A new 3 GHz Athlon64 X2 requires 89W of power, whereas the old 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird used 74W.
So a new CPU is using 20% more power than the old one. Doesn't sound more power efficient to me. Better efficiency would involve the second number being lower than the first.
Sure but "it does more faster" I hear you say. That needs qualification. With the same battery I'll be able to use my laptop for 20% less time (say 2.5 hours instead of 3). If it does more faster, how come I get 30 minutes less time to use it before my battery craps out?
What would be better is a CPU that can use up to 89W when it needs it, then falls back to much lower - say 10W - when it idle and waiting for me to type a clever response into Slashdot. You need power consuption is only relevant over a period of time, so figures need to be in Kwh to be of any use. TFA stated tests last 15 min so all figures can be converted to Kwh. Your arguement doesn't.
Spoken like someone who doesn't own a a hi-def television.
I have a frigging hi-def projector permanently mounted to give me a 100" screen a mere 3 metres away from my head. I watch it three or four hours a night with a mixture of standard-def & hi-def TV and DVDs.
And I agree with the GP: regular DVD is fine. Hi-def is slightly better and then only true hi-def. I'll upgrade when they invent holo-vision and I doubt before. You feel free to waste your cash. Me I work for mine.
Well, personally I've grown tired of DVDs and is using a 500GB external eSATA drive.
I'm with you. On to my 14th hard drive on my LAN - 3.06 TB of storage. Plenty of room for lots of vids, photos and music of any format and no friggin' shiny disks to get scratched.
The state? Come on! How post-war is that attitude? Down here we can't even get the state to build simple things like roads and broadband. Even education and hospitals are no longer seen as viable infrastructure the State can provide - its all being privatised. The State does nothing more than hand out traffic infringements, collect taxes and throw money at special interests and marginal electorates. A pollie's primary responsibility this century is to get him and his party re-elected.
Apparantly for you to read it is. JNLP is the Java WebStart extension which is automatically installed by the JRE, which you should note was mentioned as a requirement on the page. And in every comment on this thread.
Perhaps Java is too complicated for folk such as yourself. But then, I guessing anything more complicated then fire and stone tools are as well. It does require you to read a sentence every now and then and it allows you too make decisions on how you'd like to use it. Nice and friendly the way it leaves you in control of your computer instead of just randomly downloading everything it can so that the little Flash demo works.
Java is not for the masses, and neither are computers in general. Unfortunately, Sun has to believe otherwise or it dies a commercial death. Don't you love capitalism.
A good example is the situation with AIDS drugs. If there were no copyrights or patents covering those drugs, they would be far more accessible.
Actually, I'd argue that without an enforceable patent nobody would have funded the effort to investigate the disease and develop a drug for it in the first place. Then it woulnd't be accessible to anybody.
The open source model, of donating small bits of one's time ad hoc to a project, wouldn't work when developing a drub. For that you need lots of expensive equipment and expensive labour that needs to be co-ordinated over many years. Without IP protection who would donate the very expensive resources to the cause?
If you use Adblock, please edit your useragent header so websites can require you to pay a subscription while allowing me to continue accessing their content in exchange for viewing a few ads.
I would except... wait for it... I don't give a fuck about how you view the suites you visit nor how they make money, if at all. There is no commercial agreement in place between me and the site owners to view their adverts when I view their site. They are expecting me to view them, hell maybe even to click on 'em, but I don't have to if I choose not too. And technology gives me that choice.
Same rule with television and radio. You put it out on they are waves or the Net and allow me access I may view your content. If you lace it with adds and I can remove those adds before they hit my eyeballs and ears then I might just do that. That's the risk you run in allowing your precious content to be unleashed over the ether.
And if that means that the industry moves away from ad-supported sites to subscription-based content then bloody excellent. Less noise for my ad-block filters to remove all round. I'll pay for content I want to read/view/listen. Don't through "free" shit at me if you expect me to care about your ads.
Now all those times I looked in a telescope at pluto, I have to remind myself that I was just looking at a friggin rock.
