This was also my conclusion, print out the pictures and stick them in a nice album using starch-based glue. Will be very quaint in 2021.
But what about the videos?:-) Flip book?
I don't really want to present my daughter with a pack of SCSI DLTs and the hardware to go. Surely something more simple... portable DVD player, maybe, complete with power supplies. If only I could be sure DVDs would last.
Probably the best option would be a link where she can find her data online and live. Idea for a new kind of business? www.everlastingdata.com, guaranteed archival for 100 years!
I threw up a comment about LOCKSS, which does something like this for libraries.
Here is a project based on peer-to-peer concepts that aims to preserve information over long periods of time without depending on specific media, readers, etc.
Seems far more realistic, after all this is what most of us do with valuable data, we copy it from hard disk to hard disk over time.
Magnetic tapes leak, don't they? I have a pack of cassettes recorded with old stuff I wrote for a C64, 20-odd years ago, and even ten years ago they were already unreadable. This was not even high-density recording, just normal screeching. My understanding is that each layer of tape has a small effect on its neighbours, and after some time the entire tape is reprogrammed to noise. Presmably if the tapes are played and rewound the effect is less dramatic. But magnetic tapes do not strike me as particularly stable. Hard disks may be more stable than tapes.
We just had a baby girl (yes, even geeks need to reproduce). So people ask "what can we bring the little gorgeous thing?" (they don't have to sit through nights of "woaAAAHHH!") I've figured that the best thing would be presents that she can open when she's old enough to appreciate them, like on her 18th birthday.
DVD players may still be around in 2021, after all I can still read 3.5" floppies. But DVD media has a shelf life of 5-7 years AFAICT, several older DVDs I've tried recently don't work anymore. CDs may be less delicate, resist better.
But if you wanted to give someone a digital present (say a bunch of their baby photos) for 18 years hence, how would you go about it?
This was going to be an Ask Slashdot, but (a) I'm too tired, and (b) the whole "what can I give a gurgling baby" thing is not really stuff that interests geeks.
Like for ages IBM's mainframes has a standard privileged technician account with the password "musigate", very useful when some BOFH expired my accounts. Ooops, you mean it's still musigate now?
Is GSL (aka GSLgen), part of the RealiBase OSS toolset from iMatix.
Yes, I'm biased, I use it extensively. Extensively.
Write your metamodel in XML, build code generation scripts, generate anything from interfaces to database layers to entire applications.
I took some of the examples from CGIA (which is an excellent book, I read it and I like it and I recommend it heartily) and converted them to GSL - simpler, clearer, more obvious.
If you are a professional programmer you need code generation. This is simply a basic technique, like editing text with a visual editor and not edlin. And of all the code generation tools out there, GSL is by far the most flexible and powerful, mainly because it was designed from the ground up, and has been used and evolved over about 10 years specifically as a code generation tool (unlike XSLT which does the job but with more weight and less elegance).
In my journal, I include a GSL script that generates a complete C interface layer for MySQL, turning a simple description like this:
<table name = "history" description = "Message History" >
Holds all messages received and sent. The command and body are parsed
from the smstext.
<field name = "id" domain = "recordid" >Record id</field>
<field name = "groupid" domain = "id" >Parent group</field>
<field name = "userid" domain = "id" >Parent user to/from</field>
<field name = "incoming" domain = "boolean" >Incoming message?</field>
<field name = "appl" domain = "msisdn" >Application MSISDN</field>
<field name = "text" domain = "smstext" >Message text contents</field>
<field domain = "audit"/> </table>
Into a complete abstract interface.
Whatever: code generation is a cult technique that deserves a place at the center of every serious developer's toolbox, and this book is possibly the first one that I've seent that may achieve this.
This device represents something interesting that is worth investigating.
Not the software, which is apparently almost entirely absent, but the hardware concept.
Unbreakable, cheap, fairly compact video on near-to-disposable media. Let's drive this up a rev and see what will be possible in two or three years time with some modest improvements.
1. Most obviously, a larger and color display. Well, I guess OLEDs are the answer, since this is basically a toy which does not need years of lifespan.
2. Larger size, based on CDROM format. So we can use normal CDRs.
3. Basic video decoding so that the CD can hold a full movie. This should be possible in hardware, I'm sure chips or PGAs already exist for this.
