Professional bodies exist to monopolise fields of study and provide a bar to entry. Organisations like the American medical association and the Bar council are just protection rackets.
Nobel-prizewinning economist Milton Friedman makes a similar, and very well reasoned, argument in his book "Free to Choose" (co-written with his wife Rose D. Friedman). The only profession for which he reluctantly concedes that a professional organization might be unavoidable is for MD's.
I agree with him that most such organizations are perfectly dispensable and over time mutate into money-gathering and lobbying organizations, paying only lip-service to their original goals. There have been examples galore of licensed MD's who have killed their patients, licensed engineers who built highrises that tumbled down and killed scores of people, licensed lawyers who've commited all sorts of imbecilities... the notion that these organizations are per se able to guarantee the professional competence of their associates is just wishful thinking.
I've also had several personal run-ins with such people. Over 25 years ago (and in another country), when I co-founded a software consulting company, we were pestered for over a year by a Business Administrator's Association, which claimed that we had to pay dues, employ at least two licensed administrators, and so forth, because according to their understanding "software" necessarily meant "administrative software" like payroll and accounting, and therefore fell exclusively under their charter... argumenting that we did systems software (of which they'd never even heard of) was to no avail. We let several thousand buck's worth of unpaid fees and penalties pile up and ignored them until they went away.
IMHO the solution is showing competence. If an engineer, architect, or programmer can show me solid, well-executed work, I don't care if he/she's certified or not - heck, I don't care if she/he/it's got a diploma, even.
I never stopped to analyze the mechanism, however.
The mechanism is actually quite simple, the trick is in the linkage that converts a dimensional variation along one axis into an inverse variation at right angles, which is then taken up and reconverted by the adjoining edges. So all polygons are forced to contract or expand proportionally.
While one is limited to building unit-edge polyhedra - closed ones work better than open ones - there are much more of those than is usually supposed. Have a look at Poly (Mac and Windows versions available), a shareware program which displays an astonishing variety of polyhedra. [Insert usual disclaimers here]
And there's also nothing absolutely wrong with mere arrogance and insult -- they often provide some of the best entertainment in some views. What too many posters here forget is that different people interact in this forum with different purposes. Some are here for the news (although I can't imagine why, since most of these stories come over the AP bulletins days in advance). Some come for the insightful rantings of others. Some come for the humorous rantings of others. Some come to blow off steam with other nerds.
Well, there are always stated purposes and covert purposes in any public forum. I for one don't read/. primarily to be entertained, although there certainly are humourous people here posting funny things... but reading "arrogance and insult"-type stuff gets boring very quickly. Yes, it may be an art - but there are very few artists.
It is not your prerogative to declare some of these motives orthodox and others verboten.
Far from me to declare that kind of thing; although I'm not a knee-jerk "freedom of speech" advocate, I agree that it is an important freedom to preserve - as long as my freedom to vote with my feet (or URL, in these cases) is considered more important.
My point was, rather, that polite people generally are more likely to be heard or read... and that I, particularly, tend to look down on whoever thinks being obnoxious is a virtue per se. And that is a prerogative of mine... just a matter of taste.
Call me an obsolete old fogey, but the word "politeness" is rarely mentioned on/. (or elsewhere), it seems.
What happened? I've always considered myself an individualistic iconoclast, someone who distrusts authority and has his own opinions about everything. Yet it seems my old-fashioned upbringing, at the hand of uneducated but polite old-world parents, has left me with an impatience and, even, disdain towards online flaming and rude language... and by "rude" I mean neither scatological nor profane, but simply disconsiderate of other's opinions and feelings.
Am I an obsolete voice in the wilderness, or what?
Hedy Lamarr must be about the closest thing to a geek guy's ideal woman. She was certainly a hot chick in her day.
And don't forget Jayne Mansfield, who reputedly had the "highest IQ in Hollywood" in her time... somewhere in the 180s, IIRC.
So why didn't she in her spare time invent side-looking radar or something like that? She was a pragmatist and decided that making movies was an easier way to get rich... Hey Lamarr never made a dime from her invention...
I saw on TV that in Brazil they have a huge program to produce alcohol from sugar cane for automotive use.
You're nearly two decades off, man... the program is about that old. Around 1985 nearly 90% of cars sold in Brazil burned ethanol. Last year this was only 5%... the program may be considered a failure, despite heavy government aid.
In order to meet the demand they are clearing large amounts of land (primarily rain forest, of course) to grow the stuff.
Most of the "rain forest" is too far away from the industrialized part of Brazil to make it economical to do that, although it has undoubtedly happened in the past. As for "demand", read above... there's very little nowadays. One reason is that, despite the fact that ethanol burns much cleaner than gasoline, the byproducts of producing it are serious pollutants... especially the destillation residues.
