There is certainly research being done in user interfaces, even ones that aren't 3D. Some general areas include the following:
Speech. See Portico for a real commercial product with pervasive use of a speech UI (if only the smarts were on my Newton....)
Agents. Lots of work being done on how to make "smarter" user interfaces. Just do a query on any big search engine. Brenda Laurel's seminal Computers as Theater is a prime example.
PDA intercases, at least the better ones, are also an area of active research. WinCE is mostly a scaled-down WIMP UI, but the Newton is not. The Newton makes pervasive use of gestures (and not just handwriting - even cut, copy, and paste), as well as sound, animation, and a lack of anything resembling a desktop, "saving" files, or even files at all at the user level.
General references to UI research include Ben Schneiderman's textbook (good for learning just how complex the field is) and Baecker et al's collection (which has some of the recent results) and the pages of SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction.
Everyone knows about the dedication of the linux subculture, fanatics, loyalists, whatever you want to call them.
Yes, in large part because of the media exposure. And this can backfire - people might cease asking for your technology opinion because they figure "Oh he's a Linux fanatic."
Is there such a culture surrounding windows? I'm asking honestly, because I don't know... Is there a huge following that would join the FIN, support microsoft, and rally around them during these "trying times" ??
Well, there's at least several tens of thousands. But they all get paychecks from Microsoft:-)
Seriously, I don't see the average computer consumer particularly caring one way or the other about Microsoft. They to date have not been especially bothered by its bullying monopoly, and I would be surprised if a broad spectrum of computer users would be bothered by a broken-up Microsoft. Business leaders (an oxymoron?) will care, because it will affect the market (though it might very well be a positive effect), but a broken-up Microsoft will still consist of much of the same people, and thus much of the same corporate culture as before.
After break-up, the Baby Bells continued to act like monopolists, with poor customer service, reluctance to comply with (much less support) legislation to stimulate competition, and rates that increased, not decreased as a competitive situation would have. And then they all went on merger and acquisition sprees.
I was just wondering exactly what leads microsoft to PR moves like this... are they trying to tap into this culture? create one?
Microsoft has a very insular corporate culture - before Linux fanatics were identified to the general public by the media, there were Microserfs who worked insane hours for lousy pay but were millionaires on paper. And always toed the party line. Gates was and is the head of a cult of personality.
whatever you may say about gates/microsoft, they are where they are today from sheer business sense.. it may not be the best code in the world, or the best product, but they are sinister business people..
Sinister? No. An extreme example of corporatism? You betcha.
A fair amount of work has been done on using graphics accelerators for collision detection in the field of robot motion planning. SIGGRAPH 90, Lengyel et al. describes one such approach. One striking demo of this being used showed motion-planning for moving a piano through a ridiculously complicated maze, with low obstacles and narrow halls. It involves twisting the piano, backing up, etc.
The approach calculates the "Minkowski sum" for a given robot and a given set of obstacles - the Minkowski sum being a stretched-out version of the obstacles that accounts for the closest possible approach of the robot to the obstacle. Then, you repeatedly render the robot into this Minkowski sum rendering (the M. sums are polyhedra) and basically "stumble" around by looking for overlaps between the robot polyhedra and the environment. Dynamic programming is used to prevent repeat checks.
So if you can put a bunch of these in a rackmount with a gig or two of RAM, wouldn't it be a cheaper alternative than a Beowulf cluster?
As usual, the answer is most likely "It depends." (ObDisc - I don't have one of these cards to play with)
No matter what API you're using (SMP/threads or Beowulf/PVM) these are most likely best used for SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) kinds of problems (of which SETI is one). Communication between boards will be a major performance bottleneck, since they all share the same bus.
Since they do have local RAM (and not just cache), you load the card's RAM with one set of code and four sets of data. Do that for all the cards you have. Now wait, and get your answers back off the local RAM. Did you use threads or processes? Threads and its closer to SMP, processes and it is closer to PVM or Beowulf.
But will it outperform a comparable Beowulf cluster? If it is compute-constrained, then the PCI cards will do better, especially as the problem scales, because the PCI cards share hardware costs for disks, network cards, fast bus, large RAM, etc. If it is disk or network limited, though, the Beowulf will eventually win out. The PCI cards will do well on a price/performance basis while the problem is small, because it will still be sharing hardware. But once the PCI bus fills up, those processors will start waiting on the bus. The bigger the problem gets, the more the processors wait. The Beowulf cluster, on the other hand, can distribute all that hardware - instead of one 100Mbps network card, it may have dozens (you start worrying more about what your ethernet switch's backplane looks like).
So these cards are best for compute-intensive simulation-style stuff (image filters would also scream - mostly - FFTs require lots of communication). Simulated wind tunnels or weather phenomena, finite-element analysis, etc.
Note though, that these cards have their own slower PCI bus, including support for an add-on card (!), so conceivably you could get a lot of server oomph by giving every four processors their own network card. But you better make sure you data (i.e., your web site) can fit in the local RAM, or you'll bog down in bus contention again.
By extension, wouldn't the site they came from be illegal also?
Don't give the RIAA ideas:-)
Seriously, how the RIAA found the site is not especially relevant, unless they did something illegal to do so (think of search and seizure laws - evidence can be thrown out of court if acquired illegally). Even if a court ruled that linking to an illegal site was illegal, it is a separate issue as to whether following the link is legal or not.
Phone phreaking equipment is illegal (except to the phone company, natch) because, ostensibly, its only possible use is illegal. If the RIAA made the case that the only possible use of links to MP3 sites was an illegal one, then links to MP3 sites might conceivably be banned. However, I don't think the RIAA will be able to make that point too easily:
A perfectly legal use of links to illegal sites is to track down illegal sites:-)
If a site that was linked to contained any legal content, or if there was even a chance that it did, then following that link would be a legitimate search for legitimate content.
It is not the sites per se that are illegal - it is the copying and distribution of copyrighted content without authorization from the copyright holder that is illegal.
As I understand US laws, it is perfectly legal to list illegal acts, even specific incidents, even specific individuals. If I identify individuals as law-breakers and they aren't, then I can be sued for slander or libel (depending on whether I was speaking or writing), but if they are law-breakers, I'm simply stating a fact. Even if it isn't a fact, it's only libelous if I did it with "malice aforethought", if I did it to harm the person. If my intent wasn't harm, then I simply made a mistake.
So MP3Board is, at worst, guilty of libel, if and only if they claim that some sites have illegal content and those sites do not in fact have illegal content and MP3Board was malicious in identifying those sites.
The channel is called alpha (Red Green Blue Alpha) perhaps just by convention, but it's used very consitently.
And it has been used that way for something like twenty years, ever since Ed Catmull (king geek of Pixar) coined the term to contrast with the then-prevalent "z-buffer." He created a new rendering technique called the - cue drum-roll - a-buffer. Catmull added a channel to the frame buffer - the "alpha channel", so that there were now five channels in the rendering system - red, green, blue, depth (z), and transparency (alpha). In fact, he first used it more for "coverage" than transparency. The a-buffer renderer computed sub-pixel polygons and then used the alpha channel to store what percentage of the pixel was covered (i.e., how much light got through from a further pixel). This enabled his renderer to produce anti-aliased images at a phenomenal rate (especially when compared to an over-sampling ray-tracer, which was then the state of the art in anti-aliasing).
At the time, the renderer was called "Reyes" for "renders everything you've ever seen" (and of course, for Point Reyes, near Silicon Valley). Guess what it is called these days? (pregnant pause) RenderMan.
Basically, C# is an attempt to combine the features of Java and C++.
Combining C++ and Java does not strike me as an especially laudable goal. Mix up two Algol-family languages? Ugh.
As for the rest of the stuff, it actually isn't so new at all. Self, developed at Stanford and Sun, did all of these starting in the late eighties.
Garbage collection - check. It was one of the first systems to use generational GC for high performance.
explicit pass by reference - everything is a reference in Self - if you want "pass by value" you make a copy of it (which is what the default way of invoking a method does).
initializing variables - since you make new objects in Self by copying ones you already have, everything is necessarily initialized.
