Such a cheap Mac is going to be filled with horribly cheap parts, and it will likely be a piece of shit.
Doing that would defeat the purpose of this machine - introducing new users to Apple engineering (hard and soft ware) and showing them that the Apple price premium for desktops is worth it.
If they come to this box as a result of seeing an iPod, their expectations will be sky-high for fit and finish. Any significant quality problems with a machine like that would turn a whole generation off of desktop Macs.
If this machine is real, I'll bet the rumored price is too low. $500 would be great, but I wouldn't be surprised if the price was more like $700, with real Apple engineering included.
I know that Apple machines tend to be a bit thriftier on power than PCs, but I'd be surprised if a normal PC laptop couldn't get by just fine on 75W. Should I be surprised?
No, sadly. I have a RadioShack brick car power inverter (140W continuous, 400W for seconds). This inverter can run two iBooks with no trouble. It cuts out if I connect one Toshiba 6300 to it with the battery in - the machine boots and runs until XP gets up enough to start running power management and charging the battery, then the inverter overloads. I can charge the battery with the computer off, or run the computer with the battery out, but not both at once.
If contributing to the design of four major programming languages doesn't get you into the top twenty, how about designing the original EMACS command set? There may be people who are better known for contributions to one language or one toolset, but it's hard to beat him for sheer breadth.
Interesting idea, though - what if Apple sold an iPod with electronic paper in the case? You really could skin that hardware, and it would sell the same way that custom cases and faceplates for cellphones do today.
All the rumors about flash iPods have the word "cheap" in them somewhere. Now, everybody think back to the period before the iPod mini was released - remember all the rumors back then said the mini was going to be "cheap".
What did we get? A smaller form factor, same storage as the original iPod, not "cheap"... and Apple sold a zillion of them.
People, Apple doesn't do cheap. The main reason Jobs dumps on flash MP3 players is they're too small - not enough room for a significant fraction of most people's music library. If there is anything to the flash iPod rumors, what do you bet it'll be a 4GB flash device, costing $250? And it'll be half the size of an iPod mini? And Apple will sell a zillion of them?
... in his 1974 short story That Thou Art Mindful of Him. At the end of it, rather than being forced to stop making robots altogether, US Robotics moves into making robotic animals designed to support and clean up the ecosystem.
That's not much of a spoiler, BTW, so you have no excuse not to track the story down and read it.
I've referred to myself as a Migrant Information Worker for some time now. In my case, it means working two half-time jobs - fortunately within the same company, and only three miles apart.
From here I see a breakdown of the sources of energy in the United States:
Oil 39%
Natural gas 24%
Coal 23%
Nuclear 8%
Hydropower 3%
Other 3%
The coal, nuclear, and hydro are almost all for electricity generation. If we got up to roughly four times as many nuclear plants as we currently have, we could stop burning coal, and we'd be up with France (see here in total energy from nuclear power.
Oil is used mostly for transportation (and feedstock for the chemical industry). Without a major breakthrough in transportation energy (hydrogen, fuel cells, batteries), nuclear can't replace oil for transportation,
Wow, my first reply that's longer than the standard Slashdot limit. I'm honored;-).
You are right in that there are no hard and fast rules for what should be an attribute and what should be an element, but then I really haven't found it to be a real problem once I adopted the above.
My heuristic for that is attributes are for metadata that has little or no structure, and is very unlikely to change. In practice, this reduces to "never use attributes" for me.
My personal favorite is RelaxNG which most popular parsers support now.
Mine too. Compact, intelligible syntax, and a decent automata-based grounding - what's not to like, other than the W3C's not-invented-here attitude.
On the other hand, S-Expressions doesn't even have a bad standard schema language. It instead has hundreds. One schema language for almost each S-Expression schema. This is an improvement?
No - more of an acknowledgement that the real test of document validity is always processing it. Validation against schemas of any sort can't really check everything, unless you have a schema language that's as powerful as your application programming language. Schemas are good as a documentation formalism, but I suspect the attitude of most Lisp hackers to mechanical pre-validation would be "why bother?" Hey, what do you expect from a bunch of slobs who prefer untyped variables (but strongly typed data)?
