"Its an application protocol that functions over TCP" has the same semantic function as "Its a TCP based protocol" or even "Its a TCP protocol" although the latter can have other meanings as well.
My point was that English semantics do leave a lot of room for what someone "means" (thus deconstructionism).
I believe you've forgotten the E-mail exchage we had at the time...... and more importantly, I no longer have the E-mail conversations nor the sources in question (yay for contract work). My many appologies -- I was certain I'd kept you apprised of the work I'd done. There was a very messy "so long sucker" ending to that contract over which I had no control.
That said, as I recall, I wrote a wrapper around a UTF-8 -> UCS-16 conversion routine that then used the wide font (--mfont) support in Eterm.
I imagine that with a fast enough processor and more memory at their disposal, some smaller developpers will be able to bring simple games to market faster because of being able to use high-level or even interpreted languages.
Your hard-core push-the-limits groups will still use machine language to develop their engines of course.
I'm sure the API will be beautiful no matter what though -- Sony wouldn't risk losing developpers to Direct-X.
What is HTTP? Oh yes, a TCP protocol. For proper semantics, you might say its a protocol that sits on top of TCP, or go into network layers and bore the reader to tears.
On the other hand, lets say we're talking about a new revision of the TCP protocol... TCP version 42... wouldn't that be a new TCP protocol as well?
I'm surprised you can't figure out what that would mean.
Great interview -- about 4 years ago I got asked if we could do Japanese on dual screens for an embedded project. I said sure. We used Enlightenment and Eterm with UTF8 support.
Printing was a nightmare of PERL and fontsets and all kinds of wierdness.
In fact, if you look here, you can see the slightly customized RedHat login screen I did for them back then.
Disclaimer: They are no longer a customer, I can't recommend their project professionally but I think its really cool on a personal level and I helped develop a lot of the back-end code and interfacing that runs the thing which I won't say more about because it was on a contract;-).
PS, Dave, if you're reading this, any Slashdot reader would have figured out the Enlightenment, Gnome and Eterm connections on their own.
Or better, in this case, you don't have to restart at all... middle-click, select last menu, select "regenerate menus".
Done.
Of course, if you wanted to, you could write a little tool that uses fam to automatically update the menus when the files changed. Assuming you were willing to pre-parse and make sure they were valid first.
Rasterman's way of writing software differs quite a bit from others' in some cases. His direction and goals often encompass both cool and correct code.
Imlib2 for example has both efficient caching for remote image display as well as all-round support for image formats of various kinds and a lot of cool tricks up its sleave.
His decisions to create libraries of code that are used by other modules so that like can be kept with like and linked together as necessary is wise, even if it slows down release schedules.
... and they'd reboot and select the last-known good kernel from grub and be all better again, because a kernel upgrade doesn't kill the system.
My main complaint about Microsoft patches is that I can't (easily) convince the system to store each patched version seperately.
I have/usr/local/openssl-0.9.7a,/usr/local/openssl-0.9.7c,/usr/local/openssl-0.9.7d, etc. on my system. Why? If a new version kills things, I revert easily by changing a symlink and retest.
I've been thinking the same thing for years. Cable on demand is stupid -- I have highspeed Internet already. I can stream download high-definition 40 minute TV shows in under half an hour. I even E-mailed the producers of Alias about this (but they're under contract... ). I'd love to download the full-quality production footage right from them (and pay for it).
Anyone willing to front a few million bucks putting together contracts for major TV syndications and providing them by streaming to subscribers?
I click and receive a website in under a second in many cases (10Mbit feed at home). BitTorrent takes over a second just to figure out what peers are out there, not including beginning a download.
There are smart ways to spread copies of small amounts of data around for faster access; BitTorrent isn't one of them.
Oooh, scroll bars. I hate scroll bars. That is to say, I love them telling me where I am in a document and how big the document is compared to what I'm looking at (thank-you Microsoft for the variable-sized scroll region), but most people don't even know how it works (really).
I know, I know, scroll mouse.
Here's an idea: the user moves their cursor near the bottom of the screen and *isn't* highlighting, etc. and doesn't jerk the mouse back up (indicating the following wasn't what they expected), scroll down for them to see more document... slowly. And while you're at it, highlight the scrollbar with a little question-mark bubble next to it that they can click to find out "hey, I'm scrolling for you, wanna learn how this thingy works?"
