In 1995, Visual Basic 4 was released. Anyone who thinks that there were no bad programmers around then was either not alive or not paying attention.
That said, there are now a lot more programmers and, more importantly, the number of tasks where slow code is fast enough has increased and speed has stopped being the main concern. Software projects often live for over a decade and being able to continue to modify the code to meet new requirements in ten years is a lot more important than having it run very fast now (and what does 'very fast' mean? If it completes the day's processing in 0.5 seconds instead of 0.005 seconds, who cares?). Back in 1995, throwing away your code after a couple of years was only just going out of fashion.
I was doing both, but even there the differences are huge. For example, back then I would check my email once or twice per day. As in, people would send me an email and it would be stored on a server for a while, and then some time later I would get it. Downloading my mail often took a minute or two - and most of it was plain text. Now, my mail client is basically always connected to the server. I get notified as soon as mail is available and I read it as soon as I want a break from whatever I'm doing. If I wanted to send someone a picture, I had to upload it to some FTP or web space and then they'd download it (and I'd just hope no one guessed it was there).
The web back then was purely static. There was no JavaScript (depending on when in 1995, it was either not released, or so new that hardly anyone was using it). Frames were all the rage - they reduced bandwidth, which was useful, but also broke the back button, which wasn't. Animated gifs and embedded midi tracks were the height of dynamic behaviour. Most companies had a little bit of marketing information online, if anything. Things like online shopping were pretty rare - Amazon existed, but I couldn't order groceries online, for example. I could get news from the BBC, but not very much.
Let's look at HDCP as an example. The 'secret' key was discovered and is no longer secret. You can take the HDCP stream, send it through an FPGA (or a $5 ASIC from China) and get an unencrypted stream. Then you just need to recompress it. Difficult? Well, the SoC that my cheapish phone uses can encode 720p H.264 in realtime and an i.MX515 (under $50) can encode 1080p, so that's not really hard either. And only one person needs to do this - they can then share the unencrypted version with anyone. Sure, you need about $100 of hardware to take an HDCP stream and generate an unencrypted.m4v, but that's not really a lot and that price is going down all the time - a couple more generations and desktops will easily have enough computing power to do it without any dedicated hardware (and a lot come with GPUs that can do the encoding already). The only reason that no one bothers with this is that the encryption on the previous step is even easier to crack.
Now, still looking at HDCP, how has this affected normal (non-pirating) users? Well, it means that the early adopters who bought pre-HDMI HD displays can't use them to watch BluRay content. It means that you can't watch BluRay disks on your computer at full resolution unless your entire driver stack is signed and your monitor is HDCP-compliant (which a lot of HD-capable DVI monitors are not).
The problem with storing these things in a revision control system is viewing the diffs. If I have source code, which is plain text, stored in a revision control system, then I can do svn diff (or whatever) and see what changes someone has made. More importantly, I can use tools like viewvc and have a side-by-side syntax-highlighted view of the before and after files.
Now what happens if you put a Word or ODF document into the revision control system? The diffs are not human readable. You need another tool to interpret them. With integrated change tracking, you can open the document in Writer or Word, turn on the 'view changes' option, and see each change and who made it.
The problem is not the packages, it is that TeX is a case study in how not to design a programming language. It is evidence that you should only listen to Knuth when he talks about theory, not about implementation. The language has no concept of scope! Creating a programming language that has no support for structured programming is simply inexcusable. The other problem with LaTeX is that there is no separation of content and presentation. The input file is just a turing machine tape.
I quite like the StarOffice / OpenOffice one. It has both a point-and-click interface and a LaTeX-like one that uses the same AMS mnemonics as LaTeX, just with a different escape character. If you know the mnemonics, the command line interface is much faster. If you don't, then the point-and-click one is much faster than looking up the symbol / arrangement in a LaTeX manual. And you can combine the two approaches: create a complex structure with the GUI and then enter the simple parts of the formula in the text window.
I think the thing that you're missing is that most normal people can't do these things in Word either. Let's take the cross referencing example. I recently proofread a masters dissertation for a friend who is not a native speaker. She was using Word, and used Word in her day job. Yet all of the references to figures were done by explicitly typing 'See Figure 12'. When I suggested that she might want to add a figure, she said that she didn't want to because she'd have to renumber everything. I was pretty shocked by this, since that's exactly the sort of thing that computers are supposed to do - the boring and repetitive tasks. Surely, I said, Word can do this? Yes, it can, and actually Word's cross-referencing tool is more powerful than LaTeX's one (which is pretty primitive, although there are a few packages that improve it).
