Microsoft depend on sales from Office, Windows and other apps. They feel the slump in PC sales just like the hardware vendors do.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, MS lives in close symbiosis with the vendors; every 2 years or so progress in hardware development produces faster PCs, and every 2 years or so MS produces a version of Windows, as well as applications, that serve to bring the speed of those PCs down to a sluggish sublevel of performance, the added bells and whistles effectively canceling out the performance gains. Users have been indoctrinated into accepting this cycle as natural, which is why users so often acknowledge the speed of Linux, BeOS and other OSes as wonderous, when in truth we shouldn't accept anything less.
In short, Microsoft boosts the new generation of speedy hardware because users "need" it. And speedy hardware boosts the new generation of Microsoft stuff because users "need" it. At the moment, that cycle is slowing down as users feel applications are fast enough for their needs. The recent improvements in performance have been almost entirely for the sake of gaming performance and multimedia: AGP, 3D instructions, HW-accelerated DVD playback, HW-accelerated sound, cooling supplies, cool cases etc. -- precious little of that stuff is for business tasks.
Everybody knows the upgrade cycle can't go on like this. And consciously or not, this game of leapfrog will be artificially boosted by.NET because this technology, by definition, will slow down your computer; similar to Java, it relies on bytecode that is compiled into native code on demand (Just-In-Time compilation). While some argue that this process can produce superior performance to traditional pre-compilation, in the short run it probably won't -- Java is a good case study here.
The fact that.NET could run on other hardware platforms is another possible sales-booster: a hardware-independent Windows would promote new types of hardware, freeing the burden of innovation from being completely on Intel, spurring competition, thereby potentially spurring more sales, etc.
I was just thinking about this very topic yesterday, toying with the idea of submitting a review of a Strugatsky book.
I keep recommending these books to people I meet. It's wonderful literature; I keep saying it's literature, not deserving the restrictive label of "SF"; a good Strugatsky is the kind of book you don't fully appreciate until you have put it down, when its flavour lingers and you realize that, while reading it, your mind took flight, and that you're still flying a few days after.
It is sad, but not too surprising, to learn how unknown they are outside the literati (by which I don't mean the average Slashdot geek type with their Asimov and Trekkie stuff). The English translations are, as far as I can know, almost entirely out of print. Roadside Picnic was recently resurrected, at least in Europe, by Gollancz as part of their "Gollancz SF" series (instantly recognizable as trade-paperbacks with minimalistic yellow covers), a wonderful series which also includes other semi-forgotten masterpieces by the likes of Brunner, John Sladek, Heinlein, Thomas Disch and John Crowley.
Obtaining these absent volumes is not hard. ABE Books is your friend; basically it's a network of used-book sellers with a unified shopping cart -- it's an amazing system that has significantly added to my personal library. Books typically arrive by air mail within a week, even here in Europe (Norway). Also popular, but untested by me, is BookFinder.
There have been posts in this discussion, some serious and some not, about the readability/relevance of Russian fiction, comments pretty typical of ethnocentric Americans. I can't stress this enough: There is absolutely nothing that should prevent you from completely enjoying a Russian book (translated into English, to wit). The references to Russian culture/history/etc. are more or less nonexistent, and their stories are usually set outside the Soviet state.
As for translations, most of the Strugatsky books were done by an extraordinary translator, Antonina W. Buois. I cannot vouch for their correctness, as I have not read the original texts, but I applaud their beauty, humanity, subtlety and ingenuity, qualities which I can only assume are also present in the originals.
As for what to read, I highly recommend Roadside Picnic, which is a masterpiece in any genre (it served as the inspiration for Tarkovsky's Stalker). It is about the aftermath of an alien visitation -- after the beings themselves have left and mysteriously, without having revealed themselves -- which has left the Earth riddled with small "Zones", contaminated by alien debris. One theme of the novel is that while we humans consider ourselves "rational beings", our sense of rationality -- a way of putting order to chaos -- is closely tied to our human form; an alien civilization may in fact appear beyond our capacity to understand, and therefore their nature will seem chaotic, irrational and impossible to us. The debris is wonderful stuff, often dangerous, often inexplicable, and humans scavenge it like ants over the trash left, as a character says, by a family "roadside picnic".
Their other works are similarly masterly: Far Rainbow, Hard to Be a God (actually made into a French-German-Russian-produced film in 1989) and Definitely Maybe. The latter's original title is, translated: "A Billion Years to the End of the World: A manuscript discovered under unusual circumstance". It tells the story of how one day all scientific progress is suddenly threatened by, well, hedonistic distractions. It was adapted into the film Days of the Eclipse (1988).
Many of the Strugatskys' books play out in the same "universe", or continuum, of the 22nd century, which includes several novels featuring intergalactic investigator Maxim Kammerer, and also developing the backstory of "the Wanderers", a mysterious, never-seen, incredibly powerful race of beings that seem to be silently following and manipulating the human race, similar to the Visitors in Roadside Picnic. The most chilling example is "Wanderers and Travellers", a hypnotic little short story about a diver who tags rare marine animals with radio tracking, and who then meets a man who suspects that, after a visit to a remote planet, he has somehow been... tagged himself.
