The mere appearance of a phrase like frame-shattering paradigm-shift pegs the needle on my bullshit detector. It's not just buzzword-compliant, it is redundantly so.
The more unique or the more quality or quantity of things that you bring to people, the more money you will get.
This is quite simply not true, and even a cursory examination of the products on the shelves of your local grocery or department store will disabuse you of this utopian notion pretty quickly. Price and quality are important, but it is arguable whether they are the most important factors in the success of a product, and quality is largely subjective anyway.
Marketing is the manipulation of perceptions, and that is what really drives sales. Wal-Mart offers neither the best quality nor the lowest prices, for example, but they have successfully convinced a very large number of people that they do, and that's as good as the real thing. There are a lot of market forces at work in the success or failure of a product, and it is often the case that the best products and the hardest-working people fail miserably.
Mind you, I don't think this is the way it should be, but absent some really far-reaching regulation, that's just the way it is in a free market, and it's why there are degrees in things like business and marketing. And yes, virtually all of the other factors amount to unscrupulous behavior to one degree or another. If you'd like that to change, the first step lies in recognizing the market as it actually is.
I hate to belabor the obvious, but it's no wonder soil bacteria are resistant to antibiotics: they live in close proximity with the same fungi that evolved antibiotic chemicals to combat them. While we humans are doing a pretty poor job of judiciously using antibiotics and we are probably creating some real long-term problems by polluting the environment with antibiotics and disinfectants, we shouldn't forget that we didn't invent antibiotics, we discovered them. There are going to be lots of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics simply because they evolved in an environment rich in fungi that produce them.
If you want to worry about antibiotic resistant bacteria capable of causing disease in humans, hospitals are a much bigger breeding ground than soil, which harbors innumerable species of bacteria that are harmless to us or even beneficial agriculturally, and only a few that can do us harm.
While Galileo is an improvement over GPS in many ways, the main issue is that the EU doesn't trust the US, and with damned good reason. The EU states need a system they can count on to be available at all times, not just when the US feels like sharing.
Articles like this embarrass me as an American. If it was the other way around, and the EU had a monopoly on global positioning systems, do you think we would hesitate for a second to launch our own? Any state or power bloc with the ability to launch such a system almost certainly will do so in order to avoid dependency on a potentially hostile foreign power.
Eh? I finally stopped using desktop PCs altogether once roughly equivalent laptops fell into the humanly-affordable range. I find that the laptop is a *lot* more flexible. I can use it in different rooms or take it out somewhere. The only limit on where I can work is battery life or the availability of outlets. When I'm doing a lot of typing, I put it on a stand and use an external keyboard. I suppose I could hook it up to an external monitor as well, but I shelled out the extra money for one of the better built-in screens. The flat-panel screens where I work are markedly inferior to my laptop's screen.
Everything you say about laptops is true of desktop machines. It's just that desktop machines don't have built-in keyboards and monitors for those occasions when you don't have extras handy.
Jiminy, I don't give three-quarters of a rat's ass about movies on BluRay. I want these turkeys to go ahead and get their consumer market rolling along so I can get a writable BluRay drive and start burning spindles full of data DVD-R's to a handful of BluRay discs.
If Cervantes had written Don Quixote today, the erstwhile knight-errant would be designing alternative keyboard layouts instead of tilting at windmills.
What amazes me is that real people continue to invest gobs of real money in actually manufacturing products that are essentially doomed from the start. Yes, the standard QWERTY keyboard sucks, but for a variety of reasons anything that replaces it has to be a lot better than the marginal improvement offered by mere variations on the theme. If it were otherwise, we'd all be using Dvorak keyboards now.
Personally I like a desktop which puts 95% of the functionality that most users are ever likely to need in front of them and hides the rest.
The problem with GNOME isn't that "the rest" are hidden, it's that they aren't available at all. I don't tend to customize my desktop a whole bunch, but most of the relative handful of things I do like to change aren't configurable in GNOME.
It's hard for me to feel much passion about the GNOME vs KDE debate. Both of them suck, and suck badly, compared to either OSX or XP (with the eye-candy crap turned off on the latter). After using Linux most of the time since '97, I finally said fuck it last year and installed XP. I still program, both professionally and my own hobby stuff, on Linux servers, and do so enthusiastically, but I'm seriously thinking of deleting the Linux partition on my laptop because I haven't booted into it for months.
It seems to me that there is a false dichotomy between technical types and end users. Even if you are a software engineer, you are also an end user in areas where you are not a specialist. Because I write database applications, I want total control and zero hand-holding while I'm doing that. On the other hand, when I want to copy some old home movies on VHS to a DVD, I want both hardware and software that are pure point-and-drool. I would certainly feel differently if I was deep into video editing as a job or even a hobby, but I'm not. Same thing when I want to burn a CD or when I'm indulging in various creative hobbies. Not everything has to be a big production, and certainly not every trivial task needs to be an exercise in technical machismo.
Why are the commercial GUIs so much more polished than the free GUIs? Truly, I don't think it's the lack of programming resources. Ever look at the source code for GNOME and KDE? The developers on those projects are pretty damn good. I think it's because Microsoft and Apple test their interfaces with real live end users, observe their interactions, and listen to their feedback. Open Source GUI developers, on the other hand, seem to indulge in a lot of baseless speculation about what users want without ever actually asking. Or else they code for their own preferences, which is fine, but isn't likely to attract much of a userbase.
