It does seem a bunch of people all came to the same mistaken conclusion that people wanted to see fonts the same physical size on all screens, but for some reason were uninterested in seeing any other graphics be the same physical size.
No, they simply understood that the semantically meaningful piece of information is whether a font is 12pt or 24pt. A 24pt font is wrong for running text even if its pixels happen to fit into the rectangle you want to fit them in. An MS Word or OpenOffice document using a 24pt font when viewed at 50% isn't the same as an MS Word or OpenOffice document using a 12pt font when viewed at 100%.
Applications are selecting fonts from a two-dimensional space when they select by point size; it's just that, historically, people happened to view documents only at 100% (machines were slow in the early 1980's) and that the toolkit implicitly assumed that you wanted screen resolution. But that assumption is no longer warranted. Like so many other things, X11 got this right from the start.
Quite awhile ago I fixed fltk to take the font size in pixels.
Then it sounds like you broke it. Any toolkit that only lets applications select fonts using a single parameter is incomplete and outdated. Font specifications require two size-related paramters: size and resolution. You can specify size in pixels or in points, but the pixel size is pretty meaningless, so people usually go for points.
I have no idea why X, Microsoft, and you all seem to think points are important, especially when every other graphics call measures stuff in pixels.
It's because "Times Roman 12 pt rendered at 144 dpi" and "Times Roman 24 pt rendered at 72 dpi" have different character shapes. It's not a resolution issue--the character shapes themselves are different. Fonts don't just scale. Just knowing the pixel size simply isn't enough--you are going to get the wrong font if you just ask for pixel size.
If FLTK doesn't use both screen resolution and point size for font selection then FLTK is seriously broken and will give many people the wrong fonts--they'll usually still roughly look right, but they won't be exactly right.
I wish it weren't so complicated, but that's how fonts work. And fonts work that way because human eyes work that way. And it is elementary computer graphics stuff.
So to answer your question. No, 12 point is the accepted standard for most communication.
Oh? Really? I suspect most scientific articles are published in smaller point sizes. Systems like TeX also make 10pt the default, and they predate pixel/point confusions for on-screen font display.
Unfortunately since the majority of computers in the world render points incorrectly '10 point' has become a defacto, and typographically incorrect, standard.
Well, that's not entirely accidental. Macintosh, for example, used 72dpi screens and made 1 pixel equal to 1 point. Then, those bitmapped "12 point fonts" got shipped around and rendered on many different screens. Apple could have called them "12 pixel fonts", but they didn't.
Cameras on most cell phones are currently of such poor quality that they might as well not be there at all. You really need 1-2Mpixel with acceptable quality and noise levels co call something a "cell phone with camera".
But I think it's a fundamental mistake to approach PDA development like desktop development (in fact, I think it's a mistake to approach desktop development like people do today, but desktop machines are powerful enough to get away with it).
For a usable PDA environment, you need efficiency, robustness, easy communications, and easy extensibility. A dynamic language that runs everything in a single address space can give you that. A collection of C/C++ behemoths linked against complex C/C++ GUI libraries cannot. The Newton got this right. Smalltalk got this right.
You're missing the point. This was the hardware equivalent of a honeypot. Their own espionage did them in.
If you set up a honeypot, knowing that it would endanger the lives of people unrelated to breaking into that honeypot, you would be legally responsible for that as well.
You may not agree with the tactics of warfare, and you may object in every case of its use, but war serves a useful purpose for humanity.
I did not "object" in every case, nor even in this one. It may well have been necessary for the US to carry out these actions.
What I object to is that people don't even call into question whether that was a good thing, or whether it was legal, or whether our blanket condemnation of similar acts by other nations is justifiable.
Bush has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to fighting things that, when we do them, we apparently just consider part of international politics. If that's really our attitude, let's at least drop the hypocrisy and say that we consider them acceptable. Most of the rest of the world has already concluded that that's the way we conduct policy anyway--pouting over it (calling it "anti-American") or hiding it behind government propaganda only hurts political debate and decision making in this country. We really should think twice before overthrowing yet another foreign government because it costs us dearly in the long run. And then, everybody asks naively "Why do they hate us?"
An asshole is someone who will kill others or take what is lawfully theirs for his own enrichment.
You mean, like the US, who has done lots of illegal things, started wars, killed lots of civilians, and even overthrown governments, to ensure a steady and cheap supply of oil, gas, raw materials, and sweat shop labor?
They hire men to drive around in armed trucks we call "technicals" to harass the populace into compliance.
