Where does he draw the line at "wasting time writing code"? This is exactly the mindset that leads us to buffer overruns, SQL injections, and many other problems which should not make it into production software. He wants his developers to abstract as much as possible, but code reuse all too easily leads to blind acceptance and a failure to understand what is being imported.
I agree strongly with your 'old man' grump about sedimentary layers of abstraction being a very bad thing (Chuck Moore of Forth and Alan Kay of Smalltalk are saying similar things) but disagree with this specific diagnosis of what the problem is.
Writing code - or in fact creating ANYTHING - to solve a problem which has already been solved is IMO a mistake and is the cause of errors. Humans should not be doing any tasks which computers can do.
My problem with today's software ecosystems is rather the opposite: that we've accumulated all these crufty layers precisely because they DON'T solve our problems correctly, so we have to add more layers on top. We have lots of libraries and frameworks and class abstractions but they all do 'sorta, somewhat, kinda' the right thing, but not exactly the right thing. All those not-quites add up to leaky abstractions and failure.
And our libraries don't quite do the right thing because our languages still aren't powerful enough to let them express clearly and precisely our problems - rather than expressing procedures to solve our problems, which are not the same thing. 'Powerful' doesn't mean more features, it means the reverse: less 'built-in' features, but more reflection.
In my opinion, what we need is a new focus on languages which allow declarative programming - 'what' rather than 'how'. 'How' is what the compiler should generate. 'What', however - data and transformations - is the actual truth of the system, and that's what our current C-based languages are very poor at representing. So we settle for telling the computer 'how to do it' because we can't conceive of how to express 'what', and we don't even realise that we're settling; we approximate in 'coding' as a matter of course, and then all these approximations add up to built-in layers of failure.
Sapir-Whorf is biting us badly.
By way of example, a bare _minimum_ language I'd consider suitable for declarative programming (and it's still enormously sucky) is Prolog. Lisp for preference since you could reimplement Prolog done right in it, but we need at least logic programming rather than even functional programming.
What we consider 'properties' are actually APPROXIMATIONS, very rough simplifications, of the true properties of things. The true properties of even simple things - as long as those things include the ability to be combined and modified by that combination - are very deep and powerful and rich indeed.
We say that 'water has the property of being wet' while hydrogen doesn't, therefore water must have created a new property!
But if hydrogen-as-water has the property of being wet, then that's just another way of saying that hydrogen-as-H2 must also have the property of arranging itself as hydrogen-as-water, therefore the property of implementing the property of wetness must still belong to hydrogen. A meta-property if you like. Very clever stuff then, this hydrogen.
Similarly, a transistor might not apparently 'in itself' appear to have the property of being a Pentium chip, but in fact it DOES have the property of being combined in an infinity of complex ways, one of which is the Pentium chip. A straight piece of copper, on the other hand, doesn't - solder as many bits of copper together as you like you'll never make even a single NOR. The junction structure of the transistor includes a very deep property which the copper alone doesn't.
Likewise, a Turing-complete language has the property of being able to compute any computable function, even though the language itself is far simpler than the set of all possible programs which can be written in it. Does it make sense to say then that a program to compute a factorial has a property which the language that program is written in - the very means by which it exists - doesn't?
Same with hydrogen and water. Hydrogen (as the sum of electron + proton) is the 'language' in which all hydrogen-based compounds are 'written'. It's not just a simple substance, it's a set of rules for the combination of small pieces into bigger ones. Its simple molecular form is actually only one expression of that vast set of possibility, only one of which is immediately obvious, but all of which are in fact its properties.
Hydrogen forms atomic bonds and interacts via a field of electrons which strictly obey the laws of quantum physics and relativity in space-time locality. Oxygen forms atomic bonds and interacts via a field of electrons which strictly obey the laws of quantum physics and relativity in space-time locality.
Put the two together, however and suddenly:
H2O exists as a sentient shade of purple in a pandimensional multiverse capable of levitating spaceships with its mind, and is free of both quantum and relativistic effects, instead exchanging sequences of plaited telepathic unicorns. It is also Bruce Willis and a small pretzel.
Hey you're right! Just mixing two things does create properties not shared by either of the two original components!
