That's true, and I made good use of it to manage my email on my desktop via queries saved as folders. It was pretty cool, having the tracker show my unread email in a folder on my desktop.
That said, where BeOS lacked was in the query syntax. It wasn't easy to write, and the documentation was lacking. I'm sure that if BeOS hadn't died, they would have put some love into natural language parsing. But, then, that didn't happen.
So it goes. I'll be installing Tiger when it comes out, more for the new developer features ( and for better GL drivers ) than for spotlight. And, I'll probably keep using launchbar for my command-space lovin.
I would take a lot to make the earth uninhabitable by any living thing. In fact I don't think we could do it.
But we sure could, via nuclear war or some serious chemical or other mishap make the earth mostly uninhabitable by people not wearing hazmat suits.
The earth really isn't *that* big. And we've done a lot already, in the last 3oo years of industrialization. It would take some seriously foolish analysis to say that we can't fuck this planet -- of rour way of living -- big time.
You've GOT to look in the long term. Like 50 or 100 years.
When we, ( I mean America, the "West" and probably Japan ) no longer make anything, or design anything, but only consume, consume consume... we will fall apart.
Everything we buy will be designed in China or India, and made in China or India. Our universities (if they're still relevant, and haven't been shut down by the evangelical right-wing) will be educating Chinese or Indians in math, science, engineering, etc while we get degrees in "communications" and get jobs pushing paper around, so we can buy chinese products.
Such an aritficial economy can't support itself, and we'll *probably* collapse into some sort of 3rd world police state. Here I'm referring to America -- we've been tottering on being a plice state for like 50 years, an economic collapse would push us over the edge.
Meanwhile, China and India will have become what America was 40 years ago -- the Big Cheese, but *too* successful. Fat on money and industry, with those pesky (educated) workers demanding high falutin' things like medicare, wages, retirement packages, etc.
So what happens? The chinese will move their factories to the US, Japan, England, and so on! Our starving and uneducated populations will *want* these jobs, because its better than tending the rice patties, and everything will be A-O-K.
Now, in all seriousness, as far as I'm concerned, the Chinese and Indians deserve the success they are having right now. They're educated, and hard working. And we, we deserve to have our asses handed to us for our laziness and hubris. I just hope all this manages to happen without too much warfare.
9 years is excellent, in the terms of monetary damage to corporations for bandwidth cost, and intangibles such as mass frustration.
But, our prison system is full.
Therefore, I say, this is why public stocks, were an excellent "deterrent". You put him in a stock for, say, 12 hours a day in front of city hall. Maybe for a month, or two. I imagine that'd give him some time to think.
I work no more than 15 minutes walk from there. I'm going to have to see if I can check it out over my lunch break. What luck, it seems like this kind of stuff only happens on the west coast.
That said, I agree -- Titan's more appealing. But there's a lot to say that mars *once* was earth-like, and imagine if someday astronauts, digging, find fossilized skeletons of ancient creatures. It would be an amazing opportunity to study evolution, and how it works on similar planets. Imagine if the creatures were four-legged and had spinal columns/cords... the implications for complex animal life would be staggering.
In fact, Apple provides build configurations such that you can specificallly target, say 10.2 or 10.1 from 10.3, and be confident that you'll have the correct API & ABI versioning.
That said, with each version of OS X, shareware developers salivate to use the new features, since they often make the dirty work easier, or negligible ( for exampe, Cocoa Bindings for 10.3 ).
Obviously, the big development houses, Adobe, Quark, etc will not generally use these new features.
Uh... I think what you've just discovered is that graphic designers have known *for years* what you've just discovered. Graphic designers "just want to get things done". They're not people enamored with computing. They want to work, and Macs let them work reasonably reliably and with minimum fuss.
I wish people would stop acting as if graphic design isn't work. It's how I've eaten and paid my rent for six years. I even have a degree in it. Sheesh, it's not like we're selling magic crystals which make your car get better mileage. It's work, with clients and deadlines. Most of us use macs because we learned on them, and because the workflow is fast, reliable, and transparent.
And yes, I actually did use to do graphic design on PCs, for a couple years ( on win2k ). And it really was worse. It's hard to explain how -- win2k was reliable enough -- it just got in the way of my workflow.
I doubt this will have much of an impact on programmers' work, but, the natural language parsing into a declarative structure is *really* fascinating.
I'll bet this work will ultimately lead to effective verbal control of computers, as in the sort of Sci-Fi situation where you might say "Computer, play KidA by Radiohead, and get me the NY Times".
Good, interesting stuff, I hope they keep working on it.
He made a flash animation too. Clearly, Flash is the problem!
