The *real* *question* is whether Firefox is free or open-source?
No, that's not the *real* question. Hate to break it to you, but only a very very tiny minority even worries about that question.
If 'open source' were only an ideological one, then you might be right. But it's not -- Mozilla more than anything has shown that it has practical benefits, too. Most people might not care that Mozilla is free and open source, but they do care that it's fast, secure, well featured, supports standards, and is in active development. And those are all a direct result of it being free and open source.
Whether FireFox continues to be free and open source is important to everyone, whether they realise it or not, because that affects whether it'll continue to be all of those things in the future.
If no-one cares about version numbers, why did MS go jump several version numbers when releasing Word 6.0, to match WordPerfect's 6.0 version number? I doubt they'd have done so unless they expected it to have an effect.
(OTOH, I've no idea how much effect it did have. Anyone know?)
Well, right now Safari is better than the MS browser in a number of ways: it's more standards-compliant, more secure, has better control over pop-ups and other web features, and is easier to get rid of. (It's my No.1 browser; but I also use Camino, the Cocoa port of the FireFox engine, a lot.)
But yes, ultimately the important thing is to return to competition in the browser space; letting browsers compete on merit, support for standards, and easy switching between browsers.
To which end, shouldn't this advert be promoting all alternative browsers, rather than trumpeting FireFox as the solution?
On-device development is definitely better than ANY other handheld... It is the best handheld-computer out there.
Would it be presumptuous of me to suggest that maybe you've never seen a Psion 5mx?
Yes, it's a few years old now, but it's still an extremely powerful, extremely well-supported, and extremely usable machine. And it's not bad for development, either. It has its own built-in language (OPL) which though not cutting-edge is pretty neat (roll-your-own dialog boxes in 2-10 lines of code, for example), and it's possible to write some really neat apps in it. Plus it has Java, which though not terribly fast is capable of development on the machine. There's also a Perl port, which works fine, and a Python one which I haven't tried. (You need a Windows box to do C++ development, which is a shame.)
For example, and in reference to the previous BBS story, here's an off-line reader (OLR) written in OPL that I co-wrote. It works about as well as desktop ones, and even now, lots of people use it every day; I'm one.
Actually, the point is: how many Linux users would buy Office?
Even in the Windows world, where users are used to paying exorbitant fees for software, Office would still be in trouble without OEM deals, bundling, and other reductions. Without those, and in a market used to getting software for free, the prospects can't look good...
A newspaper or a TV network makes more money if it's operated primarily as an entertainment. That means: nothing that requires the consumer to think, because a lot of people don't like to think.
How true, how pathetically true. I was just saying the same thing about TV science programmes, but it applies all the more to politics, current affairs, and most other areas of the media too.
The purpose of the media use to be partly to inform. Now it's just to entertain.
What's even sadder is that it's not just the commercial networks any longer. Now people have got used to that sort of thing, used to not having to think about anything, that's all they want to read/listen to/watch, and the rest of the media has to follow suit. Even the BBC. Even its flagship morning news programme, Today -- it's respected, or at least used to be, because it asks tough questions of the politicians and other guests, and won't accept evasive or misleading answers. But the interviews have become so short, and the coverage so shallow, that the only effect is to provoke the interviewees without actually covering the issues in any depth. Soundbite journalism.
Thankfully, I can still find thoughtful and intelligent programmes, often on (BBC) Radio 4 hidden in the darkened corners of the schedules.
Recently I saw a clip from the epic 1973 BBC documentary series, The Ascent of Man. And it struck me just how old-fashioned it seems now -- but not for the clothes, or the accent,or the photography or other technical aspects. Two things made it seem dated: 1) They had a presenter who was intelligent and informed, who had something worth saying. And 2) they trusted him to hold your attention with it; they didn't try to fill even inch of screen or every second of time with extraneous stuff for the attention-deficient; they didn't distract you with quick cuts, exotic camera techniques, or flash graphics; they just gave the presenter all the time and space he needed. How sad that such a concentration on content rather than form should seem old-fashioned...
