recovered from the infrastructural mess this made.
The IMG tag allowed corporations to burn money on graphic designers to avoid competing on actual content. Wikipedia as an application was viable once we had TEXTAREA, and before if you count the TimBL's NextStep browser; myspace and toyota.com were not.
What really built out the net we still use is one core idea: the Web is "a badly animated TV with a buy button". And the Web would have gone the way of Gopher+ without that. So let me toast the IMG tag. I'll see you in hell.
(Or whatever they're calling it these days; I think it was absorbed into the ActiveX branding.)
Just about every Unix vendor had this dream of turning their entire desktop environment into a sea of programmable objects.[1] The one I got to laugh at was Sun, with DOE, although you formerly-MacOS-bigots got to see it replayed in AppleScript and OpenDoc.[2]
Well, Microsoft delivered. I can write a script (in my choice of languages) that opens up a Word document, finds any bold text at the start of paragraphs and then HTTP POSTs it to a URL. And if I feel really annoying, I'll increase the volume level on the sound device, and read it to you. In a page of code.
It's really amazing what you can script this way. OK, yes, there's a reason I'm typing this on a Linux box, and why I have cygwin installed on any Win32 box I care about. But through marketing muscle and a desire to create opportunities for small VARs, Microsoft let little software authors poke around inside big applications. And created some nice tools for those little authors to write code with.
Shame it breaks in such obscure ways.
[1]: ARexx doesn't count. That's just DDE.
[2]: Obligatory joke about whether "the" is optional at some point in hypercard syntax here. Apple has been getting better, though.
I'm sad because I don't have modpoints today. That's the funniest thing I've seen in months. I'm still giggling five minutes later.
But just try to explain it to outsiders.
"See, Microsoft had this little problem with the transition of hotmail to NT...the server smelled funny so they put it back...uh, so there's this fierce rivalry between Microsoft and Google...lawsuits...uh...developers! developers! developers!"
Yet another reason why Linux weenies aren't headlining the comedy tours this summer.
2) Some of those benchmarks, like Pifast, likely fit inside the Core 2 Duo's massive L2 cache. Intel uses all that expensive cache to compensate for their lack of on-board memory controllers and HyperTransport.
I'm not sure I see the problem. A few years ago Intel apparently decided that maximizing headline clock speed was their priority. Oh yeah, baby. I've got a netburst for you.
IBM in mainframe mode has their own pipeline, and it primarily involves ratios of kilograms of solid steel packaging to performance delivered.
Intel screwed up so badly that the Power4 690, a mainframe chip, was the fastest machine in the world. The 690 took this title by....uh having a lot of cache it could borrow.
Today, 4MB is an insane amount of cache. But I don't care. If blowing that amount of real estate on the die makes my code get faster, Intel picked the right thing to optimize on.
But up in business class, the selling point is "we'll deliver your employees to their destination and they'll be rested." If Phones On A Plane interfere with this, we're either going to see lower international C fares, or FA nazis telling people to hang up and fly.
This is an excellent reason for the carriers to deliberately fail to regulate loud annoying people in the coach cabin. If you don't buy tickets that book into C, your employees are going to be hosed when they get to their destinations. There might be screaming babies, but if not, we've got loudmouths with VoIP. So cough up the dough to upgrade.
There's a fascinating game of chicken going on: how bad can the domestic carriers make discounted coach before corporate and government policies booking tickets decide that "lowest in discounted coach" has adverse effects on productivity?
"I want these motherfucking phones off this motherfucking plane!"
While I, a flyertalk poster, agree that it will really suck when the vast unwashed masses spend a JFK->ICN hop chatting to their book club (yes, that's 16 hours), it seems unlikely to happen any time soon.
First, we've already had the possibility of this. Airfone covers the lower 48 pretty well, and some vessels have satellite service as well. I've both called and received from them for several years. Admittedly these calls were cut off a bit short given how expensive they looked to get. Every now and then they'd run specials; one of my guilty pleasures was MUDding from an HP200LX palmtop back when your seatmates thought that was hot tech.
There's no good reason for the airlines to make it easy to bypass the Airfone pricing. So after all you nerds get done posting success reports about skype and gtalk, don't be surprised if jitter for UDP "mysteriously" starts wandering into ham radio range. Second, paid international business class is one of the things that keeps many US-flagged carriers alive. And now things get weird.
