it was a RADIO series first and foremost. The novels came later. Radio is it's natural home for me because that's where I first heard it all those years ago on a shortwave radio in the Indian Ocean. Ah. Happy days!
Mind you, how many hollywood "writers" listen to the radio or even know of it's existence. Not many I'd guess.
To be fair, it was originally a radio series. Painting pictures with words, that sort of thing. The original radio series and books had direct input from Adams and were small-scale creative enterprises.
The transition to television - which I seemed to have wiped off my memory banks - was OKish but still not that brilliant. Adams was alive for that but I think it showed the weaker side of his creativity - which would have been diluted anyway by the large crews and money this sort of thing requires.
I don't give the film a snowball's chance in very large furnace. Too many competing interests, too much money, nice endings, Adams dead etc etc. It's like seeing your favorite kitten being shoved through a lawn mower.
Agreed. However I'm talking about a *military* usage so it would not have been a bog standard CRT as it stands. Damn! I wish I'd paid more attention to that Open University program. Tantalisingly, I can see references to Westinghouse, CRTs and LCDs thru a google search but not enough to provide provenance for my story. You'll just have to take my word for it:-)
Yes, a similar situation wrt the USA in the 19th century. I have a feeling this is the same for holland a long time ago as well. Also during my history lessons on the British Industrial revolution, I don't recall IP being mentioned as a big driver of, uh, "innovation".
There is one example I can think of of IP driving "innovation". During the 60's and 70's, the UK defence establishment had to pay royalties for, I think, the CRT (westinghouse had the monopoly? Can't rightly remember who but they were american) and the LCD screen was invented to *avoid* paying royalties.
So patents can be a driver but not in the way people think it is. Certainly, witness the retrospective patenting being done by MS. I'm not even sure that retrospective patenting should be allowed. IMO, once something has snuck out the door and onto the open market, then it should not be patentable, prior art or not.
The driver of invention should either neccessity or profit. Anything else is bogus.
To you and all the others who made this suggestion (and who were modded as "insightful" rather than "redundant") the maps thing is still only a BETA after all. One day soon, the mighty google will give you all your christmas presents, with added paranoia.
My argument still stands. The large amounts of money gained through OEM-lockin is bound to lead to a better feature set.
You can see it happening again and again. Some non-MS product for windows comes out with a marginally better feature set. MS diverts some of it's cash mountain into a marketing campaign and a push to envelope those new features in it's own products. Linux has security? Well, here's an unfeasibily large amount of cash and windows can become as least as good as if not better than. Firefox is better? Crank out a team to improve IE.
So the current set-up is twisted against MS competitors who have or who are trying to get a better feature set. My argument is that you can't have one without the other. An open-market - or at least a more level playing field than we have now - would lead to competitors competing with similar feature sets. It's this commodification of the software market that MS fears most and which is what we should be aiming towards.
Maybe - just maybe - with OSS the cash mountain has met the limitless scribblings of an infinite number of monkeys...we'll see who has the most amount of patience.
I draw your attention to win3.1. Singularly unusable - I believe at the time GEM was a windowing system vastly superior to Win3.1 - yet Win 3.1 succeeded. MS can afford to incrementally improve their system because, through the tethered OEMs, they have this huge captive audience with a steady unthreatened income.
If RH were in the *same position* as MS and the roles reversed, they too would be able to make the same sort of incremental changes. XP - if such a beast actually existed in this scenario - would then be in the current RedHat role of playing continual catch-up with no real hope of major recurring funding.
Technology doesn't matter overly at the end of the day in the market as it stands. It's who *controls* the market wins. As it stands, that's MS.
Now, *if* the market were equalized and OEMs had the ability to install whatever OS their customers wanted, then the MS tax would cease to exist. RedHat would then have a significant chance of breaking through on the desktop. Until that happens, superior technology or not, Linux will never succeed on the desktop. No non-MS OS has a chance, including MS's pet strawman Apple ("Oh look, a competing OS. We aren't really a monopoly!")
If you ask me, this is what legislators are for...but I'm waxing nostalgic for 1997:-j
RH would make that kind of money if RH Linux only, and nothing else, were sold with a PC. It's only the grip of MS on the OEMs that allows MS to charge so much. MS aren't stupid because they've distorted the market to their profit margins. So we're back to dodgy business practices rather than closed/open source, which I think is a non sequitur in this case.
