'We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity. We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us.
I believe the real reason the myth of the space colony still hangs around is that secretly (or not so secretly), otherwise intelligent people believe that the real problem with Earth isn't that we face resource shortages or biosphere degradation, but that those social and environmental problems are all really the fault of the ignorant swarming masses. And if we could only somehow get rid of the lower 99% of the Earth's population, we'd be fine.
The attraction of the space colony is that it's believed to be an elite, gated community which by virtue of its extreme expense and difficulty, would attract only a "high class of colonist" along the lines of the first generation of US astronauts: university PhD educated, military trained, logical scientific thinkers, in the peak of physical fitness. Given such a genetic pool of "the right stuff", the space myth goes, these super-demigods couldn't help but create a new Utopia of scientific wonders, even given the huge resource disadvantage they started from.
It's really an updated Atlas Shrugged idea: a Galt's Gulch in space populated only by Earth's Finest, who would sadly watch the dull, evil swarming masses back on Earth collapse into inevitable resource war and chaos, while the smart people up on the colony would of course just get on with making life better for everyone. As a political philosophy, it's basically Space Libertarianism, shading towards good old 1800s aristicratic racism: just putting "a better class of people" into a locked room, and keeping everyone else out, would create instant utopia. It's slightly less genocidal than out-and-out Fascism, since it just leaves Earth's masses to rot rather than actively killing them, but it harbours the same intense distrust and hatred of the untermensch as the worst excesses of WW2.
The problem is, utopias simply don't work like that. There've been many attempts at creating closed, self-selected communities, and they always go bad. Not even thinking about cults, have you ever seen a university, political activist movement, or high-tech company in action? Have you seen the kind of petty squabbles that occur in our elite institutions? Do you really think things will be different in space?
No. They won't be. And that's why the virtuous, pioneering Space Colony that can magic a healed biosphere and super-energy sources by sheer force of logic out of a desert of vacuum and hard radiation - just so long as they're not pestered by those ignorant savages down on Earth - is just that, a myth, and a fairly nasty one. We really need to put it behind us before it screws up our thinking even more than it has.
5a. Yes, okay, bringing asteroid-sized quantities of ore down-well to Earth is pointless, BUT we could use all that metal to build ships / O'Neill colonies in space! Forget planets, space is where it's at! No gravity, Okay, nice argument, but that assumes you have a reason for people to be IN those colonies to start with. Why are they there? To build more colonies of course! Well, why are the other colonies there? Um.... Unless it's more attractive to live in space than on Earth, people won't live in space. And the problem is, it ISN'T and WON'T be more attractive to live in space, because Earth has all the biosphere resources. Gravity and a magnetosphere also turn out to be essential for human health (see bone calcium loss and radiation sickness). For every one self-sustaining space biosphere, we could build a dozen much cheaper and safer and nicer gated arcologies on Earth (see 1, 4). Result: still no reason to be in space in the first place.
Granted, this equation changes in the far future given the sheer mass of the gas giants. If we could colonise those, there's a lot of raw materials. But that's on the order of centuries to millennia, and more likely the latter. It won't be a problem this generation faces, or even the next five. The human body simply isn't that adaptable, and even if we nuked the Earth a dozen times it would never be a nastier place to live than Jupiter's moons.
A) The "what if" scenarios that have the Earth being destroyed, if we aren't off the Earth by then humankind is done.
The problem is that even if we have off-Earth colonies, humankind will still be in just as much danger as if we didn't. Consider the most likely scenarios:
1. Asteroid impact. Extensive damage to population and biosphere, but nothing that would render Earth less habitable than Mars. If we had the ability to colonise Mars, we'd certainly have the ability to build shelters on Earth. Result: no need to colonise Mars, just build greenhouses on Earth.
2. War, social unrest, mass insanity. Possible huge damage to Earth's population, depending on how crazy things get. However, space structures will be launched by nation-states and large commercial combines with ties to Earth and will therefore surely be part of the wider Sol system social fabric and will take part in the war. Possibly they'll be the first to be destroyed. For example, World War II began in the core European nations but quickly swept up all European colonies, and some of them such as North Africa and the Pacific became key battlegrounds. Also, the technologies which launched human spaceflight were the flip-side of Earth's worst weapons of mass destruction - the ICBM program. Result: little shelter from a war by extending human culture into space, and a lot of actual danger created by doing so.
