How is a dictatorship that allows capitalistic enterprise "the Left"? The central idea of "the Left" is more equal distribution of income. China is becoming more and more unequal. That's why today's China appeals to neither the freedom-loving Right nor the equality-loving Left.
Open source is one thing, but I'm wondering how useful to us Sun's move really is if the code will not be put out under a GPL-like or BSD-like license
What license are you afraid of? In order to meet the OSI definition of open source, they can't be TOO far away from the existing licenses!
... lately I sense that "open-sourcing" is more an attempt of big companies to get some work done for free and get some PR at the same time, BUT with little real use to the community as GPL'ing the code would provide.
But the CGI effects, the inserted additional characters, the extra (and totally redundant) scene with Jabba restored from the cutting room floor, the ruining of Han's big intro moment (he shot Greedo unprovoked to avoid being captured in the original), etc. These are the kinds things which whiny nerds like me are complaining about.
None of this has anything to do with the services that Lowry Digital performs. Lowry Digital takes analog movies, converts them to digital and removes degradation caused by analog rot and dust. They also sharpen the picture to make up for limitations of the original filming. But they are not a special effects company. You are talking about work Lucas did long before Lowry Digital had even touched the Star Wars originals. I know because I know someone who works there. But you could also just RTFA.
Why for the love of whatever god you pray to, if any, do you feel the constant desire to further destroy this set of films?
Did your read the article? "Even though the original film elements of the three movies have spent most of their time resting in vaults, they had gathered wear and tear that would have been noticeable had they been transferred, as is, straight to DVD." ""They have been printed more often and been duplicated more often, and each of those passes adds scuffs, dirt, scratches and the like."
Are you such a damn purist that you love every scratch on the film? And if so, do you love them all or only the ones that were put on before the original theatrical release or perhaps the ones that occurred only during the 70s and 80s but not 90s?
More info about making the movie look better than the original: "In the first movie, you have C-3P0 and R2-D2 walking across the desert, and I think half of that desert sand ended up in the camera. It was unbelievable. One technique we use is where you look at the frame before and the frame after to determine what is dirt on the frame in between. When you have as much dirt as this, though, the before and after frames have the same damn dirt -- and more. It's really hard for the program to separate what's dirt and what's image. It led to a lot of extra work -- run it again, check it again, multiple passes, a lot of hand work at the end."
It's been my experience dealing with image processing of "analog" imagery that the higher up in resolution you go, the more "anomolies" can be detected...i.e. there is only so much you can do with the original baseline, and going up in resolution requires huge amounts of post processing to clean up those anomolies.
The article is about the company that does the post-processing to clean up the anomolies.
AAANNND the final product is still limited by the originals.
To some extent but perhaps not as much as you think. I've spoken with the CTO of the company and he told me that sometimes films they "restore" look better than the originals because they can use extrapolation techniques.
Did you read the article? The makeover is RETURNING the movie to the quality that you saw "the week it opened"
The article says: "Even though the original film elements of the three movies have spent most of their time resting in vaults, they had gathered wear and tear that would have been noticeable had they been transferred, as is, straight to DVD."
Lowry's company fixes up analog movies by removing "scuffs, dirt, scratches an the like." Are these the parts of Star Wars you like best?
Ian Caven is a regular member of the Vancouver Python User's Group and he spoke about this amazing system at our conference a month ago.
One intersting bit is that the vast majority of this system is written in Python using numpy. Ian says "he doesn't know how they would have done it" otherwise. C is used for the inner loops but Python does the majority of the algorithmic stuff that makes one image processing job (e.g. removing dust) different from another (e.g. correcting for film degradation). Python also manages all of the distributed processing.
Another interesting bit is that they are using Python, Zope and HTTP to make a virtual file system for managing the frames and movies. This will help with the storage management problems that arise from working with such massive files.
There are other amazing facts but it is hard to know which are competitive secrets that are better not divulged. One hint I'll give is that the productivity of the programmers at this company would shock you. They've obviously benefitted from building on a very high-level language and they also have some very sharp tools they've built themselves to make these amazing jobs possible.
It isn't so much from the Python community in general as from a particular set of high school students. You're picking on high school students you meanie!
The XML community seems to be largely devoid of any knowledge of history or computer science depth. I have yet to find a description of XML schema processing in terms of grammars and parsers.
The brain damaged SAX parser has become popular, while few know about the XmlPullParser. Since many of those who use XML parsers don't seem to have ever parsed anything else, they do not seem to find it odd that the scanner should call the parser, rather than the other way around.
