Dr. Edsger Wybe Djikstra has left us.
I don't like GOTO either Dr. Djikstra.
I don't know what to think, it hurts, though theres peace in having some level of certainty thats hes on the shortest path to heaven.
For more glimpses into his genius, have a look at some of the papers at this link.
“I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, ‘Dijkstra would not have liked this,’ well that would be enough immortality for me." - Dr. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
First off I just want to say that I love Mozilla. This makes me love Mozilla even more. It means Mozilla will load pages 5-10% faster! Gotta love the lizard!
So a friend of mine who shares my interest of UI and UI issues sent me this link to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox from a while back. I very much agree with this breakdown of the attitude toward online advertising. Online ads are almost completely different than TV or print material adverts and trying to annoy your users into looking at an ad is definitely not going to improve user satisfaction or the click through rates. I thought it was an interesting read all in all. Now with that in mind....
...have a look at this web page. So these guys seem to have a system that can block people who block popups from viewing content. I am sure that Mozilla and Opera will respond with a new addition that makes scripts and servers think the popup loaded when in fact it went straight to /dev/null. Whats even more interesting about these AntiAdBlocker people is that they are hosted on a network run by CAIS.net. Hmm, why does this matter? Well have a look at SpamCop's recent post here. The people forging SpamCop's from address are also using CAIS.net as the attack host. Methinks these CAIS.net people are bed fellows of the email and advert spamming dummies. Don't worry though, Mozilla stops almost all popups and will continue to do so no doubt and my 60+ email filters keep my main inbox very happy. One day though, these spammers will pay, its just a matter of time. In the mean time check out SPAMHAUS to make sure you know who is behind the spam in your inbox. Oh how I wish I could deliver flaming dog poop as an email attachment.
I must by virtue of my Keyurness completely and totally disagree with the findings of this website. Pumpernickel?! Maybe a good rye, but pumpernickel?!?!
Okay now onto the world of radio which has just gotten soo boring since I left high school a long long 4 years ago. Ever wonder why? Well you might want to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the excellent series over at Wired which covers whats been happening in the world of radio. Yea buddy, gotta love the big anonymous conglemerates that will eventually control the world.
I am getting antsy waiting for this. I hope it's so expensive that I can't afford it otherwise I'm sooo going to want one of those phones and that service. Oh it hurts!!!
How many of you have heard of Janis Ian? Yea I didn't know she existed until three days ago. Apparently Janis Ian has been in the music industry long long before I was born and she makes some darn good music. She also knows the music industry inside and out. Why should I care? Well read this article and then its followup that she wrote about the music industry and its "give 'em hell" again P2P networks and music downloading services such as Napster. These articles are written with an unabashed clairvoyance that I have never seen in any articles or opinion pieces on the RIAA, the recording companies and their collective attitude towards the consumer and the new internet based distribution options. Anyone who enjoys music in America should not miss these two articles. I know its lame to just agree but I can't help it. She makes clear succinct points and then backs them up with the facts, you can't go wrong with that. These pieces are a must read.
Lastly Sony has begun hyping the processor for the PlayStation3. So this is going to be another massively parallel effort that adds the facet of distributed computing. For any of your who have read the PS2 developer forums know that the PS2 is one of the hardest consoles to design for. Not only does the PS3 further the parallelism but it adds distributed computing to the mix. The programmability is going to be very very hard. I don't see this as an advantage at all. I also hate the PS2 controller because I'm sure it was designed specifically for Verne Troyer.
Okay now back to work.
P.S. The Dr. Pepper flavour doesn't mix well at all with the mango flavour. *EECH*
Have a go at this article about human spam. This is just so so sad. Its even sadder than random adverts popping up while I'm watching a television show. If someone misses the ethical problem with this, then I just don't know what to say. I need to go find out if there is a rule about trying to advertise without clearly stating that it is in fact advertising. I know that the good people of the UK have very clear rules about sneaky advertising; I wonder what America does about sneaky advertising. If you think about this look at the problems with this:
1. Someone at the bar is talking to this human spam and they realize all too late what they really are. Does the company using human spam want their product or brand name associated with a bar tease? I'm quite sure that the feelings associated with a bar tease are not pleasant. They're quite like a kick to the groin I'm told.
