Every desktop computer I've had since my old Tandy 1000 has been a custom-built clone, excepting my stint with an Amiga 500. I've done the piecemeal upgrade thing. Here's my take on it: it's not worth it unless you're really broke, and if you're doing it often, you're probably wasting your time on your tools instead of what you do with them. Hence, two out of my three laptops have been Macs, and I like them a great deal.
There's another thing. If you want a second machine to your desktop, a laptop doesn't need to be a screamer to be very useful, nor does it need to run the same operating system. In fact, having two different kinds of machines can be pretty darn cool. So, try some old iBook or something; that's my advice if you want to sample the world of OSX. As long as you have over 512MB, even an old 600MHz iBook G3 machine is plenty for the basic browsing and email.
I think NVidia is doing something right in this department. The same video driver works across the majority of their cards, from the old TNT2 to the latest GeForce. This implies that a good level of abstraction is possible with video cards, and if this is the case with video cards, one wonders how much can be done with other hardware.
I have my doubts as to the ability to get those thousands of times the brain's performance with any natural progression of current technology. The brain has some 15 quadrillion connections between all its neurons, and the adaptability is inspiring.
Why do we want so badly to re-invent something that already works well, anyway? I think too much technology makes us lazy in developing our own talent. I am reminded of a discourse in Plato where the inventor of writing gets a stern rebuke, because his invention would make people familiar with many things while knowing nothing, reminiscing instead of memorizing. Well, to some extent, I find that true.
Actually, the wheel has been invented in nature. E. Coli has a rotary propulsion system. It hasn't happened on a multicellular level, though if you think about it, legs can go places can't. Goodness knows how many dramatically different possible branches of evolution have been closed off through mass extinctions. It is interesting to ponder, though, what cheetahs and antelopes would look like on wheels.
Ever seen the indie film "Waking Life"? There's a segment where a post-humanist goes on about how predatory relationships will be obsolete in the post-singularity world.
I saw that and thought of a recent simulation of an evolving ecosystem. Autotropes, herbivores, predators and parasites all evolved independently in a simulation that simply required growth and survival. I think they are naturally emergent phenomena. You can even explain the existence of defense attorneys and cold-call telephone soliciting this way.
You know, I used to have this technological post-human bent. Buried in C++ programming projects, I admired the order of all that I was creating. It was fun. I'd get a new set of behaviors programmed in the usual conditional branching - if/else, class polymorphism, you name it - and seeing it work was exhilarating. The idea that humanity could reinvent its world piece by piece - much like in the argument where if you replaced each neuron in your brain one by one with an artificial equivalent, at what point would you cease to be human, if at all? I still have Raymond Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines on one of my bookshelves.
The thing is, we are still way surpassed at this by billions of years of evolution. We run on energy from fossil fuels and build from materials we've mined and shipped. On the other hand, we find bacteria living in the most surprising places, we find superior sonar in dolphins and bats to anything we make, and all of it runs on, ultimately, fresh plant matter. We get excited over a myomer that lifted some heavy weight, and I tell you, an elephant can do the same thing given enough food. The sheer variety and efficiency of the ecosystem virtually guarantees that most any way you can think to survive has been done somewhere, somehow, by some living creature. We're worrying about when oil will peak, if we can live another century, and outside our doors the world can go on for eons to come provided we don't break it with our silly toys.
And in a geek-intense environment like this one, I think I can say that it's difficult to beat the end product of a long-term evolutionary algorithm, which itself is an arguably good model of what the world around us acts like, and you all will understand.
I don't deny the coolness of my Apple notebook and I've got a decent number of shelves full of programming books, but I think biomimicry is where it's at. We can go a lot further learning from our world of proteins and DNA and RNA and using - or just having fun with! - what's already there.
We can also get out more and enjoy our analog, fuzzy-logic, neural-net-driven, molecularly-computed fleshy selves.;)
You know, that portrayal of Dean in the media was really unfair. That "scream" was made when he was holding a noise-cancelling mic that was using then-new technology. What you didn't hear is that Dean was speaking in a tone that would be natural when you're surrounded by a noisy crowd, which he was. But really, lopsided portrayals and dirty shenanigans are like water, food, and air to mass media and politics.
