Adobe is pretty interesting. Not that I know a lot about them, but they seem to open up the file formats, and compete on the tools.
Agreed, and to me this is a Good Thing(tm). There are lots of tools for reading and creating PDF - tools that have nothing to do with Adobe beyond implementing a format they originated. Do the same for the Flash ecosystem and we'll see open source tools, alternative proprietary tools and the continuation of Adobe proprietary tools also.
In other words, proper competition and to the end user's benefit. Definitely a good thing.
The Hobbit is not The Lord Of The Rings. This might sound crushingly obvious, but nothing I've seen so far suggests they're going to keep the light touch of the book. Looks like they just want to do another Lord Of The Rings and that's not right - it's a different style of story. And as for sequels...
Years and years ago, around 1992'ish I think, I wrote an app for the Mac called StartupFrills. It was a toy which showed a different screen each reboot, played a different sound, movie, read something out using Speech Manager...that kind of thing. I released it as freeware, with a note in the readme saying if you liked it please donate to your local children's hospital.
You will be amazed how many emails I got saying that people had done exactly that. I had no idea at that time - the idea of putting it up on the net at all was something of a novelty for me. I remember one mail from a Freemason, who said it was his duty to donate and that he would donate to a children's hospital this time round because I'd asked people to. He then said he was actually head of the Freemasons in Texas, and he would be asking all in his...err....chapter? group?....whatever the word is to donate to their local children's hospital that time. I have no idea how much that raised, but it's not a bad start is it.
I was astounded. I have a particular interest in donating to children's hospitals - as I kid I caught polyneuritis, was paralysed, 'died', was in a wheelchair and yet actually fully recovered - there's no trace of that in me now beyond a tracheotomy scar. I expected nothing from releasing StartupFrills and asking for donations, and I was extremely surprised at what took place.
Uh? Don't you remember the CIRCLE, PLOT and DRAW commands? Sure they were slow (I can remember watching as large circles were drawn clockwise to the screen), but they were there.
I certainly do - I actually wrote a vector graphics game in BASIC on the Spectrum. Wrote it the day after being taught vectors and matrices at school - it was a reakky, really simple plane racing game where you raced around two towers.
And it was awful. Terrible. Appalling. Speed? I'd heard of it...
Not knocking the Spectrum, just sometimes people who don't know better, ie. the me of the time, start writing code where Code Should Not Be(tm).
IMHO, the Beeb always seemed a bit dull. It was what you used at schoo...At home is where you had a ZX Spectrum, and where you had free reign and did the real inventive programming.
Extrapolation: the machine you had at home was the fun one. True whether Beeb, Spectrum, C64...whatever.
I had friends with Beebs and enjoyed messing around with them. I had a Spectrum 48k myself and enjoyed messing with that (wireframe vector graphics in Spectrum BASIC anyone? Anyone? No, didn't think so...). I also moved to the C64 and enjoyed messing with that.
It's whatever you got free reign on, not what the specific platform was.
Another difference from Betamax is that an HD-DVD player can play today's most popular format without trouble - the DVD. It can also act as an upscaling DVD player, so in fact you'll get better quality than a standard DVD player.
There was a Digg link where everyone laughed at play.com rebranding an HD-DVD player as an Upscaling DVD Player with HD Capabilities. I disagree with the laugh track - I think that's a clever step to take, and it's also completely true.
I've been considering getting one of these for use as a build tool.
Eons ago, Slashdot had an article on using lava lamps as part of your build control process. The idea was that if the build broke, the lava lamp of the developer who broke was switched on. Since lava lamps take a while to get going, you had about twenty minutes or so to fix the build before everyone started noticing what was going on.
Now I thought about doing the same with an Ambient Orb. A spot of searching suggests I'm not the only one who thought about this, but I ran into two problems straight off - the ambient orb doesn't work in Europe, and you need to post data to an external web site whereas my stuff is internal only. So that's a dead end.
