Where he compares salt mine storage of analog media to storage of digital media, and decides to just multiply his made-up $208k figure by 100 years to come up with.. wait for it... $208 million. I guess that's why he went into journalism and not the sciences.
Leaving out the humongous math error, why can't you just store the digital fucking media in the same salt mine? The things that damage analog film are the same things that damage digital media.
Is it any wonder we have the expression "lies, damned lies, and statistics"? This article is all three, with some incompetency thrown in.
But the difference is you can make a perfect copy of a digital format. You can't do that with analog formats, there's always some loss.
And since you can do that, you can also archive the environment and toolchain used to create and read it, so why the heck they don't do that I don't know. Store the Linux operating system it was rendered on, and an emulator for the cpu chipset, what's the difference? It's bound to be less data than the archival-format movie data they're already storing.
It's very unlikely RSJ knows anything about the legal battle between his company and FSJ. He may be a micro-manager (so they say) but that doesn't mean he's going to be involved in every threatening letter Apple sends and every time they try to suppress information about their products.
You should look at the above list of links and wonder, like I do, why anyone on Slashdot finds this story surprising. And labeling it "conspiracy theory"-level stuff is nonsense. It has all the earmarks of a true story, and I'm just waiting for verification, which I expect to come soon. If it's false, I'll happily mea culpa all over the place.
(In fairness, I left out an awful lot of links to stories about Apple getting sued by someone else.. wow, was that ever a long list. Apple's lawyers: very busy.)
I don't think t2s or s2t are useless at all; just useless for controlling a computer. Not all the time, but in some situations I would very much like to be able to dictate an email into my phone, or call something that reads my email to me. And then, being able to log my conversation with another human being to text, which then gets emailed me, is a righteously good app.
These aren't the holy grail technologies they were once hailed to be, for sure. But they have some very important niches.
Let's see we've got a battleship/salvo thing. That's pretty normal.
Then it's an arrow.
Then it's in a house of mirrors.
Apparently the leaders are inside the house of mirrors. Wearing.. wait, breaking the mirrors makes it harder to see? The mirrors are there to confuse people. Seems like breaking them would be ok.
Then.. oh god, spiders and glasses. Are the spiders wearing the glasses? Are they just climbing on peoples' eyes?
And we're back to the arrows, now poisonous. (Would the poison make it harder or easier to break the mirrors?)
And the poison is Mandrake--way to bring it back around!
I've seen some fucked-up metaphors on here, but you win the blue ribbon for attendance by technical knock-out.
Wikipedia's search may or may not be terrible (I've never had any problems..) but I doubt it's Lucene's fault. I've written a pylucene-based application, and I found the search results to be outstanding.
That said, Lucene really does need lots of help. It's terrible to compile, the bindings leave something to be desired, it seems to be a resource hog and it needs built-in numeric range search ("find me all typewriters costing more than $100 and less than $400").
I hope Yahoo! is actually interested in helping there.
The UNIX pedigree (I use the term loosely) derives from having a chain of descendents that reaches back to AT&T Unix. BSD... has this, but Linux does not.
Except that the AT&T stuff deemed proprietary was removed from BSD in the 1990s when AT&T sued over this. On the other hand it's true that AT&T lifted a lot from BSD and they share a lot of code in that direction.
Reading lesson time! "having a chain of descendents that reaches back to AT&T Unix" is what I said and it's 100% factually correct. That the code was later removed is irrelevant, it is the reason why people call BSD unix but don't call Linux Unix.
But back to what you said earlier:
BSD (on which OS X is based)
Yes, code from *BSD does play a critical role in Mac OS X, but let's not forget the other parts of Darwin, some of which was developed by Apple in house, others taken from other sources (eg. Mach). In some crucial areas, this is the defining characteristic of Mac OS X, not the BSD parts.
No shit, sherlock. I didn't say Apple didn't have a hand in it. Apple's underlying architecture and kernel are BSD. All that neat stuff Apple did was ported to BSD. That means the OS is based on BSD, in exactly the same way that Ubuntu is based on Linux.
I tediously explain this to every one of my employees when I'm training them
Incidentally, as a soon-to-be college grad looking for a job in software, I have to say that I'm glad I'm not working for you. You've demonstrated that you don't know the history and yet you force this incorrect version of events on your employees.
More power to you on your quest to find better employment. Let me know how long it takes you find a job where your boss teaches you how to write Unix applications on your own Ubuntu laptop.
