I for one am waiting for this car fad to die off. Once we run out of oil we can give up on the madness and go back to a far more practical system. Now if we can just find 3 billion horses everything will be fine.
Be careful what you wish for - we just might get there. Whether we like it or not doesn't seem relevant to whether nature will give us the option.
But sir - the twitterati are already blogging and we've got multiple pingbacks inbound! If we don't cross-site script the XML to a recursive realtime JSON feed in the next thirty seconds we'll 404 the memebases! ALL OF THEM!
News flash! A constantly fluctuating quantity is at the lowest point it's been since a short time ago! Everybody rush to go turn on CNN and hear more about this vital piece of news!
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to invest in the consolidated Dow Jones Spam Index.
There are people who have spent many thousands of hours in front of their word processor. When you change it they hate you.
Yes, and even if the Ribbon wasn't a classic example of a bad user interface design change (it violates about 25 years of WIMP HIGs), this woudl be an important reason to avoid change for change's sake.
Change is trauma. This is something we need to understand in computing, and don't yet. Change always has a cost, because it breaks things, and that cost needs to be less than the benefits of change - otherwise we're constantly hurting ourselves, destroying our memory, losing information, each time we change.
Is this why the IT industry seems to often have the memory of a goldfish? We should be smarter than that. We've had, what, fifty years or so of computers now? We should be able to understand the whole broad sweep of the industry. But so often, we don't, and get swept into the fad of the moment, only to drop it five seconds later like a hyperactive ferret with a shiny toy.
Change, in itself, is not good, it is in fact a net negative. Change is only justified if it produces benefits that far outweigh the trauma.
Google/Help-docs is often the only way to find a newly hidden item in the MS Ribbon that was once easily found in the menus . . ./rant
Don't even get me started on how bad Office 2010 Help is. The times I've tried and failed to do a simple function keyword search in Office Help - yes, usually to answer the question 'where the heck on the Ribbon is Alt-My-Old-Menu'- which would have worked just fine in older Office Helps, but draws a complete blank on 2010.... and then, I put the same keyword into Google, and up it comes.
Usually not from a Microsoft website, either.
Outlook 2010 Contact Groups, I'm looking at you particularly. When I search Help for 'Contact' 'Group' I do not want a hundred pages telling me about the 'Business Contact Manager' and none telling me about ordinary Contact Groups.
Excel wanted to add a feature, they'd either become incompatible
There is this little thing called 'backward compatibility' which makes that statement wrong.
Compatibility works two ways, see. That's the genius of standards. You can always do more than the standard requires, but not less. The crushing conformist jackboots of socialist government regulation will still let you implement api.i.am.a.beautiful.genius.snowflake() - just as long as you remember to implement api.pay.the.bills() and api.feed.the.cat()
We're not working with supermen or angels anymore than any other part of society there
But... but... you guys are the NSA! You have a crashed alien spaceship on every desk, a 100 terabit cranial jack just for the office World of Starcraft guild, and spend every waking moment clustered around huge 3D wall screens hacking all the Gibsons on the Interplanetary Interweb, simultaneously!
Don't you? Hollywood, surely you haven't put me wrong!
OK, so let's say all software is secure. That doesn't stop people from combining it in ways that leads to insecurities, or even configuring a single piece so that it's insecure.
Doesn't it?
It depends, I suppose, on what you mean by 'secure'. If you adopt a very wide view, like 'not making available any information in posession of the user which someone else would not want made available' - like, say, uploading and tagging a photo of a friend on Facebook at a party they would rather their boss/girlfriend not know they had attended - then yes, achieving perfect 'security' in a world of perfect knowledge is probably theoretically impossible, much like DRM.
However, if you define security more narrowly in the sense of provable formal properties of software - such as 'guaranteed never to expose a buffer overflow or race condition exploit given any conceivable set of input data' - then it's hard for me to see how combining two such secure pieces of software could ever create a third insecure one.
I'd settle for such a narrow definition of security, since from the days of C and Unix we've just become resigned to undetectable buffer overflows living in all our software - and that's something I think does approach criminal levels of negligence, since it's entirely preventable. (And if pointer exploits are provably not preventable with current languages, then it approaches criminal negligence to release such languages for use on Internet-attached systems.)
tl;dr: Software is logic, it should be possible to prove that it does exactly what it was built to do. If not, it's irresponsible for us to build business and government processes on software.
"watch Japanese TV programs from the UK without needing all the special satellite equipment." - y'know, ever since the Earth became round, you cannot see anymore Japanese satellites in the UK...
