And it's called sourceforge.net. If you're looking for "small" projects, have your students shoot out there to sf.net, pick one or more projects that are personally interesting to them, find the project's "TODO" list and implement a few features for the sf team. Turn in the before-and-after source, explain what the feature was and how you implemented it. Would require a modicum of oversight by the professor beforehand so he could make sure that everyone's project was about the same complexity and amount of work. Sourceforge even contains hierarchically categorized lists so you could channel your class into a specific category of application or problem depending on the particular class or module you were in.
If even one university put this sort of class project into operation the open source community would benefit tremendously. Imagine: instead of having a new flavor of mp3 encoder coming out every day, students could all pick their favorite and make it better.
And I don't think I need to tell you that this would be an important learning process for CS majors today, given the open source revolution we seem to be in the midst of. Writing the code is important, but learning the CVS model of development has real-world implications (even if you go to work for a commercial software entity like I did). Any coder can sit down and knock off a simple program from scratch; it takes real knowhow to learn how to work with and leverage other people's code.
What I want to know is, who the hell is HELPED by this dog? Here's why big software companies get it in the serial port:
The company I am a developer for, a MAJOR ERP vendor, ships many many different applications with each new release. We certify each release with a subset of 3rd-party software, including: - The operating system (Windows plus a dozen or so Unixes, Mainframe OS's etc.) - The middleware product - Certain office suites which integrate with our stuff - Reporting tools such as Crystal - Web servers (the first two that popped into your head, for example) - etc. The list goes on and on. More importantly, we also BUILD our software with a bunch of 3rd-party products, which provide everything from the middleware API to the STL we use.
Now imagine how screwed we'd be if we couldn't count on support contracts and liability contracts from any of those vendors? The quality of our product would become a random quantity based on how charitable those 3rd-party vendors were feeling today. And we'd be forced to ship this crap to our customers, passing the joy on to them. Sure, we'd be somewhat legally protected from the wrath of our customers by the UCITA, but just because they couldn't sue us doesn't mean they have to buy from us. They'd probably go back to developing everything in-house or buying only from vendors who provide 100% of the functionality from a single site. As of today, I doubt there is a single vendor who can claim THAT.
Let's take a case study. I open up a b&m (that's brick&mortar not Barnes&Mobile) bookstore on the corner and I get a brilliant idea. Hey, I'll help my business with a new idea I just had. I don't think people should have to wait in line if they only want one book. I'll put a mini-cash register at several places in the store. If you want a book, you drop your money in, it gets scanned, you get a receipt, (optional: if I'm using those electronic tags, the tag gets turned off), and you walk out the store. One-stop book shopping. It's smart enough that people who use it would probably remember and keep coming back, and that's great for me, repeat business. Even if someone else used my idea, I'd still be first in the minds of those customers.
Am I entitled to keep other people from using this idea? Maybe. Probably not, since I won't be making the hardware required to do all of this (I own a bookstore, not a scanner/cash register business). But here's where JB's argument REALLY falls down: I don't feel entitled to own the entire book market because I had the idea. I own a bookstore. There's millions of them. If someone walks into a bookstore, sees my self-serve cash registers and thinks "hey, I can buy those pieces of equipment and put them together myself", maybe I can stop them, maybe I can't, but I probably won't try because I JUST OWN A BOOKSTORE. Stopping them from using it won't help MY business - a successful bookstore is all about location, ambience, marketing, and the other intangibles that make people choose to shop.
And believe me, Amazon is in the same boat. Marketing, ambience, and intangibles make Amazon successful, not its flipping patents. They've built themselves a customer base that will rely on them in the future, and that's fine. If they market enough, they'll get new customers. If they can keep their business going with just THAT, then more power to them. But what they won't do, what they don't deserve to do, is be the multi-billion-dollar-IPO golden child forever, because IT'S JUST A STORE. There's millions of them. JB feels entitled to own the whole web because his website was first and his stock valuation is high, and I'm here to say, not only were you not first, you won't be last.