Regarding the announcement, there's been serious research into small-scale fuel cells for decades - most have been failures because of high operating temperatures, something you definitely wouldn't want in a laptop. But there's been progress recently. Look at Ballard for instance, they've been building automotive fuel cells for Daimler-Benz and Honda, among others.
So if your dock has tiny 4x4 icons, they'll zoom up to a readable size when you pass the mouse over -- I believe that this is the effect being shown in the screenshot.
While much of the "new" interface is evolutionary - a refinement and consolidation of many ideas from past iterations of the Mac OS - there are some indications of what the future GUI will look like. IMHO this is one of them... while this will unsettle many people who have grown used to static screens, dynamically changing depending on context - what you're pointing at (and in the future, what you're looking at) - will be the way to go.
BTW Netscape's buttons that stay flat while you're not pointing at them were a preview of that, although personally I consider them a good idea badly executed.
The three colored buttons which grow indicators may not be that great, since there are many color-blind folks out there - there should be an option to keep the indicators permanently. Large icons are great, as long as the user can scale them down. It's been getting progressively harder to design distinctive and good-looking icons - now we can go into detail and color, which was just not possible with 32x32 and 14-color icons (yes, I know lately 32-bit color icons have been possible).
Using animations, sounds, translucency and so forth will also be a hit, although of course the CLI set will hate wasting cycles on that sort of thing... and also, amateur interface designers will be able to shoot themselves in both feet very easily. Just call it evolution in action:-)
One of my embedded systems (now thankfully obsolete), over n 11-year span had version numbers from 0.01 to 2.18, in 0.01 steps.
Yes, this means there actually were 218 versions! Actually, my rationale was this... for every burned ROM that left the development lab for testing - even if just in-house testing - I incremented by 0.01.
In practice, this meant that versions that actually went out to users incremented at somewhere between 0.02 and 0.1, depending on the number of bugs fixed or new features.
It's good to see Apple releasing this stuff, but why do they have to do it under Yet Another Licence? Is it just to keep their lawyers busy?
Are you seriously proposing that their lawyers will let them use a BSD (or other "finished") license, and thereby put themselves out of work? If Steve Jobs proposed such an absurdity, they'd probably sue his pants off:-)... remember, "code reuse" is one of the most scary things lawyers can think of.
But it's good news. Scott Anguish and Andrew Stone are very capable people (I don't know the other two personally), and we can expect great things to come along from this collaboration.
I would be curious how the G3 compares to your two 604's. It might tell us something interesting about Apple's MPU designs...
Interesting idea. I haven't tried mounting the old board for over a year, but with 8.1 the two 604s (at 132 MHz each) ran Photoshop at little more than half the speed of the G3 (at 300 MHz).
I remember doing some comparisons between the BeOS (can't remember the version) on the twin 604s and the G3, and my tentative conclusion was that the G3's 1 MByte backside cache (running at 1:1 - 300 MHz) was the most important factor.
Now, seeing that the G4's interprocessor communication protocol is even better than the 604s - and the multi-G4 boards will probably have 2 MByte backside caches - I would predict that a dual-G4 board at 500 MHz each should give at least 3 times the effective PhotoShop performance of my current G3. Not considering the AltiVec units, of course...
Regarding Mac OS 9, I have some doubts that the new nanokernel will have a dramatic impact on a MP system, but I'll try it out over the weekend.
I'm writing this on a Genesis MP528. This is a 4-CPU multiprocessor box - a PPC 9500 clone with a Genesis-developed processor board. Four 132 MHz 604 CPUs... this was a top-of-the line system when I bought it several years ago.
At the time only Photoshop, Premiere, and a fractal-calculating demo could use the 4 CPUs, until I installed the BeOS on it. It was amazing what difference the added CPUs made...
After 2 of the CPUs burned out a couple of years ago, (the thermal paste wasn't tropics-proof, it seems) I installed a 300MHz G3 board - which at the time performed somewhat better than all 4 of the original CPUs.
The Mac OS has for some years supported extra CPUs strictly for number-crunching, but it wasn't symmetrical for other things. I'm looking forward to swapping my board for a dual or quad G4 in the near future, once full SMP support is in place.
It's quite fitting that such breakthroughs be made on the threshhold of a new era of unprecedented cultural return to mysticism. I'm still betting in science's corner, myself.
Funny how so many otherwise well-informed people still think that "mysticism" must necessarily be opposed to science. I agree that the current trend towards unquestioning acceptance of "crystals", horoscopes, channeling, creationism and so forth is alarming, but to extend this trend to argue that "since these things are 'mystic', mysticism is 100% wrong" doesn't follow.
Read some of Fritjof Capra's work to see how scientific insights can have a mystic aspect. Yes, many people jump on that and just start mixing "quantum" and other buzzwords into their tealeaves, but I think it's perfectly possible to study the workings of the universe in a rigorous scientific way and keep a sense of marvel about the whole thing.
