Does this mean he somehow has an intrinsic credibility in making sweeping statements which are ultimately baseless? That is akin to saying “hey look, I wrote fetchmail, therefore I am an authority on the social-political issues surrounding software development.”
Also, the so-called Star Trek interface you paint is really full-fledged AI and so is stupid as a goal of serious interface design.
The discussion here does not refer to the vocal interaction with the Lady. (Besides, what is “full-fledged AI” anyway? It amuses me when people make comments involving “true”, “real” or some other way of describing sentience with artificial intelligence. AI, to some extent, is in use in many modern user interfaces and services, if only as an expert system, but I digress.) It involves the seemless access to data that puts it into proper context based on the task at hand. For example, accessing data from a small hand-held device when you are exploring new terrain is different from when you are analyzing it on the bridge back home. This is possible, hypothetically, because the machine “understands” the data. It is not just an anonymous stream of meaningless numbers and text, but rather pieces of telemetry, names, times, events, and so forth. Some of that data is useful for the field, and some of it is not. Because the data has meaning, rules can be written in terms of that meaning and that is what would allow more intelligent usage.
Finally, XML is a step backwards. A HUGE step backwards. What was good for typesetting documents is really horrific for arbitrary objects.
SGML, and even HTML at first, were both intended to markup documents semantically, not typeset them. This whole business for making presentational markup is the result of browser wars and amateur users who do not understand why (or how) to separate content, presentation, and behavior. What’s more, Mr. Naggum has some pretty bizarre ideas as to the inapplicability of XML, it seems. He talks about how a closing tag is a good idea for blocks that are longer than your 20-line terminal. There are also complaints about processing overhead in that post. His thoughts are so chaotic and unwieldy that I found it hard to read anything past his first paragraph. (Maybe I can spend some time on it later.)
Getting back to reality, let me clue you in. Processing overhead does not matter. We live in an age where processors run at multiple gigahertz, memory and storage are plentiful, and the cost of bandwidth has plummeted. Furthermore, XML is just a means of encoding semantic data. The value is not in the syntax of the markup language (not in the least) but rather in the notion that data is self-describing.
Nuclear bombs aren't inherently evil or good, it's just how you use them. Otherwise they just sit there.
But what is their purpose? We cannot simply evaluate things by their inert state. We also have to factor in their reason for being. A gun isn’t made just for the purpose of propelling an object at high velocity in a particular direction (there are superior devices for doing that), it is intended to destroy something as a result.
This type of thinking might be carelessly superficial in some circumstances. You are right to an extent, but that should not keep you from further consideration.
There were several shots where it was obvious they fucked up the color process. (For example, when they were standing on the ridge, there was a close-up of the childrens' faces with mountains behind them. They obviously looked out of place.) The color of the river scene kept shifting as well (they couldn't decide if we were dealing with blue, or cyan water it seems).
Overall, remarkable special effects, but the worst color processing I have ever seen in a modern movie.
One faulty assumption I picked out of that read was the mention of header tags.
Why, for instance, does HTML have headings H1 through H6? Who ever seriously used a six-level-deep heading hierarchy?
Well, I have. My company makes a web application where we have some heavily nested data (say, for example, a person nested within another person who is their relative, for any number of levels). Because I try to keep all my mark-up as semantic as possible, I need deeply nested header tags. I can also think of all sorts of technical writing that might use deeper than six levels of section hierarchy.
It is useless to state assumptions which assume a usage will not be necessary. Instead, make as few assumptions as posisble then handle general case which applies as well to everybody’s typical situation but is easy to extend to edge cases. That’s a basic principle anybody in technology should follow. And, in fact, this is precisely what XHTML 2.0 does. It has a "header" tag which is not indexed and styled by CSS which checks for how many ancestor headers there are.
