Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has failed the interface test. My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now.
I doubt it. I think he wants some simple principles to be acknowledged. Like having a self-documenting interface (which doesn't mean context-sensitive help, but an interface which makes it obvious how to do what you want to do), or like designing an application for the user, instead of for the computer (by starting with the interface, and building a backend to serve it, instead of the other way around), or like actually teaching UI design principles in CS courses, which way too often isn't done at all. That last thing is a bit like teaching someone how to build an airplane and leaving out how to do the cockpit. Yes, your plane might be technically excellent and very capable, but it'll be a PITA to fly. Same thing for computer software.
I think raskin is pissed off that overall productivity for office workers hasn't improved all that much in the last few decades, despite the computer being hailed as a revolution for productivity, because UI design is still largely an afterthought, and building software from the user down instead of from the hardware up is looked at as a ridiculous idea by a lot of programmers.
I'll agree though that he should put up or shut up.
Problem with this 'We can do more' attitude is that you could end up with serious bloat for simple software.. like your web-browser being a 20mb download and supporting everything under the sun.
Firefox is not a 20 meg download, it is a 6 meg download, which is lean enough for my tastes. And for all intents and purposes, it already is the platform they want it to be, with the browser merely yet another app running on top of the platform, written in javascript, xul and css. So it is not going to bloat. In fact, it has been steadily shrinking/speeding up, and will continue to do so.
On a wider level though, the paradigm shift is inevitable. Historically the market has always demanded richer web apps in waves, and the browser maker which responded best won out marketsharewise. Now we see again the market complaining browsers are too dumb, asking for the ability to deliver desktop-quality apps to the browser. To not become a broader platform at this point is suicide marketsharewise. Even microsoft, who has tried desperately to avoid having the browser become a generic app design platform because it would make the OS less relevant, recognizes this and is launching their XAML initiative partly to focus attention away from the platforms that already exist, and partly to have something in the fray they can push at those wanting richer web apps.
However, I'm becoming increasingly dismayed by the sheer amount of security holes being found. I mean - shockingly - if you look at sites like Secunia, there have been _MORE_ vulnerabilities in Firefox than IE in the last six months!
The reason there have been more security vulnerabilities is because of the security bug bounty, which rewards people monetarily for finding security bugs. They're simply trying to shake out the security bugs in advance, before it goes big.
Plus, there's been more interest in firefox recently from security firms who see it as a rising star, and think they can get some fame and draw to their consulting business by finding and publicly revealing security bugs.
I doubt mozilla/firefox is as insecure as IE. It doesn't have the same structural design problems, like activex, and "zones".
After about 60 days (right after my chargeback privilege with my issuer expired), they sent me an email stating, "We have found in your favor. However, the seller has a zero balance in their bank account, so we cannot give you your money."
I guess the smart thing to do would be to not trust paypal and do a chargeback at the same time as you file a complaint with them.
I don't buy that it takes 60 days to check if someone conned you. Has anyone managed to get their money back through this complaint system? Please post your stories.
The advantage to me as a consumer is that I don't have to give my CC# to a complete stranger. The burden of proof is on the vendor but it is still a hassle to get everything fixed if your card number is stolen.
It's a hassle to get it back, but if you're defrauded with paypal you can't get it back. Personally I'd rather have trouble getting it back than to not be able to get it back at all.
Also, if your card number gets stolen out of a database from someone you gave it to, visa usually quickly finds out and issues you a new card. I've had this happen to me once, when one of the sites I had purchased something from had their server hacked into. VISA had replaced my card before the bad guys got around to trying to charge me for something.
I would rather have multiple cores than a faster processor. The combined clocks of my old dual processor system ran just over half that of my current (similar core) processor, yet the feel of it on the desktop was far better. None of the little hitches, glitches and rogue processes that plague me on the uniprocessor system.
Usually dual-cpu systems have better bandwidth on the motherboard, which impacts performance in any but the most cpu-bound tasks a lot more than a faster cpu does. For years the bottlenecks on most systems have been the hard disk, the motherboard/memory bandwidth, and the video card. A fast cpu just does not matter that much if you don't spend all your time compiling or rendering 3D art.
They mention in the article specifically how intel's design foolishly decreases bandwidth per cpu to make the dual-core magic happen. Since the xeon's will arrive so much later that leads me to conclude they know performance is going to be abysmal, but they're going for the "dual" buzzword because amd is, and at the same time they're re-engineering their bus tech for the xeon line to improve bandwidth so the dual core nature actually becomes useful.
