The people at "GUI Industries" can't make a link or shortcut to the appropriate script?
Yes.
This is a huge flaw in almost all current GUI models. They've reinvented a whole object/component-based architecture on top of the old process/file-based CLI-accessible portions of the OS, and then provided basically no scriptability of those objects, and even less ways to interface the topmost GUI level to any scripts you do manage to somehow cobble together.
(Possible noteworthy exception-in-progress being PowerShell 2, Apple Automator (except AppleScript is a horrible language because it tries to be fake-English), and maybe some parts of RiscOS and OS/2. )
But this object/scripting gap is something I noticed way back in my teens, in the 80s, and couldn't bring myself to believe that the Top Minds in software architecture had missed this glaring oversight. But they had. Apparently everyone was going to either program in raw C++, or click icons, and nothing much in between. Basically there was no thought put into anything like a 'Unix shell' for Finder / Explorer and friends.
I mean, 5 seconds thought suggests that someone should have come up with a quick visual tool for dragging icons into a box, drawing lines between them, and having that save and load from a text file describing connections between components. And then make that a fundamental part of the OS and build all OS and application GUIs using that. If you ever came across a GUI you wanted to build for an application that couldn't be expressed in that language, then mark it as a bug in the language and extend the language.
Then we'd have had something approaching the power of Unix scripting for visual desktops, and we would have . But no. We went for a 'all GUIs will be sealed binaries written in low-level assembler or C++" approach. Then we deconstructed the GUI as web pages, and again, first chance we got, we ripped out Tim Berners-Lee's HTML editor component from all web browsers, enforced a hard split between "web server" and "web browser", and once again destroyed the ability for users to do their own interface design and to program their own workflow.
It's like we have this obsession with making things hard for ourselves just to keep application developers in jobs.
"Take this image, resize it by 50% and increase the contrast 10%" then people would use CLIs all the time.
Oh heck no. That is exactly the kind of thinking which led to AppleScript, and it's the opposite of useful.
Instead of being unable to remember "is it sed or grep?" you end up being unable to remember "do I say it 'look through file replacing words' or 'examine a file making changes' or or 'make file change to new words'...
Using a fake English-like language does not mean you gain any understandability. Plus, you lose the ability to Google for keywords when they're all common words.
Sadly true. I have a 2010 desktop PC with dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu Maverick (both 64-bit). This week I tried to plug in my Keystation USB MIDI keyboard to do some noodling about. Nothing fancy, just get it to the 'push key and have piano sounds come out speaker' stage. I'd previously got the Rosegarden/Timidity/ALSA/Jack stack working on Lucid on another PC, but hadn't configured professional audio since doing a fresh Maverick install on this new box. I even had Rosegarden, Jack and timidity-daemon already installed via Synaptic.
Ubuntu experience: plug in the keyboard. Light goes on. Start Rosegarden. It shows Timidity and Keystation detected as MIDI devices. It shows notes coming from the keyboard. But no sound comes out. Spend several hours digging into the guts of Timidity++ config files, Googling, trying to work out where in the Timidity-ALSA-PulseAudio-Jack stack the sound is stopping. Start multiple command windows, stop and start services, read text files in/etc, Google and apt-get multiple troubleshooting tools. Add user to 'audio' group and reboot. Try not to frag my existing audio setup in doing all this.
End result: half an evening wasted, hair shredded, no luck.
Windows 7 experience: reboot into Windows 7. Google "garageband for Windows". Get recommendations for MixCraft. Download MixCraft free trial. Start it. Push key on Keystation. Sound comes out. Just like that. No insane configuration weirdness required. I'll happily pay $75 for something that works.
I love Linux but sadly.... getting the simplest thing in multimedia to work at all is still a nightmare. Just... ugggh. Bad, bad, bad.
Every time I've searched for a name on Facebook, it has turned up dozens of matches. Unless they are using their actual picture for their profile pic, it's impossible to disambiguate.
That's where the "friends in common" list works wonders. Once you have enough real-world acquaintances friended on Facebook, if you stumble on or type in the name of a new person you know, chances are they'll know and have friended someone in your friends network. Then it's just a matter of "oh, it's Jane Smith from my gaming group, not Jane Smith from the wine tasting seminar or Jane Smith from NASA".
