Everybody else is jumping all over the question, "Why would you even want to get rid of the old box?" I'd like to sidestep that and address the industry complaints about the proposed European regulations regarding monitors.
Face it, people are going to get rid of their old computers. Not everyone wants a network in their homes (Ghu only knows why not -- I think it's just darn cool, but anyway...) and most people do want to be able to run the latest eye-candy video games or the newest MS Bloat. So, the manufacturers will continue to sell brand new devices into homes that already have computers in them. It's the same as cars: you don't really need to buy a new car every 10 years, but many many people do.
The European Union has issued a draft directive that would make computer and other major electronic equipment manufacturers responsible for recycling used products. It would ban the use of some materials, including lead.
...
"This is the most dynamic, cutting-edge industry in the world, and we don't think that in the absence of a real compelling case as to why government regulations should be telling us how to design our products that it makes sense in sort of a cavalier fashion to be banning essential materials," Isaacs said. "We think (the directive) could restrict the trade in electronic products around the world and could potentially have a more adverse impact on American manufacturers."
Yeah, my heart bleeds for those American manufacturers. We're already pursuing HMDs and non CRT based visual output devices, and undoubtedly if the resolution passes it'll have some kind of grandfather clause as well as a phase-in period. There may be some cases where a substitute material just isn't going to work, but there are plenty of cases where it's just a question of cost. Oh, that new computer costs so much that you won't be able to sell a gazillion of 'em? See the rest of the comments on this board regarding the "uselessness" of older hardware! The way I see it, we're just figuring out that we're going to need parachutes before we are in free-fall, which is just a tad earlier than usual. Of course, we're already in the plane, but some warning's better than none, I reckon.
Another application that distinguishes between return and enter is MPW. Return just creates a line terminating whitespace, but enter sends the contents of the current line (or selection if the selection has length greater than zero) to the shell for execution.
If you've got a Mac that doesn't have an enter key but you want to type that character, I think you can send it via cmd-return.
The dispute is similar to the fight being waged by U.S. software companies, who are barred from exporting strong encryption programs overseas. The FBI has lobbied to bar these exports--
and has advocated for stricter rules governing use of encryption inside the United States (italics added)--arguing that law enforcement needs to be able to crack encryption on encoded email messages of criminals and terrorists.
So, what are they gonna do? Take away our PGP? Man. Just when you start to get all excited about how the guv'mint is invading your privacy, you realize that although they're the Enemy, they're a big, slow, dumb Enemy.
Burning bugs, our shoes, leaves, old newspapers, and bits of wood -- with magnifying glasses. It's a small miracle the city of Los Angeles didn't go up in a firestorm.
Doing chemistry experiments with the contents of the kitchen cabinets.
Reading books by flashlight. (First book read: Starship Troopers -- reading is easy if you don't sweat comprehension.)
Replacing the batteries in my flashlight.
Don't underestimate the ability of a six year old. My five year old nephew knows how to change the tape in the VCR and operate the TV remote. He knows how to work a Mac, and how to change the CD in the drive. I'm pretty sure that if this six year old kid had seen an electric toy car before, he'd have had no trouble at all in hooking up the wires properly.
I was walking down the street with my girlfriend a few years ago, and I reached out and took her hand in mine. "I thought you didn't like PDAs," she said.
"Oh, I think they're great," I responded, "but the technology isn't really mature yet. My Newton is still kinda bulky and slow..."
The Palm is small enough that I can fit it in my pocket, and Graffiti is easy enough to do the kind of data entry I do (names and notes). An added bonus of Graffiti is that other people don't try to write on my Pilot. My organizer used to hold my calendar, a notepad, my addresses, and it served as a wallet, holding checkbook, bills, and coins. My Pilot is small enough that I can fit it in my clutch along with my wallet & checkbook. The technology is getting more mature.
