Frater above has the real problem nailed here. He basically says that people need to learn to think logically/clearly/algorithmically to really work competently with computers.
Today, that means learning a text-based programming language, because there really is no alternative - there are no "visual" programming languages that allow users to express their requirements as precisely and succinctly as text. Even Visual Basic bottoms out in text.
People have been trying to create more "visual" programming systems for decades, and the closest they've gotten to them is IDEs that analyze your program text and visually show you interesting summaries of it, or maybe let you make straightforward refactoring changes to it.
(For those of you who will reply to this, pointing to your favorite purely visual programming tool - why have those academic systems never caught on, if they're actually superior to text? If they could really empower the current crop of non-programmers, they would have taken over by now.)
Mom and Pop stores by and large live and die on their regular customers. You treat them like gold, and never annoy them.
Spam annoys 99.999% of the people that receive it, but it "works" because that majority can't retaliate effectively, and they make money off the.001% that respond.
Advertising that annoys 99.999% of people that receive it would kill a Mom and Pop store, because the annoyed customers would retaliate by taking their business elsewhere.
Bluejack ads would only work for businesses with no repeat customers, and there are damn few of those.
Jess is actually new stuff
on
Jess in Action
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I originally reacted to Jess much the way Black Parrot did, knowing that rete-based rule engines have been around since 1989 or so.
Jess is a rete-based rule engine, but the implementors have done a lot of work on the innards of rete network processing and have made serious order-of-magnitude improvements in matching speed.
{snipe} They had to - Jess would have been too slow relative to rule engines in native-compiled languages otherwise. {/snipe}
Seriously, Jess is a real improvement over ancient and revered rule engines like CLIPS. You can find out more about Jess by going straight to the sources at Sandia Labs here.
You can see where they're headed with this - a "shell" which can do anything that can be done in a.NET program. The Un*x equivalent would be a C interpreter as a shell, but without the C low-level orientation. This shell is essentially a.NET interpreter.
The description reminded me of Lisp machines, which have this level of command-line support because they run Lisp all the way down to the bare metal, so the command-line expression language is exactly the same as the OS implementation language.
NASA started out as a little research agency. It became a big agency with a mission (going to the moon by 1970).
The moment it became big, it attracted the attention of Congress, which sees everything the Government does in terms of "how can this be used as a vehicle to steer federal dollars to my state/district?" Ever wonder why the rockets are launched from Florida, but manned mission control is in Houston? LBJ ran the Senate at the time, and a major federal program in his state was the price he charged for getting the moon missions funded.
After we got to the moon, NASA evolved from an agency with a mission into the full-employment wing of the aerospace industry, with bits and pieces of it in every state. This focus on spending money in every district makes everything NASA does cost too much.
It has even compromised spacecraft design, fatally at times. Remember the boosters on the Challenger? The O-rings that failed sealed the "field joint" in the solid boosters - it's called that because the boosters are manufactured far away from the launch site, then assembled in the field. It's possible to make those boosters in one piece, without a joint - they're stronger and lighter when you do it that way. But if you do that, they're too big to ship, so they can't be made in a remote Congresscritter's district.
NASA should do research and prototype development for launch systems and manned vehicles. It should not be in the business of providing space transportation services. Congress makes it do so because doing that creates more long-term, high-tech jobs.
So far, this has given them a 25 million user market, which is slowly expanding, though not at the rate that the X86 market is expanding.
I have one quibble with this - is the x86 market still expanding? In the developing world, I suspect pretty much everyone who needs a computer already has one, and unless they do video or games their raw hardware is fast enough for what they do (word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing).
If this is true, then what we're left with is competition of style (ease of use, fit and finish) versus externalities (compatibility with the rest of the universe). If there's any justice, Apple ought to continue to grow.
Though I hope they don't "win" - a monopoly Apple would probably become just as fat, lazy, and obnoxious as Microsoft.
You know, the act of filing a lawsuit that anyone with an actual clue about the law in question would know was invalid, solely to threaten the recipients?
Doing this is illegal in almost every jurisdiction. It's also grounds for disbarment if a complaint is filed with the appropriate bar association.
I will bet the hackers in question know this, given their demonstrated knowledge of the law to date, and are waiting to see if it's necessary to use the really big hammer to swat these clowns.
Of course developers are more productive with more screen space. If I can have more windows open at once without overlapping them, I'll spend less time raising/lowering/rearranging them, with less disruption to my thought processes while I'm coding/testing/debugging. More information in front of me with less effort to get it keeps me in flow, which is where I want to be.