The 'standard' part is the important bit. I don't care if there is a supported FreeBSD client, I care that enough documentation is publicly available that one can be written for whatever client device I choose to use. This is possible for DVDs now, although only as a result of reverse engineering.
The company I rent DVDs from has just switched their streaming service from Flash to Silverlight, because this is a condition of their license. Flash supports all of the devices I want to use, Silverlight doesn't support any of them. The company has been forced as a result to develop an iOS streaming app, and an Android streaming app. They won't support minority platforms and no one else can because their streaming is not using a standard form.
Now we get to the important part: It is not possible to implement DRM in an open standard. DRM, intrinsically, relies on obfuscation. The client must have the decryption key and algorithm, and if they have both of these then removing the DRM is trivial. All implementations rely on hiding it and making sure that it's difficult for someone disassembling the client to work out how it works. The time between someone publishing details of how a DRM scheme works and cracking it so far has not exceeded one week and is typically less than one day.
I'm comparing to DVD rental. I can pop the disk in my FreeBSD machine and play it on a projector. No current DRM system provides a client that will work on this machine. I can transcode the video and, as long as I delete it before I send the disk back, I can stream it to another machine or copy it to a mobile device to watch.
Not the original AC, but it's quite simple: security by obscurity can't be done in proprietary software any more than it can be in Free Software. It doesn't matter whether the attacker is reading the source code or reading the disassembled binary. In some ways it's easier to work with the binary - that way you only see what it is doing, not what the programmer thought it was doing.
Encryption is a technique for allowing one person to get a message to the recipient without someone intercepting the message being able to read it. In a DRM scheme, the recipient and the intercepter are the same person. There is no possible way for it to work, but snake-oil salesmen keep persuading an industry that it can keep propping up a dying business model.
The encryption is limiting what I can do with it. Can I, for example, watch it on the FreeBSD-based media centre / NAS that is connected to the projector in my living room? Can I watch it on my HP TouchPad? Can I copy it to my phone and watch it when I'm away from the Internet?
I can do all of these things with DVDs that I rent. They're trying to sell streaming as a replacement for DVD rental, so it needs to provide at least the same capabilities.
Doesn't work, unfortunately. The same copyright cartel controls the distribution rights for most of what people want to watch. You can't set up a new streaming service without agreeing to the conditions that they require and that currently means Silverlight (not even Flash anymore).
You've never been in the academic world, have you?
You mean aside from a PhD and a postdoc? No.
Sometimes an experiment can take years just to set up. Sometimes it takes months and months of computer time to interpret the results.
And that is all that you're working on? You don't have any preliminary results that you can publish? Any small spin-off projects? Doesn't sound like any project I've ever worked on...
In a lot of fields, journals have an almost two year turnaround - so work you have done can get delayed enormously.
Latency is not the same as throughput. I've published papers in journals with an 18-month turn-around, but that doesn't mean that I only published one paper in 18 months. Papers that were submitted earlier are still trickling through the publication pipeline in the interim.
And publishing a "This doesn't work" paper? Wow, good luck finding a journal that will take that. They simply don't exist.
And yet some of the most interesting papers I've read recently have been exactly that format: we tried this, we discovered it didn't work because of these factors, we plan on trying this approach to address those issues.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. Why would you be applying for professorships if your primary interest is teaching? A professorship is primarily a research post. Most universities also have teaching-focussed positions, some pure teaching and some mostly teaching with some research. If you applied for one of these and said you weren't really interested in teaching but were interested in research then I'd expect you to get the same blank stares.
In bioinformatics you can easy publish multiple papers in a year. In high energy physics, not so much.
I just checked the web sites of a couple of friends of mine who work in high energy physics, because I found that a bit hard to believe given how often they claimed that they were in the middle of preparing papers. Even PhD students and postdocs seem to be able to publish at least one journal paper per year. Lecturers usually get their names on their students' work as a second author, so publishing one thing a year is trivial for them, if being first author is not a requirement.
If they don't have a TV signal because of interference from 4G, then there's a good chance that they do have very a good mobile signal. If they're living sufficiently far from an exchange that ADSL isn't an option and outside a major population centre so that cable isn't available, then they're likely not to be sharing it with too many people.