2. How would the owner of a bar/club/lounge feel about their establishment being used for solicitation, because lets face it thats what it is. Also the article talk about the companies choosing national park grounds to do this, I'm sure there are rules about soliciting on federal property.
3. Physical safety of the human spam. What if someone gets angry at these people and decides to give them a good thrashing? I know I feel like delivering a beat down to phone spam operators, would I be able to control myself if there was an individual close to me spamming me? Would others?
4. Will the fat complacent American populace eventually accept people abusing common social privilege to peddle wares? You betcha!
Whats worse is that teens are already subject to this wonderful sort of mental manipulation.
A lot of people wonder why I hate circuses. Yes one bad circus is enough to make me hate all of them because I've never once seen proof of a circus over doing animal care. You know why? Its not financially feasible. Money talks my friend, how well do you listen? Animal abuse and mistreatment is as much a part of our society and tradition as humanity as are slavery, women's oppression and religious persecution. In my eyes they're all the same. As some wise man said some time ago and I paraphrase, "I'll be happier knowning that a farm of animals will not follow me to my grave."
Randomness:
Hey Internet Explorer users check out this link. You'll enjoy it.
What an awesome woman! You go girl! Pioneering girl hax0rs rule.
Why god WHY?!?!
Recently I had an almost three hour long discussion with a friend of mine while I should have been studying at the PMA. We talked a whole lot about America's antidrug stance its effects and outcomes. This whole thing came up because of the recent coverage in the news about the failure of the "War on Drugs."
So what is the problem with drugs? Drugs are substances make people less productive members of society or they make people a burden unto society or in many cases outright kill people. Hmm so that means that the war on drugs should be expanded to include alcohol as well as tobacco because if they're not included that could mean a police officer could arrest a man for smoking pot in his home and then that same police officer could go home and smoke and get drunk. So does that mean that alcohol and tobacco are state sponsored drugs? Does that mean that the government has an inherent interest in making sure that the drugs of choice remains alcohol and tobacco?
Honestly I just don't see why any government should care what their populace does with their own bodies. If Dilip Patel (the brown John Doe) wants to do cocaine and ruin his life then why the should the government make it their business to try and stop him. And if its in the government's interest to make sure that people don't abuse drugs and ruin their life then why is the government not outlawing alcohol or tobacco for that matter?
Although theres a mountain of evidence pointing to the addictive and deadly spiral that cocaine and other "hard" drugs ensnare the user within, but where is this proof for pot? From what I've read and been told pot is no more dangerous than tobacco or alcohol and its not addictive. However the U.S. government continues its rampage against it even going so far as to suggest that Dilip Patel smoking pot is helping out al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits.
Talk about a skewed concept of morality enforcement. There is nary an outcry or staunch posturing in the U.S. government regarding the blatant disregard in relation to the recent accounting scandals. However ask anyone member of the U.S. governemtn and they will most likely come down hard on the idea drug usage even pot. A few years ago I remember that then Surgeon General Dr. Joyce Elders suggested that drug legalization be looked into and man alive there rose a cry of opposition. The U.S. doesn't even want to think about discussing the issues. In the mean time the "war" continues to meddle in the affairs of other countries that could potentially use the attention that is currently showered upon their drug corps in their education systems!
Imagine if the concept of capitalism was applied to drugs like pot? Imagine the tax revenue! Also I think it'd take out the "danger" factor. Just like drinking alcohol during prohibition was a cool taboo, smoking pot is today's cool taboo. Take the danger out of it and many people would be less inclined to give it a go. Sure you could also argue that making it legal may cause more people to try it, but I don't think there is enough evidence to cause concern. Tobacco usage has been on the decline amongst teenagers even though its legal, the cool factor is gone.
