Speaking as a greybeard (both literally and as a thirty-year veteran of this industry), bullshit. When I was young there were still a few people around who could write software by writing opcodes out in pencil on the train home and have them work first time without bugs (Chris Burton, who helped build the Manchester Mark One, I'm thinking of you), but most people can't. And most people cannot write C well enough to outperform the software that the same person can write in a decent high level language.
Virtually no-one, now, can write anything sophisticated or complex in opcodes. Virtually no-one can do it even in assembler (yes, I know you did a little assembler project in CS101, but that really doesn't count). Yes, I know that a few rare geniuses can write exceedingly efficient fault free code in C or C++. Most complex programs written in C or C++, however, are too expensive in debugging and maintenance costs to outweigh any very small performance advantages they might have over high level languiages. Grow up, and live in the modern age. Toggling switches on the console, teletypes, punchcards, assembler and C are all history.
(Mind you, of course, there is some exceedingly bloated code around. I recently installed, on Windows, a Bluetooth device driver that was 60 Megabytes, which I found unbelievable... the fact that we have high level languages is no excuse for bloat or sloppy engineering practices.)
Re:Tab syncing: first thing I'll disable
on
Google I/O Day Two
·
· Score: 1
I really do not want the tabs I browse at home automatically opening up on my work PC. Or my phone, for that matter. Three different media, used for three totally different purposes. It's cool that they figured out how to do this, but I can't see myself ever actually using it.
Simples.
Just don't set up 'Sync' on your work instance of Chrome. I don't know whether you can switch it off if you have set it up, because I'm at work and so I don't have it set up... but I expect you can. I do not want some of my home bookmarks to be visible on my work machine, and, guess what? They aren't. If I want to access them at work, I have chrome beta on my phone, and it does have sync.
I certainly expect to use this new feature, and expect to find it very useful, between my phone, my laptop and my home computer.
The problem is that there is no innovation going on here on the Android side. The Android devices all are trying to be "Well it's no an iWhatever, but it's good enough and it's a bit cheaper".
To which I say to you Asus Transformer. It's quite a bit better than an iPad on quite a lot of measures - faster, longer battery life, better build quality - and, with the addition of the clip-on keyboard, a useful replacement for a laptop for light office tasks and internet surfing. OK, it's more expensive than an iPad, but you're getting what you pay for.
I'd endorse this. I've bought netbooks from Dell with Ubuntu installed and they've been good reliable machines which have worked well (especially considering their price). I think it's worth supporting mainstream manufacturers who ship Linux - that way, they'll be encouraged to offer more models to more customers, and that (I think) builds up the Linux installed base and so helps us all.
Mind you I adopted the original KDE pretty soon after it came out ('98 or '99) and stuck with it until 4.0, which basically wasn't finished/didn't work, much the position Gnome 3.0 is in today... Doing a major re-engineering on a significant component of the Open Source desktop stack is always going to be painful, but they do, from time to time, need to be done. At least with Open Source we can choose our window manager, unlike the Windows world who are just going to have to swallow Metro and pretend they like it.
The reason no-one has yet bothered to port decent office apps to Android is the lack of a keyboard and decent display. If these things catch on (and, provided it was enough cheaper than an Asus Transformer, I'd certainly buy one), then the apps will come.
The first computer I worked on, an ICL 1902, had 8K 32-bit words of core storage, which is to say the equivalent of 32Kb of RAM. It ran at about quarter of a million instructions per second. It supported 18 simultaneous users on teletypes (proper teletypes, with paper rolls, not these new fangled 'glass teletype' things). Later on in life, I was responsible for one single Intel 80486
box (66 million instructions per second, and if I recall correctly about 64Mb of RAM) running UNIX System V.4, which supported a typing pool of thirty typists all doing word-processing on dumb terminals, and five accountants mostly using spreadsheets also on dumb terminals.
