I have a couple benchmarks i've run over the years, in multiple languages. For CPU intensive jobs on the same machine:
C: 1 Java: 1.1-3 javascript: 117
Javascript is in IE8 on win xp.
Javascript on IE has restrictive time limits for execution, though there are work arounds. But If you have 8 cores, you're still 14.6x slower than C.
IMO, Java, which already runs in the browser, is the better solution. That said, compared to C, Java also has huge memory requirements. It would make more sense to allow mutli-core execution in Java in the browser.
My benchmarks show that guile is a pretty slow. For example, on one machine, it was 238 times slower than C. So, instead of a 3.6 GIPS machine, we'll all go back to 15 MIPS. Who here wants to use a 486/66 again? Who here isn't old enough to remember when Intel had numbers for chip models? Perhaps the long jump support could be removed and half way decent performance could be put in. I mean, what good is a functional language when it's faster when you code loops?
I was researching LISP a couple years back and ran into a great quote. It talked about how a student had written an elegant matrix multiply function in LISP, which had the misfeature of being incredibly slow. It caught my attention because i'd written a nearly identical function, and was amazed at how poorly it performed. The author made the comment that no C programmer could make such a mistake. However, he totally failed to give the slightest hint on why the performance should have sucked. And, he continued to rant about how (compiled) LISP was as fast as C.
Javascript is finally getting some performance. Firefox 3.5.7's javascript is only 25.6x slower than C. The recent browser wars show rapid progress.
Readability is important That said. I know dozens of languages. I understand my 30 year old BASIC programs without much effort. I was a bit more clever with my 25 year old C programs, so they're a bit tougher. LISP is one of only two languages where i actually took a class. But none of my LISP or scheme is halfway comprehensible two weeks after i've written it. Forth is a bit better, taking a couple months. Procedural languages are simply easier. At the end of the day, you spend most of your time in maintenance. If it isn't broken, then the requirements are changing. Oh, and time is money, just like Einstein said.
If you add 2 + 2 and get 4, you can say that this is true in a way that almost nothing else is true. And people seem to think that this means that math means truth.
But Frank Drake created his famous equation to organise his thoughts and get a handle on what is and isn't known. As time has moved on, we have gotten better estimates of the terms. For example, actually discovering 300+ planets around other stars gives us a handle on the fraction of stars with planets. And the Kepler mission should improve things even more. If Drake's equation did nothing more than inspire the launch of the Kepler mission, it would be very important indeed.
But as the Drake equation is filled in with better data, there's a next step. And it's interesting that people are thinking about what those next steps might be.
Attributed to Mark Twain: "There are liars. There are Damned Liars. And then, there are statistics."
I'm happy that people are still researching violin making. And there are many new techniques in the last 20 or so years. But I keep hearing that while the Strads are good, a $20,000 modern violin is better. At least this seems to be a consensus view among professionals. The key problem with violin making is consistency. So people have attempted to make graphite violins, and so on. And if all violins could be top notch, they wouldn't cost $20,000.
I, personally, own a very poor violin. A modern $500 violin would be an improvement. My son's $200 3/4 size (it's really just an inch shorter than mine) sounds, in my opinion, better. And for MY violin, pretty much the only opinion that matters is mine. I'm my only audience.
There are people who have publicly said that if they obtained a Stradivarius, it would quickly meet with an accident, for insurance reasons. Not for personal gain. Such money could fund other music endeavours. I'd have thought he could have just sold it. A Stradivarius is an historical artifact, without regard to how good it sounds, and for that reason alone is worth the million+ dollars they often fetch.
Most companies don't know about the superstars they have. Or otherwise.
If you ARE a superstar, then you should be able to identify one in a conversation. It's the Turing Test. Is the person across the table competent?
Unfortunately, being a really good programmer does not always make you good at other things. For example, i'm terrible at sales.
So here's one of the better conversation starters in the interview:
What are your favorite tools?
Oh, and try to get some detail about some past project.
I'm really good at this. Perhaps i should hire myself out to perform interviews. But it should be noted that the only real candidate i talked to turned us down.
