I ordered books from both of the big Canadian booksellers this month.
In the second week of December, I ordered a book online from Chapters for my brother, to be shipped via Canada Post, and it was in my mailbox two days later.
And then last week, to compare how its competitor Indigo is, I checked their website and wound up ordering a couple of novels (for myself, not presents) that weren't in the Chapters database. Indigo listed them as being out of stock, to be available in a few weeks. I placed the order, not expecting it before Christmas, and sure enough, I got an email saying my order couldn't be shipped for Christmas and offering me a $10 gift certificate as a result.
Needless to say, I'm quite happy with both of them, above and beyond the pleasure of not being stiffed by the US-Canadian exchange rate.
Marshall may win on the fundamentals but I have to give Churchill the win on style points. Sure he was an egotist, but what a life he lived!
Hearty agreement here. Churchill's life was rather amazing. The Ottawa Citizen recently ran a couple of articles about Churchill's exploits during the Boer War. He maneuvered to get press credentials from a London newspaper, connived to get near the front lines, was engaged in battle, and made an escape as a prisoner.
It should be noted that Churchill's accomplishments didn't end after the war. His speech gave the words "Iron Curtain" to the world, and his two major historical works (The History of the English Speaking Peoples and a four part World War II one) are significant.
Pascal had an intermediary form before gcc
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RMS The Coder
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· Score: 2
gcc sources are a good example. I don't know if he's the one that came up with the idea of compiling to an intermediate form and then having each cpu target translate the intermediate, prepackaged form to machine code, but that's a fabulous idea.
Probably not. Pascal compilers did that in the late 70s for machine portability. The Pascal code was compiled to an intermediary called P-code, which was then compiled to machine code by an architecture dependent piece.
The Pascal vendors billed this as a big breakthrough for portability at the time, but I'm sure that earlier examples could also be found.
The NSA just realized that if they allow strong e-commerce crypto, but still block strong email encryption, the big companies will stop complaining and we'll never be able to export PGP (legally, that is!).
Exactly. A lot of the noise towards opening up the U.S.'s export restrictions on crypto have been coming from big companies that want to do e-commerce. Greater e-commerce is in the U.S. government's best interest, as American companies currently dominate that scene, and stand to make a lot of taxable income if the whole world can use strong encryption to buy from them.
Once those companies get strong encryption exports for e-commerce, they'll be quiet and happy. No one will be strongly lobbying (with money to really make the government change its mind) for further opening up, and exports of crypto in other areas like email will never happen.
Plus, I'm sure the intelligence impact to the NSA of not being able to read https connections is minimal, unless it turns out that they're using credit card fraud to supplement their budget or something.
Several posts here have advocated setting up a permanent base on the Moon before attempting to go Mars. This isn't a good idea, as the Moon is a lot less desirable as a place to attempt to build a self-sustaining colony. Of all the bodies in the solar system, Mars is the best choice for a colony, for the following reasons, among others.
Resources
Mars is the one body aside from Earth that we know has all of the raw materials for civilization. In particular, it has readily accessible water, which is critical not only for human use and growing plants, but as a source of hydrogen for rocket propellant. This is in stark contrast to the Moon, where the discovery of water ice at the south pole means that there is one place on the Moon that isn't drier than terrestrial concrete.
Farming
Conditions on Mars are much more favorable to growing plants than anywhere except Earth. Growing things is actually very energy intensive, but we don't notice it much on Earth because farmers get energy for free from sunlight. Mars is the only place where we'll be able to easily set up outdoor farms to get sunlight.
Mars has an atmosphere that provides reasonable protection against radiation, and would only require inflated tents of transparent plastic to setup greenhouses on the surface. The Martian day is only 40 minutes longer than that of Earth, so there wouldn't be a drastic shock to plants from the length of sunlight.
To do the same on the Moon would require radiation hardened shelters to be established on the surface, where the plants would have to adjust to the two weeks of constant sunlight and subsequent two week long night. And you'd still have to bring all of the needed water up the gravity well from Earth, or mine it from the limited supply at the south pole.