Well, okay, not everything in Self is a COM object, but is pervasive use of COM necessarily a good thing? Interface negotiation is a major pain in the tuchas.
Even primitive types are objects in Self. And oh, you can change them, too. Don't like the way "if" statements work? Write your own, and replace the defaults, if you want.
As for forward declarations, well, things are so dynamic in Self, declarations are pretty pointless.
Sounds like a monstrously slow language, doesn't it? It's not. Self is the language that pioneered JIT compilation, and ten years ago ran benchmarks at 50% the speed of optimized C while maintaining full debuggability, GC, arbitrary precision ints, checking for stack overflow and a whole host of other goodies.
As for Java taking performance hits for bytecodes, keep in mind that JIT compilation can often produce better code than static compilation. JIT compilers can do all sorts of things that would fuddle offline compilers, like unrolling loops all the way to be perfectly flat. Takes memory - so what? We're throwing it out after a thousand iterations. Spend your time optimizing the code that actually is being used by observation in the field, rather than slogging through profiler output on test data.
As always, look before you say something is new - someone may have done it before.
Do you honestly think that AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Earthlink, etc. will actually start paying royalties to British Telecom for something as lame as hyperlinks?!? Hell no.
Oh, of course large ISPs aren't going to pay this. You don't even have to run the numbers to figure out whether it costs more to fight it or to simply pay. Any ISP that pays the license is admitting the validity of the patent and opens itself up to arbitrarily large licensing fees.
They're huge companies with a large influence in the federal government,
Yep. But the ridiculousness of the patent and the influence of the licensees does not lead to this conclusion:
and if they all get hit with this, I have no doubt that the patent system will be changed.
Large companies would not fight the patent system, only the patent itself. Changing the patent system removes their own revenue stream - kind of like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (to coin a phrase (not)). It will be much easier, cheaper, and ultimately more profitable to simply defeat this individual patent. As, I think, CRT terminals were frequently in use well before 1980, if the specifics of what they describe wasn't in common use, it would certainly fall in the "obvious to a competent practitioner" category. Anyone got a date on the vt100 terminal? Indeed, it might not even get that far - BT could settle with everyone, even for one-time payments. In "lawyerese", this is the answer to the question "How much will it cost to make this problem go away?"
That being said, I still think the patent system needs to be reconsidered (if not abolished). Some truly ridiculous patents have managed to be upheld in court. The most egregious one I can think of is Gemstar's patents on TV program guides - essentially anything with a grid with channels on one side and times along the other is patented. That's right. TV Guide is patented (at least, on a TV screen it is). Your VCR, your cable box, even your digital TV, all pay licenses of several dollars per unit to Gemstar/TV Guide. Gemstar can pay for a lot of lawyers.
Several dollars may seem like peanuts, but this is consumer electronics, not computers - engineers in CE argue about whether to add a $0.05 piece because it is too expensive. Even in $10k digital TVs, these arguments happen. If you wanted to hook up a Sony HD DTV to a Sony HD DirecTV satellite dish, you'd think it would be one connection - they both have 1394 ports (Firewire to Apple, iLink to Sony). Nope. The people making the DTV wanted to reduce costs by not including the extra logic gates that would be required to decode control signals on 1394! So you have to hook up an analog Control-A1 line (what Sony devices speak to each other) to have the satellite dish communicate with the DTV.
Getting emulator software for your laptop makes sense, if you already have a laptop. But let's say you're a parent and you are taking your kids on a plane flight from New York to California. Or maybe a four hour drive to Grandma's house. The kids most likely don't have their own laptops, and at 15k yen, or about $150, it's hella cheaper to get the kids one of these, even one for each, than to get them one laptop (even one iBook) to share. Can they do more with a laptop? Sure. But they've got my old computer at home for that - travelling, I just want to keep them from getting bored, and schoolwork on a laptop doesn't cut it:-)
Heck, I'd buy the software for my laptop, but buy one of these for my daughter (she's almost four, and loves Parappa the Rapper).
Wouldn't you know it, six months after I stop working for Sony, they start doing all this cool stuff? Or maybe it just seems cooler from the outside, since I no longer know about all the really cool stuff they're doing in the research labs (the successor to AIBO kicks ass).
"Simulator sickness", the variant of motion sickness induced by immersive virtual environments, can be some of the most intense motion sickness around. Though I can't compare it with space sickness (yet:-), I can say that I almost never get motion sick except when using an immersive display, especially a head-mounted one.
Last I read, the causes of motion sickness weren't well-understood, but the theory generally was that differences in visual and proprioceptic feedback is what induces nausea. "Proprioceptic" feedback is the knowledge (a sense, like touch or pressure, if you will) of where your body is in space and how the parts are positioned relative to each other. Proprioception is what lets you close your eyes and touch your left and right fingertips together.
How does this apply to games? The one-word answer is lag, the bane of all researcher working in virtual reality (in augmented reality it is even harder). User input occurs, and it takes a certain amount of time for that input to be processed by the computer, for the machine to determine what to do, and then to produce the appropriate output. The difference between the user's input (action) and the computer's response (reaction) is the critical lag factor in VR, games, and simulation. Cognitive experiments suggest that, so long as this lag is less than about a tenth of a second (the number varies based on task), the user feels in control. Greater than a tenth, and the user feels like their actions don't correspond to the reactions.
So, in VR, move your head. The screen needs to reflect this in under a tenth of a second. "No problem," you say, "because Quake runs at 60Hz on my machine." Yes, but frame rate is not the critical factor, but the length of time between your mouse click and the appearance of a missle on screen.
Let's run some numbers. Just to keep the math easy, lets say we'd like to maintain a 100Hz frame rate and a 0.1 second lag. So, at worst, no more than ten frames can go by between the time the user moves the mouse and the screen changes to reflect the move (e.g., a new door becomes visible on the edge.
Suppose the mouse is sampled at 100Hz (that's fast, but let's keep the math simple). Then worst case the user's move occurs just after a sample is taken. That's 0.01 second of lag right there (it takes that long before the mouse is sampled again).
Now how often can the IO controller put info on the bus? Probably no more than a 100 times a second - after all, that's the sampling rate. So add 0.01 second of lag.
Now let's handle the IO interrupt. Add 0.01 sec of lag for the kernel-level context switch to deal with that. We're up to 0.03, with 0.07 left to spare, and we haven't yet hit the main CPU.
So the CPU finally gets the click. Let's pretend our game is really well-coded and so it only takes us 10 milliseconds to decode the click, look up the corresponding action (hope the event table didn't get swapped out:-), and get the geometry for that door to put on the screen (better hope you pre-loaded it and you don't have to get it from disk now - that would blow the lag budget right there). 0.04.
Now we run through all the other stuff going on in the game - monsters, AI, etc. Again, let's be generous - 10 msec. We're halfway to the "lag barrier" at 0.05 sec.
Now process all the geometry. Visibility, any transforms you can't do on the framebuffer card, etc. 10 msec, 0.06.
Another 10msec dealing with the bus and shipping all that geometry to the graphics accelerator. 0.07! Phew! We made it!
Nope. Haven't drawn everything yet. Let's say the card does all the geometry transforms, clipping, etc. in our math-friendly 10 msec. 0.08.
Now rasterize all those polygons. 0.09. Uh oh.
Ship the frame to the monitor - 0.10 - we just made it!
Bzzt. Try again. Your monitor refreshes at 100Hz, and you just missed it. 0.11 and we're over.
We're not over "lag budget" by much, but that's not the point. This was a contrived example. Now add all the layers of software and such in there, speed up some parts (the bus), and slow down others (gee, that fancy new AI isn't so cool anymore). The point is, many parallel steps in the pipeline, and end-to-end lag can be dramatically higher than frame rate might indicate (more than ten times, in this case). Add network traffic and, ugh.
So how is this relevant to the question of OpenGL vs DirectX? Well, it sounds to me that the original poster gets well and truly immersed, setting up the possibility for simulator sickness if lag gets ugly. And it would seem that the lag is just under the poster's nausea threshold with OpenGL and just over it with DirectX - the user moves the mouse and the screen keeps up with OpenGL, but lags behind in DirectX. Time to spew your cookies.
