Life is one continuous learning process. I think it's time the idea of going to school and then getting a lifelong career is put to rest. Then people will see that each person is capable of creativity and learning is an enjoyable process.
We also need to rid ourselves of the monopoly Universities have on "higher education." Not everyone can afford to play that fraudulent textbook, TI-xx calculator, laptop, etc. scheme. Especially now that things like pell grants (US, of course) are getting cut. Not that they saved students from massive debt anyhow...
Thank you, pedantic spelling Nazi. Instead of ad hominem, try actual criticism. I never said I was perfect.
Your line of reasoning is similar to what one might follow on Slashdot. You use an underscore in your user name. How can anyone possibly trust some idiot who can't find the spacebar? You have a much higher user ID than mine, are you some newbie? etc. etc.
You obviously have beef with what I've said. Refute like a rational person, or keep quiet.
After living through Saddam Hussein and the two wars to take him down, a truly ghastly sequence, the Iraqis just weren't scared of the insurgent threats to stop the voting. As far as I can see, they aren't afraid of anything.
If you live in hell already, it definately can't get worse. But I still do not believe the violence was anywhere near what it is today, under Saddam. They are happy now for one reason: food and water. The sanctions really hurt them, and it doesn't help matters that the US destroyed their water, etc. utilities on purpose before leaving the Gulf War.
We have also given them hope. Just for that, many Iraqis will gladly trade true freedom for some sort of US approved "democracy." And put up with extreme violence in the meantime. But they are getting incredibly weary.
But I guarantee you, this democracy will not work out. There are simply too many loose ends, such as what checks and balances do they have? Do they have a judicial system? Legislative system? What about Islam? WHO's Islam? To what degree is the punishment? Who decides the degree of punishment? And then we notice that most Iraqis are voting simply so the US will leave Iraq or to spite the other ethnic groups so they don't come to power.
Yes, it's going to be a never-ending occupation. But I've said that since 2002 and no one was listening then. Only a few are listening now. Let's put the White House optimism in check for a second. First, they said this would be a low-cost operation. Not much more than $50-60 billion, they said. They also said everything would be done in 6 months. Well, that's when Mr. "Mission Accomplished" proclaimed an end to major operations. But they had NO plan for democracy. They never had the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq in the first place. It was a complete afterthought. I don't know if they thought toppling Saddam was enough and everything would work itself out because, hey, we are "liberators!" It's funny because just a day or two ago Vietnam celebrated their liberation and independence from a brutal occupation. That occupation was, of course, the US.
the fact that you cannot distinguish between parody and official message is all the more reason to worry about this country today... and is all the more reason to use the seal.
We've just passed the 20th anniversary of DOS 3.x, which IMO was their best OS yet. DOS 4.x and 5.x were unstable shit. And the 3.x era seems to have had a ton of cool things happen in terms of gaming. IIRC, sound cards were just coming out or cheap enough to buy, we had color graphics and games were looking more like true arcade games.
With higher level languages, design patterns disappear.
For example, in Lisp and Scheme we have the MAP function. In other languages, MAP would be a design pattern. This is why design patterns are bunk. If you discover such a pattern in Scheme (et al.) you simply bottle it up for the next time you need it. You don't need to run and search through a book to find the pattern which fits the problem you're trying to solve because you have one tool and that tool works damn well. The "closure" concept, first-class functions, and macros make design patterns obsolete. The thing with Scheme, etc. is that you never encounter the same problem twice. If you do, you're definately running into something that should be placed in a library. If you think Scheme/Lisp is incapable of packaging all design patterns, then you probably haven't discovered "functors" and/or functional objects. When working in Scheme you are always working at solving the problem. You don't worry about solutions to solved problems.
It took me a minute to even figure out what the pattern was trying to do (I couldn't remember). Implementation took less time than making sure I was following the pattern correctly.
That's the point. Sending people to space is not profitable.
I would like to fly to space just as much as the next nerd, but ultimately I know that there just isn't much to do out there. The novelty of weightlessness would soon become a pain in the ass, and after a few days cabin fever would set in.
Getting to space and getting to the moon are completely different things.
What will fuel the space industry is the same that fueled exploration by sea centuries ago: the desire for wealth. Just as people carried spices, gold, etc. around on ship, we will likely do the same in space. And then maybe we'll build a few casinos and titty bars to fool people into going to a desert by calling it a "vacation." It seems to have worked well for Las Vegas.
Sure, it has some cool network caching and distribution going on. But I can't imagine modifying general 3D environments in real-time is going to be much more than novelty. For highly specific tasks (medical, etc.) it might make more sense. But then you just design an appropriate architecture (which you will have to anyhow).
And then they carried on about how cool it was to see through the portals. Try Quake 3. That game has the exact same thing. I think a few members in the audience questioned them, IIRC, about this.
And I really do think we'll be dragging windows around a 2D desktop in 30 years, because we have been using a CLI for the past 30+ years. The 2D desktop was the answer to multitasking. While not impossible in a CLI/console, quite tedious. Now I have firefox, emacs, and a few xterms always open.
For general-purpose usage we need to come a long way in a short amount of time. We need fine-grained software integration. For Croquet, we would need that of Squeak (which Croquet runs on). We really are at a dead-end in terms of desktop advancement. No amount of hacking, CORBA, OLE, etc. is going to turn a C/C++ static world into that of Squeak.
It's not that they have changed. As I remember it, quite a few people didn't understand Enlightenment. And that window manager really had no innovation, other than bringing eye-candy to X11.
I wrote a few posts a few days ago on this, but I'll repeat...
As much as people talk about innovation, few really want such a thing. That's how it has always been.
