I'll just leave you with this: in our society, actual work is done by a large amount of people; products are produced by a large amount of people, etc. Yet the small few at the top who do not actually produce any products; who do not know how or want to actually work for a living; who attempt to administrate despite their complete lack of knowledge about what is actually produced; those people retain the largest cut of the money and hand out the rest to everyone else who did something. Is there something wrong with this societal model??
Slave ethic. If they paid the actual workers at the top of the pyramid, they'd work for a year and retire, and the leadership would no longer have a work force.
At least that's my theory.
I hate it though. Most companies, if you're really good at what you do, they reward you by paying you more money to not do it any more (promotion to management). Where's the logic in any of this?
The answer, of course, is that business doesn't work on logic.
A fundamentally new OS with an emphasis on cross-platform binaries, the ability to multiprocess on non-homogenous CPUs, shipped as a "hosted" system running on another OS (at least for the time being). An Amiga with no hardware of its own, no custom chips to become obsolete in 18 months. A totally fresh start, no 68K code at all, except inside an emulation layer (probably UAE or a derivative).
because it creates a situation in which an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented
One, you don't need the source code to cause this kind of problem. Ever come in one morning to discover the sysadmins - with the blessings of management - changed the server software during the night? Yeah, sorry your CGIs no longer work, we switched from Web Site Pro to IIS, didn't you get the memo?
Two, the other extreme: some places you can't make ANY unauthorized changes to production code without fifteen signatures. Touching the kernel on a production server would be a firing offense.
In short, if this is likely to be a problem, the IT department has bigger problems - like an inability to control their machines. Seems to me that's a management problem, not a software one, and if the sysadmin is tinkerhappy and won't leave a paper trail, the sysadmin will be tinkerhappy whether he has source code or not. Do you need the source code to make a mess of a running NT server?
"Having somebody who can screw around with my operating system would make me very, very nervous"
However, I do think we need to be aware that it was a mistake.
Most of what we do in space is a mistake.
We need manned spaceflight - but we need MEANINGFUL manned spaceflight, planetary expeditions, colonies, that sort of thing, not just pointless shuttle flights designed to keep the budget for next year. I take that back - maybe we DO need to keep putting humans in space for no productive reason at all, because if we stop putting humans in space, the bureaucracy and apathy that drives (or fails to drive) our space program will pretty much guarantee that we will never return to space. Just like the moon.
I believe part of the paperwork the client fills out to start the job should include the client's concise answer to "what is the site meant to accomplish" - and the client should be held to that throughout the product cycle. If the purpose of the site is to sell products, or talk about an issue, or advertise the client's existence, great. If the purpose of the site is to be a dotcom vanity plate, it should be clearly stated and I'll happily build it. If the entire purpose of the site is to look good on the CEO's 23-inch flat panel in the boardroom, state it. But never should a site enter development unless the customer has signed off on a clear sentence stating the purpose of the project; if the client doesn't know what they want, chances are they don't even know WHY they want it, they certainly don't need it, they will be slow to respond with materials (content, graphics, or answers to questions), and they will NEVER be happy with the result.
Protest the bankruptcy bill itself. If you succeed, the bill stops, no one thinks you're a stoner, and better yet, if you ever have to declare bankruptcy yourself, your rights are protected there too.:-)
The day they require you to earn a doctorate and get a license to be able to use a computer is the day your analogy is correct.
The restriction is bizarre because using a computer is something akin to a "natural right" - and the kazoo analogy is thus closer to the mark.
How to deal with someone like Mitnick? I don't know, but inventing weird kinds of punishment and violating the Bill of Rights several times along the way just doesn't seem like the way to do it.
I was referring to the people who haven't read this or any of the last 15 Amiga stories here, and thus condemn the "new" Amiga because they still think it's the "old" Amiga in a new package.
The new Amiga OS is built from Tao Elate. It shares 0% legacy with that A500 you may have owned in 1988. It may have a compatibility layer, but so does any Linux box running UAE, and I notice these people don't condemn Linux by the same logic. My point, though, is that the first 30 replies everytime the Amiga is mentioned are from people who are actively trying not to learn these things.
The first one of you to post "the Amiga was good for its day but it should die in peace" - thus demonstrating that you haven't read the article and don't know we aren't talking about the "classic" Amiga anyway - will be beaned with an A500 power supply brick.
Why is it everyone seems to think Windows is somehow what every other GUI wants to be when it grows up? I mean, I can understand when Mac people try to "blue sky" future OSes and they look Maclike, or when Amiga people try to "blue sky" things that only look like the Amiga. But why are there so many UNIX GUIs that look like Windows? I thought we didn't like Windows.
It's as if everyone thinks there is absolutely no middle ground between total interface chaos (the X Window m.o. so far) and Microsoft Knows Best. How dare anyone try to think of something new, or even to emulate much else besides Windows and its half-baked design principles.
