Philip K Dick summarizes what is sf quite well in the preface to 'The
short happy Life of the brown oxford and other classic stories by PKD'
isbn 0-8065-1153-2.
"This ~science fiction world~
must differ from the given in at least one way, and the one way must be
sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society
-- or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent
idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a
conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one -- this is the essence of science
fiction, the conceptual dislocation the society so that a result a new
society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and
from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition. he
knows that it is not his actual world that he is reading about."
Also:
"It ~SF~ cannot be defined as `a story (novel or play) set in the
future."
M$ knows that outsourcing of IT projects will not go away. As such, getting into china ahead of Open-Source offerings will help to strengthen their hold in the higher level IT market.
This strategy has worked with India as they pump out so much M$ crap that it scares me.
Although I love 2001 and Blade Runner (book is way better though), I would love to see Rendevous with Rama. This series is probably one of the most interesting and diverse series that ACC has come up with.
In the 2001 series it was based on a concept short story. I don't think that Arthor C. Clark really had a real concept for what he was writing. As such, with reading the rest of the series, he totally changes gears with those concepts leaving much to be desired. With Rendevous, he had a full concept in mind and the series flows and flows well.
I have been dreaming of a VR headset that contains a curved screen. If such a technology could be made small enough could be the enabler for turning these virtually not reality headsets to real VR headsets.
IE currently sucks with the following:
- CSS Support.
- GZip Support for js/css/xml resources.
- Debuggging model (no stack property/method of error)
- Unstable application model (way too optimized to be of any good)
- Total lack of JSConnect support
- Plug-in support (active-x bites).
I've been developing using Mozilla for my IE using employer for years now and will continue to do so.
I honestly don't think that MS will do any attempts to make DHTML work better. They just want another chance to obfuscate the world so they can invent a new way of doing things.
If you are planning to be in IT or need to use a computer for communications, it is necessary. It skares mee when I see IT people who type with two fingers and look at the keyboard.
I would never hire a programmer if they could not touch type. In fact, typing is a standard test I give to potential programmers. No touch, no job.
True. I program in Java but also program in TCL and Python. What makes me enjoy using Java is avoiding standard java programming paradigms like using objects for everything. Instead, if I can use Java's primitive data structures such as Arrays, I can make my code shorter and as such more readable.
Although I do like the ideal of minimal lines of code. I try to enforce this in all my applications, however everytime I try to read somebody's perl, I feel like I'm reading martian. I love Python and feel that although it in some cases takes more keystrokes than perl, it is at least humanly readable.
I've heard many a good programmers call perl a `write once, read never` language. I'll take Jython.
From the information I'm getting, this little globe in the sky is kinda doomed at the rate we are going.
wouldn't it be logical to say that space travel is one of the only ways our species will survive for the long run (outside of environmental dome's that is).
I am one of the toughest UI and ergonomics critics and have been
looking for years to find the perfect computer application interface
and have finally found it - Eclipse..
The UI for Eclipse is extremely well designed and though out even so it
seems to make Apple
developers happy.
Having a application UI framework that is window manager and
language independent is exactly what the Open Source community needs to
make OS apps easier to use and attract the non-OS users. Unfortunately, such a project
would need collaboration between the biggest OSS platform teams but would'nt it be nice.
I have been working on a long term American driven global application. I currenly have one other programmer working on contract doing the same.
My team in the U.S. loves having a low latency on changes fixes and such. They have worked with large IT companies in India and have had complaints regarding issue latency. For a bug that would take 2 days to resolve specifics and fix, in Canada it would be 2 hours.
One of the reasons this has not happend in Canada yet is the lack of involvement of the Canadian Federal, Provincial and Municipal governments to get involved in making such a formula work. The reason it works so well in countries such as India is the programs sponsored by the goverment.
I'd love to see such companies start up in the near future. Any takers?
Rather than add to the already great list of ideas, my idea looks at the overall design architecture. Machine learning should be a minimalist venture as any other features added to a core application should be.
I would like to see a Mozilla machine learning interface (MML*) where I can manage the various ML modules. This UI component should be able to point to a MML extension page that will have all the registered MML extensions.
This design would ensure a consistent management interface for the machine learning extensions as well as making the smallest footprint on the base install on Moz.
Single panel outliners allow brainstorming of just about anything including to-do lists. I use it for my design layouts, issue tracking, to-do, Program pseudo code, Meeting logs.
Palm - ShadowPlan:
Looks good, however their windows application bites. The palm component is sweet but I just hate those small screens. Give me my old 21" please!