You mean, like what some US-based corporations are doing in third world nations in order to bring the workers and local population in line when they ask for control over their own domestic resources and better working conditions?
Out of curiosity, where are you from? In the Houston area, the mass transit system is horrible and not getting better any time soon. Also, this is the second largest city in the US in land area, 4th largest in population. It's VERY spread out
Look, I'm not blaming you in particular. I commute by car as well because I don't have a choice. But as a society, we will have to change, not for warm-and-fuzzy feelings, but because of simple economic pressures.
Or should I simply say "I'll take a lower paying job and decrease my children's standard of living, while the higher paying job is still available?"
Higher paying jobs don't necessarily translate into a higher standard of living, or even higher disposable income. So, yes, you might.
People with three kids in a 4 bedroom house aren't going to up and say "we should all share bedrooms now, and we won't need that gameroom anymore" when they feel like they've earned it.
Well, historically, wages and living standards haven't always gone up. Post-war, we have come to expect it, but there is no reason that it should continue indefinitely.
When your wages are cut in half because you are competing against outsourcing to Indian contract programmers, maybe that four bedroom house and two car lifestyle just won't be affordable anymore. Maybe once gas prices double (again) because of increased demand from India and China, you'll think twice about buying that gas guzzler. Maybe you'll vote for people who give you decent public transportation and housing densities. Maybe you'll move to communities where you only need one car.
Better to spend money making the house more efficient i.e. r10 windows, r30 insulation, energy efficient appliances. All of this puts people to work as well, so you're helping the economy at the same time.
Just consuming more stuff doesn't help the economy or create jobs. In fact, if anything, it seems to be the opposite. It looks to me like societies with smaller dwellings fill them with more labor-intensive goods (hand-made furniture, clever designs, etc.). Big houses consume lots of raw materials but don't require much labor or skill to build or furnish compared to smaller dwellings.
When one state blows up a pipeline in another state, that's an act of war.
No. In order for something to be a war, it needs to follow certain rules. Bombing of a pipeline could be an act of war if the pipeline serves primarily military purposes and a war has been declared.
Deliberately targetting civilians or civilian infrastructure is a war crime when it occurs during a declared war. If there isn't a declared war in effect, then it's state-sponsored terrorism. This case wasn't even remotely like a war: no bombers, no soldiers, no public reports from the front, just sabotage and misinformation, something that has remained hidden for decades.
Terrorism is something done to disrupt civilian life by making people afraid to go about their daily lives.
You mean like pointing hundreds of nuclear missiles at civilian populations? Seems to me, both sides in the Cold "War" were guilty of that.
If they would do this to an European software company like SAP or Nokia. And one might also speculate if there is any connections to the latest steel and Galileo-related trade wars.
They would and they have. And, all other reasons aside, simply because there is no such thing as a "European company": if SAP or Nokia becomes monopolistic, half a dozen other European nations scream.
I think for Americans to complain that other Western nations have too close ties between domestic companies and government is absurd.
Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing -- or secretly buying through third parties -- the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself.
Maybe it took Safire thirty years to figure this one out (the guy doesn't seem to be too bright, despite his reputation), but the Soviets themselves were saying it at the time, as were the Europeans. Of course, they didn't put it as "we need to steel technology in order to keep up", they put it as "the US is forcing this arms race upon us".
"The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
Apart from the scientists and engineers this could have killed, it may also have condemned many civilians to a miserable existence and even killed them. Depriving civilians of heat and energy really is terrorism, whether it is perpertrated by the US or anybody else.
The Soviet Union was not a nice regime. But the end does not justify the means, and it is far from clear whether the downfall of its government and the resulting chaos is making the world safer. These kinds of dirty campaigns may have blowback a century from now, just like US intervention in the Middle East decades ago is hurting us now.
The last chapter of the history of this is not at all written yet. But one thing we can already be certain of: people like Safire, who gloat about such dirty tricks, are morally bankrupt.
The article itself talked about some alternatives. In fact, that was the point of the article: it didn't say "no more glass", it said "let's make an effort to make glass more bird-safe". Other alternatives I have seen are silhouettes of predators, nets, screens, careful gardening, and various patterned reflective coatings on the outside.
Of course, simply having vertical blinds, Venitian blinds, or sheer curtains on the inside will probably already reduce the problem: they look like a solid surface from the outside but stil give you a good view from the inside. Even bug screens probably make windows a little more visible and less reflective from the outside and cushion any collision.