I'd purchase the $18 toaster, seeing that it was made more efficiently.
A fine member of the human race you are. Your genes will surely survive your equals.
Back in college I was an office boy earning $4.15/hour, but the work I was doing was worth maybe $2/hour. Minimum wage laws are stupid--and ironically enough, end up hurting those at the low end of the job market (by pricing them out of jobs).
The basic philosophy behind minimum wage laws is that if you work a full work week, you should be able to have enough money to feed, clothe and otherwise care for you and your immediate family. In the absence of minimum wage laws jobs have only to pay well enough to improve the quality of life beyond joblessness, which doesn't need to mean that it necessarily actually provides anything approximating a quality of life we would consider "humane". Without minimum wage laws people will literally work themselves to death, as long as that death arrives later than it otherwise would have.
The one strong argument against minimum wage laws is that in the presence of minimum wage laws some jobs aren't created, and so people who would otherwise take those jobs make nothing instead of making something. However, it's an argument bred from shortsightedness, pessimism and laziness, from the belief that it is acceptable to merely aim for survival, instead of a healthy world economy which serves all, and that it is foolish to even try to do better. But then maybe I'm a hopeless utopian for believing we can improve upon a worldwide economic system that statistically doesn't do all that much better than that of the middle ages, with a large group of people having as their best choice something akin to slavery.
You don't prove your point at all. Economies of scale occur whether or not the market is regulated. A better argument would be to note that regulation can reduce barriers to entry just as they can raise barriers to entry.
Economies of scale are the explanation of why a totally unregulated market over time turns into a few large behemoths, unless the product doesn't afford barriers to entry or economies of scale (very few products are like that). I think I made that point, you may want to refute it.
But try this exercise. Name a regulation that doesn't exaggerate the effects of economy of scale or increase barriers to entry. You can find them, but not easily.
You can find anecdotal evidence to bolster any argument, I could easily come back and cite countless examples of just such regulation, but it wouldn't support my case. My case is that an unregulated market is inherently a sick market because it will grow steadily more inefficient. Regulation is the fix for this problem, not the cause, even though regulation, if done poorly (most often the case), can increase market inefficiency even more than monopolization will.
So, yes, you're right that regulation can be very bad for the market. I'm not arguing that it's not. I'm arguing that you need regulation to keep a free market free.
How about this exercise: take a look at markets in zones of lawlessness, like warzones, and see how efficiently they function, how "healthy" they are.
Big companies really welcome true market regulation, because it prevents smaller players from entering the field. For example, the reasons drug prices are so high is because regulation makes it virtually impossible for small companies to compete. Therefore, the only people willing to lose money for 5-10 years before becoming profitable are those whose only goal is to become absurdly profitable.
That's why I used the qualifier "if done correctly". Antitrust law by itself is not adequate as market regulation, because it only goes after problems as they arise, when considerable market distortion has already happened. Market regulation needs to prevent market distortion, not just erase it as it occurs.
If the market was truely libertarian, then demand would cause new ventures to popup to undercut the markup thus putting the overpriced ones out of business.
It's a myth that an unregulated market is good for the small guy trying to break in. The reason this is not the case is the concept of scale effects. When you sell 100 items of a product your fixed costs per product are a lot higher than when you sell 100.000 items, and your variable costs tend to be higher as well (due to the inefficiencies of low volume production). Because your cost per product as a small guy is higher, it is hard to compete against the bigger businesses, who can maintain lower prices and still be profitable. Over time, this effect causes the market to merge in a number of big behemoths (the larger you are the more profit you make per product), and once you reach that point usually they will form cartels, where they use various kinds of underhanded tactics, like predatory pricing, coupled sales, government bribing and so on to keep out new market entrants and maintain higher prices than market forces would dictate. Examples of this are the music industry (the big five), microsoft's windows and office empire, the telecom industry on the local level, and on and on.
Cartels or monopolies have been demonstrated to tend towards having low market efficiency, due to the profit maximalization imperative and their ability to maintain non-market-optimal pricing models at greater profit to the business.
The only way to avoid this is to limit the ability of market players to form cartels or monopolies, and then abuse their power. Retroactively, that means antitrust law. So antitrust is a necessary part of maintaining a healthy free market. Proactively it means making sure that new market players can enter without high entrance costs (like allowing small telecom companies to use existing networks for a fair price, so they don't have to build up their own network at extreme cost), so raising prices by the big players would cause new players to enter at lower price points.