My HTC One X runs at 6 Billion instructions per second. OK, they're RISC instructions so you can maybe half that to get a comparable number, but even so... It has 2Gb of RAM. It is five orders of magnitude faster than that ICL 1902, two orders of magnitude faster the 486. The idea that the phone in your pocket isn't a sufficiently powerful computer to support one user doing ordinary office tasks is simply silly. What's been lacking up to now is a convenient user interface for office tasks. Devices like this solve that problem.
My home has on average 100 watts of power available. I can use more in the short term, but doing so depletes the battery and means I'll have to use much less for some part of the week. The wind turbine which is my sole source of power is rated at 750 watts, but only generates that much in absolutely perfect conditions. So I know quite a bit about how to use power economically. I can light my whole house effectively with just 18 watts of LEDs. They're strategically placed, yes - but you can easily read more or less everywhere.
In this situation, the graphics card on my computer (Radeon HD 6850 at 127 watts TDP) is actually the biggest power drain I've got. Obviously, my gaming is limited to two or three hours a day... Power is worth thinking about.
Correctly does not show? Surely a good map shows you what's actually on the ground, and the 'gated off forest roads' are nevertheless roads which (If you have a key to the gate, or else a bicycle) you can actually use. It should show it as what it is - a track, without necessarily public access, but nevertheless there.
UK postcodes generally identify a particular street, or even a particular section of a street if it's particularly long or has a large number of houses.
UK postcodes are just a grid 1km I think, I am on the wrong computer to check. You can always import that leaked Postcode db into a mapping software to see what I mean. This normally translates in to a part of a street.
Wrong. My postcode covers about twelve square kilometers; down in the village they have three within a hundred metres. It's based on a (rough) number of delivery addresses.
For heaven's sake, it's a start, and a start is better than a slap in the face with a wet fish.
Sadly, I think it's England only. Those of you outside the United Kingdom think we're all one country, but we aren't - we're an international union just like the EU. There is no 'UK' educational system. However, we should all of us be supporting initiatives like this where ever we are.
Including, notably, Oracle. SQL is IBM's intellectual property: where would Oracle be if they had to pay IBM punitive damages or stop using SQL? C is AT&T's intellectual property (based in turn on intellectual property from the Universities of Cambridge and London). Where would Oracle be if they had to pay AT&T punitive damages or stop using languages written in C? The x86 opcodes are Intel's intellectual property. Where would Oracle be if they had to pay Intel punitive damages or stop using x86 opcodes?
If Oracle win this, they will be very big losers indeed.
"Journaling makes sense for servers; not so much for personal boxes."
I'm sorry my friend but you must be insane. I don't go uncleanly powering off my boxes intentionally but it still happens a couple times over the course of a month for various reasons (power flickers and the like). In my experience ext2 will fsck its way back to functionality 4 or 5 times tops before it won't fix or the data lost in the fixing is something critical.
Linux was a fun toy and nothing more before ext3 because ext2 is the most destructible filesystem on earth. Don't get me wrong, I played with that toy but that is all it was.
When you really don't know what you're talking about it's best to shut up. I've been running (many) production servers on Linux since 1995; I recall only one instance of a failed fsck. I do remember a number of occasions when a little bit of manual intervention was needed to help fsck along, but if you're competent that intervention was pretty easy. Actually, with e2fsck the intervention was always pretty easy because the defaults rarely failed..
And if you think Linux was a toy, what the hell operating system did you think most of the Internet was running on in those days? It certainly wasn't anything out of Microsoft!
Was discussing this with my boss yesterday. we agreed that money was very effective for motivating salesmen, very poor for motivating engineers. Good challenges and good toys to play with seem to me the best way to motivate engineers (by which I mean they're the best way to motivate me).
Would you like to buy some thousand-year-old snake oil? That's great, I brewed some yesterday.
The proof of millenial sotrage is when you find some thousand-year-old copies that are still readable. Hieroglyphs carved on temple walls count. So does ink on cured calfskin. No form of digital storage has yet got that sort of track record. It may last a thousand years; alternatively, it may not. Come back in nine hundred and ninety nine years and tell us how it's doing.
