>Dave doesn't know that there are these spinning
platters inside his computer, NOR SHOULD HE NEED TO.
Sure and people shouldn't "need to" know cars have engines
and the world should be a peaceful utopia where computers don't have mechanical failures and UIs
are so intuitive that no documentation is necessary.
Suffice it to say that reality falls somewhat
short of utopic visions. But put things in
perspective -- the industrial revolution happened
only about 125 years ago and PCs have only been
around for about 25 years. In the context of
historical technological improvements, the PC
is advancing quite quickly. There are a great
number of people in the world who worry less about
optimal UIs and more about not having a good
supply of drinking water and food, and that to me
is a far worse failure of technology and civilization than Windows XX crashing on occasion.
Why don't Cooper, Tog, Engelbart, Norman, and
Nielsen all get together and build the perfect
PC with the perfect software? As brilliant and
insightful as those guys are, technology takes
time to develop. When you take the utopic view
of what computers can't do, you ignore the
practical side of the amazing things they can do
already. There will always be visionaries leading the way, and everyday people just trying to get work done.
Dave Barry is just pandering to everyday people who get frustrated with PCs, and as such is not worthy of debate on his technical points. If he was writing in the early 20th century, he'd be talking
about "those awful horseless carriages -- give me back my horse", or 6000 years ago, "why aren't those wheels ever really round? I'm going to just carry my firewood".
I agree - it may be interesting to go through a
printer setup "adventure" once, but
difficult configuration gets old fast. Then
once you learn how to configure a service, it seems
to get replaced with a different program altogether
(sendmail->postfix, wuftpd->proftpd,...). Just get a PostScript printer and spare yourself the pain:).
I was just going to post about incidents when
I saw your post.
A company wants an assurance that problems will be solved. With an incident you can do that -- it stays open until the problem is resolved.
IRC and newsgroups are no substitute for incident
types of issues. Also, problems that
come up in a company may be different and more critical than problems that come up for general
users.
-Kevin
Re:Legitimate uses?!
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The existence or absense of a law doesn't legitimize actions in an ethical or moral sense.
Cartels that artificially control prices and
distribution may be legal, but many people, myself included, believe that they are wrong.
Slavery, prohibition, and preventing women from
voting were all legal once in the U.S.
And there are plenty of instances where "copy protection" causes problems for legitimate users.
I've had many rented VHS tapes with Macrovision
where the tracking was screwed up. Some of my
games require me to have a CD in the drive even
though I installed everything on the hard disk.
I do not copy these things. I paid for them
legitimately.
That's what I thought when I read the intro. Supporting old software is a drag. Sorry to
ramble on so much here, but I think as the
industry matures, these sorts of issues will
need to be addressed.
However, I don't think that software licenses should expire. It's reasonable for a company to politely inform customers that they will no longer support versions older than xx.x after some date though. But if customers are willing to provide
the support internally (if they're business customers) or forego support, that should be okay.
The gas pump doesn't stop supporting your old
car!
I still have Word 97 at work. I will have a current version in a couple days since they're replacing my PC and no longer installing that version, but I have no technical need for it. Of course my development tools are kept up
to date.
This gets a little more complicated with programs that connect to online services. At some point, providing backwards compatibility becomes very difficult, especially if it includes working around bugs in the old software. In the case
of the TurboTax web version (which I use for
preparing my taxes), there is no software installed on the client. So for at least some
types of software, having them be browser-based
solves the problem of customers that don't want
to upgrade.
> Ever digital computer from the Altair to the AMD Athlon is a direct decendent from the Turing Machine invisioned by Alan Turing.
Oh, is that why they refer to the von Neumann
architecture all the time? And what about Erdos's establishment of the field of discrete mathematics, Boolean algebra, Ada, Babbage,
Goedel, Church,...
Anyway, you seem to have forgotten a few contributors.
It's Usenet humor. The Unix Pnews posting utility used to give the following ominous warning when you set
your distribution to world:
"This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]"
> Does anyone realize what would happen if Sony started pre-loading Linux onto PS2's? Does anyone realize how many users would learn to use (and love) Linux?
Three geeks? You can already buy a cheap actually upgradeable PC for a couple hundred bucks with a less-ridiculous amount of memory. The usefulness
of a proprietary system is questionable.
* How I can have free will and be in control of my actions
* How I can feel love for my Creator, my family, etc.
* What happens to my state of being when I die (that is, how does it feel to die)
* Why society should hold me responsible for my actions, if they are just caused by a bunch of chemical changes
* Near-death experiences
* The undeniable actions and sightings of spirits, saints, the Virgin Mary, and other acts of God
* What makes us different from animals
These questions can only be answered by the
triumverate of all-powerful omnipotent pink space poodles that created the universe.
I simply cannot accept your blanket acceptance
of the human soul unless you address why it
is that these questions lead you to the conclusion
that there is a god behind it. I assure you
the poodles will not cast your blasphemy aside
and be placated with multidimensional omnipresent space bones.