I suspect birds hitting windows is mostly a problem with modern office buildings, where there is lots of glass, plenty of energy-efficient (=mirror-like) outside coatings, no curtains, and no bug screens.
The problem, of course, is not the glass; it's this pesky desire of ours to have transparent artificial barriers as part of our dwellings---something which will not go away.
You're right--it won't go away. Just like that pesky desire to pollute or to take over all arable land. However, desires can be curbed, and it is a mark of civilization that we do curb our desires and don't live out every one of them.
In the case of glass, there are plenty of architectural ways in which we can have brightly lit dwellings with gorgeous views without creating traps for birds.
Much of the time, my sympathies lie mostly with the animals; but in this case, they're kinda on their own. Survival of the fittest...
Humans are fittest, for now, so, yes, we can kill off all other (large) animals. Trouble is, in the long run, that is not an adaptive strategy for us: we are dependent on a functioning environment. So, what you suggest, namely not worrying about the survival of animals, is, in the long run, maladaptive for us: it will bring about our own extinction.
I think we should mandate that every american should live in a 10'x10' box with one toilet and eat soylent green. Then the third world would seem like a paradise. Ah, liberal logic...
No, the logic is that in order to prevent such a scenario, we should be more prudent in our use of resources and in our spending habits. And that doesn't require heavy-handed government regulation, it just requires an efficient market--people need to pay for what they consume.
Right now, US consumers live in a fairy-land, in which gasoline prices are artificially low, few people pay for their retirement, and Bush sends out one military raiding party after another, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's all financed by massive borrowing, both domestically and internationally.
Sooner or later, the US is going to run out of politically powerless groups to screw and places to borrow money from. The devaluation of the dollar is only the beginning.
Just out of curiosity, why in the world will we (Americans)/have/ to live in smaller houses?
Numerous reasons. One is energy efficiency. Another is housing density: big houses equal low density, and that means longer commutes.
And energy efficient? Have you built a house lately? As long as you're not some ass skimping on shitty building supplies, our houses are more efficient than anyone else in the world, I'd wager...
Per square foot, perhaps. Per occupant, no. Also, the construction materials themselves require lots of energy to produce, so just building a big house means consuming lots of energy. Furthermore, achieving energy efficiency through insulation has its own set of problems (lack of air circulation, etc.).
Also, consider the coming boom in hybrid cars... that'll take care of that for a bit. (and if you don't believe it's coming, you're not paying attention:))
SUVs and trucks are as popular as ever. Even hybrid SUVs only get the gas mileage that traditional passenger cars get. So, no, I don't see average gas mileage increasing anytime soon. And even a hybrid car takes a lot of resources to build and operate. The only long-term solution is to get away from personal automobiles altogether.
netbeans/forte was pretty stable. as for me, i use netbeans not because of its corporate backing
Without Sun's push, you'd probably not have heard about it.
but because it has a gui designer, and eclipse doesn't (well, 3rd party but that doesn't count!)
Ah, yes, we wouldn't want any kind of modularity in our systems. Everything should be put into one super-application. Why, again, aren't you just using Microsoft software?
for eclipse to be the clear winner, i need a gui designer
GUI designers are bad. But, as you said, if you want one for Eclipse, you can get one.
and the eclipse-framework apps need to look better on the OS X, cuz they currently look like butt. no joke.
And Netbeans is butt-ugly on Linux. So, which one matters more?
I fear that OSS is soon going to force all programming jobs to move to India
Quite to the contrary: because OSS developers actually are OSS users and because OSS users are in the US, OSS keeps programming jobs in the US; they simply aren't called "programming jobs".
Furthermore, by using underhanded tactics like "borrowing" Unix code, they'll beat their commercial competitors -- and the commercial companies will either be forced to open source, or go out of business.
Yes, that's what usually happens when a better technology comes along that lowers the cost of production--the factories and corporations that use the old processes become uncompetitive. OSS beats what you call "commercial" software development because it's better and cheaper. Now, we only have to wait for the market to take care of the dinosaurs. As it should be.
The problem with that is to achieve equilibrium, two sides need to meet in the middle and that means decrease in the std of living for the higher income group.
I don't see a problem with that. Some people (us) have been getting more than their fair share for a while. We should consider ourselves lucky to have had such good fortune for so long. It's not our right.
To prevent this it requires a smart plan, one which is sorely lacking in this case.
No, it requires a very simple plan: improve the average standard of living of the globe quickly enough so that it compensates for the decrease resulting from equillibration. Anything else wouldn't be a "plan", it would be a fraud.