3. Plague (including aliens and zombies). A fast spreading virus could conceivably take out most of the human population on-planet, but is unlikely to take out the biosphere or even all of the human population. Earth's survivors will still vastly outnumber any reasonably expected number of space colonists, and will still inherit a much more robust ecosystem than anything on Mars. Worse, any space colonisation program will involve constant resupply and then travel and trade between Earth and the colonies, which will be vectors for transmission of disease. Space colonies themselves will be tightly-packed and fragile, vastly more dangerous places in terms of plague. Result: no survival advantage in space colonies, in fact the colonies will probably die first.
4. Environmental collapse. We're certainly degrading Earth's environment, but space won't help us - all other planets are far worse environmentally than we could conceivably ever make Earth. All space colonies will need either constant resupply from Earth, or the environmental skills to be completely self-sustaining. And if we had those skills, we could just build greenhouses on Earth. Terraform Mars? Well, if we could terraform anywhere reliably, we could start doing it on Earth and fix all our environmental problems in one hit. Result: no environmental disadvantage to going into space, but no advantage either.
5. Ore depletion. Okay, so let's assume we fix the biosphere, but we're still running out of metals to make iPods. We can mine those in space, right? Well, yes and no. If we mine vast quantities of metal and introduce that into Earth's biosphere, that might mess up the biosphere (see 4). Moving asteroid-sized rocks around the system introduces huge military problems (see 2) as they'll be more dangerous than nukes. Space mining is also likely to be be more expensive than just recycling landfill, so where's the commercial advantage? Result: a commercial non-starter and a major military threat, best avoided really.
6. Supernova, red giant. The big one, a complete solar-system destroying event with no chance of sheltering in place. This is the only scenario where conceivably we could improve our chances by going into (interstellar) space. Problem is, to get out of range of Sol going boom we'd need to have either a generation ship going for several hundred years and having already solved the closed life support problem (see 1, 4), so this will be a long-term rather than short-term capability. Best estimates for Sol going boom are millions to billions of years, so again, this is not a pressing human need. Result: maybe worth look
Yes, it's called a TiVo. They've been doing this since the beginning of the 3rd Millennium.
Interesting TiVo story: I live in New Zealand. TiVo has only decided to sell here for about a year. Until about a month ago, they sold the boxes only through Telecom (one of our phone companies), it wasn't available in appliance stores alongside, you know, TVs. They finally realised that nobody knew their product existed, and decided to partner with only one appliance retailer, as if their product was a super-premium exclusive thing.
The kicker? The current version they're selling, in the one store, doesn't even get the online guide correct for the New Zealand Freeview (DVB-T) digital channels. Analog TV is being turned off in 2013; Freeview is what everyone in the country will have to have within two years. And the TiVo product on the market doesn't even do the NZ standard TV format properly.
Right now there's only about one fully Freeview compliant digital DVR available in NZ, and that's not a TiVo, it's a Panasonic.
TiVo practically invented the hard disk TV recorder product category. Yet in NZ, they've inexplicably chosen to first abandon the market entirely, then enter late, grudgingly, with strange encumberances, and finally when they do show up, it's with a faulty product.
Can someone explain to me why TiVo have been so outstandingly idiotic here? Is it an American "we just simply don't care about non-US markets" sort of thing, or are they a formerly smart company who went through a dumb phase, like Palm did? Either way, this bizarre behaviour doesn't endear them to me as a company. I'd avoid them on principle for at least five years and a CEO change.
Why is there this unspoken assumption that the Apple model will take over?
Because Apple are the hottest tech company on Wall Street and so everyone in the industry, including open source projects like Firefox and Ubuntu who ought to know better but apparently don't, are frantically trying to clone their business model.
Why wouldn't there be an assumption that a model which the entire industry is adopting, will take over?
