Files on the system level are fine. They're just an implementation. But why should implementation details make it into the user's interface?
Re: text only interfaces - you should read Raskin's book. He describes the interface and the experiments they performed using it. It was quite eye opening for me. BTW, why do you think that Emacs still has such a large following - after all it's just a text interface. Check Raskin's pages out.
...richie
P.S. My notebooks are just piled up on my desk in time order (most recent on top).:-)
First of all rather than trying to come up with better ways to manage your files, people should realize that the whole concept of "files" is flawed. Why should computer's implementation (i.e. two levels of storage) show up so strongly in user applications?
When I write something in a notebook I don't have to "save" it, or give a special name etc.
For example, I've used a wordprocessor, called "YeahWrite", that does away with files. You simply open new pages and write. Everything is automatically saved and you pages are arranged in time order. This works great for people who are not computer expersts and are not interested in learning about computers.
In "The Humane Interface" Jef Raskin describes an interface that's based on plain text. There are no documents, just one big text stream that contains separators. The user interface just manipulates this text.
Finally, do these usibility experts actually watch people work? One of the most useful UI features is the idea of "Virtual Screens" (as implemented by Unix window managers). Each virtual screen keeps the context of a particular task and makes it easy for me to switch between them. Why hasn't this become a standard feature of Windows is beyond me!?
I'm always amazed by the people wishing for the "good old days" of the internet. The good old days may have
been ad-free, and charge-free, but the information was largely stale
In good old days of the internet, we all used Usenet and email and talked about stuff that interested us. Really neat communities grew around particular news groups (rec.aviation and comp.lang.eiffel for me).
It's nice to get news up to the minute from CNN.com. But I prefer to read Slashdot comments on current events, rather than doctored reports from the news media.
The simple truth is that we should be paying when we visit a website - not for the content - you DO NOT pay for
content - but for the cost of transfer. It is unfair and unrealistic that a large part of the cost of transfer should fall on the
publisher, rather than the person who benefits from the transfer.
This is an excellent point. However, this assumes that we need a central server that requires tons of bandwith to support a community of users.
Not so. There are many distributed systems where the cost of bandwidth and computers is shared by its users. Usenet was an early example, something like Freenet is a more modern example.
We can use the computers in our homes to build communities that are not based on the central server/web idea. Then the cost is shared among the users and for each person the cost is reasonable. We each pay for the bandwith ($30 month for cable modem) and we provide our own "content".
Actually, checking WeatherUnderground I saw that NY winds are out of north-west. Which means that landing airplanes approach over the water to land on runway 32. Taking off from runway 32 takes the airplane over Far Rockway. So it seems more logical that the airplane was just taking off.
I can see the smoke from our office window in downtown Manhattan. It seems that the plane went down in Far Rockway. This would make sense if the plane was on a landing approach, as the wind is out of the south east in NY this morning...
I love Ani DeFranco. By being indepent she can produce music that's really out there and one that would never be accepted by any of the popular labels.
There are many artists who get burried because they refuse to make music as specified by record company marketoids. Look what happened to Joan Osborne for example...
I use Emacs, and I've used Jbuilder for debugging, but I started to play with IntelliJ IDEA few days ago and I find it amazingly good.
For example, I had to change a class name in a system of 400 classes and 35,000 LOC. IDEA did it in about 5 seconds. I haven't yet tried the other refactoring features - but they look amazing.
I also like the remote debugging (IDE on my machine, debugged program on another server in another city).
...richie
P.S. I played with Netbeans and Forte, but IDEA seems much easier to use.
What is engineering then? My definition of engineering is the science and the art of building useful things. The engineer can use whatever tools science provides, but if such tools do not exist he has to build the thing anyways, as that's what people pay him for.
For example, in late 18th century a lot of iron bridges in England and US failed, because the science of metal fatigue was not there. Should the engineer's have not built those bridges?
Similarly, today there is no science of software development (there are just little things here and there that are well understood) so the software engineer has to hack to build the systems that people want.
Someone said that "A scientist discovers what is, but the engineer builds what never was".
But you didn't answer my question. I'm updating an older machine for my son to run '98 (what a pain!) and I'm curious if I should pay my MS Tax and get XP. But this machine must run Myst and Riven, plus some old DOS games...