That's it: layer the unbreakable OLED screen over the lid, simple circuitry to playback the video, and it should be possible to make $99 portable video players with very decent resolution and five-hour battery lives. And the whole thing should be simple enough for hobbyists to build.
This is a worthwhile goal. Certainly the device would sell millions.
Ah, so you Europeans are pissed that we straightened out *our* fixed-line monopolies?
Got that right, bro.:) It's not so much the regulation that seems to mess up the US markets, as the half-assed deregulation. In Europe most of the state telcos were simply sold off, and now have to compete in the open market. GSM was defined as a standard but each country sold licenses as it liked, so arbitrary companies were able to implement it.
This may be true but it's close to meaningless when it comes to the market and quality of coverage. The great debate over CDMA/TDMA/whatever is fun for telco engineers but the public wants to know only:
1. does it work in my area?
2. is it reasonably reliable?
3. is it economical?
And most of the mobile networks in the USA fail on these grounds for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with technology. I remember trying to use my GSM in the States, frustrated to find that outside the airports and a few major cities, nothing worked.
Mobile telecoms in the US are handicapped by the regulations surrounding fixed lines: in most European countries mobile phones outstrip fixed lines because they are as cheap and much more useful. In the US, the "local calls are basically free" regulations mean mobile phones can't compete fairly.
This kind of issue is much, much more important than the relative merits of CDMA, TDMA and their variants.
Possibly already an irrelevant technology
on
Seamless Video Walls
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
OLEDs are almost there, they are already being used in small portable devices (cameras and phones). They can be scaled without the fabrication issues that hit CRTs and LCDs. There is a good chance that OLED screens will be the first consumer-ready wall screen system (the current best of breed being the projector).
But this looks fun, and it may be a good stopgap. I'm wondering whether it can be used to build (for instance) large LCD monitors for PCs...? I once had a portable that used two B&W LCDs to achieve a larger display area, but I've never seen this done with color LCDs.
No, but judges may treat a "guilty" verdict in another member state as contributory information. It depends rather on the basis for the charge: if it comes under some quirk of German national law, the chances it will affect a ruling elsewhere are slim. But if it comes under a law enacted on the basis of an EU convention, the chances may be good. Disclaimer: IANAL.
Once SCO has been sued, the amount does not matter. If the plaintiffs (I must RTFA) can enjoin SCO to stop their claims, and get the courts to set damages, each time SCO repeats their offense, they'll pay again. Besides, I strongly suspect that a conviction in a German court will weigh heavily against SCO in other courts should this become a popular tactic. Even a 1 EUR award would be a significant blow against SCO's position.
For some reason you Americans (though eminently logical in most areas) persist in believing that you live in a free market. A free market is one where government does not choose the winners but defines the rules and allows any player to compete. The USA just does not work like this: most significant industries are incredibly regulated, and telecoms is one of these. Energy is another. The USA's "free market" is anything but. For a really free market in telecoms, you have to look to countries where there is no anti-competitive parastate monopoly. Amazingly, also the countries with the cheapest and often best mobile phone services.
Perhaps you're living in the wrong country. My Nokia GSM has more than 6 hours' talk time, the battery runs for ten days or so, and reception is crystal clear everywhere I go.
All it is really missing is motion control. That way I can answer the phone simply by picking it up, hold a call by putting the phone down, and scroll through my address list by shaking the phone like a lunatic instead of clicking those damn arrow keys.
My guess is: if the rocker control is cheap and easy to hook up to the UI, it will be a natural and useful extension to the way we use phones.
Sorry to take this seriously, but enough of the "And I for one welcome our new Asteroid Overlords" jokes. The idea of a scale that measures the likelyhood of impending destruction just seems too wonderful to leave unanalyzed.
The Torino scale seems a wonderful invention, since obviously the dinosaurs didn't have it, and see what happened to them! But it has an obvious bug, it works only with integer values. Zero means "all clear" and One means "enough danger to panic and start looting". What about "enough danger to reconsider whether life as a tea jockey is really worthwhile?" I mean, it would be really useful to know that the current Torino scale is 0.003 or whatever. People could change jobs and say "Torino went up, I'm reconsidering my life choices!" or whatever. A single decimal Torino jump could be enough to spark divorces, a full digit change enough to halt wars. But we need more accuracy.
