> However, once I didn't have autocompletion of my methods, and pretty charts that show all of my members, I found myself actually REMEMBERING everything instead of just relying on the program to do it for me
You remember all the members of other peoples code? That's pretty amazing. Some of us aren't coding in a bubble, you know.
I watched the three minute video and saw lots of aiming at the vertical and horizontal scrollbars so they could scrub the window over these BIG thumbnails, or follow the history arrows as they fly WAY off the screen, and thought "i'd rather just use text". Now if you could zoom out, collapse and expand the tree, show a text list to the side and thumbnails to another side, then there'd be something. As it is, it looks like more aiming with the mouse than even the average mac user would care for.
Don't believe me? Then you probably didn't know that "aspirin" and "cellophane", for example, were originally trademarks, not generic words. They were lost to common usage.
Actually you'll still see a Registered Trademark Symbol after Aspirin if you buy Bayer brand, but it's not actually meaningful now. Bayer AG had to give up their trademark to Aspirin as a term of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.
Factoid for ya, another trademark Bayer lost that way: Heroin.
You're a dude trying to collect valuable... whatevers... and being chased around a brick jungle gym by other dudes trying to stop you. Your only weapon is a digging implement of some sort that can only dig a hole of a certain size, directly to the side of you. And the holes heal up by themselves (interesting brick). You can fall any distance without hurting yourself, but touching the dudes trying to stop you or being in a hole that heals up is instant death. You can land on or walk over the dudes heads with impunity though, their heads are harmless (or perhaps you have dude proof shoes).
Come to think of it, I guess I have seen stranger games.
> There IS certainly innovation among all those categories (books, films, music, etc.), but the VAST MAJORITY of the innovation is usually being made on a very small scale, with just a handful of talented individuals working on the edge.
I think that's almost tautological for some definition of innovation. Innovation means, literally, "making something new". New things have not developed an economy of scale, because productions with a scale economy are in a well-worn path: industries know exactly how to produce and market generic action flicks, but have no idea what to do with movies like Pi because the "art house" demographic is notoriously fickle and hard to pin down (except perhaps on college campuses).
It's a genre called "4X" (a term these days co-opted by forex scamsters), standing for eXplore, eXploit, eXpand, eXterminate (Alpha Centauri did a genius thing and actually renamed them and built it into the game mechanics: Explore, Discover, Build, Conquer). It's a niche genre, and RTS's looked ready to eclipse it, but it still hangs in there.
> And where do you put the classic roleplaying games like Ultima, Bard's Tale, etc?
CRPG. Same as non-online CRPG's now, just more archaeic for back then. Anyone who wants to wax nostalgiac, go back and replay the bards tale games -- I guarantee you'll find the graph-paper-mapping experience numbingly dull even if it was interesting back then. Unfortunately, I don't see publishers funding a non-online CRPG anymore, which is a shame; I despise MMORPG's. If I wanted a plot written and orchestrated by the MMORPG crowd, I'd never read a Tolkein book, I'd just ask the local high school to send me a bunch of essays about "Orcs and battles and stuph".
> This document is well laid out and visually designed in a way that not only is Word unable to do, but isn't expected to accomplish.
Word is perfectly capable of columns and backgrounds that are fixed or attached to text, and even ships with a template that does a layout more complex than that. The gradient background might be tricky (gradients generally suck anyway). The fact that the resulting word doc would be several hundred K could be dissuasive to doing it in word.
I do rather wonder how painful or even possible it would be to do that document in OO, mind you.
As it has always been in the smalltalk family of languages (which includes basically Smalltalk and Self). This was once considered a necessity as smalltalk was interpreted strictly as a stream of instructions (much like forth is now), but now that it's always compiled, I rather wonder whether this isn't legacy baggage. Certainly flexible overloadable operators aren't inimical to the notions of operator precedence, as the ML language family shows.
I certainly don't get why (3/4) != (3/4). If it's because it's inexact, they might learn a thing or two from how scheme handles it.
> [snipped example] > How could someone argue with a straight face that this gobblygook is progress in programming languages?
Syntax-wise it sure isn't, it looks like slavish adherence to smalltalk's syntax, with Self's prototypes and C++'s klunky "traits" stapled on (traits are meaningless when you have either manifest types like scripting languages or type inference like ML). It's implemented in a language that itself manages to be a mismatch to Slate, but I imagine they want to make it self-hosting later on.
Slate has some really nifty ideas, but I've seen lots of nifty ideas come and go. Usually such projects run out of steam when they reach the final hump of getting everything integrated and performing well. Slate looks nice under the hood, even if it has an ugly paint job, but I damn near asphyxiated when I last held my breath on a similar project.
