Well,
We are, say some people who study such things, at a critical place in history, where it's sometimes impossible to distinguish between pseudo-scientific research and art.
..might be more to the point.
Of course, the argument is centuries out of date. The examples are decades old. Let's make it more relevant! Art and Technology has been around for a long, long time. Incidentally Art Technology Group (ATG), which among other things created Dynamo which is now a huge application server product, is from the MIT Media Lab.
For example, 1965: Sony introduces the first monochrome half-inch tape Video Rover portapak-used almost immediately by New York video artist Nam June Paik.
And the contemporary media art scene is not about using photoshop. Even if you just count using digital technology, this has been around for years and it is vibrant. One well-known artist (Ingo Gunther) has used satellite transponders in his work, and one project (Kanal X) involved setting up a pirate TV station in Leipzig the transmitter of which was a sculpture. Ars Electronica has been going on for 20 years. DEAF has been held since 1986. ZKM has been open since '97 though many of its exhibitors have been active for far longer. The Getty has a collection of art and technology works from 1966 to 1993. Japan has one of the best media art infrastructures (hurt by the economy to be sure) which draw artists from Japan and overseas to places like the ICC, the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), and other spaces. Often the artists are in fact visiting professors who teach technology students (especially programmers) in universities.
Not only have artists always sought to make use of the latest media, but media artists often have to develop the cutting edge themselves in order to get their message across. This is true now that we use supercomputers like the Silicon Graphics Reality Engine, as it was when bromides and daguerrotypes took advantage of advances in industrial chemistry. Art drives science and vice-versa. I don't think you can point to any time when art and technology were not closely related.
While I don't usually have so much trouble with Mr. Katz' work, this time I'd have to say that sweeping generalizations without any enlightening examples must be hurtful to slashdotters' potential enjoyment and participation in some of the most exciting art in the world. Where's the beef? Many cutting edge artists work with very talented programmers and need their help badly.
In particular, people who have a flair for networking, opengl, and hardware setup/troubleshooting (oh don't forget circuitry and wireless!) are really needed. Linux is extremely relevant now that machines have gotten so powerful, and the preemptive kernel sounds great for art! Artists who are interested in technology might like to check out MAX which is a great MIDI music and device controller.
It would be useful to point this out with substantial explanation of what this means for this site's users. Art gives context and meaning to budding researchers. And talented artists often come up with the new concepts that drive innovation. A public artwork can drive personal study and honing of one's technological skills like nothing else.
I think the reason it seems new now is that we've got so darn many computers now but little funding for artists (in the U.S.). There are also some very talented young artists who are taking advantage of the latest technology. More about them on Slashdot might be fun! How about a new icon and a media art section? Here are some neat online exhibits at the NYC MOMA.
Of course it won't work, nobody expected it to.
It just appeared to work at the demo and everyone *knows* about demos.
There are no 10 million CDs. There is no copy protection. There is no spoon.
What there is a heck of a lot of, is spouting about Cactus Data Shield, which has a really good name. We are helping launch this company, people. But how to keep quiet when the only way to express oneself is to talk / type?
We could limit ourselves to a minimum mnemonic. Don't waste words on these droids. No flamefest for lurking writers to write about. They can only write, "The Slashdot Community again voted a resounding NO with 853 negative minimum responses against CDS Corp. and 1 for them, which was by an Anonymous Coward, Guess Who."
Some likely mnemonics: "DOWN WITH CDS" (or just "DOWN!@*%") - Full moral support for complete technical, business, social failure of the company.
"DUH" (or "DUMB", or "BAKA" if you are feeling Japanese) - Breaks the laws of physics and sociology; techies know, and their investors will get it in the end. Embellishment may be added after first keyword in caps; subsequent posters can get away with "DUH (see above)".
"CRACK IT NOW!" - Call to Arms, etc.
Now we can mail Perl-calculated tallies to elected officials, RIAA, etc. while 1) redefining target company's name as a mnemonic, 2) limiting time we waste - adds up to a man-month, and 3) creating an intelligent, opt-in, scary voice that is news by itself. Then we distribute our own software.
Slashdot might like to incorporate top recent keywords (they're in caps at the top) into a handy pull-down item to save irritation - adds up to 4 ulcers per month - while forcing DUH target to provide minimum grim satisfaction.
Pick Perl and then use whatever language you like.
Different languages have different strengths, and with no idea of even what industry you work in it is not easy to tell whether you are building real-time physical process management, security tools, or what. So right off the bat, I have to say you are going at this ass-backwards.
That said, Perl has all of the above functionality, and is the highest level language which does so. That means you can abstract as far away from the nitty gritty as you like, or you can hit the metal. It also is a superset of the languages you mentioned, so if you want you can program in Java, C, C++, or many other languages and insert that source code right into your Perl programs, Inline (not using XS). GUI through Tk, Qt, or other packages are possible. It is probably best for you, unless you already have a great Java team, or you are writing a video game or have a lot of flashy graphics. I was going to say, or if you want to sell your product as shrinkwrapped software, but that isn't true anymore with ActiveState's DevKit.
