It's much easier for a computer to get away with writing a poem than prose. The modern trend is to write poetry that sounds cool but no one understands. The same is true for modern songwriting.
Cortana is probably a new and better Clippy. But besides that, the rest seems like polishing the brass on the Titanic.
New folder icons? I remember visiting gnome-look.org for the first time ten years ago and being blown away: page after page of themes, icon sets, etc.
Start menu tweaked again? Why is this so hard? And it still looks awkward to me. Program names are inside squares, instead of just being text items in a list. Or small squares at least, like the launcher in Chrome OS.
I've used Mac since 1984, Windows since 95, and Linux since '05. I've either not minded or actually liked all of the iterations of program launching in Mac and Linux. But I have never, never, like the Windows Start menu.
Let's start with the word Start, which is where you go to Shut Down. Makes sense. And while it was a little more straightforward than today's shenanigans, it wasn't exactly pleasant to dig through. Plus, I was always stymied by why Windows took several seconds sometimes to me just trying to open the submenu --- not launch a program, just open a folder within the Start menu to see what's in there. It's like Windows was going to the bathroom, and I had to wait for it to finish even to answer a simple question.
And then there was the My everything fiasco, where Documents became My Documents, Computer became My Computer, and so on.
There is the trash can that they still won't default to the bottom right, because if you ever resize the screen, it messes up the position, since Windows calculates everything as the number of pixels from the top left, apparently. So they put the trash can in the top left. This never looked right to me. A trashy-looking thing like a trash can should be in a minor part of the screen (bottom right) even if they call it a Recycle Bin. The Macintosh somehow figured out how to do this 30 years ago.
"Arguably" is the lazy writer's word for "not"
on
The Magic of Pallets
·
· Score: 1
the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
The word arguably is "the lazy writer’s synonym for 'not.' For example: 'The Red Sox are arguably the strongest team in the American League East.'" --- Alex Beam
David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.
I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.
Just read Getting Real. I was thinking of recommending their second book, ReWork, but it's mostly a rework of the first. You either get Getting Real or you don't, and if you don't get it, you have problem about getting real.
Don't roll your own password system. If you're a public site, use OAuth Connect to let them sign in with their account from Google, Yahoo, or some other company that specializes in this sort of thing. If it's a business-to-business site, use Kerberos or LDAP to let them sign them in with their own company's username and password. This also cuts down on the number of usernames and passwords users must remember.
And then there's the launchd / inetd way of launching services that systemd also copies. The service config file can list a set of sockets that the service binds in order to service requests. For example Apache binds to port 80 and 443. So long as all services (including mounting filesystems...) describe *all* of their external interfaces, dependencies no longer matter at all.
The init system can bind all of the sockets that every service needs all at once, and either start the real service the first time the socket is used, or start them all at once. If one service connects to another, the first request will block until the other service is ready to handle it. Then all you have to worry about is the potential for deadlocking, which you'd have to consider anyway.
Thank you for the explanation. That sounds much more elegant.
I like the UNIX philosophy and don't think it goes out of style just because it's a few decades old.
I am against systemd, for now, mainly because of the binary log files and how it was railroaded through the community.
However, do these programs follow the do-one-thing-and-do-it-well principle: web servers like Apache, database servers like PostgreSQL, the X Window system, the GIMP, OpenOffice? Is an init system more like one of these or more like sed and awk? That's not a rhetorical question. I'm a web programmer who loves Linux, but the kernal and start-up are still black magic to me.
Maybe an init system can be simple. I don't understand why even shell scripts are needed. Seems like they should be the exception, not the rule. Seems like configuration should be a single file that lists the programs to start from top to bottom. If you wanted add some parallel start-ups, it seems like you could just make the config file format a little fancier, maybe with some braces or indentation to express dependency.
Maybe instead of systemd we could come up with a start-up standard, sort of like the POSIX standard. Most programs seem already to be callable with the same arguments: start to start it, stop to stop it, restart to restart it. So the simple config file would call one or the other depending on which cycle we're in. Why the need for shell scripts? I've looked at them, and they mostly seem to be doing this anyway: call start on the shell script, and it calls start on the program. I see some checking, some setting of environmental variables maybe, but is this really needed? Can't programs be formalized to follow some init API? If the start, stop, and restart are not enough, maybe also an option, like --bg, that they'd all take, so the init system always calls $program --bg start, or $program --bg stop, or whatever; so that all we need is that simple config file. Those programs that don't yet follow the init API could keep using a shell script until they do.
Please have mercy if this question is terribly naive. I've tried googling . . . a little. I was hoping a real live human being could either explain it all. Or feel free to reply with some links that explain why SysV init needs all those shell scripts and can't be just a simple list or somewhat-simple declarative configuration.
While perpetual motion machines would violate known physical phenomena—like the conservation of energy—cold fusion is possible in principle.