I think MS don't want to open their source for many other reasons, mostly atavistic, but partially going back to Mr Bill's letter to hobbyists in the 80's.
So I guess you already *know* that yr server is burning slowly in the background..
but, smartarseness aside, I saw BK speak at NotCon last year and he is *great*. IIRC, he was hawking a job for technical director of the european center and it's to my everlasting regret that I didn't put myself forward for it because the whole deal that you guys do is frigging *fantastic*: an archive to surpass the Library of Alexandria is how I understand it. Awesome. I do hope you achieve it.
The current set of symbols we know as Mathematics was standardised in the 17th century as a "universal language".
As for prime numbers, that's as hokey as the Will Smith AppleTalk malarkey. Picard's canard draws on the universal math thing but, as we all know, there's more than one way to represent a number. First we would have to syncronise our number systems with the aliens then we might start talking primes. So something as basic as counting maybe the first point of contact.
umm. Think of our potential aliens as decoders. Instead of trying to *confuse* our alien decoders, we want to help them. Reverse the normal way messages are encrypted: include redundancy, repetitions, quirkiness. In fact all the things that our decoders use to crack codes. Give them masses of text, ensuring the patterns reinforce each other rather than fight against each other.
I'd start with similar blocks that were very simple then gradually slide the reading age of the grouped blocks upwards until we got enough coverage so that our alien decoders could get a working knowledge of the "language" (numeric or otherwise).
Wagner was one of those who *promoted* anti-semtism as part of building a larger Germany. Even in the context of the times, he strayed heavily towards being actively anti-semitic. But he didn't go as far as touting extermination. That would be left to Cosima to support. His operas are heavily orchestrated towards building a Germanic state, dredging up the stories of the Volk, and some say making them implicitly, if not explicitly anti-semitic. I think this makes him than averagely bound to the anti-semitic discourse.
This isn't vapourware this is ghostware, forever at the edges of delivery, prototypes and betas hanging around like bad smells at the bottom of the stairwell where age-old blood still waits to be wiped up, marketing campaign logos so many dead flowers on the granite gravestone, hollow husks of men those who've wasted years in one of Redmonds failed experiments, dashed confetti at the castles walls, whilst others leaner, fitter strive on past them...beware, beware.
Having more than one way to do things is neat until you start maintenance. Just that more futz to learn. Makes it an *expensive* language to maintain - expense in terms of skills to learn and time.
I agree that having multiple ways to do things may make it more comfortable for the programmer - but it's at the expense of easier maintenance.
Readability shouldn't be a lesson learned by a programmer. We all - even the stars amongst us - have to maintain other people's code. We should be kind to ourselves more often.
Then again, I'd say never write a perl program more 100 lines. If you've got a battery of tests, then maybe 500 lines. Anything else is foolhardy - I know. I'm paid to maintain 8000 lines of the stuff and it gives me nightmares.
I find the clearer the name, the better my ideas behind the algorithm. Typically, when writing something, I might start off with variable names that are worthless. As the code progress, the names jell and become clearer.
I can always tell a suspect piece of code: the names are ill-thought out and have little contextual meaning.
I'll certainly use that idea of scope.
I use logging *a lot* and I find that logging can obviate some of the need for comments.
But, however well names are given, they cannot convey some of my assumptions behind the code, which is what should be documented. Big time.
Yes, yes, but also use Wikipedia as a model for editing. Of course, it may not be as "respected" (see Encylopaedia Britannica v Wikipedia) and it may be a different form of information paradigm but seriously, how much money do researchers make out of reviewing journals? Would it be missed?
...none of this sems like real cutting-edge. None of this is going to change my world. How much do they spend on research?
IMO, once you're hooked into some huge dinosaur like MS office, you don't let go until you or it dies. And you don't do any fancy research on the side. Take for example Longhorn. That's looking more like Duke Nukem every day. And mark my words, when that appears, it won't be as revolutionary as the spin makes out. It will still have to run MS Office so it can't be that revolutionary or one of the only products that makes a profit for MS will die. Therein lies the catch.