I see why it's a draft. On page 13, it says "all you can do pick a box", which clearly needs a verb, "is". A suboptimal version was picked from the Library of Babel. That's probably because a genetic algorithm was chosen to pick a pretty good paper, but it was caught at a local maximum fitness value...
I'm nearly 50, and can still hear into the 40 KHz range. Yes, it's hard to test this with stuff around the house. But there are still stores with ultrasonic systems (anti theft, i suppose) that i avoid.
My point is that there is variation. It's a belle curve. While i'm average for many things, i'm not average for everything. No one is. Most people lose higher frequency hearing as they age. Perhaps i have, if so it's not been enough.
Before you go off the deep end and say "that's impossible", consider the limits of hearing. Sounds vibrate a little disk in your ear. The softest sounds detectable move that little disk less than the diameter of an atom. It's hard to imagine.
Let's say that there's more than one DVD's worth of CC content available. What do you send? I'd say, send it all. Each laptop gets one DVD, but a random one. If you want to hear more music, you collaborate with others who have it handy...
It is estimated that less than a percent of microorganisms have been identified. You can go to your back yard and discover something new to science. Go ahead and do that right now - i'll wait. The article suggests that this new finding is the not end of the issue. So clearly, instead of changing the textbooks and making students buy the new one, the textbooks should be on line, where they can be updated and disseminated quickly. For example:
So, Archaea, Prokaryotes, Eukaryotes and Viruses. Eukaryotes come in four groups: Plants, Opisthokonts (that's us and other fungi, etc.), Excavates, and SAR.
The article does not eliminate Prokaryotes, or combine Archaea with something else, or mention Viruses.
Computer programming is a one rung ladder. Once you get into management, you are no longer doing computer programming.
A number of companies i've worked for have pushed me towards management in one way or another. My experience is that people who want to be managers should in no circumstances be allowed to do it. One good reason to do it is if your current management is so bad that something just has to be done about it. At that point, you're ready for it.
There's a long standing argument over whether computer programming is engineering or not. As an engineer and practicing computer programmer, i can say with authority that computer programming is engineering, only more so. Non-engineers can't manage engineers. It's far worse with computer programmers. Even engineers aren't prepared to manage them.
So read Fred Brooks' book - The Mythical Man Month. Understand how it relates to what you do. It's a start. A bad manager can set up the programmers for a 30x slow down with a guarantee of poor quality. Who has time for that? Life is too short.
Fred Brooks says that the difference between a good programmer and the next level down is a factor of seven. So, if you could figure out who is who, it'd be worth that much.
But looking at a resume isn't likely to do it for you. What you need to do is talk to the candidate. It's a touring test. In order to see if you're getter a good programmer, you have to be a good programmer. If you are a good programmer, you might not need a good programmer.
This leads people in the industry to stupid things. Employers who need good help have no idea how to get it. They also have no idea when they've got it. And, of course, you get people to exploit this weakness in the system. And there will always be companies that are willing to trade their reputation (which starts out non-zero, even though it's free) for a quick buck.
The good news for Zed and others is this: There are jobs out there for cleaning up messes. Some of my most enjoyable gigs have been mess cleanups.
I, for one, enjoyed Zed's rant. Nothing new under the Sun, but enjoyable all the same.
SETI@Home works by breaking up the problem into billions of small chunks. As far as i know, no effort was made to make the work units themselves run parallel. If you want to do that, run more than one on your box at a time. It took some effort to make SETI@Home work, though. This idea works for searching large number spaces - for primes, and such. This idea is basically "Hungry puppies". If you can get your app to work this way, then you can scale up to nearly any practical limit. (SETI@Home ran into bandwidth limits, sending out units - they eventually required work units to do more work).
Another approach is SIMD - Single Instruction, Multiple Data. Thinking Machines had hardware and software that used this approach. A single host sent out "instructions" on broadcast to thousands of processors. Each processor had it's own segment of the data to work on, but did the same instructions as all the others. This can be done completely in software on a MIMD machine, like a modern multichip, multicore SMP machine. Thinking Machines had two languages to support SIMD - C* (C star) and Lisp* (Lisp star). They had operations that could be sent out.