The 1997 report leads me to believe that some of the technology required has been developed and is being integrated. A pertinent quote:
integration is carried on the following technologies: wireless energy supply (optical and microwave), environment recognition device, connector, micro gear train, micro motor, micro catheter, micro welder, optical scanner, and angular velocity sensor
Sadly, more detail may not be available. Another quote:
Complete ATIP reports on Asian Science and Technology go to subscribers and collaborating organizations by direct distribution, or via electronic access. These contain text and often, charts, graphs and pictures. Reports for unrestricted distribution often contain summarized, or abstracted information. Sponsors can also obtain specific follow up information - including copies of proceedings, selected papers, exhibition particulars, updates, translations, query searches, etc. Contact ATIP at INFO@ATIP.OR.JP
This is the micromachine R&D promo page, wherein they talk about what kind of power plan operations they're designing for. It's mostly eye candy and doesn't talk about the nitty-gritty of power or control, but at least there are some pictures.
Did you notice the part about the size of the deal? $300,000 is peanuts even if that's US dollars; in Australian money that works out to about $196k American. Now, couple that with the 5 year projected development time; what can $196k do over 5 years? It might rent some really cheap office space (really cheap), or it might pay for janitorial service, or maybe the salary of one young slave boy.
What it really looks like is an angel investor taking a long shot. I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't turn into anything.
I also noticed that the article didn't mention what his machine does. I mean, I presume it processes RNA strands and produces enzymes or something based on that input (like what your cells and what viruses do already), but what custom behavior did he code it for?
People get all excited about the possibilities, and I'll grant you that some things would be really cool as well as possible, like curing hormone imbalances (chemically-based insanity, pituitary and thyroid problems, etc.) but I wonder what he thinks this model would do. Cure HIV? Eliminate rhinoviruses? Run Linux?
MP3 is not having any of the adoption trouble that minidisc is encountering. Have you not noticed MP3.com and the scores of MP3 players out there? Besides, it's not a competing medium; it's more like audio tapes to vinyl -- sure, people pirated and bootlegged music after audio tape became available, but records still sold. With MP3, people are bootlegging music and playing it on their computers, but it's not the death of music sales.
Yeah. I'm a white male, and therefore any difficulty I encounter is my own damn fault and any hardship I endure is nothing compared to that endured by some other non-white non-males at the same time in some other place.
It's a question of focus. I think that it is quite telling that these school slayings (didja hear the news this morning about the 14 year olds who're being tried as adults for conspiracy to commit murder?) are happening in the suburbs and not in the inner city. I think that it's really interesting and we ought to be paying more attention to the evils of homogenous culture.
Sadly, what has happened with the Voice article is a shift of focus onto comparative misery. I told my father recently, "We didn't live in a crack neighborhood, I was not in the death camps, and I was not abused at home. My school experience doesn't add up to that much misery -- but nonetheless, it's the worst experience I've had."
Just because something's not as bad as it could be doesn't mean it's good. There's a tendency among lobbyists and agenda groups to compare widely separated events -- it's a polarizing tactic -- and use the (falsely) invidious comparison to promote their own agendas. Don't get distracted by the assertion that this is a white male phenomenon. Keep your eye on the point: brutality in schools is commonplace and so far our culture has said that it's okay for kids to grow up inside what is effectively a large version of the Milgram guards/prisoners study. Now that's a polarizing issue.
It's truth. After nearly ten years of long days, stupid projects, and high salaries that don't make up for graying hair and lost time with friends and family, I'm looking to change my lifestyle fairly dramatically.
Imagine: cash out, buy a house someplace where property values aren't hyperinflated, get some part-time job to pay for electricity and groceries, and catch up on a decade's worth of slack. Ahhhh...
Microsoft will release a patch, I don't doubt that. But as anybody who works with MS crap knows, the patch is going to have at least one subsequent patch to fix the errors the first patch introduced. The interesting part is the EDS stuff. So Rudin was saying, "No, we won't need to upgrade, we'll just get the patch from MS," but then when MS said they wouldn't have a patch, he says, "Okay, we're going to have to upgrade," and then resigns? I'm interested in *that* story. In my dreams, it was a conscience-driven decision and Rudin resigned rather than be in charge of giving MS more money...
I dunno. I mean, I felt more than a little uneasy when I heard about this satellite in the first place. On one hand, it'd make things like BADGER (maps of the SF Bay Area superimposed on aerial photographs) implementable all over the place. On the other, I'm not so sure I like the idea of being observed that closely all the time I'm outdoors.
