I've had a 500 MHz iBook for about a year now. I beat the hell out of portable hardware, and the iBook laps it up with no visible damage. I've dropped it off tables three times so far, once while it was open and running - that time I bent the place where the hinge mounts to the screen. No crash, I was able to straighten it out without permanent damage, and it's still running.
The only time I've wanted a G4 book instead was when I tried to run Virtual PC on it - it was basically unuseable. For my major usages, web browsing and software development, it's just fine.
Or more specifically, low-level, annoyance DRM versus heavy-handed, we-own-your-machine DRM. If the consumer has a choice between Apple-style music management and the music-rental style Microsoft and the RIAA want, which one do you think they'll choose?
Yeah, I know, "the one that's pre-installed". We may still be globally screwed, but at least Apple's trying...
Usenet, warts and all, will be useful far into the future, because its store-propagate-forward protocol will continue to work in the face of long delays between nodes. Hell, in early Usenet days some links were done with courier-carried magtapes.
Usenet will be useable between planets in this solar system - a web forum based on Earth wouldn't be useable by anyone past the Moon. And if we finally get out of the solar system, the Net of a Million Lies can go out with us.
Returning to Earth, Usenet still scales better than web forums. I wonder how many web forums have started up, been swamped by lots of users, and had to close for lack of bandwith money, or gone so commercial to pay for server resources that they alienated their community. Neither of these are a problem when creating a Usenet group.
"Oh no, Mister Prosecuting Attorney! I would never upload music to Kazaa for illegal distribution! A virus must have entered my computer and uploaded that music without my knowledge!"
Lines of code/developer/day, function points, whatever they'll buy. The most important thing is to get them to do it again a year from now, when the cubes have been in place awhile. If your management says no, start looking for a new job, because they have just told you:
They don't care about your working conditions.
They don't care about measuring the effect of your working conditions on your productivity.
I'm not so much a "machead" as an "anything but Windows" head, myself. That said, I use Macs:
Because you have to mess with them less to get your tasks done. I bend computers to my will as my job - at home I have other things to do.
Because they're less vulnerable to the virus-du-jour. Some of this is just better software, especially since OS X. Most of it is just choosing to live on the outer edges of the target, rather than right in the bullseye.
"Consensus" is what got us into the current privacy mess! The current "compromise" on most personal financial data is that data holders have to tell you what their sharing policy is (in dense legalese text which usually has "we will share with basically anybody who will pay us for it" buried in it) and give you the chance to "opt out".
If the regulations had been made with consumers in mind at all, the default would have been to not share data and to only allow sharing when people opt-in. This would make private data a liability rather than an asset.
My wife has done taxes for H&R Block seasonally for the past eight years, so I know something of what I say here. If your tax situation is at all funky, when you go to H&R Block, ask to see an experienced preparer.
The vast majority of Block workers only work for them during tax season (January 1 - April 15), and the vast majority of them have been with the company two years or less. The tax code isn't like programming - it's internally inconsistent, because of the patch-it-and-try-again way it gets built. The only way to know what the IRS will accept is to have seen it before, and that takes experience.
BTW, this is also a reason to go to a tax wizard rather than an accountant. Accountants know a lot about designing systems that reflect financial reality - unfortunately this knowledge is a liability when doing taxes because you try to make the regulations make sense, and they don't
The virtue and problem with Java is that it's a virutal machine. A lot of operations that are primitive at the Java byte code level eventually are implemented natively (and differently!) for each different virutal machine. This means that your optimizations for VM X may turn out to be pessimizations for VM Y.
Take threads, for instance - synchronizing primitives are cheap in a Java VM that fakes threads, more expensive in a uniprocessor machine with real threads, and still more expensive in a multi-processor implementation. Code that performs well on the simple VM may be a dog on the later, more-capable VM.
Storage management (garbage collection) is another example. There are a bunch of different strategies for garbage collection, with potentially different costs for creating primitive types versus class objects, class objects with no references versus those with references, etc. Some types of garbage may be almost cost-free in some VMs, and very expensive in others.
But, optimizing code for a particular VM/platform is exactly the thing that Java was supposed to free us from!
The most important advice this book gives is the stuff in Part 1:
Before you spend any time profiling, you have to have a process and a goal. Without setting goals, the tuning process will never end and it will likely never be successful.
What I could really use is a browser that let you set the timeout (when waiting for an HTTP transaction to come back) to something large, or better yet to turn it off completely.