I'm not knocking the idea - it's a good one - but the icons as shown on the sample page differentiate 'good' from 'bad' icons only by the colour of the surrounding ring. That means that if displayed on a monochroms screen (think e-ink displays, or printout), or viewed by a colour-blind user, the information content is totally lost - at worst they could be actively misleading. Far better if the 'bad' icons had a triangular frame as well as a red border, as with 'warning' road signs, and 'good' icons remained circular and possibly got a non-white background.
Wouldn't Oracle be guilty of this, as well, to some extent? Oracle couldn't possibly be using a 100% "clean" environment for their product or development systems. If they use C and standard libraries, they're using, in effect, copyright-able APIs.
+1, wish I had mod points.
And C was heavily based on B, which was in turn heavily based on BCPL (and BCPL's CINT-code interpreter was a clear fore-runner of the Java Virtual Machine), which in turn was heavily based on the Combined Programming Language. So if Oracle were to win this case, they owe shed-loads of money to the Universities of Cambridge and London, whose code they have so maliciously stolen. Meantime, SQL, the language which is at the core of Oracle's core database product, is clearly the property of IBM, while the database engine itself is written in C... If Oracle win this case, it could bankrupt them.
...and now we have bus drivers and secretaries deciding what applies to us and our trade in the span of mere weeks...
If you'd been following the case you'd know that this judge has been working very hard, for months, to understand the issues and make sure the jury is presented with well-formed questions and good background. How good a job he has been able to do, I don't know because that would require wading through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages:-)
The key point about juries is that they are 'of your peers', people equal to and in a similar position to the people being tried. It does not seem to me that in this case bus drivers and secretaries are in any useful sense 'peers' of software engineers - they lack the knowledge, concepts and language required to form a considered opinion of this case. It's like having a jury of Indonesian rice farmers adjudicating on the Enron case: it doesn't work because they cannot reasonably be expected to understand the arguments. It really doesn't matter how well intentioned or well read the judge may be: without a common language, communication isn't possible (which is, actually, precisely what the case is about).
The number of humans using Linux every day is roughly the number using network connected computers, since somewhere along their path to the data they use from the network is a Linux box doing something useful for them. The number with Linux on their desktop (or phone, or tablet) though, is, admittedly, smaller. But overall a lot more people are using Linux than are using OS X; it's just that those who are using OS X know that they are.
The 20 km range excludes cheap electric model aircraft. Also your location requires something with a lot of excess power, due to the disturbed air over mountains.
Small off-the-shelf quadropters depend on electric motors to control the speed of the rotors, so it's not trivial to drive the rotors directly off an infernal combustion engine. But you could have a small infernal combustion engine driving an alternator or dynamo, generating electricity for the rotors and control system. This would give extended range. Of course, you'd need to build it extremely light if an off-the-shelf quadroptor is going to be able to carry it, but using a model aircraft engine and a bicycle dynamo (and some sort of reduction gear!) it should be feasible. A larger, custom quadroptor designed to carry a lawnmower engine or small petrol generator would be possible but would take much more work and expense to get working. Also, extremely lightweight drones are likely to be tolerated by the authorities even if they're not technically legal, because they won't do too much damage if they crash, but I'd expect people to get much more concerned about a drone weighing 25Kg or more.
Alternatively a blimp has more lifting capacity and lower power requirements at the expense of less manoeuvrability. It could either carry more battery or an infernal combustion engine.
In fact it's still probably http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/bookshelf/hyper/mgi/"> the largest hyperfiction ever written. It's not very good and I'm not very proud of it. The reason people aren't writing things called 'hyperfictions' any more is because they're now writing things called 'role playing games' - but they're still immersive non-linear narratives.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a greybeard (both literally and as a thirty-year veteran of this industry), bullshit. When I was young there were still a few people around who could write software by writing opcodes out in pencil on the train home and have them work first time without bugs (Chris Burton, who helped build the Manchester Mark One, I'm thinking of you), but most people can't. And most people cannot write C well enough to outperform the software that the same person can write in a decent high level language.
