That's true, and in general, I'm OK with a filmmaker taking liberties with a story. E.g., David Lynch's version of Dune is in many ways different than Frank Herbert's story. But the gist is still there. For me, I feel like when someone like Soderbergh feels that they can improve on a "masterpiece" by de-emphasizing the main themes of the work, they're missing the point. The love theme in Solaris was there only to heighten the fact that Solaris was tormenting this poor guy-- it wasn't love, it was torture, because all the planet knew was that it evoked a strong emotional reponse. The planet and the person were alien to each other. Soderbergh completely missed this. It makes me wonder if he even read the novel.
While it's true that starting pay is low, it's not in the $15K range; more like $20-$25K. But it's also true that that you don't stay in that pay range for long. See here.Your post is very misleading. Average pay and starting pay are very different things!
I come from a family of pilots (IANAP), and they all live quite well. The low pay is a known problem, because many pilots do extra duty to make ends meet, but it also has the effect of encouraging only the truly motivated ones to stick around.
<loaded question>How much do military pilots make? Do you feel unsafe with them?</loaded question>
As long as there is a strong emphasis that one's position in life is within their own control, and that the rules are fair (at least, in school) to ensure upward (and downward) mobility, I have no problem with stratifying students. Yes, this exposes some uncomfortable truths, like: children with active parents are more likely to do well in school; children in financially-comfortable families can better focus on their studies. But the fact is, this is how the world works, and children need to learn that lesson someday. Penalizing the motivated students by catering to the least common denominator is the worst possible solution to this problem! And teaching the class at the level of the motivated students hurts the less-capable students, because, even if they are motivated, they may have no way to get up to speed on their own.
In the real world, your fate is in your own hands, but the rules aren't fair. Never were, and probably never will be. I think it is a great disservice to our children to pretend like this problem doesn't exist. In the US, we seem to have this major inability to differentiate between what should be and what is. We need to prepare children for what is.
I was recently asked to do a reading for a wedding which had a strong geek audience in attendance, and I very much considered reading Lem's love poem. This was a book that deeply influenced my decision to spend a life in pursuing hackerdom, and I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Lem by a former Bell Labs employee who also introduced me to a variety of other cool geeky things (telnet, for instance). In the end, I decided not to go with the poem, because it doesn't really fit the couple actually getting married, but my own wedding is at the end of the summer, so you know what I'm going to ask my best man to read!
For those not familiar with the poem-- what is even more astounding about it is that it was original written in Polish! The translation is marvelous. On the subject of Solaris, though-- I think it is a masterpiece of psychologial terror, totally gripping-- but that the film adaptations (Tarkovsky's less so) are somewhat weak. Too bad Kubrick didn't take a stab at it.
Sorry, yes, I meant Spaces. But Spaces has some annoying bugs. Try binding an application to a space. Now go to a different space, and try to switch back to the application by clicking on the application's Dock icon. It doesn't always work. Instead, I use a keyboard shortcut that is a lot like GNOME's, but for me, Fluxbox's virtual desktop handling is ideal. I wish Spaces were more like that.
Ugh. Maybe you can explain why I'd want to buy an HDTV with all of the accoutrements rather than buy a vastly cheaper flat panel display, and use it with my far more flexible computer. In my opinion, TVs and computers are converging, and new revisions of HDMI are a way to keep them differentiated. Is there really an advantage to an HDTV? This is the thing that has stopped me from buying an HDTV.
Now, as far as cabling goes, I suspect most of this is driven by a marketing department. If you look at computer display technology, which has been in rapid flux for at least 20 years, they've managed to standardize on TWO different connectors: one for analog and one for digital. Sure, there are some weirdo ones out there, like ADC and 13W3, but they never really had any real relevance. But with TVs, which is ostensibly simpler than computer displays, we have this panoply of cables. Why?