Of course, free trade or not, the Western lifestyle will have to change: it simply isn't sustainable, and it can't be scaled up to the rest of the world. In particular, Americans will need to live in smaller, more energy-efficient houses, take public transportation, buy more energy efficient cars, recycle more, etc.
The facts bear out the assertion that the rich are benefitting from this arrangement since both the US and Mexico have seen a shrinking of their middle class and a growth in the income gap between top and bottom. Also, in the absence of a smart plan for implementing free trade, it allows the corporations to continue to support corrupt regimes with total impunity, with no control by any authority.
The US middle class has lots of serious, self-created problems; don't blame Mexico or free trade for that.
in general just think this sort of competition is counter-productive in this type of setting.
Yes, I agree. So, why does Sun keep using their corporate muscle to prop up an IDE (Netbeans/Forte) that few people would bother with if it didn't have that kind of corporate backing?
The logical conclusion is for Sun to stop developing Netbeans/Forte and adopt Eclipse, since Eclipse is the clear winner. All this posturing by Sun is only because they know they have lost in the market but can't deal with the fact that there is something successful about Java they don't control yet.
Don't worry, Sun will probably figure out a way anyway. McNealy/Schwartz won't rest until they have Microsoft-like control over everything related to Java, including the IDE. They managed with the open source J2EE projects, too.
Even "safe runtimes" has bugs that might be exploitable.
I said "safe runtime", not "secure runtime". It is unnecessary to protect against exploitable bugs between different applications because you don't expect your own applications to try and exploit bugs in the runtime environment to wreak havoc. For example, Gnumeric can already wreck AbiWord files if it wants to, even though they are running in different address spaces; they are running as the same user and can already get at each other's files and memory.
Besides, Java actually claims to be a "secure runtime", not just a "safe runtime", meaning, it will run untrusted code in the same address space as important, trusted code.
Of course, for a completely open streaming solution, Ogg has both excellent encoders and numerous free players (including one that runs inside a web page, written in Java).
I thought it was important to stress the difference because yesterday I've seen posts on other boards where people were assuming the pentagon is predicting that we are causing global warming, and therefore, our demise.
They probably don't consider "stressing the difference" important because there is no difference. Human carbon dioxide emissions clearly contribute to climate change and they are growing. The only question is when and how human contributions become catastrophic.
And if humans cause an unavoidable ice age to happen just 50 years earlier through excessive carbon dioxide emissions, that in itself would be huge: at the rate at which technology is changing, 50 extra years might allow us to cope with an ice age much better.
That shouldn't require a separate piece of hardware. Instead, the camera should sign the image digitally and store the signature as an entry in the EXIF header. You know, the same way you sign stuff with PGP. Anybody should be able to verify it.
I wonder whether Canon is going the "secure hardware reader" route in order to make more money or in order to get around some patent.
For some reason, Microsoft's brilliant and cutting-edge.NET
Actually,.NET is neither "brilliant" nor "cutting-edge"--it's a modest evolution from Java, which is itself 1970's technology.
The tool in question? A linker. Here's what a linker does. It combines the compiled version of your program with the compiled versions of all the library functions that your program uses. [...] Instead,.NET has this idea of a "runtime"... a big 22 MB steaming heap of code that is linked dynamically and which everybody has to have on their computers before they can use.NET applications.
Well, that's roughly like saying that automobiles leave out the horses and the whip. The whole point of.NET and Java is to run inside a runtime, a runtime that provides garbage collection, dynamic typing, and just-in-time compilation.
Runtimes are a problem, much like DLLs, because you can get into trouble when application version 1 was designed to work with runtime version 1, and then runtime version 2 comes out, and suddenly application version 1 doesn't work right for some unpredictable reason.
Well, duh. So, I guess operating systems are a problem, too.
We solve that sort of thing by having standards and sticking to them. Oh, I forget, besides being rather confused about software in general, Spolsky also actually seems to like Microsoft Windows, so the notion of "standards" and "compatibility" must be rather foreign to him..NET and Java do have serious design problems. Foremost, safe runtimes like that should run all applications on a machine in a single address space. Then, you can get rid of a lot of useless machinery for inter-process communication, and the overhead gets amortized over dozens of programs. Again, old stuff. But Spolsky's criticism is just missing the point completely.
Slashdot Mirror
It does seem a bunch of people all came to the same mistaken conclusion that people wanted to see fonts the same physical size on all screens, but for some reason were uninterested in seeing any other graphics be the same physical size.