On note: Alongside their SF production, the Strugatskys also produced some absurdist fables, including Tale of the Troika and The Second Invasion of Mars, and while this is great stuff, it's likely to shock and disappoint anyone looking for a "vintage Strugatsky".
I don't remember the exact reference -- though I think it's mentioned in the introduction to the first book of The History of the Lord of the Rings -- but Tolkien later regretted stealing names from Voluspå (note correct spelling; the title means "wolf's prophecy") for The Hobbit, saying that with hindsight, choosing the names was admittedly pretty silly and unoriginal of him. In writing its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, he was forced to keep those names.
3G is stupid, hard, expensive, and the telecomms industry is still struggling to get "2.5G" (like GPRS) to work.
Wireless Ethernet is a better idea. For data services, which is what 3G is all about, you don't really need roaming support -- being able to seamlessly switch to a new carrier -- when you have TCP/IP.
I believe the latest wireless Ethernet spec gives you about 20mbps of shared bandwidth. It's ridiculously cheap. You have these local clouds that can potentially interact with other clouds by overlapping and gatewaying. Each cloud can be fit to serve a number of users. You get real IP. You can scale locally without having to upgrade the entire world or invent a new spec every month (4G anyone?). You can boost your bandwidth by setting up your own box. And so on.
Some serious thinking about a public infrastructure is needed, obviously. I don't know how 802.11 deals with multiple overlapping networks.
But if you're talking about serious broadband, which no phone today is technically proficient enough to justify [1] (unless they start making GameBoy Advance phones -- now there's a thought), that's what you want.
[1] My Siemens S45's SMS message editor isn't able to keep up with my typing. (The Nokia T9-capable phones also work increasingly slower as you type a message.) I believe SL45i, which runs the J2ME Java virtual machine, has a faster processor, but according to reports, apparently not by much.
I suspect that you really meant a pallet, which according to Webster is "a small, low, portable platform on which goods are placed for storage or moving."
Somehow I don't see how gluing a "thin, usually oval or oblong board or tablet used by painters for holding and mixing colors" to your box would help ensure the safety of your goods.
At least when I tried it a few months ago, CommonC++ did not compile correctly under Windows. Its configure script did not even work out of the box, failing to detect Cygwin and Visual C++. It compiles fine on Linux, but the Win32 support seems to have been neglected for a while.
As a whole, the CommonC++ design is pretty messy, relying on massive amounts of kludgy ifdefs and macros in the header files. I believe they are working on cleaning it up.
Other libraries I would consider:
ACE: threads, synchronization, sockets. ACE's design is not very object-oriented, but its probably the most extensively portability layer you will find.
IOLib, portable I/O (also includes identical ports for C and Objective-C).
NT's POSIX subsystem is for running POSIX.1 binaries. Access to this subsystem is not provided to Win32 executables, which run under the Win32 subsystem.
Since the two are completely isolated from each other, POSIX programs cannot make use of common Win32 services like networking, graphics, DCOM etc. All subsystems are implemented on top of the native, undocumented NT APIs (ntdll.dll).
Similarly, NT has an OS/2 subsystem which is capable of running OS/2 console programs. The original idea was that NT could expose different, swappable "personalities", of which Win32 is but one, but of course that potential has never been realized.
"2k is our nominal working resolution"
on
Behind the Scenes
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· Score: 4, Informative
For those interested in the digital transfer mention in the article, "2k" and "4k" refer to the horizontal resolution of the scanned images: 2k means 2048 pixels per line, 4k means 4096 pixels.
The Imagica Imager XE digital film scanner mentioned has a maximum resolution of 4096x3112 pixels. It does a 2k frame scan from 35mm in 4 seconds and a 4k in 6-8 secs, counting speed to a remote disk via Fiber Channel or Gigabit Ethernet. It's about the size of a refrigerator and weighs 400kg. Heavy duty stuff.
Forget the advanced search. Try using stragically placed + and - to force presence or absence of terms.
Google ignores the plus, since it considers all terms important in the query. It honours the minus, however, for exclusion. Please realize that Googles honours phrases for page ranking. So if you're searching for "write only memory", it sorts on proximity, so you'll get exact phrase hits first, and the lower-ranked results will list documents that merely contain the words "write", "only" and "memory".
Windows NT has always been multi-user
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
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· Score: 2
If you want to compare to Windows: up till Windows XP it wasn't even possible to be logged in as multiple users at the same time
This is incorrect.
Windows NT, of which Windows 2000 and XP are but new iterations, has been multi-user from the start, even though it has lacked the shell counterparts to easily exploit it without resorting to C or C++. For example, the Windows NT Resource Kit comes with a "su" program.
The NT user API design is heavily based on ACLs, which means, for example, that you can create threads, pipes, files, synchronization objects, etc. and restrict access to users with certain permissions. I'm no Windows fan, but they got this part right.
Re:Different types of niche operating systems
on
Niche Operating Systems
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· Score: 3, Funny
You left another important category:
"Wannabe" systems that are written by idealistic, hopeful and often naïve developers, often trying to emulate the success of Linux. Some of these are clearly over-ambitious. But it all has to start somewhere (apparently Finland works for some people).
... sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed...
Um. Like who doesn't do this? Due to the nature of C++, this is required to avoid redefinitions that would otherwise occur on multiple inclusions. Given this, it has little to do with reducing compile time; for that you use pre-compiled headers (support for which isn't expected in GCC until 3.1 or later).