I write web applications in Common Lisp, so when developing I have the Lisp top-level open and running. Errors on the server side pop up a Lisp debugger on the thread doing the transaction, I can poke around in the stack, figure out the problem, even fix it and continue - but only if I do it quickly, before the browser decides it's waited on me long enough and closes the connection, which causes a broken-pipe error on the server side and can clobber my debugger session.
So, anybody know how to make any decent browser never time out? Mac OS X browser preferred, but I'll take Linux or Windows in a pinch.
Really, given the cost of getting to a remote island and staying out there for four months, the cost of of a backup laptop and a link to the outside world that will work from anywhere should be down in the noise.
Legacy hardware = bad, legacy software = good
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Most posters seem to be confusing these two. They're different, because:
Hardware has gotten better over the last 20 years
Software hasn't I'm not kidding, folks. Hardware has obvoulsly gotten better - faster, more reliable, cheaper, simpler to interconnect and configure. The hardware available to research labs is at most one generation ahead of what's sold to the masses.
On the software front, though, remarkably little has changed in the last twenty+ years, except for stuff moving from research labs out to the real world, and consolidation behind the Microsoft "standard". How much difference is there, fundamentally, between an Alto running Smalltalk and a PC running XP (other than hackability and stability, of course)? The major difference is that the Alto could only interact with the small community of other Altos, whereas the XP box can hang out with the much larger community of PCs.
people forget all too quickly that amachine that takes 10 minute to boot is a worthless piece of crap.
Well, that depends on how often you boot it, doesn't it? At the time, Lisp machines took a long time to boot, but they stayed up for months at a time. Altos in use as file servers had similar uptimes. You must have had to boot your Lisa a lot if their time to boot was a big concern.
One reason Altos and their kin took a long time to boot was the multiple layers in the OS - boot loaders that load microcode loaders that load image loaders that load images... Once while I was working on a complex diagram on a Star, I selected a group of objects and punched "Ungroup". The screen went black for a few seconds, and a different-looking window system popped up, called "Pilot". A few windows scrolled, the screen went black, and a more primitive-looking window system appeared, calling itself "CoPilot". This one printed some stuff to a window and vanished, and a very simple window system appeared, called "CoCoPilot". After a little more screen activity, the screen went black again for a few seconds, and my original Star session appeared again! I quickly saved my diagram and was quite weirded out for the rest of the afternoon...
Fumbling the Future is a fast read, but a good one. It alternates between history of PARC research and development (stuff like people working weekends wire-wrapping workstation boards, so they could join the party faster) and the history of the business decisions around PARC.
The most telling story in the book is about the Star's coming-out party, at a big Xerox new-products show. They set up a room full of Stars, file servers and printers, and showed them off to a bunch of senior VPs and their wives. This was the early 80s, so the Xeroid management was pretty much white male, older guys, and their wives were housewives who might have been secretaries before they got married.
The guys didn't have a clue about how revolutionary this stuff was - to them, keyboards were tools of the lower class. They walked around and nodded. Their wives, however, got it at once, and were quite excited about it all.
... because Steve Jobs happened to get a tour of Xerox PARC and decided that GUIs should be the next step in the evolution of computers.
Correct as far as it goes. Two small additions from a former Xeroid (Xerox AI Systems - just down the road from PARC- 1986-88):
At the time of the jobs PARC visit, Xerox was a significant investor in Apple, owning something like 15% of its shares. That's how he got the tour.
Jobs was given the tour over the strenuous objections of many of the PARC researchers. They knew what they had at PARC, were frustrated that Xerox wasn't doing anything significant with it, and were afraid that someone else would take it and run with it.
There are any number of books on how Xerox dropped the ball on PARC research. My personal favorite is Fumbling the Future. Xerox management style has long been somewhat manic-depressive, oscillating between two ideas:
We put marks on paper. The internal phrase for this was "toner pays our salaries."
We are the information/document company - information management is the future.
They switch back and forth between these two poles at intervals of two to three years. Lately they appear to be closer to the "marks on paper" pole.
Rather than whining about having their meme hijacked, they should try and take it back, by starting/colonizing a zillion lefty-leaning blogs that use "Second Superpower" the way they want it to be used. This is right in line with the traditions of free speech and the democratic nature of the net, which the original posters support, right?
Granted, this takes work and resources. It's far easier to just post a complaining article with just a hint of conspiracy theory...