And I remembered something that I'd forgotten: learning something can be entertaining! It's ironic: if you set out to educate your audience, then they may well be entertained in the process; but if you set out just to entertain them, then their chances of thinking or learning anything from the experience are pretty low...
Because Jews run Hollywood. I don't mean that as a troll,
I'm sorry, but how could that possibly be anything other than a troll?
If you'd said that there was a good number of Jewish actors and other film professionals in Hollywood, then that would be a reasoned argument. A slightly inflammatory one, and one whose truth I've no information on, but reasonable nonetheless. But a ludicrous, sweeping overgeneralisation and naive oversimplification like that? Do me a favour.
A more rational point might be that if a good proportion of actors and directors were Jewish, then you might expect a similar proportion of the very talented ones, and hence of the award-winning ones. And a similar argument might apply to the low proportion of African-Americans (or whatever the current politically-correct term is -- I'm from a different continent, so I don't know). But since I've no real (i.e. not just anecdoral) information about the ethnic and/or religious demographic of film professionals -- and neither, I suspect, have you -- then this is all academic.
Erm, yes... In case you missed it, that's exactly what the original posted code will end up doing, too! (Hint: the break; statement between cases that's mysteriously absent.) And with a decent optimising compiler, it'll be just as efficient.
No, that's JPEG2000, which is a completely separate format.
JPEG itself continues to use Fourier transforms as always. (Well, actually, discrete cosine transforms (DCTs), but they're similar enough in principle that I thought I'd get away with it!)
Mac OS X does the same sort of thing, only better. Like Mac OS 'classic', there's a rather neat scripting language called AppleScript, and not only the Finder (the equivalent to the desktop, shell, workplace, file manager, or whatever you want to call it), but most apps expose a lot of stuff as objects -- from documents, files, and windows right down to a lot of real nitty gritty stuff.
For example, I wrote a little script which takes an iTunes playlist and exports the files to Toast (a CD-burning app) ready to burn, neatly arranged by artist &c. I've got one which speaks the sender of each email I get; next on my list is one which spots the 'Someone has replied to your message' emails that Slashdot sends, and opens the relevant reply in my web browser. You can set a script to execute on a particular keypress, at particular times, when files get added to particular folder, &c. It's very powerful.
I find it interesting because it looks so different from other languages -- it's almost plain English. For example, if you have a list called, I dunno, 'folderList', then you can say
set the currentFile to item n of the folderList
or
set currentFile to folderList's item n
(or several other variatiosn). I wouldn't like to see a large system written in it, but for small tasks it's a refreshing change from the terse, symbolic languages we use. And the very free syntax can lead to very natural and expressive, if long-winded, code.
In Mac OS X, there's still a bit of a split between GUI and CLI; AppleScript works mostly at the GUI level. But you can run shell scripts and other Unix commands from AppleScripts, and vice versa, so it's not too much of a limitation.
...when TV science programmes used to be fascinating. I used to switch off having learned something -- not to put too fine a point on it, they used to be educational. Of course, that's a rude word in most TV programming these days -- instead, they have to be entertaining.
I think it comes down to the people making the programmes. In the old days, the people who made the programmes understood what they were telling you. They designed the programmes to inform, to explain, to convey knowledge -- and that was what made them interesting.
These days, most programmes are made by people who clearly don't have a clue about their subject matter. The idea is just to interview a few professors and hope that some information will leak out somewhere... Which rarely happens. Or, alternatively, you get the whizz-bang style, the 'Hey, wow, we don't understand any of this stuff either, but doesn't it look good??!!' approach.
And then they wonder why people don't get as much out of such programmes...
Personally, I'm happier watching old Open University programmes than most prime-time science programmes, even those on the BBC. The thrill of learning something new, of having your horizons broadened. You can't beat it.
To take your example: if you present Fourier transforms as a series of integrals, then it might not be too interesting. But as a way of moving between time and frequency domains, they're something we use without knowing it all the time.