Python might be good, though it seems Perl is still going to have more support for different platforms and general ways to save yourself from trouble. I have to say I have way more experience with Perl than Python myself, though mainly this is because it wasn't mature enough when I was seriously considering a switch, and now because I have no need to change and the future for Perl looks very bright. I get more return on my effort with Perl, it's that simple. You could also use C/C++ with one of the popular cross-platform GUI toolkits, but the more flash the less portable in general.
Another person recommended English, another good choice. The closest language computers understand these days though is Perl, and the language itself is easily to extend. Maybe the best thing to do is figure out what you are building first, then pick the right language. Perl doesn't solve every possible problem, it just seems more likely to be all-powerful than anything else out there, that's why it is the glue of the Internet.
"Answers from the Perlmonks" or similar title with proceeds going to its upkeep, with a stationary server for the book. Contact vroom or post with contact info on the site for more feedback from a number of really experienced people who have wanted something like this for a long time.
Would save repetition by contributing to editing down the answers the monks have given for free. Also need more Perl books to solve problems, teach people, and reduce the amount of bad, security holed, or otherwise noxious code running around "with scissors" as one Monk puts it.
Would involve Perl Monks community, possibly could bring in some cool waves from the three open source funded scholars of Perl, and would generate by itself more material for the next edition. A vibrant, extremely useful community ready-made for the book not vice versa. Run the book by the monks and you'll get thoughtful proofreading in parallel, almost guaranteed.
Also I believe all books should come with the full text available on CD as well, or downloadable in plain text, possibly with an additional version in pdf or an open source format, all in a tar.bz2 archive (the latter of which is handled by WinRAR just fine).
Table of contents and other things should be available as a tab-separated file or some other format (maybe a Berkeley DB file) which would be 1) updateable with annotations and additions from readers downloaded from the website for free, 2) far more useful than what passes for an index in most books, and 3) gives readers a good reason to code and recode their own utilities to handle them.
I think this project would improve the state of programming in general, including standard level of competency, cost efficiency, creativity, realism, and humor.
I read the article just becase I don't like to reply without giving the benefit of the doubt.. but in this case it was a waste of time.
QUOTE: 'Things have simply stopped getting better, or worse, for our species.'
Then the Atomic Scientists wouldn't have a Doomsday Clock. And we wouldn't be worried about destroying our coastal cities with rising tides.
The article is only saved by Stringer who says the obvious, that 'Evolution goes on all the time. You don't have to intervene. It is just that it is highly unpredictable.'
I'd say that any mind that thinks evolution is over, is destined to become roadkill due to 'evolutionary' causes.
In our near future we have the prospect of mutations spreading which fight against aids, tropical diseases spreading north, and resistance to biowarefare or radiation. Somewhere along the way we will likely have changes in populations due to great artificial genes which can be passed on. Robotics and other technologies will enhance humans at some pace or another, there seems little doubt of that or you can read Hans Moravec if you are still unsure about that. We will have plenty of stresses on our populations and our genes, no worries about that. Homo Sap's going to have to advance a heck of a lot more for that.
The problem with a guy like Jones is that when people start to base strategies or policies on such delusions, we all lose out. Do you think we are losing no great artistic or scientific minds in the African tragedy of AIDS? Does it really matter if the makeup of populations change by one outliving the other, or being more procreative, or eating better, or what if they just ethnically cleanse, water war, bomb, poison, or otherwise do each other in? And are we all so homogenous now? I'd rather not consider myself as the least common denominator.
I think the battles of evolution require a lot of creative thinking to elucidate if you are thinking about your own time, and even then all bets are off. If anything evolution will accelerate as we become able to modify/improve our genes more quickly than the natural rate. And lots more people in the world will gain the means to exterminate those with genes they dislike. Finally, Natural Selection is always in operation. You can't turn it off just because increased mobility makes it difficult to measure.
Evolution is sort of like a saying of Buckaroo Banzai's: Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.
and it also has as its theme, the killer app of the net which is email.
so the venue is the net, and the audience is
manipulated. windows visitors may have to have
a linux user explain the difficult parts.
The idea that the full potential of perhaps the
most important application by the world's richest man (tm?) is a new definition of subverting the common denominator. Applause to whom?
Perhaps some people would like mr. gates to be
mentioned on the site as artistic collaborator?
Suse on my Dell Inspiron 7.5K used to work with the suspend key, but no longer (X just hangs).
But ancient software is involved.
That said, rather than hibernation I'd prefer a software-UPS or time-rollback widget. How viable would it be to keep a very high frequency incremental save of state (even just the contents of a limited number of folders would be useful)?
It would be useful to be able to send your machine backwards in time without requiring everything to be in a database or versioning system that requires explicit saves. I'd like to be able to remove the effects of every command in the history of all shells in reverse, in the right order, and have high-granularity access to previous states of a filesystem.
If I could do that for all the relevant accounts on various machines it would be like never having to worry. I could leave the desk when I want to, kick the power cord or make meatheadded mistakes, and could keep a less paranoid number of full backups. I'd be worried about the life of my hard disk though. Already exists?
In Japan this happened with the government-run NHK which is two terrestrial and some satellite TV channels. NHK is the channel you go to when there is a big bumpy earthquake or a typhoon, and sometimes they have not so dry kind of interesting stuff too.
So NHK got the government to let them go door to door demanding cash from people all across the country, since people are watching their channels with no commercials on them, which means they must owe them something. Just started a couple years ago after many many years of free government TV.