What does the Windows style guide get right? Which features of its UI work better than their counterparts on other platforms? Which elements of the system are absolutely perfect and could not stand any improvements? Ain't much in there that's great, some elements are good but not great, nothing strikes me as perfect. The Windows paradigm is one of confusing layered toolbars with nondescript icons (and tooltips to bail you out), 1001 uses for a folder icon, file dialogs that are not well thought out, unnecessarily complex dialogs (with layered tabs and "More..." buttons), things shoehorned into a Web metaphor without actually adding anything useful, and interface elements like combo boxes that "fit all" but never fit any task they're assigned to do. And this is what we're supposed to WANT TO EMULATE? And from what I read on here, we're supposed to emulate these things for the same damn reasons these misfeatures exist in the first place: market forces.
Go right ahead and moderate away my measly karma, if you think I'm not right about this sorry state of affairs. UNIX got where it is BECAUSE of its spectacularly sane, beautiful, consistent and flexible UI - the one you access from the command line. But as soon as it moved into the second dimension, into the land of graphics, it all went to hell. X Window bears no resemblance to the UNIX underneath it, which many of you seem to think is because CLI is the only way to go and GUIs are a flawed concept anyway, but I think is because no one ever thinks about it from a UNIX perspective. It's never about actually designing an interface, it's always a matter of borrowing the most obvious ideas from whichever OS's market share we covet.
UNIX has a lot of concepts that don't translate well to the metaphors used by other OSes. File permissions, for example, I have NEVER seen "done right" in any file manager - it's always bolted-on functionality, since most file managers are borrowed more or less from OSes where permissions are bolted-on functionality. Why not put checkboxes in the "view by list" mode in file managers, one checkbox for each protection bit, and have it so you can click and hold on one checkbox and then drag down the list and set or unset that bit on a whole bunch of files at once? If you can rename files without a dialog, why not set permissions without a dialog?
Similarly, consider how you use your home account: THAT IS YOUR DESKTOP when you run from the command line. You arrange the dirs in your home dir such that they make sense when you hop into it first thing in the morning, and your fingers are maybe hardwired to type out paths to a couple of other dirs (/home/www for example). Why not simply have the desktop actually reflect the contents of your home dir, instead of a bunch of symlinks and loose files in some subfolder buried deep within the file system as most file managers (on every OS) seem to do?
Devices under UNIX work like they do in pretty much no other OS on the planet. It will NEVER be possible to shoehorn floppy mounting procedures into the model used on the Mac for instance - so let's try to think of a new metaphor for removable media under UNIX. After all, UNIX already treats removable media as directories - a metaphor. Not that the Mounter in BeOS has been a great success, but there MUST be some metaphor that will make the attaching and detaching of pieces of file system make sense visually. Has anyone even attempted this? (Most of my ideas in this department are vehicle metaphors: ships docking, the moving van pulling up out front, the ice cream truck parks out front, the flying Chinese restaurant in Fifth Element.)
I think we can simplify and clarify the role of the superuser in the OS by calling it the Janitor (at least for the consumer-end UI). System functions the average user has no business messing with would be presented by the interface as "in the utility room" or such; I think most consumers would feel quite comfortable with such a metaphor, and would understand WHY there are things they shouldn't mess with (and why UNIX handles this so differently from other OSes). The janitor user "has the keys" (and the interface would incorporate su in the context of "borrowing the keys" in order to perform janitorial duties).
Pipelines should be incorporated into the UI. Have "droplet" apps (like those common on the Mac) that you can not only drop files onto to have them processed, you can drag a little piece off the droplet's icon and "chain" it to another droplet (it could even draw a line onscreen indicating this connection!) - and when done, you simply drop your files onto the frontmost droplet in the chain and watch your processed goodies fall out the other end. These "droplets" would, I suppose, be 'snapshots' of a command and some parameters; use a GUI to set the parameters once and create the droplet. Most of us would have zillions of droplets neatly organized in folders, something like shell aliases on steroids. I can also see droplets that function as loops, droplets that pop up and ask for parameters, droplets that are mere file viewers, droplets that tee the output, and droplets that are just good old-fashioned shell scripts. I can even see droplets that accept multiple chains, for, say, combining text files. Essentially a visual scripting system. Then - as if that isn't sweet enough - file dialogs will let you select droplets as filenames you can save files to, thus letting you save through the pipeline.
These are just blue-sky ideas I coughed up in an afternoon. Why is it I have to come up with this stuff? Why instead does every new GUI toolkit or file manager showcased on Slashdot look exactly like some other OS? Is there ANYTHING to Linux except emulating other people's design flaws? Or is it just that programmers are never UI-inclined, and thus those of us who talk about improving things are forever cursed to be unable to do anything about it?
Note: I'm not saying there's NO research going on, just that it seems like there's NOT MUCH research going on. But then, maybe Slashdot should run features on the TRULY innovative stuff (wherever it's hiding) instead of the Explorer clone of the week club.
Also note I do think there's some merit to having a Windows UI on Linux, I just worry when I see so many people basically attempting the same project (cloning Windows under Linux) when there's so much more to be done. Assuming we need any MS Windows, we only need two: the official one, and an open source version. We don't need five, not when the "perfect" UNIX GUI remains unattempted.
Slightly amusing comments I've found in my own code:
# They painted the office today and the fumes are getting to # me. Don't be surprised at anything you find in the code # from here down.
In code claiming to be a "complete rewrite" from the previous version: # This section stolen from the previous version
# I have a feeling this is very wrong.
# This code would require about eight seconds to optimize, I just haven't # done it yet. (I've had plenty of chances in the last 2 years to optimize that code.)