The searching by real name and friends network - assisted by auto-prompting for "do you know this person?" to nudge you into friending as many people as you know - is the "killer app" feature of Facebook, really. If someone could write a similar search/index system for Twitter or email or blogs, and a unified web-based dashboard to keep you up to date with what your email and blog friends are saying (Twitter already has this bit), then Facebook would have a serious open-world competitor. But I've not seen anyone trying yet.
The real names thing is a step change for Internet culture, too. Even on Twitter people have cryptic handles - and email users positively delight in having semi-anonymous identities and NOT handing out their real email address to bystanders, for fear of spam. But Facebook is about being open, being publically findable, and having one identity, which is both your "real" one and your "net" one, and not really caring who overhears. It's the end of the "cypherpunk" era.
Playing devils advocate, public funded research could be consider an integral part of a capitalist society, and something capitalists support?
In the fine print of its employment contract, the word "capitalism" is required to scream loudly and faint when used in the same sentence as either "public" or "society".
Its a luddite position to think that your body and mind are well suited for modern living
Indeed. Ned Ludd was a big fan of Fred Taylor. The two of them often went out for drinks together, in between rounds of machine-smashing and systematising the workforce.
With the radiation level dropping lower and lower to 0.1-2 uSv/h
I'm sorry, but - what?
Which "radiation level" are you referring to? There's not one "the". There's the trace emissions in the jetstream worldwide, there's the iodine and cesium contamination locally within the evacuation zone (in one hotspot measuring higher than in the Chernobyl exclusion zone), there's the over 1Sv/hr extremely hot water (like, stand next to it for an hour and you get radiation sickness) in the drainage pit under the plant, there's the thousands times normal iodine contamination leaking into the seawater, with the potential to either make a lot of fish very sick or worse, bioaccumulate in fish tissue for decades to come. There's the "jumpers" being recruited to work onsite in multi-Sievert conditions where you get your lifetime's exposure in 15 mins...
Somewhere in the world, yes, there is "a" radiation level associated with this Situation Normal All Fukushima'd which is still in the microSievert range. That does not mean everything everywhere associated with it is peachy keen and shiny.
It's entirely possible, for instance, that the 20km zone might not be usable for farming for the next 300 years.
just burn the radioactive waste on big pile! Problem solved! DUH!!
TEPCO is way ahead of you. They've been applying that remediation strategy at Fukushima since right after the tsunami. They're called "spent fuel pools".
three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense
Mmm, because a disease-racked, starving underclass is the perfect foundation for a stable and prosperous democratic society. But if we at least fund the military, the desperatly hungry, plague-ridden rabble with no jobs and no future will at least be well-trained in modern urban combat and the overthrow of oppressive (or just annoying) regimes.
Nothing about this bold social plan could ever possibly go wrong!
nothing next to the radioisotopes centuries of coal burning has put into the environment.
Yes, because coal burns at 2,000 degrees centigrade and emits a high-density neutron flux and plenty of Cerenkov radiation. That's what gives a coal fire such a warm, tingly blue glow.
The government needs to get their power company out of the picture and work on real solutions
They would, but magic wands capable of dispelling multi-Sievert-level ionising radiation are highly restricted after the unfortunate international incidents which led to the 1948 Treaty of Avalon and the 1949 Geneva Conventions on Thaumaturgical and Faerie Invocations.
I'm sure no head of state wants to see a repeat of those dark post-war years when entire European cities were instantaneously converted to chocolate pie, rose petals, or in one particularly gruesome case, a gigantic olive martini.
A few thousand deaths by radiation are a small price to pay for a safe, non-magical future.
Yah, I had the same WTF moment when they started using mSv all the time.
Don't forget the difference between mSv and mSv/hr. The media has been constantly confusing them. One's a total accumulated dose, the other's a dose rate. A chunk of contaminated soil radiating at 1mSv per hour, giving you an accumulated dose of 24 mSv per day, is a lot more dangerous than getting one dental X-ray at 1mSv total. And that's not counting the effect of inhaling or eating particles which are radiating, which give you a point-blank constant dose until they decay or you excrete them (and for iodine or cesium or strontium, youmight not excrete them).
