If you bought a car and didn't know how to fill the gas would you ask someone to show you or would you drive an extra 20 miles to a non self-service gas station?
I'm having trouble imagining myself in that situation, so I can't answer.
Again, if computers came with "Computer attendants" who would tell you what to do, and if you could easily observe other computer users to see what they were doing and copy them, computers would be as easy to use as being a passenger in a plane. But we don't have these things, so using computers is more difficult than being a passenger in a plane.
There are what, 200 books on computers for newbies in any bookstore? Almost everyone has someone they know that also knows computers. See my initial example.
I'm not sure what "initial example" you are referring to, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If this helps clarify things for you, I think the fact that there are 200 books on computers for newbies in any bookstore, and there are not 200 books on "being a passenger in an airplane", is strong evidence for my claim that using computers is more difficult than being a passenger in a plane.
See my initial example, if stitches were like computers people would rip them out constantly and just go have the doctor put them back in.
This does happen. I'm sure if you ask any doctor, you'll find out that they have patients who refuse to listen to the advice the doctors give them, and then go back to have the doctors "fix" the damage done by ignoring said advice.
I don't know how to code an OS or even compile one from sratch truly. A better analogy is that someone doesn't know how to pump gas or fill their tires.
I don't know how to fill tires. I know how to pump gas 'cause I saw my dad pump gas when I was a kid, and he let me try it a few times. Similarly, I've thought kids a specific computer task (e.g. how to double click on an icon), and they've picked it up. It's not that they were smart enough to figure it out on their own or anything like that. They saw me double click on the icon, then they tried double clicking while I supervised, and now they know how. If nobody showed them how to double click, I wouldn't expect them to know how to do that. If nobody showed them how to pump gas, I wouldn't expect them to know how to do that.
i can't separate waste from water to make it drinkable again.
Yet you know that drinking sewage water would not be good for you.
This may be a combination of your parents telling you, and the foul smell of sewage water which causes you to instinctively not want to drink it. If we had similar instincts with computers, that'd be great, but we don't. So again, it's all about having someone around to explain these things to us.
i can't start or fly a commercial airplane.
Yet you know how one flies, generally, and how to properly be a passenger on one. I doubt you've tried to get out in mid-flight for example.
This is a simple manner of observing other people, doing what they do, and doing what you're told. The flight attendants will tell you to sit down and buckle your seat belt during landing and take off. During flight, most people remain seated. So you naturally feel like you should stay seated too.
Again, if computers came with "Computer attendants" who would tell you what to do, and if you could easily observe other computer users to see what they were doing and copy them, computers would be as easy to use as being a passenger in a plane. But we don't have these things, so using computers is more difficult than being a passenger in a plane.
i am completely incapable of stitching up a wound...
Yet you know not to rip apart stitches or when you may need to get stitches (or go to a hospital).
Again, because someone told you. When you get stiches, your first instinct is to scratch at them, 'cause it itches. The doctor will tell you not to do that. So now you know. You might not have known if nobody told you.
If patents are supposed to patent non-obvious ideas, then how do you explain the number of software patent violations when software developers dont look at patents?
Perhaps by the fact the software developers look at other software? I'm sure the developers of Open Office have looked at Microsoft Office, for example.
The headline of the submission "Vista Sales Strong, Higher Than Expected" is simply not supported by the only externally available evidence ("Profits jumped 65% from the previous year") because Vista DIDN'T EXIST last year.
Read the article summary:
Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said Vista beat internal forecasts by $300 million to $400 million, and Office 2007 sales were $200 million better than expected.
I think the "Ask the user before irreversibly erasing all the data on the hard drive" software design guideline has priority over the "Don't bother the user with pesky questions" software design guideline.
The research I was able to do showed pretty clearly using other artists' work in mixes is tacitly allowed with a wink. The artists getting additional exposure are getting free advertising. (I'd be happy to know if there are artists out there who really don't want their art in others' mixes.
James Brown recently died, so I've been seeing a lot of articles on him. In some of them, it is claimed that he's upset about how many artists are mixing his stuff into their songs, but realizes that there isn't much he can do about it at this point. Here's a paraphrasing of what James Brown said from memory, as I can't find the relevant article right now.
"When you're listening to Funk, you're listening to James Brown [referring to himself in the 3rd person]. When you listen to Rap, you're listening to James Brown. When you listen to Hip Hop, House, or even Rock and Roll, you're listening to James Brown. If you hear a beat... and it gets your toe tapping... you're listening to James Brown."
I guess when you're James Brown, the marginal additional exposure you gain doesn't outweigh the royalties you could be getting if everything were done the RIAA way.
