User interface design is important. But when Raskin says you ought to design the interface first and then design an OS to support it, it's terribly clear that he has been looking at one problem for so long that he sees everything in terms of it.
If I said we ought to design a really, really good steering wheel, and then design a car to support it, everyone (except perhaps Mr. Raskin) would say I was a fscking moron. And they'd be right.
It's not a failure of the OS engineer if the UI sucks, it's a failure of the UI designer. Computers and operating systems are built to provide raw power for people to do things, and the job of the UI designer is to present that power to the user in a way he or she can understand and apply it. It obviously isn't easy, but to hear Mr. Raskin tell it, if he gave you a Lamborghini with a square steering wheel, it's the fault of the guys who designed the engine.
Pure hooey. I'll start taking these UI creampuffs seriously when one of them finds an intuitive and simple way to provide me with a GUI with even one feature as elegant and powerful as the CLI pipe and redirect symbols. Until then, they're just arrogant toy designers.
Heck, you are the only first-world nation that doesn't use metric, and that's easy to figure out.
This got modded up as 'Insightful'? The vital difference is that IPv6 actually does something; the difference between the metric and the older system we inherited from the UK is just a matter of notational conventions.
(The British hecklers in the audience may wish to remember that they are the only first-world nation without a written constitution, which is arguably more danger-prone than occasionally slamming an unmanned probe into Mars.);-)
Not everyone cares about the movie/audio industry and they need to figure that out.
The thing that amazes me is that movies and music are a pretty piddly market compared to the computing hardware, software, and telecom industries. Microsoft and Intel alone could fit Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen, and their entire penny-ante outfit into their ashtrays. Why the heck does entertainment media, whose entire annual profits are measured in the low billions, have so much power -- or think they do -- to manipulate the business practices of single companies that spend more on R&D for individual projects than the media weenies gross in a year?
The practical lesson here is that they lobby like hell and make campaign contributions to back their views. Go write a real paper letter to your favorite congressman and enclose a $25 campaign check. No, you won't match the RIAA's contribution, but you and a few thousand of your like-minded geeks will.
Everywhere I've ever been has been like this except for one, and that's the company that went belly-up this past May. I don't know if there's a connection there or not, but it does seem to be the rule rather than the exception.
The important thing to remember is that management personnel -- like everyone else -- do not get promoted because they do a good job. They get promoted because they managed to convince their superiors that it's to their advantage. Actually doing a good job is one way to do that, but so is ass-kissing, lying, intimidation, submission, being related to the boss, having good internal connections, making coffee and giving head. If you want to go far, you need to ignore the management propaganda that Arbeit macht frei and actually look around to see who gets promoted and why. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to give up your devotion to quality, but it does mean that you have to come to grips with the fact that you may be the only person concerned with the quality of your work and you need to figure out what your superiors are concerned with.
The XBOX is a game *console*. It's perfectly reasonable to maintain a closed standard.
Oh hooey! This is exactly the same as if a fork manufacturer tried to restrict the brands of pork chops you were allowed to stick it into. Selling a product entitles you to be paid for the product; it does not magically grant you additional rights to dictate to third parties how to conduct their business. That's called an "anticompetitive practice", and the current administration notwithstanding, it's illegal.
Of course, the laws are written for and interpreted by people who are paid by the people who want the laws in the first place, so it's rather academic, but still...
Under this line of reasoning, rocks would be illegal because you could bang someone over the head with them.
This is, of course, completely off-topic and therefore likely to be modded down, but I had a roommate once who watched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the news for years before issuing this classic boner:
"Damn, the Israelis would have a lot less trouble with the Palestinians if they would just clean up all the loose rocks lying around town."
It's obvious it didn't work the first time and that most people here think he should be punished.
The kid should get whatever he deserves under the law, within the limits of what's left of the Constitution -- I don't think anyone can make a serious argument against that. However, it would be equally difficult to make a serious argument that this isn't just grandstanding on the part of the Federal government, taking advantage of the public's bin Laden-induced cerebral paralysis to persecute anyone they can get away with while no one's too concerned about civil liberties. A parallel could be drawn to the John Walker Lindh case, where an individual who is arguably pledged allegiance to and is a citizen of Afghanistan is being tried for treason as an American citizen.
