> certainly Perl has a larger library of pre-written modules
There is that. I like the way someone else stated this: "90% of every Perl program is already written."
Although sometimes I find myself rejecting the existing modules and rolling my own solution for something, for one reason or another. For instance, for the Open Clip Art Library, our upload facility had been using CGI::Lite to parse the form input data, but for several reasons we ended up scrapping that and rolling our own function. We could have tried another module (such as CGI.pm perhaps, or WWW::Form), but rather than deal with the quirks of these and make them fit our needs, I spent fifteen minutes rolling a custom one.
OTOH, for my personal music track database, I pretty much just slapped a wrapper around Class::DBI and called it done.
I also just realized the irony of your referring to C# noobs. Pretty much *every* C# programmer at this point is a C# noob, because the language is just not that old yet. (Java, however, is not hampered by this, and of course the C# noobs usually have prior C++ experience.)
> I've worked a lot in Perl and enough in C# to know that your 1:21.6 ratio > is more than just Perl vs. C#. Maybe you're a guru Perl coder and they're > C# noobs?
Okay, I'm pretty solidly conversant in Perl, but "guru" conjures up images of people like Ovid, and I'm nowhere *near* that category of competency. In fact, those people scare me just a little. On Larry Wall's "seven levels", I guess I'm a Perl Adept (though, I don't even meet all the criteria for that), which is two fairly significant levels below Guru (and Guru is not the top of the scale; there's Wizard above that).
> Maybe your problem domaim is lexical analysis?
Not per se, although granted, there is a lot of text processing in what I do. But then, there's a lot of text processing to be done in the world; it's a very common thing.
I will admit that I don't do GUI work in Perl (unless you count web-based frontends as GUI, which is dubious), because the available GUI-oriented modules are almost as painful to work with as the C equivalents. That's one of the things I'm hoping gets fixed in Perl6, though I fear we may have to wait longer than 6.0.
> Please, give one example of something you *could* do in an 8 hour shift > it would take a C#/Java developer a month to do.
One example: implement a web-based database for tracking the Friends of the Library, with authentication by IP address and by username/password, that displays all the friends in a table, sortable by any field, and allows easy entering of new Friends, tracking existing friends, editing their information, and searching based on name, or based on things such as willingness to be involved in the book sale. Took me about four hours to get the basics working, and three or four more for debugging and tweaking the layout.
Granted, this example hits right smack in the middle of Perl's problem domain, but OTOH, so does almost everything I do.
And yes, a month might be a little generous; maybe I've just seen some pretty slow Java and C# programmers. Still, a ratio of 2:1 just seems really wrong to me; it takes significantly longer than that for a Java or C# programmer to wait for the compiler every time he changes anything, and nevermind about other time-saving Perl features such as the CPAN and general language goodness. I had assumed Python would be closer to Perl in this regard than to "traditional languages", which is usually secret code for "languages that are painfully hard to get anything done in".
It seemed fine to me. Sure, there's some overhead for the extra features, so all else being equal it's not going to perform quite as fast as a simpler filesystem like ext2, but it's not an order of magnitude worse, either, so most users would never notice.
> BeFS is metadata-only journalling.
So is ext3. So is Reiser, until version 4, which was only just released quite recently.
> BeFS fragmentation is a nightmare
I'll have to take your word on that. I never used BeOS for long enough to run into that situation. I played with 5PE for a few weeks, but ultimately it wasn't the OS I was looking for -- for reasons that had nothing to do with the filesystem.
> BeFS features are marginal
All filesystem features are marginal, that was my point. BeFS was a pretty cool piece of filesystem technology, one that filesystem designers at companies such as Microsoft are still interested in looking at and copying, but for all that, nobody really cares, because it is, after all, just a filesystem. Microsoft virtually had to hit OEMs with sticks to get them to switch from FAT32 to NTFS for default OEM installations of Windows XP. Why do you suppose that is? NTFS is in many ways a much nicer filesystem than FAT32. Why didn't everyone jump on the chance to switch to it as soon as possible? My take on that is, the OEMs figured users would place more value on the ability to access their data easily from another operating system -- something most users would never even think about, but, and here's the stinger for filesystem enthusiasts, even FEWER users would care one lick about what filesystem WinXP is using, and the various advantages of NTFS over FAT32.
