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
Google. Legal sharks are running an ad on the Segway search term. They promise serious bodily harm if you ride a Segway. This is a new low for Internet advertising. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
To say nothing of the legal profession. Thanks for the reminder as to why it used to be illegal for lawyers to advertise.
11:22:59 PM
Oops
The other day I posted about the search term "worst XML tool" and how Dave Winer got the first result on Google. Maybe that was a mistake, now I get the first result. Heh, heh, oh well. [Inspirational Technology]
Google, like any respectable search engine, will rank a page with the words in the search phrase in order higher than a page in which they all occur, but not in order.
More generally, this is just a pleasing reflection of the fact that, on the web as in physics, you can't observe the process without affecting the process.
11:17:45 PM
Mac OS X Java Update
Apple has just made available an update for Java on Mac OS X. It is available through software update and is version 1.3.1 update 1.
They also announced that a preview release 1.4 will be available at WWDC in May. This is the first official word I've heard about a 1.4 release for Mac OS X. [Inspirational Technology]
I'm very much looking forward to trying out the Java update. Apple's Java team has some extremely sharp people, like Scott Adler. The Adler brothers—Scott, Mitch, and Darin—are all amazing: Scott's on Apple's Java team, Mitch is on Apple's iPod team, and Darin was Apple's technical lead on System 7.0 back in the day and consults for a variety of clients, including Apple, to this day. I wish I were as smart as these guys.
11:15:18 PM
Seems he's becoming more of a Mac lover everyday. Good to see his experiment is working out in the Macs favor. Wonder if he's going to stick with it once his 30 days are up? [Inspirational Technology]
Coursey's always been relatively even-handed, and in general the editors of PC Magazine seem pleasantly open-minded as well. The simple fact of the matter is that MacOS Classic's lack of protected memory and, to a lesser extent, preemptive multitasking were real limitations. Couple that with the disastrous "extension" concept (layer upon layer upon layer of third-party code patching MacOS toolbox/OS code) and the worst engineering decision Apple ever made (making the MacOS Classic file system cache non-write-through) and the result was an extremely—and extremely unnecessarily—unstable system. I'll never forget my horror upon discovering at one former workplace that the dozen or so graphic designers routinely exited applications that were misbehaving due to extension conflicts and/or crappy device drivers by force-quitting them and not immediately restarting their systems. Small wonder; most of them had some four rows of extensions load on their 22" monitors, a process that took some 3-5 minutes depending upon how rapidly their scanners/printers responded to having their drivers loaded.
I cannot tell you how vastly superior MacOS X is to that world. The mind boggles.
11:11:59 PM
Jack Valenti: "The reason pitifully few films are legitimately available on the Internet is not producer hoarding. It is that those valuable creative works can't be adequately protected from theft." [Scripting News]
Paper money can't be adequately protected from theft (in the specific form of counterfeiting, which is the analog of the theft that Valenti has in mind) either, but the American dollar, even with its well-known weaknesses that render it among the easiet currencies in the world to counterfeit, is nevertheless doing just fine.
The hand has written on the wall; the old Hollywood business models that rely on iron control of the distribution channels will not stand. Hollywood can invest their time, money, and energy into altering their business models or attempting, unsuccessfully, to continue to tighten their grip further and further around an ever-shrinking slice of the pie.
11:02:30 PM
Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings (written in 1950)...
"We must cease to kiss the whip which lashes us."
Lisa Lynch concludes...
"[W]hat exactly does information that wants to be free want to be free from, anyhow?"
The whip that lashes us is what makes us treat ourselves as less than human. Ultimately the information that will make us more human is the information that should be free, openly pursued, and freely accepted.
I have no interest in anythingposthuman. It would be too easy to skip right over understanding what it means to be human. Let's accept the real challenge first, and it's not electronic.
An excellent reminder that if we focus exclusively on the long-term realities (eventually we'll need not only to get off of this rock, but to take a form that will survive the radically different conditions of future Universe) we risk allowing short-term conditions to arise that will make reaching our long-term potential impossible (e.g. the extinction of sapient life prior to our getting off of this rock).
In my opinion, no one understood this goal, researched it more consistently and thoroughly, or strove more mightily to articulate his findings—even when those findings were maddeningly abstruse because they flew in the face of literally millenia of received wisdom and conventional thinking—than the late, great R. Buckminster Fuller. If you are reading this, please click away and visit the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Read all you can on Synergetics. A good place to start is Amy Edmondson's A Fuller Explanation. Do not attempt to start with Fuller's writing; you'll only become frustrated and annoyed.
10:58:04 PM
Peter asks about this C# code interacting with VB.NET...
public class Person { public void Relax(string s) { Console.WriteLine("Ignoring {0}", s); } }
public class Geek : Person { public void Relax(object o) { Console.WriteLine("Hacking {0}", o); } }
class UseGeek { static void Main() { Geek g = new Geek(); g.Relax("MSCOREE"); } }
Now an unsuspecting VB.NET developer ports the C#:
Class UseGeek Shared Sub Main() Dim g As Geek = New Geek() g.Relax("MSCOREE") End Sub End Class
What do you think happen when he runs his program? Hint: It's not the same as the C# case. For bonus points, do you know why? [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]
My hunch is it will distinguish methods based on argument type. The VB.NET call will choose the Person.Relax method based on the argument being a string.
(Here is where I could plug the benefits of runtime type checking of data rather than compile-time type checking of variables!)
(I could also put in a more general plug for language simplicity. No matter what the real explanation is, this example shows C#, VB.NET, and Java to be more complicated than is needed.)
Well, sure, Patrick, but then, you and I are both fond of pointing out that any language more complicated than Scheme is more complicated than is needed!
More seriously, I don't know a good way around this, nor do I think the case is a serious one. It has nothing to do with .NET at all, and everything to do with the differing semantics of the languages in question. And how often do people really transliterate source code between languages? And the moment the answer becomes "more than once," doesn't it make more sense to write a transliteration tool that handles the semantic differences?
10:47:19 PM
