No, not quite. OOP started with Simula and systems like Sketchpad, but PARC did have a big role in the 1970s and 1980s.
Also, Xerox had every idea of what they had in their hands and tried hard to market it. But, as you may discover yourself some time, even with great technology and great marketing, having a huge success is still luck.
Even Apple priced itself out of the early market with the Lisa. Apple only hit a marketable formula the second time around, and with the Macintosh they ended up selling something that looked a lot like the original Xerox systems but was much more primitive.
But hierarchy, or representatives choosing representatives, is always the enemy of democracy.
I disagree. Democracy isn't about mob rule or about everybody getting whatever they want. You may want democracy to be libertarianism or anarchy, but it simply isn't.
And a hierarchy of government doesn't necessitate a hierarchy of power. You may be far away from decision making in one area and close in another.
War had everything to do with it. War means centralized power, centralized power means less self-government,
War also means social change and social mobility, and those can break up old power structures. On balance, both in the US and in Europe, WWI and WWII have helped democracy enormously.
The only solution is more self-government--empower individual cities and counties to do more for themselves. That requires higher levels of the government taking fewer taxes
I'm all for more local government. However, starting that process with reducing taxes is the wrong end. If you reduce federal taxes, it just means that the actually useful programs get less, while the pork keeps getting funded or expanded (9/11 has led to enormous and completely unjustified handouts to numerous defense companies).
Fiddling with taxes is disingenuous, but convenient: you know it won't work, but at least you'll have more money in your pockets, and you have a good excuse for it, too. I say: either tackle the corruption and power structure in Washington or don't complain. Don't fight battles over political power on the backs of people who actually do need government help.
I see. Like the fixed point MP3 decoder, I suspect the free Ogg libraries will probably be updated to include a fixed point version as well soon and you'll just be able to use that with the existing clients; usually, those kinds of conversions aren't all that hard, at least if you have a C++ compiler.
There are a bunch of excellent, free graphical Ogg Vorbis players for X11, and they even work on small screens and handhelds. Why ever would you pay money for something like tkcPlayer?
That's a good argument for adding ONE layer, but once you vote for one representative, that representive SHOULD be spending all of their time on government, therefore further layers are unneccesary.
Our DNS system is hierarchical, our computer networks have multiple levels of routers, and the complexity of our governments demands multiple levels as well. All things being equal, fewer layers are better, but all things aren't equal. It would make no sense for Congress to consist of 300000 representatives, even though that would be necessary for making government more directly connected to the pepole.
If you don't design good hierarchical mechanisms into the system, they just appear by themselves. If an elected representative represents too many people, they create a hierarchy of helpers and staff under them that you will be talking to. And that hierarchy is not transparent and not accountable. That's worse than having a transparent, controlled system.
I also dispute that the idea of full-time politicians is a good one. I think politicians should have a day job.
Two World Wars forced America to abandon democracy in exchange for power and size--why Europe is determined to do the same thing in a time of peace is beyond me.
War had nothing to do with it. Apathy, greed, and lack of education are at the root of America's political problems. But while ailing, America is still a democracy, and if Americans get off their collective behinds, they can fix what is wrong.
Removing all legacy ports seems a bit silly, to me; it takes so little to provide serial and parallel ports, they're usually integrated into some other multi-purpose I/O chip these days anyway. Sure, don't bother to have the full port on the mother board (just hook up a ribbon cable to some pins, if you need to break out the port), and allow people to disable it. But completely removing it would limit it's utility to some folks.
I'm glad to see that stuff go. Configuration of legacy ports is a headache, and even just their presence on the motherboard is a potential pitfall. Furthermore, there is something good about making the life of people relying on them harder: it gives hardware and software vendors a reason to finally update their offerings to the new standards.
If you really must have serial or parallel ports, USB-to-Serial and USB-to-Parallel cables work very well and are cheap.
Can anyone guess how successful a Linux installation would be on such a motherboard? (Without even a PS/2 keyboard port, I'm wondering if the RedHat installer would even talk to you, without a lot of hacking and customization.)
USB support is completely integrated into current Linux kernels; USB keyboards just work--there is nothing to do.
At best, the European Union is like the United States Senate back in the 19th century when Senators were chosen by the legislature of each state. A European citizen gets to elect the people who appoint the people who appoint the people who run the European Union.
