step 1) liberals create federal regulatory agency, with mixed results.
step 2) "anti - big government" conservatives are elected.
step 3) said conservatives never actually trim the government, but merely underfund agencies create deficit and appoint people who do not believe in the agencies mission to head them. vast corruption occurs.
step 4) agencies stop regulating and start brokering favors.
step 5) bill clinton reduces size of federal government, but not nearly enough.
step 6) agencies continue to broker favors, appropriations bills divide pork among many industries in many states. these industries are now dominated by a few giant players, now dependent upon those agencies to keep their oligopolies federally enforced. agencies and broken regulations are now politically invincible since they were originally democratic causes, but now support industries purchasing the votes of republicans (and to a lesser but ever-increasing extent, democrats)
step 7) voters somehow continue to think that welfare is the largest violation of free market principles going, never call representatives to task on the issue.
step 8) innovation moves overseas to avoid competing with government supported change-phobic dinosaurs.
step 9) districts are redrawn to insure 97% re-election rate in the house.
Dell is a volume producer. Macs are better compared to Toshibas, Lenovos, or Sonys, all of which run more expensive than similarly equipped HPs, Dells, and Gateways.
I don't think Macs are the best deal on the planet, but but Apple isn't gunning for the absolute minimal cost for a given set of hardware features market. They've got a pretty sweet niche hollowed out for themselves. They aren't trying to be everything to every computer purchaser.
It's curious how angry people get about corporations releasing products that aren't specific to their needs or wants. You don't like or use macs... fine...neither do I, really (though I find the OS superior to Windows). Do BMW people get spitting mad every time there's an article about a new Cadillac? Geeks can be such opinionated whiners...
Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"
on
Driving Plan 9
·
· Score: 1
I honestly don't mean this as a flame:
If the first thing you look at on a new OS is the GUI, Plan9 is 100% not remotely suited to your interests.
Plan 9 isn't awesome because it's a slick desktop OS, but rather, because writing software for 10,000 computers running in parallel is as easy as writing software for a single box.
I think the early 2007 one is going to be some sort of "Vista ME" to business customers they're now saying Q4 2007, which is I guess when the non-beta will be sold to the public.
Of course I'm aware that there still is business in mainframes. But what happened to IBM was it's main business - mainframes - became a niche market. The same thing is happening to shrinkwrapped per-seat licensed software.
Ruby is still very young. The version in development will run on a bytecode VM, and there's an independant project in works to port the language to the.NET platform.
Ruby's speed is a problem, but less so than you'd think. It is _very_ easy to write Ruby code for multiple machines. A lot of companies have found the developer time saved by going with Ruby (at the cost of $60,000 per developer per year + insurance & benefits) more than makes up for the cost of a a few extra $1000 boxes.
Go into Best Buy or Fry's. Count how many rows of non-game shrinkwrapped software you see. Think back 6 or 7 years ago to how giant the same section of the store used to be. The computer world is finally undoing the damage that the PC revolution did to the idea of software. It's a set of instructions to a machine. It's a contracted design, not a packageable discrete product.
Microsoft is the old big dog in a dying breed. They're going to be like IBM circa the late 80s, standing around wondering why nobody wants to buy a mainframe any more.
Re:Rails needs to be more mature
on
Ruby For Rails
·
· Score: 1
- The documentation is provided by the community. Have you posted your apache configuration? Ruby is a much meatier program than Perl or Python or PHP and as a result, doing CGI the non-fast cgi way isn't an option. The fact that Apache has problems with fastCGI isn't the fault of Rails however.
- I don't know how far into the API you've looked, but there are most definitely ways of using literal SQL statements rather than.save().
- Yes the wiki could use some work, and this is something any rails fan can do to help the project. There sure seem to be a lot of fans, so what are people waiting for?
Games aren't and shouldn't be storytelling. Games are more toycrafting with narrative metaphor.
Story games always have finite possibility. The great games are those that combine fully independant elements so that game possibility is the exponential sum of its parts. Tieing all elements to a linear (or at best, a few linear) stories vastly reduces the number of gameplay possibilities.
The most extreme example of this is the cutscene. Cutscenes are dead gametime, the equivalent of having static on the radio. Personally I blame anime (which also has long pointless exposition between the parts one generally cares about) If it takes more than 1 minute to get from powering up the game to get from powering on to playing a real (not training) level, then the designers are doing something very wrong. These are games, not movies, or something we should have to *train* for.