Now, Cat5e-- that's an impressive technology. The data rates people have been able to squeeze out of plain ol' twisted pair! But seriously; we do everything in software now. Why does television insist on having cable after cable to do functions that we could do with a single one?
Yeah, I'd love to see a Google UI, too. I can't wait for context-sensitive ads about shirt buttons when I'm trying to click a button:^P
To all of these people who are bitching about the UI in Linux-- are you actually using Linux? Maybe I'm an old-timer, but Ubuntu 9.04 looks a lot nicer to me than my Windows box at work. The MacOS is pretty slick, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it is "consistent" or "intuitive". And the Expose pretty much blows compared to your bog-standard workspace switchers on Linux.
GNOME has human interface guidelines and has had them since 1.0. If Ben Goodger is bitching about GTK+/GNOME not having consistent UI guidelines, it's because it's not consistent with whatever his vision is. In my opinion, GNOME is a heck of a lot more consistent than MacOSX's Steve-Jobs-whim-of-the-day, and-- let's not even get started on the Windows UI fustercluck. Of course, if he's talking about KDE... well, OK. KDE's interface is... odd.
I have an old GTK book somewhere that says that the developers based their HIG on the original Macintosh HIG (that the MacOS now no longer follows), which was actually based on user-feedback and also based in part on the Xerox Star. That's a pretty long lineage when it comes to GUI.
The complaint about Mozilla having a functionless 511MB executable after switching to GTK+ has nothing to do with GTK+. GTK+ is not exactly lightweight, but it ain't exactly a bloated beast either.
Complaints about audio are well-founded, though. Audio in Linux still sucks.
It's pretty easy to make claims like this when there are, in fact, no Windows machines providing any core Internet services (BGP, DNS, etc). It's like dividing by zero, right?
True, but how many banks do you think actually perform any due diligence in determining whether a protocol is secure or not? I think that as long as they can cover their asses, they think they're fine. E.g., "well, everyone else is leveraged 30:1, so we might as well be too! If it fails, it's not going to affect us, because the entire world economy is fucked!" As long as everyone else is using SecureBox 2000 too, they have a good excuse.
I really think the banks apply the bare minimum of oversight, because in the end, it's not them that gets fucked, it's us. Passing the buck is the cheapest option-- that's the problem.
PHP already has a couple: PEAR::DB and AdoDB. And, of course, Perl has DBI.
I don't think the lack of abstraction is stopping anyone. We might call our stack LAMP, because people have a good idea what that means, even if our actual environment is OADP (OpenBSD, Apache, DBI, Perl). Same difference. We have LAMP machines, too, and they are pretty much equivalent.
But wait-- is it really that important for the database to do authentication anyway? It's not like every single user of your application needs different database rights. In the apps I write, there's usually like three user-types with differing permissions. The database maintains a map between the userid and the user type on the DB. It really doesn't need to know much more than that. As long as the user really is who they say they are-- and that part can be handled further up in the stack-- everything works simply.
I'm OK with Apple doing idiotic stuff like this. History has shown that, in the long run, the "walled garden" approach does not have a lot of longevity. Apple should know this better than anyone, seeing as they've tried it repeatedly. In the end cheap and open always wins.
I'm willing to bet that once Android phones are really available, you're going to see the smartest developers moving over. Not because Android is technically superior-- it may not be-- but because no one wants to PAY for a SDK and pour loads of time into developing and refining applications, only to have it blocked by Apple for some arbitrary or unknown reason. Couple that with Apple's long history of incorporating good ideas into their own platform at the expense of developers, and I think their App Store will eventually marginalize itself.
Right now, the iPhone is really the only slick thing out there (I speak as a Blackberry user and administrator, which is a platform that works but not well), but how long do you think this will be the case?
Ah, yes. I always thought that King's Quest really nailed the essence of a good game. You had the action part (had to use joystick or keyboard to run away from trolls, etc), you had the adventure part (escape from the wizard!, find the magic thing!, etc), and you had the puzzle part (what the heck do I want cat hair for?). Great game. I remember showing KQIII to some people not too long ago and one of them said "Wow, the graphics suck!" I guess it depends on where you came from, though-- when I saw the original King's Quest on a PCjr coming from a TI computer, that was pretty mind-blowing to me. It was a big step up from Scott Adams adventure games.