Your inner ear effectively does Fourier transforms! It takes a sound wave in, and has tiny hairs that vibrate at different frequencies, each one triggering a different nerve impulse. Similarly, the spectrum analyser, tone controls or graphic equaliser on your hi-fi system are working in the frequency domain. Piano keyboards, radio tuners, synthesisers, and many other things are all concerned with Fourier transforms and their effects. Most of use think of sound in the frequency domain!
Even if you restrict yourself to the mathematics, they underpin MP3 and pretty much all forms of audio compression; JPEG, MPEG and many forms of graphic compression; the circuitry behind CD players (those digital filters), and so on.
I'm sure a good director could come up with a really fascinating programme about them!
Re: No wolves here, but a hell of a lot of sheeple
on
The Empires Strike Back
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes, of course, there are good reasons for the authorities keeping as much information secret as possible. But there are also overriding reasons why they are required to observe due process. And that includes things like needing to tell you what you're being arrested for, showing you a warrant before searching and seizing goods, and so on.
It's not just about the police vs 'the bad guys' -- if the police don't follow due process, then they are the bad guys! (And a much more scary set of bad guys they make, too, with the full power of the state behind them.)
Anyway, what happened to 'innocent until proved guilty'?
Yes and no. No, of course it didn't actually happen. But as a story, it exists. And it's a story that an awful lot of people have spent an awful lot of time immersed in, one whose lessons will tend to sink into people's subconsciouses.
It may be only a story, but stories can have an awful lot of power. Just ask Hamlet about that. Or Salman Rushdie.
I was counting Java on the traditional, large-scale side of things -- in fact, it's one of my favourite languages!
I know lots of folks round here don't like it much, for various reasons (most of which I'd rather not get into yet more arguments about!). But it does seem to have been designed by people who 'get it', who understand what it's like not just to write little bits of code, but to write large systems, and to maintain them.
As we've said, you can't enforce good coding, but so many features of Java seem designed to encourage it as much as possible. JavaDoc, for example, makes it as easy as possible to document the big picture and the API issues, to keep them up to date, and to use them. The packaging (namespacing) and source code file layout makes it easy to locate the source code for almost anything the code references. There's no preprocessor to obfuscate things, so you know that what you see is what's actually being run. The enforced exception handling makes it less likely that shortcuts and oversights will come back to bite you. The strong encapsulation makes it straightforward to rework and refactor. Parts of the standard library are a masterclass in the design and documentation of a reusable library. And so on.
Of course, it has its drawbacks, and things it's not suited to. But I'd far rather maintain a large system written in Java than one in C++, C, Perl, or just about any other language I know.
Oh, and I should have included a disclaimer with my last post: I know quite a bit of Perl, but very little Python and Ruby. (And the little I do know makes me want to know more, but there are only so many hours in a day...) So apologies if I'm characterising them wrongly.
Looks reasonable to me, but then I'm no expert. (Never done any kernel-level stuff!)
One thing worth mentioning is that a mutex can be used for other types of resource, as well as memory. You might use one for serialising access to a database connection, for example, or a message queue, or a storage device, or any sort of resource that can't handle concurrent access.
Mind you, in those sorts of cases, you might wrap the mutex in a safer and more manageable bit of API; it might not be the sort of thing that other bits of the system should handle directly. But I think that serialisation often comes down to a mutex or similar feature.
The knack with writing proper concurrent programs is to restrict as little code as possible (for performance and ease of coding), and yet make sure it's enough to guarantee safety. Knowing how to do that is a skill indeed!
It's interesting to see this in the light of the one about most companies having four stages. In the beginning they're led by idealists, technologists, doers -- people who are concerned about the core business, who get excited by it. Then, when a company reaches a certain size, that's not enough to keep control of things, and management takes over: managers don't tend to have the same vision, so the company often loses innovation, but it consolidates, doing what it was already doing better than ever. That stage may last a long time, but at some point when things aren't going quite so well, the accountants tend to gain control; that's when the company cuts R&D and support, and makes shoddy products in the name of short-term gain. Finally, when the end is in sight, the lawyers end up in charge...