I think Microsoft and Apple get credit for that one -- WinThis, MacThat, yada yada. Apple did it first, though.;)
What I really get tired of are the prefixes on app names indicating the language they're written in. Java, PHP, and lately Python programmers are the worst culprits. What does any user care what the development language is? Shit, I'm a professional software engineer, and *I* don't care. Sure, I care if it's a library because it actually matters then, but not with applications. Christ, I wish these people would jGo phpFuck pyThemselves.
FWIW, I have a Pentium 120 with 48 megs of RAM that I have set up to dual boot Win98 and Linux. Both of them run acceptably fast. I wouldn't try running XP and Photoshop on the poor old thing, but then I wouldn't try running X, Enlightenment, and the GIMP on it, either. I have a much nicer and more recent laptop now that I got as a desktop replacement, but I still carry the old one around because it's perfectly adequate for email and word processing (Word 97), and it wouldn't be a great loss if it got stolen or dropped.
The simple fact of the matter is that, depending on what you do with them, computers became fast enough for most common tasks many years ago. The average Slashdotter feels the need for higher performance -- God knows I do -- a great deal more than the average user. Aside from games and some specialized applications, the main reason that systems continue to become larger and faster is the incestuous relationship between MS and hardware manufacturers: more machines sold mean more Windows licenses, so Windows becomes ever more resource-intensive to require new machines to be sold.
I just downloaded 1.5 RC3 to try out the featured applet, and it seems faster than the older release I was using, and it still weighs in many tens of megs lighter than MSIE.
If it was me, I'd tell prospective students that prospects are really bleak, like north of England bleak. That way, they'd pick another field, the shortage of new recruits would continue, and wages might start to go up again.
English is already capable of ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning, as are most languages. It has always been that way. One of the reasons that people have been arguing about the significance of the Old Testament for thousands of years is that ancient Hebrew was an especially flexible and ambiguous language.
As far as short units of meaning go, summaries of longer works (epitomes) and collections of epigrams were very popular among the Greeks and Romans, and the potentials of text with absent or obscured meanings were pretty much explored around the beginning of the last century by the literary arms of movements like Dada and Surrealism.
I don't mean to suggest that these things aren't interesting and possibly useful, but they are by no means new.
Actually, what is likely to happen is that virtually any literary patent will be vulnerable to prior art claims. Unless you get very, very specific, it is exceedingly difficult to describe a story that hasn't been written before.
What are the overall goals of OSS? I suspect you'd get 10 different answers from 5 different people.
I contribute to various FOSS projects in order to help people. That's the beginning, middle, and end of my motivation -- to be helpful. At the very minimum, I'm helping someone save money. At the other end of the scale, I could be one of the folks working on software for people with handicaps, in which case that's even more significant help.
The overwhelming majority of people use Windows. There are a lot of reasons for that, and depending on what you're doing and how savvy you are, you may not have a choice. Am I going to refuse to help people because I don't like their OS vendor? No, that would be petty.
It's ironic that so many of the zealots forget that Stallman's Free Software ideology is, at root, an exhortation to share with others. That's a noble goal, IMHO. Being a narrow-minded ideologue is not.
And so we'll probably have artifical intelligence shortly.
I believed that when they were saying the same thing in the 70's. I still believed it in the 80's. Now I just think it's full of shit.
If someone manages to produce strong AI, it will be as an accidental byproduct of something else. It will be a long, long time before we understand biological intelligence well enough to produce a mechanical replica.
Whenever OOo comes up, I make the same complaint, and invariably, someone tells me I'm a clueless asshole, but it's gotten to be a tradition now, so I'll do it again.
My benchmark for office suite comparisons is MS Office 97. I have used all of the subsequent versions of MS Office at work, but I always install Office 97 on my own machines. The reason for this is that, aside from functionality mostly aimed at group collaboration, there have been no significant changes in Word or Excel in the last eight years, so why bother upgrading?
Well, there has been one significant change -- the same functionality requires vastly more resources in later versions of Office. Office 97 runs comfortably on an old 120MHz Pentium I laptop with 32 megs of RAM that I like to haul around when I'd rather not risk losing my more recent and expensive desktop replacement laptop. Office 2003 or XP? Forget it.
As near as I can tell, OpenOffice has reached feature-parity with MS Office for single-user purposes; I can't speak to its collaboration features. There are some aspects of its interface that I don't much like, but I suspect that's mostly a matter of familiarity. But it is a giant, shrieking, slow resource hog, and I wouldn't use it on anything other than a fairly recent machine. It is, moreover, slower than Office 2003.
Now, as I noted at the start of the post, someone will inevitably -- and generally without much tact -- argue that some theoretical user population, like corporate office users, will have the latest machines and not be bothered by this. That might even be true in some cases, though my experience has been that most companies don't upgrade machines unless they absolutely have to. But that's the point to some extent: why should anyone have to perform a hardware upgrade to get the same level of functionality that was available back in 1997? Word processors and spreadsheets are mature application categories; shouldn't they become more efficient as time goes by?
Make no mistake about it, I am not a Microsoft partisan. I am as enthusiastic about the promise of FOSS as I was a decade ago. I am thrilled that OpenOffice exists. But I am deeply disappointed that in so many cases -- and OpenOffice is but one of many -- free software is just as bloated as its commercial counterparts. It may be that in the corporate environment, the cost of hardware upgrades is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of endless Microsoft software licenses. (In fact, I'm pretty sure it is true.) But for the private individual, that's often not the case.
