"but by now you have a codebase you don't want to have to go back and rewrite"
Of course, forward-thinking OS developers make sure that in order to write files into a preferences location (for example) you have to call "GetPreferencesFolder" and you are discouraged from using absolute paths, assuming there is such a thing as "C:" and so forth. So when the OS gets revised you don't have to rewrite anything at all. Your code does the right thing.
This is the marvelous thing about Mac OS X and its legacy Carbon APIs. I have a fairly large shareware music program that I originally wrote for Mac OS classic, and it took me about two days to get it running on Mac OS X. And I didn't have to do anything specifically for the multi-user elements of the new OS because the system environment is so well abstracted. (And it was very helpful that Apple provided the "Carbon Dater" utility which told me all the changes I needed to make, and where.)
Of course, just getting it running wasn't enough. I felt the need to redesign the appearance and to take advantage of the modernized music and sound technologies that Mac OS X provides. Now I have a program with an entirely new codebase, but one which I can now use to build future music applications. And I wrote it entirely in C++ with strong separation between TheirAPIs and MyData so I can consider faster cross-platform migration in the future.
I think if you install the developer tools and study the Apple headers you'll be pretty impressed with their forward vision and the intelligent choices their technology developers have made. (There are also very few LONG_UNWIELDY_UPPERCASE_LABELS to deal with, so code tends to be more readable.) Who knows, you might even decide to field some Mac projects in the future...?
I say, if this is what the people of Wisconsin want, then they should be allowed to have it! God bless them for finding yet another source of revenue they can piddle away until they need another fix. Maybe they want to build an "art park" In Milwaukee to compete with Chicago in the category of ostentatious waste.
I know this isn't a left-right thing, but I don't understand why a Democrat would bolster this idea, since I feel it is a tenet of the left to play hands-off with the net. At least, I consider myself pretty far-left and I certainly think this is a foolhardy idea given the current disparities in tax policy. I tend to think this guy must be in the pocket of some special interests, or he himself stands to benefit in some way.
... I wholeheartedly support plans by cities to deploy their own wireless networks. Especially those cities and counties that private companies have failed to adequately supply. The market has become too uptight and created an artificial scarcity, and it needs competition from municipalities to shake it out of its complacency.
The new regulations outlawing such measures are completely brain-dead, and do harm to the competitive environment while espousing "libertarian" values. Hell, even the venerable CATO Institute has become nothing more than a shill for corporations, and lost its ability to be objective and realistic.
From my perspective as a staunch Libertarian it is becoming increasingly clear that mixed economies provide the best soil for healthy competition, and that they do a better job of supporting the human and technological infrastructure required to foster a healthy economy.
This goes to the wider question about our increasingly mediated culture. It's as though everyone has been dying forever to have some kind of "middleware" to protect them from the requirements, risks, and complicated emotions of real life.
The impetus for this may be general laziness, or people just being too caught up in their personal work and goals to want to bother with the broader personal issues in the world and the ongoing trivial dramas of their children's emotional lives. It's a bottom-line mentality with a short-term vision, very much in the spirit of our capitalist institutions. "Externalization" is not just the way that corporations escape the collateral costs of their upkeep. It is fast becoming the goal of every individual.
An helpful motto to remember as we try to reclaim our humanity: THE INDIRECT APPROACH *NEVER* WORKS!
In the latest election Diebold delivered the election to the Repubs by an altogether sneakier means. They simply under-delivered machines to those districts which were heavily Democratic and/or delivered "broken" machines to those districts. It worked like a charm. Ohio and Florida were scrutinized closely, but there it appears that this sort of thing went on wherever Diebold and their "brother" company were involved.
"you guys are the ones that have always clamored for more government involvement in everything."
I'm not sure I agree. As a liberal-minded person myself I'm for the government staying out of our beliefs and traditions, but conversely I believe that that our systems must be designed to ensure that the collective rights we are guaranteed are provided-for. That includes elements of the public welfare that can be dealt with systematically rather than on an ad-hoc basis. In the past this has meant shoring up those areas of the government which were lacking, and today it means refining those areas and applying the latest developments in anthropology, sociology, and other sciences that deal with emergent phenomena in large populations.
