It's a democratic approach to knowledge, which reminds me of the story of the Emperor of China's nose. No one saw his nose, so they asked everyone how long it was, took the average and declared that was the length of his nose.
Democracy and accurate knowledge/innovation/sound judgement are not always good bedfellows.
I sympathise with your point of view, but hardware is pretty much just a commodity now. It's hard to find a software developer whose work needs to know about the gate level. I'd agree maybe to the assembler level, but even there, it's pretty rare these days that that's important.
When I interview I usually ask a C question about a function referencing a variable assigned in a higher stack frame, now freed. But that's more to see if they are a) interested in "how things really work", b) whether they've ever thought about it, c) how quick they can catch onto stuff etc., rather than any practical direct requirement
for the job.
Software will become a commodity too. As a (really) smart co-worker of mine said some time ago: "Our job will have the status of TV Repairman in 25 years time".
Are they not in a league? The only time it doesn't matter at all is in games that are one-offs. Anything with a league or a knockout system that has a discrete and one-dimensional measure of victory in any single game is susceptible to the same analysis.
The point about a game is that it is about performing *when it matters*, not getting a certain number of points. All votes should be equal. By your analogy, getting John Q Doe's vote in Ohio might be more valuable than John P Smith's vote in California.
It's going to be painful and resisted until it "just works" (TM), and then everyone will want to use it. So the trailblazers will most likely be techies who become suits, and want to prove themselves by saving a business loads of money by doing this. Probably banks, non?
The overheads will be enormous though, at least initially. Security issues, data issues, even logging issues have to be thought through. Any system that implements this will be *fucking* complicated to work through.
In any case, the "old timers" are often right, and call the younger guys on their technical wet dreams. In between the two camps lies progress...
Mine broke. They offered to fix it no questions asked, and sent me a box to send it in. Unfortunately it was so inconvenient to sort out sending and receiving it back again that I thought "sod it" and bought a new one...
They did all they could, though, and it was about two years old at the time, so I don't know what this guy is complaining about... unless it's differentin the states
Tit-for-tat was never the "ideal" solution (there can't be one, by definition) - it always depends on the environment (ie the other players/programs in a population). Tit for tat was simply a simple and robust algorithm that works best for many environments, but modifications to it have performed better in certain environments.
Of course if your environment consists of programs of the same type of program, then it's easy to beat tit-for-tat. As I say, it all depends on the environment. I'm surprised this is a story, to be honest.
The problem comes when you need to analyse why a library isn't working too well for you (in the real world etc etc). Then, if you haven't got the knowledge/background to udnerstand what's really going on and why something would work badly, then you're stuffed.
You may know SQL very well, but if you don't understand what the query planner's doing then you may end up writting crappy queries and unable to diagnose what's wrong with them.
APIs/Libraries save you development time, but at the cost of losing power. If all you see is dashboards, you will never know how to fix the engine!
This is utter nonsense. While MS have a lot of control over how HTML is used, the "Internet at large" is far from controlled by them, so they have little power to change it. The idea of MS stampeding over all other platforms and browsers when they can't even get half the webservers in the world to run on their code/platform is absurd.
I also disagree that MS developers are substandard or thoughtless. They are developing code for systems where the goalposts are always shifting and adherence to open standards simply doesn't carry much weight.
Microsoft aren't stupid enough to try and overthrow an infrastructure that works far better than anything they've come up with, mainly because the designers of the internet were academic engineers with lots of time and little commercial pressure.
I think it's more that it empowers you to think of a computer in the right way. It shows you that everything is built on top of very simple commands, and Java (the default language of choice for many mediocre Comp Sci courses), for example, is nothing special.
I interview people for jobs all the time, and you can tell right off who are the ones who've been taught a language as a tool (VB'ers), and who visualises a computer from the ground up. They think around problems and beyond the API.
It doesn't matter whether anyone did this before. I'm sure a great many developers wrote little scripts to grep lines for tags of their own devising in order to find left-over tasks to do. The idea that this is non-obvious or original is ridiculous.