I used to have a 17" Apple monitor that I ran at 1600x1200 for development, solely to keep as much text as possible in my field of vision while working. My favorite monitor of all time was a Sun 20" monochrome 100 DPI screen - ran at something like 2000x1500.
Screen space is an extension of my short-term memory - it lets me deal with more complex things with less effort.
All you have to do is go here and tell them you're a homeschooler who meets the requirements of the area you live in.
They trust you not to use this discount fraudulently. Like they trust you to only install Mac OS on machines you paid for, without license key or authorization BS to enforce it.
Slightly related note: according to a friend who works in Cupertino, Apple is homeschooler-friendly because a small but significant number of the employees there are homeschoolers.
... the state is purchasing these laptops on a two-year lease. Nobody knows what's supposed to happen to these computers once the lease is up and the computers are obsolete.
Assuming giving 6th graders laptops is a good idea (have to agree with others in this thread that it's optional at best), and that they'll be leased, Apples are clearly the way to go.
Apple hardware in general (and laptops in paricular) are famous for holding their value over time. Check out iBook sales on eBay - people routinely get 70% or better of original retail for machines that are two years old.
Also, Apple's recent OS X upgrades have improved performance on older hardware, rather than obsoleting it. A batch of recent-vintage iBooks ought to still be usable by students three years from now, maybe more.
Is this a sucessful business model? Put out a new OS every year? Sorry, I should say an "upgrade" every year, and charge users $129 every time?
Yes, if and only if the yearly upgrade gives users things they're willing to pay $129 a year to get.
OS X is still a relatively "young" OS, despite its BSD/Mach roots. I'm going to get it for the performance enhancements alone - the "fast" machine in my house is a 466 MHz G4, my white iBook is a 500 MHz G3, and they'll both benefit.
{aside type="snarky"}
Anyone have any examples of a Microsoft OS upgrade or new release that promised and delivered improved performance on 2+ year-old hardware?
{/aside}
In a year or two, all the "easy" tuning in the OS will be done. At that point, new OS releases will have to sell primarily on new features. That's when we'll see if this digital hub stuff sells.
Instead of doing something as obvious as big dots, they could be smart and digitally put different details in the background of certain scenes - a bookcase with a code corresponding to different colored books, say.
The technology already exists to do this in real time for TV - it's used to do virtual advertising (replacing billboards in stadiums, so the ads seen by the home viewer are different from the ones in the park). When films are distributed digitally, it should be possible to invisibly watermark each copy - you wouldn't see the difference unless you went to two different theaters.
It was 1989, spring. I was working for a spin-out from a large Silicon Valley area company. They were still headquartered in Mountain View, and I was working for them by remote control (which in those days meant email via 19.2K modem and Usenet, and overnight packages) from the Washington DC area. My wife and I had just bought a house, and we were planning our first child.
I got a phone call from one of my co-workers just after noon. The company, which was in no apparent financial trouble up to that time, was closing immediately.
There are advantages to hearing news like that at a distance:
No escorted office cleanout ritual. They had to be nice to me - I had their hardware and their data in my house.
No drama. I wasn't even tempted to scream or throw things - who would see?
Everyone else got the news first thing in the morning. I had a three hour jump on them due to the time zone difference.
We collectively found out later that our spinout had been a political football within the parent company, and the parent's reneging on contract work for the spinout was a major factor in the sudden collapse.
Two days later the parent company came back to the techie subset of the spinout employees and told us they had forgotten they were contractually obligated to deliver the final version of our new system (due about a year out)- could we finish it up for them as consultants?
We did - for hourly rates roughly equivalent to our old salaries, with a 50% bonus on delivery of the system. Biggest single check I've ever cashed...
Absentee/remote voting should stay as it is now - a last resort for people who can't get to the polls on election day. Why? Because it's the best way to be sure that everyone can vote without coercion.
If you can vote from the comfort of your home, there's nothing to stop thugs from showing up at your home and asking you politely to vote for the candidate of their choice (and you get to keep your fingers unbroken in the bargain).
If you can vote from your office desktop, there's nothing to stop your supervisor from dropping in and watching you vote (with your job on the line if you vote wrong).
You know you're good when you can post on/. without internet.
I keep a dialup account at a local ISP for the times when Comcast spazzes; until Isabel it did this 3-4 times a year, typically for 12-24 hours.
In OS X, I just change the machine's Location from "Comcast" to "Phone Line" and I'm connected (and crawling - my neighborhood is behind a digital switch, so I can't get more than 28K or so over the phone, ever).