It's actually fascinating to see Americans, who have for fifty years chafed under political movements aimed at suppressing all forms of public hatred, suddenly unleash all that pent up nastiness on Moslems, Arabs, random nutballs (like this guy), and legitimate domestic dissidents as soon as something like 9/11 makes them feel like they have an excuse to behave like inbred, semiliterate rednecks with a cross to burn. I don't suppose it should be any great surprise to see the beast that lies under the thin veneer of civilization, but I always thought it would take a deeper scratch.
I wonder how long before we have something like Orwell's "Five Minutes Hate" for Goldsteinism. Oh wait -- that's CNN.
Given BT's cash problems I think they are trying it just in case they can get some money.
If I had major cash problems, I wouldn't try launching a patent infringement suit on a technology with prior art going back at least 34 years, especially when the defendant is basically everyone with a website. Not even Microsoft is running with the kind of cash you'd need to face that kind of opposition.
When I was in high school in the mid-80's, we had a pair of IBM System/3 Model 15 minicomputers that had been given to the school as obsolete equipment. We used them to learn programming in FORTRAN, COBOL, and RPG, as well as for maintaining class registration records. This refrigerator-sized machine had 16 kilobytes of RAM and was easily outperformed by the also obsolete TRS-80's in the next room, and programming with punchcards is something you have to love for the sheer mechanical thrill, because there isn't much convenient about it. But I'll tell you this, those old machines had a few things which are entirely absent on more modern machines, and without which they will never measure up:
More than fifty different blinking lights that indicated more than simple traffic
Bunches of rotary dials of the sort that used to be on televisions that most Slashdotters are probably too young to remember, either
Secret panels containing toggle switches to manipulate the inner workings of the machine
Sure, there are cheap handheld devices today that can outmuscle an IBM System/3, but they are all about as exciting as toasters by comparison. Old iron was just plain cool.
All of this is, of course, true, and unless I had a chunk of change to blow and data I had firmly backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't even think of it. OTOH, I have an old hard drive I disassembled to demonstrate how it worked to students. A working (or even apparently working) hard drive with a see-through window would make a nice instructional tool.
The amazing thing, IMHO, is that this drive worked at all.
Remember, not everyone here can compile their own kernels
Oh bull. In a simple case, where you don't mind the (negligible) overhead of compiling without using modules, it goes like this:
cd/usr/src/linux
make menuconfig
make dep
make install
(reboot)
Damn, that was hard. Sure, if you want to support some obscure hardware or tune the holy living crap out of it, it can get somewhere from slightly to extremely more difficult, but the point is: you can if you want to, but you don't have to, and in fact the stock Mandrake and RedHat installs work pretty well with common setups without recompiling the kernel at all.
and not everyone cares about being able to do that.
Fair enough, so go buy your Macs. But remember this: even easy jobs are tough if you never bother to learn how to do them.
I won't repeat the excellent responses to the question of "Why C?", nor will I succumb to the temptation to start another pointless flamewar about the advantages and disadvantages of either OO or high-level languages. I will, however, note that just as OO programming with C++ requires about 14 months of solid work to really "get it", writing good procedural code with C requires about the same learning curve. Too many people learn C++ these days and assume they know C because C++ is a superset of C syntax, but the simple fact is -- as anyone who has used both for significant work will attest -- that they are very, very different languages.
C has its place. That place, IMHO, is when:
You need maximum performance and control, and you'd rather not surrender portability by resorting to assembly language.
The application you are working on is written in C, or the bulk of your staff consists of C programmers (which could apply to any language, not just C, and is, in fact, usually the reason a particular language is chosen in the real world).
You actually understand the overhead involved in OO languages and decide that it isn't appropriate to the project at hand.
You're interfacing with hardware (or, for that matter, with various network protocols) and would rather not jump through hoops to get the job done.
Flexibility. Perhaps too much for the nervous nellies who think "type safety" is a first-order concern, but it's there if you want it.