I would not narrowly characterize Liberalism as "that which demands more government programs." Nor would I characterize Liberal-sponsored programs as merely "those which increase tortuous interference" either. My feeling is that Liberalism is concerned with all aspects of a given problem, and not merely shoring up the status-quo.
You must be aware that although Capitalism is an effective system there is nothing which requires any corporation to give back in proportion to its usury and/or damage. In other words, since ethics often stands in the way of the bottom-line, ethics is expendable. Therefore, systematic reform is necessary.
In the past I have been a champion of pure laissez-faire, but in recent years I have seen too much lip-service given to the laissez-fair concept in service of corporate hegemony to remain such an idealist. It seem to me that mixed socialist-capitalist economies offer the best of all worlds, preserving the health and welfare of the human infrastructure while providing a fertile ground for innovation and competition.
I know that the media and other corporate shills will continue to use any symbolism and hyperbole necessary to further their profiteering goals, but I hope that private problem-solving individuals will do better than to simply repeat their maxims and will look more deeply into the solutions we need in this critical time.
The reference to "Longtime" in the article was cute, but lately I've adopted a more cutting name for the system under development that seems to capture more of its true essence:
...which was this little program I wrote around the nascence of the internet. it took any sentence as input and kept a record of which words preceded each word, and which words followed each unique word. The idea was to build up a simple map of which words could precede or follow others completely without context. From this you could follow paths that made sentences or paths that looped forever, or paths that made no sense, and some interesting paths that made unintended sense.
Why a tree? Language and geneology seem to have a common thread. Meaning is like genetics. Language is expressive. Information is a kind of tree whose branches grow as reality elaborates and past events accumulate. New terms need to be invented for the dynamics we perceive in reality, just as new names are given to individuals as they emerge into the world. Patterns, continuity, periodicity. Such things lie at the heart of material existence and provide the hooks for consciousness itself. Information theory is the next great frontier, along with particle physics. Already they have converged and diverged and converged again. And playing with artificial trees turns out to be a lot of fun.
As for the "Meme Tree" program... The next iteration built up a more discreet map by scoring proximity of unique words in sentences and inclusion in sentences together. Again, the idea was to build a simple statistical map free of any context, simply to get a sense of pure lexical association.
The theory is that the internal consistency of these various lexical maps should roughly reflect many aspects of associative meaning. You could think of the statistical map as a Godelian bubble whose "truth" - if you will - is imposed by the laws governing the statistical associations. We don't derive the laws of language and meaning from these exercises, but we create an internally-complete map that reflects something about the nature of meaning.
There is a practical aim as well. If you can derive the strength of equivalence and the various levels and colors of associative meaning you could in theory build a "Truth Machine" capable of answering any question with a high degree of accuracy. The result of any question could be computed as any other information retrieval problem would be.
I never got around to having my little Meme Tree programs scrape the internet for random sentences. However, this should be a very simple thing to do. Google has had programming contests in the past - programs that use the Google database in interesting ways. Statistical analysis of language is basically what they do. Research projects on their data could provide stunning insights into the nature of information itself, its relation to language and to reality, and likely into our very nature as linguistic beings.
Okay, bear with me here. The impetus behind this article seems to be that discrete consciousnesses have become attached to their form and identity and wish to preserve these forms/identities by some means that transcends the material universe.
My understanding is that if you want to preserve your identity beyond the decomposition of its material medium you must first have a grasp of what the identity is, and that the means to this is a process of pure observation of consciousness which is called meditation.
Meditation provides the realization that the discrete individual consciousness is actually an illusion, and that one's identity is not bound to or defined by the material form that temporarily manifests it.
So although I certainly sympathize with the desire of beings to preserve their valued forms, I think it would be the wiser course to realize the truth about it before trying to solve the non-problem.
Another, perhaps more basic approach to the problem would be to view it in terms of pure information-theory and to seek a means to transmit serial data between parallel universes by something akin to quantum morse-code. This would be far simpler and saner than trying to unscramble a living form after squeezing it through a wormhole.