I think geeks are killing gaming. In the early 90s PC gaming was full of countless genres of odd, off-the-wall games. Most dads I knew (I live in a University town) had Civilization, Lemmings, Kings Quest, etc. on their office computers. These days games are increasingly fast paced, increasingly involved, increasingly require dozens or even hundreds of hours of play to uncover content (locking content is a very cheap way of artificially creating interest in otherwise dull aspects of the game), increasingly require the simultaneous use of 12 buttons. Games are increasingly only for hard-core gamers, and as a working adult with very few video game playing friends it pisses me off. I don't want to play a game for ten hours before I get to the meat. I'm not going to slog through 100 hours of repetitive menu based battles to watch some cutscenes. I want simulations, things that are fun to play with the first 15 minutes you're in the game, and won't lose interest once the game runs out of script. Or if it's a scripted game, I want something more like the old adventures and american computer RPGs, where the story was revealed along the sides as a fun *game* progressed, and the reward for getting further was getting to a cool level, not getting some non-interactive cgi cartoon of 13-22 year old's idea of "hot."
By "ambient heat" I mean in a situation where the temperature of the entire system is constant. Yes there's 'energy' in the air around your contained machine, but you can't do anything with it because you can't create a differential.
Likewise, to get energy our of the zero-point field, you'd need to come up with something more empty than empty.
So do you not know any libraries or frameworks in other languages? Do you write your own printf since, sooner or later that'll change too. Do you use DirectX/OpenGL or do you directly address VRAM? I don't think anyone is arguing for learning a framework (rails) without knowing the language (ruby). In fact that's what the book in question is about: learning the underlying language.
Friendster (as far as I know the first one of these sites) was targetted at 20-35 year olds. I think it died off due to poor service and frequent outages though.
entropy can be viewed as the inverse of the usefulness of energy.
a differential (your bug trap) requires energy to work, in that case the bugs provide a lot of energy flying into the trap under their own power and operating nervous systems that intelligently differentiate inside-the-trap and outside-the-trap. a bug trap can be passive because the bugs are active.
it might be the case that zero-point energy, like ambient heat, is incapable of being translated into other forms of energy in nature, but then somehow (unlike ambient heat) we would be able to engineer a useful means of extracting work, but it doesn't seem likely.
entropy is the law that over time, energy gets less useful.
War has become much safer for soldiers and much much MUCH more deadly for civilians. It used to be civilians didn't die until the infantry actually marched into the city. With bombs and, later, missiles, civilian casualties in warfare now grossly outnumber military casualties. This is a product of modern technology.
As far as MAD saving lives, I think we'll need to wait another hundred years or so before we can really claim that. While it's prevented large scale conflict in the past 50 years, if the dominoes start falling, and those stockpiles get used, all those traditional wars that were prevented aren't going to look like diddley compared to the death tolls that will start ringing up when major cities get turned into glass and ashes.
The combat advances of world war II did overcome the stalemate problem of world war I (WWI was the first time since mideval seiges where defensive technology outperformed offensive technology) defensive weaponry almost always creates horrible combat situations that the inventors didn't predict.
Oh please! Won't someone think of the soulless legal automata?
I'm not some bomb-throwing anti-corporate activist. The way our economy is set up, we absolutely need them. But you have to think of "corporations" as "titanic powerful robots." Are titanic, powerful robots good or are they bad? Well, it depends on what they're doing and how they're programmed and what restrictions are placed on their actions, right? I hate how all discussions of economics and corporate policing turn into debates between ultra-liberatrianism and outright communism. Neither philosophy will ever actually exist in the real world, at least not as long as there are democracies and people like owning stuff, so why fight for those positions?
If you need a new computer, you'll buy now. Prices are suddenly great, and the current line will have a shelf-life of about 2 1/2 - 3 1/2 years, just like processors always do. If you just WANT a new computer, then the best time to buy will *always* be "6 months from now."
I'm related to a successful (by independant standards) musician. I've been around a whole lot of musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists and the likes.
They're maniacs. In the true sense of the word. Either that or they have a deep and bitter self-hatred that they're able to externalize. But yeah, they're all unipolar nutjobs with more than a few screws loose. It seems to me that the secret to creative success is to be bat-shit insane, and hold yourself together just long enough to get just enough success so that "normal" people will flock to you and keep track of your life for you while you just let your wheels spin.