No, that's not how it works in general. Some parts
of the EU are appointed by elected representatives,
others are elected directly.
Furthermore, to refer to elected representatives
as a "ruling class" is, in general, incorrect.
In a functioning democracy, representatives don't
have power personally, they represent the
power of their constituents. Only when democracy
goes awry, representatives start acting in their
own interest, and can hold on to their positions
unreasonably, can they be said to have "power" and
constitute a "ruling class".
The more layers of government you add, the less direct control people are going to have in what's going on.
Actually, that's not true. You are forgetting that
most people don't spend all their time on elections.
If you only have time and energy to participate in
a few elections,
you are more likely to get what you want if you
elect representatives that then take on the burden
of negotiating and choosing other representatives
for you.
Is this some kind of bad joke?
When I go to that page, I see some
uninteresting low-level features.
And the Word document "Preview: Windows 'Longhorn' Proposed
Requirements for Client PCs", a 199k Word file
doesn't load into AbiWord , but actually just contains the string
"The content is to be provided at a
future date." (199kb of backwards incompatible
WordXP just for that? Some things apparently
never change.)
Ah, yes, the old "pay money to save time" argument.
Save time for what, pray tell? If you outsource
your life, you don't have much of a life left;
all you get to do is pay bills and work hard.
Start valuing your life, not your time.
Popularity is largely unrelated to whether something is great art or not. Some great art was enormously popular in its time because it also happened to be great entertainment. Other great art did not become popular until centuries later.
But something popular doesn't magically get transformed into great art through the passage of time. To see that, just listen to some of the extremely dull stuff Mozart's or Shakespeare's popular contemporaries were producing.
it's a MOVIE. Sit back and enjoy it -- it's not worth having an embolism over.
Well, there are good movies and there are enjoyable movies. It's a matter of taste and people like to talk about it.
I tend to agree with the Salon articles: I found the moral message of Star Wars offensive even when I first saw it as a teenager, and I find the Campbell connection pretty pompous. To me, the Star Wars movies are mediocre flicks with lousy dialog whose main redeeming features are some nifty special effects and a bit of camp.
More likely they're democratic in the same way that the European Union or World Trade Organization are democratic--chosen by the ruling class of each province,
Since you apparently don't have a clue about how the European Union works (or European democracies, for that matter), I recommend you refrain from such comments. Aren't their plenty of problems with fair elections, millionaires effectively buying political offices, and large parts of the population having no say in the outcome of an election where you come from? Maybe you can worry about those first.
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
I wish that we would spend billions of dollars on getting some 'manned' craft to Mars... something a little more practical. something that the whole globe can engage in.
For the money it costs to send one human, we could send a dozen robotic probes. Let's not waste billions for someone's vanity, or for the entertainment of millions who have read too many science fiction stories.
US power is overrated
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The US really doesn't have much power to act independently. While the US has a big military, if that were ever used in ways not consistent with the interests of powerful European or Asian nations, the US economy would find itself in complete shambles very quickly. It wouldn't even require explicit sanctions by those nations, the market itself would exact the punishment, since the US is highly dependent on the economic well-being of Europe and Asia. The US military is, for practical purposes, a mercenary force that acts in the interest of the other economically powerful nations of the world, not primarily the US domestic interests.
Economically, the US doesn't have that much power either. Sure, the US government moves a lot of money around. But there are very view US corporations left--corporations and capital have become global, and they are associated with the US only to the degree that it furthers their economic interests.
While globalization has its problems, globalization and economic interdependencies have delivered on one big promise: they have eliminated all superpowers and forced all wealthy nations to cooperate, and that's a good thing. Whether Americans realize it or not pretty much doesn't matter. The only nations that are not subject to the imperatives and constraints of globalization are those nations that feel they don't have anything to lose; and the best way to fix that is to make them wealthy enough that they, too, feel that it is to their advantage to play by the rules. In different words, if you turn Iraqis and Palestinians into well-off, happy consumers, they'll kick out any leader that endangers a steady supply of PlayStations or BigMacs. Depressing perhaps, but it beats the alternatives.
For a comparison, go through some C++ code and comment out every #include , , any calls you might make to OpenGL or the MFC, etc etc.