Instead of innovation, people want familiarity. Which is why many people years ago did not want to move from text console to X11 when hardware and drivers were finally reasonable. I was one of those people, sadly. You couldn't get me to touch an xterm (or rxvt, my preferred). That is, until I discovered those nice terminal fonts and how it was possible to change the default xterm colors to that of a VGA textmode terminal. That is what I still use today.
I try to be as open-minded as possible, but I catch myself doing those same things today. I've had many discussions with people who claim to want innovation when they really want upgrades to the things they already use. There isn't much innovative about switching from devfs to udev, etc. yet quite a few act as if innovation occurs often.
Given the choice between backwards compatibility or innovation, hardware and software manufacturers will always choose backwards compatibility. Only because that is what the end-user always wants.
If you can tell me with a straight face that Python and Ruby solve a technical problem that cannot be solved with Lisp (or BASIC, Fortran, C, etc.) and can tell me what exactly that problem is, then maybe I'll believe you. As I see it now, they are both invented for political reasons or the search for the silver bullet (the mythical software technology or language that solves every problem). Or possibly they are created for egotistical reasons. You can't deny that Larry Wall has an overinflated sense of himself. Or James Gosling. Or Guido van Rossum.
Scheme's call/cc mechanism is a real technology. Syntax is a political tool, not a technology. Politics is the cause of many wars which kill innovation and progress.
You can read the reason behind Python's existance here
Guido mentions much about why Python was needed in the late '80s and early '90s. But it's 2005. Why continue with Python? And the only experience Guido claims to bring to the design table of Python is Modula-3 and the ABC language.
What was the motivation behind Modula-3? No one really knows. Greater stability and robustness are a few claimed desired attributes, yet neither of those is substantial motivation. Greater stability than what? C? Modula-3 adds garbage collection as if it were innovative in the late '80s. Complete NIH syndrome.
The Python/Ruby development models follow the same democratic evolution model that Linux does, to a certain extent. Neither is innovative, simply progressive. Evolutionary.
My favorite quote on innovation happens to come from Scheme R5RS spec. Keep in mind this quote does not only apply to language design, but design of all sorts:
Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.
This goes back to what I was saying with Perl becoming unnecessary if the OS had the proper design to begin with. We wouldn't need all these silly hacks and languages we do today. Sure, Python and Modula-3 do make things easier in a certain sense than C. But that's only for doing things that C was doing in the first place. If you remove the restrictions C is bound by (file systems, etc.) then you won't need ten new languages for dealing with every tedious thing you have to do in C.
As much as people harp on about innovation on Slashdot and elsewhere, I have extensive first-hand experience that people really do not want innovation. What they want is to keep familiarity. They want their Linux, Windows, OS X, etc. but only patched up, and slightly better. Evolved. I once had a discussion about orthogonal persistence on a fairly open-minded forum (Lisp forum). A few people suggested no less than total
apocalypse. "We can't have a global database like that! Look what happens with the Windows registry!" etc. etc. Yet they forget that their nice "plaintext" file system Unix is an illusion, albeit a damn good one (only because it's stable). If they had a look at PalmOS they would likely claim it's only possible on a small-scale. Yet any Palm Pilot or Clie today is just as capable as a Unix workstation 30 years ago.
I'm not familar with spotlight or smart folders, but they likely err on the side of feature creep.
Innovation is something that completely changes the way things are done. Not small little upgrades, patches, hacks, etc. When there is talk about innovation, we all assume it must be in the positive direction. Positive innovation is anything that removes complexity, elucidates, and generally makes things easier to use and better (more stable, robust, secure, reliable, scalable, etc.).
Negative innovation is anything that adds complexity and stifles positive innovation. Things like feature creep, hacks, etc. are bad because backwards compatibility is not opt-in. Every little hack, library, feature added to a system is there *forever*. People become dependent on it and it becomes impossible to remove. An example, we will never free ourselves of either GTK+ and Qt in Linux. You may use a different CLI shell, but you will never be able to remove bash from your system. Perl is there to stay as is Python now. We still are dependent on TCL/Tk, Motif. OSS (the sound lib) has been replaced by ALSA, but you likely have ALSA OSS emulation for the many apps that still require OSS. All this dead weight just makes true (positive) innovation impossible.
GUI is one part that needs innovation, but just about everything can be rethought. File systems and how we store and recall information is one area that could use massive work. Processes, multi-users, security, etc. It all needs innovative new design.
Unix does not extend naturally to a GUI, nor does the Unix philosophy say much about the DLL hell that KDE/GNOME/etc. bring and that is required by those "simple" wrappers. That was my mistake--I called them simple. They are simple in that they don't do much but execv() a command-line program. That's nice and good, but realize that the command-line program is being wrapped by a GUI because it's a nightmare to use. Do you know all the flags to cdrecord? What about lame, etc. etc. In this case, the command-line interface is being used incorrectly as an API.
I did express my displeasure for the Unix system. It was the best back when text was all our hardware could manipulate. And by text I mean ASCII. Today we could have so much more than "everything is a file" (an abstraction which is badly broken on any *ix, and any programmer will tell you never to break your abstractions).
Today we could have proper databases. Not those silly file systems that masquerade as databases, where the only organizing policy is "toss it where you can remember it." That's just one example, and I'm not picking on any one OS. Every system today seems to be homogenizing towards a *ix system, where the common ingredients are 1) file system, 2) command-line, 3) multi-user, 4) WIMP. There really isn't much difference between Linux, Windows, and OS X in terms of system design. Each share the exact same concept of "process" (which is so ingrained into our thinking that it will take you a few minutes to think about how it could differ).
Windows is not "totalitarian" as such. The design has had many hands involved and is just as messy as *ix. And I could have used any *ix, be it FreeBSD, Solaris, etc. Only Linux seems to have many more people involved than those.