Note that the original article discussed scripting as a development tool, not as an automation tool for end users. It's in this context that I like XML.
Yes, it's clunky, but it works exceedingly well if you have the tools to handle it. GSL is the "generator scripting language", a tool made by iMatix and distributed as part of their RealiBase package, a rather large and eclectic collection of OSS tools.
Personally I find GSL extraordinary, but totally outside the scope of this discussion. I simply can't imagine working without it: like I said, most of our development centres around high-level XML scripting. GSL is the engine that turns these into whatever code we actually have to run. gsl (the tool) interprets scrips in GSL (the language) which compile the XML into a target language. When we're faced with a new problem domain, we spend some time understanding it, and then we define one or more XML language that implements the highest-level scripting model we can design. We build code generators in GSL that take these models and turn them into code. GSL is beautiful for this because the language is intimately tied to XML, and very tight, and so we can build maintainable code generators of thousands of lines.
It's very close to the model described in the article to build plugins for the Sims, except that we compile, not interpret the scripting language. This is not a critical matter: the important thing is that the language exists and allows a developer to think at a higher level, so work better and faster.
You'll find various references to GSL on the web, but most people still use a very old and limited version. The more recent releases are closer to "normal" languages but still have the ability to swim in XML like penguins under the ice.
Feel free to ask me more questions on GSL. I happen to know the authors quite well. I once asked them why they did not publish the tool more widely, instead of hiding it inside RealiBase. Their answer was something like this:
"We made the tool because we needed it. We share it because we share everything we can't sell. We don't spend time publicizing it because we enjoy the vicarious pleasure of people discovering it and saying "what the heck?!" And we have other axes to grind."
What's true for the Sims and mobile apps is just as true for business applications.
The first trick is to define a language that expresses the highest level of abstraction you can, thus giving your developers the most powerful modeling tool they can get. The second trick is to do this economically. Hehe.
My team does just about everything with scripting, using XML languages as the scripting language and a code generator (GSL) as the metaengine. It's a good combination that lets us hit any level of abstraction we need to. Using XML is a bit clunky, but it gives us a single syntax (and single parser) for all our scripting languages. GSL... well, that's another story. Let's just say it does this kind of thing wonderfully.
Cool, this might work for our company. All we would need is emulation for COM+, ASP, VBScript, MTS, IIS, SQLServer and oh, there is also a little Win32 thrown in there too. Well, at least we didn't write the whole thing using MSWord macros, as I saw one of our (ex)clients doing. Using the French version of MSOffice, with all the macro names translated. Would AcleretX ^h^h^hAccelerX ^H^H^H AccxexxxX (aaagh, my brain is dissolving!) help... perhaps I'll give them a call.
my brain keeps wanting to make this name into some variant of "Accel-".... as in Accelerex
Yeah, same thing here. Bizarre Latin-sounding names went out of style around May 2002, this is just terrible marketing. How much did this name cost them? Sheesh. There is a perfectly good industry-standard IEEE-approved naming technology, the TLA.
Besides, I still can't figure out who this product is meant for: companies trying to move other people's software to Linux, or companies that make Windows software?
Perhaps I'm just too stupid for this product, yeah that's probably the answer.
Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?
Re:Looks too much like XP
on
Aethera 1.0
·
· Score: 1
Actually I agree with the parent comment in theory, but not in practice. In theory, the vast amounts of money spent on UI research at Microsoft should give its products a quality that is unatainable by any other means except copying. In practice it's quite different, however. The vast amounts of money just get turned into expensive fluff that no-one actually wants. Microsoft are the Hollywood of software. OSS developers should not imitate this style. Learn from the independent film directors that style comes from an inate coherent and intelligent taste, not from user panels and marketing research.
The people of Kazaa Lite could have reversed engineered Kazaa as to the protocols...
Except they didn't, they took the Kazaa package, removed and renamed some files, modified others, and redistributed the result under a name that was intentionally very similar. What else can you call this but "crooked". Redistributing modified versions of someone's non-OSS package...
Slashdot Mirror
This was also my conclusion, print out the pictures and stick them in a nice album using starch-based glue. Will be very quaint in 2021.
:-) Flip book?