Why would a provider of content not release content in a format that Apple devices support? T
I don't know, but last week I went to YouTube on my brother's iPad to show him a clip called "Just Glue Some Gears On It (And Call It Steampunk)" and guess what, the official YouTube iPad App refused to play the content saying it was in the wrong format.
It isn't about every user being able to write software. That is never going to happen.
It's not? Then what are spreadsheets and Access databases?
It already happened. Don't try to draw an arbitrary line and say "data containing calculations on THIS side of the line is software, and, um, data containing calcuations on THAT side of the line is just dumb silly user data, and I'm the smart one on the right side of the line". I mean, you can pretend that enterprise power users are incapable of "programming" if you like, but you'd just be fooling yourself.
What we should be doing is asking "how did application programming go so horribly wrong that we ended up thinking that C++ was at all a sensible language in which to program graphical user interfaces, when we could and should have made it so simple that everyone could write their own UI skin in a perfectly safe declarative language". Because "when I click this box, change this value" isn't exactly real-time kernel programming, and we shouldn't have made it as obscure and baroque as it's become. Until we admit that we've built entirely the wrong toolsets using entirely the wrong abstractions, we're going to continue using the wrong toolsets and thinking we're smart for doing things the hard way.
I mean, say "declarative programming" to most application developers today and they won't even know what you're talking about. We've lost an entire generation of fundamental language research, starting with the abandonment of Prolog. That we lost that knowedge is a tragedy, but that we don't even realise what we've lost - that's just farce.
It is? So what is this odd black box under my desk with a keyboard and mouse that I'm browsing the web, playing games, keeping my spreadsheets and buying music on and which I just jacked the HDMI cable into my widescreen TV?
I guess the kids must call it some kind of cellphone? Well, call it whatever makes you happy, I suppose. I'm just glad it's still there, and isn't going anywhere. Cos you could try to put a widescreen TV in your pocket, but I'm not sure you'd enjoy doing that.
When I design a GUI I want limits around how the end-user can customize it...unless it really easy to reset it to the default values.
Actually, I think this is the biggest problem with GUIs: that the developer can lock down the end-user from customising it. You're not me, you don't know how I like my desktop to look, it's really not your business telling me what my GUI should look like unless you're paying for my computer.
See, as a user, what I really want isn't a whole pile of non-interacting "applications", each of which thinks it's the best thing since sliced Marmite, loosely joined by a filesystem and OS in which they savagely compete for my attention. What I want is to build a personalised workflow of "data I really care about" and "stuff I want to do to that data", and your application-developer mindset about what you want your application to look and feel like doesn't really appear on my radar at all. I want something a bit like a giant spreadsheet where I can plug in every possible data source and transformation as just sort of functions out of a toolbox. I don't want applications, and I especially don't want "apps", as in super-dumbed-down applications which don't even believe in using a shared filesystem.
But the way we've built things at the moment, we've priviledged this rather out of date concept of "application", and left the idea of "data" in the dust. And the GUI model has somehow lent itself to that. I think mostly because the GUIs we've built have been excessively cranky and explosive contraptions which melt down at the slightest touch of a pixel out of place. I'd like to think that that doesn't have to be the way of the future. Shouldn't a GUI just be something like a skin over the data which is already there? But we've never made a way to expose the raw data without doing so in shiny chunks of non-user-accessible pixels. Would be nice to change that.
Where does "ach" come into it? "Yah" sounds exactly like "yar", as in what pirates say, which rhymes with "jar" and "far" and "ahh" and "pa", while "yaw" sounds exactly like "yore", which rhymes with "paw" and "poor" and "door" and "more". "Ah" vs "or".
At least that's how we pronounce those letters here in the Antipodes.
You had to say it, didn't you? You had to say that one little four-letter word. You couldn't just say "call hell" or "eval hell" or "do hell while true" or even "gosub hell". No, you had to put yourself right there beyond the bounds of civilised discourse and say The Word.
Can someone tell me when the prevailing opinion shifted from "programmers suck at UI design" to "programmers make the best UI's"?
When the "UI designers" who'd been slamming the programmers finally released their alternative vision of the desktop, and the result was Unity, Gnome Shell, and iOS. That's when.
Re:Affordable replacement for something paid for
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You just know someone, eventually, is going to launch nuclear weapons. If we can stop that, we should.
