If I were God, I would subtly alter the laws of physics so that spontaneous human combustion would result every time someone excused an injustice by saying:
People have always been screwed this way, or...
Someone is screwing you in a similar way right now.
Suggesting that we should put up with further invasions of privacy because other invasions already exist is like saying that we ought not to mind being mugged because people have always been mugged, or that there's no point in outlawing muggings because there's always shoplifting.
Yes, there are other Bad Things in the world. And we should fix them, too. What we should not do is sit around in online discussions trying to score the most points for hipper-than-thou cynicality by ignoring the evil that men do. Dammit.
Safeguards are meaningless if the industry is to regulate itself. I know there is a certain faction of people who believe that big business (or small business, for that matter) can regulate itself, but the simple fact of the matter is that profit always wins out over self-control. If self-regulation were actually effective, industry would fight it tooth and nail. It is embraced by industry precisely because it's a joke designed to lull the public -- through the medium of naive, middle-class libertarians -- into a false sense of security.
We don't attempt to prevent murder through a system of self-regulation, we make it illegal. Knowing that it is always easier for an institution to act unethically than for an individual, why place fewer restrictions on institutions?
I'd be willing to be that this is a calculated move on the part of Adobe to drum up free publicity for Photoshop 6 at the expense of (or, for the paranoid, in collusion with) MacNN. Sure, it looks bad to us, but don't forget that the general public seems to think that IP laws are cool.
C'mon -- when the pages are still up at AppleInsider under slightly changed filenames, and someone posts the changed URLs to freaking Slashdot, which is of course a hush-hush underground site that nobody reads (where nobody == MAX_LONG, anyway), can you really believe the official story?
I've long suspected that "rumor sites" devoted to games and to other commercial, closed source software and hardware are basically paid shills for the industry, but rarely are they as ham-handed as this.
And yes, I like italics. John Dvorak is my spiritual master.
For those of you who are suffering with Win9x, I prepared a nice graphical front end for ten post-Infocom text adventures. You can get it at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/starters/ AB10.exe. Granted, you need none of this flashy stuff if you're playing a real text-mode client under Linux, but it's handy for giving to your less technically ept friends.
The games were written by people more talented than I, but the whole thing is free as in beer. (It would be free as in speech, except that I long since lost track of the source.)
Hey, this is wonderful. Not only are whales and dolphins harrassed endlessly by the sound of motors, now they can be tortured by the screeching of 2400 baud modems.
Free Software (and to a lesser degree, Open Source) is all about choice. I get really sick of the endless predictions by Mac people (and every other advocacy group: Windows, Java, OOP, and even Linux) that someday soon, everyone will either be forced into their One True Way or that they will suddenly see the wisdom of the One True Way.
Newsflash: there is no One True Way. People differ in their preferences and needs, and there is no reason to believe that, even in this arch-conformist age, human nature will suddenly metamorphose into vanilla.
Why do so many people get off on the idea of forcing everyone to join their narrow little cliques? I'm perfectly happy for Mac people to use Macs, Windows people to use Windows, GUI people to use GUIs, and C++ people to write big, bloated, sloppy, hard-to-maintain code. (Okay, that was biased, but...) I just don't understand why they aren't content to play with their toys and leave the rest of us the fsck alone.
Yes, we need compiled languages. If I'm going to spend big bucks on a system that runs thousands of times faster than what I was using ten years ago, why would I want to run interpreted programs and only get 5%-10% of the speed I paid for?
If we're going to go that route, why don't we use the now-ultra-cheap 80486 series along with hand-coded assembly language programs and have $30 computers?
As with all such monomaniacal fantasies...
I personally believe interpreted languages will triumph in the end
...I believe that choice and diversity of options should triumph in the end. It's not necessary to wish the destruction of the dreams of others in order to pursue your own.
Maybe Pike is amusing, but next to a language like Perl, is it really needed?
