Let's examine this statement, using that nearly forgotten old craft, Logic:
Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof,' he says.
If is true that ease of use is directly tied to functionality so that a gain in one is offset by a loss in the other, this connection could be utilized to make phenomenal gains in functionality by decreasing ease of use!
There are complicated ways to do this, of course, but let's keep it simple. The programmer can do this by replacing all text with "x". Or the user can do it himself by just turning off the monitor. The program becomes almost impossible to use, so, if the author is right, it's functionality would skyrocket!
I didn't read the article, and maybe the author has a good point, but he lost the chance to tell it to me when he wrote that one immensly stupid line.
Of course. But what I said was something completely different, that a bad language makes good programmers bad.
Or in better terms, tools not suited for the task makes the end result worse. C is not a bad language, it's the best procedural language there is. But a procedural language is just not suited to build complex high quality software.
Your argument is a good example of the old fallacy (a -> b) -> (b -> a).
CORBA is a pretty complex and impractical environment to work in, but that's the price you pay to get OO programming in a platform and language independent environment. To pay that price, and not use any of the things you paid for seems really stupid.
Producing modern high quality software in a non OO language like C must be a royal pain. I guess it's goodbye to my dreams of becoming a GNOME developer when I retire with my zillions...
The thing is that if you've learned to be really really good at something, it makes it easier to be really good at other things. You learn to be skilled, and to learn, in general.
So while it's a pretty useless skill outside Quake, I don't think they're wasting their time at all!
I hear Zen monks use archery (or more recently Darts) for this purpose.
Well, it may not have come to English from Swedish - though a lot of olde english words are old viking toungue -, but "sol" is the Swedish word for "sun".
...surely it would be possible to do business with *some* non-US countries? The ones that had good security and law enforcement etc. The problem might be on the US side, you know...
As an immigrant to California from Europe, I can assure you that the US has both a more primitive banking system, more crime, and stupid bureaucracy than my home country.
Su dude, ask yourself your own question. And why not travel around the world a bit? It's fun, and it's not all like Sudan and Bosnia.
It'd be fun to go. But you can do almost anything by remote control these days. Just send over the equipment the 'nauts would have used to test the rock, and run it from earth. It saved a lot on weight & cost.
It won't take 1000 years before some punk will haul it in for the fun of it.
I suppose you could count that under "random debris".
More destructive than exctincion??
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TigerCloning
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· Score: 1
even if you overcome that barrier you still have inbreeding taken to its most extreme level. That would be even more destructive to the species than the unrestricted hunting of the past was.
How can anything be more destructive to a species than extinguishing it? Than a total holocaust?? An existing population must be better than a non existing one, even if it's not in the best health.
In time, we might find new Tiger DNA to spiff up the gene pool, or come up with some other workable solution.
Just don't give up before we've even started. Sheesh...
IMHO, an OS is something that controls and mediates access to common resources between programs. A computer running just one program accessing ram, disk etc directly, does not have an OS under this definition.
An OS enables programs to share resources
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Is UNIX An OS?
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Instead of just blurting out an opinion on what's in an OS, let me explain *why* I think what I do.
The reason an OS is needed in the first place is to let several programs all use common resources that are in limited supply.
This has always included RAM, CPU time, and disk space, and managing those resources are what the classic Unix OS does.
A modern computer has several more common resources that need to be managed. Screen area is one good example. All programs can't be allowed to write directly to the screen at will. So some kind of GUI manager *is* needed to fulfill the purpose of an OS on a modern computer. Other modern shared resources are network connections and bandwidth, audio output/input, and even the clipboard.
I'm sure you can come up with other examples. Note how it really has nothing to do with how "low level" the code is.
That part is very obvious to me. More borderline are things like interprocess communication, basic toolboxes etc.
But I'll quit here. Nobody is reading comments to a 2 days old topic anyway...
Nobody who's followed how Steve turned Apple from the most open company in the business to tighter than the Pentagon can be surprised. Apparently somebody at ATI was not aware of this, but now they are.
Apple does do the cheap spy thriller trick of releasing partially wrong info to it's people, and check which numbers turn up on the rumor sites. "MOSR says 110MHz - fire Johnsson".
So there's an "Eject" button on the new keyboard. Has anyone heard what key code this has? I'm hoping I can map it to F5 using ResEdit. It should be in the OS already, since the new keyboard will work with all USB mdels.
So if Woz has this anti-M$ article lying about, that NYT won't publish, why not publish it somewhere else. Such as here on Slashdot. I know *I* would read it!