What does scanning have to do with XML parsing? The whole point of XML is that the tokens are predefined (elements, attributes, text nodes), so that the application writer does not need to deal with scanning at all. It is an internal detail of the parser.
If you are trying to say that the application should call the parser rather than the other way around then you are making some sense.
But the underlying problem is actually the programming languages we have available. The single-stack languages that are popular force either the parser or the application to NOT keep its local data on the stack. Since the first XML parsers were more complicated than the applications built on top of them, the parsers took the stack and the application had to deal with callbacks. Now parsers are commonplace and it is right that the roles should reverse and the complexity should be pushed into the parser. (and pull parsers are gaining in popularity)
But whose fault was it that we had to make the choice in the first place? The programming languages! Languages with coroutines do not have this problem.
Perhaps this lack of computer science depth is due to the fact that XML grew out of the dot-com bubble, when people felt they had no time to design or think about much.
Let's presume that's true. Then what is the excuse for the commercial DB world that Fabian Pascal claims is just as broken? I guess that things went wrong in the "minicomputer bubble"? Can you remind me of a time when the industry was moving slowly enough that people could be contemplative?
It makes no sense to have "loyalty" to a document. The document is a means to an end. The end is the nation. And the nation is a means to an end. The end is the freedom of the citizens. Therefore your loyalty should be first and foremost to the citizenry. It is confusion at best and idolatry at worst to worship either the symbols of or mechanisms behind citizenship. And if you are really enlightened you might take a moment to think even about citizens of other countries and what sort of respect and consideration might also be due them.
First, it is ridiculous to think that a Chinese villager competes with you in any real sense. They don't have access to the education. They don't speak the language that computer programming books are written in. They don't even have access to reliable electricity.
Second, let's presume that overnight they all did get access to these things. Then by definition they would, overnight, become both consumers and producers. They could only get their education by going to universities, reading books, consuming electricity, etc. And one assumes that they don't exist merely to toil. They probably consume all kinds of goods and services. Some will be made at home. Others (especially software and software-related services!) will tend to be imported.
Except they don't always have a choice. A lot of people work in crappy jobs. According to your theory this wouldn't happen because they'd choose another profession.
For an individual the cost of switching jobs is high. So there is a lot of friction keeping people in crappy jobs. Increasing the friction by forcing jobs to stay within particular countries makes the situation worse, not better. Thank God that today's Indians and Chinese can choose to be computer programmers where they could not twenty years ago. Despite the bitching and moaning of Americans, an increased choice for them and for their new employers is pretty unambiguous progress.
Except they can't, because no one else will hire them. They take whatever they can get, and sometimes that's barely enough to survive.
The system is set up to ensure that there is always poverty at one end and prosperity at the other in order to encourage productivity. Furthermore, each society chooses what they absolute lower bound will be for poverty. But if a society has no money coming in then they do not have the capacity to choose, do they? There needs to be a tax base before there can be social programs and actual jobs/wages before there can be minimum wages.
I am all for unions in these countries. Go there and agitate for them! But it is wrong to require them to conform to your ideas of appropriate labor laws before doing business with them. That's just an underhanded way of keeping them poor and pretending you are doing them a favor.
And the cheapest labor is that of a slave or prisoner who is being given barely enough to eat.
It is ludicrous to suggest that there are slaves or prisoners in China doing software development. Please present a shred of evidence.
The competition has no incentive to change their ways (they're more "competitive" than you, after all), so you're forced to adopt their ways.
That's just silly. In a society that is even marginally capitalist, the end goal of each player is to make a comfortable life for themselves. This means that employers have to compete for talent just as employees compete for jobs. According to your theory of economics, McDonald's and Burger King would be in a race to the bottom that would price their value meals at a penny each. Otherwise "how would they compete?" Well at the point where McDonald's and Burger King realize that they can no longer price their meals profitably they shift their resources where they can make money.
Employees do that too. When they realize that gardeners do not make much money they become computer programmers. When they can't make enough money there, they move on to something else. Nobody ever gets to $0.00. This is exactly what is happening in India and China.
Otherwise you may as well throw out 100+ years of economic and labor progress (what, you think the middle class just magically appeared? It came about as a direct result of sane labor laws,
What: you think labor laws just magically appeared? Perhaps they came about as a direct result of a burgeoning middle class that thought that it might be more comfortable to have weekends and evenings off. Perhaps their relative prosperity gave them some levels to control the political process and the interest to do so.
because the use of automation virtually guarantees that there is more human labor available than work to do).