But what about the videos?
I don't really want to present my daughter with a pack of SCSI DLTs and the hardware to go. Surely something more simple... portable DVD player, maybe, complete with power supplies. If only I could be sure DVDs would last.
Probably the best option would be a link where she can find her data online and live. Idea for a new kind of business? www.everlastingdata.com, guaranteed archival for 100 years!
I threw up a comment about LOCKSS, which does something like this for libraries.
Here is a project based on peer-to-peer concepts that aims to preserve information over long periods of time without depending on specific media, readers, etc.
Seems far more realistic, after all this is what most of us do with valuable data, we copy it from hard disk to hard disk over time.
Magnetic tapes leak, don't they? I have a pack of cassettes recorded with old stuff I wrote for a C64, 20-odd years ago, and even ten years ago they were already unreadable. This was not even high-density recording, just normal screeching. My understanding is that each layer of tape has a small effect on its neighbours, and after some time the entire tape is reprogrammed to noise. Presmably if the tapes are played and rewound the effect is less dramatic.
But magnetic tapes do not strike me as particularly stable. Hard disks may be more stable than tapes.
We just had a baby girl (yes, even geeks need to reproduce). So people ask "what can we bring the little gorgeous thing?" (they don't have to sit through nights of "woaAAAHHH!") I've figured that the best thing would be presents that she can open when she's old enough to appreciate them, like on her 18th birthday.
DVD players may still be around in 2021, after all I can still read 3.5" floppies. But DVD media has a shelf life of 5-7 years AFAICT, several older DVDs I've tried recently don't work anymore. CDs may be less delicate, resist better.
But if you wanted to give someone a digital present (say a bunch of their baby photos) for 18 years hence, how would you go about it?
This was going to be an Ask Slashdot, but (a) I'm too tired, and (b) the whole "what can I give a gurgling baby" thing is not really stuff that interests geeks.
Like for ages IBM's mainframes has a standard privileged technician account with the password "musigate", very useful when some BOFH expired my accounts. Ooops, you mean it's still musigate now?
Is GSL (aka GSLgen), part of the RealiBase OSS toolset from iMatix.
/>
Yes, I'm biased, I use it extensively. Extensively.
Write your metamodel in XML, build code generation scripts, generate anything from interfaces to database layers to entire applications.
I took some of the examples from CGIA (which is an excellent book, I read it and I like it and I recommend it heartily) and converted them to GSL - simpler, clearer, more obvious.
If you are a professional programmer you need code generation. This is simply a basic technique, like editing text with a visual editor and not edlin. And of all the code generation tools out there, GSL is by far the most flexible and powerful, mainly because it was designed from the ground up, and has been used and evolved over about 10 years specifically as a code generation tool (unlike XSLT which does the job but with more weight and less elegance).
In my journal, I include a GSL script that generates a complete C interface layer for MySQL, turning a simple description like this:
<table name = "history" description = "Message History" >
Holds all messages received and sent. The command and body are parsed
from the smstext.
<field name = "id" domain = "recordid" >Record id</field>
<field name = "groupid" domain = "id" >Parent group</field>
<field name = "userid" domain = "id" >Parent user to/from</field>
<field name = "incoming" domain = "boolean" >Incoming message?</field>
<field name = "appl" domain = "msisdn" >Application MSISDN</field>
<field name = "text" domain = "smstext" >Message text contents</field>
<field domain = "audit"
</table>
Into a complete abstract interface.
Whatever: code generation is a cult technique that deserves a place at the center of every serious developer's toolbox, and this book is possibly the first one that I've seent that may achieve this.
Enjoy.
This device represents something interesting that is worth investigating.
Not the software, which is apparently almost entirely absent, but the hardware concept.
Unbreakable, cheap, fairly compact video on near-to-disposable media. Let's drive this up a rev and see what will be possible in two or three years time with some modest improvements.
1. Most obviously, a larger and color display. Well, I guess OLEDs are the answer, since this is basically a toy which does not need years of lifespan.
2. Larger size, based on CDROM format. So we can use normal CDRs.
3. Basic video decoding so that the CD can hold a full movie. This should be possible in hardware, I'm sure chips or PGAs already exist for this.