Globalview was a Xerox thing, I used it at Xerox (never seriously, there was a Sparc port lying around that I tried) It never escaped Xerox alive -- and probably couldn't have survived anyway if it did. The Globalview name might have been a more recent coinage, but it was a direct descendant of the STAR gui.
Or so I was told at any rate... There was an updated windows (3.x) port of Globalview as well, but that was more of a klunky "document centered" application toolkit and runtime, and really had little in common other than some odd widget behavior.
> Apple more or less invented most of what you think of as the GUI. It was their property.
I really don't think I need any longer to point out these astonishing hypocrisies in that revisionist partisan history (anyone who wants to see real mental gymnastics of justifications and rationalizations, do click through to it). I have seen and used a port of the original Globalview, which predates Apple's GUI system. It's a lot more primitive, yes, but Apple's GUI is most certainly evolutionary. About the only thing Apple added was overlapping resizeable windows; menus, icons, and of course the pointer controlled by the mouse, those were all there.
Apple sued people for making things that looked like their things. I'm happy the courts and eventually the market repudiated this behavior and forced Apple to compete on merit.
> Then you verify that the forward DNS and the reverse DNS match....
And you blow away loads of legit mail when you drop mail that fails this test. Best you can do usually is flag it.
SPF could nip this trick in the bud, though it is specific to mail. I suppose nothing stops SPF from being generalized with the existing service resolution hack though (e.g. looking up TXT records for _XMPP_.slashdot.org or _IRC_.slashdot.org for example).
> A huge amount (if not the majority) of spam comes from open relays and compromised machines... > A ground-up overhaul of the mail system (with authentication) is what's needed
Sounds to me like a ground-up overhaul of security is what's needed, or else it'll punch holes in any new system you built, ground up or no. SMTP has survived this long. You want to invent a new transfer system, feel free, go get yourself a well known port for it from IANA and get everyone using it. Stick a persistent message store on Jabber if you want a good running start.
Meanwhile, the rest of us would prefer to entertain solutions that can be implemented to fix what exists while you go off and blaze new trails.
um, we have this cool tool called reverse DNS that allows us to confirm that the machine we are talking to does indeed have a legitimate entry under the DNS name they are purporting to send mail from.
My RDNS can say "mail.slashdot.org" if I want it to. Your automated tools good at parsing WHOIS output yet?
> If you're comparing to IE, then it's not a fair comparison since IE hides some of its memory footprint in explorer
It does not. Evidenced by my being able to run a fully functional iexplore.exe without explorer.exe running, and it having the same memory footprint. I do find that both IE and mozilla grow to about the same memory footprint after about an hour of heavy use, however. Mozilla merely allocates more up front, though it's always going to be a little bit fatter due to using its own widget set (whereas using windows native controls will "hide" some resources in GDI, which is typically mapped right into the video driver).
Ultimately on even 5 year old hardware, the difference isn't noticeable (even startup time -- IE takes ages while to start up if you don't have active desktop running), but the first thing people tend to notice about firefox on my machine is "wow, it renders fast".
None of the apps you mentioned have any "special settings" to stay pinned in RAM -- all DLL's stay loaded until they get unloaded by a single kernel thread (you can unload directly, but it tends to be crashy for some weird reason). Apps that use a lot of DLL's make this effect more pronounced. Acrobat sticks around because plugins typically don't shut themselves down properly. I just kill it off with task manager, and it doesn't appear to impact browser stability.
> Otherwise, what's to stop someone voting, getting their printout and then feeding a slip of paper of the same size back in so they can vote again without destroying their original.
First, there's a human watching the equipment. Individual funny business might stand, organized would have to be, well, organized.
Secondly, simple sequence numbers ought to suffice. Scantron sheets have those already (what do you think all those little black bars on the side are)
> Hoagland refuses to back down from his claims and keeps selling books on the subject
That's precisely it. Skepticism has a smaller market. He's a charlatan plain and simple, who probably doesn't truly believe most of his own claims; he's probably not cynical enough to disbelieve them, but he's resolved the cognitive dissonance by "keeping an open mind". Were to challenge his worldview, he'd lose his livelihood and community.
Look for this pattern in a whole lot of new-age claimants of the paranormal or just plain fantastic. It's definitely not limited to Hoagland.
Slashdot Mirror
> However, once I didn't have autocompletion of my methods, and pretty charts that show all of my members, I found myself actually REMEMBERING everything instead of just relying on the program to do it for me
You remember all the members of other peoples code? That's pretty amazing. Some of us aren't coding in a bubble, you know.
