Hey, this just needs to be combined with the story on Slashdot recently about tank treads on trucks and you'd have a motorcycle which could do around 150mph and still be easy on the road!
My father uses the stuff, and there's actually a reason it's heavily marketed toward black men. If you have very curly hair, you often get what's called "shaving bumps" when you use a razor due to the hair curliness factor. I don't know quite how it works, but at any rate, this isn't a problem which affects white guys.:)
So yeah it exists and there's a reason. Magic Shave is the oldest kind.
One of the design goals of Cobol was that it be readable by non-programmers, so that one's PHB could review the code. Obviously they were ahead of the curve back then.
This is less about being "ahead of the curve" and more about trying to accomplish impossible goals. An untrained individual will probably never be able to pick up code and read it -- and why should we expect them to?
I could reduce structural engineering blueprints to crayoned pictures of houses and smiling cats. That doesn't mean I should. Why is complexity and obscurity to the uneducated bad? The products of skilled workers will always, by definition, be separated from something anyone could do.
"Natural language" compilers are a noble effort. It's nice that we want non-technical individuals to be able to understand what's going on under the hood, and products like Visual Basic and other rapid prototyping apps have a place in the world. But will they ever replace line-by-line programming? Not likely.
I don't think so. To a degree, languages have gotten "higher-level," but the real development languages seem to have stopped around the level of C/C++. After all, those languages are, what, 20 years old?
Languages like Visual Basic, decidedly more "high-level," have failed to catch on for serious development. The reason, of course, is that "natural language compilers" will always fail as long as a computer can't intelligently optimize code itself. No computer today can do this, and I think it's a long, long way off.
Software engineering will never be a "blue-collar" environment, and certainly not because of natural language compilers. The invention of the printing press didn't turn every man into an author, and VB doesn't turn PHBs into engineers.
Well, some things will always be the same: we'll have disease, famine, war, and death till the end of time. But I don't thinks are the same as they ever were, largely due to this innovation that everyone is poo-pooing.
Mostly the changes have come as globalism. Expanding our perspective to a global scale changes a lot of things, and to a great degree the scale of human society is always increasing.
From ten-man tribes to 300-million-man nations, to world governments to multi-world governments, human expansion changes things constantly. And that, at least, is a constant, spurred on by innovation.
Most of the additions seem fairly minor or cosmetic to me. It'll be an interesting release, but I'm not drooling over it -- it'll be a while before I go to the trouble of a kernel upgrade.
I think, frequently, we software types get too worked up over the "new release" that we don't even care what is being released. We hear "new" and we knee-jerk faster than a conservative near an abortion clinic. To a large degree, this contributes to what a lot of people have noted as an overall low quality of software.
Is it the only cause? No. But if we "power users" were more discriminating about what we'd download, perhaps those downloads would become ever-more worthwhile. I'm not saying this release won't be good; just encouraging discretion.
That's what the world needs. eBay bounty hunters! I'll become an undercover NARC for "the Man," hunting down these offline sellers in exchange for getting my own selling fees waived. I have to make a profit somehow. "Sealed Box Of Random Contents" aren't selling for much.:\
LK
Look, I realize that plumbing is neat and all, but let's get serious: those chumps lived in the past! Can you imagine how much that sucked? If they wanted to play Carmageddon in 1890, they had to deal with extremely questionable framerates if the game ran at all. Patches were still decades away. Though Dr. Derek Smart, PhD, at least told them tales of BattleCoveredWagon 2000 A.D.
We, however, live in the future. Love In The Time Of Cholera begone -- we're Leet in the Time Of Handspring. Maybe the authors of this article didn't notice this, but just because technology hasn't helped us pee better in a while doesn't mean the pace of innovation is slowing.
For example, right now I am listening to pirated music on my shiny new laptop while betting on the Broncos with someone in another state. Soon I will go play SSX until I pass out. I realize that the flu vaccine probably helped more people, but just because we're focusing our efforts on entertainment instead of staying alive doesn't mean we're innovating less.
Dragon Warrior, baby. Granted, it's not the hardest game in the world, but I was only 7 when I was playing it. RPGs are fuckin' hard if you're 7! What's worse, I got it from some mall trade-in shop so it didn't come with an instruction booklet or anything.
Man, that was nuts. Walking around killing slimes till I was sick in the head, just so I could level up... say what you will, but those old RPGs were HARD. Developers had NO bones about throwing in chests that could kill you if you stepped near them, and when you died, you lost half your gold and 10% of your experience. God, that was a bitch.
But I eventually won! I beat that fucker! I did it! And RPGs have been my favorite type of game ever since. You'd better believe I have FF IX on pre-order.