"Today at around 9:30 am, we detected water containing radiation dose over 1,000 mSv/h in the pit"
That doesn't make any sense. Sievert is a measure of absorbed radiation dose. The measure of 'radiactiveness' is Becquerel/Curie (per liter, kilogram, mole).
No, it makes sense. Adjusting for the radiation type and averaging over body parts, if you stood near that water, you would receive a dose of 1000 milliSieverts (1 Sievert) in one hour. I would assume that they quote that figure because the electronic dosimeters they used to take that reading measure in Sieverts/hour, not in raw Bequerels.
Though there's some confusion as to whether they have dosimeters capable of reading above 1,000 mSv. It may be that the meter is pegged at 1Sv and that water is actually radiating a much higher dose. 1Sv seems too much of a 'round figure' to be plausible as the exact figure,
Our country is as unlikely to support Nuclear Power as "Capital Punishment"
Nuclear power as capital punishment? That's a pretty harsh form of criminal justic - oh, "as unlikely". Oops.
In short, what the hell is going on?
In short: leaky reactor is leaking. In full: nobody seems sure just how much damage or how long term it'll be. Worst case scenario is probably permanent uninhabitability of the current 20-30km exclusion zone, potentially damage to Japanese and/or international fisheries as well (radioiodine readings in the seawater are high, though so far spot checks of fish are more reassuring).
But I've been pretty stunned by how epic bad the mass media coverage has been. Not just "blowing out of proportion" bad, but "getting basic radiation units confused, and reporting news from two days ago as if it's breaking now" bad. At the moment the best repository of technical information I think is the Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/
Slashdot Mirror
The people at "GUI Industries" can't make a link or shortcut to the appropriate script?
Yes.
This is a huge flaw in almost all current GUI models. They've reinvented a whole object/component-based architecture on top of the old process/file-based CLI-accessible portions of the OS, and then provided basically no scriptability of those objects, and even less ways to interface the topmost GUI level to any scripts you do manage to somehow cobble together.
(Possible noteworthy exception-in-progress being PowerShell 2, Apple Automator (except AppleScript is a horrible language because it tries to be fake-English), and maybe some parts of RiscOS and OS/2. )
But this object/scripting gap is something I noticed way back in my teens, in the 80s, and couldn't bring myself to believe that the Top Minds in software architecture had missed this glaring oversight. But they had. Apparently everyone was going to either program in raw C++, or click icons, and nothing much in between. Basically there was no thought put into anything like a 'Unix shell' for Finder / Explorer and friends.
I mean, 5 seconds thought suggests that someone should have come up with a quick visual tool for dragging icons into a box, drawing lines between them, and having that save and load from a text file describing connections between components. And then make that a fundamental part of the OS and build all OS and application GUIs using that. If you ever came across a GUI you wanted to build for an application that couldn't be expressed in that language, then mark it as a bug in the language and extend the language.
Then we'd have had something approaching the power of Unix scripting for visual desktops, and we would have . But no. We went for a 'all GUIs will be sealed binaries written in low-level assembler or C++" approach. Then we deconstructed the GUI as web pages, and again, first chance we got, we ripped out Tim Berners-Lee's HTML editor component from all web browsers, enforced a hard split between "web server" and "web browser", and once again destroyed the ability for users to do their own interface design and to program their own workflow.
It's like we have this obsession with making things hard for ourselves just to keep application developers in jobs.
If a command line could be written as:
"Take this image, resize it by 50% and increase the contrast 10%" then people would use CLIs all the time.
Oh heck no. That is exactly the kind of thinking which led to AppleScript, and it's the opposite of useful.
Instead of being unable to remember "is it sed or grep?" you end up being unable to remember "do I say it 'look through file replacing words' or 'examine a file making changes' or or 'make file change to new words'...
Using a fake English-like language does not mean you gain any understandability. Plus, you lose the ability to Google for keywords when they're all common words.
Bah! You can learn to write every control structure with GOTO LABEL if you just twist your brain into a tortured nightmare of insanity.
It's quite comfortable once you get used to it.
64 billion should be enough for anyone.