In general, I'd agree, but publishing just over one paper per year shouldn't be hard for any moderately competent researcher. At the very least, they can publish something saying 'we tried this approach, and now we can show why it's a bad idea'.
and the cable will be mostly high in the atmosphere or in space where it is cold
No. Just no. Look at any existing space-based installation. The two big problems (aside from actually getting stuff up there in the first place) are radiation hardening and head dissipation. Space is 'cold', but the lack of atmosphere means that the only way of getting rid of excess heat is radiation. In direct sunlight, things in space can heat up just as they would on Earth, and yet won't lose any heat to convection or radiation. It's slightly harder to keep things in space cool than it is in a vacuum flask.
I've been using them for about a year. Occasionally I don't get a useful result, so I try Google. So far, I have not come across a single instance where DDG does not provide a useful result but Google does (although several times DDG will produce no results and Google will produce 100,000 totally irrelevant links). I also find the DDG zero-click information contains the result I want for more than half of my searches.
Transmission : The cable may be conductive itself...
Spoken like someone with no concept of scale. The cable will be 35,786 km long. Consider the transmission loss over a 300km power line. Now scale that up by two orders of magnitude. Anything short of a superconductor is going to end up with losses too great to be useable.
The biggest issue by far is the cable, we cannot current make one strong enough, when we can the other issues will be trivial...
I see. And this is why DARPA and NASA currently have active research projects to try to transmit power via lasers (loss: 98%) with a view to using them for to power climbers on a space elevator: because the power transmission problem is 'trivial'. You really should apply for one of those $5m grants - write down the 'trivial' solution, send it in, and keep the money.
I would happily pay 20k to go to said stationary station for a few days. Even if it took a week to get there in cramped quarters.
Last time I saw someone do the sums, the cost was about $110k to get the mass of a human (without the required support apparatus) into geostationary orbit, assuming the sorts of efficiencies that are projected for a working space elevator (i.e. more efficient power transmission than anything we can do now, by about an order of magnitude). This may be offset by sending rocks down to Earth to generate power, but I doubt that a trip on a space elevator will be affordable for most people for a few decades after one is constructed.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1995, Visual Basic 4 was released. Anyone who thinks that there were no bad programmers around then was either not alive or not paying attention.
That said, there are now a lot more programmers and, more importantly, the number of tasks where slow code is fast enough has increased and speed has stopped being the main concern. Software projects often live for over a decade and being able to continue to modify the code to meet new requirements in ten years is a lot more important than having it run very fast now (and what does 'very fast' mean? If it completes the day's processing in 0.5 seconds instead of 0.005 seconds, who cares?). Back in 1995, throwing away your code after a couple of years was only just going out of fashion.
I was doing both, but even there the differences are huge. For example, back then I would check my email once or twice per day. As in, people would send me an email and it would be stored on a server for a while, and then some time later I would get it. Downloading my mail often took a minute or two - and most of it was plain text. Now, my mail client is basically always connected to the server. I get notified as soon as mail is available and I read it as soon as I want a break from whatever I'm doing. If I wanted to send someone a picture, I had to upload it to some FTP or web space and then they'd download it (and I'd just hope no one guessed it was there).
The web back then was purely static. There was no JavaScript (depending on when in 1995, it was either not released, or so new that hardly anyone was using it). Frames were all the rage - they reduced bandwidth, which was useful, but also broke the back button, which wasn't. Animated gifs and embedded midi tracks were the height of dynamic behaviour. Most companies had a little bit of marketing information online, if anything. Things like online shopping were pretty rare - Amazon existed, but I couldn't order groceries online, for example. I could get news from the BBC, but not very much.
Let's look at HDCP as an example. The 'secret' key was discovered and is no longer secret. You can take the HDCP stream, send it through an FPGA (or a $5 ASIC from China) and get an unencrypted stream. Then you just need to recompress it. Difficult? Well, the SoC that my cheapish phone uses can encode 720p H.264 in realtime and an i.MX515 (under $50) can encode 1080p, so that's not really hard either. And only one person needs to do this - they can then share the unencrypted version with anyone. Sure, you need about $100 of hardware to take an HDCP stream and generate an unencrypted .m4v, but that's not really a lot and that price is going down all the time - a couple more generations and desktops will easily have enough computing power to do it without any dedicated hardware (and a lot come with GPUs that can do the encoding already). The only reason that no one bothers with this is that the encryption on the previous step is even easier to crack.