Microsoft may deliberately crash the $200 Windows 2000 OS which is exploring software stores and computers worldwide at this moment to avoid contaminating system memory. MS Programmers believe simple life forms may exist in your motherboard, as evidenced by the system "bus" which they obviously must use for transportation. An MS spokesman made a statement: "If our OS didn't crash so much, these simple creatures wouldn't be able to survive in your computer. Stable, free OS's run too long, not allowing the bus creatures to come up for air often enough. We're just doing the humane thing."
Sometimes a need comes along before a solution, and the solution comes along to fill it. Sometimes a solution comes along before the need, and the need comes along to fill it. I call it the Innovation Equilibrium. Call it what you want, in this case I think we've got a solution with no need (yet). But rest assured there will be a need, even for those of you who don't: - Game - Program - Run an MS OS Or have some other obvious reason to use 1 billion cycles per second. I believe the need that will come along will be called the "3D OS", and it's coming soon ladies and germs. The combination of consumer 2D and 3D cards into one piece of hardware in the last couple of years was the handwriting on the wall, and these processors are the wall itself.
But I don't need 3D, I'm happy with my command line! the curmudgeons cry. Well fine, and you'll probably still be using your P133's and your command lines 10 years from now and you'll probably still be smug. But there are real benefits that could be realized from a 3D OS, or to go a bit further, an immersive OS. The human mind is built to navigate a 3D, full-sensory world, so it's only natural that making the computer more like that in every way would enhance usability, shrink the learning curve and increase productivity.
You probably didn't read it here first, but you read it here last.
Oh wait, that's not news. Nowhere in the article does it say that L0phtCrack (spelled LOphtCrack by the news media...i guess their keyboards HAVE a capital-o character) was made illegal. It's always been illegal to break into a company (physically or electronically) in retaliation for being fired though, and I have absolutely no sympathy for that.
- Planning ahead. Your online bank will tell you what your balance is now, but a good personal finance app will tell you what your balance is at the end of the month. Which is critical when you want that balance always to be in the black. - Organizing several accounts (my wife and I have at least 6 to our name. Most of them have online access, bill pay, etc., which I use religiously. But it doesn't cover everything.) - Tracking non-account-based assets (a home, cars, etc.) To be fair, I didn't see anything to indicate that GnuCash would do this. But it should, or I won't be able to use it. - Calendaring/scheduling. Your bank can schedule bill pays, but can it schedule an entire loan payoff? This overlaps with planning ahead, but having the visual view of the calendar is vital. GnuCash should have this too.
1 - Sotheby's is now "tainted." If eBay wants to paint itself with that brush, go right ahead. 2 - It's not so much cheating the shareholders as advocating a style of business that is frankly predatory. Economic Darwinism is only OK to a point and I think this behavior is slightly over the line.
While I'm a capitalist through and through, I don't believe in buying something just to make a quick buck. I though eBay was above just grabbing quick distressed property. Stockholders be damned, strong companies follow strong ethical standards. If Sotheby's is involved in a scandal, no one should touch them. Buying them is just crass.
Why is this moderated "funny"? I think he should be taken literally. If we pirate 100% of their sales out from under them, they won't be able to pay their lawyers.
We don't need more work on making our OS pretty. (KDE for example is "prettier" out of the box than all the GUI enhancements for Windows put together.) And it's not that we need a standard GUI.
It's that the GUI, any GUI, has to have a standard metaphor that works across all programs. We have long since diverged from a standard metaphor from the first days of the Mac desktop. The metaphor was supposed to be pieces of paper that you push around on a desk... and which also have buttons and knobs and levers and sliders on them?? Is it any wonder your mother is confused? The mouse, which is supposed to be a metaphor for your hand, alternately becomes a metaphor for a pencil (word processor) a finger (the frame of the "window" - another blown metaphor), a volume control knob (don't even get me started on the windows 2000 cd player), and half a dozen other things.
GUI designers no longer understand the simple concept: one metaphor = no confusion. Human beings are designed to recognize patterns, but there's no single pattern in the modern GUI. If you make your GUI desktop a million different metaphors, it doesn't matter how pretty it is or how much command-line complexity it hides - if the human being who's never seen it before can't quickly extract the pattern, the metaphor, from it - you blew it. Compared to a "Windowing" GUI, the command line is easy to understand because it's like speaking orders to a butler. Do this, do that. It's a single, unified metaphor. It's hard to remember what all the commands are, though, and for some tasks it takes longer, which is why we need a GUI in the first place - but no one fails to understand within the first few seconds what the PURPOSE of a command line is.