So, Vermont's doing even better than that from where I'm standing.
PS - don't hire crack-addicted monkeys if you care about your code.
You know, you're really kinda right, but where pointy-haired bosses rule there's no guarantee. Language designers really ought to pay attention to things that cause the most common or most subtle bugs, and many of them do. If you learn C++, you learn that the reason for all those headers and namespaces is to keep code from stomping on each other, and keep things scalable. A language that read like ksh and sed and awk held together by duct tape was good for its day, but it just wasn't ready for its success without providing for these things. Perl 6 is way overdue.
I vehemently disagree. Messes are a problem, not consumption. Why do we have this new puritanism taking over in certain places? I don't want conservation. I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance, and there is no intrinsic reason why we can't have it.
If you need to use a finite resource like oil at a rate that will deplete it within our lifespan, and live a way that leads to widespread destruction of ecosystems, there's a problem. It all comes down to energy: the earth receives a certain amount from the sun each year, emits another set amount in geothermal energy, and after that it's all a question of where that energy goes. Ecosystems do a very good job of correcting for any imbalance that would lessen living thing's ability to harness it; food webs are magnificient things. There just is no precedent, however, for a mechanized species with dinosaurs for fuel, and that species is in trouble when its deficit spending days are come to an end.
Manufacturing cars and gadgets is a very energy-intense process and one of the best ways we can keep the environmental impact down is make them last.
Technology is a means, not an end. Technology is not our life.
Human lifespan just isn't the only metric of a planet's viability. Long-term survivability demands that resources consumed be renewable. It also means that we need to pay attention to the biosphere, because our monocultures of lawn grass and crops and animals simply don't have the viability in the long term. We only get by with it right now because we're burning through millions year of surplus solar energy in the form of petroleum right now. You have to be on your toes not to be feeding, indirectly, on oil through the products of industrialized agriculture.
The worst destruction is definitely in the third world, where cash crops that the industrial world demands and the chemicals used to grow them destroy the soil, and people move on to destroy more land. We haven't solved the problem. We've just swept it under the rug for a while.
In the meantime, scientists are saying that the rate of extinction of species on this planet is catastrophic and fits the parameters of a mass extinction. Loss of biodiversity means loss of evolutionary potential, and hence survivability.
We can do a lot to fix it, but until serious ecological responsibility becomes ingrained in our society, I don't see how we'll prevent a disaster that might even reach into air-conditioned Western suburban homes.
As a British man, I love America and I hope the feeling is mutual. I raise this glass to the future of Science and hope you will raise your glass too! To Science!
At long last, some sign of approval from our parent country after all these long hard years! I'm going to tear up.
C and Perl are for professional programmers. Ruby and Python are for people who need to write short programs from time to time, better than VB, of course, but no substitute for professional quality tools.
I have to call BS on this one. I highly doubt that the parent poster has seen the ubiquitous pile of legacy Perl code lying around, and how bad and bug-ridden it can be because the programmers didn't do enough to control a sloppy language. I think Perl Medic is the only Perl book I'll ever recommend for that reason.
Based on years of professional and hobby experience, I'd keep Perl around for 100 line one-off scripts and no more. Perl's flaws as a language have bit down hard anywhere where multiple programmers had to collaborate on a sizable project or maintain it over a period of time. The amount of nonsensical boilerplate is tremendous. Having to shovel more of it to force what is essentially an sh script with everything in the world tacked on just to keep its variables non-global is the precise opposite of what a serious language should do. And the language even lets a freestanding next or last statement in a function break loops in the calling function! Try being on a team with sloppy programmers with those kind of design flaws running loose.
That was the past. I now work in a Silicon Valley startup where we use Java and Python, depending on the kind of work being done. Python's design scales far better for application development, with good modularization and OO done right without extra judo moves just to force behavior. The Ruby and PHP people seem pretty happy too.
Perl was good in its day. Other languages have long since surpassed it. Let it go the way of COBOL.