This kind of stuff is a bear to manage - it is like real-time computing only you don't have the guarantees you usually have in a bona fide real-time environment. Usually, RT environments have a fixed number of tasks to deal with - you know how much time anything is going to take (it's still a bitch dealing with it, but at least you know the bounds). A game doesn't work that way. If the user's facing the wall (one or two big polygons) and suddenly looks back over her shoulder to see the glorious million-polygon Great Hall, well, you get the idea. Bounds shmounds. You've got no idea how long that will take to process.
Maybe I am just ignorant and some other tools provide same functionality AND fine security (please, let me know if that's the case),
Emacs.
:-)
but until I see them, I maintain that poor security in this case is just a flip side of an honest attempt to have great features and not a pure evil.
Universality of functionality can be a Good Thing®, of course. Just consider "undo." The same design that enables universal undo (encapsulating all application actions as a subclass of some generic Action class) makes it very easy to provide scripting as well.
Scripting, however, is not the universal boon that undo is, and I don't mean simply because of security. Frankly, scripting falls on to the wrong side of the 80/20 rule for typical users (and/. users are not typical users of productivity software).
Given that, providing scriptability for use other than by developers (and I would put many sophisticated Excel users in that category - the cell language is a mess, but it is a language) is a questionable investment of resources during product development. Making scripts runnable under anything but direct user control in an untrusted environment (the Internet) may not have been an act of deliberate malice (I make no claims for understanding the Hive Mind of Microsoft®). But if it wasn't an act of malice, it was one of colossal stupidity.
I recently went on a (sales) tour of Globix's new facility in downtown Manhattan. The doors, even the racks and cages, have fingerprint scanners (in addition to scan cards and regualr physical keys). Why do I bring this up?
We jokingly asked "What happens if someone cuts off your finger?"
Deadpan, the tour guide says "There's a body temperature scanner built in, so that wouldn't work".
:-)
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that fingerprint-only protection for a private key is not as great as it may seem. Especially when it's being done by a company like Sony, who's typical response to the thought of having unique, per-device keys is "That's too expensive."
Re:I scanned this book at B&N, and passed....
on
Object Oriented Perl
·
· Score: 2
So, msuzio replied to my post, in which I called Perl syntax "opaque":
I do not think (at this point in time) Perl syntax can be considered opaque. It certainly has plenty of strange things as a legacy of how it has grown over it's lifetime,....
First off, let's keep things in context. I said Perl syntax was opaque if you didn't already know the various things it was vased on, which as most Perlmonks know, includes sed, awk, C, sh, csh, C++, Lisp, and Scheme. (for those that don't think Perl draws anything from Lisp or Scheme because it doesn't have all the parens, try looking at "anonymous subroutines" - aka closures (which is what Wall rightly calls them))
Second, opacity of Perl syntax is is obviously something that reduces as you become more familiar with the language. This is complicated by the fact that Perl syntax allows several different ways to do any one thing (a design goal of Perl, of course), which results in a language that lends itself to extreme obvuscation. Consider - a Perl obfuscator could run through Perl code stripping out many local variables, replacing their use with nested expressions, $_, and the like. Flatten some of the subroutines, and make all variable names no more than two characters. A lot of Perl code looks just like this when it is first written - it works but try to get anyone other than the original author to do anything with it. Yes, you can write more engineer-able code in Perl, but you can also write object-oriented assembler.
but is this chunk of code so unclear? use DBI::DBD; my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:Oracle:', 'fooboy/foo@database'); my $file = IO::File->new($inputFileName); while($in = $file->getlines()) { $dbh->execute($in); } ..seems pretty easy to understand to me, once you know the basics that DBI is a database interface layer and IO::File is an object to do IO from files.
I'm guessing you have experience in other Algol-based languages, and with some form of shell scripting. Even so, consider the (equivalent):
use DBI::DBD; for (my ($d,$f)=(DBI->connect('dbi:Oracle:', 'fooboy/foo@database'), IO::File-<new($i);$->getlines();) { $D->execute($_); }
Now suppose you don't know what DBI is. or IO::File. Start throwing regular expressions around and things can get really hairy. This example didn't even start messing with mixes of arrays, hashes, and references.
In it's basic structure and flow of control, Perl is pretty much the same (to me, at least) as it's close relatives (C, C++, Java). It lacks a lot of the complexities of those (and has plenty of it's own), but it's *not that hard* to learn!
Which complexities does Perl lack?
Strong typing? How many times have you mistakenly put a hash in a scalar context (or vice-versa)? The code goes happily along until, later, you try to look up something in what you thought was a hash (after all, you assigned it a hash), only to get an error that you can't coerce a scalar to a hash?
Inlines? Nested expressions in Perl and anonymous subroutines got that beat.
Direct memory access? Tell me that pointer arithmetic is inherently more complicated than the pointer chasing involved in a typical hash/array mix in Perl.
Templates? Yeah, Perl lacks those, but it lacks those because it lacks strong typing (see above).
Parameters? Ever do my ($a,$b) = shift; by mistake? After having had one parameter and needing to add a second? How about mixing shift, @_, and other list operations?
I could go on, but my wrists are starting to hurt.
I think, for instance, that Perl is a perfectly easy language to teach in a 100-level CS "Intro to Programming". No prior experience needed.
Sounds like you've never actually taught such a class. Try explaining parameter passing. Now try explaining scoping rules. Do you really think you can do that with Perl without driving all your students away?
It may not be so hard for an experienced *nix hacker to learn, but anyone else? C'mon. Be realistic.
I didn't need the OOP theory (having written a book myself that taught OOP to people without any prior programming experience). I didn't need the Perl introduction (having just forced myself to learn perl after avoiding it for being the blight of a PL that it is (albeit useful) in order to change slash). So what did it it offer?
Using Perl packages as objects? Nope. Got that from the Ostrich.
Subroutines as methods? Nope. Second thing I did (after twinking a calendar package to use slash's user table and cookies) was create a Slash::Sql wrapper around the "do/execute/fetchrow" nonsense of DBI.
Persistence? Nope. Third thing I did was make a Slash::Object class, which could read itself from an Sql database, and had an AUTOLOAD corresponding to the columns in the table.
Multimethods? Okay, this was slightly useful. I caught from skimming the book that there was a multimethod package on cpan. Went there, did a search, then did perl -MCPAN -e "install Class::Multimethod" and I was done.
Perl's syntax is often opaque (especially if you didn't already know all the Unix utilities, shell scripting langs and programming langs it is based on). It ispowerful, but this book didn't quite seem to get it all. Closures, non-class-based inheritance (a la Self), or even some more useful examples? (the fourth thing I did was make a Slash::Handler class to interface to Apache, automatically placing query args or form input into fields on itself - subclass and override "handle" to decide what to do) (fifth thing was a subclass of Slash::Handler to use Text::Metatext to generate the page).
A nice enough book, but I think I'm gonna have to write one myself before I see one I really like:-)
Does DMCA eliminate the ability to cite brief passages in reviews? I haven't (yet) read all of that 59-page beast, but somehow I doubt it. Why? Aside from the tremendous change to present copyright common practice that would represent (the NY Times Book Review can't cite a particularly beautidul or particularly bad passage?), there seem to be provisions in the DMCA to allow breaking copyright protection for exactly the purpose of news reporting!
Where can you find this? See Section 1201.B of the DMCA, which states, clearly, that the Librarian of Congress can determine when it is legal to break copy protection. If you look at 1201.B.i through v, you see what factors the Librarian is to consider when deciding what kinds of uses to allow. Look particularly at 1201.B.iii:
the impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research;
The way I read this (and of course, I'm not a lawyer, YMMV, etc.), even DeCSS would be legal so long as it is used for the above kinds of uses. For example, if I'm a professor of film theory at a university, I might very well write a multimedia scholarly work comparing the use of montage in two different films. Montage invariably occurs over time - the only to make relevant passage comparisions is with the relevant passages of the film in front of you. I'm not a professor, but I did this myself, perhaps eight years ago, when I did a comparison of narrative structure in Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" and "Full Metal Jacket."