So, in conclusion, to have a truly free market (meaning with near non-existant barrier to entry), you must regulate it so no market player can become too powerful. A correctly regulated market is a healthy market, an unregulated market is a diseased or soon-to-be-diseased market.
Ofcourse, big business has been very successful at spreading the meme that market regulation is bad for the market. The reality is that it's good for the market (if done correctly), but it's bad for the behemoth.
I expect Microsoft's momentum to carry it a few more years yet... but after that the energy will have bled off and people will begin to see the benefits of Linux more clearly.
Microsoft suffers from the problem that their "solution" to computers doesn't apply to a networked world. They want duplicate copies of identical software separately installed on all end-user machines, whereas anyone can see that with ubiquitous 24/7 networking connections this is extremely inefficient and a nightmare to maintain. So, likely, what'll replace windows won't be linux, but a universal cross-platform environment, that will run remote software and will be only a login away from any computer that supports it. What is extremely surprising is that they know this, and have destroyed netscape, frozen IE development, crippled java, and are gunning for google for this very reason, all the while without trying to be the platform provider king because their windows and office monopolies are too comfy, and to truly innovate and switch paradigms is too brash a move for them to be able to make. So, the microsoft policy is basically that of delaying the inevitable.
I've noticed for a lot of people there's a sense of pride that they managed to "swindle" the system and trick their way into an illegal copy of a program. "It's good to be bad" and things of that ilk.
I blame a society that takes away opportunity to misbehave in safe ways. By trying to lock down people's need to be an ass it comes out in all kinds of unexpected ways; piracy, drunk driving, republicanism, and sometimes even public nosepicking. We really need to encourage some kind of emotional cleansing rite, possibly involving ritual combat to the death, or glowsticks. Everyone loves glowsticks.
This doesn't provide anything like what TCP provides, namely a connection between two network nodes that allows transfer of arbitrary data with guaranteed reliability, with automated congestion control for optimized use of available network resources.
As far as I can tell (their website could use some more straightforward actual content), this is more like bittorrent, where a file is cut up into blocks, the blocks get distributed across the network, and anyone interested in the file then reconstructs it from available data from all sources, not necessarily having to get the entire file correctly from a single source. Only it does it more efficiently than bittorrent.
The two protocols target very different uses. TCP excels in interactive use, where the data is sent as it is generated, and no error is tolerable in the single sender-to-receiver link. Bittorrent (and other distributed network protocols) target batch jobs, where throughput is more important than reliability (because reliability can be reconstructed on the client through clever hashing schemes), and where responsiveness is entirely irrelevant.
So, this could not possibly replace TCP, since it does not do what TCP is most useful for. At the same time, the criticisms aimed at TCP by the rateless designers are valid, but well known, since TCP is indeed poorly suited for high-volume high-throughput high-delay transmissions of prepackaged data.
Still, good job to them for trying to come up with better protocols for niche or not-so-niche markets. I wish them all the best.
if you want a good picture, you need good optics....which need a lot more space than those tiny lenses built into mobile phones. That's just one of the reasons mobiles can't replace real cameras.
Aren't fluid lenses on the verge of revolutionizing the size (or lack thereof) of digital camera's?
Even if they aren't, I would never use the expression "can't" when it comes to technology, and especially not when it comes to the size of lens systems. After all, nature has demonstrated that lens systems can be versatile, high-quality, and positively tiny. If nature can do it, eventually we'll do it too.
There is a premise to your post you didn't mention. You assume there is a why to accompany the how. I see no reason to assume that. It might just be that things are the way they are, without a reason. In that case "why are we here?" gets the answer "because if we weren't we couldn't ask ourselves why we are here".
Definitely the diamond age. The more nanotech advances, the more it seems like a near-perfect prediction of what the future will be like.
Imho, the reason stephenson reads better to non-geeks than most sci-fi is because he comprehends (consciously or not) a novel is first and foremost about the people. A lot of sci-fi writers don't seem to understand books must reveal a slice of humanity first, technology wizardry second. They write one-dimensional characters you have a hard time caring about, and if you're not interested in the technology, they're insanely boring.
Incidentally, this is why the star wars prequels suck, the George Lucas model III android had a memory malfunction in between the original trilogy and the new one, and it forgot the part of making movies where you require believable characters that people care about.