Like many other posters here, I can type much faster than I can write - and my handwriting was distorted to caps-only during my punchcard years. So nowadays I sign checks and scrawl notes for my wife... the rest is typed.
Unlike many others, I can also type faster than I can talk. Frankly, I think speech input should never be an universal option as there are many people who have some sort of speech problem, foreign accent, or just plain mangle their language (just listen to any teenager:-).
Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite writers, but the 3 laws themselves are a bit dated.
Specifically, they - although they're supposed to be encoded at the lowest level of the robot's "positronic brain" - are stated in terms of high-level concepts; "human", "harm", "orders", "inaction", "protection", "conflict" and so forth. (Needless to say, Asimov himself was quite aware of this, and all of his Robot stories involve juggling the exact definition and application of these concepts.)
When the 3 laws were first written out - in the early 50's AFAIK - the prevailing view of consciousness, the mind, and AI was upside-down from what we think today. Namely, concepts, analogies and calculations were supposed to be low-level "intelligence" operations, and robotic (or human) consciousness was built with these as building blocks.
Instead, today we view consciousness, concepts, analogies and even mental calculations as an emergent property of a great number of low-level functions which seem to be simple feedback loops, pleasure/pain learning circuits, perceptual functions, and what linguist George Lakoff calls "conceptual metaphors". One of the points to the modern view is that, probably, an AI would have to be taught to do mental calculations, and probably would do them with same speed (and the same accuracy) as a human.
So, when practical robots come about, they'll be built on physical metaphors, basic learning circuits, and will have to "learn" the equivalent of the 3 laws once they can grasp the abstract concepts involved - and they'll probably want to argue a lot about the implications.
Well, obviously some Brazilian representative cares what I think, because he based his proposed bill on something the Debian developers and I wrote:-)
Sorry to disagree with you here, Bruce.
Obviously this "representative" has a son (or cousin, or...), probably a university CS student, which is a recent convert to the Linux "movement", and who is poised to get a big government contract for Linux tech support. Assuming that Walter Pinheiro has even heard of you (or even touched a coomputer in his life) is just wishful thinking. There's an abundance of legislation here in Brazil with similar underhanded purposes, some of which thankfully didn't pass - more out of a general cluelessness of Brazilian Congress, rather than a wish to curtail such sleaze - and this is simply one more example.
I'm amazed how the general/. response, usually a knee-jerk response against government abuse of "free speech" or "free enterprise", becomes a knee-jerk response in favor of any harebrained government initiative which happens to pay lip-service to "open source" for its own purposes.
Interesting that/. is asking/.ers - most of which probably are Americans - to write to a Brazilian congressman in support of legislation which certainly will benefit only a few American companies like Red Hat. I'm all in favor of breaking the stranglehold Microsoft has on the Brazilian Government. If you don't run Windows you're practically locked out of any web site or data interchange with any public agency - official documents are in Word format, official databases are in Access format, income tax software is Windows-only. But, kicking Brazilian software companies in the nuts in favor of "open source" software, which is just starting to find a viable commercial model in the US, and has none at all here, will just add to the massive unemployment figures.
I have the proposal here in front of me. Article 9 clearly states that any public agency (this includes govt. companies, public schools, and universities) will be forced to use "open source" software in preference to other options unless none at all is available for the intended use. This clearly opens the way for all sort of shenanigans, as any such acquisitions are approved by local committees - and the proposal nowhere spells out any requirement that the software should work at all for the intended purpose. And, let's face it, to assume that any agency will go, every time, through a months-long rigmarole of examining source code, is to be completely unfamiliar wih the way these things are done here. Either some "consultant" will be hired at an inflated salary to approve some package which interests himself, or another "consultant" will be hired to recompile something which has been bought already by some other agency, since the source code will be publicly available.
I have personal experience with selling software to the Brazilian government. The first package I did (on spec) had no copy protection - I finally managed to sell one in every major city, and then, no more sales at all. And even for these half-dozen copies I had to go to court to see my money... I've been looking into writing a legal dictionary - where presumably at least half of the sales should go to government agencies - but if this thing is approved, I'll be out of business.
I'm cautiously in favor of "open source" for operating systems, for a limited number of cases - but to extend this to application software is madness. This effectively legislates a well-established business sector - non-"open source" software companies - out of existence.
Consider the education sector. Public schools here are often constrained to install Windows-based systems, which end up underused or even scrapped because of huge support problems. I've worked for over a decade to open up more schools to Macintoshes, which are much easier and cheaper to support. If this legislation passes, do you think schools will be able to use Linux systems? This is just ridiculous.
Well, I'll be e-mailing lots of people next week and lobby to get this nonsense scrapped.
Finally, a posting on/. with which I can agree a 100%!
So, what's bad about human cloning? You've spent paragaphs hinting darkly about unspeakable horrors, but what are they? What is all that awful and horrible about human cloning? After all when it happens naturally and twins are born, nobody seems to be all that excited about it...