No, they simply understood that the semantically meaningful piece of information is whether a font is 12pt or 24pt. A 24pt font is wrong for running text even if its pixels happen to fit into the rectangle you want to fit them in. An MS Word or OpenOffice document using a 24pt font when viewed at 50% isn't the same as an MS Word or OpenOffice document using a 12pt font when viewed at 100%.
Applications are selecting fonts from a two-dimensional space when they select by point size; it's just that, historically, people happened to view documents only at 100% (machines were slow in the early 1980's) and that the toolkit implicitly assumed that you wanted screen resolution. But that assumption is no longer warranted. Like so many other things, X11 got this right from the start.
Quite awhile ago I fixed fltk to take the font size in pixels.
Then it sounds like you broke it. Any toolkit that only lets applications select fonts using a single parameter is incomplete and outdated. Font specifications require two size-related paramters: size and resolution. You can specify size in pixels or in points, but the pixel size is pretty meaningless, so people usually go for points.
I have no idea why X, Microsoft, and you all seem to think points are important, especially when every other graphics call measures stuff in pixels.
It's because "Times Roman 12 pt rendered at 144 dpi" and "Times Roman 24 pt rendered at 72 dpi" have different character shapes. It's not a resolution issue--the character shapes themselves are different. Fonts don't just scale. Just knowing the pixel size simply isn't enough--you are going to get the wrong font if you just ask for pixel size.
If FLTK doesn't use both screen resolution and point size for font selection then FLTK is seriously broken and will give many people the wrong fonts--they'll usually still roughly look right, but they won't be exactly right.
I wish it weren't so complicated, but that's how fonts work. And fonts work that way because human eyes work that way. And it is elementary computer graphics stuff.
So to answer your question. No, 12 point is the accepted standard for most communication.
Oh? Really? I suspect most scientific articles are published in smaller point sizes. Systems like TeX also make 10pt the default, and they predate pixel/point confusions for on-screen font display.
Unfortunately since the majority of computers in the world render points incorrectly '10 point' has become a defacto, and typographically incorrect, standard.
Well, that's not entirely accidental. Macintosh, for example, used 72dpi screens and made 1 pixel equal to 1 point. Then, those bitmapped "12 point fonts" got shipped around and rendered on many different screens. Apple could have called them "12 pixel fonts", but they didn't.
Cameras on most cell phones are currently of such poor quality that they might as well not be there at all. You really need 1-2Mpixel with acceptable quality and noise levels co call something a "cell phone with camera".
Many of the things I agree with.
But I think it's a fundamental mistake to approach PDA development like desktop development (in fact, I think it's a mistake to approach desktop development like people do today, but desktop machines are powerful enough to get away with it).
For a usable PDA environment, you need efficiency, robustness, easy communications, and easy extensibility. A dynamic language that runs everything in a single address space can give you that. A collection of C/C++ behemoths linked against complex C/C++ GUI libraries cannot. The Newton got this right. Smalltalk got this right.
You're missing the point. This was the hardware equivalent of a honeypot. Their own espionage did them in.
If you set up a honeypot, knowing that it would endanger the lives of people unrelated to breaking into that honeypot, you would be legally responsible for that as well.
You may not agree with the tactics of warfare, and you may object in every case of its use, but war serves a useful purpose for humanity.
I did not "object" in every case, nor even in this one. It may well have been necessary for the US to carry out these actions.
What I object to is that people don't even call into question whether that was a good thing, or whether it was legal, or whether our blanket condemnation of similar acts by other nations is justifiable.
Bush has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to fighting things that, when we do them, we apparently just consider part of international politics. If that's really our attitude, let's at least drop the hypocrisy and say that we consider them acceptable. Most of the rest of the world has already concluded that that's the way we conduct policy anyway--pouting over it (calling it "anti-American") or hiding it behind government propaganda only hurts political debate and decision making in this country. We really should think twice before overthrowing yet another foreign government because it costs us dearly in the long run. And then, everybody asks naively "Why do they hate us?"
An asshole is someone who will kill others or take what is lawfully theirs for his own enrichment.
You mean, like the US, who has done lots of illegal things, started wars, killed lots of civilians, and even overthrown governments, to ensure a steady and cheap supply of oil, gas, raw materials, and sweat shop labor?
They hire men to drive around in armed trucks we call "technicals" to harass the populace into compliance.
You mean, like what some US-based corporations are doing in third world nations in order to bring the workers and local population in line when they ask for control over their own domestic resources and better working conditions?