Virtually no-one, now, can write anything sophisticated or complex in opcodes. Virtually no-one can do it even in assembler (yes, I know you did a little assembler project in CS101, but that really doesn't count). Yes, I know that a few rare geniuses can write exceedingly efficient fault free code in C or C++. Most complex programs written in C or C++, however, are too expensive in debugging and maintenance costs to outweigh any very small performance advantages they might have over high level languiages. Grow up, and live in the modern age. Toggling switches on the console, teletypes, punchcards, assembler and C are all history.
(Mind you, of course, there is some exceedingly bloated code around. I recently installed, on Windows, a Bluetooth device driver that was 60 Megabytes, which I found unbelievable... the fact that we have high level languages is no excuse for bloat or sloppy engineering practices.)
I really do not want the tabs I browse at home automatically opening up on my work PC. Or my phone, for that matter. Three different media, used for three totally different purposes. It's cool that they figured out how to do this, but I can't see myself ever actually using it.
Simples.
Just don't set up 'Sync' on your work instance of Chrome. I don't know whether you can switch it off if you have set it up, because I'm at work and so I don't have it set up... but I expect you can. I do not want some of my home bookmarks to be visible on my work machine, and, guess what? They aren't. If I want to access them at work, I have chrome beta on my phone, and it does have sync.
I certainly expect to use this new feature, and expect to find it very useful, between my phone, my laptop and my home computer.
If you're going to use the dock all the time, you'd be better off buying a netbook.
Which part of fourteen hours battery life did you not understand?
The problem is that there is no innovation going on here on the Android side. The Android devices all are trying to be "Well it's no an iWhatever, but it's good enough and it's a bit cheaper".
To which I say to you Asus Transformer. It's quite a bit better than an iPad on quite a lot of measures - faster, longer battery life, better build quality - and, with the addition of the clip-on keyboard, a useful replacement for a laptop for light office tasks and internet surfing. OK, it's more expensive than an iPad, but you're getting what you pay for.
I'd endorse this. I've bought netbooks from Dell with Ubuntu installed and they've been good reliable machines which have worked well (especially considering their price). I think it's worth supporting mainstream manufacturers who ship Linux - that way, they'll be encouraged to offer more models to more customers, and that (I think) builds up the Linux installed base and so helps us all.
Can I use the classic AOL meme and say 'me too'?
Mind you I adopted the original KDE pretty soon after it came out ('98 or '99) and stuck with it until 4.0, which basically wasn't finished/didn't work, much the position Gnome 3.0 is in today... Doing a major re-engineering on a significant component of the Open Source desktop stack is always going to be painful, but they do, from time to time, need to be done. At least with Open Source we can choose our window manager, unlike the Windows world who are just going to have to swallow Metro and pretend they like it.
The reason no-one has yet bothered to port decent office apps to Android is the lack of a keyboard and decent display. If these things catch on (and, provided it was enough cheaper than an Asus Transformer, I'd certainly buy one), then the apps will come.
The first computer I worked on, an ICL 1902, had 8K 32-bit words of core storage, which is to say the equivalent of 32Kb of RAM. It ran at about quarter of a million instructions per second. It supported 18 simultaneous users on teletypes (proper teletypes, with paper rolls, not these new fangled 'glass teletype' things). Later on in life, I was responsible for one single Intel 80486
box (66 million instructions per second, and if I recall correctly about 64Mb of RAM) running UNIX System V.4, which supported a typing pool of thirty typists all doing word-processing on dumb terminals, and five accountants mostly using spreadsheets also on dumb terminals.
My HTC One X runs at 6 Billion instructions per second. OK, they're RISC instructions so you can maybe half that to get a comparable number, but even so... It has 2Gb of RAM. It is five orders of magnitude faster than that ICL 1902, two orders of magnitude faster the 486. The idea that the phone in your pocket isn't a sufficiently powerful computer to support one user doing ordinary office tasks is simply silly. What's been lacking up to now is a convenient user interface for office tasks. Devices like this solve that problem.
Build it, and they will come.
I get 'em regularly, and I'm not a subscriber either. I thought everyone did!
... what's the problem?