This thread sees a surprising number of people supporting this idea using the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, why should you worry?” fallacy. There have been weak arguments on both sides, but I would like to nail this one shut by reminding everyone that tracking citizens is distinctly unconstitutional. Maybe some of you have read the following provision in United States law.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
(Emphasis mine.) Sure, I know this is a little quaint, but hear me out. This law, known as the First Amendment, among other things, protects the right (note it does not grant a right—rights cannot be granted, only protected) of citizens to associate freely and anonymously. The reason it protects this right is so members of the population can either meet up for Thursday night poker, or overthrow the government. Shock and dismay I’m sure, but that is why we have it (and the Second Amendment). Oppressive governments, as a first order of business in controlling a population, restrict the ability of people to assemble. The First Amendment restricts our government’s ability to do that. Of course, it applies directly to protecting to a much simpler, less severe act of “petition the government for a redress of grievances”. Tracking people with GPS everywhere they go will have a chilling effect on the desire to exercise this right, regardless of the intent. Like everything else, people can gather to do something positive or commit a crime. Take guns for example. Not intrinsically bad, but used both for sharp-shooting sports and killing innocent people. Should they be taken away? Absolutely not and the same applies with our freedom to go wherever we choose without being monitored. It is astonishing to me that we live in an age where people are willing to allow the government to track and monitor their every move. These people should be utterly ashamed of themselves because this a freedom that has been won by great sacrifice and is one of the founding principles of the United States. Too bad we really don’t teach this material in schools anymore.
You say we are reducing crime with harsher sentences, but we have the highest number of prisoners per capita in the world. What should we make of the fact that we have 80% more people in jail than the global average (and leading Canada by 84%)? Are just better at catching people? Then there is the fact that yearly prisoner intake is increasing steadily. Of course, that said, I am not sure how to interpret that the incarceration rate has slowed. I would also like to point out that just because violent crime is going down (as your data demonstrate), it does not indicate that crime as a whole is decreasing. Case in point: we have more and more white collar crime that (largely) goes unpunnished. Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous. Take Finland’s admirably low crime rates and note their justice system utilizes lighter sentences which focus on rehabilitation (I will cite a source after I get to work;).
It is a cultural mainstay of ours to steal from the rich and give to the poor because the rich are likely greedy and corrupt. Why is Robin Hood a hero, but someone who steals from a corporation that pays starvation wages, drives smaller businses out, and fills out world with junk a criminal?
You need to grow up and realize that breaking the rules/law is wrong whether or not you get caught.
I would like to point out that it is the previous generation(s) who hold positions of influence in business and government routinely get away with henious crimes. (Take small sentences for destroying retirement funds for thousands of people, among other things.) We frequently see the wealthy and powerful get away with minor punishments that are effectively summed up as serving a prison sentence on a yaht in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, our society is replete with cases of minor offenses being punished beyond any reasonable severity. ($250,000 and larger fines for music swappers, or felony charges for young children reading passwords printed on their computers, for example.) If I was a young person, I would be extremely confused. Does this mean that the more serious your crimes are, the less serious the consequences? Does this mean I can do whatever I want if I am affluent? Given that getting into some trouble is part of youth, this makes for a dangerous influence. There are also plenty of cases where breaking the law is not “wrong”, so we cannot treat this as an absolute either. What Rosa Parks did was not wrong or unethical (quite the opposite), but it was most certainly against the rules.
So, you are absolutely correct that stealing is wrong, as is breaking most laws. However, I think we as a society need to do a few things (which come to mind) if we are to have any success in reducing crime. First, the punishments must fit the crime. Copying digital music should not have equal or worse consequences to stealing millions, perhaps billions from a corporation. Murder is a felony charge, not typing a password printed on the bottom of your laptop. You get the idea. Second, we must teach people how to properly evaluate laws and whether or not they are just. This is intrinsic to the continued operation of our democracy but it is hardly given any treatment. People must be able to determine which laws are reasonable insofar as the gravity of violations, and which laws must be disobeyed for the greater good. Third, we need to restore equal application under law irregardless of political, social, or economic standing. Today, the wealthy can afford good lawyers who are better versed in the law and thus finding loopholes. Meanwhile, the poor rarely have competent defense. This is very biased, and aside from being unfair and unjust, it also leads to further crime (these cycles are much more likely to be perpetuated in the lower classes).
This excuse people use that Windows is crap because of diverse hardware is tiresome. It has nothing to do with that. There’s an endless lineup of people who are willing to tell you they honestly run Linux or some BSD variant on weird hardware and their platforms are solid. Beyond that, bad hardware does not create an inconsistent and confusing interface, security holes, application bloat, and other nonsense that is strictly further up the stack on Windows. OS X, on the otherhand, is solid in design both under the hood and as far as usres are concerned. It lacks decades of legacy bagage except in a controled, deliberate fashion (Classic support is not a critical component, but an optional add-on). We live in an era where resources are abstracted such that user applications don’t have to care about specific processors, video cards, motherboard chipsets, and so on. Maybe Windows users should wake up and realize this.