Out of curiosity, where are you from? In the Houston area, the mass transit system is horrible and not getting better any time soon. Also, this is the second largest city in the US in land area, 4th largest in population. It's VERY spread out
Look, I'm not blaming you in particular. I commute by car as well because I don't have a choice. But as a society, we will have to change, not for warm-and-fuzzy feelings, but because of simple economic pressures.
Or should I simply say "I'll take a lower paying job and decrease my children's standard of living, while the higher paying job is still available?"
Higher paying jobs don't necessarily translate into a higher standard of living, or even higher disposable income. So, yes, you might.
People with three kids in a 4 bedroom house aren't going to up and say "we should all share bedrooms now, and we won't need that gameroom anymore" when they feel like they've earned it.
Well, historically, wages and living standards haven't always gone up. Post-war, we have come to expect it, but there is no reason that it should continue indefinitely.
When your wages are cut in half because you are competing against outsourcing to Indian contract programmers, maybe that four bedroom house and two car lifestyle just won't be affordable anymore. Maybe once gas prices double (again) because of increased demand from India and China, you'll think twice about buying that gas guzzler. Maybe you'll vote for people who give you decent public transportation and housing densities. Maybe you'll move to communities where you only need one car.
Better to spend money making the house more efficient i.e. r10 windows, r30 insulation, energy efficient appliances. All of this puts people to work as well, so you're helping the economy at the same time.
Just consuming more stuff doesn't help the economy or create jobs. In fact, if anything, it seems to be the opposite. It looks to me like societies with smaller dwellings fill them with more labor-intensive goods (hand-made furniture, clever designs, etc.). Big houses consume lots of raw materials but don't require much labor or skill to build or furnish compared to smaller dwellings.
When one state blows up a pipeline in another state, that's an act of war.
No. In order for something to be a war, it needs to follow certain rules. Bombing of a pipeline could be an act of war if the pipeline serves primarily military purposes and a war has been declared.
Deliberately targetting civilians or civilian infrastructure is a war crime when it occurs during a declared war. If there isn't a declared war in effect, then it's state-sponsored terrorism. This case wasn't even remotely like a war: no bombers, no soldiers, no public reports from the front, just sabotage and misinformation, something that has remained hidden for decades.
Terrorism is something done to disrupt civilian life by making people afraid to go about their daily lives.
You mean like pointing hundreds of nuclear missiles at civilian populations? Seems to me, both sides in the Cold "War" were guilty of that.
If they would do this to an European software company like SAP or Nokia. And one might also speculate if there is any connections to the latest steel and Galileo-related trade wars.
They would and they have. And, all other reasons aside, simply because there is no such thing as a "European company": if SAP or Nokia becomes monopolistic, half a dozen other European nations scream.
I think for Americans to complain that other Western nations have too close ties between domestic companies and government is absurd.
A fine under a billion dollars is a round-off error to Microsoft.
Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing -- or secretly buying through third parties -- the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself.
Maybe it took Safire thirty years to figure this one out (the guy doesn't seem to be too bright, despite his reputation), but the Soviets themselves were saying it at the time, as were the Europeans. Of course, they didn't put it as "we need to steel technology in order to keep up", they put it as "the US is forcing this arms race upon us".
"The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
Apart from the scientists and engineers this could have killed, it may also have condemned many civilians to a miserable existence and even killed them. Depriving civilians of heat and energy really is terrorism, whether it is perpertrated by the US or anybody else.
The Soviet Union was not a nice regime. But the end does not justify the means, and it is far from clear whether the downfall of its government and the resulting chaos is making the world safer. These kinds of dirty campaigns may have blowback a century from now, just like US intervention in the Middle East decades ago is hurting us now.
The last chapter of the history of this is not at all written yet. But one thing we can already be certain of: people like Safire, who gloat about such dirty tricks, are morally bankrupt.
The article itself talked about some alternatives. In fact, that was the point of the article: it didn't say "no more glass", it said "let's make an effort to make glass more bird-safe". Other alternatives I have seen are silhouettes of predators, nets, screens, careful gardening, and various patterned reflective coatings on the outside.
Of course, simply having vertical blinds, Venitian blinds, or sheer curtains on the inside will probably already reduce the problem: they look like a solid surface from the outside but stil give you a good view from the inside. Even bug screens probably make windows a little more visible and less reflective from the outside and cushion any collision.
I suspect birds hitting windows is mostly a problem with modern office buildings, where there is lots of glass, plenty of energy-efficient (=mirror-like) outside coatings, no curtains, and no bug screens.