Yes, but the reason any of us are alive is that biodiversity allows survival. Somewhere in that diverse pool, something has got what it takes to live. We live atop of billions of years of ecosystems making the most of the energy we've gotten from the earth and sun, and it happens because nearly every possible way to turn that energy into organic life that you can think of is done somewhere. That energy to live is the real wealth; people just use money and playstations and air conditioned buildings to forget that.
This late outbreak of people with bulldozers burning millions of year's worth of stored solar energy in just a century or two to impose their frail and imbalanced monocultures of grass and plastic and cash crops by brute force destroys far more than any rational being can justify. Have a look at what mountaintop-removal mining is doing to Appalachia. Look at the difference between a living coral reef and a dead one. Notice how human intervention with levees and destroyed wetlands made Katrina such a disaster. Listen to the astronauts when they say that over their careers they can see the differences made as the rain forests are stripped.
What they teach in any decent biology class at the college level should be taught far sooner, so people could appreciate that no one species can really live on its own. Condone the ways of modern industry and call people Luddites if you will, but you simply can't do it in the name of long-term human survival.
No, being human is about making intelligent, forward-thinking decisions. Ignoring the billions-year-old balance of life that we depend on for our gadgets sounds robotic to me!
I've heard this perspective that explains a lot to me:
Remember how the climatologists were predicting an ice age? They were on sound footing in many respects. We were due for a cold cycle, but they did not account for human greenhouse gas emissions. Humans affected the climate, but to the negation of that disaster.
Much like the people denying that Y2K would have happened, to businessmen and some observers, it looked like the scientists had been off base and don't need to be listened to now. And you can say that preventing an ice age is a good thing, too.
But in the meantime, CO2 and other greenhouse gasses have increased all the more and the temperatures are rising in contravention to the natural cycle. As the temperature rises, we're likely to see positive feedback loops: methane ice melting at the bottom of the oceans and getting into the atmosphere, unhealthy forests and soil emitting their stored carbon, so forth.
I think that the best example of what you're saying would be the Java compiler in the gcc suite. That separate front-end, back-end approach of gcc is terribly helpful.
And yet, if you're going to compile Python, I'd want the translation into source code. If it's worth rewriting in C++, it's worth tuning, especially if you can improve the usage of type-safe code.
Actually it didn't work, nine times out of ten. It usually knocked the whine into a less annoying octave, though. Occasionally it brought the picture clarity back - stopped a bunch of horizontal pincushioning and all, other times it didn't. Chaos theory, man. You never know exactly what to expect.
I say we chip all of you border-hopping, Ellis Island-packing sweatshop-working immigrants and send you where you came from, to preserve our heritage. You too, Plymouth Rock n00blets. We didn't work our butts off and eat people for thirteen years to have you take our jobs. 1607 is it, the rest...
Just kidding. Really I don't have a right to claim "native" status either.
That's exactly how I kept my old Amiga's 1084s monitor, complete with its whiny flyback, going for years and years - right down to the relaxed palm and loose fingers that whack it slightly after.
People outside the software development field really do make an awful lot of assumptions about the number of things that can go wrong in millions of lines of source code. Specification versus implementation is a tricky beast by itself.
If they really want to follow through with this talk, they'd better be prepared for the design decisions that go along with it, code reuse most of all. One thing that I think is particularly detrimental to code reuse is a proprietary model where the OS and every software vendor re-invents wheels over and over. You're going to need more open specs to change that.
If this is rooting for regulation of the software industry, beware. The big guys have a lot more to gain from this than the small innovators and startups. Who would really want to take advise from stereotyping wags like that anyway?
The problem isn't a data monoculture. Standard formats for data are great things! But in computers, monocultures of operating systems and executables, particularly automatic and insecure ones like those rife on Windows and Outlook and Office, are dangerous things. I doubt you'll be seeing a file that infects OpenOffice users on load on Windows, Mac, and *nix machines.
Okay, off with the funky glasses. Since when do they want to sell you future-proof hardware when they can sell you a whole new unit then?? I'm surprised they aren't made to break more!
