Your comic -- which is fucking hilarious, BTW -- would have completely escaped my attention if you had not bitched about its categorization as a blog on Slashdot. There are two reasons for this:
1. I am reasonably certain, even if I lived to be a hundred years old, I would never have typed "dinosaur search" into Google.
2. I am equally certain that I will never use a blog-specific search tool. If I want to search blogs, I'll just use the main Google interface with a search key like "noise -signal".
The lesson to learn here, of course, is to forget about your Google search ranking and engage in shameless plugging on Slashdot.
I'm not much of a gamer, though I was at one time. Part of it is that I just don't have the spare time I had when I was younger and didn't have kids of my own, but a most of it is that every game I see in the stores looks like every other game. I guess some people just can't get enough dimly-lit, grim, gritty, post-apocalyptic scenery, but I can.
The available types of games seem to have shrunk as well. There are first-person shooters, real-time strategy, resource-management (often combined with RTS), and masturbatory twiddleware like the Sims, and that's about it.
God help you if you'd like to find something that isn't predicated on violence, too. Don't get me wrong, I like violent games. I thought Postal was wonderful, especially the level where you get to fire heavy weaponry into a high-school marching band. I'm not sure what I liked best -- the screaming teenagers when you hit them with incediaries, or the way their little brass instruments went spinning down the street when you used high explosives. But I don't want to engage in senseless mayhem all the time. I remember the first time I played GTA: Vice City thinking that it would be great to have a whole interactive city to explore where I didn't have to spend all my time shooting people and stealing shit.
The problem with games these days, IMHO, is that the gaming industry has gotten so large that it is driven entirely by popular fashion. Big game companies aren't going to invest time and money in games that don't have the largest audience possible. The end result is the same kind of focus-group-driven crap you see in movies and popular music, the only difference being that gamers who would sneer at listening Britney Spears will rush out to buy equally derivative, unimaginative crap like an FPS that differs from every other FPS only in the graphical skin draped over the same dead horse.
There are other big problems, at least with PC games: game companies only seem to write games for people who buy a new PC and graphics card every six to twelve months, and no one in the industry seems to have flashed on the fact that 3D gameplay is in many ways less flexible than 2D gameplay, but the main problem is that the games and fashion industries have effectively merged.
Forget the resolution, look at the picture -- this stuff is much greyer than even newsprint. There's a reason real paper is white and so much money and effort goes into bleaching wood pulp to make it that way: the contrast makes it easier to read and reduces eyestrain.
If you are a MySQL user, and you care about the future of Open Source, you should be looking at alternatives, such as PostgreSQL.
When PostgreSQL can handle the kind of load we throw at MySQL, you can be sure a second look will be taken at it. And before some PostgreSQL partisan turns his flame on, yes, we did test it in the past year, and it didn't cut it. To be fair, our application uses MySQL as a glorified hash table, which is MySQL's strong point; it might be different if we were doing complex joins.
In the meantime, the company I work for, which is no behemoth but which does $5 million per year in net-only sales, relies heavily on MySQL, and we use the GPLed version. Our product consists of information services, and we're pretty agnostic about the back end.
FWIW, if we were producing a distributable binary of some kind, it would definitely be back-end agnostic and not use any kind of embedded database. If your customers are using many different databases -- Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, and so on -- why would you take any other approach. If it's a single-user app, there are plenty of alternatives to MySQL; SQLite would be a no-brainer for a lot of them, as would BerkeleyDB.
The real danger of lock-in where MySQL is concerned, IMHO, is the same as with every other database: proprietary extensions to SQL. That's where they'll fuck you.
Is this the type of personality you would want running the company your 401(k) was invested in? Your retirement future, child's education, or second house at the lake, all riding on the ability of a short tempered reactionist who would scream and shout and create a personal vendetta not only aginst a competitor, but CEO-to-CEO?
Ethical and social issues aside, yes. I know it's de rigeur on Slashdot to proclaim the imminent death of Microsoft, but they're making billions upon billions of dollars selling their second-rate products. Sure, it may have a lot more to do with marketing and vendor lock-in than quality products, but investors generally don't give a shit how the money is being made, just that it is being made, and Ballmer has been delivering money for many years. And that, when it gets down to it, is all that matters in the market.
It would be nice if the system didn't reward flaming assholes like Steve Ballmer, but looking around myself, day after day, in an office full of bright, creative, and thoroughly nice people working for a boss who's at least as much of a sociopath as Ballmer, I have to conclude that what the market values are not the same set of characteristics I value in a coworker, roommate, or wife.
I'd rather invest in a company who's CEO is headstrong and confident enough to try to innovate their competition our of existance, not temper tantrem their CEO to death.