A down side of SIMD also affects vector machines. The non-vectorizable part of the code has to be run on the single processor host. Even if the vector processor is infinitely fast, if 30% of the application doesn't run on it, then you must wait at least that long. In this case you could only triple your total speed.
Again, on a modern MIMD system, a hybrid approach might work. The SIMD controller might itself run on multiple threads. There might be several instruction streams broadcast to processors.
Much like the guy who attempted to buy a burger at a fast food place using $2 bills. The cashier had never seen one and thought they were bogus. The manager too.
Different from the guy who wanted to change for a whole stack of $6 bills, and was given $3's.
My 2000 Saturn SL (a 4 door sedan) has an EPA highway rating of 40 MPG. My most recent 50,000 miles averaged 43.7 MPG. It has a 1.9 liter engine and 5 speed manual. The car is reasonably peppy, but not hardly a muscle car. The car was not expensive. A lighter car with a smaller engine and a good highway cruise gear yields good economy. Going 65 MPH instead of 70 MPH gives me an extra 9 MPG, for example, on trips (49 MPG).
According to epa.gov, GM no longer sells a car that gets 40 MPG. To replace it (and this one has over 200,000 miles), i'll need to buy a Toyota Corolla. Detroit needs to build them for me to buy them from Detroit. My complaint isn't that Detroit sells gas guzzling SUVs, it's that Detroit stopped selling cheap, reliable and efficient cars. Perhaps this law will eventually inspire a return to old offerings. After all, the Big Three are not so big anymore.
I've not gotten far enough into Python to have any clue why. That means that the barrier to entry is fairly high. If this is a standard idiom, then the next question is naturally, What problem does this solve?
Are there any Linux distributions that have Opera pre-installed? Most of the distributions i've used of late come with Firefox. My Nokia 770 (Linux based) came with Opera. I assumed that was because Opera has a smaller footprint than Firefox (but none too small for my 64 MB RAM (and no swap) pocket computer). However, it might be that Opera was written with GTK, or had been optimized for a stylus based user interface, or something.
My last two projects have been to babysit and sun down legacy systems. These were written in Perl, are web & database based, were written over a period of about ten years by multiple people, had no development system (all changes are made in production), and are each at least a half million lines of code.
One such system has two very different kinds of programmers. One kind produces very small, tight, elegant code. Each line may be complex, but there aren't very many of them. Another kind generally codes for conceptually easier tasks, and has a verbose style. Individual lines are trivial assignments, but there are sometimes thousands of them.
The elegant code is MUCH more difficult to debug. It's also, generally, broken much less often. The verbose code is generally very easy to fix.
But i've gotten an appreciation for other ways to do things. And, there aren't nearly as many of us 'elegant coders' out there for replacement. But i still don't see how some apps can be accomplished at all without us. This appears to be language, library and tool independent. Fred Brooks seems to have something to say about this.
I'm firmly in the realm of 'elegant coder' myself. My favorite piece of late is 750 lines of very dense code involving a seven dimensional hash (but sometimes six - it varies) with dynamic indexes. It replaces a 25,000 line chunk that had to be changed every year. The new bit never needs change. However, despite ample documentation and three tutorials, i was unsuccessful in showing the new team how it worked. The new system has designed this bit out completely.
One thing about both projects is that the employer either started a project to replace them, or actually replaced them. In both cases, it was an incredible amount of work and expense to do this. Millions of dollars. It would have been both cheaper and better to fix their problems, and update their user interfaces. At least, once an appropriate programmer was found. Oddly, we have at least two on our current team.
Oh, yes. The replacement projects went over budget and were late by at least a factor of two. Much more, if you consider that something like half of the functionality was removed. And there seems to be one chunk that the new team doesn't seem to be able to deliver. Perhaps the new team needs an elegant coder.
Re:Are not most posters missing the point?
on
The Cult of Kindle
·
· Score: 1
What if the EULA actually meant something?