# No. I refuse to document this.
# This actually subverts some optimizations later on, but maybe it'll add up okay # in the end.
if ($notready) { # Kosh: "You are not ready for immortality." ...
# Done parsing silliness.
# Let's be even bruter with the brute force.
# Stupid design? Well, that or read the main list twice.
# Yowza.
# It's a dumb idea. I will fix it. When I figure out how.
# That's poorly named.
In code that was later commented out: # is this smart or stupid? I must have decided later it wasn't smart...
# Now to run through the loop again. I smell an optimization coming.
# Augh! A reference!
# Let's just use the 32-bit numbers. To hell with Y2K bugs, let's go to S2B - the # 2 billion second bug.
# There's only one universe, so no args (yet)...
# Got 'im.
# Just pretend for the moment it works.
# Nasty mean vicious nested foreach
# Whew! Several trips through the datafile later...
# This next part makes me wish I'd commented it the first time. (Followed by uncommented code, apparently written in a hurry.)
# silliness!
# Let's GET IT ON!
# cheap-ass code to calculate days between two dates
Some code that did weird (and probably unnecessary) date calculations contained these cryptic comments: # now has a Y1K9 bug and thus cannot be used in years before 1900. # It also now has a year 11734883 bug - that's when (yr*366) > 2^32.
In some particularly weird code we converted to Y2K ready in 1997: # If you need this to work past 2100, come thaw me out.
My last job I had to maintain someone else's downright weird Perl - not ordinary obfuscated Perl, mind you, this was Perl written by someone who obviously grew up in Visual Basic. His comments were few and far between, and when he DID comment, it was not much more understandable than the code it accompanied.
At one point I left a comment something like this:
# Todd, please don't comment if the code is clearer without it.
I've seen one of these dev systems in person (an early prototype version of the kit). The 'portable assembly' actually refers to a CPU-independent bytecode with its own assembly language.
If anyone is mounting attacks on God, it's you, my friend. Creationism went out of fashion in the late 1800s as CHRISTIANS, seeking to understand how God works, went out and did some digging and pretty much unilaterally decided Genesis was a parable and that life DID evolve in a gradual process over a very long time. And indeed, which is the greater glory: an unbelievably complex world billions of years old, where entire PHYLA have come and gone, all spawned from a single explosion where God infused the rules of the universe into a point of matter and let it do its thing, or just some built-all-at-once artifice a mere 6000 years old with one ten-thousandth the biological diversity? God's supposed to be this great builder, and you've just insulted His greatest masterpiece by claiming it only took him six days and it was built "last week" on the cosmic clock.
Anyway. There's a tunnel through a hillside near here, in central Indiana, where fossils (not dinosaurs, just invertebrates - brachiopods, molluscs, crinoids) are literally falling out of the walls. These are not plaster, nor are they carved stone - they are made of a different, harder mineral composition than the surrounding rock, they go all the way back into the rock (the whole hill is full of fossils, as are the nearby hills) and there is definitely NO way that a human forger could insert fakes into that hillside for you or me to find. This is just a site I know of PERSONALLY, where I have held fossils of oceangoing creatures from 230 million years ago, many of which simply don't exist today, and where I can personally see that we have certain species at the bottom of the tunnel and different species at the top. (And they're not hydrodynamically sorted either, there is no size trend.)
Creationism came back into fashion, not because of any scientific discovery or lack thereof, but because people like you needed some new tactic to "prove" to yourself and to the world that the Bible is right and science is wrong. You're saying so in your own words: you connect evolution with liberals, socialists, non-Christians, and any other unsavory things you can think of. You have NO evidence to support your claim that dinosaur fossils are frauds - in fact I think there's at least 100 Slashdotters who will volunteer to DRIVE you to sites where vertebrate fossils are literally falling out of the walls, and show you up close that they are not fakes. But the basis for your conclusion isn't scientific fact - the basis for your conclusion is that people who believe in evolution are People You Don't Like.
can't have 65 million year-old fossils on a 6,000 year-old Earth!
That's what we've been saying all along. But, um, geologists began to notice the earth was way older than 6000 years BEFORE Darwin and his naughty little book, so I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Other than the fact that you want the world to just straighten up and meet your ideal, and you don't care what facts you have to ignore or distort to get there, huh? You have the audacity to claim evolution is nonsense and that dinosaur bones are frauds, yet your 'divine' authority is a book written down by HUMANS and your 'science' is nothing but a parroting of the standard ultraconservative party line - you can't even make up your OWN mind about who you hate, you have to let Rush Limbaugh tell you!
I also note that some of your Creationist brethren DO accept that dinosaurs existed, and have come up with some bizarre theories involving the Flood in order to explain them away. Which makes you a Creationist among Creationists, an extremist among extremists.
Were you hoping to change some minds here today, or are you just trying to make brownie points with God the same way people make up job contacts for their weekly unemployment vouchers? Scene from your trial: "But I DID try to convince people! See, I even went on Slashdot and tried to show them everything they know is wrong and I even went out of my way to insult their intelligence just like I'm supposed to. You can't blame me that they didn't drop their heathen ways and follow you instantly, oh Lord..."