All of those systems work, but none of them approach good. A good design will not take away from your freedom... that's just silly conspiracy theory talk. Check out things like Squeak, Genera/LispMs, PalmOS, Apple Newton, BeOS, NeXT for what systems can be. A few of those reach "good" and even surpass it.
I'm big into language and OS design research, but a new OS becoming a success is a pipe-dream. Rob Pike has a good essay on this.
Briefly, a new OS will never happen because as you said the barrier to entry is massive. I slightly disagree with where to place blame, though. It's not so much the fault of Microsoft/Linux/Apple dominating the scene as it is apathy and laziness in users.
Hypothetically, if OS/2 crushed Windows we would all be split between OS/2, OS X, and the Unix variety. Once an OS gets a decent amount of apps written for it, it's nearly impossible to leave it. This is also the cause for the backwards compatibility insanity of today. I've written an x86 assembler and was dumbfounded by the crap one must go through just to do what appears to be a simple task (translating mnemonics to binary). ModR/M+SIB is hell and deserves the Ugliest Hack of the Universe award. Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Linux, etc. They are all bound to backwards compatibility. That alone puts a big block on innovation. I'd love to just toss out the traditional WIMP interface some time. It will likely never happen.
I must say, I'm more than a little concerned about languages as well. There have always been many languages around, but not like today. COBOL, Fortran, C, Lisp, BASIC and a few others with small userbases were around 15-20 years ago. Today it is looking more and more like the Tower of Babel.
I'm tempted to say that the language design insanity (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. etc.) and the excessive search for the silver bullet is a response to the stagnation of software innovation. Why I say this, is because it is completely misplaced.
Perl is a response to a platform (Unix) that has hideous structured information. Or, rather, it has no structured information. Everything is unconnected text that sits in files. The closest thing to the ideal Perl replacement today would probably be SQL and a RDBMS. If properly integrated into the OS, I wager that 99% of the problems Perl solves would disappear. Hence, Perl would be unnecessary.
TCL, Python and Ruby (with Perl overlap)? Those are there because people tire of using low-level languages. C *is* Linux and Linux (Unix) is C. And of course, much of it politics which completely kills innovation. Python/Ruby aren't that far removed from Lisp, yet we must reinvent for political and egotistical reasons.
Look at Java for the worst example of NIH ever, and I don't see how any of it solves a single practical problem. The portability problem will never be solved by a VM, because everyone knows that the quality of the VM implementation is the key factor and varies widely. There is no difference between porting a C compiler to 100 platforms or porting a JavaVM to 100 platforms. The portability benefits are equal. Except Java has a seperate layer of indirection which adds further complexity and is a source of inefficiency. Sure, you can't distribute C apps like Java. But Java definately isn't the pinnacle of distributed applications.
The biggest area of innovation will happen vertically as it is today. Things like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Firefox, etc. They will continue to go off on their own direction. But essential system-level innovation is dead, I'm afraid.
On a side note, Linux employs the purest form of democracy seen to date. If you want something, you stick it in the system. This unfortunately does not make a well-designed system. A single person or a small team design the best systems. There are simply too many cooks stirring the pot to make it unifed and coherent. What we end up with is a pile of hacks on top of hacks. Nothing really well thought-out. It wouldn't be such a big deal if Unix was a system designed for evolution. It's not.. it's a big static ball of bits. Linux (and many other things) seem to require a recompile on the simplest changes to the system. And rarely does anything adhere to the Unix design philosophies (everything is a file, simple programs that
was going to say the same. I got an IBM Aptiva in '97 or so and I'm still using the keyboard that came with it. Removed all the buttons and cleaned it twice. Not that it's quite like the older IBM keyboards.. but damn, IBM knows how to make them.
Half the time I forget what CPU I'm even using (not joking!). I know it's AMD, but the Ghz has slipped my mind temporarily. This is at least the 4th CPU that this keyboard has been used with.
You are confusing value from a consumer point-of-view with that of the investor's point-of-view.
While I don't write for the Economist, it's pretty obvious to me that it's not Google's "ambiguity" driving its value, it's Google's proven track record which is getting people interested
And that's why you never will write for the Economist. The party will be over eventually and many people will be hurt financially. Google can not go up forever. The fact that people were eager for Google's inclusion into the S&P 500 is a giant red flag to me. It's basically admitting that a large group of people want to catch a wave and ride it to the top before it begins to break. They do not have faith that the current break-neck pace will continue which is why, IIRC, the S&P 500 were tempted to relax a few of their inclusion rules (something about the time limit after IPO required for inclusion, I believe). If people had no fear of it going down, everyone could wait a little longer. Subconsciously, I think people realize it won't last.
That's what I meant with the more than a beep comment. Few people probably realize or remember what the internal speaker can do.
Way before Win 3.x and widespread SB cards DOS games did just that. Though it wasn't of much use for anything else because it's kinda hard to get digitized sound with no input. Even the games used it sparingly because of the massive space requirements and costs of actually aquiring and manipulating digitized sound. Still, an Adlib had a much better sound that really made games come alive. The difference was like that of games before 3d cards and those after. A world of difference.
Bah. Kids today have it easy. Back in the day all you could get your hands on was an Adlib that played.ROL FM files. Before that PCs actually came with this internal speaker that was used for sound. When I say "sound", I don't mean a beep here and there upon bootup. So the Adlib was an enormous improvement even without digitized music.
Then came SoundBlaster 8-bit and.MOD files became reality. Nothing quite like playing a 44.1khz.MOD file on a 4.77mhz XT. Of course, at the time.MOD was the only format practical for playing song-length (or album-length even) music.