Ridiculous. Labour expands to fill the vacuum. That's why there are "personal trainers" where there once were none. And "stock brokers" and "real estate agents" and "wedding planners" and "computer programmers" and "technical architects" and... Automation is irrelevant. Automation creates demand for new products and services(e.g. system administrator, phone banking clerk, Slashdot editor) just as it destroys old ones (buggy whip creator, telephone operator,...)
You say that it "easier to get good performance from higher-level languages than machine code". That's a weird comparison. "Machine code" is a way of implementing higher level languages CPUs do not interpret Perl or Java. You need intermediate languages or runtimes. Perl has such an intermediate form today. "After locating your script, Perl compiles the entire script into an internal form." That's from the Perl documentation. If you want to have a discussion on this topic you need to be prepared to compare Perl's current internal representation to a byte-code based one. Most of the universe (Java,.NET, Python, Smalltalk) seems to be moving towards bytecodes but maybe you have an argument that working with parse trees is more efficient?
Your description was fine except that "hash tables" are not relevant to the discussion. They are an application of hashes but not one with any relevance to cryptographic security.
It will never be possible for a hash of 2048 bits to return you the data of a 2MB file. That's not worth worrying about. The problem is if someone gets your/etc/passwd and can figure out how to generate a new password that will hash to the same value. At that point, there was no value in hashing the password before putting it in/etc/passwd.
P=NP is not the "strong AI problem". It has nothing specifically to do with AI and there is no reason to believe that a solution would lead to AI.
I predict that the
future will be pretty much like the present only with more people and more problems.
You may be right. You may be wrong. I don't see the problem with exploring both avenues of thought just in case. Lower primates did not predict how consciousness and speech would change their world. Hunter/gatherers did not predict how agriculture would change their world. Early farmers did not predict newer weapons technology would change their world. Empires did not predict how doctrines of human rights would change their world. etc.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/compactbsd
"CompactBSD is a powerful set of tools that allow you to build your own customized, lightweight distribution of OpenBSD and then burn it onto compact flash so that it can be run on an embedded PC platform such as FatPort's FatPoint (www.fatport.com)"
A user having the ability to run code on their own computer is not a "local exploit". It's just a user using their computer. Ar remote site being able to run code on a computer is a "remote exploit". That much is true.
We used to run whole research departments developing mathematical modelling, computational physics programmes on a single DEC VAX 11/750 with 8 MB of main memory and like 80 MB of hard disk space. It was so underutilised that astrophysics would rent out time on the darn thing to geophysics and chemistry.
For what you are talking about to be comparable to what the article is talking about (did you read it?) everybody in the department would have had to been huddled around the VAX with keyboards and monitors plugged into it directly. The whole point of this hack is to allow the school to avoid the price of terminals.
Even if you insist on running a pointy-clicky GUI, with X10 we used to run dozens of graphics terminals off of one VAX
Of course: and any idiot could set up such a system today as well. But the difference in price between cheap PCs and terminals is small enough that most people choose to just go with the extra PCs.
This article just proves that the net progress of computing is actually backwards because the computers certainly are getting bigger/faster/better more slowly than the intelligence and creativity of the users -- now they all need a GUI just to edit text and compile programs.
Yes, computing is totally moving backwards. Now there are hundreds of millions of old people, children, women and business people who use them on a daily basis, tweaking fonts in documents directly without asking a geek living in the basement to tweak their template or tell them the "code" they have to type in. Computing was so much better back in the days of VAXes when those cretins just stayed away from the computer.
It is kind of ludicrous to suggest that human beings will have affects on the planet that are so severe that it becomes easier to fix the atmosphere of another planet with the wrong size and distance from the sun than to fix our own atmosphere. It is like making such a mess of your house that it is cheaper to buy another house and replace all of your stuff then clean up your existing one and the stuff in it. Life on earth can easily tolerate the slight differences of temperature and atmosphere caused by pollution and greenhouse gasses. Society-as-we-know-it may not survive it easily but life will.
I have long wondered why web interfaces aren't much good. The technologies are there; Java applets, Flash, Python could do it, JavaScript could with a few extensions, XUL, heck, even C, compiled on the fly. All these stop just short of integrating well with the web and the client platform. Why? Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step? Even.NET doesn't go there; the GUI interface is very much tied to Windows.