Sadly true. I have a 2010 desktop PC with dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu Maverick (both 64-bit). This week I tried to plug in my Keystation USB MIDI keyboard to do some noodling about. Nothing fancy, just get it to the 'push key and have piano sounds come out speaker' stage. I'd previously got the Rosegarden/Timidity/ALSA/Jack stack working on Lucid on another PC, but hadn't configured professional audio since doing a fresh Maverick install on this new box. I even had Rosegarden, Jack and timidity-daemon already installed via Synaptic.
Ubuntu experience: plug in the keyboard. Light goes on. Start Rosegarden. It shows Timidity and Keystation detected as MIDI devices. It shows notes coming from the keyboard. But no sound comes out. Spend several hours digging into the guts of Timidity++ config files, Googling, trying to work out where in the Timidity-ALSA-PulseAudio-Jack stack the sound is stopping. Start multiple command windows, stop and start services, read text files in /etc, Google and apt-get multiple troubleshooting tools. Add user to 'audio' group and reboot. Try not to frag my existing audio setup in doing all this.
End result: half an evening wasted, hair shredded, no luck.
Windows 7 experience: reboot into Windows 7. Google "garageband for Windows". Get recommendations for MixCraft. Download MixCraft free trial. Start it. Push key on Keystation. Sound comes out. Just like that. No insane configuration weirdness required. I'll happily pay $75 for something that works.
I love Linux but sadly.... getting the simplest thing in multimedia to work at all is still a nightmare. Just... ugggh. Bad, bad, bad.
Every time I've searched for a name on Facebook, it has turned up dozens of matches. Unless they are using their actual picture for their profile pic, it's impossible to disambiguate.
That's where the "friends in common" list works wonders. Once you have enough real-world acquaintances friended on Facebook, if you stumble on or type in the name of a new person you know, chances are they'll know and have friended someone in your friends network. Then it's just a matter of "oh, it's Jane Smith from my gaming group, not Jane Smith from the wine tasting seminar or Jane Smith from NASA".
The searching by real name and friends network - assisted by auto-prompting for "do you know this person?" to nudge you into friending as many people as you know - is the "killer app" feature of Facebook, really. If someone could write a similar search/index system for Twitter or email or blogs, and a unified web-based dashboard to keep you up to date with what your email and blog friends are saying (Twitter already has this bit), then Facebook would have a serious open-world competitor. But I've not seen anyone trying yet.
The real names thing is a step change for Internet culture, too. Even on Twitter people have cryptic handles - and email users positively delight in having semi-anonymous identities and NOT handing out their real email address to bystanders, for fear of spam. But Facebook is about being open, being publically findable, and having one identity, which is both your "real" one and your "net" one, and not really caring who overhears. It's the end of the "cypherpunk" era.
I envision getting an injection and suddenly sprouting hair ... freaking everywhere.
It's not the hair.
It's the tail.
Playing devils advocate, public funded research could be consider an integral part of a capitalist society, and something capitalists support?
In the fine print of its employment contract, the word "capitalism" is required to scream loudly and faint when used in the same sentence as either "public" or "society".
Its a luddite position to think that your body and mind are well suited for modern living
Indeed. Ned Ludd was a big fan of Fred Taylor. The two of them often went out for drinks together, in between rounds of machine-smashing and systematising the workforce.
those medical Death Squad panels you hear about, looking to save money by cutting medical support for old people
Ah yes. We call those "private health insurers".
With the radiation level dropping lower and lower to 0.1-2 uSv/h
I'm sorry, but - what?
Which "radiation level" are you referring to? There's not one "the". There's the trace emissions in the jetstream worldwide, there's the iodine and cesium contamination locally within the evacuation zone (in one hotspot measuring higher than in the Chernobyl exclusion zone), there's the over 1Sv/hr extremely hot water (like, stand next to it for an hour and you get radiation sickness) in the drainage pit under the plant, there's the thousands times normal iodine contamination leaking into the seawater, with the potential to either make a lot of fish very sick or worse, bioaccumulate in fish tissue for decades to come. There's the "jumpers" being recruited to work onsite in multi-Sievert conditions where you get your lifetime's exposure in 15 mins...
Somewhere in the world, yes, there is "a" radiation level associated with this Situation Normal All Fukushima'd which is still in the microSievert range. That does not mean everything everywhere associated with it is peachy keen and shiny.
It's entirely possible, for instance, that the 20km zone might not be usable for farming for the next 300 years.
just burn the radioactive waste on big pile! Problem solved! DUH!!