First off, I should issue a disclaimer that I'm an oldbie. I started programming in assembly language on punch cards, but no, this isn't going to be a rant about youngsters and their newfangled languages. (At least it better not be; my current job has me living, breathing, and eating PHP.)
The problem with bad software today -- just like it was thirty years ago -- is bad engineering. It's not because of the methodology du jour (or its absence), licensing, choice of language, or toolsets. You can write brilliant, bug-free, efficient software in COBOL using the basic procedural structured programming paradigm. You can write awful, buggy, resource-hungry software in object-oriented Java using XP. None of that shit matters.
Good engineering requires, among other things, a detailed understanding of the problem, thorough planning, the sheer experience required to distinguish between the clever and overcomplicated on one hand, and the lucid and elegant on the other, excellent communication between developers, foresight (also borne of experience), and rigorous debugging. All of these things, including the many other prerequisites not mentioned, require lots of time and effort. Too much time and effort, in fact, for most commercial software outfits to invest and still turn a profit.
That's the rub, really. All the methodology and language fads aside, the basic principles of good software engineering were worked out decades ago, and sometimes further -- good generic engineering practices in the abstract were worked out long before we harnessed electricity. It all comes down to this: the more time, effort, and care you put into a product, all other things being equal, the better the product will be. It's easy (and well-deserved) to mock Microsoft for the shoddiness of their major products, but that very shoddiness is why you can buy MS Word for less than ten grand. If MS built word processors the way engineers built the Golden Gate Bridge, the prices would be comparable.
The market does not reward that kind of quality. In the first place, no one is willing to pay thousands of dollars for a supremely excellent product when one that is good enough can be had for a couple hundred. Most folks couldn't afford that kind of software engineering even if they wanted it. In the second place, once you have the perfect all-in-one software package, why would you ever buy another one? Microsoft is in this position already with its good-enough products. No one needs an upgrade, so remaining profitable requires MS to churn out new versions of its increasingly resource-intensive operating system so that you at least have to buy new copies as you replace your older machines.
FOSS is at least theoretically invulnerable to these pressures. In theory, there will eventually be all-singing all-dancing FOSS packages covering all of the major software categories, and the age of commercial mass-market software will be at an end. I've been waiting for this day to come since well before the first release of Linux. I'm surprised that it hasn't come yet. I'm surprised that the majority of FOSS software is still as buggy, poorly designed, and -- almost without exception -- undocumented as its commercial equivalents.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Excellence in software engineering is like excellence in any other field: it's really fucking hard. It's even harder when you have a day job; time constraints aside, after 8-12 hours coding at work, the last thing many developers want to look at when they get home is compiler output. Many of the remainder are either amateurs or students -- not to diss either category, but often the necessary experience is lacking, and the lone hacker often lacks the knowledge or the inclination to produce code that's easy for other developers to work with. I remain confident that we'll get there, though. (I am less confident that I will still care by then, but it will still be a boon to those who live to see that day.) I am equally certain, for the reasons
The difference is that in Ye Olde Days, a programmer had to understand all of that complexity because he had to code it himself. Today's systems are more complex, but the average programmer only has to understand the interfaces presented by various pre-packaged APIs and components that hide the complexity -- which was presumably understood by the specialist programmers who designed those components.
The sad truth of the matter is that both the oldbies and the newbies are wrong. Contrary to what the oldbies think, the field is now sufficiently large that it's not possible to understand all of the complexities, and you don't need to understand all of them. The newbies, on the other hand, are so wrapped up in their reflexive sophomoric belief that new = better that they miss the valuable point that their predecessors are making: sometimes, you can write better software if you know what's going on inside the black box.
This reminds me of the pointless flamewar that erupts from time to time between hard-core assembly language programmers and the users (but seldom the developers) of optimizing compilers. There is a popular but mistaken belief that today's optimizing compilers can outperform hand-coded assembly. Even for some fairly trivial cases, this is simply not true, but you have to be an experienced assembly language programmer to even make the comparison between human-generated and machine-generated code.
What I think the oldbies are really lamenting -- at least *I* am lamenting it, having been programming since the punch-card era -- is the declining level of skill necessary to write software. In the old days, it had to be not only good, but actually excellent code, because the hardware wasn't fast or capacious enough to handle the kind of code that's the norm these days. No one -- well, very few of us -- wrote code in assembly language because we wanted to; we did it because we had to. And from this, there was the usual pride that arises from what amounted to fine craftsmanship. Nowadays, the economics of software development have shifted so that it is just too goddamn expensive to build code that way, not that it's more expensive than it ever was, but because it's so much cheaper to throw some fresh junior college grads at it and call it good. That they come complete with the arrogance of ignorance only adds insult to injury.
This is not the first time this has happened. You heard similar complaints from all of the craftsmen who were put out of work by the industrial revolution. Fine, hand-crafted furniture is stronger, longer-lasting, and (arguably) more attractive than the particle-board and veneered junk that comes out of industrial furniture factories, but no one can afford the "good" stuff anymore, and the cheap junk is good enough.
