FIrebombing, attempted firebombing, repeated assault, and even attempted murder (or manslaughter at the very least) are serious crimes that usually demand prison terms--sometimes lengthy ones. The animal rights activists probably think highly of themselves as brave and courageous but truth be told they just do these incredibly mean and destructive things, then go back to their drab little lives and 9-to-5 jobs at the end of the weekend. They probably believe they are making great sacrifices for their cause, and even compare themselves and their cause to the great causes they've all read about.
But, comparing them to those who have truly sacrificed for their cause they fall embarrassingly short. Think what you may about characters like Ghandi but he spent a significant amount of his adult life in prison for taking the actions he took. These bozos don't expect to be caught, tried, or punished. "I can't go to prison. I have to pick up Muffy from daycare at 6."
What's really depressing is these "cultural terrorists" are winning. {sigh}
As a former Newton developer, I am not surprised by the comparisons made today. I've carried Palms, Psions, Blackberrys and everything in-between all the while wishing for some of the very nice features my various flavors of Newton MessagePad had.
The point made that a desktop OS cannot be easily shoehorned into a smaller place cannot be overstated. Software designs, all software designs, have a "design center" that is the embodiment of the environment the original developers envisioned when they made their design decisions. Go too far from that vision and you find some of the tradeoffs those designers made are no longer best, and now possibly may be very bad indeed.
The Newton's programming environment, based on SELF, was augmented with lots of supporting functionality that made creating high-quality applications for the device pretty easy. But, the MessagePads themselves (and remember: this was about 13 year ago now) had insufficient processor power for the really good stuff. Then again, think back about the kinds of junk that infested Palm Pilots and other hand-helds back then! If the MessagePad had been allowed to grow as a platform as all other surviving brands had done, it would have been a powerhouse.
Finally, as a developer, I must point out that one of the problems that all devices like this face is that developers hate investing time learning a new platform. The Newton faced an extra challenge in that you had to learn a whole new programming language and programming model, too. For those of us who gave it a chance, we found the learning curve to be reasonable and the results satisfying. For many programmers, though, inertia and sheer laziness precludes anything that ventures out of their comfort zone.
This last problem, the lazy programmer problem, has cast shadows on much more than just Newton MessagePad sales.
Did you mean ADA, the "Americans with Disabilities Act"? Or, did you mean Ada, the
programming language first designed in the late 1970's and early 1980's? Ada, the programming
language, was actually an important step towards many of the things we take for granted today. It is
still used in many safety-critical environments and is a workhorse for military and aerospace applications
development.
Many of the complaints about Ada in its formative days were about its size and ambitious charter,
both of which seem quite modest by today's standards and language designs. Finally, most who
complain about it most have used it least (or not at all). Or, they don't have a good understanding
of the history of the development and evolution of programming languages over the last 30 years
and the role that Ada played in shaping it.
Time for the Fourth Estate to pick up the challenge. Its passivity and timidity post 9/11 and
the run-up to the war in Iraq fed this kind of arrogance. If we want to ensure Orwell's tale
is only cautionary and not prescient, the press will need to act quickly and deliberately,
challenging these bullies instead of simply being their mouthpieces. Quit worrying about
ratings; start worrying about credibility and the truth.
My first reaction to the (lengthy) article was simply, "it is a breath of fresh air to read something thoughtful and insightful on software patents." As part of full disclosure here, I should mention that I have one (6,865,655) and participated in the arcane and sometime frustrating process. That said, the author's point that "fixing" the system might not be the right thing to do, either gave me pause. He might have a point.
After participating in several start-ups, I can also attest that the number of patents held directly affects your valuation. The author alludes to this, "A patent seems to change the balance. It gives the acquirer an excuse to admit they couldn't copy what you're doing. It may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology." Right or wrong, it is one of the external measurements made by business today of a start-up's worth.
Software is the most complicated thing man has ever created. It isn't surprising that the Patent Office struggles. The question is, as software professionals, will we choose to help or just stand by like "art critics"? Software engineers usually see a bad system and want to immediately "chuck it", re-write it, and go again. We can't do that here. We need to do the thing we all hate most: on-going maintenance. We could help if we engage and participate. Perhaps more thoughtful discourse like this will help us get started. My 2-cents.
I thought there was some notion that we would not attempt to militarize space. Given the problems we already have with "space junk", orbiting materials left over from previous launches ranging in size from rivets and nuts to whole satellites, encouraging a "space race" of orbiting weapon systems (including weapons against communication) seems crazy and deeply disappointing.