Not sure if I 100% agree with him, but when I look to hire someone, I really can see the difference between somebody who pursued advanced education and someone who didn't. That's not the only criteria of course
Indeed. There's also a big difference that can be seen in how well you implement subject/verb agreement.
I am so completely sick of seeing people trot out the "Gattaca" references every time anything to do with DNA is mentioned. We've come to the point where it's not clever anymore. Gattaca is not just an unlikely future, it's a poor movie with subpar acting and stilted directing. It's like making oblique references to "Snow Crash" when people talk about the Internet. You're not being original anymore -- you're just following the crowd. And the moderator who moderated up all of the "Gattaca" posts as insightful and is about to moderate this one down: blow me!
Actually, if you pay attention, very few Stormtroopers are killed by Ewoks. The battle in ROTJ turns when Chewie commandeers the AT-ST and starts mowing down troopers with heavy infantry. ~Kynes
Well, whether it's "Open Source" or not doesn't matter as much as the question -- would it still be free? That's the real concern. A huge majority of the Linux users out there will never poke at the code for the OS or even look at the source, and I'd say that the ability to do so is not a huge issue for most...
But what is a huge issue for most is the fact that Linux is free. If it weren't, I can't say it would be a much better choice than, say, some non-free BSD... and FreeBSD would definitely have a leg up on it. (Just like it does already!:)
The time for Open Source has definitely come. With or without Linux, it would have happened.
Perhaps this is the old-schooler in me speaking, but I really detest portals. To me, they've always been nothing but another marketing gimmick aimed at keeping users attached to a single system. When the online services of old started dying, their proprietors needed a way to hold onto people... you can't let them wander around, not contributing to your revenue, after all.
So what did they do? The portal was born. All the content of the old services, plus they don't have to provide you with dial-up access to see it! You just come on your own, look at their ads, provide them with demographic information... pretty sweet deal. For them.
The beauty of the Internet is the unconnectedness of these things. Down with portals, and down with AltaVista for joining this insane movement!
Truthfully, I hadn't considered this aspect of Open Source before. I thought the comparison to the automobile was particularly interesting; I think it's a bit flawed, however. Open Source is more than just multiple vendors; when you provide your source code, you provide your product for free.
This of course differs from automobiles. The blueprints for a Dodge Intrepid are not made public, and even if they were, you couldn't necessarily build one. So while I think that the analogy is good one, the real key of Open Source is something that is not stressed in this article... and that is, of course, value-addition.
By now, we're all familiar with the concept. You give a product away, but you support it for a fee. Or you let everybody download an ISO of your CD and give it to whomever they'd like, but printed manuals cost extra. I think this is the only model that really makes sense when you consider the unique aspect of digital commodities: they're non-physical and infinitely replicatable.
A thing which can be duplicated ten billion times at no cost has very little intrinsic value. It is no longer scarce in any sense of the word... and as even the most uneducated high school economics student will tell you, when you remove scarcity from the economics equation, everything else falls apart. Value is derived from scarcity... at least in traditional economics. So what do companies wishing to offer non-scarce products and also make money do? Tie in some scarce things! Support is scarce. Printed manuals are scarce. So people pay for them.
I wonder how long this sham is going to hold up?:) As we move increasingly toward an economic system based heavily on products that are non-scarce, I think traditional capitalism is going to collapse more and more. And it's not just software, either. Music can be made non-scarce. Art can be made non-scarce. Anything which can be digitalised can be made non-scarce. When we look at this more, the key emerges: just because it is non-scarce does not mean it isn't unique. The best song in the world duplicated 10,000 times is still the best song.
What does this mean? It's hard to say. Perhaps we're approaching a day where creativity and the actual utility of a product will be valued paramount, rather than its price or availability. I can't fathom an economic system based on non-scarcity, but then I'm hardly an expert. I'm sure we'll think of something.:)
Well, Echelon in its current incarnation really doesn't have the ability to do this. It functions more as "listening stations" than active traffic routers; if it were going to block the e-mails, you'd have to have an Echelon machine in place of *every* router on the Internet, at *every* peering point.
Now all we need is a Color Gameboy emulator, and the era of palm computing will have truly arrived.;)
Seriously, those, these do look quite nice; Palm will finally get rid of one of WinCE's more glaring advantages with this, if in fact they are legit (which is very much in doubt at this point).
Should you consider a bimbo with great legs, or a fat girl with great brain? Well, think of it this way: you can lose weight much more easily than you can gain a brain.
Or why not shoot for the moon -- a brilliant, beautiful girl with a heart of gold and a voice like a faery princess? Why must it be one or the other? Why not have everything? Plenty of these girls exist, and their standards are more often than not above the typical "girls like jerks" stuff.