Other people have already suggested that it was not exactly accidental, and I'd have to say that I think it's quite credible that the bird was hijacked by some spook. If there's one thing we've learned about the US intelligence agencies, it's that they'll exploit every opportunity to abuse their power and conceal information, and I don't doubt that other countries' agencies are similar.
We're interviewing a lot of people for programming positions. I see loads of resumes, and when I look at the "Objective" section or talk to the candidates, I've lost track of how many of them say they're interested in software design. You want to design? Then go back to school, get your Ph.D. and design intricate problems and useless programming languages for the undergrads. In the world of commercial software, design is important but you don't get paid unless you ship something. I'm as lazy as the next guy, and therefore interested in coding once rather than over and over, but when your development cycle is measured in single-digits of weeks you've got to come up with a design and then implement it. I have worked with Ph.D.s before, and they're brilliant. They know loads of stuff that I haven't studied. They come up with truly elegant solutions to sticky problems...9 months after you shipped.
...I didn't want to go to an 8:00 a.m. math final. Ultimately, I got a lot of exposure to the artistic side of the campus and continued to mess around with computers in my spare time. Acting classes gave me good interview skills, and when it came time to integrate into the workforce I found myself better prepared to talk to nontechnical people (e.g. The Boss) about what they wanted my code actually to do. I don't think that a decline in CS grads is anything to worry about.
Yeah, I got my B.A. in drama (emphasis on electrics) but all my employment since college has been computer related. The people I've worked with who did get their degrees in computer science were all really sharp, but a lot of the work doesn't really require all the skills they picked up in school. It's not all that common that you have to write a compiler or create a new programming language, after all.
Y'know, I keep seeing a lot of people gripe about type prefixing for variables. I don't get it. Maybe you-all write code in one person shops.
I work with other programmers, and when I am looking through somebody else's code, it's awfully nice to know that:
if (bFoo)
is testing a boolean and not testing whether a pointer is NULL:
if (pBar)
Sure, it gets extreme when you are fully compliant with the convention, but anybody who says that informative variable names are a bad idea is a person who has never maintained or debugged somebody else's code.
I think it's really handy to know that a variable is an instance variable rather than a local (or global).
Sheesh. One letter variable names are for functions that nobody else is ever going to look at (and that the coder won't look at ever again) or for simple loop iteration.
You're both making good points, but the situation isn't so clearly delineated as Cassius paints it.
We've already put our HTML on a lean diet, and we expect it to get even slimmer as our HTML guys redesign and publish site updates. The impulse to fix the browser is the official reason, but it's far from the sole reason.
We've already benefitted greatly from freely available source code (database connectivity, SSL libraries, and the list just goes on), and we have made some improvements to it. Our primary goal is to succeed as a company, and if it so happens that we can do that at the same time that we improve the public codebase, then we're quite happy to do that.
So, if I were directed solely at working on mozilla, yeah, it'd be a stupid move for my employer. I'm not, though: I'm directed to see what I can do about it as my other projects permit me. I interpret it as a positive indicator of my own competence that I've got that time, and a sign that my employer actually means it when it speaks of giving something back to the communities that helped get the company going.
And guess what, boys and girls, is the best way to conetrate [sic] a group of engineers? Thats right kids - pay them and put them in the same building. Oops, I forgot, corporations aren't in style with the/. crowd, are they?
It's a problem, all right: how do you eat, pay rent, and buy electricity and network connectivity if you're not selling your work? On the other hand, I'm seeing some positive movement in this area. My boss, for instance, has said that he'd like me to see if I can't help get the next version of Navigator to render pages more quickly so that users can see our company's website without waiting for minutes for all the tables to render. So here's an example of a startup (HomeShark) directing engineering resources to help out with the open source development.
The way I see it, though, the documentation is a big problem. I know I'd much rather bang out code than documentation, but in trying to come up to speed on Gecko I'm doing an awful lot of grepping through the source tree, trying to figure out where the hell stuff happens.