No, the prudish Americans are a tiny minority - bordering on a myth, really.
The media props up this mythical form of being in order to Disney-fy the airwaves and make anyone who lives a normal flawed human lifestyle feel like a depraved piece of shit. This helps to prop up those capitalist endeavors that rely on a cowed populus, such as the snack industry, the advertising industry, and the defense industry.
The underlying aim of the media is to teach ordinary Americans that they are in constant danger of being demonized as outsiders. They are told they can escape this alienation by joining the mass-consciousness. All they need do is practice the dubious virtues of jingoism and an unquestioning submission to authority and they will be accepted, loved, and embraced by the status-quo....They also have a lot to say about the relative value of light-skinned blonde daughters versus black-skinned kinky-haired daughters....
One major value it has is for creating basic layouts. It can then export to Word format, and then you use Word to add the integrative features like scripting and database merge.
Most documents are of the simpler sort, so for 80% of the things we use word processors for, Pages seems like it would be worth taking a chance on. Apple has a good reputation, and can be counted upon to leverage the resources built into Mac OS X imaginatively and masterfully. This is a bold new foray into the office space, and I think it will pay off.
I imagine the new headless Mac Mini, set up to auto-login to a limited Finder desktop. The kind with the tabs and buttons. And on this box are the office applications the user has access to. It has become a true office appliance.
It seems to me that companies could simply add a positive incentive and make things simple. "Inform us of a bug that leads to a security exploit and we will give you $1000.00."
Probably some would expect this to lead to rampant abuse of the system from both sides. First, when some black hacker demands $2000.00 or he won't disclose (which would be foolish) or from the other side when a company claims they already know about it and hack their own CVS repository to make it look as if they fixed the hole a week prior.
Other than these little mishaps I can't imagine why a company wouldn't want to have a bunch of volunteers vying for a prize by stress-testing their software....unless they believe that there is no such thing as impenetrable security. Now there's a blind faith.
I wonder if lawyers are trained to hypnotize their clients and always sell the non-solution over all others.
When my friend and I were looking around at libraries to write the first game for our little game software startup company we found SDL plus OpenGL to be the wisest choice by far. For one thing, as the lone coder for these games I wanted something I could compile and test on Mac OS X. For another, we wanted something that would build and run on Linux in addition to Mac OS X and Windows 98/2K/XP. SDL was the only choice.
It is inevitable (perhaps even nigh) that a Linux-based console will be marketed some time within the next 10 years. It is also clear that multi-user systems like Linux and Mac OS X have serious long-term advantages over esoteric OS's like Longtooth based on Windows NT technology, however ubiquitous they may be.
Those who produce software with a short-term outlook probably find many advantages with DirectX, but to me it seems those advantages are more due to Microsoft's support policies than to the technology itself. SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL are only going to keep going and keep getting stronger.
Damn, that's exactly what I've been saying about the whole East India Company thing. Finally somebody who agrees with me it's a waste of time to compete for resources and real estate.
I've had this self-heating sake in a can, and I have to say it's not bad. I remember wondering why self-heating cans hadn't been introduced into the USA. Then I remembered... it's the bloody USA. Some kid would stick an icepick in the bottom of the can and burn his eye and the Mad Parents' Lobby would take it as a sign of the Impending Apocalypse. The industry would be shut down post-haste to prevent children from having a potential unmediated experience.
I think something similar happened to the spork not long ago....
I can confirm that the battery life is improved. Before the update I had about 1:30 left on the battery. I gained a half hour of battery life after the update.
I'm hopeful for the day that Ideology itself is dead. Then people like yourself might recover their clarity of perception and their spontaneous free will.
Slashdot Mirror
"but by now you have a codebase you don't want to have to go back and rewrite"
Of course, forward-thinking OS developers make sure that in order to write files into a preferences location (for example) you have to call "GetPreferencesFolder" and you are discouraged from using absolute paths, assuming there is such a thing as "C:" and so forth. So when the OS gets revised you don't have to rewrite anything at all. Your code does the right thing.