If you just joined us without reading the full article, Woz describes how NYT asked him to write an article about the M$ case, but woudn't run it after he was too critical of M$, and he thinks it's beacause of the close ties between M$ and NYT
Whites may be 80% of the US population, but they're a bit under 50% in Silicon Valley.
In the High Tech world, the engineering departments tend to be 25% Indian, 25% Chinese, 25% European, and 25% US Citizens (all races). Really! Marketing and salespeople are far more american, since those jobs require native social skills, but to clam that white's are on top is ludocrous. If any "group" is ahead, it's asians, narrowly.
You don't see many mexicans in the high tech world though, that's true.
Secondly, the public servants here may be well paid by outside-world-standards, but in SV $50k is on the edge of poverty. It is a publicly debates issue here how to make it possible to have government workers survive, so the services they provide can be delivered. Apparently the obvious solution of paying them more is not possible in the world of government. But that's a different rant...
Existing homeowners will always oppose new home construction, since it would lower the price of their homes. Of course, they'll claim some more politically feasible excuse, but that's really the bottom line.
That is understandable, and to be expected.
It is a measure of how much government and society is geared towards the public good if they can ignore such selfish pleas from the well to do.
It depends on you application. For many, the faster deveopment cycle, fewer bugs, more maintainable code, and portability, more than makes up for the lack of speed. For hard core perfomance hungry applications, it doesn't.
That the phone is on does not mean that the display has to be on, especially if it's designed used such a limited life laterial. Only when you're actively calling, or using some other function does the screen need to be showinf stuff.
Why you need a RGB screen on you cell phone is of course quite unclear to me...
Slashdot Mirror
And exactly what is going to make it flop around?? This is in Space remember - ie. vacuum, no wind, no gravity, ...
Well, the lauch is a pretty shaky 5 g or so! Seems to me it could do a lot of damage to a big thin sheet of glass?
Let's examine this statement, using that nearly forgotten old craft, Logic:
Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof,' he says.
If is true that ease of use is directly tied to functionality so that a gain in one is offset by a loss in the other, this connection could be utilized to make phenomenal gains in functionality by decreasing ease of use!
There are complicated ways to do this, of course, but let's keep it simple. The programmer can do this by replacing all text with "x". Or the user can do it himself by just turning off the monitor. The program becomes almost impossible to use, so, if the author is right, it's functionality would skyrocket!
I didn't read the article, and maybe the author has a good point, but he lost the chance to tell it to me when he wrote that one immensly stupid line.
Languages do not make bad programmers good,
Of course. But what I said was something completely different, that a bad language makes good programmers bad.
Or in better terms, tools not suited for the task makes the end result worse. C is not a bad language, it's the best procedural language there is. But a procedural language is just not suited to build complex high quality software.
Your argument is a good example of the old fallacy (a -> b) -> (b -> a).
Exactly what I thought.
CORBA is a pretty complex and impractical environment to work in, but that's the price you pay to get OO programming in a platform and language independent environment. To pay that price, and not use any of the things you paid for seems really stupid.
Producing modern high quality software in a non OO language like C must be a royal pain. I guess it's goodbye to my dreams of becoming a GNOME developer when I retire with my zillions...
The thing is that if you've learned to be really really good at something, it makes it easier to be really good at other things. You learn to be skilled, and to learn, in general.
So while it's a pretty useless skill outside Quake, I don't think they're wasting their time at all!
I hear Zen monks use archery (or more recently Darts) for this purpose.
Well, it may not have come to English from Swedish - though a lot of olde english words are old viking toungue -, but "sol" is the Swedish word for "sun".
So now you know.
So the second set of tables are pictures showing how it should look, right? Is that page in esperanto??
Latin A displays characters everywhere, but most of them are wrong.
Latin B is mostly "?" and a few incorrect characters.
This is on an iCab 2.1, with no i18n settings tweaked (if there are any), running on a standard US MacOS 8.6.
...surely it would be possible to do business with *some* non-US countries? The ones that had good security and law enforcement etc. The problem might be on the US side, you know...
As an immigrant to California from Europe, I can assure you that the US has both a more primitive banking system, more crime, and stupid bureaucracy than my home country.
Su dude, ask yourself your own question. And why not travel around the world a bit? It's fun, and it's not all like Sudan and Bosnia.
It'd be fun to go. But you can do almost anything by remote control these days. Just send over the equipment the 'nauts would have used to test the rock, and run it from earth. It saved a lot on weight & cost.