To evaluate coding practices, I would look at
Consistent coding conventions: syntax, identifiers, directory layout etc.
Presence of good comments (German ones don't count;).
Application of good OO principles (which, contrary to a surprising number of people's opinions, apply to all languages, not merely explicitly OO languages like C++), such as encapsulation, modularization, etc.
Application of good OO patterns (GangOfFour-style).
Use of interfaces ("abstract base classes" in Bjarne terminology) to decouple API interfaces from their implementation.
Presence of unit tests.
Presence of assertions and other kinds of code guards that contribute to "self-documenting" and "self-testing" code.
etc.
Re:bugzilla vs. debian bug tracking vs. sourceforg
on
Mozilla's 100,000th Bug
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· Score: 3, Informative
There are not that many around. Before we submitted to Bugzilla, we looked at several systems (late last year), such as Mantis, GNATS, Jitterbug, and Keystone.
I have nothing great to say about any of them.
They all lack many essential features. They all have web-based GUIs that are tighly coupled with the back-end logic; that is, they have no back ends. Thus the default GUI is the only GUI you can ever realistically put on top of it. A lot of people are missing out on the MVC model these days. What you need is a programmable back end accessible through a cross-platform API (based on CORBA, SOAP, XML-RPC, UNO, anything that strikes your fancy). Then you can leverage the back-end support for clients. One can be a powerful reporting tool with graphing capabilities. Another one can be a wxWindows-based portable GUI for modern desktops. Another one can be a common-denominator HTML-based GUI for browsers. Etc.
Current GUIs are all crude and cluttered and obviously designed by programmers with no interface design background (and by that I don't mean graphical design, but functional design). Many are ad-hoc systems thrown together using PHP. Presumably the poor devils think that by slapping it on SourceForge or Freshmeat it will magically bloom into a usable product. Nuh-uh.
Another common problem with these systems is that they're fundamentally bug-tracking systems. When you get to a certain point in development, you realize that a better all-embracing concept is the idea of issues -- a generalization of problems that aren't specifically related to code. There is a popular fork of Bugzilla, for example, called IssueZilla.
The only system that was mildly interesting was Keystone, which provides some interesting form-based extensibility -- basically, if I remember correctly, the schema is malleable, so you can add stuff like time estimation numbers, completion progress, or other metadata that would be useful in your project. Also Keystone supports the notion of subtasks: any bug "slip" can have another slip as its parent. This is more elegant than Bugzilla's dependency system. Unfortunately, Keystone sports a GUI from hell. (Applying CSS to it might sound fun, but it isn't; their HTML isn't very CSS-friendly, so to do anything radical you have to delve into their HTML generation code).
We currently use Bugzilla. It's currently the best system out there, but that doesn't say much. We are pretty excited about Scarab -- this is a project where the developers actually sat down and designed it beforehand (wowee).
Every single traditional news outlet basically failed yesterday, and if it weren't for mirrors of such sites' data, we wouldn't understand the events of 9-11 as clearly.
Interestingly, the major news outlets that didn't fail was the Washington Post. Why? They use the Akamai infrastructure, which provides distributed caching of static content. The Post pages were quite nippy, even during the first hours. (Ironically, one of the victims of the WTC crashes was the co-founder and CTO of Akamai.)
Dylan is a lovely, lovely language. At times awfully verbose in a way that reminds me of Ada, but its syntax and design is different. Its design is consistent and thoughtful, and the language is blissfully free of the cruft we see in C++ and Java.
For example, Dylan's syntax is based on whitespace; so identifiers are permitted to contain most characters except whitespace and punctuation. (The downside, of course, is that you must type spaces around most operators. However, any character can be escaped with \, and you can even reuse reserved words this way.)
This flexibility gives you a lot of freedom. For example, the official convention uses dashes to separate words; methods/functions that return a boolean value ends with ?; globals are surrounded by asterisks; and types are surrounded by angle brackets. So a method may be named is-camera-on?(), a global may named *game-clients*, and a class may be named <socket-server>.
Dylan provides other small, but distinctive, features. For example, it supports per-file metadata: Any source file can start with an RFC 822-like header, which you'd typically use for version, author, copyright, license and documentation data.
Of course, I haven't even started on the language features. Dylan has an interesting, elegant object model. It has explicit support for "slots", analogous to Delphi's class properties: data members whose access is delegated to accessor methods. It has explicit support for singletons and generic programming. It has multiple inheritance. It has garbage collection, type safety, a modern module system, etc. Dylan is usually compiled, but can be interpreted. Its extremely dynamic nature means that method dispatching and "smart linking" can be a complex affair; this is a weak link, and at least for Functional Developer (formerly Harlequin Dylan), program efficiency is dependent on the compiler being able to do "whole program" analysis.
However, I would hesitate to call it a functional programming language. According to the Dylan reference manual, "Dylan is a general-purpose high-level programming language, designed for use both in application and systems programming". It is a structured programming language belonging to the same paradigm as C++ and Java. There are clear signs of having been influenced by functional programming, though.
The name "Dylan" does not come from Bob or Thomas, but from the phrase "dynamic language".