The idea is if you pay, you get a shiny sticker which you post on your house, one a year. Of course everybody and his or her brother says to their question "Do you watch TV?", "Yeah! But I never watch NHK." Which is possible but difficult because you scan through two of their channels to hit the other five or so you get in Tokyo anyway.
When's the last time this happened? Not for a long time, then they showed up on 9-11 or within a day or so of it I remember. I best remember of course my intense anger (from the New York area doncha know) and I got really pissed off at the person who came to the door.
They went off never getting it, you know, that they could have been in the wrong. Even if technically they might not have been, though of course I never watch NHK intentionally now except when there is a typhoon or an earthquake.
Maybe Comcast could be reduced to a more pathetic lifeform like NHK, which also happens to be made of some quite corrupt and very nasty people at the top. Lucky they don't have spyware for the tv, yet.
Create a plan on how to use the money you
saved by not using Microsoft, or say that
you will give x dollars back to each taxpayer.
Possibly you could create a digital government
initiative which would reduce costs and provide
jobs to local talent pool, though it would not
be easy to show how/when you would save money.
Perhaps easiest is to look at example of a city
which has switched and modify it for your needs.
Also, you could calculate your liability in the
event that you actually had to pay Microsoft for
all of the liscenses and upgrades that they require. Perhaps it would work out to something
significant.. this money could be again, given back to the people, or better yet show some leadership and use it to hire people who can
save you more. Open source isn't just about money, it also means people can modify the code.
That's a community project and you could foster
the development of solutions for government starting at home, and take advantage of work done
elsewhere for other local governments.
Also you could check and see how many people have
ADSL or cable Internet access and see how happy they are. Maybe linux could be part of an initiative to give good access or other services to homeowners courtesy of the city and open source.
I sent you an email by the way in case this is something serious; I do what you need (software development and liscensing/bizdev) professionally.
Unfortunately I was unable to view the page in my linux browser (sending me to a page to teach me about standards..) then after downloading an activex pane each page there is no content. Too
bad since you have all these people looking. In particular comparing it right against Sorenson and WMP with nothing behind your words makes you wonder if you want to touch something like this out of the blue.
Anybody who could help is going to need more subtantial information, for example what you think are the pros/cons of the software as compared to competitors in your space, to help with diligence. GPL might be one way to do it, and people might love you for it, but it will very likely hurt your chances on liscensing or selling it outright at this stage and getting your money back.
In particular a number of companies that are likely to listen are here in Japan but GPL is not something they want, unless maybe you already have a big team building it through GPL. They know tech and make quick decisions if everything is clear and up front, that's your challenge.
Have an antivirus company move a large part of its assets into banks in one or more countries other than its home country.
Give a lawyer in each country bank account number and legal duty to withdraw all the money when it has been proven that that company has been compromised. The lawyer must open a new bank account for a competitor who has never been compromised.
Something tells me we will end up pretty quickly with a well-funded open source antivirus company!
an embedded MS security agent in your private network.
Think, Sony Playstation II *created* the Japanese home DVD market. PCs in Japan have quickly tried to converge on home AV market and shortly we will have lots of home AV networked servers (like all the new Vaio towers for the past year).
Anything M$ would like more than to 0wn your house? It will be easy and convenient, and they will also get a revenue stream (a new one or through your utility or maybe NTT DoCoMo) in which lots of nice copyright charges can be inserted. Maybe a few bucks a month for the next DirectX, Harry Potter II on WMV/DVD without commercials, pay per view over DSL etc. It can be done with current technology and infrastructure and it would sell.
I'd guess if the U.S. lets them get away with this (leveraging OS monopoly using WMP which has already been a major tool in killing RealVideo Server, Darwin, Quicktime, etc etc) their company will be one of the most profitable in the 21st C.
So long as new software releases are closed source and break standards, they are laughing all the way to the bank.
You can be artistic or even create artworks with anything.. although I once found visual basic to be a big impediment.
If you have ever heard of an elegant mathematical proof or an elegant bit of code, this is something like what "artistic" is. It also could mean efficient, clear, etc.
I think you need to differentiate between
- traditional artworks like maybe oil paintings
- artworks which use digital media in some way
- making a statement with/through art
- craftsmanship
- intellectual and visual elegance i.e. of design
Hypercard? Yes, blech. But I hope you think about elegance or craftsmanship at least if you are turning your code out to the public.
We need more elegance in open source code because it tends to 1) make work fun/creative 2) make it run efficiently 3) reduces bugs 4) strong metaphor makes paradigm more powerful/extensible.
Presumably this is due to 1) cost, 2) backdoors inserted by Microsoft, NSA, or other source.
I think #1 is main because of a friend who got school and goverment in a French town to convert to his linux based preinstalled machines, and also because of the Florida examples.
Here's some questions then..
1. What if Microsoft provides source code or even ability to make own builds to selected institutions/countries if they pay/sign enough paper? Is there a price point at which Microsoft becomes interesting again? In Japan some cell phones cost a penny up front. Paid $5 for mine, but have to pay $100 a month..
2. How do apt-getters and up2daters really know they are getting nsa-backdoor-free binaries (besides having a server in their country rebuild all the binaries automatically..) I.e. how to make best case for linux security over M$. Doubt full answer is "duh, MD5".