Look at your desktop - your real, physical desktop. Are there any icons on it? Is there a menu at the top of that fax you're holding? OK, there may well be a volume control knob on your desktop (presumably attached to some sort of sound system), but there sure as hell ain't no button to make that pile of papers disappear.
KDE and Gnome are doing a fine job of emulating, and in many ways improving on the current fundamentally-flawed GUI framework as manifested by Micros~1 and Apple (the most grievous exception being performance). They can still make more of a dent in the Linux learning curve, though, if they do two things:
- Enforce strong, clear standards for visual display of information. The method of enforcement and the particulars of the standard are obviously the sticking points; what open source developer wants to have someone else's way of doing things forced on him? But it can be done in such a way that it makes the developer's job easier, through improvements in the library.
- Provide more feedback. Feedback to the user is crucial for his understanding of the metaphor, whether that metaphor is clear or confused. That means instant response when you double-click on an icon - no waiting for the window to pop up, not knowing if your action worked or not. That means auditory responses that are built in by default. (If you don't like them, turn them off. That had better be easy to do, too.) That means - and this relates to the first change - enforce changes to the cursor's appearance when it moves over certain important areas.* That means that when you click and drag something around you either immediately get a message that you can't do it (in the form of a cursor change, let's not annoy the user with popups), or you immediately get the response that the user was EXPECTING. Who's to say you can't drag icons around the menus like you do on the desktop?
* BTW, this does not contradict what I was saying earlier about the problems with the metaphor of the mouse. If the mouse has to become a million different things - and, unless we scrap the whole GUI framework and start from scratch, it does - then it had damn well better let the user know what the metaphor is at this moment.
With one of these devices all you have to do is stand in a dark room with your laptop on one side of your head and a piece of magnetic film on the other and no more need for MRI's.
The state of the law at this moment notwithstanding (I refer to the legal actions against the deCSS author, about which I will say nothing more lest I fill this space with a rant), there is nothing wrong with using reverse engineering to fix his third problem, the stone-in-the-shoe, software obsolescence.
With the current state of technology, data can now outlast Copyrights. If there is anything legally wrong with reverse-engineering a piece of data to extract the human-readable meaning, it won't apply to 20-year-old data since it will only be under copyright if the owner of the intellectual property still values it--in other words, still supports it. Otherwise, the copyright will have lapsed by the time you need to extract that data.
Data formats are created by humans, have structure, and therefore can be dismantled and examined for their contents. The original programs had to do it, why not trust that future generations, who will be competent humans, will also be able to do it. I postulate a law: Xant's law: software containing meaningful data can always be reverse engineered when the need is great enough. BTW, NOT EVEN ENCRYPTED DATA is excepted from this rule. Today's high-encryption standards are tomorrow's trivial joke. According to Moore's law, which appears in recent years to be accelerating, encryption that today would take a million years for a computer to crack could, 30 years from today, be cracked in a single year; and a project like distributed.net could probably do it in a matter of hours--that's assuming Moore's law does not accelerate. Projects like quantum computing raise the possibility that there is no limit to the speed of our electronic brains, nor to their rate of acceleration. A few hours is not such a high cost to decrypt the sort of data that we might truly find valuable 30 years from now, whatever it might be.
And 30 years from now, who's to say AI won't be good enough to break down any of the "trivial" data formats we have today into human-readable forms. I can theorize a generalized software algorithm for standardizing data formats.
Hardware obsolescence is a whole 'nother ball of wax, but who's to say in 60 years we won't have a generalized algorithm for pulling data off of hardware?
What's more interesting than "why do men play women?" - a question that I think has been adequately answered by the gamers here - is "How come nobody notices?" Being happily married, I do not hit on women on IRC, in online games or indeed anywhere else. That gives me a certain freedom to stand back and observe, and it is possible to learn how to tell real women from fake women instantly.