Nice AC post, BTW. I'm glad you're willing to put your resume where your mouth is.
The UNIX pedigree (I use the term loosely) derives from having a chain of descendents that reaches back to AT&T Unix. BSD (on which OS X is based) has this, but Linux does not.
Linux, BTW, is proud of this, and it also helps when they get sued by stupid copyright trolls like SCO. Linux is UNIX reimplemented from scratch, and thus, technically, is not UNIX but Unix-like.
I tediously explain this to every one of my employees when I'm training them on using their new Ubuntu laptop.
I even have dark stuff around like Lavey or Baudelaire, but he wants garden-variety books on Wicca.
Your son is reading? I think that qualifies you for parent of the year.:-) Seriously, there's nothing wrong with them taking the opportunity in their own direction, as long as they have it.
I'm always bemused by the optimism that kids are going to be hacking perl scripts if they're given the opportunity. Kids are individuals, and those who are curious about computers are just curious about computers. The rest are not.
For that latter fraction who are curious about computers, if they're not given the opportunity they won't hack perl scripts. This is about providing the opportunity to everyone, and hoping that a few rise to the challenge and start stimulating the society to grow.
Societies are always driven by a few over-achievers, but those are more likely to succeed given opportunities. They'll never hack a Python script out if they're not given a Python interpreter.
It's just that your definition of "elegant" is wrong.
See the zen of Python.
Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
Python is a language designed with the goal of leading programmers to write more readable code. It's still possible to write dense, terse Python code, but the language itself with its significant whitespace and assignments as statements makes this harder. It's easy to tell well-written "elegant" Python code from the other kind.. when you're reading it, you can find any variable name either in an import or on the left hand side of an assignment.
But what's possible to do in Python is possible in almost any language.
Your readable code doesn't have to be inefficient or information-sparse. Use your language's idioms to achieve expressiveness.. your language's gurus have probably come up with the "right" way to express something a long time ago, and practitioners of the language will know how to read it in a glance. For example, this old gem in Python:
a,b = b,a
This is an extremely readable and yet information-dense idiom. Similarly, most Pythonistas know about this one to detangle a zipped list:
Not quite as readable to someone who doesn't know Python very well, but extremely information dense.. and if you understand the language's idioms, you don't have to think about what that does very hard.
The point is not that Python is such a great language. All languages have these nifty idioms once you learn the language. Learning the language's idioms very well gives you terse, expressive, and efficient code that remains readable.
I think what happened here is what happens to a lot of cult movies these days. Producers (Fox) expected it to tank, so did not spend money promoting it. Instead of tanking, it garnered a big cult following. Fox now wants to cash in on that big cult profit center by promoting the DVD. Hence, Brawndo as a tie-in to the movie, basically a promotion for the DVD since it's now too late to promote it at the box office. And this exactly is the sort of movie that makes more money on DVD even in the best case scenario.
Still, I can't help thinking that all of the Fox channels and Fox News in particular would be well-served by the world as depicted in Idiocracy, a world which the fictional Brawndo helped build. Maybe they think it'll happen in reality, too.
Coming soon: "Ow! My Balls!" on your local Fox affiliate.
Technical issues aside, this means that most users won't be able to share their home videos and sound recordings. So, no garage band videos allowed.
Forget "garage band". The hilarious part is this means nobody in the MPAA will want to buy it either. They do have a lot of their own works to store and share, you know.
There are legal issues and responsibilities that really should be cleared up, so people who do want to share WIFI can.
You realize, though, that "clearing up" the issues and responsibilities might mean making it illegal to share your WIFI? Let's keep it murky. The law is only going to overreact to the threat, if it even exists.
Which it may not.. how many cases have there been? I suggest that people doing a lot of illegal downloading need a lot of bandwidth. Your neighbor's wifi ain't that.
If there's a privacy problem, Google is not likely to tell you about it. Not everyone in the world is aware of problems with the privacy of their data. "Advocates" are the people who warn other people about those problems. Everyone should make their own informed decisions. It is ridiculous to think every possible user of GDrive would know the possible issues with it.
That's assuming the problems will actually exist, which I'm not convinced of yet.
High-quality products general stay flat or lose developers over time without losing any quality. I have no idea whether tomcat is a high-quality product or not, but the core of it probably requires very little maintenance now, leaving the "core" developer circle free to work on edge features. There are an unlimited number of those for any given project, but the urgency of those edges falls off rapidly as a project ages, so it's rarely the case that a project needs to grow in developers just because it's getting older. Such projects usually split into separate projects with their own functionality core.