An excellent point, which has been made not enough times before. Nature clones all the time, there's nothing horrible about it. Even genetic mutation and refinement in the same individual happens all the time... 1000-year old redwoods have different genes today than when they started out, they just evolve all the time. I wouldn't mind this happening to me!
A generation ago, who could have imagined that one company would have its software in more than 90 per cent of the personal computers in the world?
A generation ago, this was exactly the case. The company was IBM. We seem to have survived this...
In less than a generation, this article will seem as quaint and bigoted as last century's rants about "the white man's burden".
If you plan on doing business worldwide, your name needs to be pronounceable by people with many different native languages, and needs to lack bad connotations in those languages.
In practice, this is rarely done.
Some of you may recall a couple of years ago, when Pepsi USA launched a soft drink called "Josta", based on the Brazilian Guaraná fruit... unfortunately, "Josta" is an euphemism for "shit" in Brazilian Portuguese:-).
But then again, many standard English brandnames are obscure to foreigners... take "Starbuck's". I've never figured out what this is derived from, and why it relates to coffee - and it took me nearly a year to find out why so many Java logos had a coffee cup in them, too. Apparently only Americans buy Javanese coffee...
Well, he also talked about rogue (or nethack). I bet if he had spent more time on rogue than on vi, you wouldn't be pissing at him like this. And guess what? It's the same interface!
Well, I've never used either rogue or nethack. If they use the same interface as vi, I'm glad I never did, too... and my comments were about the interface, so they'd stand.
And... "pissing"? A term neither correct nor polite, IMHO.
Re:No, I *don't* want to use VI... (nor Emacs)
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...it is a fervent piece of VI advocacy from someone who has been stuck on that interface so long that their mind has irrevocably wrapped around it.
Well, while I respect the author enormously, I agree that he went a little overboard in his praise of the VI-type editor. I've used vi, I've used Emacs, I've used TECO, I've used ed, I've even punched cards on an IBM 026, and I'm very glad I'll never have to do any of those again. Modes in a text editor - even a source code editor - are anathema. (And usually anywhere else, too...)
I recall - in a long-ago cover article of DDJ (IIRC) that text editors are governed by the "ducky imprinting principle". In other words, one tends to imprint on the first full-featured text editor one has occasion to use intensively, and after that no other editor looks right to you.
That said, many of the other points he makes are quite valid, and it's a great article overall.
In a suffiently large group of people, there are idiots. Some are true idiots, some are half idiots tipped over the line for a momemnt, and some are just ok people who happened to have a bad day or overeact to a story and act stupidly. Most of us try to control ourselves and think things over before we say them, but some people are better at that then others.
Well said. But the percentage of idiots is growing - must be that law that says that the universe's IQ is a constant...
This just shows that free-speech advocates, ecologists, feminists, slashdotters, and similar fanatics, should be treated with extreme caution... however right they may be individually, in groups they're unbearable. (BTW I'm proud to belong to all of the cited groups.)
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way. - Huxley
I dislike lengthy legal verbiage, but it is reactions exactly like these that cause them to grow. Every time someone says "Sue 'em!" over something, a lawyer proposes another paragraph in a license document.
My feelings exactly.
American companies have become craven doormats for lawyers and insurance companies. I've had opportunities in the past to put some software onto the US market, and concluded it wasn't worth the trouble of hiring a disgrace of lawyers (or whatever the collective noun is nowadays:-)) to check on trademark violations, license implications, possible offense to sensitive pressure groups, political correctness, remote consumer rights issues, user support implications, and to write up warning stickers like "if you jump off a plane holding this software you may get hurt". And it's getting more ridiculous all the time.
The most upstanding thing to do would be to have explicit UI that asks on installation if you don't mind sending your data when you play multiplayer games. I would consider that justified if we were sending a detailed system spec. That is something we may want to do in the future. Data like that is helpfull in making good development decisions.
It's in the user's best interest to fully inform the developer about which system the product is run on. And to have the software itself collect that information is much better than relying on the user filling out a form or registration card. My suggestion would be to have some sort of rebate, or enhanced support, or (in the case of a game) to turn on extra levels or features if the user consents in sending in this information. Yes, the user should be asked somewhere, but only if personal data are included. I don't consider hardware configuration to be personal data (unless you're an AI).
But this is just a driver string riding along with your game version. It just seems silly, like requiring you to acknowledge before leaving your house that someone might see you.....I can see that it is a slipperly slope to be on, and I can easily project it to a scenario that I would be offended by, but I just can't convince myself that knowing the reletive distribution of different OpenGL implementations is violating people's rights.
The browser identification all browsers send to the server are just as "sneaky" and "privacy violating", then? And the user isn't asked, and can't turn it off.
Face it, folks, the world is interactive. You can't just hover invisibly above it and not be seen or identified by anyone. Heisenberg's principle applies.