Win32 - Ecco:
I use this every day because I work for a M$ loving company. Very well thought out program but originally made for win95:p It's also free!
Mac OSX - Omni-Outliner
Great company. Very well written tool. Copied Ecco or at least motivated by it. Only supports single page per file though:[ (This is due to lacking native tab support in Mac OSX)
Mac OSX - NoteTaker
Well written, Supports chapters, pages and good outlining. Does not support columns which can be helpful for gathering tabular information such as due dates and scales...
*nix - Nada (as in none)
None that I really like (yet). There is Vim outliner if you like Vim. There are others but they are still very simple programs right now.
I am seriously thinking about building a cross platform one myself like Ecco/omni on top of Mozilla XUL or Eclipse Platform or maybe some quazi ObjC-Java-Python monster....Any takers???
JD
It is a common mistake to think that because you have more options that the product is better. Sure M$ gives us 10 different ways to do things on the system with 10 different languages. They create a multitude of non-standard gui driven tools and wizards that purposefully move the user away from understanding the underlying tasks and force them into memorizing GUI's. I prefer companies that specialize in building a solid core product like lets say Honda as opposed to GM. GM gives us dozens of colors with several different but same cars. GM also drops tons of features and when compared to a Honda, initially they are cheaper. But when you compare over the long run, Hondas are much cheaper. I see Mac OSX (Honda) vs Windows (GM) the same way.
Their success at this can be measured by the number of MCSE's out there of which probably only about 1% of which could make any production quality code on their own. Protocol names that differ from standards based protocols not for any reason but to confuse people. And syntax in languages that again differ purposefully to distract programmers from the true common methods.
Open standard languages and platforms is the only way to form a solid foundation and M$ has clearly and purposefully thrown smoke and mirrors to make developers think that thier programs are simpler when in actual fact, they are not. Take a VB programmer and put them on a real language like Java and they are totally lost.
I use Mac OSX for my home machines because it supports Open languages and frameworks. It is also imensely more secure than windoze and is extremely simple for me to set up my family to use.
I only use Windoze for work becuase I need a machine that has Netmeeting and my company paid for it. Thats' it. Finito. No more. Chao
I totally agree. I bougt the Podium CoolPad and I love it. It's the best purchase I ever made for computers. My lap is cool, my computer is cool, it makes typing easier, it elevates the computer so sidways liquid flows from extra large latte's don't wash into side of computer.
It's funny that the only thing that would keep me from suggesting
OSX to a large school board is always the office suite. For moral and
bug related issues, I would never sugges M$ Office Mac. Open Office
currently running through an X11 layer and as such has very poor
printing support. As such, I could never recommend it either.
In the past, Apple has never gotten on board with the OO / Star
Office community. If they did, we would already have a native port.
Instead, we must wait for a wonderful group of non Applers who are
coding their eyes out to build something that Apple would greatly
benefit from.
Come on Apple, make the right decision and ignore what those M$
board members are saying. Support OO) and help them accelerate the
2.0 native release timeline. The payback will be recovered 10 fold.
JD
BTW - I am and have been an avid OSX user and supporter. It's the
only home machine I recommend to anybody (except hard-core gamers) as
their home machine.
I agree completely. Forking is only an issue when the library tree is young and not matured. Java's base is highly mature and the 'main line' of java releases are after the 'Open Sourceing' of Java will be carried as the primary fork. All enterprise Java applications and implementations will follow the primary fork.
Any subsequent forks that will exist (and they will), will only be for applications that need very specialized performance enhancements. I am sure that most forks will still follow the main line but they will add or enhance subsets of the API. This type of development can only be seen as positive. Any worthy tweak or enhancement would be eventually be merged into the primary java line.
Sun knows this. They are just playing a marketing game right now. They have nothing else that is as big as the OS of Java. They'll probably let this drag out until they actually have a hard plan in place to OS Java.
Slashdot Mirror
Philip K Dick summarizes what is sf quite well in the preface to 'The short happy Life of the brown oxford and other classic stories by PKD' isbn 0-8065-1153-2.
"This ~science fiction world~ must differ from the given in at least one way, and the one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society -- or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one -- this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation the society so that a result a new society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition. he knows that it is not his actual world that he is reading about."
Also:
"It ~SF~ cannot be defined as `a story (novel or play) set in the future."
This one cost me thousands.
:(
I basically don't get 1.5 time anymore unless I work 54 hours a week. With a family, this is not possible
I for one will vote this down, however I don't think that the Ontario government will listen.
Ontario - the sweatshop capital of Canada.