Also, it's ridiculous to extrapolate this process and make a statement about all open source. Developers are rarely destroyed, converting their energy into entropy. Instead, they are simply attracted to new products that need developers.
Finally, the talented open source developers pool will only grow, as it always has. If Microsoft is hiring people to work on open source, then those people will be new talented open source developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Where he compares salt mine storage of analog media to storage of digital media, and decides to just multiply his made-up $208k figure by 100 years to come up with.. wait for it... $208 million. I guess that's why he went into journalism and not the sciences.
Leaving out the humongous math error, why can't you just store the digital fucking media in the same salt mine? The things that damage analog film are the same things that damage digital media.
Is it any wonder we have the expression "lies, damned lies, and statistics"? This article is all three, with some incompetency thrown in.
You probably ruined all that media by running on your 20-year-old IIe, with its deteroriating drive. :-P
But the difference is you can make a perfect copy of a digital format. You can't do that with analog formats, there's always some loss.
And since you can do that, you can also archive the environment and toolchain used to create and read it, so why the heck they don't do that I don't know. Store the Linux operating system it was rendered on, and an emulator for the cpu chipset, what's the difference? It's bound to be less data than the archival-format movie data they're already storing.
It's very unlikely RSJ knows anything about the legal battle between his company and FSJ. He may be a micro-manager (so they say) but that doesn't mean he's going to be involved in every threatening letter Apple sends and every time they try to suppress information about their products.
Why?
Because they do it an awful lot.
You should look at the above list of links and wonder, like I do, why anyone on Slashdot finds this story surprising. And labeling it "conspiracy theory"-level stuff is nonsense. It has all the earmarks of a true story, and I'm just waiting for verification, which I expect to come soon. If it's false, I'll happily mea culpa all over the place.
(In fairness, I left out an awful lot of links to stories about Apple getting sued by someone else.. wow, was that ever a long list. Apple's lawyers: very busy.)
FF 3 passes the test. (I downloaded it just to see that, a while back.)
:-)
And it's virtually certain that FF3 will be out before IE8.
In other news, the FIRST major browser to pass the test was Safari, and I just tried it--it no longer passes! WTF, WebKit doodz.
Never underestimate the ability of Microsoft to ignore browser bugs forever.
I don't think t2s or s2t are useless at all; just useless for controlling a computer. Not all the time, but in some situations I would very much like to be able to dictate an email into my phone, or call something that reads my email to me. And then, being able to log my conversation with another human being to text, which then gets emailed me, is a righteously good app.
These aren't the holy grail technologies they were once hailed to be, for sure. But they have some very important niches.
Let's see we've got a battleship/salvo thing. That's pretty normal.
Then it's an arrow.
Then it's in a house of mirrors.
Apparently the leaders are inside the house of mirrors. Wearing.. wait, breaking the mirrors makes it
harder to see? The mirrors are there to confuse people. Seems like breaking them would be ok.
Then.. oh god, spiders and glasses. Are the spiders wearing the glasses? Are they just climbing on peoples' eyes?
And we're back to the arrows, now poisonous. (Would the poison make it harder or easier to break the mirrors?)
And the poison is Mandrake--way to bring it back around!
I've seen some fucked-up metaphors on here, but you win the blue ribbon for attendance by technical knock-out.
Wikipedia's search may or may not be terrible (I've never had any problems..) but I doubt it's Lucene's fault. I've written a pylucene-based application, and I found the search results to be outstanding.
That said, Lucene really does need lots of help. It's terrible to compile, the bindings leave something to be desired, it seems to be a resource hog and it needs built-in numeric range search ("find me all typewriters costing more than $100 and less than $400").
I hope Yahoo! is actually interested in helping there.
Nice AC post, BTW. I'm glad you're willing to put your resume where your mouth is.
The UNIX pedigree (I use the term loosely) derives from having a chain of descendents that reaches back to AT&T Unix. BSD (on which OS X is based) has this, but Linux does not.
Linux, BTW, is proud of this, and it also helps when they get sued by stupid copyright trolls like SCO. Linux is UNIX reimplemented from scratch, and thus, technically, is not UNIX but Unix-like.
I tediously explain this to every one of my employees when I'm training them on using their new Ubuntu laptop.
And then I tell them, "But basically, it's Unix."