The difference in quality is not imaginary. Compare the old MS-DOS editor, QEdit, with the trivial and ubiquitous Unix editor, PICO. QEdit, which was written in assembly language and is completely statically linked, weighed in somewhere around 48k and included vastly more capabilities as well as a fairly sophisticated macro language. PICO, which doesn't have much in the way of capabilities at all and is written in a high-level language, weighs in at 171k and then dynamically links in some more libraries, occupying over a meg of RAM before it has even loaded a file.
Would the average user notice any difference in performance if all code was written the old way? Yes, especially -- but not exclusively -- on older machines. The problem is that the average user couldn't afford to buy software built that way, any more than the average person can afford to furnish their entire home with fine handcrafted furniture.
What surprises me, however, is that in the free software world, where such economic considerations do not apply, the free apps are often not much better than the equivalent commercial apps. OpenOffice and MS Office, for example, are both big, lumbering, resource-hungry hogs whose resour
Am I the only person who thinks that Phillip Greenspun is just another dot-bomb self-promoter desperate for the easy press coverage of the old days who can be safely ignored?
Am I the only person who's had enough of con artists and marketroids declaring, decade after decade, that the PC is dead and what consumers really want is vendor lock-in and endless subscription fees?
There are a couple of compelling reasons. One is privacy. While it is possible that my personal data will be compromised through a security hole on my Internet-connected PC, it is much more likely that it will be compromised if I leave it on a network server out there where any would-be spammer or identity thief can bribe underpaid sysadmins to give them a copy. Certainly, no company is going to want its trade secrets and financials exposed in that way.
The other major reason is cost. No one is going to host several hundred gigs of data for me for free. And while I realize that most folks don't have that much data -- ignoring for the moment gigantic collections of pirated movies and MP3s -- even small amounts of data storage will come at a cost, whether that's a subscription fee that adds up to much more than the cost of a hard drive over its lifetime, or just having ads shoved in one's face whenever you want to use it.
There's one other important reason to host your own data: when network data storage is commoditized, the service providers will be operating on razor-thin margins and therefore prone to bankruptcies and mergers. What happens to your data when your hosting service goes belly up? What happens to your data and your privacy terms when your hosting service is acquired by a larger company with less scruples?
Why even buy music or movies? Pay-per-play!
Because my daddy doesn't pay for my rock and roll lifestyle anymore.
Too true. I suspect that the GIMP = Photoshop crowd mostly uses GIMP to do graphics for the web -- for which it is a very nice tool, aside from its interface. When it comes to the other stuff that Photoshop is designed to do, like prepress and, oh, fine photography, GIMP is roughly equivalent to Photoshop 3.0.
That's not to say that I don't like the GIMP or that I don't hope it catches up to and surpasses Photoshop, but at the current rate of progress, Photoshop is advancing faster than the GIMP.
That said, making the transition to a more familiar interface might attract more users, and some small fraction of those may also be developers who will be inspired to lend a hand. This can only be a good thing.
There will, of course, be those who object to imitating the Photoshop UI, but I don't think those people really care about attracting new users. For all the blather from self-appointed UI experts, there is no such thing as an intuitive interface -- except possibly the nipple. What people mean by "intuitive" is, ultimately, "familiar". It is far better, in terms of usability, to stick to a suboptimal but universally-used interface than to produce a revolutionary interface that leaves most users scratching their heads. That isn't to say that we shouldn't be constantly improving our interfaces, but if we want to avoid frustrating the hell out of our users, we need to do it gradually.
And if there is any Open Source GUI program out there that frustrates the hell out of me more than the GIMP, I don't know what it is. This has always struck me as a real pity because the GIMP is actually a capable graphics editor, and even if it is roughly equivalent to Photoshop 3.0, that's not such a bad thing -- Photoshop 3.0 was a pretty good program.
Firefox goes against IE behavior and starts each browser instance from scratch. IE intentionally brings the browser history into the new window: the bet being that users who want to continue from where they left off can, and those that want to go their home page can do that with one click.
That has to be my least favorite IE feature. Open a new window when you're on a poorly-designed dynamically-generated page, and all sorts of unanticipated behaviors can happen when Javascript re-executes and triggers server-side behaviors through GET arguments passed to dynamically-loaded graphics. At the very least, you get to wait for some slow-ass ad site -- cough cough atwola.com cough coughnew window, not a copy of an old one.
How about we do something completely old-fashioned and make this a configurable option with the status quo behavior as the default?
People have said that about just about every language when the speaker is not particularly experienced with it. Assembly language can be quite lucid if it's well-written, well-organized, and well-commented. Readable Perl code is possible. Where complex data structures are involved, it's really hard, but still possible.
That said, having worked on some very large applications in Perl, I have been forced to the conclusion that you have to be an extremely self-disciplined programmer to write good code in Perl, mainly because the language itself tempts you at every turn to do it the easy (unreadable, unmaintainable) way. It seems to have been designed from the ground up to attract hotshots who want to prove how clever they are at the expense of the other developers who have to suffer through their code -- the sort of folks who will write a function that returns an anonymous list of anonymous hashes of anonymous functions using maps and greps nested six deep just because they can.
Now mind you, I like Perl. But a large part of the reason I like it is that the general programming skills I learned in the course of working with a team of developers on a 750k line Perl application for a now defunct dot-bomb have served me well in other languages. If Perl doesn't teach you to write excellent comments and to refactor now when it occurs to you, and not later when you must, nothing will.
