For example, the study notes that "On the positive side, the results indicate some benefits on cognitive skills". So in fact there was some measurable benefit to the student having the computers. Also they note that students learned basic computer skills -- something presumably they would not be able to do without a computer.
What is interesting is that only 40% of the students were allowed to take the computer home. And it also looks like they mostly don't have access to the internet. Both of those would have to be fixed before I feel like we have done a real test of this program.
Thanks for mentioning the Drake equation. Slowly but surely we are chipping away at the variables in that famous equation. Michael Crichton gave a famous lecture harshly mocking the Drake equation (emphasis is mine):
N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL
Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.
This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. ETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.
The question is who did the people of Florida actually intend to be president. I don't care if it "would take a long time", the point is to accurately reflect the will of the people. We need to trust that the system is working correctly. The hasty intervention of the Supreme Court needlessly opened a deep wound in this country. Many felt that it was justice denied not "sparing" us anything.
Now as to who the people of Florida actually intended to elect it is pretty clear that it was Gore. Check out this summary from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-05-10 -recountmain.htm. It is interesting to note that there we a lot structural issues that were working against Gore.
So why are we even talking about this? Because until we have a voting system that everyone can trust we are not really living in a democracy.
I just read the Childrens Crusade article, and I think it is great!
Here is how it starts:
The Children's Crusade (1212) is the name given to a possibly fictional and curious attempt to 'free' the Holy Land inspired by the 12-year old French boy Stephen de Cloyes. Several conflicting accounts of this event exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians
If that is not a clear enough warning, I don't know what is. The text made it clear to me anyways that the first stories are very likely to be just a legend. Ironically, the beauty of a wikipedia is that anytime you point out a flaw saying, "see it doesn't work!", will just mean that particular flaw is quickly fixed.
Re:Play nice with Piers Anthony
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Singularity Sky
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· Score: 1
You are absolutely right. Just recognize that there are much, much better writers out there.
The biggest problem I have with Piers is that his characters are almost always two-dimensional. That is to say, there is no real emotional connection or development.
When I was younger I also read a *lot* of Piers (mainly his Xanth fantasy series), and I don't regret it, but when I try to read it now I don't find issues that interest me as an adult.
Click on the above reference link -- it shows an interesting graphic showing the KiloWatt hour cost of electricity in Europe -- it looks like they are charging roughly the same or *less* than in the U.S. (as of 1997, though).
Then click on the "Return to Electricity DeregulationText" link. The article is a nice, even-handed evaluation of electricity deregulation.
The assumption is that deregulation lowers prices for the consumer. It would be interesting to look at all the places that have deregulated their electicity utilities, and see whether or not the prices actually went down.
If the only point of this was to create a direct replacement for Mozilla, et al. you are right -- there is no need for this.
However, as a Java developer I see a *lot* of potential in this. First of all, I currently have a need for a rich text control that uses html. It technically doesn't have to be html, but why force users to learn some weird homebrew mark up language? Or worse force a proprietary one on them. Also there are lots of html editors that they can make use of. I've looked around and there does not appear to be many polished, open-source html text controls for Java. So if all this project does is create a nice and powerful Java html widget they will have done a very good thing.
But lets step back and look at the bigger picture. I think we might have frozen a little prematurely on the UI for web browsing. Wouldn't it be fun to experiment a little bit more? For example, how about a mostly html based game that uses a special browser? Or how about experimenting with better ways of keeping track of history? For example, what if you kept a reduced snap shot of every page you visited? This is how HyperCard worked, and I found it very useful.
The advantage of doing this in Java is that it is (for many programmers at least) a more productive language than C/C++. My hope is that this project encourages people to play around with what a web browser can be and maybe stretch it a little bit.
The secret to enjoying running is to go into "flow". If you are a programmer, you already know what I mean by "flow" because you have already experienced it while programming. It is that state where time just seems to fly by.
The way to do this with running is to find the right pace. If you are getting bored, start running faster, if you are gasping for breath run slower. Of course, you have to have a certain basic level of fitness to work, but when you do it works really well. I find that I do some of my best thinking while I run.
When I went to U. of C. the ratio of men to women was 65% men to 35% women. To make it even worse, many of the women were so focused on their studies that they did not want to be distracted by dating (it's a pretty serious school!), so the real ratio was even worse.
I wonder what the ratio is today. But then, after looking at this list, it seems *really* likely that it hasn't changed much:-). I wouldn't say this list is particularily female friendly.
I can still remember doing the scavenger hunt, it was the most fun I had there. Looks like there has been a bit of escalation since then.