The cues are subtle enough that you would actually have to practice at it to get any good. It's not anything so simple as "all the sex-crazed ones are really men." An awful lot of real sex-crazed women are on the net too. Nevertheless, the cues (such as the linguistic style and conversational themes they use) do exist, and they're the sort of thing you would notice in real life if you were paying attention, like, "didn't that hottie have an Adam's apple?" for the electronic world.
Yet nobody seems to notice. Maybe everyone is too polite to mention the obvious, but I tend to think that's not the case because so many men are getting genuinely fooled. I see it happen all the time, when Lilah logs into the mud and all of a sudden every male character in town is handing her virtual flowers, and you're going, "Didn't that chiq have an Adam's apple?"
The insidious answer: Men don't care about the object of their fantasies as long as it's not possible to dispel the myth.
He's "aware" of the ABC censors? Who's to say he's going to be self-censoring it, then? The history and style of the show say that he's going to be making it MORE offensive, not less, given his awareness of the censors.:-)
It's quite easy to verify, actually. The ruler will only have 24 marks on it, after all. Anyone with a lot of time and a calculator with an subtract button could do it. There's...let's see... 23+22+21+...+2+1 pairs to check. That works out to 276(?) subtractions you would have to do to verify it manually.
How does it run Unreal Tournament? I've just recently got the UT demo running on 3.3.6/Voodoo3 with downloads from 3dfx for the Glide and non-root-runnable modules. I found the performance to be playable, but basically unacceptable. Certainly a far cry from the Windows performance (with the possible exception that it won't blue screen my OS, as the Windows version will). Does 3.9x improve on this? The release notes certainly have a lot to say about improvements to 3dfx, DRI, Glide, etc., but how about some real-world experiences...?
Talk about using hydrogen directly as fuel seems to me to be missing the point. Why not do to hydrogen what we've been doing to coal, oil, and atoms: convert the stored energy into electricity? It's the energy glue of our society. I'll grant that there may be more efficient ways to carry energy but it's the current standard.
Somehow, I think this move actually has nothing to do with pirates at all. People just love to say "pirates" and "Hong Kong" next to each other, since Hong Kong is, after all, the crime capital of the world (or maybe that's just my impression since the only Chinese movies I get to see were made there).
This is about squeezing just a liiiiil bit more out of a dusty pile of near-dead media. I think within 2 years, the average joe will have the bandwidth to watch these, though (at least in my neighborhood).
Unfortunately for Yahoo, two years is plenty of time for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology to tick off and kill off the customer population. So I guess, on the balance, I'm agreeing with you.
The lonely makes you Internet
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I didn't IRC at all until a time in my life when I felt isolated. Being in the community, however virtual, gave me BACK my sense of belonging to the human race. I felt less lonely afterwards, not more. I also met my wife of 2 years on IRC. We also found the beautiful site where we got married, on the Internet. Fsck anyone who tells you the Internet makes you an introvert.
This is the most trivial type of study you can do. "Are you on the Internet?" A:Yes. "Do you feel more lonely than most people?" A:Yes. (Note: even the most extroverted people can answer yes to that second question.) Conclusion: Internet makes you lonely. "Do you spend more time on the Internet now?" A:You mean more time than before, when I wasn't on the Internet at all?--yes.
Science is good, but don't put too much faith in non-controlled experiments. What's a "controlled experiment"? Group A is given the Internet, and Group B is given a Placebo of the Internet. Both groups are measured for loneliness before and after using their computers. That would be an example of a controlled study. And: Don't EVER EVER EVER let a study--or worse, a news article about a study--tell you what your conclusions should be. Don't let me tell you, either. Read the methods, read the results, draw your own conclusions.
Finally, Slashdot: Please provide a link to the actual study whenever you post these, not just articles about it. We don't want to know what the (less-well-informed, given-to-over-summarization) newspaper reporter thinks about it, we want to know what the researchers did.
Start letting people know that it is you, not some fundamentalist group with a three-letter acronym name, that is ultimately responsible for raising your children.