You know, there's a really simple way for America to stop at least one of those countries from launching nuclear weapons: shut them off.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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If forced to, they'd do stuff like give/sell off the profitable bits and have their Crony Corporations now charge fees, tolls, rent instead (of taxes).
Ah, I see you were in New Zealand during the 1984 Lange/Douglas government. We did all that, it was lots of fun! The phone company became Telecom and jacked up prices while exporting all its profits offshore. NZ Rail was run into the ground until eventually the NZ people bought it back, a skeleton, for more than they'd paid. Air NZ went belly up and had to be bailed out. We'd already be exporting our dirty-burning coal to China to pollute their crops if the darn mine hadn't exploded and caught fire.
Good times, good times. And it's coming back in fashion again, if John Key gets his way in November. ("But he's got such a nice smile, not like that Helen Clark who had a deep voice and was a woman!")
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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Wait until the barbarians show up at the gates - you know, the ones that don't give a damn about your sestertii, your circuses and your plumbing.
Indeed. However, the problem is that historically speaking, the barbarians who showed up at Rome's gates were the guys they'd just outsourced their military to.
Right, because we'd bring back leaded gas, and I'm sure farmers are just _itching_ to use contaminated effluent to irrigate their crops. Because we like that, which is why there's no such thing as organic food. And companies don't care at all about PR, which is why they never buy carbon credits.
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what would happen. Leaded gas makes cars go faster. Contaminated effluent is cheap, and food contamination is a huge problem in China. Organic food is already marketed as a niche luxury item for rich people, while poor people are expected to eat cheap genetically engineered food laced with dangerous additives. The market has basically decided that only the rich deserve to eat healthily and sustainably. And carbon credits only exist because of regulation - that's the whole point of creating a carbon credit market, to address the failure of the market to not act like a horde of locusts with no broader plan for the future than "nom nom rarrgh belch".
Given the opportunity, I'll buy African before I buy Chinese.
My very dear and honoured friend, what a lucky coincidence this is! My close friend, President-General Mbutu Kiwali of the Nigerian Interior Ministry of Anti-Corruption, has just embezzled US$1500 million and is willing to share half of it with anyone who can help him launder the money. I am offering you, most gracious and learned colleague, the chance to help him clear some unavoidable legal difficulties by purchasing two shiploads of Pentium motherboards which, of course, will contain no actually functional chips but will allow you to receive a high rate of return on this investment. This is a completely trustworthy business deal and requires only a small $10 million deposit...
But 99, we have to kill steal lie and destroy. We're the good guys! Anyway, you terrorists better just give yourself up. This country is completely defended by the most advanced nuclear military in the world. You don't believe that, huh? Well would you believe...the cheapest dozen defence contractors we could buy at the Wal*Mart five buck special? How about one really angry bobcat? Hold on a moment, I'm getting an incoming Facebook message on my iShoe.
Why, ten years after Microsoft announced that they were "focusing on security", is commercial software from any vendor still allowed to be shipped with 0-days embedded? These things can be found with rigorous enough testing (ie, what criminal gangs are able to afford). Why then is it not a criminal offence for a company to sell software without having done this amount of testing? They are aiding and abetting criminal enterprise by allowing these security holes to exist in software they wrote.
This isn't a game any more. It's time to get real about software security on the Internet, or get out of the industry. Stop shipping native code if you can't guarantee that you can write it 100% correctly every time. It doesn't matter how fast your word processor runs if it gets your customers pwned.
Slashdot Mirror
'We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity. We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us.
Arrrgh, trim yer sails, and steady on, mate.
Obligatory interactive fiction link:
Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home
I can't be but at awe and terror when I think of the stars.
They say Aldebaran once killed a man at Rigel, just to see him die.
It's Proxima Centauri on the phone. He's calling from inside the Oort Cloud!
And then the hitchhiker turned around, and instead of a main-sequence class F, it was a red giant!
Okay, I'll rephrase his question: Will we be irradiated by a plant run by PHBs?
Yes.
But it's okay, because radioactive strontium in your bones is your happy atom friend.
Addendum Two.