The myth that innovation is the key to success -- which has, with cosmic irony, been largely propagated by Microsoft -- is pure bullshit. The innovators typically flame out early because the market they have created grows more slowly than their need for cash or out of simple business ineptitude, and established firms come along and ride the ideas of the innovators to success. The exceptions are precisely cases where hyperactive megalomaniacs -- Jobs and Ballmer, for example, or Thomas Edison -- stumble into a room of pleasantly creative folks and horsewhip them mercilessly.
Mind you, I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but it definitely appears to be the way things actually are.
The FA says that patent applications have been filed. Are those available anywhere online?
I'm curious partly because this sounds very similar to a couple of pieces of prior art, but mostly because the description of how they go from basic structural recognition to translation between two unrelated languages reminds me a bit of that famous cartoon where two blocks of equations are separated by a little balloon containing the words, "And here, a miracle happens."
Near as I can tell, it's new like most everything else is new -- the folks who slept through basic science classes missed how simple galvanic cells work, and now they're surprised by PR from an engineering firm whose employees didn't sleep through science class.
For those just tuning in now, Wikipedia has a nice explanation of this cutting-edge 1780 technology.
For those inclined to experiment, stick a copper rod and an iron rod an inch apart in the dirt in your backyard, and piss in the space between them. Connect wires to the tops of the rods and then to a voltmeter. Wooooeee! You've got current. And you can recharge every time you need to pee.
Of course, technically speaking, you aren't recharging anything. Rechargeable batteries involve a reversible chemical reaction, while a galvanic cell just slowly dissolves its anode and cathode in the intervening electrolyte. For the purpose of providing a feeble current to a disposable medical device, it's not a bad idea. The battery is, however, really old news -- like more than three hundred years old. It's the microelectronics that can take advantage of such weak currents that are the real news, but those aren't exactly at the bleeding edge, either.
There's more to it than that. Anyone remember Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption? The basic idea, for those who haven't, is that when unnecessary overconsumption is socially sanctioned -- that is, when it becomes fashionable -- then the normal laws of supply and demands are, if not suspended altogether, then greatly modified.
There is no consumer pressure to make fuel-efficient cars because the very inefficiency and extravagance of the modern SUV is what is really being purchased by design. People want wasteful, expensive vehicles because they are fashion statements. They say, "Look at me! I have assloads of discretionary income." An Armani suit is manifestly inferior to jeans and a denim work shirt in purely practical terms, but no one buys Armani because it's practical. A twenty-dollar digital watch is a functionally better watch than a fancy Rolex, but people aren't buying Rolexes because of their chronographic accuracy.
If you want to reduce the waste of resources, you have two options: make efficiency hipper than waste, or require efficiency through regulation. To wait for simple market forces to correct the situation is to wait in vain: viewed through a purely economic lens, the market is working correctly. It is delivering what people want, which is waste.
Energy-efficiency is primarily a social problem, and only secondarily a technological or economic problem. Oh sure, in the long term, energy-efficiency is a survival problem for the human race, but humans are not very good at long-term decision-making.
You really have to be completely fnarking divorced from reality to think that consumers are going to buy into any product that includes a "self-destruct" feature.
Legalize drugs now. It's not fair that Sony marketing people get to have them if we don't.
[...] but are not so thick as to believe that the games from the 80s were actually in any way superior to the games we play today.
Well, let's see...
1. There were many different kinds of games in the 80's, but now there are only three or four kinds so similar that they're effectively skinnable.
2. Many of the games of the 80's were accessible to casual players who neither wanted to read a hefty manual nor spend hours just learning how to play.
3. 80's games seldom crashed, and never spent an hour or more downloading the latest patches upon install.
4. 80's games were not able to substitute elaborate graphics for enjoyable gameplay.
Which isn't to say that there aren't some good games today or that there weren't plenty of awful games in the 80's. But let's not conflate improvements in graphics and audio with improvements in fun, which is, after all, the whole point of games. It doesn't much matter how stunning the graphics are if the game isn't any fun to play.
Freenet has never been about dissent, at least not in any realistic way. The system is designed to preserve data on the basis of its popularity. It might be marginally useful to a popular resistance group, but it won't do shit for a minority group promoting an unpopular point of view -- including advocacy for their own survival. The numerically superior group need only participate actively in Freenet for the minority view to be drowned out.