Adium, a mutliple protocol instant messenger client for Mac OS X is an outstanding example. It is both simple and elegant in that it can be configured to stay completely out of your way and it takes advantage of the conventions provided by the "standard" user interface to deliver notifications rather than some cheesy, custom, in-your-face approach. The interface is very clean and consistent. It is obvious whoever is responsible for its interface understands typography and layout. When compared to many other clients, it seems to offer exactly what you need. Load up the most other clients and you are faced with a torrent of ads, and other useless features that clutter up the experience.
Look, I usually try not to lose my cool on this, but 90% of the comments here indicate that people think the key to this performance increase is the use of gotos in code. No, you fucking idiots. "Goto", in this case, is Goto-san, a Japanese person (pronounced "Goh-toh" with long o's, not "goh-tu"). The use of gotos in human-written (and read) code is always bad and nowhere is that actually suggested. Do any of you nitwits even understand what a pun is?
Microsoft has way too much experience in software development to not be able to estimate how long a project will take. When projects are chronically late by significant anounts of time, your means of estimating time to complete projects needs to be re-examined.
Here are my own Rules of Estimates.
Estimates are always wrong, no matter who gives them.
The length of any estimate given by a subordinate must be multiplied by a factor inversely proportional to difference in rank.
Managers are only given the estimates their subordinates think they want to hear.
These reflect the sad reality of corporate culture in the United States.
Furthermore, it is impossible to fully quantify all the minutiae of any non-trivial software development project (and everything Microsoft does is non-trivial). To make things worse, developers are always going to tell their superiors what they think their bosses want to hear. If you say n time units and your co-worker says n / 2 time units, guess who looks better. In the end, the overzealous estimate will be forgotten and the workers who are reality driven will be the only ones to look bad.
Also consider the fact that Microsoft management and marketing, more than likely, actually believes their products are solid and well-built. When you get down to it though, Windows is a hacked-up mess which attempts to support decades of (buggy) APIs. Fundamental modifications to it are akin to whacking a bee hive with a short stick. It just so happens that every major release of Windows includes fundamental changes.
My first impression is that this is in direct response to Massachusetts choosing OpenOffice.org for its support of open document formats. In otherwords, Open Source influenced Microsoft in this move so they could remain a contender. This, I would argue, is actually unfortunate. We do not want Open Source to be the stick with which we whack Microsoft because they, obviously being smarter than we give them credit for, will move to avoid being struck. In this event in particular, some people (namely people like us) will respond by thinking: “oh, we can use Microsoft Office now as Microsoft satisfied our complaint.” Wrong. We should not use Microsoft and they only answered one of many problems with their software and fundamental philosophy. Instead, the thinking should be: “Microsoft opened up their document format, so what?” Just because it is documented does not mean there is no vendor lock-in, insanely high-prices, or missing interoperability. Remember that Microsoft is a company which will always work to protect its so-called “Intellectual Property”. They will fight their competition with seedy legal maneuvers instead of obscurity in their file formats. To summarize: same scam, different approach. The only solution is to use Open Source regardless.
Obviously, in the context of this story, a half-dozen Slashbots are going to grab their cat and prepare an entree with it the manner which you described. Come on, what were you thinking!? They'll no doubt end up suing Slashdot and depriving us all of one of our favorite drugs.
The specifications of the MCP7447AEC (which is used by the latest PowerBooks, last updated in August of 2005) indicate the chip is rated only for 1.42GHz (with massive power consumption, might I add). Wow. Once you start looking, you start finding new ways that the G4 sucks to everything else out there.
From my previous post, the specifications from Freescape indicate 512Kb of L2 cache. Intel is just slightly ahead on this front, and that means a lot (updated this past October).
Two points. First, the clock speed on the bus in PowerBooks remains remarkably low. 167MHz as far as I know (not taking DDR into account, which manufacturers claim makes it 333MHz). Huge bottleneck here with most x86 systems doubling that. As it has always been, bus speed is more important than your CPU clock. Second, we've seen no serious improvements to the G4, just (slightly) better fabrication processes which allow for higher multipliers. What makes this suck even more is Apple has resorted to overclocking the G4s in PowerBooks. Freescale states: “[The MPC7447A is] [d]esigned as pin-compatible replacements for Freescale’s MPC7447 products, these new processors have been shown to reach speeds of 1.5 GHz.” Funny considering I saw a recent source (can’t find the link) that said G4s are maxed out at 1.4GHz. Not that these minor gains mean much for most interactive tasks, of course, but it just goes to show how Apple’s long-in-the-tooth G4 platform is becoming hacked and stretched.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. &ldquolWhat do you think this is?”