... my Comcast bandwidth was capped at zero, starting Thursday evening, and hasn't been above that since.
I think I'm going to ask for a credit on this month's cable bill. My neighborhood didn't lose power (for more than a few seconds at a time) or phone service, but the cable and internet have been solidly down since the storm.
At one point it had an uptime of over 28 days. That's 28 days of open, close, open, close and the system began doing strange things.
I use my iBook in a similar fashion. but I do mostly development (emacs, browser, Common Lisp). It seems to me that problems with OS X start after I use anything from MS Office.
Until then, I'll make do with my 12" iBook. It's a G4 chaser, too, but at least it's in the same league.
When someone else has a laptop with sub-two-second wake-from-sleep, that only needs rebooting after major system updates, runs all my favorite Un*x tools, and lets me run Microsoft junk when I must, I'll look into it.
I park my car in the middle of summer. As I get out and lock up, the car senses the temperature and time of day, the body turns white and the windows all go mirror-refelctive. When I get back, the inside of the car is ambient air temperature instead of 140F.
In the winter, the car body goes black and the windows stay clear, keeping the inside warm and reducing the snow and ice buildup.
In either case, I come out of the shopping center, push a button on my keychain, and the car's color starts flashing between international orange and white/black. Quieter than chirping the horn/alarm, and works better in daylight than flashing the headlights.
And both generics and templates are kiddy toys...
on
Does C# Measure Up?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
... compared to the code-generating power of lisp macros.
And you can get away with that because...
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 1
... most server-side apps are bottlenecked by either internet bandwidth, or database access speed. Java is just fast enough that the cost of bytecode-interpretation and JVM semantics-preservation can be covered up with big beefy servers.
Riddle me this: if Java rocks on the server, why are there no industrial-strength databases in native Java? You would think Oracle would be thrilled to write once and deploy everywhere...
... and you'll see that the two of them were responsible for the core design of the H-bomb. H-bombs are a lot more complicated than just setting off an A-bomb in a barrel of deuterium. He wasn't called the "Father of the H-bomb" for his political clout alone.
All popular OSs have memory/resource leak problems. Even my OS X laptop gets s-l-o-w after a few days or weeks of use, and logging out and back in speeds it up again. I notice it most when I use anything from MS Office, for some reason...
Almost all of this can be laid at the feet of pervasive use of languages that require manual memory and resource management. Writing leak-free-C is apparently beyond most normal mortal programmers, or even the wizards who write things like Apple's Quartz layer or XFree86.
All these issues are going to be magnified with MRAM-based machines - if sleep/hibernate mode is free, it'll get used more, and more systems will have longer routine uptimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Frater above has the real problem nailed here. He basically says that people need to learn to think logically/clearly/algorithmically to really work competently with computers.
Today, that means learning a text-based programming language, because there really is no alternative - there are no "visual" programming languages that allow users to express their requirements as precisely and succinctly as text. Even Visual Basic bottoms out in text.
People have been trying to create more "visual" programming systems for decades, and the closest they've gotten to them is IDEs that analyze your program text and visually show you interesting summaries of it, or maybe let you make straightforward refactoring changes to it.
(For those of you who will reply to this, pointing to your favorite purely visual programming tool - why have those academic systems never caught on, if they're actually superior to text? If they could really empower the current crop of non-programmers, they would have taken over by now.)
Mom and Pop stores by and large live and die on their regular customers. You treat them like gold, and never annoy them.
.001% that respond.
Spam annoys 99.999% of the people that receive it, but it "works" because that majority can't retaliate effectively, and they make money off the
Advertising that annoys 99.999% of people that receive it would kill a Mom and Pop store, because the annoyed customers would retaliate by taking their business elsewhere.
Bluejack ads would only work for businesses with no repeat customers, and there are damn few of those.
I originally reacted to Jess much the way Black Parrot did, knowing that rete-based rule engines have been around since 1989 or so.
Jess is a rete-based rule engine, but the implementors have done a lot of work on the innards of rete network processing and have made serious order-of-magnitude improvements in matching speed.
{snipe}
They had to - Jess would have been too slow relative to rule engines in native-compiled languages otherwise.
{/snipe}
Seriously, Jess is a real improvement over ancient and revered rule engines like CLIPS. You can find out more about Jess by going straight to the sources at Sandia Labs here.
Dang. Leave it to Microsoft to come so close to a simple, elegant, powerful approach, and bounce right off it in favor of a more baroque system.