Information volume is growing exponentially - especially on the Internet, where it probably will have left non-online volume behind - and information-gathering power by any single entity is linear. Sooner or later it becomes an impossible task.
Unless they decentralize completely, and assign this to distributed nodes - a worm in each router, or something like that - which doesn't seem likely anytime soon, either.
In theory, I'd agree with you guys. But the USA has an unfortunate track record of being able to export "policy" (NOT legislation!) by bringing commercial and PR pressure to bear. Look at how many governments have been signed up in the "War on Drugs" and their offspring - FDA directives, written by an anonymous US bureaucrat, are being incorporated in legislation all over the world even though in the USA they never went through the legislative provess, public debate, or review by anybody else.
I wanna know if they'd put it on the 'net, assuming of course they could find implementors for the necessary software.
768 words (see specs) would probably be a tight fit, but the tough part would be the hardware... serial ports did not appear until much later.
The first computer I programmed on, an IBM 1401 with 4K (decimal) core RAM, which was from a later generation - transistors and so forth - didn't have any serial ports either. Even when the IBM/360 came out, serials were a separate (and costly!) option... something like $10K for a 300-baud port, IIRC.
Of course, you could bit-bang data to one of the panel lights - or byte-bang 8 of them, come to think of it... but even so I doubt you could find any workable TCP/IP implementation in there.
Although they're not disclosing details, from the picture it's pretty clear they don't depend on the lithography resolution to achieve this small size... otherwise there'd be no point in the announcement, since anyone could announce something that can't be build with today's technology.
My guess is that they've achieved a controllable way to either side-etch the channel down to that width, or build it up in a chemically (not optically) produced crack.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobel-prizewinning economist Milton Friedman makes a similar, and very well reasoned, argument in his book "Free to Choose" (co-written with his wife Rose D. Friedman). The only profession for which he reluctantly concedes that a professional organization might be unavoidable is for MD's.
I agree with him that most such organizations are perfectly dispensable and over time mutate into money-gathering and lobbying organizations, paying only lip-service to their original goals. There have been examples galore of licensed MD's who have killed their patients, licensed engineers who built highrises that tumbled down and killed scores of people, licensed lawyers who've commited all sorts of imbecilities... the notion that these organizations are per se able to guarantee the professional competence of their associates is just wishful thinking.
I've also had several personal run-ins with such people. Over 25 years ago (and in another country), when I co-founded a software consulting company, we were pestered for over a year by a Business Administrator's Association, which claimed that we had to pay dues, employ at least two licensed administrators, and so forth, because according to their understanding "software" necessarily meant "administrative software" like payroll and accounting, and therefore fell exclusively under their charter... argumenting that we did systems software (of which they'd never even heard of) was to no avail. We let several thousand buck's worth of unpaid fees and penalties pile up and ignored them until they went away.
IMHO the solution is showing competence. If an engineer, architect, or programmer can show me solid, well-executed work, I don't care if he/she's certified or not - heck, I don't care if she/he/it's got a diploma, even.
The mechanism is actually quite simple, the trick is in the linkage that converts a dimensional variation along one axis into an inverse variation at right angles, which is then taken up and reconverted by the adjoining edges. So all polygons are forced to contract or expand proportionally.
While one is limited to building unit-edge polyhedra - closed ones work better than open ones - there are much more of those than is usually supposed. Have a look at Poly (Mac and Windows versions available), a shareware program which displays an astonishing variety of polyhedra. [Insert usual disclaimers here]
Well, there are always stated purposes and covert purposes in any public forum. I for one don't read /. primarily to be entertained, although there certainly are humourous people here posting funny things... but reading "arrogance and insult"-type stuff gets boring very quickly. Yes, it may be an art - but there are very few artists.
It is not your prerogative to declare some of these motives orthodox and others verboten.
Far from me to declare that kind of thing; although I'm not a knee-jerk "freedom of speech" advocate, I agree that it is an important freedom to preserve - as long as my freedom to vote with my feet (or URL, in these cases) is considered more important.
My point was, rather, that polite people generally are more likely to be heard or read... and that I, particularly, tend to look down on whoever thinks being obnoxious is a virtue per se. And that is a prerogative of mine... just a matter of taste.
What happened? I've always considered myself an individualistic iconoclast, someone who distrusts authority and has his own opinions about everything. Yet it seems my old-fashioned upbringing, at the hand of uneducated but polite old-world parents, has left me with an impatience and, even, disdain towards online flaming and rude language... and by "rude" I mean neither scatological nor profane, but simply disconsiderate of other's opinions and feelings.
Am I an obsolete voice in the wilderness, or what?
And don't forget Jayne Mansfield, who reputedly had the "highest IQ in Hollywood" in her time... somewhere in the 180s, IIRC.
