Jobs maintaining these creations will always exist, because they wouldn't be able to administer themselves.
Ermm.. I dunno about this. Seems like you're contradicting yourself a little bit. If the maintenance of these machines can better be done by other machines, capable of ±0.01mm tolerances, then machines will take over that job.
I think what you mean to say is, there will always be work to create more, and better machines. Machines are incapable - so far - of original sin (the creative kind), though they are capable of the re-productive kind...
What bothers me about the onward march of technological progress is that it often appears only to serve the purpose of making machines, instead of serving the higher purpose of solving some of mankinds very real problems. I don't think the world needs more and more plastic junk landfill, yet todays cell phone mfr's seem quite happy to have replaced their countless millions of plastic toys with yet more countless millions of plastic toys, for example.
What I'd like to see is a true revolution of machines that feed people. Someone needs to take the 'turkey guts into oil' machines and make them utterly portable, and utterly personal. That'd be a really useful direction for technology, in my opinion...
It used to be that a computers 'usefulness' was measured not in terms of MIPS, or Desktop Dominance, or "user base", but in terms of Decisions made.
Any successful branch of a computer program, determined by its Logic Design, is a "Decision".
Think "Yes" or "No" trees in any flow diagram: this was a "Decision".
IBM used to promote their machines as having "made 150,000 decisions a day". These weren't just program branches, but real business decisions - e.g. "Is this account overdue?" - Yes == one successful Decision. No == a Decision, etc.
I still think this is a pretty useful metric, since it equates to actual business use, not just "performance"...
A word or phrase, the meaning of which which people rarely care enough about to actually try to understand before they use... or complain about its so-called 'use'.
I think "buzzword" is the worst buzz word of all. Its like, an "anti-" word...
What is it you don't understand about the phrase "paradigm shift"? What makes this a 'bullshit' phrase?
Just because your pop culture has allowed you to overlook the very real, very significant, definition of the word 'paradigm', and just because you are unable to see past general hubris on 'phrase bigotry', doesn't lessen the actual value of the meanings of words.
Fact: The "Paradigm Shift" actually means something.
Counter-Fact: Very few people give a shit enough about their language to actually care to understand what such phrases mean.
"Open Source" -is- a change in paradigm. Very definitely so.
Arrogant Brand-Brainwashed English-language speakers notwithstanding, "Paradigm Shift" and "Open Source" are two phrases which actually do belong together.
Open Source in industry does require you to refresh your paradigm cache...
... Like a modern touchstone the iPod Mini is a product people will love to hold...
The reason for this is simple: iPod is pure Bar of Soap.
The "Bar of Soap" design methodology simply states: the most initimate 'implement' most people use these days, is the bar of soap. A bar of soap goes where no other implement goes. It is held and used in loving trust.
Design any consumer device to match the parameters of a bar of soap, and it will be loved...
Me too. Considering what it basically was - run around, find your opponents tank, then just blast the hell out of each other until one of you dies. There wasn't much skill to it, really...
I understood your point: it was an honest question. But I would've pitched it more on the "what will OS'es do?" arena more than "solution to poor programming" direction... I could see it actually being technically applicable to have MRAM management and 'state maintenance' a function of the OS, not further down the line in the programming realm.
Perhaps we'll see 'services' added to OS'es that allow us to malloc() with a 'MRAM_PERSISTENT' flag... ?
I agree with you. I just don't see how 'non-volatile RAM' is supposed to be a 'protective measure' against bad programming. That is what an OS is for...
"How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?"
Hello. What do you think -hard disks- are?
I'll give you 5 seconds to come up with a list of operating system 'features' that have been 'standardized' which really resulted from this 'ideology' about how to not write 'safe' code and just let other parts of the system 'deal with it'...
Give up? Okay, I'll give you a few:
1. Swap. Yup, if the program has no idea how much RAM it has or needs, and no idea how to manage it, and the programmer just wants it all... there's swap. Otherwise known as 'virtual memory', or, as they used to say in the good ol' days "fail-safe swap-over".