I've heard the term roach motel applied to MS and this is it. All that expensive talent goes in and we get, what, a teddy-bear? Uh-uh. At least with google, expensive talent produces goods, things that make me go "ah". MSN makes stuff that makes me go "yuck". Amd I guess therein the difference lies.
I think they've already got their OS, but it's not for sale to the desk top. It's what runs the company. From what I've read, they've already got a load of other *top-flight* OS architects. This is about making Google perform better and cheaper, hot-swapping multiple disks and machines etc. Making sure that they deliver their services better than anyone else. This is their core focus and thy're feeding it. Unlike MS. Just what is the MS focus thse days? Right. They've not got one.
I don't thnk they're going to take on MS on the desktop any day soon. Why should they? They're rolling out enough shit to keep MS worried *already*. Why complicate things by selling an OS as well?
*Everything* is dangerous when taken to extremes, or picked out as small incidents. This is why we have code reviews and reviewers. In the company I work for, we have a system where each task in change request is given a coder and an approver. The approvers' job is to inspect the code precisely to pick up problems like this, so when it's done, the approver can tick the box. Of course, if the approver is as slack, then management should exercise their perogative, do some manging and tell the approver where he or she are going wrong.
Which is why I hate STAR PROGRAMMERS. As pointed out earlier, they can be bastards to work with, and leave behind piles of doggy doo for others to prod at and look on in fear and wonder. Management only see that "wow, finished on record time and so fast as well".
Tip for budding STAR PROGRAMMERS: checkin as much code and as near to the dead-line as you can, the more the better. NObody in the world will ever dare to challenge you. QA will never challenge it. Mgt should kick back those changes if they had the balls...but, no, he (and it's usually a he) is A STAR PROGRAMMER and they can't be touched.
SO I guess what I saying is that code quality reflects the quality of management and the tools they put in place to ensure quality. Programmers will do what they want usually.
Slashdot Mirror
it was a RADIO series first and foremost. The novels came later. Radio is it's natural home for me because that's where I first heard it all those years ago on a shortwave radio in the Indian Ocean. Ah. Happy days!
Mind you, how many hollywood "writers" listen to the radio or even know of it's existence. Not many I'd guess.
To be fair, it was originally a radio series. Painting pictures with words, that sort of thing. The original radio series and books had direct input from Adams and were small-scale creative enterprises.
The transition to television - which I seemed to have wiped off my memory banks - was OKish but still not that brilliant. Adams was alive for that but I think it showed the weaker side of his creativity - which would have been diluted anyway by the large crews and money this sort of thing requires.
I don't give the film a snowball's chance in very large furnace. Too many competing interests, too much money, nice endings, Adams dead etc etc. It's like seeing your favorite kitten being shoved through a lawn mower.
Just *how* do they get the bits to go perpendicular? The cartoon doesn't really tell me :-)
Agreed. However I'm talking about a *military* usage so it would not have been a bog standard CRT as it stands. Damn! I wish I'd paid more attention to that Open University program. Tantalisingly, I can see references to Westinghouse, CRTs and LCDs thru a google search but not enough to provide provenance for my story. You'll just have to take my word for it :-)
Yes, a similar situation wrt the USA in the 19th century. I have a feeling this is the same for holland a long time ago as well. Also during my history lessons on the British Industrial revolution, I don't recall IP being mentioned as a big driver of, uh, "innovation".
There is one example I can think of of IP driving "innovation". During the 60's and 70's, the UK defence establishment had to pay royalties for, I think, the CRT (westinghouse had the monopoly? Can't rightly remember who but they were american) and the LCD screen was invented to *avoid* paying royalties.
So patents can be a driver but not in the way people think it is. Certainly, witness the retrospective patenting being done by MS. I'm not even sure that retrospective patenting should be allowed. IMO, once something has snuck out the door and onto the open market, then it should not be patentable, prior art or not.
The driver of invention should either neccessity or profit. Anything else is bogus.
Has anyone spotted it on googlemaps? And can we see the aliens please?
To you and all the others who made this suggestion (and who were modded as "insightful" rather than "redundant") the maps thing is still only a BETA after all. One day soon, the mighty google will give you all your christmas presents, with added paranoia.