And everytime I look at Mars through a telescope I realise it too is just a friggin' rock. As is the moon. And Jupiter and Saturn are just friggin' balls of gas.
Moron. If I can convince the New Hampshire legislature to declare my ass as a planet are you going to stare at that all night too?
here's always the choice of building it and charging reasonable fees. as long as the company and the regulating body can agree on a fair fee
Ah the sticking point that makes 3 unrealistic. "Fair fee" is rarely agreed upon. That's the nature of "get what the market will bear" capitalism where the company wants as much as it can get. The company has to do this to provide the most return to its shareholders. "Most" return, not "fairest" return. Private companies care nought for fair.
And so neither build it, niether private nor public money, and the populace wait until the government capitulates in some way, usually by chaing their definition of "fair". This is a natural consequence of privitased national interests. Once they are privatised they become monopolies and only unfair regulation can rein them in.
The same game is playing down under in OZ. Telstra won't build the fibrre network until the ACCC agrees to allow it to set pricing. Gov't says, no build it for us and then we'll decide what return you get on your investment. Round and round and nothing gets built.
Oh, BTW, the analogies to highways that I see here are spot on and exactly what govts are trying to do with telecom infrastructure. No govt here in OZ has built a highway out of tax payer money in more than a decade. Its all private/public meaning private companies build the roads and the public gets screwed with tolls all day every day. Govts don't build national infrastructure anymore, they no longer see that as their role.
(a) Watched the broadcast and want their own copy for future viewing; or
(b) Didn't watch it the first time around and want a copy for future viewing
I can't think of any other case so if you can, feel free to add to the list.
Yeah, you missed one, the one that's the point of the original article:
(c) Are sick of not knowing when and if the broadcast will be on and just want to watch the damned thing now.
Now this group don't care about broadcasting revenue and put up with ads so they can have the convienience of a regularly scheduled piece of entertainment in their weekly life. These last few years even the big prime time hits of been jumping around slots and days through the key ratings periods, so throw out the schedule. When that happens people make they're own schedule.
I was watching House M.D. all last year at 8:30pm on a Wednesday night followed by NCIS. Channel Ten started me on that, and when they started showing repeats and fussing with the schedule I found and alternative provider and kept it up. Except now NCIS at my house starts at 9:15 pm, cause we don't have to watch all the ads that we used to on Channel 10.
You are always personally responsible for what you do. If you think policies of the organization you are working for are immoral, you can always switch jobs to another company, or at least a project that you don't find offensive.
I'm more personally responsible for feeding my kids, sending them to school, and ensuring they have housing and medical attention. I'm not going to let my minor aversion to an organisations policies make those tasks harder for me or on my family, ie. by me earning less money. That's economic reality.
If they pay better money and offer better conditions in return for me enforcing a couple of minor policies then no prob. That's part of any cost/benefit analysis when choosing a job. Doesn't make me personally responsible. You should see some of the crap code I'm forced to write in the various contract roles I've had these last couple of years. Its not my code, it's theirs, so I write what they want.
As long as I don't have to cross any moral boundaries I personally have. That's too far for me.
Morality means checking which way the societal wind blows
WTF? So burning witches at the stake 400 yrs ago was moral? Forcing 8 yr olds to work down a coal shaft for 16 hrs a day was moral? Slavery was moral? There were all the norms for a lot of societies for a long, long time.
Not in my head. I prefer do no harm to be the basis of my moral compass. Just the basis, there are few absolutes. These examples are not moral and never were - ever! I like to think that if I was born in those times I would still have opposed those behaviours as much as I do today. I'll never know.
Have a read of Lord Of The Flies for an example of how quickly the acceptal behaviour of a society can change, and why that standard should not be the basis of morality.
Of course, this is probably where my thinking is different to billions of others. For them, morality is as the parent states or more importantly "whatever I can get away with". That's not morality - that's hypocrosy.
I think It's awesome that the BBC is going to have YouTube foot the bill for their bandwidth instead of making the UK citizens do it.