The other problem with Freenet is that it appears to be predicated on the oppressive government's willingness to play by the rules of due process. So you can't say which Freenet machine(s) contains the offending information? Clarke seems to think that an oppressive regime like mainland China will just throw up its hands and give up. Much more likely is that everyone using the software will be considered a subversive, and they'll all be sought out and shut down by state security. Oppressive regimes wouldn't be oppressive if they were fastidious about applying due process and avoiding collective punishment, now would they?
Software can and does change the world, sometimes in dramatically beneficial ways. But it does so in large part because the industrialized world consists primarily of relatively free countries. Repressive countries will be no more affected by software like Freenet than China is affected by FREE TIBET bumper stickers on American cars.
IBM and HP both recently laid off 14,000 workers each. There should be plenty of brains out there, available for work.
Considering the huge number of layoffs over the last five years, that was my thought, too. There is no shortage of software engineers, and there hasn't been one for well over a decade.
What there is a shortage of is American developers willing to work for the same wages as receptionists. Every time large companies start bitching about a shortage of tech workers, it's a lead-up to increasing the H1B quota.
I'll resist the urge to point out that English is a very old language, dating back in one form or another to the first millennium, and instead focus on the unquestioned assumption in Metcalf's rant: that we need a new OS.
With all due respect, why? I know this is a very exciting topic if you're involved in OS development, but if not, who gives a shit? Certainly, the average user does not. Ideally, the average user shouldn't even be concerned with the OS or necessarily even know what OS he or she is using. The average user runs a few accustomed applications and maybe some games, and doesn't really care about anything else. If it doesn't unduly hog resources and is reasonably stable, why would 99% of users care?
I understand -- believe me -- that this is a very different question from the developer's point of view. Some operating systems are a lot easier to work with when writing code than others. All of the current major microcomputer operating systems are, however, at least adequate to the majority of tasks, and many of the annoying features for us developers have more to do with poor API design than anything else.
There reaches a point when a technology has matured and future improvements are likely to be incremental. Operating systems have reached that point. There's no demand for anything new right now. Linux managed to squeak onto the scene not so much because it was good (though it is) but because it is free as in beer and as in speech. If IBM had caught the OSS bug sooner, it might have been OS/2 instead.
I would suggest that if Mr. Metcalfe is becoming bored, he should check into a field at an earlier stage of development, like biotechnology. Computer science has become mature and successful -- and a lot duller than it was twenty or thirty years ago.
There's more to life than using a text editor to crank out code. I do numeric data entry both as a programmer and in a business role. There is no way I'm going to hit 18,000 ksh without a ten-key, and I can't break 60 wpm on a tiny laptop keyboard. With a proper, full-scale buckling spring keyboard, I can hit almost 90 wpm. (Not, mind you, while writing code, but again, there is more to life than writing code.)
I also do a lot of graphics and audio work with the usual bewildering array of applications. Having a visually-remappable keyboard would be a big help with the applications I don't use frequently enough to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts.
And, of course, there are games. Not twitchy FPS shit, but the complex strategic wargames.
Finally, if we had a keyboard like this, we might finally get programming languages with decent mathematical symbols -- instead of crap like !=, <> **, and so on.
There really isn't much choice between the Americans, Chinese, Russians, or Indians if you're not a citizen of one of them, with the possible exception that, if you're not Pakistani, you don't have to be worried about being subject to attack by the Indians. All that is irrelevant, anyway.
The real question here is how the hell do you defend a LaGrange point? They're known positions with no cover. The amount of money and energy required to build an installation at a LaGrange point is vastly more than it would take to overwhelm its defenses with numerous small impactors or beam weapons.
The idea that the LaGrange points represent some kind of interplanetary chokepoint is plainly being advanced by military officials who are used to operating at low velocities on a more or less two-dimensional surface. In space, the only position that matters is not being near the position you were in when the enemy targeted his fire. Big stationary fortresses don't even make sense on the ground any more; they never made sense in space.
Yeah, I'm sure folks will be racing to download the home movie version of Plato's Phaedo. Even with the inevitable directorial liberties (Socrates is a wookiee, Echecrates is actually a Sith apprentice conspiring with Socrates' Athenian captors), I somehow doubt that it's going to put much of a dent in the revenues of the latest action flick.
Mind you, I'd buy this collection if I had the spare change -- or, more likely, the Loeb Classical Library instead -- but I'm not under any illusions about its mass appeal.
Science operates by taking a vast field of possibilities and narrowing it down by experimental method to just one. Science is about determining what is.
Science fiction -- or speculative fiction -- starts with what is, and explores the consequences of what thinks might be like if the variables were tweaked and some unknown were introduced.
In a sense, the two are working at cross purposes. Moreover, science fiction is, or at least can be, literature. It's creative art for its own sake. The idea that there is something deficient about it because it's not just a propaganda vehicle for attracting fresh students and funding to science is nonsense. One might as well criticize Shakespeare for not hewing closely enough to modern historians' understanding of Julius Caesar.