Now I'm worried, since I spend 4 out of 8 hours a day in Flash. Thank god photoshop and BBEdit, where I spend the rest of my day, haven't yet been conclusively linked to violence.
Won't somebody please think of the web developers?
I *loved* IBM's butterfly keyboard. I didn't understand ( being a Mac guy, and not actually owning a computer but instead using the ones at my university ) why it quietly died.
I had thought it was ahead of its time, now I know it was an anemic machine, just with a brilliant keyboard.
Oh, wait, perhaps you feel that a musician, artist, programmer, etc has no right to make money off his or her labor. Perhaps we should all be janitors by day, and make the stuff you want to not pay for at night.
When I was a bus driver in college, there was this one neighborhood ( close to downtown Charlottesville, VA ) where somebody's wireless landline would cause massive interference with our CB radios. Massive enough that we could here *complete* conversations, clearly, if we were within a few blocks.
Once I heard one hell of a yelling match, he threatened to kill somebody and bury him in his garage.
When I'm on the DC metro and I hear people loudly yammering and laughing and in general being obnoxious, it's pretty much 10 to 1 that it's a bunch of French students. Why French? I don't know. But they're speaking French, & they're too skinny and good looking and oddly dressed to be French Canadians. No offense to French Canadians.
My theory about the Obnoxious American ( or whatever nationality ) is simple: You don't notice the polite, quiet tourists.
You're right. I was super excited back in college when they first became available but living on the east coast I never actually saw one.
Back in 2001 when I was in LA for a funeral, I took a walk and heard a weird quiet noise as a car pulled up to a light. I took a look and thought "Wow. There's an EV1. I didn't know any were still on the road."
With any luck the more foresighted car companies of Asia and Europe will drag us kicking and screaming into the 21st century. After all, Ford and GM are claiming to be pursuing hybrids -- and GM has that rollerscate platform.
But, as a cantankerous 27 year old who's seen a LOT of brilliant ideas from detroit never materialize, or if they do they show up as cheap bastardizations: I'll believe it when I can buy one.
Well sure, if all you're talking about is *storage*. But employing people to read all that for incriminating discussion would be prohibitive.
Sure, a computer could pattern match to find potentially incriminating discussion, but frankly, AI ain't there. You'll need humans, and humans require pay.
Not to mention the fact that anybody forced/paid to read even a tenth of a percent of that crap would go apeshit in just one day of reading all that inanity.
It does seem like a lot of money. I'll wager some of it goes into the maintenance of *seriously* outdated equipment on the receiving end, for which it is increasingly hard to find replacement parts. I'll bet NASA employs a number of people to rig up replacements as 30 year old computers running 30 year old code blow out.
I think, to clarify my point above, it should be pointed out that you and I can right now write open source games using OpenGL or DirectX; anybody can get the SDKs ( I don't know what dev tools cost on windows, but for Mac OS X and linux it's free ).
So, my question is, can we poor OSS types program against the PPU? Or do we have to drop 10k for a Novodex license?
I'm not a professional developer... that said I'm developing both a robotic simulation API/framework and a game, both in my free time, both *heavily* use the open dynamics engine for physics.
The Open Dynamics Engine is free, & open source. It's not the best physics engine, by any margin. However, being open source I can afford it... and most importantly I can use it on my Mac ( hell, I actually provided some patches to get it to correctly use single-precision trig when OS X.3 came out ). Plus, I want to release my game and robot simulator under an open source license... can't expect people to *buy* novodex or havok just to build the apps.
This PPU looks like a *wonderful* thing, but reading their site, and the interview, it sounds like to use it you've got to use Novodex. That said, Novodex is awesome -- and many games use Novodex already for physics.
(Perhaps I missed something, maybe Novodex is just an API wrapper. Maybe they'll have a low-level API which you can bind to as you want. )
But the thing is, I'd like to be able to buy one of these boards and *not* have to shell out for a developer license for an API which isn't even available on Mac ( maybe it is ). Also, both my simulator and game are intended to be released under an open source license at some point. So, no novodex for me. So, no PPU for me.
Perhaps we're just a little short on data at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, and I made good use of it to manage my email on my desktop via queries saved as folders. It was pretty cool, having the tracker show my unread email in a folder on my desktop.
That said, where BeOS lacked was in the query syntax. It wasn't easy to write, and the documentation was lacking. I'm sure that if BeOS hadn't died, they would have put some love into natural language parsing. But, then, that didn't happen.
So it goes. I'll be installing Tiger when it comes out, more for the new developer features ( and for better GL drivers ) than for spotlight. And, I'll probably keep using launchbar for my command-space lovin.