NOTE: this post may contain traces of sarcasm.
My home has on average 100 watts of power available. I can use more in the short term, but doing so depletes the battery and means I'll have to use much less for some part of the week. The wind turbine which is my sole source of power is rated at 750 watts, but only generates that much in absolutely perfect conditions. So I know quite a bit about how to use power economically. I can light my whole house effectively with just 18 watts of LEDs. They're strategically placed, yes - but you can easily read more or less everywhere.
In this situation, the graphics card on my computer (Radeon HD 6850 at 127 watts TDP) is actually the biggest power drain I've got. Obviously, my gaming is limited to two or three hours a day... Power is worth thinking about.
Correctly does not show? Surely a good map shows you what's actually on the ground, and the 'gated off forest roads' are nevertheless roads which (If you have a key to the gate, or else a bicycle) you can actually use. It should show it as what it is - a track, without necessarily public access, but nevertheless there.
UK postcodes generally identify a particular street, or even a particular section of a street if it's particularly long or has a large number of houses.
UK postcodes are just a grid 1km I think, I am on the wrong computer to check. You can always import that leaked Postcode db into a mapping software to see what I mean. This normally translates in to a part of a street.
Wrong. My postcode covers about twelve square kilometers; down in the village they have three within a hundred metres. It's based on a (rough) number of delivery addresses.
Scrapping the existing curriculum was a good first step
Why not continue the existing program until you develop a replacement? I'm pretty sure even a flawed program is better than none at all.
Because the 'existing program', in England, literally was worse than nothing. It was teaching children to use obsolete versions of Microsoft Office.
For heaven's sake, it's a start, and a start is better than a slap in the face with a wet fish.
Sadly, I think it's England only. Those of you outside the United Kingdom think we're all one country, but we aren't - we're an international union just like the EU. There is no 'UK' educational system. However, we should all of us be supporting initiatives like this where ever we are.
Including, notably, Oracle. SQL is IBM's intellectual property: where would Oracle be if they had to pay IBM punitive damages or stop using SQL? C is AT&T's intellectual property (based in turn on intellectual property from the Universities of Cambridge and London). Where would Oracle be if they had to pay AT&T punitive damages or stop using languages written in C? The x86 opcodes are Intel's intellectual property. Where would Oracle be if they had to pay Intel punitive damages or stop using x86 opcodes?
If Oracle win this, they will be very big losers indeed.
"Journaling makes sense for servers; not so much for personal boxes."
I'm sorry my friend but you must be insane. I don't go uncleanly powering off my boxes intentionally but it still happens a couple times over the course of a month for various reasons (power flickers and the like). In my experience ext2 will fsck its way back to functionality 4 or 5 times tops before it won't fix or the data lost in the fixing is something critical.
Linux was a fun toy and nothing more before ext3 because ext2 is the most destructible filesystem on earth. Don't get me wrong, I played with that toy but that is all it was.
When you really don't know what you're talking about it's best to shut up. I've been running (many) production servers on Linux since 1995; I recall only one instance of a failed fsck. I do remember a number of occasions when a little bit of manual intervention was needed to help fsck along, but if you're competent that intervention was pretty easy. Actually, with e2fsck the intervention was always pretty easy because the defaults rarely failed..
And if you think Linux was a toy, what the hell operating system did you think most of the Internet was running on in those days? It certainly wasn't anything out of Microsoft!
Money
Otherwise why are we truly there?
Was discussing this with my boss yesterday. we agreed that money was very effective for motivating salesmen, very poor for motivating engineers. Good challenges and good toys to play with seem to me the best way to motivate engineers (by which I mean they're the best way to motivate me).
http://millenniata.com/m-disc/
http://www.google.ca/search?q=m-disc
Would you like to buy some thousand-year-old snake oil? That's great, I brewed some yesterday.
The proof of millenial sotrage is when you find some thousand-year-old copies that are still readable. Hieroglyphs carved on temple walls count. So does ink on cured calfskin. No form of digital storage has yet got that sort of track record. It may last a thousand years; alternatively, it may not. Come back in nine hundred and ninety nine years and tell us how it's doing.