Show me someone credible that claimed that. I don't ever recall Tim Berners-Lee ever saying that.
OK. You asked for it. You have to pay for the full article, but the excerpt at the link gives you the hype flavor. The most depressing thing about that article is that one of its co-authors is Jim Hendler. I've worked with Jim - he and I are both veterans of the AI bubble and the AI Winter that followed. He knows that most of the Semantic Web hype requires solutions to problems where no significant progress has been made since 1980.
I could reply in more detail on character sets and structure encodings, but I'm willing to agree that Lisp has been pretty stagnant since the ANSI Common Lisp spec was finalized in 1990. Hell, CL has a lot of stuff missing from it - no standard for sockets, threads, Unicode... Part of the problem is that Lisp people tend toward the MIT side of the worse-is-better spectrum. CL has no standard threads because they would require a decent solution to multi-processing GC, which still doesn't exist (Java implementations to the contrary). There is hope that things are going to start moving again in the near future.
When I see your sig, I don't have a sudden desire to defend XML from the big, bad Lispers. I simply marvel at the hubris.
I have a similar reaction when I see people saying that putting something into XML "solves the interoperability problem". Please note, I'm not saying you are one of those. Anyone who likes RelaxNG is clearly not one of the XML sheep.
XML is an inelegant solution to the problem of serializing nested property lists. Its SGML roots are a bigger boat-anchor than Lisp's historical weirdnesses - most people like it because it looks like something simple they're familiar with (HTML), and it's the first time they've encountered any notation for nested property lists.
Unfortunately, XML is so entrenched that I see no possibility of "XML Winter" - XML getting the blame for the upcoming failure of the Semantic Web to live up to its hype, the way Lisp got the blame for AI's failure in the 1980's.
The problem is that citizens of the US living overseas can file absentee ballots.
What group do you think of when you hear "likely voting US citizens overseas"? Anybody else think "military personnel"?
And how do military personnel vote? In 2000 in Florida, the GOP thought they were pretty heavily Republican, judging by the way they made out military absentee ballots to be a partisan issue.
Nothing would please me more than to hear that the georgewbush.com people had a technical or abuse-based reason for cutting their site off from non-North-American sites - because the alternative is that they're tin-eared idiots, and the USA should not have a 50-50 chance of being run by people like that.
Sorry, Slashdot signatures are limited to 120 characters, and are meant to be short and provocative.
I've seen that article before. It does a fairly good job of missing the point, or seeing the point and getting it backwards. XML does get one thing right - the idea that chunks of information ought to be self-describing, down to the character set level. Even Common Lisp punts on that one - the spec basically says "we require this subset of ASCII, and here's an API to manipulate whatever your implementation supports."
However, when I say "XML is S-expressions in drag", I mean:
XML and S-expressions are roughly equivalent in representational power - they can both do labeled trees(*).
XML has unneeded complexity that does not give it more representational power - consider the brain-damaged distinction between attributes and sub-elements, or the way namespaces and DTD's sort-of kind-of interoperate.
XML is missing important stuff, and grafting that stuff in afterwards is painful - S-expressions at least have the idea of a number as a leaf element; you need XML Schemas to do that.
XML is promoted as the data format that is going to solve all interoperability problems - witness the current Semantic Web hype. I maintain that there has been no significant progress in ontology wrangling since the mid 1980's, when several depressing results were published - the most depressing one was that certain basic operations on ontologies are NP-complete. This was done before the Web took off, so modern "researchers" can't find it (if Google doesn't see it, it doesn't exist), but nevertheless it's still true, and it's still waiting to clobber Semantic Web efforts.
I will consider changing my.sig when I hear something about the Semantic Web that's more than hype, or I hear about a programming language that bottoms out in XML that anyone actually uses.
(*) Yes, I know they can actually do labeled graphs. S-expressions in Common Lisp can do arbitrary graphs within one "document", and this has worked since 1984. XML tries to do this with magic attributes (ID and IDREF, I think), which requires the application to recognize links in the DOM - yecch. XML also has cross-document links with stuff like XPath - this is a big problem, and XPath is a big, hairy solution.