A torrent download has the same advantage:-) BBC has lower bandwidth costs. Besides how much bandwidth does it take to suck down a 20MB 320x240 10 min FLV file?
You know what I'm sick of? Media companies that think they know what I'm going to like, or what's going to encourage me to buy stuff from them.
That's a fundamental assumption of capitalism. Guess what consumers want and offer it to them. If the product/service, price and conditions are in balance then a large enough percentage of the market will buy and you'll earn money.
If you don't like what they offer don't buy from them. But you can't whinge that they try.
In today's world, you eating that bacon while chugging a soda and smoking a Marlboro costs me money. When you have a heart attack, or have to take $1500 worth of meds each month to keep yourself functioning, that raises my health insurance rates.
Whoops, you made a small over-simplification to support your argument. Remove that and your argument falls flat.
Your health insurance rates are determined by your health insurance company based on your lifestyle and risk profile. My rates are likewise based on my lifestyle. If the insurance company considered my eating of a pound of bacon and drinking gallons of soft drink a day to provide a greater risk then they would ask me such a question on our insurance application and build a risk profile accordingly, thereby charging me more for my lifestyle.
And since these questions are not on my health insurance application forms I guess the insurance company doesn't think my lifestyle is much of a risk to your premiums. I get the health care I pay for. If the industry thinks I need more care to my lifestyle it is free to charge me higher premiums. That's fine with me. If you want lower premiums, you change your lifestyle not mine!
Same arguement the GP is using. Let's not stretch the social contract too much. I didn't agree to live with you in this society, but I will tolerate you living in society with me. Just let me live my life in my own way, and you can eat all the tofu you want.
Where is bandwidth cheap and virtually unlimited? Not here in OZ. It's already rationed, with small download limits and marginal speeds.
After watching the Internet grow up these last 15 years we still are no where near being able to utilise the Net in the ways the technology is capable of allowing us. And we won't be for a while yet. Video-On-Demand? VOIP? Music and video downloads? Pipe dreams. I'll visit this planet again in a decade or two and cross my fingers for you.
which sucks because so many Aussies hate America, but our ruler loves those yanks and wants us to be just like them
If we don't, by and large, like what our PM is doing - and has been doing for over a decade - then why do we still vote for him? The people continue to vote him and his party in so I'd say most Aussies therefore agree with his policies. If not, the Aussie people have only the Aussie people to blame. Just like the American people must take the blame for the actions of their leader.
Can you give me some examples of trading platforms that are pure Java? I used to work for a company that provided trading platforms for stock exchanges and the like. They regarded Java as too slow and did everything in C++, a few counter examples of similar systems providing good performance in Java would be interesting if I feel like an argument next time I meet one of their developers...
Yup, I was just involved building one for a large Australian bank and then interviewed with another that was doing the same. Major FX trading for a full desk, with an add-on for equities. Had Java adaptors to eight different platforms.
Wasn't slow at all, but then we coded it well. The old "Java is slow" stigma is gonna stick for a few years yet regardless of what the reality yet. Bad coders can code any language slow...
Do you need to know how assembly is compiled into machine code then put into memory and fetched by the CPU (with lots of nop in the case of x86:)?
Actually sometimes you do. I remember a bug a couple of years ago that was traced down to the compiler incorrectly compiling a few lines of C++ code. Yup, a nasty compiler bug (hey, compilers a programs too). One of our guys not only detected this, hey found out why and how and wrote the embedded assembler to fix it. None of the rest of us knew assembler so we were in the dark.
So, whilst you don't need to know such things in your day to day workings its good to have a familiarity with them so that when a problem like ours falls "outside of the box" (ie. compilers don't have bugs) you can grasp that thread of thought and follow it down to a solution, learning more intricate detail as you go. Else your quickly become stuck at "but compilers don't do that" and get nowhere to fixing your problem.
Even though calculators are cheap and generally in easy reach it's still good to be able to do some math by hand. And even though third-level languages are prevalent, its good to get under the covers occasionaly so you understand what really happens not what's suppossed to happen.
