I am with John Lennon on this the sooner all religions are banished the better as they always have fanatics somewhere and these can be Christian or Muslim or any other religion. What worries me is the human race generally has a set of people who need to take any belief to an extreme. I am thinking football hooligans, O/S fanbois etc.
As a race, if we don't sort this out we are doomed to extinction. And no, I don't know what the answer, is but there must be some way of identifying the potential extremists and getting them out of the genome!
Siv
I have always argued that the negatives of producing batteries (fetching raw materials from all over the world and the landfill or whatever they end up in when they are spent) are much worse than say modifying our vehicles to run on hydrogen. Admittedly you would still have the particulate issue from brakes and tyres etc but that's just another problem to crack. I think filling up with hydrogen would be much quicker and would give you similar range and refill times to fossil fuels.
Most people argue that to produce the hydrogen would mean using electric and thus ramp up the CO2 further back up the chain to the power station level. At least there, as another poster pointed out, at least that is a single (or relatively few) points to fix in the chain and if the electric was produced by wind or solar it wouldn't be a problem.
I have also seen in Gizmag that there are research projects that have figured out ways to make Hydrogen as part of a desalination plant and another where they were using algae to break down waste matter to produce Hydrogen.
The other great benefit is as a petrol head who likes the sound of a thumping V8, that we could be green and still have that great noise! Whereas with electrics you stand the risk of being run over because you didn't hear the damn things coming!?
I just think this is all a big marketing exercise by Apple.
I think they should extract the data from the phone onto a hard disk and hand that to the FBI, they can run whatever unencryption tools they have on it to their hearts content without the fear that the software that erases the data won't kick in.
This would demonstrate that they were prepared to help the FBI to get at what is on the phone that might help save innocent lives and also does not mean they have to produce a weakened version of the IOS software.
I am sure people at Apple are bright enough to have come up with this idea themselves, so it must mean that they want to use this exercise as a way of marketing that if you use an iPhone they won't hand over your data willy nilly to the government!
I wholeheartedly agree with this post. When I was first on Slashdot there weren't many items in the daily email with the links in it that I wouldn't read, nowadays I am struggling to find 2 or 3 each day out of the 15 stories that are sent.
Let's get back to Linux, programming, web and general IT Industry news like it used to be!
I agree, I think Google have done some wonderful things like Street View and Maps and their curation of the internet into an easily searchable resource, it's just a shame that of late they seem to be getting more and more underhand trying to monetise everything.
Precisely; and this is the major issue trying to get "free" operating systems into business, it's not free in the end because you have to fork out a fortune in training to get people used to another system. It can be done but the brave souls who try to get Linux adopted seem to ignore this very real cost and also the extra cost of getting Linux admins who are rare compared to Windows Admins and thus demand much higher salaries which again adds more to the bottom line.
This is why Windows 8 never got into business as the cost of training the new paradigm was too great!
Hurrah! A real programmer actually responded to this. I was reading down the comments to see how far I could actually get until someone replied with the only possible answer to this question and it's a sad indictment of how slashdot has moved away from a real IT readership and is being used by complete air heads!
It's not a math issue its a programming issue and you most definitely should not mask this sort of error, you should look at your code and eliminate any occurences where the programmer has allowed a div by zero to occur. Doing what the OP is suggesting is absolutely ridiculous.
Computer users have only changed in so much that there is a new breed of casual home user who only needs a tablet and doesn't need the bells and whistles of a full laptop or desktop. Microsoft got sucked into this beleving that all computer work would be done on tablets and decided to build Windows 8. Well look where that got them!
The reality is that tablets are a fad, they are like netbooks before them, they appealed to a certain demographic which was a largely untapped one who didn't see the point in forking out more than two hundred pounds (I'm in the UK) for a computing device. Now that they have either bought a netbook or a tablet, they will disappear from the landscape until they need a new one and if someone is offering some device at half the price they paid for their tablet they will switch to that.