If the TV in a restaurant bothers you, DON'T GO TO THAT DAMNED RESTAURANT.. problem solved. The world doesn't revolve around your sorry ass.
It does, actually. I'm at the center of my world. If you are not at the center of yours, you need to see a shrink. The problem is when people forget we are ALL at the center of the world, in our own mind, and try to act as if other people aren't centers of the world themselves.
I would define a religion as a world view that includes some form of supernatural entity; but that's really just semantics. The definition that interest me is your definition of the word "God". Most "beleivers" I have asked about this are unable or unwilling to provide a definition, which makes any discussion of whether God exists pretty pointless. So if you can tell me what "God" means, I'll tell you if I'm an Atheist. (if you care)
religion: Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
atheism: The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
So, you're an atheist if you believe there is no God. Atheism is a belief, but not a religion, though one might classify it as a faith (as in "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.").
Someone who truly does not believe in the existance or non-existance of a god is agnostic, as in "One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God."
And then you have the deists, those who believe in a God, but can't label any specifics, and believe that this God doesn't play an active role in the world anymore.
It just came to me vnc allows you to do remote dual screens that are usable locally too.
You'd take a linux box with two screens, and on each screen run an x server which nests a vnc session on the same box, then you'd use x2x to connect the two vnc sessions together into one large screen.
Then, if you wanted to see it remotely, you'd go to another dual screen box and open up remote vnc sessions to the two different screen's sessions. If you moved the mouse it would tunnel itself through the x2x link on the remote machine, and your mouse would jump screens.
Ofcourse, that setup wouldn't allow dragging windows from one screen to the next, and performance on the second screen would probably be abysmal because of all the roundtrips, but you can't have everything you know.
Additionally, if you replaced the x2x with x2vnc you could do it with one linux box and one windows box.
I used to run x2x between different machines to make them behave like a single dual screen machine, but I never tried doing it remotely within vnc sessions.
That is actually the best-case scenario with regards to cooperating with microsoft. If you could conceivably be any threat to MS at any point in the future, they WILL immobilize your business, by trying to buy you out, relegating you to a niche, or destroying you entirely.
On the other hand, with his code layout, it's clearer where the if starts and ends, and it's clearer to what the else is associated.
It's clearer for you, because that's how you got used to coding. The other way is clearer to me, because that's how I got used to it.
With regards to the vertical space wastage, this is just my personal opinion, but there is always code that is self-contained but doesn't fit on the screen in one go, and the more of it you can fit, the easier debugging becomes. There's a reason we don't use line-by-line editors anymore, it's because seeing more of your code at once actually helps you code.
Regardless though, this is a matter of personal preference. It's my personal opinion that those using the newline before brace style are making life harder on themselves, but I'll respect them if they respectfully disagree with me, and let them be.
Meanwhile, let me state that any project where more than one person is working on the code needs a coding style guide, including how to name things. I'd code the other way if the style guide told me to, because it's better to have code all in the same style than to protect your own personal opinion fiefdom.
You might get your mind blown back the other way after watching the 13 minutes of John Stewart (_The Daily Show_) on Crossfire.
I do think it was a very ironic interview. Stewart was complaining that real debate is finding the compromise and common ground among all positions, so that all the debaters end up agreeing on one conclusion, and that what programs like crossfire do is artificially separate the positions and make them dig in so deep a common ground is never found. Carlson responded by attacking Stewart, driving a wedge between their two positions, and generally destroying any possibility for real debate. Now this makes me wonder: does Carlson really know what he does, and is therefore evil and only interested in the money he makes, or does he not know, and is just a total moron?
But didn't Kerry later say he would have voted for the war knowing what he knows now... that there were no WMDs?
No, he said he would have voted for the authorization so there was a stick to threaten with to get the inspectors back in. He has stated for a while now he thinks the iraq war was avoidable, if the inspectors had just been allowed to do their job and bring the necessary facts to light.
Bush is the one going around saying that knowing what he knows now he would still have gone into iraq.
If you wrote something interesting, take credit for it. Say, "I recently did some experimenting with a dual monitor setup, and I wrote up some of my conclusions." But don't try to pass it off as anything except self-promotion, as if all of us are idiots who won't catch on.
In Sal's defense, the editors apparently are idiots who didn't catch on. Ofcourse, the editors sometimes don't catch on when they post a story which was posted already less than an hour earlier, so it might be expecting too much from them to notice Sal's not-so-clever ruse.
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Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has failed the interface test. My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now.