That's it: layer the unbreakable OLED screen over the lid, simple circuitry to playback the video, and it should be possible to make $99 portable video players with very decent resolution and five-hour battery lives. And the whole thing should be simple enough for hobbyists to build.
This is a worthwhile goal. Certainly the device would sell millions.
Ah, so you Europeans are pissed that we straightened out *our* fixed-line monopolies?
:) It's not so much the regulation that seems to mess up the US markets, as the half-assed deregulation. In Europe most of the state telcos were simply sold off, and now have to compete in the open market. GSM was defined as a standard but each country sold licenses as it liked, so arbitrary companies were able to implement it.
Got that right, bro.
It has seemed to work, so far.
This may be true but it's close to meaningless when it comes to the market and quality of coverage. The great debate over CDMA/TDMA/whatever is fun for telco engineers but the public wants to know only:
1. does it work in my area?
2. is it reasonably reliable?
3. is it economical?
And most of the mobile networks in the USA fail on these grounds for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with technology. I remember trying to use my GSM in the States, frustrated to find that outside the airports and a few major cities, nothing worked.
Mobile telecoms in the US are handicapped by the regulations surrounding fixed lines: in most European countries mobile phones outstrip fixed lines because they are as cheap and much more useful. In the US, the "local calls are basically free" regulations mean mobile phones can't compete fairly.
This kind of issue is much, much more important than the relative merits of CDMA, TDMA and their variants.
OLEDs are almost there, they are already being used in small portable devices (cameras and phones). They can be scaled without the fabrication issues that hit CRTs and LCDs. There is a good chance that OLED screens will be the first consumer-ready wall screen system (the current best of breed being the projector).
But this looks fun, and it may be a good stopgap. I'm wondering whether it can be used to build (for instance) large LCD monitors for PCs...? I once had a portable that used two B&W LCDs to achieve a larger display area, but I've never seen this done with color LCDs.
No, but judges may treat a "guilty" verdict in another member state as contributory information.
It depends rather on the basis for the charge: if it comes under some quirk of German national law, the chances it will affect a ruling elsewhere are slim. But if it comes under a law enacted on the basis of an EU convention, the chances may be good. Disclaimer: IANAL.
Like, I mean, wow, dude!
This comes as a real surprise.
Uh, only one third?
Once SCO has been sued, the amount does not matter. If the plaintiffs (I must RTFA) can enjoin SCO to stop their claims, and get the courts to set damages, each time SCO repeats their offense, they'll pay again.
Besides, I strongly suspect that a conviction in a German court will weigh heavily against SCO in other courts should this become a popular tactic.
Even a 1 EUR award would be a significant blow against SCO's position.
For some reason you Americans (though eminently logical in most areas) persist in believing that you live in a free market. A free market is one where government does not choose the winners but defines the rules and allows any player to compete. The USA just does not work like this: most significant industries are incredibly regulated, and telecoms is one of these. Energy is another.
The USA's "free market" is anything but. For a really free market in telecoms, you have to look to countries where there is no anti-competitive parastate monopoly.
Amazingly, also the countries with the cheapest and often best mobile phone services.
Perhaps you're living in the wrong country. My Nokia GSM has more than 6 hours' talk time, the battery runs for ten days or so, and reception is crystal clear everywhere I go.
All it is really missing is motion control. That way I can answer the phone simply by picking it up, hold a call by putting the phone down, and scroll through my address list by shaking the phone like a lunatic instead of clicking those damn arrow keys.
My guess is: if the rocker control is cheap and easy to hook up to the UI, it will be a natural and useful extension to the way we use phones.
Sorry to take this seriously, but enough of the "And I for one welcome our new Asteroid Overlords" jokes. The idea of a scale that measures the likelyhood of impending destruction just seems too wonderful to leave unanalyzed.
The Torino scale seems a wonderful invention, since obviously the dinosaurs didn't have it, and see what happened to them! But it has an obvious bug, it works only with integer values. Zero means "all clear" and One means "enough danger to panic and start looting". What about "enough danger to reconsider whether life as a tea jockey is really worthwhile?" I mean, it would be really useful to know that the current Torino scale is 0.003 or whatever. People could change jobs and say "Torino went up, I'm reconsidering my life choices!" or whatever. A single decimal Torino jump could be enough to spark divorces, a full digit change enough to halt wars. But we need more accuracy.