Today even video is taken for granted with DivX and friends. Years ago all we had was.FLI and a handful of others that were only useful for playing around with.
What is scary is that content itself is now taken for granted. The internet and today's tech make things just too easy. I know people who must constantly have a new album playing. They will rarely listen to music past a week or two and discard it like a consumable item, but I digress.
The term "hacking" has been co-opted first by the cracker/warez/phreak community then by the media.
It only gets confusing because people like Paul Graham, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, et al. come from an era when "hacking" meant hobby programming. Then during the '90s they unfortunately referred to what they did as "hacking." Which is why the previous poster's web page refers to Linux as the "Hacker OS," although the intent and usage is really "Cracker OS" which is definately not what Linus had in mind. I really can't believe we are having this discussion in 2005 on what used to be a fairly informed forum.
Submitting a patch to fix a bug is not the same as deliberately breaking software (what you call "hacking"). No person on the face of planet Earth breaks software like those who read and contribute to Phrack/2600 magazines to test how secure software is or to submit patches.
Those who legitimately push software to its limits during a test phase are doing just that: testing. They consider it part of the process of programming and not a seperate activity. They are not actively looking for ways to exploit software so they can override security mechanisms in place. If they find a nasty bug that allows such a thing, then they will fix it and probably send a patch to those who need it. This has absolutely nothing to do with what Phrack/2600 are concerned with.
It is a matter of intent. Legit programmers like Linus would never want to be associated with those who take an interest in Phrack magazine. We are talking about a magazine that advocates stealing credit card numbers and defrauding people. You act as if Phrack could be mentioned in the same breath as Byte, Compute, or hell, even Linux Gazette magazines. We all know there is a substantial difference between the two groups and you have already admitted it. Only now you seem to be trying to turn criminal activity into a legit interest. It's not.
It's sick and perverse to read Phrack just for the information (as you and many others harp on about). I guarantee there are not more than a handful of people who read Phrack and do *not* attempt to partake in any criminal activity. The information is there to be used, and a goddamn ton of people *are* using it.
People who "hack" bind are telling themselves (and everyone else, hence most of the replies to this article) that it's just a hobby like the rest of the stuff you mentioned. In reality, most of these people are criminals or they associate with criminals on a daily basis. No "hacker" gets off the hook here.
No sane person hacks bind just because they want the thrill of exploitation. Let's not kid ourselves here. Sure, some people do it for peer recognition which consists of someone giving the "hacker" "props" in a.NFO file that accompanies some warez release. Which consists of something along the lines of "greetz to my nig l0rDl4m3r" etc. etc. Those people who do it for recognition are even more pathetic than the criminals who use this "knowledge."
I've been there, done that. I know that the vast majority of the "we do it for the information" mantra crowd are just spewing hyperbole. Just so they can feel more "elite" (or "leet" for those still entrenched in the culture) than those pathetic "script kiddies." There really is not that much distance between the two, and since "hacking" is entirely based on status you have to differentiate yourself however you can. Gotta have that dick extension and get on top. Have that 200 smurf (DDoS) botnet, etc. etc.
but every since a certian movie about HACKERS came out it became cool and everyone and their mother wanted to do it
Wargames anyone?
Seriously, anyone who glorifies "hacking" (cracking) is a moron. "Script kiddie" or not, you both come from the same cesspool. And don't give me that tired shit about how you just hack because you desire the know-how. There are literally millions of more worthy things to know than how to exploit bind to gain root access on a SunOS box. "Hacking" has always been a dick extension and looked at as a cool thing to do by prepubescents everywhere. It's hardly a recent trend.
Also, don't equate "hacking" with what legitimate programmers such as Linus, Alan, and RMS do (or have done). There's a world of difference between real knowledge and that pseudo-facade-bullshit knowledge "hackers" like to ballet around.
Q1 used a limited palette as a speed hack. you have to put quake 1 in its proper place in time... it was the first true 3D game. so of course the sprite 2.5D games looked better because the art is entirely hand-created and not limited by choice of color.
id Software has never been known for great single player games. There are two things the original Doom was known for: being the first truely immersive "3D" game and one of the best multiplayer games ever created.
with the exception of q2 (which I never fully played), every game after the original Doom was simply a variation of the Doom/Wolf3d game play. Yet there has always been something redeeming about the games. Quake1, for example, had the most amazing FPS action and feel you will ever experience. The online game play (Quakeworld) is so vast that people play it even today. The physics and feel of q1 were so good that id Software tried to duplicate it for Quake3, after seeing the physics style of Quake2/Half-Life/etc. just isn't good for fast-paced action. Quake3 was an updated Quake1, but with much different weapons and a focus on multiplayer. And, of course, 3D cards were finally popular with the arrival of Quake3 making for much better graphics.
"The Berkeley Internet Name Domain package was originally written at University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student project under a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA)."
sendmail and BSD were developed at Berkeley as well. You seem to not quite understand that non-profit does not equal "not paid." The development was funded by tax-payer dollars.
Again, come back when you have a point to make. And do try to do your own research this time.
Slashdot Mirror
It should legally be an option.
Life is one continuous learning process. I think it's time the idea of going to school and then getting a lifelong career is put to rest. Then people will see that each person is capable of creativity and learning is an enjoyable process.
We also need to rid ourselves of the monopoly Universities have on "higher education." Not everyone can afford to play that fraudulent textbook, TI-xx calculator, laptop, etc. scheme. Especially now that things like pell grants (US, of course) are getting cut. Not that they saved students from massive debt anyhow...
Thank you, pedantic spelling Nazi. Instead of ad hominem, try actual criticism. I never said I was perfect.