Whilst all that was going on, we were in a recession and people were worried about losing their job, so forking out for a new desktop PC was not on the horizon. Mend and make do is what you do when there is a recession. Allied to that the fact that MS had just produced their best O/S to date; Windows 7 and the one following was worse than Vista and ME together from a desktop productivity user's perspective and it's no wonder the vast majority of Windows users sat on their hands waiting for things to improve.
As far as I can see, there will always be a need for desktop or laptop PCs, as accountants will always need a proper offline (for security of client data) application that crunches numbers. Businesses will always want to crunch large volumes of data in spreadsheets or databases and I don't care how good touch based apps are they will never beat the usability of a keyboard and mouse. Have you ever noticed when MS are demonstrating touch based Excel or Word, you never see them actually creating the numbers or text, they are always reformatting some stuff that's already there. Who wants to work on a spreadsheet with your finger if you have mutiple tabs containing thousands of rows of data and hundreds of formulae... no one who actually does real work! Only the marketing drones who try and sell you this crap think this stuff makes sense.
The fads will come and go but at the end of the day, productivity users will want real power and a screen a keyboard and a mouse.
I think the the original question has it arse about face. By abstracting to higher level non textual objects you are removing yourself further from the simplest things. The simplest things are the binary ones and zeros that the computer works with. That would be the simplest thing to use and yes that would be like building ships with matchsticks and not easy for humans to follow easily.
We don't think in pictures we think in words and that is why once we got beyond programming using binary switches which is too near the bare metal (but _the_ most simple set of instructions to do programming with that gives you ultimate flexibility) we went to assembly language. By doing that the the programs could be read easily and understood and more importantly we could work out where the bug was, but it was still a bit too near the bare metal for mere mortals who need to the vast majority of day to day programming.
So we stepped one step further away from the simplest thing to something that you can read and learn like a human language. Admittedly it is more complicated because there are more syntactical words to use to achieve some of what you can do with machine code. But once you have learned the language like you would English or German and can speak it fluently and as some programmers will tell you they "think" in C or VB or whatever language suits them best they can be the most productive with a computer producing the amazing things we do for the betterment of our fellow man.
The more you go beyond what we think in i.e. a language like C, VB, C#, F#, Lisp, Java, Pascal or whatever, you necessarily lose even more fine control and are stuck with whatever the graphical representation limits you to. As soon as you want to do something more complex than the designer of the graphical programming language thought of, you are stuck down a blind alley.
So what you want is the best compromise a programming language that matches how we think in words that has enough simple building blocks that can be put together to create anything we can think of to access all the capabilities of the platform we are writing the code for. Which is pretty much where languages like C and C++ put you. I am a VB programmer and accept that I rely on C++ programmers to reduce the complexity for me a little bit by writing the VB language and Visual Studio as I am unlikely to ever want to rewrite Windows or create device drivers I just want a language that I can think in that allows me to produce database applications that my clients use day in and out to manage their businesses.
If you tried to make a Visual programming language that the OP is asking for it would be easy for him/her to use but wouldn't be very capable. If you could make one that was more capable and used smaller building blocks it would be too unwieldy and it would be far easier to use text to achieve the same things in much simpler words. Hence that is why we are where we are.
Siv
I agree wholeheartedly with that comment. Apple and now Microsoft are the biggest threat to the internet because they are trying to lock applications into their walled gardens. We are heading back to how it was in the days of CompuServe and AOL where you logged into their walled garden and had no way out onto the general internet.
What bugs me is that the Mac/iPad users seem to like this idea of being tied into everything Apple and don't care that pretty much everything they do is via iTunes?? This blindly following what Steve Jobs wanted them to do like Lemmings has made Microsoft perk up and decide that they want a piece of that cake.
Now Microsoft are playing "me too" and it won't be long before they turn off the "Classic" desktop and you are stuck with a) Metro apps and b) touch as the primary way of interacting with your PC. I personally want none of it.
I am using Windows 8 as I have to keep ahead of my clients so that when they need support I know about it. However to do my other work developing database applications I need to be in Desktop all the time.
(Thankfully Stardock have created "Start8" and it makes WIndows 8 on a desktop PC really usable. You can put back the classic Aero start menu and make Windows go straight to the desktop avoiding the Metro start screen altogether. WIndows 8 does improve a lot of things when you are using the desktop only so it is like Windows 7 SP3!