The reason predictive interfaces work is that most encodings have some degree of redundancy in them. English text is about 50% redundant information, in an information-theoretic sense, and anything based on XML is going to be more so.
To see this for yourself, pick a nice big hunk of English text and gzip it. You'll get about 50-60% compression. Now, pick a similar-sized hunk of XML and gzip it - you'll probably get 75% compression or more.
Tools like this make using bloated, redundant encodings more tolerable by automating some of the redundancy away. It's not clear to me that this is a good thing.
... it will be at about the same level as uranium ore, which occurs naturally and randomly around the planet. With any reasonable form of disposal, this stuff will be safer than uranium ore, because it at least will look man-made.
Maybe, just maybe, there is something to this "financial incentive" business that patents bring to the table.
Maybe. We won't know for sure unless:
Someone comes up with a way to measure the contribution of "innovation" to the economy that doesn't depend on counting patents
That measure is applied to places and times with and without patents (US before/after software patents, US vs. EU vs Japan)
Without that kind of measure, we're reduced to dueling anecdotes - patent holder beats up megacorp and makes money, startup is crushed by megacorp with patent basket, etc.
So really, there are two reasons why Mac OS has not had mass exploits: 1.) Obscure 2.) Not an emotional target
You're at least partially right, though there is room for disagreement (the way Windows puts all the metadata about executability in the file extension is a fundamental flaw, I'd say).
In the end, it doesn't matter why Mac OS X has fewer security problems - it only matters that it does have fewer problems.
Right now, if you're using file formats and applications that are standards-based and/or cross-platform, you have a choice as to which platform to use.
If you're using Windows, you're sitting right in the bullseye.
If you're using anything else, you're sitting out at the edge of the target.
I prefer to get work done with my computer, without worrying about incoming darts - that's why I use Anything But Microsoft. I'll reconsider my stance when the situation in the real world changes - either exploits for other platforms go up, or exploits for Windows taper off to the annoyance level. Call me when that happens, OK?
If you have auto-save turned on (it's on by default in Word for OS X), Word saves at N-minute intervals behind your back, and you get the same buggy behavior as you do when you do it manually. All you have to do is leave a document open for a long time.
I was asked by my supervisors to try and use MS tools to minimize their grief in reading my output. So, while I was debugging a program on a remote machine (via X11), I left a Word document open for my notes. After a few days, I suddenly couldn't save any more. I gave up and started keeping my notes in an emacs buffer (which has infinite undo, and can stay up for days with no trouble - go figure).
I remember thinking at the time, "this has got to be a file-handle leak problem". I'm surprised to see I was right!
I was at the award ceremony, and Ridley Scott was there to accept the Hugo. He thanked the crowd, and said something to the effect of "you people were the only ones who went to see it, though".
If you're looking for a GUI IDE, you'll have to go with one of the commercial Common Lisps, or one of the Scheme variants mentioned in other replies. However, lisp-in-a-box will get you hacking pretty fast - it's Common Lisp + emacs + slime (superior lisp mode for emacs) in one easy-to-unroll ball that should Just Work on the platform of your choice.
This link normally works, but common-lisp.net appears to be offline as I type. Google will show you the sites for various platforms
Both Google and Microsoft are offering free email with lots of storage. Google is going to pay for its service by delivering targeted ads, based on examination of your email contents.
People appear to trust Google with that information, largely because Google has a reputation for "not doing evil". They had the opportunity to deliver skewed search results for short-term profit, and didn't take it.
Microsoft can't offer a similar service, largely because nobody would trust them with that information. Microsoft has a reputation that's basically the opposite of Google - market share first, profit second, ethics when it doesn't conflict with either of those (say - The Three Laws of Microsoft?).
Anybody who goes the Dutch auction route earns Wall Street's wrath. Overstock.com did this two years ago - their CEO claims nobody wanted their business, and that they still get bad-mouthed because of it (see here and here for the Motley Fool's take on that).
Granted, Overstock.com is a classic dot-com, which could explain a lot of the bad press...
Most of the time, corporations behave "morally" because that's the best long-term strategy (see tit-for-tat). If you have to deal with the same actors repeatedly, or if the actors can share information about you, your reputation as a fair dealer becomes more valuable than the profit you make off one raw deal.