Or, conceivably, what some people consider 'emergent properties' of an assembly are merely the exact SAME properties of the components, just given a little more time and space to reveal themselves.
and neither be emotionally moved, nor see the spiritual/social metaphors behind both of them.
Both games actually make me cry and think deeply about the world around me and the direction culture is headed. They are both doing very interesting and subtle things in terms of using carefully designed and integrated game constructs to evoke a deeper thematic level of meaning.
If this deeper-level-of-meaning thing isn't the goal of 'art', then what is?
Hey hey, ho ho, these suburbs have got to go! No grass for ooze! We shall, we shall not be paved! What do we want? CHEMICAL WEAPON RESIDUE! Where do we want it? RIGHT WHERE IT ALWAYS WAS!
Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear and surprise. Surprise and fear. Fear of this battle station. Fear, surprise, and a laser the size of a small moon. And Lord Vader's sorcerer's ways, though his sad devotion to that ancient religion has not yet given him the clairvoyance to locate the missing data tapes. *Erk choke thunk* Apology accepted. I'll come in again.
Certainly. Whistling any recorded tune will of course be considered 'possession', while singing lyrics will be dealing. Three strikes in a public place and it's twenty to life, no parole.
Anyone posting air-guitar clips of themselves on Youtube... well, let's just say we have some very enthusiastic contractors with extensive experience in Columbia and Nicaragua who would like a few words.
This reminds me of when GUI's were new in the mid 80's, all the elitist jerks who fancied themselves to be high-caliber nerds loudly proclaiming that it was all a gay bullshit fad, etc., ad nauseum.
Lemme ask you guys, any chance we'll get a humble redaction if it turns out you are completely and utterly wrong about this?
I still think most GUIs are fundamentally wrongly engineered. Not only is there no text interface to them, there's often no interface to the event stream at all. It all has to be done with compiled OO languages, hugely platform-specific binary interfaces, and callbacks, which compared to the scripting power of a good CLI - or even to the original Smalltalk/Dynabook vision - is just... wrong is the only word for it. The whole messy overcomplicated paradigm 'works', but only in very limited cases and in spite of itself.
I mean, to make our fancy classful binary OO GUIs work across the net, what did we have to invent? A text-based, page-based protocol called HTTP. There's something wrong with this picture. Wasn't OO itself supposed to solve distribution scalability problems? In our universe, it didn't. We had to go back to ASCII text streams for that.
There must be lessons to be learned from the whole GUI -> Web experience, but I don't see many people teaching about them, or even acknowledging that they exist.
I do appreciate that devices are based around the task they do, and they need to be fit for that task. Sometimes that implies special-purpose tools for special tasks.
I think what I'm arguing is that the existence of a separate tool is itself a fairly heavy cost to pay, and wherever possible we should have a small number of simple, generic, universal tools with high value, rather than lots of low-value special-purpose tools.
Primitive societies, and wilderness explorers, would generally agree with this: a good knife, for instance, can serve many purposes. I think in many ways our 20th century experiment in mass industrial production was a bit misguided, in that it generated large numbers of overly-specialised tools and toys, and therefore a huge amount of mental confusion and physical garbage as a byproduct. The focus was on the producing and selling, not the using.
The general-purpose computer represents for me a chance to reverse this trend, to move back towards a culture where you might have one or two very powerful tools and use these for life. There seems little reason, to me, why the category of 'handheld or portable data network interface device' needs more than one representative. If we were paying the true costs for all the externalities of production, instead of consuming rare minerals and dumping them into landfill, I believe we would in fact be much more conservative about how many electronic devices we built, and much more liberal about the capabilities and reprogrammability of those devices.
There's a whole other reason, too, why I dislike this 2000s move back toward special-purpose devices and online social networks. Not just because I saw it before, in the 1980s before the Web, and it was an annoying mess then. But because there is a deeply social/political/cognitive aspect to the use of computing as a thought-enhancing tool, and I don't think we're currently taking this nearly as seriously as it deserves. The 1960s pioneers of personal computing, hypertext and networking - Douglas Engelbart, Stewart Brand, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Jacques Vallee for instance, and the later software freedom advocates such as Richard Stallman - all are very outspoken about how the intention of making the computer personal was to safeguard its thought-altering properties and give freedom of thought back to the user.