Artificial lighting won't be practical for intensive agriculture until there is a cheap energy source available in deep space, such as fusion. Otherwise, the energy requirements for food production would dominate the need for power in any space settlement.
Delta V for outer solar system
Mars is the best place to have a staging area for expeditions to the outer solar system. The availability of raw materials means that many supplies can be manufactured on Mars for further space exploration and colonization efforts. It'll always be cheaper to transport goods from Mars than Earth to the outer planets, so anything that can be supplied from Mars will be.
Note that this also the case for the Moon, to a lesser degree. It wouldn't work for supplying a Mars mission, though - the delta V wouldn't be advantageous, so it's still easier to ship things from Earth directly to Mars.
I freely admit that the preceding arguments are cribbed from Robert Zubrin's books The Case for Mars and Entering Space. I encourage anyone interested in space exploration to read them.
These are not technological issues. These are all addressed by our current judge/jury system.
From his home page, Stiegler describes the link to the exam as follows:
Yes, this is a final exam for a college course--a course I taught on "The Future Of Computing". Several friends suggested that this Final Exam should be taken by anyone who thinks the way to make the Web a "safe place" is to pass thousands of new government regulations. In this Exam, the student must use advanced Web-tools (currently under development by many different parties) to solve problems without saying, "there ought to be a law." No, there ought to be a choice.
After reading this, the exam makes a whole lot more sense. He is saying that with the web technologies listed at the top of the exam, it's possible to solve many human problems without needing to create and enforce laws.
This makes #11 all the more interesting. It may well be a reminder that not all problems can be solved by technology, or merely that the technology isn't mature enough for everything. I can see how a reliable communication and information device described would be very useful for the inhabitants of a really oppressed place, but it couldn't solve the immediate needs very quickly.
These have nothing to do with the future of computing, these are exclusively the future of culture.
True enough. However, as anyone living in the West today can attest, changes in technology lead to strong changes in culture. This course sounds like it was all about examining this set of coming technological advances to determine their impact. Even more than that, to find ways of channeling this technology into being a strong tool for freedom, and not for oppression.
I don't have much respect for Apple, but I must admit an installation can't get any simpler.
Actually, you didn't even need your first step, so it can get a little simpler. The MacOS CDs are bootable, and the Mac has been able to boot from SCSI for as long as they've had it. You could have booted from the install CD, and avoided making a boot disk.
A lot of people may have missed the news that LinuxPPC is now offering a quarterly subscription model. For $99, you get CDs for a year, with promised releases every quarter. Under this scheme, having the quarter of release be the version name makes an awful lot of sense, as the most unambiguous way of identifying what version a user has.
This is rather nice even if one doesn't intend to update every three months, as R5 was pushed back from its release date for about half a year (two current releases-worth of time).
I use Nedit and love it, which is why I'm surprised you weren't aware that it already has most of the features that you are asking for.
I wish there was a GUI text editor that did perl/html/php3/etc. syntax highlighting
As of version 5 and greater, Nedit has a wonderfully customizable syntax coloring feature. You can specify syntax coloring for language modes using regular expressions. Of the ones you listed, both Perl and HTML modes come built in, and you can easily write patterns to match php3 syntax, or any other language.
could run my scripts (if they're that kind of thing) or do a perl -cw on them (if they're not)
In addition to syntax coloring, the language modes can be used to set macros in Nedit's builtin language to only run for particular source types. For the features not builtin, it can easily execute arbitrary shell commands.
that would integrate seamlessly with ftp and cvs
There might be existing macros to do this from the Nedit macro list. If not, it shouldn't be difficult to write your own.
Because the cash is actually "in" the card, the card becomes identical to cash. And for the same reason, since the cash is no longer "in" the bank account, the banks don't have to pay interest on it. If many people used smartcards instead of ATM cards, this would save the banks a lot of money.
