What we really need is for browsers to support a set of standard site-specific navigation buttons scriptable by Javascript. The amount of coding that goes into stateful sites to deal with users who hit the back button at "inappropriate" times is enormous -- anyone here who's coded a shopping cart will know exactly what I mean.
The benefit for the user would be a clear, standard set of buttons -- as opposed to the often confusing, overly "creative" navigation third-rate designers foist upon us -- and fewer confusing errors.
"I can't help but wonder what the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities etc."
The Chinese are not interested in running Western binaries or being vulnerable to common Wintel viruses, so if there is a lack of binary compatibility, that's actually a plus. The question is, can they get Red Flag Linux to compile on it, and unless it's a completely dain bramaged design, the answer will certainly be yes.
Given the aggressive intrusiveness of both Microsoft and the U.S. government, not being able to run Windows or Windows software is something the Chinese might actually be aiming for.
Their prediction that almost all data will be "push" instead of "pull" sounds way off to me.
It sounds off because it is. "Push" is one of those stillborn ideas that marketroids insist on resurrecting every few years, like the impending death of the PC, the ascendance of subscription-everything, thin clients, household automation, and so on.
The thing that has struck me as absurd about the whole DRM mess, and its DVD-specific issues, is that the proponents of such laws, who undoubtedly think of themselves as capitalists, are acting in a markedly anticapitalist fashion. The end result in this case is a young man being tried for breaking through an informal anticompetitive arrangement between the MPAA on one hand and Microsoft and Apple on the other.
The same is true of region coding: it is a method of creating artificial scarcity, i.e. of anticompetitive market manipulation.
And this, in the end, is what most of the wrangling decried on Slashdot is about -- companies that were formerly highly competitive using their success to suppress competition that might lead to their downfall. Unfortunately, so accustomed are "capitalists" to admiring gigantic corporations that they can, without blinking, swallow the notion that anticompetitive behavior is a form of competition. It is indeed, but only in a political sense, not a market sense, and market competition is what capitalism is about.
Physical engineering generally does the same thing as code building, use standard parts to build a variation on a theme. Creativity in the selection of standard parts will end up in an end product of unknown quality.
I think it goes deeper than that. Physical engineering isn't distinguished from computing in terms of standardized parts: most languages are standardized, many software and hardware interfaces are standardized, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they are standardized by some of the same standards bodies that write standards for "real" engineers.
The difference is that the way the standard parts are put together is itself standardized in mechanical construction. If you're building a house, you have to do so within the framework of the building codes. You would never, for example, use some leftover flooring material in lieu of proper roofing shingles just because you happen to be good with linoleum. Programmers, on the other hand, will frequently use standard parts in unusual ways, often to ill effect.
This is why programming is more fun than building bridges, and why programs fail more often than bridges. That being said, in most software applications, no one dies when a program fails, which is definitely not true of bridge collapses. Perhaps in the minority of cases where software reliability is a life or death issue -- medical applications and airplane avionics come to mind -- more rigorous standards should be applied. The rest of the time, the costs outweigh the benefits.
Unpromoted? Shock.
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No wonder this film isn't getting any promotion. The idea of drugging a society into obedience probably sounds pretty reasonable to a population spooked by an isolated terrorist attack that killed almost three-quarters as many Americans as died of heart disease and cancer every day, 365 days a year.
Of course, you don't get as many votes by waging war on heart disease and cancer as you do by vaporizing foreigners with exotic bombs.
Yeah, I'm totally off-topic. The movie sounds cool. Mod me into oblivion. I was just feeling cranky and wanted to add to my PATRIOT Act dossier.
There also seems to be a lack of detailed documentation
That's it for me in a nutshell. Forget the "mainstream" -- the lack of good documentation renders a lot of otherwise nice software useless in the IT workplace.
Look at it this way: if you pay an admin $60/hr., every hour he or she spends struggling with your fragmentary docs or (much) worse, reading the source to figure out what's going on, reduces the cost-competitiveness of your software versus a commercial product by $60. In a big project, multiply that by the multiple admins and developers who have to struggle with it, and it's not long before your free-as-in-speech software is much more expensive than the free-in-no-way commercial alternative.