You'll note that in the paper he mentions several different license schemes, and mentions that they each have applications.
As you mention, the per-use scheme wouldn't work well with a small program with a broad range of applicability. On the other hand, consider something where the true cost of implementation is really high, so that if you were to pay a fair value for an unlimited runtime license you'd have to shell out several years' worth of income.
A concrete example of this is a database of property sales across the United States. In this example, each county within a state is responsible for maintaining its own records and those are not in a common format. For a database provider to collect all that information would require a huge network of data entry and validation people. That's something that would be affordable, but only if this provider could charge enough for the database.
The way database providers solve this is to charge fees based on the information used. You pay a nominal fee just to have the database and to receive updates, and then you pay a trivial amount per record used. This way, people who really only want data from North Carolina and occasionally Tennessee pay less than people who want information from the whole country.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody else is jumping all over the question, "Why would you even want to get rid of the old box?" I'd like to sidestep that and address the industry complaints about the proposed European regulations regarding monitors.
Face it, people are going to get rid of their old computers. Not everyone wants a network in their homes (Ghu only knows why not -- I think it's just darn cool, but anyway...) and most people do want to be able to run the latest eye-candy video games or the newest MS Bloat. So, the manufacturers will continue to sell brand new devices into homes that already have computers in them. It's the same as cars: you don't really need to buy a new car every 10 years, but many many people do.
...
Yeah, my heart bleeds for those American manufacturers. We're already pursuing HMDs and non CRT based visual output devices, and undoubtedly if the resolution passes it'll have some kind of grandfather clause as well as a phase-in period. There may be some cases where a substitute material just isn't going to work, but there are plenty of cases where it's just a question of cost. Oh, that new computer costs so much that you won't be able to sell a gazillion of 'em? See the rest of the comments on this board regarding the "uselessness" of older hardware! The way I see it, we're just figuring out that we're going to need parachutes before we are in free-fall, which is just a tad earlier than usual. Of course, we're already in the plane, but some warning's better than none, I reckon.
Another application that distinguishes between return and enter is MPW. Return just creates a line terminating whitespace, but enter sends the contents of the current line (or selection if the selection has length greater than zero) to the shell for execution.
If you've got a Mac that doesn't have an enter key but you want to type that character, I think you can send it via cmd-return.
So, what are they gonna do? Take away our PGP? Man. Just when you start to get all excited about how the guv'mint is invading your privacy, you realize that although they're the Enemy, they're a big, slow, dumb Enemy.
I dunno about him but when I was six, I was:
Don't underestimate the ability of a six year old. My five year old nephew knows how to change the tape in the VCR and operate the TV remote. He knows how to work a Mac, and how to change the CD in the drive. I'm pretty sure that if this six year old kid had seen an electric toy car before, he'd have had no trouble at all in hooking up the wires properly.
In their "what is it" page, they say:
It's just more marketing. If it tastes like Josta, I'll pass. I tried some of that a couple of years ago and I thought it was nasty.
I was walking down the street with my girlfriend a few years ago, and I reached out and took her hand in mine. "I thought you didn't like PDAs," she said.
"Oh, I think they're great," I responded, "but the technology isn't really mature yet. My Newton is still kinda bulky and slow..."
The Palm is small enough that I can fit it in my pocket, and Graffiti is easy enough to do the kind of data entry I do (names and notes). An added bonus of Graffiti is that other people don't try to write on my Pilot. My organizer used to hold my calendar, a notepad, my addresses, and it served as a wallet, holding checkbook, bills, and coins. My Pilot is small enough that I can fit it in my clutch along with my wallet & checkbook. The technology is getting more mature.
The 1997 report leads me to believe that some of the technology required has been developed and is being integrated. A pertinent quote:
Sadly, more detail may not be available. Another quote:
This is the micromachine R&D promo page, wherein they talk about what kind of power plan operations they're designing for. It's mostly eye candy and doesn't talk about the nitty-gritty of power or control, but at least there are some pictures.