The BeFS was a very interesting filesystem, as filesystems go, with very intersting features, as filesystems went, in 1998 and, frankly, for some while afterward. But, ultimately, it's just a filesystem, and nobody cares.
Prediction: if you watch Reiser4 adoption rates, they're going to be, in a word, slow. Sure, there are always a few enthusiasts. Watch, though, and see how fast Reiser4 catches on overall. Clearly, it's a superior filesystem to ext2/3. Arguably, it's much superior to NTFS. Watch as people don't all jump to using it right away based on these merits. It's just a filesystem.
(ext3 is different, because it's backward-compatible, which always improves adoption rates by several orders of magnitude.)
# Speakers told of experiments and used anecdotes to explain that programmers # who use Python finish jobs in no more than half the time required by those # coding in more conventional languages
The "more conventional languages" it's talking about are C# or Java, mainly. (It also mentions XML and SQL, but you don't use Python instead of those.)
I'm trying to figure out how doing anything in a VHLL such as Python could take anywhere *near* half as long as in C# or Java. As a Perl programmer, I know that if I can't complete, test, debug, and deploy in an eight-hour shift what would take a C# programmer a month, then there's something wrong with my understanding of the problem. I would not expect Python development to be quite as fast as Perl, since it's a bit stricter about certain things, but nevertheless, I would have thought it would be a lot closer to Perl than to Java or C#. It *is* a VHLL, after all, right?
Are they just being really conservative with this claim, or is Python develpment really that slow?
> did they consider they might be accidentially associated, i.e. with > Zeta Creations?
You mean e.g. (exempli gratia), not i.e. (id est). i.e. means "that is"; whereas, e.g. means "for example". HTH.HAND.
Zeta is a letter of the Greek alphabet, so of course there are hundreds of thousands of different companies and products that use the word. If they'd called it Theta or Phi, it wouldn't be any more distinctive, and Omega would be decidedly worse.
They probably chose a Greek letter for the name because it will sound familiar both in Germany and in the US. If they'd given it a German name, it would sound foreign in the US.
> There are no marketing claims for BeOS after about 2000. If you're going > to be evaluating the original claims for BeOS made during its brief moment > in the sun, 1998-1999, compare those claims with what was around then, not > what's around now.
He could have been clearer, I think he was talking about the fan base, not official company marketing claims. There are still a few loons out there claiming that BeOS has better multimedia support than current OSes, et cetera, and infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam. Which is, of course, a load of hooey, because despite what PDP-11 advocates will tell you, the software industry has, in fact, made some technological improvements in the last thirty years.
> I'm not particularly interested in ZetaOS because, in the context of 2005, > it's not a very compelling operating system.
Here you're wrong. The rest of what you say is largely true, albeit perhaps needlessly inflammatory, but the BeFS is actually quite good; it is today what it was in 1998, and yet, it is today what WinFS was originally supposed to be in 2004, now wants to be in 2008, and will probably not really achieve until 2012 if it keeps slipping like it has been. (The WinFS that's supposed to come out later this year (if you're optimistic) has had features cut from it that BeFS has always had, in order to meet deadlines.)
Where the BeOS fans go wrong in talking about the filesystem is this: they assume that a great filesystem is an important desktop feature that every user cares about -- when, in fact, for most users, FAT32 with the LFN extension (technically a quite horrible filesystem) would be just fine. As long as they can save their stuff and retrieve it later, almost nobody really cares, when it comes down to brass tacks, about the filesystem. I keep most of my data on FAT32 filesystems, just because they're supported by pretty much every OS, so I don't have to worry about being able to access my data. (Somebody who only uses one OS wouldn't need that portability, but somebody who only uses one OS wouldn't likely be messing with Zeta at this point, now would they?) Are there other filesystems I could use that are technically much better? Yeah. NTFS is better, but not all my OSes support it. ext2/3 is better than FAT32, but not all my OSes support it. Reiser4 is *way* better than FAT32, but guess what? Yeah, so I don't use it. And that's where BeFS is too.