For more information, I recommend the Functional Objects site. They provide a Windows/Linux-based IDE and compiler for Dylan. The "Basic Edition" is free as in beer.
For me, developing free (as in speech) software is an act of charity. I enjoy taking part in building something for posterity. I value my freedom.
My second reason is that I find the public development process superior. Having two persons studying your code is better than having just one. Having four is twice as good. And so on. There is always some person somewhere with expert knowledge on an esoteric subject. There are people with specific skills, and there are people with specific interests, such as documenting, testing, logistics or herding.
I find that mere information transparency is a good reason by itself -- and it's a philosophy that pervades much of the technological foundation of the net. I can test a POP3 server with a telnet client. I can tunnel XML-RPC through Apache. I can feed my favourite news server into a mailing list with GNU Mailman. I can harvest my favourite web sites onto my hard drive and postprocess it. And so on. Openness tends to breed openness.
There are other personal incentives for developing such software -- receiving the admiration of one's peers, developing one's technical skills, interacting with interesting people, finding new technical challenges, the structural aesthetics of a well-organized project, etc. Many of these incentives are present in "closed" projects (by which I mean any project where the source is publicly divulged). However, if recognition and ego expansion is one's goal, closed projects won't offer much relief.
"Eller was in ACT, the advanced consumer technology group, which [Nathan] Myhrvold had recently set up. Gates had decided to make Microsoft the first software company with an internal division fully dedicated to advanced research. It would serve two purposes: to develop add-on products for Windows, and, as analysts have often speculated,
to absorb some of the company's outrageously high profits, and thereby, ideally, lower the potential for further government scrutiny. Since 1988, prosecutors had kept Microsoft staked out as if they were the Gambino family, a trend that would only intensify as time went on." (rest of chapter one here)
(This is a mildly fun book, if awkwardly written and often too swaggeringly slandering. Can't really recommend it, though.)
No idea. Never read it beyond the first two pages or so, and -- call me prejudiced, but I'm not particularly interested in wading through that turgid, awkward prose.
Re:Great books, but way out of the genre
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I can't give you a definition. But for me, in hard sf the plot is focused on, and often dependent on, the science of technological inventions, and in which the science plays a larger role than, say, philosophical or social questions/polemics-disguised-as-story.
Orwell's 1984 told of screens that monitored the population; but the science of that technology was not the issue, the idea of freedom restriction was. The brothers Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic [probably my favourite sf novel] was about the life-changing effects of alien junk upon humans wondering about, and struggling with, their place in the universe. Conversely, Clarke's Rendesvouz With Rama was about the novelty of humans exploring alien technology, and Greg Bear's Eon was about the novelty of humans exploring future technology. (I didn't want to mention the Clarke example alone, as Clarke tends to straddle the worlds of hard/soft sf, as in the case of 2001).
Neuromancer is indeed about technology, but not from the science angle; it is about the dehumanizing, life-consuming impact of technology upon society -- as much as Gibson is enamoured with gadgets, if his books are about anything, it is about how we don't get happier by burying ourselves in techno junk -- and as such joins the proud ranks of soft sf.
The only guy who ever did a good job at it is Darko Suvin, the Canadian SF theoretician. He nails it down pretty well, in like five hundred academic essays, but nobody in the field is ever going to say he is right. He talks about cognitive estrangement; that sf is "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment". (Note that my short excerpt of those aforementioned zillions of essays is broad enough to include fantasy; further reading is recommended, especially if you have trouble sleeping at night.)
Some other nice definitions:
By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story -- a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. (Hugo Gernsback)
A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its speculative scientific content. (Theodore Sturgeon)
Science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings. (Isaac Asimov)
Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities. (Miriam Allen deFord)
Personally I prefer this definition, offered by John Clute and Peter Nichols in The SF Book of Lists (emphasis mine):
Science fiction is a label applied to a publishing category and its application is subject to the whims of editors and publishers.
Re:Great books, but way out of the genre
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
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· Score: 5, Insightful
They're not all hard SF. Stand on Zanzibar, Neuromancer, The Man in the High Castle, A Canticle For Leibowitz, The Demolished Man, Lord of Light, Stranger in a Strange Land etc. -- lots of great soft SF here. I should know; I don't read hard SF.:)
Described in The Silmarillion, as part of the Akallabeth, the story of the fall of Numénor, the name of which in Quenya becomes "Atalantie", a linguistic similarity which Tolkien himself described as a "curious chance".
The Lost Road was Tolkien's attempt at writing a time-travel story (while C. S. Lewis was writing his space-travel story, Out of the Silent Planet), which he later abandoned, but incorporated into his mythology; see The Lost Road and Other Writings (The History of Middle-earth, volume 5).
"Telecommuting" does not necessarily mean "home office", though. I rent some office space.
There are hardly any people here during my work hours. I miss being able to interact; no cracking jokes with one's coworkers without having to involve textual smileys. No way to verbally or socially express or sublimate aggression, frustration, or happiness.
I live in the city, which I prefer merely for the convenience. I lived in a suburb for a while, working from a collective, but there were inconvenience, and while it was socially rewarding, it was not much different.
