Rich client-side interface... means letting the client side do ALL your application logic and interface, seperately. And let the server do the dumb job of validating, saving and returning raw data that can be handled by client-side custom components or logic-flow.
Thank you for warning us against hiring you or your company to build Web applications.
You want to put ALL your application logic on the client side? You're kidding, right? A bit limiting, don't you think? How about designing applications for scalability and extensibility? How about taking advantage of the collective wisdom of software engineers and applying some common design patterns to properly separate concerns and distribute responsibilities across appropriate application layers?
No wonder you think the client side is so complex. You have no concept of how to design an application.
I can't figure out why some people think it is "ludicrous" that software should cost more than hardware. Given the commoditization of current PC hardware, it would seem that much more engineering and investment goes into the production of an office suite than in the slapping together of a motherboard, case, hard drive and monitor. People buy computers for the sole purpose of running software.
When you buy a regular ol' paper back book, what percentage of the purchase price is for "hardware" (the paper its printed on) and what percentage is for the "software" (the story printed on its pages)?
Let's see if I can burn what little karma I have..
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 2, Funny
What if we made a Beowulf cluster of Donald Becker?
Why would I spend $99 on a monochrome, no-backlight Palm when I can get:
o 256 Color screen o Complete Calendar/Organizer/Todo/etc. o Contact Management o Wireless, always-on Internet access (GPRS) o Built-in IMAP and POP3 support o SMS, MMS, WAP o T9 text input (far faster than I could ever get with Graffiti) o Voice recorder o Voice control o Built-in Bluetooth and Infrared o SyncML for synchronization with my desktop o 4-5 days battery life o 1/3 the size/weight of a Palm o intuitive Joystick for menu navigation
Oh yeah, it's a cell phone, too. And I can use it anywhere in the world. And it was only $50 after various AT&T and Best Buy rebates.
People seem to think that their bodies do not belong to them, for some strange reason. (to me.)
I think members of the so-called "religious right" have done a poor job of explaining their objections to such research and this has led to your misunderstanding. As someone who is against embryonic stem cell research, I would not say that your body does not belong to you. What I would say is that someone else's body doesn't belong to you. The fundamental principle behind my argument against stem-cell research is that people should not be used as means to other people's ends. I consider embryos to be people, so if you use an embryo as a means (via research) to cure someone else, I consider that an immoral act.
If you'd like to use your own stem cells, from your own body to do research, please feel free. Just don't take them from someone else without his or her consent.
As an aside, it seems to me that this is a principle many/. posters support in other contexts. How many of you fight against the limitations on personal freedoms that Microsoft, the RIAA, DMCA, etc. support? These personal freedoms all fall under the above principle.
Consider the following definitions of "Artificial Intelligence":
A) Intelligence that is identical to real intelligence (e.g., that of man), but that is manufactured by man or by some machine of man's design. I.e., real intelligence produced not through nature's normal processes, but through engineering.
2) Intelligence (also manufactured as in #A) that approximates real intelligence. As an analogy, "artificial flavoring" is often added to foods and beverages. Grape juice made entirely from artificial flavoring tastes somewhat like juice made from real grapes, but, given sufficiently sensitive taste buds, can be distinguished from real grape juice. According to this definition, Artificial Intelligence would function similarly to real intelligence, but not exactly. Note that the Turing Test may verify AI that meets this definition, but is not rigorous enough to verify AI that meets definition A.
Which of these definitions describes the Artificial Intelligence your research aims to produce? If not one of these, what is your working definition?
This has nothing to do with the first and fourth amendments to the constitution. Those amendments prohibit the government from restricting your speech and unreasonably searching you, respectively. The phone company is not the government. You're using services that the telephone company provides. If they want to sell data about your usage of their services to their partners, they have the right to do that. You have the right to stop using their service.
this type of technology bypasses the eardrum altogether, hinting at the possibility of sending sound to some who otherwise wouldn't be able to hear
What makes you think this bypasses the eardrum? In "normal" hearing, air conducts vibrations to eardrum, which interfaces with nerves. With this technology the vibrations are conducted over bone, which still causes vibrations to impact the eardrum, resulting in your hearing the sound. This is not a general solution for those whose hearing is impaired by damaged eardrums.