You can see where they're headed with this - a "shell" which can do anything that can be done in a .NET program. The Un*x equivalent would be a C interpreter as a shell, but without the C low-level orientation. This shell is essentially a .NET interpreter.
The description reminded me of Lisp machines, which have this level of command-line support because they run Lisp all the way down to the bare metal, so the command-line expression language is exactly the same as the OS implementation language.
NASA started out as a little research agency. It became a big agency with a mission (going to the moon by 1970).
The moment it became big, it attracted the attention of Congress, which sees everything the Government does in terms of "how can this be used as a vehicle to steer federal dollars to my state/district?" Ever wonder why the rockets are launched from Florida, but manned mission control is in Houston? LBJ ran the Senate at the time, and a major federal program in his state was the price he charged for getting the moon missions funded.
After we got to the moon, NASA evolved from an agency with a mission into the full-employment wing of the aerospace industry, with bits and pieces of it in every state. This focus on spending money in every district makes everything NASA does cost too much.
It has even compromised spacecraft design, fatally at times. Remember the boosters on the Challenger? The O-rings that failed sealed the "field joint" in the solid boosters - it's called that because the boosters are manufactured far away from the launch site, then assembled in the field. It's possible to make those boosters in one piece, without a joint - they're stronger and lighter when you do it that way. But if you do that, they're too big to ship, so they can't be made in a remote Congresscritter's district.
NASA should do research and prototype development for launch systems and manned vehicles. It should not be in the business of providing space transportation services. Congress makes it do so because doing that creates more long-term, high-tech jobs.
I have one quibble with this - is the x86 market still expanding? In the developing world, I suspect pretty much everyone who needs a computer already has one, and unless they do video or games their raw hardware is fast enough for what they do (word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing).
If this is true, then what we're left with is competition of style (ease of use, fit and finish) versus externalities (compatibility with the rest of the universe). If there's any justice, Apple ought to continue to grow.
Though I hope they don't "win" - a monopoly Apple would probably become just as fat, lazy, and obnoxious as Microsoft.
You know, the act of filing a lawsuit that anyone with an actual clue about the law in question would know was invalid, solely to threaten the recipients?
Doing this is illegal in almost every jurisdiction. It's also grounds for disbarment if a complaint is filed with the appropriate bar association.
I will bet the hackers in question know this, given their demonstrated knowledge of the law to date, and are waiting to see if it's necessary to use the really big hammer to swat these clowns.
Of course developers are more productive with more screen space. If I can have more windows open at once without overlapping them, I'll spend less time raising/lowering/rearranging them, with less disruption to my thought processes while I'm coding/testing/debugging. More information in front of me with less effort to get it keeps me in flow, which is where I want to be.
I used to have a 17" Apple monitor that I ran at 1600x1200 for development, solely to keep as much text as possible in my field of vision while working. My favorite monitor of all time was a Sun 20" monochrome 100 DPI screen - ran at something like 2000x1500.
Screen space is an extension of my short-term memory - it lets me deal with more complex things with less effort.
All you have to do is go here and tell them you're a homeschooler who meets the requirements of the area you live in.
They trust you not to use this discount fraudulently. Like they trust you to only install Mac OS on machines you paid for, without license key or authorization BS to enforce it.
Slightly related note: according to a friend who works in Cupertino, Apple is homeschooler-friendly because a small but significant number of the employees there are homeschoolers.
Assuming giving 6th graders laptops is a good idea (have to agree with others in this thread that it's optional at best), and that they'll be leased, Apples are clearly the way to go.
Apple hardware in general (and laptops in paricular) are famous for holding their value over time. Check out iBook sales on eBay - people routinely get 70% or better of original retail for machines that are two years old.
Also, Apple's recent OS X upgrades have improved performance on older hardware, rather than obsoleting it. A batch of recent-vintage iBooks ought to still be usable by students three years from now, maybe more.
Yes, if and only if the yearly upgrade gives users things they're willing to pay $129 a year to get.
OS X is still a relatively "young" OS, despite its BSD/Mach roots. I'm going to get it for the performance enhancements alone - the "fast" machine in my house is a 466 MHz G4, my white iBook is a 500 MHz G3, and they'll both benefit.
{aside type="snarky"} Anyone have any examples of a Microsoft OS upgrade or new release that promised and delivered improved performance on 2+ year-old hardware? {/aside}
In a year or two, all the "easy" tuning in the OS will be done. At that point, new OS releases will have to sell primarily on new features. That's when we'll see if this digital hub stuff sells.
