I suppose that writing in FORTRAN is marginally better than writing in C or Assembler. But... there really are better options: I base this on 20+ years of writing sucessful applications using a range of platforms and languages. (And I'm an EE orignally, have designed ICs, so I think I know a bit about technical applications).
I suppose that the continued proliferation of FORTRAN is a symptom of why the pace of significant new scientific discovery has dropped off tremendously in the last 20-30 years. No major medical breakthroughs -- we've made almost 0 progress in curing cancer, a little in curing heart disease. No major breakthroughs in physics that I can recall.
The only real advances have been in technology -- and technology industries don't use FORTRAN, to my knowledge.
Linux is a stupendous 'operating system for consumer electronics goods' -- as an engineer who's developed embedded systems, I think that Linux is great for this purpose. For example, Tivo, which is Linux-based, is the greatest consumer electronic item of all time.
But $450k? Gee, what a commitment! That's like 2-3 full time people if you include overhead.
Just got mine today. Signal went from crappy in most of my house to superb everywhere. Totally rocks, costs less than $90. Takes 30 seconds to install.
Having used Orcle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, I'm wondering... why use anything other than PostgreSQL? This attack just further reinforces my belief that 95% of folks using Oracle and SQL Server should switch.
On the one hand, this sounds perfectly fair. After all, they are taking steps to prevent folks from stealing intellectual property.
On the other hand, it seems like it's easily bypassed -- some authority should keep a central server with a list of known good files and some sort of hash associated with each file. If the file is distributed in pieces, there could be a hash for each piece.
Finally, isn't the entertainment industry's time is better spent developing a functioning revenue model? People want music online, and they won't pay a lot. Sorry, the genie is out of the bottle -- get a real revenue model -- or someone else will, and they'll kick your butts. All the incredibly crappy and formulaic new "music" isn't helping much, either.
Agreed! Most Linux distributions (other than RedHat 8) do a worse job of rendering fonts than Windows did 9 years ago. When you consider that the vast majority of computer users are staring at fonts all day, this bodes poorly for the prospect of Linux on the desktop.
On the other hand, since RedHat 8 finally features font rendering that doesn't suck, they may have a shot at whooping Redmond upside the head on the desktop -- but ONLY if they tone down installation so that it doesn't ask you about PPP connectivity, give you eight (or however many) terminal emulator apps to select among, and similar things that drive non-uber-nerds nutty.
Somebody help me get a clue: At first glance, it would seem that a seven digit number would be good for almost 10 million phone numbers, while adding three more digits would take us up to more than one phone number per inhabitant of our planet.
Why so many digits? Why are we running out of phone numbers?
And, while we're at it, why not assign each individual a phone number that they keep for life, no matter where they move, like a domain name? I'd imagine that modern telco equipment could support this by now.
On the one hand, a telecom server is an excellent place to put Linux -- Linux is stable, fast, powerful, remotely accessable, and flexible, just what is needed in a piece of equipment that ought to sit and do its thing for months on end without human supervision*.
On the other hand, there really is not much of a telecom market these days. Why go after a business that is rapidly shrinking?
*And, in a telecom server, few users will be irritated by the hideous screen fonts that plague most distros.
Can anyone share a single success story where software was ousourced overseas?
I've been watching companies outsource to India and elsewhere for years. Every single episode has been a flaming catastrophe, yielding unusable product and hideous code.
The funniest instance was when a friend's team at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) outsourced to India -- outsourcee outsourcing to an outsourcee, 2 layers of bad abstraction Total mess, complete garbage delivered, even by Anderson's standards it had to be rewritten.
The problem is not, I think, that people overseas are dumber than people in the US. The problem is that outsourcing is bad, for many reasons, including differences in motivation between outsourcer and outsourcee, and loss of control. Overseas outsourcing can mean an astonishing lack of control, and a long, long link between the ultimate customers and the coders, which invites mayhem.
Granted that this is a pretty cool demonstration of the ability to beam 2.4GHz over a l-o-o-o-ng distance while maintaining adequate signal to noise.
But a constantly drifting balloon? Seems like tracking this with the ground antenna, which is probably highly directional, would be a total pain.
But maybe...
I think that the folks at O'Reilly should thank the creator that:
1. Documentation for unices and open source stuff sucks so unbelievably (except PostgreSQL)
2. Most authors of computer books are not substantially better writers than the folks who document unices and open source stuff.
Frankly, I find the O'Reilly books to be generally bland and mediocre, with a handful of particularly good and bad titles.
However: in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king and thus, I suppose, even I'm thankful for O'Reilly. But I really wish that a truly good publisher of computer books would come along! Boy does the Unix/Open Source movement need this!