If our current understanding of science becomes the test for valuing a particular work of science fiction, most if not all of the best science fiction novels would be tossed out as garbage. Let the scientists do science, and let the storytellers tell stories. Both are valuable.
Most of the employees at the best pizza place in this county (actually rated best by the newspapers, not just IMO) have tattoos, piercings, and non-standard haircuts, and they do their jobs well.
Congratulations on winning today's award for best unconscious self-parody.
Yes, there are lots of great food service workers with tats and piercings. The same is true of record store employees, retail cashiers, and janitorial night staff. And yes, those are often quite congenial work environments. Some of the most enjoyable places I ever worked were retail stores because my coworkers were a lot of fun.
You are going to be hard-pressed to stay very far above the poverty line with jobs like that, however. Personally, I'd have been happy to stay there -- my hobbies are pretty inexpensive -- but I ended up with a family, and was forced to turn my free-time programming habit into a full time job.
I make pretty good money now. Is it worth it to me? Yes, at least until my daughter is safely off to college. Then I'll probably go back to a much lower budget form of existence.
The point is, the people who write the checks get to make the rules. The reason so many posters have pointed out that this is a maturity issue is that it takes maturity to recognize that and to see that, right or wrong, your personal choices have consequences. Those may be utter bullshit consequences cooked up by some uptight asshole who thinks not wearing a tie is a cardinal sin, but if you want his money, you have to keep him happy. Going somewhere else is not always an option -- there are an awful lot of people out there who can swallow their pride and wear the tie, after all.
It's not gender identity or any such twaddle. The point is that people who go to great lengths to draw attention to themselves are, in the professional world, not much of an asset. (I am deliberately excluding marketing sorts for whom that is their job, though even there, they are supposed to draw attention to themselves in a way that helps promote the product.)
I'm personally pretty damn liberal about appearance; I don't really give a shit what anyone wears. But when I see someone stroll in for a job interview with tattoos and piercings and unnatural hair colors, I dread the possibility of their being hired. Why? Because ninety-nine percent of them will end up spending an inordinate amount of work time talking about their body modification hobby, or bitching about the reactions they get, or otherwise trying to make themselves the center of attention rather than get any work done.
There's a reason companies have dress codes, and aside from "front counter" positions, it has nothing to do with relating to the public. It's basically a test of maturity and self-discipline. In other words, can you put your ego aside long enough to get a good eight hours a day of work done?
Another poster made some adolescent remark about not wanting to be treated like a commodity. Guess what? Unless you are in some really specialized field, you are a commodity. Get over it. But then, that takes us back to the question of whether you can put your ego aside enough to work as part of a team.
Personally, I see the presence of trendy piercings and tats as a sign that someone isn't likely to be an original thinker. Hint: if there are several entire magazines devoted to your peculiar appearance, you aren't being original.
Heh. That pattern applies to practically every mailing list in the world, too. I can't wait for the non-technical press to start running stories about "criminal software" like listserv, majordomo, and mailman.
Re:Ah... history fails to be remembered again...
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's worse than that. Run ps under Linux or the task manager under Windows, and tell me how many processes you see running. Sure, most of them are single-threaded applications, but they're all competing for the same CPU (or two). A 32-way chip would make things much speedier even if there were no multithreaded applications running. (And yes, I'm aware that other issues, like memory contention, come into play.)
You don't want that 32-way CPU? Well, give it to me and I'll let you have this old Pentium.
Maybe you just haven't become fully familiar with all of the features in InDesign. This may, in fact, be a pattern with you. For example, Slash supports automatic word wrap so that you don't have to manually break every line like that.
I'd agree with the assertion that a word processor, spreadsheet, or other primarily textual application is definitely easier to use with a keyboard and control strokes than with a mouse -- if you're willing to overcome the initial learning curve. I am, but a surprising number of people aren't. Personally, it annoys the holy living shit out of me if a word processor requires me to use a mouse for anything at all. Sometimes, I'll use the mouse for selecting a field in a dialogue box, but this is less often because there are a lot of fields (legitimate reason), than because the UI engineer came up with a stupid tab order.
For graphics apps, on the other hand, the mouse is going to be the primary tool. Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, and so on would be virtually unusable for real work without a mouse. That said, I use keyboard shortcuts extensively in all of the above.