Yeah, Myst. That was a great game, not the least of which was the *suspense*. I.e., the suspense of waiting for the f*&%ing CD-ROM drive. I owned a "blazingly fast" NEC Intersect 2x CD-ROM drive (yes, 2x; yes, external SCSI). I'd click on something, that thing would thrash around for a few minutes, and then I'd get that wonderful HyperCard-dissolve-into-next-eerie-scene. I remember my parents angrily telling me to "go to bed" because the NEC was so damn loud and was keeping them up. It was fun, but, thankfully storage is relatively fast and cheap now.
As a counterpoint, I was asked by a coworker a few weeks ago to help her install Ubuntu on her laptop. She was sick to death of dealing with viruses/spyware and had heard that this Ubuntu thing might help. I explained that it was quite different than Windows, that she might occasionally find it frustrating, but that it would, indeed solve many of her problems. She decided to go ahead anyway.
I installed Ubuntu 8.10 with her watching over my shoulder. When I was done, she said "That's it?"
"Yeah, " I replied, "that's it."
"Well I could have done that."
She came back several weeks later-- and I was pretty much expecting her to ask me to remove it. What she had actually come back for was to show me how she had installed Ubuntu 9.04 by herself. She was quite proud of this, and very happy with her new system.
I'm not sure if this is an example of how much easier Ubuntu has gotten (point of reference: I have not yet touched a single config file in 9.04), or if she is an exceptionally fast learner. But it makes me think that "not ready for the desktop" is quickly becoming a euphemism for "it doesn't run Windows software." Because it is definitely ready for the desktop.
And you're really just talking about the GUI here. What makes UNIX great-- better than Windows-- is what's underneath.
1. A lot of control over how processes are run.
2. Common and well-defined interfaces that allow you to arbitrarily connect program outputs to program inputs.
3. A sane system API.
4. Extensive system-wide documentation, especially where the BSDs are concerned (the libc/system call library documentation comes with the system!)
5. Lots of built-in tools to make your life easier: package management, compiler collection, editors. sudo, xargs, dd, hexdump, perl, and on and on and on...
6. Common ways to configure application startup (rc), shutdown (rc), and periodic jobs (cron).
7. and most importantly, a PHILOSOPHY that programmers conform to so that programs behave as expected, and take advantage of the full power of the system. This last part cannot be understated, and it is the thing that I find most frustrating about Windows.
You're ignoring my point about virtual 8086 mode. This is how Windows achieved backward compatibility with DOS for many, many years. On desktops. Virtual 8086 is nothing more than a VM layer in the Intel chip itself. Are you telling me that backward compatibility with DOS was not important to Microsoft?
Real mode and virtual 8086 mode are still present in Intel chips today, and the x86 instruction set is, in a sense, a VM layer on top of the machine's real instruction set. Intel, AMD, VIA, and so on-- they most certainly would not expend the effort to make these features available on their chips if they did not think they were important, because they contribute in a not-insignificant way to the transistor count on a chip.
Point is, VMs are very important, even for desktop systems, and they will be with us for a long time. You are simply mistaken.
But since they're general drivers, they never archieve the same results as specific drivers made for Windows by the manufacturer.
OTOH, you also have OSS drivers that are better, where, e.g., you can use the same configuration utility to run your wireless card or the same configuration utility to manage your RAID.
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That's true, and in general, I'm OK with a filmmaker taking liberties with a story. E.g., David Lynch's version of Dune is in many ways different than Frank Herbert's story. But the gist is still there. For me, I feel like when someone like Soderbergh feels that they can improve on a "masterpiece" by de-emphasizing the main themes of the work, they're missing the point. The love theme in Solaris was there only to heighten the fact that Solaris was tormenting this poor guy-- it wasn't love, it was torture, because all the planet knew was that it evoked a strong emotional reponse. The planet and the person were alien to each other. Soderbergh completely missed this. It makes me wonder if he even read the novel.