So why didn't she in her spare time invent side-looking radar or something like that? She was a pragmatist and decided that making movies was an easier way to get rich... Hey Lamarr never made a dime from her invention...
You're nearly two decades off, man... the program is about that old. Around 1985 nearly 90% of cars sold in Brazil burned ethanol. Last year this was only 5%... the program may be considered a failure, despite heavy government aid.
In order to meet the demand they are clearing large amounts of land (primarily rain forest, of course) to grow the stuff.
Most of the "rain forest" is too far away from the industrialized part of Brazil to make it economical to do that, although it has undoubtedly happened in the past. As for "demand", read above... there's very little nowadays. One reason is that, despite the fact that ethanol burns much cleaner than gasoline, the byproducts of producing it are serious pollutants... especially the destillation residues.
Regarding the announcement, there's been serious research into small-scale fuel cells for decades - most have been failures because of high operating temperatures, something you definitely wouldn't want in a laptop. But there's been progress recently. Look at Ballard for instance, they've been building automotive fuel cells for Daimler-Benz and Honda, among others.
While much of the "new" interface is evolutionary - a refinement and consolidation of many ideas from past iterations of the Mac OS - there are some indications of what the future GUI will look like. IMHO this is one of them... while this will unsettle many people who have grown used to static screens, dynamically changing depending on context - what you're pointing at (and in the future, what you're looking at) - will be the way to go.
BTW Netscape's buttons that stay flat while you're not pointing at them were a preview of that, although personally I consider them a good idea badly executed.
The three colored buttons which grow indicators may not be that great, since there are many color-blind folks out there - there should be an option to keep the indicators permanently. Large icons are great, as long as the user can scale them down. It's been getting progressively harder to design distinctive and good-looking icons - now we can go into detail and color, which was just not possible with 32x32 and 14-color icons (yes, I know lately 32-bit color icons have been possible).
Using animations, sounds, translucency and so forth will also be a hit, although of course the CLI set will hate wasting cycles on that sort of thing... and also, amateur interface designers will be able to shoot themselves in both feet very easily. Just call it evolution in action :-)
Yes, this means there actually were 218 versions! Actually, my rationale was this... for every burned ROM that left the development lab for testing - even if just in-house testing - I incremented by 0.01.
In practice, this meant that versions that actually went out to users incremented at somewhere between 0.02 and 0.1, depending on the number of bugs fixed or new features.
It worked quite well for us...
Are you seriously proposing that their lawyers will let them use a BSD (or other "finished") license, and thereby put themselves out of work? If Steve Jobs proposed such an absurdity, they'd probably sue his pants off :-)... remember, "code reuse" is one of the most scary things lawyers can think of.
But it's good news. Scott Anguish and Andrew Stone are very capable people (I don't know the other two personally), and we can expect great things to come along from this collaboration.
Interesting idea. I haven't tried mounting the old board for over a year, but with 8.1 the two 604s (at 132 MHz each) ran Photoshop at little more than half the speed of the G3 (at 300 MHz).
I remember doing some comparisons between the BeOS (can't remember the version) on the twin 604s and the G3, and my tentative conclusion was that the G3's 1 MByte backside cache (running at 1:1 - 300 MHz) was the most important factor.
Now, seeing that the G4's interprocessor communication protocol is even better than the 604s - and the multi-G4 boards will probably have 2 MByte backside caches - I would predict that a dual-G4 board at 500 MHz each should give at least 3 times the effective PhotoShop performance of my current G3. Not considering the AltiVec units, of course...
Regarding Mac OS 9, I have some doubts that the new nanokernel will have a dramatic impact on a MP system, but I'll try it out over the weekend.
At the time only Photoshop, Premiere, and a fractal-calculating demo could use the 4 CPUs, until I installed the BeOS on it. It was amazing what difference the added CPUs made...
After 2 of the CPUs burned out a couple of years ago, (the thermal paste wasn't tropics-proof, it seems) I installed a 300MHz G3 board - which at the time performed somewhat better than all 4 of the original CPUs.
The Mac OS has for some years supported extra CPUs strictly for number-crunching, but it wasn't symmetrical for other things. I'm looking forward to swapping my board for a dual or quad G4 in the near future, once full SMP support is in place.
Funny how so many otherwise well-informed people still think that "mysticism" must necessarily be opposed to science. I agree that the current trend towards unquestioning acceptance of "crystals", horoscopes, channeling, creationism and so forth is alarming, but to extend this trend to argue that "since these things are 'mystic', mysticism is 100% wrong" doesn't follow.
Read some of Fritjof Capra's work to see how scientific insights can have a mystic aspect. Yes, many people jump on that and just start mixing "quantum" and other buzzwords into their tealeaves, but I think it's perfectly possible to study the workings of the universe in a rigorous scientific way and keep a sense of marvel about the whole thing.
Unlike many others, I can also type faster than I can talk. Frankly, I think speech input should never be an universal option as there are many people who have some sort of speech problem, foreign accent, or just plain mangle their language (just listen to any teenager :-).