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The mere appearance of a phrase like frame-shattering paradigm-shift pegs the needle on my bullshit detector. It's not just buzzword-compliant, it is redundantly so.
The more unique or the more quality or quantity of things that you bring to people, the more money you will get.
This is quite simply not true, and even a cursory examination of the products on the shelves of your local grocery or department store will disabuse you of this utopian notion pretty quickly. Price and quality are important, but it is arguable whether they are the most important factors in the success of a product, and quality is largely subjective anyway.
Marketing is the manipulation of perceptions, and that is what really drives sales. Wal-Mart offers neither the best quality nor the lowest prices, for example, but they have successfully convinced a very large number of people that they do, and that's as good as the real thing. There are a lot of market forces at work in the success or failure of a product, and it is often the case that the best products and the hardest-working people fail miserably.
Mind you, I don't think this is the way it should be, but absent some really far-reaching regulation, that's just the way it is in a free market, and it's why there are degrees in things like business and marketing. And yes, virtually all of the other factors amount to unscrupulous behavior to one degree or another. If you'd like that to change, the first step lies in recognizing the market as it actually is.
I hate to belabor the obvious, but it's no wonder soil bacteria are resistant to antibiotics: they live in close proximity with the same fungi that evolved antibiotic chemicals to combat them. While we humans are doing a pretty poor job of judiciously using antibiotics and we are probably creating some real long-term problems by polluting the environment with antibiotics and disinfectants, we shouldn't forget that we didn't invent antibiotics, we discovered them. There are going to be lots of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics simply because they evolved in an environment rich in fungi that produce them.
If you want to worry about antibiotic resistant bacteria capable of causing disease in humans, hospitals are a much bigger breeding ground than soil, which harbors innumerable species of bacteria that are harmless to us or even beneficial agriculturally, and only a few that can do us harm.
While Galileo is an improvement over GPS in many ways, the main issue is that the EU doesn't trust the US, and with damned good reason. The EU states need a system they can count on to be available at all times, not just when the US feels like sharing.
Articles like this embarrass me as an American. If it was the other way around, and the EU had a monopoly on global positioning systems, do you think we would hesitate for a second to launch our own? Any state or power bloc with the ability to launch such a system almost certainly will do so in order to avoid dependency on a potentially hostile foreign power.
Eh? I finally stopped using desktop PCs altogether once roughly equivalent laptops fell into the humanly-affordable range. I find that the laptop is a *lot* more flexible. I can use it in different rooms or take it out somewhere. The only limit on where I can work is battery life or the availability of outlets. When I'm doing a lot of typing, I put it on a stand and use an external keyboard. I suppose I could hook it up to an external monitor as well, but I shelled out the extra money for one of the better built-in screens. The flat-panel screens where I work are markedly inferior to my laptop's screen.
Everything you say about laptops is true of desktop machines. It's just that desktop machines don't have built-in keyboards and monitors for those occasions when you don't have extras handy.
Jiminy, I don't give three-quarters of a rat's ass about movies on BluRay. I want these turkeys to go ahead and get their consumer market rolling along so I can get a writable BluRay drive and start burning spindles full of data DVD-R's to a handful of BluRay discs.
If Cervantes had written Don Quixote today, the erstwhile knight-errant would be designing alternative keyboard layouts instead of tilting at windmills.
What amazes me is that real people continue to invest gobs of real money in actually manufacturing products that are essentially doomed from the start. Yes, the standard QWERTY keyboard sucks, but for a variety of reasons anything that replaces it has to be a lot better than the marginal improvement offered by mere variations on the theme. If it were otherwise, we'd all be using Dvorak keyboards now.
Personally I like a desktop which puts 95% of the functionality that most users are ever likely to need in front of them and hides the rest.
The problem with GNOME isn't that "the rest" are hidden, it's that they aren't available at all. I don't tend to customize my desktop a whole bunch, but most of the relative handful of things I do like to change aren't configurable in GNOME.
It's hard for me to feel much passion about the GNOME vs KDE debate. Both of them suck, and suck badly, compared to either OSX or XP (with the eye-candy crap turned off on the latter). After using Linux most of the time since '97, I finally said fuck it last year and installed XP. I still program, both professionally and my own hobby stuff, on Linux servers, and do so enthusiastically, but I'm seriously thinking of deleting the Linux partition on my laptop because I haven't booted into it for months.
It seems to me that there is a false dichotomy between technical types and end users. Even if you are a software engineer, you are also an end user in areas where you are not a specialist. Because I write database applications, I want total control and zero hand-holding while I'm doing that. On the other hand, when I want to copy some old home movies on VHS to a DVD, I want both hardware and software that are pure point-and-drool. I would certainly feel differently if I was deep into video editing as a job or even a hobby, but I'm not. Same thing when I want to burn a CD or when I'm indulging in various creative hobbies. Not everything has to be a big production, and certainly not every trivial task needs to be an exercise in technical machismo.
Why are the commercial GUIs so much more polished than the free GUIs? Truly, I don't think it's the lack of programming resources. Ever look at the source code for GNOME and KDE? The developers on those projects are pretty damn good. I think it's because Microsoft and Apple test their interfaces with real live end users, observe their interactions, and listen to their feedback. Open Source GUI developers, on the other hand, seem to indulge in a lot of baseless speculation about what users want without ever actually asking. Or else they code for their own preferences, which is fine, but isn't likely to attract much of a userbase.