To my mind, the best thing, and it's a biggie, is that we finally have a distribution (Redhat 8.0 -- perhaps others?) that, out of the box, renders fonts so that they look good to non-nerds. This is the first step towards bringing Linux to the masses!
Next we need to radically cut the number of choices that the average user needs to make at install-time (Gee, which of the following 87 libraries should I install? And what the hell is a library anyway?)
If some entity (Redhat? IBM?) just grabs the bull by the horns, we'll have a good Windows replacement in a few months! Pleasepleaseplease somebody do it!
There is ungodly profit potential in medical "science", and research physicians and similar types will do almost anything to make a buck, or many hundreds of thousands of bucks, from big pharmaceutical companies and so forth. My perspective comes from years in the medical industry.
To paraphrase James Carville, it's amazing what happens when you drag a $100 bill through a research hospital. These folks will make stuff up for money. Some of them deal in half truths -- they'll play clever games with the truth to support things that they know to be nonsense. Others just make stuff up out of whole cloth.
Some people in the field are good -- but there are many others for who you'd be well advised to count your fingers after shaking their hand to make sure they gave 'em all back.
Hey thanks for the empowerment! I just ran down to the 7-11 and liberated some Twinkies in the name of "civil disobedience" and "recovering a culture that belongs to me". I would never have done it before, when it was called "shoplifting". Does my new interpretation say something better about me? I sure hope so.
I've been using Rhapsody for a few weeks, and it's a blast. For $10 (roughly the price of CD) each month, I get unlimited online access to a huge catalog of well-digitized music. Very simple and very good.
The $1 per track charge to burn to CD is pretty high, so I don't do that.
Just because record companies are swine, it does not mean that it's OK to steal stuff from them. Rhapsody lets me get (most of) the music I want at a very reasonable cost.
A huge problem with crappy software development is that it is not approached as engineering. Rather, projects usually start as kludges ("Hey, look at the cool thing I did this morning"), and develop into large or huge kludges.
This is not real engineering.
This sad situation has come about because it's too easy to do develop this mentality in the software world, where making quick changes is as simple as hitting backspace a few times and typing some new code. ("I don't have to plan! I can get it sorta right, then fix it later! It's easy!")
When one is building a circuit, or a bridge, one can't simply make quick changes. Any changes are ltime consuming, expensive, and painful. Thus, REAL engineers actually plan stuff.
(Not that there's no room for kludges and "screwing around". I always have a "Let's mess around and do neat stuff" period at the beginning of projects. But once this is done, and we've come up with some fun and clever stuff, we roll up our sleeves and do real engineering to build a real product. And, Hey Presto!, we end up with solid and usable applications.
Sometimes I'm fortunate enough to be working on one project with undivided attention. Then I usually don't carry my PDA -- it's easy to remember what I should be doing.
When I'm in my more scattered mode (meetings-R-us), my PDA is a godsend, keeping me on track.
In the past, I've always carried my PDA while travelling because of the address book feature. But I've just purchased a cell phone (Motorola V60i) that allegedly syncs to my Windows address book, so the PDA might not be as necessary for this purpose anymore -- we'll see.
Well, at some point the signal has to go analog, if we're going to use our ears to hear it. Once it's analog, it's up for grabs.
I suppose that it might be possible to install a digital port in our heads that would dirctly stimulate the neurons coming from the hair cells in the cochlea -- things are more or less digital at that point, as I recall. Perhaps the DRM folks could be the first to volunteer for the procedure.
It might be possible to imbed some sort of analog signal in the music that could be recognized by decoders, but that would be difficult for MP3 or similarly-compressed material -- the introduced signal would have to be unhearable in order to not affect the listener's experience, BUT MP3 and similar compression schemes work, in part, by getting rid of stuff that the listener can't hear anyway.
Actually, this is a really interesting problem, from a technical point of view...
There's probably not a way to keep folks from tapping off of an analog output, such as the headphone out.
Simply feed headphone out to another computer (or perhaps even the same computer), record, and, presto!, we have a copy that is indistinguishable* from the original.
*except for pretend distinguishability by "golden-eared audiophiles" with tube amplifiers. But they'd rather listen to LPs, anyway.
If MS prevents.NET from fully running on other platforms, they will have a big problem selling.NET.
Linux is going to stick around as a server OS -- it's a huge pain in the ass in some ways -- the "user experience" is a big problem -- but it is really superb as a server, and is being pushed by big guns such as IBM. If Java (which I'm personally not in love with) runs on *nix & Windows, but.NET is Windows only, then Java will win.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose that writing in FORTRAN is marginally better than writing in C or Assembler. But... there really are better options: I base this on 20+ years of writing sucessful applications using a range of platforms and languages. (And I'm an EE orignally, have designed ICs, so I think I know a bit about technical applications).