Enter Arduino. There are sites on the web showing how to create a glowing orb using an Arduino-based device connected via USB. Now if I had that, I could write a small app to interpret cruise control output and then have the globe start glowing orange for, say, failed unit tests or red for 'this build is dead'. Green or blue for 'everything is fine'. I'm pretty interested in doing this project, as ever it's a question of time, but I can easily see the benefits of it.
Putting on my po face and taking that comment much more seriously than I ought to for a moment....
One of the most productive machines I ever owned was an Atari ST. It's what I learned C on*, it's what I wrote my degree papers on, it's what I wrote a lot of my music on. A single tasking operating system with a single task going at any given moment. I'm quite convinced it's the single-task nature of the app that forced me to concentrate and as I result I got a lot more done.
Look at how many people use Windows. Load up one application, then hit maximise. Voila - an effectively single-tasking environment. Look at the discussion generated around things like WriteRoom for the Mac - a single-tasking fontless word processing/lightweight text editing environment. Look at some of the new Apple interfaces in iLife - they go full screen (ie. they drop even the menu bar), so they're effectively presenting a single-tasking interface.
The guy who wrote this article has definitely got a point, in my opinion.
Who are these power users everyone is talking about? I run genetic simulations and I'd be fine with what the MBA is offering.
Well, there's me. The things that it lacks for me are...
Memory - I run large VMware images and 2G is barely sufficient for me.
Storage - Not big enough to store lots of vms plus a large amount of music and video. Probably not fast enough either - I do a lot of compilation and have multiple processes writing huge log files simultaneously. A fast drive is appreciated.
CPU - inside my VMware images I'm often running 5 or more large Java VMs - I like my CPU.
Screen - it's both not quite big enough for what I do, and it's glossy whereas I prefer matt
No firewire - so no input from a DV camcorder
No wired ethernet - I hate adapters
"There can't be that many people doing video editing"
Oh, and I also do video editing. And Logic Express for music work too.
Now don't get me wrong, the above wasn't an anti-MacBook Air rant and in fact I quite like the device. Those answers are specifically addressed to your question - "who are these power users?". One would be me. That's fine though, a MacBook Air isn't aimed at me whereas a MacBook Pro is. I'm actually fine with the no optical drive thing which others are seeing as such a controversy, but the other compromises are a bit too much for my usage.
"OLPC spokesperson Jackie Lustig acknowledges problems with the ordering and the fulfillment process, but says the biggest challenges are a short supply of XO laptops and the organization's ability to meet consumer demand for the XO laptop....Lustig says delivering in bulk to just over a dozen countries is infinitely simpler than processing and delivering 80,000 individual laptops."
But how can that be, if the problem is short supply of the laptop?
Whether you go for their whole strategy or not, a good thing to come out of their announcement is them allowing non-Ultimate Vista to be virtualisable (or non-Business, or whichever of the twenty levels they arbitrarily set it at the last time).
I'm on OS X and run a VMware image of XP for a couple of apps. I have no need for Vista, but should a need arise I can now upgrade to the lower versions and carry on running. MS gets some money from me it previously wouldn't have had and I can still use my platform of choice.
To address your point - for forty years or so people have dithered about what the main point is, so yes I rather feel that the "in my lifetime" bit has been wasted.
Another post sets it out clearly - this one. What is the goal? To my mind, the goal is colonisation. If that is the goal, actions which delay this is in favour of a different goal are to be considered counterproductive.
Now, you may well state that your goal doesn't match mine. That's fine, and fully understood. However, unless someone actually states what they want out of the research and what their end goal is then no progress towards it will be made. The thing to do is to define what "it" actually is, and that's what my post was about.
For me, I want to see efforts towards a moon base as it provides definitive proof that it is possible to live off the Earth. I'm aware of dependencies such as provisions and potentially even energy coming in the form of supplies from the Earth, but until we try it we'll never really know. My hope is that some of the solutions to those problems will be found after we're there - I'm a believer in proximity to the problem helping to focus minds, the "necessity is the mother of invention" situation.