I mean most EULAs are a hundred pages long, in a tiny font that can't be changed. Look at the iPhone's list of licenses! No one reads them, they just click "accept". And, AFAIK, they don't hold up in court. Useless.
But what if the EULA was a single line? What if it read:
I agree not to give away this book to others.
or something that simple in large, friendly text. You'd click OK, and you'd have actually read it. You could hardly avoid it. And the honest people would actually honor it. The pirates don't even when the content is encrypted. But I would. So, it would amount to the same thing. That would be DRM that works for everyone.
Re:I was so excited ... at first. Kindle and acade
on
The Cult of Kindle
·
· Score: 1
I've got a Nokia 770. The current versions are the 800 and 810. It has an 800x480 color screen, displays PDFs, and has a text editor. It can run more than one app at the same time. So, you could read the PDF, and annotate it in a memo pad. The device fits in a shirt pocket, like a Palm. You can get a Bluetooth keyboard for it, if you want. I bought a 2 GB flash card for mine. It has WiFi and USB. So the most likely limitation is the small screen. The dots are really tiny. I read PDFs with 800 dots across the page, and adjust the zoom so that the content area just fits. It leads to very tiny text.
Does that do it for you?
What I'd rather do is extract the text from the PDF, or convert it to HTML and view in FBReader or a web browser. When i get Word Doc files, i often convert them to html for reading. I get pictures, but can adjust the screen with and still have a larger font.
Maybe someone could write a PDF viewer that doesn't attempt to retain the as-printed form. That might not be so hard. There are open source PDF readers one could start from.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a couple benchmarks i've run over the years, in multiple languages. For CPU intensive jobs on the same machine:
C: 1
Java: 1.1-3
javascript: 117
Javascript is in IE8 on win xp.
Javascript on IE has restrictive time limits for execution, though there are work arounds.
But If you have 8 cores, you're still 14.6x slower than C.
IMO, Java, which already runs in the browser, is the better solution. That said, compared to C, Java also has huge memory requirements.
It would make more sense to allow mutli-core execution in Java in the browser.
Performance is important
My benchmarks show that guile is a pretty slow. For example, on one machine, it was 238 times slower than C. So, instead of a 3.6 GIPS machine, we'll all go back to 15 MIPS. Who here wants to use a 486/66 again? Who here isn't old enough to remember when Intel had numbers for chip models? Perhaps the long jump support could be removed and half way decent performance could be put in. I mean, what good is a functional language when it's faster when you code loops?
I was researching LISP a couple years back and ran into a great quote. It talked about how a student had written an elegant matrix multiply function in LISP, which had the misfeature of being incredibly slow. It caught my attention because i'd written a nearly identical function, and was amazed at how poorly it performed. The author made the comment that no C programmer could make such a mistake. However, he totally failed to give the slightest hint on why the performance should have sucked. And, he continued to rant about how (compiled) LISP was as fast as C.
Javascript is finally getting some performance. Firefox 3.5.7's javascript is only 25.6x slower than C. The recent browser wars show rapid progress.
Readability is important
That said. I know dozens of languages. I understand my 30 year old BASIC programs without much effort. I was a bit more clever with my 25 year old C programs, so they're a bit tougher. LISP is one of only two languages where i actually took a class. But none of my LISP or scheme is halfway comprehensible two weeks after i've written it. Forth is a bit better, taking a couple months. Procedural languages are simply easier. At the end of the day, you spend most of your time in maintenance. If it isn't broken, then the requirements are changing. Oh, and time is money, just like Einstein said.
The Shuttle has a 1 in 50 chance of failure. That's not exactly the right benchmark. 1 in 500 isn't particularly good.
If you add 2 + 2 and get 4, you can say that this is true in a way that almost nothing else is true. And people seem to think that this means that math means truth.
But Frank Drake created his famous equation to organise his thoughts and get a handle on what is and isn't known. As time has moved on, we have gotten better estimates of the terms. For example, actually discovering 300+ planets around other stars gives us a handle on the fraction of stars with planets. And the Kepler mission should improve things even more. If Drake's equation did nothing more than inspire the launch of the Kepler mission, it would be very important indeed.