I can only hope that such a space-race doesn't clog the low-Earth-orbit regions so legitimate, peaceful endeavors can continue without being pelted by the space-borne mine-field of junk left over from this disaster.
Congratulations to the GoF. Their observations of patterns of systems and behavior are well-described and well-cataloged in their book. I only wish the concepts and materials were conveyed better when taught.
Most of the time people start with the attitude "Let's start with the Visitor pattern" or something like that. The point of the patterns movement is there are common things that are done, wouldn't it be nice if we could talk about them with common terminology and use the full richness of our experience to ensure when we see the problem again that we don't make all the same mistakes we made last time.
I'd like to see it taught (and this can be in the programming shop, too) like this: "What are we trying to do? Where have we done something like this before? Doesn't this look like something we've done last month? Can you detect a pattern to all this?!"
Instead, what I often see if people spouting pattern names like one would name-drop at a party--the more you drop the more important you must be. Starting with the problem to be solved, the understanding of same, and then recognizing that we've seen this before, then naming the pattern is less flashy but is more the intent of the GoF IMHO.
Tommy, another project for this competition, was featured
at the lastest JavaONE in San Francisco in July. You can find
the link to the group here.
In addition to some really interesting technology, they've got a great video demonstrating the vehicle in action that drew whoops and applause in their talk at the conference.
Right now most of us have two buckets in our mail programs: our inbox and junk mail folders. If we did have 'sender ID' (or whatever wins) then we could have three (or more) buckets: known senders, inbox of unverifiable senders, and junk mail.
At first, we wouldn't get much traffic in the known senders bucket but there would eventually be a cross-over point where the vast majority of the mail we want to receive is funneled to the known senders folder and we stop paying attention to the regular inbox of unverifiable senders (or we only look in it a couple of times a day).
Of course whatever happens next will need to be evolutionary, but this path seems like a reasonable one to me.
There have been many times my offer to show people the capabilities of the Mac platform were rebuffed because, as they would say, "I spent years learning how to do this stuff on Windows. I couldn't invest that much time again!"
Though I would try to explain they would not be investing "years" of time, they couldn't believe it. They had been so soured by their Windows experience that they were both stuck and commited since, in their view, nobody else could have done it better (though they had nothing to base that opinion on).
I've stopped prostheletizing. But as a heavy user of both platforms (and others as well), it saddens me to see that such strong opinions are flamed about by folks with no experience or facts whatsoever.
It seems reasonable that the next step after podcasting would be to add video and then look for outlets like these to be the distribution medium. it might also be a welcomed new outlet for independent film makers who are left only with IFC and a few other places for their films, especially "shorts" (films typically under 30 minutes).
At last, perhaps there will be more than "500 channels and nothing on".
I have, at various parts of my life, tried to keep a diary or
notebook. This isn't because my life is particularly interesting
(it isn't) but becuase I thought that it would just turn into a
meaningless jumble if the days ran into weeks and years
with no accounting.
It wasn't until recently that I discovered that my email archive
was as much of a diary as I would ever have. It chronicled my
interests, actions, choices, and desires. It is a record of my
friendships and troubles. It followed my career, such as it is.
Perhaps the growing sizes of mail archives corresponds to a
shift in our culture from handwritten diaries to personal
electronic chronicles. And, like diaries, these chronicles
probably won't make sense to anybody 20 years from now
except, perhaps, you.
I was working in a COBOL shop in the late 1970s (I was young,
I needed the money) and management decided it would subject
all serious job candidates for the IT department of this little
manufacturing company to a "programmer's aptitude test".
But, before they did that, they wanted a baseline from the
existing employees. I took the test.
I did well very well against the "average" of those who had
taken the test (supposedly). But, what does this prove? Most
of these kinds of tests look for the mechanical "put this here, put that there" process-of-elimination kinds of activities. The
real challenge in using a computer as a tool is understanding
how to generalize and extrapolate, skills
I've never seen these tests assess.
We now have a generation of people who know how to do some things but have not learned why they system works--an insight that would make them an order of magnitude more effective with these tools.
The how vs. why wasn't explored in those tests from 25 years ago; I've not seen any evidence that tests of today explore it either.
You're right about Hubble being scratched by NASA leadership. My hasty wording made my serious point about ceding leadership in space sciences into flamebait. [And, upon reading it again, the flamebait tag was well-deserved.]
That said, leadership comes from the top. If leaders in the White House and Congress had thought that continued support of Hubble and Voyager were worthy, that would have set the tone and neither project would today be in trouble.