I actually started on the Atkins diet as a result of that NYT article. I have been wondering how healthy this diet is long term so I turned to this article with interest. Unfortunately the writer apparently never bothered to actually find out the specifics of the Atkins diet.
Some misconceptions:
* Can't eat many vegetables such as carrots. Actually there are three different phases of the diet, and only on the first and shortest phase is this true.
* Lacking in vitamins. Again this is mainly true of the first phase and less so in the later phases. The Atkins book *strongly* emphasizes the need for taking a wide range of vitamins. Only someone who never read the book could not have noticed this -- vitamin taking is an integral part of the diet! And at any rate now that I am on the long term maintaining part of the diet, I doubt that I am lacking in vitamin intake now.
* The diet is boring and focused mainly on saturated fats meat (ie beef). Again, only someone who has not looked into this diet seriously could make such a claim. Ironically, as a result of this diet I have been eating much *more* vegetables than I would have otherwise. I've also been eating a wider range of foods.
But even more important than that is that she never directly comes to terms with the first articles main theses -- it is an outright scandal that the Atkins test has never been properly tested. Her response is just the sarcastic:
"Why hasn't the government tested it? One possible reason is that it is unlikely to be approved by any review committee, given what is known about the effects of animal fats and cholesterol on the risk of heart disease, strokes and some cancers, as well as accumulating evidence that diets rich in fruits and vegetables and moderate in protein and fat can prevent diseases like high blood pressure, prostate cancer, heart disease and diabetes."
In other words the first NYT article was right -- the establishment already knew what was the correct answer and weren't about to let an inconvenient thing like science get in the way! The problem this poses for me is that when I try to find truly, objective scientific points of view -- they are hard to find if they exist at all in the world of nutrition!
I saw your post in another forum touting Net Terrarium, so I downloaded it. It turns out that Net Terrarium, an official Microsoft example product for.Net does not run, ironically, on my MSN DSL system. The problem, apparently is because I don't have a static IP. That is a pretty common, major problem -- that pretty much wipes everybody out from using it.
The Java alternative, JXTA (at jxta.org) handles this with the notion of http peers. Java has a surprising number of thriving open source projects (JBoss, Ant, JXTA, Tomcat, Jetty, etc.).
And then you have just plain fun events like this Robocode.
GUI's still aren't good enough
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Do You Remember Bob?
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· Score: 5, Informative
OK, first I have to admit that I was one of the developers for Bob. Don't hold it against me, it has been a long time since I worked for Microsoft. Most of the other Bob developers have long since left as well.
Bob, was one of the very, very few truly creative product attempts for the general market Microsoft has ever made. The first version was deeply flawed, but it also had some very good ideas. Microsoft is not very comfortable with the messiness of creativity and so like a foreign microbe Bob got expelled before these problems could be fixed. Version 2 got cancelled just a week before going into general beta.
The product started out as skunk works, and if it had stayed like that, we might have done a better job. However, I think the biggest curse was that mid-project our Product Unit Manager (PUM) became Melinda French, soon to become Melissa Gates. Melinda never had much direct say in the product, but she was obviously very well connected. We then got showered with money and developers and it went to our heads. It has become a very good object lesson to me on the dangers of over-engineering.
What I find distressing, though is that the good ideas that were in Bob are ignored, and no other product seems to be picking them up.
Here are some of the key ideas:
* Menus are not necessarily the best UI. Think about it; they are passive, they quite often show lots of options that are in appropriate, and the commands are stuffed in all sorts of weird places. Even experienced users have trouble finding some of the options.
* A shockingly high percentage of people are still scared of computers. If you are truly going to create consumer software you have to address this somehow.
* UI is a conversation. GUI's are built on the realization that we are very visual creatures. But what about tapping into our sociability? We are very social creatures. There is a body of evidence that shows that people interact in a social way with their computer (really!). That is where the characters come in -- in extensive usability tests we found a real benefit to them. They helped allay the fear factor and they served as a useful UI metaphor -- UI as a conversation. By the way, the characters were always completely optional -- there was a very easy way to turn them off completely.
*Task basked UI. Most programs are general purpose programs that do quite a number of things. The only problem is that the vast majority of people only use a small fraction of the features. One solution is to take the code for word processing and present it as a family of specialized tasks. So you would end up with a letter writer, a report writer, an e-mail writer, a list maker, etc.
I wrote Bob's Letter Writer. This may sound like a weird specialization, but since we knew that people using this particular program were just writing letters, we could do a great job of making mail merge easy, and also doing neat graphic effects (ala Publisher) that would appeal to someone writing a letter to a friend.