Oh, so it's possible!
The combination of the energy barrier of normal matter, the Coulomb barrier of individual nuclei, the negligibly low probability of quantum tunneling at all but the shortest distances, and the fact that the physics of nuclear reactions is so incredibly well-understood (and verified) all tells us that low-energy cold fusion should be impossible.
Oh, so it's impossible. But even here, don't you mean it's just unlikely?
Even though I’m a theoretical physicist myself, I’m open to the possibility that physics has it wrong, and that cold fusion could be possible
Wait, you said it was possible in principle. Now you're saying that cold fusion contradicts theory.
MGM, Universal, Sony, and all copyright owners should just make all their content watchable on their own websites. Instead of clicking to channel 24, I should click to channel mgm.com, paramount.com, or whatever.
This usage of a middleman like Netflix, where most content isn't even available, doesn't make sense to me.
I guess they would have to figure out how to inject ads in or around all their content, or standardize on OAuth Connect or something so I don't have to sign up on each website. They would also have to be happy with micropayments per show or very small monthly credit card charges. I can't sign up on all of them for $10 a month.
I understand database abstration layers that let you write:
db_query('select * from table where id = 3')
instead of:
mysql_query('select * from table where id = 3') or pgsql_query('select * from table where id = 3')
But I'm not sure I understand why you would want even more abstraction that lets you write:
db_select('*').from('table').where({ id: 3 })
---
Sealing against SQL injection isn't that hard. Don't ever write:
select * from table where id = $id
If you see a dollar sign in an SQL string, it should catch your eye. Instead use parametric queries whenever you can:
select * from table where id = ? or select * from table where id = $1 or select * from table where id =:id or whatever your programming language's syntax is.
Maybe variables in queries are unavoidable, if you have some kind of query building code: if ($x) {
$table = 'x'; } else {
$table = 'y'; }
$q = db_prepare("select * from $table where id = ?");
Does anyone have a better way to build up queries?
For styling and formatting it’s ok, but for layout it is a convoluted mess.
I'm one of the few who think you should not use CSS for layout.
If you use CSS for fonts, color, bold, italic, margins, padding, it's fine. What do these things have in common? They're traits of a box with little consideration about its relationship with other boxes. Margin sort of is, but it's just saying, "Keep this far away from me." These CSS properties are all sort of self-centered.
And then for layout if you use HTML, in particular, HTML tables, life is easy. At this point I casually step behind an embankment, to hide from the onslaught by the standardistas. They complain that using a table is not "semantic." Well, guess what? If you use a list tag for things that don't line up vertically, then you're also being unsemantic, because "list" meant "strip" or "edge," because the text lined up along a common edge. "Paragraph" means "a mark beside," so if you're not putting pilcrows beside each paragraph you're being unsemantic.
What does it even mean that tables should only be used for "tabular data"? Isn't that a tautology? It's like saying, only pour water on things that are already wet.
Cascading Style Sheets come from the style sheets publishers have used for years. Pre-Internet desktop publishing software like Quark had style sheets too. And neither letterpress nor desktop publishers used these stylesheets for layout to the extent that people say we should use CSS for it.
If they are planning to sell the camera for $500, with the FPGA/SoC costing about $100 alone, that can't work out.
No, the $100,000 they raised is purely for research and development. Backing the project puts you in line to later buy the AXIOM Beta model at cost, which will be around another couple thousand dollars.
I don't know the people behind this project, but because of my side interest in filmmaking I've been keeping tabs on it. For what it's worth, it's been going on for years, and this is the first time they've asked for money.
In my experience as a programmer, the more you work on software the smaller it should become, while the doing the same thing or even doing more. It's a paradox of software and also one of writing in general. Blaise Pascal once wrote in a letter, "I made this very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter."
Not that I would expect a tech blogger to understand this, because most of them don't know much about tech or writing.
Yes, they should use the Roman numeral and call this Windows X. Apple did it, and it was cool. Then they could call their next version Windows 10 Plus, or for short, Windows XP. Businesses will jump right on that one.
collaboratively developing complex open source platforms in order to accelerate deployment of new business models while enabling interoperability across a wide range of products and services
Slashdot Mirror
Color me paranoid but this sounds like Google is going out of there weigh too weeken encryption in transport.
Color me hopeful, but this looks like you went out of your way to misspell four words in a row.
It's much easier for a computer to get away with writing a poem than prose. The modern trend is to write poetry that sounds cool but no one understands. The same is true for modern songwriting.
P. S. Now get off my lawn.
Cortana is probably a new and better Clippy. But besides that, the rest seems like polishing the brass on the Titanic.
New folder icons? I remember visiting gnome-look.org for the first time ten years ago and being blown away: page after page of themes, icon sets, etc.
Start menu tweaked again? Why is this so hard? And it still looks awkward to me. Program names are inside squares, instead of just being text items in a list. Or small squares at least, like the launcher in Chrome OS.