* Microsoft has at its fingertips billions of email messages now easily and quickly searchable
* Microsoft releases the dogs with bees in their mouth so that when they bark, they shoot bees at you.
it's been GNU/.ed
I watched the three minute video and saw lots of aiming at the vertical and horizontal scrollbars so they could scrub the window over these BIG thumbnails, or follow the history arrows as they fly WAY off the screen, and thought "i'd rather just use text". Now if you could zoom out, collapse and expand the tree, show a text list to the side and thumbnails to another side, then there'd be something. As it is, it looks like more aiming with the mouse than even the average mac user would care for.
> Aol goes after other spammers, but doesn't AOL spam its own customers?
They're AOL's mail servers, they can send whatever they want to their own mailboxes.
Don't believe me? Then you probably didn't know that "aspirin" and "cellophane", for example, were originally trademarks, not generic words. They were lost to common usage.
Actually you'll still see a Registered Trademark Symbol after Aspirin if you buy Bayer brand, but it's not actually meaningful now. Bayer AG had to give up their trademark to Aspirin as a term of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.
Factoid for ya, another trademark Bayer lost that way: Heroin.
> The web needs to incorporate a Nielsen Ratings system.
You mean like the one Nielsen already has?
> (BTW, anyone know the first pop culture reference to dingos eating babies? Seinfeld's Elaine once referenced it, but I want to know the source.)
It's Googleriffic, it's based on a true story!
This is a good step forward but still does not go far enough. We must erase this "user interface" tyranny.
Here you go
You're a dude trying to collect valuable ... whatevers ... and being chased around a brick jungle gym by other dudes trying to stop you. Your only weapon is a digging implement of some sort that can only dig a hole of a certain size, directly to the side of you. And the holes heal up by themselves (interesting brick). You can fall any distance without hurting yourself, but touching the dudes trying to stop you or being in a hole that heals up is instant death. You can land on or walk over the dudes heads with impunity though, their heads are harmless (or perhaps you have dude proof shoes).
Come to think of it, I guess I have seen stranger games.
> There IS certainly innovation among all those categories (books, films, music, etc.), but the VAST MAJORITY of the innovation is usually being made on a very small scale, with just a handful of talented individuals working on the edge.
I think that's almost tautological for some definition of innovation. Innovation means, literally, "making something new". New things have not developed an economy of scale, because productions with a scale economy are in a well-worn path: industries know exactly how to produce and market generic action flicks, but have no idea what to do with movies like Pi because the "art house" demographic is notoriously fickle and hard to pin down (except perhaps on college campuses).
In short, almost everything new starts small.
> Where do you put Civilization?
It's a genre called "4X" (a term these days co-opted by forex scamsters), standing for eXplore, eXploit, eXpand, eXterminate (Alpha Centauri did a genius thing and actually renamed them and built it into the game mechanics: Explore, Discover, Build, Conquer). It's a niche genre, and RTS's looked ready to eclipse it, but it still hangs in there.
> And where do you put the classic roleplaying games like Ultima, Bard's Tale, etc?
CRPG. Same as non-online CRPG's now, just more archaeic for back then. Anyone who wants to wax nostalgiac, go back and replay the bards tale games -- I guarantee you'll find the graph-paper-mapping experience numbingly dull even if it was interesting back then. Unfortunately, I don't see publishers funding a non-online CRPG anymore, which is a shame; I despise MMORPG's. If I wanted a plot written and orchestrated by the MMORPG crowd, I'd never read a Tolkein book, I'd just ask the local high school to send me a bunch of essays about "Orcs and battles and stuph".
> This document is well laid out and visually designed in a way that not only is Word unable to do, but isn't expected to accomplish.
Word is perfectly capable of columns and backgrounds that are fixed or attached to text, and even ships with a template that does a layout more complex than that. The gradient background might be tricky (gradients generally suck anyway). The fact that the resulting word doc would be several hundred K could be dissuasive to doing it in word.
I do rather wonder how painful or even possible it would be to do that document in OO, mind you.
Will our quasi-president announce a quasi-mission to land on this quasi-moon?
> 3 + 4 * 5 " ==> 35 (not 23) "
As it has always been in the smalltalk family of languages (which includes basically Smalltalk and Self). This was once considered a necessity as smalltalk was interpreted strictly as a stream of instructions (much like forth is now), but now that it's always compiled, I rather wonder whether this isn't legacy baggage. Certainly flexible overloadable operators aren't inimical to the notions of operator precedence, as the ML language family shows.
I certainly don't get why (3/4) != (3/4). If it's because it's inexact, they might learn a thing or two from how scheme handles it.
> [snipped example]
> How could someone argue with a straight face that this gobblygook is progress in programming languages?
Syntax-wise it sure isn't, it looks like slavish adherence to smalltalk's syntax, with Self's prototypes and C++'s klunky "traits" stapled on (traits are meaningless when you have either manifest types like scripting languages or type inference like ML). It's implemented in a language that itself manages to be a mismatch to Slate, but I imagine they want to make it self-hosting later on.