Specifically, they - although they're supposed to be encoded at the lowest level of the robot's "positronic brain" - are stated in terms of high-level concepts; "human", "harm", "orders", "inaction", "protection", "conflict" and so forth. (Needless to say, Asimov himself was quite aware of this, and all of his Robot stories involve juggling the exact definition and application of these concepts.)
When the 3 laws were first written out - in the early 50's AFAIK - the prevailing view of consciousness, the mind, and AI was upside-down from what we think today. Namely, concepts, analogies and calculations were supposed to be low-level "intelligence" operations, and robotic (or human) consciousness was built with these as building blocks.
Instead, today we view consciousness, concepts, analogies and even mental calculations as an emergent property of a great number of low-level functions which seem to be simple feedback loops, pleasure/pain learning circuits, perceptual functions, and what linguist George Lakoff calls "conceptual metaphors". One of the points to the modern view is that, probably, an AI would have to be taught to do mental calculations, and probably would do them with same speed (and the same accuracy) as a human.
So, when practical robots come about, they'll be built on physical metaphors, basic learning circuits, and will have to "learn" the equivalent of the 3 laws once they can grasp the abstract concepts involved - and they'll probably want to argue a lot about the implications.
Sorry to disagree with you here, Bruce.
Obviously this "representative" has a son (or cousin, or...), probably a university CS student, which is a recent convert to the Linux "movement", and who is poised to get a big government contract for Linux tech support. Assuming that Walter Pinheiro has even heard of you (or even touched a coomputer in his life) is just wishful thinking. There's an abundance of legislation here in Brazil with similar underhanded purposes, some of which thankfully didn't pass - more out of a general cluelessness of Brazilian Congress, rather than a wish to curtail such sleaze - and this is simply one more example.
I'm amazed how the general /. response, usually a knee-jerk response against government abuse of "free speech" or "free enterprise", becomes a knee-jerk response in favor of any harebrained government initiative which happens to pay lip-service to "open source" for its own purposes.
Interesting that /. is asking /.ers - most of which probably are Americans - to write to a Brazilian congressman in support of legislation which certainly will benefit only a few American companies like Red Hat. I'm all in favor of breaking the stranglehold Microsoft has on the Brazilian Government. If you don't run Windows you're practically locked out of any web site or data interchange with any public agency - official documents are in Word format, official databases are in Access format, income tax software is Windows-only. But, kicking Brazilian software companies in the nuts in favor of "open source" software, which is just starting to find a viable commercial model in the US, and has none at all here, will just add to the massive unemployment figures.
I have the proposal here in front of me. Article 9 clearly states that any public agency (this includes govt. companies, public schools, and universities) will be forced to use "open source" software in preference to other options unless none at all is available for the intended use. This clearly opens the way for all sort of shenanigans, as any such acquisitions are approved by local committees - and the proposal nowhere spells out any requirement that the software should work at all for the intended purpose. And, let's face it, to assume that any agency will go, every time, through a months-long rigmarole of examining source code, is to be completely unfamiliar wih the way these things are done here. Either some "consultant" will be hired at an inflated salary to approve some package which interests himself, or another "consultant" will be hired to recompile something which has been bought already by some other agency, since the source code will be publicly available.
I have personal experience with selling software to the Brazilian government. The first package I did (on spec) had no copy protection - I finally managed to sell one in every major city, and then, no more sales at all. And even for these half-dozen copies I had to go to court to see my money... I've been looking into writing a legal dictionary - where presumably at least half of the sales should go to government agencies - but if this thing is approved, I'll be out of business.
I'm cautiously in favor of "open source" for operating systems, for a limited number of cases - but to extend this to application software is madness. This effectively legislates a well-established business sector - non-"open source" software companies - out of existence.
Consider the education sector. Public schools here are often constrained to install Windows-based systems, which end up underused or even scrapped because of huge support problems. I've worked for over a decade to open up more schools to Macintoshes, which are much easier and cheaper to support. If this legislation passes, do you think schools will be able to use Linux systems? This is just ridiculous.
Well, I'll be e-mailing lots of people next week and lobby to get this nonsense scrapped.
So, what's bad about human cloning? You've spent paragaphs hinting darkly about unspeakable horrors, but what are they? What is all that awful and horrible about human cloning? After all when it happens naturally and twins are born, nobody seems to be all that excited about it...
An excellent point, which has been made not enough times before. Nature clones all the time, there's nothing horrible about it. Even genetic mutation and refinement in the same individual happens all the time... 1000-year old redwoods have different genes today than when they started out, they just evolve all the time. I wouldn't mind this happening to me!
A generation ago, who could have imagined that one company would have its software in more than 90 per cent of the personal computers in the world?
A generation ago, this was exactly the case. The company was IBM. We seem to have survived this...