Yes. Even if Perl wasn't a horribly designed language (to the extent that it was designed at all) with so many inherent flaws that it's amazing it gets used at all, much less commands the popular acclaim it gets. BASIC and COBOL are better-designed languages than Perl.
But Perl's enormous set of weak points aside, a diversity of tools is always a good thing. Not only do different languages and design methodologies have differing strengths suited to different problems, but a wider variety of tools better suits the variety of personalities among developers.
God forbid we ever end up in a world in which platform/language/methodology partisans have locked up all progress because their sacred cow is "good enough" or because of a misguided belief in portability. It only sounds good until the faddish wave of popularity you're riding has passed; other people's monochromatic fantasies are rarely as appealing.
If I was in charge, everyone would use ANSI C under some variety of Unix, and eschew all interpreted languages, object-orientation, and GUIs. Be as glad that I am not in charge as I am that you are not.
Moral: If it makes sense in biological evolution, it probably does in software as well. Diversity is a good thing.
Unfortunately, Brunei is an Islamic sultanate. Countries where bare arms on women are considered obscene are not likely to be good places to set up uncensored web sites. (Aside from the ethical implications of doing business with countries that treat women like animals.)
IANAL, but part of the laws regulating trade secrets presumes that you are taking reasonable measures to prevent the public release of the secret. Posting a "trade secret" to a website for the general public to access could very easily invalidate any future claims to trade secret status.
An analogous situation would be if Bill Gates, staggering around drunk in Central Park, walked up to each of several thousand people and offered to tell them Microsoft trade secrets if they "promise not to tell". While there are no doubt judges that would let this crap slip by, I think it is likely that the vast majority of appellate courts would laugh loud and long at this. Secrets are secrets because they are, well, secret. They are not secret because Bill Gates distributes them to a billion-plus people and says "Shhhhhh".
Considering that one goal of OSS is to get as many programmers involved as possible, resorting to C++ (or most OO languages, for that matter) is self-defeating to the extent that it raises the bar on a newcomer's ability to understand the code.
Of course, IMHO, the main purpose of OO is to overcomplicate what should be simple and elegant designs in the name of vanity and job security, but I grok that the obscurantists won that battle, and there's not much point in bitching about it. Except that I can't help it sometimes.
The level of hypocrisy here exceeds even that exuded by Microsoft lawyers. A sincere (and important) effort is being made on behalf of countless people who are being victimized by the system, and the "data wants to be free" crowd is having a hissy fit over copyright.
IANAL, but it is worth pointing out that unless you register your copyright by sending the actual paper form to the federal government, you cannot sue for punitive damages. You can only sue for compensatory damages, i.e., only if you can demonstrate that Andover prevented you from making money from your words that you would have made if the book had not been published.
I dunno 'bout the rest of you, but when I emailed Jon -- as when I email any journalist -- I assumed that I was risking publication unless I specifically requested otherwise. And while I'd be surprised if anything I said ends up in this book, it doesn't bother me at all. There's a lot more at stake here than whether I ever get a dime for writing an email. And if someone does make some money off of it, I don't give a rat's ass.
The level of sheer, mindless, greedy grasping and r-complex territorial behavior being demonstrated here is mind-boggling. Explicit copyright notices on your Slashdot posts? How childish! Do you stamp the old circle-C on the end product of your digestive processes? (Most AC's may as well.) Go work for Microsoft or the RIAA and quit cluttering public forums with spurious copyright claims.
The preceding comments are released into the public domain, where they belong, along with everything else I've ever said or ever will say in a public forum.
Netbooting is a significant issue in an institutional environment. In the school district I work for, which is underfunded like every other school district, we have upwards of 3000 computers, which we replace at a rate of 20% per year. 600 computers at $100 per hard drive is $60,000, which ain't chickenfeed at this level. Plus, being able to serve the OS and applications over our high-speed internal network substantially cuts tech support and administration costs.