Slate has some really nifty ideas, but I've seen lots of nifty ideas come and go. Usually such projects run out of steam when they reach the final hump of getting everything integrated and performing well. Slate looks nice under the hood, even if it has an ugly paint job, but I damn near asphyxiated when I last held my breath on a similar project.
Globalview was a Xerox thing, I used it at Xerox (never seriously, there was a Sparc port lying around that I tried) It never escaped Xerox alive -- and probably couldn't have survived anyway if it did. The Globalview name might have been a more recent coinage, but it was a direct descendant of the STAR gui.
Or so I was told at any rate... There was an updated windows (3.x) port of Globalview as well, but that was more of a klunky "document centered" application toolkit and runtime, and really had little in common other than some odd widget behavior.
> Apple more or less invented most of what you think of as the GUI. It was their property.
I really don't think I need any longer to point out these astonishing hypocrisies in that revisionist partisan history (anyone who wants to see real mental gymnastics of justifications and rationalizations, do click through to it). I have seen and used a port of the original Globalview, which predates Apple's GUI system. It's a lot more primitive, yes, but Apple's GUI is most certainly evolutionary. About the only thing Apple added was overlapping resizeable windows; menus, icons, and of course the pointer controlled by the mouse, those were all there.
Apple sued people for making things that looked like their things. I'm happy the courts and eventually the market repudiated this behavior and forced Apple to compete on merit.
> Then you verify that the forward DNS and the reverse DNS match....
And you blow away loads of legit mail when you drop mail that fails this test. Best you can do usually is flag it.
SPF could nip this trick in the bud, though it is specific to mail. I suppose nothing stops SPF from being generalized with the existing service resolution hack though (e.g. looking up TXT records for _XMPP_.slashdot.org or _IRC_.slashdot.org for example).
> A huge amount (if not the majority) of spam comes from open relays and compromised machines ...
> A ground-up overhaul of the mail system (with authentication) is what's needed
Sounds to me like a ground-up overhaul of security is what's needed, or else it'll punch holes in any new system you built, ground up or no. SMTP has survived this long. You want to invent a new transfer system, feel free, go get yourself a well known port for it from IANA and get everyone using it. Stick a persistent message store on Jabber if you want a good running start.
Meanwhile, the rest of us would prefer to entertain solutions that can be implemented to fix what exists while you go off and blaze new trails.
um, we have this cool tool called reverse DNS that allows us to confirm that the machine we are talking to does indeed have a legitimate entry under the DNS name they are purporting to send mail from.
My RDNS can say "mail.slashdot.org" if I want it to. Your automated tools good at parsing WHOIS output yet?
How about a little credit, like a link?
> If you're comparing to IE, then it's not a fair comparison since IE hides some of its memory footprint in explorer
It does not. Evidenced by my being able to run a fully functional iexplore.exe without explorer.exe running, and it having the same memory footprint. I do find that both IE and mozilla grow to about the same memory footprint after about an hour of heavy use, however. Mozilla merely allocates more up front, though it's always going to be a little bit fatter due to using its own widget set (whereas using windows native controls will "hide" some resources in GDI, which is typically mapped right into the video driver).
Ultimately on even 5 year old hardware, the difference isn't noticeable (even startup time -- IE takes ages while to start up if you don't have active desktop running), but the first thing people tend to notice about firefox on my machine is "wow, it renders fast".
None of the apps you mentioned have any "special settings" to stay pinned in RAM -- all DLL's stay loaded until they get unloaded by a single kernel thread (you can unload directly, but it tends to be crashy for some weird reason). Apps that use a lot of DLL's make this effect more pronounced. Acrobat sticks around because plugins typically don't shut themselves down properly. I just kill it off with task manager, and it doesn't appear to impact browser stability.
... with the Second.
A housemate of mine used to love that expression. Only guy I knew who was a card-carrying member of both the ACLU and the NRA.
> Otherwise, what's to stop someone voting, getting their printout and then feeding a slip of paper of the same size back in so they can vote again without destroying their original.
First, there's a human watching the equipment. Individual funny business might stand, organized would have to be, well, organized.
Secondly, simple sequence numbers ought to suffice. Scantron sheets have those already (what do you think all those little black bars on the side are)
> Hoagland refuses to back down from his claims and keeps selling books on the subject
That's precisely it. Skepticism has a smaller market. He's a charlatan plain and simple, who probably doesn't truly believe most of his own claims; he's probably not cynical enough to disbelieve them, but he's resolved the cognitive dissonance by "keeping an open mind". Were to challenge his worldview, he'd lose his livelihood and community.
Look for this pattern in a whole lot of new-age claimants of the paranormal or just plain fantastic. It's definitely not limited to Hoagland.