I just downloaded the update, and was happy to find that upon setting a low maximum volume (about 10%), the control granularity has actually increased: the far right of the bar is now 10%, allowing me to carefully adjust it between 0 and 10%.
5% of newspaper revenues? Presumably that only counts online newspapers that have corresponding print media. What about online news sources that are exclusively online such as Slate and Salon? Salon has been getting my money for years instead of my local Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The budget of the National Science Foundation was slashed to increase support for pork, the NSA, and NASA, and hundreds of NSF graduate research fellowships were replaced with a new fellowship to support security research. Scientists across the country have been reeling for a couple years now, especially those going up for tenure. Before this, about 1 in 6 NSF proposals got funded. Today its about 1 in 20.
Much of the cutting edge research in user interfaces, both in software and hardware, has been published at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Take a gander at the last five years, starting from the 2004 conference site.
Interesting how everyone thinks the article is about Natural Language programming. The researchers say nothing about "Natural Language": they only use the word "Natural" to mean "pertaining to the constitution of a thing."
As if people with $250 of disposable income care that much more about music formats and choice. They aren't some special class of techno-savvy x-napster users--they're music lovers with money, parents who want to get their kids the latest craze, and even aficionados who can't afford it, but will charge it anyway. I simply question whether the market that so many companies seem to be designing for actually exists.
A lot of the iPod competition seems to think that the killer app is more features, more formats, and more choices in general. Do these companies have any clue what it's like for the average consumer to walk into a Best Buy and make this decision? Not only does brand, which Apple has in spades, make this decision a lot easier, but choosing one from two (iPod or iPod Mini, or, in other words, big or small), is a heck of a lot easier than choosing one from Archos GMini XS200, Olympus MR500i and MR100 and a Creative Muvo Micro N200. And what the hell is an MPIO FL300 with "Ogg Vorbis"?
"Just give me the iPod. My son's friend has one of those and he seems to like it."
The secret is that you know you're trying to do, and by asking a question, you're implicitly telling the debugger what the program should do. The debugger doesn't have to be smart; you're the smart one. It just has to be predictable.
We've found that programmers always know what their program is supposed to do, but they're frequently wrong about what their program is actually doing. The key innovation of the Whyline is that it reveals any discrepancies between what you think your program did (implicit in your question) and what it actually did. Sure, you could spend half an hour littering your code with print statements, checking all of your assumptions, fixing code that ain't broke, but why not have the computer do what it's good at: automatically collect and process ****load of data?
The interface for the tool (yes, its merely a tool, not a panacea), has little to do with English. The question menu divides the millions of runtime events by the object and method or data on which the event occurred. It gives the menu items in the hierarchical menu reasonable names; you could just as easily click on something on-screen (such as some printf output) and say "why isn't this x?" or "why didn't that do_the_method_I_thought_was_going_to_happen()?" An English-based anything goes straight against everything we know and love in HCI (show what can be done, how to do it, and what happened afterwards).
If you're interested in seeing the Whyline in action, download the Quicktime version of our talk, which was presented at CHI 2004 this past year.
The zooming problem with drawers is system-wide--in Jaguar.
In Panther, which comes out in 14 days, drawers are considered when zooming a window, so there's no off-screen erratic behavior.
Also in Panther, you can attach keyboard shortcuts to menu items, such as the Zoom item in iCal's Window menu. Now, with a quick ctrl-z on my PowerBook, any window is zoomable. Mail's drawer works fine, iCal's drawer works fine. Any app's drawer works fine.
It's funny to "I really hate upgrading operating systems" and "OS X" in the same post. I've been installing (legally obtained) Panther builds every week for a couple months now on my TiBook. What's my process?
- Drag and drop home folder and Applications folder to external firewire drive (40 GB, 15 minutes)
- Erase Install with Panther disc 1 (15 minutes)
- Drag and drop home folder and Applications folder to TiBook (40 GB, 15 minutes)
Yeah, okay, I have to log out and log back in too:P Back to work in less than an hour.
2) - Dual rpocessors give a 70% speed increase at best. Few programs are optimised for them so the biggest benefit you get is when running multiple programs, so going with a 30% increase would be a tad more realistc.
I was under the impression that current PowerMacs supportsymmetric multiprocessing of multithreaded applications (even Java threads), which means that in iTunes, one processor can be ripping a CD while the other can be importing a library of MP3s. I wouldn't be surprised by a 70% figure for multithreaded apps.