Which is to say, how we think is determined by the tools and languages we use, and computing is both a tool and a language. Not only are we creating a physically unsustainable system producing e-waste, but we really are treading in very dangerous cognitive ground when we start artificially restricting the usage of electronic tools to predetermined 'market categories'.
Do you remember the bad days in the late 80s / early 90s when [...] 'portable machine' meant you had a tiny incompatible screen which wouldn't run desktop software
Yes, which is exactly my point. Those machines are lighter desktops, not laptops. That's why they're merely a footnote of history, instead of a vibrant product category.
Sorry, but that wasn't my point at all. I was saying that those machines were not in fact lighter desktops because they didn't run the software that desktops could. They were a different class of machine, but they were broken because of that differentness, not enabled by it.
I understand what you're saying about form factors. What I'm saying is that form factors, to me, are less important (or at the very least, no more important) than the software a machine can run, because the software is what we use these machines for. (Actually it's the data; but the software is how we get at the data).
There's a tension between special-purpose devices and generic ones, and sometimes a special-purpose device breaks through to become something very special (like, say, the Palm) - but I'm arguing that being 'a new product category' is, in itself, a limitation rather than a feature. More and more, I think our devices are converging to be merely portals on our data-universe: to the extent that the device asserts its 'differentness' it gets in the way of being such a portal and becomes an impediment.
Perhaps that idea is wrong, but it has appeal to me.
For example, a laptop is not just a lighter all-in-one desktop with a battery.
Actually for most purposes it exactly is, and that 100% hardware and software compatibility is what makes a laptop usable. It turns a laptop from 'annoyingly limited specialist device' to 'generic portable desktop environment' where you can guarantee that yes, you can run everything you can run on your desk machine.
Do you remember the bad days in the late 80s / early 90s when 'PC-compatible' meant 'not really compatible at all', when 'portable machine' meant you had a tiny incompatible screen which wouldn't run desktop software, and when things like specialist 'word processors' (hardware units, not software) were sold with their own proprietary disks and formats?
We've advanced a long way in portable technology since then, and the reason why we've advanced is that we standardised things so that laptops are identical to desktops in everything except software-irrelevant things like 'exact size of the screen and touchpad'.
This new Apple philosophy of 'buuuuut don't you see it doesn't have to be compatible because it's an entirely new class of device!' is actually a step way, way back to a time some of us dimly recall as The Bad Years.
only on slashdot would someone boil something down to it's most basic function, and then compare it to something else based on that criteria.
Er, yes? Because that's exactly what science and technology is, and what programmers do? Understand what the basic functions of things is? If learning and saying the truth about how things work makes us social pariahs, then something is wrong with society.
Yes we get frustrated when someone who doesn't understand how either Technology A or Technology B work looks at A and says 'what is this crap', looks at B and says 'oh wow this is amazing', and both A and B are fundamentally the same thing with a different skin and a cooler marketing department but with freedom removed and lots of pointless strings attached.
And yes this cuts both ways: sometimes technologists with a great infrastructure miss that last tiny last-mile bit of connectivity to make an integrated solution. All IRC needed to make it become Twitter was someone to write a web interface and an SMS interface and host it publically.
So nobody did that tiny bit of work to make it usable - but why can't they? Why do we have to depend on an unreliable private corporation as a chokepoint for all our communications WHEN WE ALREADY HAVE THE SAME TECHNOLOGY just missing a few interfaces?
They were probably too busy watching Medieval Idol to even realize who Shakespeare or the King was;)
Shakespeare was Renaissance English Idol, while Chaucer slammed the Medieval category.
Just because something is now stuffy 'literature' doesn't mean it wasn't wildly populist entertainment in its time. There's a reason why a lot of Shakespeare centers on drunks, crossdressing and hitting people with swords.
It's better because a flashy dotcom startup can put themselves into the message loop for everyone on the planet, causing a single centralised point of failure for global communications, and add unwanted noise to your signal, while extracting and salting away millions of dollars in profit, making lots of business transactions less efficient in the process.