Actually, another future that I see is that everyone will run their own servers. Why should I host my web site somewhere, where it can run off a computer in my basement.
The web has been "corporatized", so there is little room for little guys. But other things are coming. For example, in all P2P networks (Gnutella, Freenet) it's your machine that is the server - you just need a pipe and an address.
As people think of more apps that are networked, but not web based, the current web will become less relevant. We just need to be able to connect to each other.
...richie
Version numbers and release dates are for vendors.
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
another thing to consider is that there are no deadlines or date accountability in open source software. There's no "i have to get Emacs21 out by the end of july". It's done when its done
But what would be interested in a specific version of Emacs (or any other program for that matter)? What you want, usually, is to have bugs fixed or features added.
With open source you can fix bugs/add features yourself or pay someone to do it right now. If they do a good job your changes might make it into the main source tree - especially if the change you want is widely useful.
Release dates and version numbers are convenient for the vendors not for the customers.
If you ever worked on an internally developed system at some company, when a bug is found it is fixed right then and there, there is _no_ "wait 6 months for the next release" thing.
Disney wanted to use Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" music in their animated film "Fantasia". When they proposed the project to Stravinsky, he did not want anything to do with this project and he hated the way his music was used in the movie.
Disney said: we're going to use the music anyways, since you (i.e. Stravisky) are Russian and US does not abide by Russian copyrights.
For a reference look here (this is after a quick google search).
Now, what was it Disney said about "protecting the artists"????
Which laptop are you using it on? I have a ThinkPad running 6.2 and I'm ready to upgrade...
...richie
IBM was the "alpha-male" for a long time
on
Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 2, Informative
Society is full of people who want to have their legacy, and want to be "men of destiny." These are people who want to be the kinds of cultural icons that live on forever. IBM thankfully didn't have too many of them at the helm. That meant that they didn't have individual egos looking for their places in the sun at the expense of the rest of the company and the world at large. In plain English, that meant that when the world changed and IBM ceased to be the alpha male, they made that transition
IBM was the computer company from the end of WW II until the late seventies. They got a good racket^H^H^H^H^Hbussiness going with punch cards and card machines and then early computers.
The IBM anti-trust trouble started in the sixties and the goverment finally dropped its suit in '82.
Read the story of IBM and Ahmdal to see how IBM did not play nice.
f programmers as a whole stopped thinking along the "bugs are inevitable" line and started taking a fresh approach, one
where they think perfect, bug-free code is possible, then the software industry as a whole would become a much cleaner
place.
What is the largest program you've ever written? Have you proved that it was correct? And I do not mean tested - but provided a mathematical proof of correctness?
In the real world programs are written to someone's requirements. Just figuring out what the requirement is probably the hardest part of the job - as everyone who has an interest in the program thinks he knows best.
What happens most often is that the requirements and the code are developed in parallel, as otherwise we'd never finish anything, and when things are left unclear programmers must improvise.
To be pedantic a bug is where a program doesn't follow it's specification. If no precise specification exits, there are no bugs!
If programmers really cared about quality of their code we'd all be coding in Eiffel (just a plug for my favorite language)...
Let the FBI arrest all 50,000 people. Go on. I dare it. Some of the most intelligent, free-thinking people in the country, helping
power its infrastructure, running the day-to-day operations of its businesses.
Would you still do this if the FBI arrested only you?
The above is not a troll, it is the truth. MySQL is junk [openacs.org] compared with PostgreSQL. Why anyone would use it is beyond me.
Well, but MySQL is fast. It's the same reason why Sybase became popular. It was missing some important features (like row-level locks), but boy it was fast.
This also shows you that most applications using dbs are not that complex - just updating one row at a time is fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: text only interfaces - you should read Raskin's book. He describes the interface and the experiments they performed using it. It was quite eye opening for me. BTW, why do you think that Emacs still has such a large following - after all it's just a text interface. Check Raskin's pages out.
P.S. My notebooks are just piled up on my desk in time order (most recent on top). :-)
When I write something in a notebook I don't have to "save" it, or give a special name etc.
For example, I've used a wordprocessor, called "YeahWrite", that does away with files. You simply open new pages and write. Everything is automatically saved and you pages are arranged in time order. This works great for people who are not computer expersts and are not interested in learning about computers.