In those terms, Apple under Jobs is back near the end of stage 1 (after a while in Stage 2). Not that Jobs isn't a good manager, just that he leads by vision.
Post-Jobs, things will depend upon his successor. They'll need someone who can get excited by what Apple can do, someone who can still inspire all the good folk at Apple to break new ground and, er, think differently...
First they invent a language where you DON'T SAY MOST OF THE LETTERS IN A WORD.
You've probably never seen Gaelic, then... (Even its name has been spelled Gaedhealg, Gaedhilg(e), Gaedhealaing, Gaeilic, Gaelainn, Gaoidhealg, Gaolainn, and Gaeilge!)
I've never understood the point of the 'litigious bastards' one. Who actually types that phrase into Google to see what comes out??? (Well, who apart from the people creating those links...)
Far more useful would be a link the other way around; so that if someone typed 'SCO Group' into Google, they'd find the top link took them to a 'litigious bastards' site, explaining just why SCO deserved that title!
It looks like they're going to lose anyway; but if they can come up with some stupid excuse like this web site, then they won't have to admit they were wrong about the facts of the case.
"We were right all along -- we just lost coz of this stupid web site!"
That way, they (and, more importantly, MS) can carry on spreading FUD as long as they like.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're to protect only an implementation of an idea, as they say they are, then copyright already offers perfectly good protection.
And if they're protecting more than that, then they shouldn't be!
Either way, they're unnecessary. And given the sort of flagrant abuses we're seeing so often, what reason is there for keeping them?
If 'open source' were only an ideological one, then you might be right. But it's not -- Mozilla more than anything has shown that it has practical benefits, too. Most people might not care that Mozilla is free and open source, but they do care that it's fast, secure, well featured, supports standards, and is in active development. And those are all a direct result of it being free and open source.
Whether FireFox continues to be free and open source is important to everyone, whether they realise it or not, because that affects whether it'll continue to be all of those things in the future.
But isn't that exactly the point of FOSS, that someone can build and release their own version?
If you can only use your changes privately, then it's not much better than MS's Shared Source...
(OTOH, I've no idea how much effect it did have. Anyone know?)
But yes, ultimately the important thing is to return to competition in the browser space; letting browsers compete on merit, support for standards, and easy switching between browsers.
To which end, shouldn't this advert be promoting all alternative browsers, rather than trumpeting FireFox as the solution?
-- Tom Stoppard
Would it be presumptuous of me to suggest that maybe you've never seen a Psion 5mx?
Yes, it's a few years old now, but it's still an extremely powerful, extremely well-supported, and extremely usable machine. And it's not bad for development, either. It has its own built-in language (OPL) which though not cutting-edge is pretty neat (roll-your-own dialog boxes in 2-10 lines of code, for example), and it's possible to write some really neat apps in it. Plus it has Java, which though not terribly fast is capable of development on the machine. There's also a Perl port, which works fine, and a Python one which I haven't tried. (You need a Windows box to do C++ development, which is a shame.)
For example, and in reference to the previous BBS story, here's an off-line reader (OLR) written in OPL that I co-wrote. It works about as well as desktop ones, and even now, lots of people use it every day; I'm one.
Even in the Windows world, where users are used to paying exorbitant fees for software, Office would still be in trouble without OEM deals, bundling, and other reductions. Without those, and in a market used to getting software for free, the prospects can't look good...
How true, how pathetically true. I was just saying the same thing about TV science programmes, but it applies all the more to politics, current affairs, and most other areas of the media too.
The purpose of the media use to be partly to inform. Now it's just to entertain.
What's even sadder is that it's not just the commercial networks any longer. Now people have got used to that sort of thing, used to not having to think about anything, that's all they want to read/listen to/watch, and the rest of the media has to follow suit. Even the BBC. Even its flagship morning news programme, Today -- it's respected, or at least used to be, because it asks tough questions of the politicians and other guests, and won't accept evasive or misleading answers. But the interviews have become so short, and the coverage so shallow, that the only effect is to provoke the interviewees without actually covering the issues in any depth. Soundbite journalism.