I think Microsoft and Apple get credit for that one -- WinThis, MacThat, yada yada. Apple did it first, though. ;)
What I really get tired of are the prefixes on app names indicating the language they're written in. Java, PHP, and lately Python programmers are the worst culprits. What does any user care what the development language is? Shit, I'm a professional software engineer, and *I* don't care. Sure, I care if it's a library because it actually matters then, but not with applications. Christ, I wish these people would jGo phpFuck pyThemselves.
FWIW, I have a Pentium 120 with 48 megs of RAM that I have set up to dual boot Win98 and Linux. Both of them run acceptably fast. I wouldn't try running XP and Photoshop on the poor old thing, but then I wouldn't try running X, Enlightenment, and the GIMP on it, either. I have a much nicer and more recent laptop now that I got as a desktop replacement, but I still carry the old one around because it's perfectly adequate for email and word processing (Word 97), and it wouldn't be a great loss if it got stolen or dropped.
The simple fact of the matter is that, depending on what you do with them, computers became fast enough for most common tasks many years ago. The average Slashdotter feels the need for higher performance -- God knows I do -- a great deal more than the average user. Aside from games and some specialized applications, the main reason that systems continue to become larger and faster is the incestuous relationship between MS and hardware manufacturers: more machines sold mean more Windows licenses, so Windows becomes ever more resource-intensive to require new machines to be sold.
I just downloaded 1.5 RC3 to try out the featured applet, and it seems faster than the older release I was using, and it still weighs in many tens of megs lighter than MSIE.
If it was me, I'd tell prospective students that prospects are really bleak, like north of England bleak. That way, they'd pick another field, the shortage of new recruits would continue, and wages might start to go up again.
English is already capable of ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning, as are most languages. It has always been that way. One of the reasons that people have been arguing about the significance of the Old Testament for thousands of years is that ancient Hebrew was an especially flexible and ambiguous language.
As far as short units of meaning go, summaries of longer works (epitomes) and collections of epigrams were very popular among the Greeks and Romans, and the potentials of text with absent or obscured meanings were pretty much explored around the beginning of the last century by the literary arms of movements like Dada and Surrealism.
I don't mean to suggest that these things aren't interesting and possibly useful, but they are by no means new.
Actually, what is likely to happen is that virtually any literary patent will be vulnerable to prior art claims. Unless you get very, very specific, it is exceedingly difficult to describe a story that hasn't been written before.
What are the overall goals of OSS? I suspect you'd get 10 different answers from 5 different people.
I contribute to various FOSS projects in order to help people. That's the beginning, middle, and end of my motivation -- to be helpful. At the very minimum, I'm helping someone save money. At the other end of the scale, I could be one of the folks working on software for people with handicaps, in which case that's even more significant help.
The overwhelming majority of people use Windows. There are a lot of reasons for that, and depending on what you're doing and how savvy you are, you may not have a choice. Am I going to refuse to help people because I don't like their OS vendor? No, that would be petty.
It's ironic that so many of the zealots forget that Stallman's Free Software ideology is, at root, an exhortation to share with others. That's a noble goal, IMHO. Being a narrow-minded ideologue is not.
And so we'll probably have artifical intelligence shortly.
I believed that when they were saying the same thing in the 70's. I still believed it in the 80's. Now I just think it's full of shit.
If someone manages to produce strong AI, it will be as an accidental byproduct of something else. It will be a long, long time before we understand biological intelligence well enough to produce a mechanical replica.
Whenever OOo comes up, I make the same complaint, and invariably, someone tells me I'm a clueless asshole, but it's gotten to be a tradition now, so I'll do it again.
My benchmark for office suite comparisons is MS Office 97. I have used all of the subsequent versions of MS Office at work, but I always install Office 97 on my own machines. The reason for this is that, aside from functionality mostly aimed at group collaboration, there have been no significant changes in Word or Excel in the last eight years, so why bother upgrading?
Well, there has been one significant change -- the same functionality requires vastly more resources in later versions of Office. Office 97 runs comfortably on an old 120MHz Pentium I laptop with 32 megs of RAM that I like to haul around when I'd rather not risk losing my more recent and expensive desktop replacement laptop. Office 2003 or XP? Forget it.
As near as I can tell, OpenOffice has reached feature-parity with MS Office for single-user purposes; I can't speak to its collaboration features. There are some aspects of its interface that I don't much like, but I suspect that's mostly a matter of familiarity. But it is a giant, shrieking, slow resource hog, and I wouldn't use it on anything other than a fairly recent machine. It is, moreover, slower than Office 2003.
Now, as I noted at the start of the post, someone will inevitably -- and generally without much tact -- argue that some theoretical user population, like corporate office users, will have the latest machines and not be bothered by this. That might even be true in some cases, though my experience has been that most companies don't upgrade machines unless they absolutely have to. But that's the point to some extent: why should anyone have to perform a hardware upgrade to get the same level of functionality that was available back in 1997? Word processors and spreadsheets are mature application categories; shouldn't they become more efficient as time goes by?
Make no mistake about it, I am not a Microsoft partisan. I am as enthusiastic about the promise of FOSS as I was a decade ago. I am thrilled that OpenOffice exists. But I am deeply disappointed that in so many cases -- and OpenOffice is but one of many -- free software is just as bloated as its commercial counterparts. It may be that in the corporate environment, the cost of hardware upgrades is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of endless Microsoft software licenses. (In fact, I'm pretty sure it is true.) But for the private individual, that's often not the case.