Where morals come into play is when tit-for-tat doesn't apply - one of the dealers is much bigger than the other, or has an opportunity to crush the other without repercussions. Microsoft (to pick a random example) screws its partners primarily because it can.
When I first saw the ads for ReMax realtors with the hot air balloon ("Take a Step Above The Crowd!"), my first thought was, how could they pick a symbol that was:
Slashdot Mirror
Doing that would defeat the purpose of this machine - introducing new users to Apple engineering (hard and soft ware) and showing them that the Apple price premium for desktops is worth it.
If they come to this box as a result of seeing an iPod, their expectations will be sky-high for fit and finish. Any significant quality problems with a machine like that would turn a whole generation off of desktop Macs.
If this machine is real, I'll bet the rumored price is too low. $500 would be great, but I wouldn't be surprised if the price was more like $700, with real Apple engineering included.
... is that you have ten years of baby-boomer guinea pigs ahead of you.
... because if it isn't, it looks like Vinge-style Focus is possible, and might be really ugly.
Who do you think would try it first, North Korea or China? Scary,,,
No, sadly. I have a RadioShack brick car power inverter (140W continuous, 400W for seconds). This inverter can run two iBooks with no trouble. It cuts out if I connect one Toshiba 6300 to it with the battery in - the machine boots and runs until XP gets up enough to start running power management and charging the battery, then the inverter overloads. I can charge the battery with the computer off, or run the computer with the battery out, but not both at once.
One of the original designers of Scheme?
Primary author of Common Lisp the Language?
Co-author of C: A Reference Manual, which was the bible on writing portable C?
Co-author of The Java Language Specification?
If contributing to the design of four major programming languages doesn't get you into the top twenty, how about designing the original EMACS command set? There may be people who are better known for contributions to one language or one toolset, but it's hard to beat him for sheer breadth.
Unfortunately, Apple has it patented.
Interesting idea, though - what if Apple sold an iPod with electronic paper in the case? You really could skin that hardware, and it would sell the same way that custom cases and faceplates for cellphones do today.
All the rumors about flash iPods have the word "cheap" in them somewhere. Now, everybody think back to the period before the iPod mini was released - remember all the rumors back then said the mini was going to be "cheap".
... and Apple sold a zillion of them.
What did we get? A smaller form factor, same storage as the original iPod, not "cheap"
People, Apple doesn't do cheap. The main reason Jobs dumps on flash MP3 players is they're too small - not enough room for a significant fraction of most people's music library. If there is anything to the flash iPod rumors, what do you bet it'll be a 4GB flash device, costing $250? And it'll be half the size of an iPod mini? And Apple will sell a zillion of them?
... in his 1974 short story That Thou Art Mindful of Him. At the end of it, rather than being forced to stop making robots altogether, US Robotics moves into making robotic animals designed to support and clean up the ecosystem.
That's not much of a spoiler, BTW, so you have no excuse not to track the story down and read it.
I've referred to myself as a Migrant Information Worker for some time now. In my case, it means working two half-time jobs - fortunately within the same company, and only three miles apart.
Oil 39%
Natural gas 24%
Coal 23%
Nuclear 8%
Hydropower 3%
Other 3%
The coal, nuclear, and hydro are almost all for electricity generation. If we got up to roughly four times as many nuclear plants as we currently have, we could stop burning coal, and we'd be up with France (see here in total energy from nuclear power.
Oil is used mostly for transportation (and feedstock for the chemical industry). Without a major breakthrough in transportation energy (hydrogen, fuel cells, batteries), nuclear can't replace oil for transportation,
My heuristic for that is attributes are for metadata that has little or no structure, and is very unlikely to change. In practice, this reduces to "never use attributes" for me.
Mine too. Compact, intelligible syntax, and a decent automata-based grounding - what's not to like, other than the W3C's not-invented-here attitude.
No - more of an acknowledgement that the real test of document validity is always processing it. Validation against schemas of any sort can't really check everything, unless you have a schema language that's as powerful as your application programming language. Schemas are good as a documentation formalism, but I suspect the attitude of most Lisp hackers to mechanical pre-validation would be "why bother?" Hey, what do you expect from a bunch of slobs who prefer untyped variables (but strongly typed data)?