Also developing encryption is good for Ontario business. Entrust Technologies is headquartered in Ottawa. I also recall the lead developer from the Ipsec presentation at the Ottawa Linux Symposium saying that he was from Ottawa. There's already a lot of software expertise in Ottawa and Toronto, so support like this makes it possible for Ontario to become a world leader in encryption.
As a new Ontario resident, I'm rather pleased, and pleasantly surprised to find a reason to like the Harris government.
Since others have mentioned other of Card's works, here are my picks for his best:
Ender's Game of course, which is arguably his best work. The best parts, those that made me cry in rereading it this afternoon after reading the chapters of the new book, are straight from the original novella. The fleshing out into a novel to provide more motivation for Ender in the sequel doesn't make it any less powerful. It's one of the seminal works of modern science fiction.
Speaker for the Dead in many ways stands alone, despite being part of the Ender series. In addition to the very human subplot about a family torn apart in tragedy and reunited by the love of an outsider, it's fundamentally about humans trying to establish contact with an alien species. One of the key concepts from it, the Demosthenian Heirarchy of Exclusion, is a powerful tool for thinking about what separates us from aliens.
The Memory of Earth and Seventh Son are the first and best books of his Homecoming and Alvin Maker series. I like them both over the later entries because of the brilliantly realized settings (a city on another planet millions of years in the future and an alternate 18th century America where magic works, respectively).
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is one of the few books I've read that addresses the moral and ethical issues of time travel. It also serves as the fiction equivalent of Guns, Germs, and Steel in trying to answer the question of "Why did history turn out the way it did?"
The novella "The Originist" was written for Friends of Foundation, an anthology to celebrate Isaac Asimov's 50th anniversary of writing, and is set on Trantor during the time of Hari Seldon. It's a touching work that considers how storytelling provides a chain of continuity to history.
And, since this is a place where freely available source code is a favored topic of discussion, I should mention that I first encountered Card's writing in an old Commodore-64 magazine called Ahoy!, where he had a monthly programming column, usually with working code to type in. In particular, I fondly remember the Gypsy Starship game from the Dec. 1984 issue, which his storytelling even in making a computer game.
ESR asserts that open source reverse Brooke's Law.Not from what I've seen. Linux being a case in point - lets face it, we all know which 10 or fifteen developers do most of the core work, and X is handled by an entirely different group. Brooke's Law is alive and well.
This is exactly the point that Alan Cox made in his keynote presentation at the Ottawa Linux Symposium last weekend. Alan did a comparison of how software engineering is done in big firms and by free software projects, and found them to be rather similar. It was most striking in regard to team size, where both styles of development work around an upper bound of 6 people per team. In companies, a heirarchical management structure breaks the developers up into small groups. Free software projects tend to fission as they attract developers, becoming a cluster of small related projects, all with small core teams of 6 or fewer developers. He pointed out the GNOME project as a good example of this, and after looking at the number of modules in GNOME CVS, I'm forced to agree.
This has some consequences for free software, that came up intermittantly in other sessions at the conference, so I found the keynote to be inadvertantly a good summation. For this fissioning to work, free software has to be much more modular than proprietary, and this leads to a strong role for developing interfaces in free software. Alan also pointed out that it also tends to lead to a lot of duplicated code. Both of the GNOME sessions, as well as the Mozilla one, strongly emphasized the need for component software, glued together with high-level languages for the user interface stuff.
Appropriately enough for this discussion, the Mozilla presentation by Mike Shaver (and a Netscape engineer whose name I've forgotten) was the session immediately preceding the keynote. As a result of it, I'm extremely confident about Mozilla's future (and I'm not just saying that because I got a Mozilla t-shirt there!).
I'm reminded of the book by Robert Forward where they find that critter made from negitive matter
The book you're thinking of is Timemaster. In it, a space company finds exotic creatures (called Silverhairs in the book) composed of negative matter, and containing wormhole entrances. Using the negative matter, they construct a relativistic starship to travel to the stars, leaving the wormhole intact after the trip for instant travel. After troubles from a competitor, the company's president makes a round trip via several stars to create a working time gate, thus bringing up the consistency problems of time travel.