* Files are a low level concept. I mean really -- why should the common user have to care about such a geeky thing as a file? They just want to get their document. They could care less about whatever low level construct the developers have come up with to store this information, and really they shouldn't have to. It is weird that we still do not have an object oriented OS. My biggest disappointment with Linux is that it has done very little to push forward truly new ideas (I'm still rooting for it though).
On a technical side, the reason why Bob performed so poorly was because we tried to create the very first OLE component system that worked just as well for C++ as for Visual Basic. VB was not yet up to the challenge, and yet most of the apps were done in VB. We also used every Microsoft technology (the Jet database engine, the Quill word processing engine, VBA, etc.) and yet machines of that time only had 4 megabytes of memory! We required way too much memory for the time -- probably around 12 MB. The graphics looked bad because we had such a tight memory budget that we did not use any bitmaps at all. Everything was done with meta files (vector objects). On top of that we had to write to Windows 3.1 -- 16 bit programming.
When I first started programming, there was a raging argument about one language that was super efficient, but a bit hard to program vs. this other language that was not quite as efficient but much easier to program in. Sound familiar? The languages in question were Assember vs. C. I also saw the same arguments with C vs. C++.
What you have to remember is that programmers are way more expensive than machines. If I can spend $5000 more on hardware and save myself $25,000 in salary costs, that is a pretty good investment.
And of course this all is based on getting more powerful machines each year. There was a time when programmers really did have to agonize over using Assembler vs. C because memory was so tight.
There also was a time when we had to agonize over using C++ vs. Java, but that time has passed.
The rise of Java (or C# or one of the other new and improved languages) is inevitable. But if it is any comfort Java too will be replaced one day as soon as we can afford the next programmer productivity boost.
You are going to have a great time! I volunteered to teach programming at my local school and it was deeply fulfilling. I did this for five years.
I chose Logo after reading Seymour Papert's Mindstorms : Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. It is a very inspirational, powerful book and I highly recommend it. The Logo language may appear to be simple but there is some very deep thinking behind it.
The best Logo that I could find was Microworlds. It is a very nicely done program and runs on both Mac and Windows. This link talks about it:
http://www.kidsandcomputers.com/index.cfm
Here is a fun way to start: First have the kids program a square, then a triangle, then a pentagon. Let them start to see that in all of these shapes they are basically asking the turtle to rotate 360 degrees, and that a circle can be thought of as a many sided polygon.
One of the many joys of Logo is that it brings kids into the realm of math and logic without them even really thinking about it. The turtle might seem hoky, but it helps enormously with the abstraction. If the kids get stuck on an algorithm, have them pretend they are the turtle and make them step through their program.
Enjoy -- you are going to be surprised how much fun this is!
I worked in Japan for 4 years as a programmer, and I am somewhat fluent in Japanese. I also was project lead for a commercial Japanese computer dictionary.
Don't be fooled, this is not a technical article, but instead a political rant. I've talked to some of the designers of Unicode, and they tried to be very, very respectful of Asian wishes, But all of the nations of Asia refuse to cooperate on most things including character encodings.
While I worked in Japan officials claimed that Japan could not import beef because Japanese have evolved longer intestines and therefore can't properly digest red meat. This is laughably not true, but many Japanese still believe it. They also claimed that ski gear couldn't be imported because Japanase snow (hence the laws of physics) is fundamentally different in Japan. And of course they claim they couldn't possibly import another character set because their characters are unique.
One thing that was never mentioned in the article was the difference between a glyph (how a character looks) and what it means. So for example the letter "A" and "A" are the same characters but they have different glyphs.
What the unicode designers did was to identify all of the unique characters in all the mainstream languages. It turns out that Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China share a large number of characters. This should not be terribly surprising because all of these countries directly imported their characters from China. What does differ from country to country is how those characters are represented.
A lot of Asians, seem to really hate the idea of using the same code point for the same characters mainly, I think, because they don't really like the idea of sharing *anything* with the other countries. It is a political and cultural thing, not a technical thing. From a technical point of view it is just gross to think of assigning multiple codepoints for the exact same character.
Which is not to say that Unicode is perfect. Unicode, for better or worse, solves just the problem of encoding the unique characters, it has very little to say about the font problem. That however is still a wonderful thing to solve -- you no longer have to worry about losing meaning, at worst the characters might end up looking a little funny.
And Unicode works. In creating our Japanese dictionary we were forced to use Shift-JIS (one of the Japanese standards), and it was just horrible because there were so many Chinese characters outside the standard Shift-JIS encoding that we needed. Unicode would have greatly simplified the problem for us.
I worked as a programmer in Japan for 4 year, and I've also done several projects in Unicode.
There are couple of things I would like to point out:
>>Japan and Korea get no benefit from Unicode. In fact, their ISO 2022 encodings are at least in "alphabetical order" for the relevant alphabets. Unicode is just a jumble.