Forget the broader social issues, forget the long term. Management does not think that way, and they have compelling incentives not to. And most of all, forget the dollar cost of the software. Cost of software is almost always trivial compared to the cost of the labor required to maintain it, even with expensive packages like Oracle and (may god pity you if you have to deal with it) Interwoven. The real question from a "straight" business perspective is: how long will it take us to have Package X up and running smoothly? From a business perspective, that's the whole issue.
The idea that businessmen can be persuaded on a large scale to make decisions on something other than relatively short term ROI calculations is a fantasy. That's what federal regulation is for. If you want to move product -- and that includes free software -- you must understand your customers' needs and satisfy them better than the competition. Free software, by and large, does not do this.
"Intuitive" GUIs only become a major issue when you're talking about non-technical users -- not that it wouldn't be nice for plenty of server apps. When it comes to ordinary end-users, you can probably skip the docs because they won't read them. The GUI becomes absolutely critical then. Again, stop thinking about whether the end user can figure out the interface, or whether it's documented -- ask yourself, "Is my free package as easy to use as the competition's non-free package?" If your answer is no, go fix your interface problem.
Finally -- and slightly off-topic -- the notion that point-and-drool idiot-proof interfaces will cripple a program is nonsense. Sure, some things don't translate to GUIs well, but a lot of stuff will, and you can still provide a CLI/config file interface to the advanced users.
It is not as simple as it seems. You want the nearer bones (or whatever structure) to show up more, but not completely obscure what is behind. And you want the stuff behind to look "behind". But how?
This is actually pretty easy. For each row of voxels running along the Z-axis from the "front" of the dataset to the "back", generate a sum of the densities of the voxels in the row. The end result is a two-dimensional greyscale image which you can then dither according to your preference of dithering algorithms.
Since this makes rotation fairly costly, my guess is what they are actually doing is doing a simple transform of an n-bit three-dimensional array into a somewhat larger 1-bit three-dimensional array, with the dithering happening in actual threespace and then being frozen; rotation is then a simple matrix transform applied to a few tens of thousands of fixed 1-bit points -- a trivial operation with modern CPUs.
My guess is that the graphics hardware is not some fancy 3D accelerated card at all, but just an ordinary 2D business desktop card.
However, if I'm listening to music on my computer, or in my car, the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps encoded mp3s is undetectable [1].
I'm not a musician (at least, I wouldn't call what I can squeeze out of a guitar music at this point), and I'm not a high-end audio geek. I do most of my music listening at my computer or on the bus with an MP3 CD player, or in my car. In those environments, there isn't much difference between 128kbps and 256kbps.
That said, when I do play MP3s through my stereo -- a ten-year-old mid-range Kenwood rack system -- 128kbps sounds pretty poor, 192kbps sounds fine if I'm not actively listening for MP3 artifacts, and 256kbps sounds as good as an uncompressed CD except in a few odd cases. I know people who claim to be able to detect the difference, but fortunately for me, my ears aren't that good, and frankly, CD-quality audio is overkill for the Sex Pistols anyway.
For $9.95 a month, and in my normal listening environments, eMusic is a fabulous deal, and I hope they do well. I also hope they offer higher bitrates in the future, and I'd be willing to pay for it. In the meantime, being able to legally download a few dozen albums every night or two is really nice.
Sounds cool, and reminds me of a project I've been tinkering with for about a year now -- a multiprocessor system based on the 6502 (actually, the 65c02), the same chip as was in the Apple II, Atari, the C64, and the original NES, among others. Problem is, my electronics knowledge at this point is not good enough to get beyond a good theoretical knowledge of what would be involved, though my 6502 assembly language skills are still sharp enough to write the firmware and software.
I only mention this because I hope someone who does have the requisite electronics skills will email me so we can join forces.
As for the earlier post to the effect of "what is it good for?", I can only say that it's fun to do, and old computers are good for the same things they were good for when they were new. One may as well ask what a 1965 Mustang is good for.
"Smart Display" is the 21st century market-speak version of what used to be called the "dumb terminal". Mind you, it's not a bad idea, but it's neither new nor earthshaking.
I would have just hung up, as with any other total stranger who called me uninvited and began making bizarre demands. The bipolar pothead I work for now is bad enough without dealing with former bosses, ex-girlfriends, or my second grade PE coach. Screw 'em.
OTOH, if I was out of work, I'd probably suck it up and do it. But I would insist on a rate of pay at the outset and immediate payment at the conclusion of the job. Otherwise, my time would probably be better spent combing want ads and harassing my contacts at the employment agencies.