Web interfaces are not that good because the monopolistic owner of the most popular browser decided years ago that the Web was a competitor to their proprietary APIs. Therefore they've thrown no resources at advancing or evolving it. This sucks the wind out of the whole Web industry because nobody is going to serve data that requires an alternate browser.
Slashdot Mirror
How is a dictatorship that allows capitalistic enterprise "the Left"? The central idea of "the Left" is more equal distribution of income. China is becoming more and more unequal. That's why today's China appeals to neither the freedom-loving Right nor the equality-loving Left.
Open source is one thing, but I'm wondering how useful to us Sun's move really is if the code will not be put out under a GPL-like or BSD-like license
What license are you afraid of? In order to meet the OSI definition of open source, they can't be TOO far away from the existing licenses!
Please give an example.
But the CGI effects, the inserted additional characters, the extra (and totally redundant) scene with Jabba restored from the cutting room floor, the ruining of Han's big intro moment (he shot Greedo unprovoked to avoid being captured in the original), etc. These are the kinds things which whiny nerds like me are complaining about.
None of this has anything to do with the services that Lowry Digital performs. Lowry Digital takes analog movies, converts them to digital and removes degradation caused by analog rot and dust. They also sharpen the picture to make up for limitations of the original filming. But they are not a special effects company. You are talking about work Lucas did long before Lowry Digital had even touched the Star Wars originals. I know because I know someone who works there. But you could also just RTFA.
Why for the love of whatever god you pray to, if any, do you feel the constant desire to further destroy this set of films?
Did your read the article? "Even though the original film elements of the three movies have spent most of their time resting in vaults, they had gathered wear and tear that would have been noticeable had they been transferred, as is, straight to DVD." ""They have been printed more often and been duplicated more often, and each of those passes adds scuffs, dirt, scratches and the like."
Are you such a damn purist that you love every scratch on the film? And if so, do you love them all or only the ones that were put on before the original theatrical release or perhaps the ones that occurred only during the 70s and 80s but not 90s?
Maybe they are alluding to the fact that it doesn't all sit on one big hard drive as a layperson (CNN reader!) might presume.
More info about making the movie look better than the original: "In the first movie, you have C-3P0 and R2-D2 walking across the desert, and I think half of that desert sand ended up in the camera. It was unbelievable. One technique we use is where you look at the frame before and the frame after to determine what is dirt on the frame in between. When you have as much dirt as this, though, the before and after frames have the same damn dirt -- and more. It's really hard for the program to separate what's dirt and what's image. It led to a lot of extra work -- run it again, check it again, multiple passes, a lot of hand work at the end."
here
It's been my experience dealing with image processing of "analog" imagery that the higher up in resolution you go, the more "anomolies" can be detected...i.e. there is only so much you can do with the original baseline, and going up in resolution requires huge amounts of post processing to clean up those anomolies.
The article is about the company that does the post-processing to clean up the anomolies.
AAANNND the final product is still limited by the originals.
To some extent but perhaps not as much as you think. I've spoken with the CTO of the company and he told me that sometimes films they "restore" look better than the originals because they can use extrapolation techniques.
Did you read the article? The makeover is RETURNING the movie to the quality that you saw "the week it opened"
The article says: "Even though the original film elements of the three movies have spent most of their time resting in vaults, they had gathered wear and tear that would have been noticeable had they been transferred, as is, straight to DVD."
Lowry's company fixes up analog movies by removing "scuffs, dirt, scratches an the like." Are these the parts of Star Wars you like best?
Ian Caven is a regular member of the Vancouver Python User's Group and he spoke about this amazing system at our conference a month ago.
One intersting bit is that the vast majority of this system is written in Python using numpy. Ian says "he doesn't know how they would have done it" otherwise. C is used for the inner loops but Python does the majority of the algorithmic stuff that makes one image processing job (e.g. removing dust) different from another (e.g. correcting for film degradation). Python also manages all of the distributed processing.
Another interesting bit is that they are using Python, Zope and HTTP to make a virtual file system for managing the frames and movies. This will help with the storage management problems that arise from working with such massive files.
There are other amazing facts but it is hard to know which are competitive secrets that are better not divulged. One hint I'll give is that the productivity of the programmers at this company would shock you. They've obviously benefitted from building on a very high-level language and they also have some very sharp tools they've built themselves to make these amazing jobs possible.
It isn't so much from the Python community in general as from a particular set of high school students. You're picking on high school students you meanie!
The XML community seems to be largely devoid of any knowledge of history or computer science depth. I have yet to find a description of XML schema processing in terms of grammars and parsers.