And that's that. It's purely a statement of position by myself - I value progress towards an off-Earth settlement as being of greater value than increased understanding of asteroids. That's all the "I want" stuff was - statement of position. Not a waah waah waah give it to me now-type thing (and where's my flying car?), but a statement of what I believe the end goal should actually be.
If true, this is very good news. Asteroids, the smaller and more numerous ones being undifferentiated bodies, have considerably more scientific value than the moon.
I am unqualified to evaluate what you say and so I will not quibble with any of it. However, can I come outright and say that I honestly do not care about scientific value at this point? I want to see a moonbase. I want proof it can be done on a small planetary scale. I want to see new settlements of humans off this planet, even if only to our nearest satellite. I want to see the whole thing shown to be do'able, not for study's sake, but because it should be being done. I want to see a practical application and a first step to living elsewhere. I think a base on the moon provides that in a way that asteroid exploration just doesn't.
Notice too that the article is in the Journal Of 'Defence' Software Engineering. Ada was designed by committee as a language for use within the military. I was taught Ada in the UK's Lancaster University in the late 80s/early 90s, and at the time that university had decent links with military recruiters.
I really don't see why they're so much against Java as compared to Ada - to my mind there's a lot of similarity with a lot of dependency placed on the langauge's runtime checks. I liked Ada. I like Java now (started with it whilst the language was still in beta). I like C too. Years ago I also worked with Prolog and Lisp, though not so much now. I wasn't terribly keen on C++ after my first year of it and still am not, though I admit I'm not up to date with latest developments in it. I mention all that though because whilst being taught Ada, the professors of the time described C as "an abortion of a language" unsuitable for software engineering. Interesting to now see people describing it as essential to know for good computer science...
"Perl" and "readability" don't fit in the same sentence to begin with.:)
Lean on your keyboard for long enough, and you will eventually have produced a valid Perl script. Of course you won't know what it actually does, but then how does that differ from 90% of Perl scripts anyway?
Switch statements are syntactic sugar. They're really not needed. Nested if/then/else do the same thing.
Yeah, and who needs if statements anyway, or a high-level language come to that? Just syntactic sugar, I say we go back to sector-editing ones and zeros directly to the disk. Readability? Pah.
I GUARANTEE that if OSX did that people would be quick to point out that it's using it wisely and gives it up when you want it etc.
OS X does do that, and the howls about memory use when the behaviour changed to that (Tiger I believe) did come out. A spot more education and people are satisfied with it.
Same for Vista - not enough people are using it yet for this information to filter down and enter accepted wisdom. There's a lot of people basing their idea of memory behaviour on the older XP way and expecting things to be exactly the same in Vista. Unlearning old habits will take a while.
There's got to be a time where you have to be able to say "I'm sorry, but I was out and couldn't check company mail".
Indeed, there's got to be a time where you are able to "I was out and unavailable for company mail". Forget sorry and couldn't - my time is mine.
I actually do some work voluntarily from home, but it's time I've arranged and not just random "hope you're available" time. And it remains my ambition in life to never own a blackberry.
In case people don't know why the parent made that post - you can't make any sort of turn on red in the UK. Red means stop, and stop is what it means. No wiggle room.
I remember driving in San Francisco, my first time driving in the US. I only got caught the once being beeped because I'd just stopped at red and didn't turn right although it was clear, but my other local transgression was a lot worse. We came up to some flashing red lights - I had no idea what they were for. There was one car in front of us before the lights, it stopped for a while and then went. I thought "ah ha - flashing red means stop and go if clear".
It doesn't. It means "tram coming". I found this out at the end of the week we stayed there, suddenly realising I'd spent the entire week running red lights against trams...
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe is pretty interesting. Not that I know a lot about them, but they seem to open up the file formats, and compete on the tools.
Agreed, and to me this is a Good Thing(tm). There are lots of tools for reading and creating PDF - tools that have nothing to do with Adobe beyond implementing a format they originated. Do the same for the Flash ecosystem and we'll see open source tools, alternative proprietary tools and the continuation of Adobe proprietary tools also.