The question "Why did the chicken cross the road" is invalid. It is invalid because "why" assumes that the chicken had some reason for taking the action "cross the road". This, in turn, assumes that the chicken has the concept of "road"; after all, if the chicken doesn't know that the road is there, then the chicken did not - from the chickens point of view - cross the road, and consequently it is meaningless to ask for its motivations for doing so.
Not nescessarily. You can ask "Why do tennis balls fall when released?", "Why does toast always land buttered side down", "Why did my computer crash?", etc. without nescessarily assuming that tennis balls/slices of toasts/computers have any sense of motivation.
there should be a UI standard whereby, if a user hovers their mouse cursor over a greyed-out control (or if a blind user tabs over to a given greyed-out control and leaves it there for a few seconds), the computer should tell you why said item is greyed out.
Some of the meta data required is the path to the program executable. This is so that you can check if a program is installed, and then vary your actions accordingly. It does not make sense to store this data on the file itself.
Interestingly, Microsoft has started opting more for.config XML files stored in the application directory (sort of like their old.ini files) in their new wave of.NET applications, and that seems to be more like the recommended way of storing application settings. I don't know how user-specific settings are dealt with if doing it that way though, and if it's only suitable for settings for the local machine.
There's a special directory for storing user-specific settings. On a default install of Windows XP, it's located at "C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\[company name]\[program name]"
AFAIK, there's no guidelines on what to do if two companies share the same name and the same product, though I guess that would be relatively unlikely.
How do we really know we are the dumb, slow ones in the universe? A priori it seems just as likely we are the smart ones.
It's a question of statistics. The universe has existed a lot longer than humans have. As a rough estimate, the universe has been around for 15 billion years, and life has existed on earth for about 3 billion years.
Assuming that our technological progression is average (and really, we can't make any other assumptions since we have no other species to compare with), the usually, if life on another planet was more advanced, it probably existed longer than us, and if they are less advance, they probably existed for a shorter period of time.
Not having much information on the probability of life spontaneously coming into existence, let's just assume that the probability is uniform with time (which is unrealistic at the beginning, because there was probably no life during the high temperature levels of the big bang, but the temperature levelled off relatively quickly).
So, assuming uniform probability, for each form of life, it seems much more probably that it came into existence between 15 billion years ago and 3 billion years ago, than it coming into existence between 3 billion years ago and now.
That's why it's likely that if we encounter intelligent life, it'll be more advance than us.
The vulnerabilities that you are referring to are called "Buffer Overflow Attacks", and it has nothing to do with the format. The problem lies with the viewers. Even TXTs can have buffer overflow attacks injected to them, though no TXT viewer is known to be supceptible yet.
It's not inordinately difficult to make an extension safe. I mean, CSS has also extended the abilities of the WWW without introducing any new exploits.
I don't think Microsoft is planning on turning RSS into a Turing Complete language or anything.
"Theory of Computation" along with its sister course "Compilers" is what got me the job I'm at right now. I write compiler tools for the Eclipse framework. ToC covers the concepts of computer languages, what is a regular language, what is a context free language, and so on. It also deals with complexity, what is Turing computable and so on.
With this knowledge in hand, you can actually determine whether a feature a client wants is even computationally possible or not. And if it is possible, you'll know what kind of tools (regular expressions? State machines? stack-based machines?) you'll need to complete the job.
As for the others, "Numerical Analysis", "Artificial Intelligence" and "Machine Learning", I've taken them too, but they haven't shown to be directly relevant to the job I'm working at. However, I'm sure there exists jobs out there that need training in these domains.
"Video Games" might seem like an area where AI would be needed, but I have the strong suspicion that smart behaviour of computer controlled opponents is faked a lot more often than actual AI ideas and theories are used.
The W3C, or the World Wide Web Consortium, publishes documents which explains what all the HTML and XHTML tags are, what they do, how they behave, etc.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer team figures "We own 90% of the market. We can just make up our own standards."
Some Web site designers think "IE has 90% of the market. We should write websites that look great on IE."
The end result is the the pages look bad on standard compliant browsers, such as Firefox.
Sun publishes documentats that explain what all the Java statements are, what they do, how they behave, etc.
Microsoft's JVM team figures "We're preinstalling the JVM with Windows, so everyone's going to use our JVM anyway. We can just make up our own standards."
Java developpers running Windows write Java programs on their Windows machines.
These programs don't work with Sun's JVM.
And so on. In the end, people who actually follow the specifications (or people who use software which follows specification) suffer because of Microsoft's large market share and general apathy towards standard compliance.
An MPAA tip, for example, led to the recent prosecution of Randy Guthrie, the black sheep of a blueblood New York family, who was recently sentenced to 21/2 years in a Chinese jail for selling nearly $1 million in pirated movies over the Internet.