I doubt it. I think he wants some simple principles to be acknowledged. Like having a self-documenting interface (which doesn't mean context-sensitive help, but an interface which makes it obvious how to do what you want to do), or like designing an application for the user, instead of for the computer (by starting with the interface, and building a backend to serve it, instead of the other way around), or like actually teaching UI design principles in CS courses, which way too often isn't done at all. That last thing is a bit like teaching someone how to build an airplane and leaving out how to do the cockpit. Yes, your plane might be technically excellent and very capable, but it'll be a PITA to fly. Same thing for computer software.
I think raskin is pissed off that overall productivity for office workers hasn't improved all that much in the last few decades, despite the computer being hailed as a revolution for productivity, because UI design is still largely an afterthought, and building software from the user down instead of from the hardware up is looked at as a ridiculous idea by a lot of programmers.
I'll agree though that he should put up or shut up.
Problem with this 'We can do more' attitude is that you could end up with serious bloat for simple software.. like your web-browser being a 20mb download and supporting everything under the sun.
Firefox is not a 20 meg download, it is a 6 meg download, which is lean enough for my tastes. And for all intents and purposes, it already is the platform they want it to be, with the browser merely yet another app running on top of the platform, written in javascript, xul and css. So it is not going to bloat. In fact, it has been steadily shrinking/speeding up, and will continue to do so.
On a wider level though, the paradigm shift is inevitable. Historically the market has always demanded richer web apps in waves, and the browser maker which responded best won out marketsharewise. Now we see again the market complaining browsers are too dumb, asking for the ability to deliver desktop-quality apps to the browser. To not become a broader platform at this point is suicide marketsharewise. Even microsoft, who has tried desperately to avoid having the browser become a generic app design platform because it would make the OS less relevant, recognizes this and is launching their XAML initiative partly to focus attention away from the platforms that already exist, and partly to have something in the fray they can push at those wanting richer web apps.
However, I'm becoming increasingly dismayed by the sheer amount of security holes being found. I mean - shockingly - if you look at sites like Secunia, there have been _MORE_ vulnerabilities in Firefox than IE in the last six months!
The reason there have been more security vulnerabilities is because of the security bug bounty, which rewards people monetarily for finding security bugs. They're simply trying to shake out the security bugs in advance, before it goes big.
Plus, there's been more interest in firefox recently from security firms who see it as a rising star, and think they can get some fame and draw to their consulting business by finding and
publicly revealing security bugs.
I doubt mozilla/firefox is as insecure as IE. It doesn't have the same structural design problems, like activex, and "zones".
After about 60 days (right after my chargeback privilege with my issuer expired), they sent me an email stating, "We have found in your favor. However, the seller has a zero balance in their bank account, so we cannot give you your money."
I guess the smart thing to do would be to not trust paypal and do a chargeback at the same time as you file a complaint with them.
I don't buy that it takes 60 days to check if someone conned you. Has anyone managed to get their money back through this complaint system? Please post your stories.
The advantage to me as a consumer is that I don't have to give my CC# to a complete stranger. The burden of proof is on the vendor but it is still a hassle to get everything fixed if your card number is stolen.
It's a hassle to get it back, but if you're defrauded with paypal you can't get it back. Personally I'd rather have trouble getting it back than to not be able to get it back at all.
Also, if your card number gets stolen out of a database from someone you gave it to, visa usually quickly finds out and issues you a new card. I've had this happen to me once, when one of the sites I had purchased something from had their server hacked into. VISA had replaced my card before the bad guys got around to trying to charge me for something.
I would rather have multiple cores than a faster processor. The combined clocks of my old dual processor system ran just over half that of my current (similar core) processor, yet the feel of it on the desktop was far better. None of the little hitches, glitches and rogue processes that plague me on the uniprocessor system.
Usually dual-cpu systems have better bandwidth on the motherboard, which impacts performance in any but the most cpu-bound tasks a lot more than a faster cpu does. For years the bottlenecks on most systems have been the hard disk, the motherboard/memory bandwidth, and the video card. A fast cpu just does not matter that much if you don't spend all your time compiling or rendering 3D art.
They mention in the article specifically how intel's design foolishly decreases bandwidth per cpu to make the dual-core magic happen. Since the xeon's will arrive so much later that leads me to conclude they know performance is going to be abysmal, but they're going for the "dual" buzzword because amd is, and at the same time they're re-engineering their bus tech for the xeon line to improve bandwidth so the dual core nature actually becomes useful.