And finally, though the recent (completely full-of-crap) Internet boom and ESR lead many people to forget this, the purpose of free software is not necessarily to chase bucks and compete with corporate offerings -- writing code can be fun, and its purpose can be exploratory/educational or altruistic, in which case you're free to choose the language that is best suited to the task, or best suited to the programmer.
The APPRENTICE option allows you to execute a command even if the associated package is not installed on your system. Sorcery will simply download, compile and install the necessary package before executing it.
Hmmm...
[newbie@home newbie]$ startx
"Damn, X sure does load slowly on this box!"
(Seriously, it does sound like a cool idea, even if I'm not convinced it's practical, but I may try it.)
If I pay for software (especially if I didn't have a choice about it, as is the case with taxes) I damn well better get a license to it. The only exception I can think of offhand would be in instances where national security is at stake -- which is fine, as I don't have any use for missle guidance software.
This is only an ambiguous issue to people who think Microsoft EULAs are handed down from God.
There is nothing especially remarkable about this email, whether it is authentic or not. (I was momentarily put off by the grammatical errors, but that's not really atypical of sales executives.) I used to see stuff like this all the time when I worked for the marketing people at another giant technology company that will go unnamed but which is well-known as the supplier of the last three letters in "Wintel". They, too, had special sales teams devoted to specific competitors and kept a close eye on the use of competing products among their customers and made no secret about it. There's nothing unusual about it; it's commonly called "competition".
Whether other Microsoft practices are ethical or commonplace is open to debate, but this is no big deal.
The thing you should definitely pay close attention to here is how technically un-clued this guy sounds. That, too, is typical of sales forces in MS and other tech companies. This is because they don't have to be. The people making the purchasing decisions aren't technical either. If you draw the obvious lesson from this, you will be half-way to winning the battle against MS within your organization.
If so there are some six million combinations, still weaker than a optimum password but probably stronger than the passwords most people choose (usually their significant other's name).
I wish. A couple of years ago, I worked as a sysadmin for a large government institution (which will remain unnamed) where I determined that 89% of all passwords could be compromised in three tries by using
the username
"password"
"secret"
Given a fourth try, you could nail half of the remainder with "pass".
And yes, I tried to get this changed, but end-user recalcitrance trumped common-sense. Until we have standardized biometric validation over secure channels, I don't think it's going to get any better.
it's been 5 years since I've been working in the tech industry and I've make great progress. My salary has grown by an annual rate of about 50% and I'm currently working as a consultant in a leading consulting firm.
I'd go ahead and get a four-year degree, preferably at an older school where there is some possibility that, in the process of acquiring a good general education, you may learn that publicly discussing your income (I'm being kind here -- the proper term would be "boasting") is in exceedingly poor taste.
XML? TLA for the decade. Its going to be here for a long time. Much more difficult to parse than most text files and this looks like a cool idea to
thouse who didn't understand why we have LALR grammar.
Thank you, thank you, thank you a thousand times for burying the sword of computer science up to the hilt into the lard-filled cranium of corporate IT. Hurt them some more, please!
Don't forget the other major drawback of XML: it's enormously redundant. (For those who didn't understand the LALR reference, please add the Claude Shannon to your reading list once you're done with the Dragon Book.) More than a few large corporations are upgrading their network capacity to handle the demands of bandwidth-hungry XML applications.
All of this could have been solved by developing a universal data-format and -transformation language, and keeping everything in its original compact binary representation.
Ditto here, though I'm a Thelemite rather than a Pagan. Christmas is just another day unless you're part of the one-sixth of the world population that adheres to Christianity. The rest of us have our own holidays, and we often work the "official" holidays to get them off. Fortunately, the major Thelemic holidays are in early April and early October when competition for time off is not especially stiff.
When I was a teenager, I always volunteered for Christmas -- it's the biggest sales day of the year for movie theatres, and one of the biggest in the restaurant business.
I'm just glad I don't have to deal with a holy month like my Muslim colleagues do.
Finally, though it's hard to say exactly how far this technology is from being useful (or alternately the probability that it will EVER be useful), it is probably safe to say it will be quite a while from now. Moreover, it is probably also safe to say that it only gets harder from here.