This is the marvelous thing about Mac OS X and its legacy Carbon APIs. I have a fairly large shareware music program that I originally wrote for Mac OS classic, and it took me about two days to get it running on Mac OS X. And I didn't have to do anything specifically for the multi-user elements of the new OS because the system environment is so well abstracted. (And it was very helpful that Apple provided the "Carbon Dater" utility which told me all the changes I needed to make, and where.)
Of course, just getting it running wasn't enough. I felt the need to redesign the appearance and to take advantage of the modernized music and sound technologies that Mac OS X provides. Now I have a program with an entirely new codebase, but one which I can now use to build future music applications. And I wrote it entirely in C++ with strong separation between TheirAPIs and MyData so I can consider faster cross-platform migration in the future.
I think if you install the developer tools and study the Apple headers you'll be pretty impressed with their forward vision and the intelligent choices their technology developers have made. (There are also very few LONG_UNWIELDY_UPPERCASE_LABELS to deal with, so code tends to be more readable.) Who knows, you might even decide to field some Mac projects in the future...?
I say, if this is what the people of Wisconsin want, then they should be allowed to have it! God bless them for finding yet another source of revenue they can piddle away until they need another fix. Maybe they want to build an "art park" In Milwaukee to compete with Chicago in the category of ostentatious waste.
I know this isn't a left-right thing, but I don't understand why a Democrat would bolster this idea, since I feel it is a tenet of the left to play hands-off with the net. At least, I consider myself pretty far-left and I certainly think this is a foolhardy idea given the current disparities in tax policy. I tend to think this guy must be in the pocket of some special interests, or he himself stands to benefit in some way.
... I wholeheartedly support plans by cities to deploy their own wireless networks. Especially those cities and counties that private companies have failed to adequately supply. The market has become too uptight and created an artificial scarcity, and it needs competition from municipalities to shake it out of its complacency.
The new regulations outlawing such measures are completely brain-dead, and do harm to the competitive environment while espousing "libertarian" values. Hell, even the venerable CATO Institute has become nothing more than a shill for corporations, and lost its ability to be objective and realistic.
From my perspective as a staunch Libertarian it is becoming increasingly clear that mixed economies provide the best soil for healthy competition, and that they do a better job of supporting the human and technological infrastructure required to foster a healthy economy.
Now, let the real competition begin!
This goes to the wider question about our increasingly mediated culture. It's as though everyone has been dying forever to have some kind of "middleware" to protect them from the requirements, risks, and complicated emotions of real life.
The impetus for this may be general laziness, or people just being too caught up in their personal work and goals to want to bother with the broader personal issues in the world and the ongoing trivial dramas of their children's emotional lives. It's a bottom-line mentality with a short-term vision, very much in the spirit of our capitalist institutions. "Externalization" is not just the way that corporations escape the collateral costs of their upkeep. It is fast becoming the goal of every individual.
An helpful motto to remember as we try to reclaim our humanity: THE INDIRECT APPROACH *NEVER* WORKS!
.
In the latest election Diebold delivered the election to the Repubs by an altogether sneakier means. They simply under-delivered machines to those districts which were heavily Democratic and/or delivered "broken" machines to those districts. It worked like a charm. Ohio and Florida were scrutinized closely, but there it appears that this sort of thing went on wherever Diebold and their "brother" company were involved.
"you guys are the ones that have always clamored for more government involvement in everything."
I'm not sure I agree. As a liberal-minded person myself I'm for the government staying out of our beliefs and traditions, but conversely I believe that that our systems must be designed to ensure that the collective rights we are guaranteed are provided-for. That includes elements of the public welfare that can be dealt with systematically rather than on an ad-hoc basis. In the past this has meant shoring up those areas of the government which were lacking, and today it means refining those areas and applying the latest developments in anthropology, sociology, and other sciences that deal with emergent phenomena in large populations.
I would not narrowly characterize Liberalism as "that which demands more government programs." Nor would I characterize Liberal-sponsored programs as merely "those which increase tortuous interference" either. My feeling is that Liberalism is concerned with all aspects of a given problem, and not merely shoring up the status-quo.