The only difference between The Anarchist's Cookbook and a virus, or between any book and any program, is that a book is software that runs in a brain and a program is software that runs in a CPU. It is not what ideas (or software) you have that matters, it is what you do with them.
The difference between detonating a nuclear weapon and running a virus is this: you cannot safely detonate a nuclear weapon, but a virus can be executed and studied under controlled conditions.
This plays into the patent issue, too. Software is not a machine, it is the idea of a machine. It just happens that thanks to computers, the idea becomes as good as a real machine. But that no more makes it a machine than a vivid masturbatory fantasy is sex with Laetitia Casta, no matter how many might wish it were otherwise.
This got moderated down as flamebait? Sounded pretty reasonable to me.
The problem with moderation, as is becoming pretty obvious here, is that it's just a way to enforce the lowest common denominator -- mediocrity. I don't want to sound like a Katz groupie -- I reserve the right to filter out anyone I damn well please -- but when the filtering is driven by popular acclaim, only popular ideas will get exposure. Or, in other words, we'll just keep hearing the same old shit over and over again.
Hmmm... that's overoptimistic. It's not popular acclaim that's driving the moderation, it's a relatively small group of socially-maladjusted retards whose own localized lowest common denominator makes the mass LCD look like a paragon of excellence.
Until Slashdot has some sort of filtering system that lets users do there own moderation on their own terms, both the discussions and the moderation system are worse than useless.
"Instead of just displaying information, it should act like a personal secretary filtering information and telling you what's important and what's not."
Which is exactly what your desktop should not be doing. The Windows Explorer does this to a limited degree -- hiding system files and obscuring file extensions -- and it's a bad idea even for end users. I not infrequently have to deal with users who can't figure out why their web pages don't seem to work -- usually it's because they have two files, "foo.htm" and "foo.txt", which Windows truncates to "foo" in both cases on the theory that file extensions are too complicated for end users. What's complicated for end users in this case is that the FM has filtered out the information they need to solve their own problems. The contempt for the user is pretty profound, too: it's like producing a phone directory with only first names because end users can't be trusted to handle last names.
I can agree with the idea that you should be able to use your machine to apply filtering rules you have yourself defined. (Scoff if you want, but if you put a point-and-drool interface on it, end users can figure it out: witness the filter wizard in MS Outlook, which even my extraordinarily dense PHB figured out all by himself.) Letting something as chronically stupid as a computer (or a patronizing GUI engineer) decide to conceal things from you by default is a recipe for disaster and encourages an unhealthy lack of basic self-reliance.
End users can learn, and given the chance, a lot of them will do so readily, if not quite eagerly. The great flaw of the Mac interface (and, we may presume, of Nautilus), is that it encourages helplessness. Ask anyone who's done tech support for non-technical Mac users -- at the least difficulty, they started barking and waving their flippers because they have been conditioned to believe that anything not immediately obvious must be hard.
We can't expect every end user to be a technician, nor should we. But a substantial portion of the end user population will grow if you give them space to do so. Mac-style UIs generally don't provide this room. The Mac interface is, as we used to say in the mid-80's, like a set of training wheels you can't remove. And since the attitude that power and room for growth are bad things seems deeply ingrained in the Apple human interface ethos, I don't have much hope for this product.
And another thing: the idea that a hierarchal file system is too confusing is just patronizing BS. I've yet to meet anyone I couldn't explain it to in a few minutes. It's the insistence on cute but invalid analogies that screws up end users. Directories are not "folders". No one nests paper folders eight levels deep. If GUI designers worked harder on providing lucid representations of real data instead of hiding data, we might make some progress.
Oh joy. Former employees from Apple -- a company with an interface dumbed down to the point of unusability -- and AOL -- a company that dumbs down the internet to the point of unusability -- banding together to lobotomize Linux. Great news, I guess... anything that makes it easier to disengage the drooling millions from the great teat of Microsoft. At least with Linux, when they dumb it down, I'm not obliged to follow suit. My bash prompt will not go away because someone else decided it was unnecessary.
