But the standard American diet is a fad diet already! Compared to many other developed countries, your levels of sugar and equivalents (high-fructose corn syrup, for example) are ridiculous. And yet cutting down on them is seen as 'a fad'...
Of course, I agree with you that most people get far too little exercise than is good for them, and that getting more is an important way to health.
P.S. Why isn't a low-carb diet sustainable? In olden times, fruit and sweet things weren't around for much of the year, and people seemed to survive somehow. In fact, the best description I've heard is that low-carb is a 'winter diet', in contrast with our current permanent 'summer diet'.
He's widely considered to have fucked up the Jargon File, mostly due to his huge ego and lack of respect for history.
Widely, but far from universally. It could be argued that the Jargon File was always parochial and a personal view, and that the complaints are simply due to it being a different person now. It could be argued that the Jargon File was always a 'living' document, with changes made as terms came into and out of favour and meanings changed, and that this hasn't altered. It could be argued that there are few people as closely involved with as many people who make and recognise 'jargon' as ESR, and that no-one is likely to do a better job of it than he does. It could be argued that many of the people who don't like his stewardship are fuddy-duddies who long for the old days and dislike any changes that reduce the importance of themselves and their cultures and times.
I'm not saying I argue any of this, just that it could be so argued:) (Personally, I think he goes slightly too far at times, but does a reasonably good job of it, all things considered.)
That's because he's a pragmatist. ESR and RMS are idealists; they do a lot of good work, but they also have their own ideas about How Things Should Be, and put time and effort into trying to change things and telling people about it. Whereas Linux generally keeps quiet, staying out of controversy and concentrating on the work he's doing.
(At least, that's my impression based on what I've read about them.)
I'm not saying either type is wrong; the world probably needs both types of people. In fact, in some ways they probably need each other.
This is ludicrous! Should we ban email, say, simply because some people use it to send offensive messages?
The problem is inconsiderate people making too much noise. So if anything, why not take action against that?
If someone's disturbing you at the cinema by speaking too loudly, does it matter whether they're speaking into a mobile phone, or to the person next to them, or to the rest of the cinema, or to themselves? No -- noise is noise, and that's the problem, not the excuse for it.
And just as it's perfectly possible to be inconsiderate without a phone, it's possible to be considerate with one. I try to be so, for example. I try to speak quietly into the phone, resisting the urge to shout. My phone's ringtone is the plainest possible, starting almost silently, and vibrating so that I've usually felt the ring and stopped it before anyone else has heard it. I turn the phone off in public places like cinemas and theatres; and if I forget, then I'll cancel the call without answering. End result: usually, no-one else in the cinema is aware. (And if it's a vital call, I can tell from the caller display, leave, and call back where it doesn't disturb anyone.)
Why should I suffer because some people are inconsiderate?
But as I said, this isn't a phone issue. I don't recall digital watches being banned, for example, because a few people left those annoying beeps on the hour. And should we ban popcorn because some people spend the whole film rustling with it?
No, of course not. Neither should we think about banning, jamming, or otherwise restraining mobile phones. If people are behaving inconsiderately, then ask them to leave for that, whatever excuse they may or may not have. Don't chicken out and blame it on something irrelevant.
Surprised no-one else has mentioned this, but it's a perfect example of why grammar's important: the title is ambiguous! It could either have a spurious 'A', or a missing apostrophe (in 'User's'); it could refer either to several power users, or to a single one. (I'm not saying I actually care which was meant, of course...)
I know/. editors don't have time to read the articles they're linking to, and don't read other/. articles to check for dupes, but is it too much to ask that they read the actual headlines they're posting???
If many folks believe that Java doesn't have a strong presence on the client side, isn't that the definition of "low profile"?
On the client, and for domestic users, yes. But there's far more to software than that.
From the beginning Sun promoted Java as...
That wasn't the beginning. It wasn't even called Java in the beginning. Yes, Sun did hype it in that direction at that point, but that hadn't always been the plan.
