How can it be good to put an article on the screen with column width designed to accomodate newspaper business of centuries ago? That's an innovation? If the text was as wide as the screen, it would be easier to read and you wouldn't need the navigation links or get confused.
Click on more at the bottom of the page
http://www.protocopy.com/osgui.html and what do you get? The same page. And the guy who writes this is telling me about what's a good UI? Try again.
Graded Problems in Computer Science -- learn to program by working the problems (in whatever language you choose).
Bugs in Writing -- learn to write (very important).
OO Software Construction -- Meyer's a windbag and a promoter, but his writing is entertaining because he writes endearingly, like a nutty professor.
The Computer Science and Engineering Handbook -- Leave this one as the only book in your bathroom for two years. Then eat some prunes and call me in the morning.
Programming Classics (Oliver)-- Good code samples.
Object Oriented Methods (Graham)-- A different look at OO.
The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer -- Yourdon gets a lot wrong, but he got some things right in this one, but a little too early.
He was a humongous mathematician. How'd he get to be an authority on internet growth? If Bud Selig can be Commissioner of Baseball, I guess that's ok, too, but Andy ought to have better things to do.
If you are looking for a job and it's a company HR department job openings site that's broken, you need the other browser to see the jobs. I see about 1 out of fifteen of those sites are broken on my machine. You can't say "I'd like to work for you because you are too dumb to even put up a usable web site," or even "I'd like to work for you, and, BTW you are too dumb to even put up a usable web site."
Cheap, rugged, accessible. But the Beetle was designed at Hitler's request. The technology doesn't know who owns it.
Build a machine to defeat DRM. DRM leads to centralized control of content. Content being technologically indistinguishable from expression, this leads wherever they want it to lead.
Yes. They can do that. Visual Studio will come with a VM that is certified and will be a shell for your app for you. Just like Excel will be certified and will run uncertified macros. No improvement, just hurdles for non-MS developers.
The first thing that they want to be able to do is to impose a 'nominal' fee on anyone who wants to get a binary certified. This will be high enough that the average compile twice a day garage programmer can't afford it and is forced to write code that runs under the certified VM.
The first step is not to prohibit 'uncertified' binaries. All they need is to pop up a big warning screen every time someone tries to install or run one. This is the form of evangelism known as 'scaring the hell out of them'. It's not death for uncertified binaries, just a yellow arm band.
Nobody really thought that outer space started at
fifty miles of altitude -- sixty or seventy five
miles up was the start of real space. Then the US developed spy satellites that could dip down to about 60 miles to get a better look and refused to agree to any treaties that wouldn't allow that. So, space is not what it used to be.
I'd rather have an external (hidden under a garment) body buzzer that talked in Morse. I can't listen to multiple talkers at once, but I can carry on one conversation and copy Morse while I keep my log and put a new sheet of paper in my typewriter at 75 WPM. Different devices have to use different parts of the brain or overload occurs. Not enough geeks learn Morse's code anymore.
As an independent doing a few thousand dollars in sales in a good month, I can't afford that. My customers know that I sell by reputation and word-of-mouth mostly. I do everything a 1-person shop can do to make the product high-quality, but it's not perfect. I offset the advantages of the bigger firms I compete with by giving strong service and by being the lowest on price by about 50%. That's a fair deal, and my customers like it. But if the law makes me guarantee quality, how in the world could I do that?
This would vastly reduce the number of software firms and the availability of low-priced specialty software.
Whatever kind of fancy content they have on their
site, it makes my Netscape 4.79 tertallly toominate before the link finishes loading. Neat trick. Are they shutting down my bowser because I won't take their cookies? What a nice way to make friends.
Well, the patent involved is not a patent
on the material, it's a patent on the use of it
for this kind of implant. One might argue whether
or not that use was obvious; I'm no expert, so I can't say. But the situation when patents cover 'use of A in B' for complicated devices that include multiple simple A's as pats of one B is much like the situation with roads that cross an expanse of territory -- if there is no right of imminent domain, everyone who contributes a little wants to squeeze out all the value for their little contribution. There is no reason to expect that the current system will allocate the rewards fairly based on the relative value of the contributions. I believe that in the case I described, the competitor won't license, because they want a monopoly.
Consider this one (true): There was recently a sale of land agreed to. However, a third party objected to the sale on the grounds that there were scores of patented trees growing on the land and he held the patent, which neither the buyer nor the seller knew anything about. Patent holder had to be satisfied before the sale could be consummated.
I know of a medical researcher making great progress on a wonderful device that might eventually be implanted in many people. He notes that there is one problem he needs to solve, a problem with the body rejecting one of his materials. Someone else has solved the problem, but they've got a patent on using the material that they use, so he's got to find a different one that works almost as well or better. Would be a shame if many people wound up walking around with a second-best material inside of them.
