I only read his most recent book, Next, and found that it didn't really live up to what I'd hoped from the dust jacket. It was full of interesting ideas, but eventually it just wandered off and I wondered what the point was. It also confirmed what I suspected about Crichton before I'd read anything of his -- that his books are basically plot-driven, which explains their success at airports etc. But he was clearly a modern man who liked to think and discuss ideas, and I think any Slashdotter should be able to respect that. Couldn't disagree with the "andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag more.
For those that modded the parent "Troll": Michael Crichton's Web site seems to be down now, but he gave a speech called "Aliens Cause Global Warming" in which he claimed to debunk "consensus science." The gist was that political discussion of global warming too often invoked "scientific consensus," where he argued that science was not consensus-based and that such claims were therefore meaningless.
Similarly, though we may not have consensus that Michael Crichton is dead, it makes absolutely no difference to him.
It's not very often you get to see the boot up but in one case they rebooted the system after they landed and in the other my partners crashed when we were trying to change the default language.
Oh my God, that's terrible! My condolences for your loss, and I will never use Linux again.
OS/2 1.3 lived on for many years in ATM machines. Unlike Windows 3.1x, it was considered the most rock solid 16 bit OS out there. What did a majority of the machines get replaced with?... oh Windows.
And as I've said in earlier stories, that's a bummer.
Here in California we still have two types of Bank of America ATM machines. The older models, with the amber monochrome screens, I am told still run OS/2. The newer ones, with the color LCD screens, run Windows, and they are MUCH slower than the old ones and their interface is much less streamlined and intuitive.
Now I ask you: It's an ATM machine. What was gained by the transition? The new ones allow you to do some fancy things -- such as setting preferences, so you can hit a "Quick Cash" button and get a predetermined amount with one keypress -- but most folks are just trying to get money out of the things and never spend the time to configure their own preferences. Really the only benefit of the new machines was the ability to show color ads during the transaction, but otherwise the OS/2 software was perfectly capable of handling the required operation (and even more so).
Sometimes I wish more applications developers had experience with the embedded systems world. Know what I mean?
I have found that most people will not state their opinions if they are forced to sign them.
If true, this is very disappointing to me. I was taught from a very young age that if you have anything to say, you sign it. Sign it and date it. You may well be totally off-base and somebody may call you to task for it, but if so, that's life. It may not feel great to get called to account for your opinions all the time, but one day you will realize that you've become a person with integrity.
Wait. Everybody knows you... so you have to stay on the QT? Doesn't one usually "stay on the QT" when one is doing something sort of crooked? If you're not advertising, as you claim, what exactly is your motive?
As long as you stay on true public property -- that is, places to which the public has unimpeded access, you can film.
I'm really not so sure about that. I don't know the specific law (hence the not-sure)... but in my state (California), polling places have signage out in front that says you're basically not allowed to talk about election issues within XX number of feet of the polling place. It may sound like an infringement of personal liberties, but it seems like a good thing to me.
I think it's worth noting, also, that the compunction to meet such challenges is particularly strong where the proscription against the given activity doesn't seem fair.
People are not stupid. If an Authority tells me, "We do not want you to look into the laser beam. Nay, in fact, you are expressly prohibited from looking directly into the laser beam," I am probably going to nod my head and say. "OK, I will not do that." There is something in the core of my being that suggests to me that this rule is probably for my own good.
If you say to me, on the other hand, "We have sold you a copy of this data set, and despite the fact that manipulating data sets is precisely what computers are good at, we do not want you to use your computer to make yourself another copy of this data set. In fact, you cannot make a copy -- if you want another copy you must buy it from us" -- well, to me that restriction doesn't sound like it's for my own good. It sounds like it's expressly for your good only, while making life harder for me.
Scientific experiments have shown that even some animals possess a sense of fairness. They will help each other where the outcome is to their mutual benefit, and they will show hostility when another animal is rewarded more than themselves for the same activity.
People express a form of this idea when they say things like "the world doesn't owe you a living." Perhaps people need to say it to the entertainment industry more often.