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype.”
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”
“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”
“The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”
“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”
“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v.8.3’ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”
“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean he somehow has an intrinsic credibility in making sweeping statements which are ultimately baseless? That is akin to saying “hey look, I wrote fetchmail, therefore I am an authority on the social-political issues surrounding software development.”
Hey! Capitalize the first letter of your sentences! ;-)
Glad to see porn[o][os] in there!
If Quicktime was a codec, I am sure it would be fantastic.
The discussion here does not refer to the vocal interaction with the Lady. (Besides, what is “full-fledged AI” anyway? It amuses me when people make comments involving “true”, “real” or some other way of describing sentience with artificial intelligence. AI, to some extent, is in use in many modern user interfaces and services, if only as an expert system, but I digress.) It involves the seemless access to data that puts it into proper context based on the task at hand. For example, accessing data from a small hand-held device when you are exploring new terrain is different from when you are analyzing it on the bridge back home. This is possible, hypothetically, because the machine “understands” the data. It is not just an anonymous stream of meaningless numbers and text, but rather pieces of telemetry, names, times, events, and so forth. Some of that data is useful for the field, and some of it is not. Because the data has meaning, rules can be written in terms of that meaning and that is what would allow more intelligent usage.
SGML, and even HTML at first, were both intended to markup documents semantically, not typeset them. This whole business for making presentational markup is the result of browser wars and amateur users who do not understand why (or how) to separate content, presentation, and behavior. What’s more, Mr. Naggum has some pretty bizarre ideas as to the inapplicability of XML, it seems. He talks about how a closing tag is a good idea for blocks that are longer than your 20-line terminal. There are also complaints about processing overhead in that post. His thoughts are so chaotic and unwieldy that I found it hard to read anything past his first paragraph. (Maybe I can spend some time on it later.)
Getting back to reality, let me clue you in. Processing overhead does not matter. We live in an age where processors run at multiple gigahertz, memory and storage are plentiful, and the cost of bandwidth has plummeted. Furthermore, XML is just a means of encoding semantic data. The value is not in the syntax of the markup language (not in the least) but rather in the notion that data is self-describing.
But what is their purpose? We cannot simply evaluate things by their inert state. We also have to factor in their reason for being. A gun isn’t made just for the purpose of propelling an object at high velocity in a particular direction (there are superior devices for doing that), it is intended to destroy something as a result.
This type of thinking might be carelessly superficial in some circumstances. You are right to an extent, but that should not keep you from further consideration.
There were several shots where it was obvious they fucked up the color process. (For example, when they were standing on the ridge, there was a close-up of the childrens' faces with mountains behind them. They obviously looked out of place.) The color of the river scene kept shifting as well (they couldn't decide if we were dealing with blue, or cyan water it seems).
Overall, remarkable special effects, but the worst color processing I have ever seen in a modern movie.
One faulty assumption I picked out of that read was the mention of header tags.
Well, I have. My company makes a web application where we have some heavily nested data (say, for example, a person nested within another person who is their relative, for any number of levels). Because I try to keep all my mark-up as semantic as possible, I need deeply nested header tags. I can also think of all sorts of technical writing that might use deeper than six levels of section hierarchy.
It is useless to state assumptions which assume a usage will not be necessary. Instead, make as few assumptions as posisble then handle general case which applies as well to everybody’s typical situation but is easy to extend to edge cases. That’s a basic principle anybody in technology should follow. And, in fact, this is precisely what XHTML 2.0 does. It has a "header" tag which is not indexed and styled by CSS which checks for how many ancestor headers there are.
This thread sees a surprising number of people supporting this idea using the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, why should you worry?” fallacy. There have been weak arguments on both sides, but I would like to nail this one shut by reminding everyone that tracking citizens is distinctly unconstitutional. Maybe some of you have read the following provision in United States law.