OTOH, the rush to World Domination has often led me to wonder -- will the presence of the clueless millions "improve" Linux the same way the opening of AOL's floodgates "improved" the Internet? You do realize that they're not going to clue in when they switch operating systems any more than they clued in when they went online, don't you? To them, this is just an extension of television.
The IIe didn't use a 68000 chip -- it used the Rockwell 65HC02, which was an enhanced version of the 6502 used in earlier models.
What killed the II line was Steve Jobs. The Apple II series was still tremendously popular, and he didn't want it competing with his Macs. This is ironic, as the Apple IIgs models that were contemporary with the early Macs blew them away in terms of performance. It's also what got me to migrate over to the x86 platforms, where users weren't assumed to be drooling morons, just as the Macification of the PC with Windows is what led me to Linux.
The book's title is, unfortunately, a misnomer. Dennett and followers are representative of that class of "scientists" who, having been offended at some deep level by the scientific intractability of the human mind, have settled on an explanation, any explanation, that puts that disturbing mystery to rest. This is not to say that the mind is not subject to scientific investigation by any means, but Daniel Dennett (and, for that matter, Marvin Minsky) are less interested in answering hard questions than they are in formulating questions for which they can trot out pat and largely untestable answers.
It's not OO because Linus Torvalds is one of the relative few who hasn't been suckered into creating bloated, inefficient, buggy, hard-to-maintain OO code just because his professors told him it was the right thing to do.
Is it just me, or has Jon Katz never actually reviewed a book here? He'll make a few offhand references to things mentioned in the book and then just use them as a springboard for ranting about whatever is eating at him at that moment. (Which is usually the same four or five topics, but that's another gripe.)
Personally, I expect a book reviewer to tell me something about the book, its strengths and weaknesses, and maybe some biographical info about the author. Silly me.
It's just plain stupid for people to be coming up with more disposable garbage for non-critical purposes. I wish the gee-whiz crowd would pull their heads out of cyberspace long enough to recognize that the computer industry leads the pack in shortening the amount of time this planet will remain habitable. But hey, let's bring on another piece of marketing BS emphasizing short-term returns over long-term survival.
The voting booth is a perfect example of the sort of technology we ought to be pursuing: durable, long-lasting tools that may cost more but destroy less. At the very least, how about a GPL'ed secure electronic voting app that can be run on obsolete hardware?
Moore's Law does not apply to natural resources. The gratuitous use of natural resources for frivilous purposes needs to be brought into check, and soon. This guy deserves his poverty; it's a pity the junk mailers and the packaging people can't follow him there.
Re:Inexperience: The root of all BS
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Those optimizations are fun to use, but they aren't algorithms (you can write HLL code that gives the same result, possibly more slowly).
Results aren't algorithms, any more than a shell sort is a quicksort. And if you write a program that produces the same output but at half the speed, you have not produced the same "result" if maximum speed was one of your design goals. Obviously, it's neither necessary nor possible to squeeze every last CPU cycle out of every trivial app, but sometimes there is no other way.
And isn't this one of those nasty opinions about what others ought to do? Not that there's anything wrong with that - IMHO public debate about which projects are worthy is the only way to keep civilization pointed in a sane direction.
In the first place, this has not been a public debate. This has mostly been a public attitude problem that has generated way more heat than light. In the second place, civilization has been kept pointed in the right direction by those who buck the trends at least as often as those who merely follow them. And finally, I don't think the course of civilization (or the great sacred cow of Linux) has been in any way threatened by the release of what might eventually turn out to be a good free mini-OS for embedded x86 apps, nor has civilization been served in any way by the monumental lack of civility this minor project has aroused here.
