I did add the reservation "to the current technological cycle". Both of your examples, 640k and 486DX2, were "good enough" for quite some time at their time. The famous 640k should be enough for everyone quote by Bill Gates had the same semantics. Gates did mean 640k were enough for the masses for the time being. His comment is frequently taken out of context to show lack of insight. For example, 250GB hard drives today are good enough for pretty much everyone, where everyone means the masses and not Big Businesses and people with special space needs. Will it change? Of course it will, but for now it's good enough.
Computers are getting to the point of "good enough" for the current technological cycle. This means people won't be shelling out hundreds of dollars every three years for a new computer when their old computer is good enough and in good shape thanks to an extended warranty.
Hiding an embarrassing employee's web presence is a common PR tactic used to delay journalists by making them look for facts about the employee longer. The lazy journalists and bloggers who just want to publish now will have fewer facts and skimpier stories which translates to less interesting stories and less media attention.
This is part of a huge conspiracy to re-enact The West Wing in real life.
The Nobel Prize committee is just following The West Wing script, where the ideal president has a Nobel Prize (fictional President Bartlet received a Nobel Prize in economics).
Symantec doesn't want to shutdown the criminals who create demand for Symantec's products. This is all PR bull. Why this is on Slashdot's front page is beyond me.
If I as a customer and citizen get to view whole books or book snippets for free while still having access to books as I used to have in the past, then why should I care if Google "monopolizes" the virtual library market or not?
I can vouch for the site and newspaper's credibility
An Anonymous Coward vouching for a newspaper's credibility. Very credible.
Yedioth Achronoth along with its YNet website is the paper with the largest circulation in Israel for the same reason other newspapers around the world gain popularity - very "yellow" infortainment. It is hardly credible. The NYTimes Israeli equivalent newspaper in Israel is Haaretz.
people that dislike the ribbon interface are more likely to be "power users" that tinker and customize everything
In this interesting talk, the program manager of the Office UI group mentioned that fewer than 2% of users customize office. And of those, 80% change two or fewer buttons. Power users are really quite scarce.
That's a rather bold statement. You do realize that those neat features of Clojure like STM or actors weren't originally invented for it? In fact, you could do most (all?) of that in Haskell before Clojure even appeared.
I do realize that many of the innovations in Clojure are not brand new, but Clojure did put them into a practical form that incorporates many "right" innovations into one language. Haskell is a fine language and one of the languages that heavily influenced Clojure. Clojure makes some paradigms used in Haskell far more usable than they are in their original form.
On a side note, while STM sounds great in theory for care-free concurrent programming, the performance penalty that comes with it in existing implementations is hefty. It's definitely a prospective area, but it needs more research before the results are consistently usable in production.
In addition, things like STM is more of a general title for a set of technologies with same general principles but vastly different implementation. Clojure's implementation plus the immutability paradigm Clojure embraces makes its STM darn close to care-free concurrent programming in almost all situations you'll encounter. And I'm well aware that this is an even bolder statement, but I strongly recommend checking it out if you do any kind of concurrent programming. It delivers.
I chose not to use the Erlang-style actor model for same-process state management in Clojure for several reasons:
It is a much more complex programming model, requiring 2-message conversations for the simplest data reads, and forcing the use of blocking message receives, which introduce the potential for deadlock. Programming for the failure modes of distribution means utilizing timeouts etc. It causes a bifurcation of the program protocols, some of which are represented by functions and others by the values of messages.
It doesn't let you fully leverage the efficiencies of being in the same process. It is quite possible to efficiently directly share a large immutable data structure between threads, but the actor model forces intervening conversations and, potentially, copying. Reads and writes get serialized and block each other, etc.
It reduces your flexibility in modeling - this is a world in which everyone sits in a windowless room and communicates only by mail. Programs are decomposed as piles of blocking switch statements. You can only handle messages you anticipated receiving. Coordinating activities involving multiple actors is very difficult. You can't observe anything without its cooperation/coordination - making ad-hoc reporting or analysis impossible, instead forcing every actor to participate in each protocol.