What is it about bookstores that make them ideal for explaining how a programming language, database or markup language work?
Well, as someone who writes computer-science textbooks and professional developer books for a living (including several with multi-tier bookstores as examples) I can honestly say that there's a very simple reason: advertising. By inserting bookstore applications into every book, and by populating the application databases with the appropriate information, we can advertise all the other books we write.
The BeOS has enabled you to do just this since day one. In Be, every email is just a file. Because of the uberfilesystem BFS (and its file-typing system), you can create lightning-fast queries based on the email headers, achieving exactly the result you describe--no specialized client required.
I was at JavaOne this past week where they were selling the Zaurus and the Linksys 802.11 card at a pretty steep discount. They had access points all around the Moscone center so you could access the 'net and participate in a programming contest they held.
One of the very first things I noticed about the Zaurus was the the battery life is pitiful. The freshly, fully, properly charged removable battery lasted about 20-30 minutes when using the wireless card for internet access. Battery life without the wireless card installed wasn't much better. What am I supposed to do with a PDA that lasts 30 minutes?
1600x1200 would be too small to be useful for me I would think
Gotta disagree with you there. I have a Dell Latitude C800 that does 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD and it is *beautiful*. Very usable and, since I'm in book publishing, it's great to be able to fit two pages side by side. If fonts are too small for you to read at that resolution, you can always increase the font size and still get lots of usable screen real estate.
Can anyone get Mozilla 0.9.3 (or 0.9.2 for that matter) to render http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt? Mozilla seems to strip all formatting so it appears as just plain text...
For the past four years I've been working on a research project at Boston College called EagleEyes that was developed for exactly this purpose. EagleEyes is a mouse replacement technology that allows the user to control the mouse cursor just by moving his eyes or head
The technology is about 6 years in the making and we currently have over 35 students, most with cerebral palsy, using the sytsem on a regular basis (a couple of hours each week) for their learning. We also have five systems installed in homes around Massachusetts, three in special needs schools, and two systems in Birmingham and Manchester England.
The Hardware isn't free, but the system specifications and all of the necessary software (much of which I have written) are available for free as well as support for the system.
Whatever your or my understanding of buddism may be, it is extremely poor form to challenge someone's religion rather than inquiring as to your perception of incongruity
Point taken. However, I honestly did not mean my remarks as an attack. I think every one of us needs to constantly question his beliefs in an effort to reach the truth. As a Christian I am constantly questioning myself and the Catholic church so that I might have some chance at arriving at the truth. I think challenging beliefs is one of the most important things a person can do. How else can we come to understand anything?
When for instance you had stated that you thought the world was intrinsicly good, I would be in poor form to say "then you aren't a xtian" rather than asking "isn't the fall of man and thus essential corruption of the material world a central point of xtianity? How do you reconcile that, and define your faith as xtian?")
I wouldn't take exception to such an assertion, as long as it was said in earnest. I would disagree with it, however, just as the previous poster is allowed to disagree with my assertion that he is not a Buddhist.
I would reply that the fall of man by no means implies a corruption of the material world. The material world is not corrupt, according to Christianity. It is the human soul that was corrupted in the Fall and it is because of this that men pervert their use of the material world. Gold, for example, is not evil in any way. It is a creation of God. However men pervert its use by coveting it, stealing it, etc.
I grant you that "Mere Christianity" doesn't prove Christianity to be true. That wasn't, however, Lewis' intent in writing it. The book is meant to define what Christianity is as opposed to what it is not. It describes Christianity in both a more concrete and more abstract way than any particular sect. To use Lewis' own metaphor, Christianity is a house with many rooms. In each room you find a different "version" of Christianity, but they share the same walls, and hallways. "Mere Christianity" is a description of these common elements.
My comment about the previous poster not being a Buddhist wasn't meant to be an insult, it is simply a matter of fact. When it comes to the material world, religions can be divided into 3 major camps. The first embraces the material world as the supreme reality (Pantheism). The second revolts against the material world and goes so far as to call it evil, or an illusion (Buddhism). The third recognizes that the material world is good and was created by a divine hand but also recognizes that there was a divine hand that made it and this divine hand made reasoning creatures in its own image (Christianity). By affirming materialism, the previous poster was saying himself that he is not a Buddhist. A Buddhist, by definition, is radically opposed to materialism.