Amazing as it sounds, I still have very VERY old data that goes as far back as 7th grade when I started using computers. I know of no converter for Professional Write that will convert Professional Write documents into ODF, or even MS Word 97/2000/2003.
The only hope I have is that I can use strings to extract the text elements of the data.
Jeez! You that know when people say "Google is your friend" they're not just trying to be funny, right? Try these guys -- it's not free, but it claims to do the job. If you have a lot of data, they sell a product that will let you do the conversion yourself. How much are those old files really worth to you? Or, Microsoft has some suggestions.
I think you misunderstood. The car doesn't have a wind turbine on it. The energy company, which controls the fuel supply for the car, has a farm of wind turbines that it uses to generate electric power that is used to charge batteries, which are put into the cars. What he's saying is that he won't be using coal-fired turbines to charge up the zero-emission vehicles. But let's see whether that actually turns out to be true.
Actually, now that I think about it, Gillette is the wrong model. The current car model is the PC model: Pay a bunch of money up front for the computer, pay for software and support on an ongoing basis, eventually send the computer to the junkyard. Agassi's model is the cell phone model: Pay next to nothing up front, pay the service provider regular installments, replace or upgrade the hardware as needed for a nominal fee, but the hardware is all tied to the service provider. What you're paying for is not a car, but transportation.
It's an intriguing concept, but it's hard to see it taking off in the U.S., where the automobile probably ranks ahead of diamond jewelry as a universally-recognized status symbol. Even Prius owners are making a statement about their lifestyle.
This is the electric-car effort spearheaded by Shai Agassi, formerly of SAP. He was profiled in Wired a couple of issues back.
The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
In short, the idea is to move away from the Gillette razor model for cars, toward the cell phone model.
Javascript was designed specifically to: 1) Have a similar syntax to java
I'm afraid not. Both Java and JavaScript were designed to have syntax similar to C. Java did not exist when Netscape began work on JavaScript. Over time, JavaScript has perhaps evolved to resemble Java more than it used to, but this is at least 13 years into the game.
I've never dealt with Oracle's in-house consultants, because I'm not dumb enough to spend good money on Oracle's software.
Cheap shot. Oracle makes arguably the best database software in the world. The thing is, not everybody needs the best database software in the world. Probably the majority can settle for a lot less.
I can't argue your point about Oracle's consulting group, though. We've all heard stories.
When is the press going to realize that Java != Javascript? (Or Java !== Javascript, even!)
Heh heh heh. Believe it or not, when I first interviewed for a Senior Editor position at Web Techniques magazine, back around 2000, I had never been any kind of Junior Editor before. I just assumed I could do the job. In the course of several interviews, the editorial staff asked me a number of questions about Web technologies, including one from the editor-in-chief: "What's the relationship between Java and JavaScript?"
I got really nervous for a second. I wasn't sure what to say. My interviewer raised an eyebrow. Finally I stammered out, "Well... I'm not sure I really know how to answer that. The truth is there really isn't much of a relationship." I then talked about Sun's release of Java 1.0, and how Netscape had been working on a language called LiveScript that they planned to include in their browser, and that they changed the name to JavaScript as a favor to Sun. But, I emphasized, the languages were really not very closely related, and I felt a little awkward comparing them without maybe a more specific question. My interviewer jotted down a couple of notes and suggested we move on to another topic.
I later found out that a big part of the reason they hired me, despite my lack of publishing experience at the time, was because of all the candidates they interviewed -- some with years of experience in the trade press -- not one but me had a satisfactory answer to the Java/JavaScript question. Most said something along the lines of "JavaScript is a stripped-down version of Java for Web browsers."
So in answer to your question -- when will the press get a clue -- I'm not sure. But I can testify from firsthand experience that they're working on it!;-)
I understand the theoretical value of this, but I have never heard of anybody suing their way past Microsoft's EULAs, or getting any sort of compensation for bugs, no matter how heinous.