Now, still looking at HDCP, how has this affected normal (non-pirating) users? Well, it means that the early adopters who bought pre-HDMI HD displays can't use them to watch BluRay content. It means that you can't watch BluRay disks on your computer at full resolution unless your entire driver stack is signed and your monitor is HDCP-compliant (which a lot of HD-capable DVI monitors are not).
The problem with storing these things in a revision control system is viewing the diffs. If I have source code, which is plain text, stored in a revision control system, then I can do svn diff (or whatever) and see what changes someone has made. More importantly, I can use tools like viewvc and have a side-by-side syntax-highlighted view of the before and after files.
Now what happens if you put a Word or ODF document into the revision control system? The diffs are not human readable. You need another tool to interpret them. With integrated change tracking, you can open the document in Writer or Word, turn on the 'view changes' option, and see each change and who made it.
The problem is not the packages, it is that TeX is a case study in how not to design a programming language. It is evidence that you should only listen to Knuth when he talks about theory, not about implementation. The language has no concept of scope! Creating a programming language that has no support for structured programming is simply inexcusable. The other problem with LaTeX is that there is no separation of content and presentation. The input file is just a turing machine tape.
I quite like the StarOffice / OpenOffice one. It has both a point-and-click interface and a LaTeX-like one that uses the same AMS mnemonics as LaTeX, just with a different escape character. If you know the mnemonics, the command line interface is much faster. If you don't, then the point-and-click one is much faster than looking up the symbol / arrangement in a LaTeX manual. And you can combine the two approaches: create a complex structure with the GUI and then enter the simple parts of the formula in the text window.
I think the thing that you're missing is that most normal people can't do these things in Word either. Let's take the cross referencing example. I recently proofread a masters dissertation for a friend who is not a native speaker. She was using Word, and used Word in her day job. Yet all of the references to figures were done by explicitly typing 'See Figure 12'. When I suggested that she might want to add a figure, she said that she didn't want to because she'd have to renumber everything. I was pretty shocked by this, since that's exactly the sort of thing that computers are supposed to do - the boring and repetitive tasks. Surely, I said, Word can do this? Yes, it can, and actually Word's cross-referencing tool is more powerful than LaTeX's one (which is pretty primitive, although there are a few packages that improve it).
The 'standard' part is the important bit. I don't care if there is a supported FreeBSD client, I care that enough documentation is publicly available that one can be written for whatever client device I choose to use. This is possible for DVDs now, although only as a result of reverse engineering.
The company I rent DVDs from has just switched their streaming service from Flash to Silverlight, because this is a condition of their license. Flash supports all of the devices I want to use, Silverlight doesn't support any of them. The company has been forced as a result to develop an iOS streaming app, and an Android streaming app. They won't support minority platforms and no one else can because their streaming is not using a standard form.
Now we get to the important part: It is not possible to implement DRM in an open standard. DRM, intrinsically, relies on obfuscation. The client must have the decryption key and algorithm, and if they have both of these then removing the DRM is trivial. All implementations rely on hiding it and making sure that it's difficult for someone disassembling the client to work out how it works. The time between someone publishing details of how a DRM scheme works and cracking it so far has not exceeded one week and is typically less than one day.
I'm comparing to DVD rental. I can pop the disk in my FreeBSD machine and play it on a projector. No current DRM system provides a client that will work on this machine. I can transcode the video and, as long as I delete it before I send the disk back, I can stream it to another machine or copy it to a mobile device to watch.
Not the original AC, but it's quite simple: security by obscurity can't be done in proprietary software any more than it can be in Free Software. It doesn't matter whether the attacker is reading the source code or reading the disassembled binary. In some ways it's easier to work with the binary - that way you only see what it is doing, not what the programmer thought it was doing.
Encryption is a technique for allowing one person to get a message to the recipient without someone intercepting the message being able to read it. In a DRM scheme, the recipient and the intercepter are the same person. There is no possible way for it to work, but snake-oil salesmen keep persuading an industry that it can keep propping up a dying business model.
The encryption is limiting what I can do with it. Can I, for example, watch it on the FreeBSD-based media centre / NAS that is connected to the projector in my living room? Can I watch it on my HP TouchPad? Can I copy it to my phone and watch it when I'm away from the Internet?
I can do all of these things with DVDs that I rent. They're trying to sell streaming as a replacement for DVD rental, so it needs to provide at least the same capabilities.