Certainly. On the other hand, if you had looked at the thermionic-valve computers of the 1940's, it would have been hard to imagine the Atari 2600, much less a Beowulf cluster of quad-Xeons.
nor do I really think it's likely that the NSA has a quantum supercomputer sitting in the back room decrypting my credit card information.
Nor should you. However, given the way the NSA has largely backed off any serious efforts to outlaw public-key cryptography, it is likely that they have either the brute force computing power or classified algorithms to crack it, so it's not necessary to imagine exotic computing technology. Besides, if an agency like the NSA really wants information from you badly enough, you'll end up giving it to them, Winston.
Shouldn't there be a +1 Deeply Paranoid moderation option?
While Heaney's translation is excellent from a literary standpoint, I thought it obscured the source for the sake of readability. Literary works from other cultures, especially those separated from us by a gulf of centuries, are hard to read by their very nature, but that's a lot of the point of reading this sort of thing. His Irishness is almost beside the point, considering that Beowulf is the archetypal Anglo-Saxon literary work. One may as well recommend a translation of Borges by Russians emigres. All that being said, Heaney's rendition is not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but if you can't approach Beowulf in the original tongue, I'd recommend reading several translations.
Slashdot Mirror
User interface design is important. But when Raskin says you ought to design the interface first and then design an OS to support it, it's terribly clear that he has been looking at one problem for so long that he sees everything in terms of it.
If I said we ought to design a really, really good steering wheel, and then design a car to support it, everyone (except perhaps Mr. Raskin) would say I was a fscking moron. And they'd be right.
It's not a failure of the OS engineer if the UI sucks, it's a failure of the UI designer. Computers and operating systems are built to provide raw power for people to do things, and the job of the UI designer is to present that power to the user in a way he or she can understand and apply it. It obviously isn't easy, but to hear Mr. Raskin tell it, if he gave you a Lamborghini with a square steering wheel, it's the fault of the guys who designed the engine.
Pure hooey. I'll start taking these UI creampuffs seriously when one of them finds an intuitive and simple way to provide me with a GUI with even one feature as elegant and powerful as the CLI pipe and redirect symbols. Until then, they're just arrogant toy designers.
This got modded up as 'Insightful'? The vital difference is that IPv6 actually does something; the difference between the metric and the older system we inherited from the UK is just a matter of notational conventions.
(The British hecklers in the audience may wish to remember that they are the only first-world nation without a written constitution, which is arguably more danger-prone than occasionally slamming an unmanned probe into Mars.) ;-)
The thing that amazes me is that movies and music are a pretty piddly market compared to the computing hardware, software, and telecom industries. Microsoft and Intel alone could fit Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen, and their entire penny-ante outfit into their ashtrays. Why the heck does entertainment media, whose entire annual profits are measured in the low billions, have so much power -- or think they do -- to manipulate the business practices of single companies that spend more on R&D for individual projects than the media weenies gross in a year?
The practical lesson here is that they lobby like hell and make campaign contributions to back their views. Go write a real paper letter to your favorite congressman and enclose a $25 campaign check. No, you won't match the RIAA's contribution, but you and a few thousand of your like-minded geeks will.
KOffice.
I haven't worked too much with the other components yet, but the word processor is a lot more powerful than its StarOffice equivalent.
Everywhere I've ever been has been like this except for one, and that's the company that went belly-up this past May. I don't know if there's a connection there or not, but it does seem to be the rule rather than the exception.
The important thing to remember is that management personnel -- like everyone else -- do not get promoted because they do a good job. They get promoted because they managed to convince their superiors that it's to their advantage. Actually doing a good job is one way to do that, but so is ass-kissing, lying, intimidation, submission, being related to the boss, having good internal connections, making coffee and giving head. If you want to go far, you need to ignore the management propaganda that Arbeit macht frei and actually look around to see who gets promoted and why. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to give up your devotion to quality, but it does mean that you have to come to grips with the fact that you may be the only person concerned with the quality of your work and you need to figure out what your superiors are concerned with.