Concerts nowadays are multi-media shows. The big bands used to travel with a ton of sheet music (literally). Now the performers(?) are preformed, travelling with a ton of canned sound and canned video. There's no way you can tell what's real at a big rock/gospel/country concert nowadays, if anything. Rock stars are getting paid for doing something about as much as Bud Selig is getting paid to be a baseball commissioner.
It's the number of users, counting testers, that matters. Feedback is the main thing. Most bugs can be located quickly, if their existence is realized. The shops that do high quality either spend considerable time on reviews or considerable time on testing (like 3 testers per developer). Unfortunately, there are about 300 people who want to be a developer for everyone who wants to be a tester.
Open source can get many users emailing in bug reports if it is easy to do so (please don't make me subscribe to an email list to send in a bug report). The interesting statistic that I'd like to see is the percentage of open source projects that are in beta. It seems like the 'good' version of open source projects, ie the one with the 'must have' features, is almost never done, but often in alpha or beta, and I can be a tester for free. I like to do that, but I can't afford to do it for every piece of software that I use, sorry.
First I have to endure misfunctional software, then I have to endure attempts at wit? Humor derives from ambiguity, which the angry reader is not going to like. Would computer manual humor be any better than this?
About 80% of the cost to the phone company of providing telephone service is related to charging, billing and accounting. This is true for local service and for long distance service. Unless the average user would increase long distance usage by 500% if it was unmetered, it would cost society less if it was free.
When Edison's desk was opened fifteen years after
he died, a sample of uranium nitrate was found among the last things he had been working with. The proponents of the Edison myth suggested that he had been on the road to nuclear energy in the early 1930's. But, Edison had no knowledge of nuclear physics, only a few weeks of education, not much contact with theoretical researchers. It is nearly impossible that he could have been working on nuclear energy, let alone contributed anything to its development. The age had changed. Edison was a great man of the nineteenth century. In the 21st, no one can tell you who our great inventors are, except that Bill Gates invented the mail merge. A scientist was Time's man of the year five years ago -- now he's forgotten.
Edison had a fairly big lab, but he didn't like book learning so he missed a lot of talent, and most of the time only the projects that he got personally involved in made progress. He did the electric light in 1877 and the phonograph in 1878, and did movies and re-did the phonograph in the following decade or so, but by then his wad was shot. He wound up spending way too much time in court proving that he invented the things that he invented. The lawyers wore him out. His iron ore extraction process went bust. His synthetic rubber didn't deliver. His phonograph record company lost out. He wasted years trying to develop an electric car. He spent WWI working on submarine and anti-submarine warfare, which was used as a morale booster by the US government propaganda machine, but he came up empty on that one, too.
Farnsworth won royalty payments and cross-licensing from RCA before the US was in WWII. He could have competed with RCA, but they had much more capital and more manufacturing experince than he. He was the brilliant inventor of electronic TV, but when the time came to produce the goods, he was barely an also-ran.
Slashdot Mirror
"We'll need some noodle-brained consultants to cover for us."
"Monday."
"Do you think we can wait that long?"
"Yes, they are slow, but they're dumber."
"Who?"
"No, who's on first."
"Who?"
"Exactly."
"How about PWC?"
"You're supposed to call them Monday."
"They're not on my calendar."
"Then call them tomorrow."
"But you said to call them Monday."
"Do you think we can wait that long."
"Didn't I ask you that?"
Had to sell out when the genius consultants couldn't figure out how they would answer the phone on Tuesdays.
How can it be good to put an article on the screen with column width designed to accomodate newspaper business of centuries ago? That's an innovation? If the text was as wide as the screen, it would be easier to read and you wouldn't need the navigation links or get confused.
Click on more at the bottom of the page http://www.protocopy.com/osgui.html and what do you get? The same page. And the guy who writes this is telling me about what's a good UI? Try again.
Bugs in Writing -- learn to write (very important).
OO Software Construction -- Meyer's a windbag and a promoter, but his writing is entertaining because he writes endearingly, like a nutty professor.
The Computer Science and Engineering Handbook -- Leave this one as the only book in your bathroom for two years. Then eat some prunes and call me in the morning.
Programming Classics (Oliver)-- Good code samples.
Object Oriented Methods (Graham)-- A different look at OO.
The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer -- Yourdon gets a lot wrong, but he got some things right in this one, but a little too early.
He was a humongous mathematician. How'd he get to be an authority on internet growth? If Bud Selig can be Commissioner of Baseball, I guess that's ok, too, but Andy ought to have better things to do.
If you are looking for a job and it's a company HR department job openings site that's broken, you need the other browser to see the jobs. I see about 1 out of fifteen of those sites are broken on my machine. You can't say "I'd like to work for you because you are too dumb to even put up a usable web site," or even "I'd like to work for you, and, BTW you are too dumb to even put up a usable web site."
Build a machine to defeat DRM. DRM leads to centralized control of content. Content being technologically indistinguishable from expression, this leads wherever they want it to lead.