Doesn't work, unfortunately. The same copyright cartel controls the distribution rights for most of what people want to watch. You can't set up a new streaming service without agreeing to the conditions that they require and that currently means Silverlight (not even Flash anymore).
You've never been in the academic world, have you?
You mean aside from a PhD and a postdoc? No.
Sometimes an experiment can take years just to set up. Sometimes it takes months and months of computer time to interpret the results.
And that is all that you're working on? You don't have any preliminary results that you can publish? Any small spin-off projects? Doesn't sound like any project I've ever worked on...
In a lot of fields, journals have an almost two year turnaround - so work you have done can get delayed enormously.
Latency is not the same as throughput. I've published papers in journals with an 18-month turn-around, but that doesn't mean that I only published one paper in 18 months. Papers that were submitted earlier are still trickling through the publication pipeline in the interim.
And publishing a "This doesn't work" paper? Wow, good luck finding a journal that will take that. They simply don't exist.
And yet some of the most interesting papers I've read recently have been exactly that format: we tried this, we discovered it didn't work because of these factors, we plan on trying this approach to address those issues.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. Why would you be applying for professorships if your primary interest is teaching? A professorship is primarily a research post. Most universities also have teaching-focussed positions, some pure teaching and some mostly teaching with some research. If you applied for one of these and said you weren't really interested in teaching but were interested in research then I'd expect you to get the same blank stares.
In bioinformatics you can easy publish multiple papers in a year. In high energy physics, not so much.
I just checked the web sites of a couple of friends of mine who work in high energy physics, because I found that a bit hard to believe given how often they claimed that they were in the middle of preparing papers. Even PhD students and postdocs seem to be able to publish at least one journal paper per year. Lecturers usually get their names on their students' work as a second author, so publishing one thing a year is trivial for them, if being first author is not a requirement.
If they don't have a TV signal because of interference from 4G, then there's a good chance that they do have very a good mobile signal. If they're living sufficiently far from an exchange that ADSL isn't an option and outside a major population centre so that cable isn't available, then they're likely not to be sharing it with too many people.
And for people outside academia, here's the obligatory SMBC...
In general, I'd agree, but publishing just over one paper per year shouldn't be hard for any moderately competent researcher. At the very least, they can publish something saying 'we tried this approach, and now we can show why it's a bad idea'.
and the cable will be mostly high in the atmosphere or in space where it is cold
No. Just no. Look at any existing space-based installation. The two big problems (aside from actually getting stuff up there in the first place) are radiation hardening and head dissipation. Space is 'cold', but the lack of atmosphere means that the only way of getting rid of excess heat is radiation. In direct sunlight, things in space can heat up just as they would on Earth, and yet won't lose any heat to convection or radiation. It's slightly harder to keep things in space cool than it is in a vacuum flask.
They had about $30m of VC funding, which will take a while to burn through. They now show adverts as well.
Bing powers Yahoo's BYOSS. This is, as the grandparent said, one of the sources that DDG uses. It is not the only one.
I've been using them for about a year. Occasionally I don't get a useful result, so I try Google. So far, I have not come across a single instance where DDG does not provide a useful result but Google does (although several times DDG will produce no results and Google will produce 100,000 totally irrelevant links). I also find the DDG zero-click information contains the result I want for more than half of my searches.
Transmission : The cable may be conductive itself...
Spoken like someone with no concept of scale. The cable will be 35,786 km long. Consider the transmission loss over a 300km power line. Now scale that up by two orders of magnitude. Anything short of a superconductor is going to end up with losses too great to be useable.
The biggest issue by far is the cable, we cannot current make one strong enough, when we can the other issues will be trivial ...
I see. And this is why DARPA and NASA currently have active research projects to try to transmit power via lasers (loss: 98%) with a view to using them for to power climbers on a space elevator: because the power transmission problem is 'trivial'. You really should apply for one of those $5m grants - write down the 'trivial' solution, send it in, and keep the money.
I would happily pay 20k to go to said stationary station for a few days. Even if it took a week to get there in cramped quarters.
Last time I saw someone do the sums, the cost was about $110k to get the mass of a human (without the required support apparatus) into geostationary orbit, assuming the sorts of efficiencies that are projected for a working space elevator (i.e. more efficient power transmission than anything we can do now, by about an order of magnitude). This may be offset by sending rocks down to Earth to generate power, but I doubt that a trip on a space elevator will be affordable for most people for a few decades after one is constructed.
To be fair, it's also littered with highly successful companies that looted the corpses of the failures...