2. "Protected Memory". Yup. Same deal. Let the OS deal with 'bad programming'.
Non-volatile memory has nothing to do with 'protecting from bad programming' and everything to do with writing 'true' persistent state machines... just like these two 'features'.
In summary: If it wasn't for 'bad programming', operating systems wouldn't have anything to do...
Dude, if you're worried about "Trident-class subs all over your ass" the same thing would exist in space.
i don't see why this is necessarily the case. you're right, of course, military might here on earth will always superscede civilian life, but i'm sick of that. thats why i want to go to space. it doesn't have to be that way, its just the current earth culture that dictates that. american culture dictates that. police states dictate that. in space, we don't have to do all that, at all.
Are you sure you're not just trying to get away from yourself?
well, going to space would be a pretty silly way to do that, where all i'd have would be my self... and hopefully a few kilotons worth of bio-vat systems, of course, maybe a realdoll or two...
if there were a way to stay on earth and somehow effect a change in the hyper-aggression of our species that promotes police totalitarianism and militarism, then i'd do it. but i don't see that.
so, i'll piss off, start a new colony somewhere, breed a few generations or so, and... i guess, since its 'inevitable', come back and invade earth all over again...;)
remember there are millions of square miles of ocean right here on earth to live on that no one claims ownership of.
Yeah, thats fun and fine and everything, until your community gets big, has some resource of value, and suddenly you've got Trident-class subs all over your ass.
No thanks. The point of space is its -reallllly- big. And the further I get away from the Fascist Dictator State that some... ahem... 'industrialized' nations... are creating, the better.
*sigh*
Its a pipe-dream, anyway. Ain't nobody going nowhere... For the Love Of Big Brother, we're all in it together...
The fact of the matter is, that Software gets easier and easier to create, over time. The only solution to this 'dilemna' is to do everything you can to make it more and more difficult to write software.
Programmers/Developers have a hard time with this, but its true. Whereas 10 years ago, a professional was expected to be able to conjur up GUI's and Servers and Apps and Tools and Utils, and was paid for it, now any punk-ass kid with a C compiler can write the same software, for fun, in his spare time.
The more software you write, the easier it gets to write software.
Microsoft are not confronting this issue. It used to be that software was a professionals game. But this has been proven, time and again, to not be true; if you can read, if you can work out the basic mechanics of using a dictionary, and if you have patience and willpower enough to keep yourself in front of the computer long enough to get something actually running, then You Too Can Be A Programmer (tm).
Chasing endless API's and "new" dev kits and "frontier frameworks" and implementing new protocols: This all gets easier the more you do it.
Open Source has proven this, time and time again. The Millionaire Kiddy who writes a $10,000 perl script to run his New Enterprise is standing on the shoulders of many, many giants^H^H^H^H^H^HHackers who have come before him. Software gets easier.
No corporation in the history of computing sciences has done more to combat this fact than Microsoft. The moment their developer pool starts using their API's and SDK's to develop products that compete with Microsofts' internal developer programs, Microsoft 'updates' the API's and SDK's and "Technology Platforms" to give everyone something new to learn, 'revolutionizing' the industry with 'innovation'... innovation which in fact turns out to be nothing more than a new 'straw man API', catering to pop-culture 'jones next door' economics.
API's don't need to evolve. A properly planned abstraction layer solves *all* issues. The constant release/re-release/update/re-update of fundamental, core developer tools is a treadmill being used by Microsoft to keep the industry 'busy', when in fact so much more could be being done if things just settled into a solid, standard state.
Open Source proves this. Once an API is ready and released, and usable, it sticks. Witness libc. Witness POSIX. Witness Qt. Witness countless other fundamental, core API's and Platform SDK's which are available in the F/OSS world, upon which massive amounts of applications programs have been written.