You also imply that materialism is incompatible with spirituality
How can it not be? The very definition of spirituality (or of a spirit, a soul, etc.) is something non-material. If matter is all that there is, there can be nothing that is non-material, therefore there can be no spirit. That is simply irrefutable logic. Furthermore, this isn't even a strictly Christian view. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and may others held that the soul was entirely non-material (Cf. Plato's Phaedo).
Furthermore, if you think materialism is true, or even possible, then you are certainly not a Buddhist. Do you have any idea what enlightenment means to the Buddha? It means realizing that everything in this world is mere illusion and neither you nor I really exist. The word "Nirvana", by definition, is "extinction". It is the realization that "all is nothing."
why does every fundamentalist x-ian with an inferiority complex feel the need to trot out Lewis to try to validate their intellectual standing?
I "trot out Lewis" because he is an extremely clear and rigorous writer who stands on the shoulders of great theologians like Augustine and Aquinas and is, perhaps, more accessible to the modern reader. Have you read any Lewis besides his children's fiction?
No. You are confusing materialism with believing in a deterministic Newtonian universe.
I certainly have not confused the two. The one (materialism), by definition, implies the other (determinism). This has nothing to do with Newtonian physics, so perhaps I shouldn't have used the examples I did. (And what does what is "generally accepted" have to do with what is true, anyway?)
The point is this: a strictly material universe is a causally closed system. That is, since matter is all that exists, the cause of every effect must be a material one. Whether matter behaves according to the laws of Newtonian physics or Quantum mechanics doesn't matter. Every material effect is the result of a material cause in such a system.
If fact, it is usually used to argue *against* materialism
Your point? I *am* arguing *against* materialism...
So, the random path of a random atom at Big Bang caused you to make a fool out of yourself on Slashdot...
Certainly not. I, as a human being with a free will, made a conscious decision to express my thoughts about the true nature of reality: i.e. a universe that was created by a non-material, supernatural being who also has a free will.
I admit it. I cannot understand materialism. That is, I don't understand how people can possibly believe that matter is all that exists and that all of our actions are determined by strictly material causes.
The materialist believes that there is no such thing as the supernatural, whether it be God, or gods, or the Tao, or the Buddha. He thinks every effect in the universe can be explained by material causes. But let us (as C.S. Lewis does in his book "Miracles") take a look at the implications of such a belief.
If materialism is true, then everything that exists at this moment is the result of an extremely long chain of physical events spanning back to the big bang. Life came to exist on earth because a few water molecules accidentally got mixed up with some amino acids. Human beings came about because of random genetic mutations in apes that turned out to make the apes survive longer. I'm sure the details here are entirely inadequate, but you see the point. Darwinian evolution is a generally accepted theory on the development of human beings.
But what about our thoughts? If materialism is true, then the cause of every thought that you or I have can be traced back to the big bang. That is, it is only because one particular atom left the big bang at such and such a trajectory that I think anything at all. So all of my thoughts are simply the effects, or results, of the random motion of atoms in my brain. If materialism is true, then the universe is causally closed. That is, every effect in the universe can be shown mathematically to have been caused by a particular physical cause.
Yet can this be possible? If the thoughts in my head are simply the random movements of atoms, why should I believe my own thoughts to be true? Why should I trust my own thoughts? Would any one of us trust a computer that was programmed by throwing marbles randomly at the keyboard? Of course not!
The materialist shoots himself in the foot as soon as he argues for materialism. If materialism is true, then there can be no truth! The the very thought of materialism is simply the result of the random motion of atoms and cannot be said to be true. If a particular atom, or group of atoms had moved along a slightly different trajectory millions of years ago, the materialist would have an entirely different set of thoughts, and might not have thought of materialism at all.
The great thing about the Simpsons is its social commentary and willingness to poke fun even at Fox and itself. I just hope the tradition continues. I don't mean to say that I hope Futurama is just The Simpsons transposed into the year 3000, but just that I hope the essence is maintained.
Slashdot Mirror
Rich client-side interface ... means letting the client side do ALL your application logic and interface, seperately. And let the server do the dumb job of validating, saving and returning raw data that can be handled by client-side custom components or logic-flow.
Thank you for warning us against hiring you or your company to build Web applications.