It may seem like a lofty goal, but take heart. If you're an intelligent, caring, good person, you're already in the top 5% of the population.:)
Users must have a host computer or a Web site running on Microsoft Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0 to use the PocketSign program.
Pardon? What an inane restriction; limiting this software to webservers only running Win32 operating systems is going to severely limit its use. A vast majority of the webservers out there are running Apache or other U-ix-based servers. Does anyone running a website on Windows 98 really have a need for digitally authenticated documents?
Though it's a step in the right direction, I don't think that this is the program that's going to make digital authentication of documents a reality. The best solution for digital signatures has been and continues to be public-key encryption (PGP, et. al.).
How about instead dividing the total bandwidth available to a region by its area? The result would be a completely useless but semi-useful "bits per mile" number that we could put on maps.;)
No. There won't be a Linux port, no matter what your "rumors" say. Blizzard is a small company and does not have the manpower or desire to port their games to other OSes. Macs are lucky to get it as it is; Linux? No way.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, this just needs to be combined with the story on Slashdot recently about tank treads on trucks and you'd have a motorcycle which could do around 150mph and still be easy on the road!
LK
My father uses the stuff, and there's actually a reason it's heavily marketed toward black men. If you have very curly hair, you often get what's called "shaving bumps" when you use a razor due to the hair curliness factor. I don't know quite how it works, but at any rate, this isn't a problem which affects white guys. :)
So yeah it exists and there's a reason. Magic Shave is the oldest kind.
~LK
"Natural language" compilers are a noble effort. It's nice that we want non-technical individuals to be able to understand what's going on under the hood, and products like Visual Basic and other rapid prototyping apps have a place in the world. But will they ever replace line-by-line programming? Not likely.
Languages like Visual Basic, decidedly more "high-level," have failed to catch on for serious development. The reason, of course, is that "natural language compilers" will always fail as long as a computer can't intelligently optimize code itself. No computer today can do this, and I think it's a long, long way off.
Software engineering will never be a "blue-collar" environment, and certainly not because of natural language compilers. The invention of the printing press didn't turn every man into an author, and VB doesn't turn PHBs into engineers.
Ian Samuel
The revolution is here at last! Full-screen streaming video content, available for free over the airwaves? Truly, this was Linux's calling.
Well, some things will always be the same: we'll have disease, famine, war, and death till the end of time. But I don't thinks are the same as they ever were, largely due to this innovation that everyone is poo-pooing.
Mostly the changes have come as globalism. Expanding our perspective to a global scale changes a lot of things, and to a great degree the scale of human society is always increasing.
From ten-man tribes to 300-million-man nations, to world governments to multi-world governments, human expansion changes things constantly. And that, at least, is a constant, spurred on by innovation.
LK
I think, frequently, we software types get too worked up over the "new release" that we don't even care what is being released. We hear "new" and we knee-jerk faster than a conservative near an abortion clinic. To a large degree, this contributes to what a lot of people have noted as an overall low quality of software.
Is it the only cause? No. But if we "power users" were more discriminating about what we'd download, perhaps those downloads would become ever-more worthwhile. I'm not saying this release won't be good; just encouraging discretion.
LK
That's what the world needs. eBay bounty hunters! I'll become an undercover NARC for "the Man," hunting down these offline sellers in exchange for getting my own selling fees waived. I have to make a profit somehow. "Sealed Box Of Random Contents" aren't selling for much. :\
LK
Look, I realize that plumbing is neat and all, but let's get serious: those chumps lived in the past! Can you imagine how much that sucked? If they wanted to play Carmageddon in 1890, they had to deal with extremely questionable framerates if the game ran at all. Patches were still decades away. Though Dr. Derek Smart, PhD , at least told them tales of BattleCoveredWagon 2000 A.D.
We, however, live in the future. Love In The Time Of Cholera begone -- we're Leet in the Time Of Handspring. Maybe the authors of this article didn't notice this, but just because technology hasn't helped us pee better in a while doesn't mean the pace of innovation is slowing. For example, right now I am listening to pirated music on my shiny new laptop while betting on the Broncos with someone in another state. Soon I will go play SSX until I pass out. I realize that the flu vaccine probably helped more people, but just because we're focusing our efforts on entertainment instead of staying alive doesn't mean we're innovating less.
LK!
Dragon Warrior, baby. Granted, it's not the hardest game in the world, but I was only 7 when I was playing it. RPGs are fuckin' hard if you're 7! What's worse, I got it from some mall trade-in shop so it didn't come with an instruction booklet or anything.
Man, that was nuts. Walking around killing slimes till I was sick in the head, just so I could level up... say what you will, but those old RPGs were HARD. Developers had NO bones about throwing in chests that could kill you if you stepped near them, and when you died, you lost half your gold and 10% of your experience. God, that was a bitch.