The other advantage is that you can still get to Metro Applications and the Metro deskto pif you want, so it's handy if you want to play a full screen Metro game when not doing serious stuff. To me this is how MS should have done it giving desktop users the option to skip the Metro Start and give their users a traditonal start menu. This will save big corporate clients a much more painless way of adopting new PCs that have WIn 8 installed).
If Microsoft decide to either turn off the classic desktop or block third party tools like Start8 that allow me to have a more familiar productive desktop environment I will finally jump ship completely to Linux and start recommeding it for my business clients. The current strategy at Microsoft seems to ignore their desktop user base in order to make big bucks chasing consumers who just want consumer devices.
I also do not like this one size fits all approach to using the Cloud, why would any sane business want their data entirely in the cloud?? Are you going to tell the boss that we can't do any work this week whilst MS, Amazon whover recover after their servers are hacked by anonymous and have to take it offline for a week to clean out the damage. Oh and by teh way they have sold all our company confidential data to the Chinese!!
Siv
Pre NT Based O/Ss 11/1985 Windows 1 version 1.0 05/1990 Windows 3 Version 3.0 03/1992 Windows 3.1 Version 3.1 08/1995 Windows 95 Version 4.00.950 06/1998 Windows 98 Version 4.10.1998 05/1999 Windows 98SE Version 4.19.2222 06/1999 Windows ME Version 4.90.3000
NT Based Windows O/Ss 08/1993 Windows NT 3.1 Version 3.1 09/1994 Windows NT 3.5 Version 3.5 06/1995 Windows NT 3.51 Version 3.51.1057 07/1996 Windows NT 4 Version 4.0.1381 02/2000 Windows 2000 Version 5.0.2195 10/2001 Windows XP Version 5.1.2600 09/2002 Windows XP SP1 Version 5.1.2600.1106 08/2004 Windows XP SP2 Version 5.1.2600.2180 04/2008 Windows XP SP3 Version 5.1.2600.5512 01/2007 Windows Vista Version 6.0.6000.16386 04/2008 Windows Vista SP1 Version 6.0.6001.65536
Don't confuse marketing with proper version numbers!!
I wholeheartedly agree, "what problem" Norton is like a cycle sucking piece of spyware, if MS Anti-Spyware Beta can get it off and clear all the clutter it deposits all over a system I would use it in preference to the Add/Remove programs applet.
I never understand why NAV and Norton Internet Security get such good writeups in the PC mags, I have had to forcibly remove it from a good number of my customer's PCs as it has a) sapped resources and b) often caused BSODs or c) interfered with some other key application that they need and it is blocking it.
I have noticed even when you are opening a plain MS Excel spreadsheet it has got its hooks into Excel and is doing some kind of scan before opening, so after NAV goes on all your office documents take days to open.
I remove NAV or NIS completely and put McAfee VirusScan on and either Sunbelt Counterspy or MS Antispyware, those two and a good NAT router seem to keep most systems running smoothly without too much overhead and overt interference.
Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security are just bloatware and overkill. I think if MS can come up with a good alternative that covers antivirus and spyware in one package they might have a winner on their hands.
I wish all the AV companies would keep it simple and fast with low overhead. Even though I like McAfee VirusScan I hate their spam killer it seriously f**ks up your email.
Stop trying to buy your way out of this mess with technology and get to the root of the problem global warming. That's a bit harder isn't it, and requires you guys to give up your gas guzzling cars.
Just remember you guys are responsible for between a fifth and a quarter of the entire world's greenhouse emissions!
The worst thing is it's rubbing off us in the UK as well we're getting just as bad!
I would have thought by now that the US would finally have got the message. If you keep on burning fossil fuels and pollute the atmosphere with your huge energy consumption, it will come back to bite you. (It has now in New Orleans and Florida).
The annoying thing is that it isn't only limited to you guys, you will drag the rest of us down too!!