I think the fear is that the featureful, small uTorrent client the world loves will now be "improved" to provide fast dollars for the new owners. And how do you do that these days? Stuff advertsing into your product, turn off advanced features and produce a "pro" version, "encourage" your community to download your commercial stuff, and when they resist then automatically "upgrade" their client for them to follow the new "strategic direction".
The uTorrent community is the biggest "asset" that BitTorrent bought, just like the BitTorrent community was what MPAA thought it was buying. Now that community will be "leveraged" to provide a significant return on this "investment".
In short, commericalisation. It is the way of things. Not that I blame or hold a grudge against the authors. They put a lot of work in and why shouldn't they profit. Any developer in their place would do the same. Its business, that's all, just business. But people, particularly on/. get quite righteous about these things.
The ride was good. Now pay or get off. Capitalism 101.
But is that something that really improves productivity? Simple tasks are pretty fast with any interface. It's conveying complex tasks and getting the computer to do them that increases productivity. Sure you can do simple tasks with natural language. You can even do a limited number of reasonable complex tasks.
Agreed.
Regardless of what language you use - natural or otherwise - the information has to be organised in the speaker's head prior to being spoken / written in such a way that the language conveys the concepts accurately. Computer languages force you to think a certain way, and our compilers enforce this even more, so that programmers generally start thinking in a structured way. That's way people who naturally think that way often are more suited to programming / scripting tasks.
Most of the people don't think in a structured way. Forcing them to think that way by using a formal structured language is not a goal I believe we should be striving for. English is particularly flexible and unstructured do to its origins and so there can be huge problems conveying complex information through English so that everybody is clear and understands. Look a the law as an example of how difficult it can be.
However, have you every noticed the lanugage used by "ordinary" people in a futuristic society where speaking to computers is a common occurrence (say, Star Trek)? Everybody talks a little more formally and structured, even common citezens. Slang is very uncommon in those cultures, probably because slang is hard for a computer to understand and they use computers so, so, much.
I think as us coders learn to program our computers to better interact with people, they'll learn to better interact with computers.
And forcing them to understand a scripting language, simply because us coders do, won't cut the mustard.
Nice straw-man. You don't have to write Perl to watch Stargate, and nobody advocated that, so your "point" is moot.
Not straw man at all. I don't have to write a perl script to watch Stargate: I have to open a video player on the machine I want to watch it on (if I have a keyboard), browse my network, know where the Stragates are, and select one.
Know if I want to automate those steps - and execute them remotely - I have to write a script. The script gets more an more complicated the more options I choose to want, such as playing specific files; in a specific order; random selections; playing at specific times; on specific screens - and all in combinations.
Or I write more and more scripts, each more compplicated than the last. If I want my wife and kids to use it then I have to teach them all the options of all the scripts.
Or write a script that can interpret the commands they naturally give, ie. English.
Have you ever actually tried communicating complex problems in a human language? It's much slower and more difficult than communicating in a more rigid language such as most programming uses. There are to many places where human language can be confussing or misunderstood even between humans let alone by some machine.
Yes I have tried. In fact I am doing at home using my very own personal assistant. It works fairly well for a limited set of tasks, but it means I don't have to write scripts to do it.
I can simply walk to any keyboard in my house and type "play 2 random Stargate on tv" and it happens. When I get the speech interface working better I'll just say it into a microphone. It adapts to my sentence structure as time progresses (ie, it "learns"). Yes it has bugs - lots of them - and is useful for a limited set of tasks, but its a good step forward in the direction our tools should be taking.
It wasn't that hard to code and can only improve with time. My wife uses it quite a bit as do my kids. Much easier than teaching them Perl just to watch some Stargate.
Slashdot Mirror
So a new CPU is using 20% more power than the old one. Doesn't sound more power efficient to me. Better efficiency would involve the second number being lower than the first.
Sure but "it does more faster" I hear you say. That needs qualification. With the same battery I'll be able to use my laptop for 20% less time (say 2.5 hours instead of 3). If it does more faster, how come I get 30 minutes less time to use it before my battery craps out?