Photoshop and Word are the biggest reasons. While the GIMP is -- once you get past its poorly designed interface -- almost the equal of Photoshop for preparing web graphics, it's almost useless for prepress. Nothing in the Unix world comes close to the full functionality of MS Word, and yes, I do use all those "worthless" features.
Then there are a slew of lesser programs that are Windows-only (or even DOS only, in the case of the Apple II emulator I love dearly), some but not most of which are games, that either do not run under WINE and DOSemu or do so too slowly or unreliably to be worth it.
It's definitely not the relative strengths of the operating systems. It's the availability of certain software packages. Otherwise, Windows itself has nothing to recommend it over Linux, with the sole minor exception that it is a royal pain in the ass to set up a printer under Linux.
Y'know, I hate to point this out to the RIAA, but blank CD-R's are used for a lot more than music. Between work and home, I maintain a collection of several thousand CD-R's that contain various kinds of archival data, (legally purchased) stock images, my own photography and design work, source code, and so on, including legally purchased MP3s (from Emusic) and legal free MP3s (from MP3.com, among others. The assumption that CD-R's sold equals music CDs pirated is just plain false.
I'm fortunate in that the majority of the music I buy comes from independent labels, so this won't affect me much, especially since, henceforth, I'll be buying all of my music from independent labels. It's not a great loss -- for each of the hundred or so acts the RIAA manages, there are thousands of better independent acts. Which is, I suspect, what they're really afraid of.
Remember that Bill Clinton -- the gift of god to Democrats
This Democrat didn't think he was the gift of god. I thought he was a dangerously immature jerk who sabotaged liberalism in general by smearing it with his outrageously stupid public behavior. His primary contribution to history was making Rush Limbaugh seem reasonable by comparison. Now we're stuck with a public that has swallowed the Prime Directive of the GOP: "Having lots of money makes people virtuous and trustworthy."
In many ways Charles Moore is a seriously twisted genius. I have always rooted for him, despite the fact I prefer to use a cleaner, more readable language.
Amen to that. A lot of Chuck's work, especially his new ColorForth, borders on the bizarre, but it's never drooling-in-the-corner bizarre -- it's always mad genius bizarre.
That being said, Forth is a lot of fun to work with even if you never do anything remotely useful with it. The underlying dynamics of a Forth environment are simple enough that you can roll your own very quickly, which is not something you're going to do with C or C++ or Java. Ultimately, that's what probably kept Forth from becoming more popular: the temptation to create new Forth-like languages was easily satisfied by Forth programmers. Case in point, of course, is Chuck Moore himself, who apparently despises the standard version of Forth and who has never stuck with one version of the language for very long.
Using Forth and building your own Forth environment is still a fascinating way to gain insight into interpreters and virtual machines, and the kind of thinking required for using Forth well is quite an enjoyable exercise. If you do want to use Forth for "real" work, it is worth bearing in mind that some very complex systems have been built very, very quickly by seasoned Forth programmers -- including air traffic control systems -- and the mode of bottom-up programming used in Forth basically ensures continuous unit testing, so Forth programs tend to require less debugging late in the development process.
So what I'm getting at is whether the Vatican plans on opening up all works for perusal or do they plan on omitting certain works based, possibly, on how well the information fits in with the desired line of thinking.
All the articles I saw seemed to suggest that only a selection of the 2m+ items in the library will be put online. I wouldn't hold my breath on getting to see anything listed on the index of forbidden works. The Catholic Church didn't spend the better part of two millennia dragging all social, scientific, and political progress to a standstill just so they could indict themselves for unparalleled crimes against humanity on their own website.
It's not that the Church has any problem with admitting that they were wrong, it's that they still think they were right.
Currently I am on a project where a 'web' form takes 20 days to build but the store procedures that manage the data take 2 or 3 days.
This is typical of UI issues in general, and I wish to heck more non-technical managers would realize this. The amount of coding and hard thinking that goes into making an interface reliable, idiot-proof, and easy to use can be truly astounding, and is often the largest part of implementing an interactive application. A ratio of 85% UI code to 15% non-UI code isn't at all unusual. Nor should this be surprising: interfacing with a database using a set of well-defined logical rules is almost easy compared to interfacing with the unreliable sack of semi-random chemical reactions sitting at the keyboard. Even when they're not clueless and stupid, people are among the most complex real-world phenomena any programmer will ever deal with.