Just an idea -- lots of things can do this.
PS, yes, I know, its like clippy in MS Office. You know what? People love the help if its useful. Non-experts hated clippy because it was annoying to be told things you didn't want to know or need to know right then... but once they knew how it worked, they used it.
There was a really good (TLC?) episode about designing modern jet fighter aircraft. They spoke of two things: making it fly, and making pilots able to fly it.
It seemed that with all the control surfaces necessary to make this plane (new F-16?) fly, it would be impossible for the pilot to successfully fly the plane in combat (or at all?).
Instead, they engineered the plane the way they wanted, essentially ignoring the pilot's limitations and then wrote a software interface between the pilot's usual tools (pedals, joystick, etc.) and the plane's mechanics. They ran top gun pilots through flight simulators while listening to their comments... "it should have banked harder to the left" or "why did it stall? I increased power..." After much tweaking, they had a software system that "understood" what the pilot expected to have happen from their control of the plane and the plane could be made to do those things (within its limits) by the software.
Designing UIs should be similar. Where I work we design database systems that are used, in part, at both POS and for data-entry clerks. The UIs for each are quite different but related. The POS worker shouldn't have to navigate menus, etc. to get a sale completed; the system simply runs through the normal questions one after the next with "ENTER" alone doing the right thing most of the time.
Data entry clerks are asked for several starting pieces of information (type of customer/transaction, etc.) and then presented with a form that allows them to simply keep typing without moving their hands almost at all.
In cases where redundancy sets in (entering 50 of something slightly different), filling in the fields automatically is also possible.
I shouldn't have to navigate a word processor's menus to spell-check my document, or to change the margins, or to move text around, etc. And for the most part, modern word processors are fairly well-designed beasts (being heavily used by many people).
Good UI design takes a lot of thought, and user testing, and ignoring your "instincts" as a programmer sometimes -- your users probably aren't programmers.
I was about to post more or less the same thing you did -- that users shouldn't care what its written in but I realized as I read your post that it isn't in fact true.
How would you feel if Microsoft released the source code to MS Excel in, say, Brainf*ck?
Actually, lets say its an obscure compiled language that can't be easily translated into another language at all.
Would you be praising MS for their contribution to the community or decrying their choice of language which limits the legibility and review of the code?
Haskell is completely opaque to me (as far as debugging is concerned) although I'm sure I could learn it if I wanted to (having tucked many others under my belt already, including most recently PostScript for some reason). That opacity does change my feelings about using a program -- RMS' views and paranoias notwithstanding, his thoughts about "what if the developper dies or quits maintaining the code?" are justified.
I have expectations that people would continue to maintain a Haskell program because I've met Haskell programmers -- but not as assured as I'd be if it were written in C, PERL or even Python. (I leave Java off that list since most Java programmers seem intent on code-hiding rather than sharing).
One of the first concepts my daughter learned to verbalize at a very young age was that of "inside" and "outside". She began talking during the (canadian) winter and didn't make many excursions outside compared to the summer months. She would go to the windows low enough to look out of and point and say "outside". If one of us picked her up and she could see a tree or whatever, she'd just point and say "outside".
She still has a fascination with being outside... which is good considering she was born to a computer geek and his wife who got accepted to computer engineering at 16.
I do love going to the lake & cottage outside cell range... for 4 or 5 days maybe.
I remember Nintendo announcing their disc format early on and thinking that they were pretty smart and pretty paranoid and they'd probably figure something out that wouldn't be easily hacked.
I still remember Intel claiming (references anyone?) that on-chip L2 cache couldn't be done with current technology (at the time)... AMD did it within months.
Lets pretend for a moment that the psychological effects of event A can be handled by a child. Lets say that event A would typically be considered harmful to the child, but the child seems to be able to cope. However, it seems that coping mechanisms in children, because of the rapid ongoing development phases they are in have permanent effects on their psyches.
Lets now say that event A is violence around them. Well, above hypothesis is so far true from studies done.
Lets say event A is about neglect. Well, having a wife who works in shelters, yes, neglect on the part of ones parents does seem to feed later neurosis of various forms (read up on your social psychology).