Now, there are other factors. Working for a startup means I don't have much of a personal life -- there is little in terms of social support to fall back on when the work day is over. I don't ever get to see my old friends, and consequently they might even be counted as friends anymore. My girlfriend lives 337km away. And so on. Perhaps this is the lesson to learn: Don't telecommute for a startup, at least not if you let the work take over your life.
The stress level of the work itself is fine; but the nature of my situation amplifies it tenfold. Working 9-5 from home would have been great.
What's extreme about this? The distance? The alienness of a post-communistic European country in shambles, as perceived by an average, ethnocentric American Slashdotter? The underdeveloped network infrastructure? The exploitation of workers who are only too happy to work for Western-funded peanuts because it's a lot more than they would otherwise earn in Russian jobs?
This isn't exactly news that matters.
Anyone out there in a similarly distant job?
Yeah, I work from Norway, for a New York start-up. Technically it works well: CVS, SSH, web, instant messaging, email, NetMeeting, phone -- technically there is no reason for me to be physically located alongside my coworkers.
However, the psychological effects are dire. Somebody else in this discussion has already catalogued them pretty well (though the thing about bad breath was surprising to me). I never see my co-workers. Communication mostly consist of typing, aside from daily phone meeting and the odd call. I spend all my waking time alone in a rented office. Since I started on this project, my personal life has fallen into ruin, I basically have no friends anymore. Et cetera. It is fun, rewarding work, but man, it can be painful.
On the other hand, I live in one of the world's nicest countries, and I get to sleep late (I'm basically on an EST schedule).
Slashdot Mirror
Whether they acknowledge it or not, MS lives in close symbiosis with the vendors; every 2 years or so progress in hardware development produces faster PCs, and every 2 years or so MS produces a version of Windows, as well as applications, that serve to bring the speed of those PCs down to a sluggish sublevel of performance, the added bells and whistles effectively canceling out the performance gains. Users have been indoctrinated into accepting this cycle as natural, which is why users so often acknowledge the speed of Linux, BeOS and other OSes as wonderous, when in truth we shouldn't accept anything less.
In short, Microsoft boosts the new generation of speedy hardware because users "need" it. And speedy hardware boosts the new generation of Microsoft stuff because users "need" it. At the moment, that cycle is slowing down as users feel applications are fast enough for their needs. The recent improvements in performance have been almost entirely for the sake of gaming performance and multimedia: AGP, 3D instructions, HW-accelerated DVD playback, HW-accelerated sound, cooling supplies, cool cases etc. -- precious little of that stuff is for business tasks.
Everybody knows the upgrade cycle can't go on like this. And consciously or not, this game of leapfrog will be artificially boosted by .NET because this technology, by definition, will slow down your computer; similar to Java, it relies on bytecode that is compiled into native code on demand (Just-In-Time compilation). While some argue that this process can produce superior performance to traditional pre-compilation, in the short run it probably won't -- Java is a good case study here.
The fact that .NET could run on other hardware platforms is another possible sales-booster: a hardware-independent Windows would promote new types of hardware, freeing the burden of innovation from being completely on Intel, spurring competition, thereby potentially spurring more sales, etc.
I keep recommending these books to people I meet. It's wonderful literature; I keep saying it's literature, not deserving the restrictive label of "SF"; a good Strugatsky is the kind of book you don't fully appreciate until you have put it down, when its flavour lingers and you realize that, while reading it, your mind took flight, and that you're still flying a few days after.
It is sad, but not too surprising, to learn how unknown they are outside the literati (by which I don't mean the average Slashdot geek type with their Asimov and Trekkie stuff). The English translations are, as far as I can know, almost entirely out of print. Roadside Picnic was recently resurrected, at least in Europe, by Gollancz as part of their "Gollancz SF" series (instantly recognizable as trade-paperbacks with minimalistic yellow covers), a wonderful series which also includes other semi-forgotten masterpieces by the likes of Brunner, John Sladek, Heinlein, Thomas Disch and John Crowley.
Obtaining these absent volumes is not hard. ABE Books is your friend; basically it's a network of used-book sellers with a unified shopping cart -- it's an amazing system that has significantly added to my personal library. Books typically arrive by air mail within a week, even here in Europe (Norway). Also popular, but untested by me, is BookFinder.
There have been posts in this discussion, some serious and some not, about the readability/relevance of Russian fiction, comments pretty typical of ethnocentric Americans. I can't stress this enough: There is absolutely nothing that should prevent you from completely enjoying a Russian book (translated into English, to wit). The references to Russian culture/history/etc. are more or less nonexistent, and their stories are usually set outside the Soviet state. As for translations, most of the Strugatsky books were done by an extraordinary translator, Antonina W. Buois. I cannot vouch for their correctness, as I have not read the original texts, but I applaud their beauty, humanity, subtlety and ingenuity, qualities which I can only assume are also present in the originals.
As for what to read, I highly recommend Roadside Picnic, which is a masterpiece in any genre (it served as the inspiration for Tarkovsky's Stalker). It is about the aftermath of an alien visitation -- after the beings themselves have left and mysteriously, without having revealed themselves -- which has left the Earth riddled with small "Zones", contaminated by alien debris. One theme of the novel is that while we humans consider ourselves "rational beings", our sense of rationality -- a way of putting order to chaos -- is closely tied to our human form; an alien civilization may in fact appear beyond our capacity to understand, and therefore their nature will seem chaotic, irrational and impossible to us. The debris is wonderful stuff, often dangerous, often inexplicable, and humans scavenge it like ants over the trash left, as a character says, by a family "roadside picnic".