Maybe not, but the world isn't quite so black and white. Remember, most civil lawsuits never make it to court. Everybody settles. In the case of a software vendor, their chosen method of "settling" will be to help you fix your problem. (After all, it's in nobody's interests to let their own customers go out of business.)
For example, not naming names, I know of one company who was doing something a little funny with their Oracle database. Funny, but it worked -- that is, until Oracle came up with some new patches that eliminated the loophole that this particular customer was exploiting. That effectively ground this customer's systems to a halt. But believe it or not, Oracle actually went ahead and supplied the customer with a custom build of the Oracle database software that allowed the customer's hack to keep functioning. It was a one-time only offer: "Now fix your code." But Oracle did it. It's all in the nature of enterprise software contracts -- give us enough money, and we'll do things for you.
You could argue that that's silly -- if the customer had been using an open source database instead of the Oracle product, they could have gone in and made the fixes themselves. But who was going to offer any kind of support for their custom, modified version of an open source product? Oracle was still willing to stand behind its own custom build. Would Red Hat stand behind one that you compiled yourself?
Maybe it is all "due diligence theater," and maybe it's not. If having a list of companies who provide you with your software is what gets you funding, and gets you insured, and whatever else, then that's the name of the game and you'd better play ball.
Scientific research is just that -- research. If it were as easy as doing a couple of experiments, revealing the "truth" and moving on to the next thing, we'd all be living around Alpha Centauri by now. But science is hard and therefore a lot of conclusions are naturally going to be wrong. If that weren't the case then we wouldn't even need any scientific journals -- all we'd need would be newspapers.
Remember the whole "theory of evolution" issue that the creationists keep harping on? "They call it a theory so it must not really be true?" We all know that evolution is just about as "true" as any science gets -- and yet surely there are some portions of the current body of knowledge about evolution that will one day be falsified by later research. That's not a bad thing.
Notable research that has since been thought to be flawed or insufficient: Newtonian physics. Niels Bohr's model of the atom. Gregor Mendel's research into genetics. Einstein's theory of general relativity. Koch's postulates for determining disease causation. Quantum mechanics. And so on.
almost every vendor in existance has explicity information in their EULA that states that they are not responsible for anything basically related to any type of "protection"
Every vendor in existence except Microsoft, perhaps? I agree wholeheartedly with the GP. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. I'm not being a shill here, or trying to be funny -- it's just the truth. If you need to cover your ass -- and by "need" I mean "have the legal responsibility to" -- downloading Windows binaries of OpenOffice.org from a Web site backed by no vendor just isn't going to cut it. Even VI isn't going to cut it if there's some small chance that you'll wake up one morning and find that VI seems to be corrupting everyone's saved files, and there's nobody to call to fix the problem for you. That's what CFOs want to hear: that in the however-unlikely eventuality that there's a serious problem with software, you have a Throat to Choke. And that's what commercial software vendors offer. Large enterprise customers don't get their license terms from a little piece of paper slipped inside the software box. They call the vendor's sales department and arrange lunch, and go from there.
Sorry; I'm still drawing a blank. What errors with Gears? And how would you install Gears before installing Chrome -- you mean in another browser? How would that affect Chrome?
Google Gears stood in the way of successful installation.
Could you be more specific? Cuz I have no idea what you're talking about. True, Chrome includes the capabilities of the Google Gears plug-in for Firefox and IE, built-in. What does that have to do with installation?
If you're talking about Peer-to-Peer, good luck without end-to-end connectivity.
Well, if you don't care about that then you may as well kiss goodbye to SSH, Remote Desktop, Skype, P2P, hosting PC games or running your own IRC/HTTP/SMTP server.
I do all of that right now, and guess what? My PC has a non-routable IP address, so it's not end-to-end. Amazing, I know.
Slashdot Mirror
I only read his most recent book, Next, and found that it didn't really live up to what I'd hoped from the dust jacket. It was full of interesting ideas, but eventually it just wandered off and I wondered what the point was. It also confirmed what I suspected about Crichton before I'd read anything of his -- that his books are basically plot-driven, which explains their success at airports etc. But he was clearly a modern man who liked to think and discuss ideas, and I think any Slashdotter should be able to respect that. Couldn't disagree with the "andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag more.