I stand corrected on your point of money being allocated but the NASA administrator not doing the right thing.
Perhaps it would be best if we were to convince the Japanese that they should take over the stewardship of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Voyager Probe, both of which are now slated for abandonment by the Bush administration. This would give the Japanese the ability to take over efforts that were well run and highly successful. As discussed here on slashdot, the very small costs would hardly be a blip compared to their current plans.
Americans could then consider this just one more instance of outsourcing under the Bush administration, a policy that they've applauded.
-- Scott
> Your average blogger doesn't spend $10, let alone
> $1,000, and most political blogs are not for one specific
> SF candidate.
If they rent space in a NOC, the rack, power, and packets could very easily be over $80 a month, which brings you very close to that magic $1000 for a year's efforts.
-- Scott
The end of the fairness doctrine during the Regan administration has blown the lid off of most any effort to have accountability on the airwaves and elsewhere. Instead of politicians speaking directly, their message is usually delivered by proxies. The Republicans have been masterful at this, deferring to talk radio hosts much of their message. Since the Right(tm) nearly owns all of the AM dial and all of the FM talk dial not associated with Public Radio, this has been an very effective conduit for them.
Even if some wrong-headed blog-managing rules were put into place by SF, CA or the US, proxies would appear quickly and funnel the same information to those who might listen, with the source one-level-removed.
Attempting to regulate speech is problematic, as I'm sure those behind this effort will discover.
It would be interesting to understand how much of this is due to the underlying computer infrastructure failing and how much is due to a particular application's failure. Certainly, there has been technology available for decades to make the platform reliable.
I'm wondering how it is we've managed to lower our expectations to the point where we thought such failures were anything but outrageous?
Skip the Kirk/Spock tie-in and stick with the major premise: There are a number of coming-of-age shows on TV right now that are well accepted (if not well done). Hospital shows about young doctors in training, for example. So long as it is more like a military academy drama setting sans the militaristic feel, and not like "Police Academy", I think it could fly.
Slashdot Mirror
FIrebombing, attempted firebombing, repeated assault, and even attempted murder (or manslaughter at the very least) are serious crimes that usually demand prison terms--sometimes lengthy ones. The animal rights activists probably think highly of themselves as brave and courageous but truth be told they just do these incredibly mean and destructive things, then go back to their drab little lives and 9-to-5 jobs at the end of the weekend. They probably believe they are making great sacrifices for their cause, and even compare themselves and their cause to the great causes they've all read about.
But, comparing them to those who have truly sacrificed for their cause they fall embarrassingly short. Think what you may about characters like Ghandi but he spent a significant amount of his adult life in prison for taking the actions he took. These bozos don't expect to be caught, tried, or punished. "I can't go to prison. I have to pick up Muffy from daycare at 6."
What's really depressing is these "cultural terrorists" are winning. {sigh}
The point made that a desktop OS cannot be easily shoehorned into a smaller place cannot be overstated. Software designs, all software designs, have a "design center" that is the embodiment of the environment the original developers envisioned when they made their design decisions. Go too far from that vision and you find some of the tradeoffs those designers made are no longer best, and now possibly may be very bad indeed.
The Newton's programming environment, based on SELF, was augmented with lots of supporting functionality that made creating high-quality applications for the device pretty easy. But, the MessagePads themselves (and remember: this was about 13 year ago now) had insufficient processor power for the really good stuff. Then again, think back about the kinds of junk that infested Palm Pilots and other hand-helds back then! If the MessagePad had been allowed to grow as a platform as all other surviving brands had done, it would have been a powerhouse.
Finally, as a developer, I must point out that one of the problems that all devices like this face is that developers hate investing time learning a new platform. The Newton faced an extra challenge in that you had to learn a whole new programming language and programming model, too. For those of us who gave it a chance, we found the learning curve to be reasonable and the results satisfying. For many programmers, though, inertia and sheer laziness precludes anything that ventures out of their comfort zone.
This last problem, the lazy programmer problem, has cast shadows on much more than just Newton MessagePad sales.
And I'm sure the *NIX and VMS marketplace remembers saying that Microsoft can have the desktop but _WE_ own the server room.
Did you mean ADA, the "Americans with Disabilities Act"? Or, did you mean Ada, the programming language first designed in the late 1970's and early 1980's? Ada, the programming language, was actually an important step towards many of the things we take for granted today. It is still used in many safety-critical environments and is a workhorse for military and aerospace applications development.