Their other works are similarly masterly: Far Rainbow, Hard to Be a God (actually made into a French-German-Russian-produced film in 1989) and Definitely Maybe. The latter's original title is, translated: "A Billion Years to the End of the World: A manuscript discovered under unusual circumstance". It tells the story of how one day all scientific progress is suddenly threatened by, well, hedonistic distractions. It was adapted into the film Days of the Eclipse (1988).
Many of the Strugatskys' books play out in the same "universe", or continuum, of the 22nd century, which includes several novels featuring intergalactic investigator Maxim Kammerer, and also developing the backstory of "the Wanderers", a mysterious, never-seen, incredibly powerful race of beings that seem to be silently following and manipulating the human race, similar to the Visitors in Roadside Picnic. The most chilling example is "Wanderers and Travellers", a hypnotic little short story about a diver who tags rare marine animals with radio tracking, and who then meets a man who suspects that, after a visit to a remote planet, he has somehow been... tagged himself.
On note: Alongside their SF production, the Strugatskys also produced some absurdist fables, including Tale of the Troika and The Second Invasion of Mars, and while this is great stuff, it's likely to shock and disappoint anyone looking for a "vintage Strugatsky".
I don't remember the exact reference -- though I think it's mentioned in the introduction to the first book of The History of the Lord of the Rings -- but Tolkien later regretted stealing names from Voluspå (note correct spelling; the title means "wolf's prophecy") for The Hobbit, saying that with hindsight, choosing the names was admittedly pretty silly and unoriginal of him. In writing its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, he was forced to keep those names.
I'm talking about using 802 for data only, not for voice.
Wireless Ethernet is a better idea. For data services, which is what 3G is all about, you don't really need roaming support -- being able to seamlessly switch to a new carrier -- when you have TCP/IP.
I believe the latest wireless Ethernet spec gives you about 20mbps of shared bandwidth. It's ridiculously cheap. You have these local clouds that can potentially interact with other clouds by overlapping and gatewaying. Each cloud can be fit to serve a number of users. You get real IP. You can scale locally without having to upgrade the entire world or invent a new spec every month (4G anyone?). You can boost your bandwidth by setting up your own box. And so on.
Some serious thinking about a public infrastructure is needed, obviously. I don't know how 802.11 deals with multiple overlapping networks.
But if you're talking about serious broadband, which no phone today is technically proficient enough to justify [1] (unless they start making GameBoy Advance phones -- now there's a thought), that's what you want.
[1] My Siemens S45's SMS message editor isn't able to keep up with my typing. (The Nokia T9-capable phones also work increasingly slower as you type a message.) I believe SL45i, which runs the J2ME Java virtual machine, has a faster processor, but according to reports, apparently not by much.
Somehow I don't see how gluing a "thin, usually oval or oblong board or tablet used by painters for holding and mixing colors" to your box would help ensure the safety of your goods.
As a whole, the CommonC++ design is pretty messy, relying on massive amounts of kludgy ifdefs and macros in the header files. I believe they are working on cleaning it up.
Other libraries I would consider:
ACE: threads, synchronization, sockets. ACE's design is not very object-oriented, but its probably the most extensively portability layer you will find.
IOLib, portable I/O (also includes identical ports for C and Objective-C).
ZThread for threads.
Nescape Portable Runtime (NSPR), a C library: sockets/IPC, threads, synchronization primitives, layered I/O, ADTs/algorithms, portable shared libraries, logging, etc.
Since the two are completely isolated from each other, POSIX programs cannot make use of common Win32 services like networking, graphics, DCOM etc. All subsystems are implemented on top of the native, undocumented NT APIs (ntdll.dll).
Similarly, NT has an OS/2 subsystem which is capable of running OS/2 console programs. The original idea was that NT could expose different, swappable "personalities", of which Win32 is but one, but of course that potential has never been realized.
For more information, see Understanding Windows NT POSIX Compatibility.
The Imagica Imager XE digital film scanner mentioned has a maximum resolution of 4096x3112 pixels. It does a 2k frame scan from 35mm in 4 seconds and a 4k in 6-8 secs, counting speed to a remote disk via Fiber Channel or Gigabit Ethernet. It's about the size of a refrigerator and weighs 400kg. Heavy duty stuff.
- Forget the advanced search. Try using stragically placed + and - to force presence or absence of terms.
Google ignores the plus, since it considers all terms important in the query. It honours the minus, however, for exclusion. Please realize that Googles honours phrases for page ranking. So if you're searching for "write only memory", it sorts on proximity, so you'll get exact phrase hits first, and the lower-ranked results will list documents that merely contain the words "write", "only" and "memory".- If you want to compare to Windows: up till Windows XP it wasn't even possible to be logged in as multiple users at the same time
This is incorrect.Windows NT, of which Windows 2000 and XP are but new iterations, has been multi-user from the start, even though it has lacked the shell counterparts to easily exploit it without resorting to C or C++. For example, the Windows NT Resource Kit comes with a "su" program.