I managed to miss most of this because I bought into ESR's propaganda about the open source business model and the imminent ascendance of Linux. So instead of getting my MCSE and an Oracle certification, I dived into Linux system administration and Perl- and PHP-based web development. Consequently, while my friends were making $100k+, I was averaging half that through the 90's, taking the work I wanted to do instead of slinging C++ and VB writing Windows apps.
Of course, my $100k+ friends are now making what I was, and I'm only down a few thousand a year from my peak pay in the late 90's. Not that I don't occasionally wish I had gone for the big bucks during the boom, but I know myself well enough to know I would have squandered most of what I would have earned, just like my friends did.
So in the end, thanks to Linux, it worked out about even for me. Except that my total debt load is now about $14k, and more than a few of my friends are into six digits.
Is Spanish better than English? Does Japanese trump Swahili?
For any given language, the eloquence of the communicator far outweighs the syntax of the language. As with natural languages, it is harder to master the idioms of some languages than others, but that's all.
There is one major area where digital photography has not overtaken film, and one area where it never will.
The first area is price. Provided we're not just talking about casual snapshots, you can get some fantastically good medium-format analog cameras for a fraction of the price of the high-end digitals.
The second area, which is the important one for me, is process. Taking, developing, and printing analog images is an enjoyable craft. Whether it is for anyone else is a matter of personal taste, but I enjoy the hell out of it. I also enjoy painting and drawing, too, and those are skills that have long since been "obsoleted" by film and now software.
Now mind you, I own several digital cameras, and there are tasks for which I prefer doing things digitally, but the very labor and uncertainty which digital photography eliminates are a very large part of the charm of analog photography.
Plus, knowing that my pictures will be viewable with nothing more expensive than a human eyeball for at least the rest of my lifetime is a big damn plus.
The only free license is no license at all. While I realize that there are sometimes good reasons to release under a particular "open source" license, there's a lot of code out there that should, could, and would be in the public domain if it were not for the screaming egos of their authors.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows Security Holes Go Mostly Unexploited
Well let's get to work!
What we really need is for browsers to support a set of standard site-specific navigation buttons scriptable by Javascript. The amount of coding that goes into stateful sites to deal with users who hit the back button at "inappropriate" times is enormous -- anyone here who's coded a shopping cart will know exactly what I mean.
The benefit for the user would be a clear, standard set of buttons -- as opposed to the often confusing, overly "creative" navigation third-rate designers foist upon us -- and fewer confusing errors.
devices capable of dynamically changing their ornamental or decorative appearance.
Isn't the reversible jacket already prior art?
"I can't help but wonder what the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities etc."
The Chinese are not interested in running Western binaries or being vulnerable to common Wintel viruses, so if there is a lack of binary compatibility, that's actually a plus. The question is, can they get Red Flag Linux to compile on it, and unless it's a completely dain bramaged design, the answer will certainly be yes.
Given the aggressive intrusiveness of both Microsoft and the U.S. government, not being able to run Windows or Windows software is something the Chinese might actually be aiming for.
Their prediction that almost all data will be "push" instead of "pull" sounds way off to me.
It sounds off because it is. "Push" is one of those stillborn ideas that marketroids insist on resurrecting every few years, like the impending death of the PC, the ascendance of subscription-everything, thin clients, household automation, and so on.
The thing that has struck me as absurd about the whole DRM mess, and its DVD-specific issues, is that the proponents of such laws, who undoubtedly think of themselves as capitalists, are acting in a markedly anticapitalist fashion. The end result in this case is a young man being tried for breaking through an informal anticompetitive arrangement between the MPAA on one hand and Microsoft and Apple on the other.
The same is true of region coding: it is a method of creating artificial scarcity, i.e. of anticompetitive market manipulation.
And this, in the end, is what most of the wrangling decried on Slashdot is about -- companies that were formerly highly competitive using their success to suppress competition that might lead to their downfall. Unfortunately, so accustomed are "capitalists" to admiring gigantic corporations that they can, without blinking, swallow the notion that anticompetitive behavior is a form of competition. It is indeed, but only in a political sense, not a market sense, and market competition is what capitalism is about.
Physical engineering generally does the same thing as code building, use standard parts to build a variation on a theme. Creativity in the selection of standard parts will end up in an end product of unknown quality.