But as the Drake equation is filled in with better data, there's a next step. And it's interesting that people are thinking about what those next steps might be.
Attributed to Mark Twain: "There are liars. There are Damned Liars. And then, there are statistics."
I'm happy that people are still researching violin making. And there are many new techniques in the last 20 or so years. But I keep hearing that while the Strads are good, a $20,000 modern violin is better. At least this seems to be a consensus view among professionals. The key problem with violin making is consistency. So people have attempted to make graphite violins, and so on. And if all violins could be top notch, they wouldn't cost $20,000.
I, personally, own a very poor violin. A modern $500 violin would be an improvement. My son's $200 3/4 size (it's really just an inch shorter than mine) sounds, in my opinion, better. And for MY violin, pretty much the only opinion that matters is mine. I'm my only audience.
There are people who have publicly said that if they obtained a Stradivarius, it would quickly meet with an accident, for insurance reasons. Not for personal gain. Such money could fund other music endeavours. I'd have thought he could have just sold it. A Stradivarius is an historical artifact, without regard to how good it sounds, and for that reason alone is worth the million+ dollars they often fetch.
I play UT2004 on Linux. But the box I picked up at the store will run under Winders.
Well, i don't have a copy of Winders to check, but the box says it will run there.
Read it or burn it at your leisure.
Most companies don't know about the superstars they have. Or otherwise.
If you ARE a superstar, then you should be able to identify one in
a conversation. It's the Turing Test. Is the person across the
table competent?
Unfortunately, being a really good programmer does not always make you
good at other things. For example, i'm terrible at sales.
So here's one of the better conversation starters in the interview:
What are your favorite tools?
Oh, and try to get some detail about some past project.
I'm really good at this. Perhaps i should hire myself out to perform interviews.
But it should be noted that the only real candidate i talked to turned us down.
I see why it's a draft. On page 13, it says "all you can do pick a box", which clearly needs a verb, "is". A suboptimal version was picked from the Library of Babel. That's probably because a genetic algorithm was chosen to pick a pretty good paper, but it was caught at a local maximum fitness value...
I'm nearly 50, and can still hear into the 40 KHz range. Yes, it's hard to test this with stuff around the house. But there are still stores with ultrasonic systems (anti theft, i suppose) that i avoid.
My point is that there is variation. It's a belle curve. While i'm average for many things, i'm not average for everything. No one is. Most people lose higher frequency hearing as they age. Perhaps i have, if so it's not been enough.
Before you go off the deep end and say "that's impossible", consider the limits of hearing. Sounds vibrate a little disk in your ear. The softest sounds detectable move that little disk less than the diameter of an atom. It's hard to imagine.
So, i hear "teen age ringtones" and stuff.
Let's say that there's more than one DVD's worth of CC content available. What do you send? I'd say, send it all. Each laptop gets one DVD, but a random one. If you want to hear more music, you collaborate with others who have it handy...
It is estimated that less than a percent of microorganisms have been identified. You can go to your back yard and discover something new to science. Go ahead and do that right now - i'll wait. The article suggests that this new finding is the not end of the issue. So clearly, instead of changing the textbooks and making students buy the new one, the textbooks should be on line, where they can be updated and disseminated quickly. For example:
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/
So, Archaea, Prokaryotes, Eukaryotes and Viruses. Eukaryotes come in four groups: Plants, Opisthokonts (that's us and other fungi, etc.), Excavates, and SAR.
The article does not eliminate Prokaryotes, or combine Archaea with something else, or mention Viruses.
So, what's the current consensus on Prions?
Computer programming is a one rung ladder. Once you get into management, you are no longer doing computer programming.
A number of companies i've worked for have pushed me towards management in one way or another. My experience is that people who want to be managers should in no circumstances be allowed to do it. One good reason to do it is if your current management is so bad that something just has to be done about it. At that point, you're ready for it.
There's a long standing argument over whether computer programming is engineering or not. As an engineer and practicing computer programmer, i can say with authority that computer programming is engineering, only more so. Non-engineers can't manage engineers. It's far worse with computer programmers. Even engineers aren't prepared to manage them.