What would be better is a CPU that can use up to 89W when it needs it, then falls back to much lower - say 10W - when it idle and waiting for me to type a clever response into Slashdot. You need power consuption is only relevant over a period of time, so figures need to be in Kwh to be of any use. TFA stated tests last 15 min so all figures can be converted to Kwh. Your arguement doesn't.
I have a frigging hi-def projector permanently mounted to give me a 100" screen a mere 3 metres away from my head. I watch it three or four hours a night with a mixture of standard-def & hi-def TV and DVDs.
And I agree with the GP: regular DVD is fine. Hi-def is slightly better and then only true hi-def. I'll upgrade when they invent holo-vision and I doubt before. You feel free to waste your cash. Me I work for mine.
I'm with you. On to my 14th hard drive on my LAN - 3.06 TB of storage. Plenty of room for lots of vids, photos and music of any format and no friggin' shiny disks to get scratched.
The state? Come on! How post-war is that attitude? Down here we can't even get the state to build simple things like roads and broadband. Even education and hospitals are no longer seen as viable infrastructure the State can provide - its all being privatised. The State does nothing more than hand out traffic infringements, collect taxes and throw money at special interests and marginal electorates. A pollie's primary responsibility this century is to get him and his party re-elected.
Apparantly for you to read it is. JNLP is the Java WebStart extension which is automatically installed by the JRE, which you should note was mentioned as a requirement on the page. And in every comment on this thread.
Perhaps Java is too complicated for folk such as yourself. But then, I guessing anything more complicated then fire and stone tools are as well. It does require you to read a sentence every now and then and it allows you too make decisions on how you'd like to use it. Nice and friendly the way it leaves you in control of your computer instead of just randomly downloading everything it can so that the little Flash demo works.
Java is not for the masses, and neither are computers in general. Unfortunately, Sun has to believe otherwise or it dies a commercial death. Don't you love capitalism.
Actually, I'd argue that without an enforceable patent nobody would have funded the effort to investigate the disease and develop a drug for it in the first place. Then it woulnd't be accessible to anybody.
The open source model, of donating small bits of one's time ad hoc to a project, wouldn't work when developing a drub. For that you need lots of expensive equipment and expensive labour that needs to be co-ordinated over many years. Without IP protection who would donate the very expensive resources to the cause?
And everytime I look at Mars through a telescope I realise it too is just a friggin' rock. As is the moon. And Jupiter and Saturn are just friggin' balls of gas.
Moron. If I can convince the New Hampshire legislature to declare my ass as a planet are you going to stare at that all night too?
Ah the sticking point that makes 3 unrealistic. "Fair fee" is rarely agreed upon. That's the nature of "get what the market will bear" capitalism where the company wants as much as it can get. The company has to do this to provide the most return to its shareholders. "Most" return, not "fairest" return. Private companies care nought for fair.
And so neither build it, niether private nor public money, and the populace wait until the government capitulates in some way, usually by chaing their definition of "fair". This is a natural consequence of privitased national interests. Once they are privatised they become monopolies and only unfair regulation can rein them in.
The same game is playing down under in OZ. Telstra won't build the fibrre network until the ACCC agrees to allow it to set pricing. Gov't says, no build it for us and then we'll decide what return you get on your investment. Round and round and nothing gets built.
Oh, BTW, the analogies to highways that I see here are spot on and exactly what govts are trying to do with telecom infrastructure. No govt here in OZ has built a highway out of tax payer money in more than a decade. Its all private/public meaning private companies build the roads and the public gets screwed with tolls all day every day. Govts don't build national infrastructure anymore, they no longer see that as their role.
Yeah, you missed one, the one that's the point of the original article:
(c) Are sick of not knowing when and if the broadcast will be on and just want to watch the damned thing now.
Now this group don't care about broadcasting revenue and put up with ads so they can have the convienience of a regularly scheduled piece of entertainment in their weekly life. These last few years even the big prime time hits of been jumping around slots and days through the key ratings periods, so throw out the schedule. When that happens people make they're own schedule.