Software gets easier and easier to write, the more you do it. Microsoft know this. All attempts they make to bring 'new, innovative technology' to the field are really nothing more than attempts to keep their developer pools pre-occupied with learning 'new stuff', maintaining some sort of 'professional standard' for what is and isn't a developer.
But I'm telling you, software sciences that were once hard, don't stay that way for long. While there are many things (DSP programming, for example) which are 'hard', they do not stay that way. Once you've written an app once, you can write it again, better, without having to change your platform, or your SDK, or your API.
The Open Source movement seems to intrinsically recognize this fact. This is why so much work was done to get the 'platform' (GNU, kernels, libs, tools) all in stable, working order - because software gets easier to write, the more you do it.
I stopped using Microsoft when I recognized that their MSDN "tools" were really being used to DISTRACT me from actually doing neat, innovative stuff. MFC wasn't there for my convenience, it was there for Microsofts. ActiveX wasn't there to make my life easier, it was there to draw yet more lines in the developer sand, and create 'elites' and 'cliques' in the developer sphere, upon which to divide developers into 'cans' and 'c
I think it just imploded from the mass, personally.
I was a Comdex die-hard in the 80's, and early 90's, but once it got to the point where you had to plan "a day over here, a day over there" it really became less of an interesting break in Vegas, and far more of a Geek Trek. Fully stressful.
Too many times I'd come back from Comdex and been like "well, got that done", only to find that there were 3 other major conference halls containing all the really interesting shit, which I missed because my sneakers were too slick from blood.
If it weren't for COMDEX, I wouldn't have as big an addiction to USENET, where everyone knows, schwag issues aside, you can get all the scoop and none of the blisters...
Re:Subs can't go any deeper.
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 1
Sure, vehicles have reached those depths.
But what about habitats? I'd move to the Mariana Trench Habitat tomorrow, if I could.
(... long as it had free cable and good gym facilities that is...)
Well, this isn't really a 'console'-specific question... or actually, it really is... but what about apps that can do graphics straight to the framebuffer?
I don't remember what its called, but a few years ago there was a Terminal app that you could 'cat *.jpg' to and it would display those jpegs inline, with the text console, integrated like. I really liked that.
Then there was another "XMLTerm" app, (was that its name, actually?) that could handle HTML and XML docs, displaying stuff in the console/text buffer using SVGALib and such. That had promise.
I remember the hard-core terminal days - hazeltine 1500's baby! - that could do graphics as well as text 'in' the console. I always liked that - like you could do a graph just by 'catting' the raw file straight to your terminal. X came along, and made all that redundant, but it seems to me that in this day of 1024x768 Framebuffer support, it could make for some truly interesting 'hollywood' style graphics systems... if only there was interest in all that again.
Personally, I don't need a window manager (though I'm happy to use one if its available). Think I'm gonna go and see if I can find that XMLTerm thing... maybe Sweetcode has it... lessee...
And why is the BSA a bad thing by itself? Microsoft is losing a hell of a lot more money to privacy than to Open Source, so it is only logical that they fund BSA.
Heh heh. I think I know what you thought you were saying, but either way, s/privacy/piracy/, or s/piracy/privacy/, it still makes sense as a statement.
Remember, the mission of BSA has nothing to do with open source, their purpose is to keep you from using software you did not pay for.
Right. And what does the "Free" part in "Free, Open Source Software" mean? Of course BSA has everything to do with free, open source software... if you're not paying, you're not playing... by their rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh yeah.
In other words, this pretty much sums up your position, eh?
Heh heh. I sure would like to see a liquidy' mp3 player, that'd be quite interesting ...
Jobs maintaining these creations will always exist, because they wouldn't be able to administer themselves.
Ermm.. I dunno about this. Seems like you're contradicting yourself a little bit. If the maintenance of these machines can better be done by other machines, capable of ±0.01mm tolerances, then machines will take over that job.