It is often the case that taking something that works well locally and transparently distributing it doesn't work out - the conversation granularity is too chatty or the message payloads are too large or the failure modes change the optimal work partitioning, i.e. transparent distribution isn't transparent and the code has to change anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I did add the reservation "to the current technological cycle". Both of your examples, 640k and 486DX2, were "good enough" for quite some time at their time. The famous 640k should be enough for everyone quote by Bill Gates had the same semantics. Gates did mean 640k were enough for the masses for the time being. His comment is frequently taken out of context to show lack of insight. For example, 250GB hard drives today are good enough for pretty much everyone, where everyone means the masses and not Big Businesses and people with special space needs. Will it change? Of course it will, but for now it's good enough.
Computers are getting to the point of "good enough" for the current technological cycle. This means people won't be shelling out hundreds of dollars every three years for a new computer when their old computer is good enough and in good shape thanks to an extended warranty.
The bane of Wikipedia is people with deletionist mentality.
TFA listed only the obvious stuff.
What about: Cash, credit cards, tickets, ID cards, wallets, keys, remote controls, maps, compasses, GPS devices, eBook readers, books, newspapers, flashlights, USB drives and other portable media, calculators, dictionaries, calenders, scanners of all kinds, road signs, ballot-boxes, stereo systems, video cameras, microphones, VCR/DVD players, TiVos, computer mice, laser pointers, thermometers, the box of your desktop computer, physical pictures, receipts, coupons, fliers, brochures, menus, projectors, etc.
And this is only the technologically easy stuff. Some of it already obsolete in places like Japan.
Indulge.
Much better than "30M GET" posts, IMHO.
A decoy doesn't have to be perfect. If it's good enough to distract, it's a good decoy.
What happens if people start setting their own balloons as decoys?
Any chance you'd do a Reddit IAMA?
Hiding an embarrassing employee's web presence is a common PR tactic used to delay journalists by making them look for facts about the employee longer. The lazy journalists and bloggers who just want to publish now will have fewer facts and skimpier stories which translates to less interesting stories and less media attention.
To be truly useful to travelers, put wikitravel on it with offline google maps of major cities.
Good. With these numbers they're admitting this is beyond control of any legal measure.
This is part of a huge conspiracy to re-enact The West Wing in real life.
The Nobel Prize committee is just following The West Wing script, where the ideal president has a Nobel Prize (fictional President Bartlet received a Nobel Prize in economics).
Symantec doesn't want to shutdown the criminals who create demand for Symantec's products. This is all PR bull. Why this is on Slashdot's front page is beyond me.
I love the irony of holding regular smear meetings in order to make others look like the bad guy.
If I as a customer and citizen get to view whole books or book snippets for free while still having access to books as I used to have in the past, then why should I care if Google "monopolizes" the virtual library market or not?
An Anonymous Coward vouching for a newspaper's credibility. Very credible.
Yedioth Achronoth along with its YNet website is the paper with the largest circulation in Israel for the same reason other newspapers around the world gain popularity - very "yellow" infortainment. It is hardly credible. The NYTimes Israeli equivalent newspaper in Israel is Haaretz.
Finally Google found a use for YouTube - an incentive to phase out old browsers in preparation for their web software.
In this interesting talk, the program manager of the Office UI group mentioned that fewer than 2% of users customize office. And of those, 80% change two or fewer buttons. Power users are really quite scarce.
This subject has already been discussed.
Do this every morning. Not only will it make you fit, it'll also make you feel great during the day.
I was making a point about the instantaneous nature of news in our days.
In today's news world, the big news is that we hear about it only now and not two months ago.
I do realize that many of the innovations in Clojure are not brand new, but Clojure did put them into a practical form that incorporates many "right" innovations into one language. Haskell is a fine language and one of the languages that heavily influenced Clojure. Clojure makes some paradigms used in Haskell far more usable than they are in their original form.
In addition, things like STM is more of a general title for a set of technologies with same general principles but vastly different implementation. Clojure's implementation plus the immutability paradigm Clojure embraces makes its STM darn close to care-free concurrent programming in almost all situations you'll encounter. And I'm well aware that this is an even bolder statement, but I strongly recommend checking it out if you do any kind of concurrent programming. It delivers.