The first thing that they want to be able to do is to impose a 'nominal' fee on anyone who wants to get a binary certified. This will be high enough that the average compile twice a day garage programmer can't afford it and is forced to write code that runs under the certified VM.
The first step is not to prohibit 'uncertified' binaries. All they need is to pop up a big warning screen every time someone tries to install or run one. This is the form of evangelism known as 'scaring the hell out of them'. It's not death for uncertified binaries, just a yellow arm band.
Football pools -- $241 billion/year
Alcoholism -- $1533 billion/year
Drugs -- $800 billion/year
Coffee breaks -- $526 billion/year
Bathroom time -- $715 billion/year
Krispy Kreme Donuts -- $445 billion/year
Software company lawyers -- $440 billion/year
Neckties -- $211 billion/year
Slashdot -- $688 /year
Nobody really thought that outer space started at fifty miles of altitude -- sixty or seventy five miles up was the start of real space. Then the US developed spy satellites that could dip down to about 60 miles to get a better look and refused to agree to any treaties that wouldn't allow that. So, space is not what it used to be.
I'd rather have an external (hidden under a garment) body buzzer that talked in Morse. I can't listen to multiple talkers at once, but I can carry on one conversation and copy Morse while I keep my log and put a new sheet of paper in my typewriter at 75 WPM. Different devices have to use different parts of the brain or overload occurs. Not enough geeks learn Morse's code anymore.
This would vastly reduce the number of software firms and the availability of low-priced specialty software.
Nanotectonics
Whatever kind of fancy content they have on their site, it makes my Netscape 4.79 tertallly toominate before the link finishes loading. Neat trick. Are they shutting down my bowser because I won't take their cookies? What a nice way to make friends.
Consider this one (true): There was recently a sale of land agreed to. However, a third party objected to the sale on the grounds that there were scores of patented trees growing on the land and he held the patent, which neither the buyer nor the seller knew anything about. Patent holder had to be satisfied before the sale could be consummated.
I know of a medical researcher making great progress on a wonderful device that might eventually be implanted in many people. He notes that there is one problem he needs to solve, a problem with the body rejecting one of his materials. Someone else has solved the problem, but they've got a patent on using the material that they use, so he's got to find a different one that works almost as well or better. Would be a shame if many people wound up walking around with a second-best material inside of them.
Concerts nowadays are multi-media shows. The big bands used to travel with a ton of sheet music (literally). Now the performers(?) are preformed, travelling with a ton of canned sound and canned video. There's no way you can tell what's real at a big rock/gospel/country concert nowadays, if anything. Rock stars are getting paid for doing something about as much as Bud Selig is getting paid to be a baseball commissioner.
Open source can get many users emailing in bug reports if it is easy to do so (please don't make me subscribe to an email list to send in a bug report). The interesting statistic that I'd like to see is the percentage of open source projects that are in beta. It seems like the 'good' version of open source projects, ie the one with the 'must have' features, is almost never done, but often in alpha or beta, and I can be a tester for free. I like to do that, but I can't afford to do it for every piece of software that I use, sorry.
email and newsgroups (as Netscape Communicator and Opera do)?
First I have to endure misfunctional software, then I have to endure attempts at wit? Humor derives from ambiguity, which the angry reader is not going to like. Would computer manual humor be any better than this?
About 80% of the cost to the phone company of providing telephone service is related to charging, billing and accounting. This is true for local service and for long distance service. Unless the average user would increase long distance usage by 500% if it was unmetered, it would cost society less if it was free.
When Edison's desk was opened fifteen years after he died, a sample of uranium nitrate was found among the last things he had been working with. The proponents of the Edison myth suggested that he had been on the road to nuclear energy in the early 1930's. But, Edison had no knowledge of nuclear physics, only a few weeks of education, not much contact with theoretical researchers. It is nearly impossible that he could have been working on nuclear energy, let alone contributed anything to its development. The age had changed. Edison was a great man of the nineteenth century. In the 21st, no one can tell you who our great inventors are, except that Bill Gates invented the mail merge. A scientist was Time's man of the year five years ago -- now he's forgotten.
Edison had a fairly big lab, but he didn't like book learning so he missed a lot of talent, and most of the time only the projects that he got personally involved in made progress. He did the electric light in 1877 and the phonograph in 1878, and did movies and re-did the phonograph in the following decade or so, but by then his wad was shot. He wound up spending way too much time in court proving that he invented the things that he invented. The lawyers wore him out. His iron ore extraction process went bust. His synthetic rubber didn't deliver. His phonograph record company lost out. He wasted years trying to develop an electric car. He spent WWI working on submarine and anti-submarine warfare, which was used as a morale booster by the US government propaganda machine, but he came up empty on that one, too.
Farnsworth won royalty payments and cross-licensing from RCA before the US was in WWII. He could have competed with RCA, but they had much more capital and more manufacturing experince than he. He was the brilliant inventor of electronic TV, but when the time came to produce the goods, he was barely an also-ran.