It won't take 1000 years before some punk will haul it in for the fun of it.
I suppose you could count that under "random debris".
even if you overcome that barrier you still have inbreeding taken to its most extreme level. That would be even more destructive to the species than the unrestricted hunting of the past was.
How can anything be more destructive to a species than extinguishing it? Than a total holocaust?? An existing population must be better than a non existing one, even if it's not in the best health.
In time, we might find new Tiger DNA to spiff up the gene pool, or come up with some other workable solution.
Just don't give up before we've even started. Sheesh...
What are you going to define as "an OS"?
I don't think it's about abstraction layers.
IMHO, an OS is something that controls and mediates access to common resources between programs. A computer running just one program accessing ram, disk etc directly, does not have an OS under this definition.
Instead of just blurting out an opinion on what's in an OS, let me explain *why* I think what I do.
The reason an OS is needed in the first place is to let several programs all use common resources that are in limited supply.
This has always included RAM, CPU time, and disk space, and managing those resources are what the classic Unix OS does.
A modern computer has several more common resources that need to be managed. Screen area is one good example. All programs can't be allowed to write directly to the screen at will. So some kind of GUI manager *is* needed to fulfill the purpose of an OS on a modern computer. Other modern shared resources are network connections and bandwidth, audio output/input, and even the clipboard.
I'm sure you can come up with other examples. Note how it really has nothing to do with how "low level" the code is.
That part is very obvious to me. More borderline are things like interprocess communication, basic toolboxes etc.
But I'll quit here. Nobody is reading comments to a 2 days old topic anyway...
The biological/mechanical distinction is bogus.
We "biological" beings are in fact mechanical machines. There is nothing unmechanical about us.
Cool!
I realize it's an early version, but has anyone got a sense of how performance is, in terms of speed and memory use?
Is there a working C# implementation?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression C# is just vaporware so far.
Nobody who's followed how Steve turned Apple from the most open company in the business to tighter than the Pentagon can be surprised. Apparently somebody at ATI was not aware of this, but now they are.
Apple does do the cheap spy thriller trick of releasing partially wrong info to it's people, and check which numbers turn up on the rumor sites. "MOSR says 110MHz - fire Johnsson".
So there's an "Eject" button on the new keyboard. Has anyone heard what key code this has? I'm hoping I can map it to F5 using ResEdit. It should be in the OS already, since the new keyboard will work with all USB mdels.
So if Woz has this anti-M$ article lying about, that NYT won't publish, why not publish it somewhere else. Such as here on Slashdot. I know *I* would read it!
If you just joined us without reading the full article, Woz describes how NYT asked him to write an article about the M$ case, but woudn't run it after he was too critical of M$, and he thinks it's beacause of the close ties between M$ and NYT
You can probably get the soundclip from the siskel-ebert.com web site, once they get it up there.
Whites may be 80% of the US population, but they're a bit under 50% in Silicon Valley.
In the High Tech world, the engineering departments tend to be 25% Indian, 25% Chinese, 25% European, and 25% US Citizens (all races). Really! Marketing and salespeople are far more american, since those jobs require native social skills, but to clam that white's are on top is ludocrous. If any "group" is ahead, it's asians, narrowly.
You don't see many mexicans in the high tech world though, that's true.
Secondly, the public servants here may be well paid by outside-world-standards, but in SV $50k is on the edge of poverty. It is a publicly debates issue here how to make it possible to have government workers survive, so the services they provide can be delivered. Apparently the obvious solution of paying them more is not possible in the world of government. But that's a different rant...
Existing homeowners will always oppose new home construction, since it would lower the price of their homes. Of course, they'll claim some more politically feasible excuse, but that's really the bottom line.
That is understandable, and to be expected.
It is a measure of how much government and society is geared towards the public good if they can ignore such selfish pleas from the well to do.
It depends on you application. For many, the faster deveopment cycle, fewer bugs, more maintainable code, and portability, more than makes up for the lack of speed. For hard core perfomance hungry applications, it doesn't.
I don't know if you're right or not, but it sure is a very Dickian plot!
:-)
I'm amazed that paranoia and trusting noone and nothing can be such brilliant fun when Dick does it
That the phone is on does not mean that the display has to be on, especially if it's designed used such a limited life laterial. Only when you're actively calling, or using some other function does the screen need to be showinf stuff.
Why you need a RGB screen on you cell phone is of course quite unclear to me...