Do some /.'ers actually still use IE?
What kind of (bad) drugs are they smokin?
M$ knows that outsourcing of IT projects will not go away. As such, getting into china ahead of Open-Source offerings will help to strengthen their hold in the higher level IT market.
This strategy has worked with India as they pump out so much M$ crap that it scares me.
My thoughts exactly!
Time to crack open those 3d libs. Things are going to get interesting.
Although I love 2001 and Blade Runner (book is way better though), I would love to see Rendevous with Rama. This series is probably one of the most interesting and diverse series that ACC has come up with.
In the 2001 series it was based on a concept short story. I don't think that Arthor C. Clark really had a real concept for what he was writing. As such, with reading the rest of the series, he totally changes gears with those concepts leaving much to be desired. With Rendevous, he had a full concept in mind and the series flows and flows well.
I vote for a Rendevous series please....!
The only reason M$ will create open source apps is to try and debunk the Open Source world by dropping code that pushes users to M$ windoze.
They sucessfully killed Java Applets and many other potentially revolutionary efforts with these wolf in sheeps clothing methods.
I for one will never and I mean NEVER use or read their open source code. Just as I never use any of their languages anymore.
M$ would never release any code that is open platform which is the drive of most open source projects.
Time for a new term Open Source and Platform?
Without mozilla, I would not be able to develop web pages for my IE only customer on my macintosh. For that I say thanks.
Now, I can look forward to having my address, browser, calendar amd mail completely sharable across my osx and win32 machines. I could not be happier.
Now if only they can get it to work with my corporate exchange server... mmmmm....
Kudos (once again) to the Moz team (world)!
I have been dreaming of a VR headset that contains a curved screen. If such a technology could be made small enough could be the enabler for turning these virtually not reality headsets to real VR headsets.
mmmmm....
IE currently sucks with the following:
- CSS Support.
- GZip Support for js/css/xml resources.
- Debuggging model (no stack property/method of error)
- Unstable application model (way too optimized to be of any good)
- Total lack of JSConnect support
- Plug-in support (active-x bites).
I've been developing using Mozilla for my IE using employer for years now and will continue to do so.
I honestly don't think that MS will do any attempts to make DHTML work better. They just want another chance to obfuscate the world so they can invent a new way of doing things.
If you are planning to be in IT or need to use a computer for communications, it is necessary. It skares mee when I see IT people who type with two fingers and look at the keyboard.
I would never hire a programmer if they could not touch type. In fact, typing is a standard test I give to potential programmers. No touch, no job.
Maybe Big Brother awards can add a history manipulation award. I'm sure SCO would qualify.
True. I program in Java but also program in TCL and Python. What makes me enjoy using Java is avoiding standard java programming paradigms like using objects for everything. Instead, if I can use Java's primitive data structures such as Arrays, I can make my code shorter and as such more readable.
Although I do like the ideal of minimal lines of code. I try to enforce this in all my applications, however everytime I try to read somebody's perl, I feel like I'm reading martian. I love Python and feel that although it in some cases takes more keystrokes than perl, it is at least humanly readable.
I've heard many a good programmers call perl a `write once, read never` language. I'll take Jython.
From the information I'm getting, this little globe in the sky is kinda doomed at the rate we are going.
wouldn't it be logical to say that space travel is one of the only ways our species will survive for the long run (outside of environmental dome's that is).
Waiting for Rama...
I am one of the toughest UI and ergonomics critics and have been looking for years to find the perfect computer application interface and have finally found it - Eclipse..
The UI for Eclipse is extremely well designed and though out even so it seems to make Apple developers happy.
Having a application UI framework that is window manager and language independent is exactly what the Open Source community needs to make OS apps easier to use and attract the non-OS users. Unfortunately, such a project would need collaboration between the biggest OSS platform teams but would'nt it be nice.
I have been working on a long term American driven global application. I currenly have one other programmer working on contract doing the same.
My team in the U.S. loves having a low latency on changes fixes and such. They have worked with large IT companies in India and have had complaints regarding issue latency. For a bug that would take 2 days to resolve specifics and fix, in Canada it would be 2 hours.
One of the reasons this has not happend in Canada yet is the lack of involvement of the Canadian Federal, Provincial and Municipal governments to get involved in making such a formula work. The reason it works so well in countries such as India is the programs sponsored by the goverment.
I'd love to see such companies start up in the near future. Any takers?
me too although I do like the brevity of me@no.com
Rather than add to the already great list of ideas, my idea looks at the overall design architecture. Machine learning should be a minimalist venture as any other features added to a core application should be.