You want to put ALL your application logic on the client side? You're kidding, right? A bit limiting, don't you think? How about designing applications for scalability and extensibility? How about taking advantage of the collective wisdom of software engineers and applying some common design patterns to properly separate concerns and distribute responsibilities across appropriate application layers?
No wonder you think the client side is so complex. You have no concept of how to design an application.
I can't figure out why some people think it is "ludicrous" that software should cost more than hardware. Given the commoditization of current PC hardware, it would seem that much more engineering and investment goes into the production of an office suite than in the slapping together of a motherboard, case, hard drive and monitor. People buy computers for the sole purpose of running software.
When you buy a regular ol' paper back book, what percentage of the purchase price is for "hardware" (the paper its printed on) and what percentage is for the "software" (the story printed on its pages)?
What if we made a Beowulf cluster of Donald Becker?
Why would I spend $99 on a monochrome, no-backlight Palm when I can get:
o 256 Color screen
o Complete Calendar/Organizer/Todo/etc.
o Contact Management
o Wireless, always-on Internet access (GPRS)
o Built-in IMAP and POP3 support
o SMS, MMS, WAP
o T9 text input (far faster than I could ever get with Graffiti)
o Voice recorder
o Voice control
o Built-in Bluetooth and Infrared
o SyncML for synchronization with my desktop
o 4-5 days battery life
o 1/3 the size/weight of a Palm
o intuitive Joystick for menu navigation
Oh yeah, it's a cell phone, too. And I can use it anywhere in the world. And it was only $50 after various AT&T and Best Buy rebates.
T68i
People seem to think that their bodies do not belong to them, for some strange reason. (to me.)
I think members of the so-called "religious right" have done a poor job of explaining their objections to such research and this has led to your misunderstanding. As someone who is against embryonic stem cell research, I would not say that your body does not belong to you. What I would say is that someone else's body doesn't belong to you. The fundamental principle behind my argument against stem-cell research is that people should not be used as means to other people's ends . I consider embryos to be people, so if you use an embryo as a means (via research) to cure someone else, I consider that an immoral act.
If you'd like to use your own stem cells, from your own body to do research, please feel free. Just don't take them from someone else without his or her consent.
As an aside, it seems to me that this is a principle many /. posters support in other contexts. How many of you fight against the limitations on personal freedoms that Microsoft, the RIAA, DMCA, etc. support? These personal freedoms all fall under the above principle.
The article's author says:
"[Nokia] has condemned as theft the placing of chalk symbols on walls and pavements at places where people can use wireless net access."
Nokia Says:
"anyone using bandwidth without the permission of the person paying for it was simply stealing."Seems to me this is a simple mis[interpretation|representation] by the author.
I guess I misread the headline "What Makes Gecko [as in Mozilla's HTML rendering engine] Sick" ...
Dr. Wallace -
Consider the following definitions of "Artificial Intelligence":
A) Intelligence that is identical to real intelligence (e.g., that of man), but that is manufactured by man or by some machine of man's design. I.e., real intelligence produced not through nature's normal processes, but through engineering.
2) Intelligence (also manufactured as in #A) that approximates real intelligence. As an analogy, "artificial flavoring" is often added to foods and beverages. Grape juice made entirely from artificial flavoring tastes somewhat like juice made from real grapes, but, given sufficiently sensitive taste buds, can be distinguished from real grape juice. According to this definition, Artificial Intelligence would function similarly to real intelligence, but not exactly. Note that the Turing Test may verify AI that meets this definition, but is not rigorous enough to verify AI that meets definition A.
Which of these definitions describes the Artificial Intelligence your research aims to produce? If not one of these, what is your working definition?
This has nothing to do with the first and fourth amendments to the constitution. Those amendments prohibit the government from restricting your speech and unreasonably searching you, respectively. The phone company is not the government. You're using services that the telephone company provides. If they want to sell data about your usage of their services to their partners, they have the right to do that. You have the right to stop using their service.
this type of technology bypasses the eardrum altogether, hinting at the possibility of sending sound to some who otherwise wouldn't be able to hear
What makes you think this bypasses the eardrum? In "normal" hearing, air conducts vibrations to eardrum, which interfaces with nerves. With this technology the vibrations are conducted over bone, which still causes vibrations to impact the eardrum, resulting in your hearing the sound. This is not a general solution for those whose hearing is impaired by damaged eardrums.