OK. You asked for it. You have to pay for the full article, but the excerpt at the link gives you the hype flavor. The most depressing thing about that article is that one of its co-authors is Jim Hendler. I've worked with Jim - he and I are both veterans of the AI bubble and the AI Winter that followed. He knows that most of the Semantic Web hype requires solutions to problems where no significant progress has been made since 1980.
I could reply in more detail on character sets and structure encodings, but I'm willing to agree that Lisp has been pretty stagnant since the ANSI Common Lisp spec was finalized in 1990. Hell, CL has a lot of stuff missing from it - no standard for sockets, threads, Unicode... Part of the problem is that Lisp people tend toward the MIT side of the worse-is-better spectrum. CL has no standard threads because they would require a decent solution to multi-processing GC, which still doesn't exist (Java implementations to the contrary). There is hope that things are going to start moving again in the near future.
I have a similar reaction when I see people saying that putting something into XML "solves the interoperability problem". Please note, I'm not saying you are one of those. Anyone who likes RelaxNG is clearly not one of the XML sheep.
XML is an inelegant solution to the problem of serializing nested property lists. Its SGML roots are a bigger boat-anchor than Lisp's historical weirdnesses - most people like it because it looks like something simple they're familiar with (HTML), and it's the first time they've encountered any notation for nested property lists.
Unfortunately, XML is so entrenched that I see no possibility of "XML Winter" - XML getting the blame for the upcoming failure of the Semantic Web to live up to its hype, the way Lisp got the blame for AI's failure in the 1980's.
What group do you think of when you hear "likely voting US citizens overseas"? Anybody else think "military personnel"?
And how do military personnel vote? In 2000 in Florida, the GOP thought they were pretty heavily Republican, judging by the way they made out military absentee ballots to be a partisan issue.
Nothing would please me more than to hear that the georgewbush.com people had a technical or abuse-based reason for cutting their site off from non-North-American sites - because the alternative is that they're tin-eared idiots, and the USA should not have a 50-50 chance of being run by people like that.
I've seen that article before. It does a fairly good job of missing the point, or seeing the point and getting it backwards. XML does get one thing right - the idea that chunks of information ought to be self-describing, down to the character set level. Even Common Lisp punts on that one - the spec basically says "we require this subset of ASCII, and here's an API to manipulate whatever your implementation supports."
However, when I say "XML is S-expressions in drag", I mean:
XML and S-expressions are roughly equivalent in representational power - they can both do labeled trees(*).
XML has unneeded complexity that does not give it more representational power - consider the brain-damaged distinction between attributes and sub-elements, or the way namespaces and DTD's sort-of kind-of interoperate.
XML is missing important stuff, and grafting that stuff in afterwards is painful - S-expressions at least have the idea of a number as a leaf element; you need XML Schemas to do that.
.sig when I hear something about the Semantic Web that's more than hype, or I hear about a programming language that bottoms out in XML that anyone actually uses.
XML is promoted as the data format that is going to solve all interoperability problems - witness the current Semantic Web hype. I maintain that there has been no significant progress in ontology wrangling since the mid 1980's, when several depressing results were published - the most depressing one was that certain basic operations on ontologies are NP-complete. This was done before the Web took off, so modern "researchers" can't find it (if Google doesn't see it, it doesn't exist), but nevertheless it's still true, and it's still waiting to clobber Semantic Web efforts.
I will consider changing my
(*) Yes, I know they can actually do labeled graphs. S-expressions in Common Lisp can do arbitrary graphs within one "document", and this has worked since 1984. XML tries to do this with magic attributes (ID and IDREF, I think), which requires the application to recognize links in the DOM - yecch. XML also has cross-document links with stuff like XPath - this is a big problem, and XPath is a big, hairy solution.
The reason predictive interfaces work is that most encodings have some degree of redundancy in them. English text is about 50% redundant information, in an information-theoretic sense, and anything based on XML is going to be more so.
To see this for yourself, pick a nice big hunk of English text and gzip it. You'll get about 50-60% compression. Now, pick a similar-sized hunk of XML and gzip it - you'll probably get 75% compression or more.