My experience has been the opposite, at least for Mac vs. PC software. On PCs, especially from MS software or the OS itself, you tend to get one of two types of error alerts:
Something generic and near totally uninformative like "{Action you tried} failed"
A register and stack dump, useful to a MS developer, maybe Seldom anything inbetween. Mac software more often tries to give you enough information to actually diagnose the problem, without burying you in useless detail.
Take mail handlers. When MS Outlook is having trouble picking up email, it pops up a window with a list of the mail sources that worked/failed, and if you select one of the failed ones, you usually get an unenlightening dialog window that's no help at all diagnosing the problem. When Eudora is having trouble, you can try fetching mail looking at the status window, where every SMTP transaction is printed as it goes by, and the real error number and text is displayed if something fails.
In general, if you get an uninformative error message from Mac software, it should be taken as a hint that "you probabaly can't fix this, unless you have Woz's phone number handy...".
If MS built a Google-scale site using their security-challenged tools, it would be the biggest target for crackers on the net. Also, given their record for keeping their own servers patched (remember Slammer?), it would probably get raped about once a week.
The resulting flood of data as MS-Google tried to infect the rest of the net would be a marvel to behold, at least until all the outgoing connections melted...
At least Bray agrees with me about S-expressions
on
Why XML Doesn't Suck
·
· Score: 1
As for S-Expressions, I can see the arguments, and can't honestly tell you why the same technologists who ignored decades of S-Expression lore instantly took up XML. It's crystal-clear that you could have used S-Expression syntax for XML and it all would have worked about as well.
Maybe it's because S-Expressions were too closely identified with the tattered dreams of the AI community? Or maybe just because XML's compulsory end-tags make it a little easier to read?
I don't know, either. I will predict, though, that XML may create new interest in Lisp. The rest of you can go on pushing around mountains of Java and XSLT, bringing your computers to their knees when you need to do hairy XML manipulation - I'll run rings around you using S-expressions as DOM-lite, using systems that have been tuned for twenty years to efficiently handle these data structures.
Letting customers spend less money on hardware means there is more money leftover for buying pricey Adobe software.
Letting customers spend less money on hardware also puts pressure on software vendors to reduce their prices. Anybody else remember when software shipped on various flavors of Unix and PC, and the software on the PC was always cheaper? Even after PC hardware started to outperform Unix workstations? The software did the same stuff, but people wouldn't buy it for the same price on PCs.
Adobe should run the other way from commodity hardware, unless it plans to aim its software at the mass market rather than the graphics pro market.
The mass market is hard to make money in, given that most of the buyers can't tell the difference between their options and will thus buy based on price, and most of the competition is free (software bundled with scanners, the Gimp, etc.).
How about a law that lists the major capabilities required for fair use (quoting, backup copies, media change, etc.), and then says:
Works published by their copyright holders using any technology that limits a fair use capability will not have copyright protection.
Copyright is, after all, a deal between the copyright holder (CH) and the public - CH gets a limited monopoly, the public gets control after it expires. Anyone going beyond the limited monopoly is not following the rules, and shouldn't get the benefits of copyright protection.
Slashdot Mirror
When you make your first purchase on any given day, they put a $20 hold on your card and record your charge
Subsequent charges just bump up your total for the day
At the end of the day, they remove the hold, and charge your card, once, for the day's total
... but they are really tough.
I've had a 500 MHz iBook for about a year now. I beat the hell out of portable hardware, and the iBook laps it up with no visible damage. I've dropped it off tables three times so far, once while it was open and running - that time I bent the place where the hinge mounts to the screen. No crash, I was able to straighten it out without permanent damage, and it's still running.
The only time I've wanted a G4 book instead was when I tried to run Virtual PC on it - it was basically unuseable. For my major usages, web browsing and software development, it's just fine.
Or more specifically, low-level, annoyance DRM versus heavy-handed, we-own-your-machine DRM. If the consumer has a choice between Apple-style music management and the music-rental style Microsoft and the RIAA want, which one do you think they'll choose?
Yeah, I know, "the one that's pre-installed". We may still be globally screwed, but at least Apple's trying...
Usenet, warts and all, will be useful far into the future, because its store-propagate-forward protocol will continue to work in the face of long delays between nodes. Hell, in early Usenet days some links were done with courier-carried magtapes.
Usenet will be useable between planets in this solar system - a web forum based on Earth wouldn't be useable by anyone past the Moon. And if we finally get out of the solar system, the Net of a Million Lies can go out with us.