Many of the complaints about Ada in its formative days were about its size and ambitious charter, both of which seem quite modest by today's standards and language designs. Finally, most who complain about it most have used it least (or not at all). Or, they don't have a good understanding of the history of the development and evolution of programming languages over the last 30 years and the role that Ada played in shaping it.
Time for the Fourth Estate to pick up the challenge. Its passivity and timidity post 9/11 and the run-up to the war in Iraq fed this kind of arrogance. If we want to ensure Orwell's tale is only cautionary and not prescient, the press will need to act quickly and deliberately, challenging these bullies instead of simply being their mouthpieces. Quit worrying about ratings; start worrying about credibility and the truth.
My first reaction to the (lengthy) article was simply, "it is a breath of fresh air to read something thoughtful and insightful on software patents." As part of full disclosure here, I should mention that I have one (6,865,655) and participated in the arcane and sometime frustrating process. That said, the author's point that "fixing" the system might not be the right thing to do, either gave me pause. He might have a point.
After participating in several start-ups, I can also attest that the number of patents held directly affects your valuation. The author alludes to this, "A patent seems to change the balance. It gives the acquirer an excuse to admit they couldn't copy what you're doing. It may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology." Right or wrong, it is one of the external measurements made by business today of a start-up's worth.
Software is the most complicated thing man has ever created. It isn't surprising that the Patent Office struggles. The question is, as software professionals, will we choose to help or just stand by like "art critics"? Software engineers usually see a bad system and want to immediately "chuck it", re-write it, and go again. We can't do that here. We need to do the thing we all hate most: on-going maintenance. We could help if we engage and participate. Perhaps more thoughtful discourse like this will help us get started. My 2-cents.
Based on my experience with the Patent Office, even if they were presented with a working model it would still take them four years to process it.
-- Scott
I thought there was some notion that we would not attempt to militarize
space. Given the problems we already have with "space junk", orbiting
materials left over from previous launches ranging in size from rivets and
nuts to whole satellites, encouraging a "space race" of orbiting weapon
systems (including weapons against communication) seems crazy and
deeply disappointing.
I can only hope that such a space-race doesn't clog the low-Earth-orbit
regions so legitimate, peaceful endeavors can continue without being
pelted by the space-borne mine-field of junk left over from this disaster.
Congratulations to the GoF. Their observations of patterns of systems and behavior are well-described and well-cataloged in their book. I only wish the concepts and materials were conveyed better when taught.
Most of the time people start with the attitude "Let's start with the Visitor pattern" or something like that. The point of the patterns movement is there are common things that are done, wouldn't it be nice if we could talk about them with common terminology and use the full richness of our experience to ensure when we see the problem again that we don't make all the same mistakes we made last time.
I'd like to see it taught (and this can be in the programming shop, too) like this: "What are we trying to do? Where have we done something like this before? Doesn't this look like something we've done last month? Can you detect a pattern to all this?!"
Instead, what I often see if people spouting pattern names like one would name-drop at a party--the more you drop the more important you must be. Starting with the problem to be solved, the understanding of same, and then recognizing that we've seen this before, then naming the pattern is less flashy but is more the intent of the GoF IMHO.
Once they get you there, wait until they quote you for the return trip!
-- Scott
Tommy, another project for this competition, was featured at the lastest JavaONE in San Francisco in July. You can find the link to the group here.
In addition to some really interesting technology, they've got a great video demonstrating the vehicle in action that drew whoops and applause in their talk at the conference.
-- Scott
Right now most of us have two buckets in our mail programs: our inbox and junk mail folders. If we did have 'sender ID' (or whatever wins) then we could have three (or more) buckets: known senders, inbox of unverifiable senders, and junk mail.
At first, we wouldn't get much traffic in the known senders bucket but there would eventually be a cross-over point where the vast majority of the mail we want to receive is funneled to the known senders folder and we stop paying attention to the regular inbox of unverifiable senders (or we only look in it a couple of times a day).
Of course whatever happens next will need to be evolutionary, but this path seems like a reasonable one to me.
-- Scott
Also of note is Pixar at number 9. So, Steve Jobs is 2 of the 10.
-- Scott
There have been many times my offer to show people the
capabilities of the Mac platform were rebuffed because,
as they would say, "I spent years learning how to do
this stuff on Windows. I couldn't invest that much time again!"
Though I would try to explain they would not be investing
"years" of time, they couldn't believe it. They had been so
soured by their Windows experience that they were both
stuck and commited since, in their view, nobody else could
have done it better (though they had nothing to base that
opinion on).