Lets say event A is anything else? Why believe the brain of a child will cope with atypical stimuli (for what we usually measure as the average child's statistically normal experiences) any differently?
Go study it, then open your mouth about how to raise my kids.
The DOJ cared enough to have an initial case in the early 90's and to bring MS back to court in the late 90's. My suspicion is that the administration told them to drop it after the findings of fact and before a penalty was brought (and many news sources back that theory up).
I'd love to know if this constitutes interfering with an ongoing case and how european law deals with such things. I'm not sure the DOJ would be so thrilled about it either -- interfering with a trade-partner's legal procedings that is.
I doubt they'd care if MS paid of some chinese diplomat to be quiet, but the EU is a fairly big partner these days.
I had a friend call me because he'd arranged a 100Mbit feed for under $1000 and he was pretty happy about it. I told him I get 10Mbit at home for under $50;-).
Mind you, he got a backbone connection to a major network... mine is cable.
What I really don't understand is that ID's games don't have this feature.
Doom 3 works when you install it. Doom 1 and 2 did too, as did Heretic and Hexen, most of which I borrowed from friends;-)
Of course, I singlehandedly sold about 30 copies of Doom 1 in highschool to other people (just cause I had a 0-day copy didn't mean they deserved one).
But more to the point, some of the recent games by ID software have been very highly anticipated and I'd presume highly pirated. I'm assuming they care, but its not worth their effort to go beyond a key check from the box (which I'm quite happy with for Quake ]I[).
Slashdot Mirror
"Its an application protocol that functions over TCP" has the same semantic function as "Its a TCP based protocol" or even "Its a TCP protocol" although the latter can have other meanings as well.
My point was that English semantics do leave a lot of room for what someone "means" (thus deconstructionism).
I believe you've forgotten the E-mail exchage we had at the time ... ... and more importantly, I no longer have the E-mail conversations nor the sources in question (yay for contract work). My many appologies -- I was certain I'd kept you apprised of the work I'd done. There was a very messy "so long sucker" ending to that contract over which I had no control.
That said, as I recall, I wrote a wrapper around a UTF-8 -> UCS-16 conversion routine that then used the wide font (--mfont) support in Eterm.
I imagine that with a fast enough processor and more memory at their disposal, some smaller developpers will be able to bring simple games to market faster because of being able to use high-level or even interpreted languages.
Your hard-core push-the-limits groups will still use machine language to develop their engines of course.
I'm sure the API will be beautiful no matter what though -- Sony wouldn't risk losing developpers to Direct-X.
tcpclient www.slashdot.org 80 cat /dev/urandom
;-)
Jeez
Slashdot sucks
Insightful?
... TCP version 42 ... wouldn't that be a new TCP protocol as well?
What is HTTP? Oh yes, a TCP protocol. For proper semantics, you might say its a protocol that sits on top of TCP, or go into network layers and bore the reader to tears.
On the other hand, lets say we're talking about a new revision of the TCP protocol
I'm surprised you can't figure out what that would mean.
Great interview -- about 4 years ago I got asked if we could do Japanese on dual screens for an embedded project. I said sure. We used Enlightenment and Eterm with UTF8 support.
;-).
Printing was a nightmare of PERL and fontsets and all kinds of wierdness.
In fact, if you look here, you can see the slightly customized RedHat login screen I did for them back then.
Disclaimer: They are no longer a customer, I can't recommend their project professionally but I think its really cool on a personal level and I helped develop a lot of the back-end code and interfacing that runs the thing which I won't say more about because it was on a contract
PS, Dave, if you're reading this, any Slashdot reader would have figured out the Enlightenment, Gnome and Eterm connections on their own.
Middle-click, "restart window manager", watch spinny thing, done.
... middle-click, select last menu, select "regenerate menus".
Or better, in this case, you don't have to restart at all
Done.
Of course, if you wanted to, you could write a little tool that uses fam to automatically update the menus when the files changed. Assuming you were willing to pre-parse and make sure they were valid first.
Rasterman's way of writing software differs quite a bit from others' in some cases. His direction and goals often encompass both cool and correct code.