Thankfully, I can still find thoughtful and intelligent programmes, often on (BBC) Radio 4 hidden in the darkened corners of the schedules.
Recently I saw a clip from the epic 1973 BBC documentary series, The Ascent of Man. And it struck me just how old-fashioned it seems now -- but not for the clothes, or the accent,or the photography or other technical aspects. Two things made it seem dated: 1) They had a presenter who was intelligent and informed, who had something worth saying. And 2) they trusted him to hold your attention with it; they didn't try to fill even inch of screen or every second of time with extraneous stuff for the attention-deficient; they didn't distract you with quick cuts, exotic camera techniques, or flash graphics; they just gave the presenter all the time and space he needed. How sad that such a concentration on content rather than form should seem old-fashioned...
And I remembered something that I'd forgotten: learning something can be entertaining! It's ironic: if you set out to educate your audience, then they may well be entertained in the process; but if you set out just to entertain them, then their chances of thinking or learning anything from the experience are pretty low...
I'm sorry, but how could that possibly be anything other than a troll?
If you'd said that there was a good number of Jewish actors and other film professionals in Hollywood, then that would be a reasoned argument. A slightly inflammatory one, and one whose truth I've no information on, but reasonable nonetheless. But a ludicrous, sweeping overgeneralisation and naive oversimplification like that? Do me a favour.
A more rational point might be that if a good proportion of actors and directors were Jewish, then you might expect a similar proportion of the very talented ones, and hence of the award-winning ones. And a similar argument might apply to the low proportion of African-Americans (or whatever the current politically-correct term is -- I'm from a different continent, so I don't know). But since I've no real (i.e. not just anecdoral) information about the ethnic and/or religious demographic of film professionals -- and neither, I suspect, have you -- then this is all academic.
Erm, yes... In case you missed it, that's exactly what the original posted code will end up doing, too! (Hint: the break; statement between cases that's mysteriously absent.) And with a decent optimising compiler, it'll be just as efficient.
JPEG itself continues to use Fourier transforms as always. (Well, actually, discrete cosine transforms (DCTs), but they're similar enough in principle that I thought I'd get away with it!)
For example, I wrote a little script which takes an iTunes playlist and exports the files to Toast (a CD-burning app) ready to burn, neatly arranged by artist &c. I've got one which speaks the sender of each email I get; next on my list is one which spots the 'Someone has replied to your message' emails that Slashdot sends, and opens the relevant reply in my web browser. You can set a script to execute on a particular keypress, at particular times, when files get added to particular folder, &c. It's very powerful.
I find it interesting because it looks so different from other languages -- it's almost plain English. For example, if you have a list called, I dunno, 'folderList', then you can say
or(or several other variatiosn). I wouldn't like to see a large system written in it, but for small tasks it's a refreshing change from the terse, symbolic languages we use. And the very free syntax can lead to very natural and expressive, if long-winded, code.In Mac OS X, there's still a bit of a split between GUI and CLI; AppleScript works mostly at the GUI level. But you can run shell scripts and other Unix commands from AppleScripts, and vice versa, so it's not too much of a limitation.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I think it comes down to the people making the programmes. In the old days, the people who made the programmes understood what they were telling you. They designed the programmes to inform, to explain, to convey knowledge -- and that was what made them interesting.
These days, most programmes are made by people who clearly don't have a clue about their subject matter. The idea is just to interview a few professors and hope that some information will leak out somewhere... Which rarely happens. Or, alternatively, you get the whizz-bang style, the 'Hey, wow, we don't understand any of this stuff either, but doesn't it look good??!!' approach.
And then they wonder why people don't get as much out of such programmes...
Personally, I'm happier watching old Open University programmes than most prime-time science programmes, even those on the BBC. The thrill of learning something new, of having your horizons broadened. You can't beat it.
To take your example: if you present Fourier transforms as a series of integrals, then it might not be too interesting. But as a way of moving between time and frequency domains, they're something we use without knowing it all the time.