> There was a BeOS version that loaded from within Win9x, and that has been > now tweaked to run as a full standalone system
You're confused. 5PE was a full standalone system from the moment it was released. It had a bootloader that started out of Win95, and the installer used this for bootstrapping since it didn't come with a bootable CD, but you could also install it on its own partition, if you had one available, and boot it from any boot loader that supported booting arbitrary OSes, such as OS-BS, BOSS, or even LILO. Once you had it installed that way, you could delete the Windows partition if you wanted, and re-use the space.
Yeah, the Pro version cost money, but the Personal edition, while it didn't have every bundled feature you could want, was not crippled in terms of booting.
> There was printing capabilities, but only something like three printers > were supported at the time.
It wasn't quite that bad. A lot of printers worked. Of course, that was aeons ago, and so any *recent* printer will not work in the old BeOS unless it happens to work with the driver from an old model, which is quite unlikely. That's why the Zeta team put CUPS in -- they needed support for modern printers, and they could either develop it themselves, or use an existing solution.
> Which would have been technically better as Apple's new OS - the nextstep > based OSX, or a BeOS based OS?
I don't think it's fair to compare them. NeXT had some advantages of its own; among other things, it was solidly multi-user with an established permissions system; whereas, retrofitting the BeOS with that could have been messy. On the other hand, the BeOS had some remarkable features, including a legendary ability to deal with hardware changes as if they were perfectly normal everyday occurrances.
The deal-sealing argument that convinces me Apple did the right thing is a nontechnical thing, err, person: Jobs. I do wish the BeOS assets would have been picked up by another company besides Palm, a company interested in, you know, actually *doing* something with the technology. But I'm not sorry Apple made the decision they did.
As far as Zeta, I fear at this point it's about six years too late. In 1999, when Apple was still working in-house on what would become OS X and shipping their hideously nightmarish classic OS to the masses, and Microsoft meanwhile was still shipping two OSes, one being about as stable as a house of cards and the other going nowhere in the home user market for assorted reasons, Zeta would have been a very interesting option. Today, it is a fascinating historical footnote -- although, of course, there are still some things other OSes could and should learn from it, but that is true of TOPS-20 for that matter.
The joke submissions wouldn't bother me, if they would *also* accept non-joke submissions. It appears the *only* legitimate stories they'll accept on April 1 are the ones that might plausibly be mistaken for jokes, like the Gmail story. In other words, if we want to read actual news, we can't.
What they should do is accept both regular *and* joke stories, so that you have to sort out which are which.
> Yahoo says will keep competitive to Google, and is now offering Infinity > plus Infinity megabytes. Google replies, offering Infinity squared megabytes.
I'm holding out for at _least_ two raised to the infinity power megabytes. Of course, in an ideal world we'd all have infinity factorial to the infinity factorial power terabytes.
> granted, using your font of choice is great for design
On the web, it's great for *bad* design.
On paper, it's different, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the users can't possibly substitute their own preferred fonts into a paper publication, so the only two options are for the creator to choose nice ones, or for the creator to choose ones that aren't very nice (*cough* Times), don't go well together, or cetera. But there's another difference: on paper, the text is rendered to a much higher resolution, which makes it practical to use some fonts that are a decidedly bad idea on the web -- script fonts, for instance, can be tastefully used in a print publication, but on the web, for the sake of legibility, you're pretty much limited to a basic serif font, a basic sans, or something fixedwidth, unless you're doing just one or two words (in which case,.png works okay). Anything else and you either have to set the point size so high it looks rediculous, or else the user's going to have trouble reading it.