With fastest / longest / etc. records, I think you have to assume perfect conditions. If you can find a better track with more ideal conditions, then that's part of getting to set a new record.
The point isn't to pit one racer against the other in a perfectly "fair" way, it's to asymptotically approach the limits of human capability, so adding a couple miles to the record is significant.
I hope you're right. But I'm always wary of claims that new weapons will reduce human misery.
Look at non-lethal policing weapons. They haven't replaced lethal force, they've just allowed the police to weaponize conflicts they previously wouldn't have had weapons for: they can shoot first against a civilian demonstration if they aren't using bullets. I'm sure the people working on those projects imagined their technology replacing firearms. I'd be wary of working on any weapons project, no matter how rosy a picture the client painted for me.
likewise, there's nothing stopping them from charging more for bandwidth. If ATT's pipe is straining, they can charge more per g/bit sent. They want the right to charge based on content and origin. They want to put skype out of business and be able to hand-pick which internet movie site has usable bandwidth.
Keep in mind that most of these guys are from the business world or have close friends in the business world. Most of them are too old to have ever known how to work a VCR or cassette deck.
In the DRM room, they're going to see a lot of credit cards flashing around. They're going to like that room better.
"Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don't exist largely today,"
There are actually no digital mediums that are as durable as acid free paper or vinyl.
This has been a known problem for a very long time, but nobody seems to be doing much about it. Our society will be the first to preserve only the memories of itself that it choses. There will be no accidental dead sea scrolls, unless someone prints something out on physical medium first.
A keyboard gives you ten simultaneous points of input.
If you have even a small amount of experience, it's faster than using a mouse. Sit an experienced vim / emacs hacker next to someone using Visual Studio, Code Warrior, Smalltalk whatever, Ecclipse, etc. and I'll give you ten to one odds I can predict who is going to be working more efficiently and spending lest time copying pasting and navingating four tier deep menus.
Slashdot Mirror
American Capitalism:
step 1) liberals create federal regulatory agency, with mixed results.
step 2) "anti - big government" conservatives are elected.
step 3) said conservatives never actually trim the government, but merely underfund agencies create deficit and appoint people who do not believe in the agencies mission to head them. vast corruption occurs.
step 4) agencies stop regulating and start brokering favors.
step 5) bill clinton reduces size of federal government, but not nearly enough.
step 6) agencies continue to broker favors, appropriations bills divide pork among many industries in many states. these industries are now dominated by a few giant players, now dependent upon those agencies to keep their oligopolies federally enforced. agencies and broken regulations are now politically invincible since they were originally democratic causes, but now support industries purchasing the votes of republicans (and to a lesser but ever-increasing extent, democrats)
step 7) voters somehow continue to think that welfare is the largest violation of free market principles going, never call representatives to task on the issue.
step 8) innovation moves overseas to avoid competing with government supported change-phobic dinosaurs.
step 9) districts are redrawn to insure 97% re-election rate in the house.
wheeee! we're selling our future down the river!
Dell is a volume producer. Macs are better compared to Toshibas, Lenovos, or Sonys, all of which run more expensive than similarly equipped HPs, Dells, and Gateways.
I don't think Macs are the best deal on the planet, but but Apple isn't gunning for the absolute minimal cost for a given set of hardware features market. They've got a pretty sweet niche hollowed out for themselves. They aren't trying to be everything to every computer purchaser.
It's curious how angry people get about corporations releasing products that aren't specific to their needs or wants. You don't like or use macs... fine...neither do I, really (though I find the OS superior to Windows). Do BMW people get spitting mad every time there's an article about a new Cadillac? Geeks can be such opinionated whiners...
I honestly don't mean this as a flame:
If the first thing you look at on a new OS is the GUI, Plan9 is 100% not remotely suited to your interests.
Plan 9 isn't awesome because it's a slick desktop OS, but rather, because writing software for 10,000 computers running in parallel is as easy as writing software for a single box.
I think the early 2007 one is going to be some sort of "Vista ME" to business customers they're now saying Q4 2007, which is I guess when the non-beta will be sold to the public.
Never buy a 1.0 product from Microsoft.
Of course I'm aware that there still is business in mainframes. But what happened to IBM was it's main business - mainframes - became a niche market. The same thing is happening to shrinkwrapped per-seat licensed software.