It's known that this exact bones->legends progression happened with the mammoths. It's also known that the Cyclops legend was inspired by elephant skulls found in caves (possibly Hannibal's elephants!) wherein the nasal opening looks like a large single eye socket. So it's possible that monster legends could descend from ancient bones.
Of course, for our dragon legend to be started from dinosaur bones, I'm guessing it would have had to be a mostly articulated skeleton, and in order to accommodate the "wings" our mythical dragons seem to always have, maybe it was a plesiosaur or mosasaur or other aquatic beastie whose huge front flippers looked to an ancient like wings. If the skeleton were not articulated, they'd find the giant bones and think of giant people, as seemed to happen all too often, and if it were articulated but of something like a t-rex, the shape of our modern dragon would be very different.
Something to consider: I've been a Sarah McLachlan fan since 1989, I've bought all her albums (3 copies of her first, 2 copies of her third, 2 copies of Freedom Sessions), most of her singles, numerous shirts, tour books, souvenirs, and attended so many concerts I lost count (more than ten). How much of that money do you think she's seen? About $1 per album, probably less for the singles, maybe a dollar per shirt... under $20 not counting the concerts, and I doubt she gets the whole $35 from each concert ticket.
Which means in eleven years of being a fanboy, I've given her almost enough money that she could buy two of her own CDs at retail.
Oh it gets better. When you buy a CD from Columbia House, the artists often get NO royalties at all - it's considered an advertising expense! (How come Metallica isn't suing THEM?)
These companies pay their artists "starving wages" (and then MAYBE actually promote them so that they can at least make it up by getting $1 from each of a half million people). Then they say WE'RE the ripoff artists. I think that's just a little bit insulting.
These bands made a conscious choice to sign a contract with a record company, and should have been aware of the pricing policies before they did so.
So, after years of washing dishes for a living, when the record company shows up to offer the next Sarah McLachlan her recording deal, before she can decide, she has to go look up their pricing policies in 67 different countries?
OK, so let's fast forward, their pricing policies seem sound, so she accepts the deal. Two weeks later the company adds a Minidisc division, but prices them three times as much as CDs in Venezuela and Sri Lanka. Should she be a conscientious objector and quit, supposing her contract is even written in such a way that she can do so?
OK, there's obviously a market for this. So let's imagine how it could be done The Right Way (or at least within the law, until someone decides they don't like it and buy some new laws to make it illegal):
Imagine a company that NEGOTIATES broadcast rights with the networks, exactly like a local cable TV station, but does its broadcasting over the Internet. Preferably in MPEG but I could live with Real or QT streaming.
This company would effectively be a "regional cable company" where its "region" is the Internet. Local cable companies (like Time Warner) would probably complain, but it's still perfectly fair.
The company could do other interesting things too, like allow a personal VCR service like this place. Maybe do some shuffling of commercials for such timeshifted rebroadcasts.
I can imagine a "free" usage level, where the picture size is small and there are banners and commercials everywhere, then a "budget" level with a bigger window, no banners, but the usual amount of commercials, and a "premium" level with no commercials (black space during real-time broadcasts, deleted space on 'playback's) that would probably have to cost about $80/month to offset the lack of commercials (since the company would have to pay both the TV producers and advertisers some sort of royalty to cover the deleted commercials). Or maybe have special Internet-only content that doesn't interrupt the show for commercials, but places banner ads all around it in the browser window!
I like the idea of having this in MPEG, so I can download this week's Farscape or the episode of Law & Order where the kid hacked someone's pancreas (well, hacked the hospital and made them mess up a diabetes patient) and watch it again, without having to clog up my connection every time (and so I can just watch the good parts). But fat chance of that happening, even though there would be little risk of piracy - if the service becomes popular, why trade MPEGs if you can go get your own from their archives? Besides, it means more exposure for the advertisers if people DO pirate the shows, though without a means of tracking it; if the Internet cable company is fine with this, the networks shouldn't have a problem either, and the advertisers will CERTAINLY be happy. (Or if the company is worried, they can charge MPEG downloads at 10x the usual advertising rate, on the notion that the commercials will be seen many more times; the 'live' broadcasts could still be in a streamed format and the commercials sold at the usual rate.)
(Removal of commercials from the MPEGs once you download them: is this also a piracy issue? Not much difference in file size, so it's not like it'll be a mad rush to download the decommercialed version - especially if they adaptively compress it so the commercials are small to begin with. Plus the advertiser is already paid at the "ten people will watch it for every one that gets downloaded" rate anyway.)
Only the movie studios might be unhappy, since when Episode One gets shown on the nightly movie, anyone can download it, splice out the commercials (and ignore the 20 minutes that usually gets edited out of any movie to bring it down to length) and put it on Hotline for all and sundry.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll just leave you with this: in our society, actual work is done by a large amount of people; products are produced by a large amount of people, etc. Yet the small few at the top who do not actually produce any products; who do not know how or want to actually work for a living; who attempt to administrate despite their complete lack of knowledge about what is actually produced; those people retain the largest cut of the money and hand out the rest to everyone else who did something. Is there something wrong with this societal model??
Slave ethic. If they paid the actual workers at the top of the pyramid, they'd work for a year and retire, and the leadership would no longer have a work force.
