The FAQ seems slashdotted, but if the currency is based on CPU time, inflation would not only be high (how many years between doubling of CPU capacity?) but also rather erratic. Every time Sony released a new 'super computer caliber' gaming station inflation would shoot up as the price of CPU time just went down.
You don't have the right to ignore laws you don't agree with.
Sorry
Only in a literal sense. You don't "have the right" to ignore a law - that's just by definition of a law. He was talking about what's evil, not what's lawful. In fact, without even taking a stance on whether this particular law is evil or not, I think we could safely say that following an evil law may in itself be evil.
Some will say these copyright laws harm our cultural wellbeing. With or without a 'right' to do so, I can see how some would say the morally correct action is civil disobedience.
In my experience that's far too long. Here's the message as seen by the user:
...permissions and integrity of your filesystem.
[More information] [Retry] [Ignore Error]
The customer would then assume the software has destroyed their filesystem. They'd call and leave a screaming voicemail starting something like 'Someone needs to call me RIGHT NOW.'
Messages need to be ten words or less to have a fighting chance. And I'm talking about simple words. Even then, people will still call in. We recently had a customer call in wondering what to do about this error in our shipping software: "you have to specify a weight greater than 0 pounds."
Here's how to make error messages work: make them simple and actionable for the sake of the literate. For the rest, charge per incident for support and hire a lot of cheap labour.
While your typical/.er might be on a 1-3 year upgrade cycle, a lot of people (ie older parents/grandparents) buy a Mac because it's "easier" and are more inclined to be on a 5-10 year cycle.
Great, then it'll take them 5 years to upgrade Firefox and notice something is wrong. Hey, that's just around the time they're upgrading their computer anyhow!
The whole thing needs a complete redesign. I think doing something to get rid of the whole HTML thing would be a giant improvement; just display things straight into a window from application code
Right. HTML is a great language for documents, horrible for applications. The solution you are looking for is called Cappuccino and it throws out HTML and CSS in favour of a regular Objective-C Cocoa like paradigm where you just draw in a window or place UI widgets using layout managers.
Trying to write a web application in HTML is like painting with a tennis ball for a brush. It's the wrong tool for the job and you'll spend half the time bending the various components to your will.
Yes seriously. I have lost count of how many times I had to force quite Photoshop just to get it to stop loading when all I wanted was to bring up a picture in Preview.
Let me put it this way: if you are seriously ill, you go to Germany. Not only are there endless queues in Sweden for any more complicated treatment but the survival rates are among Europe's lowest.
As a Swede I can say this comment is likely to just be rightist bias. I have never felt the need to go to Germany and know of no-one who has. Keep in mind that Swedes in general love to complain and the right wingers love it doubly so to draw attention to their alternative.
Medical care in Sweden is very good and close family members and myself have had excellent treatment available in a timely manner time and time again, for everything from surgery to life long conditions. By contrast, the one time I had a serious problem in the US - appendicitis - I was receiving new bills over a year after my day in the hospital and the numbers which my insurance had to cover were just astronomical. If I read the paperwork right I basically paid several years worth of salary for a three hour routine surgery. That just doesn't happen in Sweden. My last surgery in Sweden is just a memory and a scar - I don't even recall a single bill. Wait time was shorter than in San Jose, California in the US.
As someone else's signature here on Slashdot says: I like paying taxes. With it I buy civilization.
The professors who are afraid of calculators and automatic problem solvers are the same as those who think class attendance matter. A university, if anything in the world, should be a place for learning, not a very expensive kindergarten. In that perspective the activities of the students are irrelevant: if they learn practical abilities through Wolfram Alpha, great. If they don't, that's their problem. Ultimately the student is the paying customer. Professors much too often slide into this illusion of grandeur where they think the student owes them anything or needs to satisfy the professors when it's in fact the other way around.
If you choose to go to and pay for a university education, do it your way. If Wolfram Alpha gives you the insights you need, then that's the right tool for you. If your style of learning is snoozing under a tree, occasionally watching an apple fall, then do that. If you never go to a class in your life but you come out as the next Einstein you have succeeded. If you waste all your time 'cheating' that's your problem. You're the boss, you're the one paying for it.
And before somebody brings it up, grades are arbitrary statistics based on a flawed system. If they are affected by something as simple as the use of Wolfram Alpha that's just another demonstration of how little real world value they have.
If an engineer is working on a bridge and his supervisor orders him to use a dangerously weak cable, the engineer has both a moral and legal duty to refuse. The same principle ought to apply to software developers, especially when life and property are at stake.