You must be aware that although Capitalism is an effective system there is nothing which requires any corporation to give back in proportion to its usury and/or damage. In other words, since ethics often stands in the way of the bottom-line, ethics is expendable. Therefore, systematic reform is necessary.
In the past I have been a champion of pure laissez-faire, but in recent years I have seen too much lip-service given to the laissez-fair concept in service of corporate hegemony to remain such an idealist. It seem to me that mixed socialist-capitalist economies offer the best of all worlds, preserving the health and welfare of the human infrastructure while providing a fertile ground for innovation and competition.
I know that the media and other corporate shills will continue to use any symbolism and hyperbole necessary to further their profiteering goals, but I hope that private problem-solving individuals will do better than to simply repeat their maxims and will look more deeply into the solutions we need in this critical time.
The reference to "Longtime" in the article was cute, but lately I've adopted a more cutting name for the system under development that seems to capture more of its true essence:
Longtooth!
Portland is also home to Free Geek, a model for what computer reclamation / redistribution centers can accomplish.
Dude! I think you figured out why space bends.
...which was this little program I wrote around the nascence of the internet. it took any sentence as input and kept a record of which words preceded each word, and which words followed each unique word. The idea was to build up a simple map of which words could precede or follow others completely without context. From this you could follow paths that made sentences or paths that looped forever, or paths that made no sense, and some interesting paths that made unintended sense.
... The next iteration built up a more discreet map by scoring proximity of unique words in sentences and inclusion in sentences together. Again, the idea was to build a simple statistical map free of any context, simply to get a sense of pure lexical association.
Why a tree? Language and geneology seem to have a common thread. Meaning is like genetics. Language is expressive. Information is a kind of tree whose branches grow as reality elaborates and past events accumulate. New terms need to be invented for the dynamics we perceive in reality, just as new names are given to individuals as they emerge into the world. Patterns, continuity, periodicity. Such things lie at the heart of material existence and provide the hooks for consciousness itself. Information theory is the next great frontier, along with particle physics. Already they have converged and diverged and converged again. And playing with artificial trees turns out to be a lot of fun.
As for the "Meme Tree" program
The theory is that the internal consistency of these various lexical maps should roughly reflect many aspects of associative meaning. You could think of the statistical map as a Godelian bubble whose "truth" - if you will - is imposed by the laws governing the statistical associations. We don't derive the laws of language and meaning from these exercises, but we create an internally-complete map that reflects something about the nature of meaning.
There is a practical aim as well. If you can derive the strength of equivalence and the various levels and colors of associative meaning you could in theory build a "Truth Machine" capable of answering any question with a high degree of accuracy. The result of any question could be computed as any other information retrieval problem would be.
I never got around to having my little Meme Tree programs scrape the internet for random sentences. However, this should be a very simple thing to do. Google has had programming contests in the past - programs that use the Google database in interesting ways. Statistical analysis of language is basically what they do. Research projects on their data could provide stunning insights into the nature of information itself, its relation to language and to reality, and likely into our very nature as linguistic beings.
Okay, bear with me here. The impetus behind this article seems to be that discrete consciousnesses have become attached to their form and identity and wish to preserve these forms/identities by some means that transcends the material universe.
My understanding is that if you want to preserve your identity beyond the decomposition of its material medium you must first have a grasp of what the identity is, and that the means to this is a process of pure observation of consciousness which is called meditation.
Meditation provides the realization that the discrete individual consciousness is actually an illusion, and that one's identity is not bound to or defined by the material form that temporarily manifests it.
So although I certainly sympathize with the desire of beings to preserve their valued forms, I think it would be the wiser course to realize the truth about it before trying to solve the non-problem.
Another, perhaps more basic approach to the problem would be to view it in terms of pure information-theory and to seek a means to transmit serial data between parallel universes by something akin to quantum morse-code. This would be far simpler and saner than trying to unscramble a living form after squeezing it through a wormhole.
Shouldn't this be modded "funny"?