In other words, proper competition and to the end user's benefit. Definitely a good thing.
Cheers,
Ian
The Hobbit is not The Lord Of The Rings. This might sound crushingly obvious, but nothing I've seen so far suggests they're going to keep the light touch of the book. Looks like they just want to do another Lord Of The Rings and that's not right - it's a different style of story. And as for sequels...
Cheers,
Ian
Years and years ago, around 1992'ish I think, I wrote an app for the Mac called StartupFrills. It was a toy which showed a different screen each reboot, played a different sound, movie, read something out using Speech Manager...that kind of thing. I released it as freeware, with a note in the readme saying if you liked it please donate to your local children's hospital.
You will be amazed how many emails I got saying that people had done exactly that. I had no idea at that time - the idea of putting it up on the net at all was something of a novelty for me. I remember one mail from a Freemason, who said it was his duty to donate and that he would donate to a children's hospital this time round because I'd asked people to. He then said he was actually head of the Freemasons in Texas, and he would be asking all in his...err....chapter? group?....whatever the word is to donate to their local children's hospital that time. I have no idea how much that raised, but it's not a bad start is it.
I was astounded. I have a particular interest in donating to children's hospitals - as I kid I caught polyneuritis, was paralysed, 'died', was in a wheelchair and yet actually fully recovered - there's no trace of that in me now beyond a tracheotomy scar. I expected nothing from releasing StartupFrills and asking for donations, and I was extremely surprised at what took place.
Cheers,
Ian
Uh? Don't you remember the CIRCLE, PLOT and DRAW commands? Sure they were slow (I can remember watching as large circles were drawn clockwise to the screen), but they were there.
I certainly do - I actually wrote a vector graphics game in BASIC on the Spectrum. Wrote it the day after being taught vectors and matrices at school - it was a reakky, really simple plane racing game where you raced around two towers.
And it was awful. Terrible. Appalling. Speed? I'd heard of it...
Not knocking the Spectrum, just sometimes people who don't know better, ie. the me of the time, start writing code where Code Should Not Be(tm).
Cheers,
Ian
When the BBC was launched (did anyone really call it a 'Beeb'? That's always meant the corporation, not the computer to me)
Yep, I did. And so did Beebug magazine.
Cheers,
Ian
IMHO, the Beeb always seemed a bit dull. It was what you used at schoo...At home is where you had a ZX Spectrum, and where you had free reign and did the real inventive programming.
Extrapolation: the machine you had at home was the fun one. True whether Beeb, Spectrum, C64...whatever.
I had friends with Beebs and enjoyed messing around with them. I had a Spectrum 48k myself and enjoyed messing with that (wireframe vector graphics in Spectrum BASIC anyone? Anyone? No, didn't think so...). I also moved to the C64 and enjoyed messing with that.
It's whatever you got free reign on, not what the specific platform was.
Cheers,
Ian
Another difference from Betamax is that an HD-DVD player can play today's most popular format without trouble - the DVD. It can also act as an upscaling DVD player, so in fact you'll get better quality than a standard DVD player.
There was a Digg link where everyone laughed at play.com rebranding an HD-DVD player as an Upscaling DVD Player with HD Capabilities. I disagree with the laugh track - I think that's a clever step to take, and it's also completely true.
Cheers,
Ian
When the shareholders come to vote on it, somehow the results won't be quite as expected...
Cheers,
Ian
I've been considering getting one of these for use as a build tool.
Eons ago, Slashdot had an article on using lava lamps as part of your build control process. The idea was that if the build broke, the lava lamp of the developer who broke was switched on. Since lava lamps take a while to get going, you had about twenty minutes or so to fix the build before everyone started noticing what was going on.
Now I thought about doing the same with an Ambient Orb. A spot of searching suggests I'm not the only one who thought about this, but I ran into two problems straight off - the ambient orb doesn't work in Europe, and you need to post data to an external web site whereas my stuff is internal only. So that's a dead end.