Your line of reasoning is similar to what one might follow on Slashdot. You use an underscore in your user name. How can anyone possibly trust some idiot who can't find the spacebar? You have a much higher user ID than mine, are you some newbie? etc. etc.
You obviously have beef with what I've said. Refute like a rational person, or keep quiet.
If you live in hell already, it definately can't get worse. But I still do not believe the violence was anywhere near what it is today, under Saddam. They are happy now for one reason: food and water. The sanctions really hurt them, and it doesn't help matters that the US destroyed their water, etc. utilities on purpose before leaving the Gulf War.
We have also given them hope. Just for that, many Iraqis will gladly trade true freedom for some sort of US approved "democracy." And put up with extreme violence in the meantime. But they are getting incredibly weary.
But I guarantee you, this democracy will not work out. There are simply too many loose ends, such as what checks and balances do they have? Do they have a judicial system? Legislative system? What about Islam? WHO's Islam? To what degree is the punishment? Who decides the degree of punishment? And then we notice that most Iraqis are voting simply so the US will leave Iraq or to spite the other ethnic groups so they don't come to power.
Yes, it's going to be a never-ending occupation. But I've said that since 2002 and no one was listening then. Only a few are listening now. Let's put the White House optimism in check for a second. First, they said this would be a low-cost operation. Not much more than $50-60 billion, they said. They also said everything would be done in 6 months. Well, that's when Mr. "Mission Accomplished" proclaimed an end to major operations. But they had NO plan for democracy. They never had the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq in the first place. It was a complete afterthought. I don't know if they thought toppling Saddam was enough and everything would work itself out because, hey, we are "liberators!" It's funny because just a day or two ago Vietnam celebrated their liberation and independence from a brutal occupation. That occupation was, of course, the US.
the fact that you cannot distinguish between parody and official message is all the more reason to worry about this country today... and is all the more reason to use the seal.
We've just passed the 20th anniversary of DOS 3.x, which IMO was their best OS yet. DOS 4.x and 5.x were unstable shit. And the 3.x era seems to have had a ton of cool things happen in terms of gaming. IIRC, sound cards were just coming out or cheap enough to buy, we had color graphics and games were looking more like true arcade games.
With higher level languages, design patterns disappear.
For example, in Lisp and Scheme we have the MAP function. In other languages, MAP would be a design pattern. This is why design patterns are bunk. If you discover such a pattern in Scheme (et al.) you simply bottle it up for the next time you need it. You don't need to run and search through a book to find the pattern which fits the problem you're trying to solve because you have one tool and that tool works damn well. The "closure" concept, first-class functions, and macros make design patterns obsolete. The thing with Scheme, etc. is that you never encounter the same problem twice. If you do, you're definately running into something that should be placed in a library. If you think Scheme/Lisp is incapable of packaging all design patterns, then you probably haven't discovered "functors" and/or functional objects. When working in Scheme you are always working at solving the problem. You don't worry about solutions to solved problems.
Another example, the Abstract Factory pattern:
(define (make-car-factory aquire-tires
aquire-engine
aquire-chassis)
(lambda ()
(let ((tires (aquire-tires))
(engine (aquire-engine))
(chassis (aquire-chassis)))
(list tires engine chassis))))
(define aquire-firestone-tires
(let ((serial-number 123))
(lambda ()
(set! serial-number (+ serial-number 1))
(string-append "firestone-tireset-"
(number->string serial-number)))))
(define aquire-kent-engine
(let ((serial-number 567)) ; a second "design pattern"
(lambda ()
(set! serial-number (+ serial-number 1))
(string-append "kent-engine-"
(number->string serial-number)))))
(define aquire-ford-chassis
(let ((serial-number 890))
(lambda ()
(set! serial-number (+ serial-number 1))
(string-append "ford-chassis-"
(number->string serial-number)))))
(define make-ford-pinto
(make-car-factory aquire-firestone-tires
aquire-kent-engine
aquire-ford-chassis))
(define my-car (make-ford-pinto))
(define your-car (make-ford-pinto))
my-car
;=> ("firestone-tireset-124" "kent-engine-568" "ford-chassis-891")
your-car
;=> ("firestone-tireset-125" "kent-engine-569" "ford-chassis-892")
It took me a minute to even figure out what the pattern was trying to do (I couldn't remember). Implementation took less time than making sure I was following the pattern correctly.
That's the point. Sending people to space is not profitable.
I would like to fly to space just as much as the next nerd, but ultimately I know that there just isn't much to do out there. The novelty of weightlessness would soon become a pain in the ass, and after a few days cabin fever would set in.
Getting to space and getting to the moon are completely different things.
What will fuel the space industry is the same that fueled exploration by sea centuries ago: the desire for wealth. Just as people carried spices, gold, etc. around on ship, we will likely do the same in space. And then maybe we'll build a few casinos and titty bars to fool people into going to a desert by calling it a "vacation." It seems to have worked well for Las Vegas.
Nah. "gangsta" is never about sticking it to the man... it's all about the turf war.
East vs. West
Emacs vs. VI
I have to say I was disappointed.
Sure, it has some cool network caching and distribution going on. But I can't imagine modifying general 3D environments in real-time is going to be much more than novelty. For highly specific tasks (medical, etc.) it might make more sense. But then you just design an appropriate architecture (which you will have to anyhow).
And then they carried on about how cool it was to see through the portals. Try Quake 3. That game has the exact same thing. I think a few members in the audience questioned them, IIRC, about this.
And I really do think we'll be dragging windows around a 2D desktop in 30 years, because we have been using a CLI for the past 30+ years. The 2D desktop was the answer to multitasking. While not impossible in a CLI/console, quite tedious. Now I have firefox, emacs, and a few xterms always open.