Did you notice the part about the size of the deal? $300,000 is peanuts even if that's US dollars; in Australian money that works out to about $196k American. Now, couple that with the 5 year projected development time; what can $196k do over 5 years? It might rent some really cheap office space (really cheap), or it might pay for janitorial service, or maybe the salary of one young slave boy.
What it really looks like is an angel investor taking a long shot. I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't turn into anything.
I also noticed that the article didn't mention what his machine does. I mean, I presume it processes RNA strands and produces enzymes or something based on that input (like what your cells and what viruses do already), but what custom behavior did he code it for?
People get all excited about the possibilities, and I'll grant you that some things would be really cool as well as possible, like curing hormone imbalances (chemically-based insanity, pituitary and thyroid problems, etc.) but I wonder what he thinks this model would do. Cure HIV? Eliminate rhinoviruses? Run Linux?
MP3 is not having any of the adoption trouble that minidisc is encountering. Have you not noticed MP3.com and the scores of MP3 players out there? Besides, it's not a competing medium; it's more like audio tapes to vinyl -- sure, people pirated and bootlegged music after audio tape became available, but records still sold. With MP3, people are bootlegging music and playing it on their computers, but it's not the death of music sales.
Yeah. I'm a white male, and therefore any difficulty I encounter is my own damn fault and any hardship I endure is nothing compared to that endured by some other non-white non-males at the same time in some other place.
It's a question of focus. I think that it is quite telling that these school slayings (didja hear the news this morning about the 14 year olds who're being tried as adults for conspiracy to commit murder?) are happening in the suburbs and not in the inner city. I think that it's really interesting and we ought to be paying more attention to the evils of homogenous culture.
Sadly, what has happened with the Voice article is a shift of focus onto comparative misery. I told my father recently, "We didn't live in a crack neighborhood, I was not in the death camps, and I was not abused at home. My school experience doesn't add up to that much misery -- but nonetheless, it's the worst experience I've had."
Just because something's not as bad as it could be doesn't mean it's good. There's a tendency among lobbyists and agenda groups to compare widely separated events -- it's a polarizing tactic -- and use the (falsely) invidious comparison to promote their own agendas. Don't get distracted by the assertion that this is a white male phenomenon. Keep your eye on the point: brutality in schools is commonplace and so far our culture has said that it's okay for kids to grow up inside what is effectively a large version of the Milgram guards/prisoners study. Now that's a polarizing issue.
It's truth. After nearly ten years of long days, stupid projects, and high salaries that don't make up for graying hair and lost time with friends and family, I'm looking to change my lifestyle fairly dramatically.
Imagine: cash out, buy a house someplace where property values aren't hyperinflated, get some part-time job to pay for electricity and groceries, and catch up on a decade's worth of slack. Ahhhh...
Microsoft will release a patch, I don't doubt that. But as anybody who works with MS crap knows, the patch is going to have at least one subsequent patch to fix the errors the first patch introduced. The interesting part is the EDS stuff. So Rudin was saying, "No, we won't need to upgrade, we'll just get the patch from MS," but then when MS said they wouldn't have a patch, he says, "Okay, we're going to have to upgrade," and then resigns? I'm interested in *that* story. In my dreams, it was a conscience-driven decision and Rudin resigned rather than be in charge of giving MS more money...
I dunno. I mean, I felt more than a little uneasy when I heard about this satellite in the first place. On one hand, it'd make things like BADGER (maps of the SF Bay Area superimposed on aerial photographs) implementable all over the place. On the other, I'm not so sure I like the idea of being observed that closely all the time I'm outdoors.
Other people have already suggested that it was not exactly accidental, and I'd have to say that I think it's quite credible that the bird was hijacked by some spook. If there's one thing we've learned about the US intelligence agencies, it's that they'll exploit every opportunity to abuse their power and conceal information, and I don't doubt that other countries' agencies are similar.
We're interviewing a lot of people for programming positions. I see loads of resumes, and when I look at the "Objective" section or talk to the candidates, I've lost track of how many of them say they're interested in software design. You want to design? Then go back to school, get your Ph.D. and design intricate problems and useless programming languages for the undergrads. In the world of commercial software, design is important but you don't get paid unless you ship something. I'm as lazy as the next guy, and therefore interested in coding once rather than over and over, but when your development cycle is measured in single-digits of weeks you've got to come up with a design and then implement it. I have worked with Ph.D.s before, and they're brilliant. They know loads of stuff that I haven't studied. They come up with truly elegant solutions to sticky problems...9 months after you shipped.