Any Slashdot reader interested in warp drives or time travel should check it out. Amusingly enough, the book itself was a reference for a real-world scientific paper on the consistency principle for time travel. Robert Forward's other science fiction books are also highly recommended.
For some reason, they didn't want to get stuck with the "single platform" tag for IE, so they produced the unix versions.
I wonder if there may be another reason for the Unix ports. The company I was an intern at had a (likely expensive) site-wide license for Netscape. All the engineers had HP or Sun workstations, and the managers were all using Macs at the time, so Netscape was the only possibility for a standard company browser. They began to transition out the Macs in favor of Windows for the managers, but the engineers won't give up Unix. With HP-UX and Solaris versions of IE, it has a shot at becoming the "standard" browser in companies that can't all go to Windows, and still pay MS for the privilege.
funny you should mention how vehemently some linux users M$, a couple years back, the same thing could have been said about the Mac vs. Wintel arguement, and look now, the top selling office suite on Mac's is a microsoft product.
The case of Office 98 isn't directly relevant here. The Mac users buying it are mostly people who have to work with others who have standardized on the MS Office suite, and have to have a copy, one way or another. Given a choice between
a Mac running a version of Office that tries to adhere to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines
a Wintel box running MS apps in their original bletcherous glory
nearly every Mac user would pick the former in a hurry.
Internet Explorer on the Mac, though, is a much better comparison. Thanks to MS's deal with Apple, IE is now the Mac's standard browser. Last time I checked, though, Apple still includes a copy of Netscape on the system CD, and any reasonably competent computer user can install it instead.
Some Mac people avoid IE for political reasons. Some use it because it's the default browser, for many reasons. Some use it because it has a more Mac-like interface. Some use both IE and Netscape, for checking web designs or for specific features of both. Others feel both IE and the current Netscape are monstrosities, which is why iCab is getting so much attention from the Mac community right now.
This would probably be the case for Linux, although the interface and default cases would be smaller. The avoid for political reasons group would be large. If MS actually tried to get a version of IE that worked decently on Linux, some might choose it on its merits. Web designers might finally have a reason to drop a Windows partition.
This, of course, completely ignores the proprietary standards slant. If MS succeeds in getting a large segment of web content IE-only, some Linux users might have to use IE, at least until the free software community adds the needed features to Mozilla or another open-source browser.
Colin
Multiple Dispatch explained
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Java for EGCS
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· Score: 1
Is multiple dispatch (mentioned by a Dylan guy) a sort of SIMD thing?
No. What it does is use the types of all arguments to a function to determine which version of the function to call, and not just one.
To illustrate with an example: In single-dispatch languages such as Java and C++ (to name the two most relevant to this thread), method calls look like this: obj.foo(arg1, arg2, arg3), where obj is an instance of some class. The version of method foo() that gets invoked depends on what class obj belongs to.
In Dylan, method calls can use the above syntax, but they're really treated as if they use the alternate form foo(obj, arg1, arg2, arg3). Here, nothing is special in particular about the first argument, rather, the types of all arguments to foo() are used to determine which version to run.
What this means is that you can specialize a function based on more than a single argument. In single dispatch languages, you can only specialize functions based on a single type tree. That limitation doesn't apply to multiple dispatch, where function calls are specified by the types of all arguments. In fact, Dylan's singleton types allow you to even specialize functions on particular instances of a type!
The ideal is that Dylan compilers are able to determine the real types of all arguments at compile-time, which would make multiple dispatch calls no more expensive at runtime than a static dispatch call in C. If the types can't be accurately determined by the compiler, then it's usually the same as a dynamic dispatch call in a single dispatch language such as Smalltalk or Objective-C. Of course, this makes Dylan compilers rather difficult to write.
For more information on Dylan, I recommend checking out Gwydion Dylan, a free software project to create working Dylan tools.