I can't speak for Korean, but there is no such thing as an alphabetic order for Kanji. In Japanese, Kanji almost always have at least two pronunciations, and often more.
>>The Japanese hate Unicode. If you bother to ask them, which the web did not, you find a loud and impolite dislike for Unicode. The Japanese want their ISO 2022 solution, aka shift-JIS.
Have you ever tried to program in shift-JIS? It is horrific. Basically they mix one byte and two byte characters. The problem is that if you jump into the middle of the string there is no way to know if you are looking at a one byte character or the second byte of a two byte character. You also can't do tell the number of characters in a string simply by looking at the length. It is a *terrible* standard.
I see a lot of joy about the death of clippy. What is getting ignored here is that software is still too hard to use.
The vast majority of users use are still somewhat intimidated by computers and do not even begin to make use of their full power. Don't believe me? Try watching a "normal" user work with their computer. How about sitting in on customer support calls? It is a deeply humbling experience. Software is still not good enough.
So what is the solution?
How about for starters rethinking the entire GUI paradigm. I mean Xerox Parc was way ahead of the curve back in the late 70's, but maybe it is time that we try and rethink things a bit.
For starters, what's so sacred about the menu bar? It is just this inert thing that shows me a list of commands where most are inappropriate for the work at hand. It is also quite cryptic. I agree that the clip guy was not implemented that well, but as a replacement for the menu bar it has potential.
Another thing to think about is that we are social creatures. And suprisingly, tests have shown that we unconsciously work with computer in a social manner. The clip guy is a start towards making that social interaction explicit. That may not sound like much, but consider that the whole point of GUI is to tap into an intuition about how our brains work.
I think people should be able to choose their UI. Ultimately I think software should be able to morph between serving people who only use a product several times a month and people who use that same product day in and day out. People who don't use the product that often would probably prefer more agent interactions (such as an improved Bob like interface), and people who use the product everyday would prefer a more bare to the metal interface. With computers as powerful as they are today there should be no serious problem providing both UI's for a program.
Is it only me, but doesn't this seem like this is an unusually clear case of monopoly abuse?
I've set up four DSL lines, and I've had to work with both Verizon and Northpoint. There is no comparison between them -- Northpoint was far superior in every way. Northpoint was an ambitious, customer focused company. Verizon was a fat and lazy monopoly.
I do not understand the economics at play, but I do know that Verizon was actively trying to sabotage companies like Northpoint. Then they did a clever head fake -- Verizon signed an agreement to acquire Northpoint, but then conveniently decided to not honor that agreement. Oops! Too late for you to look elsewhere for financing, game over. And where is a disgruntled customer like me going to go anyways? All roads lead back to Verizon.
After my Northpoint connection was shut down, I reluctantly called Verizon. After first telling me that my line did not qualify for a DSL connection (wrong), someone eventually told me that I just would have to wait in line for them to provision more DSL connections.
Again this looks like a classic case of monopoly abuse -- as least as bad as anything as Microsoft has ever done. So why don't we hear more about this?
-- Eventually all discussions end up comparing one of the participants to Hitler, that's when you know the conversation has ended.
I think they do a great wedding website. They let you combine your registries from many different companies (including all of the ones mentioned so far)
They also let you set up a wedding website to give people info on all the what/when/where stuff.
They also have a number of useful features such as an app to track wedding guests, an app to generate text for invites, etc. My fiancee has been spending a lot of time at this site!:-)
My Northpoint account is going to be cancelled, and the only alternative I have is... Verizon. Is it truly a coincidence that Verizon decided to just let Northpoint wither on the vine?
Before signing up for a Northpoint account, I had a very expensive Verizon account. The service was just awful -- customer service was bureaucratic, and the connection kept on going down. Now I have no choice but to go back to their higher fees and terrible service.
This looks to me like a clear case of monopoly abuse. I believe in the power of the free market, but what are we going to do when we have companies like Verizon that are sitting on all of those last mile wires?
There is an even deeper problem here. I firmly believe that a lot of the.com implosion is due to the fact that most people are still trapped with modem access. The masses have no idea of what using the internet is like when using something like DSL. Have you ever tried to shop online using a modem connection? I'm surprised that so many people still do -- it is not a pleasant experience.
But now that monopolistic companies like Verizon are sucessfully crushing startups like Northpoint,
how are we going to get broadband out to the masses? Certainly not from Verizon -- if you don't believe me just try signing up for service from them. I believe you will be quite surprised by how difficult the process typically is. Verizon just does not know how to do good customer service, but they are good at making sure that they don't have to learn how.