(Emphasis mine.) Sure, I know this is a little quaint, but hear me out. This law, known as the First Amendment, among other things, protects the right (note it does not grant a right—rights cannot be granted, only protected) of citizens to associate freely and anonymously. The reason it protects this right is so members of the population can either meet up for Thursday night poker, or overthrow the government. Shock and dismay I’m sure, but that is why we have it (and the Second Amendment). Oppressive governments, as a first order of business in controlling a population, restrict the ability of people to assemble. The First Amendment restricts our government’s ability to do that. Of course, it applies directly to protecting to a much simpler, less severe act of “petition the government for a redress of grievances”. Tracking people with GPS everywhere they go will have a chilling effect on the desire to exercise this right, regardless of the intent. Like everything else, people can gather to do something positive or commit a crime. Take guns for example. Not intrinsically bad, but used both for sharp-shooting sports and killing innocent people. Should they be taken away? Absolutely not and the same applies with our freedom to go wherever we choose without being monitored. It is astonishing to me that we live in an age where people are willing to allow the government to track and monitor their every move. These people should be utterly ashamed of themselves because this a freedom that has been won by great sacrifice and is one of the founding principles of the United States. Too bad we really don’t teach this material in schools anymore.
You say we are reducing crime with harsher sentences, but we have the highest number of prisoners per capita in the world. What should we make of the fact that we have 80% more people in jail than the global average (and leading Canada by 84%)? Are just better at catching people? Then there is the fact that yearly prisoner intake is increasing steadily. Of course, that said, I am not sure how to interpret that the incarceration rate has slowed. I would also like to point out that just because violent crime is going down (as your data demonstrate), it does not indicate that crime as a whole is decreasing. Case in point: we have more and more white collar crime that (largely) goes unpunnished. Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous. Take Finland’s admirably low crime rates and note their justice system utilizes lighter sentences which focus on rehabilitation (I will cite a source after I get to work ;).
It is a cultural mainstay of ours to steal from the rich and give to the poor because the rich are likely greedy and corrupt. Why is Robin Hood a hero, but someone who steals from a corporation that pays starvation wages, drives smaller businses out, and fills out world with junk a criminal?
I would like to point out that it is the previous generation(s) who hold positions of influence in business and government routinely get away with henious crimes. (Take small sentences for destroying retirement funds for thousands of people, among other things.) We frequently see the wealthy and powerful get away with minor punishments that are effectively summed up as serving a prison sentence on a yaht in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, our society is replete with cases of minor offenses being punished beyond any reasonable severity. ($250,000 and larger fines for music swappers, or felony charges for young children reading passwords printed on their computers, for example.) If I was a young person, I would be extremely confused. Does this mean that the more serious your crimes are, the less serious the consequences? Does this mean I can do whatever I want if I am affluent? Given that getting into some trouble is part of youth, this makes for a dangerous influence. There are also plenty of cases where breaking the law is not “wrong”, so we cannot treat this as an absolute either. What Rosa Parks did was not wrong or unethical (quite the opposite), but it was most certainly against the rules.
So, you are absolutely correct that stealing is wrong, as is breaking most laws. However, I think we as a society need to do a few things (which come to mind) if we are to have any success in reducing crime. First, the punishments must fit the crime. Copying digital music should not have equal or worse consequences to stealing millions, perhaps billions from a corporation. Murder is a felony charge, not typing a password printed on the bottom of your laptop. You get the idea. Second, we must teach people how to properly evaluate laws and whether or not they are just. This is intrinsic to the continued operation of our democracy but it is hardly given any treatment. People must be able to determine which laws are reasonable insofar as the gravity of violations, and which laws must be disobeyed for the greater good. Third, we need to restore equal application under law irregardless of political, social, or economic standing. Today, the wealthy can afford good lawyers who are better versed in the law and thus finding loopholes. Meanwhile, the poor rarely have competent defense. This is very biased, and aside from being unfair and unjust, it also leads to further crime (these cycles are much more likely to be perpetuated in the lower classes).
This is just outright false. Sorry.
Funny. Updates tend to be released on a monthly cycle.
This excuse people use that Windows is crap because of diverse hardware is tiresome. It has nothing to do with that. There’s an endless lineup of people who are willing to tell you they honestly run Linux or some BSD variant on weird hardware and their platforms are solid. Beyond that, bad hardware does not create an inconsistent and confusing interface, security holes, application bloat, and other nonsense that is strictly further up the stack on Windows. OS X, on the otherhand, is solid in design both under the hood and as far as usres are concerned. It lacks decades of legacy bagage except in a controled, deliberate fashion (Classic support is not a critical component, but an optional add-on). We live in an era where resources are abstracted such that user applications don’t have to care about specific processors, video cards, motherboard chipsets, and so on. Maybe Windows users should wake up and realize this.