Anyway, to get to the core of it and to paraphrase what many before me have, "legalize it and then tax the hell out of it", not to mention end the hypocracy.
Excellent explanation of the mess that is the Mozilla frontend.
P.S. Anonymous stabbing pains in your psyche are almost never good.
Remember a while back McDonald's got sued for having beef in their fries and then they had to pay up to the order of $12.5 million. Well check out whats happening to that settlement money. This just makes me sick; the kind of sick where you can almost taste the bile in your mouth.
What I don't understand is how getting money is going to help the religious or moral beliefs of any of the people that felt wronged by McDonald's untruthful disclosure regarding the fries. Being a staunch lifelong vegetarian if I was given a food product which was wrongly marked vegetarian I don't think money would be the answer at all. Some of kind of mass public apology along with clauses to hire consultants from animal rights groups to inspect and revise animal handling practices would surely hit the spot a lot better than some money.
Whats even more confusing in this case is how millions of people are clamoring for this money when after all is said and done and its divided up it will only be a few dollars each. As I said earlier this makes me very very sick. Its gone from a "damn you McDonald's" case to a "we want free money" case.
Also the other day my Texas aunty sent me this link. Notice how the site pretends to adhere to some ghostly Vedic beliefs that seems to have originated in some random dumb-American friendly place as opposed to outright say "We believe in the whiteified version of ancient Hindu beliefs". I guess thats what happens when the Vedic sytem based on the Vedas is coupled with capitalism and then it is raped for some monetary benefit by a bunch of dumbass money hungry Americans.
Oh how I wish I had access to a never ending account of beat downs I could hand out.
Hopefully I'll be less angry after I eat some lunch.
Have a look at this story over at news.com. Whoever this Andrew Neff fellow is over at Bear Sterns is, he sure isn't very in-tune with the technological aspects of his outlandish claims. The idea that Apple can transition their entire architecture over to x86 within a matter of two to four years is just crazy. I am not saying this will never happen or that it cannot happen, but Neff has totally discounted the PPC architecture. Apple has openly invested heavily in the upcoming G5 architecture, to the point where they had Apple engineering teams working alongside Motorola engineers.
There are quite a few reasons Apple cannot just switch gears from PPC to x86. Publicly only the Darwin open source kernel can be compiled and run directly on the x86 architecture. There is a lot more to the MacOS X architecture than just Darwin. The most important aspects of OS X (Aqua, Classic, Cocoa, Carbon, and Quartz) cannot just be recompiled for x86. Almost all of these aspects have been heavily optimized for the PPC architecture. These parts of OS X written for the PPC instruction set will not run natively on x86 w/o either an almost complete rewrite or some type of an emulation mode. Emulation is not the way to go when performance is what you're after. Ask Linus over at Transmeta about how Intel beat their Transmeta (code translation) architecture over the head.
So what can Apple do? PPC as powerful as it is just doesn't seem to have the type of R&D power behind it like x86 has with Intel and AMD. Well in my humble opinion Apple has two options:
1. Outright buy the PPC intellectual property from Motorola and take over the R&D aspect of the PPC architecture and then do the FAB with some independent FAB out in Taiwan.
Problem with this option is that it is a very expensive and investment intensive undertaking. Its a fact that designing new processors and new architectures is hard beyond definition and to keep this up over time is even more impossible. However, Apple has a lot of experience with the PPC architecture and being in firm control of the architecture gives them obsolescence protection like none other (Motorola has less interest in keeping the PPC architecture fresh, they make more money with cell phones and embedded designs). Furthermore this also gives them the ability to maintain their codebase, platform dependency and closed architecture advantages.