PLEASE Get your act together before this planet ends up like Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
I am with John Lennon on this the sooner all religions are banished the better as they always have fanatics somewhere and these can be Christian or Muslim or any other religion. What worries me is the human race generally has a set of people who need to take any belief to an extreme. I am thinking football hooligans, O/S fanbois etc. As a race, if we don't sort this out we are doomed to extinction. And no, I don't know what the answer, is but there must be some way of identifying the potential extremists and getting them out of the genome! Siv
I have always argued that the negatives of producing batteries (fetching raw materials from all over the world and the landfill or whatever they end up in when they are spent) are much worse than say modifying our vehicles to run on hydrogen. Admittedly you would still have the particulate issue from brakes and tyres etc but that's just another problem to crack. I think filling up with hydrogen would be much quicker and would give you similar range and refill times to fossil fuels. Most people argue that to produce the hydrogen would mean using electric and thus ramp up the CO2 further back up the chain to the power station level. At least there, as another poster pointed out, at least that is a single (or relatively few) points to fix in the chain and if the electric was produced by wind or solar it wouldn't be a problem. I have also seen in Gizmag that there are research projects that have figured out ways to make Hydrogen as part of a desalination plant and another where they were using algae to break down waste matter to produce Hydrogen. The other great benefit is as a petrol head who likes the sound of a thumping V8, that we could be green and still have that great noise! Whereas with electrics you stand the risk of being run over because you didn't hear the damn things coming!?
I just think this is all a big marketing exercise by Apple.
I think they should extract the data from the phone onto a hard disk and hand that to the FBI, they can run whatever unencryption tools they have on it to their hearts content without the fear that the software that erases the data won't kick in.
This would demonstrate that they were prepared to help the FBI to get at what is on the phone that might help save innocent lives and also does not mean they have to produce a weakened version of the IOS software.
I am sure people at Apple are bright enough to have come up with this idea themselves, so it must mean that they want to use this exercise as a way of marketing that if you use an iPhone they won't hand over your data willy nilly to the government!
I have been around slashdot for a long while and these changes are very welcome.
I wholeheartedly agree with this post. When I was first on Slashdot there weren't many items in the daily email with the links in it that I wouldn't read, nowadays I am struggling to find 2 or 3 each day out of the 15 stories that are sent.
Let's get back to Linux, programming, web and general IT Industry news like it used to be!
Siv
I agree, I think Google have done some wonderful things like Street View and Maps and their curation of the internet into an easily searchable resource, it's just a shame that of late they seem to be getting more and more underhand trying to monetise everything.
Precisely; and this is the major issue trying to get "free" operating systems into business, it's not free in the end because you have to fork out a fortune in training to get people used to another system. It can be done but the brave souls who try to get Linux adopted seem to ignore this very real cost and also the extra cost of getting Linux admins who are rare compared to Windows Admins and thus demand much higher salaries which again adds more to the bottom line.
This is why Windows 8 never got into business as the cost of training the new paradigm was too great!
Siv
Hurrah! A real programmer actually responded to this. I was reading down the comments to see how far I could actually get until someone replied with the only possible answer to this question and it's a sad indictment of how slashdot has moved away from a real IT readership and is being used by complete air heads!
It's not a math issue its a programming issue and you most definitely should not mask this sort of error, you should look at your code and eliminate any occurences where the programmer has allowed a div by zero to occur. Doing what the OP is suggesting is absolutely ridiculous.
Computer users have only changed in so much that there is a new breed of casual home user who only needs a tablet and doesn't need the bells and whistles of a full laptop or desktop. Microsoft got sucked into this beleving that all computer work would be done on tablets and decided to build Windows 8. Well look where that got them!
The reality is that tablets are a fad, they are like netbooks before them, they appealed to a certain demographic which was a largely untapped one who didn't see the point in forking out more than two hundred pounds (I'm in the UK) for a computing device. Now that they have either bought a netbook or a tablet, they will disappear from the landscape until they need a new one and if someone is offering some device at half the price they paid for their tablet they will switch to that.