I've used Mac since 1984, Windows since 95, and Linux since '05. I've either not minded or actually liked all of the iterations of program launching in Mac and Linux. But I have never, never, like the Windows Start menu.
Let's start with the word Start, which is where you go to Shut Down. Makes sense. And while it was a little more straightforward than today's shenanigans, it wasn't exactly pleasant to dig through. Plus, I was always stymied by why Windows took several seconds sometimes to me just trying to open the submenu --- not launch a program, just open a folder within the Start menu to see what's in there. It's like Windows was going to the bathroom, and I had to wait for it to finish even to answer a simple question.
And then there was the My everything fiasco, where Documents became My Documents, Computer became My Computer, and so on.
There is the trash can that they still won't default to the bottom right, because if you ever resize the screen, it messes up the position, since Windows calculates everything as the number of pixels from the top left, apparently. So they put the trash can in the top left. This never looked right to me. A trashy-looking thing like a trash can should be in a minor part of the screen (bottom right) even if they call it a Recycle Bin. The Macintosh somehow figured out how to do this 30 years ago.
the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
The word arguably is "the lazy writer’s synonym for 'not.' For example: 'The Red Sox are arguably the strongest team in the American League East.'" --- Alex Beam
CLIPPY: I see you're writing a letter. Would you like help? Please enter a valid credit card number.
So the "news" is that there is no news?
Oh, this was another NetworkWorld post by alphadogg.
Just another InfoWorld post by the user snydeq.
David Heinemeier Hansson was sick of PHP, found Ruby, and invented Rails in 2004. No mention is made of him toying with Python. I think that if he had found Python that he would have liked it just as much. Django had not come out though.
I guess that he did the best he could with what he had, but I wonder if he would he would have just switched from PHP to Django had he started five years later.
Just read Getting Real . I was thinking of recommending their second book, ReWork, but it's mostly a rework of the first. You either get Getting Real or you don't, and if you don't get it, you have problem about getting real.
Wow that was a hard headline to parse! "What's a start-up assembly bank, and why is it on paid, open-source development?"
I'm so glad technology has come to the point where I can stop reading science fiction novels for entertainment and just pick up a newspaper.
"There are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them."
--- George Orwell
Don't roll your own password system. If you're a public site, use OAuth Connect to let them sign in with their account from Google, Yahoo, or some other company that specializes in this sort of thing. If it's a business-to-business site, use Kerberos or LDAP to let them sign them in with their own company's username and password. This also cuts down on the number of usernames and passwords users must remember.
And then there's the launchd / inetd way of launching services that systemd also copies. The service config file can list a set of sockets that the service binds in order to service requests. For example Apache binds to port 80 and 443. So long as all services (including mounting filesystems...) describe *all* of their external interfaces, dependencies no longer matter at all.
The init system can bind all of the sockets that every service needs all at once, and either start the real service the first time the socket is used, or start them all at once. If one service connects to another, the first request will block until the other service is ready to handle it. Then all you have to worry about is the potential for deadlocking, which you'd have to consider anyway.
Thank you for the explanation. That sounds much more elegant.
Thank you! That was very helpful, especially why you might want a script for each daemon instead of a single config file.
I like the UNIX philosophy and don't think it goes out of style just because it's a few decades old.
I am against systemd, for now, mainly because of the binary log files and how it was railroaded through the community.
However, do these programs follow the do-one-thing-and-do-it-well principle: web servers like Apache, database servers like PostgreSQL, the X Window system, the GIMP, OpenOffice? Is an init system more like one of these or more like sed and awk? That's not a rhetorical question. I'm a web programmer who loves Linux, but the kernal and start-up are still black magic to me.
Maybe an init system can be simple. I don't understand why even shell scripts are needed. Seems like they should be the exception, not the rule. Seems like configuration should be a single file that lists the programs to start from top to bottom. If you wanted add some parallel start-ups, it seems like you could just make the config file format a little fancier, maybe with some braces or indentation to express dependency.
Maybe instead of systemd we could come up with a start-up standard, sort of like the POSIX standard. Most programs seem already to be callable with the same arguments: start to start it, stop to stop it, restart to restart it. So the simple config file would call one or the other depending on which cycle we're in. Why the need for shell scripts? I've looked at them, and they mostly seem to be doing this anyway: call start on the shell script, and it calls start on the program. I see some checking, some setting of environmental variables maybe, but is this really needed? Can't programs be formalized to follow some init API? If the start, stop, and restart are not enough, maybe also an option, like --bg, that they'd all take, so the init system always calls $program --bg start, or $program --bg stop, or whatever; so that all we need is that simple config file. Those programs that don't yet follow the init API could keep using a shell script until they do.