But software is not built that way. Chances are this started out as a small project, at a small company, and then only grew later into something where security was an issue. In your analogy it'd perhaps be like an engineer designing a wooden park bridge, not knowing that in the future somebody would try to lay down an 8 lane highway on it. You wouldn't hold the engineer himself responsible for his work being overextended in a future scenario he did not account for.
So the true problem then is with the supervisor who allowed the project to grow out of reasonable bounds without properly revisiting the foundation.
I think that perhaps you are a little negative. Objective-C and Cocoa are different from C++ in some aspects but otherwise fairly straightforward. I believe a good C++ developer would have their first Cocoa mini application within a day and fancier stuff, such as drag and drop and custom UI components, within a week. From there on it only gets easier. There's a lot of power in the Cocoa UI kit.
What works in Adobe's advantage in this case is that they most likely have a pluggable UI architecture already since the application is already cross platform. The rest of the code base such as image opening and saving, filters, manipulation and so on is unlikely to contain even a line of Carbon code.
My mother speaks Estonian and can with some level of adaptation understand and express herself in a way that is understood by the Finnish, which I know for certain as my father is Finnish. Unfortunately, as I grew up in Sweden and was too much of an ungrateful kid to actually learn the languages of my parents, I can't directly comment on the similarity of the languages.
I second the opinion that the reference to an 'Estonian teenager' isn't very appropriate. It continues a strong, traditional and completely wrong tradition to separate 'us' and 'them'.
There's actually a website that does exactly this already. It's called StumbleUpon. You click a button and you're brought to a random page according to one of your many subscribed interests. If you like it, you say so, if you don't you vote it down. Bad pages don't get any up votes, or may even get down votes, and so they are quickly weeded out. Nice pages get some number of up votes and then subsequently get shown to more people who in turn might give them more up votes and so on.
I've written shipping software for a living. People do ship very expensive watches through UPS and FedEx, no problem. Like you hinted at in your posted yourself, the trick is just to pay for insurance.
Perhaps it's now only a matter of time before people start giving out CAD designs for free. These designs will be usable for creating all kinds of interesting things. Initially it might just be a design to make plastic chopsticks, but going forward people will open source component designs, which can then be reused in true 'object oriented design' fashion. You'll grab the design of nuts and bolts, electrical engines and cute little tires and since they're all open source you're free to combine them into a toy car. Then you release your toy car design online.
There's also digitalization: as we reinvent the world open source style we get 3D models of everything as a side effect. Computer games will be faster than ever to create because if you need to model a realistic garage you can just grab the open source models of walls, doors, cars, wrenches and everything else. It'll be like the perfect 3D model library since each object will be designed to work in real life and thus is the perfect counterpart 3D model at the same time.
A question that's even more interesting is when we'll see the first self replicating virus. It's first step is to create a 3D printer which know to print more 3D printers of the same type. Although driven by a computer program deep down, the virus is almost completely similar to natural viruses and bacteria in the way it replicates. What we today call an "anti virus program" may in the future be an "anti virus killer robot", as it needs to destroy physical copies of the virus.
The fact that a product is popular or 'has an impact' does not mean it is good. Consider Windows. As pointed out elsewhere, Java is not successful because of its features but because of the support from Sun, and because it has caught on with the academic community. The later is most likely precisely because it is a philosophical language.
Perhaps you are right - perhaps the problems I am experiencing are of a transient nature. But it turns out I've worked with Java every weekday and weekend for the last year and a half. If this is a temporary problem, I would like to move on to a language with fewer temporary problems.
Pardon my disdain for the academic; we have a stormy background, academia and I.
"So things like Ruby and PHP are really good for generating web pages. But as soon as you go beyond that, you get into trouble. And with so many enterprise applications, the web page is sort of the skin on the outside of the real application. And mostly scripting languages don't do the high-performance, large-scale computing very well." Because we all know how fast Java is. Just zips along really.
Java is a miserable failed academic experiment. It is written for the people who enjoy a healthy dose of philosophy in their work life, yet never actually need to work on anything practical. For the developers of Java, a programming language is not a tool to solve problems. It's an exercise in philosophy.
I work with Java professionally and I spend a frightful amount of my time just fixing the underlying system. Swing, lack of closures and multiple inheritance, lousy string handling, fantastically bloated code base, and so forth, are just some of the things that threaten my sanity on a day to day basis.
Who's to say that insects aren't actually doing better than humans at this point?
More importantly there's a huge difference between comparing two extremely similar technologies in a market with space for one, to comparing two entirely different species in a market with space for billions. Numbers will indeed determine the outcome in the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD race.