I think it goes deeper than that. Physical engineering isn't distinguished from computing in terms of standardized parts: most languages are standardized, many software and hardware interfaces are standardized, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they are standardized by some of the same standards bodies that write standards for "real" engineers.
The difference is that the way the standard parts are put together is itself standardized in mechanical construction. If you're building a house, you have to do so within the framework of the building codes. You would never, for example, use some leftover flooring material in lieu of proper roofing shingles just because you happen to be good with linoleum. Programmers, on the other hand, will frequently use standard parts in unusual ways, often to ill effect.
This is why programming is more fun than building bridges, and why programs fail more often than bridges. That being said, in most software applications, no one dies when a program fails, which is definitely not true of bridge collapses. Perhaps in the minority of cases where software reliability is a life or death issue -- medical applications and airplane avionics come to mind -- more rigorous standards should be applied. The rest of the time, the costs outweigh the benefits.
No wonder this film isn't getting any promotion. The idea of drugging a society into obedience probably sounds pretty reasonable to a population spooked by an isolated terrorist attack that killed almost three-quarters as many Americans as died of heart disease and cancer every day, 365 days a year.
Of course, you don't get as many votes by waging war on heart disease and cancer as you do by vaporizing foreigners with exotic bombs.
Yeah, I'm totally off-topic. The movie sounds cool. Mod me into oblivion. I was just feeling cranky and wanted to add to my PATRIOT Act dossier.
There also seems to be a lack of detailed documentation
That's it for me in a nutshell. Forget the "mainstream" -- the lack of good documentation renders a lot of otherwise nice software useless in the IT workplace.
Look at it this way: if you pay an admin $60/hr., every hour he or she spends struggling with your fragmentary docs or (much) worse, reading the source to figure out what's going on, reduces the cost-competitiveness of your software versus a commercial product by $60. In a big project, multiply that by the multiple admins and developers who have to struggle with it, and it's not long before your free-as-in-speech software is much more expensive than the free-in-no-way commercial alternative.
Forget the broader social issues, forget the long term. Management does not think that way, and they have compelling incentives not to. And most of all, forget the dollar cost of the software. Cost of software is almost always trivial compared to the cost of the labor required to maintain it, even with expensive packages like Oracle and (may god pity you if you have to deal with it) Interwoven. The real question from a "straight" business perspective is: how long will it take us to have Package X up and running smoothly? From a business perspective, that's the whole issue.
The idea that businessmen can be persuaded on a large scale to make decisions on something other than relatively short term ROI calculations is a fantasy. That's what federal regulation is for. If you want to move product -- and that includes free software -- you must understand your customers' needs and satisfy them better than the competition. Free software, by and large, does not do this.
"Intuitive" GUIs only become a major issue when you're talking about non-technical users -- not that it wouldn't be nice for plenty of server apps. When it comes to ordinary end-users, you can probably skip the docs because they won't read them. The GUI becomes absolutely critical then. Again, stop thinking about whether the end user can figure out the interface, or whether it's documented -- ask yourself, "Is my free package as easy to use as the competition's non-free package?" If your answer is no, go fix your interface problem.
Finally -- and slightly off-topic -- the notion that point-and-drool idiot-proof interfaces will cripple a program is nonsense. Sure, some things don't translate to GUIs well, but a lot of stuff will, and you can still provide a CLI/config file interface to the advanced users.
It is not as simple as it seems. You want the nearer bones (or whatever structure) to show up more, but not completely obscure what is behind. And you want the stuff behind to look "behind". But how?
This is actually pretty easy. For each row of voxels running along the Z-axis from the "front" of the dataset to the "back", generate a sum of the densities of the voxels in the row. The end result is a two-dimensional greyscale image which you can then dither according to your preference of dithering algorithms.
Since this makes rotation fairly costly, my guess is what they are actually doing is doing a simple transform of an n-bit three-dimensional array into a somewhat larger 1-bit three-dimensional array, with the dithering happening in actual threespace and then being frozen; rotation is then a simple matrix transform applied to a few tens of thousands of fixed 1-bit points -- a trivial operation with modern CPUs.
My guess is that the graphics hardware is not some fancy 3D accelerated card at all, but just an ordinary 2D business desktop card.
However, if I'm listening to music on my computer, or in my car, the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps encoded mp3s is undetectable [1].