For those that modded the parent "Troll": Michael Crichton's Web site seems to be down now, but he gave a speech called "Aliens Cause Global Warming" in which he claimed to debunk "consensus science." The gist was that political discussion of global warming too often invoked "scientific consensus," where he argued that science was not consensus-based and that such claims were therefore meaningless.
Similarly, though we may not have consensus that Michael Crichton is dead, it makes absolutely no difference to him.
It's not very often you get to see the boot up but in one case they rebooted the system after they landed and in the other my partners crashed when we were trying to change the default language.
Oh my God, that's terrible! My condolences for your loss, and I will never use Linux again.
OS/2 1.3 lived on for many years in ATM machines. Unlike Windows 3.1x, it was considered the most rock solid 16 bit OS out there. What did a majority of the machines get replaced with?... oh Windows.
And as I've said in earlier stories, that's a bummer.
Here in California we still have two types of Bank of America ATM machines. The older models, with the amber monochrome screens, I am told still run OS/2. The newer ones, with the color LCD screens, run Windows, and they are MUCH slower than the old ones and their interface is much less streamlined and intuitive.
Now I ask you: It's an ATM machine. What was gained by the transition? The new ones allow you to do some fancy things -- such as setting preferences, so you can hit a "Quick Cash" button and get a predetermined amount with one keypress -- but most folks are just trying to get money out of the things and never spend the time to configure their own preferences. Really the only benefit of the new machines was the ability to show color ads during the transaction, but otherwise the OS/2 software was perfectly capable of handling the required operation (and even more so).
Sometimes I wish more applications developers had experience with the embedded systems world. Know what I mean?
I have found that most people will not state their opinions if they are forced to sign them.
If true, this is very disappointing to me. I was taught from a very young age that if you have anything to say, you sign it. Sign it and date it. You may well be totally off-base and somebody may call you to task for it, but if so, that's life. It may not feel great to get called to account for your opinions all the time, but one day you will realize that you've become a person with integrity.
Wait. Everybody knows you ... so you have to stay on the QT? Doesn't one usually "stay on the QT" when one is doing something sort of crooked? If you're not advertising, as you claim, what exactly is your motive?
As long as you stay on true public property -- that is, places to which the public has unimpeded access, you can film.
I'm really not so sure about that. I don't know the specific law (hence the not-sure)... but in my state (California), polling places have signage out in front that says you're basically not allowed to talk about election issues within XX number of feet of the polling place. It may sound like an infringement of personal liberties, but it seems like a good thing to me.
I think it's worth noting, also, that the compunction to meet such challenges is particularly strong where the proscription against the given activity doesn't seem fair.
People are not stupid. If an Authority tells me, "We do not want you to look into the laser beam. Nay, in fact, you are expressly prohibited from looking directly into the laser beam," I am probably going to nod my head and say. "OK, I will not do that." There is something in the core of my being that suggests to me that this rule is probably for my own good.
If you say to me, on the other hand, "We have sold you a copy of this data set, and despite the fact that manipulating data sets is precisely what computers are good at, we do not want you to use your computer to make yourself another copy of this data set. In fact, you cannot make a copy -- if you want another copy you must buy it from us" -- well, to me that restriction doesn't sound like it's for my own good. It sounds like it's expressly for your good only, while making life harder for me.
Scientific experiments have shown that even some animals possess a sense of fairness. They will help each other where the outcome is to their mutual benefit, and they will show hostility when another animal is rewarded more than themselves for the same activity.
People express a form of this idea when they say things like "the world doesn't owe you a living." Perhaps people need to say it to the entertainment industry more often.
Eventually y'all progress to a huge orgy, so everyone in the neighborhood has a CB Radio.
Except your wife. Your wife is Cogent Communications.