Imlib2 for example has both efficient caching for remote image display as well as all-round support for image formats of various kinds and a lot of cool tricks up its sleave.
His decisions to create libraries of code that are used by other modules so that like can be kept with like and linked together as necessary is wise, even if it slows down release schedules.
I've been using DR16 for "ever" now and love it.
PS, DR17 has been in CVS for "ever" as well.
That's the whole point of good vote counting -- to find out IF he has a mandate.
I'm not saying he doesn't; I'm saying we can't possibly know without a fair and accurate (and accountable) voting system.
The Ukranians are aware of this -- they want a third vote to make sure things are properly counted.
... and they'd reboot and select the last-known good kernel from grub and be all better again, because a kernel upgrade doesn't kill the system.
/usr/local/openssl-0.9.7a, /usr/local/openssl-0.9.7c, /usr/local/openssl-0.9.7d, etc. on my system. Why? If a new version kills things, I revert easily by changing a symlink and retest.
My main complaint about Microsoft patches is that I can't (easily) convince the system to store each patched version seperately.
I have
Yay for versions.
I've been thinking the same thing for years. Cable on demand is stupid -- I have highspeed Internet already. I can stream download high-definition 40 minute TV shows in under half an hour. I even E-mailed the producers of Alias about this (but they're under contract ... ). I'd love to download the full-quality production footage right from them (and pay for it).
Anyone willing to front a few million bucks putting together contracts for major TV syndications and providing them by streaming to subscribers?
No offence, but its way too high in latency.
I click and receive a website in under a second in many cases (10Mbit feed at home). BitTorrent takes over a second just to figure out what peers are out there, not including beginning a download.
There are smart ways to spread copies of small amounts of data around for faster access; BitTorrent isn't one of them.
Oooh, scroll bars. I hate scroll bars. That is to say, I love them telling me where I am in a document and how big the document is compared to what I'm looking at (thank-you Microsoft for the variable-sized scroll region), but most people don't even know how it works (really).
... slowly. And while you're at it, highlight the scrollbar with a little question-mark bubble next to it that they can click to find out "hey, I'm scrolling for you, wanna learn how this thingy works?"
... but once they knew how it worked, they used it.
I know, I know, scroll mouse.
Here's an idea: the user moves their cursor near the bottom of the screen and *isn't* highlighting, etc. and doesn't jerk the mouse back up (indicating the following wasn't what they expected), scroll down for them to see more document
Just an idea -- lots of things can do this.
PS, yes, I know, its like clippy in MS Office. You know what? People love the help if its useful. Non-experts hated clippy because it was annoying to be told things you didn't want to know or need to know right then
There was a really good (TLC?) episode about designing modern jet fighter aircraft. They spoke of two things: making it fly, and making pilots able to fly it.
... "it should have banked harder to the left" or "why did it stall? I increased power ..." After much tweaking, they had a software system that "understood" what the pilot expected to have happen from their control of the plane and the plane could be made to do those things (within its limits) by the software.
It seemed that with all the control surfaces necessary to make this plane (new F-16?) fly, it would be impossible for the pilot to successfully fly the plane in combat (or at all?).
Instead, they engineered the plane the way they wanted, essentially ignoring the pilot's limitations and then wrote a software interface between the pilot's usual tools (pedals, joystick, etc.) and the plane's mechanics. They ran top gun pilots through flight simulators while listening to their comments
Designing UIs should be similar. Where I work we design database systems that are used, in part, at both POS and for data-entry clerks. The UIs for each are quite different but related. The POS worker shouldn't have to navigate menus, etc. to get a sale completed; the system simply runs through the normal questions one after the next with "ENTER" alone doing the right thing most of the time.
Data entry clerks are asked for several starting pieces of information (type of customer/transaction, etc.) and then presented with a form that allows them to simply keep typing without moving their hands almost at all.
In cases where redundancy sets in (entering 50 of something slightly different), filling in the fields automatically is also possible.
I shouldn't have to navigate a word processor's menus to spell-check my document, or to change the margins, or to move text around, etc. And for the most part, modern word processors are fairly well-designed beasts (being heavily used by many people).
Good UI design takes a lot of thought, and user testing, and ignoring your "instincts" as a programmer sometimes -- your users probably aren't programmers.