You forgot one:
d) Cheap, uneducated 3rd world labor force.
I think it's vain of us to attempt to store data in multiple locations when we haven't perfected the storage of data in one place yet.
We really should invest in perfect, 100% reliable data storage, here, in our offices, before we waste money shipping backups offsite.
I would take a lot to make the earth uninhabitable by any living thing. In fact I don't think we could do it. But we sure could, via nuclear war or some serious chemical or other mishap make the earth mostly uninhabitable by people not wearing hazmat suits. The earth really isn't *that* big. And we've done a lot already, in the last 3oo years of industrialization. It would take some seriously foolish analysis to say that we can't fuck this planet -- of rour way of living -- big time.
I was being a little sarcastic. ( for what it's worth, I agree with you. But I still think my predictions are valid )
You've GOT to look in the long term. Like 50 or 100 years.
When we, ( I mean America, the "West" and probably Japan ) no longer make anything, or design anything, but only consume, consume consume... we will fall apart.
Everything we buy will be designed in China or India, and made in China or India. Our universities (if they're still relevant, and haven't been shut down by the evangelical right-wing) will be educating Chinese or Indians in math, science, engineering, etc while we get degrees in "communications" and get jobs pushing paper around, so we can buy chinese products.
Such an aritficial economy can't support itself, and we'll *probably* collapse into some sort of 3rd world police state. Here I'm referring to America -- we've been tottering on being a plice state for like 50 years, an economic collapse would push us over the edge.
Meanwhile, China and India will have become what America was 40 years ago -- the Big Cheese, but *too* successful. Fat on money and industry, with those pesky (educated) workers demanding high falutin' things like medicare, wages, retirement packages, etc.
So what happens? The chinese will move their factories to the US, Japan, England, and so on! Our starving and uneducated populations will *want* these jobs, because its better than tending the rice patties, and everything will be A-O-K.
Now, in all seriousness, as far as I'm concerned, the Chinese and Indians deserve the success they are having right now. They're educated, and hard working. And we, we deserve to have our asses handed to us for our laziness and hubris. I just hope all this manages to happen without too much warfare.
9 years is excellent, in the terms of monetary damage to corporations for bandwidth cost, and intangibles such as mass frustration.
But, our prison system is full.
Therefore, I say, this is why public stocks, were an excellent "deterrent". You put him in a stock for, say, 12 hours a day in front of city hall. Maybe for a month, or two. I imagine that'd give him some time to think.
I work no more than 15 minutes walk from there. I'm going to have to see if I can check it out over my lunch break. What luck, it seems like this kind of stuff only happens on the west coast.
Mars:
Relatively close
Titan:
Really far away.
That said, I agree -- Titan's more appealing. But there's a lot to say that mars *once* was earth-like, and imagine if someday astronauts, digging, find fossilized skeletons of ancient creatures. It would be an amazing opportunity to study evolution, and how it works on similar planets. Imagine if the creatures were four-legged and had spinal columns/cords... the implications for complex animal life would be staggering.
In fact, Apple provides build configurations such that you can specificallly target, say 10.2 or 10.1 from 10.3, and be confident that you'll have the correct API & ABI versioning.
That said, with each version of OS X, shareware developers salivate to use the new features, since they often make the dirty work easier, or negligible ( for exampe, Cocoa Bindings for 10.3 ).
Obviously, the big development houses, Adobe, Quark, etc will not generally use these new features.
Uh... I think what you've just discovered is that graphic designers have known *for years* what you've just discovered. Graphic designers "just want to get things done". They're not people enamored with computing. They want to work, and Macs let them work reasonably reliably and with minimum fuss.
I wish people would stop acting as if graphic design isn't work. It's how I've eaten and paid my rent for six years. I even have a degree in it. Sheesh, it's not like we're selling magic crystals which make your car get better mileage. It's work, with clients and deadlines. Most of us use macs because we learned on them, and because the workflow is fast, reliable, and transparent.
And yes, I actually did use to do graphic design on PCs, for a couple years ( on win2k ). And it really was worse. It's hard to explain how -- win2k was reliable enough -- it just got in the way of my workflow.
I doubt this will have much of an impact on programmers' work, but, the natural language parsing into a declarative structure is *really* fascinating.
I'll bet this work will ultimately lead to effective verbal control of computers, as in the sort of Sci-Fi situation where you might say "Computer, play KidA by Radiohead, and get me the NY Times".
Good, interesting stuff, I hope they keep working on it.
Sure, but the WHOLE POINT of plugins is that they're optional. Too bloated? Unload some plugins.
Sheesh. Come on, think for a second before posting.