I'm not knocking the idea - it's a good one - but the icons as shown on the sample page differentiate 'good' from 'bad' icons only by the colour of the surrounding ring. That means that if displayed on a monochroms screen (think e-ink displays, or printout), or viewed by a colour-blind user, the information content is totally lost - at worst they could be actively misleading. Far better if the 'bad' icons had a triangular frame as well as a red border, as with 'warning' road signs, and 'good' icons remained circular and possibly got a non-white background.
Wouldn't Oracle be guilty of this, as well, to some extent? Oracle couldn't possibly be using a 100% "clean" environment for their product or development systems. If they use C and standard libraries, they're using, in effect, copyright-able APIs.
+1, wish I had mod points.
And C was heavily based on B, which was in turn heavily based on BCPL (and BCPL's CINT-code interpreter was a clear fore-runner of the Java Virtual Machine), which in turn was heavily based on the Combined Programming Language. So if Oracle were to win this case, they owe shed-loads of money to the Universities of Cambridge and London, whose code they have so maliciously stolen. Meantime, SQL, the language which is at the core of Oracle's core database product, is clearly the property of IBM, while the database engine itself is written in C... If Oracle win this case, it could bankrupt them.
...and now we have bus drivers and secretaries deciding what applies to us and our trade in the span of mere weeks...
If you'd been following the case you'd know that this judge has been working very hard, for months, to understand the issues and make sure the jury is presented with well-formed questions and good background. How good a job he has been able to do, I don't know because that would require wading through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages :-)
The key point about juries is that they are 'of your peers', people equal to and in a similar position to the people being tried. It does not seem to me that in this case bus drivers and secretaries are in any useful sense 'peers' of software engineers - they lack the knowledge, concepts and language required to form a considered opinion of this case. It's like having a jury of Indonesian rice farmers adjudicating on the Enron case: it doesn't work because they cannot reasonably be expected to understand the arguments. It really doesn't matter how well intentioned or well read the judge may be: without a common language, communication isn't possible (which is, actually, precisely what the case is about).
So, "sudo apt-get install whatever" is too complicated?
Actually, yes it is. That's the reason it never was the year of Linux right there. Sudo? apt-get? Linux is full of gobbledy-gook just like that.
So if you're a member of the point-and-drool generation, use Synaptic, for heaven's sake. How hard is that?
The number of humans using Linux every day is roughly the number using network connected computers, since somewhere along their path to the data they use from the network is a Linux box doing something useful for them. The number with Linux on their desktop (or phone, or tablet) though, is, admittedly, smaller. But overall a lot more people are using Linux than are using OS X; it's just that those who are using OS X know that they are.
The 20 km range excludes cheap electric model aircraft. Also your location requires something with a lot of excess power, due to the disturbed air over mountains.
Small off-the-shelf quadropters depend on electric motors to control the speed of the rotors, so it's not trivial to drive the rotors directly off an infernal combustion engine. But you could have a small infernal combustion engine driving an alternator or dynamo, generating electricity for the rotors and control system. This would give extended range. Of course, you'd need to build it extremely light if an off-the-shelf quadroptor is going to be able to carry it, but using a model aircraft engine and a bicycle dynamo (and some sort of reduction gear!) it should be feasible. A larger, custom quadroptor designed to carry a lawnmower engine or small petrol generator would be possible but would take much more work and expense to get working. Also, extremely lightweight drones are likely to be tolerated by the authorities even if they're not technically legal, because they won't do too much damage if they crash, but I'd expect people to get much more concerned about a drone weighing 25Kg or more.
Alternatively a blimp has more lifting capacity and lower power requirements at the expense of less manoeuvrability. It could either carry more battery or an infernal combustion engine.
In fact it's still probably http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/bookshelf/hyper/mgi/"> the largest hyperfiction ever written. It's not very good and I'm not very proud of it. The reason people aren't writing things called 'hyperfictions' any more is because they're now writing things called 'role playing games' - but they're still immersive non-linear narratives.