This is a big deal for all of us. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm afraid it might be political.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone is commenting on a summary of a summary. The original study is much more interesting: http://idbdocs.iadb.org/wsdocs/getdocument.aspx?docnum=36706954. Please check it out -- the summaries leave out some really interesting information.
For example, the study notes that "On the positive side, the results indicate some benefits on cognitive skills". So in fact there was some measurable benefit to the student having the computers. Also they note that students learned basic computer skills -- something presumably they would not be able to do without a computer.
What is interesting is that only 40% of the students were allowed to take the computer home. And it also looks like they mostly don't have access to the internet. Both of those would have to be fixed before I feel like we have done a real test of this program.
We now are finding lots of extra-solar planets, and have moved on to analzying some of their atmospheres. Is SETI really a "religion"?
The question is who did the people of Florida actually intend to be president. I don't care if it "would take a long time", the point is to accurately reflect the will of the people. We need to trust that the system is working correctly. The hasty intervention of the Supreme Court needlessly opened a deep wound in this country. Many felt that it was justice denied not "sparing" us anything.
0 -recountmain.htm. It is interesting to note that there we a lot structural issues that were working against Gore.
Now as to who the people of Florida actually intended to elect it is pretty clear that it was Gore. Check out this summary from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-05-1
So why are we even talking about this? Because until we have a voting system that everyone can trust we are not really living in a democracy.
Here is how it starts:
The Children's Crusade (1212) is the name given to a possibly fictional and curious attempt to 'free' the Holy Land inspired by the 12-year old French boy Stephen de Cloyes. Several conflicting accounts of this event exist, and the facts of the situation continue to be a subject of debate among historians
If that is not a clear enough warning, I don't know what is. The text made it clear to me anyways that the first stories are very likely to be just a legend. Ironically, the beauty of a wikipedia is that anytime you point out a flaw saying, "see it doesn't work!", will just mean that particular flaw is quickly fixed.
You are absolutely right. Just recognize that there are much, much better writers out there.
The biggest problem I have with Piers is that his characters are almost always two-dimensional. That is to say, there is no real emotional connection or development.
When I was younger I also read a *lot* of Piers (mainly his Xanth fantasy series), and I don't regret it, but when I try to read it now I don't find issues that interest me as an adult.
Click on the above reference link -- it shows an interesting graphic showing the KiloWatt hour cost of electricity in Europe -- it looks like they are charging roughly the same or *less* than in the U.S. (as of 1997, though).
Then click on the "Return to Electricity DeregulationText" link. The article is a nice, even-handed evaluation of electricity deregulation.
The assumption is that deregulation lowers prices for the consumer. It would be interesting to look at all the places that have deregulated their electicity utilities, and see whether or not the prices actually went down.
If the only point of this was to create a direct replacement for Mozilla, et al. you are right -- there is no need for this.
However, as a Java developer I see a *lot* of potential in this. First of all, I currently have a need for a rich text control that uses html. It technically doesn't have to be html, but why force users to learn some weird homebrew mark up language? Or worse force a proprietary one on them. Also there are lots of html editors that they can make use of. I've looked around and there does not appear to be many polished, open-source html text controls for Java. So if all this project does is create a nice and powerful Java html widget they will have done a very good thing.
But lets step back and look at the bigger picture. I think we might have frozen a little prematurely on the UI for web browsing. Wouldn't it be fun to experiment a little bit more? For example, how about a mostly html based game that uses a special browser? Or how about experimenting with better ways of keeping track of history? For example, what if you kept a reduced snap shot of every page you visited? This is how HyperCard worked, and I found it very useful.
The advantage of doing this in Java is that it is (for many programmers at least) a more productive language than C/C++. My hope is that this project encourages people to play around with what a web browser can be and maybe stretch it a little bit.
The secret to enjoying running is to go into "flow".
If you are a programmer, you already know what I mean by "flow" because you have already experienced it while programming. It is that state where time just seems to fly by.
The way to do this with running is to find the right pace. If you are getting bored, start running faster, if you are gasping for breath run slower. Of course, you have to have a certain basic level of fitness to work, but when you do it works really well. I find that I do some of my best thinking while I run.
When I went to U. of C. the ratio of men to women was 65% men to 35% women. To make it even worse, many of the women were so focused on their studies that they did not want to be distracted by dating (it's a pretty serious school!), so the real ratio was even worse.
I wonder what the ratio is today. But then, after looking at this list, it seems *really* likely that it hasn't changed much:-). I wouldn't say this list is particularily female friendly.
I can still remember doing the scavenger hunt, it was the most fun I had there. Looks like there has been a bit of escalation since then.