Or don't, and regain the element of surprise. You see, you WILL raise your children, and they WILL acquire your memes, regardless of what laws and rules are imposed on your family by the misguided others. Sure, those others are annoying, but ultimately, your children listen to YOU. So be a good parent, and infect them with your memes. Then make sure they're a little more successful than you, so they pass your memes on to their children. This is happening now, and it has been happening for thousands of years. The idea that information should be suppressed, filtered, hidden, is inherently a dying meme. (It's a little like a genetic predisposition to be homosexual. If there is such a thing, and there might be, it faces hardcoded barriers to reproducing itself. You are free to feel however you want to about that.)
Nevertheless, it's a slowly dying meme, even now. Even with technology advances like the Internet making it more difficult to suppress information, there's still just as many people who WANT to, and will attempt to come up with technology weapons to use against the Internet. Blocking software is one example and there will be others. Fight carefully, fight by educating your children (this is the sort of war you are morally obliged to send your children into), fight with better memes. Critically examine what you read, even here. Critically examine my words. The truth is that we will be a happier species if our ideas are not suppressed, and we are naturally predisposed toward truthful memes.
Feb 15, 2002 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, NASDAQ) made headlines in the processor world today by demoing a processor capable of transmitting data across the bus faster than the speed of light (FTL). Recent advances in nanotechnology and wormhole miniaturization made this breakthrough possible. Intel Corp. is expected to announce its new line of Faster than Faster than Light (FTL+) processors later this week. Although no official statement to this effect has come out of Intel, this sort of one-ups-man-ship has now being going on for, what, 4 straight years now? So nobody's going to be surprised by the next big announcement, are they?
the Net is so free it threatens, even traumatizes, institutions that have long clung to their prerogatives and to political and cultural power - journalism, industry, education, politics, the law, medicine
Don't forget the music, film and book entertainment industries. Oh yeah, and Scientology.
Slashdot Mirror
If even one university put this sort of class project into operation the open source community would benefit tremendously. Imagine: instead of having a new flavor of mp3 encoder coming out every day, students could all pick their favorite and make it better.
And I don't think I need to tell you that this would be an important learning process for CS majors today, given the open source revolution we seem to be in the midst of. Writing the code is important, but learning the CVS model of development has real-world implications (even if you go to work for a commercial software entity like I did). Any coder can sit down and knock off a simple program from scratch; it takes real knowhow to learn how to work with and leverage other people's code.
The company I am a developer for, a MAJOR ERP vendor, ships many many different applications with each new release. We certify each release with a subset of 3rd-party software, including:
- The operating system (Windows plus a dozen or so Unixes, Mainframe OS's etc.)
- The middleware product
- Certain office suites which integrate with our stuff
- Reporting tools such as Crystal
- Web servers (the first two that popped into your head, for example)
- etc.
The list goes on and on. More importantly, we also BUILD our software with a bunch of 3rd-party products, which provide everything from the middleware API to the STL we use.
Now imagine how screwed we'd be if we couldn't count on support contracts and liability contracts from any of those vendors? The quality of our product would become a random quantity based on how charitable those 3rd-party vendors were feeling today. And we'd be forced to ship this crap to our customers, passing the joy on to them. Sure, we'd be somewhat legally protected from the wrath of our customers by the UCITA, but just because they couldn't sue us doesn't mean they have to buy from us. They'd probably go back to developing everything in-house or buying only from vendors who provide 100% of the functionality from a single site. As of today, I doubt there is a single vendor who can claim THAT.
Let's take a case study. I open up a b&m (that's brick&mortar not Barnes&Mobile) bookstore on the corner and I get a brilliant idea. Hey, I'll help my business with a new idea I just had. I don't think people should have to wait in line if they only want one book. I'll put a mini-cash register at several places in the store. If you want a book, you drop your money in, it gets scanned, you get a receipt, (optional: if I'm using those electronic tags, the tag gets turned off), and you walk out the store. One-stop book shopping. It's smart enough that people who use it would probably remember and keep coming back, and that's great for me, repeat business. Even if someone else used my idea, I'd still be first in the minds of those customers.
Am I entitled to keep other people from using this idea? Maybe. Probably not, since I won't be making the hardware required to do all of this (I own a bookstore, not a scanner/cash register business). But here's where JB's argument REALLY falls down: I don't feel entitled to own the entire book market because I had the idea. I own a bookstore. There's millions of them. If someone walks into a bookstore, sees my self-serve cash registers and thinks "hey, I can buy those pieces of equipment and put them together myself", maybe I can stop them, maybe I can't, but I probably won't try because I JUST OWN A BOOKSTORE. Stopping them from using it won't help MY business - a successful bookstore is all about location, ambience, marketing, and the other intangibles that make people choose to shop.