While it's true that starting pay is low, it's not in the $15K range; more like $20-$25K. But it's also true that that you don't stay in that pay range for long. See here.Your post is very misleading. Average pay and starting pay are very different things!
I come from a family of pilots (IANAP), and they all live quite well. The low pay is a known problem, because many pilots do extra duty to make ends meet, but it also has the effect of encouraging only the truly motivated ones to stick around.
<loaded question>How much do military pilots make? Do you feel unsafe with them?</loaded question>
Lemme guess. You're an asshole.
Probably just as accurate, no?
when James T. Kirk has the conn. He doesn't believe in a no-win scenario!
As long as there is a strong emphasis that one's position in life is within their own control, and that the rules are fair (at least, in school) to ensure upward (and downward) mobility, I have no problem with stratifying students. Yes, this exposes some uncomfortable truths, like: children with active parents are more likely to do well in school; children in financially-comfortable families can better focus on their studies. But the fact is, this is how the world works, and children need to learn that lesson someday. Penalizing the motivated students by catering to the least common denominator is the worst possible solution to this problem! And teaching the class at the level of the motivated students hurts the less-capable students, because, even if they are motivated, they may have no way to get up to speed on their own.
In the real world, your fate is in your own hands, but the rules aren't fair. Never were, and probably never will be. I think it is a great disservice to our children to pretend like this problem doesn't exist. In the US, we seem to have this major inability to differentiate between what should be and what is. We need to prepare children for what is.
I was recently asked to do a reading for a wedding which had a strong geek audience in attendance, and I very much considered reading Lem's love poem. This was a book that deeply influenced my decision to spend a life in pursuing hackerdom, and I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Lem by a former Bell Labs employee who also introduced me to a variety of other cool geeky things (telnet, for instance). In the end, I decided not to go with the poem, because it doesn't really fit the couple actually getting married, but my own wedding is at the end of the summer, so you know what I'm going to ask my best man to read!
For those not familiar with the poem-- what is even more astounding about it is that it was original written in Polish! The translation is marvelous. On the subject of Solaris, though-- I think it is a masterpiece of psychologial terror, totally gripping-- but that the film adaptations (Tarkovsky's less so) are somewhat weak. Too bad Kubrick didn't take a stab at it.
The Variation in the Frequency of Meteorite Impact with Geographic Latitude.
Sorry, yes, I meant Spaces. But Spaces has some annoying bugs. Try binding an application to a space. Now go to a different space, and try to switch back to the application by clicking on the application's Dock icon. It doesn't always work. Instead, I use a keyboard shortcut that is a lot like GNOME's, but for me, Fluxbox's virtual desktop handling is ideal. I wish Spaces were more like that.
Ugh. Maybe you can explain why I'd want to buy an HDTV with all of the accoutrements rather than buy a vastly cheaper flat panel display, and use it with my far more flexible computer. In my opinion, TVs and computers are converging, and new revisions of HDMI are a way to keep them differentiated. Is there really an advantage to an HDTV? This is the thing that has stopped me from buying an HDTV.
Now, as far as cabling goes, I suspect most of this is driven by a marketing department. If you look at computer display technology, which has been in rapid flux for at least 20 years, they've managed to standardize on TWO different connectors: one for analog and one for digital. Sure, there are some weirdo ones out there, like ADC and 13W3, but they never really had any real relevance. But with TVs, which is ostensibly simpler than computer displays, we have this panoply of cables. Why?
Now, Cat5e-- that's an impressive technology. The data rates people have been able to squeeze out of plain ol' twisted pair! But seriously; we do everything in software now. Why does television insist on having cable after cable to do functions that we could do with a single one?