At least that's my theory.
I hate it though. Most companies, if you're really good at what you do, they reward you by paying you more money to not do it any more (promotion to management). Where's the logic in any of this?
The answer, of course, is that business doesn't work on logic.
ESCOM, huh? The fungus was probably put there at the factory.
A fundamentally new OS with an emphasis on cross-platform binaries, the ability to multiprocess on non-homogenous CPUs, shipped as a "hosted" system running on another OS (at least for the time being). An Amiga with no hardware of its own, no custom chips to become obsolete in 18 months. A totally fresh start, no 68K code at all, except inside an emulation layer (probably UAE or a derivative).
Yep, I'm just feelin' the 1980s here...
but companies don't pick an OS because they think it's cool.
I dunno, I think a lot of the success of Windows can be attributed to peer pressure.
One, you don't need the source code to cause this kind of problem. Ever come in one morning to discover the sysadmins - with the blessings of management - changed the server software during the night? Yeah, sorry your CGIs no longer work, we switched from Web Site Pro to IIS, didn't you get the memo?
Two, the other extreme: some places you can't make ANY unauthorized changes to production code without fifteen signatures. Touching the kernel on a production server would be a firing offense.
In short, if this is likely to be a problem, the IT department has bigger problems - like an inability to control their machines. Seems to me that's a management problem, not a software one, and if the sysadmin is tinkerhappy and won't leave a paper trail, the sysadmin will be tinkerhappy whether he has source code or not. Do you need the source code to make a mess of a running NT server?
So don't leave vmlinuz world writable.
However, I do think we need to be aware that it was a mistake.
Most of what we do in space is a mistake.
We need manned spaceflight - but we need MEANINGFUL manned spaceflight, planetary expeditions, colonies, that sort of thing, not just pointless shuttle flights designed to keep the budget for next year. I take that back - maybe we DO need to keep putting humans in space for no productive reason at all, because if we stop putting humans in space, the bureaucracy and apathy that drives (or fails to drive) our space program will pretty much guarantee that we will never return to space. Just like the moon.
I believe part of the paperwork the client fills out to start the job should include the client's concise answer to "what is the site meant to accomplish" - and the client should be held to that throughout the product cycle. If the purpose of the site is to sell products, or talk about an issue, or advertise the client's existence, great. If the purpose of the site is to be a dotcom vanity plate, it should be clearly stated and I'll happily build it. If the entire purpose of the site is to look good on the CEO's 23-inch flat panel in the boardroom, state it. But never should a site enter development unless the customer has signed off on a clear sentence stating the purpose of the project; if the client doesn't know what they want, chances are they don't even know WHY they want it, they certainly don't need it, they will be slow to respond with materials (content, graphics, or answers to questions), and they will NEVER be happy with the result.
death-knell of the old guard with the introduction of the freedom which information confers on those who will wield its awesome power
:-)
Does this sound vaguely like the beginning of Tales from Topographic Oceans to anyone else here?
Protest the bankruptcy bill itself. If you succeed, the bill stops, no one thinks you're a stoner, and better yet, if you ever have to declare bankruptcy yourself, your rights are protected there too. :-)
The day they require you to earn a doctorate and get a license to be able to use a computer is the day your analogy is correct.
The restriction is bizarre because using a computer is something akin to a "natural right" - and the kazoo analogy is thus closer to the mark.
How to deal with someone like Mitnick? I don't know, but inventing weird kinds of punishment and violating the Bill of Rights several times along the way just doesn't seem like the way to do it.
I will consider Lars and the gang to have officially and irreperably sold out.
There are those who believe this has already happened...
I was referring to the people who haven't read this or any of the last 15 Amiga stories here, and thus condemn the "new" Amiga because they still think it's the "old" Amiga in a new package.
The new Amiga OS is built from Tao Elate. It shares 0% legacy with that A500 you may have owned in 1988. It may have a compatibility layer, but so does any Linux box running UAE, and I notice these people don't condemn Linux by the same logic. My point, though, is that the first 30 replies everytime the Amiga is mentioned are from people who are actively trying not to learn these things.
The first one of you to post "the Amiga was good for its day but it should die in peace" - thus demonstrating that you haven't read the article and don't know we aren't talking about the "classic" Amiga anyway - will be beaned with an A500 power supply brick.
*coughsputtersputterwheeze* "That's funny, as soon as we crossed the Kansas state line the car stopped."
:-)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Why is it everyone seems to think Windows is somehow what every other GUI wants to be when it grows up? I mean, I can understand when Mac people try to "blue sky" future OSes and they look Maclike, or when Amiga people try to "blue sky" things that only look like the Amiga. But why are there so many UNIX GUIs that look like Windows? I thought we didn't like Windows.
It's as if everyone thinks there is absolutely no middle ground between total interface chaos (the X Window m.o. so far) and Microsoft Knows Best. How dare anyone try to think of something new, or even to emulate much else besides Windows and its half-baked design principles.