Colin
Suggest waiting a bit for LinuxPPC version
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GNOME 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
You can download the SRPMs and rebuild them, but you'll probably want to wait until PPC versions show up on ftp.linuxppc.org or linuxppc.cs.nmt.edu. Recent versions of GTK+ (> 1.1.11 or so) interact badly with the compiler on PowerPCs, so you need to apply a patch and change a compiler option before building. Otherwise, any GTK+-based apps (like most of GNOME) segmentation fault right away.
I guess my rant is this... is BeOS making this challenge to place itself in the same media hype that Linux is in or is it truely a challenge against Microsoft?!
It's truly a challenge to Microsoft. In the DOJ trial, Microsoft has consistently listed BeOS and Linux as competitors that could take the market away from Windows (and completely ignored the other OSes you listed). Gassee was a little upset at this - see his Another Bedtime Story article from the Be newsletter. I'll bet he's doing this to show that the BeOS and Linux can't compete with Microsoft, because even for free no OEM will preload either of them. And if one does bundle the BeOS, than it's to his benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
I ordered books from both of the big Canadian booksellers this month.
In the second week of December, I ordered a book online from Chapters for my brother, to be shipped via Canada Post, and it was in my mailbox two days later.
And then last week, to compare how its competitor Indigo is, I checked their website and wound up ordering a couple of novels (for myself, not presents) that weren't in the Chapters database. Indigo listed them as being out of stock, to be available in a few weeks. I placed the order, not expecting it before Christmas, and sure enough, I got an email saying my order couldn't be shipped for Christmas and offering me a $10 gift certificate as a result.
Needless to say, I'm quite happy with both of them, above and beyond the pleasure of not being stiffed by the US-Canadian exchange rate.
Hearty agreement here. Churchill's life was rather amazing. The Ottawa Citizen recently ran a couple of articles about Churchill's exploits during the Boer War. He maneuvered to get press credentials from a London newspaper, connived to get near the front lines, was engaged in battle, and made an escape as a prisoner.
It should be noted that Churchill's accomplishments didn't end after the war. His speech gave the words "Iron Curtain" to the world, and his two major historical works (The History of the English Speaking Peoples and a four part World War II one) are significant.
Probably not. Pascal compilers did that in the late 70s for machine portability. The Pascal code was compiled to an intermediary called P-code, which was then compiled to machine code by an architecture dependent piece.
The Pascal vendors billed this as a big breakthrough for portability at the time, but I'm sure that earlier examples could also be found.
The NSA just realized that if they allow strong e-commerce crypto, but still block strong email encryption, the big companies will stop complaining and we'll never be able to export PGP (legally, that is!).
Exactly. A lot of the noise towards opening up the U.S.'s export restrictions on crypto have been coming from big companies that want to do e-commerce. Greater e-commerce is in the U.S. government's best interest, as American companies currently dominate that scene, and stand to make a lot of taxable income if the whole world can use strong encryption to buy from them.
Once those companies get strong encryption exports for e-commerce, they'll be quiet and happy. No one will be strongly lobbying (with money to really make the government change its mind) for further opening up, and exports of crypto in other areas like email will never happen.
Plus, I'm sure the intelligence impact to the NSA of not being able to read https connections is minimal, unless it turns out that they're using credit card fraud to supplement their budget or something.
Several posts here have advocated setting up a permanent base on the Moon before attempting to go Mars. This isn't a good idea, as the Moon is a lot less desirable as a place to attempt to build a self-sustaining colony. Of all the bodies in the solar system, Mars is the best choice for a colony, for the following reasons, among others.
Mars is the one body aside from Earth that we know has all of the raw materials for civilization. In particular, it has readily accessible water, which is critical not only for human use and growing plants, but as a source of hydrogen for rocket propellant. This is in stark contrast to the Moon, where the discovery of water ice at the south pole means that there is one place on the Moon that isn't drier than terrestrial concrete.