So read Fred Brooks' book - The Mythical Man Month. Understand how it relates to what you do. It's a start. A bad manager can set up the programmers for a 30x slow down with a guarantee of poor quality. Who has time for that? Life is too short.
So does it tell you how to get you linux box to gateway a wireless router to the internet via slow phone modem?
Repeal the DMCA
Reform Patent law
Institute National Health care, no citizen left behind
Reform teaching to use modern techniques, known superior to that currently used
Fund science: alternative energy, medicine, etc.
Apply some military funding to defend against asteroids and comets, including demonstrator
Push to adopt Kyoto, fund alternative energy
Fix the Farm bill to encourage health
Probably more. There's plenty to do.
Zed has advice on how to hire.
Fred Brooks says that the difference between a good programmer and the next level down is a factor of seven. So, if you could figure out who is who, it'd be worth that much.
But looking at a resume isn't likely to do it for you. What you need to do is talk to the candidate. It's a touring test. In order to see if you're getter a good programmer, you have to be a good programmer. If you are a good programmer, you might not need a good programmer.
This leads people in the industry to stupid things. Employers who need good help have no idea how to get it. They also have no idea when they've got it. And, of course, you get people to exploit this weakness in the system. And there will always be companies that are willing to trade their reputation (which starts out non-zero, even though it's free) for a quick buck.
The good news for Zed and others is this: There are jobs out there for cleaning up messes. Some of my most enjoyable gigs have been mess cleanups.
I, for one, enjoyed Zed's rant. Nothing new under the Sun, but enjoyable all the same.
SETI@Home works by breaking up the problem into billions of small chunks. As far as i know, no effort was made to make the work units themselves run parallel. If you want to do that, run more than one on your box at a time. It took some effort to make SETI@Home work, though. This idea works for searching large number spaces - for primes, and such. This idea is basically "Hungry puppies". If you can get your app to work this way, then you can scale up to nearly any practical limit. (SETI@Home ran into bandwidth limits, sending out units - they eventually required work units to do more work).
Another approach is SIMD - Single Instruction, Multiple Data. Thinking Machines had hardware and software that used this approach. A single host sent out "instructions" on broadcast to thousands of processors. Each processor had it's own segment of the data to work on, but did the same instructions as all the others. This can be done completely in software on a MIMD machine, like a modern multichip, multicore SMP machine. Thinking Machines had two languages to support SIMD - C* (C star) and Lisp* (Lisp star). They had operations that could be sent out.
A down side of SIMD also affects vector machines. The non-vectorizable part of the code has to be run on the single processor host. Even if the vector processor is infinitely fast, if 30% of the application doesn't run on it, then you must wait at least that long. In this case you could only triple your total speed.
Again, on a modern MIMD system, a hybrid approach might work. The SIMD controller might itself run on multiple threads. There might be several instruction streams broadcast to processors.
Much like the guy who attempted to buy a burger at a fast food place using $2 bills. The cashier had never seen one and thought they were bogus. The manager too.
Different from the guy who wanted to change for a whole stack of $6 bills, and was given $3's.
My 2000 Saturn SL (a 4 door sedan) has an EPA highway rating of 40 MPG. My most recent 50,000 miles averaged 43.7 MPG. It has a 1.9 liter engine and 5 speed manual. The car is reasonably peppy, but not hardly a muscle car. The car was not expensive. A lighter car with a smaller engine and a good highway cruise gear yields good economy. Going 65 MPH instead of 70 MPH gives me an extra 9 MPG, for example, on trips (49 MPG).
According to epa.gov, GM no longer sells a car that gets 40 MPG. To replace it (and this one has over 200,000 miles), i'll need to buy a Toyota Corolla. Detroit needs to build them for me to buy them from Detroit. My complaint isn't that Detroit sells gas guzzling SUVs, it's that Detroit stopped selling cheap, reliable and efficient cars. Perhaps this law will eventually inspire a return to old offerings. After all, the Big Three are not so big anymore.
ll = [[1,'a'], [2,'b'], [3,'c']]
zip(*ll)[1] ## returns ['a','b','c']
actually returns:
('a', 'b', 'c')
I've not gotten far enough into Python to have any clue why. That means that the barrier to entry is fairly high. If this is a standard idiom, then the next question is naturally, What problem does this solve?