Re:Inexperience: The root of all BS
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I didn't say anything about earning the right to say something. I said that if you are speaking from ignorance, you ought to shut up until you know enough to have an opinion worth voicing. You're certainly free to open your mouth at any time and make a fool of yourself. There may be little educational value in it, but it can occasionally be funny.
What you think other people should or shouldn't create on their own time is a kind of opinion that, IMHO, is not worth having at all, no matter how much or how little you know.
And yes, I do mean that no code generator for any HLL will ever be able to consistently exploit the speed and efficiency hacks that are accessible to assembly language programmers. Short of strong AI, no compiler can intelligently analyze the program and its intended data and exploit whatever special-case hacks might be available. Learn assembly language and you'll see what I mean, or dwell in self-satisfied ignorance. It makes no difference to me. It does to you, but you'll probably never know it.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, that was the first thing that occurred to me, too. Except that maybe being a con-man is a step up from being a preacher.
- People have always been screwed this way, or...
- Someone is screwing you in a similar way right now.
Suggesting that we should put up with further invasions of privacy because other invasions already exist is like saying that we ought not to mind being mugged because people have always been mugged, or that there's no point in outlawing muggings because there's always shoplifting.Yes, there are other Bad Things in the world. And we should fix them, too. What we should not do is sit around in online discussions trying to score the most points for hipper-than-thou cynicality by ignoring the evil that men do. Dammit.
We don't attempt to prevent murder through a system of self-regulation, we make it illegal. Knowing that it is always easier for an institution to act unethically than for an individual, why place fewer restrictions on institutions?
I'd be willing to be that this is a calculated move on the part of Adobe to drum up free publicity for Photoshop 6 at the expense of (or, for the paranoid, in collusion with) MacNN. Sure, it looks bad to us, but don't forget that the general public seems to think that IP laws are cool.
C'mon -- when the pages are still up at AppleInsider under slightly changed filenames, and someone posts the changed URLs to freaking Slashdot, which is of course a hush-hush underground site that nobody reads (where nobody == MAX_LONG, anyway), can you really believe the official story?
I've long suspected that "rumor sites" devoted to games and to other commercial, closed source software and hardware are basically paid shills for the industry, but rarely are they as ham-handed as this.
And yes, I like italics. John Dvorak is my spiritual master.
For those of you who are suffering with Win9x, I prepared a nice graphical front end for ten post-Infocom text adventures. You can get it at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/starters/ AB10.exe. Granted, you need none of this flashy stuff if you're playing a real text-mode client under Linux, but it's handy for giving to your less technically ept friends.
The games were written by people more talented than I, but the whole thing is free as in beer. (It would be free as in speech, except that I long since lost track of the source.)
Hey, this is wonderful. Not only are whales and dolphins harrassed endlessly by the sound of motors, now they can be tortured by the screeching of 2400 baud modems.
Free Software (and to a lesser degree, Open Source) is all about choice. I get really sick of the endless predictions by Mac people (and every other advocacy group: Windows, Java, OOP, and even Linux) that someday soon, everyone will either be forced into their One True Way or that they will suddenly see the wisdom of the One True Way.
Newsflash: there is no One True Way. People differ in their preferences and needs, and there is no reason to believe that, even in this arch-conformist age, human nature will suddenly metamorphose into vanilla.
Why do so many people get off on the idea of forcing everyone to join their narrow little cliques? I'm perfectly happy for Mac people to use Macs, Windows people to use Windows, GUI people to use GUIs, and C++ people to write big, bloated, sloppy, hard-to-maintain code. (Okay, that was biased, but...) I just don't understand why they aren't content to play with their toys and leave the rest of us the fsck alone.
If we're going to go that route, why don't we use the now-ultra-cheap 80486 series along with hand-coded assembly language programs and have $30 computers?
As with all such monomaniacal fantasies...
Maybe Pike is amusing, but next to a language like Perl, is it really needed?