This goes in exactly the same category as every other use of Flash: ways to gratuitously make the web uglier, while at the same time also making it harder to use.
This guy needs to look up "AI Complete". Natural language parsing is not just a common example, it is *the* canonical example, the one that is NEVER left out of ANY serious discussion of the issue. Of *course* their grammar checker is worthless; *every* computer grammar checker is worthless (unless it's checking the grammar for a computer language, as opposed to a human language).
Re:Mass media distribution
on
The Next Net
·
· Score: 1
> Every post seems to be suggesting that south korea is some third world country
It was a third-world country when most of us were in school. South Korea has really only crossed the line into being a first-world country within the last couple of decades. Have patience; the world will catch on in time. Everyone knows Japan is a first-world country, but they've been one for a bit longer.
Also, per-capita GDP is not the main way to determine first-world status. Any statistic measured per-capita can be fooled by a high standard deviation. You really want to look for certain indicating factors: * The literacy rate (granted, for most countries, including the US, it's
impossible to get a really reliable number here) should be high. * Better than 99% of the population should have indoor plumbing. * Better than 99% of the population should have reliable (360+ full 24-hour
days per year) electrical power. * There should not be any subsistence agriculture in the country at all. South Korea has only even *started* to meet these criteria quite recently, by historical (as opposed to internet) standards for what is "recent".
But, OTOH, I might note that anybody who thinks all web pages should be held to the same academic standards as formal research papers is more than slightly out of touch. What SCO has done here is ironic only because of the rediculous stance they have taken, and because the other sites in question are anti-SCO; it would not have the same impact if any random company (say, a manufacturer of motor vehicles) found on the web and posted on their own website scans of public-domain legal documents related to a court case they're involved in. I don't think anybody would bat an eye at that, under normal circumstances. It is SCO's particular situation that makes this funny.
> Do you have to cite the library from which you checked out a book you cite
No, but you have to cite the book *you* got the information from. For example, if you take something for your introduction out of a dictionary of quotations, you have to cite the dictionary of quotations, even though the material came ultimately from another source. In a case like that, it's probably enough to put the dictionary of quotations on your Works Cited page; you probably don't have to put the citation on the quote itself, because most such quotes are considered common knowledge. However, if you present information that is not considered to be common knowledge, you cite it then and there, e.g. with a footnote or an (Author, Page) citation, or whatever the style manual you're using calls for.
> "One thing users should be aware of is that Longhorn will include a new kernel > and will thus not offer the same level of compatibility with legacy 16-bit and > 32-bit code that Windows XP does today. For business users, Microsoft believes > that Virtual PC 2007 will help broaden corporations' compatibility options."
> This seems like a bad idea
No, it is what Microsoft has needed to do for several years now. Was it a bad idea when Apple did this going from OS 9 (which sucked rocks) to OS X (which is actually pretty decent)? Granted, if they're doing this, they ought to bundle VirtualPC; OS X included Classic and OS 9 OOTB for the first couple of years. But the basic idea of going to a new kernel is a good one. There was a new kernel going from DOS/Win3 to Win95, and a different (albeit not new per se) kernel going from 98/Me to 2K/XP, a _desperately_ needed change, since 9x/Me had no memory protection. But the NT kernel is itself showing its age now, and replacing it sooner, rather than later, is a Good Thing. (Someone will rush to point out how great the NT kernel's architecture design was/is, but the fact remains that it is even older than the 9x/Me kernel and has accumulated a lot of cruft.)
Slashdot Mirror
And here I was thinking document.layers died with Navigator 4, may it rest in
pieces. Are the sites that still use it, 4-6 years later?
> certainly Perl has a larger library of pre-written modules
There is that. I like the way someone else stated this:
"90% of every Perl program is already written."