I believe the real reason the myth of the space colony still hangs around is that secretly (or not so secretly), otherwise intelligent people believe that the real problem with Earth isn't that we face resource shortages or biosphere degradation, but that those social and environmental problems are all really the fault of the ignorant swarming masses. And if we could only somehow get rid of the lower 99% of the Earth's population, we'd be fine.
The attraction of the space colony is that it's believed to be an elite, gated community which by virtue of its extreme expense and difficulty, would attract only a "high class of colonist" along the lines of the first generation of US astronauts: university PhD educated, military trained, logical scientific thinkers, in the peak of physical fitness. Given such a genetic pool of "the right stuff", the space myth goes, these super-demigods couldn't help but create a new Utopia of scientific wonders, even given the huge resource disadvantage they started from.
It's really an updated Atlas Shrugged idea: a Galt's Gulch in space populated only by Earth's Finest, who would sadly watch the dull, evil swarming masses back on Earth collapse into inevitable resource war and chaos, while the smart people up on the colony would of course just get on with making life better for everyone. As a political philosophy, it's basically Space Libertarianism, shading towards good old 1800s aristicratic racism: just putting "a better class of people" into a locked room, and keeping everyone else out, would create instant utopia. It's slightly less genocidal than out-and-out Fascism, since it just leaves Earth's masses to rot rather than actively killing them, but it harbours the same intense distrust and hatred of the untermensch as the worst excesses of WW2.
The problem is, utopias simply don't work like that. There've been many attempts at creating closed, self-selected communities, and they always go bad. Not even thinking about cults, have you ever seen a university, political activist movement, or high-tech company in action? Have you seen the kind of petty squabbles that occur in our elite institutions? Do you really think things will be different in space?
No. They won't be. And that's why the virtuous, pioneering Space Colony that can magic a healed biosphere and super-energy sources by sheer force of logic out of a desert of vacuum and hard radiation - just so long as they're not pestered by those ignorant savages down on Earth - is just that, a myth, and a fairly nasty one. We really need to put it behind us before it screws up our thinking even more than it has.
Addendum.
5a. Yes, okay, bringing asteroid-sized quantities of ore down-well to Earth is pointless, BUT we could use all that metal to build ships / O'Neill colonies in space! Forget planets, space is where it's at! No gravity, Okay, nice argument, but that assumes you have a reason for people to be IN those colonies to start with. Why are they there? To build more colonies of course! Well, why are the other colonies there? Um.... Unless it's more attractive to live in space than on Earth, people won't live in space. And the problem is, it ISN'T and WON'T be more attractive to live in space, because Earth has all the biosphere resources. Gravity and a magnetosphere also turn out to be essential for human health (see bone calcium loss and radiation sickness). For every one self-sustaining space biosphere, we could build a dozen much cheaper and safer and nicer gated arcologies on Earth (see 1, 4). Result: still no reason to be in space in the first place.
Granted, this equation changes in the far future given the sheer mass of the gas giants. If we could colonise those, there's a lot of raw materials. But that's on the order of centuries to millennia, and more likely the latter. It won't be a problem this generation faces, or even the next five. The human body simply isn't that adaptable, and even if we nuked the Earth a dozen times it would never be a nastier place to live than Jupiter's moons.
A) The "what if" scenarios that have the Earth being destroyed, if we aren't off the Earth by then humankind is done.
The problem is that even if we have off-Earth colonies, humankind will still be in just as much danger as if we didn't. Consider the most likely scenarios:
1. Asteroid impact. Extensive damage to population and biosphere, but nothing that would render Earth less habitable than Mars. If we had the ability to colonise Mars, we'd certainly have the ability to build shelters on Earth. Result: no need to colonise Mars, just build greenhouses on Earth.
2. War, social unrest, mass insanity. Possible huge damage to Earth's population, depending on how crazy things get. However, space structures will be launched by nation-states and large commercial combines with ties to Earth and will therefore surely be part of the wider Sol system social fabric and will take part in the war. Possibly they'll be the first to be destroyed. For example, World War II began in the core European nations but quickly swept up all European colonies, and some of them such as North Africa and the Pacific became key battlegrounds. Also, the technologies which launched human spaceflight were the flip-side of Earth's worst weapons of mass destruction - the ICBM program. Result: little shelter from a war by extending human culture into space, and a lot of actual danger created by doing so.