It's interesting how industry and academic research in systems and languages seem to have been racing neck and neck for the past decade. Visual programming languages have been around for a long time now, all which operate on "parse-trees" (which is largely a misnomer, since there's really no parsing going on). Keep in mind that by "visual," academics don't really mean to emphasize the visual. They mean to emphasize the fact that such computational formalisms allow programmers to operate on higher-level semantics than single characters, while completely avoiding syntactic errors (and often most type errors).
Of course, the difference is that academics build these programming systems because they offer the potential for easier learning and better domain-specific reasoning--and Gosling developed Jackpot because "...[it's] kind of goofy, but entertaining." Both approaches are essential for taking the programming systems community beyond it's archaic language-centric viewpoint. IMHO, Gosling won the programming language race with Java--who will the programming systems race?
5% risk, huh? Wow, that sure is small! Oh wait, they don't cite the baseline incidence, so who knows if its all that small. 5% could be a 300% greater risk for all we know.
No signifiant relationship between more than 20 hours of use of a keyboard? Great news, for me: I work 60 hours a week with a keyboard! Oh wait, they neglected to analyze the subset of individuals like me. Talk about a low powered measure and analysis. Did they even look at the distribution? I bet there's a slight skew.
Well I'm glad the numbness in my palm isn't caused by my excessive computer use. Then what the hell is causing it? I sit on my butt all day and sleep on my back all night! What else could it be?
Seriously, until every scientist on Earth is forced to pass a course on psychometrics, this kind of research gets us nowhere. Statistics is a garbage in, garbage out practice.
There's quite a bit of science behind programming systems for children and novices, and a few good solutions as well. I'm understandably partial to Alice, which is free and provides a structured, drag-and-drop syntax editor which prevents all type and syntax errors. I'm currently working on a Ph.D. centered around making Alice even easier for novices by designing highly integrated, error-preventing programming and debugging tools.
But regarding age, keep in mind that most children don't even have the cognitive abilities to create and manipulate social and communicative abstractions, let alone programming abstractions, until 5 or 6. But no one's proven that no programming system exists that can't lower that threshold.
...supposedly uses some form of Baysian reasoning. I've been using it for a year now. I trained it for a couple of weeks, turned it on "automatic filtering" mode, and now I can count the number of times its misclassified a message on my two hands. I used to get more spam than legit mail, now I can't help but wonder why spam is a problem for people. Until I remember that most people don't use a mac.
Every once in a while, I flip it back into training mode so that I can see the lovely see of brown-colored spam messages that flood my inbox. I flip it back to automatic mode, Mail automatically moves them to my junk folder, and I can forget about them.
...is far from new, but it's still in its infancy. Check out the Software Engineering Institute at CMU for a wealth of literature on precisely why software can be engineered.
As for whether programmers are engineers, it depends solely on their training. As a fresh graduate in Computer Science at Oregon State, I can say that graduates from OSU are less scientists and more engineers everyday. Unfortunately, students in CS will eventually be split into the construction workers and archiects of the 21st century. (I'll leave it to you to figure out who the programmers are).
Long gone are the days of building a bridge without statistics, design, and blueprints. You might do it in your backyard, but no one will use it. The same is true for the "field" of programming.
...would extract the one worthwhile feature of the chain of Windows OSes--backwards compatibility--and run with it. Imagine taking that compatability layer and combining it with any number of OSes with stronger functionality.
Arguably, at a high level, a Windows compatability layer is all other popular systems lack. Look at Virtual PC and WINE--in some sense, if these projects were respectively fast and stable, they would subsume a great number of open source projects.
Whether or not this would be a better world is up for debate.
IF Apple happens to be a consumer of these chips, what is IBM likely to charge for them? It really seems that most consumers complaint about Apple computers is the price, given consumers even consider them an option. I can't imagine Apple would take a hit on these to keep PowerMacs at their current prices.
And I don't imagine most switchers will really want to pay for speed when they get it for a commodity price in the PC world.
sinker. While this might seem outrageous to some fervent mac users, it's a tried and true strategy of any software developer:it sounds like a modified form of shareware.
Personally, I can't think of any other apps I'd spend $50 on; I just finished a 4 gig "iDVD" using dozens of "iMovies" and drag and dropped many of my legal MP3s from iTunes for background music. To use any other software would cost me hundreds, and would have taken me more time.
The real question is whether the new features will be worth the money. All those content with previous versions need not gripe.