Oh, you meant better for the users? It's not at all. But they don't make the venture capital magazines, do they?
I've always boggled why something like Twitter is a dotcom rather than a fundamental protocol. It's not adding any content - it's a pure message forwarding service. There's no apparent reason why 'forward short text message from point A to many points B' is something more value-added than 'retrieve HTTP' or 'forward SMTP' and needs to have a corporation managing it. Rather, it seems like a basic service that ISPs should provide. That would take care of the monetisation just fine.
As far as I can see there are a very few actual uses for space:
1. Satellite communications 2. Military 3. Tourism 4. SCIENCE! (let's count the number of planets around stars that we will never be able to get to because of relativity! like angels and pinheads except we can fit curves to it)
and of those four, military and SCIENCE! are basically big money pits which achieve nothing but international prestige (and ICBMs actively endanger all life on earth), tourism is a brief entertainment for the idle rich, and satellite data communications is the only thing which actually contributes to the health and wellbeing of Earth. So yay one out of four, I guess.
Haven't we basically 'done the space thing' by now? Moonbases didn't work out, we're practically speaking not going to colonise Mars let alone Jupiter because of the radiation problems, so...... why DO we need manned lifters? There's nothing out there to send people to, and even if we send people to nowhere there still won't be anything for them to send back.
What's the big point of the Space Future, again? If we had warp drive or canals on Mars it would be different, but in our universe....?
Slashdot Mirror
SETI should be, in my opinion, more interested in searching the asteroid belts for Von Neumann probes than listening for radio signals.
Those would be happy cheerful self replicating planet devouring robots, would they?
For my part I'm quite happy for SETI to be actively avoiding finding anything like this in our backyard.
Where does he draw the line at "wasting time writing code"? This is exactly the mindset that leads us to buffer overruns, SQL injections, and many other problems which should not make it into production software. He wants his developers to abstract as much as possible, but code reuse all too easily leads to blind acceptance and a failure to understand what is being imported.
I agree strongly with your 'old man' grump about sedimentary layers of abstraction being a very bad thing (Chuck Moore of Forth and Alan Kay of Smalltalk are saying similar things) but disagree with this specific diagnosis of what the problem is.
Writing code - or in fact creating ANYTHING - to solve a problem which has already been solved is IMO a mistake and is the cause of errors. Humans should not be doing any tasks which computers can do.
My problem with today's software ecosystems is rather the opposite: that we've accumulated all these crufty layers precisely because they DON'T solve our problems correctly, so we have to add more layers on top. We have lots of libraries and frameworks and class abstractions but they all do 'sorta, somewhat, kinda' the right thing, but not exactly the right thing. All those not-quites add up to leaky abstractions and failure.
And our libraries don't quite do the right thing because our languages still aren't powerful enough to let them express clearly and precisely our problems - rather than expressing procedures to solve our problems, which are not the same thing. 'Powerful' doesn't mean more features, it means the reverse: less 'built-in' features, but more reflection.
In my opinion, what we need is a new focus on languages which allow declarative programming - 'what' rather than 'how'. 'How' is what the compiler should generate. 'What', however - data and transformations - is the actual truth of the system, and that's what our current C-based languages are very poor at representing. So we settle for telling the computer 'how to do it' because we can't conceive of how to express 'what', and we don't even realise that we're settling; we approximate in 'coding' as a matter of course, and then all these approximations add up to built-in layers of failure.
Sapir-Whorf is biting us badly.
By way of example, a bare _minimum_ language I'd consider suitable for declarative programming (and it's still enormously sucky) is Prolog. Lisp for preference since you could reimplement Prolog done right in it, but we need at least logic programming rather than even functional programming.
Slightly less snarkily:
What we consider 'properties' are actually APPROXIMATIONS, very rough simplifications, of the true properties of things. The true properties of even simple things - as long as those things include the ability to be combined and modified by that combination - are very deep and powerful and rich indeed.
We say that 'water has the property of being wet' while hydrogen doesn't, therefore water must have created a new property!