Hedge automata: a formal model for XML schemata
The brain damaged SAX parser has become popular, while few know about the XmlPullParser. Since many of those who use XML parsers don't seem to have ever parsed anything else, they do not seem to find it odd that the scanner should call the parser, rather than the other way around.
What does scanning have to do with XML parsing? The whole point of XML is that the tokens are predefined (elements, attributes, text nodes), so that the application writer does not need to deal with scanning at all. It is an internal detail of the parser.
If you are trying to say that the application should call the parser rather than the other way around then you are making some sense.
But the underlying problem is actually the programming languages we have available. The single-stack languages that are popular force either the parser or the application to NOT keep its local data on the stack. Since the first XML parsers were more complicated than the applications built on top of them, the parsers took the stack and the application had to deal with callbacks. Now parsers are commonplace and it is right that the roles should reverse and the complexity should be pushed into the parser. (and pull parsers are gaining in popularity)
But whose fault was it that we had to make the choice in the first place? The programming languages! Languages with coroutines do not have this problem.
Perhaps this lack of computer science depth is due to the fact that XML grew out of the dot-com bubble, when people felt they had no time to design or think about much.
Let's presume that's true. Then what is the excuse for the commercial DB world that Fabian Pascal claims is just as broken? I guess that things went wrong in the "minicomputer bubble"? Can you remind me of a time when the industry was moving slowly enough that people could be contemplative?
It makes no sense to have "loyalty" to a document. The document is a means to an end. The end is the nation. And the nation is a means to an end. The end is the freedom of the citizens. Therefore your loyalty should be first and foremost to the citizenry. It is confusion at best and idolatry at worst to worship either the symbols of or mechanisms behind citizenship. And if you are really enlightened you might take a moment to think even about citizens of other countries and what sort of respect and consideration might also be due them.
First, it is ridiculous to think that a Chinese villager competes with you in any real sense. They don't have access to the education. They don't speak the language that computer programming books are written in. They don't even have access to reliable electricity.
Second, let's presume that overnight they all did get access to these things. Then by definition they would, overnight, become both consumers and producers. They could only get their education by going to universities, reading books, consuming electricity, etc. And one assumes that they don't exist merely to toil. They probably consume all kinds of goods and services. Some will be made at home. Others (especially software and software-related services!) will tend to be imported.
Except they don't always have a choice. A lot of people work in crappy jobs. According to your theory this wouldn't happen because they'd choose another profession.
For an individual the cost of switching jobs is high. So there is a lot of friction keeping people in crappy jobs. Increasing the friction by forcing jobs to stay within particular countries makes the situation worse, not better. Thank God that today's Indians and Chinese can choose to be computer programmers where they could not twenty years ago. Despite the bitching and moaning of Americans, an increased choice for them and for their new employers is pretty unambiguous progress.
Except they can't, because no one else will hire them. They take whatever they can get, and sometimes that's barely enough to survive.
The system is set up to ensure that there is always poverty at one end and prosperity at the other in order to encourage productivity. Furthermore, each society chooses what they absolute lower bound will be for poverty. But if a society has no money coming in then they do not have the capacity to choose, do they? There needs to be a tax base before there can be social programs and actual jobs/wages before there can be minimum wages.
I am all for unions in these countries. Go there and agitate for them! But it is wrong to require them to conform to your ideas of appropriate labor laws before doing business with them. That's just an underhanded way of keeping them poor and pretending you are doing them a favor.
And the cheapest labor is that of a slave or prisoner who is being given barely enough to eat.
It is ludicrous to suggest that there are slaves or prisoners in China doing software development. Please present a shred of evidence.
The competition has no incentive to change their ways (they're more "competitive" than you, after all), so you're forced to adopt their ways.
That's just silly. In a society that is even marginally capitalist, the end goal of each player is to make a comfortable life for themselves. This means that employers have to compete for talent just as employees compete for jobs. According to your theory of economics, McDonald's and Burger King would be in a race to the bottom that would price their value meals at a penny each. Otherwise "how would they compete?" Well at the point where McDonald's and Burger King realize that they can no longer price their meals profitably they shift their resources where they can make money.
Employees do that too. When they realize that gardeners do not make much money they become computer programmers. When they can't make enough money there, they move on to something else. Nobody ever gets to $0.00. This is exactly what is happening in India and China.