I suppose that the continued proliferation of FORTRAN is a symptom of why the pace of significant new scientific discovery has dropped off tremendously in the last 20-30 years. No major medical breakthroughs -- we've made almost 0 progress in curing cancer, a little in curing heart disease. No major breakthroughs in physics that I can recall.
The only real advances have been in technology -- and technology industries don't use FORTRAN, to my knowledge.
Another version of FORTRAN! Yeah! Now if I can just find a card punch machine and reader on eBay, I'll have hutled into the 1970s!
At the risk of being obvious...
Linux is a stupendous 'operating system for consumer electronics goods' -- as an engineer who's developed embedded systems, I think that Linux is great for this purpose. For example, Tivo, which is Linux-based, is the greatest consumer electronic item of all time.
But $450k? Gee, what a commitment! That's like 2-3 full time people if you include overhead.
Just got mine today. Signal went from crappy in most of my house to superb everywhere. Totally rocks, costs less than $90. Takes 30 seconds to install.
Having used Orcle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, I'm wondering... why use anything other than PostgreSQL? This attack just further reinforces my belief that 95% of folks using Oracle and SQL Server should switch.
On the one hand, this sounds perfectly fair. After all, they are taking steps to prevent folks from stealing intellectual property.
On the other hand, it seems like it's easily bypassed -- some authority should keep a central server with a list of known good files and some sort of hash associated with each file. If the file is distributed in pieces, there could be a hash for each piece.
Finally, isn't the entertainment industry's time is better spent developing a functioning revenue model? People want music online, and they won't pay a lot. Sorry, the genie is out of the bottle -- get a real revenue model -- or someone else will, and they'll kick your butts. All the incredibly crappy and formulaic new "music" isn't helping much, either.
Agreed! Most Linux distributions (other than RedHat 8) do a worse job of rendering fonts than Windows did 9 years ago. When you consider that the vast majority of computer users are staring at fonts all day, this bodes poorly for the prospect of Linux on the desktop.
On the other hand, since RedHat 8 finally features font rendering that doesn't suck, they may have a shot at whooping Redmond upside the head on the desktop -- but ONLY if they tone down installation so that it doesn't ask you about PPP connectivity, give you eight (or however many) terminal emulator apps to select among, and similar things that drive non-uber-nerds nutty.
Somebody help me get a clue: At first glance, it would seem that a seven digit number would be good for almost 10 million phone numbers, while adding three more digits would take us up to more than one phone number per inhabitant of our planet.
Why so many digits? Why are we running out of phone numbers?
And, while we're at it, why not assign each individual a phone number that they keep for life, no matter where they move, like a domain name? I'd imagine that modern telco equipment could support this by now.
On the one hand, a telecom server is an excellent place to put Linux -- Linux is stable, fast, powerful, remotely accessable, and flexible, just what is needed in a piece of equipment that ought to sit and do its thing for months on end without human supervision*.
On the other hand, there really is not much of a telecom market these days. Why go after a business that is rapidly shrinking?
*And, in a telecom server, few users will be irritated by the hideous screen fonts that plague most distros.
I've been watching companies outsource to India and elsewhere for years. Every single episode has been a flaming catastrophe, yielding unusable product and hideous code.
The funniest instance was when a friend's team at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) outsourced to India -- outsourcee outsourcing to an outsourcee, 2 layers of bad abstraction Total mess, complete garbage delivered, even by Anderson's standards it had to be rewritten.
The problem is not, I think, that people overseas are dumber than people in the US. The problem is that outsourcing is bad, for many reasons, including differences in motivation between outsourcer and outsourcee, and loss of control. Overseas outsourcing can mean an astonishing lack of control, and a long, long link between the ultimate customers and the coders, which invites mayhem.
Granted that this is a pretty cool demonstration of the ability to beam 2.4GHz over a l-o-o-o-ng distance while maintaining adequate signal to noise. But a constantly drifting balloon? Seems like tracking this with the ground antenna, which is probably highly directional, would be a total pain. But maybe...
Ooooooohhhh! How scary! The man who split Microsoft into two companies! And ensured that Albert Gore assumed the US Presidency!
Given Boise's track record, we can all sleep well tonight.
I think that the folks at O'Reilly should thank the creator that:
1. Documentation for unices and open source stuff sucks so unbelievably (except PostgreSQL)
2. Most authors of computer books are not substantially better writers than the folks who document unices and open source stuff.
Frankly, I find the O'Reilly books to be generally bland and mediocre, with a handful of particularly good and bad titles.
However: in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king and thus, I suppose, even I'm thankful for O'Reilly. But I really wish that a truly good publisher of computer books would come along! Boy does the Unix/Open Source movement need this!