Returning to Earth, Usenet still scales better than web forums. I wonder how many web forums have started up, been swamped by lots of users, and had to close for lack of bandwith money, or gone so commercial to pay for server resources that they alienated their community. Neither of these are a problem when creating a Usenet group.
"Oh no, Mister Prosecuting Attorney! I would never upload music to Kazaa for illegal distribution! A virus must have entered my computer and uploaded that music without my knowledge!"
Hey, a jury might buy it...
They don't care about your working conditions.
They don't care about measuring the effect of your working conditions on your productivity.
Because you have to mess with them less to get your tasks done. I bend computers to my will as my job - at home I have other things to do.
Because they're less vulnerable to the virus-du-jour. Some of this is just better software, especially since OS X. Most of it is just choosing to live on the outer edges of the target, rather than right in the bullseye.
"Consensus" is what got us into the current privacy mess! The current "compromise" on most personal financial data is that data holders have to tell you what their sharing policy is (in dense legalese text which usually has "we will share with basically anybody who will pay us for it" buried in it) and give you the chance to "opt out".
If the regulations had been made with consumers in mind at all, the default would have been to not share data and to only allow sharing when people opt-in. This would make private data a liability rather than an asset.
My wife has done taxes for H&R Block seasonally for the past eight years, so I know something of what I say here. If your tax situation is at all funky, when you go to H&R Block, ask to see an experienced preparer.
The vast majority of Block workers only work for them during tax season (January 1 - April 15), and the vast majority of them have been with the company two years or less. The tax code isn't like programming - it's internally inconsistent, because of the patch-it-and-try-again way it gets built. The only way to know what the IRS will accept is to have seen it before, and that takes experience.
BTW, this is also a reason to go to a tax wizard rather than an accountant. Accountants know a lot about designing systems that reflect financial reality - unfortunately this knowledge is a liability when doing taxes because you try to make the regulations make sense, and they don't
Take threads, for instance - synchronizing primitives are cheap in a Java VM that fakes threads, more expensive in a uniprocessor machine with real threads, and still more expensive in a multi-processor implementation. Code that performs well on the simple VM may be a dog on the later, more-capable VM.
Storage management (garbage collection) is another example. There are a bunch of different strategies for garbage collection, with potentially different costs for creating primitive types versus class objects, class objects with no references versus those with references, etc. Some types of garbage may be almost cost-free in some VMs, and very expensive in others.
But, optimizing code for a particular VM/platform is exactly the thing that Java was supposed to free us from!
The most important advice this book gives is the stuff in Part 1:
So, I mung my preferences.js file, adding something like:
user_pref("network.http.request.timeout", 3600);
I'll try it. Thanks!
What I could really use is a browser that let you set the timeout (when waiting for an HTTP transaction to come back) to something large, or better yet to turn it off completely.
I write web applications in Common Lisp, so when developing I have the Lisp top-level open and running. Errors on the server side pop up a Lisp debugger on the thread doing the transaction, I can poke around in the stack, figure out the problem, even fix it and continue - but only if I do it quickly, before the browser decides it's waited on me long enough and closes the connection, which causes a broken-pipe error on the server side and can clobber my debugger session.
So, anybody know how to make any decent browser never time out? Mac OS X browser preferred, but I'll take Linux or Windows in a pinch.
Really, given the cost of getting to a remote island and staying out there for four months, the cost of of a backup laptop and a link to the outside world that will work from anywhere should be down in the noise.
Hardware has gotten better over the last 20 years
Software hasn't
I'm not kidding, folks. Hardware has obvoulsly gotten better - faster, more reliable, cheaper, simpler to interconnect and configure. The hardware available to research labs is at most one generation ahead of what's sold to the masses.
On the software front, though, remarkably little has changed in the last twenty+ years, except for stuff moving from research labs out to the real world, and consolidation behind the Microsoft "standard". How much difference is there, fundamentally, between an Alto running Smalltalk and a PC running XP (other than hackability and stability, of course)? The major difference is that the Alto could only interact with the small community of other Altos, whereas the XP box can hang out with the much larger community of PCs.
Well, that depends on how often you boot it, doesn't it? At the time, Lisp machines took a long time to boot, but they stayed up for months at a time. Altos in use as file servers had similar uptimes. You must have had to boot your Lisa a lot if their time to boot was a big concern.