Slashdot Mirror
Every desktop computer I've had since my old Tandy 1000 has been a custom-built clone, excepting my stint with an Amiga 500. I've done the piecemeal upgrade thing. Here's my take on it: it's not worth it unless you're really broke, and if you're doing it often, you're probably wasting your time on your tools instead of what you do with them. Hence, two out of my three laptops have been Macs, and I like them a great deal.
There's another thing. If you want a second machine to your desktop, a laptop doesn't need to be a screamer to be very useful, nor does it need to run the same operating system. In fact, having two different kinds of machines can be pretty darn cool. So, try some old iBook or something; that's my advice if you want to sample the world of OSX. As long as you have over 512MB, even an old 600MHz iBook G3 machine is plenty for the basic browsing and email.
I think NVidia is doing something right in this department. The same video driver works across the majority of their cards, from the old TNT2 to the latest GeForce. This implies that a good level of abstraction is possible with video cards, and if this is the case with video cards, one wonders how much can be done with other hardware.
I have my doubts as to the ability to get those thousands of times the brain's performance with any natural progression of current technology. The brain has some 15 quadrillion connections between all its neurons, and the adaptability is inspiring.
Why do we want so badly to re-invent something that already works well, anyway? I think too much technology makes us lazy in developing our own talent. I am reminded of a discourse in Plato where the inventor of writing gets a stern rebuke, because his invention would make people familiar with many things while knowing nothing, reminiscing instead of memorizing. Well, to some extent, I find that true.
Actually, the wheel has been invented in nature. E. Coli has a rotary propulsion system. It hasn't happened on a multicellular level, though if you think about it, legs can go places can't. Goodness knows how many dramatically different possible branches of evolution have been closed off through mass extinctions. It is interesting to ponder, though, what cheetahs and antelopes would look like on wheels.
Ever seen the indie film "Waking Life"? There's a segment where a post-humanist goes on about how predatory relationships will be obsolete in the post-singularity world.
I saw that and thought of a recent simulation of an evolving ecosystem. Autotropes, herbivores, predators and parasites all evolved independently in a simulation that simply required growth and survival. I think they are naturally emergent phenomena. You can even explain the existence of defense attorneys and cold-call telephone soliciting this way.
You know, I used to have this technological post-human bent. Buried in C++ programming projects, I admired the order of all that I was creating. It was fun. I'd get a new set of behaviors programmed in the usual conditional branching - if/else, class polymorphism, you name it - and seeing it work was exhilarating. The idea that humanity could reinvent its world piece by piece - much like in the argument where if you replaced each neuron in your brain one by one with an artificial equivalent, at what point would you cease to be human, if at all? I still have Raymond Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines on one of my bookshelves.
;)
The thing is, we are still way surpassed at this by billions of years of evolution. We run on energy from fossil fuels and build from materials we've mined and shipped. On the other hand, we find bacteria living in the most surprising places, we find superior sonar in dolphins and bats to anything we make, and all of it runs on, ultimately, fresh plant matter. We get excited over a myomer that lifted some heavy weight, and I tell you, an elephant can do the same thing given enough food. The sheer variety and efficiency of the ecosystem virtually guarantees that most any way you can think to survive has been done somewhere, somehow, by some living creature. We're worrying about when oil will peak, if we can live another century, and outside our doors the world can go on for eons to come provided we don't break it with our silly toys.
And in a geek-intense environment like this one, I think I can say that it's difficult to beat the end product of a long-term evolutionary algorithm, which itself is an arguably good model of what the world around us acts like, and you all will understand.
I don't deny the coolness of my Apple notebook and I've got a decent number of shelves full of programming books, but I think biomimicry is where it's at. We can go a lot further learning from our world of proteins and DNA and RNA and using - or just having fun with! - what's already there.
We can also get out more and enjoy our analog, fuzzy-logic, neural-net-driven, molecularly-computed fleshy selves.
You know, that portrayal of Dean in the media was really unfair. That "scream" was made when he was holding a noise-cancelling mic that was using then-new technology. What you didn't hear is that Dean was speaking in a tone that would be natural when you're surrounded by a noisy crowd, which he was. But really, lopsided portrayals and dirty shenanigans are like water, food, and air to mass media and politics.