And finally, people will always do stupid things ( like installing *every* single plugin for JEdit ). But *you* don't have to.
He made a flash animation too. Clearly, Flash is the problem!
Now I'm worried, since I spend 4 out of 8 hours a day in Flash. Thank god photoshop and BBEdit, where I spend the rest of my day, haven't yet been conclusively linked to violence.
Won't somebody please think of the web developers?
I *loved* IBM's butterfly keyboard. I didn't understand ( being a Mac guy, and not actually owning a computer but instead using the ones at my university ) why it quietly died.
I had thought it was ahead of its time, now I know it was an anemic machine, just with a brilliant keyboard.
What a waste.
Good luck trying to make a living, then.
Oh, wait, perhaps you feel that a musician, artist, programmer, etc has no right to make money off his or her labor. Perhaps we should all be janitors by day, and make the stuff you want to not pay for at night.
Good luck, buddy.
When I was a bus driver in college, there was this one neighborhood ( close to downtown Charlottesville, VA ) where somebody's wireless landline would cause massive interference with our CB radios. Massive enough that we could here *complete* conversations, clearly, if we were within a few blocks.
Once I heard one hell of a yelling match, he threatened to kill somebody and bury him in his garage.
Those were the days...
It's true, though, at least in my experience.
When I'm on the DC metro and I hear people loudly yammering and laughing and in general being obnoxious, it's pretty much 10 to 1 that it's a bunch of French students. Why French? I don't know. But they're speaking French, & they're too skinny and good looking and oddly dressed to be French Canadians. No offense to French Canadians.
My theory about the Obnoxious American ( or whatever nationality ) is simple: You don't notice the polite, quiet tourists.
Spaceballs II : The quest for more money
--Yogurt
You're right. I was super excited back in college when they first became available but living on the east coast I never actually saw one.
Back in 2001 when I was in LA for a funeral, I took a walk and heard a weird quiet noise as a car pulled up to a light. I took a look and thought "Wow. There's an EV1. I didn't know any were still on the road."
With any luck the more foresighted car companies of Asia and Europe will drag us kicking and screaming into the 21st century. After all, Ford and GM are claiming to be pursuing hybrids -- and GM has that rollerscate platform.
But, as a cantankerous 27 year old who's seen a LOT of brilliant ideas from detroit never materialize, or if they do they show up as cheap bastardizations: I'll believe it when I can buy one.
Until then, I'll walk and ride my bicycle.
Cthulhu awakening in 350 trillion polygons And when I saw the demo, I promptly went insane and threw myself out the window.
Well sure, if all you're talking about is *storage*. But employing people to read all that for incriminating discussion would be prohibitive.
Sure, a computer could pattern match to find potentially incriminating discussion, but frankly, AI ain't there. You'll need humans, and humans require pay.
Not to mention the fact that anybody forced/paid to read even a tenth of a percent of that crap would go apeshit in just one day of reading all that inanity.
Now, back to reading slashdot...
It does seem like a lot of money. I'll wager some of it goes into the maintenance of *seriously* outdated equipment on the receiving end, for which it is increasingly hard to find replacement parts. I'll bet NASA employs a number of people to rig up replacements as 30 year old computers running 30 year old code blow out.
I think, to clarify my point above, it should be pointed out that you and I can right now write open source games using OpenGL or DirectX; anybody can get the SDKs ( I don't know what dev tools cost on windows, but for Mac OS X and linux it's free ).
So, my question is, can we poor OSS types program against the PPU? Or do we have to drop 10k for a Novodex license?
This would *suck* for the indy game industry.
I'm not a professional developer... that said I'm developing both a robotic simulation API/framework and a game, both in my free time, both *heavily* use the open dynamics engine for physics.
The Open Dynamics Engine is free, & open source. It's not the best physics engine, by any margin. However, being open source I can afford it... and most importantly I can use it on my Mac ( hell, I actually provided some patches to get it to correctly use single-precision trig when OS X.3 came out ). Plus, I want to release my game and robot simulator under an open source license... can't expect people to *buy* novodex or havok just to build the apps.
This PPU looks like a *wonderful* thing, but reading their site, and the interview, it sounds like to use it you've got to use Novodex. That said, Novodex is awesome -- and many games use Novodex already for physics.
(Perhaps I missed something, maybe Novodex is just an API wrapper. Maybe they'll have a low-level API which you can bind to as you want. )
But the thing is, I'd like to be able to buy one of these boards and *not* have to shell out for a developer license for an API which isn't even available on Mac ( maybe it is ). Also, both my simulator and game are intended to be released under an open source license at some point. So, no novodex for me. So, no PPU for me.
Perhaps we're just a little short on data at the moment.