I'd purchase the $18 toaster, seeing that it was made more efficiently.
A fine member of the human race you are. Your genes will surely survive your equals.
Back in college I was an office boy earning $4.15/hour, but the work I was doing was worth maybe $2/hour. Minimum wage laws are stupid--and ironically enough, end up hurting those at the low end of the job market (by pricing them out of jobs).
The basic philosophy behind minimum wage laws is that if you work a full work week, you should be able to have enough money to feed, clothe and otherwise care for you and your immediate family. In the absence of minimum wage laws jobs have only to pay well enough to improve the quality of life beyond joblessness, which doesn't need to mean that it necessarily actually provides anything approximating a quality of life we would consider "humane". Without minimum wage laws people will literally work themselves to death, as long as that death arrives later than it otherwise would have.
The one strong argument against minimum wage laws is that in the presence of minimum wage laws some jobs aren't created, and so people who would otherwise take those jobs make nothing instead of making something. However, it's an argument bred from shortsightedness, pessimism and laziness, from the belief that it is acceptable to merely aim for survival, instead of a healthy world economy which serves all, and that it is foolish to even try to do better. But then maybe I'm a hopeless utopian for believing we can improve upon a worldwide economic system that statistically doesn't do all that much better than that of the middle ages, with a large group of people having as their best choice something akin to slavery.
You don't prove your point at all. Economies of scale occur whether or not the market is regulated. A better argument would be to note that regulation can reduce barriers to entry just as they can raise barriers to entry.
Economies of scale are the explanation of why a totally unregulated market over time turns into a few large behemoths, unless the product doesn't afford barriers to entry or economies of scale (very few products are like that). I think I made that point, you may want to refute it.
But try this exercise. Name a regulation that doesn't exaggerate the effects of economy of scale or increase barriers to entry. You can find them, but not easily.
You can find anecdotal evidence to bolster any argument, I could easily come back and cite countless examples of just such regulation, but it wouldn't support my case. My case is that an unregulated market is inherently a sick market because it will grow steadily more inefficient. Regulation is the fix for this problem, not the cause, even though regulation, if done poorly (most often the case), can increase market inefficiency even more than monopolization will.
So, yes, you're right that regulation can be very bad for the market. I'm not arguing that it's not. I'm arguing that you need regulation to keep a free market free.
How about this exercise: take a look at markets in zones of lawlessness, like warzones, and see how efficiently they function, how "healthy" they are.
Big companies really welcome true market regulation, because it prevents smaller players from entering the field. For example, the reasons drug prices are so high is because regulation makes it virtually impossible for small companies to compete. Therefore, the only people willing to lose money for 5-10 years before becoming profitable are those whose only goal is to become absurdly profitable.
That's why I used the qualifier "if done correctly". Antitrust law by itself is not adequate as market regulation, because it only goes after problems as they arise, when considerable market distortion has already happened. Market regulation needs to prevent market distortion, not just erase it as it occurs.
If the market was truely libertarian, then demand would cause new ventures to popup to undercut the markup thus putting the overpriced ones out of business.
It's a myth that an unregulated market is good for the small guy trying to break in. The reason this is not the case is the concept of scale effects. When you sell 100 items of a product your fixed costs per product are a lot higher than when you sell 100.000 items, and your variable costs tend to be higher as well (due to the inefficiencies of low volume production). Because your cost per product as a small guy is higher, it is hard to compete against the bigger businesses, who can maintain lower prices and still be profitable. Over time, this effect causes the market to merge in a number of big behemoths (the larger you are the more profit you make per product), and once you reach that point usually they will form cartels, where they use various kinds of underhanded tactics, like predatory pricing, coupled sales, government bribing and so on to keep out new market entrants and maintain higher prices than market forces would dictate. Examples of this are the music industry (the big five), microsoft's windows and office empire, the telecom industry on the local level, and on and on.
Cartels or monopolies have been demonstrated to tend towards having low market efficiency, due to the profit maximalization imperative and their ability to maintain non-market-optimal pricing models at greater profit to the business.
The only way to avoid this is to limit the ability of market players to form cartels or monopolies, and then abuse their power. Retroactively, that means antitrust law. So antitrust is a necessary part of maintaining a healthy free market. Proactively it means making sure that new market players can enter without high entrance costs (like allowing small telecom companies to use existing networks for a fair price, so they don't have to build up their own network at extreme cost), so raising prices by the big players would cause new players to enter at lower price points.