That's why you need the special satellite equipment.
Don't give me that look! You've all studied seventeen-dimensional geometry, right?
Matrix 2 and 3 were what you expected -- special effects, Keanu saying "woah" and pop-philosophy.
The problem is that that's not what I was expecting.
The story in Matrix 1 was about transcending grey reality. Matrix 2 and 3 didn't really have a story: or rather, they threw out the obvious next challenge for the hero and replaced it with pointless make-work.
At the end of the first one, Neo has fully 'woken up'. He's learnen the movie's key lesson: the machine world is not real. What's the obvious next problem? How to wake up everyone else. How to teach them to transcend, without killing them, either by shooting, by Agent takeover, or by Matrix crash. It's a heck of a moral dilemma and would have given him a sensible reason to go back into the Matrix.
But instead, we have nonsensical quests for 'keymakers' and French nightclub owners, all of which are machine constructs and therefore unreal, deceptive illusions - and the audience knows this, which makes them smarter than Neo. Then he gets into pointless fights with infinite Smiths which save nothing and achieve nothing since he shouldn't even be in the Matrix to start with.
When your protagonist is doing things the audience knows are dumb, you have a major story problem, and that's when even the cooelst fight gets boring.
A pilot is VERY expensive to make. A pilot is like a movie: all of the sets and costumes and such have to be made up front, before you've seen a single dollar in revenue. All that for "if they like it, they might deign to pay a buck for it; charge any more and they'll get it on BitTorrent
If you're trying to charge anything for post-production, per-copy distribuition in the digital age, it seems like the physics of information says you're doing it wrong - short of going to a total iTunes / AppStore / Steam lockdown of the channel (which admittedly is working like gangbusters for Apple and Valve right now, but still seems fundamentally impossible to enforce in the long run).
As you say, the money is all spent up front. So why not do the charging up front? Raise $X from investors, where the investors are also the consumers, pay the talent $X, make the product, let it scatter to the four winds by BitTorrent. If it's enjoyed, the reputation of the production house is raised for the next cycle of investment and production.
It's possible that this wouldn't work, there might be not enough committed interest from the hardcore fans to sustain a show of the price we've come to expect from per-copy funded distribution. But isn't it worth a try?
Someone coined the word 'prosumers'; how about 'convesters'? Consumer-investors. Are we all too cheap to pay the going rate for our entertainment?
The trick is, you need to be seriously committed to the get-paid-once, work-for-hire model - licence it permissively (CC-BY-SA for preference), don't try to squirrel money twice out of the audience after the fact - and need to also have a product and some reputation to attract funding before the fact, which is a lot harder.
But we've got platforms like Kickstarter to do this now, so do we have any data points to check whether this model has been able to work?
You haters who think Apple sucks - they have an infrastructure capable of billing, invoicing, tracking, and serving up 10 billion plus items; the same infrastructure is used for iTunes. 1% of their traffic would crush your website.
Do not be too proud of this technological terror you have constructed.
The ability to deliver 10 billion applications to a captive vertical market is nothing compared to the attention span of the average cons- hey a kitteh! OMG WANT! Ponies!
Which is the UNIX approach to dong things, which has worked out very well for a long time.
Great monolithic applications are the exception, not the norm.
That was the Unix way 20 years ago. Sadly, since the rise of the huge monolithic X-Window desktop frameworks like Gnome and KDE, it's no longer the case. Even XFCE isn't all that modular.
It would be nice if the open source world had an equivalent to 'Unix pipes' for a GUI environment - at the moment, Microsoft PowerShell is looking like the best step in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one am waiting for this car fad to die off. Once we run out of oil we can give up on the madness and go back to a far more practical system. Now if we can just find 3 billion horses everything will be fine.
Be careful what you wish for - we just might get there. Whether we like it or not doesn't seem relevant to whether nature will give us the option.
but people won't pay $800 for a "full snake oil kit"
That's awful. Think of all those poor rusty snakes!
What if the "islamists" are the ones that people actually want? That in a fair and open election, they would be the people's first choice?
Would that still be "curse"?
Simple: Send In The Marines.
Which summarizes Web 2.0 extremely well.
Welcome to Gopher and Usenet 20 years ago? Old is new with a different label.
Or FidoNet 25 years ago.
datamine the cyber-zeigeist
But sir - the twitterati are already blogging and we've got multiple pingbacks inbound! If we don't cross-site script the XML to a recursive realtime JSON feed in the next thirty seconds we'll 404 the memebases! ALL OF THEM!