Wouldn't "literally" playing god involve things
like creating solar systems? Now that would kick
ass. Then we could start breeding a planet of beautiful blonde chicks. THEN, because they'd think us geeks and nerds were the only males, we could like, you know, do stuff.
Yes, I've done C/C++ as well, It can be damned hard to get rid of all the leaks with C, and even with Java if you're using native JDBC drivers (and the VM's limit won't help there!). It's very common for long-running processes to leak, at least until the leaks are fixed or worked around. , so you have to have limits on production systems. Proper memory management by design is a good idea, but it's hard to design around buggy third party libraries or bad programming by other developers (or even just basic human error). Complex programs are changed extensively over time, and by people other than the designer or original implementors. GC and bounds checking at least gets you most of the way towards keeping memory problems in check.
Frankly, I'm an imperfect programmer and Java makes it easier for me to get stuff working correctly. It's been a few years since I have
done major work in C++ and I don't miss it. The STL was not very efficient at that time. Threading in C/C++ with pthreads is much harder than with Java also. I do still use C for some small personal projects that are CPU-limited, but have found my use decreasing.
-Kevin
Re:GUI Toolkit Design
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 1
I agree! This should be modded up.
I don't have an opinion on XUL since I haven't used it, but I hope more GUI toolkits appear that use XML descriptions. Developing a GUI
when you have to modify code is tedious. And
auto GUI code generators are just the wrong way to
solve the problem.
I don't know why people bash XUL's concept. Even if
it's true that XUL isn't efficient, I don't think
that means that the concept can't be efficiently implemented. Programmers scoffed at compiled
languages once too since they thought they could
write better programs in assembly. IBM had to mandate that its programs be written in FORTRAN so that they didn't look like hypocrites when selling their FORTRAN compilers. And they were better for it, IMO -- popularity and variety of programming languages surged right after that.
How many large applications are written in assembly these days?
Software evolution is all about moving to higher levels to develop more sophisticed applications.
It's probably true that XUL won't be as efficient as your hand-tuned assembler making direct X protocol calls, but hey, nobody is stopping you from doing it:).
It's not that foreign when you
think about it - every web page uses HTML, which is a page description
language. Web apps use ASP, JSP, or templates to separate out presentation. Can you imagine designing web pages for a website with Swing? And programmers are often terrible at designing GUIs - separating the presentation layer opens doors for nonprogramming designers to easily modify the interface.
from http://doc.trolltech.com/3.0/templates.html :
"C++ with the moc preprocessor essentially gives us the flexibility of Objective-C or of a Java Runtime Environment, while maintaining C++'s unique performance and scalability advantages. It is what makes Qt the flexible and comfortable tool we have today."
Slashdot Mirror
Sure and people shouldn't "need to" know cars have engines and the world should be a peaceful utopia where computers don't have mechanical failures and UIs are so intuitive that no documentation is necessary.
Suffice it to say that reality falls somewhat short of utopic visions. But put things in perspective -- the industrial revolution happened only about 125 years ago and PCs have only been around for about 25 years. In the context of historical technological improvements, the PC is advancing quite quickly. There are a great number of people in the world who worry less about optimal UIs and more about not having a good supply of drinking water and food, and that to me is a far worse failure of technology and civilization than Windows XX crashing on occasion.
Why don't Cooper, Tog, Engelbart, Norman, and Nielsen all get together and build the perfect PC with the perfect software? As brilliant and insightful as those guys are, technology takes time to develop. When you take the utopic view of what computers can't do, you ignore the practical side of the amazing things they can do already. There will always be visionaries leading the way, and everyday people just trying to get work done.
Dave Barry is just pandering to everyday people who get frustrated with PCs, and as such is not worthy of debate on his technical points. If he was writing in the early 20th century, he'd be talking about "those awful horseless carriages -- give me back my horse", or 6000 years ago, "why aren't those wheels ever really round? I'm going to just carry my firewood".
-Kevin
-Kevin
>So you're saying that ten transmeta processors put
>out as much heat as a single P3 card solution? What >exactly is the problem?
I don't think that's what he meant. He was
comparing Transmeta cards to Pentium cards.
-Kevin
I was just going to post about incidents when I saw your post.
A company wants an assurance that problems will be solved. With an incident you can do that -- it stays open until the problem is resolved.
IRC and newsgroups are no substitute for incident types of issues. Also, problems that come up in a company may be different and more critical than problems that come up for general users.
-Kevin
Cartels that artificially control prices and distribution may be legal, but many people, myself included, believe that they are wrong. Slavery, prohibition, and preventing women from voting were all legal once in the U.S.
And there are plenty of instances where "copy protection" causes problems for legitimate users. I've had many rented VHS tapes with Macrovision where the tracking was screwed up. Some of my games require me to have a CD in the drive even though I installed everything on the hard disk. I do not copy these things. I paid for them legitimately.