I actually started on the Atkins diet as a result of that NYT article. I have been wondering how healthy this diet is long term so I turned to this article with interest. Unfortunately the writer apparently never bothered to actually find out the specifics of the Atkins diet.
Some misconceptions:
* Can't eat many vegetables such as carrots. Actually there are three different phases of the diet, and only on the first and shortest phase is this true.
* Lacking in vitamins. Again this is mainly true of the first phase and less so in the later phases. The Atkins book *strongly* emphasizes the need for taking a wide range of vitamins. Only someone who never read the book could not have noticed this -- vitamin taking is an integral part of the diet! And at any rate now that I am on the long term maintaining part of the diet, I doubt that I am lacking in vitamin intake now.
* The diet is boring and focused mainly on saturated fats meat (ie beef). Again, only someone who has not looked into this diet seriously could make such a claim. Ironically, as a result of this diet I have been eating much *more* vegetables than I would have otherwise. I've also been eating a wider range of foods.
But even more important than that is that she never directly comes to terms with the first articles main theses -- it is an outright scandal that the Atkins test has never been properly tested. Her response is just the sarcastic:
"Why hasn't the government tested it? One possible reason is that it is unlikely to be approved by any review committee, given what is known about the effects of animal fats and cholesterol on the risk of heart disease, strokes and some cancers, as well as accumulating evidence that diets rich in fruits and vegetables and moderate in protein and fat can prevent diseases like high blood pressure, prostate cancer, heart disease and diabetes."
In other words the first NYT article was right -- the establishment already knew what was the correct answer and weren't about to let an inconvenient thing like science get in the way! The problem this poses for me is that when I try to find truly, objective scientific points of view -- they are hard to find if they exist at all in the world of nutrition!
I saw your post in another forum touting Net Terrarium, so I downloaded it. It turns out that Net Terrarium, an official Microsoft example product for .Net does not run, ironically, on my MSN DSL system. The problem, apparently is because I don't have a static IP. That is a pretty common, major problem -- that pretty much wipes everybody out from using it.
The Java alternative, JXTA (at jxta.org) handles this with the notion of http peers. Java has a surprising number of thriving open source projects (JBoss, Ant, JXTA, Tomcat, Jetty, etc.).
And then you have just plain fun events like this Robocode.
OK, first I have to admit that I was one of the developers for Bob. Don't hold it against me, it has been a long time since I worked for Microsoft. Most of the other Bob developers have long since left as well.
Bob, was one of the very, very few truly creative product attempts for the general market Microsoft has ever made. The first version was deeply flawed, but it also had some very good ideas. Microsoft is not very comfortable with the messiness of creativity and so like a foreign microbe Bob got expelled before these problems could be fixed. Version 2 got cancelled just a week before going into general beta.
The product started out as skunk works, and if it had stayed like that, we might have done a better job. However, I think the biggest curse was that mid-project our Product Unit Manager (PUM) became Melinda French, soon to become Melissa Gates. Melinda never had much direct say in the product, but she was obviously very well connected. We then got showered with money and developers and it went to our heads. It has become a very good object lesson to me on the dangers of over-engineering.
What I find distressing, though is that the good ideas that were in Bob are ignored, and no other product seems to be picking them up.
Here are some of the key ideas:
* Menus are not necessarily the best UI. Think about it; they are passive, they quite often show lots of options that are in appropriate, and the commands are stuffed in all sorts of weird places. Even experienced users have trouble finding some of the options.
* A shockingly high percentage of people are still scared of computers. If you are truly going to create consumer software you have to address this somehow.
* UI is a conversation. GUI's are built on the realization that we are very visual creatures. But what about tapping into our sociability? We are very social creatures. There is a body of evidence that shows that people interact in a social way with their computer (really!). That is where the characters come in -- in extensive usability tests we found a real benefit to them. They helped allay the fear factor and they served as a useful UI metaphor -- UI as a conversation. By the way, the characters were always completely optional -- there was a very easy way to turn them off completely.
*Task basked UI. Most programs are general purpose programs that do quite a number of things. The only problem is that the vast majority of people only use a small fraction of the features. One solution is to take the code for word processing and present it as a family of specialized tasks. So you would end up with a letter writer, a report writer, an e-mail writer, a list maker, etc.
I wrote Bob's Letter Writer. This may sound like a weird specialization, but since we knew that people using this particular program were just writing letters, we could do a great job of making mail merge easy, and also doing neat graphic effects (ala Publisher) that would appeal to someone writing a letter to a friend.
* Files are a low level concept. I mean really -- why should the common user have to care about such a geeky thing as a file? They just want to get their document. They could care less about whatever low level construct the developers have come up with to store this information, and really they shouldn't have to. It is weird that we still do not have an object oriented OS. My biggest disappointment with Linux is that it has done very little to push forward truly new ideas (I'm still rooting for it though).