And once again, a like makes it all the way around the world before the truth even gets its pants on.
We can thank Facebook for that.
News flash! A constantly fluctuating quantity is at the lowest point it's been since a short time ago! Everybody rush to go turn on CNN and hear more about this vital piece of news!
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to invest in the consolidated Dow Jones Spam Index.
There are people who have spent many thousands of hours in front of their word processor. When you change it they hate you.
Yes, and even if the Ribbon wasn't a classic example of a bad user interface design change (it violates about 25 years of WIMP HIGs), this woudl be an important reason to avoid change for change's sake.
Change is trauma. This is something we need to understand in computing, and don't yet. Change always has a cost, because it breaks things, and that cost needs to be less than the benefits of change - otherwise we're constantly hurting ourselves, destroying our memory, losing information, each time we change.
Is this why the IT industry seems to often have the memory of a goldfish? We should be smarter than that. We've had, what, fifty years or so of computers now? We should be able to understand the whole broad sweep of the industry. But so often, we don't, and get swept into the fad of the moment, only to drop it five seconds later like a hyperactive ferret with a shiny toy.
Change, in itself, is not good, it is in fact a net negative. Change is only justified if it produces benefits that far outweigh the trauma.
But often, it doesn't.
Google/Help-docs is often the only way to find a newly hidden item in the MS Ribbon that was once easily found in the menus . . . /rant
Don't even get me started on how bad Office 2010 Help is. The times I've tried and failed to do a simple function keyword search in Office Help - yes, usually to answer the question 'where the heck on the Ribbon is Alt-My-Old-Menu'- which would have worked just fine in older Office Helps, but draws a complete blank on 2010.... and then, I put the same keyword into Google, and up it comes.
Usually not from a Microsoft website, either.
Outlook 2010 Contact Groups, I'm looking at you particularly. When I search Help for 'Contact' 'Group' I do not want a hundred pages telling me about the 'Business Contact Manager' and none telling me about ordinary Contact Groups.
Excel wanted to add a feature, they'd either become incompatible
There is this little thing called 'backward compatibility' which makes that statement wrong.
Compatibility works two ways, see. That's the genius of standards. You can always do more than the standard requires, but not less. The crushing conformist jackboots of socialist government regulation will still let you implement api.i.am.a.beautiful.genius.snowflake() - just as long as you remember to implement api.pay.the.bills() and api.feed.the.cat()
We're not working with supermen or angels anymore than any other part of society there
But... but... you guys are the NSA! You have a crashed alien spaceship on every desk, a 100 terabit cranial jack just for the office World of Starcraft guild, and spend every waking moment clustered around huge 3D wall screens hacking all the Gibsons on the Interplanetary Interweb, simultaneously!
Don't you? Hollywood, surely you haven't put me wrong!
People leave the NSA all the time. It's a government agency that has employees, just like the DMV or Post Office.
"Buddy, there are two ways outta this place. You can leave in a stamped self-addressed air-freight parcel... or in a box."
OK, so let's say all software is secure. That doesn't stop people from combining it in ways that leads to insecurities, or even configuring a single piece so that it's insecure.
Doesn't it?
It depends, I suppose, on what you mean by 'secure'. If you adopt a very wide view, like 'not making available any information in posession of the user which someone else would not want made available' - like, say, uploading and tagging a photo of a friend on Facebook at a party they would rather their boss/girlfriend not know they had attended - then yes, achieving perfect 'security' in a world of perfect knowledge is probably theoretically impossible, much like DRM.
However, if you define security more narrowly in the sense of provable formal properties of software - such as 'guaranteed never to expose a buffer overflow or race condition exploit given any conceivable set of input data' - then it's hard for me to see how combining two such secure pieces of software could ever create a third insecure one.
I'd settle for such a narrow definition of security, since from the days of C and Unix we've just become resigned to undetectable buffer overflows living in all our software - and that's something I think does approach criminal levels of negligence, since it's entirely preventable. (And if pointer exploits are provably not preventable with current languages, then it approaches criminal negligence to release such languages for use on Internet-attached systems.)
tl;dr: Software is logic, it should be possible to prove that it does exactly what it was built to do. If not, it's irresponsible for us to build business and government processes on software.
Somewhere out there, someone has a very detailed profile of what makes me tick.. and really it’s not doing me much harm that I can see.
That's what you think now, but when Google's android doubles start replacing us all with very small wget scripts, don't say you weren't warned...