Slashdot Mirror
The FAQ seems slashdotted, but if the currency is based on CPU time, inflation would not only be high (how many years between doubling of CPU capacity?) but also rather erratic. Every time Sony released a new 'super computer caliber' gaming station inflation would shoot up as the price of CPU time just went down.
You don't have the right to ignore laws you don't agree with.
Sorry
Only in a literal sense. You don't "have the right" to ignore a law - that's just by definition of a law. He was talking about what's evil, not what's lawful. In fact, without even taking a stance on whether this particular law is evil or not, I think we could safely say that following an evil law may in itself be evil.
Some will say these copyright laws harm our cultural wellbeing. With or without a 'right' to do so, I can see how some would say the morally correct action is civil disobedience.
In my experience that's far too long. Here's the message as seen by the user:
...permissions and integrity of your filesystem.
[More information] [Retry] [Ignore Error]
The customer would then assume the software has destroyed their filesystem. They'd call and leave a screaming voicemail starting something like 'Someone needs to call me RIGHT NOW.'
Messages need to be ten words or less to have a fighting chance. And I'm talking about simple words. Even then, people will still call in. We recently had a customer call in wondering what to do about this error in our shipping software: "you have to specify a weight greater than 0 pounds."
Here's how to make error messages work: make them simple and actionable for the sake of the literate. For the rest, charge per incident for support and hire a lot of cheap labour.
While your typical /.er might be on a 1-3 year upgrade cycle, a lot of people (ie older parents/grandparents) buy a Mac because it's "easier" and are more inclined to be on a 5-10 year cycle.
Great, then it'll take them 5 years to upgrade Firefox and notice something is wrong. Hey, that's just around the time they're upgrading their computer anyhow!
The whole thing needs a complete redesign. I think doing something to get rid of the whole HTML thing would be a giant improvement; just display things straight into a window from application code
Right. HTML is a great language for documents, horrible for applications. The solution you are looking for is called Cappuccino and it throws out HTML and CSS in favour of a regular Objective-C Cocoa like paradigm where you just draw in a window or place UI widgets using layout managers.
Trying to write a web application in HTML is like painting with a tennis ball for a brush. It's the wrong tool for the job and you'll spend half the time bending the various components to your will.
Yes seriously. I have lost count of how many times I had to force quite Photoshop just to get it to stop loading when all I wanted was to bring up a picture in Preview.
Let me put it this way: if you are seriously ill, you go to Germany. Not only are there endless queues in Sweden for any more complicated treatment but the survival rates are among Europe's lowest.
As a Swede I can say this comment is likely to just be rightist bias. I have never felt the need to go to Germany and know of no-one who has. Keep in mind that Swedes in general love to complain and the right wingers love it doubly so to draw attention to their alternative.
Medical care in Sweden is very good and close family members and myself have had excellent treatment available in a timely manner time and time again, for everything from surgery to life long conditions. By contrast, the one time I had a serious problem in the US - appendicitis - I was receiving new bills over a year after my day in the hospital and the numbers which my insurance had to cover were just astronomical. If I read the paperwork right I basically paid several years worth of salary for a three hour routine surgery. That just doesn't happen in Sweden. My last surgery in Sweden is just a memory and a scar - I don't even recall a single bill. Wait time was shorter than in San Jose, California in the US.
As someone else's signature here on Slashdot says: I like paying taxes. With it I buy civilization.
The professors who are afraid of calculators and automatic problem solvers are the same as those who think class attendance matter. A university, if anything in the world, should be a place for learning, not a very expensive kindergarten. In that perspective the activities of the students are irrelevant: if they learn practical abilities through Wolfram Alpha, great. If they don't, that's their problem. Ultimately the student is the paying customer. Professors much too often slide into this illusion of grandeur where they think the student owes them anything or needs to satisfy the professors when it's in fact the other way around.
If you choose to go to and pay for a university education, do it your way. If Wolfram Alpha gives you the insights you need, then that's the right tool for you. If your style of learning is snoozing under a tree, occasionally watching an apple fall, then do that. If you never go to a class in your life but you come out as the next Einstein you have succeeded. If you waste all your time 'cheating' that's your problem. You're the boss, you're the one paying for it.
And before somebody brings it up, grades are arbitrary statistics based on a flawed system. If they are affected by something as simple as the use of Wolfram Alpha that's just another demonstration of how little real world value they have.
If an engineer is working on a bridge and his supervisor orders him to use a dangerously weak cable, the engineer has both a moral and legal duty to refuse. The same principle ought to apply to software developers, especially when life and property are at stake.
But software is not built that way. Chances are this started out as a small project, at a small company, and then only grew later into something where security was an issue. In your analogy it'd perhaps be like an engineer designing a wooden park bridge, not knowing that in the future somebody would try to lay down an 8 lane highway on it. You wouldn't hold the engineer himself responsible for his work being overextended in a future scenario he did not account for.