Amazing as it sounds, I still have very VERY old data that goes as far back as 7th grade when I started using computers. I know of no converter for Professional Write that will convert Professional Write documents into ODF, or even MS Word 97/2000/2003. The only hope I have is that I can use strings to extract the text elements of the data.
Jeez! You that know when people say "Google is your friend" they're not just trying to be funny, right? Try these guys -- it's not free, but it claims to do the job. If you have a lot of data, they sell a product that will let you do the conversion yourself. How much are those old files really worth to you? Or, Microsoft has some suggestions.
I also purchased a second weapon, realizing the limitations of the one I had when it came to home defense.
Yeah, man. When those wild boars start coming down the chimney you gotta be ready.
I think you misunderstood. The car doesn't have a wind turbine on it. The energy company, which controls the fuel supply for the car, has a farm of wind turbines that it uses to generate electric power that is used to charge batteries, which are put into the cars. What he's saying is that he won't be using coal-fired turbines to charge up the zero-emission vehicles. But let's see whether that actually turns out to be true.
According to Scientific American, the plan is to power the cars with "wind turbines and other renewable sources (when possible)". Take it as you will.
Actually, now that I think about it, Gillette is the wrong model. The current car model is the PC model: Pay a bunch of money up front for the computer, pay for software and support on an ongoing basis, eventually send the computer to the junkyard. Agassi's model is the cell phone model: Pay next to nothing up front, pay the service provider regular installments, replace or upgrade the hardware as needed for a nominal fee, but the hardware is all tied to the service provider. What you're paying for is not a car, but transportation.
It's an intriguing concept, but it's hard to see it taking off in the U.S., where the automobile probably ranks ahead of diamond jewelry as a universally-recognized status symbol. Even Prius owners are making a statement about their lifestyle.
But what do I know? I ride the bus.
This is the electric-car effort spearheaded by Shai Agassi, formerly of SAP. He was profiled in Wired a couple of issues back.
The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
In short, the idea is to move away from the Gillette razor model for cars, toward the cell phone model.
Javascript was designed specifically to: 1) Have a similar syntax to java
I'm afraid not. Both Java and JavaScript were designed to have syntax similar to C. Java did not exist when Netscape began work on JavaScript. Over time, JavaScript has perhaps evolved to resemble Java more than it used to, but this is at least 13 years into the game.
2) Be a light scripting language
Exactly unlike Java. So your point?
I've never dealt with Oracle's in-house consultants, because I'm not dumb enough to spend good money on Oracle's software.
Cheap shot. Oracle makes arguably the best database software in the world. The thing is, not everybody needs the best database software in the world. Probably the majority can settle for a lot less.
I can't argue your point about Oracle's consulting group, though. We've all heard stories.
When is the press going to realize that Java != Javascript? (Or Java !== Javascript, even!)
Heh heh heh. Believe it or not, when I first interviewed for a Senior Editor position at Web Techniques magazine, back around 2000, I had never been any kind of Junior Editor before. I just assumed I could do the job. In the course of several interviews, the editorial staff asked me a number of questions about Web technologies, including one from the editor-in-chief: "What's the relationship between Java and JavaScript?"
I got really nervous for a second. I wasn't sure what to say. My interviewer raised an eyebrow. Finally I stammered out, "Well... I'm not sure I really know how to answer that. The truth is there really isn't much of a relationship." I then talked about Sun's release of Java 1.0, and how Netscape had been working on a language called LiveScript that they planned to include in their browser, and that they changed the name to JavaScript as a favor to Sun. But, I emphasized, the languages were really not very closely related, and I felt a little awkward comparing them without maybe a more specific question. My interviewer jotted down a couple of notes and suggested we move on to another topic.
I later found out that a big part of the reason they hired me, despite my lack of publishing experience at the time, was because of all the candidates they interviewed -- some with years of experience in the trade press -- not one but me had a satisfactory answer to the Java/JavaScript question. Most said something along the lines of "JavaScript is a stripped-down version of Java for Web browsers."