I've stopped prostheletizing. But as a heavy user of both
platforms (and others as well), it saddens me to see that
such strong opinions are flamed about by folks with no
experience or facts whatsoever.
-- Scoott
It seems reasonable that the next step after podcasting would be to add video and then look for outlets like these to be the distribution medium. it might also be a welcomed new outlet for independent film makers who are left only with IFC and a few other places for their films, especially "shorts" (films typically under 30 minutes).
At last, perhaps there will be more than "500 channels and nothing on".
-- Scott
Does this mean that, officially, Apple outlasted IBM in the
personal computer industry?
-- Scott
I have, at various parts of my life, tried to keep a diary or notebook. This isn't because my life is particularly interesting (it isn't) but becuase I thought that it would just turn into a meaningless jumble if the days ran into weeks and years with no accounting.
It wasn't until recently that I discovered that my email archive was as much of a diary as I would ever have. It chronicled my interests, actions, choices, and desires. It is a record of my friendships and troubles. It followed my career, such as it is. Perhaps the growing sizes of mail archives corresponds to a shift in our culture from handwritten diaries to personal electronic chronicles. And, like diaries, these chronicles probably won't make sense to anybody 20 years from now except, perhaps, you.
Just a thought (or, perhaps half of one).
-- Scott
I was working in a COBOL shop in the late 1970s (I was young, I needed the money) and management decided it would subject all serious job candidates for the IT department of this little manufacturing company to a "programmer's aptitude test". But, before they did that, they wanted a baseline from the existing employees. I took the test.
I did well very well against the "average" of those who had taken the test (supposedly). But, what does this prove? Most of these kinds of tests look for the mechanical "put this here, put that there" process-of-elimination kinds of activities. The real challenge in using a computer as a tool is understanding how to generalize and extrapolate, skills I've never seen these tests assess.
We now have a generation of people who know how to do some things but have not learned why they system works--an insight that would make them an order of magnitude more effective with these tools.
The how vs. why wasn't explored in those tests from 25 years ago; I've not seen any evidence that tests of today explore it either.
-- Scott
You're right about Hubble being scratched by NASA leadership.
My hasty wording made my serious point about ceding leadership in space sciences into flamebait. [And, upon reading it again, the flamebait tag was well-deserved.]
That said, leadership comes from the top. If leaders in the White House and Congress had thought that continued support of Hubble and Voyager were worthy, that would have set the tone and neither project would today be in trouble.
I stand corrected on your point of money being allocated but the NASA administrator not doing the right thing.
Perhaps it would be best if we were to convince the Japanese that they should take over the stewardship of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Voyager Probe, both of which are now slated for abandonment by the Bush administration. This would give the Japanese the ability to take over efforts that were well run and highly successful. As discussed here on slashdot, the very small costs would hardly be a blip compared to their current plans.
Americans could then consider this just one more instance of outsourcing under the Bush administration, a policy that they've applauded. -- Scott> Your average blogger doesn't spend $10, let alone > $1,000, and most political blogs are not for one specific > SF candidate. If they rent space in a NOC, the rack, power, and packets could very easily be over $80 a month, which brings you very close to that magic $1000 for a year's efforts. -- Scott
The end of the fairness doctrine during the Regan administration has blown the lid off of most any effort to have accountability on the airwaves and elsewhere. Instead of politicians speaking directly, their message is usually delivered by proxies. The Republicans have been masterful at this, deferring to talk radio hosts much of their message. Since the Right(tm) nearly owns all of the AM dial and all of the FM talk dial not associated with Public Radio, this has been an very effective conduit for them.
Even if some wrong-headed blog-managing rules were put into place by SF, CA or the US, proxies would appear quickly and funnel the same information to those who might listen, with the source one-level-removed.
Attempting to regulate speech is problematic, as I'm sure those behind this effort will discover.
Stupid arguments 4 years old or older should also be below my threshold, regardless of moderator point assignments.
Now that would be be a feature I could really use. This would be an excellent test case.
-- Scott
It would be interesting to understand how much of this
is due to the underlying computer infrastructure failing and how
much is due to a particular application's failure. Certainly, there
has been technology available for decades to make the platform
reliable.
I'm wondering how it is we've managed to lower our
expectations to the point where we thought such failures
were anything but outrageous?
-- Scott
Skip the Kirk/Spock tie-in and stick with the major premise:
There are a number of coming-of-age shows on TV right now that are well accepted (if not well done). Hospital shows about young doctors in training, for example. So long as it is more like a military academy drama setting sans the militaristic feel, and not like "Police Academy", I think it could fly.
-- Scott