Otherwise you may as well throw out 100+ years of economic and labor progress (what, you think the middle class just magically appeared? It came about as a direct result of sane labor laws,
What: you think labor laws just magically appeared? Perhaps they came about as a direct result of a burgeoning middle class that thought that it might be more comfortable to have weekends and evenings off. Perhaps their relative prosperity gave them some levels to control the political process and the interest to do so.
because the use of automation virtually guarantees that there is more human labor available than work to do).
Ridiculous. Labour expands to fill the vacuum. That's why there are "personal trainers" where there once were none. And "stock brokers" and "real estate agents" and "wedding planners" and "computer programmers" and "technical architects" and ... Automation is irrelevant. Automation creates demand for new products and services(e.g. system administrator, phone banking clerk, Slashdot editor) just as it destroys old ones (buggy whip creator, telephone operator, ...)
I'd suggest you read a bit more.
To be fair, "3D Visual Enterprise" is a SERVICE not a product. It is a buzzwordy name for a consulting methodology.
Your description was fine except that "hash tables" are not relevant to the discussion. They are an application of hashes but not one with any relevance to cryptographic security. It will never be possible for a hash of 2048 bits to return you the data of a 2MB file. That's not worth worrying about. The problem is if someone gets your /etc/passwd and can figure out how to generate a new password that will hash to the same value. At that point, there was no value in hashing the password before putting it in /etc/passwd.
- We haven't solved the strong AI problem (P=NP).
P=NP is not the "strong AI problem". It has nothing specifically to do with AI and there is no reason to believe that a solution would lead to AI.
I predict that the future will be pretty much like the present only with more people and more problems.
You may be right. You may be wrong. I don't see the problem with exploring both avenues of thought just in case. Lower primates did not predict how consciousness and speech would change their world. Hunter/gatherers did not predict how agriculture would change their world. Early farmers did not predict newer weapons technology would change their world. Empires did not predict how doctrines of human rights would change their world. etc.
Sometimes things do change radically.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/compactbsd "CompactBSD is a powerful set of tools that allow you to build your own customized, lightweight distribution of OpenBSD and then burn it onto compact flash so that it can be run on an embedded PC platform such as FatPort's FatPoint (www.fatport.com)"
'nuff said.
A user having the ability to run code on their own computer is not a "local exploit". It's just a user using their computer. Ar remote site being able to run code on a computer is a "remote exploit". That much is true.
We used to run whole research departments developing mathematical modelling, computational physics programmes on a single DEC VAX 11/750 with 8 MB of main memory and like 80 MB of hard disk space. It was so underutilised that astrophysics would rent out time on the darn thing to geophysics and chemistry.
For what you are talking about to be comparable to what the article is talking about (did you read it?) everybody in the department would have had to been huddled around the VAX with keyboards and monitors plugged into it directly. The whole point of this hack is to allow the school to avoid the price of terminals.
Even if you insist on running a pointy-clicky GUI, with X10 we used to run dozens of graphics terminals off of one VAX
Of course: and any idiot could set up such a system today as well. But the difference in price between cheap PCs and terminals is small enough that most people choose to just go with the extra PCs.
This article just proves that the net progress of computing is actually backwards because the computers certainly are getting bigger/faster/better more slowly than the intelligence and creativity of the users -- now they all need a GUI just to edit text and compile programs.
Yes, computing is totally moving backwards. Now there are hundreds of millions of old people, children, women and business people who use them on a daily basis, tweaking fonts in documents directly without asking a geek living in the basement to tweak their template or tell them the "code" they have to type in. Computing was so much better back in the days of VAXes when those cretins just stayed away from the computer.
It is kind of ludicrous to suggest that human beings will have affects on the planet that are so severe that it becomes easier to fix the atmosphere of another planet with the wrong size and distance from the sun than to fix our own atmosphere. It is like making such a mess of your house that it is cheaper to buy another house and replace all of your stuff then clean up your existing one and the stuff in it. Life on earth can easily tolerate the slight differences of temperature and atmosphere caused by pollution and greenhouse gasses. Society-as-we-know-it may not survive it easily but life will.
I have long wondered why web interfaces aren't much good. The technologies are there; Java applets, Flash, Python could do it, JavaScript could with a few extensions, XUL, heck, even C, compiled on the fly. All these stop just short of integrating well with the web and the client platform. Why? Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step? Even .NET doesn't go there; the GUI interface is very much tied to Windows.
Web interfaces are not that good because the monopolistic owner of the most popular browser decided years ago that the Web was a competitor to their proprietary APIs. Therefore they've thrown no resources at advancing or evolving it. This sucks the wind out of the whole Web industry because nobody is going to serve data that requires an alternate browser.