I think what you mean to say is, there will always be work to create more, and better machines. Machines are incapable - so far - of original sin (the creative kind), though they are capable of the re-productive kind...
What bothers me about the onward march of technological progress is that it often appears only to serve the purpose of making machines, instead of serving the higher purpose of solving some of mankinds very real problems. I don't think the world needs more and more plastic junk landfill, yet todays cell phone mfr's seem quite happy to have replaced their countless millions of plastic toys with yet more countless millions of plastic toys, for example.
What I'd like to see is a true revolution of machines that feed people. Someone needs to take the 'turkey guts into oil' machines and make them utterly portable, and utterly personal. That'd be a really useful direction for technology, in my opinion...
It used to be that a computers 'usefulness' was measured not in terms of MIPS, or Desktop Dominance, or "user base", but in terms of Decisions made.
Any successful branch of a computer program, determined by its Logic Design, is a "Decision".
Think "Yes" or "No" trees in any flow diagram: this was a "Decision".
IBM used to promote their machines as having "made 150,000 decisions a day". These weren't just program branches, but real business decisions - e.g. "Is this account overdue?" - Yes == one successful Decision. No == a Decision, etc.
I still think this is a pretty useful metric, since it equates to actual business use, not just "performance"...
If you can't be bothered installing MAME, or buying a GameBoy, this page full of retro-Flash games is superlative.
...
I was flabbergasted at the quality, actually. The Invader clone is pretty darned good for a Flash app
A word or phrase, the meaning of which which people rarely care enough about to actually try to understand before they use
I think "buzzword" is the worst buzz word of all. Its like, an "anti-" word...
What is it you don't understand about the phrase "paradigm shift"? What makes this a 'bullshit' phrase?
Just because your pop culture has allowed you to overlook the very real, very significant, definition of the word 'paradigm', and just because you are unable to see past general hubris on 'phrase bigotry', doesn't lessen the actual value of the meanings of words.
Fact: The "Paradigm Shift" actually means something.
Counter-Fact: Very few people give a shit enough about their language to actually care to understand what such phrases mean.
"Open Source" -is- a change in paradigm. Very definitely so.
Arrogant Brand-Brainwashed English-language speakers notwithstanding, "Paradigm Shift" and "Open Source" are two phrases which actually do belong together.
Open Source in industry does require you to refresh your paradigm cache...
... Like a modern touchstone the iPod Mini is a product people will love to hold ...
The reason for this is simple: iPod is pure Bar of Soap.
The "Bar of Soap" design methodology simply states: the most initimate 'implement' most people use these days, is the bar of soap. A bar of soap goes where no other implement goes. It is held and used in loving trust.
Design any consumer device to match the parameters of a bar of soap, and it will be loved...
Me too. Considering what it basically was - run around, find your opponents tank, then just blast the hell out of each other until one of you dies. There wasn't much skill to it, really ...
You think MRAM is practical as primory memory?
... I could see it actually being technically applicable to have MRAM management and 'state maintenance' a function of the OS, not further down the line in the programming realm.
... ?
I understood your point: it was an honest question. But I would've pitched it more on the "what will OS'es do?" arena more than "solution to poor programming" direction
Perhaps we'll see 'services' added to OS'es that allow us to malloc() with a 'MRAM_PERSISTENT' flag
I agree with you. I just don't see how 'non-volatile RAM' is supposed to be a 'protective measure' against bad programming. That is what an OS is for ...
"How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?"
Hello. What do you think -hard disks- are?
I'll give you 5 seconds to come up with a list of operating system 'features' that have been 'standardized' which really resulted from this 'ideology' about how to not write 'safe' code and just let other parts of the system 'deal with it'
Give up? Okay, I'll give you a few:
1. Swap. Yup, if the program has no idea how much RAM it has or needs, and no idea how to manage it, and the programmer just wants it all
2. "Protected Memory". Yup. Same deal. Let the OS deal with 'bad programming'.