Enter Arduino. There are sites on the web showing how to create a glowing orb using an Arduino-based device connected via USB. Now if I had that, I could write a small app to interpret cruise control output and then have the globe start glowing orange for, say, failed unit tests or red for 'this build is dead'. Green or blue for 'everything is fine'. I'm pretty interested in doing this project, as ever it's a question of time, but I can easily see the benefits of it.
Cheers,
Ian
In the same breath, they say naming something after ones own name is unusual, and refer to the OS written by a guy named Linus. Hows that for irony.
Linus named it FreakOS I believe. It was someone else who convinced him to rename it to Linux.
Cheers,
Ian
I'm posting from DOS.
Putting on my po face and taking that comment much more seriously than I ought to for a moment....
One of the most productive machines I ever owned was an Atari ST. It's what I learned C on*, it's what I wrote my degree papers on, it's what I wrote a lot of my music on. A single tasking operating system with a single task going at any given moment. I'm quite convinced it's the single-task nature of the app that forced me to concentrate and as I result I got a lot more done.
Look at how many people use Windows. Load up one application, then hit maximise. Voila - an effectively single-tasking environment. Look at the discussion generated around things like WriteRoom for the Mac - a single-tasking fontless word processing/lightweight text editing environment. Look at some of the new Apple interfaces in iLife - they go full screen (ie. they drop even the menu bar), so they're effectively presenting a single-tasking interface.
The guy who wrote this article has definitely got a point, in my opinion.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, there's me. The things that it lacks for me are...
Oh, and I also do video editing. And Logic Express for music work too.
Now don't get me wrong, the above wasn't an anti-MacBook Air rant and in fact I quite like the device. Those answers are specifically addressed to your question - "who are these power users?". One would be me. That's fine though, a MacBook Air isn't aimed at me whereas a MacBook Pro is. I'm actually fine with the no optical drive thing which others are seeing as such a controversy, but the other compromises are a bit too much for my usage.
Cheers,
Ian
From the summary:
"OLPC spokesperson Jackie Lustig acknowledges problems with the ordering and the fulfillment process, but says the biggest challenges are a short supply of XO laptops and the organization's ability to meet consumer demand for the XO laptop....Lustig says delivering in bulk to just over a dozen countries is infinitely simpler than processing and delivering 80,000 individual laptops."
But how can that be, if the problem is short supply of the laptop?
Cheers,
Ian
Whether you go for their whole strategy or not, a good thing to come out of their announcement is them allowing non-Ultimate Vista to be virtualisable (or non-Business, or whichever of the twenty levels they arbitrarily set it at the last time).
I'm on OS X and run a VMware image of XP for a couple of apps. I have no need for Vista, but should a need arise I can now upgrade to the lower versions and carry on running. MS gets some money from me it previously wouldn't have had and I can still use my platform of choice.
That's good news for people.
Cheers,
Ian
To address your point - for forty years or so people have dithered about what the main point is, so yes I rather feel that the "in my lifetime" bit has been wasted.
Another post sets it out clearly - this one. What is the goal? To my mind, the goal is colonisation. If that is the goal, actions which delay this is in favour of a different goal are to be considered counterproductive.
Now, you may well state that your goal doesn't match mine. That's fine, and fully understood. However, unless someone actually states what they want out of the research and what their end goal is then no progress towards it will be made. The thing to do is to define what "it" actually is, and that's what my post was about.
For me, I want to see efforts towards a moon base as it provides definitive proof that it is possible to live off the Earth. I'm aware of dependencies such as provisions and potentially even energy coming in the form of supplies from the Earth, but until we try it we'll never really know. My hope is that some of the solutions to those problems will be found after we're there - I'm a believer in proximity to the problem helping to focus minds, the "necessity is the mother of invention" situation.
And that's that. It's purely a statement of position by myself - I value progress towards an off-Earth settlement as being of greater value than increased understanding of asteroids. That's all the "I want" stuff was - statement of position. Not a waah waah waah give it to me now-type thing (and where's my flying car?), but a statement of what I believe the end goal should actually be.