And believe me, Amazon is in the same boat. Marketing, ambience, and intangibles make Amazon successful, not its flipping patents. They've built themselves a customer base that will rely on them in the future, and that's fine. If they market enough, they'll get new customers. If they can keep their business going with just THAT, then more power to them. But what they won't do, what they don't deserve to do, is be the multi-billion-dollar-IPO golden child forever, because IT'S JUST A STORE. There's millions of them. JB feels entitled to own the whole web because his website was first and his stock valuation is high, and I'm here to say, not only were you not first, you won't be last.
Microsoft may deliberately crash the $200 Windows 2000 OS which is exploring software stores and computers worldwide at this moment to avoid contaminating system memory. MS Programmers believe simple life forms may exist in your motherboard, as evidenced by the system "bus" which they obviously must use for transportation. An MS spokesman made a statement: "If our OS didn't crash so much, these simple creatures wouldn't be able to survive in your computer. Stable, free OS's run too long, not allowing the bus creatures to come up for air often enough. We're just doing the humane thing."
- Game
- Program
- Run an MS OS
Or have some other obvious reason to use 1 billion cycles per second. I believe the need that will come along will be called the "3D OS", and it's coming soon ladies and germs. The combination of consumer 2D and 3D cards into one piece of hardware in the last couple of years was the handwriting on the wall, and these processors are the wall itself.
But I don't need 3D, I'm happy with my command line! the curmudgeons cry. Well fine, and you'll probably still be using your P133's and your command lines 10 years from now and you'll probably still be smug. But there are real benefits that could be realized from a 3D OS, or to go a bit further, an immersive OS. The human mind is built to navigate a 3D, full-sensory world, so it's only natural that making the computer more like that in every way would enhance usability, shrink the learning curve and increase productivity.
You probably didn't read it here first, but you read it here last.
Oh wait, that's not news. Nowhere in the article does it say that L0phtCrack (spelled LOphtCrack by the news media...i guess their keyboards HAVE a capital-o character) was made illegal. It's always been illegal to break into a company (physically or electronically) in retaliation for being fired though, and I have absolutely no sympathy for that.
- Planning ahead. Your online bank will tell you what your balance is now, but a good personal finance app will tell you what your balance is at the end of the month. Which is critical when you want that balance always to be in the black.
- Organizing several accounts (my wife and I have at least 6 to our name. Most of them have online access, bill pay, etc., which I use religiously. But it doesn't cover everything.)
- Tracking non-account-based assets (a home, cars, etc.) To be fair, I didn't see anything to indicate that GnuCash would do this. But it should, or I won't be able to use it.
- Calendaring/scheduling. Your bank can schedule bill pays, but can it schedule an entire loan payoff? This overlaps with planning ahead, but having the visual view of the calendar is vital. GnuCash should have this too.
1 - Sotheby's is now "tainted." If eBay wants to paint itself with that brush, go right ahead.
2 - It's not so much cheating the shareholders as advocating a style of business that is frankly predatory. Economic Darwinism is only OK to a point and I think this behavior is slightly over the line.
While I'm a capitalist through and through, I don't believe in buying something just to make a quick buck. I though eBay was above just grabbing quick distressed property. Stockholders be damned, strong companies follow strong ethical standards. If Sotheby's is involved in a scandal, no one should touch them. Buying them is just crass.
Why is this moderated "funny"? I think he should be taken literally. If we pirate 100% of their sales out from under them, they won't be able to pay their lawyers.
So how many lawyers will $US1.4 billion buy for stomping on open source authors?
It's that the GUI, any GUI, has to have a standard metaphor that works across all programs. We have long since diverged from a standard metaphor from the first days of the Mac desktop. The metaphor was supposed to be pieces of paper that you push around on a desk... and which also have buttons and knobs and levers and sliders on them?? Is it any wonder your mother is confused? The mouse, which is supposed to be a metaphor for your hand, alternately becomes a metaphor for a pencil (word processor) a finger (the frame of the "window" - another blown metaphor), a volume control knob (don't even get me started on the windows 2000 cd player), and half a dozen other things.