...that DeBeers manage to persuade everyone, with a cunning advertising campaign, that there's nothing like a natural diamond, and that she'd be insulted to receive anything artificial as an engagement present? After all, it worked for cubic zirconia... They can afford it, and they do have an awful lot to lose if they fail.
It sounds as if you, like many other folks here, assume that because you don't see that much going on Java-wise for client-side, Windows apps, that it therefore has a low profile. However, there's a lot of stuff going on with Java in corporates, where the rest of us don't see it; and there's also a lot of stuff going on server-side, ditto. Java may be unlike BSD in most other respects, but rumours of its death are greatly exaggerated:)
The other thing to remember is that Java wasn't initially developed as a M$-killer, or a C- or C++-killer, or anything like that. It was an internal project, something for a limited market, that survived partly for coincidental reasons and partly on its own merits. And that's why it was released: partly due to the coincidental rise of the Web, and partly because it's a good language that deserved a wider audience. There was no over-arching business plan for it, just a succession of mid-to-long-term tactics -- but it's done well so far. Maybe it'll continue to do well, too. I'm sure I'm not the only one to hope so.
Come off it... You think spammers are interested in piddly little lists of a few thousand addresses, when the automated harvesters pull in millions upon millions? Even if they could pull down/. addresses in an automated fashion, it wouldn't be worth their while to spend the time automating it. And as for having a human scan stories and recognise and enter addresses manually... forget it!
I've done the same for several years, and find that none of the spam I've ever checked has come from a web site. None. All the hundred-odd I get each day has just my plain unadorned address, which much have come from a couple of unwise Usenet posts way back, or the limited period of time it was on a couple of friends' web sites before I asked them to remove it.
Of course, I'm sure some web sites aren't too careful about who gets their email list, but from my experience, the vast majority don't pass their list on to spammers, and the vast majority of addresses to spam comes from other sources.
Why not, especially if Sun were allowed to reincorporate MS's extensions into the "canonical" JVM?
Because M$'s extensions would almost certainly connect with Windows-only features, weakening Java's cross-platform appeal, and removing its major strength. Enough developers would be ignorant or lazy enough to use them, and Sun simply wouldn't be able to fold them back into non-Windows JVMs. Bingo -- embraced, extended, and extinguished, open-sourced or not.
You'd also have to know how much of that revenue would be at risk by 'setting Java free' -- I suspect not much. But money isn't the only issue here -- not for Sun, and certainly not for the rest of us.
Part of the problem is its cross-platform nature. As a user of more than one minority platform, I see this as being a massive advantage. However, I know that people who only use Windows (and some who only use Linux) see it merely as a speed penalty; should those people have the right to fragment the platform, making it a little better for the majority, but much much worse -- or even impossible -- for the rest? Is 'majority rule' such a good thing in this case?
If Java had been completely free in its early days, I think there's little doubt that, er, a certain company would have embraced and extended it in their traditional fashion, turning it into a de facto Windows language. Sun's strong control early on was necessary to prevent this. They've slowly relaxed their control, though; the Java Community Process lets anyone propose improvements, and many of the current ones have come from outside Sun. And the platform has always been open in the sense that anyone can make a clean-room implementation of the spec and call it Java if it passes the compatibility tests.
The question, I think, is just how much control they still need to have. Too much, and people will worry about their motives and Java's future; OTOH, too little, and maybe even now the platform will fragment, making it far less useful to developers, and possibly leaving room for a less altruistic company to take control of it? A similar question is how fast should the platform change -- too slow, and it risks losing out to more modern ones that have whizz-bang features; too fast, and it risks losing developers who don't want to keep relearning or rewriting.
So, while I generally agree with open-source principles, I think Sun has generally done the right thing for Java so far. But how much control do they still need? I don't know. Does anyone?