...I didn't want to go to an 8:00 a.m. math final. Ultimately, I got a lot of exposure to the artistic side of the campus and continued to mess around with computers in my spare time. Acting classes gave me good interview skills, and when it came time to integrate into the workforce I found myself better prepared to talk to nontechnical people (e.g. The Boss) about what they wanted my code actually to do. I don't think that a decline in CS grads is anything to worry about.
Yeah, I got my B.A. in drama (emphasis on electrics) but all my employment since college has been computer related. The people I've worked with who did get their degrees in computer science were all really sharp, but a lot of the work doesn't really require all the skills they picked up in school. It's not all that common that you have to write a compiler or create a new programming language, after all.
Y'know, I keep seeing a lot of people gripe about type prefixing for variables. I don't get it. Maybe you-all write code in one person shops.
I work with other programmers, and when I am looking through somebody else's code, it's awfully nice to know that:
if (bFoo)
is testing a boolean and not testing whether a pointer is NULL:
if (pBar)
Sure, it gets extreme when you are fully compliant with the convention, but anybody who says that informative variable names are a bad idea is a person who has never maintained or debugged somebody else's code.
I think it's really handy to know that a variable is an instance variable rather than a local (or global).
Sheesh. One letter variable names are for functions that nobody else is ever going to look at (and that the coder won't look at ever again) or for simple loop iteration.
You're both making good points, but the situation isn't so clearly delineated as Cassius paints it.
We've already put our HTML on a lean diet, and we expect it to get even slimmer as our HTML guys redesign and publish site updates. The impulse to fix the browser is the official reason, but it's far from the sole reason.
We've already benefitted greatly from freely available source code (database connectivity, SSL libraries, and the list just goes on), and we have made some improvements to it. Our primary goal is to succeed as a company, and if it so happens that we can do that at the same time that we improve the public codebase, then we're quite happy to do that.
So, if I were directed solely at working on mozilla, yeah, it'd be a stupid move for my employer. I'm not, though: I'm directed to see what I can do about it as my other projects permit me. I interpret it as a positive indicator of my own competence that I've got that time, and a sign that my employer actually means it when it speaks of giving something back to the communities that helped get the company going.
And guess what, boys and girls, is the best way to conetrate [sic] a group of engineers? Thats right kids - pay them and put them in the same building. Oops, I forgot, corporations aren't in style with the /. crowd, are they?
It's a problem, all right: how do you eat, pay rent, and buy electricity and network connectivity if you're not selling your work? On the other hand, I'm seeing some positive movement in this area. My boss, for instance, has said that he'd like me to see if I can't help get the next version of Navigator to render pages more quickly so that users can see our company's website without waiting for minutes for all the tables to render. So here's an example of a startup (HomeShark) directing engineering resources to help out with the open source development.
The way I see it, though, the documentation is a big problem. I know I'd much rather bang out code than documentation, but in trying to come up to speed on Gecko I'm doing an awful lot of grepping through the source tree, trying to figure out where the hell stuff happens.
You'll note that in the paper he mentions several different license schemes, and mentions that they each have applications.
As you mention, the per-use scheme wouldn't work well with a small program with a broad range of applicability. On the other hand, consider something where the true cost of implementation is really high, so that if you were to pay a fair value for an unlimited runtime license you'd have to shell out several years' worth of income.
A concrete example of this is a database of property sales across the United States. In this example, each county within a state is responsible for maintaining its own records and those are not in a common format. For a database provider to collect all that information would require a huge network of data entry and validation people. That's something that would be affordable, but only if this provider could charge enough for the database.
The way database providers solve this is to charge fees based on the information used. You pay a nominal fee just to have the database and to receive updates, and then you pay a trivial amount per record used. This way, people who really only want data from North Carolina and occasionally Tennessee pay less than people who want information from the whole country.