The NT user API design is heavily based on ACLs, which means, for example, that you can create threads, pipes, files, synchronization objects, etc. and restrict access to users with certain permissions. I'm no Windows fan, but they got this part right.
... sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed ...
Um. Like who doesn't do this? Due to the nature of C++, this is required to avoid redefinitions that would otherwise occur on multiple inclusions. Given this, it has little to do with reducing compile time; for that you use pre-compiled headers (support for which isn't expected in GCC until 3.1 or later).To evaluate coding practices, I would look at
Consistent coding conventions: syntax, identifiers, directory layout etc.
Presence of good comments (German ones don't count ;).
Application of good OO principles (which, contrary to a surprising number of people's opinions, apply to all languages, not merely explicitly OO languages like C++), such as encapsulation, modularization, etc.
Application of good OO patterns (GangOfFour-style).
Use of interfaces ("abstract base classes" in Bjarne terminology) to decouple API interfaces from their implementation.
Presence of unit tests.
Presence of assertions and other kinds of code guards that contribute to "self-documenting" and "self-testing" code.
etc.
They all lack many essential features. They all have web-based GUIs that are tighly coupled with the back-end logic; that is, they have no back ends. Thus the default GUI is the only GUI you can ever realistically put on top of it. A lot of people are missing out on the MVC model these days. What you need is a programmable back end accessible through a cross-platform API (based on CORBA, SOAP, XML-RPC, UNO, anything that strikes your fancy). Then you can leverage the back-end support for clients. One can be a powerful reporting tool with graphing capabilities. Another one can be a wxWindows-based portable GUI for modern desktops. Another one can be a common-denominator HTML-based GUI for browsers. Etc.
Current GUIs are all crude and cluttered and obviously designed by programmers with no interface design background (and by that I don't mean graphical design, but functional design). Many are ad-hoc systems thrown together using PHP. Presumably the poor devils think that by slapping it on SourceForge or Freshmeat it will magically bloom into a usable product. Nuh-uh.
Another common problem with these systems is that they're fundamentally bug-tracking systems. When you get to a certain point in development, you realize that a better all-embracing concept is the idea of issues -- a generalization of problems that aren't specifically related to code. There is a popular fork of Bugzilla, for example, called IssueZilla.
The only system that was mildly interesting was Keystone, which provides some interesting form-based extensibility -- basically, if I remember correctly, the schema is malleable, so you can add stuff like time estimation numbers, completion progress, or other metadata that would be useful in your project. Also Keystone supports the notion of subtasks: any bug "slip" can have another slip as its parent. This is more elegant than Bugzilla's dependency system. Unfortunately, Keystone sports a GUI from hell. (Applying CSS to it might sound fun, but it isn't; their HTML isn't very CSS-friendly, so to do anything radical you have to delve into their HTML generation code).
We currently use Bugzilla. It's currently the best system out there, but that doesn't say much. We are pretty excited about Scarab -- this is a project where the developers actually sat down and designed it beforehand (wowee).
- Every single traditional news outlet basically failed yesterday, and if it weren't for mirrors of such sites' data, we wouldn't understand the events of 9-11 as clearly.
Interestingly, the major news outlets that didn't fail was the Washington Post. Why? They use the Akamai infrastructure, which provides distributed caching of static content. The Post pages were quite nippy, even during the first hours. (Ironically, one of the victims of the WTC crashes was the co-founder and CTO of Akamai.)For example, Dylan's syntax is based on whitespace; so identifiers are permitted to contain most characters except whitespace and punctuation. (The downside, of course, is that you must type spaces around most operators. However, any character can be escaped with \, and you can even reuse reserved words this way.)
This flexibility gives you a lot of freedom. For example, the official convention uses dashes to separate words; methods/functions that return a boolean value ends with ?; globals are surrounded by asterisks; and types are surrounded by angle brackets. So a method may be named is-camera-on?(), a global may named *game-clients*, and a class may be named <socket-server>.
Dylan provides other small, but distinctive, features. For example, it supports per-file metadata: Any source file can start with an RFC 822-like header, which you'd typically use for version, author, copyright, license and documentation data.
Of course, I haven't even started on the language features. Dylan has an interesting, elegant object model. It has explicit support for "slots", analogous to Delphi's class properties: data members whose access is delegated to accessor methods. It has explicit support for singletons and generic programming. It has multiple inheritance. It has garbage collection, type safety, a modern module system, etc. Dylan is usually compiled, but can be interpreted. Its extremely dynamic nature means that method dispatching and "smart linking" can be a complex affair; this is a weak link, and at least for Functional Developer (formerly Harlequin Dylan), program efficiency is dependent on the compiler being able to do "whole program" analysis.
However, I would hesitate to call it a functional programming language. According to the Dylan reference manual, "Dylan is a general-purpose high-level programming language, designed for use both in application and systems programming". It is a structured programming language belonging to the same paradigm as C++ and Java. There are clear signs of having been influenced by functional programming, though.
The name "Dylan" does not come from Bob or Thomas, but from the phrase "dynamic language".
For more information, I recommend the Functional Objects site. They provide a Windows/Linux-based IDE and compiler for Dylan. The "Basic Edition" is free as in beer.