First off, I should issue a disclaimer that I'm an oldbie. I started programming in assembly language on punch cards, but no, this isn't going to be a rant about youngsters and their newfangled languages. (At least it better not be; my current job has me living, breathing, and eating PHP.)
The problem with bad software today -- just like it was thirty years ago -- is bad engineering. It's not because of the methodology du jour (or its absence), licensing, choice of language, or toolsets. You can write brilliant, bug-free, efficient software in COBOL using the basic procedural structured programming paradigm. You can write awful, buggy, resource-hungry software in object-oriented Java using XP. None of that shit matters.
Good engineering requires, among other things, a detailed understanding of the problem, thorough planning, the sheer experience required to distinguish between the clever and overcomplicated on one hand, and the lucid and elegant on the other, excellent communication between developers, foresight (also borne of experience), and rigorous debugging. All of these things, including the many other prerequisites not mentioned, require lots of time and effort. Too much time and effort, in fact, for most commercial software outfits to invest and still turn a profit.
That's the rub, really. All the methodology and language fads aside, the basic principles of good software engineering were worked out decades ago, and sometimes further -- good generic engineering practices in the abstract were worked out long before we harnessed electricity. It all comes down to this: the more time, effort, and care you put into a product, all other things being equal, the better the product will be. It's easy (and well-deserved) to mock Microsoft for the shoddiness of their major products, but that very shoddiness is why you can buy MS Word for less than ten grand. If MS built word processors the way engineers built the Golden Gate Bridge, the prices would be comparable.
The market does not reward that kind of quality. In the first place, no one is willing to pay thousands of dollars for a supremely excellent product when one that is good enough can be had for a couple hundred. Most folks couldn't afford that kind of software engineering even if they wanted it. In the second place, once you have the perfect all-in-one software package, why would you ever buy another one? Microsoft is in this position already with its good-enough products. No one needs an upgrade, so remaining profitable requires MS to churn out new versions of its increasingly resource-intensive operating system so that you at least have to buy new copies as you replace your older machines.
FOSS is at least theoretically invulnerable to these pressures. In theory, there will eventually be all-singing all-dancing FOSS packages covering all of the major software categories, and the age of commercial mass-market software will be at an end. I've been waiting for this day to come since well before the first release of Linux. I'm surprised that it hasn't come yet. I'm surprised that the majority of FOSS software is still as buggy, poorly designed, and -- almost without exception -- undocumented as its commercial equivalents.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Excellence in software engineering is like excellence in any other field: it's really fucking hard. It's even harder when you have a day job; time constraints aside, after 8-12 hours coding at work, the last thing many developers want to look at when they get home is compiler output. Many of the remainder are either amateurs or students -- not to diss either category, but often the necessary experience is lacking, and the lone hacker often lacks the knowledge or the inclination to produce code that's easy for other developers to work with. I remain confident that we'll get there, though. (I am less confident that I will still care by then, but it will still be a boon to those who live to see that day.) I am equally certain, for the reasons
The difference is that in Ye Olde Days, a programmer had to understand all of that complexity because he had to code it himself. Today's systems are more complex, but the average programmer only has to understand the interfaces presented by various pre-packaged APIs and components that hide the complexity -- which was presumably understood by the specialist programmers who designed those components.
The sad truth of the matter is that both the oldbies and the newbies are wrong. Contrary to what the oldbies think, the field is now sufficiently large that it's not possible to understand all of the complexities, and you don't need to understand all of them. The newbies, on the other hand, are so wrapped up in their reflexive sophomoric belief that new = better that they miss the valuable point that their predecessors are making: sometimes, you can write better software if you know what's going on inside the black box.
This reminds me of the pointless flamewar that erupts from time to time between hard-core assembly language programmers and the users (but seldom the developers) of optimizing compilers. There is a popular but mistaken belief that today's optimizing compilers can outperform hand-coded assembly. Even for some fairly trivial cases, this is simply not true, but you have to be an experienced assembly language programmer to even make the comparison between human-generated and machine-generated code.
What I think the oldbies are really lamenting -- at least *I* am lamenting it, having been programming since the punch-card era -- is the declining level of skill necessary to write software. In the old days, it had to be not only good, but actually excellent code, because the hardware wasn't fast or capacious enough to handle the kind of code that's the norm these days. No one -- well, very few of us -- wrote code in assembly language because we wanted to; we did it because we had to. And from this, there was the usual pride that arises from what amounted to fine craftsmanship. Nowadays, the economics of software development have shifted so that it is just too goddamn expensive to build code that way, not that it's more expensive than it ever was, but because it's so much cheaper to throw some fresh junior college grads at it and call it good. That they come complete with the arrogance of ignorance only adds insult to injury.
This is not the first time this has happened. You heard similar complaints from all of the craftsmen who were put out of work by the industrial revolution. Fine, hand-crafted furniture is stronger, longer-lasting, and (arguably) more attractive than the particle-board and veneered junk that comes out of industrial furniture factories, but no one can afford the "good" stuff anymore, and the cheap junk is good enough.