I'm not a musician (at least, I wouldn't call what I can squeeze out of a guitar music at this point), and I'm not a high-end audio geek. I do most of my music listening at my computer or on the bus with an MP3 CD player, or in my car. In those environments, there isn't much difference between 128kbps and 256kbps.
That said, when I do play MP3s through my stereo -- a ten-year-old mid-range Kenwood rack system -- 128kbps sounds pretty poor, 192kbps sounds fine if I'm not actively listening for MP3 artifacts, and 256kbps sounds as good as an uncompressed CD except in a few odd cases. I know people who claim to be able to detect the difference, but fortunately for me, my ears aren't that good, and frankly, CD-quality audio is overkill for the Sex Pistols anyway.
For $9.95 a month, and in my normal listening environments, eMusic is a fabulous deal, and I hope they do well. I also hope they offer higher bitrates in the future, and I'd be willing to pay for it. In the meantime, being able to legally download a few dozen albums every night or two is really nice.
Sounds cool, and reminds me of a project I've been tinkering with for about a year now -- a multiprocessor system based on the 6502 (actually, the 65c02), the same chip as was in the Apple II, Atari, the C64, and the original NES, among others. Problem is, my electronics knowledge at this point is not good enough to get beyond a good theoretical knowledge of what would be involved, though my 6502 assembly language skills are still sharp enough to write the firmware and software.
I only mention this because I hope someone who does have the requisite electronics skills will email me so we can join forces.
As for the earlier post to the effect of "what is it good for?", I can only say that it's fun to do, and old computers are good for the same things they were good for when they were new. One may as well ask what a 1965 Mustang is good for.
"Smart Display" is the 21st century market-speak version of what used to be called the "dumb terminal". Mind you, it's not a bad idea, but it's neither new nor earthshaking.
Microsoft: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow!
I would have just hung up, as with any other total stranger who called me uninvited and began making bizarre demands. The bipolar pothead I work for now is bad enough without dealing with former bosses, ex-girlfriends, or my second grade PE coach. Screw 'em.
OTOH, if I was out of work, I'd probably suck it up and do it. But I would insist on a rate of pay at the outset and immediate payment at the conclusion of the job. Otherwise, my time would probably be better spent combing want ads and harassing my contacts at the employment agencies.
Photoshop and Word are the biggest reasons. While the GIMP is -- once you get past its poorly designed interface -- almost the equal of Photoshop for preparing web graphics, it's almost useless for prepress. Nothing in the Unix world comes close to the full functionality of MS Word, and yes, I do use all those "worthless" features.
Then there are a slew of lesser programs that are Windows-only (or even DOS only, in the case of the Apple II emulator I love dearly), some but not most of which are games, that either do not run under WINE and DOSemu or do so too slowly or unreliably to be worth it.
It's definitely not the relative strengths of the operating systems. It's the availability of certain software packages. Otherwise, Windows itself has nothing to recommend it over Linux, with the sole minor exception that it is a royal pain in the ass to set up a printer under Linux.
Y'know, I hate to point this out to the RIAA, but blank CD-R's are used for a lot more than music. Between work and home, I maintain a collection of several thousand CD-R's that contain various kinds of archival data, (legally purchased) stock images, my own photography and design work, source code, and so on, including legally purchased MP3s (from Emusic) and legal free MP3s (from MP3.com, among others. The assumption that CD-R's sold equals music CDs pirated is just plain false.
I'm fortunate in that the majority of the music I buy comes from independent labels, so this won't affect me much, especially since, henceforth, I'll be buying all of my music from independent labels. It's not a great loss -- for each of the hundred or so acts the RIAA manages, there are thousands of better independent acts. Which is, I suspect, what they're really afraid of.
Remember that Bill Clinton -- the gift of god to Democrats
This Democrat didn't think he was the gift of god. I thought he was a dangerously immature jerk who sabotaged liberalism in general by smearing it with his outrageously stupid public behavior. His primary contribution to history was making Rush Limbaugh seem reasonable by comparison. Now we're stuck with a public that has swallowed the Prime Directive of the GOP: "Having lots of money makes people virtuous and trustworthy."
In many ways Charles Moore is a seriously twisted genius. I have always rooted for him, despite the fact I prefer to use a cleaner, more readable language.
Amen to that. A lot of Chuck's work, especially his new ColorForth, borders on the bizarre, but it's never drooling-in-the-corner bizarre -- it's always mad genius bizarre.