Cheers,
Ian
Honestly, if this doesn't sum up the American mentality, I don't know what does
I'm British.
Cheers,
Ian
If true, this is very good news. Asteroids, the smaller and more numerous ones being undifferentiated bodies, have considerably more scientific value than the moon.
I am unqualified to evaluate what you say and so I will not quibble with any of it. However, can I come outright and say that I honestly do not care about scientific value at this point? I want to see a moonbase. I want proof it can be done on a small planetary scale. I want to see new settlements of humans off this planet, even if only to our nearest satellite. I want to see the whole thing shown to be do'able, not for study's sake, but because it should be being done. I want to see a practical application and a first step to living elsewhere. I think a base on the moon provides that in a way that asteroid exploration just doesn't.
Cheers,
Ian
Anything to get rid of that horrible "cyber" prefix on ordinary stuff. Please make it all go away. Please.
Cheers,
Ian
Notice too that the article is in the Journal Of 'Defence' Software Engineering. Ada was designed by committee as a language for use within the military. I was taught Ada in the UK's Lancaster University in the late 80s/early 90s, and at the time that university had decent links with military recruiters.
I really don't see why they're so much against Java as compared to Ada - to my mind there's a lot of similarity with a lot of dependency placed on the langauge's runtime checks. I liked Ada. I like Java now (started with it whilst the language was still in beta). I like C too. Years ago I also worked with Prolog and Lisp, though not so much now. I wasn't terribly keen on C++ after my first year of it and still am not, though I admit I'm not up to date with latest developments in it. I mention all that though because whilst being taught Ada, the professors of the time described C as "an abortion of a language" unsuitable for software engineering. Interesting to now see people describing it as essential to know for good computer science...
Cheers,
Ian
>>Yeah, and who needs if statements anyway...
/tongue-in-cheek
>You wrote something accidentally insightful. Look at the following expression:...
Away - away foul Lisp advocate, and darken not my doors again!
Cheers,
Ian
"Perl" and "readability" don't fit in the same sentence to begin with. :)
Lean on your keyboard for long enough, and you will eventually have produced a valid Perl script. Of course you won't know what it actually does, but then how does that differ from 90% of Perl scripts anyway?
Cheers,
Ian
Switch statements are syntactic sugar. They're really not needed. Nested if/then/else do the same thing.
Yeah, and who needs if statements anyway, or a high-level language come to that? Just syntactic sugar, I say we go back to sector-editing ones and zeros directly to the disk. Readability? Pah.
Cheers,
Ian
I GUARANTEE that if OSX did that people would be quick to point out that it's using it wisely and gives it up when you want it etc.
OS X does do that, and the howls about memory use when the behaviour changed to that (Tiger I believe) did come out. A spot more education and people are satisfied with it.
Same for Vista - not enough people are using it yet for this information to filter down and enter accepted wisdom. There's a lot of people basing their idea of memory behaviour on the older XP way and expecting things to be exactly the same in Vista. Unlearning old habits will take a while.
Cheers,
Ian
There's got to be a time where you have to be able to say "I'm sorry, but I was out and couldn't check company mail".
Indeed, there's got to be a time where you are able to "I was out and unavailable for company mail". Forget sorry and couldn't - my time is mine.
I actually do some work voluntarily from home, but it's time I've arranged and not just random "hope you're available" time. And it remains my ambition in life to never own a blackberry.
Cheers,
Ian
In case people don't know why the parent made that post - you can't make any sort of turn on red in the UK. Red means stop, and stop is what it means. No wiggle room.
I remember driving in San Francisco, my first time driving in the US. I only got caught the once being beeped because I'd just stopped at red and didn't turn right although it was clear, but my other local transgression was a lot worse. We came up to some flashing red lights - I had no idea what they were for. There was one car in front of us before the lights, it stopped for a while and then went. I thought "ah ha - flashing red means stop and go if clear".
It doesn't. It means "tram coming". I found this out at the end of the week we stayed there, suddenly realising I'd spent the entire week running red lights against trams...
Cheers,
Ian