Oddly, many companies are willing to buy business class fares for their employees on long flights, but find in-flight communications expenses to be strictly unallowable, regardless of ticketed class. Never mind that the difference between discounted business and discounted coach can be thousands of dollars....wait, what's this "can be?" Math: five dollars a minute is *only* $300 an hour. If I'm going to sleep four hours anyway, can I have a seat in the back of the bus if I get decent net access for some of the rest?
But up in business class, the selling point is "we'll deliver your employees to their destination and they'll be rested." If Phones On A Plane interfere with this, we're either going to see lower international C fares, or FA nazis telling people to hang up and fly.
And at least for flights arriving in the US, failing to follow the directions of a flight crew tends to lead to a very quick trip through Customs....
With the advent of STL, most things are on the stack (and thus memory management problems are minimised).
Until they aren't on the stack. Or are you always sloshing around huge arrays as lvalues? Somewhere around here is when we separate the actual C++ programmers from the kidz who wouldn't have been fired if they were writing in Java.
It is a language designed so that a genius can write libraries designed for the merely smart to use. How many geniuses do you have in your workgroup? Me, I'm lucky. But I'd really rather they work on real design than trying to remember how copy constructors interact with template instantiation.
I don't know C++, and I know that I don't know it. Somewhere around here I have a list of interview questions for people who put C++ on their resume. They're mostly from me reading C++ code and going "what the heck does that imply?"
Unsurprisingly, most candidates fail that section of the interview. And they fail even trivial stuff like "what's a virtual pointer all about?" They may be aces at writing O(n^3) algorithms with CString, but they have no clue what's going on under the surface.
To be fair, I do know some true C++ experts. Most of them would rather be writing Haskell.
The problem with Banks is that somehow the energy is gone. My nethack-flavored review of Look To Windward was: "A cheap plastic imitation of a Culture novel." Well, it worked, since I bought it in hardcover.
I bought The Algebraist in Paris during US embargo, and it did ruin some of my trip by keeping me up all night reading it. But it seemed too long per plot twist delivered. Don't get me wrong, I live for books that surprise me. But a lot of that was unreliable narrator, and the cosmology seemed directly ripped off from Orion's Arm, and Banks didn't even get into the truly fascinating issue of Empire Time, and what it would mean for competing civilizations. Probably our Linux buddy Strosser nailed it in one of his books I haven't read yet.
Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book), The Player Of Games, or Feersum Enjinn (after learning to read again). They've all been sucked up deep into my mind.
Robert Heinlein (just for the idea that when you don't know what to do, keep the readers on their toes by saying "the door dilates". Got to love that)
You left out the guy who pointed that out and analyzed that.
Samuel R. Delany; bear with the introduction.
From Triton (now apparently called Trouble on Triton), Bantam, 1976 (1976!) page 333:
Text and textus? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means "web". In modern printing, the "web" is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of graphemes upon the "web", rendering it as text. All the uses of the words "web", "weave", "net", "matrix" and more, by this circular 'etymology' become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.
Skipping up to page 336:
Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)---that is to say the "science"---are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence "The door dilated." from Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it---in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture---is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus? All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read that sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.
Since I'm a glutton for RSI punishment, I'll finish with something from p. 337:
In science fiction, "science"---i.e., sentences displaying verbal emblems of scientific discourses---is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as "His world exploded", or "She turned on her left side", as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and through the labyrinth of technological possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel textus into text.
And now, since my wrists hurt, I'll just quote myself:
No, the book we're going to be talking about [in 20 years] is Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Published in '85, it posits a society where an organization called the Web provides books, papers, general information, background, and context to the conscious and preconscious (through implants, to be sure). I don't know anything out there in fiction that describes so well where we're heading, with cellphone Google and cellphone Wikipedia.
The next time I run into TimBL, my third question is going to be "Hey, did you read Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand when it came out?"
Normally I read digg entirely by RSS. Predictably, if you want any content, they want you to click through, since they haven't figured out how to transfer their ad-serving tech to RSS.
Recently, I *did* click through to something sufficiently enticing, and started reading. Woah.