So the true problem then is with the supervisor who allowed the project to grow out of reasonable bounds without properly revisiting the foundation.
Check out Jamendo for cheap to license music which is actually pretty good.
I know, why don't we call it something easier than "illusion cloak." Something like... a photograph of an elephant!
Brilliant post. Clear and to the point, backed by cogent reasoning and checkable facts.
I think that perhaps you are a little negative. Objective-C and Cocoa are different from C++ in some aspects but otherwise fairly straightforward. I believe a good C++ developer would have their first Cocoa mini application within a day and fancier stuff, such as drag and drop and custom UI components, within a week. From there on it only gets easier. There's a lot of power in the Cocoa UI kit.
What works in Adobe's advantage in this case is that they most likely have a pluggable UI architecture already since the application is already cross platform. The rest of the code base such as image opening and saving, filters, manipulation and so on is unlikely to contain even a line of Carbon code.
My mother speaks Estonian and can with some level of adaptation understand and express herself in a way that is understood by the Finnish, which I know for certain as my father is Finnish. Unfortunately, as I grew up in Sweden and was too much of an ungrateful kid to actually learn the languages of my parents, I can't directly comment on the similarity of the languages.
I second the opinion that the reference to an 'Estonian teenager' isn't very appropriate. It continues a strong, traditional and completely wrong tradition to separate 'us' and 'them'.
Digg is down now. I guess they're going to take a step back and let people sleep on it, including the admins.
There's actually a website that does exactly this already. It's called StumbleUpon. You click a button and you're brought to a random page according to one of your many subscribed interests. If you like it, you say so, if you don't you vote it down. Bad pages don't get any up votes, or may even get down votes, and so they are quickly weeded out. Nice pages get some number of up votes and then subsequently get shown to more people who in turn might give them more up votes and so on.
I've written shipping software for a living. People do ship very expensive watches through UPS and FedEx, no problem. Like you hinted at in your posted yourself, the trick is just to pay for insurance.
Perhaps it's now only a matter of time before people start giving out CAD designs for free. These designs will be usable for creating all kinds of interesting things. Initially it might just be a design to make plastic chopsticks, but going forward people will open source component designs, which can then be reused in true 'object oriented design' fashion. You'll grab the design of nuts and bolts, electrical engines and cute little tires and since they're all open source you're free to combine them into a toy car. Then you release your toy car design online.
There's also digitalization: as we reinvent the world open source style we get 3D models of everything as a side effect. Computer games will be faster than ever to create because if you need to model a realistic garage you can just grab the open source models of walls, doors, cars, wrenches and everything else. It'll be like the perfect 3D model library since each object will be designed to work in real life and thus is the perfect counterpart 3D model at the same time.
A question that's even more interesting is when we'll see the first self replicating virus. It's first step is to create a 3D printer which know to print more 3D printers of the same type. Although driven by a computer program deep down, the virus is almost completely similar to natural viruses and bacteria in the way it replicates. What we today call an "anti virus program" may in the future be an "anti virus killer robot", as it needs to destroy physical copies of the virus.
It works in Safari 2.0.4, but it's not very interesting to look at. :)
Here's what "tabbed desktops" look like on a Mac: video of Virtue Desktops. So it's not exactly tabs but it sure saves you from stacking windows.
The fact that a product is popular or 'has an impact' does not mean it is good. Consider Windows. As pointed out elsewhere, Java is not successful because of its features but because of the support from Sun, and because it has caught on with the academic community. The later is most likely precisely because it is a philosophical language.
Perhaps you are right - perhaps the problems I am experiencing are of a transient nature. But it turns out I've worked with Java every weekday and weekend for the last year and a half. If this is a temporary problem, I would like to move on to a language with fewer temporary problems.
Pardon my disdain for the academic; we have a stormy background, academia and I.
Java is a miserable failed academic experiment. It is written for the people who enjoy a healthy dose of philosophy in their work life, yet never actually need to work on anything practical. For the developers of Java, a programming language is not a tool to solve problems. It's an exercise in philosophy.
I work with Java professionally and I spend a frightful amount of my time just fixing the underlying system. Swing, lack of closures and multiple inheritance, lousy string handling, fantastically bloated code base, and so forth, are just some of the things that threaten my sanity on a day to day basis.
Who's to say that insects aren't actually doing better than humans at this point?
More importantly there's a huge difference between comparing two extremely similar technologies in a market with space for one, to comparing two entirely different species in a market with space for billions. Numbers will indeed determine the outcome in the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD race.