No, the prudish Americans are a tiny minority - bordering on a myth, really.
...They also have a lot to say about the relative value of light-skinned blonde daughters versus black-skinned kinky-haired daughters....
The media props up this mythical form of being in order to Disney-fy the airwaves and make anyone who lives a normal flawed human lifestyle feel like a depraved piece of shit. This helps to prop up those capitalist endeavors that rely on a cowed populus, such as the snack industry, the advertising industry, and the defense industry.
The underlying aim of the media is to teach ordinary Americans that they are in constant danger of being demonized as outsiders. They are told they can escape this alienation by joining the mass-consciousness. All they need do is practice the dubious virtues of jingoism and an unquestioning submission to authority and they will be accepted, loved, and embraced by the status-quo.
One major value it has is for creating basic layouts. It can then export to Word format, and then you use Word to add the integrative features like scripting and database merge.
Most documents are of the simpler sort, so for 80% of the things we use word processors for, Pages seems like it would be worth taking a chance on. Apple has a good reputation, and can be counted upon to leverage the resources built into Mac OS X imaginatively and masterfully. This is a bold new foray into the office space, and I think it will pay off.
I imagine the new headless Mac Mini, set up to auto-login to a limited Finder desktop. The kind with the tabs and buttons. And on this box are the office applications the user has access to. It has become a true office appliance.
That's what I would do as a young student with a DNA machine.
It seems to me that companies could simply add a positive incentive and make things simple. "Inform us of a bug that leads to a security exploit and we will give you $1000.00."
...unless they believe that there is no such thing as impenetrable security. Now there's a blind faith.
Probably some would expect this to lead to rampant abuse of the system from both sides. First, when some black hacker demands $2000.00 or he won't disclose (which would be foolish) or from the other side when a company claims they already know about it and hack their own CVS repository to make it look as if they fixed the hole a week prior.
Other than these little mishaps I can't imagine why a company wouldn't want to have a bunch of volunteers vying for a prize by stress-testing their software.
I wonder if lawyers are trained to hypnotize their clients and always sell the non-solution over all others.
I believe that consciousness - in the sense of pure luminous awareness - is the primary substance (above emptiness) of reality.
I can't prove it to you, but I have had enough subjective experiences that reinforce it for myself.
When my friend and I were looking around at libraries to write the first game for our little game software startup company we found SDL plus OpenGL to be the wisest choice by far. For one thing, as the lone coder for these games I wanted something I could compile and test on Mac OS X. For another, we wanted something that would build and run on Linux in addition to Mac OS X and Windows 98/2K/XP. SDL was the only choice.
It is inevitable (perhaps even nigh) that a Linux-based console will be marketed some time within the next 10 years. It is also clear that multi-user systems like Linux and Mac OS X have serious long-term advantages over esoteric OS's like Longtooth based on Windows NT technology, however ubiquitous they may be.
Those who produce software with a short-term outlook probably find many advantages with DirectX, but to me it seems those advantages are more due to Microsoft's support policies than to the technology itself. SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL are only going to keep going and keep getting stronger.
Damn, that's exactly what I've been saying about the whole East India Company thing. Finally somebody who agrees with me it's a waste of time to compete for resources and real estate.
PRESbyteriAnS!
PRESbyteriAn!
And in the US all the papers blared...
"Could This Signal the Beginning of the End for SCO?"
Wait, what were we talking about?
I've had this self-heating sake in a can, and I have to say it's not bad. I remember wondering why self-heating cans hadn't been introduced into the USA. Then I remembered... it's the bloody USA. Some kid would stick an icepick in the bottom of the can and burn his eye and the Mad Parents' Lobby would take it as a sign of the Impending Apocalypse. The industry would be shut down post-haste to prevent children from having a potential unmediated experience.
I think something similar happened to the spork not long ago....
I can confirm that the battery life is improved. Before the update I had about 1:30 left on the battery. I gained a half hour of battery life after the update.
I'm hopeful for the day that Ideology itself is dead. Then people like yourself might recover their clarity of perception and their spontaneous free will.