The problem, of course, is not the glass; it's this pesky desire of ours to have transparent artificial barriers as part of our dwellings---something which will not go away.
You're right--it won't go away. Just like that pesky desire to pollute or to take over all arable land. However, desires can be curbed, and it is a mark of civilization that we do curb our desires and don't live out every one of them.
In the case of glass, there are plenty of architectural ways in which we can have brightly lit dwellings with gorgeous views without creating traps for birds.
Much of the time, my sympathies lie mostly with the animals; but in this case, they're kinda on their own. Survival of the fittest...
Humans are fittest, for now, so, yes, we can kill off all other (large) animals. Trouble is, in the long run, that is not an adaptive strategy for us: we are dependent on a functioning environment. So, what you suggest, namely not worrying about the survival of animals, is, in the long run, maladaptive for us: it will bring about our own extinction.
I think we should mandate that every american should live in a 10'x10' box with one toilet and eat soylent green. Then the third world would seem like a paradise. Ah, liberal logic...
No, the logic is that in order to prevent such a scenario, we should be more prudent in our use of resources and in our spending habits. And that doesn't require heavy-handed government regulation, it just requires an efficient market--people need to pay for what they consume.
Right now, US consumers live in a fairy-land, in which gasoline prices are artificially low, few people pay for their retirement, and Bush sends out one military raiding party after another, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's all financed by massive borrowing, both domestically and internationally.
Sooner or later, the US is going to run out of politically powerless groups to screw and places to borrow money from. The devaluation of the dollar is only the beginning.
Americans won't "choose" smaller housing, economics will force them to; that's my point.
Competition from other nations will drive wages down and increased demand for oil and other raw materials around the world will drive prices up.
The US is already living on borrowed time anyway: without a huge influx of foreign money, the current US standard of living would be unmaintainable.
Just out of curiosity, why in the world will we (Americans) /have/ to live in smaller houses?
:))
Numerous reasons. One is energy efficiency. Another is housing density: big houses equal low density, and that means longer commutes.
And energy efficient? Have you built a house lately? As long as you're not some ass skimping on shitty building supplies, our houses are more efficient than anyone else in the world, I'd wager...
Per square foot, perhaps. Per occupant, no. Also, the construction materials themselves require lots of energy to produce, so just building a big house means consuming lots of energy. Furthermore, achieving energy efficiency through insulation has its own set of problems (lack of air circulation, etc.).
Also, consider the coming boom in hybrid cars... that'll take care of that for a bit. (and if you don't believe it's coming, you're not paying attention
SUVs and trucks are as popular as ever. Even hybrid SUVs only get the gas mileage that traditional passenger cars get. So, no, I don't see average gas mileage increasing anytime soon. And even a hybrid car takes a lot of resources to build and operate. The only long-term solution is to get away from personal automobiles altogether.
netbeans/forte was pretty stable. as for me, i use netbeans not because of its corporate backing
Without Sun's push, you'd probably not have heard about it.
but because it has a gui designer, and eclipse doesn't (well, 3rd party but that doesn't count!)
Ah, yes, we wouldn't want any kind of modularity in our systems. Everything should be put into one super-application. Why, again, aren't you just using Microsoft software?
for eclipse to be the clear winner, i need a gui designer
GUI designers are bad. But, as you said, if you want one for Eclipse, you can get one.
and the eclipse-framework apps need to look better on the OS X, cuz they currently look like butt. no joke.
And Netbeans is butt-ugly on Linux. So, which one matters more?
I fear that OSS is soon going to force all programming jobs to move to India
Quite to the contrary: because OSS developers actually are OSS users and because OSS users are in the US, OSS keeps programming jobs in the US; they simply aren't called "programming jobs".
Furthermore, by using underhanded tactics like "borrowing" Unix code, they'll beat their commercial competitors -- and the commercial companies will either be forced to open source, or go out of business.
Yes, that's what usually happens when a better technology comes along that lowers the cost of production--the factories and corporations that use the old processes become uncompetitive. OSS beats what you call "commercial" software development because it's better and cheaper. Now, we only have to wait for the market to take care of the dinosaurs. As it should be.
The problem with that is to achieve equilibrium, two sides need to meet in the middle and that means decrease in the std of living for the higher income group.
I don't see a problem with that. Some people (us) have been getting more than their fair share for a while. We should consider ourselves lucky to have had such good fortune for so long. It's not our right.
To prevent this it requires a smart plan, one which is sorely lacking in this case.