The solution, IMHO, is to make sure that you can do as much as possible with either the mouse or the keyboard, and let the user decide which one works best for particular tasks in his or her own unique workflow.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comic -- which is fucking hilarious, BTW -- would have completely escaped my attention if you had not bitched about its categorization as a blog on Slashdot. There are two reasons for this:
1. I am reasonably certain, even if I lived to be a hundred years old, I would never have typed "dinosaur search" into Google.
2. I am equally certain that I will never use a blog-specific search tool. If I want to search blogs, I'll just use the main Google interface with a search key like "noise -signal".
The lesson to learn here, of course, is to forget about your Google search ranking and engage in shameless plugging on Slashdot.
I'm not much of a gamer, though I was at one time. Part of it is that I just don't have the spare time I had when I was younger and didn't have kids of my own, but a most of it is that every game I see in the stores looks like every other game. I guess some people just can't get enough dimly-lit, grim, gritty, post-apocalyptic scenery, but I can.
The available types of games seem to have shrunk as well. There are first-person shooters, real-time strategy, resource-management (often combined with RTS), and masturbatory twiddleware like the Sims, and that's about it.
God help you if you'd like to find something that isn't predicated on violence, too. Don't get me wrong, I like violent games. I thought Postal was wonderful, especially the level where you get to fire heavy weaponry into a high-school marching band. I'm not sure what I liked best -- the screaming teenagers when you hit them with incediaries, or the way their little brass instruments went spinning down the street when you used high explosives. But I don't want to engage in senseless mayhem all the time. I remember the first time I played GTA: Vice City thinking that it would be great to have a whole interactive city to explore where I didn't have to spend all my time shooting people and stealing shit.
The problem with games these days, IMHO, is that the gaming industry has gotten so large that it is driven entirely by popular fashion. Big game companies aren't going to invest time and money in games that don't have the largest audience possible. The end result is the same kind of focus-group-driven crap you see in movies and popular music, the only difference being that gamers who would sneer at listening Britney Spears will rush out to buy equally derivative, unimaginative crap like an FPS that differs from every other FPS only in the graphical skin draped over the same dead horse.
There are other big problems, at least with PC games: game companies only seem to write games for people who buy a new PC and graphics card every six to twelve months, and no one in the industry seems to have flashed on the fact that 3D gameplay is in many ways less flexible than 2D gameplay, but the main problem is that the games and fashion industries have effectively merged.
Forget the resolution, look at the picture -- this stuff is much greyer than even newsprint. There's a reason real paper is white and so much money and effort goes into bleaching wood pulp to make it that way: the contrast makes it easier to read and reduces eyestrain.
If you are a MySQL user, and you care about the future of Open Source, you should be looking at alternatives, such as PostgreSQL.
When PostgreSQL can handle the kind of load we throw at MySQL, you can be sure a second look will be taken at it. And before some PostgreSQL partisan turns his flame on, yes, we did test it in the past year, and it didn't cut it. To be fair, our application uses MySQL as a glorified hash table, which is MySQL's strong point; it might be different if we were doing complex joins.
In the meantime, the company I work for, which is no behemoth but which does $5 million per year in net-only sales, relies heavily on MySQL, and we use the GPLed version. Our product consists of information services, and we're pretty agnostic about the back end.
FWIW, if we were producing a distributable binary of some kind, it would definitely be back-end agnostic and not use any kind of embedded database. If your customers are using many different databases -- Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, and so on -- why would you take any other approach. If it's a single-user app, there are plenty of alternatives to MySQL; SQLite would be a no-brainer for a lot of them, as would BerkeleyDB.
The real danger of lock-in where MySQL is concerned, IMHO, is the same as with every other database: proprietary extensions to SQL. That's where they'll fuck you.
Is this the type of personality you would want running the company your 401(k) was invested in? Your retirement future, child's education, or second house at the lake, all riding on the ability of a short tempered reactionist who would scream and shout and create a personal vendetta not only aginst a competitor, but CEO-to-CEO?
Ethical and social issues aside, yes. I know it's de rigeur on Slashdot to proclaim the imminent death of Microsoft, but they're making billions upon billions of dollars selling their second-rate products. Sure, it may have a lot more to do with marketing and vendor lock-in than quality products, but investors generally don't give a shit how the money is being made, just that it is being made, and Ballmer has been delivering money for many years. And that, when it gets down to it, is all that matters in the market.
It would be nice if the system didn't reward flaming assholes like Steve Ballmer, but looking around myself, day after day, in an office full of bright, creative, and thoroughly nice people working for a boss who's at least as much of a sociopath as Ballmer, I have to conclude that what the market values are not the same set of characteristics I value in a coworker, roommate, or wife.
I'd rather invest in a company who's CEO is headstrong and confident enough to try to innovate their competition our of existance, not temper tantrem their CEO to death.