But I eventually won! I beat that fucker! I did it! And RPGs have been my favorite type of game ever since. You'd better believe I have FF IX on pre-order.
Indeed. There's also a big difference that can be seen in how well you implement subject/verb agreement.
I am so completely sick of seeing people trot out the "Gattaca" references every time anything to do with DNA is mentioned. We've come to the point where it's not clever anymore. Gattaca is not just an unlikely future, it's a poor movie with subpar acting and stilted directing. It's like making oblique references to "Snow Crash" when people talk about the Internet. You're not being original anymore -- you're just following the crowd. And the moderator who moderated up all of the "Gattaca" posts as insightful and is about to moderate this one down: blow me!
Actually, if you pay attention, very few Stormtroopers are killed by Ewoks. The battle in ROTJ turns when Chewie commandeers the AT-ST and starts mowing down troopers with heavy infantry. ~Kynes
By the time that's a reality, we will be "your grandma," and quite comfortable with the notion of computers. ~L. Kynes
But what is a huge issue for most is the fact that Linux is free. If it weren't, I can't say it would be a much better choice than, say, some non-free BSD... and FreeBSD would definitely have a leg up on it. (Just like it does already! :)
The time for Open Source has definitely come. With or without Linux, it would have happened.
So what did they do? The portal was born. All the content of the old services, plus they don't have to provide you with dial-up access to see it! You just come on your own, look at their ads, provide them with demographic information... pretty sweet deal. For them.
The beauty of the Internet is the unconnectedness of these things. Down with portals, and down with AltaVista for joining this insane movement!
17-year-old Comdex attendee charged with public drunkenness, solicitations of prostitutes.
This of course differs from automobiles. The blueprints for a Dodge Intrepid are not made public, and even if they were, you couldn't necessarily build one. So while I think that the analogy is good one, the real key of Open Source is something that is not stressed in this article... and that is, of course, value-addition.
By now, we're all familiar with the concept. You give a product away, but you support it for a fee. Or you let everybody download an ISO of your CD and give it to whomever they'd like, but printed manuals cost extra. I think this is the only model that really makes sense when you consider the unique aspect of digital commodities: they're non-physical and infinitely replicatable.
A thing which can be duplicated ten billion times at no cost has very little intrinsic value. It is no longer scarce in any sense of the word... and as even the most uneducated high school economics student will tell you, when you remove scarcity from the economics equation, everything else falls apart. Value is derived from scarcity... at least in traditional economics. So what do companies wishing to offer non-scarce products and also make money do? Tie in some scarce things! Support is scarce. Printed manuals are scarce. So people pay for them.
I wonder how long this sham is going to hold up? :) As we move increasingly toward an economic system based heavily on products that are non-scarce, I think traditional capitalism is going to collapse more and more. And it's not just software, either. Music can be made non-scarce. Art can be made non-scarce. Anything which can be digitalised can be made non-scarce. When we look at this more, the key emerges: just because it is non-scarce does not mean it isn't unique. The best song in the world duplicated 10,000 times is still the best song.
What does this mean? It's hard to say. Perhaps we're approaching a day where creativity and the actual utility of a product will be valued paramount, rather than its price or availability. I can't fathom an economic system based on non-scarcity, but then I'm hardly an expert. I'm sure we'll think of something. :)
Seriously, those, these do look quite nice; Palm will finally get rid of one of WinCE's more glaring advantages with this, if in fact they are legit (which is very much in doubt at this point).
Or why not shoot for the moon -- a brilliant, beautiful girl with a heart of gold and a voice like a faery princess? Why must it be one or the other? Why not have everything? Plenty of these girls exist, and their standards are more often than not above the typical "girls like jerks" stuff.
It may seem like a lofty goal, but take heart. If you're an intelligent, caring, good person, you're already in the top 5% of the population. :)
Pardon? What an inane restriction; limiting this software to webservers only running Win32 operating systems is going to severely limit its use. A vast majority of the webservers out there are running Apache or other U-ix-based servers. Does anyone running a website on Windows 98 really have a need for digitally authenticated documents?
Though it's a step in the right direction, I don't think that this is the program that's going to make digital authentication of documents a reality. The best solution for digital signatures has been and continues to be public-key encryption (PGP, et. al.).
How about instead dividing the total bandwidth available to a region by its area? The result would be a completely useless but semi-useful "bits per mile" number that we could put on maps. ;)
No. There won't be a Linux port, no matter what your "rumors" say. Blizzard is a small company and does not have the manpower or desire to port their games to other OSes. Macs are lucky to get it as it is; Linux? No way.
Excuse me, but why is this marked "insightful?" This post is about as "insightful" as the original parody itself.