My statement began with the condition "If you're really unlucky", and for you to say "I don't think so" implies that you don't think it's possible for randomly generated code to format your harddrive.
But from a pure statistical point of view, the probability is obviously not zero.
The hashes could only be for one specific file encoded by a specific encoder with the EXACT title/artist/album info which is not always consistent anyway. I see this as a futile effort.
Who pirates individual songs these days? I see this as being a major annoyance for people who pirate games. DVD ISOs are typically 4GBs, usually released by only one or two groups (and so there probably won't be more than 2 versions of the file), and take several hours if not days to download. Worst yet, the games contain executable content, so assuming the ISO mounts via Daemon Tools, for example, if you're really unlucky, you might randomly have gotten code that reformats your harddrive.
Sometimes they download a bad file, and share it. It would make more sense to have a "unchecked" folder for downloads, then more it to the "checked" folder to share.
The filesharing programs I use force you to share the directory you download into. Sure, I could name the download directory "unchecked", but few people bother to view the full paths as set by the sources from the people they download.
What is neat, or not so neat depending on your point of view, are music files which deteriorate after a while. I don't know how they are made, but I have listened to music that sounds pretty good, but after the 10th playing it starts skipping.
To tell you why this happens, we'd need to know about file formats and audio player. Assuming MP3, when you modify the ID3v2 data, the file gets completely rewritten since the ID3v2 tags are written at the head (and not the tail) of the file, for example. Depending on the player, the audio data might actually be getting decoded and re-encoded.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps by the fact the software developers look at other software? I'm sure the developers of Open Office have looked at Microsoft Office, for example.
Read the article summary:
(There's a strange feeling when you get an obviously junk/spam email and it claims to have been sent by... you!)
Really? Happens all the time in Soviet Russia.
I think the "Ask the user before irreversibly erasing all the data on the hard drive" software design guideline has priority over the "Don't bother the user with pesky questions" software design guideline.
James Brown recently died, so I've been seeing a lot of articles on him. In some of them, it is claimed that he's upset about how many artists are mixing his stuff into their songs, but realizes that there isn't much he can do about it at this point. Here's a paraphrasing of what James Brown said from memory, as I can't find the relevant article right now.
"When you're listening to Funk, you're listening to James Brown [referring to himself in the 3rd person]. When you listen to Rap, you're listening to James Brown. When you listen to Hip Hop, House, or even Rock and Roll, you're listening to James Brown. If you hear a beat... and it gets your toe tapping... you're listening to James Brown."
I guess when you're James Brown, the marginal additional exposure you gain doesn't outweigh the royalties you could be getting if everything were done the RIAA way.
The question "Why did the chicken cross the road" is invalid. It is invalid because "why" assumes that the chicken had some reason for taking the action "cross the road". This, in turn, assumes that the chicken has the concept of "road"; after all, if the chicken doesn't know that the road is there, then the chicken did not - from the chickens point of view - cross the road, and consequently it is meaningless to ask for its motivations for doing so.
Not nescessarily. You can ask "Why do tennis balls fall when released?", "Why does toast always land buttered side down", "Why did my computer crash?", etc. without nescessarily assuming that tennis balls/slices of toasts/computers have any sense of motivation.
Interestingly enough, Intel's latest project is being called "CORE". So yes, ARM is probably going to end up fighting CORE again.
there should be a UI standard whereby, if a user hovers their mouse cursor over a greyed-out control (or if a blind user tabs over to a given greyed-out control and leaves it there for a few seconds), the computer should tell you why said item is greyed out.
Microsoft already has plans to add this feature in Office 12. I wrote about it in my blog: http://nebupookins.net/entry.php?id=287
Yes, this is one reason I'm looking forward to the DBFS in Windows Vista. =)
Some of the meta data required is the path to the program executable. This is so that you can check if a program is installed, and then vary your actions accordingly. It does not make sense to store this data on the file itself.
Interestingly, Microsoft has started opting more for .config XML files stored in the application directory (sort of like their old .ini files) in their new wave of .NET applications, and that seems to be more like the recommended way of storing application settings. I don't know how user-specific settings are dealt with if doing it that way though, and if it's only suitable for settings for the local machine.
There's a special directory for storing user-specific settings. On a default install of Windows XP, it's located at "C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\[company name]\[program name]"
AFAIK, there's no guidelines on what to do if two companies share the same name and the same product, though I guess that would be relatively unlikely.
How do we really know we are the dumb, slow ones in the universe? A priori it seems just as likely we are the smart ones.
It's a question of statistics. The universe has existed a lot longer than humans have. As a rough estimate, the universe has been around for 15 billion years, and life has existed on earth for about 3 billion years.