3. Same as #2 for general case where citizen of country A wants to download distros/binaries from scary country B. "Scary" could be redefined as "France or worse" (regarding government-funded economic espionage policy). Maybe we need to have local, private, secure, trusted cross compiler studios to create a positive force at purifying the net..
4. Perhaps library/binary from non-U.S. country X might be relatively unsafe due to CIA-inserted backdoors/virii? Figure for example that China *will* make lots of attempts at doing this themselves against their own citizens now that we all and the U.S. government are giving them all these great ideas. 'Course maybe they would then promote linux to the hilt and then one democracy virus would wipe out their "Red Lantern" infrastructure..:)
5. (No, no need to flame) Are Microsoft ideas of subscriptions, or shared source, repugnant to government customers mainly because
a) they are morally bankrupt (i.e. crime against humanity)
b) would be a prior lien on a nation's prosperity (i.e. crime against your constituents)
c) your business and/or government could fail or worse if you made Microsoft an enemy by say falling in arrears
d) "information security"
e) "national security"
f) moot, we want MS (preinstalled base in our govt)
g) moot, we want MS (old established firm)
h) repugnant but only game in town
i) moot (who cares)
j) other (what?)
6. What is an effective way for private open source developers to make money on market constituted of all world governments' organs?
Obviously there is some kind of a barrier here regarding currency, local requirements, trust, obtaining contact information, every country being set up differently, etc.
I'm thinking 1) education software.. ideology agnostic (woops thats not really true). and 2) a best-practices database that would tell them what to buy. Oh, and 3) make something that saves money and sell to everyone including governments.
I had an Apple II and lots of other Macs through the ages, and a number of them were possible due to educational discounts. Donated my Apple II to my old school (kinda wish I had it now tho').
I believe the smooth, beautiful Mac user interface (doesn't have to be OS X) is superior to Windows because of its smoothness and ease of use (it was developed with cognitive science lessons heeded) and also because it has less of a corporate feel.
In other words, the same reasons designers prefer Macs is why kids should use them too. But there is *no reason on earth* why there should be *any* Microsoft software on those computers. This could be a great time for digital teaching materials, ebooks, and open source software to make waves.
I already recommended my relative purchase antivirus software *not* written by McAffee in response to their idiocy. Luckily I didn't recommend Symantec either.:)
I would guess there is a 90% probability that Microsoft's SP2 for Explorer has an FBI or NSA hole. Not that I spend a ton of time on security, it's just that Windows' dialing out already gave me a thousand dollar bill for triggering my router (got out of it luckily) and I have no more patience for sheer bloodymindedness on the part of the World's Richest Man and his cohorts, the U.S. government. Utterly ridiculous.
You can also learn alot about astronomy with currently available databases.. Tycho-2 for example is huge. The most enjoyable software I've used so far is Starry Night on the Mac (and now PC I believe as well). On linux I have starcat, skycalV5, and xephem (which is serious scientific software!).
Xephem (a planetarium and analysis program for linux) is very cool because it can both pull the sky from your LX200 telescope or by replacing the telescope driver with a perl script, it can download part of the sky from an online database, after which you can do realtime image processing on it.
It can also match stars in the sky to stars in the database. So far I have only been able to pull down large segments of the sky at once, but as soon as I can clear the disk space I'll be trying some other pieces of software to try and download smaller pieces of the sky. Starry Night also downloads
DSS (Digital Sky Survey) images I believe.
When I heard about Magic Lantern I was waiting for this.. There is no way that companies in Japan (or probably Singapore, Malaysia, China, Taiwan) will consider purchasing antivirus or other security software from U.S. companies if this happens. As it stands, Microsoft's greatest market potential is probably Japan, not the U.S. But there are plenty of other options, including say Trend Micro which is Japanese-Taiwanese.
I know somebody there and think I'll ask them if they are planning on making security holes for every local law-enforcement agency. Could be a money maker but somehow I doubt it.. if it was China they would probably have to allow the government to install keyboard loggers on your pc through this Patriotic Remote Exploit facility. Unfortunately Japanese nuclear power plants are running Windows 95 as far as I could see from a recent newspaper photo.. (+3, Cynical, Despair)
You may be right. My reasoning about PHP is mainly due to
1) often needing to extend things and *knowing* I'll be able to do it in Perl.. PHP who knows?
(I tried PHP in the early stages and whenever I come back to it, it doesn't seem powerful enough)
and
2) looking at existing php code which maybe is not written by the best people.. I get tired of seeing every PHP page restating the code to get a database handle for example. I believe in abstracting code into reusable modules, and separating design from code (it bites me whenever I forget to do so, and you can see plenty of rants about that on perlmonks.org). I also often think of doing something in PHP just as I realize I would have to add some preprocessing before the data gets to the screen that would be harder in PHP.
Possibly these things could be done if I put more time into studying PHP, and certainly a very quick interface with minimal window dressing and error checking is a cinch in PHP. But I think you lose something, it just doesn't feel as powerful as Perl does.
That said, I'd much rather do PHP than say Cold Fusion if I was asked to use it, and I do make my own Perl templates that do some of what PHP does as well. So I suppose there are shades of grey. I'd love to see some good uses of it like you mention. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
We are, say some people who study such things, at a critical place in history, where it's sometimes impossible to distinguish between pseudo-scientific research and art.