The myth that innovation is the key to success -- which has, with cosmic irony, been largely propagated by Microsoft -- is pure bullshit. The innovators typically flame out early because the market they have created grows more slowly than their need for cash or out of simple business ineptitude, and established firms come along and ride the ideas of the innovators to success. The exceptions are precisely cases where hyperactive megalomaniacs -- Jobs and Ballmer, for example, or Thomas Edison -- stumble into a room of pleasantly creative folks and horsewhip them mercilessly.
Mind you, I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but it definitely appears to be the way things actually are.
The FA says that patent applications have been filed. Are those available anywhere online?
I'm curious partly because this sounds very similar to a couple of pieces of prior art, but mostly because the description of how they go from basic structural recognition to translation between two unrelated languages reminds me a bit of that famous cartoon where two blocks of equations are separated by a little balloon containing the words, "And here, a miracle happens."
No, I believe that would be ludicrist.
How is this new?
Near as I can tell, it's new like most everything else is new -- the folks who slept through basic science classes missed how simple galvanic cells work, and now they're surprised by PR from an engineering firm whose employees didn't sleep through science class.
For those just tuning in now, Wikipedia has a nice explanation of this cutting-edge 1780 technology.
For those inclined to experiment, stick a copper rod and an iron rod an inch apart in the dirt in your backyard, and piss in the space between them. Connect wires to the tops of the rods and then to a voltmeter. Wooooeee! You've got current. And you can recharge every time you need to pee.
Of course, technically speaking, you aren't recharging anything. Rechargeable batteries involve a reversible chemical reaction, while a galvanic cell just slowly dissolves its anode and cathode in the intervening electrolyte. For the purpose of providing a feeble current to a disposable medical device, it's not a bad idea. The battery is, however, really old news -- like more than three hundred years old. It's the microelectronics that can take advantage of such weak currents that are the real news, but those aren't exactly at the bleeding edge, either.
There's more to it than that. Anyone remember Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption? The basic idea, for those who haven't, is that when unnecessary overconsumption is socially sanctioned -- that is, when it becomes fashionable -- then the normal laws of supply and demands are, if not suspended altogether, then greatly modified.
There is no consumer pressure to make fuel-efficient cars because the very inefficiency and extravagance of the modern SUV is what is really being purchased by design. People want wasteful, expensive vehicles because they are fashion statements. They say, "Look at me! I have assloads of discretionary income." An Armani suit is manifestly inferior to jeans and a denim work shirt in purely practical terms, but no one buys Armani because it's practical. A twenty-dollar digital watch is a functionally better watch than a fancy Rolex, but people aren't buying Rolexes because of their chronographic accuracy.
If you want to reduce the waste of resources, you have two options: make efficiency hipper than waste, or require efficiency through regulation. To wait for simple market forces to correct the situation is to wait in vain: viewed through a purely economic lens, the market is working correctly. It is delivering what people want, which is waste.
Energy-efficiency is primarily a social problem, and only secondarily a technological or economic problem. Oh sure, in the long term, energy-efficiency is a survival problem for the human race, but humans are not very good at long-term decision-making.
You really have to be completely fnarking divorced from reality to think that consumers are going to buy into any product that includes a "self-destruct" feature.
Legalize drugs now. It's not fair that Sony marketing people get to have them if we don't.
[...] but are not so thick as to believe that the games from the 80s were actually in any way superior to the games we play today.
Well, let's see...
1. There were many different kinds of games in the 80's, but now there are only three or four kinds so similar that they're effectively skinnable.
2. Many of the games of the 80's were accessible to casual players who neither wanted to read a hefty manual nor spend hours just learning how to play.
3. 80's games seldom crashed, and never spent an hour or more downloading the latest patches upon install.
4. 80's games were not able to substitute elaborate graphics for enjoyable gameplay.
Which isn't to say that there aren't some good games today or that there weren't plenty of awful games in the 80's. But let's not conflate improvements in graphics and audio with improvements in fun, which is, after all, the whole point of games. It doesn't much matter how stunning the graphics are if the game isn't any fun to play.
Freenet has never been about dissent, at least not in any realistic way. The system is designed to preserve data on the basis of its popularity. It might be marginally useful to a popular resistance group, but it won't do shit for a minority group promoting an unpopular point of view -- including advocacy for their own survival. The numerically superior group need only participate actively in Freenet for the minority view to be drowned out.