One reason Altos and their kin took a long time to boot was the multiple layers in the OS - boot loaders that load microcode loaders that load image loaders that load images... Once while I was working on a complex diagram on a Star, I selected a group of objects and punched "Ungroup". The screen went black for a few seconds, and a different-looking window system popped up, called "Pilot". A few windows scrolled, the screen went black, and a more primitive-looking window system appeared, calling itself "CoPilot". This one printed some stuff to a window and vanished, and a very simple window system appeared, called "CoCoPilot". After a little more screen activity, the screen went black again for a few seconds, and my original Star session appeared again! I quickly saved my diagram and was quite weirded out for the rest of the afternoon...
Fumbling the Future is a fast read, but a good one. It alternates between history of PARC research and development (stuff like people working weekends wire-wrapping workstation boards, so they could join the party faster) and the history of the business decisions around PARC.
The most telling story in the book is about the Star's coming-out party, at a big Xerox new-products show. They set up a room full of Stars, file servers and printers, and showed them off to a bunch of senior VPs and their wives. This was the early 80s, so the Xeroid management was pretty much white male, older guys, and their wives were housewives who might have been secretaries before they got married.
The guys didn't have a clue about how revolutionary this stuff was - to them, keyboards were tools of the lower class. They walked around and nodded. Their wives, however, got it at once, and were quite excited about it all.
At the time of the jobs PARC visit, Xerox was a significant investor in Apple, owning something like 15% of its shares. That's how he got the tour.
Jobs was given the tour over the strenuous objections of many of the PARC researchers. They knew what they had at PARC, were frustrated that Xerox wasn't doing anything significant with it, and were afraid that someone else would take it and run with it.
There are any number of books on how Xerox dropped the ball on PARC research. My personal favorite is Fumbling the Future. Xerox management style has long been somewhat manic-depressive, oscillating between two ideas:
We put marks on paper. The internal phrase for this was "toner pays our salaries."
We are the information/document company - information management is the future.
They switch back and forth between these two poles at intervals of two to three years. Lately they appear to be closer to the "marks on paper" pole.
Rather than whining about having their meme hijacked, they should try and take it back, by starting/colonizing a zillion lefty-leaning blogs that use "Second Superpower" the way they want it to be used. This is right in line with the traditions of free speech and the democratic nature of the net, which the original posters support, right?
Granted, this takes work and resources. It's far easier to just post a complaining article with just a hint of conspiracy theory...
Something generic and near totally uninformative like "{Action you tried} failed"
A register and stack dump, useful to a MS developer, maybe
Seldom anything inbetween. Mac software more often tries to give you enough information to actually diagnose the problem, without burying you in useless detail.
Take mail handlers. When MS Outlook is having trouble picking up email, it pops up a window with a list of the mail sources that worked/failed, and if you select one of the failed ones, you usually get an unenlightening dialog window that's no help at all diagnosing the problem. When Eudora is having trouble, you can try fetching mail looking at the status window, where every SMTP transaction is printed as it goes by, and the real error number and text is displayed if something fails.
In general, if you get an uninformative error message from Mac software, it should be taken as a hint that "you probabaly can't fix this, unless you have Woz's phone number handy...".
It's not your eyes you have to give up, it's your tongue, since your eyes are input-only devices, and hence already compliant with DRM.
If MS built a Google-scale site using their security-challenged tools, it would be the biggest target for crackers on the net. Also, given their record for keeping their own servers patched (remember Slammer?), it would probably get raped about once a week.
The resulting flood of data as MS-Google tried to infect the rest of the net would be a marvel to behold, at least until all the outgoing connections melted...
I don't know, either. I will predict, though, that XML may create new interest in Lisp. The rest of you can go on pushing around mountains of Java and XSLT, bringing your computers to their knees when you need to do hairy XML manipulation - I'll run rings around you using S-expressions as DOM-lite, using systems that have been tuned for twenty years to efficiently handle these data structures.
Letting customers spend less money on hardware also puts pressure on software vendors to reduce their prices. Anybody else remember when software shipped on various flavors of Unix and PC, and the software on the PC was always cheaper? Even after PC hardware started to outperform Unix workstations? The software did the same stuff, but people wouldn't buy it for the same price on PCs.
Adobe should run the other way from commodity hardware, unless it plans to aim its software at the mass market rather than the graphics pro market.
The mass market is hard to make money in, given that most of the buyers can't tell the difference between their options and will thus buy based on price, and most of the competition is free (software bundled with scanners, the Gimp, etc.).
Copyright is, after all, a deal between the copyright holder (CH) and the public - CH gets a limited monopoly, the public gets control after it expires. Anyone going beyond the limited monopoly is not following the rules, and shouldn't get the benefits of copyright protection.