I was about to post more or less the same thing you did -- that users shouldn't care what its written in but I realized as I read your post that it isn't in fact true.
How would you feel if Microsoft released the source code to MS Excel in, say, Brainf*ck?
Actually, lets say its an obscure compiled language that can't be easily translated into another language at all.
Would you be praising MS for their contribution to the community or decrying their choice of language which limits the legibility and review of the code?
Haskell is completely opaque to me (as far as debugging is concerned) although I'm sure I could learn it if I wanted to (having tucked many others under my belt already, including most recently PostScript for some reason). That opacity does change my feelings about using a program -- RMS' views and paranoias notwithstanding, his thoughts about "what if the developper dies or quits maintaining the code?" are justified.
I have expectations that people would continue to maintain a Haskell program because I've met Haskell programmers -- but not as assured as I'd be if it were written in C, PERL or even Python. (I leave Java off that list since most Java programmers seem intent on code-hiding rather than sharing).
What is this "going outside" I hear about?
... which is good considering she was born to a computer geek and his wife who got accepted to computer engineering at 16.
... for 4 or 5 days maybe.
Where is this "outside" place?
-- (joke over) --
One of the first concepts my daughter learned to verbalize at a very young age was that of "inside" and "outside". She began talking during the (canadian) winter and didn't make many excursions outside compared to the summer months. She would go to the windows low enough to look out of and point and say "outside". If one of us picked her up and she could see a tree or whatever, she'd just point and say "outside".
She still has a fascination with being outside
I do love going to the lake & cottage outside cell range
While we're at it, lets rename the show to "annoying people that want your money and aren't TV evangelists"
I remember Nintendo announcing their disc format early on and thinking that they were pretty smart and pretty paranoid and they'd probably figure something out that wouldn't be easily hacked.
I'm impressed.
I still remember Intel claiming (references anyone?) that on-chip L2 cache couldn't be done with current technology (at the time) ... AMD did it within months.
Lets pretend for a moment that the psychological effects of event A can be handled by a child. Lets say that event A would typically be considered harmful to the child, but the child seems to be able to cope. However, it seems that coping mechanisms in children, because of the rapid ongoing development phases they are in have permanent effects on their psyches.
Lets now say that event A is violence around them. Well, above hypothesis is so far true from studies done.
Lets say event A is about neglect. Well, having a wife who works in shelters, yes, neglect on the part of ones parents does seem to feed later neurosis of various forms (read up on your social psychology).
Lets say event A is anything else? Why believe the brain of a child will cope with atypical stimuli (for what we usually measure as the average child's statistically normal experiences) any differently?
Go study it, then open your mouth about how to raise my kids.
The DOJ cared enough to have an initial case in the early 90's and to bring MS back to court in the late 90's. My suspicion is that the administration told them to drop it after the findings of fact and before a penalty was brought (and many news sources back that theory up).
Offence intended: you're a moron.
Thanks.
*bowing out now*
That is to say, my point was obvious to people with a measurable IQ -- I don't enjoy meaningless kibitzing. Think for yourself.
I'd love to know if this constitutes interfering with an ongoing case and how european law deals with such things. I'm not sure the DOJ would be so thrilled about it either -- interfering with a trade-partner's legal procedings that is.
I doubt they'd care if MS paid of some chinese diplomat to be quiet, but the EU is a fairly big partner these days.
And broadband is cheaper too :-)
;-).
... mine is cable.
I had a friend call me because he'd arranged a 100Mbit feed for under $1000 and he was pretty happy about it. I told him I get 10Mbit at home for under $50
Mind you, he got a backbone connection to a major network
What I really don't understand is that ID's games don't have this feature.
;-)
Doom 3 works when you install it. Doom 1 and 2 did too, as did Heretic and Hexen, most of which I borrowed from friends
Of course, I singlehandedly sold about 30 copies of Doom 1 in highschool to other people (just cause I had a 0-day copy didn't mean they deserved one).
But more to the point, some of the recent games by ID software have been very highly anticipated and I'd presume highly pirated. I'm assuming they care, but its not worth their effort to go beyond a key check from the box (which I'm quite happy with for Quake ]I[).