The other problem with Freenet is that it appears to be predicated on the oppressive government's willingness to play by the rules of due process. So you can't say which Freenet machine(s) contains the offending information? Clarke seems to think that an oppressive regime like mainland China will just throw up its hands and give up. Much more likely is that everyone using the software will be considered a subversive, and they'll all be sought out and shut down by state security. Oppressive regimes wouldn't be oppressive if they were fastidious about applying due process and avoiding collective punishment, now would they?
Software can and does change the world, sometimes in dramatically beneficial ways. But it does so in large part because the industrialized world consists primarily of relatively free countries. Repressive countries will be no more affected by software like Freenet than China is affected by FREE TIBET bumper stickers on American cars.
IBM and HP both recently laid off 14,000 workers each. There should be plenty of brains out there, available for work.
Considering the huge number of layoffs over the last five years, that was my thought, too. There is no shortage of software engineers, and there hasn't been one for well over a decade.
What there is a shortage of is American developers willing to work for the same wages as receptionists. Every time large companies start bitching about a shortage of tech workers, it's a lead-up to increasing the H1B quota.
I'll resist the urge to point out that English is a very old language, dating back in one form or another to the first millennium, and instead focus on the unquestioned assumption in Metcalf's rant: that we need a new OS.
With all due respect, why? I know this is a very exciting topic if you're involved in OS development, but if not, who gives a shit? Certainly, the average user does not. Ideally, the average user shouldn't even be concerned with the OS or necessarily even know what OS he or she is using. The average user runs a few accustomed applications and maybe some games, and doesn't really care about anything else. If it doesn't unduly hog resources and is reasonably stable, why would 99% of users care?
I understand -- believe me -- that this is a very different question from the developer's point of view. Some operating systems are a lot easier to work with when writing code than others. All of the current major microcomputer operating systems are, however, at least adequate to the majority of tasks, and many of the annoying features for us developers have more to do with poor API design than anything else.
There reaches a point when a technology has matured and future improvements are likely to be incremental. Operating systems have reached that point. There's no demand for anything new right now. Linux managed to squeak onto the scene not so much because it was good (though it is) but because it is free as in beer and as in speech. If IBM had caught the OSS bug sooner, it might have been OS/2 instead.
I would suggest that if Mr. Metcalfe is becoming bored, he should check into a field at an earlier stage of development, like biotechnology. Computer science has become mature and successful -- and a lot duller than it was twenty or thirty years ago.
There's more to life than using a text editor to crank out code. I do numeric data entry both as a programmer and in a business role. There is no way I'm going to hit 18,000 ksh without a ten-key, and I can't break 60 wpm on a tiny laptop keyboard. With a proper, full-scale buckling spring keyboard, I can hit almost 90 wpm. (Not, mind you, while writing code, but again, there is more to life than writing code.)
I also do a lot of graphics and audio work with the usual bewildering array of applications. Having a visually-remappable keyboard would be a big help with the applications I don't use frequently enough to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts.
And, of course, there are games. Not twitchy FPS shit, but the complex strategic wargames.
Finally, if we had a keyboard like this, we might finally get programming languages with decent mathematical symbols -- instead of crap like !=, <> **, and so on.
There really isn't much choice between the Americans, Chinese, Russians, or Indians if you're not a citizen of one of them, with the possible exception that, if you're not Pakistani, you don't have to be worried about being subject to attack by the Indians. All that is irrelevant, anyway.
The real question here is how the hell do you defend a LaGrange point? They're known positions with no cover. The amount of money and energy required to build an installation at a LaGrange point is vastly more than it would take to overwhelm its defenses with numerous small impactors or beam weapons.
The idea that the LaGrange points represent some kind of interplanetary chokepoint is plainly being advanced by military officials who are used to operating at low velocities on a more or less two-dimensional surface. In space, the only position that matters is not being near the position you were in when the enemy targeted his fire. Big stationary fortresses don't even make sense on the ground any more; they never made sense in space.
Yeah, I'm sure folks will be racing to download the home movie version of Plato's Phaedo. Even with the inevitable directorial liberties (Socrates is a wookiee, Echecrates is actually a Sith apprentice conspiring with Socrates' Athenian captors), I somehow doubt that it's going to put much of a dent in the revenues of the latest action flick.
Mind you, I'd buy this collection if I had the spare change -- or, more likely, the Loeb Classical Library instead -- but I'm not under any illusions about its mass appeal.
Science operates by taking a vast field of possibilities and narrowing it down by experimental method to just one. Science is about determining what is.
Science fiction -- or speculative fiction -- starts with what is, and explores the consequences of what thinks might be like if the variables were tweaked and some unknown were introduced.