Whilst all that was going on, we were in a recession and people were worried about losing their job, so forking out for a new desktop PC was not on the horizon. Mend and make do is what you do when there is a recession. Allied to that the fact that MS had just produced their best O/S to date; Windows 7 and the one following was worse than Vista and ME together from a desktop productivity user's perspective and it's no wonder the vast majority of Windows users sat on their hands waiting for things to improve.
As far as I can see, there will always be a need for desktop or laptop PCs, as accountants will always need a proper offline (for security of client data) application that crunches numbers. Businesses will always want to crunch large volumes of data in spreadsheets or databases and I don't care how good touch based apps are they will never beat the usability of a keyboard and mouse. Have you ever noticed when MS are demonstrating touch based Excel or Word, you never see them actually creating the numbers or text, they are always reformatting some stuff that's already there. Who wants to work on a spreadsheet with your finger if you have mutiple tabs containing thousands of rows of data and hundreds of formulae ... no one who actually does real work! Only the marketing drones who try and sell you this crap think this stuff makes sense.
The fads will come and go but at the end of the day, productivity users will want real power and a screen a keyboard and a mouse.
Siv
I think the the original question has it arse about face. By abstracting to higher level non textual objects you are removing yourself further from the simplest things. The simplest things are the binary ones and zeros that the computer works with. That would be the simplest thing to use and yes that would be like building ships with matchsticks and not easy for humans to follow easily. We don't think in pictures we think in words and that is why once we got beyond programming using binary switches which is too near the bare metal (but _the_ most simple set of instructions to do programming with that gives you ultimate flexibility) we went to assembly language. By doing that the the programs could be read easily and understood and more importantly we could work out where the bug was, but it was still a bit too near the bare metal for mere mortals who need to the vast majority of day to day programming. So we stepped one step further away from the simplest thing to something that you can read and learn like a human language. Admittedly it is more complicated because there are more syntactical words to use to achieve some of what you can do with machine code. But once you have learned the language like you would English or German and can speak it fluently and as some programmers will tell you they "think" in C or VB or whatever language suits them best they can be the most productive with a computer producing the amazing things we do for the betterment of our fellow man. The more you go beyond what we think in i.e. a language like C, VB, C#, F#, Lisp, Java, Pascal or whatever, you necessarily lose even more fine control and are stuck with whatever the graphical representation limits you to. As soon as you want to do something more complex than the designer of the graphical programming language thought of, you are stuck down a blind alley. So what you want is the best compromise a programming language that matches how we think in words that has enough simple building blocks that can be put together to create anything we can think of to access all the capabilities of the platform we are writing the code for. Which is pretty much where languages like C and C++ put you. I am a VB programmer and accept that I rely on C++ programmers to reduce the complexity for me a little bit by writing the VB language and Visual Studio as I am unlikely to ever want to rewrite Windows or create device drivers I just want a language that I can think in that allows me to produce database applications that my clients use day in and out to manage their businesses. If you tried to make a Visual programming language that the OP is asking for it would be easy for him/her to use but wouldn't be very capable. If you could make one that was more capable and used smaller building blocks it would be too unwieldy and it would be far easier to use text to achieve the same things in much simpler words. Hence that is why we are where we are. Siv