For general-purpose usage we need to come a long way in a short amount of time. We need fine-grained software integration. For Croquet, we would need that of Squeak (which Croquet runs on). We really are at a dead-end in terms of desktop advancement. No amount of hacking, CORBA, OLE, etc. is going to turn a C/C++ static world into that of Squeak.
don't want to spoil a good rant (or conspiracy theory), but Ashcroft is no longer Attorney General. Just thought you should know...
It's not that they have changed. As I remember it, quite a few people didn't understand Enlightenment. And that window manager really had no innovation, other than bringing eye-candy to X11.
I wrote a few posts a few days ago on this, but I'll repeat...
As much as people talk about innovation, few really want such a thing. That's how it has always been.
Instead of innovation, people want familiarity. Which is why many people years ago did not want to move from text console to X11 when hardware and drivers were finally reasonable. I was one of those people, sadly. You couldn't get me to touch an xterm (or rxvt, my preferred). That is, until I discovered those nice terminal fonts and how it was possible to change the default xterm colors to that of a VGA textmode terminal. That is what I still use today.
I try to be as open-minded as possible, but I catch myself doing those same things today. I've had many discussions with people who claim to want innovation when they really want upgrades to the things they already use. There isn't much innovative about switching from devfs to udev, etc. yet quite a few act as if innovation occurs often.
Given the choice between backwards compatibility or innovation, hardware and software manufacturers will always choose backwards compatibility. Only because that is what the end-user always wants.
No, I'm quite serious.
If you can tell me with a straight face that Python and Ruby solve a technical problem that cannot be solved with Lisp (or BASIC, Fortran, C, etc.) and can tell me what exactly that problem is, then maybe I'll believe you. As I see it now, they are both invented for political reasons or the search for the silver bullet (the mythical software technology or language that solves every problem). Or possibly they are created for egotistical reasons. You can't deny that Larry Wall has an overinflated sense of himself. Or James Gosling. Or Guido van Rossum.
Scheme's call/cc mechanism is a real technology. Syntax is a political tool, not a technology. Politics is the cause of many wars which kill innovation and progress.
You can read the reason behind Python's existance here
Guido mentions much about why Python was needed in the late '80s and early '90s. But it's 2005. Why continue with Python? And the only experience Guido claims to bring to the design table of Python is Modula-3 and the ABC language.
What was the motivation behind Modula-3? No one really knows. Greater stability and robustness are a few claimed desired attributes, yet neither of those is substantial motivation. Greater stability than what? C? Modula-3 adds garbage collection as if it were innovative in the late '80s. Complete NIH syndrome.
The Python/Ruby development models follow the same democratic evolution model that Linux does, to a certain extent. Neither is innovative, simply progressive. Evolutionary.
My favorite quote on innovation happens to come from Scheme R5RS spec. Keep in mind this quote does not only apply to language design, but design of all sorts:
This goes back to what I was saying with Perl becoming unnecessary if the OS had the proper design to begin with. We wouldn't need all these silly hacks and languages we do today. Sure, Python and Modula-3 do make things easier in a certain sense than C. But that's only for doing things that C was doing in the first place. If you remove the restrictions C is bound by (file systems, etc.) then you won't need ten new languages for dealing with every tedious thing you have to do in C.
As much as people harp on about innovation on Slashdot and elsewhere, I have extensive first-hand experience that people really do not want innovation. What they want is to keep familiarity. They want their Linux, Windows, OS X, etc. but only patched up, and slightly better. Evolved. I once had a discussion about orthogonal persistence on a fairly open-minded forum (Lisp forum). A few people suggested no less than total apocalypse. "We can't have a global database like that! Look what happens with the Windows registry!" etc. etc. Yet they forget that their nice "plaintext" file system Unix is an illusion, albeit a damn good one (only because it's stable). If they had a look at PalmOS they would likely claim it's only possible on a small-scale. Yet any Palm Pilot or Clie today is just as capable as a Unix workstation 30 years ago.
I'm not familar with spotlight or smart folders, but they likely err on the side of feature creep.
Innovation is something that completely changes the way things are done. Not small little upgrades, patches, hacks, etc. When there is talk about innovation, we all assume it must be in the positive direction. Positive innovation is anything that removes complexity, elucidates, and generally makes things easier to use and better (more stable, robust, secure, reliable, scalable, etc.).
Negative innovation is anything that adds complexity and stifles positive innovation. Things like feature creep, hacks, etc. are bad because backwards compatibility is not opt-in. Every little hack, library, feature added to a system is there *forever*. People become dependent on it and it becomes impossible to remove. An example, we will never free ourselves of either GTK+ and Qt in Linux. You may use a different CLI shell, but you will never be able to remove bash from your system. Perl is there to stay as is Python now. We still are dependent on TCL/Tk, Motif. OSS (the sound lib) has been replaced by ALSA, but you likely have ALSA OSS emulation for the many apps that still require OSS. All this dead weight just makes true (positive) innovation impossible.
GUI is one part that needs innovation, but just about everything can be rethought. File systems and how we store and recall information is one area that could use massive work. Processes, multi-users, security, etc. It all needs innovative new design.
Unix does not extend naturally to a GUI, nor does the Unix philosophy say much about the DLL hell that KDE/GNOME/etc. bring and that is required by those "simple" wrappers. That was my mistake--I called them simple. They are simple in that they don't do much but execv() a command-line program. That's nice and good, but realize that the command-line program is being wrapped by a GUI because it's a nightmare to use. Do you know all the flags to cdrecord? What about lame, etc. etc. In this case, the command-line interface is being used incorrectly as an API.