But if hydrogen-as-water has the property of being wet, then that's just another way of saying that hydrogen-as-H2 must also have the property of arranging itself as hydrogen-as-water, therefore the property of implementing the property of wetness must still belong to hydrogen. A meta-property if you like. Very clever stuff then, this hydrogen.
Similarly, a transistor might not apparently 'in itself' appear to have the property of being a Pentium chip, but in fact it DOES have the property of being combined in an infinity of complex ways, one of which is the Pentium chip. A straight piece of copper, on the other hand, doesn't - solder as many bits of copper together as you like you'll never make even a single NOR. The junction structure of the transistor includes a very deep property which the copper alone doesn't.
Likewise, a Turing-complete language has the property of being able to compute any computable function, even though the language itself is far simpler than the set of all possible programs which can be written in it. Does it make sense to say then that a program to compute a factorial has a property which the language that program is written in - the very means by which it exists - doesn't?
Same with hydrogen and water. Hydrogen (as the sum of electron + proton) is the 'language' in which all hydrogen-based compounds are 'written'. It's not just a simple substance, it's a set of rules for the combination of small pieces into bigger ones. Its simple molecular form is actually only one expression of that vast set of possibility, only one of which is immediately obvious, but all of which are in fact its properties.
Are you sure?
Hydrogen forms atomic bonds and interacts via a field of electrons which strictly obey the laws of quantum physics and relativity in space-time locality.
Oxygen forms atomic bonds and interacts via a field of electrons which strictly obey the laws of quantum physics and relativity in space-time locality.
Put the two together, however and suddenly:
H2O exists as a sentient shade of purple in a pandimensional multiverse capable of levitating spaceships with its mind, and is free of both quantum and relativistic effects, instead exchanging sequences of plaited telepathic unicorns. It is also Bruce Willis and a small pretzel.
Hey you're right! Just mixing two things does create properties not shared by either of the two original components!
Or, conceivably, what some people consider 'emergent properties' of an assembly are merely the exact SAME properties of the components, just given a little more time and space to reveal themselves.
I defy anyone to play either of:
* Darwinia
* World of Goo
and neither be emotionally moved, nor see the spiritual/social metaphors behind both of them.
Both games actually make me cry and think deeply about the world around me and the direction culture is headed. They are both doing very interesting and subtle things in terms of using carefully designed and integrated game constructs to evoke a deeper thematic level of meaning.
If this deeper-level-of-meaning thing isn't the goal of 'art', then what is?
So the real acronym should be NIMTWD?
Not In My Toxic Waste Dump!
Hey hey, ho ho, these suburbs have got to go!
No grass for ooze!
We shall, we shall not be paved!
What do we want? CHEMICAL WEAPON RESIDUE! Where do we want it? RIGHT WHERE IT ALWAYS WAS!
... be sure to wear some Craigslist in your hair.
Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear and surprise. Surprise and fear. Fear of this battle station. Fear, surprise, and a laser the size of a small moon. And Lord Vader's sorcerer's ways, though his sad devotion to that ancient religion has not yet given him the clairvoyance to locate the missing data tapes. *Erk choke thunk* Apology accepted. I'll come in again.
The Emperor Astley is not as... forgiving... as I am.
Certainly. Whistling any recorded tune will of course be considered 'possession', while singing lyrics will be dealing. Three strikes in a public place and it's twenty to life, no parole.
Anyone posting air-guitar clips of themselves on Youtube... well, let's just say we have some very enthusiastic contractors with extensive experience in Columbia and Nicaragua who would like a few words.
This reminds me of when GUI's were new in the mid 80's, all the elitist jerks who fancied themselves to be high-caliber nerds loudly proclaiming that it was all a gay bullshit fad, etc., ad nauseum.
Lemme ask you guys, any chance we'll get a humble redaction if it turns out you are completely and utterly wrong about this?
I still think most GUIs are fundamentally wrongly engineered. Not only is there no text interface to them, there's often no interface to the event stream at all. It all has to be done with compiled OO languages, hugely platform-specific binary interfaces, and callbacks, which compared to the scripting power of a good CLI - or even to the original Smalltalk/Dynabook vision - is just... wrong is the only word for it. The whole messy overcomplicated paradigm 'works', but only in very limited cases and in spite of itself.