The point is that it's not a digital thing, playing an instrument.
That's funny... I use all ten of my digits whenever I play the piano...
What is it about bookstores that make them ideal for explaining how a programming language, database or markup language work?
Well, as someone who writes computer-science textbooks and professional developer books for a living (including several with multi-tier bookstores as examples) I can honestly say that there's a very simple reason: advertising. By inserting bookstore applications into every book, and by populating the application databases with the appropriate information, we can advertise all the other books we write.
The BeOS has enabled you to do just this since day one. In Be, every email is just a file. Because of the uberfilesystem BFS (and its file-typing system), you can create lightning-fast queries based on the email headers, achieving exactly the result you describe--no specialized client required.
I was at JavaOne this past week where they were selling the Zaurus and the Linksys 802.11 card at a pretty steep discount. They had access points all around the Moscone center so you could access the 'net and participate in a programming contest they held.
One of the very first things I noticed about the Zaurus was the the battery life is pitiful. The freshly, fully, properly charged removable battery lasted about 20-30 minutes when using the wireless card for internet access. Battery life without the wireless card installed wasn't much better. What am I supposed to do with a PDA that lasts 30 minutes?
Gotta disagree with you there. I have a Dell Latitude C800 that does 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD and it is *beautiful*. Very usable and, since I'm in book publishing, it's great to be able to fit two pages side by side. If fonts are too small for you to read at that resolution, you can always increase the font size and still get lots of usable screen real estate.
Can anyone get Mozilla 0.9.3 (or 0.9.2 for that matter) to render http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt? Mozilla seems to strip all formatting so it appears as just plain text...
For the past four years I've been working on a research project at Boston College called EagleEyes that was developed for exactly this purpose. EagleEyes is a mouse replacement technology that allows the user to control the mouse cursor just by moving his eyes or head
The technology is about 6 years in the making and we currently have over 35 students, most with cerebral palsy, using the sytsem on a regular basis (a couple of hours each week) for their learning. We also have five systems installed in homes around Massachusetts, three in special needs schools, and two systems in Birmingham and Manchester England.
The Hardware isn't free, but the system specifications and all of the necessary software (much of which I have written) are available for free as well as support for the system.
For details, check out http://www.bc.edu/eagleeyes
Whatever your or my understanding of buddism may be, it is extremely poor form to challenge someone's religion rather than inquiring as to your perception of incongruity
Point taken. However, I honestly did not mean my remarks as an attack. I think every one of us needs to constantly question his beliefs in an effort to reach the truth. As a Christian I am constantly questioning myself and the Catholic church so that I might have some chance at arriving at the truth. I think challenging beliefs is one of the most important things a person can do. How else can we come to understand anything?
When for instance you had stated that you thought the world was intrinsicly good, I would be in poor form to say "then you aren't a xtian" rather than asking "isn't the fall of man and thus essential corruption of the material world a central point of xtianity? How do you reconcile that, and define your faith as xtian?")
I wouldn't take exception to such an assertion, as long as it was said in earnest. I would disagree with it, however, just as the previous poster is allowed to disagree with my assertion that he is not a Buddhist.
I would reply that the fall of man by no means implies a corruption of the material world. The material world is not corrupt, according to Christianity. It is the human soul that was corrupted in the Fall and it is because of this that men pervert their use of the material world. Gold, for example, is not evil in any way. It is a creation of God. However men pervert its use by coveting it, stealing it, etc.
I grant you that "Mere Christianity" doesn't prove Christianity to be true. That wasn't, however, Lewis' intent in writing it. The book is meant to define what Christianity is as opposed to what it is not. It describes Christianity in both a more concrete and more abstract way than any particular sect. To use Lewis' own metaphor, Christianity is a house with many rooms. In each room you find a different "version" of Christianity, but they share the same walls, and hallways. "Mere Christianity" is a description of these common elements.