Conditions on Mars are much more favorable to growing plants than anywhere except Earth. Growing things is actually very energy intensive, but we don't notice it much on Earth because farmers get energy for free from sunlight. Mars is the only place where we'll be able to easily set up outdoor farms to get sunlight.
Mars has an atmosphere that provides reasonable protection against radiation, and would only require inflated tents of transparent plastic to setup greenhouses on the surface. The Martian day is only 40 minutes longer than that of Earth, so there wouldn't be a drastic shock to plants from the length of sunlight.
To do the same on the Moon would require radiation hardened shelters to be established on the surface, where the plants would have to adjust to the two weeks of constant sunlight and subsequent two week long night. And you'd still have to bring all of the needed water up the gravity well from Earth, or mine it from the limited supply at the south pole.
Artificial lighting won't be practical for intensive agriculture until there is a cheap energy source available in deep space, such as fusion. Otherwise, the energy requirements for food production would dominate the need for power in any space settlement.
Mars is the best place to have a staging area for expeditions to the outer solar system. The availability of raw materials means that many supplies can be manufactured on Mars for further space exploration and colonization efforts. It'll always be cheaper to transport goods from Mars than Earth to the outer planets, so anything that can be supplied from Mars will be.
Note that this also the case for the Moon, to a lesser degree. It wouldn't work for supplying a Mars mission, though - the delta V wouldn't be advantageous, so it's still easier to ship things from Earth directly to Mars.
I freely admit that the preceding arguments are cribbed from Robert Zubrin's books The Case for Mars and Entering Space. I encourage anyone interested in space exploration to read them.
From his home page, Stiegler describes the link to the exam as follows:
After reading this, the exam makes a whole lot more sense. He is saying that with the web technologies listed at the top of the exam, it's possible to solve many human problems without needing to create and enforce laws.
This makes #11 all the more interesting. It may well be a reminder that not all problems can be solved by technology, or merely that the technology isn't mature enough for everything. I can see how a reliable communication and information device described would be very useful for the inhabitants of a really oppressed place, but it couldn't solve the immediate needs very quickly.
True enough. However, as anyone living in the West today can attest, changes in technology lead to strong changes in culture. This course sounds like it was all about examining this set of coming technological advances to determine their impact. Even more than that, to find ways of channeling this technology into being a strong tool for freedom, and not for oppression.
Actually, you didn't even need your first step, so it can get a little simpler. The MacOS CDs are bootable, and the Mac has been able to boot from SCSI for as long as they've had it. You could have booted from the install CD, and avoided making a boot disk.
A lot of people may have missed the news that LinuxPPC is now offering a quarterly subscription model. For $99, you get CDs for a year, with promised releases every quarter. Under this scheme, having the quarter of release be the version name makes an awful lot of sense, as the most unambiguous way of identifying what version a user has.
This is rather nice even if one doesn't intend to update every three months, as R5 was pushed back from its release date for about half a year (two current releases-worth of time).
I use Nedit and love it, which is why I'm surprised you weren't aware that it already has most of the features that you are asking for.
As of version 5 and greater, Nedit has a wonderfully customizable syntax coloring feature. You can specify syntax coloring for language modes using regular expressions. Of the ones you listed, both Perl and HTML modes come built in, and you can easily write patterns to match php3 syntax, or any other language.
In addition to syntax coloring, the language modes can be used to set macros in Nedit's builtin language to only run for particular source types. For the features not builtin, it can easily execute arbitrary shell commands.
There might be existing macros to do this from the Nedit macro list. If not, it shouldn't be difficult to write your own.
Because the cash is actually "in" the card, the card becomes identical to cash. And for the same reason, since the cash is no longer "in" the bank account, the banks don't have to pay interest on it. If many people used smartcards instead of ATM cards, this would save the banks a lot of money.
Also developing encryption is good for Ontario business. Entrust Technologies is headquartered in Ottawa. I also recall the lead developer from the Ipsec presentation at the Ottawa Linux Symposium saying that he was from Ottawa. There's already a lot of software expertise in Ottawa and Toronto, so support like this makes it possible for Ontario to become a world leader in encryption.