I was watching House M.D. all last year at 8:30pm on a Wednesday night followed by NCIS. Channel Ten started me on that, and when they started showing repeats and fussing with the schedule I found and alternative provider and kept it up. Except now NCIS at my house starts at 9:15 pm, cause we don't have to watch all the ads that we used to on Channel 10.
This the Capitalist way. Litigation has far higher ROI than making good products. Notice how MS shareprice still went up even though the lost .
I'm more personally responsible for feeding my kids, sending them to school, and ensuring they have housing and medical attention. I'm not going to let my minor aversion to an organisations policies make those tasks harder for me or on my family, ie. by me earning less money. That's economic reality.
If they pay better money and offer better conditions in return for me enforcing a couple of minor policies then no prob. That's part of any cost/benefit analysis when choosing a job. Doesn't make me personally responsible. You should see some of the crap code I'm forced to write in the various contract roles I've had these last couple of years. Its not my code, it's theirs, so I write what they want.
As long as I don't have to cross any moral boundaries I personally have. That's too far for me.
WTF? So burning witches at the stake 400 yrs ago was moral? Forcing 8 yr olds to work down a coal shaft for 16 hrs a day was moral? Slavery was moral? There were all the norms for a lot of societies for a long, long time.
Not in my head. I prefer do no harm to be the basis of my moral compass. Just the basis, there are few absolutes. These examples are not moral and never were - ever! I like to think that if I was born in those times I would still have opposed those behaviours as much as I do today. I'll never know.
Have a read of Lord Of The Flies for an example of how quickly the acceptal behaviour of a society can change, and why that standard should not be the basis of morality.
Of course, this is probably where my thinking is different to billions of others. For them, morality is as the parent states or more importantly "whatever I can get away with". That's not morality - that's hypocrosy.
That's a fundamental assumption of capitalism. Guess what consumers want and offer it to them. If the product/service, price and conditions are in balance then a large enough percentage of the market will buy and you'll earn money.
If you don't like what they offer don't buy from them. But you can't whinge that they try.
Whoops, you made a small over-simplification to support your argument. Remove that and your argument falls flat.
Your health insurance rates are determined by your health insurance company based on your lifestyle and risk profile. My rates are likewise based on my lifestyle. If the insurance company considered my eating of a pound of bacon and drinking gallons of soft drink a day to provide a greater risk then they would ask me such a question on our insurance application and build a risk profile accordingly, thereby charging me more for my lifestyle.
And since these questions are not on my health insurance application forms I guess the insurance company doesn't think my lifestyle is much of a risk to your premiums. I get the health care I pay for. If the industry thinks I need more care to my lifestyle it is free to charge me higher premiums. That's fine with me. If you want lower premiums, you change your lifestyle not mine!
Same arguement the GP is using. Let's not stretch the social contract too much. I didn't agree to live with you in this society, but I will tolerate you living in society with me. Just let me live my life in my own way, and you can eat all the tofu you want.
Feel better now. Mind if I have a beer or 200?
Where is bandwidth cheap and virtually unlimited? Not here in OZ. It's already rationed, with small download limits and marginal speeds.
After watching the Internet grow up these last 15 years we still are no where near being able to utilise the Net in the ways the technology is capable of allowing us. And we won't be for a while yet. Video-On-Demand? VOIP? Music and video downloads? Pipe dreams. I'll visit this planet again in a decade or two and cross my fingers for you.
If we don't, by and large, like what our PM is doing - and has been doing for over a decade - then why do we still vote for him? The people continue to vote him and his party in so I'd say most Aussies therefore agree with his policies. If not, the Aussie people have only the Aussie people to blame. Just like the American people must take the blame for the actions of their leader.
Yup, I was just involved building one for a large Australian bank and then interviewed with another that was doing the same. Major FX trading for a full desk, with an add-on for equities. Had Java adaptors to eight different platforms.
Wasn't slow at all, but then we coded it well. The old "Java is slow" stigma is gonna stick for a few years yet regardless of what the reality yet. Bad coders can code any language slow...