Of course, the argument is centuries out of date. The examples are decades old. Let's make it more relevant! Art and Technology has been around for a long, long time. Incidentally Art Technology Group (ATG), which among other things created Dynamo which is now a huge application server product, is from the MIT Media Lab.
For example,
1965: Sony introduces the first monochrome half-inch tape Video Rover portapak-used almost immediately by New York video artist Nam June Paik.
And the contemporary media art scene is not about using photoshop. Even if you just count using digital technology, this has been around for years and it is vibrant. One well-known artist (Ingo Gunther) has used satellite transponders in his work, and one project (Kanal X) involved setting up a pirate TV station in Leipzig the transmitter of which was a sculpture. Ars Electronica has been going on for 20 years. DEAF has been held since 1986. ZKM has been open since '97 though many of its exhibitors have been active for far longer. The Getty has a collection of art and technology works from 1966 to 1993. Japan has one of the best media art infrastructures (hurt by the economy to be sure) which draw artists from Japan and overseas to places like the ICC, the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), and other spaces. Often the artists are in fact visiting professors who teach technology students (especially programmers) in universities.
Not only have artists always sought to make use of the latest media, but media artists often have to develop the cutting edge themselves in order to get their message across. This is true now that we use supercomputers like the Silicon Graphics Reality Engine, as it was when bromides and daguerrotypes took advantage of advances in industrial chemistry. Art drives science and vice-versa. I don't think you can point to any time when art and technology were not closely related.
While I don't usually have so much trouble with Mr. Katz' work, this time I'd have to say that sweeping generalizations without any enlightening examples must be hurtful to slashdotters' potential enjoyment and participation in some of the most exciting art in the world. Where's the beef? Many cutting edge artists work with very talented programmers and need their help badly. In particular, people who have a flair for networking, opengl, and hardware setup/troubleshooting (oh don't forget circuitry and wireless!) are really needed. Linux is extremely relevant now that machines have gotten so powerful, and the preemptive kernel sounds great for art! Artists who are interested in technology might like to check out MAX which is a great MIDI music and device controller.
It would be useful to point this out with substantial explanation of what this means for this site's users. Art gives context and meaning to budding researchers. And talented artists often come up with the new concepts that drive innovation. A public artwork can drive personal study and honing of one's technological skills like nothing else.
I think the reason it seems new now is that we've got so darn many computers now but little funding for artists (in the U.S.). There are also some very talented young artists who are taking advantage of the latest technology. More about them on Slashdot might be fun! How about a new icon and a media art section? Here are some neat online exhibits at the NYC MOMA.
Of course it won't work, nobody expected it to. It just appeared to work at the demo and everyone *knows* about demos. There are no 10 million CDs. There is no copy protection. There is no spoon.
What there is a heck of a lot of, is spouting about Cactus Data Shield, which has a really good name. We are helping launch this company, people. But how to keep quiet when the only way to express oneself is to talk / type?
We could limit ourselves to a minimum mnemonic. Don't waste words on these droids. No flamefest for lurking writers to write about. They can only write, "The Slashdot Community again voted a resounding NO with 853 negative minimum responses against CDS Corp. and 1 for them, which was by an Anonymous Coward, Guess Who."
Some likely mnemonics:
"DOWN WITH CDS" (or just "DOWN!@*%") - Full moral support for complete technical, business, social failure of the company.
"DUH" (or "DUMB", or "BAKA" if you are feeling Japanese) - Breaks the laws of physics and sociology; techies know, and their investors will get it in the end. Embellishment may be added after first keyword in caps; subsequent posters can get away with "DUH (see above)".
"CRACK IT NOW!" - Call to Arms, etc.
Now we can mail Perl-calculated tallies to elected officials, RIAA, etc. while 1) redefining target company's name as a mnemonic, 2) limiting time we waste - adds up to a man-month, and 3) creating an intelligent, opt-in, scary voice that is news by itself. Then we distribute our own software.
Slashdot might like to incorporate top recent keywords (they're in caps at the top) into a handy pull-down item to save irritation - adds up to 4 ulcers per month - while forcing DUH target to provide minimum grim satisfaction.
Pick Perl and then use whatever language you like.
Different languages have different strengths, and with no idea of even what industry you work in it is not easy to tell whether you are building real-time physical process management, security tools, or what. So right off the bat, I have to say you are going at this ass-backwards.
That said, Perl has all of the above functionality, and is the highest level language which does so. That means you can abstract as far away from the nitty gritty as you like, or you can hit the metal. It also is a superset of the languages you mentioned, so if you want you can program in Java, C, C++, or many other languages and insert that source code right into your Perl programs, Inline (not using XS). GUI through Tk, Qt, or other packages are possible. It is probably best for you, unless you already have a great Java team, or you are writing a video game or have a lot of flashy graphics. I was going to say, or if you want to sell your product as shrinkwrapped software, but that isn't true anymore with ActiveState's DevKit.
Python might be good, though it seems Perl is still going to have more support for different platforms and general ways to save yourself from trouble. I have to say I have way more experience with Perl than Python myself, though mainly this is because it wasn't mature enough when I was seriously considering a switch, and now because I have no need to change and the future for Perl looks very bright. I get more return on my effort with Perl, it's that simple. You could also use C/C++ with one of the popular cross-platform GUI toolkits, but the more flash the less portable in general.