My second reason is that I find the public development process superior. Having two persons studying your code is better than having just one. Having four is twice as good. And so on. There is always some person somewhere with expert knowledge on an esoteric subject. There are people with specific skills, and there are people with specific interests, such as documenting, testing, logistics or herding.
I find that mere information transparency is a good reason by itself -- and it's a philosophy that pervades much of the technological foundation of the net. I can test a POP3 server with a telnet client. I can tunnel XML-RPC through Apache. I can feed my favourite news server into a mailing list with GNU Mailman. I can harvest my favourite web sites onto my hard drive and postprocess it. And so on. Openness tends to breed openness.
There are other personal incentives for developing such software -- receiving the admiration of one's peers, developing one's technical skills, interacting with interesting people, finding new technical challenges, the structural aesthetics of a well-organized project, etc. Many of these incentives are present in "closed" projects (by which I mean any project where the source is publicly divulged). However, if recognition and ego expansion is one's goal, closed projects won't offer much relief.
- "Eller was in ACT, the advanced consumer technology group, which [Nathan] Myhrvold had recently set up. Gates had decided to make Microsoft the first software company with an internal division fully dedicated to advanced research. It would serve two purposes: to develop add-on products for Windows, and, as analysts have often speculated,
- to absorb some of the company's outrageously high profits, and thereby, ideally, lower the potential for further government scrutiny. Since 1988, prosecutors had kept Microsoft staked out as if they were the Gambino family, a trend that would only intensify as time went on." (rest of chapter one here)
(This is a mildly fun book, if awkwardly written and often too swaggeringly slandering. Can't really recommend it, though.)No idea. Never read it beyond the first two pages or so, and -- call me prejudiced, but I'm not particularly interested in wading through that turgid, awkward prose.
Orwell's 1984 told of screens that monitored the population; but the science of that technology was not the issue, the idea of freedom restriction was. The brothers Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic [probably my favourite sf novel] was about the life-changing effects of alien junk upon humans wondering about, and struggling with, their place in the universe. Conversely, Clarke's Rendesvouz With Rama was about the novelty of humans exploring alien technology, and Greg Bear's Eon was about the novelty of humans exploring future technology. (I didn't want to mention the Clarke example alone, as Clarke tends to straddle the worlds of hard/soft sf, as in the case of 2001).
Neuromancer is indeed about technology, but not from the science angle; it is about the dehumanizing, life-consuming impact of technology upon society -- as much as Gibson is enamoured with gadgets, if his books are about anything, it is about how we don't get happier by burying ourselves in techno junk -- and as such joins the proud ranks of soft sf.
The only guy who ever did a good job at it is Darko Suvin, the Canadian SF theoretician. He nails it down pretty well, in like five hundred academic essays, but nobody in the field is ever going to say he is right. He talks about cognitive estrangement; that sf is "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment". (Note that my short excerpt of those aforementioned zillions of essays is broad enough to include fantasy; further reading is recommended, especially if you have trouble sleeping at night.)
Some other nice definitions:
A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its speculative scientific content. (Theodore Sturgeon)
Science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings. (Isaac Asimov)
Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities. (Miriam Allen deFord)
Personally I prefer this definition, offered by John Clute and Peter Nichols in The SF Book of Lists (emphasis mine):
They're not all hard SF. Stand on Zanzibar, Neuromancer, The Man in the High Castle, A Canticle For Leibowitz, The Demolished Man, Lord of Light, Stranger in a Strange Land etc. -- lots of great soft SF here. I should know; I don't read hard SF. :)
The Lost Road was Tolkien's attempt at writing a time-travel story (while C. S. Lewis was writing his space-travel story, Out of the Silent Planet), which he later abandoned, but incorporated into his mythology; see The Lost Road and Other Writings (The History of Middle-earth, volume 5).
There are hardly any people here during my work hours. I miss being able to interact; no cracking jokes with one's coworkers without having to involve textual smileys. No way to verbally or socially express or sublimate aggression, frustration, or happiness.
I live in the city, which I prefer merely for the convenience. I lived in a suburb for a while, working from a collective, but there were inconvenience, and while it was socially rewarding, it was not much different.
Now, there are other factors. Working for a startup means I don't have much of a personal life -- there is little in terms of social support to fall back on when the work day is over. I don't ever get to see my old friends, and consequently they might even be counted as friends anymore. My girlfriend lives 337km away. And so on. Perhaps this is the lesson to learn: Don't telecommute for a startup, at least not if you let the work take over your life.
The stress level of the work itself is fine; but the nature of my situation amplifies it tenfold. Working 9-5 from home would have been great.
This isn't exactly news that matters.
Yeah, I work from Norway, for a New York start-up. Technically it works well: CVS, SSH, web, instant messaging, email, NetMeeting, phone -- technically there is no reason for me to be physically located alongside my coworkers.
However, the psychological effects are dire. Somebody else in this discussion has already catalogued them pretty well (though the thing about bad breath was surprising to me). I never see my co-workers. Communication mostly consist of typing, aside from daily phone meeting and the odd call. I spend all my waking time alone in a rented office. Since I started on this project, my personal life has fallen into ruin, I basically have no friends anymore. Et cetera. It is fun, rewarding work, but man, it can be painful.
On the other hand, I live in one of the world's nicest countries, and I get to sleep late (I'm basically on an EST schedule).