Ruby is still very young. The version in development will run on a bytecode VM, and there's an independant project in works to port the language to the .NET platform.
Ruby's speed is a problem, but less so than you'd think. It is _very_ easy to write Ruby code for multiple machines. A lot of companies have found the developer time saved by going with Ruby (at the cost of $60,000 per developer per year + insurance & benefits) more than makes up for the cost of a a few extra $1000 boxes.
Go into Best Buy or Fry's. Count how many rows of non-game shrinkwrapped software you see. Think back 6 or 7 years ago to how giant the same section of the store used to be. The computer world is finally undoing the damage that the PC revolution did to the idea of software. It's a set of instructions to a machine. It's a contracted design, not a packageable discrete product.
Microsoft is the old big dog in a dying breed. They're going to be like IBM circa the late 80s, standing around wondering why nobody wants to buy a mainframe any more.
- The documentation is provided by the community. Have you posted your apache configuration? Ruby is a much meatier program than Perl or Python or PHP and as a result, doing CGI the non-fast cgi way isn't an option. The fact that Apache has problems with fastCGI isn't the fault of Rails however.
.save().
- I don't know how far into the API you've looked, but there are most definitely ways of using literal SQL statements rather than
- Yes the wiki could use some work, and this is something any rails fan can do to help the project. There sure seem to be a lot of fans, so what are people waiting for?
Games aren't and shouldn't be storytelling. Games are more toycrafting with narrative metaphor.
Story games always have finite possibility. The great games are those that combine fully independant elements so that game possibility is the exponential sum of its parts. Tieing all elements to a linear (or at best, a few linear) stories vastly reduces the number of gameplay possibilities.
The most extreme example of this is the cutscene. Cutscenes are dead gametime, the equivalent of having static on the radio. Personally I blame anime (which also has long pointless exposition between the parts one generally cares about) If it takes more than 1 minute to get from powering up the game to get from powering on to playing a real (not training) level, then the designers are doing something very wrong. These are games, not movies, or something we should have to *train* for.
I think geeks are killing gaming. In the early 90s PC gaming was full of countless genres of odd, off-the-wall games. Most dads I knew (I live in a University town) had Civilization, Lemmings, Kings Quest, etc. on their office computers. These days games are increasingly fast paced, increasingly involved, increasingly require dozens or even hundreds of hours of play to uncover content (locking content is a very cheap way of artificially creating interest in otherwise dull aspects of the game), increasingly require the simultaneous use of 12 buttons. Games are increasingly only for hard-core gamers, and as a working adult with very few video game playing friends it pisses me off. I don't want to play a game for ten hours before I get to the meat. I'm not going to slog through 100 hours of repetitive menu based battles to watch some cutscenes. I want simulations, things that are fun to play with the first 15 minutes you're in the game, and won't lose interest once the game runs out of script. Or if it's a scripted game, I want something more like the old adventures and american computer RPGs, where the story was revealed along the sides as a fun *game* progressed, and the reward for getting further was getting to a cool level, not getting some non-interactive cgi cartoon of 13-22 year old's idea of "hot."
And get the hell offa my lawn ya damn hooligans.
By "ambient heat" I mean in a situation where the temperature of the entire system is constant. Yes there's 'energy' in the air around your contained machine, but you can't do anything with it because you can't create a differential.
Likewise, to get energy our of the zero-point field, you'd need to come up with something more empty than empty.
So do you not know any libraries or frameworks in other languages? Do you write your own printf since, sooner or later that'll change too. Do you use DirectX /OpenGL or do you directly address VRAM? I don't think anyone is arguing for learning a framework (rails) without knowing the language (ruby). In fact that's what the book in question is about: learning the underlying language.
Friendster (as far as I know the first one of these sites) was targetted at 20-35 year olds. I think it died off due to poor service and frequent outages though.
entropy can be viewed as the inverse of the usefulness of energy.
a differential (your bug trap) requires energy to work, in that case the bugs provide a lot of energy flying into the trap under their own power and operating nervous systems that intelligently differentiate inside-the-trap and outside-the-trap. a bug trap can be passive because the bugs are active.
it might be the case that zero-point energy, like ambient heat, is incapable of being translated into other forms of energy in nature, but then somehow (unlike ambient heat) we would be able to engineer a useful means of extracting work, but it doesn't seem likely.
entropy is the law that over time, energy gets less useful.