I don't blame Microsoft for patenting these things - it's standard practice and a cost-saving measure, and these patents don't get pursued, but surely the patent office can afford to employ consultants or clerks with at least some knowledge of what's already out there, or what's easily done.
"Painting isn't "reduced to mere representation", it started out as mere representation
No it didn't. We don't know why painting started out, but we do know that painting has always been more than just representation of reality. Some periods of art privileged verisimilitude, but most haven't. Painters such as Caravaggio were judged harshly in their time for being too life-like as well as praised. Painting has been done for many reasons, and functional representation has been a reason, but never a reason alone.
And math is more than calculation! Have you guys never done math at college? There's a step called analysis that computers/calculators *don't do* - that's math too!
The point is that maths is more than simply calculation - it requires insight and understanding, just as painting requires insight and understanding whereas pointing a camera at something doesn't. (BTW, photography can be an art too, I'm aware of that)
What's the point of photographing a scene like that in such detail when you can just go and see it? Where's the human blurring, the discoloration of the image?
"You have to ask the question, `What's the point of painting a scene like this when you can reproduce it with no loss of resolution?'" says Conor Foy, a 36-year-old painter. "The resolution of this seems to be more than anything I've seen before."
What an idiotic thing to say! To reduce painting to mere representation seems like an incredibly cretinous thing for a photographer to say. It's like saying "what's the point of doing math when a computer can calulate for you?"
Distance and time are the same thing (4-dimensional spacetime). Of course, the article is flawed in the sense that it's meaningless to talk of a view of "the past". Since you can't travel faster than the speed of light, it's as much the present to us as it is the past.
A light year is a valid distance measurement since the speed of light is a constant. It's as valid as defining the distance between home and work as "10 minutes in my car travelling at a constant 60 mph".
I think you're right in that this is Linux's big chance, but Linux still has a long way to go before it really penetrates into the naive user market. Partly because "Linux" is not a monolithic entity organised and focussed enough on the end user to really win them over.
By the time Linux is pushed as a product as useful and usable as Windows, Longhorn (albeit a stunted version) may be out, and if Microsoft have learned their lessons (I suspect they will have) it will be a much better product underneath. It doesn't even have to be that good to "win".
Linux has already won the server argument; it's just a matter of time before Microsoft recedes from view in that arena.
That's if the desktop market really exists in the same way by 2006. Linux's adaptability to new devices means that MS's domination of the desktop market could be irrelevant by 2010.
In which case MS will be like IBM: a huge lumbering beast that can't change direction until it has to. When it does, though, it's hard to ignore.
Agree totally. The terms of the abstract of the first one at least are so completely vague as to be useless. It's far from clear what's supposed to be new in these patents - they describe various things which have existed in various forms for many years, and not just in computing.
For the first one, they'd also have to sue pretty much anyone who uses any sort of standardised object interface technology, including, er, Microsoft and whoever markets CORBA in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
Journo: "What do you stand for?" No. 6: "No comment" Journo: "Freedom and democracy, very good sir!"
It's a democratic approach to knowledge, which reminds me of the story of the Emperor of China's nose. No one saw his nose, so they asked everyone how long it was, took the average and declared that was the length of his nose.
Democracy and accurate knowledge/innovation/sound judgement are not always good bedfellows.
When I interview I usually ask a C question about a function referencing a variable assigned in a higher stack frame, now freed. But that's more to see if they are a) interested in "how things really work", b) whether they've ever thought about it, c) how quick they can catch onto stuff etc., rather than any practical direct requirement for the job.
Software will become a commodity too. As a (really) smart co-worker of mine said some time ago: "Our job will have the status of TV Repairman in 25 years time".
Also, I guess it has the benefit of making teams fight for every point... maybe we could use that here.
Are they not in a league? The only time it doesn't matter at all is in games that are one-offs. Anything with a league or a knockout system that has a discrete and one-dimensional measure of victory in any single game is susceptible to the same analysis.
Oh, hang on...
Note that this also trumps "web services" in Top Trumps Buzzword, since it includes it...