So, Vermont's doing even better than that from where I'm standing.
PS - don't hire crack-addicted monkeys if you care about your code.
You know, you're really kinda right, but where pointy-haired bosses rule there's no guarantee. Language designers really ought to pay attention to things that cause the most common or most subtle bugs, and many of them do. If you learn C++, you learn that the reason for all those headers and namespaces is to keep code from stomping on each other, and keep things scalable. A language that read like ksh and sed and awk held together by duct tape was good for its day, but it just wasn't ready for its success without providing for these things. Perl 6 is way overdue.
I vehemently disagree. Messes are a problem, not consumption. Why do we have this new puritanism taking over in certain places? I don't want conservation. I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance, and there is no intrinsic reason why we can't have it.
If you need to use a finite resource like oil at a rate that will deplete it within our lifespan, and live a way that leads to widespread destruction of ecosystems, there's a problem. It all comes down to energy: the earth receives a certain amount from the sun each year, emits another set amount in geothermal energy, and after that it's all a question of where that energy goes. Ecosystems do a very good job of correcting for any imbalance that would lessen living thing's ability to harness it; food webs are magnificient things. There just is no precedent, however, for a mechanized species with dinosaurs for fuel, and that species is in trouble when its deficit spending days are come to an end.
Manufacturing cars and gadgets is a very energy-intense process and one of the best ways we can keep the environmental impact down is make them last.
Technology is a means, not an end. Technology is not our life.
Human lifespan just isn't the only metric of a planet's viability. Long-term survivability demands that resources consumed be renewable. It also means that we need to pay attention to the biosphere, because our monocultures of lawn grass and crops and animals simply don't have the viability in the long term. We only get by with it right now because we're burning through millions year of surplus solar energy in the form of petroleum right now. You have to be on your toes not to be feeding, indirectly, on oil through the products of industrialized agriculture.
The worst destruction is definitely in the third world, where cash crops that the industrial world demands and the chemicals used to grow them destroy the soil, and people move on to destroy more land. We haven't solved the problem. We've just swept it under the rug for a while.
In the meantime, scientists are saying that the rate of extinction of species on this planet is catastrophic and fits the parameters of a mass extinction. Loss of biodiversity means loss of evolutionary potential, and hence survivability.
We can do a lot to fix it, but until serious ecological responsibility becomes ingrained in our society, I don't see how we'll prevent a disaster that might even reach into air-conditioned Western suburban homes.
As a British man, I love America and I hope the feeling is mutual. I raise this glass to the future of Science and hope you will raise your glass too! To Science!
:)
At long last, some sign of approval from our parent country after all these long hard years! I'm going to tear up.
But really, cheers!
C and Perl are for professional programmers. Ruby and Python are for people who need to write short programs from time to time, better than VB, of course, but no substitute for professional quality tools.
I have to call BS on this one. I highly doubt that the parent poster has seen the ubiquitous pile of legacy Perl code lying around, and how bad and bug-ridden it can be because the programmers didn't do enough to control a sloppy language. I think Perl Medic is the only Perl book I'll ever recommend for that reason.
Based on years of professional and hobby experience, I'd keep Perl around for 100 line one-off scripts and no more. Perl's flaws as a language have bit down hard anywhere where multiple programmers had to collaborate on a sizable project or maintain it over a period of time. The amount of nonsensical boilerplate is tremendous. Having to shovel more of it to force what is essentially an sh script with everything in the world tacked on just to keep its variables non-global is the precise opposite of what a serious language should do. And the language even lets a freestanding next or last statement in a function break loops in the calling function! Try being on a team with sloppy programmers with those kind of design flaws running loose.
That was the past. I now work in a Silicon Valley startup where we use Java and Python, depending on the kind of work being done. Python's design scales far better for application development, with good modularization and OO done right without extra judo moves just to force behavior. The Ruby and PHP people seem pretty happy too.
Perl was good in its day. Other languages have long since surpassed it. Let it go the way of COBOL.