My argument still stands. The large amounts of money gained through OEM-lockin is bound to lead to a better feature set.
You can see it happening again and again. Some non-MS product for windows comes out with a marginally better feature set. MS diverts some of it's cash mountain into a marketing campaign and a push to envelope those new features in it's own products. Linux has security? Well, here's an unfeasibily large amount of cash and windows can become as least as good as if not better than. Firefox is better? Crank out a team to improve IE.
So the current set-up is twisted against MS competitors who have or who are trying to get a better feature set. My argument is that you can't have one without the other. An open-market - or at least a more level playing field than we have now - would lead to competitors competing with similar feature sets. It's this commodification of the software market that MS fears most and which is what we should be aiming towards.
Maybe - just maybe - with OSS the cash mountain has met the limitless scribblings of an infinite number of monkeys...we'll see who has the most amount of patience.
First program: "make it so"
There, that's half the work done and a thousand phbs can lie back in relief.
Roger
I draw your attention to win3.1. Singularly unusable - I believe at the time GEM was a windowing system vastly superior to Win3.1 - yet Win 3.1 succeeded. MS can afford to incrementally improve their system because, through the tethered OEMs, they have this huge captive audience with a steady unthreatened income.
:-j
If RH were in the *same position* as MS and the roles reversed, they too would be able to make the same sort of incremental changes. XP - if such a beast actually existed in this scenario - would then be in the current RedHat role of playing continual catch-up with no real hope of major recurring funding.
Technology doesn't matter overly at the end of the day in the market as it stands. It's who *controls* the market wins. As it stands, that's MS.
Now, *if* the market were equalized and OEMs had the ability to install whatever OS their customers wanted, then the MS tax would cease to exist. RedHat would then have a significant chance of breaking through on the desktop. Until that happens, superior technology or not, Linux will never succeed on the desktop. No non-MS OS has a chance, including MS's pet strawman Apple ("Oh look, a competing OS. We aren't really a monopoly!")
If you ask me, this is what legislators are for...but I'm waxing nostalgic for 1997
RH would make that kind of money if RH Linux only, and nothing else, were sold with a PC. It's only the grip of MS on the OEMs that allows MS to charge so much. MS aren't stupid because they've distorted the market to their profit margins. So we're back to dodgy business practices rather than closed/open source, which I think is a non sequitur in this case.
I think MS don't want to open their source for many other reasons, mostly atavistic, but partially going back to Mr Bill's letter to hobbyists in the 80's.
So I guess you already *know* that yr server is burning slowly in the background..
but, smartarseness aside, I saw BK speak at NotCon last year and he is *great*. IIRC, he was hawking a job for technical director of the european center and it's to my everlasting regret that I didn't put myself forward for it because the whole deal that you guys do is frigging *fantastic*: an archive to surpass the Library of Alexandria is how I understand it. Awesome. I do hope you achieve it.
The current set of symbols we know as Mathematics was standardised in the 17th century as a "universal language".
As for prime numbers, that's as hokey as the Will Smith AppleTalk malarkey. Picard's canard draws on the universal math thing but, as we all know, there's more than one way to represent a number. First we would have to syncronise our number systems with the aliens then we might start talking primes. So something as basic as counting maybe the first point of contact.
umm. Think of our potential aliens as decoders. Instead of trying to *confuse* our alien decoders, we want to help them. Reverse the normal way messages are encrypted: include redundancy, repetitions, quirkiness. In fact all the things that our decoders use to crack codes. Give them masses of text, ensuring the patterns reinforce each other rather than fight against each other.
I'd start with similar blocks that were very simple then gradually slide the reading age of the grouped blocks upwards until we got enough coverage so that our alien decoders could get a working knowledge of the "language" (numeric or otherwise).
I just felt a tremor in the force: the sound of a thousand slashdotters going "ooooh"...
film at 11
This is a set-up for a porn-movie right?
Be *careful* out there...
Wagner was one of those who *promoted* anti-semtism as part of building a larger Germany. Even in the context of the times, he strayed heavily towards being actively anti-semitic. But he didn't go as far as touting extermination. That would be left to Cosima to support. His operas are heavily orchestrated towards building a Germanic state, dredging up the stories of the Volk, and some say making them implicitly, if not explicitly anti-semitic. I think this makes him than averagely bound to the anti-semitic discourse.