My comment about the previous poster not being a Buddhist wasn't meant to be an insult, it is simply a matter of fact. When it comes to the material world, religions can be divided into 3 major camps. The first embraces the material world as the supreme reality (Pantheism). The second revolts against the material world and goes so far as to call it evil, or an illusion (Buddhism). The third recognizes that the material world is good and was created by a divine hand but also recognizes that there was a divine hand that made it and this divine hand made reasoning creatures in its own image (Christianity). By affirming materialism, the previous poster was saying himself that he is not a Buddhist. A Buddhist, by definition, is radically opposed to materialism.
You also imply that materialism is incompatible with spirituality
How can it not be? The very definition of spirituality (or of a spirit, a soul, etc.) is something non-material. If matter is all that there is, there can be nothing that is non-material, therefore there can be no spirit. That is simply irrefutable logic. Furthermore, this isn't even a strictly Christian view. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and may others held that the soul was entirely non-material (Cf. Plato's Phaedo).
Furthermore, if you think materialism is true, or even possible, then you are certainly not a Buddhist. Do you have any idea what enlightenment means to the Buddha? It means realizing that everything in this world is mere illusion and neither you nor I really exist. The word "Nirvana", by definition, is "extinction". It is the realization that "all is nothing."
why does every fundamentalist x-ian with an inferiority complex feel the need to trot out Lewis to try to validate their intellectual standing?
I "trot out Lewis" because he is an extremely clear and rigorous writer who stands on the shoulders of great theologians like Augustine and Aquinas and is, perhaps, more accessible to the modern reader. Have you read any Lewis besides his children's fiction?
No. You are confusing materialism with believing in a deterministic Newtonian universe.
...
I certainly have not confused the two. The one (materialism), by definition, implies the other (determinism). This has nothing to do with Newtonian physics, so perhaps I shouldn't have used the examples I did. (And what does what is "generally accepted" have to do with what is true, anyway?)
The point is this: a strictly material universe is a causally closed system. That is, since matter is all that exists, the cause of every effect must be a material one. Whether matter behaves according to the laws of Newtonian physics or Quantum mechanics doesn't matter. Every material effect is the result of a material cause in such a system.
If fact, it is usually used to argue *against* materialism
Your point? I *am* arguing *against* materialism
So, the random path of a random atom at Big Bang caused you to make a fool out of yourself on Slashdot...
Certainly not. I, as a human being with a free will, made a conscious decision to express my thoughts about the true nature of reality: i.e. a universe that was created by a non-material, supernatural being who also has a free will.
I admit it. I cannot understand materialism. That is, I don't understand how people can possibly believe that matter is all that exists and that all of our actions are determined by strictly material causes.
The materialist believes that there is no such thing as the supernatural, whether it be God, or gods, or the Tao, or the Buddha. He thinks every effect in the universe can be explained by material causes. But let us (as C.S. Lewis does in his book "Miracles") take a look at the implications of such a belief.
If materialism is true, then everything that exists at this moment is the result of an extremely long chain of physical events spanning back to the big bang. Life came to exist on earth because a few water molecules accidentally got mixed up with some amino acids. Human beings came about because of random genetic mutations in apes that turned out to make the apes survive longer. I'm sure the details here are entirely inadequate, but you see the point. Darwinian evolution is a generally accepted theory on the development of human beings.
But what about our thoughts? If materialism is true, then the cause of every thought that you or I have can be traced back to the big bang. That is, it is only because one particular atom left the big bang at such and such a trajectory that I think anything at all. So all of my thoughts are simply the effects, or results, of the random motion of atoms in my brain. If materialism is true, then the universe is causally closed. That is, every effect in the universe can be shown mathematically to have been caused by a particular physical cause.
Yet can this be possible? If the thoughts in my head are simply the random movements of atoms, why should I believe my own thoughts to be true? Why should I trust my own thoughts? Would any one of us trust a computer that was programmed by throwing marbles randomly at the keyboard? Of course not!
The materialist shoots himself in the foot as soon as he argues for materialism. If materialism is true, then there can be no truth! The the very thought of materialism is simply the result of the random motion of atoms and cannot be said to be true. If a particular atom, or group of atoms had moved along a slightly different trajectory millions of years ago, the materialist would have an entirely different set of thoughts, and might not have thought of materialism at all.
The great thing about the Simpsons is its social commentary and willingness to poke fun even at Fox and itself. I just hope the tradition continues. I don't mean to say that I hope Futurama is just The Simpsons transposed into the year 3000, but just that I hope the essence is maintained.