Although sometimes I find myself rejecting the existing modules and rolling my own solution for something, for one reason or another. For instance, for the Open Clip Art Library, our upload facility had been using CGI::Lite to parse the form input data, but for several reasons we ended up scrapping that and rolling our own function. We could have tried another module (such as CGI.pm perhaps, or WWW::Form), but rather than deal with the quirks of these and make them fit our needs, I spent fifteen minutes rolling a custom one.
OTOH, for my personal music track database, I pretty much just slapped a wrapper around Class::DBI and called it done.
> I don't even believe by conventional programming languages they meant Java/C#.
RTFA. They list what languages they are talking about in the previous paragraph.
I also just realized the irony of your referring to C# noobs. Pretty much *every* C# programmer at this point is a C# noob, because the language is just not that old yet. (Java, however, is not hampered by this, and of course the C# noobs usually have prior C++ experience.)
> I've worked a lot in Perl and enough in C# to know that your 1:21.6 ratio
> is more than just Perl vs. C#. Maybe you're a guru Perl coder and they're
> C# noobs?
Okay, I'm pretty solidly conversant in Perl, but "guru" conjures up images of people like Ovid, and I'm nowhere *near* that category of competency. In fact, those people scare me just a little. On Larry Wall's "seven levels", I guess I'm a Perl Adept (though, I don't even meet all the criteria for that), which is two fairly significant levels below Guru (and Guru is not the top of the scale; there's Wizard above that).
> Maybe your problem domaim is lexical analysis?
Not per se, although granted, there is a lot of text processing in what I do. But then, there's a lot of text processing to be done in the world; it's a very common thing.
I will admit that I don't do GUI work in Perl (unless you count web-based frontends as GUI, which is dubious), because the available GUI-oriented modules are almost as painful to work with as the C equivalents. That's one of the things I'm hoping gets fixed in Perl6, though I fear we may have to wait longer than 6.0.
> Please, give one example of something you *could* do in an 8 hour shift
> it would take a C#/Java developer a month to do.
One example: implement a web-based database for tracking the Friends of the Library, with authentication by IP address and by username/password, that displays all the friends in a table, sortable by any field, and allows easy entering of new Friends, tracking existing friends, editing their information, and searching based on name, or based on things such as willingness to be involved in the book sale. Took me about four hours to get the basics working, and three or four more for debugging and tweaking the layout.
Granted, this example hits right smack in the middle of Perl's problem domain, but OTOH, so does almost everything I do.
And yes, a month might be a little generous; maybe I've just seen some pretty slow Java and C# programmers. Still, a ratio of 2:1 just seems really wrong to me; it takes significantly longer than that for a Java or C# programmer to wait for the compiler every time he changes anything, and nevermind about other time-saving Perl features such as the CPAN and general language goodness. I had assumed Python would be closer to Perl in this regard than to "traditional languages", which is usually secret code for "languages that are painfully hard to get anything done in".
> BeFS performance is abysmal.
It seemed fine to me. Sure, there's some overhead for the extra features, so all else being equal it's not going to perform quite as fast as a simpler filesystem like ext2, but it's not an order of magnitude worse, either, so most users would never notice.
> BeFS is metadata-only journalling.
So is ext3. So is Reiser, until version 4, which was only just released quite recently.
> BeFS fragmentation is a nightmare
I'll have to take your word on that. I never used BeOS for long enough to run into that situation. I played with 5PE for a few weeks, but ultimately it wasn't the OS I was looking for -- for reasons that had nothing to do with the filesystem.
> BeFS features are marginal
All filesystem features are marginal, that was my point. BeFS was a pretty cool piece of filesystem technology, one that filesystem designers at companies such as Microsoft are still interested in looking at and copying, but for all that, nobody really cares, because it is, after all, just a filesystem. Microsoft virtually had to hit OEMs with sticks to get them to switch from FAT32 to NTFS for default OEM installations of Windows XP. Why do you suppose that is? NTFS is in many ways a much nicer filesystem than FAT32. Why didn't everyone jump on the chance to switch to it as soon as possible? My take on that is, the OEMs figured users would place more value on the ability to access their data easily from another operating system -- something most users would never even think about, but, and here's the stinger for filesystem enthusiasts, even FEWER users would care one lick about what filesystem WinXP is using, and the various advantages of NTFS over FAT32.
