It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Go2Mac.com - Boycott music from Universal!: The problem with UMG's approach is that it disallows the 'fair use' of UMG's copyrighted work. Because the CDs can't be copied or backed up to a computer hard disk, people who purchase UMG compact discs can't make a copy of the music they've paid for - they must lug around the CD everywhere they go instead of making a legal copy of the music for easy portability. People with notebook computers or .mp3 players won't be able to take their music along in a more portable form - ever. - One more salvo in the futile DRM arms race! [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
There's really only one appropriate response.
Fuck them into the ground.
1:03:20 PM
Ralph Hempel:Line Locked XML concurrent file access won't work: Unfortunately, the idea won't work for real software development. I know. I've been through this before. Just because you eliminate textual conflict doesn't mean logical conflict is eliminated. I can check out a few lines of a file and make changes that break the lines you are editing. There's a reason why CVS and RCS are used. They're cumbersome but they work. - Agreed! [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
Disagreed, but I would argue that the research could be usefully extended: most popular programming languages include some notion of a "block," a piece of functionality that is (relatively) self-contained. If there's no conflict in versioning within a block, then to a first approximation you could say there's no conflict at all and move on.
Of course, there are interesting questions here about the relationship between a programming language's syntax and its semantics—how close could we get to avoiding semantic conflict in syntactic merging?
It's also worth pointing out that RCS and CVS don't succeed in preventing semantic conflict just because they have file-level granularity, either.
12:48:13 PM
Java Native Compilation Examined: As an aside; I see people call Java "painfully slow," but in my experience it's not that painful post 1.3. I'm not giving you benchmarks, and anti-Java people will just "no" me, but these are my experiences after a few hundred thousand lines of Java code over the past few years. Anyway, it's a good exercise to ask naysayers what _their_ basis is; they often have none.
- Interesting! Java is flawed because it doesn't (yet) have generic programming and it has other problems, but it's improving with each release! Sounds like the time to start using it in "real" apps has arrived! [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
Some of us have been using Java in "real" apps for years. It's just that the user interface was a web browser.
As for generic programming, I agree. My favorite immediate-term solution to the problem is Pizza. I think generics apart from functional programming constructs such as functions being first-class and algebraic type constructs are of limited use.
12:42:57 PM
I have to say this is fascinating! It's nice to see someone attempt to correlate and cross-reference so much conflicting material while placing it in whatever context is available. An extremely helpful resource, whether you are necessarily of a Christian bent or not.
12:38:52 PM
The History of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: "To repel those who desired to flee Communist Cuba, Fidel Castro had milita-men plant 8 miles of cactus along the Northeastern section of the fenceline during the fall of 1961. Thus the name "Cactus Curtain" became symbolic of other, "curtains" of Communist dominated countries."" [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson]
This sounds like a fascinating snapshot of the era immediately preceding my own. I'll have to follow up later. Probably worth it, with Fidel being one of the few remaining Communist hangers-on in the world, and a continuing thorn in our side—anyone remember Elian Gonzales?
12:32:04 PM
This was inevitable the moment the Bush administration decided it was capable of waging war on "terrorism." Even if Iran, Iraq, and North Korea do sponsor terrorism, as a matter of international law, the United States cannot simply ride roughshod over the concerns of the remainder of the world community with respect to its actions towards those nations.
The solution to the problem of terrorism probably will take what the Bush administration said it would: perseverance, steadfastness, and faith. But it may take perseverance in diplomacy, steadfastness in our efforts to improve relations with the entire world community, and faith in the judgement of the leadership of other nations with respect to the approaches we can and cannot legitimately take regarding suspicious geopolitical entities.
12:29:03 PM
Most performance/security trade-offs are unnecessary and stem from the implementation of a broken security model. Systems (an OS and a language) that do not implement a broken security model and whose trade-offs fall along different dimensions are the EROS operating system and the E programming language. To my knowledge, neither of them needs to do stack-walking to ascertain privileges, and both of them are performant with respect to their designs (e.g. E is currently interpreted rather than compiled, so subjectively, it's "slow," but that's a consequence of it currently lacking a compiler rather than of design flaws, particularly design flaws around its security model).
12:22:49 PM
A thought experiment. You are the product manager of a software product with online help. You'd like your help system to be more dynamic -- accessing not just canned local resources, but also knowledge floating around on the web. Clearly web services are part of the answer. But more than plumbing is needed. Some kind of filter will be required too, so the product manager can feel confident that only high-quality material is presented. How would that work? Do the kinds of reputation we see in Slashdot and Advogato point towards a solution to this problem? Discussion here.