As a new Ontario resident, I'm rather pleased, and pleasantly surprised to find a reason to like the Harris government.
Since others have mentioned other of Card's works, here are my picks for his best:
Ender's Game of course, which is arguably his best work. The best parts, those that made me cry in rereading it this afternoon after reading the chapters of the new book, are straight from the original novella. The fleshing out into a novel to provide more motivation for Ender in the sequel doesn't make it any less powerful. It's one of the seminal works of modern science fiction.
Speaker for the Dead in many ways stands alone, despite being part of the Ender series. In addition to the very human subplot about a family torn apart in tragedy and reunited by the love of an outsider, it's fundamentally about humans trying to establish contact with an alien species. One of the key concepts from it, the Demosthenian Heirarchy of Exclusion, is a powerful tool for thinking about what separates us from aliens.
The Memory of Earth and Seventh Son are the first and best books of his Homecoming and Alvin Maker series. I like them both over the later entries because of the brilliantly realized settings (a city on another planet millions of years in the future and an alternate 18th century America where magic works, respectively).
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is one of the few books I've read that addresses the moral and ethical issues of time travel. It also serves as the fiction equivalent of Guns, Germs, and Steel in trying to answer the question of "Why did history turn out the way it did?"
The novella "The Originist" was written for Friends of Foundation, an anthology to celebrate Isaac Asimov's 50th anniversary of writing, and is set on Trantor during the time of Hari Seldon. It's a touching work that considers how storytelling provides a chain of continuity to history.
And, since this is a place where freely available source code is a favored topic of discussion, I should mention that I first encountered Card's writing in an old Commodore-64 magazine called Ahoy!, where he had a monthly programming column, usually with working code to type in. In particular, I fondly remember the Gypsy Starship game from the Dec. 1984 issue, which his storytelling even in making a computer game.
ColinThis is exactly the point that Alan Cox made in his keynote presentation at the Ottawa Linux Symposium last weekend. Alan did a comparison of how software engineering is done in big firms and by free software projects, and found them to be rather similar. It was most striking in regard to team size, where both styles of development work around an upper bound of 6 people per team. In companies, a heirarchical management structure breaks the developers up into small groups. Free software projects tend to fission as they attract developers, becoming a cluster of small related projects, all with small core teams of 6 or fewer developers. He pointed out the GNOME project as a good example of this, and after looking at the number of modules in GNOME CVS, I'm forced to agree.
This has some consequences for free software, that came up intermittantly in other sessions at the conference, so I found the keynote to be inadvertantly a good summation. For this fissioning to work, free software has to be much more modular than proprietary, and this leads to a strong role for developing interfaces in free software. Alan also pointed out that it also tends to lead to a lot of duplicated code. Both of the GNOME sessions, as well as the Mozilla one, strongly emphasized the need for component software, glued together with high-level languages for the user interface stuff.
Appropriately enough for this discussion, the Mozilla presentation by Mike Shaver (and a Netscape engineer whose name I've forgotten) was the session immediately preceding the keynote. As a result of it, I'm extremely confident about Mozilla's future (and I'm not just saying that because I got a Mozilla t-shirt there!).
ColinIt gets better. Squeak came out of a research group at Apple, which later moved to Walt Disney Imagineering to keep working on it.
Colin
The book you're thinking of is Timemaster. In it, a space company finds exotic creatures (called Silverhairs in the book) composed of negative matter, and containing wormhole entrances. Using the negative matter, they construct a relativistic starship to travel to the stars, leaving the wormhole intact after the trip for instant travel. After troubles from a competitor, the company's president makes a round trip via several stars to create a working time gate, thus bringing up the consistency problems of time travel.
Any Slashdot reader interested in warp drives or time travel should check it out. Amusingly enough, the book itself was a reference for a real-world scientific paper on the consistency principle for time travel. Robert Forward's other science fiction books are also highly recommended.