So if the comments contain only short passages for the purpose of criticising the work, how could there be any legal problem?
And if there is, who'd like to join me in a start-up company to colonize Mars?
<obKatzBash> Of course we all know, Katz, that this is simply a confirmation of what this community has known for years. Thanks for telling us. Now go get it posted on some site where you aren't, as another poster said, "preaching to the choir."</obKatzBash>
Now let's get on with some real discussions on some substantive topics around Jackson's ruling. I think it is likely that Jackson will, during the remedies phase, come to the conclusion that breaking up Microsoft is the best remedy. Fining Microsoft is only going to lead to trouble - any fine that would have any real meaning would be in the tens of billions (as Microsoft, last I checked, was sitting on some $15b in cash). If the Feds do that, business leaders world-wide will scream at the excesses of the Federal government, and the Feds should just get out of an industry they don't understand (said business leaders being rightfully disturbed by the precedent of multi-billion-dollar extortion).
As for releasing the source to Windows, again, business leaders will scream (imagine if the Feds revoked all copyrights on everything produced by Time Warner - and I know some of you think that would be a good idea, but it ain't gonna happen). Furthermore, what would it really accomplish? Creation of Windows distribution companies a la Linux distro companies like Red Hat? Not likely - the Microsoft marketing machine is too good for that. Eventually, it might make Windows more secure and more stable, but in the meantime, virus writers would have the source at the same time as everyone else. Community security checks would be a long time in coming and many Windows users wouldn't upgrade (lots of them still use Windows 3.1 - this is not the Linux community.
Personally, I think it should be three equal "Nanosofts" (to coin a name:-), each with complete rights to the source code for Windows and Office (at least). Making an operating system company perpetuates the monopoly, and leads back in to arguments about what constitutes an operating system. But while this kind of stuff is fun to talk about, appeals mean this won't happen for years, if at all.
So instead, let's focus on what we should be doing to advance free softrware. Better products. Better usability. A real user-friendly Linux (or other open source OS). A product I can give to eveyone else here at the start-up I work at, all the people that are Hollywood content types and have enough trouble with a Macintosh.
So cheer a bit - it took a long time, but thar's the nature of law - it is reactionary. But after that, remember, Microsoft isn't going away, and neither are bad products.
Also, concerning the Mips processor, how quickly do you think we'll have a version of linux running on the PSX2....
I think it will be pretty quick - after all, the development workstation runs Linux. If the DVD player will read DVD-RAM or CD-R, then burn a bootable OS. Expand anything writable into memory or onto a USB or Firewire HD.
and can anyone think of a valid reason for doing so? I'm wondering if a PSX runing linux would make a decent low-end computer for home use that I could (at the flick of a switch as it were) play storming games on as well.
Well, a cheap home computer that plays all the PS games you already have comes to mind. Throw StarOffice or somesuch onto that CD you burned (or something a little less bloaty). Plug in a USB kbd and mouse, a USB HD, and you've got the world's best Quake machine, and a word processor too.
32MB of RAM is just fine for StarOffice, KDE and X and everything - my old VAIO 505 laptop runs just fine in 32MB (it even runs a slash server!:-) Yes, it pages a fair amount when you switch apps, but I've made no efforts to keep down RAM bloat.
Paragraph's handwriting engine is indeed very good. For those that don't follow the link above, it goes to a Java applet that recognizes cursive writing with a mouse with no training whatsoever.
In fact, it's the cursive engine on the Newton (Apple's own is used for print recognition). Anybody with a touch-capable LCD should definitely see if Paragraph runs on your system.
As mentioned, it runs on Wince. CmdrTaco forgive me for my sins but I have dallied with the Beast - when my beloved Newton died, I got a Phillips Nino. Why not a Palm? I had tried Graffitti on the Newton - didn't much care for it. I gave it another go on Palms belonging to friends. Couldn't cope - my writing habits were too ingrained and I couldn't get my mind around the concept of "write each letter one on top of the other." Since Paragraph's Calligrapher ran on WinCE, I got a WinCE device. No joke. That was the only reason.
Of course, it was Microsoft software. It needed to be reset pretty much every day, even if I did nothing with it but turn it off and on occasionally. If I used it with any real frequency, it would crash. And the sync services fought with everything else for the serial port. Yuck. So I went to eBay and found a "new" Newton.
I'm much happier. My Newton gets words right when I know I got them wrong. It garbles foreign names, until you tap the word in question and select "Try Letters" (i.e., don't use a dictionary for matching). Bingo. Perfect.
Yes. Three years later, and it still kicks the pants off a Palm as an actual computing device. Sure, Palms sync great, but do you use one to take notes in meetings? I'll bet not - as Newton users observe, the Palm is the right size when you're not using it, and the Newton is the right size when you are. And on eBay, you might actually find one at a price comparable to a high-end palm.
The Sony VAIO 505 series has this capability, too, at least the older ones. You could use either your finger or the stylus hidden alongside the LCD in a pop-out tray on the left.
Like many things that show up on Slashdot, this one is an old story (not that being old news is intrinsically bad - old news is still a good starting point for discussion).
This first showed up as a rumor while Kubrick was still alive - shortly after the ShoWest teaser for Eyes Wide Shut appeared (this was one featuring a single shot of Kidman, topless, with three words successively covering up the "naughty bits" - Cruise, Kidman, Kubrick, then the title Eyes Wide Shut0). At that time, it was to have been a collaboration. There was even a young actor named who'd been booked for summers for many many years. The stock for AI on the Hollywood Stock Exchange doubled that day (it had been doing well because of Kubrick's name, then slumped when Eyes Wide Shut was announced).
People that play HSX find many rumor sites to get info on upcoming movies (HSX is a play stock exchange speculating on the success of upcoming movies - usually gets opening box office take right within a million). Perhaps the two most well-known are the following:
Ain't It Cool News (reference to John Travolta in Broken Arrow). This site is widely credited with single-handedly ruining the box office of Batman and Robin. The guy that runs the site used to be loathed by Hollywood - now they invite him to screenings and studio visits.
Dark Horizons. A little slow sometimes (loading the page, not speed of rumor - either DH or AICN is equally likely to get a scoop on a rumor), being in Australia, but a good site.
I don't think anyone else has mentioned this, buta Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is non-binding! It is quite literally a simple statement that this what they think they're going to do. Any party to the MOU can change their mind and the other parties don't have a legal leg to stand on. Wait for the "Definitive Agreement" - that's the part that has any legal weight. An MOU is just a way to generate press.
Even at that, Time Warner Cable's prior contracts nuke lots of this - Road Runner's deal with Time Warner is as exclusive ISP. Ditto AtHome with the cable companies they're carried on. Nothing will change until either Road Runner and @Home willingly back out of their deal or they expire.
So-called "arm's length" negotiations are actually fairly common and not as difficult as it might seem at first. The short answer is "top management doesn't get involved."
The longer answer is well-served by an example. I used to work at Sony, so I know the corporate structure and will use it as an example. First, take the following facts:
Sony Corporation of America (SCA) is a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Sony Corporation (Tokyo).
Nobuyuki Idei runs Sony Corporation.
Howard Stringer runs SCA, and reports to Idei (roughly - Howard's on the Tokyo board now, I think, which complicates things).
SCA owns Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE).
SPE owns Columbia Pictures.
Columbia owns a company just to do the releasing of its pictures to movie theaters. That company has staff to do the job of making contracts with theater owners.
Pretty much every major studio will have its own releasing company.
SCA also owns 50% of Loews Cineplex (Theaters, in the Sony jargon).
Theaters owns regional companies for each area where it does business. For example, there's a Loews Cineplex Manhattan. Each of those regional companies makes their own deals for movies, by working with the people from the releasing companies of the movie studios. (This kind of spider-web is why you couldn't see Episode I in a Loews theater in Manhattan, but you could across the river in New Jersey - Manhattan decided they didn't want to accept Lucas's terms, NJ decided they did).