Maybe because 'state machine' is a nebulous concept, useful for thinking about code but not directly implementable because there are different things it can do, and different ways of doing it. This state machine; does it have a finite number of states? How are the states identified and described? How are transitions between states triggered? How do you find which state to move to next -- is it deterministic, or do we try lots of states until some other condition is fulfilled? What happens when you get unexpected input? How does you find out the current state -- should it generate events for transitions, or will you query it? Does the state need to be saved for later recall -- if so, how? Should it execute arbitrary code on reaching each state, or on performing each transition -- if so, how is that specified? Do some states have special conditions or restrictions, time limits, &c? And so on, and so on.
Of course, you can write -- or generate -- some code for a SM once you've decided all these points, but you couldn't expect a language to come up with a generic SM without making fixed decisions on these sorts of questions, decisions that will be wrong for some applications.
A state machine is really a design pattern, a way of doing things, even a way of thinking about them, rather than an actual specification. A language or library can provide support for some of the things it might do, but too much depends on the implementation choices.
Maybe what we need is a language to specify code in terms of design patterns and then generate code from them... but even if someone finds a way to do that, it will take an awful lot of work to integrate with current languages.
Er, no. Both programming and mathematics tend to be very abstract; the difference is that in programming, the abstractions are often metaphors for real-world objects, whereas in mathematics, they're usually not: you deal with abstract objects for their own sake. Even number is an abstraction, albeit a common and familiar one. But most are much further removed from everyday experience; non-commutative fields, analytic functions, topological spaces, and the like are studied not because they have any direct parallels in the physical world, but because they're intrinsically useful. No metaphor in sight.
Isn't is perfectly legal and above-board for one person to read the source code, find out how some obscure protocol or another works, and post the results in a descriptive document that includes no actual source or copyright material? And then for other developers to use that document to write code making use of said protocol?
Yes, this would take care to ensure that the first party never goes near code for related projects, and that second party never goes near the M$ source, and can prove how they came to know the protocol details, but isn't this enough of a risk that M$ would be foolish to release the code themselves?
In other words, don't M$ stand to lose at least as much as they might gain from disclosure? While many of the conspiracy theories around them seem plausible, it makes this one seem a little less likely.
It's always the same when someone mentions ebooks... Maybe I can try to save people some effort by summarising all the replies people want to post:
Ebook hardware is crap. The screen is to small, &c &c.
EBook files are far too restricted -- I don't want to lose all my books when I upgrade to a new machine or reader.
EBooks are far too expensive.
You can't fold down the page corners on an ebook.
All these complaints are about some current implementations of ebooks, not inherent in the format. Yes, some reader hardware isn't good, some ebook files are overly-protected, and some reader apps are limited. But all this is changing, and will change more in future. There's nothing that says you have to have dedicated hardware; many different types of pocket computer are already good for reading ebooks, and I expect many more will become available. There's an awful lot of books available as plain text, both legally (free like Project Gutenberg, or paid like Fictionwise), and otherwise (P2P &c), which is both platform- and future-proofed. And some reader apps already handle bookmarks, annotations, &c. Most of these objections may seem silly in a few years.
No-one would ever read an entire book on screen. Paper is much easier on the eye.
There's nothing like being able to pick up a book and hold it.
You can't give ebooks as presents.
These are mostly a matter of personal taste. Many people find that a good screen (whether desktop or palmtop) is easy enough on the eye that the other advantages of ebooks outweigh that objection. If you can pick up a book, then you have to have some space to put it into in the first place; some people have far more HD space available than bookshelf space. And people already give 'virtual' presents -- just think of book tokens, for example.
In short, almost all the objections people are making are valid but limited -- to certain types of people, and/or current technology. I doubt ebooks will replace dead-tree books in the foreseeable future, but there's no reason why they may not provide a popular alternative.
Personally, I've read far more on the screen of my Psion than I have on paper for the last few years; my library is over 80MB of compressed text. I always have something to read, wherever I am, and I can edit things as I wish (e.g. converting to British English spelling). The only place where paper is still better for me is on the loo; elsewhere, ebooks are more useful -- especially for reading in bed, where the backlight lets me read in the dark!