I mean, to make our fancy classful binary OO GUIs work across the net, what did we have to invent? A text-based, page-based protocol called HTTP. There's something wrong with this picture. Wasn't OO itself supposed to solve distribution scalability problems? In our universe, it didn't. We had to go back to ASCII text streams for that.
There must be lessons to be learned from the whole GUI -> Web experience, but I don't see many people teaching about them, or even acknowledging that they exist.
To clarify:
I do appreciate that devices are based around the task they do, and they need to be fit for that task. Sometimes that implies special-purpose tools for special tasks.
I think what I'm arguing is that the existence of a separate tool is itself a fairly heavy cost to pay, and wherever possible we should have a small number of simple, generic, universal tools with high value, rather than lots of low-value special-purpose tools.
Primitive societies, and wilderness explorers, would generally agree with this: a good knife, for instance, can serve many purposes. I think in many ways our 20th century experiment in mass industrial production was a bit misguided, in that it generated large numbers of overly-specialised tools and toys, and therefore a huge amount of mental confusion and physical garbage as a byproduct. The focus was on the producing and selling, not the using.
The general-purpose computer represents for me a chance to reverse this trend, to move back towards a culture where you might have one or two very powerful tools and use these for life. There seems little reason, to me, why the category of 'handheld or portable data network interface device' needs more than one representative. If we were paying the true costs for all the externalities of production, instead of consuming rare minerals and dumping them into landfill, I believe we would in fact be much more conservative about how many electronic devices we built, and much more liberal about the capabilities and reprogrammability of those devices.
There's a whole other reason, too, why I dislike this 2000s move back toward special-purpose devices and online social networks. Not just because I saw it before, in the 1980s before the Web, and it was an annoying mess then. But because there is a deeply social/political/cognitive aspect to the use of computing as a thought-enhancing tool, and I don't think we're currently taking this nearly as seriously as it deserves. The 1960s pioneers of personal computing, hypertext and networking - Douglas Engelbart, Stewart Brand, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Jacques Vallee for instance, and the later software freedom advocates such as Richard Stallman - all are very outspoken about how the intention of making the computer personal was to safeguard its thought-altering properties and give freedom of thought back to the user.
Which is to say, how we think is determined by the tools and languages we use, and computing is both a tool and a language. Not only are we creating a physically unsustainable system producing e-waste, but we really are treading in very dangerous cognitive ground when we start artificially restricting the usage of electronic tools to predetermined 'market categories'.
Yes, which is exactly my point. Those machines are lighter desktops, not laptops. That's why they're merely a footnote of history, instead of a vibrant product category.
Sorry, but that wasn't my point at all. I was saying that those machines were not in fact lighter desktops because they didn't run the software that desktops could. They were a different class of machine, but they were broken because of that differentness, not enabled by it.
I understand what you're saying about form factors. What I'm saying is that form factors, to me, are less important (or at the very least, no more important) than the software a machine can run, because the software is what we use these machines for. (Actually it's the data; but the software is how we get at the data).
There's a tension between special-purpose devices and generic ones, and sometimes a special-purpose device breaks through to become something very special (like, say, the Palm) - but I'm arguing that being 'a new product category' is, in itself, a limitation rather than a feature. More and more, I think our devices are converging to be merely portals on our data-universe: to the extent that the device asserts its 'differentness' it gets in the way of being such a portal and becomes an impediment.
Perhaps that idea is wrong, but it has appeal to me.
For example, a laptop is not just a lighter all-in-one desktop with a battery.
Actually for most purposes it exactly is, and that 100% hardware and software compatibility is what makes a laptop usable. It turns a laptop from 'annoyingly limited specialist device' to 'generic portable desktop environment' where you can guarantee that yes, you can run everything you can run on your desk machine.
Do you remember the bad days in the late 80s / early 90s when 'PC-compatible' meant 'not really compatible at all', when 'portable machine' meant you had a tiny incompatible screen which wouldn't run desktop software, and when things like specialist 'word processors' (hardware units, not software) were sold with their own proprietary disks and formats?