That being said, Forth is a lot of fun to work with even if you never do anything remotely useful with it. The underlying dynamics of a Forth environment are simple enough that you can roll your own very quickly, which is not something you're going to do with C or C++ or Java. Ultimately, that's what probably kept Forth from becoming more popular: the temptation to create new Forth-like languages was easily satisfied by Forth programmers. Case in point, of course, is Chuck Moore himself, who apparently despises the standard version of Forth and who has never stuck with one version of the language for very long.
Using Forth and building your own Forth environment is still a fascinating way to gain insight into interpreters and virtual machines, and the kind of thinking required for using Forth well is quite an enjoyable exercise. If you do want to use Forth for "real" work, it is worth bearing in mind that some very complex systems have been built very, very quickly by seasoned Forth programmers -- including air traffic control systems -- and the mode of bottom-up programming used in Forth basically ensures continuous unit testing, so Forth programs tend to require less debugging late in the development process.
So what I'm getting at is whether the Vatican plans on opening up all works for perusal or do they plan on omitting certain works based, possibly, on how well the information fits in with the desired line of thinking.
All the articles I saw seemed to suggest that only a selection of the 2m+ items in the library will be put online. I wouldn't hold my breath on getting to see anything listed on the index of forbidden works. The Catholic Church didn't spend the better part of two millennia dragging all social, scientific, and political progress to a standstill just so they could indict themselves for unparalleled crimes against humanity on their own website.
It's not that the Church has any problem with admitting that they were wrong, it's that they still think they were right.
I'm sure the telcos would just LOVE to include a "cannot resell" clause to equipment purchases, but they can't
Well, actually, they can. It's called leasing. Unfortunately for them, most of their customers won't go for that.
Currently I am on a project where a 'web' form takes 20 days to build but the store procedures that manage the data take 2 or 3 days.
This is typical of UI issues in general, and I wish to heck more non-technical managers would realize this. The amount of coding and hard thinking that goes into making an interface reliable, idiot-proof, and easy to use can be truly astounding, and is often the largest part of implementing an interactive application. A ratio of 85% UI code to 15% non-UI code isn't at all unusual. Nor should this be surprising: interfacing with a database using a set of well-defined logical rules is almost easy compared to interfacing with the unreliable sack of semi-random chemical reactions sitting at the keyboard. Even when they're not clueless and stupid, people are among the most complex real-world phenomena any programmer will ever deal with.
I managed to miss most of this because I bought into ESR's propaganda about the open source business model and the imminent ascendance of Linux. So instead of getting my MCSE and an Oracle certification, I dived into Linux system administration and Perl- and PHP-based web development. Consequently, while my friends were making $100k+, I was averaging half that through the 90's, taking the work I wanted to do instead of slinging C++ and VB writing Windows apps.
Of course, my $100k+ friends are now making what I was, and I'm only down a few thousand a year from my peak pay in the late 90's. Not that I don't occasionally wish I had gone for the big bucks during the boom, but I know myself well enough to know I would have squandered most of what I would have earned, just like my friends did.
So in the end, thanks to Linux, it worked out about even for me. Except that my total debt load is now about $14k, and more than a few of my friends are into six digits.
Is Spanish better than English? Does Japanese trump Swahili?
For any given language, the eloquence of the communicator far outweighs the syntax of the language. As with natural languages, it is harder to master the idioms of some languages than others, but that's all.
There is one major area where digital photography has not overtaken film, and one area where it never will.
The first area is price. Provided we're not just talking about casual snapshots, you can get some fantastically good medium-format analog cameras for a fraction of the price of the high-end digitals.
The second area, which is the important one for me, is process. Taking, developing, and printing analog images is an enjoyable craft. Whether it is for anyone else is a matter of personal taste, but I enjoy the hell out of it. I also enjoy painting and drawing, too, and those are skills that have long since been "obsoleted" by film and now software.
Now mind you, I own several digital cameras, and there are tasks for which I prefer doing things digitally, but the very labor and uncertainty which digital photography eliminates are a very large part of the charm of analog photography.
Plus, knowing that my pictures will be viewable with nothing more expensive than a human eyeball for at least the rest of my lifetime is a big damn plus.
The only free license is no license at all. While I realize that there are sometimes good reasons to release under a particular "open source" license, there's a lot of code out there that should, could, and would be in the public domain if it were not for the screaming egos of their authors.