Or, more realistically, surely he can at least say something like "This site may also work in Mozilla and similar browsers, but these are not officially supported", which points people in the right direction without taking on any responsibility or liability?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this patent about a particular method for auto-playing, not about auto-playing itself?
Of course the latter has been around for ages, but if this is about a particular way of achieving that, then maybe it's not so obvious after all? And maybe it doesn't prevent any other method of achieving it?
Not that all patents are a good thing, but setting this up as a straw man isn't going to help anyone's argument.
A couple of minor points: firstly, the built-in development language, OPL, is more than 'just' a scripting language, and is capable of writing large applications. (Here's one I'm co-author of, for example.)
Also, syncing isn't a major issue for everyone. The only 'syncing' I ever do is for backups, and that's just a matter of transferring the CF card to my Mac's CF reader and transferring files. I don't bother running an agenda or contacts app on my Mac, coz it's all there in my Psion.
Another of the main reasons Psion blew it was marketing. Here in the UK (later) Psions were seen mainly as executive toys, and the message that they were very capable computers in their own right just wasn't heard. In the US, I gather it was even worse: no-one ever heard of them at all!
When the spun off their software division as Symbian, everyone raved about how this would spread the OS to a whole new class of users, but I could hear the death knell for Psion's own machines. Sad times...
Slashdot Mirror
To coin a phrase: that headline no verb!
But the standard American diet is a fad diet already! Compared to many other developed countries, your levels of sugar and equivalents (high-fructose corn syrup, for example) are ridiculous. And yet cutting down on them is seen as 'a fad'...
Of course, I agree with you that most people get far too little exercise than is good for them, and that getting more is an important way to health.
P.S. Why isn't a low-carb diet sustainable? In olden times, fruit and sweet things weren't around for much of the year, and people seemed to survive somehow. In fact, the best description I've heard is that low-carb is a 'winter diet', in contrast with our current permanent 'summer diet'.
Widely, but far from universally. It could be argued that the Jargon File was always parochial and a personal view, and that the complaints are simply due to it being a different person now. It could be argued that the Jargon File was always a 'living' document, with changes made as terms came into and out of favour and meanings changed, and that this hasn't altered. It could be argued that there are few people as closely involved with as many people who make and recognise 'jargon' as ESR, and that no-one is likely to do a better job of it than he does. It could be argued that many of the people who don't like his stewardship are fuddy-duddies who long for the old days and dislike any changes that reduce the importance of themselves and their cultures and times.
I'm not saying I argue any of this, just that it could be so argued :) (Personally, I think he goes slightly too far at times, but does a reasonably good job of it, all things considered.)
(At least, that's my impression based on what I've read about them.)
I'm not saying either type is wrong; the world probably needs both types of people. In fact, in some ways they probably need each other.
Good point, well made!
The problem is inconsiderate people making too much noise. So if anything, why not take action against that?
If someone's disturbing you at the cinema by speaking too loudly, does it matter whether they're speaking into a mobile phone, or to the person next to them, or to the rest of the cinema, or to themselves? No -- noise is noise, and that's the problem, not the excuse for it.
And just as it's perfectly possible to be inconsiderate without a phone, it's possible to be considerate with one. I try to be so, for example. I try to speak quietly into the phone, resisting the urge to shout. My phone's ringtone is the plainest possible, starting almost silently, and vibrating so that I've usually felt the ring and stopped it before anyone else has heard it. I turn the phone off in public places like cinemas and theatres; and if I forget, then I'll cancel the call without answering. End result: usually, no-one else in the cinema is aware. (And if it's a vital call, I can tell from the caller display, leave, and call back where it doesn't disturb anyone.)
Why should I suffer because some people are inconsiderate?
But as I said, this isn't a phone issue. I don't recall digital watches being banned, for example, because a few people left those annoying beeps on the hour. And should we ban popcorn because some people spend the whole film rustling with it?
No, of course not. Neither should we think about banning, jamming, or otherwise restraining mobile phones. If people are behaving inconsiderately, then ask them to leave for that, whatever excuse they may or may not have. Don't chicken out and blame it on something irrelevant.