Another person recommended English, another good choice. The closest language computers understand these days though is Perl, and the language itself is easily to extend. Maybe the best thing to do is figure out what you are building first, then pick the right language. Perl doesn't solve every possible problem, it just seems more likely to be all-powerful than anything else out there, that's why it is the glue of the Internet.
I would like to see:
"Answers from the Perlmonks" or similar title with proceeds going to its upkeep, with a stationary server for the book. Contact vroom or post with contact info on the site for more feedback from a number of really experienced people who have wanted something like this for a long time.
Would save repetition by contributing to editing down the answers the monks have given for free. Also need more Perl books to solve problems, teach people, and reduce the amount of bad, security holed, or otherwise noxious code running around "with scissors" as one Monk puts it.
Would involve Perl Monks community, possibly could bring in some cool waves from the three open source funded scholars of Perl, and would generate by itself more material for the next edition. A vibrant, extremely useful community ready-made for the book not vice versa. Run the book by the monks and you'll get thoughtful proofreading in parallel, almost guaranteed.
Also I believe all books should come with the full text available on CD as well, or downloadable in plain text, possibly with an additional version in pdf or an open source format, all in a tar.bz2 archive (the latter of which is handled by WinRAR just fine).
Table of contents and other things should be available as a tab-separated file or some other format (maybe a Berkeley DB file) which would be 1) updateable with annotations and additions from readers downloaded from the website for free, 2) far more useful than what passes for an index in most books, and 3) gives readers a good reason to code and recode their own utilities to handle them.
I think this project would improve the state of programming in general, including standard level of competency, cost efficiency, creativity, realism, and humor.
I read the article just becase I don't like to reply without giving the benefit of the doubt.. but in this case it was a waste of time.
QUOTE: 'Things have simply stopped getting better, or worse, for our species.'
Then the Atomic Scientists wouldn't have a Doomsday Clock. And we wouldn't be worried about destroying our coastal cities with rising tides.
The article is only saved by Stringer who says the obvious, that 'Evolution goes on all the time. You don't have to intervene. It is just that it is highly unpredictable.'
I'd say that any mind that thinks evolution is over, is destined to become roadkill due to 'evolutionary' causes.
In our near future we have the prospect of mutations spreading which fight against aids, tropical diseases spreading north, and resistance to biowarefare or radiation. Somewhere along the way we will likely have changes in populations due to great artificial genes which can be passed on. Robotics and other technologies will enhance humans at some pace or another, there seems little doubt of that or you can read Hans Moravec if you are still unsure about that. We will have plenty of stresses on our populations and our genes, no worries about that. Homo Sap's going to have to advance a heck of a lot more for that.
The problem with a guy like Jones is that when people start to base strategies or policies on such delusions, we all lose out. Do you think we are losing no great artistic or scientific minds in the African tragedy of AIDS? Does it really matter if the makeup of populations change by one outliving the other, or being more procreative, or eating better, or what if they just ethnically cleanse, water war, bomb, poison, or otherwise do each other in? And are we all so homogenous now? I'd rather not consider myself as the least common denominator.
I think the battles of evolution require a lot of creative thinking to elucidate if you are thinking about your own time, and even then all bets are off. If anything evolution will accelerate as we become able to modify/improve our genes more quickly than the natural rate. And lots more people in the world will gain the means to exterminate those with genes they dislike. Finally, Natural Selection is always in operation. You can't turn it off just because increased mobility makes it difficult to measure.
Evolution is sort of like a saying of Buckaroo Banzai's: Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.
and it also has as its theme, the killer app of the net which is email.
so the venue is the net, and the audience is
manipulated. windows visitors may have to have
a linux user explain the difficult parts.
The idea that the full potential of perhaps the
most important application by the world's richest man (tm?) is a new definition of subverting the common denominator. Applause to whom?
Perhaps some people would like mr. gates to be
mentioned on the site as artistic collaborator?
Suse on my Dell Inspiron 7.5K used to work with the suspend key, but no longer (X just hangs).
But ancient software is involved.
That said, rather than hibernation I'd prefer a software-UPS or time-rollback widget. How viable would it be to keep a very high frequency incremental save of state (even just the contents of a limited number of folders would be useful)?
It would be useful to be able to send your machine backwards in time without requiring everything to be in a database or versioning system that requires explicit saves. I'd like to be able to remove the effects of every command in the history of all shells in reverse, in the right order, and have high-granularity access to previous states of a filesystem.
If I could do that for all the relevant accounts on various machines it would be like never having to worry. I could leave the desk when I want to, kick the power cord or make meatheadded mistakes, and could keep a less paranoid number of full backups. I'd be worried about the life of my hard disk though. Already exists?
In Japan this happened with the government-run NHK which is two terrestrial and some satellite TV channels. NHK is the channel you go to when there is a big bumpy earthquake or a typhoon, and sometimes they have not so dry kind of interesting stuff too.
So NHK got the government to let them go door to door demanding cash from people all across the country, since people are watching their channels with no commercials on them, which means they must owe them something. Just started a couple years ago after many many years of free government TV.