Instead of doing something as obvious as big dots, they could be smart and digitally put different details in the background of certain scenes - a bookcase with a code corresponding to different colored books, say.
The technology already exists to do this in real time for TV - it's used to do virtual advertising (replacing billboards in stadiums, so the ads seen by the home viewer are different from the ones in the park). When films are distributed digitally, it should be possible to invisibly watermark each copy - you wouldn't see the difference unless you went to two different theaters.
I got a phone call from one of my co-workers just after noon. The company, which was in no apparent financial trouble up to that time, was closing immediately.
There are advantages to hearing news like that at a distance:
No escorted office cleanout ritual. They had to be nice to me - I had their hardware and their data in my house.
No drama. I wasn't even tempted to scream or throw things - who would see?
Everyone else got the news first thing in the morning. I had a three hour jump on them due to the time zone difference.
We collectively found out later that our spinout had been a political football within the parent company, and the parent's reneging on contract work for the spinout was a major factor in the sudden collapse.
Two days later the parent company came back to the techie subset of the spinout employees and told us they had forgotten they were contractually obligated to deliver the final version of our new system (due about a year out)- could we finish it up for them as consultants?
We did - for hourly rates roughly equivalent to our old salaries, with a 50% bonus on delivery of the system. Biggest single check I've ever cashed...
Absentee/remote voting should stay as it is now - a last resort for people who can't get to the polls on election day. Why? Because it's the best way to be sure that everyone can vote without coercion.
If you can vote from the comfort of your home, there's nothing to stop thugs from showing up at your home and asking you politely to vote for the candidate of their choice (and you get to keep your fingers unbroken in the bargain).
If you can vote from your office desktop, there's nothing to stop your supervisor from dropping in and watching you vote (with your job on the line if you vote wrong).
I keep a dialup account at a local ISP for the times when Comcast spazzes; until Isabel it did this 3-4 times a year, typically for 12-24 hours.
In OS X, I just change the machine's Location from "Comcast" to "Phone Line" and I'm connected (and crawling - my neighborhood is behind a digital switch, so I can't get more than 28K or so over the phone, ever).
... my Comcast bandwidth was capped at zero, starting Thursday evening, and hasn't been above that since.
I think I'm going to ask for a credit on this month's cable bill. My neighborhood didn't lose power (for more than a few seconds at a time) or phone service, but the cable and internet have been solidly down since the storm.
Grumble...
I use my iBook in a similar fashion. but I do mostly development (emacs, browser, Common Lisp). It seems to me that problems with OS X start after I use anything from MS Office.
Until then, I'll make do with my 12" iBook. It's a G4 chaser, too, but at least it's in the same league.
When someone else has a laptop with sub-two-second wake-from-sleep, that only needs rebooting after major system updates, runs all my favorite Un*x tools, and lets me run Microsoft junk when I must, I'll look into it.
I park my car in the middle of summer. As I get out and lock up, the car senses the temperature and time of day, the body turns white and the windows all go mirror-refelctive. When I get back, the inside of the car is ambient air temperature instead of 140F.
In the winter, the car body goes black and the windows stay clear, keeping the inside warm and reducing the snow and ice buildup.
In either case, I come out of the shopping center, push a button on my keychain, and the car's color starts flashing between international orange and white/black. Quieter than chirping the horn/alarm, and works better in daylight than flashing the headlights.
... compared to the code-generating power of lisp macros.
... most server-side apps are bottlenecked by either internet bandwidth, or database access speed. Java is just fast enough that the cost of bytecode-interpretation and JVM semantics-preservation can be covered up with big beefy servers.
Riddle me this: if Java rocks on the server, why are there no industrial-strength databases in native Java? You would think Oracle would be thrilled to write once and deploy everywhere...
... and you'll see that the two of them were responsible for the core design of the H-bomb. H-bombs are a lot more complicated than just setting off an A-bomb in a barrel of deuterium. He wasn't called the "Father of the H-bomb" for his political clout alone.
All popular OSs have memory/resource leak problems. Even my OS X laptop gets s-l-o-w after a few days or weeks of use, and logging out and back in speeds it up again. I notice it most when I use anything from MS Office, for some reason...
Almost all of this can be laid at the feet of pervasive use of languages that require manual memory and resource management. Writing leak-free-C is apparently beyond most normal mortal programmers, or even the wizards who write things like Apple's Quartz layer or XFree86.
All these issues are going to be magnified with MRAM-based machines - if sleep/hibernate mode is free, it'll get used more, and more systems will have longer routine uptimes.