GUI designers no longer understand the simple concept: one metaphor = no confusion. Human beings are designed to recognize patterns, but there's no single pattern in the modern GUI. If you make your GUI desktop a million different metaphors, it doesn't matter how pretty it is or how much command-line complexity it hides - if the human being who's never seen it before can't quickly extract the pattern, the metaphor, from it - you blew it. Compared to a "Windowing" GUI, the command line is easy to understand because it's like speaking orders to a butler. Do this, do that. It's a single, unified metaphor. It's hard to remember what all the commands are, though, and for some tasks it takes longer, which is why we need a GUI in the first place - but no one fails to understand within the first few seconds what the PURPOSE of a command line is.
Look at your desktop - your real, physical desktop. Are there any icons on it? Is there a menu at the top of that fax you're holding? OK, there may well be a volume control knob on your desktop (presumably attached to some sort of sound system), but there sure as hell ain't no button to make that pile of papers disappear.
KDE and Gnome are doing a fine job of emulating, and in many ways improving on the current fundamentally-flawed GUI framework as manifested by Micros~1 and Apple (the most grievous exception being performance). They can still make more of a dent in the Linux learning curve, though, if they do two things:
* BTW, this does not contradict what I was saying earlier about the problems with the metaphor of the mouse. If the mouse has to become a million different things - and, unless we scrap the whole GUI framework and start from scratch, it does - then it had damn well better let the user know what the metaphor is at this moment.
With one of these devices all you have to do is stand in a dark room with your laptop on one side of your head and a piece of magnetic film on the other and no more need for MRI's.
Why are all BSD fans grumpy?
With the current state of technology, data can now outlast Copyrights. If there is anything legally wrong with reverse-engineering a piece of data to extract the human-readable meaning, it won't apply to 20-year-old data since it will only be under copyright if the owner of the intellectual property still values it--in other words, still supports it. Otherwise, the copyright will have lapsed by the time you need to extract that data.
Data formats are created by humans, have structure, and therefore can be dismantled and examined for their contents. The original programs had to do it, why not trust that future generations, who will be competent humans, will also be able to do it. I postulate a law: Xant's law: software containing meaningful data can always be reverse engineered when the need is great enough. BTW, NOT EVEN ENCRYPTED DATA is excepted from this rule. Today's high-encryption standards are tomorrow's trivial joke. According to Moore's law, which appears in recent years to be accelerating, encryption that today would take a million years for a computer to crack could, 30 years from today, be cracked in a single year; and a project like distributed.net could probably do it in a matter of hours--that's assuming Moore's law does not accelerate. Projects like quantum computing raise the possibility that there is no limit to the speed of our electronic brains, nor to their rate of acceleration. A few hours is not such a high cost to decrypt the sort of data that we might truly find valuable 30 years from now, whatever it might be.
And 30 years from now, who's to say AI won't be good enough to break down any of the "trivial" data formats we have today into human-readable forms. I can theorize a generalized software algorithm for standardizing data formats.
Hardware obsolescence is a whole 'nother ball of wax, but who's to say in 60 years we won't have a generalized algorithm for pulling data off of hardware?
The cues are subtle enough that you would actually have to practice at it to get any good. It's not anything so simple as "all the sex-crazed ones are really men." An awful lot of real sex-crazed women are on the net too. Nevertheless, the cues (such as the linguistic style and conversational themes they use) do exist, and they're the sort of thing you would notice in real life if you were paying attention, like, "didn't that hottie have an Adam's apple?" for the electronic world.
Yet nobody seems to notice. Maybe everyone is too polite to mention the obvious, but I tend to think that's not the case because so many men are getting genuinely fooled. I see it happen all the time, when Lilah logs into the mud and all of a sudden every male character in town is handing her virtual flowers, and you're going, "Didn't that chiq have an Adam's apple?"
The insidious answer: Men don't care about the object of their fantasies as long as it's not possible to dispel the myth.