Yeah, I'd love to see a Google UI, too. I can't wait for context-sensitive ads about shirt buttons when I'm trying to click a button :^P
To all of these people who are bitching about the UI in Linux-- are you actually using Linux? Maybe I'm an old-timer, but Ubuntu 9.04 looks a lot nicer to me than my Windows box at work. The MacOS is pretty slick, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it is "consistent" or "intuitive". And the Expose pretty much blows compared to your bog-standard workspace switchers on Linux.
GNOME has human interface guidelines and has had them since 1.0. If Ben Goodger is bitching about GTK+/GNOME not having consistent UI guidelines, it's because it's not consistent with whatever his vision is. In my opinion, GNOME is a heck of a lot more consistent than MacOSX's Steve-Jobs-whim-of-the-day, and-- let's not even get started on the Windows UI fustercluck. Of course, if he's talking about KDE... well, OK. KDE's interface is... odd.
I have an old GTK book somewhere that says that the developers based their HIG on the original Macintosh HIG (that the MacOS now no longer follows), which was actually based on user-feedback and also based in part on the Xerox Star. That's a pretty long lineage when it comes to GUI.
The complaint about Mozilla having a functionless 511MB executable after switching to GTK+ has nothing to do with GTK+. GTK+ is not exactly lightweight, but it ain't exactly a bloated beast either.
Complaints about audio are well-founded, though. Audio in Linux still sucks.
Which is why I'd take Visual Studio over gcc, Microsoft DNS over BIND, and Exchange over Postfix any day.
Not.
It's pretty easy to make claims like this when there are, in fact, no Windows machines providing any core Internet services (BGP, DNS, etc). It's like dividing by zero, right?
Since this is something completely absent from the United States, can you elaborate a bit?
True, but how many banks do you think actually perform any due diligence in determining whether a protocol is secure or not? I think that as long as they can cover their asses, they think they're fine. E.g., "well, everyone else is leveraged 30:1, so we might as well be too! If it fails, it's not going to affect us, because the entire world economy is fucked!" As long as everyone else is using SecureBox 2000 too, they have a good excuse.
I really think the banks apply the bare minimum of oversight, because in the end, it's not them that gets fucked, it's us. Passing the buck is the cheapest option-- that's the problem.
PHP already has a couple: PEAR::DB and AdoDB. And, of course, Perl has DBI.
I don't think the lack of abstraction is stopping anyone. We might call our stack LAMP, because people have a good idea what that means, even if our actual environment is OADP (OpenBSD, Apache, DBI, Perl). Same difference. We have LAMP machines, too, and they are pretty much equivalent.
But wait-- is it really that important for the database to do authentication anyway? It's not like every single user of your application needs different database rights. In the apps I write, there's usually like three user-types with differing permissions. The database maintains a map between the userid and the user type on the DB. It really doesn't need to know much more than that. As long as the user really is who they say they are-- and that part can be handled further up in the stack-- everything works simply.
I'm OK with Apple doing idiotic stuff like this. History has shown that, in the long run, the "walled garden" approach does not have a lot of longevity. Apple should know this better than anyone, seeing as they've tried it repeatedly. In the end cheap and open always wins.
I'm willing to bet that once Android phones are really available, you're going to see the smartest developers moving over. Not because Android is technically superior-- it may not be-- but because no one wants to PAY for a SDK and pour loads of time into developing and refining applications, only to have it blocked by Apple for some arbitrary or unknown reason. Couple that with Apple's long history of incorporating good ideas into their own platform at the expense of developers, and I think their App Store will eventually marginalize itself.
Right now, the iPhone is really the only slick thing out there (I speak as a Blackberry user and administrator, which is a platform that works but not well), but how long do you think this will be the case?