In "The Humane Interface" Jef Raskin describes an interface that's based on plain text. There are no documents, just one big text stream that contains separators. The user interface just manipulates this text.
Finally, do these usibility experts actually watch people work? One of the most useful UI features is the idea of "Virtual Screens" (as implemented by Unix window managers). Each virtual screen keeps the context of a particular task and makes it easy for me to switch between them. Why hasn't this become a standard feature of Windows is beyond me!?
In good old days of the internet, we all used Usenet and email and talked about stuff that interested us. Really neat communities grew around particular news groups (rec.aviation and comp.lang.eiffel for me).
It's nice to get news up to the minute from CNN.com. But I prefer to read Slashdot comments on current events, rather than doctored reports from the news media.
This is an excellent point. However, this assumes that we need a central server that requires tons of bandwith to support a community of users.
Not so. There are many distributed systems where the cost of bandwidth and computers is shared by its users. Usenet was an early example, something like Freenet is a more modern example.
We can use the computers in our homes to build communities that are not based on the central server/web idea. Then the cost is shared among the users and for each person the cost is reasonable. We each pay for the bandwith ($30 month for cable modem) and we provide our own "content".
There are many artists who get burried because they refuse to make music as specified by record company marketoids. Look what happened to Joan Osborne for example...
Oh, yea! Can you do M-x tetris ???
For example, I had to change a class name in a system of 400 classes and 35,000 LOC. IDEA did it in about 5 seconds. I haven't yet tried the other refactoring features - but they look amazing.
I also like the remote debugging (IDE on my machine, debugged program on another server in another city).
P.S. I played with Netbeans and Forte, but IDEA seems much easier to use.
Is it fair use if you lend your friend the CD? Is it fair use if people come to your house and listen to the recording?
For example, in late 18th century a lot of iron bridges in England and US failed, because the science of metal fatigue was not there. Should the engineer's have not built those bridges?
Similarly, today there is no science of software development (there are just little things here and there that are well understood) so the software engineer has to hack to build the systems that people want.
Someone said that "A scientist discovers what is, but the engineer builds what never was".
* Remote control
Why remote control? Can't I use my laptop and a browser? Especially with wireless home network...
...richie
...richie
...richie
...richie
The web has been "corporatized", so there is little room for little guys. But other things are coming. For example, in all P2P networks (Gnutella, Freenet) it's your machine that is the server - you just need a pipe and an address.
As people think of more apps that are networked, but not web based, the current web will become less relevant. We just need to be able to connect to each other.
But what would be interested in a specific version of Emacs (or any other program for that matter)? What you want, usually, is to have bugs fixed or features added.
With open source you can fix bugs/add features yourself or pay someone to do it right now. If they do a good job your changes might make it into the main source tree - especially if the change you want is widely useful.
Release dates and version numbers are convenient for the vendors not for the customers.
If you ever worked on an internally developed system at some company, when a bug is found it is fixed right then and there, there is _no_ "wait 6 months for the next release" thing.
Disney said: we're going to use the music anyways, since you (i.e. Stravisky) are Russian and US does not abide by Russian copyrights.
For a reference look here (this is after a quick google search).
Now, what was it Disney said about "protecting the artists"????
IBM was the computer company from the end of WW II until the late seventies. They got a good racket^H^H^H^H^Hbussiness going with punch cards and card machines and then early computers.
The IBM anti-trust trouble started in the sixties and the goverment finally dropped its suit in '82. Read the story of IBM and Ahmdal to see how IBM did not play nice.
What is the largest program you've ever written? Have you proved that it was correct? And I do not mean tested - but provided a mathematical proof of correctness?
In the real world programs are written to someone's requirements. Just figuring out what the requirement is probably the hardest part of the job - as everyone who has an interest in the program thinks he knows best.
What happens most often is that the requirements and the code are developed in parallel, as otherwise we'd never finish anything, and when things are left unclear programmers must improvise.
To be pedantic a bug is where a program doesn't follow it's specification. If no precise specification exits, there are no bugs!
If programmers really cared about quality of their code we'd all be coding in Eiffel (just a plug for my favorite language)...
Would you still do this if the FBI arrested only you?
Well, but MySQL is fast. It's the same reason why Sybase became popular. It was missing some important features (like row-level locks), but boy it was fast.
This also shows you that most applications using dbs are not that complex - just updating one row at a time is fine.