The BeFS was a very interesting filesystem, as filesystems go, with very intersting features, as filesystems went, in 1998 and, frankly, for some while afterward. But, ultimately, it's just a filesystem, and nobody cares.
Prediction: if you watch Reiser4 adoption rates, they're going to be, in a word, slow. Sure, there are always a few enthusiasts. Watch, though, and see how fast Reiser4 catches on overall. Clearly, it's a superior filesystem to ext2/3. Arguably, it's much superior to NTFS. Watch as people don't all jump to using it right away based on these merits. It's just a filesystem.
(ext3 is different, because it's backward-compatible, which always improves adoption rates by several orders of magnitude.)
# Speakers told of experiments and used anecdotes to explain that programmers
# who use Python finish jobs in no more than half the time required by those
# coding in more conventional languages
The "more conventional languages" it's talking about are C# or Java, mainly.
(It also mentions XML and SQL, but you don't use Python instead of those.)
I'm trying to figure out how doing anything in a VHLL such as Python could take anywhere *near* half as long as in C# or Java. As a Perl programmer, I know that if I can't complete, test, debug, and deploy in an eight-hour shift what would take a C# programmer a month, then there's something wrong with my understanding of the problem. I would not expect Python development to be quite as fast as Perl, since it's a bit stricter about certain things, but nevertheless, I would have thought it would be a lot closer to Perl than to Java or C#. It *is* a VHLL, after all, right?
Are they just being really conservative with this claim, or is Python develpment really that slow?
> The next version would be "Infinity plus one and no returns."
Or you could go with the cardinality of the set of all permutations of an infinite set...
> did they consider they might be accidentially associated, i.e. with
> Zeta Creations?
You mean e.g. (exempli gratia), not i.e. (id est). i.e. means "that is"; whereas, e.g. means "for example". HTH.HAND.
Zeta is a letter of the Greek alphabet, so of course there are hundreds of thousands of different companies and products that use the word. If they'd called it Theta or Phi, it wouldn't be any more distinctive, and Omega would be decidedly worse.
They probably chose a Greek letter for the name because it will sound familiar both in Germany and in the US. If they'd given it a German name, it would sound foreign in the US.
> There are no marketing claims for BeOS after about 2000. If you're going
> to be evaluating the original claims for BeOS made during its brief moment
> in the sun, 1998-1999, compare those claims with what was around then, not
> what's around now.
He could have been clearer, I think he was talking about the fan base, not official company marketing claims. There are still a few loons out there claiming that BeOS has better multimedia support than current OSes, et cetera, and infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam. Which is, of course, a load of hooey, because despite what PDP-11 advocates will tell you, the software industry has, in fact, made some technological improvements in the last thirty years.
> I'm not particularly interested in ZetaOS because, in the context of 2005,
> it's not a very compelling operating system.
Exactly. Zeta is about six years too late.
> Their file system is utter crap.
Here you're wrong. The rest of what you say is largely true, albeit perhaps needlessly inflammatory, but the BeFS is actually quite good; it is today what it was in 1998, and yet, it is today what WinFS was originally supposed to be in 2004, now wants to be in 2008, and will probably not really achieve until 2012 if it keeps slipping like it has been. (The WinFS that's supposed to come out later this year (if you're optimistic) has had features cut from it that BeFS has always had, in order to meet deadlines.)