Please have mercy if this question is terribly naive. I've tried googling . . . a little. I was hoping a real live human being could either explain it all. Or feel free to reply with some links that explain why SysV init needs all those shell scripts and can't be just a simple list or somewhat-simple declarative configuration.
The article seems to contradict itself:
While perpetual motion machines would violate known physical phenomena—like the conservation of energy—cold fusion is possible in principle.
Oh, so it's possible!
The combination of the energy barrier of normal matter, the Coulomb barrier of individual nuclei, the negligibly low probability of quantum tunneling at all but the shortest distances, and the fact that the physics of nuclear reactions is so incredibly well-understood (and verified) all tells us that low-energy cold fusion should be impossible.
Oh, so it's impossible. But even here, don't you mean it's just unlikely?
Even though I’m a theoretical physicist myself, I’m open to the possibility that physics has it wrong, and that cold fusion could be possible
Wait, you said it was possible in principle. Now you're saying that cold fusion contradicts theory.
MGM, Universal, Sony, and all copyright owners should just make all their content watchable on their own websites. Instead of clicking to channel 24, I should click to channel mgm.com, paramount.com, or whatever.
This usage of a middleman like Netflix, where most content isn't even available, doesn't make sense to me.
I guess they would have to figure out how to inject ads in or around all their content, or standardize on OAuth Connect or something so I don't have to sign up on each website. They would also have to be happy with micropayments per show or very small monthly credit card charges. I can't sign up on all of them for $10 a month.
I understand database abstration layers that let you write:
db_query('select * from table where id = 3')
instead of:
mysql_query('select * from table where id = 3')
or
pgsql_query('select * from table where id = 3')
But I'm not sure I understand why you would want even more abstraction that lets you write:
db_select('*').from('table').where({ id: 3 })
---
Sealing against SQL injection isn't that hard. Don't ever write:
select * from table where id = $id
If you see a dollar sign in an SQL string, it should catch your eye. Instead use parametric queries whenever you can:
select * from table where id = ? or :id or
select * from table where id = $1 or
select * from table where id =
whatever your programming language's syntax is.
Maybe variables in queries are unavoidable, if you have some kind of query building code:
if ($x) {
$table = 'x';
} else {
$table = 'y';
}
$q = db_prepare("select * from $table where id = ?");
Does anyone have a better way to build up queries?
For styling and formatting it’s ok, but for layout it is a convoluted mess.
I'm one of the few who think you should not use CSS for layout.
If you use CSS for fonts, color, bold, italic, margins, padding, it's fine. What do these things have in common? They're traits of a box with little consideration about its relationship with other boxes. Margin sort of is, but it's just saying, "Keep this far away from me." These CSS properties are all sort of self-centered.
And then for layout if you use HTML, in particular, HTML tables, life is easy. At this point I casually step behind an embankment, to hide from the onslaught by the standardistas. They complain that using a table is not "semantic." Well, guess what? If you use a list tag for things that don't line up vertically, then you're also being unsemantic, because "list" meant "strip" or "edge," because the text lined up along a common edge. "Paragraph" means "a mark beside," so if you're not putting pilcrows beside each paragraph you're being unsemantic.
What does it even mean that tables should only be used for "tabular data"? Isn't that a tautology? It's like saying, only pour water on things that are already wet.
Cascading Style Sheets come from the style sheets publishers have used for years. Pre-Internet desktop publishing software like Quark had style sheets too. And neither letterpress nor desktop publishers used these stylesheets for layout to the extent that people say we should use CSS for it.
If they are planning to sell the camera for $500, with the FPGA/SoC costing about $100 alone, that can't work out.
No, the $100,000 they raised is purely for research and development. Backing the project puts you in line to later buy the AXIOM Beta model at cost, which will be around another couple thousand dollars.
I don't know the people behind this project, but because of my side interest in filmmaking I've been keeping tabs on it. For what it's worth, it's been going on for years, and this is the first time they've asked for money.
In my experience as a programmer, the more you work on software the smaller it should become, while the doing the same thing or even doing more. It's a paradox of software and also one of writing in general. Blaise Pascal once wrote in a letter, "I made this very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter."
Not that I would expect a tech blogger to understand this, because most of them don't know much about tech or writing.
Sounds familiar.
Yes, they should use the Roman numeral and call this Windows X. Apple did it, and it was cool. Then they could call their next version Windows 10 Plus, or for short, Windows XP. Businesses will jump right on that one.
collaboratively developing complex open source platforms in order to accelerate deployment of new business models while enabling interoperability across a wide range of products and services
Bingo!
Videos have a high friction to update. . . .
Wikis have a low friction to update. Even the new hire can fix things as they execute the procedures.
I don't know why people would use videos.
I agree, most things don't need a video. I well-written set of steps is usually enough.
Even so, if you do have some videos, and they're on Youtube, you just need a wiki that can support hyperlinks --- which is all wikis.