2. Slowly start rewriting Aqua, Cocoa and Quartz for the x86 architecture and then at the same time write a very very tight emulation layer to run Classic apps the same way you can currently under OS X. While the code monkeys are doing those rewrites start investing in a closed architecture like they have now with the PPC but with x86. I think the XBox is a good proof-of-concept that closed architecture x86 is possible (its not uncrackable but its complicated enough to keep the 5Cr1P+ K1Dd13$ away). Based on this same train of thought imagine for a minute if Apple joined nVidia and together they designed some kind of platform based on x86 processors and nVidia's nForce chipset. The hardware synergy on the x86 platform is awesome to say the least, but Apple's forte has always been amazing software. The amount of rewrite for all the iApps plus a lot of the core system level utilities would be just a tremendous amount of work.
These two options would pose a staggeringly difficult choice to have to make. On one hand Apple gets to hold on to their PPC roots and knowledge but take a huge risk by getting into the cut throat processor development arena. On the other hand Apple has to make huge sacrifices to their tried and true PPC roots and attempt to move their unique style to an entirely new platform.
In my opinion the latter choice would offer far more payoffs because of the style of partnerships that could be made with hardware vendors like HP and Sony. Whatever choice Apple makes it will be the choice that will either make or break them. Even with their godly industrial design and user interface teams the marketing hype can't keep up with the widening MHz gap (G4 tops out at 1GHz, P4 tops out at 2.53GHz going to 3 by Q4 '02).
So with all that said and done, heres a toast to APPLE! Truly a computer for the rest of us!
P.S. Its important to take your glasses off before going into the shower.
The lack of recent postings can be directly attributed to me doing more work. Work sucks.
Well in my readings lately I came across this gem at Salon. This article lays a pretty objective smackdown upon the RIAA. I am all for the artists getting money for their work However I will not pay $15+ for a damn CD. Make the cost reasonable or provide better channels of distribution. Also the whole usage restrictions aren't gonna fly with this brown man. If I pay for something I will want to use it as I wish. When I buy a car I don't have to sign any papers telling me how and where I'm allowed to drive it. And if the RIAA thinks they can "rent" me songs, then they got another thing coming.
Here is yet another Mozilla 1.0 review that just misses the boat again. This review from the bottom up just defends IE. It does not look at Mozilla objectively nor does it pay any due respect to the drive for more standardized web development. What really bugs me about this review is how the reviewers totally gloss over the issue of privacy protection offered by Mozilla and the huge leg up Mozilla has over IE on the issue of security exploits. Mozilla lets me block cookies from individual sites, images from individual sites, and it actually uses standard 128-bit encryption when storing data I want it to remember. When I cruise the web with Mozilla I feel like a human being, whereas cruising the web with IE I feel like a prostitute flaunting my demographic data and private information to whosoever chooses to fondle and use me electronically.
People are complacent, but that doesn't give reviewers the right to ignore major topics altogether. I won't even get into the little dig towards Mozilla's non-native GUI. I guess the author doesn't use Quicktime, RealPlayer, Norton AntiVirus, any of the utilities Creative offers to tweak their hardware, any Java based program, not to mention the odd toolbar system IE introduced that everyone now thinks is the industry standard way of doing toolbars. Does this reviewer even know what a challege writing consistent GUIs across multiple platforms is?
Also I thought it was really interesting when the review stated, "The worst problem with the current internet landscape is the proliferation of "table-based" layouts." Have a look at their source code. What do we find:
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
and
<!-- CONTENT TABLE -->
<TABLE WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0">
<TR>
Also it didn't help reading this comment on the website's own discussion forum. Honestly these guys have no real business talking about, let alone reviewing HTML layout engines and or web browsers. Frontpage?!?! I wouldn't wish that upon the devil himself.
While I'm ranting about Mozilla I came across this bug checkin. I am floored. I cannot understand why Mozilla is trying do the "me too" bit with a nasty MSHTML tag. This isn't going to help when the Mozilla team is part of the CSS2 planning meeting or anywhere else for that matter. I am a huge proponent of the display it as a properly formatted string instead. It helps usability and discoverability and it doesn't make Mozilla feel like another me too IE. Come on guys, we can make better decisions than this! I'm really really happy that MPT is my hero. If only he'd be more open minded about the whole tab thing.