3. Plague (including aliens and zombies). A fast spreading virus could conceivably take out most of the human population on-planet, but is unlikely to take out the biosphere or even all of the human population. Earth's survivors will still vastly outnumber any reasonably expected number of space colonists, and will still inherit a much more robust ecosystem than anything on Mars. Worse, any space colonisation program will involve constant resupply and then travel and trade between Earth and the colonies, which will be vectors for transmission of disease. Space colonies themselves will be tightly-packed and fragile, vastly more dangerous places in terms of plague. Result: no survival advantage in space colonies, in fact the colonies will probably die first.
4. Environmental collapse. We're certainly degrading Earth's environment, but space won't help us - all other planets are far worse environmentally than we could conceivably ever make Earth. All space colonies will need either constant resupply from Earth, or the environmental skills to be completely self-sustaining. And if we had those skills, we could just build greenhouses on Earth. Terraform Mars? Well, if we could terraform anywhere reliably, we could start doing it on Earth and fix all our environmental problems in one hit. Result: no environmental disadvantage to going into space, but no advantage either.
5. Ore depletion. Okay, so let's assume we fix the biosphere, but we're still running out of metals to make iPods. We can mine those in space, right? Well, yes and no. If we mine vast quantities of metal and introduce that into Earth's biosphere, that might mess up the biosphere (see 4). Moving asteroid-sized rocks around the system introduces huge military problems (see 2) as they'll be more dangerous than nukes. Space mining is also likely to be be more expensive than just recycling landfill, so where's the commercial advantage? Result: a commercial non-starter and a major military threat, best avoided really.
6. Supernova, red giant. The big one, a complete solar-system destroying event with no chance of sheltering in place. This is the only scenario where conceivably we could improve our chances by going into (interstellar) space. Problem is, to get out of range of Sol going boom we'd need to have either a generation ship going for several hundred years and having already solved the closed life support problem (see 1, 4), so this will be a long-term rather than short-term capability. Best estimates for Sol going boom are millions to billions of years, so again, this is not a pressing human need. Result: maybe worth look
The work on cognitive dissonance, for example, is pretty amazing and reproducible and explains so very much...
That contradicts what I already think, so I don't believe your statement.
Yes, it's called a TiVo. They've been doing this since the beginning of the 3rd Millennium.
Interesting TiVo story: I live in New Zealand. TiVo has only decided to sell here for about a year. Until about a month ago, they sold the boxes only through Telecom (one of our phone companies), it wasn't available in appliance stores alongside, you know, TVs. They finally realised that nobody knew their product existed, and decided to partner with only one appliance retailer, as if their product was a super-premium exclusive thing.
The kicker? The current version they're selling, in the one store, doesn't even get the online guide correct for the New Zealand Freeview (DVB-T) digital channels. Analog TV is being turned off in 2013; Freeview is what everyone in the country will have to have within two years. And the TiVo product on the market doesn't even do the NZ standard TV format properly.
Right now there's only about one fully Freeview compliant digital DVR available in NZ, and that's not a TiVo, it's a Panasonic.
TiVo practically invented the hard disk TV recorder product category. Yet in NZ, they've inexplicably chosen to first abandon the market entirely, then enter late, grudgingly, with strange encumberances, and finally when they do show up, it's with a faulty product.
Can someone explain to me why TiVo have been so outstandingly idiotic here? Is it an American "we just simply don't care about non-US markets" sort of thing, or are they a formerly smart company who went through a dumb phase, like Palm did? Either way, this bizarre behaviour doesn't endear them to me as a company. I'd avoid them on principle for at least five years and a CEO change.
Why is there this unspoken assumption that the Apple model will take over?
Because Apple are the hottest tech company on Wall Street and so everyone in the industry, including open source projects like Firefox and Ubuntu who ought to know better but apparently don't, are frantically trying to clone their business model.
Why wouldn't there be an assumption that a model which the entire industry is adopting, will take over?