I know /. editors don't have time to read the articles they're linking to, and don't read other /. articles to check for dupes, but is it too much to ask that they read the actual headlines they're posting???
On the client, and for domestic users, yes. But there's far more to software than that.
From the beginning Sun promoted Java as...
That wasn't the beginning. It wasn't even called Java in the beginning. Yes, Sun did hype it in that direction at that point, but that hadn't always been the plan.
...that DeBeers manage to persuade everyone, with a cunning advertising campaign, that there's nothing like a natural diamond, and that she'd be insulted to receive anything artificial as an engagement present? After all, it worked for cubic zirconia... They can afford it, and they do have an awful lot to lose if they fail.
The other thing to remember is that Java wasn't initially developed as a M$-killer, or a C- or C++-killer, or anything like that. It was an internal project, something for a limited market, that survived partly for coincidental reasons and partly on its own merits. And that's why it was released: partly due to the coincidental rise of the Web, and partly because it's a good language that deserved a wider audience. There was no over-arching business plan for it, just a succession of mid-to-long-term tactics -- but it's done well so far. Maybe it'll continue to do well, too. I'm sure I'm not the only one to hope so.
Interesting. I guess I just don't visit enough slimy sites :)
Come off it... You think spammers are interested in piddly little lists of a few thousand addresses, when the automated harvesters pull in millions upon millions? Even if they could pull down /. addresses in an automated fashion, it wouldn't be worth their while to spend the time automating it. And as for having a human scan stories and recognise and enter addresses manually... forget it!
Of course, I'm sure some web sites aren't too careful about who gets their email list, but from my experience, the vast majority don't pass their list on to spammers, and the vast majority of addresses to spam comes from other sources.
Because M$'s extensions would almost certainly connect with Windows-only features, weakening Java's cross-platform appeal, and removing its major strength. Enough developers would be ignorant or lazy enough to use them, and Sun simply wouldn't be able to fold them back into non-Windows JVMs. Bingo -- embraced, extended, and extinguished, open-sourced or not.
Part of the problem is its cross-platform nature. As a user of more than one minority platform, I see this as being a massive advantage. However, I know that people who only use Windows (and some who only use Linux) see it merely as a speed penalty; should those people have the right to fragment the platform, making it a little better for the majority, but much much worse -- or even impossible -- for the rest? Is 'majority rule' such a good thing in this case?
If Java had been completely free in its early days, I think there's little doubt that, er, a certain company would have embraced and extended it in their traditional fashion, turning it into a de facto Windows language. Sun's strong control early on was necessary to prevent this. They've slowly relaxed their control, though; the Java Community Process lets anyone propose improvements, and many of the current ones have come from outside Sun. And the platform has always been open in the sense that anyone can make a clean-room implementation of the spec and call it Java if it passes the compatibility tests.
The question, I think, is just how much control they still need to have. Too much, and people will worry about their motives and Java's future; OTOH, too little, and maybe even now the platform will fragment, making it far less useful to developers, and possibly leaving room for a less altruistic company to take control of it? A similar question is how fast should the platform change -- too slow, and it risks losing out to more modern ones that have whizz-bang features; too fast, and it risks losing developers who don't want to keep relearning or rewriting.
So, while I generally agree with open-source principles, I think Sun has generally done the right thing for Java so far. But how much control do they still need? I don't know. Does anyone?
Of course, you can write -- or generate -- some code for a SM once you've decided all these points, but you couldn't expect a language to come up with a generic SM without making fixed decisions on these sorts of questions, decisions that will be wrong for some applications.
A state machine is really a design pattern, a way of doing things, even a way of thinking about them, rather than an actual specification. A language or library can provide support for some of the things it might do, but too much depends on the implementation choices.
Maybe what we need is a language to specify code in terms of design patterns and then generate code from them... but even if someone finds a way to do that, it will take an awful lot of work to integrate with current languages.