"watch Japanese TV programs from the UK without needing all the special satellite equipment." - y'know, ever since the Earth became round, you cannot see anymore Japanese satellites in the UK...
That's why you need the special satellite equipment.
Don't give me that look! You've all studied seventeen-dimensional geometry, right?
Rikki, don't lose that number! You don't wanna call nobody else. Send it off in a letter to yourself.
Neo clicks on a cow.
What is Farmville? Farmville is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the moooth.
Click on the blue cow, and you wake up in your own barn.
Click on the red cow, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Hint: it involves real rabbits.
Matrix 2 and 3 were what you expected -- special effects, Keanu saying "woah" and pop-philosophy.
The problem is that that's not what I was expecting.
The story in Matrix 1 was about transcending grey reality. Matrix 2 and 3 didn't really have a story: or rather, they threw out the obvious next challenge for the hero and replaced it with pointless make-work.
At the end of the first one, Neo has fully 'woken up'. He's learnen the movie's key lesson: the machine world is not real. What's the obvious next problem? How to wake up everyone else. How to teach them to transcend, without killing them, either by shooting, by Agent takeover, or by Matrix crash. It's a heck of a moral dilemma and would have given him a sensible reason to go back into the Matrix.
But instead, we have nonsensical quests for 'keymakers' and French nightclub owners, all of which are machine constructs and therefore unreal, deceptive illusions - and the audience knows this, which makes them smarter than Neo. Then he gets into pointless fights with infinite Smiths which save nothing and achieve nothing since he shouldn't even be in the Matrix to start with.
When your protagonist is doing things the audience knows are dumb, you have a major story problem, and that's when even the cooelst fight gets boring.
Primer...- a good story, well told
excuse beg I differ to me,.
A pilot is VERY expensive to make. A pilot is like a movie: all of the sets and costumes and such have to be made up front, before you've seen a single dollar in revenue. All that for "if they like it, they might deign to pay a buck for it; charge any more and they'll get it on BitTorrent
If you're trying to charge anything for post-production, per-copy distribuition in the digital age, it seems like the physics of information says you're doing it wrong - short of going to a total iTunes / AppStore / Steam lockdown of the channel (which admittedly is working like gangbusters for Apple and Valve right now, but still seems fundamentally impossible to enforce in the long run).
As you say, the money is all spent up front. So why not do the charging up front? Raise $X from investors, where the investors are also the consumers, pay the talent $X, make the product, let it scatter to the four winds by BitTorrent. If it's enjoyed, the reputation of the production house is raised for the next cycle of investment and production.
It's possible that this wouldn't work, there might be not enough committed interest from the hardcore fans to sustain a show of the price we've come to expect from per-copy funded distribution. But isn't it worth a try?
Someone coined the word 'prosumers'; how about 'convesters'? Consumer-investors. Are we all too cheap to pay the going rate for our entertainment?
The trick is, you need to be seriously committed to the get-paid-once, work-for-hire model - licence it permissively (CC-BY-SA for preference), don't try to squirrel money twice out of the audience after the fact - and need to also have a product and some reputation to attract funding before the fact, which is a lot harder.
But we've got platforms like Kickstarter to do this now, so do we have any data points to check whether this model has been able to work?
You haters who think Apple sucks - they have an infrastructure capable of billing, invoicing, tracking, and serving up 10 billion plus items; the same infrastructure is used for iTunes. 1% of their traffic would crush your website.
Do not be too proud of this technological terror you have constructed.
The ability to deliver 10 billion applications to a captive vertical market is nothing compared to the attention span of the average cons- hey a kitteh! OMG WANT! Ponies!
Cappann, I can rewire the phase inducers to handle the analog temporal filtering, but it'll take all she's got!"
Nice work Scotty, now can you give me a three mil Gaussian blur and boost contrast in the midtones by about 30 percent?
Stop playing with that pencil. It's all fun and games until someone loses a silicon retina.
Which is the UNIX approach to dong things, which has worked out very well for a long time.
Great monolithic applications are the exception, not the norm.
That was the Unix way 20 years ago. Sadly, since the rise of the huge monolithic X-Window desktop frameworks like Gnome and KDE, it's no longer the case. Even XFCE isn't all that modular.
It would be nice if the open source world had an equivalent to 'Unix pipes' for a GUI environment - at the moment, Microsoft PowerShell is looking like the best step in that direction.
No time to read this article, I have to see what my favourite hollywood actress is doing with her hair this week
Now that's an engineering discipline.