I for one welcome our new Torino overlords!!
Excellent, momentous, profound.
As a stakeholder in a small innovative software business facing the uncertainty of a patented future, I say "Thank You!"
If you go and search for GSL, look under its old name, "gslgen".
Note that the original article discussed scripting as a development tool, not as an automation tool for end users. It's in this context that I like XML.
Yes, it's clunky, but it works exceedingly well if you have the tools to handle it. GSL is the "generator scripting language", a tool made by iMatix and distributed as part of their RealiBase package, a rather large and eclectic collection of OSS tools.
Personally I find GSL extraordinary, but totally outside the scope of this discussion. I simply can't imagine working without it: like I said, most of our development centres around high-level XML scripting. GSL is the engine that turns these into whatever code we actually have to run. gsl (the tool) interprets scrips in GSL (the language) which compile the XML into a target language. When we're faced with a new problem domain, we spend some time understanding it, and then we define one or more XML language that implements the highest-level scripting model we can design. We build code generators in GSL that take these models and turn them into code. GSL is beautiful for this because the language is intimately tied to XML, and very tight, and so we can build maintainable code generators of thousands of lines.
It's very close to the model described in the article to build plugins for the Sims, except that we compile, not interpret the scripting language. This is not a critical matter: the important thing is that the language exists and allows a developer to think at a higher level, so work better and faster.
You'll find various references to GSL on the web, but most people still use a very old and limited version. The more recent releases are closer to "normal" languages but still have the ability to swim in XML like penguins under the ice.
Feel free to ask me more questions on GSL. I happen to know the authors quite well. I once asked them why they did not publish the tool more widely, instead of hiding it inside RealiBase. Their answer was something like this:
"We made the tool because we needed it. We share it because we share everything we can't sell. We don't spend time publicizing it because we enjoy the vicarious pleasure of people discovering it and saying "what the heck?!" And we have other axes to grind."
What's true for the Sims and mobile apps is just as true for business applications.
The first trick is to define a language that expresses the highest level of abstraction you can, thus giving your developers the most powerful modeling tool they can get. The second trick is to do this economically. Hehe.
My team does just about everything with scripting, using XML languages as the scripting language and a code generator (GSL) as the metaengine. It's a good combination that lets us hit any level of abstraction we need to. Using XML is a bit clunky, but it gives us a single syntax (and single parser) for all our scripting languages. GSL... well, that's another story. Let's just say it does this kind of thing wonderfully.
Cool, this might work for our company. All we would need is emulation for COM+, ASP, VBScript, MTS, IIS, SQLServer and oh, there is also a little Win32 thrown in there too. Well, at least we didn't write the whole thing using MSWord macros, as I saw one of our (ex)clients doing. Using the French version of MSOffice, with all the macro names translated. Would AcleretX ^h^h^hAccelerX ^H^H^H AccxexxxX (aaagh, my brain is dissolving!) help... perhaps I'll give them a call.
my brain keeps wanting to make this name into some variant of "Accel-".... as in Accelerex
Yeah, same thing here. Bizarre Latin-sounding names went out of style around May 2002, this is just terrible marketing. How much did this name cost them? Sheesh. There is a perfectly good industry-standard IEEE-approved naming technology, the TLA.
Besides, I still can't figure out who this product is meant for: companies trying to move other people's software to Linux, or companies that make Windows software?
Perhaps I'm just too stupid for this product, yeah that's probably the answer.
Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?
Actually I agree with the parent comment in theory, but not in practice. In theory, the vast amounts of money spent on UI research at Microsoft should give its products a quality that is unatainable by any other means except copying.
In practice it's quite different, however.
The vast amounts of money just get turned into expensive fluff that no-one actually wants. Microsoft are the Hollywood of software.
OSS developers should not imitate this style. Learn from the independent film directors that style comes from an inate coherent and intelligent taste, not from user panels and marketing research.
The people of Kazaa Lite could have reversed engineered Kazaa as to the protocols...
Except they didn't, they took the Kazaa package, removed and renamed some files, modified others, and redistributed the result under a name that was intentionally very similar. What else can you call this but "crooked". Redistributing modified versions of someone's non-OSS package...
Try it, you will see for yourself.