Actually sometimes you do. I remember a bug a couple of years ago that was traced down to the compiler incorrectly compiling a few lines of C++ code. Yup, a nasty compiler bug (hey, compilers a programs too). One of our guys not only detected this, hey found out why and how and wrote the embedded assembler to fix it. None of the rest of us knew assembler so we were in the dark.
So, whilst you don't need to know such things in your day to day workings its good to have a familiarity with them so that when a problem like ours falls "outside of the box" (ie. compilers don't have bugs) you can grasp that thread of thought and follow it down to a solution, learning more intricate detail as you go. Else your quickly become stuck at "but compilers don't do that" and get nowhere to fixing your problem.
Even though calculators are cheap and generally in easy reach it's still good to be able to do some math by hand. And even though third-level languages are prevalent, its good to get under the covers occasionaly so you understand what really happens not what's suppossed to happen.
I think the fear is that the featureful, small uTorrent client the world loves will now be "improved" to provide fast dollars for the new owners. And how do you do that these days? Stuff advertsing into your product, turn off advanced features and produce a "pro" version, "encourage" your community to download your commercial stuff, and when they resist then automatically "upgrade" their client for them to follow the new "strategic direction".
The uTorrent community is the biggest "asset" that BitTorrent bought, just like the BitTorrent community was what MPAA thought it was buying. Now that community will be "leveraged" to provide a significant return on this "investment".
In short, commericalisation. It is the way of things. Not that I blame or hold a grudge against the authors. They put a lot of work in and why shouldn't they profit. Any developer in their place would do the same. Its business, that's all, just business. But people, particularly on /. get quite righteous about these things.
The ride was good. Now pay or get off. Capitalism 101.
Agreed.
Regardless of what language you use - natural or otherwise - the information has to be organised in the speaker's head prior to being spoken / written in such a way that the language conveys the concepts accurately. Computer languages force you to think a certain way, and our compilers enforce this even more, so that programmers generally start thinking in a structured way. That's way people who naturally think that way often are more suited to programming / scripting tasks.
Most of the people don't think in a structured way. Forcing them to think that way by using a formal structured language is not a goal I believe we should be striving for. English is particularly flexible and unstructured do to its origins and so there can be huge problems conveying complex information through English so that everybody is clear and understands. Look a the law as an example of how difficult it can be.
However, have you every noticed the lanugage used by "ordinary" people in a futuristic society where speaking to computers is a common occurrence (say, Star Trek)? Everybody talks a little more formally and structured, even common citezens. Slang is very uncommon in those cultures, probably because slang is hard for a computer to understand and they use computers so, so, much.
I think as us coders learn to program our computers to better interact with people, they'll learn to better interact with computers.
And forcing them to understand a scripting language, simply because us coders do, won't cut the mustard.
Not straw man at all. I don't have to write a perl script to watch Stargate: I have to open a video player on the machine I want to watch it on (if I have a keyboard), browse my network, know where the Stragates are, and select one.
Know if I want to automate those steps - and execute them remotely - I have to write a script. The script gets more an more complicated the more options I choose to want, such as playing specific files; in a specific order; random selections; playing at specific times; on specific screens - and all in combinations.
Or I write more and more scripts, each more compplicated than the last. If I want my wife and kids to use it then I have to teach them all the options of all the scripts.
Or write a script that can interpret the commands they naturally give, ie. English.
Yes I have tried. In fact I am doing at home using my very own personal assistant. It works fairly well for a limited set of tasks, but it means I don't have to write scripts to do it.
I can simply walk to any keyboard in my house and type "play 2 random Stargate on tv" and it happens. When I get the speech interface working better I'll just say it into a microphone. It adapts to my sentence structure as time progresses (ie, it "learns"). Yes it has bugs - lots of them - and is useful for a limited set of tasks, but its a good step forward in the direction our tools should be taking.
It wasn't that hard to code and can only improve with time. My wife uses it quite a bit as do my kids. Much easier than teaching them Perl just to watch some Stargate.