So, do you think Idei has the time to mess around with contract negotiations between companies that are at best three corporate levels beneath him? Do you think Howard has the time for that? The answer, of course, is that they don't. They don't get involved in the day-to-day operations.
"But wait!" you cry, "Why can't they just order Loews Theaters to carry all of Columbia's movies?"
In theory, they could. The chains of command go that way. But this is not the army. This is corporations upon corporations upon corporations. It is assumed that the lower levels know more about the day-to-day operations than the top brass (as well they should). In fact, if top management tried to dictate all the way down, they'd quickly find the entire company upset at micromanagement! (and the company would be right).
"But what about Microsoft? Everyone knows Bill calls all the shots!"
Microsoft is not AOL Time Warner. While both have a highly visible founder/chair, Microsoft is corporate-culturally rather uniform. They've never really successfully acquired a company of any real size. Their purchase of Softimage didn't pan out. MSNBC is famous for the lack of cooperation between the TV and Web sides. Even WebTV, well, Bill said WebTV would be running WinCE a long time ago. It still isn't.
The entrenched culture at Time Warner is an old-media company. They aren't going to rally around Case like Microserfs worshiping Bill. The editor in chief of Time isn't going to not distribute his content everywhere he can. It isn't in his best interest. And similarly, if ISPs offer Time Warner Cable money for carriage, Time Warner Cable will get damn pissed if Case says "no."
How do you reconcile this with Time Warner Cable not wanting other ISPs on before? First off, they didn't want to be forced by the Feds to carry it for free (as they do with local channels - the "Must Carry" regulations). Second, Time Warner Cable owns a piece of Road Runner. See that part in the memo about "prior commitments?" Road Runner is an exclusive.
All in all, AOL Time Warner is not such a huge control as it may seem (influence, yes, but that's different). The MOU is meaningless, but that's for other reasons, detailed in another post.
Well, Billy Baldwin is sitting in my office, and he saw this story and says:
Bullshit! We don't have to "blame Canada" for how uptight and politically correct this country has become. Oh no, we need not look nearly that far. All you have to do is check out Standards and Practices and those yahoo executives at ABC. To hell with censorship! Besides, if we didn't have Canada to smack around, we'd have to watch the media turn Rick Rockwell into their next prison bitch. Even if it meant my family's survival, they shouldn't change a damn thing.
You heard it here,/.'ers. And no, this isn't a joke - he really is sitting in my office.
Adjustability (like that Apple Split Keyboard)
on
Ergonomic Keyboards
·
· Score: 2
For me, adjustability is key, and a slight difference in position makes a lot of change in wrist comfort. That's why I've coveting the Aeron/split keyboard CmdrTaco is referring to. Together, they'll set you back more than a grand, but damn, I know those Aerons work for me. And as for the keyboard, well it reminds me of my old favorite.
The Apple Split Keyboard.
That one was a thing of beauty. Put it on a tray at the right height and it was heaven. You could adjust the angle til it was exactly right. Those damn Microsoft keyboards always seem to be just a smidgen off the right angle, just enough so they don't do it for me.
Of course, Apple doesn't make them anymore, and I've never seen an ergo keyboard advertised that was as elegantly simple. You didn't even need any real retraining, and it didn't ruin you for "normal" keyboards.
Ah well. More good tech Apple has consigned to the rubbish bin. Right next to my trusty Newton.
it will be Sony. Software will be nice, but Sony makes the hardware. They've been bringing the cost down for years now - they can spit out those chips like popcorn.
Furthermore, the PS2 development box runs Linux on the Emotion Engine. Consider a Linux box running an Emotion Engine (and yes, that port is long since completed and works just fine), with a complete set of PS/PS2 graphics and sound chips, and the drivers to go with them. If that doesn't make you drool, it should. With a top-flight, pre-configured (i.e., easy to use) desktop, that would be the Linux box for the masses.
This might even address Judge Jackson's "application barrier to entry," at least somewhat. Out of the box there'd be the thousands of PS and PS2 titles, and all the Linux ones too. Zoomba.
Of course, the PS2 development box also writes DVDs - so much for DeCSS:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Completely new paradigms are also being worked on - Ken Perlin's Pad is one good example, as is David Gelertner's Lifestreams.
PDA intercases, at least the better ones, are also an area of active research. WinCE is mostly a scaled-down WIMP UI, but the Newton is not. The Newton makes pervasive use of gestures (and not just handwriting - even cut, copy, and paste), as well as sound, animation, and a lack of anything resembling a desktop, "saving" files, or even files at all at the user level.
General references to UI research include Ben Schneiderman's textbook (good for learning just how complex the field is) and Baecker et al's collection (which has some of the recent results) and the pages of SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction.
Seriously, I don't see the average computer consumer particularly caring one way or the other about Microsoft. They to date have not been especially bothered by its bullying monopoly, and I would be surprised if a broad spectrum of computer users would be bothered by a broken-up Microsoft. Business leaders (an oxymoron?) will care, because it will affect the market (though it might very well be a positive effect), but a broken-up Microsoft will still consist of much of the same people, and thus much of the same corporate culture as before.
After break-up, the Baby Bells continued to act like monopolists, with poor customer service, reluctance to comply with (much less support) legislation to stimulate competition, and rates that increased, not decreased as a competitive situation would have. And then they all went on merger and acquisition sprees.
Microsoft has a very insular corporate culture - before Linux fanatics were identified to the general public by the media, there were Microserfs who worked insane hours for lousy pay but were millionaires on paper. And always toed the party line. Gates was and is the head of a cult of personality. Sinister? No. An extreme example of corporatism? You betcha.A fair amount of work has been done on using graphics accelerators for collision detection in the field of robot motion planning. SIGGRAPH 90, Lengyel et al. describes one such approach. One striking demo of this being used showed motion-planning for moving a piano through a ridiculously complicated maze, with low obstacles and narrow halls. It involves twisting the piano, backing up, etc.
The approach calculates the "Minkowski sum" for a given robot and a given set of obstacles - the Minkowski sum being a stretched-out version of the obstacles that accounts for the closest possible approach of the robot to the obstacle. Then, you repeatedly render the robot into this Minkowski sum rendering (the M. sums are polyhedra) and basically "stumble" around by looking for overlaps between the robot polyhedra and the environment. Dynamic programming is used to prevent repeat checks.
Try searching SIGGRAPH articles for more.
As usual, the answer is most likely "It depends." (ObDisc - I don't have one of these cards to play with)
No matter what API you're using (SMP/threads or Beowulf/PVM) these are most likely best used for SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) kinds of problems (of which SETI is one). Communication between boards will be a major performance bottleneck, since they all share the same bus.
Since they do have local RAM (and not just cache), you load the card's RAM with one set of code and four sets of data. Do that for all the cards you have. Now wait, and get your answers back off the local RAM. Did you use threads or processes? Threads and its closer to SMP, processes and it is closer to PVM or Beowulf.
But will it outperform a comparable Beowulf cluster? If it is compute-constrained, then the PCI cards will do better, especially as the problem scales, because the PCI cards share hardware costs for disks, network cards, fast bus, large RAM, etc. If it is disk or network limited, though, the Beowulf will eventually win out. The PCI cards will do well on a price/performance basis while the problem is small, because it will still be sharing hardware. But once the PCI bus fills up, those processors will start waiting on the bus. The bigger the problem gets, the more the processors wait. The Beowulf cluster, on the other hand, can distribute all that hardware - instead of one 100Mbps network card, it may have dozens (you start worrying more about what your ethernet switch's backplane looks like).
So these cards are best for compute-intensive simulation-style stuff (image filters would also scream - mostly - FFTs require lots of communication). Simulated wind tunnels or weather phenomena, finite-element analysis, etc.
Note though, that these cards have their own slower PCI bus, including support for an add-on card (!), so conceivably you could get a lot of server oomph by giving every four processors their own network card. But you better make sure you data (i.e., your web site) can fit in the local RAM, or you'll bog down in bus contention again.