So, in conclusion, to have a truly free market (meaning with near non-existant barrier to entry), you must regulate it so no market player can become too powerful. A correctly regulated market is a healthy market, an unregulated market is a diseased or soon-to-be-diseased market.
Ofcourse, big business has been very successful at spreading the meme that market regulation is bad for the market. The reality is that it's good for the market (if done correctly), but it's bad for the behemoth.
I expect Microsoft's momentum to carry it a few more years yet... but after that the energy will have bled off and people will begin to see the benefits of Linux more clearly.
Microsoft suffers from the problem that their "solution" to computers doesn't apply to a networked world. They want duplicate copies of identical software separately installed on all end-user machines, whereas anyone can see that with ubiquitous 24/7 networking connections this is extremely inefficient and a nightmare to maintain. So, likely, what'll replace windows won't be linux, but a universal cross-platform environment, that will run remote software and will be only a login away from any computer that supports it. What is extremely surprising is that they know this, and have destroyed netscape, frozen IE development, crippled java, and are gunning for google for this very reason, all the while without trying to be the platform provider king because their windows and office monopolies are too comfy, and to truly innovate and switch paradigms is too brash a move for them to be able to make. So, the microsoft policy is basically that of delaying the inevitable.
I've noticed for a lot of people there's a sense of pride that they managed to "swindle" the system and trick their way into an illegal copy of a program. "It's good to be bad" and things of that ilk.
I blame a society that takes away opportunity to misbehave in safe ways. By trying to lock down people's need to be an ass it comes out in all kinds of unexpected ways; piracy, drunk driving, republicanism, and sometimes even public nosepicking. We really need to encourage some kind of emotional cleansing rite, possibly involving ritual combat to the death, or glowsticks. Everyone loves glowsticks.
This doesn't provide anything like what TCP provides, namely a connection between two network nodes that allows transfer of arbitrary data with guaranteed reliability, with automated congestion control for optimized use of available network resources.
As far as I can tell (their website could use some more straightforward actual content), this is more like bittorrent, where a file is cut up into blocks, the blocks get distributed across the network, and anyone interested in the file then reconstructs it from available data from all sources, not necessarily having to get the entire file correctly from a single source. Only it does it more efficiently than bittorrent.
The two protocols target very different uses. TCP excels in interactive use, where the data is sent as it is generated, and no error is tolerable in the single sender-to-receiver link. Bittorrent (and other distributed network protocols) target batch jobs, where throughput is more important than reliability (because reliability can be reconstructed on the client through clever hashing schemes), and where responsiveness is entirely irrelevant.
So, this could not possibly replace TCP, since it does not do what TCP is most useful for. At the same time, the criticisms aimed at TCP by the rateless designers are valid, but well known, since TCP is indeed poorly suited for high-volume high-throughput high-delay transmissions of prepackaged data.
Still, good job to them for trying to come up with better protocols for niche or not-so-niche markets. I wish them all the best.
if you want a good picture, you need good optics. ...which need a lot more space than those tiny lenses built into mobile phones. That's just one of the reasons mobiles can't replace real cameras.
Aren't fluid lenses on the verge of revolutionizing the size (or lack thereof) of digital camera's?
Even if they aren't, I would never use the expression "can't" when it comes to technology, and especially not when it comes to the size of lens systems. After all, nature has demonstrated that lens systems can be versatile, high-quality, and positively tiny. If nature can do it, eventually we'll do it too.
There is a premise to your post you didn't mention. You assume there is a why to accompany the how. I see no reason to assume that. It might just be that things are the way they are, without a reason. In that case "why are we here?" gets the answer "because if we weren't we couldn't ask ourselves why we are here".
Definitely the diamond age. The more nanotech advances, the more it seems like a near-perfect prediction of what the future will be like.
Imho, the reason stephenson reads better to non-geeks than most sci-fi is because he comprehends (consciously or not) a novel is first and foremost about the people. A lot of sci-fi writers don't seem to understand books must reveal a slice of humanity first, technology wizardry second. They write one-dimensional characters you have a hard time caring about, and if you're not interested in the technology, they're insanely boring.
Incidentally, this is why the star wars prequels suck, the George Lucas model III android had a memory malfunction in between the original trilogy and the new one, and it forgot the part of making movies where you require believable characters that people care about.
If the TV in a restaurant bothers you, DON'T GO TO THAT DAMNED RESTAURANT.. problem solved. The world doesn't revolve around your sorry ass.