What does the Windows style guide get right? Which features of its UI work better than their counterparts on other platforms? Which elements of the system are absolutely perfect and could not stand any improvements? Ain't much in there that's great, some elements are good but not great, nothing strikes me as perfect. The Windows paradigm is one of confusing layered toolbars with nondescript icons (and tooltips to bail you out), 1001 uses for a folder icon, file dialogs that are not well thought out, unnecessarily complex dialogs (with layered tabs and "More..." buttons), things shoehorned into a Web metaphor without actually adding anything useful, and interface elements like combo boxes that "fit all" but never fit any task they're assigned to do. And this is what we're supposed to WANT TO EMULATE? And from what I read on here, we're supposed to emulate these things for the same damn reasons these misfeatures exist in the first place: market forces.
Go right ahead and moderate away my measly karma, if you think I'm not right about this sorry state of affairs. UNIX got where it is BECAUSE of its spectacularly sane, beautiful, consistent and flexible UI - the one you access from the command line. But as soon as it moved into the second dimension, into the land of graphics, it all went to hell. X Window bears no resemblance to the UNIX underneath it, which many of you seem to think is because CLI is the only way to go and GUIs are a flawed concept anyway, but I think is because no one ever thinks about it from a UNIX perspective. It's never about actually designing an interface, it's always a matter of borrowing the most obvious ideas from whichever OS's market share we covet.
UNIX has a lot of concepts that don't translate well to the metaphors used by other OSes. File permissions, for example, I have NEVER seen "done right" in any file manager - it's always bolted-on functionality, since most file managers are borrowed more or less from OSes where permissions are bolted-on functionality. Why not put checkboxes in the "view by list" mode in file managers, one checkbox for each protection bit, and have it so you can click and hold on one checkbox and then drag down the list and set or unset that bit on a whole bunch of files at once? If you can rename files without a dialog, why not set permissions without a dialog?
Similarly, consider how you use your home account: THAT IS YOUR DESKTOP when you run from the command line. You arrange the dirs in your home dir such that they make sense when you hop into it first thing in the morning, and your fingers are maybe hardwired to type out paths to a couple of other dirs (/home/www for example). Why not simply have the desktop actually reflect the contents of your home dir, instead of a bunch of symlinks and loose files in some subfolder buried deep within the file system as most file managers (on every OS) seem to do?
Devices under UNIX work like they do in pretty much no other OS on the planet. It will NEVER be possible to shoehorn floppy mounting procedures into the model used on the Mac for instance - so let's try to think of a new metaphor for removable media under UNIX. After all, UNIX already treats removable media as directories - a metaphor. Not that the Mounter in BeOS has been a great success, but there MUST be some metaphor that will make the attaching and detaching of pieces of file system make sense visually. Has anyone even attempted this? (Most of my ideas in this department are vehicle metaphors: ships docking, the moving van pulling up out front, the ice cream truck parks out front, the flying Chinese restaurant in Fifth Element.)
I think we can simplify and clarify the role of the superuser in the OS by calling it the Janitor (at least for the consumer-end UI). System functions the average user has no business messing with would be presented by the interface as "in the utility room" or such; I think most consumers would feel quite comfortable with such a metaphor, and would understand WHY there are things they shouldn't mess with (and why UNIX handles this so differently from other OSes). The janitor user "has the keys" (and the interface would incorporate su in the context of "borrowing the keys" in order to perform janitorial duties).
Pipelines should be incorporated into the UI. Have "droplet" apps (like those common on the Mac) that you can not only drop files onto to have them processed, you can drag a little piece off the droplet's icon and "chain" it to another droplet (it could even draw a line onscreen indicating this connection!) - and when done, you simply drop your files onto the frontmost droplet in the chain and watch your processed goodies fall out the other end. These "droplets" would, I suppose, be 'snapshots' of a command and some parameters; use a GUI to set the parameters once and create the droplet. Most of us would have zillions of droplets neatly organized in folders, something like shell aliases on steroids. I can also see droplets that function as loops, droplets that pop up and ask for parameters, droplets that are mere file viewers, droplets that tee the output, and droplets that are just good old-fashioned shell scripts. I can even see droplets that accept multiple chains, for, say, combining text files. Essentially a visual scripting system. Then - as if that isn't sweet enough - file dialogs will let you select droplets as filenames you can save files to, thus letting you save through the pipeline.
These are just blue-sky ideas I coughed up in an afternoon. Why is it I have to come up with this stuff? Why instead does every new GUI toolkit or file manager showcased on Slashdot look exactly like some other OS? Is there ANYTHING to Linux except emulating other people's design flaws? Or is it just that programmers are never UI-inclined, and thus those of us who talk about improving things are forever cursed to be unable to do anything about it?
Note: I'm not saying there's NO research going on, just that it seems like there's NOT MUCH research going on. But then, maybe Slashdot should run features on the TRULY innovative stuff (wherever it's hiding) instead of the Explorer clone of the week club.
Also note I do think there's some merit to having a Windows UI on Linux, I just worry when I see so many people basically attempting the same project (cloning Windows under Linux) when there's so much more to be done. Assuming we need any MS Windows, we only need two: the official one, and an open source version. We don't need five, not when the "perfect" UNIX GUI remains unattempted.