Ah, yes. I always thought that King's Quest really nailed the essence of a good game. You had the action part (had to use joystick or keyboard to run away from trolls, etc), you had the adventure part (escape from the wizard!, find the magic thing!, etc), and you had the puzzle part (what the heck do I want cat hair for?). Great game. I remember showing KQIII to some people not too long ago and one of them said "Wow, the graphics suck!" I guess it depends on where you came from, though-- when I saw the original King's Quest on a PCjr coming from a TI computer, that was pretty mind-blowing to me. It was a big step up from Scott Adams adventure games.
Yeah, Myst. That was a great game, not the least of which was the *suspense*. I.e., the suspense of waiting for the f*&%ing CD-ROM drive. I owned a "blazingly fast" NEC Intersect 2x CD-ROM drive (yes, 2x; yes, external SCSI). I'd click on something, that thing would thrash around for a few minutes, and then I'd get that wonderful HyperCard-dissolve-into-next-eerie-scene. I remember my parents angrily telling me to "go to bed" because the NEC was so damn loud and was keeping them up. It was fun, but, thankfully storage is relatively fast and cheap now.
As a counterpoint, I was asked by a coworker a few weeks ago to help her install Ubuntu on her laptop. She was sick to death of dealing with viruses/spyware and had heard that this Ubuntu thing might help. I explained that it was quite different than Windows, that she might occasionally find it frustrating, but that it would, indeed solve many of her problems. She decided to go ahead anyway.
I installed Ubuntu 8.10 with her watching over my shoulder. When I was done, she said "That's it?"
"Yeah, " I replied, "that's it."
"Well I could have done that."
She came back several weeks later-- and I was pretty much expecting her to ask me to remove it. What she had actually come back for was to show me how she had installed Ubuntu 9.04 by herself. She was quite proud of this, and very happy with her new system.
I'm not sure if this is an example of how much easier Ubuntu has gotten (point of reference: I have not yet touched a single config file in 9.04), or if she is an exceptionally fast learner. But it makes me think that "not ready for the desktop" is quickly becoming a euphemism for "it doesn't run Windows software." Because it is definitely ready for the desktop.
And you're really just talking about the GUI here. What makes UNIX great-- better than Windows-- is what's underneath.
1. A lot of control over how processes are run.
2. Common and well-defined interfaces that allow you to arbitrarily connect program outputs to program inputs.
3. A sane system API.
4. Extensive system-wide documentation, especially where the BSDs are concerned (the libc/system call library documentation comes with the system!)
5. Lots of built-in tools to make your life easier: package management, compiler collection, editors. sudo, xargs, dd, hexdump, perl, and on and on and on...
6. Common ways to configure application startup (rc), shutdown (rc), and periodic jobs (cron).
7. and most importantly, a PHILOSOPHY that programmers conform to so that programs behave as expected, and take advantage of the full power of the system. This last part cannot be understated, and it is the thing that I find most frustrating about Windows.
You're ignoring my point about virtual 8086 mode. This is how Windows achieved backward compatibility with DOS for many, many years. On desktops. Virtual 8086 is nothing more than a VM layer in the Intel chip itself. Are you telling me that backward compatibility with DOS was not important to Microsoft?
Real mode and virtual 8086 mode are still present in Intel chips today, and the x86 instruction set is, in a sense, a VM layer on top of the machine's real instruction set. Intel, AMD, VIA, and so on-- they most certainly would not expend the effort to make these features available on their chips if they did not think they were important, because they contribute in a not-insignificant way to the transistor count on a chip.
Point is, VMs are very important, even for desktop systems, and they will be with us for a long time. You are simply mistaken.
It's extremely silly to even think that VMs are a viable long term solution
Wait, you mean, like virtual 8086 mode? 'Cuz that just didn't work at all for decades.
Let's also not forget that virtual machines have been the main selling point of mainframe systems since the 1960's.
But since they're general drivers, they never archieve the same results as specific drivers made for Windows by the manufacturer.
OTOH, you also have OSS drivers that are better, where, e.g., you can use the same configuration utility to run your wireless card or the same configuration utility to manage your RAID.