The overheads will be enormous though, at least initially. Security issues, data issues, even logging issues have to be thought through. Any system that implements this will be *fucking* complicated to work through.
In any case, the "old timers" are often right, and call the younger guys on their technical wet dreams. In between the two camps lies progress...
They did all they could, though, and it was about two years old at the time, so I don't know what this guy is complaining about... unless it's differentin the states
Of course if your environment consists of programs of the same type of program, then it's easy to beat tit-for-tat. As I say, it all depends on the environment. I'm surprised this is a story, to be honest.
On this subject (and seriously, folks), what's the most ridiculous level of nested emulation anyone has ever achieved?
You may know SQL very well, but if you don't understand what the query planner's doing then you may end up writting crappy queries and unable to diagnose what's wrong with them.
APIs/Libraries save you development time, but at the cost of losing power. If all you see is dashboards, you will never know how to fix the engine!
I also disagree that MS developers are substandard or thoughtless. They are developing code for systems where the goalposts are always shifting and adherence to open standards simply doesn't carry much weight.
Microsoft aren't stupid enough to try and overthrow an infrastructure that works far better than anything they've come up with, mainly because the designers of the internet were academic engineers with lots of time and little commercial pressure.
Forgive my naivety, but if Alice can't know the state of the information she's sending, how can that be communication?
I interview people for jobs all the time, and you can tell right off who are the ones who've been taught a language as a tool (VB'ers), and who visualises a computer from the ground up. They think around problems and beyond the API.
I don't blame Microsoft for patenting these things - it's standard practice and a cost-saving measure, and these patents don't get pursued, but surely the patent office can afford to employ consultants or clerks with at least some knowledge of what's already out there, or what's easily done.
No it didn't. We don't know why painting started out, but we do know that painting has always been more than just representation of reality. Some periods of art privileged verisimilitude, but most haven't. Painters such as Caravaggio were judged harshly in their time for being too life-like as well as praised. Painting has been done for many reasons, and functional representation has been a reason, but never a reason alone.
And math is more than calculation! Have you guys never done math at college? There's a step called analysis that computers/calculators *don't do* - that's math too!
The point is that maths is more than simply calculation - it requires insight and understanding, just as painting requires insight and understanding whereas pointing a camera at something doesn't. (BTW, photography can be an art too, I'm aware of that)
What's the point of photographing a scene like that in such detail when you can just go and see it? Where's the human blurring, the discoloration of the image?
What an idiotic thing to say! To reduce painting to mere representation seems like an incredibly cretinous thing for a photographer to say. It's like saying "what's the point of doing math when a computer can calulate for you?"
A light year is a valid distance measurement since the speed of light is a constant. It's as valid as defining the distance between home and work as "10 minutes in my car travelling at a constant 60 mph".
If she was hacking into his account, why did she need to hang around to get his password? She must already have had it.
Because MS do a pretty good job on Office software, and decoupling Office from the OS would be a bost for other OS'es?
I think you're right in that this is Linux's big chance, but Linux still has a long way to go before it really penetrates into the naive user market. Partly because "Linux" is not a monolithic entity organised and focussed enough on the end user to really win them over. By the time Linux is pushed as a product as useful and usable as Windows, Longhorn (albeit a stunted version) may be out, and if Microsoft have learned their lessons (I suspect they will have) it will be a much better product underneath. It doesn't even have to be that good to "win". Linux has already won the server argument; it's just a matter of time before Microsoft recedes from view in that arena. That's if the desktop market really exists in the same way by 2006. Linux's adaptability to new devices means that MS's domination of the desktop market could be irrelevant by 2010. In which case MS will be like IBM: a huge lumbering beast that can't change direction until it has to. When it does, though, it's hard to ignore.
Agree totally. The terms of the abstract of the first one at least are so completely vague as to be useless. It's far from clear what's supposed to be new in these patents - they describe various things which have existed in various forms for many years, and not just in computing. For the first one, they'd also have to sue pretty much anyone who uses any sort of standardised object interface technology, including, er, Microsoft and whoever markets CORBA in any way.