On a technical side, the reason why Bob performed so poorly was because we tried to create the very first OLE component system that worked just as well for C++ as for Visual Basic. VB was not yet up to the challenge, and yet most of the apps were done in VB. We also used every Microsoft technology (the Jet database engine, the Quill word processing engine, VBA, etc.) and yet machines of that time only had 4 megabytes of memory! We required way too much memory for the time -- probably around 12 MB. The graphics looked bad because we had such a tight memory budget that we did not use any bitmaps at all. Everything was done with meta files (vector objects). On top of that we had to write to Windows 3.1 -- 16 bit programming.
When I first started programming, there was a raging argument about one language that was super efficient, but a bit hard to program vs. this other language that was not quite as efficient but much easier to program in. Sound familiar? The languages in question were Assember vs. C. I also saw the same arguments with C vs. C++.
What you have to remember is that programmers are way more expensive than machines. If I can spend $5000 more on hardware and save myself $25,000 in salary costs, that is a pretty good investment.
And of course this all is based on getting more powerful machines each year. There was a time when programmers really did have to agonize over using Assembler vs. C because memory was so tight.
There also was a time when we had to agonize over using C++ vs. Java, but that time has passed.
The rise of Java (or C# or one of the other new and improved languages) is inevitable. But if it is any comfort Java too will be replaced one day as soon as we can afford the next programmer productivity boost.
You are going to have a great time! I volunteered to teach programming at my local school and it was deeply fulfilling. I did this for five years.
I chose Logo after reading Seymour Papert's Mindstorms : Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. It is a very inspirational, powerful book and I highly recommend it. The Logo language may appear to be simple but there is some very deep thinking behind it.
The best Logo that I could find was Microworlds. It is a very nicely done program and runs on both Mac and Windows. This link talks about it:
http://www.kidsandcomputers.com/index.cfm
Here is a fun way to start: First have the kids program a square, then a triangle, then a pentagon. Let them start to see that in all of these shapes they are basically asking the turtle to rotate 360 degrees, and that a circle can be thought of as a many sided polygon.
One of the many joys of Logo is that it brings kids into the realm of math and logic without them even really thinking about it. The turtle might seem hoky, but it helps enormously with the abstraction. If the kids get stuck on an algorithm, have them pretend they are the turtle and make them step through their program.
Enjoy -- you are going to be surprised how much fun this is!
I worked in Japan for 4 years as a programmer, and I am somewhat fluent in Japanese. I also was project lead for a commercial Japanese computer dictionary.
Don't be fooled, this is not a technical article, but instead a political rant. I've talked to some of the designers of Unicode, and they tried to be very, very respectful of Asian wishes, But all of the nations of Asia refuse to cooperate on most things including character encodings.
While I worked in Japan officials claimed that Japan could not import beef because Japanese have evolved longer intestines and therefore can't properly digest red meat. This is laughably not true, but many Japanese still believe it. They also claimed that ski gear couldn't be imported because Japanase snow (hence the laws of physics) is fundamentally different in Japan. And of course they claim they couldn't possibly import another character set because their characters are unique.
One thing that was never mentioned in the article was the difference between a glyph (how a character looks) and what it means. So for example the letter "A" and "A" are the same characters but they have different glyphs.
What the unicode designers did was to identify all of the unique characters in all the mainstream languages. It turns out that Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China share a large number of characters. This should not be terribly surprising because all of these countries directly imported their characters from China. What does differ from country to country is how those characters are represented.
A lot of Asians, seem to really hate the idea of using the same code point for the same characters mainly, I think, because they don't really like the idea of sharing *anything* with the other countries. It is a political and cultural thing, not a technical thing. From a technical point of view it is just gross to think of assigning multiple codepoints for the exact same character.
Which is not to say that Unicode is perfect. Unicode, for better or worse, solves just the problem of encoding the unique characters, it has very little to say about the font problem. That however is still a wonderful thing to solve -- you no longer have to worry about losing meaning, at worst the characters might end up looking a little funny.
And Unicode works. In creating our Japanese dictionary we were forced to use Shift-JIS (one of the Japanese standards), and it was just horrible because there were so many Chinese characters outside the standard Shift-JIS encoding that we needed. Unicode would have greatly simplified the problem for us.
I worked as a programmer in Japan for 4 year, and I've also done several projects in Unicode.
There are couple of things I would like to point out:
>>Japan and Korea get no benefit from Unicode. In fact, their ISO 2022 encodings are at least in "alphabetical order" for the relevant alphabets. Unicode is just a jumble.