Your inner ear effectively does Fourier transforms! It takes a sound wave in, and has tiny hairs that vibrate at different frequencies, each one triggering a different nerve impulse. Similarly, the spectrum analyser, tone controls or graphic equaliser on your hi-fi system are working in the frequency domain. Piano keyboards, radio tuners, synthesisers, and many other things are all concerned with Fourier transforms and their effects. Most of use think of sound in the frequency domain!
Even if you restrict yourself to the mathematics, they underpin MP3 and pretty much all forms of audio compression; JPEG, MPEG and many forms of graphic compression; the circuitry behind CD players (those digital filters), and so on.
I'm sure a good director could come up with a really fascinating programme about them!
It's not just about the police vs 'the bad guys' -- if the police don't follow due process, then they are the bad guys! (And a much more scary set of bad guys they make, too, with the full power of the state behind them.)
Anyway, what happened to 'innocent until proved guilty'?
Yes and no. No, of course it didn't actually happen. But as a story, it exists. And it's a story that an awful lot of people have spent an awful lot of time immersed in, one whose lessons will tend to sink into people's subconsciouses.
It may be only a story, but stories can have an awful lot of power. Just ask Hamlet about that. Or Salman Rushdie.
I know lots of folks round here don't like it much, for various reasons (most of which I'd rather not get into yet more arguments about!). But it does seem to have been designed by people who 'get it', who understand what it's like not just to write little bits of code, but to write large systems, and to maintain them.
As we've said, you can't enforce good coding, but so many features of Java seem designed to encourage it as much as possible. JavaDoc, for example, makes it as easy as possible to document the big picture and the API issues, to keep them up to date, and to use them. The packaging (namespacing) and source code file layout makes it easy to locate the source code for almost anything the code references. There's no preprocessor to obfuscate things, so you know that what you see is what's actually being run. The enforced exception handling makes it less likely that shortcuts and oversights will come back to bite you. The strong encapsulation makes it straightforward to rework and refactor. Parts of the standard library are a masterclass in the design and documentation of a reusable library. And so on.
Of course, it has its drawbacks, and things it's not suited to. But I'd far rather maintain a large system written in Java than one in C++, C, Perl, or just about any other language I know.
Oh, and I should have included a disclaimer with my last post: I know quite a bit of Perl, but very little Python and Ruby. (And the little I do know makes me want to know more, but there are only so many hours in a day...) So apologies if I'm characterising them wrongly.
One thing worth mentioning is that a mutex can be used for other types of resource, as well as memory. You might use one for serialising access to a database connection, for example, or a message queue, or a storage device, or any sort of resource that can't handle concurrent access.
Mind you, in those sorts of cases, you might wrap the mutex in a safer and more manageable bit of API; it might not be the sort of thing that other bits of the system should handle directly. But I think that serialisation often comes down to a mutex or similar feature.
The knack with writing proper concurrent programs is to restrict as little code as possible (for performance and ease of coding), and yet make sure it's enough to guarantee safety. Knowing how to do that is a skill indeed!
But then, even English has 'uoiauai', 'Twyndyllyngs', and 'jussieuean'.
In those terms, Apple under Jobs is back near the end of stage 1 (after a while in Stage 2). Not that Jobs isn't a good manager, just that he leads by vision.
Post-Jobs, things will depend upon his successor. They'll need someone who can get excited by what Apple can do, someone who can still inspire all the good folk at Apple to break new ground and, er, think differently...
You've probably never seen Gaelic, then... (Even its name has been spelled Gaedhealg, Gaedhilg(e), Gaedhealaing, Gaeilic, Gaelainn, Gaoidhealg, Gaolainn, and Gaeilge!)
Far more useful would be a link the other way around; so that if someone typed 'SCO Group' into Google, they'd find the top link took them to a 'litigious bastards' site, explaining just why SCO deserved that title!
It looks like they're going to lose anyway; but if they can come up with some stupid excuse like this web site, then they won't have to admit they were wrong about the facts of the case.
"We were right all along -- we just lost coz of this stupid web site!"
That way, they (and, more importantly, MS) can carry on spreading FUD as long as they like.