Next you'll be saying that I shouldn't take steps to avoid accidentally my house down because nature and arsonists have also been burning houses down since time immemorial.
Huh. Back in college I used to use stacks of punchcards for scratch paper. We had boxes and boxes and boxes left over. The last computer to use a card reader had been converted to a neat-o bookshelf.
Bah. All you can do with vi is code, so you're still stuck with using a stunning array of separate applications. My life is too short for a complicated mess like that.
Now with emacs, you can have an editor, an interpeter, a compiler, a linker, a refactorer, a debugger, a CVS/SVN client, a machine virtualizer, an object browser, a documentation browser, and a game of Tetris. All in one convenient, bite-size package.
On large projects, I'd take my laptop to a classroom. Almost every important function was written in pseudocode on a chalkboard before I programmed it in C. My laptop bag was full of scratch paper with algorithm notes, ERDs, etc.
Even now at work, I don't have a chalkboard at my disposal (sigh), but my desk is an explosion of paper. I am regularly stopping by the recycle bins so I can grab some paper with a blank side, or to return some paper that is now covered on both sides.
An ounce of ink is worth a pound of keystrokes. =)
For fully-built computers, your local Best Buy will probably be lucky to see 5% of the retail price. They make the vast majority of their money on computer sales by selling in-store warranties.
I am not a computational linguist, but here's my take on the situation:
There are all sorts of ambiguities in the English language - you have to be able to understand what part of speech a word is at the moment, and in order to do that you often have to understand enough context to use clues from neighbouring sentences. Oftentimes the grammar checker is going to have no clue what part of speech a word takes, for the same reason that your spellchecker frequently complains about words you spelled correctly.
In a language where, "Buffallo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, " is a complete sentence, I think that a trustworthy grammar checker is a few years out. =)
Heh, but now that keyboards with all those funky symbols for APL silkscreened on the keys are becoming increasingly rare, it's quite the opposite for APL.
Because, you know, none of these countries have ever supported terrorism
Go look up the Contra War in Nicaragua and see who's also supporting terrorism.
or sought nuclear weapons before Gulf War II....
You don't have to invade Iraq twice to to give countries a reason to take part in nuclear proliferation. All invading Iraq does is makes them feel like they have even more reason to take part in proliferation.
(Seriously, what's more important to you, winning some sort of principal-of-the-thing "We're categorically right, you're categorically wrong" ideological bullshit pissing match, or making sure that human civilization as a whole survives the next 100 years in relative safety?)
Of course, you've just elucidated the very reason why these countries are trying to develop nuclear weapons technology in the first place.
I think the obvious thought process goes something vaguely like this: "Ya see, we've got this big behemoth that is trying to tell us what to do, and they've recently shown that they aren't afraid to invade other countries, and they've made it abundantly clear that they consider us part of their "axis of evil," right there in the same category as the other countries they have invaded. They're totally fucking crazy, you know - they're the only country to have ever used a nuclear weapon on another country, and they've done it twice. Now they're posturing against us, pointing their nukes around the planet willy-nilly, and we've gotta defend ourselves. Now, we all know the concept of mutually assured destruction - it would be insane to attack a nuclear power using nuclear weapons, because nobody can win. They have nukes. We don't. They're pointing their nukes at us. We better hurry."
Strange. I would have assumed that Sun, IBM, the Linux/Alpha or Itanium people, someone would have taken the time to port most the major parts of the GNU environment to 64bit by the time X86-64 came out.
Bad wording on my part. I didn't mean to imply that Apple and Motorola executives were being Just Plain Stupid. Just that nobody's perfect - I imagine that when you're making huge business decisions like deciding whether or not a technology should go to market, it's rather easy to make an erroneous assessment of the likely profits.
Also, people are guided at least in part by emotion. Show me an executive whose business decisions are never swayed by personal tastes, and I'll show you a particularly exceptional businessman.
I think the big problem wasn't technology, it's that it's easy to be a jack-of-all, but it's very difficult to be a master of more than one. Ignore the internals. Ignore the firmware. A quick look at the physical characteristics of a cell phone and an iPod makes it very clear that there are some very different design goals going on for these two devices, and that it's going to be very hard to come up with a design that meets both of these sets of goals adequately, let alone one that can excel at both.