I did express my displeasure for the Unix system. It was the best back when text was all our hardware could manipulate. And by text I mean ASCII. Today we could have so much more than "everything is a file" (an abstraction which is badly broken on any *ix, and any programmer will tell you never to break your abstractions).
Today we could have proper databases. Not those silly file systems that masquerade as databases, where the only organizing policy is "toss it where you can remember it." That's just one example, and I'm not picking on any one OS. Every system today seems to be homogenizing towards a *ix system, where the common ingredients are 1) file system, 2) command-line, 3) multi-user, 4) WIMP. There really isn't much difference between Linux, Windows, and OS X in terms of system design. Each share the exact same concept of "process" (which is so ingrained into our thinking that it will take you a few minutes to think about how it could differ).
No, that's not at all what I meant.
Windows is not "totalitarian" as such. The design has had many hands involved and is just as messy as *ix. And I could have used any *ix, be it FreeBSD, Solaris, etc. Only Linux seems to have many more people involved than those.
All of those systems work, but none of them approach good. A good design will not take away from your freedom... that's just silly conspiracy theory talk. Check out things like Squeak, Genera/LispMs, PalmOS, Apple Newton, BeOS, NeXT for what systems can be. A few of those reach "good" and even surpass it.
Have to agree, sadly.
I'm big into language and OS design research, but a new OS becoming a success is a pipe-dream. Rob Pike has a good essay on this.
Briefly, a new OS will never happen because as you said the barrier to entry is massive. I slightly disagree with where to place blame, though. It's not so much the fault of Microsoft/Linux/Apple dominating the scene as it is apathy and laziness in users.
Hypothetically, if OS/2 crushed Windows we would all be split between OS/2, OS X, and the Unix variety. Once an OS gets a decent amount of apps written for it, it's nearly impossible to leave it. This is also the cause for the backwards compatibility insanity of today. I've written an x86 assembler and was dumbfounded by the crap one must go through just to do what appears to be a simple task (translating mnemonics to binary). ModR/M+SIB is hell and deserves the Ugliest Hack of the Universe award. Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Linux, etc. They are all bound to backwards compatibility. That alone puts a big block on innovation. I'd love to just toss out the traditional WIMP interface some time. It will likely never happen.
I must say, I'm more than a little concerned about languages as well. There have always been many languages around, but not like today. COBOL, Fortran, C, Lisp, BASIC and a few others with small userbases were around 15-20 years ago. Today it is looking more and more like the Tower of Babel.
I'm tempted to say that the language design insanity (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. etc.) and the excessive search for the silver bullet is a response to the stagnation of software innovation. Why I say this, is because it is completely misplaced.
Perl is a response to a platform (Unix) that has hideous structured information. Or, rather, it has no structured information. Everything is unconnected text that sits in files. The closest thing to the ideal Perl replacement today would probably be SQL and a RDBMS. If properly integrated into the OS, I wager that 99% of the problems Perl solves would disappear. Hence, Perl would be unnecessary.
TCL, Python and Ruby (with Perl overlap)? Those are there because people tire of using low-level languages. C *is* Linux and Linux (Unix) is C. And of course, much of it politics which completely kills innovation. Python/Ruby aren't that far removed from Lisp, yet we must reinvent for political and egotistical reasons.
Look at Java for the worst example of NIH ever, and I don't see how any of it solves a single practical problem. The portability problem will never be solved by a VM, because everyone knows that the quality of the VM implementation is the key factor and varies widely. There is no difference between porting a C compiler to 100 platforms or porting a JavaVM to 100 platforms. The portability benefits are equal. Except Java has a seperate layer of indirection which adds further complexity and is a source of inefficiency. Sure, you can't distribute C apps like Java. But Java definately isn't the pinnacle of distributed applications.
The biggest area of innovation will happen vertically as it is today. Things like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Firefox, etc. They will continue to go off on their own direction. But essential system-level innovation is dead, I'm afraid.
On a side note, Linux employs the purest form of democracy seen to date. If you want something, you stick it in the system. This unfortunately does not make a well-designed system. A single person or a small team design the best systems. There are simply too many cooks stirring the pot to make it unifed and coherent. What we end up with is a pile of hacks on top of hacks. Nothing really well thought-out. It wouldn't be such a big deal if Unix was a system designed for evolution. It's not.. it's a big static ball of bits. Linux (and many other things) seem to require a recompile on the simplest changes to the system. And rarely does anything adhere to the Unix design philosophies (everything is a file, simple programs that
was going to say the same. I got an IBM Aptiva in '97 or so and I'm still using the keyboard that came with it. Removed all the buttons and cleaned it twice. Not that it's quite like the older IBM keyboards.. but damn, IBM knows how to make them.
Half the time I forget what CPU I'm even using (not joking!). I know it's AMD, but the Ghz has slipped my mind temporarily. This is at least the 4th CPU that this keyboard has been used with.
You are confusing value from a consumer point-of-view with that of the investor's point-of-view.
And that's why you never will write for the Economist. The party will be over eventually and many people will be hurt financially. Google can not go up forever. The fact that people were eager for Google's inclusion into the S&P 500 is a giant red flag to me. It's basically admitting that a large group of people want to catch a wave and ride it to the top before it begins to break. They do not have faith that the current break-neck pace will continue which is why, IIRC, the S&P 500 were tempted to relax a few of their inclusion rules (something about the time limit after IPO required for inclusion, I believe). If people had no fear of it going down, everyone could wait a little longer. Subconsciously, I think people realize it won't last.
That's what I meant with the more than a beep comment. Few people probably realize or remember what the internal speaker can do.