Yes, but the reason any of us are alive is that biodiversity allows survival. Somewhere in that diverse pool, something has got what it takes to live. We live atop of billions of years of ecosystems making the most of the energy we've gotten from the earth and sun, and it happens because nearly every possible way to turn that energy into organic life that you can think of is done somewhere. That energy to live is the real wealth; people just use money and playstations and air conditioned buildings to forget that.
This late outbreak of people with bulldozers burning millions of year's worth of stored solar energy in just a century or two to impose their frail and imbalanced monocultures of grass and plastic and cash crops by brute force destroys far more than any rational being can justify. Have a look at what mountaintop-removal mining is doing to Appalachia. Look at the difference between a living coral reef and a dead one. Notice how human intervention with levees and destroyed wetlands made Katrina such a disaster. Listen to the astronauts when they say that over their careers they can see the differences made as the rain forests are stripped.
What they teach in any decent biology class at the college level should be taught far sooner, so people could appreciate that no one species can really live on its own. Condone the ways of modern industry and call people Luddites if you will, but you simply can't do it in the name of long-term human survival.
No, being human is about making intelligent, forward-thinking decisions. Ignoring the billions-year-old balance of life that we depend on for our gadgets sounds robotic to me!
I've heard this perspective that explains a lot to me:
Remember how the climatologists were predicting an ice age? They were on sound footing in many respects. We were due for a cold cycle, but they did not account for human greenhouse gas emissions. Humans affected the climate, but to the negation of that disaster.
Much like the people denying that Y2K would have happened, to businessmen and some observers, it looked like the scientists had been off base and don't need to be listened to now. And you can say that preventing an ice age is a good thing, too.
But in the meantime, CO2 and other greenhouse gasses have increased all the more and the temperatures are rising in contravention to the natural cycle. As the temperature rises, we're likely to see positive feedback loops: methane ice melting at the bottom of the oceans and getting into the atmosphere, unhealthy forests and soil emitting their stored carbon, so forth.
It makes a terrible lot of sense.
I think that the best example of what you're saying would be the Java compiler in the gcc suite. That separate front-end, back-end approach of gcc is terribly helpful.
And yet, if you're going to compile Python, I'd want the translation into source code. If it's worth rewriting in C++, it's worth tuning, especially if you can improve the usage of type-safe code.
Alzheimer's progresses on its own.
Actually it didn't work, nine times out of ten. It usually knocked the whine into a less annoying octave, though. Occasionally it brought the picture clarity back - stopped a bunch of horizontal pincushioning and all, other times it didn't. Chaos theory, man. You never know exactly what to expect.
I say we chip all of you border-hopping, Ellis Island-packing sweatshop-working immigrants and send you where you came from, to preserve our heritage. You too, Plymouth Rock n00blets. We didn't work our butts off and eat people for thirteen years to have you take our jobs. 1607 is it, the rest...
Just kidding. Really I don't have a right to claim "native" status either.
That's exactly how I kept my old Amiga's 1084s monitor, complete with its whiny flyback, going for years and years - right down to the relaxed palm and loose fingers that whack it slightly after.
People outside the software development field really do make an awful lot of assumptions about the number of things that can go wrong in millions of lines of source code. Specification versus implementation is a tricky beast by itself.
If they really want to follow through with this talk, they'd better be prepared for the design decisions that go along with it, code reuse most of all. One thing that I think is particularly detrimental to code reuse is a proprietary model where the OS and every software vendor re-invents wheels over and over. You're going to need more open specs to change that.
If this is rooting for regulation of the software industry, beware. The big guys have a lot more to gain from this than the small innovators and startups. Who would really want to take advise from stereotyping wags like that anyway?
The problem isn't a data monoculture. Standard formats for data are great things! But in computers, monocultures of operating systems and executables, particularly automatic and insecure ones like those rife on Windows and Outlook and Office, are dangerous things. I doubt you'll be seeing a file that infects OpenOffice users on load on Windows, Mac, and *nix machines.
Okay, off with the funky glasses. Since when do they want to sell you future-proof hardware when they can sell you a whole new unit then?? I'm surprised they aren't made to break more!
No. Think of all those tech types getting giggly and shy. It's not pretty.
And what do the "poor" people of the world live in if not the environment? More suburbs?