War has become much safer for soldiers and much much MUCH more deadly for civilians. It used to be civilians didn't die until the infantry actually marched into the city. With bombs and, later, missiles, civilian casualties in warfare now grossly outnumber military casualties. This is a product of modern technology.
As far as MAD saving lives, I think we'll need to wait another hundred years or so before we can really claim that. While it's prevented large scale conflict in the past 50 years, if the dominoes start falling, and those stockpiles get used, all those traditional wars that were prevented aren't going to look like diddley compared to the death tolls that will start ringing up when major cities get turned into glass and ashes.
The combat advances of world war II did overcome the stalemate problem of world war I (WWI was the first time since mideval seiges where defensive technology outperformed offensive technology) defensive weaponry almost always creates horrible combat situations that the inventors didn't predict.
Oh please! Won't someone think of the soulless legal automata?
I'm not some bomb-throwing anti-corporate activist. The way our economy is set up, we absolutely need them. But you have to think of "corporations" as "titanic powerful robots." Are titanic, powerful robots good or are they bad? Well, it depends on what they're doing and how they're programmed and what restrictions are placed on their actions, right? I hate how all discussions of economics and corporate policing turn into debates between ultra-liberatrianism and outright communism. Neither philosophy will ever actually exist in the real world, at least not as long as there are democracies and people like owning stuff, so why fight for those positions?
If you need a new computer, you'll buy now. Prices are suddenly great, and the current line will have a shelf-life of about 2 1/2 - 3 1/2 years, just like processors always do. If you just WANT a new computer, then the best time to buy will *always* be "6 months from now."
I'm related to a successful (by independant standards) musician. I've been around a whole lot of musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists and the likes.
They're maniacs. In the true sense of the word. Either that or they have a deep and bitter self-hatred that they're able to externalize. But yeah, they're all unipolar nutjobs with more than a few screws loose. It seems to me that the secret to creative success is to be bat-shit insane, and hold yourself together just long enough to get just enough success so that "normal" people will flock to you and keep track of your life for you while you just let your wheels spin.
With fastest / longest / etc. records, I think you have to assume perfect conditions. If you can find a better track with more ideal conditions, then that's part of getting to set a new record.
The point isn't to pit one racer against the other in a perfectly "fair" way, it's to asymptotically approach the limits of human capability, so adding a couple miles to the record is significant.
Meanwhile I switched from Slackware to Gentoo this week and nobody seems to notice.
Maybe if I put Plan 9 on my FreeBSD box, someone will care.
I hope you're right. But I'm always wary of claims that new weapons will reduce human misery.
Look at non-lethal policing weapons. They haven't replaced lethal force, they've just allowed the police to weaponize conflicts they previously wouldn't have had weapons for: they can shoot first against a civilian demonstration if they aren't using bullets. I'm sure the people working on those projects imagined their technology replacing firearms. I'd be wary of working on any weapons project, no matter how rosy a picture the client painted for me.
likewise, there's nothing stopping them from charging more for bandwidth. If ATT's pipe is straining, they can charge more per g/bit sent. They want the right to charge based on content and origin. They want to put skype out of business and be able to hand-pick which internet movie site has usable bandwidth.
This is about the freedom to collect payola.
Keep in mind that most of these guys are from the business world or have close friends in the business world. Most of them are too old to have ever known how to work a VCR or cassette deck.
In the DRM room, they're going to see a lot of credit cards flashing around. They're going to like that room better.
"Taking full advantage of the processing power that those multicore architectures potentially make available requires operating systems and development tools that don't exist largely today,"
ahem... a*hem*
There are actually no digital mediums that are as durable as acid free paper or vinyl.
This has been a known problem for a very long time, but nobody seems to be doing much about it. Our society will be the first to preserve only the memories of itself that it choses. There will be no accidental dead sea scrolls, unless someone prints something out on physical medium first.
A keyboard gives you ten simultaneous points of input.
If you have even a small amount of experience, it's faster than using a mouse. Sit an experienced vim / emacs hacker next to someone using Visual Studio, Code Warrior, Smalltalk whatever, Ecclipse, etc. and I'll give you ten to one odds I can predict who is going to be working more efficiently and spending lest time copying pasting and navingating four tier deep menus.