Where the BeOS fans go wrong in talking about the filesystem is this: they assume that a great filesystem is an important desktop feature that every user cares about -- when, in fact, for most users, FAT32 with the LFN extension (technically a quite horrible filesystem) would be just fine. As long as they can save their stuff and retrieve it later, almost nobody really cares, when it comes down to brass tacks, about the filesystem. I keep most of my data on FAT32 filesystems, just because they're supported by pretty much every OS, so I don't have to worry about being able to access my data. (Somebody who only uses one OS wouldn't need that portability, but somebody who only uses one OS wouldn't likely be messing with Zeta at this point, now would they?) Are there other filesystems I could use that are technically much better? Yeah. NTFS is better, but not all my OSes support it. ext2/3 is better than FAT32, but not all my OSes support it. Reiser4 is *way* better than FAT32, but guess what? Yeah, so I don't use it. And that's where BeFS is too.
> wasn't BeOS only made freely available after Be went out of business?
No, it was before, when they were still struggling.
> There was a BeOS version that loaded from within Win9x, and that has been
> now tweaked to run as a full standalone system
You're confused. 5PE was a full standalone system from the moment it was released. It had a bootloader that started out of Win95, and the installer used this for bootstrapping since it didn't come with a bootable CD, but you could also install it on its own partition, if you had one available, and boot it from any boot loader that supported booting arbitrary OSes, such as OS-BS, BOSS, or even LILO. Once you had it installed that way, you could delete the Windows partition if you wanted, and re-use the space.
Yeah, the Pro version cost money, but the Personal edition, while it didn't
have every bundled feature you could want, was not crippled in terms of
booting.
> There was printing capabilities, but only something like three printers
> were supported at the time.
It wasn't quite that bad. A lot of printers worked. Of course, that was aeons ago, and so any *recent* printer will not work in the old BeOS unless it happens to work with the driver from an old model, which is quite unlikely. That's why the Zeta team put CUPS in -- they needed support for modern printers, and they could either develop it themselves, or use an existing solution.
> Which would have been technically better as Apple's new OS - the nextstep
> based OSX, or a BeOS based OS?
I don't think it's fair to compare them. NeXT had some advantages of its own;
among other things, it was solidly multi-user with an established permissions
system; whereas, retrofitting the BeOS with that could have been messy. On
the other hand, the BeOS had some remarkable features, including a legendary
ability to deal with hardware changes as if they were perfectly normal everyday
occurrances.
The deal-sealing argument that convinces me Apple did the right thing is a
nontechnical thing, err, person: Jobs. I do wish the BeOS assets would have
been picked up by another company besides Palm, a company interested in, you
know, actually *doing* something with the technology. But I'm not sorry Apple
made the decision they did.
As far as Zeta, I fear at this point it's about six years too late. In
1999, when Apple was still working in-house on what would become OS X and
shipping their hideously nightmarish classic OS to the masses, and Microsoft
meanwhile was still shipping two OSes, one being about as stable as a house
of cards and the other going nowhere in the home user market for assorted
reasons, Zeta would have been a very interesting option. Today, it is a
fascinating historical footnote -- although, of course, there are still some
things other OSes could and should learn from it, but that is true of TOPS-20
for that matter.
The joke submissions wouldn't bother me, if they would *also* accept non-joke submissions. It appears the *only* legitimate stories they'll accept on April 1 are the ones that might plausibly be mistaken for jokes, like the Gmail story. In other words, if we want to read actual news, we can't.
What they should do is accept both regular *and* joke stories, so that you have to sort out which are which.
> Yahoo says will keep competitive to Google, and is now offering Infinity
> plus Infinity megabytes. Google replies, offering Infinity squared megabytes.
I'm holding out for at _least_ two raised to the infinity power megabytes.
Of course, in an ideal world we'd all have infinity factorial to the infinity
factorial power terabytes.
but it is clear to me that this just *needs* to be compiled against aalib, or possibly run under an aalib- based X server</a>.
> granted, using your font of choice is great for design
.png works okay). Anything else and you either have to set the point size so high it looks rediculous, or else the user's going to have trouble reading it.
On the web, it's great for *bad* design.