Non-volatile memory has nothing to do with 'protecting from bad programming' and everything to do with writing 'true' persistent state machines... just like these two 'features'.
In summary: If it wasn't for 'bad programming', operating systems wouldn't have anything to do
Flame on.
It was the 'first' serious multiplayer first person shooter you could download and set up and play for a whole weekend on the office network.
...
Man that was a fun game. Too bad DOOM came along and stole all the thunder
spared by the vogons, not speared...
Give me American, or give me death!
Uh huh. Thats a pretty broad selection. Sure you wanna narrow your choices?
maybe 'quantum' is another way to interpret 'design assumes imperfect stat property'
Dude, if you're worried about "Trident-class subs all over your ass" the same thing would exist in space.
... and hopefully a few kilotons worth of bio-vat systems, of course, maybe a realdoll or two ...
... i guess, since its 'inevitable', come back and invade earth all over again ... ;)
i don't see why this is necessarily the case. you're right, of course, military might here on earth will always superscede civilian life, but i'm sick of that. thats why i want to go to space. it doesn't have to be that way, its just the current earth culture that dictates that. american culture dictates that. police states dictate that. in space, we don't have to do all that, at all.
Are you sure you're not just trying to get away from yourself?
well, going to space would be a pretty silly way to do that, where all i'd have would be my self
if there were a way to stay on earth and somehow effect a change in the hyper-aggression of our species that promotes police totalitarianism and militarism, then i'd do it. but i don't see that.
so, i'll piss off, start a new colony somewhere, breed a few generations or so, and
remember there are millions of square miles of ocean right here on earth to live on that no one claims ownership of.
... ahem ... 'industrialized' nations ... are creating, the better.
...
Yeah, thats fun and fine and everything, until your community gets big, has some resource of value, and suddenly you've got Trident-class subs all over your ass.
No thanks. The point of space is its -reallllly- big. And the further I get away from the Fascist Dictator State that some
*sigh*
Its a pipe-dream, anyway. Ain't nobody going nowhere... For the Love Of Big Brother, we're all in it together
The fact of the matter is, that Software gets easier and easier to create, over time. The only solution to this 'dilemna' is to do everything you can to make it more and more difficult to write software.
... innovation which in fact turns out to be nothing more than a new 'straw man API', catering to pop-culture 'jones next door' economics.
Programmers/Developers have a hard time with this, but its true. Whereas 10 years ago, a professional was expected to be able to conjur up GUI's and Servers and Apps and Tools and Utils, and was paid for it, now any punk-ass kid with a C compiler can write the same software, for fun, in his spare time.
The more software you write, the easier it gets to write software.
Microsoft are not confronting this issue. It used to be that software was a professionals game. But this has been proven, time and again, to not be true; if you can read, if you can work out the basic mechanics of using a dictionary, and if you have patience and willpower enough to keep yourself in front of the computer long enough to get something actually running, then You Too Can Be A Programmer (tm).
Chasing endless API's and "new" dev kits and "frontier frameworks" and implementing new protocols: This all gets easier the more you do it.
Open Source has proven this, time and time again. The Millionaire Kiddy who writes a $10,000 perl script to run his New Enterprise is standing on the shoulders of many, many giants^H^H^H^H^H^HHackers who have come before him. Software gets easier.
No corporation in the history of computing sciences has done more to combat this fact than Microsoft. The moment their developer pool starts using their API's and SDK's to develop products that compete with Microsofts' internal developer programs, Microsoft 'updates' the API's and SDK's and "Technology Platforms" to give everyone something new to learn, 'revolutionizing' the industry with 'innovation'
API's don't need to evolve. A properly planned abstraction layer solves *all* issues. The constant release/re-release/update/re-update of fundamental, core developer tools is a treadmill being used by Microsoft to keep the industry 'busy', when in fact so much more could be being done if things just settled into a solid, standard state.