Don't give the RIAA ideas :-)
Seriously, how the RIAA found the site is not especially relevant, unless they did something illegal to do so (think of search and seizure laws - evidence can be thrown out of court if acquired illegally). Even if a court ruled that linking to an illegal site was illegal, it is a separate issue as to whether following the link is legal or not.
Phone phreaking equipment is illegal (except to the phone company, natch) because, ostensibly, its only possible use is illegal. If the RIAA made the case that the only possible use of links to MP3 sites was an illegal one, then links to MP3 sites might conceivably be banned. However, I don't think the RIAA will be able to make that point too easily:
As I understand US laws, it is perfectly legal to list illegal acts, even specific incidents, even specific individuals. If I identify individuals as law-breakers and they aren't, then I can be sued for slander or libel (depending on whether I was speaking or writing), but if they are law-breakers, I'm simply stating a fact. Even if it isn't a fact, it's only libelous if I did it with "malice aforethought", if I did it to harm the person. If my intent wasn't harm, then I simply made a mistake.
So MP3Board is, at worst, guilty of libel, if and only if they claim that some sites have illegal content and those sites do not in fact have illegal content and MP3Board was malicious in identifying those sites.
And it has been used that way for something like twenty years, ever since Ed Catmull (king geek of Pixar) coined the term to contrast with the then-prevalent "z-buffer." He created a new rendering technique called the - cue drum-roll - a-buffer. Catmull added a channel to the frame buffer - the "alpha channel", so that there were now five channels in the rendering system - red, green, blue, depth (z), and transparency (alpha). In fact, he first used it more for "coverage" than transparency. The a-buffer renderer computed sub-pixel polygons and then used the alpha channel to store what percentage of the pixel was covered (i.e., how much light got through from a further pixel). This enabled his renderer to produce anti-aliased images at a phenomenal rate (especially when compared to an over-sampling ray-tracer, which was then the state of the art in anti-aliasing).
At the time, the renderer was called "Reyes" for "renders everything you've ever seen" (and of course, for Point Reyes, near Silicon Valley). Guess what it is called these days? (pregnant pause) RenderMan.
You can learn more about a-buffers and dig up references to the original literature (Catmull first published at SIGGRAPH) in "The White Book", aka, Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes.
Combining C++ and Java does not strike me as an especially laudable goal. Mix up two Algol-family languages? Ugh.
As for the rest of the stuff, it actually isn't so new at all. Self, developed at Stanford and Sun, did all of these starting in the late eighties.
Sounds like a monstrously slow language, doesn't it? It's not. Self is the language that pioneered JIT compilation, and ten years ago ran benchmarks at 50% the speed of optimized C while maintaining full debuggability, GC, arbitrary precision ints, checking for stack overflow and a whole host of other goodies.
As for Java taking performance hits for bytecodes, keep in mind that JIT compilation can often produce better code than static compilation. JIT compilers can do all sorts of things that would fuddle offline compilers, like unrolling loops all the way to be perfectly flat. Takes memory - so what? We're throwing it out after a thousand iterations. Spend your time optimizing the code that actually is being used by observation in the field, rather than slogging through profiler output on test data.
As always, look before you say something is new - someone may have done it before.
Yep. But the ridiculousness of the patent and the influence of the licensees does not lead to this conclusion:
Large companies would not fight the patent system, only the patent itself. Changing the patent system removes their own revenue stream - kind of like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (to coin a phrase (not)). It will be much easier, cheaper, and ultimately more profitable to simply defeat this individual patent. As, I think, CRT terminals were frequently in use well before 1980, if the specifics of what they describe wasn't in common use, it would certainly fall in the "obvious to a competent practitioner" category. Anyone got a date on the vt100 terminal? Indeed, it might not even get that far - BT could settle with everyone, even for one-time payments. In "lawyerese", this is the answer to the question "How much will it cost to make this problem go away?"
That being said, I still think the patent system needs to be reconsidered (if not abolished). Some truly ridiculous patents have managed to be upheld in court. The most egregious one I can think of is Gemstar's patents on TV program guides - essentially anything with a grid with channels on one side and times along the other is patented. That's right. TV Guide is patented (at least, on a TV screen it is). Your VCR, your cable box, even your digital TV, all pay licenses of several dollars per unit to Gemstar/TV Guide. Gemstar can pay for a lot of lawyers.
Several dollars may seem like peanuts, but this is consumer electronics, not computers - engineers in CE argue about whether to add a $0.05 piece because it is too expensive. Even in $10k digital TVs, these arguments happen. If you wanted to hook up a Sony HD DTV to a Sony HD DirecTV satellite dish, you'd think it would be one connection - they both have 1394 ports (Firewire to Apple, iLink to Sony). Nope. The people making the DTV wanted to reduce costs by not including the extra logic gates that would be required to decode control signals on 1394! So you have to hook up an analog Control-A1 line (what Sony devices speak to each other) to have the satellite dish communicate with the DTV.
Bleah.
Getting emulator software for your laptop makes sense, if you already have a laptop. But let's say you're a parent and you are taking your kids on a plane flight from New York to California. Or maybe a four hour drive to Grandma's house. The kids most likely don't have their own laptops, and at 15k yen, or about $150, it's hella cheaper to get the kids one of these, even one for each, than to get them one laptop (even one iBook) to share. Can they do more with a laptop? Sure. But they've got my old computer at home for that - travelling, I just want to keep them from getting bored, and schoolwork on a laptop doesn't cut it :-)
Heck, I'd buy the software for my laptop, but buy one of these for my daughter (she's almost four, and loves Parappa the Rapper).
Wouldn't you know it, six months after I stop working for Sony, they start doing all this cool stuff? Or maybe it just seems cooler from the outside, since I no longer know about all the really cool stuff they're doing in the research labs (the successor to AIBO kicks ass).
"Simulator sickness", the variant of motion sickness induced by immersive virtual environments, can be some of the most intense motion sickness around. Though I can't compare it with space sickness (yet :-), I can say that I almost never get motion sick except when using an immersive display, especially a head-mounted one.
Last I read, the causes of motion sickness weren't well-understood, but the theory generally was that differences in visual and proprioceptic feedback is what induces nausea. "Proprioceptic" feedback is the knowledge (a sense, like touch or pressure, if you will) of where your body is in space and how the parts are positioned relative to each other. Proprioception is what lets you close your eyes and touch your left and right fingertips together.
How does this apply to games? The one-word answer is lag, the bane of all researcher working in virtual reality (in augmented reality it is even harder). User input occurs, and it takes a certain amount of time for that input to be processed by the computer, for the machine to determine what to do, and then to produce the appropriate output. The difference between the user's input (action) and the computer's response (reaction) is the critical lag factor in VR, games, and simulation. Cognitive experiments suggest that, so long as this lag is less than about a tenth of a second (the number varies based on task), the user feels in control. Greater than a tenth, and the user feels like their actions don't correspond to the reactions.
So, in VR, move your head. The screen needs to reflect this in under a tenth of a second. "No problem," you say, "because Quake runs at 60Hz on my machine." Yes, but frame rate is not the critical factor, but the length of time between your mouse click and the appearance of a missle on screen.
Let's run some numbers. Just to keep the math easy, lets say we'd like to maintain a 100Hz frame rate and a 0.1 second lag. So, at worst, no more than ten frames can go by between the time the user moves the mouse and the screen changes to reflect the move (e.g., a new door becomes visible on the edge.
We're not over "lag budget" by much, but that's not the point. This was a contrived example. Now add all the layers of software and such in there, speed up some parts (the bus), and slow down others (gee, that fancy new AI isn't so cool anymore). The point is, many parallel steps in the pipeline, and end-to-end lag can be dramatically higher than frame rate might indicate (more than ten times, in this case). Add network traffic and, ugh.
So how is this relevant to the question of OpenGL vs DirectX? Well, it sounds to me that the original poster gets well and truly immersed, setting up the possibility for simulator sickness if lag gets ugly. And it would seem that the lag is just under the poster's nausea threshold with OpenGL and just over it with DirectX - the user moves the mouse and the screen keeps up with OpenGL, but lags behind in DirectX. Time to spew your cookies.