Yes. Even if Perl wasn't a horribly designed language (to the extent that it was designed at all) with so many inherent flaws that it's amazing it gets used at all, much less commands the popular acclaim it gets. BASIC and COBOL are better-designed languages than Perl.
But Perl's enormous set of weak points aside, a diversity of tools is always a good thing. Not only do different languages and design methodologies have differing strengths suited to different problems, but a wider variety of tools better suits the variety of personalities among developers.
God forbid we ever end up in a world in which platform/language/methodology partisans have locked up all progress because their sacred cow is "good enough" or because of a misguided belief in portability. It only sounds good until the faddish wave of popularity you're riding has passed; other people's monochromatic fantasies are rarely as appealing.
If I was in charge, everyone would use ANSI C under some variety of Unix, and eschew all interpreted languages, object-orientation, and GUIs. Be as glad that I am not in charge as I am that you are not.
Moral: If it makes sense in biological evolution, it probably does in software as well. Diversity is a good thing.
Unfortunately, Brunei is an Islamic sultanate. Countries where bare arms on women are considered obscene are not likely to be good places to set up uncensored web sites. (Aside from the ethical implications of doing business with countries that treat women like animals.)
IANAL, but part of the laws regulating trade secrets presumes that you are taking reasonable measures to prevent the public release of the secret. Posting a "trade secret" to a website for the general public to access could very easily invalidate any future claims to trade secret status.
An analogous situation would be if Bill Gates, staggering around drunk in Central Park, walked up to each of several thousand people and offered to tell them Microsoft trade secrets if they "promise not to tell". While there are no doubt judges that would let this crap slip by, I think it is likely that the vast majority of appellate courts would laugh loud and long at this. Secrets are secrets because they are, well, secret. They are not secret because Bill Gates distributes them to a billion-plus people and says "Shhhhhh".
Considering that one goal of OSS is to get as many programmers involved as possible, resorting to C++ (or most OO languages, for that matter) is self-defeating to the extent that it raises the bar on a newcomer's ability to understand the code.
Of course, IMHO, the main purpose of OO is to overcomplicate what should be simple and elegant designs in the name of vanity and job security, but I grok that the obscurantists won that battle, and there's not much point in bitching about it. Except that I can't help it sometimes.
The level of hypocrisy here exceeds even that exuded by Microsoft lawyers. A sincere (and important) effort is being made on behalf of countless people who are being victimized by the system, and the "data wants to be free" crowd is having a hissy fit over copyright.
IANAL, but it is worth pointing out that unless you register your copyright by sending the actual paper form to the federal government, you cannot sue for punitive damages. You can only sue for compensatory damages, i.e., only if you can demonstrate that Andover prevented you from making money from your words that you would have made if the book had not been published.
I dunno 'bout the rest of you, but when I emailed Jon -- as when I email any journalist -- I assumed that I was risking publication unless I specifically requested otherwise. And while I'd be surprised if anything I said ends up in this book, it doesn't bother me at all. There's a lot more at stake here than whether I ever get a dime for writing an email. And if someone does make some money off of it, I don't give a rat's ass.
The level of sheer, mindless, greedy grasping and r-complex territorial behavior being demonstrated here is mind-boggling. Explicit copyright notices on your Slashdot posts? How childish! Do you stamp the old circle-C on the end product of your digestive processes? (Most AC's may as well.) Go work for Microsoft or the RIAA and quit cluttering public forums with spurious copyright claims.
The preceding comments are released into the public domain, where they belong, along with everything else I've ever said or ever will say in a public forum.
Netbooting is a significant issue in an institutional environment. In the school district I work for, which is underfunded like every other school district, we have upwards of 3000 computers, which we replace at a rate of 20% per year. 600 computers at $100 per hard drive is $60,000, which ain't chickenfeed at this level. Plus, being able to serve the OS and applications over our high-speed internal network substantially cuts tech support and administration costs.