The idea is if you pay, you get a shiny sticker which you post on your house, one a year. Of course everybody and his or her brother says to their question "Do you watch TV?", "Yeah! But I never watch NHK." Which is possible but difficult because you scan through two of their channels to hit the other five or so you get in Tokyo anyway.
When's the last time this happened? Not for a long time, then they showed up on 9-11 or within a day or so of it I remember. I best remember of course my intense anger (from the New York area doncha know) and I got really pissed off at the person who came to the door.
They went off never getting it, you know, that they could have been in the wrong. Even if technically they might not have been, though of course I never watch NHK intentionally now except when there is a typhoon or an earthquake.
Maybe Comcast could be reduced to a more pathetic lifeform like NHK, which also happens to be made of some quite corrupt and very nasty people at the top. Lucky they don't have spyware for the tv, yet.
Create a plan on how to use the money you
saved by not using Microsoft, or say that
you will give x dollars back to each taxpayer.
Possibly you could create a digital government
initiative which would reduce costs and provide
jobs to local talent pool, though it would not
be easy to show how/when you would save money.
Perhaps easiest is to look at example of a city
which has switched and modify it for your needs.
Also, you could calculate your liability in the
event that you actually had to pay Microsoft for
all of the liscenses and upgrades that they require. Perhaps it would work out to something
significant.. this money could be again, given back to the people, or better yet show some leadership and use it to hire people who can
save you more. Open source isn't just about money, it also means people can modify the code.
That's a community project and you could foster
the development of solutions for government starting at home, and take advantage of work done
elsewhere for other local governments.
Also you could check and see how many people have
ADSL or cable Internet access and see how happy they are. Maybe linux could be part of an initiative to give good access or other services to homeowners courtesy of the city and open source.
Unfortunately I was unable to view the page in my linux browser (sending me to a page to teach me about standards..) then after downloading an activex pane each page there is no content. Too bad since you have all these people looking. In particular comparing it right against Sorenson and WMP with nothing behind your words makes you wonder if you want to touch something like this out of the blue.
Anybody who could help is going to need more subtantial information, for example what you think are the pros/cons of the software as compared to competitors in your space, to help with diligence. GPL might be one way to do it, and people might love you for it, but it will very likely hurt your chances on liscensing or selling it outright at this stage and getting your money back.
In particular a number of companies that are likely to listen are here in Japan but GPL is not something they want, unless maybe you already have a big team building it through GPL. They know tech and make quick decisions if everything is clear and up front, that's your challenge.
Have an antivirus company move a large part of its assets into banks in one or more countries other than its home country.
Give a lawyer in each country bank account number and legal duty to withdraw all the money when it has been proven that that company has been compromised. The lawyer must open a new bank account for a competitor who has never been compromised.
Something tells me we will end up pretty quickly with a well-funded open source antivirus company!
Sorry I meant "another" embedded security agent in your home network.. :(
an embedded MS security agent in your private network.
Think, Sony Playstation II *created* the Japanese home DVD market. PCs in Japan have quickly tried to converge on home AV market and shortly we will have lots of home AV networked servers (like all the new Vaio towers for the past year).
Anything M$ would like more than to 0wn your house? It will be easy and convenient, and they will also get a revenue stream (a new one or through your utility or maybe NTT DoCoMo) in which lots of nice copyright charges can be inserted. Maybe a few bucks a month for the next DirectX, Harry Potter II on WMV/DVD without commercials, pay per view over DSL etc. It can be done with current technology and infrastructure and it would sell.
I'd guess if the U.S. lets them get away with this (leveraging OS monopoly using WMP which has already been a major tool in killing RealVideo Server, Darwin, Quicktime, etc etc) their company will be one of the most profitable in the 21st C.
So long as new software releases are closed source and break standards, they are laughing all the way to the bank.
You can be artistic or even create artworks with anything.. although I once found visual basic to be a big impediment.
If you have ever heard of an elegant mathematical proof or an elegant bit of code, this is something like what "artistic" is. It also could mean efficient, clear, etc.
I think you need to differentiate between
- traditional artworks like maybe oil paintings
- artworks which use digital media in some way
- making a statement with/through art
- craftsmanship
- intellectual and visual elegance i.e. of design
Hypercard? Yes, blech. But I hope you think about elegance or craftsmanship at least if you are turning your code out to the public.
We need more elegance in open source code because it tends to 1) make work fun/creative 2) make it run efficiently 3) reduces bugs 4) strong metaphor makes paradigm more powerful/extensible.
"the beta test"
Presumably this is due to 1) cost, 2) backdoors inserted by Microsoft, NSA, or other source.
:)
I think #1 is main because of a friend who got school and goverment in a French town to convert to his linux based preinstalled machines, and also because of the Florida examples.
Here's some questions then..
1. What if Microsoft provides source code or even ability to make own builds to selected institutions/countries if they pay/sign enough paper? Is there a price point at which Microsoft becomes interesting again? In Japan some cell phones cost a penny up front. Paid $5 for mine, but have to pay $100 a month..
2. How do apt-getters and up2daters really know they are getting nsa-backdoor-free binaries (besides having a server in their country rebuild all the binaries automatically..) I.e. how to make best case for linux security over M$. Doubt full answer is "duh, MD5".