In a sense, the two are working at cross purposes. Moreover, science fiction is, or at least can be, literature. It's creative art for its own sake. The idea that there is something deficient about it because it's not just a propaganda vehicle for attracting fresh students and funding to science is nonsense. One might as well criticize Shakespeare for not hewing closely enough to modern historians' understanding of Julius Caesar.
If our current understanding of science becomes the test for valuing a particular work of science fiction, most if not all of the best science fiction novels would be tossed out as garbage. Let the scientists do science, and let the storytellers tell stories. Both are valuable.
Most of the employees at the best pizza place in this county (actually rated best by the newspapers, not just IMO) have tattoos, piercings, and non-standard haircuts, and they do their jobs well.
Congratulations on winning today's award for best unconscious self-parody.
Yes, there are lots of great food service workers with tats and piercings. The same is true of record store employees, retail cashiers, and janitorial night staff. And yes, those are often quite congenial work environments. Some of the most enjoyable places I ever worked were retail stores because my coworkers were a lot of fun.
You are going to be hard-pressed to stay very far above the poverty line with jobs like that, however. Personally, I'd have been happy to stay there -- my hobbies are pretty inexpensive -- but I ended up with a family, and was forced to turn my free-time programming habit into a full time job.
I make pretty good money now. Is it worth it to me? Yes, at least until my daughter is safely off to college. Then I'll probably go back to a much lower budget form of existence.
The point is, the people who write the checks get to make the rules. The reason so many posters have pointed out that this is a maturity issue is that it takes maturity to recognize that and to see that, right or wrong, your personal choices have consequences. Those may be utter bullshit consequences cooked up by some uptight asshole who thinks not wearing a tie is a cardinal sin, but if you want his money, you have to keep him happy. Going somewhere else is not always an option -- there are an awful lot of people out there who can swallow their pride and wear the tie, after all.
It's not gender identity or any such twaddle. The point is that people who go to great lengths to draw attention to themselves are, in the professional world, not much of an asset. (I am deliberately excluding marketing sorts for whom that is their job, though even there, they are supposed to draw attention to themselves in a way that helps promote the product.)
I'm personally pretty damn liberal about appearance; I don't really give a shit what anyone wears. But when I see someone stroll in for a job interview with tattoos and piercings and unnatural hair colors, I dread the possibility of their being hired. Why? Because ninety-nine percent of them will end up spending an inordinate amount of work time talking about their body modification hobby, or bitching about the reactions they get, or otherwise trying to make themselves the center of attention rather than get any work done.
There's a reason companies have dress codes, and aside from "front counter" positions, it has nothing to do with relating to the public. It's basically a test of maturity and self-discipline. In other words, can you put your ego aside long enough to get a good eight hours a day of work done?
Another poster made some adolescent remark about not wanting to be treated like a commodity. Guess what? Unless you are in some really specialized field, you are a commodity. Get over it. But then, that takes us back to the question of whether you can put your ego aside enough to work as part of a team.
Personally, I see the presence of trendy piercings and tats as a sign that someone isn't likely to be an original thinker. Hint: if there are several entire magazines devoted to your peculiar appearance, you aren't being original.
Heh. That pattern applies to practically every mailing list in the world, too. I can't wait for the non-technical press to start running stories about "criminal software" like listserv, majordomo, and mailman.
It's worse than that. Run ps under Linux or the task manager under Windows, and tell me how many processes you see running. Sure, most of them are single-threaded applications, but they're all competing for the same CPU (or two). A 32-way chip would make things much speedier even if there were no multithreaded applications running. (And yes, I'm aware that other issues, like memory contention, come into play.)
You don't want that 32-way CPU? Well, give it to me and I'll let you have this old Pentium.
Maybe you just haven't become fully familiar with all of the features in InDesign. This may, in fact, be a pattern with you. For example, Slash supports automatic word wrap so that you don't have to manually break every line like that.
That's what I was thinking.
I'd agree with the assertion that a word processor, spreadsheet, or other primarily textual application is definitely easier to use with a keyboard and control strokes than with a mouse -- if you're willing to overcome the initial learning curve. I am, but a surprising number of people aren't. Personally, it annoys the holy living shit out of me if a word processor requires me to use a mouse for anything at all. Sometimes, I'll use the mouse for selecting a field in a dialogue box, but this is less often because there are a lot of fields (legitimate reason), than because the UI engineer came up with a stupid tab order.
For graphics apps, on the other hand, the mouse is going to be the primary tool. Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, and so on would be virtually unusable for real work without a mouse. That said, I use keyboard shortcuts extensively in all of the above.
The solution, IMHO, is to make sure that you can do as much as possible with either the mouse or the keyboard, and let the user decide which one works best for particular tasks in his or her own unique workflow.