I don't think "reputation" is what Jon means to say here, but rather some kind of "is this content on topic" filtering by weighted links from other sources, similar to what Google does.
But I think we could even do better than that by appying some Latent Semantic Analysis to the problem. This would be a good context to appy it in, too, as it doesn't have the real-time requirements that applying LSA to, e.g. a search engine would.
12:10:08 PM
I think we should rename our conference rooms after debuggers that are not in common use today. Macsbug and TMON would top my list. Other people might choose THINK Pascal. I guess Jasik should have a page ;-). I "grew up" with TMON and I still think its the most amazing low-level debugger I've ever used. Not just the cool live updating / multi window aspect, but the thought that went into developing a command set that was consistent and powerful. Examples to follow... It seems like debuggers today (well, gdb) just barely gets the job done and the developers of these tools didn't go any further. TMON and Macsbug had a lot of love. In Macsbug, when you're at a branch instruction, the status display tells you whether or not the branch will be taken. I mean, why not? Its got all the information it needs. It just took someone that cared to go one step further and think "You know, the poor shmuck reading this might actually want to know whats going to happen next without having to figure out of a 'Z' in the status register means this particular permuation of branch will take. Why don't I tell him." Thank you. [Scripting, Scraping, Sleeping]
I had the great good fortune to have worked, albeit peripherally, on TMON 2.8 (I wrote a User Area function or two and I wrote the User's Guide) with Waldemar Horwat and Darin Adler. Waldemar and Darin are amazing. TMON Pro, which came after I'd gone to Apple, was even more amazing, especially with things like its lazy expression evaluator that made it possible to, e.g. dynamically display linked lists such as the list of VBL tasks and so forth. Coupled with watchpoints, this was an incredibly powerful tool, and I miss it sorely. I tend to agree that debugging technology has stagnated over time.
12:02:24 PM
I don't know that this follows from the discussion. In particular, the E programming language uses both Futures and event queues in its distributed programming model. The event queue prevents deadlock and race conditions; the Futures model makes it possible to write concurrent and distributed code in a fashion very familiar to anyone writing traditional monolithic Von-Neumann-style code. Two great tastes that taste great together.
11:48:47 AM
YAMR. "Shut up, Dan!" More whining about why I hate Macs, some of the frustrations of trying to get Catherine's Performa 550 working again last night, just there for posterity so someone will make me eat my words when I'm blathering about how much I love MacOS XXIV. [Flutterby!]
Good grief, Dan! I'm sorry, but you're right: you're totally out of line here.
Saying that the fossil broke and was a pain in the keister to fix means that you can't in good conscience recommend one o' them new-fangled mammals to anyone because, after all, who can afford to change species every couple of Cambrians anyway?
All joking aside, if your point of reference is a Performa 550 running system 7.5.3 atop a third-party PowerPC upgrade card, you really do not have anything like a realistic point of comparison even to the $800 500MHz G3 iMac that my wife almost bought last November (she went for the $1,200 slightly-faster/more RAM/CD-RW unit instead). And anyone buying the new iMac is getting an infinitely more reliable OS, much faster processor, and much better video anyway. If you're pointing them towards Windows, you're not doing them any maintenance favors, either.
So if you are going to tell people to stay away from Macs, at least let them look at a representative machine and make an informed decision. Take them to an Apple retail store and then to a Dell store or Gateway store. Let them compare what they'd really be getting.
11:43:13 AM
Drugs=Terror?. The White House is spending $3.4 million on Stupor Bowl commercials to convince you that terrorism and drugs are linked. I think it's necessary to point out that I am a patriot, and I only smoke it if it's locally grown. [Flutterby!]
This is particularly ironic when you consider that one of the things the Taliban had largely successfully done was eliminate Opium poppy farming in Afghanistan—an effort that had earned the Taliban the Bush administration's support as a "faith-based organization" prior to the events of 9-11. Now that the Taliban is essentially out, Opium poppies are essentially back in since nothing had filled the economic vacuum that their absence created.
The Bush administration can't have it both ways, especially with respect to drugs and Islamist fundamentalism. But of course by identifying one amorphous scourge with another, they can hope to achieve a synergistic fear effect that neither alone might accomplish: drugs and terrorists and __________, oh my!
I wonder what will fill in that blank?
11:32:39 AM
Rules for being Republican. Via Medley, 26 rules for being Republican. Apropos of Dylan's earlier query about Libertarians and Republicans: [Flutterby!]
*yawn* Was this supposed to be funny, or maybe witty, or even trenchant? If so, I suppose I have to admire the author's ability to ensure that his reach exceeds his grasp.
Oh, and no, I'm not Republican.