Way before Win 3.x and widespread SB cards DOS games did just that. Though it wasn't of much use for anything else because it's kinda hard to get digitized sound with no input. Even the games used it sparingly because of the massive space requirements and costs of actually aquiring and manipulating digitized sound. Still, an Adlib had a much better sound that really made games come alive. The difference was like that of games before 3d cards and those after. A world of difference.
Bah. Kids today have it easy. Back in the day all you could get your hands on was an Adlib that played .ROL FM files. Before that PCs actually came with this internal speaker that was used for sound. When I say "sound", I don't mean a beep here and there upon bootup. So the Adlib was an enormous improvement even without digitized music.
.MOD files became reality. Nothing quite like playing a 44.1khz .MOD file on a 4.77mhz XT. Of course, at the time .MOD was the only format practical for playing song-length (or album-length even) music.
.FLI and a handful of others that were only useful for playing around with.
Then came SoundBlaster 8-bit and
Today even video is taken for granted with DivX and friends. Years ago all we had was
What is scary is that content itself is now taken for granted. The internet and today's tech make things just too easy. I know people who must constantly have a new album playing. They will rarely listen to music past a week or two and discard it like a consumable item, but I digress.
The term "hacking" has been co-opted first by the cracker/warez/phreak community then by the media.
It only gets confusing because people like Paul Graham, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, et al. come from an era when "hacking" meant hobby programming. Then during the '90s they unfortunately referred to what they did as "hacking." Which is why the previous poster's web page refers to Linux as the "Hacker OS," although the intent and usage is really "Cracker OS" which is definately not what Linus had in mind. I really can't believe we are having this discussion in 2005 on what used to be a fairly informed forum.
Submitting a patch to fix a bug is not the same as deliberately breaking software (what you call "hacking"). No person on the face of planet Earth breaks software like those who read and contribute to Phrack/2600 magazines to test how secure software is or to submit patches.
Those who legitimately push software to its limits during a test phase are doing just that: testing. They consider it part of the process of programming and not a seperate activity. They are not actively looking for ways to exploit software so they can override security mechanisms in place. If they find a nasty bug that allows such a thing, then they will fix it and probably send a patch to those who need it. This has absolutely nothing to do with what Phrack/2600 are concerned with.
It is a matter of intent. Legit programmers like Linus would never want to be associated with those who take an interest in Phrack magazine. We are talking about a magazine that advocates stealing credit card numbers and defrauding people. You act as if Phrack could be mentioned in the same breath as Byte, Compute, or hell, even Linux Gazette magazines. We all know there is a substantial difference between the two groups and you have already admitted it. Only now you seem to be trying to turn criminal activity into a legit interest. It's not.
It's sick and perverse to read Phrack just for the information (as you and many others harp on about). I guarantee there are not more than a handful of people who read Phrack and do *not* attempt to partake in any criminal activity. The information is there to be used, and a goddamn ton of people *are* using it.
People who "hack" bind are telling themselves (and everyone else, hence most of the replies to this article) that it's just a hobby like the rest of the stuff you mentioned. In reality, most of these people are criminals or they associate with criminals on a daily basis. No "hacker" gets off the hook here.
.NFO file that accompanies some warez release. Which consists of something along the lines of "greetz to my nig l0rDl4m3r" etc. etc. Those people who do it for recognition are even more pathetic than the criminals who use this "knowledge."
No sane person hacks bind just because they want the thrill of exploitation. Let's not kid ourselves here. Sure, some people do it for peer recognition which consists of someone giving the "hacker" "props" in a
I've been there, done that. I know that the vast majority of the "we do it for the information" mantra crowd are just spewing hyperbole. Just so they can feel more "elite" (or "leet" for those still entrenched in the culture) than those pathetic "script kiddies." There really is not that much distance between the two, and since "hacking" is entirely based on status you have to differentiate yourself however you can. Gotta have that dick extension and get on top. Have that 200 smurf (DDoS) botnet, etc. etc.
Wargames anyone?
Seriously, anyone who glorifies "hacking" (cracking) is a moron. "Script kiddie" or not, you both come from the same cesspool. And don't give me that tired shit about how you just hack because you desire the know-how. There are literally millions of more worthy things to know than how to exploit bind to gain root access on a SunOS box. "Hacking" has always been a dick extension and looked at as a cool thing to do by prepubescents everywhere. It's hardly a recent trend.
Also, don't equate "hacking" with what legitimate programmers such as Linus, Alan, and RMS do (or have done). There's a world of difference between real knowledge and that pseudo-facade-bullshit knowledge "hackers" like to ballet around.
Q1 used a limited palette as a speed hack. you have to put quake 1 in its proper place in time... it was the first true 3D game. so of course the sprite 2.5D games looked better because the art is entirely hand-created and not limited by choice of color.
id Software has never been known for great single player games. There are two things the original Doom was known for: being the first truely immersive "3D" game and one of the best multiplayer games ever created.
with the exception of q2 (which I never fully played), every game after the original Doom was simply a variation of the Doom/Wolf3d game play. Yet there has always been something redeeming about the games. Quake1, for example, had the most amazing FPS action and feel you will ever experience. The online game play (Quakeworld) is so vast that people play it even today. The physics and feel of q1 were so good that id Software tried to duplicate it for Quake3, after seeing the physics style of Quake2/Half-Life/etc. just isn't good for fast-paced action. Quake3 was an updated Quake1, but with much different weapons and a focus on multiplayer. And, of course, 3D cards were finally popular with the arrival of Quake3 making for much better graphics.
How is this:
From isc.org:
"The Berkeley Internet Name Domain package was originally written at University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student project under a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA)."
sendmail and BSD were developed at Berkeley as well. You seem to not quite understand that non-profit does not equal "not paid." The development was funded by tax-payer dollars.
Again, come back when you have a point to make. And do try to do your own research this time.