Er, no. Both programming and mathematics tend to be very abstract; the difference is that in programming, the abstractions are often metaphors for real-world objects, whereas in mathematics, they're usually not: you deal with abstract objects for their own sake. Even number is an abstraction, albeit a common and familiar one. But most are much further removed from everyday experience; non-commutative fields, analytic functions, topological spaces, and the like are studied not because they have any direct parallels in the physical world, but because they're intrinsically useful. No metaphor in sight.
Erm... surely the real question is: Why do you still grow all this corn in the first place?
Yes, this would take care to ensure that the first party never goes near code for related projects, and that second party never goes near the M$ source, and can prove how they came to know the protocol details, but isn't this enough of a risk that M$ would be foolish to release the code themselves?
In other words, don't M$ stand to lose at least as much as they might gain from disclosure? While many of the conspiracy theories around them seem plausible, it makes this one seem a little less likely.
- Ebook hardware is crap. The screen is to small, &c &c.
- EBook files are far too restricted -- I don't want to lose all my books when I upgrade to a new machine or reader.
- EBooks are far too expensive.
- You can't fold down the page corners on an ebook.
All these complaints are about some current implementations of ebooks, not inherent in the format. Yes, some reader hardware isn't good, some ebook files are overly-protected, and some reader apps are limited. But all this is changing, and will change more in future. There's nothing that says you have to have dedicated hardware; many different types of pocket computer are already good for reading ebooks, and I expect many more will become available. There's an awful lot of books available as plain text, both legally (free like Project Gutenberg, or paid like Fictionwise), and otherwise (P2P &c), which is both platform- and future-proofed. And some reader apps already handle bookmarks, annotations, &c. Most of these objections may seem silly in a few years.- No-one would ever read an entire book on screen. Paper is much easier on the eye.
- There's nothing like being able to pick up a book and hold it.
- You can't give ebooks as presents.
These are mostly a matter of personal taste. Many people find that a good screen (whether desktop or palmtop) is easy enough on the eye that the other advantages of ebooks outweigh that objection. If you can pick up a book, then you have to have some space to put it into in the first place; some people have far more HD space available than bookshelf space. And people already give 'virtual' presents -- just think of book tokens, for example.In short, almost all the objections people are making are valid but limited -- to certain types of people, and/or current technology. I doubt ebooks will replace dead-tree books in the foreseeable future, but there's no reason why they may not provide a popular alternative.
Personally, I've read far more on the screen of my Psion than I have on paper for the last few years; my library is over 80MB of compressed text. I always have something to read, wherever I am, and I can edit things as I wish (e.g. converting to British English spelling). The only place where paper is still better for me is on the loo; elsewhere, ebooks are more useful -- especially for reading in bed, where the backlight lets me read in the dark!
Anyway, yes, it sounds like a great movie. I'll look out for it. (Just on the off-chance it ever hits these shores...)
Or, more realistically, surely he can at least say something like "This site may also work in Mozilla and similar browsers, but these are not officially supported", which points people in the right direction without taking on any responsibility or liability?
Of course the latter has been around for ages, but if this is about a particular way of achieving that, then maybe it's not so obvious after all? And maybe it doesn't prevent any other method of achieving it?
Not that all patents are a good thing, but setting this up as a straw man isn't going to help anyone's argument.
Hie thee to POS Ltd, then!
A couple of minor points: firstly, the built-in development language, OPL, is more than 'just' a scripting language, and is capable of writing large applications. (Here's one I'm co-author of, for example.)
Also, syncing isn't a major issue for everyone. The only 'syncing' I ever do is for backups, and that's just a matter of transferring the CF card to my Mac's CF reader and transferring files. I don't bother running an agenda or contacts app on my Mac, coz it's all there in my Psion.
Another of the main reasons Psion blew it was marketing. Here in the UK (later) Psions were seen mainly as executive toys, and the message that they were very capable computers in their own right just wasn't heard. In the US, I gather it was even worse: no-one ever heard of them at all!
When the spun off their software division as Symbian, everyone raved about how this would spread the OS to a whole new class of users, but I could hear the death knell for Psion's own machines. Sad times...