I can't speak for Korean, but there is no such thing as an alphabetic order for Kanji. In Japanese, Kanji almost always have at least two pronunciations, and often more.
>>The Japanese hate Unicode. If you bother to ask them, which the web did not, you find a loud and impolite dislike for Unicode. The Japanese want their ISO 2022 solution, aka shift-JIS.
Have you ever tried to program in shift-JIS? It is horrific. Basically they mix one byte and two byte characters. The problem is that if you jump into the middle of the string there is no way to know if you are looking at a one byte character or the second byte of a two byte character. You also can't do tell the number of characters in a string simply by looking at the length. It is a *terrible* standard.
I see a lot of joy about the death of clippy. What is getting ignored here is that software is still too hard to use.
The vast majority of users use are still somewhat intimidated by computers and do not even begin to make use of their full power. Don't believe me? Try watching a "normal" user work with their computer. How about sitting in on customer support calls? It is a deeply humbling experience. Software is still not good enough.
So what is the solution?
How about for starters rethinking the entire GUI paradigm. I mean Xerox Parc was way ahead of the curve back in the late 70's, but maybe it is time that we try and rethink things a bit.
For starters, what's so sacred about the menu bar? It is just this inert thing that shows me a list of commands where most are inappropriate for the work at hand. It is also quite cryptic. I agree that the clip guy was not implemented that well, but as a replacement for the menu bar it has potential.
Another thing to think about is that we are social creatures. And suprisingly, tests have shown that we unconsciously work with computer in a social manner. The clip guy is a start towards making that social interaction explicit. That may not sound like much, but consider that the whole point of GUI is to tap into an intuition about how our brains work.
I think people should be able to choose their UI. Ultimately I think software should be able to morph between serving people who only use a product several times a month and people who use that same product day in and day out. People who don't use the product that often would probably prefer more agent interactions (such as an improved Bob like interface), and people who use the product everyday would prefer a more bare to the metal interface. With computers as powerful as they are today there should be no serious problem providing both UI's for a program.
Is it only me, but doesn't this seem like this is an unusually clear case of monopoly abuse?
I've set up four DSL lines, and I've had to work with both Verizon and Northpoint. There is no comparison between them -- Northpoint was far superior in every way. Northpoint was an ambitious, customer focused company. Verizon was a fat and lazy monopoly.
I do not understand the economics at play, but I do know that Verizon was actively trying to sabotage companies like Northpoint. Then they did a clever head fake -- Verizon signed an agreement to acquire Northpoint, but then conveniently decided to not honor that agreement. Oops! Too late for you to look elsewhere for financing, game over. And where is a disgruntled customer like me going to go anyways? All roads lead back to Verizon.
After my Northpoint connection was shut down, I reluctantly called Verizon. After first telling me that my line did not qualify for a DSL connection (wrong), someone eventually told me that I just would have to wait in line for them to provision more DSL connections.
Again this looks like a classic case of monopoly abuse -- as least as bad as anything as Microsoft has ever done. So why don't we hear more about this?
-- Eventually all discussions end up comparing one of the participants to Hitler, that's when you know the conversation has ended.
Check out www.weddingchannel.com.
:-)
I think they do a great wedding website. They let you combine your registries from many different companies (including all of the ones mentioned so far)
They also let you set up a wedding website to give people info on all the what/when/where stuff.
They also have a number of useful features such as an app to track wedding guests, an app to generate text for invites, etc. My fiancee has been spending a lot of time at this site!
I think there may be more going on here...
.com implosion is due to the fact that most people are still trapped with modem access. The masses have no idea of what using the internet is like when using something like DSL. Have you ever tried to shop online using a modem connection? I'm surprised that so many people still do -- it is not a pleasant experience.
My Northpoint account is going to be cancelled, and the only alternative I have is... Verizon. Is it truly a coincidence that Verizon decided to just let Northpoint wither on the vine?
Before signing up for a Northpoint account, I had a very expensive Verizon account. The service was just awful -- customer service was bureaucratic, and the connection kept on going down. Now I have no choice but to go back to their higher fees and terrible service.
This looks to me like a clear case of monopoly abuse. I believe in the power of the free market, but what are we going to do when we have companies like Verizon that are sitting on all of those last mile wires?
There is an even deeper problem here. I firmly believe that a lot of the
But now that monopolistic companies like Verizon are sucessfully crushing startups like Northpoint,
how are we going to get broadband out to the masses? Certainly not from Verizon -- if you don't believe me just try signing up for service from them. I believe you will be quite surprised by how difficult the process typically is. Verizon just does not know how to do good customer service, but they are good at making sure that they don't have to learn how.
This is a big deal for all of us. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm afraid it might be political.