The difference in quality is not imaginary. Compare the old MS-DOS editor, QEdit, with the trivial and ubiquitous Unix editor, PICO. QEdit, which was written in assembly language and is completely statically linked, weighed in somewhere around 48k and included vastly more capabilities as well as a fairly sophisticated macro language. PICO, which doesn't have much in the way of capabilities at all and is written in a high-level language, weighs in at 171k and then dynamically links in some more libraries, occupying over a meg of RAM before it has even loaded a file.
Would the average user notice any difference in performance if all code was written the old way? Yes, especially -- but not exclusively -- on older machines. The problem is that the average user couldn't afford to buy software built that way, any more than the average person can afford to furnish their entire home with fine handcrafted furniture.
What surprises me, however, is that in the free software world, where such economic considerations do not apply, the free apps are often not much better than the equivalent commercial apps. OpenOffice and MS Office, for example, are both big, lumbering, resource-hungry hogs whose resour
No, you're not the only person who thinks that.
Am I the only person who thinks that Phillip Greenspun is just another dot-bomb self-promoter desperate for the easy press coverage of the old days who can be safely ignored?
Am I the only person who's had enough of con artists and marketroids declaring, decade after decade, that the PC is dead and what consumers really want is vendor lock-in and endless subscription fees?
Why store data on a PC or a LAN at all?
There are a couple of compelling reasons. One is privacy. While it is possible that my personal data will be compromised through a security hole on my Internet-connected PC, it is much more likely that it will be compromised if I leave it on a network server out there where any would-be spammer or identity thief can bribe underpaid sysadmins to give them a copy. Certainly, no company is going to want its trade secrets and financials exposed in that way.
The other major reason is cost. No one is going to host several hundred gigs of data for me for free. And while I realize that most folks don't have that much data -- ignoring for the moment gigantic collections of pirated movies and MP3s -- even small amounts of data storage will come at a cost, whether that's a subscription fee that adds up to much more than the cost of a hard drive over its lifetime, or just having ads shoved in one's face whenever you want to use it.
There's one other important reason to host your own data: when network data storage is commoditized, the service providers will be operating on razor-thin margins and therefore prone to bankruptcies and mergers. What happens to your data when your hosting service goes belly up? What happens to your data and your privacy terms when your hosting service is acquired by a larger company with less scruples?
Why even buy music or movies? Pay-per-play!
Because my daddy doesn't pay for my rock and roll lifestyle anymore.
Too true. I suspect that the GIMP = Photoshop crowd mostly uses GIMP to do graphics for the web -- for which it is a very nice tool, aside from its interface. When it comes to the other stuff that Photoshop is designed to do, like prepress and, oh, fine photography, GIMP is roughly equivalent to Photoshop 3.0.
That's not to say that I don't like the GIMP or that I don't hope it catches up to and surpasses Photoshop, but at the current rate of progress, Photoshop is advancing faster than the GIMP.
That said, making the transition to a more familiar interface might attract more users, and some small fraction of those may also be developers who will be inspired to lend a hand. This can only be a good thing.
There will, of course, be those who object to imitating the Photoshop UI, but I don't think those people really care about attracting new users. For all the blather from self-appointed UI experts, there is no such thing as an intuitive interface -- except possibly the nipple. What people mean by "intuitive" is, ultimately, "familiar". It is far better, in terms of usability, to stick to a suboptimal but universally-used interface than to produce a revolutionary interface that leaves most users scratching their heads. That isn't to say that we shouldn't be constantly improving our interfaces, but if we want to avoid frustrating the hell out of our users, we need to do it gradually.
And if there is any Open Source GUI program out there that frustrates the hell out of me more than the GIMP, I don't know what it is. This has always struck me as a real pity because the GIMP is actually a capable graphics editor, and even if it is roughly equivalent to Photoshop 3.0, that's not such a bad thing -- Photoshop 3.0 was a pretty good program.
Firefox goes against IE behavior and starts each browser instance from scratch. IE intentionally brings the browser history into the new window: the bet being that users who want to continue from where they left off can, and those that want to go their home page can do that with one click.
That has to be my least favorite IE feature. Open a new window when you're on a poorly-designed dynamically-generated page, and all sorts of unanticipated behaviors can happen when Javascript re-executes and triggers server-side behaviors through GET arguments passed to dynamically-loaded graphics. At the very least, you get to wait for some slow-ass ad site -- cough cough atwola.com cough coughnew window, not a copy of an old one.
How about we do something completely old-fashioned and make this a configurable option with the status quo behavior as the default?
People have said that about just about every language when the speaker is not particularly experienced with it. Assembly language can be quite lucid if it's well-written, well-organized, and well-commented. Readable Perl code is possible. Where complex data structures are involved, it's really hard, but still possible.
That said, having worked on some very large applications in Perl, I have been forced to the conclusion that you have to be an extremely self-disciplined programmer to write good code in Perl, mainly because the language itself tempts you at every turn to do it the easy (unreadable, unmaintainable) way. It seems to have been designed from the ground up to attract hotshots who want to prove how clever they are at the expense of the other developers who have to suffer through their code -- the sort of folks who will write a function that returns an anonymous list of anonymous hashes of anonymous functions using maps and greps nested six deep just because they can.
Now mind you, I like Perl. But a large part of the reason I like it is that the general programming skills I learned in the course of working with a team of developers on a 750k line Perl application for a now defunct dot-bomb have served me well in other languages. If Perl doesn't teach you to write excellent comments and to refactor now when it occurs to you, and not later when you must, nothing will.