Colin
I wonder if there may be another reason for the Unix ports. The company I was an intern at had a (likely expensive) site-wide license for Netscape. All the engineers had HP or Sun workstations, and the managers were all using Macs at the time, so Netscape was the only possibility for a standard company browser. They began to transition out the Macs in favor of Windows for the managers, but the engineers won't give up Unix. With HP-UX and Solaris versions of IE, it has a shot at becoming the "standard" browser in companies that can't all go to Windows, and still pay MS for the privilege.
Colin
The case of Office 98 isn't directly relevant here. The Mac users buying it are mostly people who have to work with others who have standardized on the MS Office suite, and have to have a copy, one way or another. Given a choice between
nearly every Mac user would pick the former in a hurry.
Internet Explorer on the Mac, though, is a much better comparison. Thanks to MS's deal with Apple, IE is now the Mac's standard browser. Last time I checked, though, Apple still includes a copy of Netscape on the system CD, and any reasonably competent computer user can install it instead.
Some Mac people avoid IE for political reasons. Some use it because it's the default browser, for many reasons. Some use it because it has a more Mac-like interface. Some use both IE and Netscape, for checking web designs or for specific features of both. Others feel both IE and the current Netscape are monstrosities, which is why iCab is getting so much attention from the Mac community right now.
This would probably be the case for Linux, although the interface and default cases would be smaller. The avoid for political reasons group would be large. If MS actually tried to get a version of IE that worked decently on Linux, some might choose it on its merits. Web designers might finally have a reason to drop a Windows partition.
This, of course, completely ignores the proprietary standards slant. If MS succeeds in getting a large segment of web content IE-only, some Linux users might have to use IE, at least until the free software community adds the needed features to Mozilla or another open-source browser.
Colin
No. What it does is use the types of all arguments to a function to determine which version of the function to call, and not just one.
To illustrate with an example: In single-dispatch languages such as Java and C++ (to name the two most relevant to this thread), method calls look like this: obj.foo(arg1, arg2, arg3), where obj is an instance of some class. The version of method foo() that gets invoked depends on what class obj belongs to.
In Dylan, method calls can use the above syntax, but they're really treated as if they use the alternate form foo(obj, arg1, arg2, arg3). Here, nothing is special in particular about the first argument, rather, the types of all arguments to foo() are used to determine which version to run.
What this means is that you can specialize a function based on more than a single argument. In single dispatch languages, you can only specialize functions based on a single type tree. That limitation doesn't apply to multiple dispatch, where function calls are specified by the types of all arguments. In fact, Dylan's singleton types allow you to even specialize functions on particular instances of a type!
The ideal is that Dylan compilers are able to determine the real types of all arguments at compile-time, which would make multiple dispatch calls no more expensive at runtime than a static dispatch call in C. If the types can't be accurately determined by the compiler, then it's usually the same as a dynamic dispatch call in a single dispatch language such as Smalltalk or Objective-C. Of course, this makes Dylan compilers rather difficult to write.
For more information on Dylan, I recommend checking out Gwydion Dylan, a free software project to create working Dylan tools.
Colin
You can download the SRPMs and rebuild them, but you'll probably want to wait until PPC versions show up on ftp.linuxppc.org or linuxppc.cs.nmt.edu. Recent versions of GTK+ (> 1.1.11 or so) interact badly with the compiler on PowerPCs, so you need to apply a patch and change a compiler option before building. Otherwise, any GTK+-based apps (like most of GNOME) segmentation fault right away.
Colin
It's truly a challenge to Microsoft. In the DOJ trial, Microsoft has consistently listed BeOS and Linux as competitors that could take the market away from Windows (and completely ignored the other OSes you listed). Gassee was a little upset at this - see his Another Bedtime Story article from the Be newsletter. I'll bet he's doing this to show that the BeOS and Linux can't compete with Microsoft, because even for free no OEM will preload either of them. And if one does bundle the BeOS, than it's to his benefit.
Colin