To my mind, the best thing, and it's a biggie, is that we finally have a distribution (Redhat 8.0 -- perhaps others?) that, out of the box, renders fonts so that they look good to non-nerds. This is the first step towards bringing Linux to the masses!
Next we need to radically cut the number of choices that the average user needs to make at install-time (Gee, which of the following 87 libraries should I install? And what the hell is a library anyway?)
If some entity (Redhat? IBM?) just grabs the bull by the horns, we'll have a good Windows replacement in a few months! Pleasepleaseplease somebody do it!
There is ungodly profit potential in medical "science", and research physicians and similar types will do almost anything to make a buck, or many hundreds of thousands of bucks, from big pharmaceutical companies and so forth. My perspective comes from years in the medical industry.
To paraphrase James Carville, it's amazing what happens when you drag a $100 bill through a research hospital. These folks will make stuff up for money. Some of them deal in half truths -- they'll play clever games with the truth to support things that they know to be nonsense. Others just make stuff up out of whole cloth.
Some people in the field are good -- but there are many others for who you'd be well advised to count your fingers after shaking their hand to make sure they gave 'em all back.
Hey thanks for the empowerment! I just ran down to the 7-11 and liberated some Twinkies in the name of "civil disobedience" and "recovering a culture that belongs to me". I would never have done it before, when it was called "shoplifting". Does my new interpretation say something better about me? I sure hope so.
I've been using Rhapsody for a few weeks, and it's a blast. For $10 (roughly the price of CD) each month, I get unlimited online access to a huge catalog of well-digitized music. Very simple and very good.
The $1 per track charge to burn to CD is pretty high, so I don't do that.
Just because record companies are swine, it does not mean that it's OK to steal stuff from them. Rhapsody lets me get (most of) the music I want at a very reasonable cost.
Highly recommended.
(No, I don't work for them, etc.)
This is not real engineering.
This sad situation has come about because it's too easy to do develop this mentality in the software world, where making quick changes is as simple as hitting backspace a few times and typing some new code. ("I don't have to plan! I can get it sorta right, then fix it later! It's easy!")
When one is building a circuit, or a bridge, one can't simply make quick changes. Any changes are ltime consuming, expensive, and painful. Thus, REAL engineers actually plan stuff.
(Not that there's no room for kludges and "screwing around". I always have a "Let's mess around and do neat stuff" period at the beginning of projects. But once this is done, and we've come up with some fun and clever stuff, we roll up our sleeves and do real engineering to build a real product. And, Hey Presto!, we end up with solid and usable applications.
As Dirty Harry would say: "Marvelous"
I'm particularly excited by the fifth movement -- since there IS no fifth movement of the 9th.
I just hope that no government funding was involved.
It depends on the mode I'm in.
Sometimes I'm fortunate enough to be working on one project with undivided attention. Then I usually don't carry my PDA -- it's easy to remember what I should be doing.
When I'm in my more scattered mode (meetings-R-us), my PDA is a godsend, keeping me on track.
In the past, I've always carried my PDA while travelling because of the address book feature. But I've just purchased a cell phone (Motorola V60i) that allegedly syncs to my Windows address book, so the PDA might not be as necessary for this purpose anymore -- we'll see.
Well, at some point the signal has to go analog, if we're going to use our ears to hear it. Once it's analog, it's up for grabs.
I suppose that it might be possible to install a digital port in our heads that would dirctly stimulate the neurons coming from the hair cells in the cochlea -- things are more or less digital at that point, as I recall. Perhaps the DRM folks could be the first to volunteer for the procedure.
It might be possible to imbed some sort of analog signal in the music that could be recognized by decoders, but that would be difficult for MP3 or similarly-compressed material -- the introduced signal would have to be unhearable in order to not affect the listener's experience, BUT MP3 and similar compression schemes work, in part, by getting rid of stuff that the listener can't hear anyway.
Actually, this is a really interesting problem, from a technical point of view...
Simply feed headphone out to another computer (or perhaps even the same computer), record, and, presto!, we have a copy that is indistinguishable* from the original.
*except for pretend distinguishability by "golden-eared audiophiles" with tube amplifiers. But they'd rather listen to LPs, anyway.
If MS prevents .NET from fully running on other platforms, they will have a big problem selling .NET.
.NET is Windows only, then Java will win.
Linux is going to stick around as a server OS -- it's a huge pain in the ass in some ways -- the "user experience" is a big problem -- but it is really superb as a server, and is being pushed by big guns such as IBM. If Java (which I'm personally not in love with) runs on *nix & Windows, but
- Can't be done as well or better already, AND
- That a large number of people want, or could be induced to want?
i.e., what is the selling proposition here?Yes, what you say is absolutely true.
But for a six foot run? No arc welders, X -ray machines, or similar within sight. Seems like serious overkill, and an extra hassle for programming.