The ROKR is so lackluster because it barely gave a nod to the iPod's design imperatives. It's not a cross between an iPod and a cell phone; it's a cell phone that can also play MP3s with the word iTunes slapped on as an afterthought.
For the same reason, it's obvious why you don't often see people who use their computers as TVs (or why WebTV failed) even though the technology to do this easily has been around for quite a while now. As soon as you make the observation that a TV is something you put on a TV stand acros the room from your sofa and that a computer is something that you put on a desk and and that you sit very close to it, it becomes clear that you are going to have to make some serious compromises if you're going to mix the two.
How can you write a secure program if you don't know what a buffer overflow is?
Programming 101: Your program shouldn't be allowed to do things you don't want it to do.
It ties in with the idea that you should be allowing certified-OK behavior. If you didn't design your software to handle writing past the end of a buffer, then your software shouldn't be writing past the end of its own buffers. It's not like we didn't discover that fencepost errors, wild pointers, etc. are a Bad Thing before the buffer overflow attack was invented.
Once OSX/x86 hits the consumer market, it will only be a matter of (relatively little) time before WINE is ported to OS X.
It's going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft does to try and kill WINE once this happens. Probably something involving a patent, which will lead to a rather interesting legal situation should WINE development continue in a place that doesn't recognize software patents.
Well, you can always use your unsolicited mail from some companies to harass other companies by stuffing it into the pre-paid envelopes they like to send you.
Slashdot Mirror
I call crass rationalization!
Next you'll be saying that I shouldn't take steps to avoid accidentally my house down because nature and arsonists have also been burning houses down since time immemorial.
Apple's thinking "Laptop" with this switch to Intel.
Ghz, bits, and performance are nice, but heat and power are the things that make laptop designers stay up at night.
Don't think old. Think "probably getting paid a lot more to do something a lot more enjoyable than grinding out line after line of crappy VB code."
Huh. Back in college I used to use stacks of punchcards for scratch paper. We had boxes and boxes and boxes left over. The last computer to use a card reader had been converted to a neat-o bookshelf.
Bah. All you can do with vi is code, so you're still stuck with using a stunning array of separate applications. My life is too short for a complicated mess like that.
Now with emacs, you can have an editor, an interpeter, a compiler, a linker, a refactorer, a debugger, a CVS/SVN client, a machine virtualizer, an object browser, a documentation browser, and a game of Tetris. All in one convenient, bite-size package.
One thing I miss about being in college:
On large projects, I'd take my laptop to a classroom. Almost every important function was written in pseudocode on a chalkboard before I programmed it in C. My laptop bag was full of scratch paper with algorithm notes, ERDs, etc.
Even now at work, I don't have a chalkboard at my disposal (sigh), but my desk is an explosion of paper. I am regularly stopping by the recycle bins so I can grab some paper with a blank side, or to return some paper that is now covered on both sides.
An ounce of ink is worth a pound of keystrokes. =)
Hopefully there will be a few women on the Moon. . .
It's even funnier when you think about one of his campaign catch-phrases back in 2000 being "fuzzy Washington math."
I'd rather that money was spent on technology that had actual uses for most people.
Like getting to live on the moon?
Didn't Intuit mail every member of Congress a free copy of Quicken maybe ~10 years ago?
Possibly we should convince them to grow this program to include the Executive branch, and to every newly elected or appointed official.
For fully-built computers, your local Best Buy will probably be lucky to see 5% of the retail price. They make the vast majority of their money on computer sales by selling in-store warranties.
I am not a computational linguist, but here's my take on the situation:
There are all sorts of ambiguities in the English language - you have to be able to understand what part of speech a word is at the moment, and in order to do that you often have to understand enough context to use clues from neighbouring sentences. Oftentimes the grammar checker is going to have no clue what part of speech a word takes, for the same reason that your spellchecker frequently complains about words you spelled correctly.
In a language where, "Buffallo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, " is a complete sentence, I think that a trustworthy grammar checker is a few years out. =)
Heh, but now that keyboards with all those funky symbols for APL silkscreened on the keys are becoming increasingly rare, it's quite the opposite for APL.