On paper, it's different, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the users can't possibly substitute their own preferred fonts into a paper publication, so the only two options are for the creator to choose nice ones, or for the creator to choose ones that aren't very nice (*cough* Times), don't go well together, or cetera. But there's another difference: on paper, the text is rendered to a much higher resolution, which makes it practical to use some fonts that are a decidedly bad idea on the web -- script fonts, for instance, can be tastefully used in a print publication, but on the web, for the sake of legibility, you're pretty much limited to a basic serif font, a basic sans, or something fixedwidth, unless you're doing just one or two words (in which case,
This goes in exactly the same category as every other use of Flash: ways to gratuitously make the web uglier, while at the same time also making it harder to use.
This guy needs to look up "AI Complete". Natural language parsing is not just a common example, it is *the* canonical example, the one that is NEVER left out of ANY serious discussion of the issue. Of *course* their grammar checker is worthless; *every* computer grammar checker is worthless (unless it's checking the grammar for a computer language, as opposed to a human language).
> Every post seems to be suggesting that south korea is some third world country
It was a third-world country when most of us were in school. South Korea has
really only crossed the line into being a first-world country within the last
couple of decades. Have patience; the world will catch on in time. Everyone
knows Japan is a first-world country, but they've been one for a bit longer.
Also, per-capita GDP is not the main way to determine first-world status.
Any statistic measured per-capita can be fooled by a high standard deviation.
You really want to look for certain indicating factors:
* The literacy rate (granted, for most countries, including the US, it's
impossible to get a really reliable number here) should be high.
* Better than 99% of the population should have indoor plumbing.
* Better than 99% of the population should have reliable (360+ full 24-hour
days per year) electrical power.
* There should not be any subsistence agriculture in the country at all.
South Korea has only even *started* to meet these criteria quite recently,
by historical (as opposed to internet) standards for what is "recent".
But, OTOH, I might note that anybody who thinks all web pages should be held to
the same academic standards as formal research papers is more than slightly
out of touch. What SCO has done here is ironic only because of the rediculous
stance they have taken, and because the other sites in question are anti-SCO;
it would not have the same impact if any random company (say, a manufacturer
of motor vehicles) found on the web and posted on their own website scans of
public-domain legal documents related to a court case they're involved in.
I don't think anybody would bat an eye at that, under normal circumstances.
It is SCO's particular situation that makes this funny.
> Do you have to cite the library from which you checked out a book you cite
No, but you have to cite the book *you* got the information from. For example,
if you take something for your introduction out of a dictionary of quotations,
you have to cite the dictionary of quotations, even though the material came
ultimately from another source. In a case like that, it's probably enough
to put the dictionary of quotations on your Works Cited page; you probably
don't have to put the citation on the quote itself, because most such quotes
are considered common knowledge. However, if you present information that
is not considered to be common knowledge, you cite it then and there, e.g.
with a footnote or an (Author, Page) citation, or whatever the style manual
you're using calls for.
> "One thing users should be aware of is that Longhorn will include a new kernel
> and will thus not offer the same level of compatibility with legacy 16-bit and
> 32-bit code that Windows XP does today. For business users, Microsoft believes
> that Virtual PC 2007 will help broaden corporations' compatibility options."
> This seems like a bad idea
No, it is what Microsoft has needed to do for several years now. Was it a bad idea when Apple did this going from OS 9 (which sucked rocks) to OS X (which is actually pretty decent)? Granted, if they're doing this, they ought to bundle VirtualPC; OS X included Classic and OS 9 OOTB for the first couple of years. But the basic idea of going to a new kernel is a good one. There was a new kernel going from DOS/Win3 to Win95, and a different (albeit not new per se) kernel going from 98/Me to 2K/XP, a _desperately_ needed change, since 9x/Me had no memory protection. But the NT kernel is itself showing its age now, and replacing it sooner, rather than later, is a Good Thing. (Someone will rush to point out how great the NT kernel's architecture design was/is, but the fact remains that it is even older than the 9x/Me kernel and has accumulated a lot of cruft.)