It does, actually. I'm at the center of my world. If you are not at the center of yours, you need to see a shrink. The problem is when people forget we are ALL at the center of the world, in our own mind, and try to act as if other people aren't centers of the world themselves.
I would define a religion as a world view that includes some form of supernatural entity; but that's really just semantics. The definition that interest me is your definition of the word "God". Most "beleivers" I have asked about this are unable or unwilling to provide a definition, which makes any discussion of whether God exists pretty pointless. So if you can tell me what "God" means, I'll tell you if I'm an Atheist. (if you care)
religion:
Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
atheism:
The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
So, you're an atheist if you believe there is no God. Atheism is a belief, but not a religion, though one might classify it as a faith (as in "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.").
Someone who truly does not believe in the existance or non-existance of a god is agnostic, as in "One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God."
And then you have the deists, those who believe in a God, but can't label any specifics, and believe that this God doesn't play an active role in the world anymore.
It just came to me vnc allows you to do remote dual screens that are usable locally too.
You'd take a linux box with two screens, and on each screen run an x server which nests a vnc session on the same box, then you'd use x2x to connect the two vnc sessions together into one large screen.
Then, if you wanted to see it remotely, you'd go to another dual screen box and open up remote vnc sessions to the two different screen's sessions. If you moved the mouse it would tunnel itself through the x2x link on the remote machine, and your mouse would jump screens.
Ofcourse, that setup wouldn't allow dragging windows from one screen to the next, and performance on the second screen would probably be abysmal because of all the roundtrips, but you can't have everything you know.
Additionally, if you replaced the x2x with x2vnc you could do it with one linux box and one windows box.
I used to run x2x between different machines to make them behave like a single dual screen machine, but I never tried doing it remotely within vnc sessions.
That is actually the best-case scenario with regards to cooperating with microsoft. If you could conceivably be any threat to MS at any point in the future, they WILL immobilize your business, by trying to buy you out, relegating you to a niche, or destroying you entirely.
On the other hand, with his code layout, it's clearer where the if starts and ends, and it's clearer to what the else is associated.
It's clearer for you, because that's how you got used to coding. The other way is clearer to me, because that's how I got used to it.
With regards to the vertical space wastage, this is just my personal opinion, but there is always code that is self-contained but doesn't fit on the screen in one go, and the more of it you can fit, the easier debugging becomes. There's a reason we don't use line-by-line editors anymore, it's because seeing more of your code at once actually helps you code.
Regardless though, this is a matter of personal preference. It's my personal opinion that those using the newline before brace style are making life harder on themselves, but I'll respect them if they respectfully disagree with me, and let them be.
Meanwhile, let me state that any project where more than one person is working on the code needs a coding style guide, including how to name things. I'd code the other way if the style guide told me to, because it's better to have code all in the same style than to protect your own personal opinion fiefdom.
They're targeting average Joe who thinks Internet Explorer is "The Internet".
Average Joe reads the New York Times? That's news to me.
You might get your mind blown back the other way after watching the 13 minutes of John Stewart (_The Daily Show_) on Crossfire.
I do think it was a very ironic interview. Stewart was complaining that real debate is finding the compromise and common ground among all positions, so that all the debaters end up agreeing on one conclusion, and that what programs like crossfire do is artificially separate the positions and make them dig in so deep a common ground is never found. Carlson responded by attacking Stewart, driving a wedge between their two positions, and generally destroying any possibility for real debate. Now this makes me wonder: does Carlson really know what he does, and is therefore evil and only interested in the money he makes, or does he not know, and is just a total moron?
But didn't Kerry later say he would have voted for the war knowing what he knows now... that there were no WMDs?
No, he said he would have voted for the authorization so there was a stick to threaten with to get the inspectors back in. He has stated for a while now he thinks the iraq war was avoidable, if the inspectors had just been allowed to do their job and bring the necessary facts to light.
Bush is the one going around saying that knowing what he knows now he would still have gone into iraq.
If you wrote something interesting, take credit for it. Say, "I recently did some experimenting with a dual monitor setup, and I wrote up some of my conclusions." But don't try to pass it off as anything except self-promotion, as if all of us are idiots who won't catch on.
In Sal's defense, the editors apparently are idiots who didn't catch on. Ofcourse, the editors sometimes don't catch on when they post a story which was posted already less than an hour earlier, so it might be expecting too much from them to notice Sal's not-so-clever ruse.