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I just downloaded the update, and was happy to find that upon setting a low maximum volume (about 10%), the control granularity has actually increased: the far right of the bar is now 10%, allowing me to carefully adjust it between 0 and 10%.
5% of newspaper revenues? Presumably that only counts online newspapers that have corresponding print media. What about online news sources that are exclusively online such as Slate and Salon? Salon has been getting my money for years instead of my local Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The budget of the National Science Foundation was slashed to increase support for pork, the NSA, and NASA, and hundreds of NSF graduate research fellowships were replaced with a new fellowship to support security research. Scientists across the country have been reeling for a couple years now, especially those going up for tenure. Before this, about 1 in 6 NSF proposals got funded. Today its about 1 in 20.
Much of the cutting edge research in user interfaces, both in software and hardware, has been published at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Take a gander at the last five years, starting from the 2004 conference site.
Interesting how everyone thinks the article is about Natural Language programming. The researchers say nothing about "Natural Language": they only use the word "Natural" to mean "pertaining to the constitution of a thing."
As if people with $250 of disposable income care that much more about music formats and choice. They aren't some special class of techno-savvy x-napster users--they're music lovers with money, parents who want to get their kids the latest craze, and even aficionados who can't afford it, but will charge it anyway. I simply question whether the market that so many companies seem to be designing for actually exists.
A lot of the iPod competition seems to think that the killer app is more features, more formats, and more choices in general. Do these companies have any clue what it's like for the average consumer to walk into a Best Buy and make this decision? Not only does brand, which Apple has in spades, make this decision a lot easier, but choosing one from two (iPod or iPod Mini, or, in other words, big or small), is a heck of a lot easier than choosing one from Archos GMini XS200, Olympus MR500i and MR100 and a Creative Muvo Micro N200. And what the hell is an MPIO FL300 with "Ogg Vorbis"?
"Just give me the iPod. My son's friend has one of those and he seems to like it."
The secret is that you know you're trying to do, and by asking a question, you're implicitly telling the debugger what the program should do. The debugger doesn't have to be smart; you're the smart one. It just has to be predictable.
We've found that programmers always know what their program is supposed to do, but they're frequently wrong about what their program is actually doing. The key innovation of the Whyline is that it reveals any discrepancies between what you think your program did (implicit in your question) and what it actually did. Sure, you could spend half an hour littering your code with print statements, checking all of your assumptions, fixing code that ain't broke, but why not have the computer do what it's good at: automatically collect and process ****load of data?
The interface for the tool (yes, its merely a tool, not a panacea), has little to do with English. The question menu divides the millions of runtime events by the object and method or data on which the event occurred. It gives the menu items in the hierarchical menu reasonable names; you could just as easily click on something on-screen (such as some printf output) and say "why isn't this x?" or "why didn't that do_the_method_I_thought_was_going_to_happen()?" An English-based anything goes straight against everything we know and love in HCI (show what can be done, how to do it, and what happened afterwards).
If you're interested in seeing the Whyline in action, download the Quicktime version of our talk, which was presented at CHI 2004 this past year.
The zooming problem with drawers is system-wide--in Jaguar.
In Panther, which comes out in 14 days, drawers are considered when zooming a window, so there's no off-screen erratic behavior.
Also in Panther, you can attach keyboard shortcuts to menu items, such as the Zoom item in iCal's Window menu. Now, with a quick ctrl-z on my PowerBook, any window is zoomable. Mail's drawer works fine, iCal's drawer works fine. Any app's drawer works fine.
It's funny to "I really hate upgrading operating systems" and "OS X" in the same post. I've been installing (legally obtained) Panther builds every week for a couple months now on my TiBook. What's my process? - Drag and drop home folder and Applications folder to external firewire drive (40 GB, 15 minutes) - Erase Install with Panther disc 1 (15 minutes) - Drag and drop home folder and Applications folder to TiBook (40 GB, 15 minutes) Yeah, okay, I have to log out and log back in too :P Back to work in less than an hour.
2) - Dual rpocessors give a 70% speed increase at best. Few programs are optimised for them so the biggest benefit you get is when running multiple programs, so going with a 30% increase would be a tad more realistc.
I was under the impression that current PowerMacs supportsymmetric multiprocessing of multithreaded applications (even Java threads), which means that in iTunes, one processor can be ripping a CD while the other can be importing a library of MP3s. I wouldn't be surprised by a 70% figure for multithreaded apps.