Yes, that's a good comparison, because APIs like OpenGL and MFC do not come from a single company: they evolved in the marketplace. All that C++ standardizes is a set of core APIs, and those are standardized as part of a multi-vendor standard. And even there, C++ went a bit overboard: STL is more complex than necessary for what needs to be in a standard, and it held back the adoption of C++ by several years. That's why I gave C as an example: the C language and standard library are about right in terms of scope and complexity. There should have been a Java standard, and it should have been a lot more like ECMA C#.
Java was never meant to be a simple language.
I suggest reading Steele's "Growing a Language" on Java.
The goal of Java is to be "best of breed" in whatever it does.
If that's the goal, it has missed by a very, very wide margin, because for most uses other than server-side web hacking, Java and its libraries are very limited.
I think for Java, it doesn't make much of a difference anymore who controls it. Java has mushroomed far beyond the size at which it can fulfill its original promise: a safe, simple, multi-vendor language and runtime. Instead, it has become a huge, complex system with a single, proprietary implementation (plus a bunch of systems from other vendors that rely for most of their code on Sun's implementation). I don't see how IBM could reverse this even if their intentions are good: Java2 can't shrink again, and we are stuck with the multitude of APIs that it has.
What we want is an open language standard with a simple runtime, something that people can build on without being tied to a single company. That's the way it worked for C, and that was good. Maybe ECMA C# fits the bill, if it can establish a life independent from Microsoft. Let's hope so.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, Xerox had every idea of what they had in their hands and tried hard to market it. But, as you may discover yourself some time, even with great technology and great marketing, having a huge success is still luck.
Even Apple priced itself out of the early market with the Lisa. Apple only hit a marketable formula the second time around, and with the Macintosh they ended up selling something that looked a lot like the original Xerox systems but was much more primitive.
I disagree. Democracy isn't about mob rule or about everybody getting whatever they want. You may want democracy to be libertarianism or anarchy, but it simply isn't.
And a hierarchy of government doesn't necessitate a hierarchy of power. You may be far away from decision making in one area and close in another.
War had everything to do with it. War means centralized power, centralized power means less self-government,
War also means social change and social mobility, and those can break up old power structures. On balance, both in the US and in Europe, WWI and WWII have helped democracy enormously.
The only solution is more self-government--empower individual cities and counties to do more for themselves. That requires higher levels of the government taking fewer taxes
I'm all for more local government. However, starting that process with reducing taxes is the wrong end. If you reduce federal taxes, it just means that the actually useful programs get less, while the pork keeps getting funded or expanded (9/11 has led to enormous and completely unjustified handouts to numerous defense companies).
Fiddling with taxes is disingenuous, but convenient: you know it won't work, but at least you'll have more money in your pockets, and you have a good excuse for it, too. I say: either tackle the corruption and power structure in Washington or don't complain. Don't fight battles over political power on the backs of people who actually do need government help.
I see. Like the fixed point MP3 decoder, I suspect the free Ogg libraries will probably be updated to include a fixed point version as well soon and you'll just be able to use that with the existing clients; usually, those kinds of conversions aren't all that hard, at least if you have a C++ compiler.
There are a bunch of excellent, free graphical Ogg Vorbis players for X11, and they even work on small screens and handhelds. Why ever would you pay money for something like tkcPlayer?
Our DNS system is hierarchical, our computer networks have multiple levels of routers, and the complexity of our governments demands multiple levels as well. All things being equal, fewer layers are better, but all things aren't equal. It would make no sense for Congress to consist of 300000 representatives, even though that would be necessary for making government more directly connected to the pepole.
If you don't design good hierarchical mechanisms into the system, they just appear by themselves. If an elected representative represents too many people, they create a hierarchy of helpers and staff under them that you will be talking to. And that hierarchy is not transparent and not accountable. That's worse than having a transparent, controlled system.
I also dispute that the idea of full-time politicians is a good one. I think politicians should have a day job.
Two World Wars forced America to abandon democracy in exchange for power and size--why Europe is determined to do the same thing in a time of peace is beyond me.
War had nothing to do with it. Apathy, greed, and lack of education are at the root of America's political problems. But while ailing, America is still a democracy, and if Americans get off their collective behinds, they can fix what is wrong.
I'm glad to see that stuff go. Configuration of legacy ports is a headache, and even just their presence on the motherboard is a potential pitfall. Furthermore, there is something good about making the life of people relying on them harder: it gives hardware and software vendors a reason to finally update their offerings to the new standards.
If you really must have serial or parallel ports, USB-to-Serial and USB-to-Parallel cables work very well and are cheap.