In less than a generation, this article will seem as quaint and bigoted as last century's rants about "the white man's burden".
In practice, this is rarely done.
Some of you may recall a couple of years ago, when Pepsi USA launched a soft drink called "Josta", based on the Brazilian Guaraná fruit... unfortunately, "Josta" is an euphemism for "shit" in Brazilian Portuguese :-).
But then again, many standard English brandnames are obscure to foreigners... take "Starbuck's". I've never figured out what this is derived from, and why it relates to coffee - and it took me nearly a year to find out why so many Java logos had a coffee cup in them, too. Apparently only Americans buy Javanese coffee...
Well, I've never used either rogue or nethack. If they use the same interface as vi, I'm glad I never did, too... and my comments were about the interface, so they'd stand.
And... "pissing"? A term neither correct nor polite, IMHO.
Well, while I respect the author enormously, I agree that he went a little overboard in his praise of the VI-type editor. I've used vi, I've used Emacs, I've used TECO, I've used ed, I've even punched cards on an IBM 026, and I'm very glad I'll never have to do any of those again. Modes in a text editor - even a source code editor - are anathema. (And usually anywhere else, too...)
I recall - in a long-ago cover article of DDJ (IIRC) that text editors are governed by the "ducky imprinting principle". In other words, one tends to imprint on the first full-featured text editor one has occasion to use intensively, and after that no other editor looks right to you.
That said, many of the other points he makes are quite valid, and it's a great article overall.
Well said. But the percentage of idiots is growing - must be that law that says that the universe's IQ is a constant...
This just shows that free-speech advocates, ecologists, feminists, slashdotters, and similar fanatics, should be treated with extreme caution... however right they may be individually, in groups they're unbearable. (BTW I'm proud to belong to all of the cited groups.)
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
- Huxley
Now that's a great sig!
My feelings exactly.
American companies have become craven doormats for lawyers and insurance companies. I've had opportunities in the past to put some software onto the US market, and concluded it wasn't worth the trouble of hiring a disgrace of lawyers (or whatever the collective noun is nowadays :-)) to check on trademark violations, license implications, possible offense to sensitive pressure groups, political correctness, remote consumer rights issues, user support implications, and to write up warning stickers like "if you jump off a plane holding this software you may get hurt". And it's getting more ridiculous all the time.
The most upstanding thing to do would be to have explicit UI that asks on installation if you don't mind sending your data when you play multiplayer games. I would consider that justified if we were sending a detailed system spec. That is something we may want to do in the future. Data like that is helpfull in making good development decisions.
It's in the user's best interest to fully inform the developer about which system the product is run on. And to have the software itself collect that information is much better than relying on the user filling out a form or registration card. My suggestion would be to have some sort of rebate, or enhanced support, or (in the case of a game) to turn on extra levels or features if the user consents in sending in this information. Yes, the user should be asked somewhere, but only if personal data are included. I don't consider hardware configuration to be personal data (unless you're an AI).
But this is just a driver string riding along with your game version. It just seems silly, like requiring you to acknowledge before leaving your house that someone might see you.....I can see that it is a slipperly slope to be on, and I can easily project it to a scenario that I would be offended by, but I just can't convince myself that knowing the reletive distribution of different OpenGL implementations is violating people's rights.
The browser identification all browsers send to the server are just as "sneaky" and "privacy violating", then? And the user isn't asked, and can't turn it off.
Face it, folks, the world is interactive. You can't just hover invisibly above it and not be seen or identified by anyone. Heisenberg's principle applies.
Information volume is growing exponentially - especially on the Internet, where it probably will have left non-online volume behind - and information-gathering power by any single entity is linear. Sooner or later it becomes an impossible task.
Unless they decentralize completely, and assign this to distributed nodes - a worm in each router, or something like that - which doesn't seem likely anytime soon, either.
In theory, I'd agree with you guys. But the USA has an unfortunate track record of being able to export "policy" (NOT legislation!) by bringing commercial and PR pressure to bear. Look at how many governments have been signed up in the "War on Drugs" and their offspring - FDA directives, written by an anonymous US bureaucrat, are being incorporated in legislation all over the world even though in the USA they never went through the legislative provess, public debate, or review by anybody else.
768 words (see specs) would probably be a tight fit, but the tough part would be the hardware... serial ports did not appear until much later.
The first computer I programmed on, an IBM 1401 with 4K (decimal) core RAM, which was from a later generation - transistors and so forth - didn't have any serial ports either. Even when the IBM/360 came out, serials were a separate (and costly!) option... something like $10K for a 300-baud port, IIRC.
Of course, you could bit-bang data to one of the panel lights - or byte-bang 8 of them, come to think of it... but even so I doubt you could find any workable TCP/IP implementation in there.
My guess is that they've achieved a controllable way to either side-etch the channel down to that width, or build it up in a chemically (not optically) produced crack.