11:27:03 AM
Chu Mei-Feng. I haven't followed the Chu Mei-Feng scandal 'cause it's not Taiwan's internal affairs that have been garnering the "international news" bits of my attention, but Dazereader has a quick run-down on the politician who ended up on a porn DVD when someone rigged her apartment with cameras. [Flutterby!]
Boy, where to start with this one? High tech meets sex and politics. It sounds like it's right out of Michael Crichton's "Rising Sun" except no one was murdered, thank God.
It also sounds like a scenario straight out of David Brin's The Transparent Society, which has much to say about microscopic cameras, invisible microphones, and keyboard monitors and how they all might affect society. Highly recommended.
11:21:40 AM
Female Nudism Legal. In Maine anyway... for the time being. A judge has ruled that the state's legal definition of indecency does not apply to "a woman simply naked in the street" - in part because women's genitalia (the defining factor of the law) are internal. [Flutterby!]
We'll see how long this lasts. I have to admit that I'm fascinated by our culture's nudism taboo and general prudishness. I think you can tell that we're a ridiculously young culture by the fact that two things that don't tend to bother adults—sex and death—still freak us out.
11:11:58 AM
Dan Gillmor: "Each of us has been asked to nominate some technology or agent of change. I'm suggesting the combination of sensing with computation, creating machines that will observe and interact with the people and things around them." Dan, that's the wrong answer. It's people, not machines. Oy. Machines make people more powerful. Don't expect machines to become people. What a looney toons notion. Dan, tell them about amateur publishing and weblogs. Lance go have a talk with Dan, he needs a reminder. [Scripting News]
While I admire Dave's particular focus (bordering on monomania), machines becoming people isn't a particularly "looney toons notion." If nothing else, exploration into artificial intelligence provides valuable feedback as to how the human brain and mind might work, even if it's by counterexample. Similarly, exploration into robotics helps reveal how awesome human locomotion is.
Dan's particular comment puts him right alongside Dr. Rosalind Picard in terms of goals. Briefly, human beings shouldn't need to become more accomodating to machines; machines should become more accomodating to people. A major step forward in accomplishing that goal would be for machines to interact with humans in ways that humans are accustomed to being interacted with. If that makes the machines "more human," so much the better.
11:09:11 AM
This is identical to the printed version, except that nine diagrams are missing. If you see a blank figure, that's what happened. These unfortunately seem to be lost.
Paul Graham's classic (and out of print) book on Lisp progamming is now online.
This is awesome news! For those who don't know, Paul Graham is something of a cause celebré in Lisp circles for his development of the system that became Yahoo Shops and its subsequent sale to Yahoo for some $20 million. Like I saw recently on the CLiki, "not bad for a dead language."
I should also note that Paul stands alongside Peter Norvig for taking a hardcore, realistic approach to performance issues in Common Lisp. Lisp is almost always compiled and can be competitive in performance with more popular static languages, but you have to write it non-naïvely. The glory of dynamic languages is that they let you get code working without much stress or strain, and then you can worry about optimization. Contrast to static languages, which are often exercises in the frustration of first getting the compiler to accept what you write and then in getting the machine to accept what you write.
10:59:33 AM
The Most Advanced City in France. Led by its visionary (some say self-promoting) mayor, a city on the outskirts of Paris is dedicating itself to improving life for its residents with the aid of technology. Dermot McGrath reports from the très hooked-up town of Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. [Wired News]
This is kind of an odd piece: on one hand, it takes an admiring tone toward Issy-les-Moulineaux and its mayor, but then in an apparent attempt to strike some balance, it quotes a couple of "critics." But critic #1's point that she'd rather see old apartment buildings rebuilt rather than replaced could have been addressed with or without the town's push toward connectivity, and the second "critic" merely indicates that the hype outstrips the progress (welcome to marketing), but then maintains that the progress is real.
Frankly, the town sounds great, particularly with respect to significant local political information and functions being placed online. Where do I sign up?
10:52:16 AM
From Sims to Slammin' Steel. Will Wright, best known for creating The Sims, is focusing these days on battling bots. Noah Shachtman profiles one of the more creative minds in the game biz. [Wired News]
What's especially interesting to me about Will Wright and his work is how well he combines his understanding of human behavior with his understanding of emergent behavior and complex systems. He's also one of the few game developers to have transcended the goal-driven game, or perhaps what I mean is that his goals—"see how well you can run a city" or "see how happy you can keep your people"—are quite a bit more abstract than is usual in a game, but the players don't seem to mind or even notice that they're attempting to reach such an abstract goal. Personally, I think there's a huge lesson for education in here.
10:43:56 AM