I agree wholeheartedly with that comment. Apple and now Microsoft are the biggest threat to the internet because they are trying to lock applications into their walled gardens. We are heading back to how it was in the days of CompuServe and AOL where you logged into their walled garden and had no way out onto the general internet. What bugs me is that the Mac/iPad users seem to like this idea of being tied into everything Apple and don't care that pretty much everything they do is via iTunes?? This blindly following what Steve Jobs wanted them to do like Lemmings has made Microsoft perk up and decide that they want a piece of that cake. Now Microsoft are playing "me too" and it won't be long before they turn off the "Classic" desktop and you are stuck with a) Metro apps and b) touch as the primary way of interacting with your PC. I personally want none of it. I am using Windows 8 as I have to keep ahead of my clients so that when they need support I know about it. However to do my other work developing database applications I need to be in Desktop all the time. (Thankfully Stardock have created "Start8" and it makes WIndows 8 on a desktop PC really usable. You can put back the classic Aero start menu and make Windows go straight to the desktop avoiding the Metro start screen altogether. WIndows 8 does improve a lot of things when you are using the desktop only so it is like Windows 7 SP3! The other advantage is that you can still get to Metro Applications and the Metro deskto pif you want, so it's handy if you want to play a full screen Metro game when not doing serious stuff. To me this is how MS should have done it giving desktop users the option to skip the Metro Start and give their users a traditonal start menu. This will save big corporate clients a much more painless way of adopting new PCs that have WIn 8 installed). If Microsoft decide to either turn off the classic desktop or block third party tools like Start8 that allow me to have a more familiar productive desktop environment I will finally jump ship completely to Linux and start recommeding it for my business clients. The current strategy at Microsoft seems to ignore their desktop user base in order to make big bucks chasing consumers who just want consumer devices. I also do not like this one size fits all approach to using the Cloud, why would any sane business want their data entirely in the cloud?? Are you going to tell the boss that we can't do any work this week whilst MS, Amazon whover recover after their servers are hacked by anonymous and have to take it offline for a week to clean out the damage. Oh and by teh way they have sold all our company confidential data to the Chinese!! Siv
Oy less of it you 'nix junkies:
Pre NT Based O/Ss
11/1985 Windows 1 version 1.0
05/1990 Windows 3 Version 3.0
03/1992 Windows 3.1 Version 3.1
08/1995 Windows 95 Version 4.00.950
06/1998 Windows 98 Version 4.10.1998
05/1999 Windows 98SE Version 4.19.2222
06/1999 Windows ME Version 4.90.3000
NT Based Windows O/Ss
08/1993 Windows NT 3.1 Version 3.1
09/1994 Windows NT 3.5 Version 3.5
06/1995 Windows NT 3.51 Version 3.51.1057
07/1996 Windows NT 4 Version 4.0.1381
02/2000 Windows 2000 Version 5.0.2195
10/2001 Windows XP Version 5.1.2600
09/2002 Windows XP SP1 Version 5.1.2600.1106
08/2004 Windows XP SP2 Version 5.1.2600.2180
04/2008 Windows XP SP3 Version 5.1.2600.5512
01/2007 Windows Vista Version 6.0.6000.16386
04/2008 Windows Vista SP1 Version 6.0.6001.65536
Don't confuse marketing with proper version numbers!!
I wholeheartedly agree, "what problem" Norton is like a cycle sucking piece of spyware, if MS Anti-Spyware Beta can get it off and clear all the clutter it deposits all over a system I would use it in preference to the Add/Remove programs applet.
I never understand why NAV and Norton Internet Security get such good writeups in the PC mags, I have had to forcibly remove it from a good number of my customer's PCs as it has a) sapped resources and b) often caused BSODs or c) interfered with some other key application that they need and it is blocking it.
I have noticed even when you are opening a plain MS Excel spreadsheet it has got its hooks into Excel and is doing some kind of scan before opening, so after NAV goes on all your office documents take days to open.
I remove NAV or NIS completely and put McAfee VirusScan on and either Sunbelt Counterspy or MS Antispyware, those two and a good NAT router seem to keep most systems running smoothly without too much overhead and overt interference.
Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security are just bloatware and overkill. I think if MS can come up with a good alternative that covers antivirus and spyware in one package they might have a winner on their hands.
I wish all the AV companies would keep it simple and fast with low overhead. Even though I like McAfee VirusScan I hate their spam killer it seriously f**ks up your email.
Stop trying to buy your way out of this mess with technology and get to the root of the problem global warming. That's a bit harder isn't it, and requires you guys to give up your gas guzzling cars. Just remember you guys are responsible for between a fifth and a quarter of the entire world's greenhouse emissions! The worst thing is it's rubbing off us in the UK as well we're getting just as bad!
I would have thought by now that the US would finally have got the message. If you keep on burning fossil fuels and pollute the atmosphere with your huge energy consumption, it will come back to bite you. (It has now in New Orleans and Florida). The annoying thing is that it isn't only limited to you guys, you will drag the rest of us down too!! PLEASE Get your act together before this planet ends up like Mars.