We've advanced a long way in portable technology since then, and the reason why we've advanced is that we standardised things so that laptops are identical to desktops in everything except software-irrelevant things like 'exact size of the screen and touchpad'.
This new Apple philosophy of 'buuuuut don't you see it doesn't have to be compatible because it's an entirely new class of device!' is actually a step way, way back to a time some of us dimly recall as The Bad Years.
Who really wrote the plays attributed to him?
David Tennant, obviously.
only on slashdot would someone boil something down to it's most basic function, and then compare it to something else based on that criteria.
Er, yes? Because that's exactly what science and technology is, and what programmers do? Understand what the basic functions of things is? If learning and saying the truth about how things work makes us social pariahs, then something is wrong with society.
Yes we get frustrated when someone who doesn't understand how either Technology A or Technology B work looks at A and says 'what is this crap', looks at B and says 'oh wow this is amazing', and both A and B are fundamentally the same thing with a different skin and a cooler marketing department but with freedom removed and lots of pointless strings attached.
And yes this cuts both ways: sometimes technologists with a great infrastructure miss that last tiny last-mile bit of connectivity to make an integrated solution. All IRC needed to make it become Twitter was someone to write a web interface and an SMS interface and host it publically.
So nobody did that tiny bit of work to make it usable - but why can't they? Why do we have to depend on an unreliable private corporation as a chokepoint for all our communications WHEN WE ALREADY HAVE THE SAME TECHNOLOGY just missing a few interfaces?
They were probably too busy watching Medieval Idol to even realize who Shakespeare or the King was ;)
Shakespeare was Renaissance English Idol, while Chaucer slammed the Medieval category.
Just because something is now stuffy 'literature' doesn't mean it wasn't wildly populist entertainment in its time. There's a reason why a lot of Shakespeare centers on drunks, crossdressing and hitting people with swords.
And just how is twitter better than IRC?>
It's better because a flashy dotcom startup can put themselves into the message loop for everyone on the planet, causing a single centralised point of failure for global communications, and add unwanted noise to your signal, while extracting and salting away millions of dollars in profit, making lots of business transactions less efficient in the process.
Oh, you meant better for the users? It's not at all. But they don't make the venture capital magazines, do they?
I've always boggled why something like Twitter is a dotcom rather than a fundamental protocol. It's not adding any content - it's a pure message forwarding service. There's no apparent reason why 'forward short text message from point A to many points B' is something more value-added than 'retrieve HTTP' or 'forward SMTP' and needs to have a corporation managing it. Rather, it seems like a basic service that ISPs should provide. That would take care of the monetisation just fine.
And harder to type.
If I remember my Microsoft history correctly, wasn't PC-DOS supposed to evolve into Xenix?
As far as I can see there are a very few actual uses for space:
1. Satellite communications
2. Military
3. Tourism
4. SCIENCE! (let's count the number of planets around stars that we will never be able to get to because of relativity! like angels and pinheads except we can fit curves to it)
and of those four, military and SCIENCE! are basically big money pits which achieve nothing but international prestige (and ICBMs actively endanger all life on earth), tourism is a brief entertainment for the idle rich, and satellite data communications is the only thing which actually contributes to the health and wellbeing of Earth. So yay one out of four, I guess.
Haven't we basically 'done the space thing' by now? Moonbases didn't work out, we're practically speaking not going to colonise Mars let alone Jupiter because of the radiation problems, so... ... why DO we need manned lifters? There's nothing out there to send people to, and even if we send people to nowhere there still won't be anything for them to send back.
What's the big point of the Space Future, again? If we had warp drive or canals on Mars it would be different, but in our universe....?
Fear is such an useful tool to keep people quiet and compliant.
Fear and design. Design and fear. Fear, design, and really shiny monitors. And a fanatical dedication to Objective-C.
I'll launch the product again.
The IIe was not a Mac. Do you perhaps mean the Macintosh SE?
"Have you ever knocked on a neighbor's door to tell them they left their headlights on? Did they then require you to cook them dinner? Exactly..."
And after dinner, did they then require you to take them to a movie, a concert, some clubs and a night of passionate...
Excuse me, I'm just going to go check all the car headlights in my street. Be right back.