Oh hooey! This is exactly the same as if a fork manufacturer tried to restrict the brands of pork chops you were allowed to stick it into. Selling a product entitles you to be paid for the product; it does not magically grant you additional rights to dictate to third parties how to conduct their business. That's called an "anticompetitive practice", and the current administration notwithstanding, it's illegal.
Of course, the laws are written for and interpreted by people who are paid by the people who want the laws in the first place, so it's rather academic, but still...
This is, of course, completely off-topic and therefore likely to be modded down, but I had a roommate once who watched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the news for years before issuing this classic boner:
"Damn, the Israelis would have a lot less trouble with the Palestinians if they would just clean up all the loose rocks lying around town."
The kid should get whatever he deserves under the law, within the limits of what's left of the Constitution -- I don't think anyone can make a serious argument against that. However, it would be equally difficult to make a serious argument that this isn't just grandstanding on the part of the Federal government, taking advantage of the public's bin Laden-induced cerebral paralysis to persecute anyone they can get away with while no one's too concerned about civil liberties. A parallel could be drawn to the John Walker Lindh case, where an individual who is arguably pledged allegiance to and is a citizen of Afghanistan is being tried for treason as an American citizen.
It's actually fascinating to see Americans, who have for fifty years chafed under political movements aimed at suppressing all forms of public hatred, suddenly unleash all that pent up nastiness on Moslems, Arabs, random nutballs (like this guy), and legitimate domestic dissidents as soon as something like 9/11 makes them feel like they have an excuse to behave like inbred, semiliterate rednecks with a cross to burn. I don't suppose it should be any great surprise to see the beast that lies under the thin veneer of civilization, but I always thought it would take a deeper scratch.
I wonder how long before we have something like Orwell's "Five Minutes Hate" for Goldsteinism. Oh wait -- that's CNN.
If I had major cash problems, I wouldn't try launching a patent infringement suit on a technology with prior art going back at least 34 years, especially when the defendant is basically everyone with a website. Not even Microsoft is running with the kind of cash you'd need to face that kind of opposition.
- More than fifty different blinking lights that indicated more than simple traffic
- Bunches of rotary dials of the sort that used to be on televisions that most Slashdotters are probably too young to remember, either
- Secret panels containing toggle switches to manipulate the inner workings of the machine
Sure, there are cheap handheld devices today that can outmuscle an IBM System/3, but they are all about as exciting as toasters by comparison. Old iron was just plain cool.All of this is, of course, true, and unless I had a chunk of change to blow and data I had firmly backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't even think of it. OTOH, I have an old hard drive I disassembled to demonstrate how it worked to students. A working (or even apparently working) hard drive with a see-through window would make a nice instructional tool.
The amazing thing, IMHO, is that this drive worked at all.
How about polyfork? Sounds like a great way to give equal weighting to every trivial disagreement over design.
Oh bull. In a simple case, where you don't mind the (negligible) overhead of compiling without using modules, it goes like this:
cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig
make dep
make install
(reboot)
Damn, that was hard. Sure, if you want to support some obscure hardware or tune the holy living crap out of it, it can get somewhere from slightly to extremely more difficult, but the point is: you can if you want to, but you don't have to, and in fact the stock Mandrake and RedHat installs work pretty well with common setups without recompiling the kernel at all.
and not everyone cares about being able to do that.
Fair enough, so go buy your Macs. But remember this: even easy jobs are tough if you never bother to learn how to do them.
C has its place. That place, IMHO, is when:
- You need maximum performance and control, and you'd rather not surrender portability by resorting to assembly language.
- The application you are working on is written in C, or the bulk of your staff consists of C programmers (which could apply to any language, not just C, and is, in fact, usually the reason a particular language is chosen in the real world).
- You actually understand the overhead involved in OO languages and decide that it isn't appropriate to the project at hand.
- You're interfacing with hardware (or, for that matter, with various network protocols) and would rather not jump through hoops to get the job done.
- Flexibility. Perhaps too much for the nervous nellies who think "type safety" is a first-order concern, but it's there if you want it.