Your son is reading? I think that qualifies you for parent of the year.
For that latter fraction who are curious about computers, if they're not given the opportunity they won't hack perl scripts. This is about providing the opportunity to everyone, and hoping that a few rise to the challenge and start stimulating the society to grow.
Societies are always driven by a few over-achievers, but those are more likely to succeed given opportunities. They'll never hack a Python script out if they're not given a Python interpreter.
My apologies. I seem to have knocked your hat off with that joke.
Really? Have you seen his code? It's terrible.
See the zen of Python.
Python is a language designed with the goal of leading programmers to write more readable code. It's still possible to write dense, terse Python code, but the language itself with its significant whitespace and assignments as statements makes this harder. It's easy to tell well-written "elegant" Python code from the other kind.. when you're reading it, you can find any variable name either in an import or on the left hand side of an assignment.
But what's possible to do in Python is possible in almost any language.
Your readable code doesn't have to be inefficient or information-sparse. Use your language's idioms to achieve expressiveness
a,b = b,a
This is an extremely readable and yet information-dense idiom. Similarly, most Pythonistas know about this one to detangle a zipped list:
ll = [[1,'a'], [2,'b'], [3,'c']]
zip(*ll)[1] ## returns ['a','b','c']
Not quite as readable to someone who doesn't know Python very well, but extremely information dense.. and if you understand the language's idioms, you don't have to think about what that does very hard.
The point is not that Python is such a great language. All languages have these nifty idioms once you learn the language. Learning the language's idioms very well gives you terse, expressive, and efficient code that remains readable.
I think what happened here is what happens to a lot of cult movies these days. Producers (Fox) expected it to tank, so did not spend money promoting it. Instead of tanking, it garnered a big cult following. Fox now wants to cash in on that big cult profit center by promoting the DVD. Hence, Brawndo as a tie-in to the movie, basically a promotion for the DVD since it's now too late to promote it at the box office. And this exactly is the sort of movie that makes more money on DVD even in the best case scenario.
Still, I can't help thinking that all of the Fox channels and Fox News in particular would be well-served by the world as depicted in Idiocracy, a world which the fictional Brawndo helped build. Maybe they think it'll happen in reality, too.
Coming soon: "Ow! My Balls!" on your local Fox affiliate.
You, sir, embrace the hacker spirit. :-)
Forget "garage band". The hilarious part is this means nobody in the MPAA will want to buy it either. They do have a lot of their own works to store and share, you know.
You realize, though, that "clearing up" the issues and responsibilities might mean making it illegal to share your WIFI? Let's keep it murky. The law is only going to overreact to the threat, if it even exists.
Which it may not.. how many cases have there been? I suggest that people doing a lot of illegal downloading need a lot of bandwidth. Your neighbor's wifi ain't that.
True. But that's because they're idiots.
Us "heavy internet users" are also known as "the computer guys in the family". AKA the people all those email-checkers go to for technology advice.
If comcast starts losing all of its geek users, it will soon find itself losing its profit cows as well when we tell them a better ISP to use.
BTW, anyone know a better ISP to use? Fucking monopolies.
Not really. The professor used it pretty much every time he had something to say.
He was quite senile.
You can ignore it. It's the same advice you gave.
If there's a privacy problem, Google is not likely to tell you about it. Not everyone in the world is aware of problems with the privacy of their data. "Advocates" are the people who warn other people about those problems. Everyone should make their own informed decisions. It is ridiculous to think every possible user of GDrive would know the possible issues with it.
That's assuming the problems will actually exist, which I'm not convinced of yet.
High-quality products general stay flat or lose developers over time without losing any quality. I have no idea whether tomcat is a high-quality product or not, but the core of it probably requires very little maintenance now, leaving the "core" developer circle free to work on edge features. There are an unlimited number of those for any given project, but the urgency of those edges falls off rapidly as a project ages, so it's rarely the case that a project needs to grow in developers just because it's getting older. Such projects usually split into separate projects with their own functionality core.
Also, it's ridiculous to extrapolate this process and make a statement about all open source. Developers are rarely destroyed, converting their energy into entropy. Instead, they are simply attracted to new products that need developers.
Finally, the talented open source developers pool will only grow, as it always has. If Microsoft is hiring people to work on open source, then those people will be new talented open source developers.
everything gets screwed. Even when it's a high-tech efficient screwdriver.
Diplomacy FTW. Literally.