They suddenly have nesting discussions (ok, only 2-level), comment rating, *and* filtering based on aggregate rating. As far as I can tell, they're only a few weeks away from the full-grown trolling ecology that is slashdot.
Don't think I'm just dissing slashdot. You should consider that this very message is pandering to you. It's a troll, albeit a troll with actual content. Despite my ph33rsom3 50 karma, I just can't resist writing a message that's informative and trying to get a good audience response.
Before you write off digg as a bunch of fucking loser teenagers who wouldn't know a VAX if somebody dropped it on their WRX (admittedly true), you should consider that they just grabbed what are probably the two most important feature from slashdot for fostering a culture encouraging intelligent commentary.
Meanwhile, slashcode in response picks up its first new features in *ages*.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the days that MCC I mean Netscape was hunting around for a scripting language, Lua was far less attractive. Without straightforward imperative iteration over tables, it would have been a hard sell, and for good reason. foreach() had significantly less power before closures started getting real. Lua 3.2 was the first release that should have made me take notice; a shame I waited until late 4.0, or else my career would have taken a different path.
IMO Tcl would have seemed a reasonable choice for Netscape at the time (and BSD-licensed too), but every now and then I sacrifice a cpio archive to Eris to thank her for preventing that disaster.
GST isn't even funny these days. The standard library is GPL'd, which means any code you write in it is also GPL'd. Game over, man! I wonder why nobody is working on its performance....
But yeah, it's lots of fun beating up on people with Lua benchmarks. I'm usually not happy until I get 3x the performance of Perl, or 20x PHP.
Jay
(i'm mostly glad our 40kloc Tk app died)
The first sign that you were in a state of sin should have been that "%" prompt. So get a real shell, and get a real operating system. Now, I'm not going to say that what follows is all that much better as far as graceful revelation of interface goes. It sucks too. But since before 1990 or so, there has been a better way. And believe me, installing this stuff on a AT&T 3B2 was worth the hassle, even back then.
...of course about half of them involve pipelines containing "perl -n -e" :-)
By the way, since it's obvious that you're using some lame vendor ls, you have no reason to complain about GNU info pages; your ls won't be documented there. In any case, Debian has a reasonable manpage for ls. The info page for ls is harder to find, shamefully, but it's only twice as long because it has a lot of implicit background information on how Unix directories work.
Oh yeah: I'm really good at driving Windows from the keyboard only, and I don't know if I would have gotten there without the menus to teach me. A lot of the time I reach for Linux file browsers (say) and am frustrated at how unsophisticated they are as keyboard-only tools. But I still have cygwin on all the Windows boxes I care about, because there are many operations that this 18-year Unix veteran can imagine how to do from the shell that are beyond the model exposed in the GUI.
117-line spammy transcript follows; this post measured by weight, not volume.
I mean, I hope it's a strawman....
But it's true. Unix *and* GNU never got very serious about allowing commands to communicate their interface surface back to a shell before execution. "These are my arguments, these are my options, and here are the classes of things that make sense as arguments for options. When you complete on them, use that information, dammit."
Instead we have external kludges:However, we do have a really concise way in zsh of saying "you're using
Yay Lua! Go team!
Depending on audience I tell people that Lua is JavaScript as designed by Scheme people. (Partially true; at least one R5RS author was involved in design discussions.) For an older audience, I say "imagine Algol crossed with Self"...
Speaking of WoW, the Natural Selection mod for Half-Life has been using pie menus in combat for a few years now. Mostly works, although they never really tweaked the timing between pops as well as you've done for your stuff.
You didn't own a CRT iMac then, or you wouldn't be laughing. The CRT never went into full powersave mode. The conventional wisdom was that Apple designed it that way so that the tube heater convection would pull cool air through the bottom of the case, cooling the motherboard underneath it.
The interesting questions are:
Frankly, fuel-air explosives are the only present reason I'm willing to tolerate the WMD acronym. Both of us could describe exactly how they work, in the primary, secondary, and tertiary stages of casualty production. (Most of these end with "in any case, the victim drowns in their own blood", but it would be a mistake to think this was not the intended result.) Oh, and I have nightmares about this. Overpressure alarm clock in the tent. "THIS SIDE FOR SCUD PROTECTION" indeed.
But the first time I saw the term "WMD" in the title of a report was in what we would now call a heavily politicized context.