Assuming that our technological progression is average (and really, we can't make any other assumptions since we have no other species to compare with), the usually, if life on another planet was more advanced, it probably existed longer than us, and if they are less advance, they probably existed for a shorter period of time.
Not having much information on the probability of life spontaneously coming into existence, let's just assume that the probability is uniform with time (which is unrealistic at the beginning, because there was probably no life during the high temperature levels of the big bang, but the temperature levelled off relatively quickly).
So, assuming uniform probability, for each form of life, it seems much more probably that it came into existence between 15 billion years ago and 3 billion years ago, than it coming into existence between 3 billion years ago and now.
That's why it's likely that if we encounter intelligent life, it'll be more advance than us.
The vulnerabilities that you are referring to are called "Buffer Overflow Attacks", and it has nothing to do with the format. The problem lies with the viewers. Even TXTs can have buffer overflow attacks injected to them, though no TXT viewer is known to be supceptible yet.
It's not inordinately difficult to make an extension safe. I mean, CSS has also extended the abilities of the WWW without introducing any new exploits.
I don't think Microsoft is planning on turning RSS into a Turing Complete language or anything.
It all depends on the job you want, of course.
"Theory of Computation" along with its sister course "Compilers" is what got me the job I'm at right now. I write compiler tools for the Eclipse framework. ToC covers the concepts of computer languages, what is a regular language, what is a context free language, and so on. It also deals with complexity, what is Turing computable and so on.
With this knowledge in hand, you can actually determine whether a feature a client wants is even computationally possible or not. And if it is possible, you'll know what kind of tools (regular expressions? State machines? stack-based machines?) you'll need to complete the job.
As for the others, "Numerical Analysis", "Artificial Intelligence" and "Machine Learning", I've taken them too, but they haven't shown to be directly relevant to the job I'm working at. However, I'm sure there exists jobs out there that need training in these domains.
"Video Games" might seem like an area where AI would be needed, but I have the strong suspicion that smart behaviour of computer controlled opponents is faked a lot more often than actual AI ideas and theories are used.
The W3C, or the World Wide Web Consortium, publishes documents which explains what all the HTML and XHTML tags are, what they do, how they behave, etc.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer team figures "We own 90% of the market. We can just make up our own standards."
Some Web site designers think "IE has 90% of the market. We should write websites that look great on IE."
The end result is the the pages look bad on standard compliant browsers, such as Firefox.
Sun publishes documentats that explain what all the Java statements are, what they do, how they behave, etc.
Microsoft's JVM team figures "We're preinstalling the JVM with Windows, so everyone's going to use our JVM anyway. We can just make up our own standards."
Java developpers running Windows write Java programs on their Windows machines.
These programs don't work with Sun's JVM.
And so on. In the end, people who actually follow the specifications (or people who use software which follows specification) suffer because of Microsoft's large market share and general apathy towards standard compliance.
An MPAA tip, for example, led to the recent prosecution of Randy Guthrie, the black sheep of a blueblood New York family, who was recently sentenced to 21/2 years in a Chinese jail for selling nearly $1 million in pirated movies over the Internet.
Why don't they just say 10.5 years?
My statement began with the condition "If you're really unlucky", and for you to say "I don't think so" implies that you don't think it's possible for randomly generated code to format your harddrive.
But from a pure statistical point of view, the probability is obviously not zero.
The hashes could only be for one specific file encoded by a specific encoder with the EXACT title/artist/album info which is not always consistent anyway. I see this as a futile effort.
Who pirates individual songs these days? I see this as being a major annoyance for people who pirate games. DVD ISOs are typically 4GBs, usually released by only one or two groups (and so there probably won't be more than 2 versions of the file), and take several hours if not days to download. Worst yet, the games contain executable content, so assuming the ISO mounts via Daemon Tools, for example, if you're really unlucky, you might randomly have gotten code that reformats your harddrive.
Sometimes they download a bad file, and share it. It would make more sense to have a "unchecked" folder for downloads, then more it to the "checked" folder to share.
The filesharing programs I use force you to share the directory you download into. Sure, I could name the download directory "unchecked", but few people bother to view the full paths as set by the sources from the people they download.
What is neat, or not so neat depending on your point of view, are music files which deteriorate after a while. I don't know how they are made, but I have listened to music that sounds pretty good, but after the 10th playing it starts skipping.
To tell you why this happens, we'd need to know about file formats and audio player. Assuming MP3, when you modify the ID3v2 data, the file gets completely rewritten since the ID3v2 tags are written at the head (and not the tail) of the file, for example. Depending on the player, the audio data might actually be getting decoded and re-encoded.
I say it was hide and seek and started this whole stealth fad.
The keys are distributed in the HD-DVD drive, so you'd basically need to buy a new HD-DVD drive.
I explain it in more detail in my blog.