Slightly amusing comments I've found in my own code:
# They painted the office today and the fumes are getting to
# me. Don't be surprised at anything you find in the code
# from here down.
In code claiming to be a "complete rewrite" from the previous version:
# This section stolen from the previous version
# I have a feeling this is very wrong.
# This code would require about eight seconds to optimize, I just haven't
# done it yet.
(I've had plenty of chances in the last 2 years to optimize that code.)
# No. I refuse to document this.
# This actually subverts some optimizations later on, but maybe it'll add up okay
# in the end.
if ($notready)
{
# Kosh: "You are not ready for immortality."
...
# Done parsing silliness.
# Let's be even bruter with the brute force.
# Stupid design? Well, that or read the main list twice.
# Yowza.
# It's a dumb idea. I will fix it. When I figure out how.
# That's poorly named.
In code that was later commented out:
# is this smart or stupid?
I must have decided later it wasn't smart...
# Now to run through the loop again. I smell an optimization coming.
# Augh! A reference!
# Let's just use the 32-bit numbers. To hell with Y2K bugs, let's go to S2B - the
# 2 billion second bug.
# There's only one universe, so no args (yet)...
# Got 'im.
# Just pretend for the moment it works.
# Nasty mean vicious nested foreach
# Whew! Several trips through the datafile later...
# This next part makes me wish I'd commented it the first time.
(Followed by uncommented code, apparently written in a hurry.)
# silliness!
# Let's GET IT ON!
# cheap-ass code to calculate days between two dates
Some code that did weird (and probably unnecessary) date calculations contained these cryptic comments:
# now has a Y1K9 bug and thus cannot be used in years before 1900.
# It also now has a year 11734883 bug - that's when (yr*366) > 2^32.
In some particularly weird code we converted to Y2K ready in 1997:
# If you need this to work past 2100, come thaw me out.
My last job I had to maintain someone else's downright weird Perl - not ordinary obfuscated Perl, mind you, this was Perl written by someone who obviously grew up in Visual Basic. His comments were few and far between, and when he DID comment, it was not much more understandable than the code it accompanied.
:-)
At one point I left a comment something like this:
# Todd, please don't comment if the code is clearer without it.
Too bad he'll never see it.
I've seen one of these dev systems in person (an early prototype version of the kit). The 'portable assembly' actually refers to a CPU-independent bytecode with its own assembly language.
You're probably just trolling, but what the hey.
If anyone is mounting attacks on God, it's you, my friend. Creationism went out of fashion in the late 1800s as CHRISTIANS, seeking to understand how God works, went out and did some digging and pretty much unilaterally decided Genesis was a parable and that life DID evolve in a gradual process over a very long time. And indeed, which is the greater glory: an unbelievably complex world billions of years old, where entire PHYLA have come and gone, all spawned from a single explosion where God infused the rules of the universe into a point of matter and let it do its thing, or just some built-all-at-once artifice a mere 6000 years old with one ten-thousandth the biological diversity? God's supposed to be this great builder, and you've just insulted His greatest masterpiece by claiming it only took him six days and it was built "last week" on the cosmic clock.
Anyway. There's a tunnel through a hillside near here, in central Indiana, where fossils (not dinosaurs, just invertebrates - brachiopods, molluscs, crinoids) are literally falling out of the walls. These are not plaster, nor are they carved stone - they are made of a different, harder mineral composition than the surrounding rock, they go all the way back into the rock (the whole hill is full of fossils, as are the nearby hills) and there is definitely NO way that a human forger could insert fakes into that hillside for you or me to find. This is just a site I know of PERSONALLY, where I have held fossils of oceangoing creatures from 230 million years ago, many of which simply don't exist today, and where I can personally see that we have certain species at the bottom of the tunnel and different species at the top. (And they're not hydrodynamically sorted either, there is no size trend.)
Creationism came back into fashion, not because of any scientific discovery or lack thereof, but because people like you needed some new tactic to "prove" to yourself and to the world that the Bible is right and science is wrong. You're saying so in your own words: you connect evolution with liberals, socialists, non-Christians, and any other unsavory things you can think of. You have NO evidence to support your claim that dinosaur fossils are frauds - in fact I think there's at least 100 Slashdotters who will volunteer to DRIVE you to sites where vertebrate fossils are literally falling out of the walls, and show you up close that they are not fakes. But the basis for your conclusion isn't scientific fact - the basis for your conclusion is that people who believe in evolution are People You Don't Like.
can't have 65 million year-old fossils on a 6,000 year-old Earth!
That's what we've been saying all along. But, um, geologists began to notice the earth was way older than 6000 years BEFORE Darwin and his naughty little book, so I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Other than the fact that you want the world to just straighten up and meet your ideal, and you don't care what facts you have to ignore or distort to get there, huh? You have the audacity to claim evolution is nonsense and that dinosaur bones are frauds, yet your 'divine' authority is a book written down by HUMANS and your 'science' is nothing but a parroting of the standard ultraconservative party line - you can't even make up your OWN mind about who you hate, you have to let Rush Limbaugh tell you!
I also note that some of your Creationist brethren DO accept that dinosaurs existed, and have come up with some bizarre theories involving the Flood in order to explain them away. Which makes you a Creationist among Creationists, an extremist among extremists.