This kind of stuff is a bear to manage - it is like real-time computing only you don't have the guarantees you usually have in a bona fide real-time environment. Usually, RT environments have a fixed number of tasks to deal with - you know how much time anything is going to take (it's still a bitch dealing with it, but at least you know the bounds). A game doesn't work that way. If the user's facing the wall (one or two big polygons) and suddenly looks back over her shoulder to see the glorious million-polygon Great Hall, well, you get the idea. Bounds shmounds. You've got no idea how long that will take to process.
Emacs.
:-)
Universality of functionality can be a Good Thing®, of course. Just consider "undo." The same design that enables universal undo (encapsulating all application actions as a subclass of some generic Action class) makes it very easy to provide scripting as well.
Scripting, however, is not the universal boon that undo is, and I don't mean simply because of security. Frankly, scripting falls on to the wrong side of the 80/20 rule for typical users (and /. users are not typical users of productivity software).
Given that, providing scriptability for use other than by developers (and I would put many sophisticated Excel users in that category - the cell language is a mess, but it is a language) is a questionable investment of resources during product development. Making scripts runnable under anything but direct user control in an untrusted environment (the Internet) may not have been an act of deliberate malice (I make no claims for understanding the Hive Mind of Microsoft®). But if it wasn't an act of malice, it was one of colossal stupidity.
I recently went on a (sales) tour of Globix's new facility in downtown Manhattan. The doors, even the racks and cages, have fingerprint scanners (in addition to scan cards and regualr physical keys). Why do I bring this up?
We jokingly asked "What happens if someone cuts off your finger?"
Deadpan, the tour guide says "There's a body temperature scanner built in, so that wouldn't work".
:-)
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that fingerprint-only protection for a private key is not as great as it may seem. Especially when it's being done by a company like Sony, who's typical response to the thought of having unique, per-device keys is "That's too expensive."
So, msuzio replied to my post, in which I called Perl syntax "opaque":
First off, let's keep things in context. I said Perl syntax was opaque if you didn't already know the various things it was vased on, which as most Perlmonks know, includes sed, awk, C, sh, csh, C++, Lisp, and Scheme. (for those that don't think Perl draws anything from Lisp or Scheme because it doesn't have all the parens, try looking at "anonymous subroutines" - aka closures (which is what Wall rightly calls them))
Second, opacity of Perl syntax is is obviously something that reduces as you become more familiar with the language. This is complicated by the fact that Perl syntax allows several different ways to do any one thing (a design goal of Perl, of course), which results in a language that lends itself to extreme obvuscation. Consider - a Perl obfuscator could run through Perl code stripping out many local variables, replacing their use with nested expressions, $_, and the like. Flatten some of the subroutines, and make all variable names no more than two characters. A lot of Perl code looks just like this when it is first written - it works but try to get anyone other than the original author to do anything with it. Yes, you can write more engineer-able code in Perl, but you can also write object-oriented assembler.
I'm guessing you have experience in other Algol-based languages, and with some form of shell scripting. Even so, consider the (equivalent):
use DBI::DBD;
for (my ($d,$f)=(DBI->connect('dbi:Oracle:', 'fooboy/foo@database'), IO::File-<new($i);$->getlines();) { $D->execute($_); }
Now suppose you don't know what DBI is. or IO::File. Start throwing regular expressions around and things can get really hairy. This example didn't even start messing with mixes of arrays, hashes, and references.
Which complexities does Perl lack?
I could go on, but my wrists are starting to hurt.
Sounds like you've never actually taught such a class. Try explaining parameter passing. Now try explaining scoping rules. Do you really think you can do that with Perl without driving all your students away?
It may not be so hard for an experienced *nix hacker to learn, but anyone else? C'mon. Be realistic.
I didn't need the OOP theory (having written a book myself that taught OOP to people without any prior programming experience). I didn't need the Perl introduction (having just forced myself to learn perl after avoiding it for being the blight of a PL that it is (albeit useful) in order to change slash). So what did it it offer?
Perl's syntax is often opaque (especially if you didn't already know all the Unix utilities, shell scripting langs and programming langs it is based on). It ispowerful, but this book didn't quite seem to get it all. Closures, non-class-based inheritance (a la Self), or even some more useful examples? (the fourth thing I did was make a Slash::Handler class to interface to Apache, automatically placing query args or form input into fields on itself - subclass and override "handle" to decide what to do) (fifth thing was a subclass of Slash::Handler to use Text::Metatext to generate the page).
A nice enough book, but I think I'm gonna have to write one myself before I see one I really like :-)
Does DMCA eliminate the ability to cite brief passages in reviews? I haven't (yet) read all of that 59-page beast, but somehow I doubt it. Why? Aside from the tremendous change to present copyright common practice that would represent (the NY Times Book Review can't cite a particularly beautidul or particularly bad passage?), there seem to be provisions in the DMCA to allow breaking copyright protection for exactly the purpose of news reporting!
Where can you find this? See Section 1201.B of the DMCA, which states, clearly, that the Librarian of Congress can determine when it is legal to break copy protection. If you look at 1201.B.i through v, you see what factors the Librarian is to consider when deciding what kinds of uses to allow. Look particularly at 1201.B.iii:
The way I read this (and of course, I'm not a lawyer, YMMV, etc.), even DeCSS would be legal so long as it is used for the above kinds of uses. For example, if I'm a professor of film theory at a university, I might very well write a multimedia scholarly work comparing the use of montage in two different films. Montage invariably occurs over time - the only to make relevant passage comparisions is with the relevant passages of the film in front of you. I'm not a professor, but I did this myself, perhaps eight years ago, when I did a comparison of narrative structure in Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" and "Full Metal Jacket."
So if the comments contain only short passages for the purpose of criticising the work, how could there be any legal problem?
And if there is, who'd like to join me in a start-up company to colonize Mars?
First, just to get it out of my system:
Now let's get on with some real discussions on some substantive topics around Jackson's ruling. I think it is likely that Jackson will, during the remedies phase, come to the conclusion that breaking up Microsoft is the best remedy. Fining Microsoft is only going to lead to trouble - any fine that would have any real meaning would be in the tens of billions (as Microsoft, last I checked, was sitting on some $15b in cash). If the Feds do that, business leaders world-wide will scream at the excesses of the Federal government, and the Feds should just get out of an industry they don't understand (said business leaders being rightfully disturbed by the precedent of multi-billion-dollar extortion).
As for releasing the source to Windows, again, business leaders will scream (imagine if the Feds revoked all copyrights on everything produced by Time Warner - and I know some of you think that would be a good idea, but it ain't gonna happen). Furthermore, what would it really accomplish? Creation of Windows distribution companies a la Linux distro companies like Red Hat? Not likely - the Microsoft marketing machine is too good for that. Eventually, it might make Windows more secure and more stable, but in the meantime, virus writers would have the source at the same time as everyone else. Community security checks would be a long time in coming and many Windows users wouldn't upgrade (lots of them still use Windows 3.1 - this is not the Linux community.
Personally, I think it should be three equal "Nanosofts" (to coin a name :-), each with complete rights to the source code for Windows and Office (at least). Making an operating system company perpetuates the monopoly, and leads back in to arguments about what constitutes an operating system. But while this kind of stuff is fun to talk about, appeals mean this won't happen for years, if at all.
So instead, let's focus on what we should be doing to advance free softrware. Better products. Better usability. A real user-friendly Linux (or other open source OS). A product I can give to eveyone else here at the start-up I work at, all the people that are Hollywood content types and have enough trouble with a Macintosh.
So cheer a bit - it took a long time, but thar's the nature of law - it is reactionary. But after that, remember, Microsoft isn't going away, and neither are bad products.
Let's make more good ones.
I think it will be pretty quick - after all, the development workstation runs Linux. If the DVD player will read DVD-RAM or CD-R, then burn a bootable OS. Expand anything writable into memory or onto a USB or Firewire HD.
Well, a cheap home computer that plays all the PS games you already have comes to mind. Throw StarOffice or somesuch onto that CD you burned (or something a little less bloaty). Plug in a USB kbd and mouse, a USB HD, and you've got the world's best Quake machine, and a word processor too.