Can anyone guess how successful a Linux installation would be on such a motherboard? (Without even a PS/2 keyboard port, I'm wondering if the RedHat installer would even talk to you, without a lot of hacking and customization.)
USB support is completely integrated into current Linux kernels; USB keyboards just work--there is nothing to do.
No, that's not how it works in general. Some parts of the EU are appointed by elected representatives, others are elected directly.
Furthermore, to refer to elected representatives as a "ruling class" is, in general, incorrect. In a functioning democracy, representatives don't have power personally, they represent the power of their constituents. Only when democracy goes awry, representatives start acting in their own interest, and can hold on to their positions unreasonably, can they be said to have "power" and constitute a "ruling class".
The more layers of government you add, the less direct control people are going to have in what's going on.
Actually, that's not true. You are forgetting that most people don't spend all their time on elections. If you only have time and energy to participate in a few elections, you are more likely to get what you want if you elect representatives that then take on the burden of negotiating and choosing other representatives for you.
Is this some kind of bad joke? When I go to that page, I see some uninteresting low-level features. And the Word document "Preview: Windows 'Longhorn' Proposed Requirements for Client PCs", a 199k Word file doesn't load into AbiWord , but actually just contains the string "The content is to be provided at a future date." (199kb of backwards incompatible WordXP just for that? Some things apparently never change.)
Ah, yes, the old "pay money to save time" argument. Save time for what, pray tell? If you outsource your life, you don't have much of a life left; all you get to do is pay bills and work hard. Start valuing your life, not your time.
But something popular doesn't magically get transformed into great art through the passage of time. To see that, just listen to some of the extremely dull stuff Mozart's or Shakespeare's popular contemporaries were producing.
Well, there are good movies and there are enjoyable movies. It's a matter of taste and people like to talk about it.
I tend to agree with the Salon articles: I found the moral message of Star Wars offensive even when I first saw it as a teenager, and I find the Campbell connection pretty pompous. To me, the Star Wars movies are mediocre flicks with lousy dialog whose main redeeming features are some nifty special effects and a bit of camp.
Since you apparently don't have a clue about how the European Union works (or European democracies, for that matter), I recommend you refrain from such comments. Aren't their plenty of problems with fair elections, millionaires effectively buying political offices, and large parts of the population having no say in the outcome of an election where you come from? Maybe you can worry about those first.
For the money it costs to send one human, we could send a dozen robotic probes. Let's not waste billions for someone's vanity, or for the entertainment of millions who have read too many science fiction stories.
Economically, the US doesn't have that much power either. Sure, the US government moves a lot of money around. But there are very view US corporations left--corporations and capital have become global, and they are associated with the US only to the degree that it furthers their economic interests.
While globalization has its problems, globalization and economic interdependencies have delivered on one big promise: they have eliminated all superpowers and forced all wealthy nations to cooperate, and that's a good thing. Whether Americans realize it or not pretty much doesn't matter. The only nations that are not subject to the imperatives and constraints of globalization are those nations that feel they don't have anything to lose; and the best way to fix that is to make them wealthy enough that they, too, feel that it is to their advantage to play by the rules. In different words, if you turn Iraqis and Palestinians into well-off, happy consumers, they'll kick out any leader that endangers a steady supply of PlayStations or BigMacs. Depressing perhaps, but it beats the alternatives.
Yes, that's a good comparison, because APIs like OpenGL and MFC do not come from a single company: they evolved in the marketplace. All that C++ standardizes is a set of core APIs, and those are standardized as part of a multi-vendor standard. And even there, C++ went a bit overboard: STL is more complex than necessary for what needs to be in a standard, and it held back the adoption of C++ by several years. That's why I gave C as an example: the C language and standard library are about right in terms of scope and complexity. There should have been a Java standard, and it should have been a lot more like ECMA C#.
Java was never meant to be a simple language.
I suggest reading Steele's "Growing a Language" on Java.
The goal of Java is to be "best of breed" in whatever it does.
If that's the goal, it has missed by a very, very wide margin, because for most uses other than server-side web hacking, Java and its libraries are very limited.
What we want is an open language standard with a simple runtime, something that people can build on without being tied to a single company. That's the way it worked for C, and that was good. Maybe ECMA C# fits the bill, if it can establish a life independent from Microsoft. Let's hope so.