Why would a provider of content not release content in a format that Apple devices support? T
I don't know, but last week I went to YouTube on my brother's iPad to show him a clip called "Just Glue Some Gears On It (And Call It Steampunk)" and guess what, the official YouTube iPad App refused to play the content saying it was in the wrong format.
Why? I dunno. But that's the reality today.
Works just fine on Windows and Linux, of course.
It isn't about every user being able to write software. That is never going to happen.
It's not? Then what are spreadsheets and Access databases?
It already happened. Don't try to draw an arbitrary line and say "data containing calculations on THIS side of the line is software, and, um, data containing calcuations on THAT side of the line is just dumb silly user data, and I'm the smart one on the right side of the line". I mean, you can pretend that enterprise power users are incapable of "programming" if you like, but you'd just be fooling yourself.
What we should be doing is asking "how did application programming go so horribly wrong that we ended up thinking that C++ was at all a sensible language in which to program graphical user interfaces, when we could and should have made it so simple that everyone could write their own UI skin in a perfectly safe declarative language". Because "when I click this box, change this value" isn't exactly real-time kernel programming, and we shouldn't have made it as obscure and baroque as it's become. Until we admit that we've built entirely the wrong toolsets using entirely the wrong abstractions, we're going to continue using the wrong toolsets and thinking we're smart for doing things the hard way.
I mean, say "declarative programming" to most application developers today and they won't even know what you're talking about. We've lost an entire generation of fundamental language research, starting with the abandonment of Prolog. That we lost that knowedge is a tragedy, but that we don't even realise what we've lost - that's just farce.
The desktop PC is dead.
It is? So what is this odd black box under my desk with a keyboard and mouse that I'm browsing the web, playing games, keeping my spreadsheets and buying music on and which I just jacked the HDMI cable into my widescreen TV?
I guess the kids must call it some kind of cellphone? Well, call it whatever makes you happy, I suppose. I'm just glad it's still there, and isn't going anywhere. Cos you could try to put a widescreen TV in your pocket, but I'm not sure you'd enjoy doing that.
When I design a GUI I want limits around how the end-user can customize it...unless it really easy to reset it to the default values.
Actually, I think this is the biggest problem with GUIs: that the developer can lock down the end-user from customising it. You're not me, you don't know how I like my desktop to look, it's really not your business telling me what my GUI should look like unless you're paying for my computer.
See, as a user, what I really want isn't a whole pile of non-interacting "applications", each of which thinks it's the best thing since sliced Marmite, loosely joined by a filesystem and OS in which they savagely compete for my attention. What I want is to build a personalised workflow of "data I really care about" and "stuff I want to do to that data", and your application-developer mindset about what you want your application to look and feel like doesn't really appear on my radar at all. I want something a bit like a giant spreadsheet where I can plug in every possible data source and transformation as just sort of functions out of a toolbox. I don't want applications, and I especially don't want "apps", as in super-dumbed-down applications which don't even believe in using a shared filesystem.
But the way we've built things at the moment, we've priviledged this rather out of date concept of "application", and left the idea of "data" in the dust. And the GUI model has somehow lent itself to that. I think mostly because the GUIs we've built have been excessively cranky and explosive contraptions which melt down at the slightest touch of a pixel out of place. I'd like to think that that doesn't have to be the way of the future. Shouldn't a GUI just be something like a skin over the data which is already there? But we've never made a way to expose the raw data without doing so in shiny chunks of non-user-accessible pixels. Would be nice to change that.
Where does "ach" come into it? "Yah" sounds exactly like "yar", as in what pirates say, which rhymes with "jar" and "far" and "ahh" and "pa", while "yaw" sounds exactly like "yore", which rhymes with "paw" and "poor" and "door" and "more". "Ah" vs "or".
At least that's how we pronounce those letters here in the Antipodes.
Did you hear how Mother Earth is creating a new island in the canaries?
Quick, scout that island for mineral resources. Will a coal mine survive in the Canaries..?
g o t o h e l l
You had to say it, didn't you? You had to say that one little four-letter word. You couldn't just say "call hell" or "eval hell" or "do hell while true" or even "gosub hell". No, you had to put yourself right there beyond the bounds of civilised discourse and say The Word.