Adium, a mutliple protocol instant messenger client for Mac OS X is an outstanding example. It is both simple and elegant in that it can be configured to stay completely out of your way and it takes advantage of the conventions provided by the "standard" user interface to deliver notifications rather than some cheesy, custom, in-your-face approach. The interface is very clean and consistent. It is obvious whoever is responsible for its interface understands typography and layout. When compared to many other clients, it seems to offer exactly what you need. Load up the most other clients and you are faced with a torrent of ads, and other useless features that clutter up the experience.
Look, I usually try not to lose my cool on this, but 90% of the comments here indicate that people think the key to this performance increase is the use of gotos in code. No, you fucking idiots. "Goto", in this case, is Goto-san, a Japanese person (pronounced "Goh-toh" with long o's, not "goh-tu"). The use of gotos in human-written (and read) code is always bad and nowhere is that actually suggested. Do any of you nitwits even understand what a pun is?
Here are my own Rules of Estimates.
These reflect the sad reality of corporate culture in the United States.
Furthermore, it is impossible to fully quantify all the minutiae of any non-trivial software development project (and everything Microsoft does is non-trivial). To make things worse, developers are always going to tell their superiors what they think their bosses want to hear. If you say n time units and your co-worker says n / 2 time units, guess who looks better. In the end, the overzealous estimate will be forgotten and the workers who are reality driven will be the only ones to look bad.
Also consider the fact that Microsoft management and marketing, more than likely, actually believes their products are solid and well-built. When you get down to it though, Windows is a hacked-up mess which attempts to support decades of (buggy) APIs. Fundamental modifications to it are akin to whacking a bee hive with a short stick. It just so happens that every major release of Windows includes fundamental changes.
My first impression is that this is in direct response to Massachusetts choosing OpenOffice.org for its support of open document formats. In otherwords, Open Source influenced Microsoft in this move so they could remain a contender. This, I would argue, is actually unfortunate. We do not want Open Source to be the stick with which we whack Microsoft because they, obviously being smarter than we give them credit for, will move to avoid being struck. In this event in particular, some people (namely people like us) will respond by thinking: “oh, we can use Microsoft Office now as Microsoft satisfied our complaint.” Wrong. We should not use Microsoft and they only answered one of many problems with their software and fundamental philosophy. Instead, the thinking should be: “Microsoft opened up their document format, so what?” Just because it is documented does not mean there is no vendor lock-in, insanely high-prices, or missing interoperability. Remember that Microsoft is a company which will always work to protect its so-called “Intellectual Property”. They will fight their competition with seedy legal maneuvers instead of obscurity in their file formats. To summarize: same scam, different approach. The only solution is to use Open Source regardless.
Obviously, in the context of this story, a half-dozen Slashbots are going to grab their cat and prepare an entree with it the manner which you described. Come on, what were you thinking!? They'll no doubt end up suing Slashdot and depriving us all of one of our favorite drugs.
The specifications of the MCP7447AEC (which is used by the latest PowerBooks, last updated in August of 2005) indicate the chip is rated only for 1.42GHz (with massive power consumption, might I add). Wow. Once you start looking, you start finding new ways that the G4 sucks to everything else out there.
From my previous post, the specifications from Freescape indicate 512Kb of L2 cache. Intel is just slightly ahead on this front, and that means a lot (updated this past October).
Two points. First, the clock speed on the bus in PowerBooks remains remarkably low. 167MHz as far as I know (not taking DDR into account, which manufacturers claim makes it 333MHz). Huge bottleneck here with most x86 systems doubling that. As it has always been, bus speed is more important than your CPU clock. Second, we've seen no serious improvements to the G4, just (slightly) better fabrication processes which allow for higher multipliers. What makes this suck even more is Apple has resorted to overclocking the G4s in PowerBooks. Freescale states: “[The MPC7447A is] [d]esigned as pin-compatible replacements for Freescale’s MPC7447 products, these new processors have been shown to reach speeds of 1.5 GHz.” Funny considering I saw a recent source (can’t find the link) that said G4s are maxed out at 1.4GHz. Not that these minor gains mean much for most interactive tasks, of course, but it just goes to show how Apple’s long-in-the-tooth G4 platform is becoming hacked and stretched.
Source: http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference- explained
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. &ldquolWhat do you think this is?”
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype.”
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”
“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”
“The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”
“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”
“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v.8.3’ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”
“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that
Scientists also estimate this gorilla had a penis larger than the leg of a full grown man. See this illustration.
Whoot!