No, it requires a very simple plan: improve the average standard of living of the globe quickly enough so that it compensates for the decrease resulting from equillibration. Anything else wouldn't be a "plan", it would be a fraud.
Of course, free trade or not, the Western lifestyle will have to change: it simply isn't sustainable, and it can't be scaled up to the rest of the world. In particular, Americans will need to live in smaller, more energy-efficient houses, take public transportation, buy more energy efficient cars, recycle more, etc.
The facts bear out the assertion that the rich are benefitting from this arrangement since both the US and Mexico have seen a shrinking of their middle class and a growth in the income gap between top and bottom. Also, in the absence of a smart plan for implementing free trade, it allows the corporations to continue to support corrupt regimes with total impunity, with no control by any authority.
The US middle class has lots of serious, self-created problems; don't blame Mexico or free trade for that.
in general just think this sort of competition is counter-productive in this type of setting.
Yes, I agree. So, why does Sun keep using their corporate muscle to prop up an IDE (Netbeans/Forte) that few people would bother with if it didn't have that kind of corporate backing?
The logical conclusion is for Sun to stop developing Netbeans/Forte and adopt Eclipse, since Eclipse is the clear winner. All this posturing by Sun is only because they know they have lost in the market but can't deal with the fact that there is something successful about Java they don't control yet.
Don't worry, Sun will probably figure out a way anyway. McNealy/Schwartz won't rest until they have Microsoft-like control over everything related to Java, including the IDE. They managed with the open source J2EE projects, too.
Even "safe runtimes" has bugs that might be exploitable.
I said "safe runtime", not "secure runtime". It is unnecessary to protect against exploitable bugs between different applications because you don't expect your own applications to try and exploit bugs in the runtime environment to wreak havoc. For example, Gnumeric can already wreck AbiWord files if it wants to, even though they are running in different address spaces; they are running as the same user and can already get at each other's files and memory.
Besides, Java actually claims to be a "secure runtime", not just a "safe runtime", meaning, it will run untrusted code in the same address space as important, trusted code.
There are thousands of sites streaming in MP3. Why don't more such sites use MP3?
Of course, for a completely open streaming solution, Ogg has both excellent encoders and numerous free players (including one that runs inside a web page, written in Java).
I thought it was important to stress the difference because yesterday I've seen posts on other boards where people were assuming the pentagon is predicting that we are causing global warming, and therefore, our demise.
They probably don't consider "stressing the difference" important because there is no difference. Human carbon dioxide emissions clearly contribute to climate change and they are growing. The only question is when and how human contributions become catastrophic.
And if humans cause an unavoidable ice age to happen just 50 years earlier through excessive carbon dioxide emissions, that in itself would be huge: at the rate at which technology is changing, 50 extra years might allow us to cope with an ice age much better.
That shouldn't require a separate piece of hardware. Instead, the camera should sign the image digitally and store the signature as an entry in the EXIF header. You know, the same way you sign stuff with PGP. Anybody should be able to verify it.
I wonder whether Canon is going the "secure hardware reader" route in order to make more money or in order to get around some patent.
For some reason, Microsoft's brilliant and cutting-edge .NET
.NET is neither "brilliant" nor "cutting-edge"--it's a modest evolution from Java, which is itself 1970's technology.
.NET has this idea of a "runtime" ... a big 22 MB steaming heap of code that is linked dynamically and which everybody has to have on their computers before they can use .NET applications.
.NET and Java is to run inside a runtime, a runtime that provides garbage collection, dynamic typing, and just-in-time compilation.
.NET and Java do have serious design problems. Foremost, safe runtimes like that should run all applications on a machine in a single address space. Then, you can get rid of a lot of useless machinery for inter-process communication, and the overhead gets amortized over dozens of programs. Again, old stuff. But Spolsky's criticism is just missing the point completely.
Actually,
The tool in question? A linker. Here's what a linker does. It combines the compiled version of your program with the compiled versions of all the library functions that your program uses. [...] Instead,
Well, that's roughly like saying that automobiles leave out the horses and the whip. The whole point of
Runtimes are a problem, much like DLLs, because you can get into trouble when application version 1 was designed to work with runtime version 1, and then runtime version 2 comes out, and suddenly application version 1 doesn't work right for some unpredictable reason.
Well, duh. So, I guess operating systems are a problem, too.
We solve that sort of thing by having standards and sticking to them. Oh, I forget, besides being rather confused about software in general, Spolsky also actually seems to like Microsoft Windows, so the notion of "standards" and "compatibility" must be rather foreign to him.