Because, you know, none of these countries have ever supported terrorism
Go look up the Contra War in Nicaragua and see who's also supporting terrorism.
or sought nuclear weapons before Gulf War II....
You don't have to invade Iraq twice to to give countries a reason to take part in nuclear proliferation. All invading Iraq does is makes them feel like they have even more reason to take part in proliferation.
(Seriously, what's more important to you, winning some sort of principal-of-the-thing "We're categorically right, you're categorically wrong" ideological bullshit pissing match, or making sure that human civilization as a whole survives the next 100 years in relative safety?)
Of course, you've just elucidated the very reason why these countries are trying to develop nuclear weapons technology in the first place.
I think the obvious thought process goes something vaguely like this:
"Ya see, we've got this big behemoth that is trying to tell us what to do, and they've recently shown that they aren't afraid to invade other countries, and they've made it abundantly clear that they consider us part of their "axis of evil," right there in the same category as the other countries they have invaded. They're totally fucking crazy, you know - they're the only country to have ever used a nuclear weapon on another country, and they've done it twice. Now they're posturing against us, pointing their nukes around the planet willy-nilly, and we've gotta defend ourselves. Now, we all know the concept of mutually assured destruction - it would be insane to attack a nuclear power using nuclear weapons, because nobody can win. They have nukes. We don't. They're pointing their nukes at us. We better hurry."
Strange. I would have assumed that Sun, IBM, the Linux/Alpha or Itanium people, someone would have taken the time to port most the major parts of the GNU environment to 64bit by the time X86-64 came out.
One word: Reputation.
I'm pretty sure that you have to have diluted rum somewhere in there for it to be grog.
Bad wording on my part. I didn't mean to imply that Apple and Motorola executives were being Just Plain Stupid. Just that nobody's perfect - I imagine that when you're making huge business decisions like deciding whether or not a technology should go to market, it's rather easy to make an erroneous assessment of the likely profits.
Also, people are guided at least in part by emotion. Show me an executive whose business decisions are never swayed by personal tastes, and I'll show you a particularly exceptional businessman.
I think the big problem wasn't technology, it's that it's easy to be a jack-of-all, but it's very difficult to be a master of more than one. Ignore the internals. Ignore the firmware. A quick look at the physical characteristics of a cell phone and an iPod makes it very clear that there are some very different design goals going on for these two devices, and that it's going to be very hard to come up with a design that meets both of these sets of goals adequately, let alone one that can excel at both.
The ROKR is so lackluster because it barely gave a nod to the iPod's design imperatives. It's not a cross between an iPod and a cell phone; it's a cell phone that can also play MP3s with the word iTunes slapped on as an afterthought.
For the same reason, it's obvious why you don't often see people who use their computers as TVs (or why WebTV failed) even though the technology to do this easily has been around for quite a while now. As soon as you make the observation that a TV is something you put on a TV stand acros the room from your sofa and that a computer is something that you put on a desk and and that you sit very close to it, it becomes clear that you are going to have to make some serious compromises if you're going to mix the two.
Of course, basic economics often makes the fundamentally flawed assumption that humans are perfectly rational beings.
How can you write a secure program if you don't know what a buffer overflow is?
Programming 101: Your program shouldn't be allowed to do things you don't want it to do.
It ties in with the idea that you should be allowing certified-OK behavior. If you didn't design your software to handle writing past the end of a buffer, then your software shouldn't be writing past the end of its own buffers. It's not like we didn't discover that fencepost errors, wild pointers, etc. are a Bad Thing before the buffer overflow attack was invented.
I think I hear a return of the rotary-dial phone in the distance . . .
Once OSX/x86 hits the consumer market, it will only be a matter of (relatively little) time before WINE is ported to OS X.
It's going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft does to try and kill WINE once this happens. Probably something involving a patent, which will lead to a rather interesting legal situation should WINE development continue in a place that doesn't recognize software patents.
Well, you can always use your unsolicited mail from some companies to harass other companies by stuffing it into the pre-paid envelopes they like to send you.