Consider yourself harmful indeed, sir!
Can someone tell me when the prevailing opinion shifted from "programmers suck at UI design" to "programmers make the best UI's"?
When the "UI designers" who'd been slamming the programmers finally released their alternative vision of the desktop, and the result was Unity, Gnome Shell, and iOS. That's when.
You just know someone, eventually, is going to launch nuclear weapons. If we can stop that, we should.
You know, there's a really simple way for America to stop at least one of those countries from launching nuclear weapons: shut them off.
If forced to, they'd do stuff like give/sell off the profitable bits and have their Crony Corporations now charge fees, tolls, rent instead (of taxes).
Ah, I see you were in New Zealand during the 1984 Lange/Douglas government. We did all that, it was lots of fun! The phone company became Telecom and jacked up prices while exporting all its profits offshore. NZ Rail was run into the ground until eventually the NZ people bought it back, a skeleton, for more than they'd paid. Air NZ went belly up and had to be bailed out. We'd already be exporting our dirty-burning coal to China to pollute their crops if the darn mine hadn't exploded and caught fire.
Good times, good times. And it's coming back in fashion again, if John Key gets his way in November. ("But he's got such a nice smile, not like that Helen Clark who had a deep voice and was a woman!")
Wait until the barbarians show up at the gates - you know, the ones that don't give a damn about your sestertii, your circuses and your plumbing.
Indeed. However, the problem is that historically speaking, the barbarians who showed up at Rome's gates were the guys they'd just outsourced their military to.
Oops.
Right, because we'd bring back leaded gas, and I'm sure farmers are just _itching_ to use contaminated effluent to irrigate their crops. Because we like that, which is why there's no such thing as organic food. And companies don't care at all about PR, which is why they never buy carbon credits.
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what would happen. Leaded gas makes cars go faster. Contaminated effluent is cheap, and food contamination is a huge problem in China. Organic food is already marketed as a niche luxury item for rich people, while poor people are expected to eat cheap genetically engineered food laced with dangerous additives. The market has basically decided that only the rich deserve to eat healthily and sustainably. And carbon credits only exist because of regulation - that's the whole point of creating a carbon credit market, to address the failure of the market to not act like a horde of locusts with no broader plan for the future than "nom nom rarrgh belch".
Given the opportunity, I'll buy African before I buy Chinese.
My very dear and honoured friend, what a lucky coincidence this is! My close friend, President-General Mbutu Kiwali of the Nigerian Interior Ministry of Anti-Corruption, has just embezzled US$1500 million and is willing to share half of it with anyone who can help him launder the money. I am offering you, most gracious and learned colleague, the chance to help him clear some unavoidable legal difficulties by purchasing two shiploads of Pentium motherboards which, of course, will contain no actually functional chips but will allow you to receive a high rate of return on this investment. This is a completely trustworthy business deal and requires only a small $10 million deposit...
Why are you complaining? You could be mute, deaf, blind and limbless and not be able to complain at all!
But you'd sure play a mean pinball.
How about the obvious:
Dept of CONTROL
But 99, we have to kill steal lie and destroy. We're the good guys!
Anyway, you terrorists better just give yourself up. This country is completely defended by the most advanced nuclear military in the world.
You don't believe that, huh? Well would you believe...the cheapest dozen defence contractors we could buy at the Wal*Mart five buck special?
How about one really angry bobcat?
Hold on a moment, I'm getting an incoming Facebook message on my iShoe.
...a new 0-day in MS Word.../quote>
That right there is the main problem here.
Why, ten years after Microsoft announced that they were "focusing on security", is commercial software from any vendor still allowed to be shipped with 0-days embedded? These things can be found with rigorous enough testing (ie, what criminal gangs are able to afford). Why then is it not a criminal offence for a company to sell software without having done this amount of testing? They are aiding and abetting criminal enterprise by allowing these security holes to exist in software they wrote.
This isn't a game any more. It's time to get real about software security on the Internet, or get out of the industry. Stop shipping native code if you can't guarantee that you can write it 100% correctly every time. It doesn't matter how fast your word processor runs if it gets your customers pwned.