And finally, though the recent (completely full-of-crap) Internet boom and ESR lead many people to forget this, the purpose of free software is not necessarily to chase bucks and compete with corporate offerings -- writing code can be fun, and its purpose can be exploratory/educational or altruistic, in which case you're free to choose the language that is best suited to the task, or best suited to the programmer.Hmmm...
[newbie@home newbie]$ startx
"Damn, X sure does load slowly on this box!"
(Seriously, it does sound like a cool idea, even if I'm not convinced it's practical, but I may try it.)
I have to wonder how many false positives this would generate for programs where the implementation is either trivial or obvious.
"Class, I'd like you all to implement a splay tree in a unique and novel way."
This is only an ambiguous issue to people who think Microsoft EULAs are handed down from God.
There is nothing especially remarkable about this email, whether it is authentic or not. (I was momentarily put off by the grammatical errors, but that's not really atypical of sales executives.) I used to see stuff like this all the time when I worked for the marketing people at another giant technology company that will go unnamed but which is well-known as the supplier of the last three letters in "Wintel". They, too, had special sales teams devoted to specific competitors and kept a close eye on the use of competing products among their customers and made no secret about it. There's nothing unusual about it; it's commonly called "competition".
Whether other Microsoft practices are ethical or commonplace is open to debate, but this is no big deal.
The thing you should definitely pay close attention to here is how technically un-clued this guy sounds. That, too, is typical of sales forces in MS and other tech companies. This is because they don't have to be. The people making the purchasing decisions aren't technical either. If you draw the obvious lesson from this, you will be half-way to winning the battle against MS within your organization.
Not if you let Slashdot know about it!
I wish. A couple of years ago, I worked as a sysadmin for a large government institution (which will remain unnamed) where I determined that 89% of all passwords could be compromised in three tries by using
- the username
- "password"
- "secret"
Given a fourth try, you could nail half of the remainder with "pass".And yes, I tried to get this changed, but end-user recalcitrance trumped common-sense. Until we have standardized biometric validation over secure channels, I don't think it's going to get any better.
I'd go ahead and get a four-year degree, preferably at an older school where there is some possibility that, in the process of acquiring a good general education, you may learn that publicly discussing your income (I'm being kind here -- the proper term would be "boasting") is in exceedingly poor taste.
Thank you, thank you, thank you a thousand times for burying the sword of computer science up to the hilt into the lard-filled cranium of corporate IT. Hurt them some more, please!
Don't forget the other major drawback of XML: it's enormously redundant. (For those who didn't understand the LALR reference, please add the Claude Shannon to your reading list once you're done with the Dragon Book.) More than a few large corporations are upgrading their network capacity to handle the demands of bandwidth-hungry XML applications.
All of this could have been solved by developing a universal data-format and -transformation language, and keeping everything in its original compact binary representation.
When I was a teenager, I always volunteered for Christmas -- it's the biggest sales day of the year for movie theatres, and one of the biggest in the restaurant business.
I'm just glad I don't have to deal with a holy month like my Muslim colleagues do.
Certainly. On the other hand, if you had looked at the thermionic-valve computers of the 1940's, it would have been hard to imagine the Atari 2600, much less a Beowulf cluster of quad-Xeons.
nor do I really think it's likely that the NSA has a quantum supercomputer sitting in the back room decrypting my credit card information.
Nor should you. However, given the way the NSA has largely backed off any serious efforts to outlaw public-key cryptography, it is likely that they have either the brute force computing power or classified algorithms to crack it, so it's not necessary to imagine exotic computing technology. Besides, if an agency like the NSA really wants information from you badly enough, you'll end up giving it to them, Winston.
Shouldn't there be a +1 Deeply Paranoid moderation option?
While Heaney's translation is excellent from a literary standpoint, I thought it obscured the source for the sake of readability. Literary works from other cultures, especially those separated from us by a gulf of centuries, are hard to read by their very nature, but that's a lot of the point of reading this sort of thing. His Irishness is almost beside the point, considering that Beowulf is the archetypal Anglo-Saxon literary work. One may as well recommend a translation of Borges by Russians emigres. All that being said, Heaney's rendition is not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but if you can't approach Beowulf in the original tongue, I'd recommend reading several translations.