He's "aware" of the ABC censors? Who's to say he's going to be self-censoring it, then? The history and style of the show say that he's going to be making it MORE offensive, not less, given his awareness of the censors. :-)
It's quite easy to verify, actually. The ruler will only have 24 marks on it, after all. Anyone with a lot of time and a calculator with an subtract button could do it. There's...let's see... 23+22+21+...+2+1 pairs to check. That works out to 276(?) subtractions you would have to do to verify it manually.
How does it run Unreal Tournament? I've just recently got the UT demo running on 3.3.6/Voodoo3 with downloads from 3dfx for the Glide and non-root-runnable modules. I found the performance to be playable, but basically unacceptable. Certainly a far cry from the Windows performance (with the possible exception that it won't blue screen my OS, as the Windows version will). Does 3.9x improve on this? The release notes certainly have a lot to say about improvements to 3dfx, DRI, Glide, etc., but how about some real-world experiences...?
Talk about using hydrogen directly as fuel seems to me to be missing the point. Why not do to hydrogen what we've been doing to coal, oil, and atoms: convert the stored energy into electricity? It's the energy glue of our society. I'll grant that there may be more efficient ways to carry energy but it's the current standard.
This is about squeezing just a liiiiil bit more out of a dusty pile of near-dead media. I think within 2 years, the average joe will have the bandwidth to watch these, though (at least in my neighborhood).
Unfortunately for Yahoo, two years is plenty of time for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology to tick off and kill off the customer population. So I guess, on the balance, I'm agreeing with you.
This is the most trivial type of study you can do. "Are you on the Internet?" A:Yes. "Do you feel more lonely than most people?" A:Yes. (Note: even the most extroverted people can answer yes to that second question.) Conclusion: Internet makes you lonely. "Do you spend more time on the Internet now?" A:You mean more time than before, when I wasn't on the Internet at all?--yes.
Science is good, but don't put too much faith in non-controlled experiments. What's a "controlled experiment"? Group A is given the Internet, and Group B is given a Placebo of the Internet. Both groups are measured for loneliness before and after using their computers. That would be an example of a controlled study. And: Don't EVER EVER EVER let a study--or worse, a news article about a study--tell you what your conclusions should be. Don't let me tell you, either. Read the methods, read the results, draw your own conclusions.
Finally, Slashdot: Please provide a link to the actual study whenever you post these, not just articles about it. We don't want to know what the (less-well-informed, given-to-over-summarization) newspaper reporter thinks about it, we want to know what the researchers did.
Or don't, and regain the element of surprise. You see, you WILL raise your children, and they WILL acquire your memes, regardless of what laws and rules are imposed on your family by the misguided others. Sure, those others are annoying, but ultimately, your children listen to YOU. So be a good parent, and infect them with your memes. Then make sure they're a little more successful than you, so they pass your memes on to their children. This is happening now, and it has been happening for thousands of years. The idea that information should be suppressed, filtered, hidden, is inherently a dying meme. (It's a little like a genetic predisposition to be homosexual. If there is such a thing, and there might be, it faces hardcoded barriers to reproducing itself. You are free to feel however you want to about that.)
Nevertheless, it's a slowly dying meme, even now. Even with technology advances like the Internet making it more difficult to suppress information, there's still just as many people who WANT to, and will attempt to come up with technology weapons to use against the Internet. Blocking software is one example and there will be others. Fight carefully, fight by educating your children (this is the sort of war you are morally obliged to send your children into), fight with better memes. Critically examine what you read, even here. Critically examine my words. The truth is that we will be a happier species if our ideas are not suppressed, and we are naturally predisposed toward truthful memes.
Feb 15, 2002 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, NASDAQ) made headlines in the processor world today by demoing a processor capable of transmitting data across the bus faster than the speed of light (FTL). Recent advances in nanotechnology and wormhole miniaturization made this breakthrough possible. Intel Corp. is expected to announce its new line of Faster than Faster than Light (FTL+) processors later this week. Although no official statement to this effect has come out of Intel, this sort of one-ups-man-ship has now being going on for, what, 4 straight years now? So nobody's going to be surprised by the next big announcement, are they?
Don't forget the music, film and book entertainment industries. Oh yeah, and Scientology.