3. Same as #2 for general case where citizen of country A wants to download distros/binaries from scary country B. "Scary" could be redefined as "France or worse" (regarding government-funded economic espionage policy). Maybe we need to have local, private, secure, trusted cross compiler studios to create a positive force at purifying the net..
4. Perhaps library/binary from non-U.S. country X might be relatively unsafe due to CIA-inserted backdoors/virii? Figure for example that China *will* make lots of attempts at doing this themselves against their own citizens now that we all and the U.S. government are giving them all these great ideas. 'Course maybe they would then promote linux to the hilt and then one democracy virus would wipe out their "Red Lantern" infrastructure..
5. (No, no need to flame) Are Microsoft ideas of subscriptions, or shared source, repugnant to government customers mainly because
a) they are morally bankrupt (i.e. crime against humanity)
b) would be a prior lien on a nation's prosperity (i.e. crime against your constituents)
c) your business and/or government could fail or worse if you made Microsoft an enemy by say falling in arrears
d) "information security"
e) "national security"
f) moot, we want MS (preinstalled base in our govt)
g) moot, we want MS (old established firm)
h) repugnant but only game in town
i) moot (who cares)
j) other (what?)
6. What is an effective way for private open source developers to make money on market constituted of all world governments' organs?
Obviously there is some kind of a barrier here regarding currency, local requirements, trust, obtaining contact information, every country being set up differently, etc.
I'm thinking 1) education software.. ideology agnostic (woops thats not really true). and 2) a best-practices database that would tell them what to buy. Oh, and 3) make something that saves money and sell to everyone including governments.
IANAP but two of these and an entangled atomic laser = mass duplication / transportation device?
With an atomic laser it is theorized that you can create a matter hologram, whatever that is, supposedly just like the original.
Wonder if it hangs around after you turn off the reference beam? It would be a bitch if you lost the original.. poof!
I had an Apple II and lots of other Macs through the ages, and a number of them were possible due to educational discounts. Donated my Apple II to my old school (kinda wish I had it now tho').
I believe the smooth, beautiful Mac user interface (doesn't have to be OS X) is superior to Windows because of its smoothness and ease of use (it was developed with cognitive science lessons heeded) and also because it has less of a corporate feel.
In other words, the same reasons designers prefer Macs is why kids should use them too. But there is *no reason on earth* why there should be *any* Microsoft software on those computers. This could be a great time for digital teaching materials, ebooks, and open source software to make waves.
This story is only about 5 years old. What's news?
Or is that the way the page is supposed to be??? I give up.
Nice lookin' page there.. Guess the public has nothing to fear from Magic Lantern if these are the security experts responsible for it.
I would guess there is a 90% probability that Microsoft's SP2 for Explorer has an FBI or NSA hole. Not that I spend a ton of time on security, it's just that Windows' dialing out already gave me a thousand dollar bill for triggering my router (got out of it luckily) and I have no more patience for sheer bloodymindedness on the part of the World's Richest Man and his cohorts, the U.S. government. Utterly ridiculous.
Xephem (a planetarium and analysis program for linux) is very cool because it can both pull the sky from your LX200 telescope or by replacing the telescope driver with a perl script, it can download part of the sky from an online database, after which you can do realtime image processing on it.
It can also match stars in the sky to stars in the database. So far I have only been able to pull down large segments of the sky at once, but as soon as I can clear the disk space I'll be trying some other pieces of software to try and download smaller pieces of the sky. Starry Night also downloads DSS (Digital Sky Survey) images I believe.
NASA Skyview service
Multimission Archive
StarView
Software for different platforms (or check freshmeat.net)
Serious scientific platforms/data
Skyview (available at IPAC) is available as linux binary and installs quickly at 10mb. It lets you do image analysis with text commands. I have not used it a lot myself.
AstroWeb
I know somebody there and think I'll ask them if they are planning on making security holes for every local law-enforcement agency. Could be a money maker but somehow I doubt it.. if it was China they would probably have to allow the government to install keyboard loggers on your pc through this Patriotic Remote Exploit facility. Unfortunately Japanese nuclear power plants are running Windows 95 as far as I could see from a recent newspaper photo.. (+3, Cynical, Despair)
You may be right. My reasoning about PHP is mainly due to
1) often needing to extend things and *knowing* I'll be able to do it in Perl.. PHP who knows?
(I tried PHP in the early stages and whenever I come back to it, it doesn't seem powerful enough)
and
2) looking at existing php code which maybe is not written by the best people.. I get tired of seeing every PHP page restating the code to get a database handle for example. I believe in abstracting code into reusable modules, and separating design from code (it bites me whenever I forget to do so, and you can see plenty of rants about that on perlmonks.org). I also often think of doing something in PHP just as I realize I would have to add some preprocessing before the data gets to the screen that would be harder in PHP.
Possibly these things could be done if I put more time into studying PHP, and certainly a very quick interface with minimal window dressing and error checking is a cinch in PHP. But I think you lose something, it just doesn't feel as powerful as Perl does.
That said, I'd much rather do PHP than say Cold Fusion if I was asked to use it, and I do make my own Perl templates that do some of what PHP does as well. So I suppose there are shades of grey. I'd love to see some good uses of it like you mention. Thanks.