Sounds like there was already a good description of this class of weapons that I had already trained for as a first responder. Why did the term "WMD" come up to describe what we were already calling "NBC"? Did it poll better or something?
Or was it just a trademark issue with NBC?
"NBC" does have one flaw: it does not distinguish between the massive weapons powered by nuclear fission and fusion, and those merely designed to use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive isotopes over mile-wide regions. In terms of military planning for maneuver, radiologic weapons are just silly, since nobody is going to be somewhere long enough to be hurt by them. But the dispersal of low-level radioactivity over large regions does have a significant effect on real estate prices.
Before you laugh too hard at this, consider what the costs to the United States would be if Long Beach were slightly radioactive.
I mostly agree with you. However, I came not to bury Mosaic, but to praise it.
We wouldn't be talking here today in this medium if Mosaic hadn't hacked in inline images. Previous verions and previous browsers were fine with images at the far end of links. They just weren't displayed as a part of the page.
Without the ability to show off cool pictures, the "commercial world" (yes, I mean that in two senses) would have ignored the Web, the same way they ignored Gopher. Maybe HyperG would have filled that niche, in which case things would look a bit different today.
As almost a direct result of Mosaic's complete hack of an IMG tag, I can sit in any airport in the world and read corporate brochureware from my chair. Oh, and sometimes I can get useful data too.
It would have been nice if HTML had been an SGML application from the beginning, and browsers would have rejected syntactically invalid docments. However, SGML cost you literally $100 for the book, and why would any browser, regardless of who sponsored it, not do some gross hacks to make a VIP's favorite web site work?
Sigh. I'm having horrific brainos if I'm forgetting where Interlisp ran. Forgive me, it's only a friend of a friend....
Yeah, from what I understand the Alto didn't have an OS itself. But like DOS, it hosted several interesting environments. Unfortunately for me, my sole involvement with them was drooling on blue-and-whites.
But you must admit that DWIM survives as an object lesson. Good story.
It's a shame about Squeak and Oberon.
- Every OS project on the Alto. Smalltalk-80 ate the world. It also hosted an influential Lisp environment. (DWIM? Structure editors? Guess who...) And Java never would have existed without Modula-3, which grew out of Cedar, which grew out of...oh, that's your point.
QNX is perhaps the weakest on your list. There are plenty of other embedded operating systems out there with great influence.I'm a little reminded of a claim that containerized shipping has had just as much of an impact on global production as IT, though.
Last night I posted this. Now I get to post it again, only now featuring new RTFA power:
[TimBL...] Interesting, he's going to go down in history with similar status as Gutenberg. One of the very very few people alive who will still be referenced in 500, 1000 years where even kings, prime ministers and presidents will be forgotten.
And a shame too. marca (or his bosses) were the ones who said "all this abstract chatter on www-talk about compound documents is interesting, but can we hack some shit into the next release to show pictures?" Behold, the IMG tag. Years later, we've just about recovered from the infrastructural mess this made.
The IMG tag allowed corporations to burn money on graphic designers to avoid competing on actual content. Wikipedia as an application was viable once we had TEXTAREA, and before if you count the TimBL's NextStep browser; myspace and toyota.com were not.
What really built out the net we still use is one core idea: the Web is "a badly animated TV with a buy button". And the Web would have gone the way of Gopher+ without that. So let me toast the IMG tag. I'll see you in hell.
The standard line (from The Ringworld Engineers) is:
"study sunspots from underneath"
[TimBL...] Interesting, he's going to go down in history with similar status as Gutenberg. One of the very very few people alive who will still be referenced in 500, 1000 years where even kings, prime ministers and presidents will be forgotten.
And a shame too. marca (or his bosses) were the ones who said "all this abstract chatter on www-talk about compound documents is interesting, but can we hack some shit into the next release to show pictures?" Behold, the IMG tag. Years later, we've just about recovered from the infrastructural mess this made.
The IMG tag allowed corporations to burn money on graphic designers to avoid competing on actual content. Wikipedia as an application was viable once we had TEXTAREA, and before if you count the TimBL's NextStep browser; myspace and toyota.com were not.
What really built out the net we still use is one core idea: the Web is "a badly animated TV with a buy button". And the Web would have gone the way of Gopher+ without that. So let me toast the IMG tag. I'll see you in hell.