The only difference between The Anarchist's Cookbook and a virus, or between any book and any program, is that a book is software that runs in a brain and a program is software that runs in a CPU. It is not what ideas (or software) you have that matters, it is what you do with them.
The difference between detonating a nuclear weapon and running a virus is this: you cannot safely detonate a nuclear weapon, but a virus can be executed and studied under controlled conditions.
This plays into the patent issue, too. Software is not a machine, it is the idea of a machine. It just happens that thanks to computers, the idea becomes as good as a real machine. But that no more makes it a machine than a vivid masturbatory fantasy is sex with Laetitia Casta, no matter how many might wish it were otherwise.
This got moderated down as flamebait? Sounded pretty reasonable to me.
The problem with moderation, as is becoming pretty obvious here, is that it's just a way to enforce the lowest common denominator -- mediocrity. I don't want to sound like a Katz groupie -- I reserve the right to filter out anyone I damn well please -- but when the filtering is driven by popular acclaim, only popular ideas will get exposure. Or, in other words, we'll just keep hearing the same old shit over and over again.
Hmmm... that's overoptimistic. It's not popular acclaim that's driving the moderation, it's a relatively small group of socially-maladjusted retards whose own localized lowest common denominator makes the mass LCD look like a paragon of excellence.
Until Slashdot has some sort of filtering system that lets users do there own moderation on their own terms, both the discussions and the moderation system are worse than useless.
"Instead of just displaying information, it should act like a personal secretary filtering information and telling you what's important and what's not."
Which is exactly what your desktop should not be doing. The Windows Explorer does this to a limited degree -- hiding system files and obscuring file extensions -- and it's a bad idea even for end users. I not infrequently have to deal with users who can't figure out why their web pages don't seem to work -- usually it's because they have two files, "foo.htm" and "foo.txt", which Windows truncates to "foo" in both cases on the theory that file extensions are too complicated for end users. What's complicated for end users in this case is that the FM has filtered out the information they need to solve their own problems. The contempt for the user is pretty profound, too: it's like producing a phone directory with only first names because end users can't be trusted to handle last names.
I can agree with the idea that you should be able to use your machine to apply filtering rules you have yourself defined. (Scoff if you want, but if you put a point-and-drool interface on it, end users can figure it out: witness the filter wizard in MS Outlook, which even my extraordinarily dense PHB figured out all by himself.) Letting something as chronically stupid as a computer (or a patronizing GUI engineer) decide to conceal things from you by default is a recipe for disaster and encourages an unhealthy lack of basic self-reliance.
End users can learn, and given the chance, a lot of them will do so readily, if not quite eagerly. The great flaw of the Mac interface (and, we may presume, of Nautilus), is that it encourages helplessness. Ask anyone who's done tech support for non-technical Mac users -- at the least difficulty, they started barking and waving their flippers because they have been conditioned to believe that anything not immediately obvious must be hard.
We can't expect every end user to be a technician, nor should we. But a substantial portion of the end user population will grow if you give them space to do so. Mac-style UIs generally don't provide this room. The Mac interface is, as we used to say in the mid-80's, like a set of training wheels you can't remove. And since the attitude that power and room for growth are bad things seems deeply ingrained in the Apple human interface ethos, I don't have much hope for this product.
And another thing: the idea that a hierarchal file system is too confusing is just patronizing BS. I've yet to meet anyone I couldn't explain it to in a few minutes. It's the insistence on cute but invalid analogies that screws up end users. Directories are not "folders". No one nests paper folders eight levels deep. If GUI designers worked harder on providing lucid representations of real data instead of hiding data, we might make some progress.
Oh joy. Former employees from Apple -- a company with an interface dumbed down to the point of unusability -- and AOL -- a company that dumbs down the internet to the point of unusability -- banding together to lobotomize Linux. Great news, I guess... anything that makes it easier to disengage the drooling millions from the great teat of Microsoft. At least with Linux, when they dumb it down, I'm not obliged to follow suit. My bash prompt will not go away because someone else decided it was unnecessary.