It sort of reminds one of regular expressions.
Are there any Linux distributions that have Opera pre-installed? Most of the distributions i've used of late come with Firefox. My Nokia 770 (Linux based) came with Opera. I assumed that was because Opera has a smaller footprint than Firefox (but none too small for my 64 MB RAM (and no swap) pocket computer). However, it might be that Opera was written with GTK, or had been optimized for a stylus based user interface, or something.
Since 1610, the largest telescopes have gotten bigger in area by 3.5% every year.
My last two projects have been to babysit and sun down legacy systems. These were written in Perl, are web & database based, were written over a period of about ten years by multiple people, had no development system (all changes are made in production), and are each at least a half million lines of code.
One such system has two very different kinds of programmers. One kind produces very small, tight, elegant code. Each line may be complex, but there aren't very many of them. Another kind generally codes for conceptually easier tasks, and has a verbose style. Individual lines are trivial assignments, but there are sometimes thousands of them.
The elegant code is MUCH more difficult to debug. It's also, generally, broken much less often. The verbose code is generally very easy to fix.
But i've gotten an appreciation for other ways to do things. And, there aren't nearly as many of us 'elegant coders' out there for replacement. But i still don't see how some apps can be accomplished at all without us. This appears to be language, library and tool independent. Fred Brooks seems to have something to say about this.
I'm firmly in the realm of 'elegant coder' myself. My favorite piece of late is 750 lines of very dense code involving a seven dimensional hash (but sometimes six - it varies) with dynamic indexes. It replaces a 25,000 line chunk that had to be changed every year. The new bit never needs change. However, despite ample documentation and three tutorials, i was unsuccessful in showing the new team how it worked. The new system has designed this bit out completely.
One thing about both projects is that the employer either started a project to replace them, or actually replaced them. In both cases, it was an incredible amount of work and expense to do this. Millions of dollars. It would have been both cheaper and better to fix their problems, and update their user interfaces. At least, once an appropriate programmer was found. Oddly, we have at least two on our current team.
Oh, yes. The replacement projects went over budget and were late by at least a factor of two. Much more, if you consider that something like half of the functionality was removed. And there seems to be one chunk that the new team doesn't seem to be able to deliver. Perhaps the new team needs an elegant coder.
What if the EULA actually meant something?
I mean most EULAs are a hundred pages long, in a tiny font that can't be changed. Look at the iPhone's list of licenses! No one reads them, they just click "accept". And, AFAIK, they don't hold up in court. Useless.
But what if the EULA was a single line? What if it read:
I agree not to give away this book to others.
or something that simple in large, friendly text. You'd click OK, and you'd have actually read it. You could hardly avoid it. And the honest people would actually honor it. The pirates don't even when the content is encrypted. But I would. So, it would amount to the same thing. That would be DRM that works for everyone.
I've got a Nokia 770. The current versions are the 800 and 810. It has an 800x480 color screen, displays PDFs, and has a text editor. It can run more than one app at the same time. So, you could read the PDF, and annotate it in a memo pad. The device fits in a shirt pocket, like a Palm. You can get a Bluetooth keyboard for it, if you want. I bought a 2 GB flash card for mine. It has WiFi and USB. So the most likely limitation is the small screen. The dots are really tiny. I read PDFs with 800 dots across the page, and adjust the zoom so that the content area just fits. It leads to very tiny text.
Does that do it for you?
What I'd rather do is extract the text from the PDF, or convert it to HTML and view in FBReader or a web browser. When i get Word Doc files, i often convert them to html for reading. I get pictures, but can adjust the screen with and still have a larger font.
Maybe someone could write a PDF viewer that doesn't attempt to retain the as-printed form. That might not be so hard. There are open source PDF readers one could start from.