My favorite thing to bash Linux bigots with:
OLE Automation.
(Or whatever they're calling it these days; I think it was absorbed into the ActiveX branding.)
Just about every Unix vendor had this dream of turning their entire desktop environment into a sea of programmable objects.[1] The one I got to laugh at was Sun, with DOE, although you formerly-MacOS-bigots got to see it replayed in AppleScript and OpenDoc.[2]
Well, Microsoft delivered. I can write a script (in my choice of languages) that opens up a Word document, finds any bold text at the start of paragraphs and then HTTP POSTs it to a URL. And if I feel really annoying, I'll increase the volume level on the sound device, and read it to you. In a page of code.
It's really amazing what you can script this way. OK, yes, there's a reason I'm typing this on a Linux box, and why I have cygwin installed on any Win32 box I care about. But through marketing muscle and a desire to create opportunities for small VARs, Microsoft let little software authors poke around inside big applications. And created some nice tools for those little authors to write code with.
Shame it breaks in such obscure ways.
[1]: ARexx doesn't count. That's just DDE.
[2]: Obligatory joke about whether "the" is optional at some point in hypercard syntax here. Apple has been getting better, though.
I'm still wiping tears from my eyes. This is right up there with one of the repurposing of the software from Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference to generate one of the best typeset listserv removal requests ever.
Of course, now that I've reseen Figure 2 and reread the summary in section 5, I'm going to be laughing for a bit longer. Dammit.
I'm sad because I don't have modpoints today. That's the funniest thing I've seen in months. I'm still giggling five minutes later.
But just try to explain it to outsiders.
"See, Microsoft had this little problem with the transition of hotmail to NT...the server smelled funny so they put it back...uh, so there's this fierce rivalry between Microsoft and Google...lawsuits...uh...developers! developers! developers!"
Yet another reason why Linux weenies aren't headlining the comedy tours this summer.
Maybe they are measuring "subjective uptime": it only seems like 436.8 days a year when you are supporting a Windows server?
Do you win or lose?
2) Some of those benchmarks, like Pifast, likely fit inside the Core 2 Duo's massive L2 cache. Intel uses all that expensive cache to compensate for their lack of on-board memory controllers and HyperTransport.
I'm not sure I see the problem. A few years ago Intel apparently decided that maximizing headline clock speed was their priority. Oh yeah, baby. I've got a netburst for you.
IBM in mainframe mode has their own pipeline, and it primarily involves ratios of kilograms of solid steel packaging to performance delivered.
Intel screwed up so badly that the Power4 690, a mainframe chip, was the fastest machine in the world. The 690 took this title by....uh having a lot of cache it could borrow.
Today, 4MB is an insane amount of cache. But I don't care. If blowing that amount of real estate on the die makes my code get faster, Intel picked the right thing to optimize on.
I know it's bad form to reply to yourseslf, but:
But up in business class, the selling point is "we'll deliver your employees to their destination and they'll be rested." If Phones On A Plane interfere with this, we're either going to see lower international C fares, or FA nazis telling people to hang up and fly.
This is an excellent reason for the carriers to deliberately fail to regulate loud annoying people in the coach cabin. If you don't buy tickets that book into C, your employees are going to be hosed when they get to their destinations. There might be screaming babies, but if not, we've got loudmouths with VoIP. So cough up the dough to upgrade.
There's a fascinating game of chicken going on: how bad can the domestic carriers make discounted coach before corporate and government policies booking tickets decide that "lowest in discounted coach" has adverse effects on productivity?
"I want these motherfucking phones off this motherfucking plane!"
While I, a flyertalk poster, agree that it will really suck when the vast unwashed masses spend a JFK->ICN hop chatting to their book club (yes, that's 16 hours), it seems unlikely to happen any time soon.
First, we've already had the possibility of this. Airfone covers the lower 48 pretty well, and some vessels have satellite service as well. I've both called and received from them for several years. Admittedly these calls were cut off a bit short given how expensive they looked to get. Every now and then they'd run specials; one of my guilty pleasures was MUDding from an HP200LX palmtop back when your seatmates thought that was hot tech.