32MB of RAM is just fine for StarOffice, KDE and X and everything - my old VAIO 505 laptop runs just fine in 32MB (it even runs a slash server! :-) Yes, it pages a fair amount when you switch apps, but I've made no efforts to keep down RAM bloat.
Paragraph's handwriting engine is indeed very good. For those that don't follow the link above, it goes to a Java applet that recognizes cursive writing with a mouse with no training whatsoever.
In fact, it's the cursive engine on the Newton (Apple's own is used for print recognition). Anybody with a touch-capable LCD should definitely see if Paragraph runs on your system.
As mentioned, it runs on Wince. CmdrTaco forgive me for my sins but I have dallied with the Beast - when my beloved Newton died, I got a Phillips Nino. Why not a Palm? I had tried Graffitti on the Newton - didn't much care for it. I gave it another go on Palms belonging to friends. Couldn't cope - my writing habits were too ingrained and I couldn't get my mind around the concept of "write each letter one on top of the other." Since Paragraph's Calligrapher ran on WinCE, I got a WinCE device. No joke. That was the only reason.
Of course, it was Microsoft software. It needed to be reset pretty much every day, even if I did nothing with it but turn it off and on occasionally. If I used it with any real frequency, it would crash. And the sync services fought with everything else for the serial port. Yuck. So I went to eBay and found a "new" Newton.
I'm much happier. My Newton gets words right when I know I got them wrong. It garbles foreign names, until you tap the word in question and select "Try Letters" (i.e., don't use a dictionary for matching). Bingo. Perfect.
Yes. Three years later, and it still kicks the pants off a Palm as an actual computing device. Sure, Palms sync great, but do you use one to take notes in meetings? I'll bet not - as Newton users observe, the Palm is the right size when you're not using it, and the Newton is the right size when you are. And on eBay, you might actually find one at a price comparable to a high-end palm.
The Sony VAIO 505 series has this capability, too, at least the older ones. You could use either your finger or the stylus hidden alongside the LCD in a pop-out tray on the left.
Like many things that show up on Slashdot, this one is an old story (not that being old news is intrinsically bad - old news is still a good starting point for discussion).
This first showed up as a rumor while Kubrick was still alive - shortly after the ShoWest teaser for Eyes Wide Shut appeared (this was one featuring a single shot of Kidman, topless, with three words successively covering up the "naughty bits" - Cruise, Kidman, Kubrick, then the title Eyes Wide Shut0). At that time, it was to have been a collaboration. There was even a young actor named who'd been booked for summers for many many years. The stock for AI on the Hollywood Stock Exchange doubled that day (it had been doing well because of Kubrick's name, then slumped when Eyes Wide Shut was announced).
People that play HSX find many rumor sites to get info on upcoming movies (HSX is a play stock exchange speculating on the success of upcoming movies - usually gets opening box office take right within a million). Perhaps the two most well-known are the following:
Enjoy.
I don't think anyone else has mentioned this, buta Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is non-binding! It is quite literally a simple statement that this what they think they're going to do. Any party to the MOU can change their mind and the other parties don't have a legal leg to stand on. Wait for the "Definitive Agreement" - that's the part that has any legal weight. An MOU is just a way to generate press.
Even at that, Time Warner Cable's prior contracts nuke lots of this - Road Runner's deal with Time Warner is as exclusive ISP. Ditto AtHome with the cable companies they're carried on. Nothing will change until either Road Runner and @Home willingly back out of their deal or they expire.
So-called "arm's length" negotiations are actually fairly common and not as difficult as it might seem at first. The short answer is "top management doesn't get involved."
The longer answer is well-served by an example. I used to work at Sony, so I know the corporate structure and will use it as an example. First, take the following facts:
- Sony Corporation of America (SCA) is a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Sony Corporation (Tokyo).
- Nobuyuki Idei runs Sony Corporation.
- Howard Stringer runs SCA, and reports to Idei (roughly - Howard's on the Tokyo board now, I think, which complicates things).
- SCA owns Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE).
- SPE owns Columbia Pictures.
- Columbia owns a company just to do the releasing of its pictures to movie theaters. That company has staff to do the job of making contracts with theater owners.
- Pretty much every major studio will have its own releasing company.
- SCA also owns 50% of Loews Cineplex (Theaters, in the Sony jargon).
- Theaters owns regional companies for each area where it does business. For example, there's a Loews Cineplex Manhattan. Each of those regional companies makes their own deals for movies, by working with the people from the releasing companies of the movie studios. (This kind of spider-web is why you couldn't see Episode I in a Loews theater in Manhattan, but you could across the river in New Jersey - Manhattan decided they didn't want to accept Lucas's terms, NJ decided they did).
So, do you think Idei has the time to mess around with contract negotiations between companies that are at best three corporate levels beneath him? Do you think Howard has the time for that? The answer, of course, is that they don't. They don't get involved in the day-to-day operations."But wait!" you cry, "Why can't they just order Loews Theaters to carry all of Columbia's movies?"
In theory, they could. The chains of command go that way. But this is not the army. This is corporations upon corporations upon corporations. It is assumed that the lower levels know more about the day-to-day operations than the top brass (as well they should). In fact, if top management tried to dictate all the way down, they'd quickly find the entire company upset at micromanagement! (and the company would be right).
"But what about Microsoft? Everyone knows Bill calls all the shots!"
Microsoft is not AOL Time Warner. While both have a highly visible founder/chair, Microsoft is corporate-culturally rather uniform. They've never really successfully acquired a company of any real size. Their purchase of Softimage didn't pan out. MSNBC is famous for the lack of cooperation between the TV and Web sides. Even WebTV, well, Bill said WebTV would be running WinCE a long time ago. It still isn't.
The entrenched culture at Time Warner is an old-media company. They aren't going to rally around Case like Microserfs worshiping Bill. The editor in chief of Time isn't going to not distribute his content everywhere he can. It isn't in his best interest. And similarly, if ISPs offer Time Warner Cable money for carriage, Time Warner Cable will get damn pissed if Case says "no."
How do you reconcile this with Time Warner Cable not wanting other ISPs on before? First off, they didn't want to be forced by the Feds to carry it for free (as they do with local channels - the "Must Carry" regulations). Second, Time Warner Cable owns a piece of Road Runner. See that part in the memo about "prior commitments?" Road Runner is an exclusive.
All in all, AOL Time Warner is not such a huge control as it may seem (influence, yes, but that's different). The MOU is meaningless, but that's for other reasons, detailed in another post.
For me, adjustability is key, and a slight difference in position makes a lot of change in wrist comfort. That's why I've coveting the Aeron/split keyboard CmdrTaco is referring to. Together, they'll set you back more than a grand, but damn, I know those Aerons work for me. And as for the keyboard, well it reminds me of my old favorite.
The Apple Split Keyboard.
That one was a thing of beauty. Put it on a tray at the right height and it was heaven. You could adjust the angle til it was exactly right. Those damn Microsoft keyboards always seem to be just a smidgen off the right angle, just enough so they don't do it for me.
Of course, Apple doesn't make them anymore, and I've never seen an ergo keyboard advertised that was as elegantly simple. You didn't even need any real retraining, and it didn't ruin you for "normal" keyboards.
Ah well. More good tech Apple has consigned to the rubbish bin. Right next to my trusty Newton.
it will be Sony. Software will be nice, but Sony makes the hardware. They've been bringing the cost down for years now - they can spit out those chips like popcorn.
Furthermore, the PS2 development box runs Linux on the Emotion Engine. Consider a Linux box running an Emotion Engine (and yes, that port is long since completed and works just fine), with a complete set of PS/PS2 graphics and sound chips, and the drivers to go with them. If that doesn't make you drool, it should. With a top-flight, pre-configured (i.e., easy to use) desktop, that would be the Linux box for the masses.
This might even address Judge Jackson's "application barrier to entry," at least somewhat. Out of the box there'd be the thousands of PS and PS2 titles, and all the Linux ones too. Zoomba.
Of course, the PS2 development box also writes DVDs - so much for DeCSS :-)