So in answer to your question -- when will the press get a clue -- I'm not sure. But I can testify from firsthand experience that they're working on it! ;-)
I understand the theoretical value of this, but I have never heard of anybody suing their way past Microsoft's EULAs, or getting any sort of compensation for bugs, no matter how heinous.
Maybe not, but the world isn't quite so black and white. Remember, most civil lawsuits never make it to court. Everybody settles. In the case of a software vendor, their chosen method of "settling" will be to help you fix your problem. (After all, it's in nobody's interests to let their own customers go out of business.)
For example, not naming names, I know of one company who was doing something a little funny with their Oracle database. Funny, but it worked -- that is, until Oracle came up with some new patches that eliminated the loophole that this particular customer was exploiting. That effectively ground this customer's systems to a halt. But believe it or not, Oracle actually went ahead and supplied the customer with a custom build of the Oracle database software that allowed the customer's hack to keep functioning. It was a one-time only offer: "Now fix your code." But Oracle did it. It's all in the nature of enterprise software contracts -- give us enough money, and we'll do things for you.
You could argue that that's silly -- if the customer had been using an open source database instead of the Oracle product, they could have gone in and made the fixes themselves. But who was going to offer any kind of support for their custom, modified version of an open source product? Oracle was still willing to stand behind its own custom build. Would Red Hat stand behind one that you compiled yourself?
Maybe it is all "due diligence theater," and maybe it's not. If having a list of companies who provide you with your software is what gets you funding, and gets you insured, and whatever else, then that's the name of the game and you'd better play ball.
Scientific research is just that -- research. If it were as easy as doing a couple of experiments, revealing the "truth" and moving on to the next thing, we'd all be living around Alpha Centauri by now. But science is hard and therefore a lot of conclusions are naturally going to be wrong. If that weren't the case then we wouldn't even need any scientific journals -- all we'd need would be newspapers.
Remember the whole "theory of evolution" issue that the creationists keep harping on? "They call it a theory so it must not really be true?" We all know that evolution is just about as "true" as any science gets -- and yet surely there are some portions of the current body of knowledge about evolution that will one day be falsified by later research. That's not a bad thing.
Notable research that has since been thought to be flawed or insufficient: Newtonian physics. Niels Bohr's model of the atom. Gregor Mendel's research into genetics. Einstein's theory of general relativity. Koch's postulates for determining disease causation. Quantum mechanics. And so on.
almost every vendor in existance has explicity information in their EULA that states that they are not responsible for anything basically related to any type of "protection"
Every vendor in existence except Microsoft, perhaps? I agree wholeheartedly with the GP. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. I'm not being a shill here, or trying to be funny -- it's just the truth. If you need to cover your ass -- and by "need" I mean "have the legal responsibility to" -- downloading Windows binaries of OpenOffice.org from a Web site backed by no vendor just isn't going to cut it. Even VI isn't going to cut it if there's some small chance that you'll wake up one morning and find that VI seems to be corrupting everyone's saved files, and there's nobody to call to fix the problem for you. That's what CFOs want to hear: that in the however-unlikely eventuality that there's a serious problem with software, you have a Throat to Choke. And that's what commercial software vendors offer. Large enterprise customers don't get their license terms from a little piece of paper slipped inside the software box. They call the vendor's sales department and arrange lunch, and go from there.
You're being funny ... but you're right. The people who frequent escorts do call it that.
Sorry; I'm still drawing a blank. What errors with Gears? And how would you install Gears before installing Chrome -- you mean in another browser? How would that affect Chrome?
Google Gears stood in the way of successful installation.
Could you be more specific? Cuz I have no idea what you're talking about. True, Chrome includes the capabilities of the Google Gears plug-in for Firefox and IE, built-in. What does that have to do with installation?
If you're talking about Peer-to-Peer, good luck without end-to-end connectivity. Well, if you don't care about that then you may as well kiss goodbye to SSH, Remote Desktop, Skype, P2P, hosting PC games or running your own IRC/HTTP/SMTP server.
I do all of that right now, and guess what? My PC has a non-routable IP address, so it's not end-to-end. Amazing, I know.