There's no good reason for the airlines to make it easy to bypass the Airfone pricing. So after all you nerds get done posting success reports about skype and gtalk, don't be surprised if jitter for UDP "mysteriously" starts wandering into ham radio range. Second, paid international business class is one of the things that keeps many US-flagged carriers alive. And now things get weird.
Oddly, many companies are willing to buy business class fares for their employees on long flights, but find in-flight communications expenses to be strictly unallowable, regardless of ticketed class. Never mind that the difference between discounted business and discounted coach can be thousands of dollars....wait, what's this "can be?" Math: five dollars a minute is *only* $300 an hour. If I'm going to sleep four hours anyway, can I have a seat in the back of the bus if I get decent net access for some of the rest?
But up in business class, the selling point is "we'll deliver your employees to their destination and they'll be rested." If Phones On A Plane interfere with this, we're either going to see lower international C fares, or FA nazis telling people to hang up and fly.
And at least for flights arriving in the US, failing to follow the directions of a flight crew tends to lead to a very quick trip through Customs....
With the advent of STL, most things are on the stack (and thus memory management problems are minimised).
Until they aren't on the stack. Or are you always sloshing around huge arrays as lvalues? Somewhere around here is when we separate the actual C++ programmers from the kidz who wouldn't have been fired if they were writing in Java.
Fodder for your fortune db, file under Murphy:
Smart pointers---aren't.
Why do people keep dismissing C++?
Because it sucks .
It is a language designed so that a genius can write libraries designed for the merely smart to use. How many geniuses do you have in your workgroup? Me, I'm lucky. But I'd really rather they work on real design than trying to remember how copy constructors interact with template instantiation.
I don't know C++, and I know that I don't know it. Somewhere around here I have a list of interview questions for people who put C++ on their resume. They're mostly from me reading C++ code and going "what the heck does that imply?"
Unsurprisingly, most candidates fail that section of the interview. And they fail even trivial stuff like "what's a virtual pointer all about?" They may be aces at writing O(n^3) algorithms with CString, but they have no clue what's going on under the surface.
To be fair, I do know some true C++ experts. Most of them would rather be writing Haskell.
The problem with Banks is that somehow the energy is gone. My nethack-flavored review of Look To Windward was: "A cheap plastic imitation of a Culture novel." Well, it worked, since I bought it in hardcover.
I bought The Algebraist in Paris during US embargo, and it did ruin some of my trip by keeping me up all night reading it. But it seemed too long per plot twist delivered. Don't get me wrong, I live for books that surprise me. But a lot of that was unreliable narrator, and the cosmology seemed directly ripped off from Orion's Arm, and Banks didn't even get into the truly fascinating issue of Empire Time, and what it would mean for competing civilizations. Probably our Linux buddy Strosser nailed it in one of his books I haven't read yet.
Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book), The Player Of Games, or Feersum Enjinn (after learning to read again). They've all been sucked up deep into my mind.
You left out the guy who pointed that out and analyzed that.
Samuel R. Delany; bear with the introduction.
From Triton (now apparently called Trouble on Triton), Bantam, 1976 (1976!) page 333:
Skipping up to page 336:
Since I'm a glutton for RSI punishment, I'll finish with something from p. 337:
And now, since my wrists hurt, I'll just quote myself:
The next time I run into TimBL, my third question is going to be "Hey, did you read Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand when it came out?"
Normally I read digg entirely by RSS. Predictably, if you want any content, they want you to click through, since they haven't figured out how to transfer their ad-serving tech to RSS.
Recently, I *did* click through to something sufficiently enticing, and started reading. Woah.
They suddenly have nesting discussions (ok, only 2-level), comment rating, *and* filtering based on aggregate rating. As far as I can tell, they're only a few weeks away from the full-grown trolling ecology that is slashdot.
Don't think I'm just dissing slashdot. You should consider that this very message is pandering to you. It's a troll, albeit a troll with actual content. Despite my ph33rsom3 50 karma, I just can't resist writing a message that's informative and trying to get a good audience response.
Before you write off digg as a bunch of fucking loser teenagers who wouldn't know a VAX if somebody dropped it on their WRX (admittedly true), you should consider that they just grabbed what are probably the two most important feature from slashdot for fostering a culture encouraging intelligent commentary.
Meanwhile, slashcode in response picks up its first new features in *ages*.
Competition is goooooooooood.