:]
I would like to see a Mozilla machine learning interface (MML*) where I can manage the various ML modules. This UI component should be able to point to a MML extension page that will have all the registered MML extensions.
This design would ensure a consistent management interface for the machine learning extensions as well as making the smallest footprint on the base install on Moz.
*MML - TLA score= 4/5
The truth only hurts the ignorant.
Single panel outliners allow brainstorming of just about anything including to-do lists. I use it for my design layouts, issue tracking, to-do, Program pseudo code, Meeting logs. Palm - ShadowPlan: Looks good, however their windows application bites. The palm component is sweet but I just hate those small screens. Give me my old 21" please! Win32 - Ecco: I use this every day because I work for a M$ loving company. Very well thought out program but originally made for win95 :p It's also free!
Mac OSX - Omni-Outliner
Great company. Very well written tool. Copied Ecco or at least motivated by it. Only supports single page per file though :[ (This is due to lacking native tab support in Mac OSX)
Mac OSX - NoteTaker
Well written, Supports chapters, pages and good outlining. Does not support columns which can be helpful for gathering tabular information such as due dates and scales...
*nix - Nada (as in none)
None that I really like (yet). There is Vim outliner if you like Vim. There are others but they are still very simple programs right now.
I am seriously thinking about building a cross platform one myself like Ecco/omni on top of Mozilla XUL or Eclipse Platform or maybe some quazi ObjC-Java-Python monster. ...Any takers???
JD
It is a common mistake to think that because you have more options that the product is better. Sure M$ gives us 10 different ways to do things on the system with 10 different languages. They create a multitude of non-standard gui driven tools and wizards that purposefully move the user away from understanding the underlying tasks and force them into memorizing GUI's. I prefer companies that specialize in building a solid core product like lets say Honda as opposed to GM. GM gives us dozens of colors with several different but same cars. GM also drops tons of features and when compared to a Honda, initially they are cheaper. But when you compare over the long run, Hondas are much cheaper. I see Mac OSX (Honda) vs Windows (GM) the same way.
Their success at this can be measured by the number of MCSE's out there of which probably only about 1% of which could make any production quality code on their own. Protocol names that differ from standards based protocols not for any reason but to confuse people. And syntax in languages that again differ purposefully to distract programmers from the true common methods.
Open standard languages and platforms is the only way to form a solid foundation and M$ has clearly and purposefully thrown smoke and mirrors to make developers think that thier programs are simpler when in actual fact, they are not. Take a VB programmer and put them on a real language like Java and they are totally lost.
I use Mac OSX for my home machines because it supports Open languages and frameworks. It is also imensely more secure than windoze and is extremely simple for me to set up my family to use.
I only use Windoze for work becuase I need a machine that has Netmeeting and my company paid for it. Thats' it. Finito. No more. Chao
JD
I totally agree. I bougt the Podium CoolPad and I love it. It's the best purchase I ever made for computers. My lap is cool, my computer is cool, it makes typing easier, it elevates the computer so sidways liquid flows from extra large latte's don't wash into side of computer.
Why bother buying anything else?
It's funny that the only thing that would keep me from suggesting OSX to a large school board is always the office suite. For moral and bug related issues, I would never sugges M$ Office Mac. Open Office currently running through an X11 layer and as such has very poor printing support. As such, I could never recommend it either.
In the past, Apple has never gotten on board with the OO / Star Office community. If they did, we would already have a native port. Instead, we must wait for a wonderful group of non Applers who are coding their eyes out to build something that Apple would greatly benefit from.
Come on Apple, make the right decision and ignore what those M$ board members are saying. Support OO) and help them accelerate the 2.0 native release timeline. The payback will be recovered 10 fold.
JD
BTW - I am and have been an avid OSX user and supporter. It's the only home machine I recommend to anybody (except hard-core gamers) as their home machine.
I agree completely. Forking is only an issue when the library tree is young and not matured. Java's base is highly mature and the 'main line' of java releases are after the 'Open Sourceing' of Java will be carried as the primary fork. All enterprise Java applications and implementations will follow the primary fork. Any subsequent forks that will exist (and they will), will only be for applications that need very specialized performance enhancements. I am sure that most forks will still follow the main line but they will add or enhance subsets of the API. This type of development can only be seen as positive. Any worthy tweak or enhancement would be eventually be merged into the primary java line. Sun knows this. They are just playing a marketing game right now. They have nothing else that is as big as the OS of Java. They'll probably let this drag out until they actually have a hard plan in place to OS Java.