OTOH, the rush to World Domination has often led me to wonder -- will the presence of the clueless millions "improve" Linux the same way the opening of AOL's floodgates "improved" the Internet? You do realize that they're not going to clue in when they switch operating systems any more than they clued in when they went online, don't you? To them, this is just an extension of television.
The IIe didn't use a 68000 chip -- it used the Rockwell 65HC02, which was an enhanced version of the 6502 used in earlier models.
What killed the II line was Steve Jobs. The Apple II series was still tremendously popular, and he didn't want it competing with his Macs. This is ironic, as the Apple IIgs models that were contemporary with the early Macs blew them away in terms of performance. It's also what got me to migrate over to the x86 platforms, where users weren't assumed to be drooling morons, just as the Macification of the PC with Windows is what led me to Linux.
The book's title is, unfortunately, a misnomer. Dennett and followers are representative of that class of "scientists" who, having been offended at some deep level by the scientific intractability of the human mind, have settled on an explanation, any explanation, that puts that disturbing mystery to rest. This is not to say that the mind is not subject to scientific investigation by any means, but Daniel Dennett (and, for that matter, Marvin Minsky) are less interested in answering hard questions than they are in formulating questions for which they can trot out pat and largely untestable answers.
It's not OO because Linus Torvalds is one of the relative few who hasn't been suckered into creating bloated, inefficient, buggy, hard-to-maintain OO code just because his professors told him it was the right thing to do.
(Can you tell I feel strongly about this?)
Personally, I expect a book reviewer to tell me something about the book, its strengths and weaknesses, and maybe some biographical info about the author. Silly me.
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It's just plain stupid for people to be coming up with more disposable garbage for non-critical purposes. I wish the gee-whiz crowd would pull their heads out of cyberspace long enough to recognize that the computer industry leads the pack in shortening the amount of time this planet will remain habitable. But hey, let's bring on another piece of marketing BS emphasizing short-term returns over long-term survival.
The voting booth is a perfect example of the sort of technology we ought to be pursuing: durable, long-lasting tools that may cost more but destroy less. At the very least, how about a GPL'ed secure electronic voting app that can be run on obsolete hardware?
Moore's Law does not apply to natural resources. The gratuitous use of natural resources for frivilous purposes needs to be brought into check, and soon. This guy deserves his poverty; it's a pity the junk mailers and the packaging people can't follow him there.
Results aren't algorithms, any more than a shell sort is a quicksort. And if you write a program that produces the same output but at half the speed, you have not produced the same "result" if maximum speed was one of your design goals. Obviously, it's neither necessary nor possible to squeeze every last CPU cycle out of every trivial app, but sometimes there is no other way.
And isn't this one of those nasty opinions about what others ought to do? Not that there's anything wrong with that - IMHO public debate about which projects are worthy is the only way to keep civilization pointed in a sane direction.
In the first place, this has not been a public debate. This has mostly been a public attitude problem that has generated way more heat than light. In the second place, civilization has been kept pointed in the right direction by those who buck the trends at least as often as those who merely follow them. And finally, I don't think the course of civilization (or the great sacred cow of Linux) has been in any way threatened by the release of what might eventually turn out to be a good free mini-OS for embedded x86 apps, nor has civilization been served in any way by the monumental lack of civility this minor project has aroused here.
What you think other people should or shouldn't create on their own time is a kind of opinion that, IMHO, is not worth having at all, no matter how much or how little you know.
And yes, I do mean that no code generator for any HLL will ever be able to consistently exploit the speed and efficiency hacks that are accessible to assembly language programmers. Short of strong AI, no compiler can intelligently analyze the program and its intended data and exploit whatever special-case hacks might be available. Learn assembly language and you'll see what I mean, or dwell in self-satisfied ignorance. It makes no difference to me. It does to you, but you'll probably never know it.