-Kevin
However, I don't think that software licenses should expire. It's reasonable for a company to politely inform customers that they will no longer support versions older than xx.x after some date though. But if customers are willing to provide the support internally (if they're business customers) or forego support, that should be okay. The gas pump doesn't stop supporting your old car!
I still have Word 97 at work. I will have a current version in a couple days since they're replacing my PC and no longer installing that version, but I have no technical need for it. Of course my development tools are kept up to date.
This gets a little more complicated with programs that connect to online services. At some point, providing backwards compatibility becomes very difficult, especially if it includes working around bugs in the old software. In the case of the TurboTax web version (which I use for preparing my taxes), there is no software installed on the client. So for at least some types of software, having them be browser-based solves the problem of customers that don't want to upgrade.
-Kevin
Oh, is that why they refer to the von Neumann architecture all the time? And what about Erdos's establishment of the field of discrete mathematics, Boolean algebra, Ada, Babbage, Goedel, Church, ...
Anyway, you seem to have forgotten a few contributors.
-Kevin
Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]"
-Kevin
P.S. I deleted all that stuff I said about your wife when I was real drunk.
-Kevin
Yes, I've read many articles about all the advancements in digital paper. I figure that one of these days they will discover how to actually make it.
-Kevin
Three geeks? You can already buy a cheap actually upgradeable PC for a couple hundred bucks with a less-ridiculous amount of memory. The usefulness of a proprietary system is questionable.
-Kevin
Who's should have been whose of course, but actually I was just ignoring AC's actual content to mess with AC for totally missing the original joke.
I'm not quite sure how that makes me an idiot, but I guess I'll just be on my merry idiot way and leave the thinking up to you geniuses.
-Kevin
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots
-Kevin
* How I can feel love for my Creator, my family, etc.
* What happens to my state of being when I die (that is, how does it feel to die)
* Why society should hold me responsible for my actions, if they are just caused by a bunch of chemical changes
* Near-death experiences
* The undeniable actions and sightings of spirits, saints, the Virgin Mary, and other acts of God
* What makes us different from animals
These questions can only be answered by the triumverate of all-powerful omnipotent pink space poodles that created the universe.
I simply cannot accept your blanket acceptance of the human soul unless you address why it is that these questions lead you to the conclusion that there is a god behind it. I assure you the poodles will not cast your blasphemy aside and be placated with multidimensional omnipresent space bones.
-Kevin
Arg! Sorry, should have used preview...
-Kevin
take a look here:
A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts
And there are many research efforts underway to replace the inadequate "desktop metaphor" (Lifestreams is one interesting idea).
-Kevin
Why not just make them darker and blurred out
of focus? I just covered one of my hands and it didn't become transparent...
-Kevin
You've read every slashdot article for four
years and you don't like their articles?
Maybe you should find another site or something
and stop stressing.
-Kevin
-Kevin
I hope you enjoy your new Internet account.
-Kevin
Wouldn't "literally" playing god involve things like creating solar systems? Now that would kick ass. Then we could start breeding a planet of beautiful blonde chicks. THEN, because they'd think us geeks and nerds were the only males, we could like, you know, do stuff.
-Kevin
I heard he got tired of his power tools.
-Kevin
Frankly, I'm an imperfect programmer and Java makes it easier for me to get stuff working correctly. It's been a few years since I have done major work in C++ and I don't miss it. The STL was not very efficient at that time. Threading in C/C++ with pthreads is much harder than with Java also. I do still use C for some small personal projects that are CPU-limited, but have found my use decreasing.
-Kevin
I don't have an opinion on XUL since I haven't used it, but I hope more GUI toolkits appear that use XML descriptions. Developing a GUI when you have to modify code is tedious. And auto GUI code generators are just the wrong way to solve the problem.
I don't know why people bash XUL's concept. Even if it's true that XUL isn't efficient, I don't think that means that the concept can't be efficiently implemented. Programmers scoffed at compiled languages once too since they thought they could write better programs in assembly. IBM had to mandate that its programs be written in FORTRAN so that they didn't look like hypocrites when selling their FORTRAN compilers. And they were better for it, IMO -- popularity and variety of programming languages surged right after that. How many large applications are written in assembly these days?
Software evolution is all about moving to higher levels to develop more sophisticed applications. It's probably true that XUL won't be as efficient as your hand-tuned assembler making direct X protocol calls, but hey, nobody is stopping you from doing it :).
It's not that foreign when you think about it - every web page uses HTML, which is a page description language. Web apps use ASP, JSP, or templates to separate out presentation. Can you imagine designing web pages for a website with Swing? And programmers are often terrible at designing GUIs - separating the presentation layer opens doors for nonprogramming designers to easily modify the interface.
-Kevin
from http://doc.trolltech.com/3.0/templates.html :
"C++ with the moc preprocessor essentially gives us the flexibility of Objective-C or of a Java Runtime Environment, while maintaining C++'s unique performance and scalability advantages. It is what makes Qt the flexible and comfortable tool we have today."
-Kevin