Tools like this make using bloated, redundant encodings more tolerable by automating some of the redundancy away. It's not clear to me that this is a good thing.
... it will be at about the same level as uranium ore, which occurs naturally and randomly around the planet. With any reasonable form of disposal, this stuff will be safer than uranium ore, because it at least will look man-made.
Maybe. We won't know for sure unless:
Someone comes up with a way to measure the contribution of "innovation" to the economy that doesn't depend on counting patents
That measure is applied to places and times with and without patents (US before/after software patents, US vs. EU vs Japan)
Without that kind of measure, we're reduced to dueling anecdotes - patent holder beats up megacorp and makes money, startup is crushed by megacorp with patent basket, etc.
You're at least partially right, though there is room for disagreement (the way Windows puts all the metadata about executability in the file extension is a fundamental flaw, I'd say).
In the end, it doesn't matter why Mac OS X has fewer security problems - it only matters that it does have fewer problems.
Right now, if you're using file formats and applications that are standards-based and/or cross-platform, you have a choice as to which platform to use.
If you're using Windows, you're sitting right in the bullseye.
If you're using anything else, you're sitting out at the edge of the target.
I prefer to get work done with my computer, without worrying about incoming darts - that's why I use Anything But Microsoft. I'll reconsider my stance when the situation in the real world changes - either exploits for other platforms go up, or exploits for Windows taper off to the annoyance level. Call me when that happens, OK?
If you have auto-save turned on (it's on by default in Word for OS X), Word saves at N-minute intervals behind your back, and you get the same buggy behavior as you do when you do it manually. All you have to do is leave a document open for a long time.
I was asked by my supervisors to try and use MS tools to minimize their grief in reading my output. So, while I was debugging a program on a remote machine (via X11), I left a Word document open for my notes. After a few days, I suddenly couldn't save any more. I gave up and started keeping my notes in an emacs buffer (which has infinite undo, and can stay up for days with no trouble - go figure).
I remember thinking at the time, "this has got to be a file-handle leak problem". I'm surprised to see I was right!
I was at the award ceremony, and Ridley Scott was there to accept the Hugo. He thanked the crowd, and said something to the effect of "you people were the only ones who went to see it, though".
A better one is here where Lava lamps are used to generate true random bits.
Too bad the website for it appears to be off line. SGI used to be cool, too...
If you're looking for a GUI IDE, you'll have to go with one of the commercial Common Lisps, or one of the Scheme variants mentioned in other replies. However, lisp-in-a-box will get you hacking pretty fast - it's Common Lisp + emacs + slime (superior lisp mode for emacs) in one easy-to-unroll ball that should Just Work on the platform of your choice.
This link normally works, but common-lisp.net appears to be offline as I type. Google will show you the sites for various platforms
Both Google and Microsoft are offering free email with lots of storage. Google is going to pay for its service by delivering targeted ads, based on examination of your email contents.
People appear to trust Google with that information, largely because Google has a reputation for "not doing evil". They had the opportunity to deliver skewed search results for short-term profit, and didn't take it.
Microsoft can't offer a similar service, largely because nobody would trust them with that information. Microsoft has a reputation that's basically the opposite of Google - market share first, profit second, ethics when it doesn't conflict with either of those (say - The Three Laws of Microsoft?).
Anybody who goes the Dutch auction route earns Wall Street's wrath. Overstock.com did this two years ago - their CEO claims nobody wanted their business, and that they still get bad-mouthed because of it (see here and here for the Motley Fool's take on that).
Granted, Overstock.com is a classic dot-com, which could explain a lot of the bad press...
Most of the time, corporations behave "morally" because that's the best long-term strategy (see tit-for-tat). If you have to deal with the same actors repeatedly, or if the actors can share information about you, your reputation as a fair dealer becomes more valuable than the profit you make off one raw deal.
Where morals come into play is when tit-for-tat doesn't apply - one of the dealers is much bigger than the other, or has an opportunity to crush the other without repercussions. Microsoft (to pick a random example) screws its partners primarily because it can.
lightweight
bloated
and full of hot air?