TEPCO is way ahead of you. They've been applying that remediation strategy at Fukushima since right after the tsunami. They're called "spent fuel pools".
three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense
Mmm, because a disease-racked, starving underclass is the perfect foundation for a stable and prosperous democratic society. But if we at least fund the military, the desperatly hungry, plague-ridden rabble with no jobs and no future will at least be well-trained in modern urban combat and the overthrow of oppressive (or just annoying) regimes.
Nothing about this bold social plan could ever possibly go wrong!
Originally, all there was was Netscape Corp.
And originally originally, there was NCSA Mosaic, from which "Mozilla" derived the "Mo" part.
if you're not interested - turn it off.
Let's all hope that turning it off is even an option.
...cut the chit-chat...does Linux run on it yet?
Yes and no.
nothing next to the radioisotopes centuries of coal burning has put into the environment.
Yes, because coal burns at 2,000 degrees centigrade and emits a high-density neutron flux and plenty of Cerenkov radiation. That's what gives a coal fire such a warm, tingly blue glow.
The government needs to get their power company out of the picture and work on real solutions
They would, but magic wands capable of dispelling multi-Sievert-level ionising radiation are highly restricted after the unfortunate international incidents which led to the 1948 Treaty of Avalon and the 1949 Geneva Conventions on Thaumaturgical and Faerie Invocations.
I'm sure no head of state wants to see a repeat of those dark post-war years when entire European cities were instantaneously converted to chocolate pie, rose petals, or in one particularly gruesome case, a gigantic olive martini.
A few thousand deaths by radiation are a small price to pay for a safe, non-magical future.
it *might* actually be better to pour this HRW into the ocean where it will be diluted down to safe levels.
Plus, as a bonus, Japan gets giant mutated laser-breathing sharks!
That's, uh, a good thing, right?
Yah, I had the same WTF moment when they started using mSv all the time.
Don't forget the difference between mSv and mSv/hr. The media has been constantly confusing them. One's a total accumulated dose, the other's a dose rate. A chunk of contaminated soil radiating at 1mSv per hour, giving you an accumulated dose of 24 mSv per day, is a lot more dangerous than getting one dental X-ray at 1mSv total. And that's not counting the effect of inhaling or eating particles which are radiating, which give you a point-blank constant dose until they decay or you excrete them (and for iodine or cesium or strontium, youmight not excrete them).
WTF?
"Today at around 9:30 am, we detected water containing radiation dose over 1,000 mSv/h in the pit"
That doesn't make any sense. Sievert is a measure of absorbed radiation dose. The measure of 'radiactiveness' is Becquerel/Curie (per liter, kilogram, mole).
No, it makes sense. Adjusting for the radiation type and averaging over body parts, if you stood near that water, you would receive a dose of 1000 milliSieverts (1 Sievert) in one hour. I would assume that they quote that figure because the electronic dosimeters they used to take that reading measure in Sieverts/hour, not in raw Bequerels.
Though there's some confusion as to whether they have dosimeters capable of reading above 1,000 mSv. It may be that the meter is pegged at 1Sv and that water is actually radiating a much higher dose. 1Sv seems too much of a 'round figure' to be plausible as the exact figure,
This cray MAY BE the source of that leak
Those science fools! When will mankind learn that no machine was meant to operate as fast as 80 Mhz?
Take me away, I don't mind
But you better promise me
I'll be back in time
(sunglasses) ...submarine patents?
Our country is as unlikely to support Nuclear Power as "Capital Punishment"
Nuclear power as capital punishment? That's a pretty harsh form of criminal justic - oh, "as unlikely". Oops.
In short, what the hell is going on?
In short: leaky reactor is leaking. In full: nobody seems sure just how much damage or how long term it'll be. Worst case scenario is probably permanent uninhabitability of the current 20-30km exclusion zone, potentially damage to Japanese and/or international fisheries as well (radioiodine readings in the seawater are high, though so far spot checks of fish are more reassuring).
But I've been pretty stunned by how epic bad the mass media coverage has been. Not just "blowing out of proportion" bad, but "getting basic radiation units confused, and reporting news from two days ago as if it's breaking now" bad. At the moment the best repository of technical information I think is the Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/