This isn't vapourware this is ghostware, forever at the edges of delivery, prototypes and betas hanging around like bad smells at the bottom of the stairwell where age-old blood still waits to be wiped up, marketing campaign logos so many dead flowers on the granite gravestone, hollow husks of men those who've wasted years in one of Redmonds failed experiments, dashed confetti at the castles walls, whilst others leaner, fitter strive on past them...beware, beware.
Duke Nukem.
Having more than one way to do things is neat until you start maintenance. Just that more futz to learn. Makes it an *expensive* language to maintain - expense in terms of skills to learn and time.
I agree that having multiple ways to do things may make it more comfortable for the programmer - but it's at the expense of easier maintenance.
Readability shouldn't be a lesson learned by a programmer. We all - even the stars amongst us - have to maintain other people's code. We should be kind to ourselves more often.
Then again, I'd say never write a perl program more 100 lines. If you've got a battery of tests, then maybe 500 lines. Anything else is foolhardy - I know. I'm paid to maintain 8000 lines of the stuff and it gives me nightmares.
h
I find the clearer the name, the better my ideas behind the algorithm. Typically, when writing something, I might start off with variable names that are worthless. As the code progress, the names jell and become clearer.
I can always tell a suspect piece of code: the names are ill-thought out and have little contextual meaning.
I'll certainly use that idea of scope.
I use logging *a lot* and I find that logging can obviate some of the need for comments.
But, however well names are given, they cannot convey some of my assumptions behind the code, which is what should be documented. Big time.
Yes, yes, but also use Wikipedia as a model for editing. Of course, it may not be as "respected" (see Encylopaedia Britannica v Wikipedia) and it may be a different form of information paradigm but seriously, how much money do researchers make out of reviewing journals? Would it be missed?
...none of this sems like real cutting-edge. None of this is going to change my world. How much do they spend on research?
IMO, once you're hooked into some huge dinosaur like MS office, you don't let go until you or it dies. And you don't do any fancy research on the side. Take for example Longhorn. That's looking more like Duke Nukem every day. And mark my words, when that appears, it won't be as revolutionary as the spin makes out. It will still have to run MS Office so it can't be that revolutionary or one of the only products that makes a profit for MS will die. Therein lies the catch.
I've heard the term roach motel applied to MS and this is it. All that expensive talent goes in and we get, what, a teddy-bear? Uh-uh. At least with google, expensive talent produces goods, things that make me go "ah". MSN makes stuff that makes me go "yuck". Amd I guess therein the difference lies.
h
I think they've already got their OS, but it's not for sale to the desk top. It's what runs the company. From what I've read, they've already got a load of other *top-flight* OS architects. This is about making Google perform better and cheaper, hot-swapping multiple disks and machines etc. Making sure that they deliver their services better than anyone else. This is their core focus and thy're feeding it. Unlike MS. Just what is the MS focus thse days? Right. They've not got one.
I don't thnk they're going to take on MS on the desktop any day soon. Why should they? They're rolling out enough shit to keep MS worried *already*. Why complicate things by selling an OS as well?
*Everything* is dangerous when taken to extremes, or picked out as small incidents. This is why we have code reviews and reviewers. In the company I work for, we have a system where each task in change request is given a coder and an approver. The approvers' job is to inspect the code precisely to pick up problems like this, so when it's done, the approver can tick the box. Of course, if the approver is as slack, then management should exercise their perogative, do some manging and tell the approver where he or she are going wrong.
Which is why I hate STAR PROGRAMMERS. As pointed out earlier, they can be bastards to work with, and leave behind piles of doggy doo for others to prod at and look on in fear and wonder. Management only see that "wow, finished on record time and so fast as well".
Tip for budding STAR PROGRAMMERS: checkin as much code and as near to the dead-line as you can, the more the better. NObody in the world will ever dare to challenge you. QA will never challenge it. Mgt should kick back those changes if they had the balls...but, no, he (and it's usually a he) is A STAR PROGRAMMER and they can't be touched.
SO I guess what I saying is that code quality reflects the quality of management and the tools they put in place to ensure quality. Programmers will do what they want usually.
h
thanks, Bill.