Open Source proves this. Once an API is ready and released, and usable, it sticks. Witness libc. Witness POSIX. Witness Qt. Witness countless other fundamental, core API's and Platform SDK's which are available in the F/OSS world, upon which massive amounts of applications programs have been written.
Software gets easier and easier to write, the more you do it. Microsoft know this. All attempts they make to bring 'new, innovative technology' to the field are really nothing more than attempts to keep their developer pools pre-occupied with learning 'new stuff', maintaining some sort of 'professional standard' for what is and isn't a developer.
But I'm telling you, software sciences that were once hard, don't stay that way for long. While there are many things (DSP programming, for example) which are 'hard', they do not stay that way. Once you've written an app once, you can write it again, better, without having to change your platform, or your SDK, or your API.
The Open Source movement seems to intrinsically recognize this fact. This is why so much work was done to get the 'platform' (GNU, kernels, libs, tools) all in stable, working order - because software gets easier to write, the more you do it.
I stopped using Microsoft when I recognized that their MSDN "tools" were really being used to DISTRACT me from actually doing neat, innovative stuff. MFC wasn't there for my convenience, it was there for Microsofts. ActiveX wasn't there to make my life easier, it was there to draw yet more lines in the developer sand, and create 'elites' and 'cliques' in the developer sphere, upon which to divide developers into 'cans' and 'c
I think it just imploded from the mass, personally.
I was a Comdex die-hard in the 80's, and early 90's, but once it got to the point where you had to plan "a day over here, a day over there" it really became less of an interesting break in Vegas, and far more of a Geek Trek. Fully stressful.
Too many times I'd come back from Comdex and been like "well, got that done", only to find that there were 3 other major conference halls containing all the really interesting shit, which I missed because my sneakers were too slick from blood.
If it weren't for COMDEX, I wouldn't have as big an addiction to USENET, where everyone knows, schwag issues aside, you can get all the scoop and none of the blisters
Sure, vehicles have reached those depths.
...)
But what about habitats? I'd move to the Mariana Trench Habitat tomorrow, if I could.
(... long as it had free cable and good gym facilities that is
Well, this isn't really a 'console'-specific question ... or actually, it really is ... but what about apps that can do graphics straight to the framebuffer?
... maybe Sweetcode has it ... lessee ...
I don't remember what its called, but a few years ago there was a Terminal app that you could 'cat *.jpg' to and it would display those jpegs inline, with the text console, integrated like. I really liked that.
Then there was another "XMLTerm" app, (was that its name, actually?) that could handle HTML and XML docs, displaying stuff in the console/text buffer using SVGALib and such. That had promise.
I remember the hard-core terminal days - hazeltine 1500's baby! - that could do graphics as well as text 'in' the console. I always liked that - like you could do a graph just by 'catting' the raw file straight to your terminal. X came along, and made all that redundant, but it seems to me that in this day of 1024x768 Framebuffer support, it could make for some truly interesting 'hollywood' style graphics systems... if only there was interest in all that again.
Personally, I don't need a window manager (though I'm happy to use one if its available). Think I'm gonna go and see if I can find that XMLTerm thing
He's gotta be responsible for the condition of computing, and electronic technology, in some small way ... in Australia.
Why hasn't he stepped in? Is he some sorta Aussie Tech Dinosaur now or something?
So clearly, everyone in the US should drive a M1A2 Abrams MBT.
Right. So gimme one of those and I'll show you the Anti-Think Tank Tank!
And why is the BSA a bad thing by itself? Microsoft is losing a hell of a lot more money to privacy than to Open Source, so it is only logical that they fund BSA.
... if you're not paying, you're not playing... by their rules.
Heh heh. I think I know what you thought you were saying, but either way, s/privacy/piracy/, or s/piracy/privacy/, it still makes sense as a statement.
Remember, the mission of BSA has nothing to do with open source, their purpose is to keep you from using software you did not pay for.
Right. And what does the "Free" part in "Free, Open Source Software" mean? Of course BSA has everything to do with free, open source software