It's interesting how industry and academic research in systems and languages seem to have been racing neck and neck for the past decade. Visual programming languages have been around for a long time now, all which operate on "parse-trees" (which is largely a misnomer, since there's really no parsing going on). Keep in mind that by "visual," academics don't really mean to emphasize the visual. They mean to emphasize the fact that such computational formalisms allow programmers to operate on higher-level semantics than single characters, while completely avoiding syntactic errors (and often most type errors).
Of course, the difference is that academics build these programming systems because they offer the potential for easier learning and better domain-specific reasoning--and Gosling developed Jackpot because "...[it's] kind of goofy, but entertaining." Both approaches are essential for taking the programming systems community beyond it's archaic language-centric viewpoint. IMHO, Gosling won the programming language race with Java--who will the programming systems race?
5% risk, huh? Wow, that sure is small! Oh wait, they don't cite the baseline incidence, so who knows if its all that small. 5% could be a 300% greater risk for all we know.
No signifiant relationship between more than 20 hours of use of a keyboard? Great news, for me: I work 60 hours a week with a keyboard! Oh wait, they neglected to analyze the subset of individuals like me. Talk about a low powered measure and analysis. Did they even look at the distribution? I bet there's a slight skew.
Well I'm glad the numbness in my palm isn't caused by my excessive computer use. Then what the hell is causing it? I sit on my butt all day and sleep on my back all night! What else could it be?
Seriously, until every scientist on Earth is forced to pass a course on psychometrics, this kind of research gets us nowhere. Statistics is a garbage in, garbage out practice.
There's quite a bit of science behind programming systems for children and novices, and a few good solutions as well. I'm understandably partial to Alice, which is free and provides a structured, drag-and-drop syntax editor which prevents all type and syntax errors. I'm currently working on a Ph.D. centered around making Alice even easier for novices by designing highly integrated, error-preventing programming and debugging tools.
But regarding age, keep in mind that most children don't even have the cognitive abilities to create and manipulate social and communicative abstractions, let alone programming abstractions, until 5 or 6. But no one's proven that no programming system exists that can't lower that threshold.
...supposedly uses some form of Baysian reasoning. I've been using it for a year now. I trained it for a couple of weeks, turned it on "automatic filtering" mode, and now I can count the number of times its misclassified a message on my two hands. I used to get more spam than legit mail, now I can't help but wonder why spam is a problem for people. Until I remember that most people don't use a mac. Every once in a while, I flip it back into training mode so that I can see the lovely see of brown-colored spam messages that flood my inbox. I flip it back to automatic mode, Mail automatically moves them to my junk folder, and I can forget about them.
Have you looked at Apple Remote Desktop? It supposedly supports remote software updates and installs.
Check out Alice, a free gift from CMU's Entertainment Technology Center. It aims to provide a strong first exposure to programming.
...is far from new, but it's still in its infancy. Check out the Software Engineering Institute at CMU for a wealth of literature on precisely why software can be engineered. As for whether programmers are engineers, it depends solely on their training. As a fresh graduate in Computer Science at Oregon State, I can say that graduates from OSU are less scientists and more engineers everyday. Unfortunately, students in CS will eventually be split into the construction workers and archiects of the 21st century. (I'll leave it to you to figure out who the programmers are). Long gone are the days of building a bridge without statistics, design, and blueprints. You might do it in your backyard, but no one will use it. The same is true for the "field" of programming.
...would extract the one worthwhile feature of the chain of Windows OSes--backwards compatibility--and run with it. Imagine taking that compatability layer and combining it with any number of OSes with stronger functionality.
Arguably, at a high level, a Windows compatability layer is all other popular systems lack. Look at Virtual PC and WINE--in some sense, if these projects were respectively fast and stable, they would subsume a great number of open source projects.
Whether or not this would be a better world is up for debate.
IF Apple happens to be a consumer of these chips, what is IBM likely to charge for them? It really seems that most consumers complaint about Apple computers is the price, given consumers even consider them an option. I can't imagine Apple would take a hit on these to keep PowerMacs at their current prices. And I don't imagine most switchers will really want to pay for speed when they get it for a commodity price in the PC world.
sinker. While this might seem outrageous to some fervent mac users, it's a tried and true strategy of any software developer:it sounds like a modified form of shareware. Personally, I can't think of any other apps I'd spend $50 on; I just finished a 4 gig "iDVD" using dozens of "iMovies" and drag and dropped many of my legal MP3s from iTunes for background music. To use any other software would cost me hundreds, and would have taken me more time. The real question is whether the new features will be worth the money. All those content with previous versions need not gripe.