Were you hoping to change some minds here today, or are you just trying to make brownie points with God the same way people make up job contacts for their weekly unemployment vouchers? Scene from your trial: "But I DID try to convince people! See, I even went on Slashdot and tried to show them everything they know is wrong and I even went out of my way to insult their intelligence just like I'm supposed to. You can't blame me that they didn't drop their heathen ways and follow you instantly, oh Lord..."
It's known that this exact bones->legends progression happened with the mammoths. It's also known that the Cyclops legend was inspired by elephant skulls found in caves (possibly Hannibal's elephants!) wherein the nasal opening looks like a large single eye socket. So it's possible that monster legends could descend from ancient bones.
Of course, for our dragon legend to be started from dinosaur bones, I'm guessing it would have had to be a mostly articulated skeleton, and in order to accommodate the "wings" our mythical dragons seem to always have, maybe it was a plesiosaur or mosasaur or other aquatic beastie whose huge front flippers looked to an ancient like wings. If the skeleton were not articulated, they'd find the giant bones and think of giant people, as seemed to happen all too often, and if it were articulated but of something like a t-rex, the shape of our modern dragon would be very different.
Something to consider: I've been a Sarah McLachlan fan since 1989, I've bought all her albums (3 copies of her first, 2 copies of her third, 2 copies of Freedom Sessions), most of her singles, numerous shirts, tour books, souvenirs, and attended so many concerts I lost count (more than ten). How much of that money do you think she's seen? About $1 per album, probably less for the singles, maybe a dollar per shirt... under $20 not counting the concerts, and I doubt she gets the whole $35 from each concert ticket.
Which means in eleven years of being a fanboy, I've given her almost enough money that she could buy two of her own CDs at retail.
Oh it gets better. When you buy a CD from Columbia House, the artists often get NO royalties at all - it's considered an advertising expense! (How come Metallica isn't suing THEM?)
These companies pay their artists "starving wages" (and then MAYBE actually promote them so that they can at least make it up by getting $1 from each of a half million people). Then they say WE'RE the ripoff artists. I think that's just a little bit insulting.
These bands made a conscious choice to sign a contract with a record company, and should have been aware of the pricing policies before they did so.
So, after years of washing dishes for a living, when the record company shows up to offer the next Sarah McLachlan her recording deal, before she can decide, she has to go look up their pricing policies in 67 different countries?
OK, so let's fast forward, their pricing policies seem sound, so she accepts the deal. Two weeks later the company adds a Minidisc division, but prices them three times as much as CDs in Venezuela and Sri Lanka. Should she be a conscientious objector and quit, supposing her contract is even written in such a way that she can do so?
when in fact, it says nothing at all.
:-)
Like most politicians.
And I'm gonna keep saying it. The ONLY meaningful way to split Microsoft is right down the middle: engineering in one company, marketing in another.
OK, there's obviously a market for this. So let's imagine how it could be done The Right Way (or at least within the law, until someone decides they don't like it and buy some new laws to make it illegal):
Imagine a company that NEGOTIATES broadcast rights with the networks, exactly like a local cable TV station, but does its broadcasting over the Internet. Preferably in MPEG but I could live with Real or QT streaming.
This company would effectively be a "regional cable company" where its "region" is the Internet. Local cable companies (like Time Warner) would probably complain, but it's still perfectly fair.
The company could do other interesting things too, like allow a personal VCR service like this place. Maybe do some shuffling of commercials for such timeshifted rebroadcasts.
I can imagine a "free" usage level, where the picture size is small and there are banners and commercials everywhere, then a "budget" level with a bigger window, no banners, but the usual amount of commercials, and a "premium" level with no commercials (black space during real-time broadcasts, deleted space on 'playback's) that would probably have to cost about $80/month to offset the lack of commercials (since the company would have to pay both the TV producers and advertisers some sort of royalty to cover the deleted commercials). Or maybe have special Internet-only content that doesn't interrupt the show for commercials, but places banner ads all around it in the browser window!
I like the idea of having this in MPEG, so I can download this week's Farscape or the episode of Law & Order where the kid hacked someone's pancreas (well, hacked the hospital and made them mess up a diabetes patient) and watch it again, without having to clog up my connection every time (and so I can just watch the good parts). But fat chance of that happening, even though there would be little risk of piracy - if the service becomes popular, why trade MPEGs if you can go get your own from their archives? Besides, it means more exposure for the advertisers if people DO pirate the shows, though without a means of tracking it; if the Internet cable company is fine with this, the networks shouldn't have a problem either, and the advertisers will CERTAINLY be happy. (Or if the company is worried, they can charge MPEG downloads at 10x the usual advertising rate, on the notion that the commercials will be seen many more times; the 'live' broadcasts could still be in a streamed format and the commercials sold at the usual rate.)
(Removal of commercials from the MPEGs once you download them: is this also a piracy issue? Not much difference in file size, so it's not like it'll be a mad rush to download the decommercialed version - especially if they adaptively compress it so the commercials are small to begin with. Plus the advertiser is already paid at the "ten people will watch it for every one that gets downloaded" rate anyway.)
Only the movie studios might be unhappy, since when Episode One gets shown on the nightly movie, anyone can download it, splice out the commercials (and ignore the 20 minutes that usually gets edited out of any movie to bring it down to length) and put it on Hotline for all and sundry.
Thoughts?