I often think that modern software systems are overly complex, and I am troubled by the vast network of dependencies between their constituent components. For example, a modern operating system has an unbelievable number of layers and components; it exceeds an individual’s ability to understand them all. Guaranteeing that the system is free of errors is impossible. The thought of bootstrapping one from scratch is daunting.
But then today I was thinking about how software compares to the “real world,” and it seems that the same layering/dependency problem exists there too—what if every structure, machine, and tool on the Earth was destroyed and we had to rebuild everything from scratch? Even if the associated knowledge was somehow preserved, I wonder how long it would take us to get back to having supertall skyscrapers, fly-by-wire jumbo jets, and smart phones.
Perhaps the situation with software isn’t so bad after all, or at least the real world is no better off (depending on how you look at it).
I hate to say it, but the fate of the Étoilé project now seems doomed to follow that of the GNUstep project itself, which, while technically impressive, has repeatedly failed to produce a practical system for users, despite nearly 20 years of ongoing software development (sound familiar?). As it stands today, the GNUstep UI is basically an imperfect clone of the outdated 25 year old NeXT UI, even though it’s still not nearly as usable or solid as the NeXT was in 1992 (I know, support for themes is in the works, but it doesn’t appear to be of practical use today).
Don’t mistake my point here—I would love to be proven wrong. I have been hoping to see GNUstep succeed for the past 15 years (and for a while thereat the end of the 90′s, when OPENSTEPwas poised to enter the mainstream, I actually thought it had a very good chance). But I have grown very weary of waiting for a utopia that has never materialized.
What do I think Étoilé/GNUstep need to do to succeed? It’s simple. (Continued)
After learning that Linux and U-Boot had been ported to the Trim-Slice and reading about CompuLab’s commitment to open source, I was very excited about this system as an ARM-based target for low-level boot loader and operating system development projects.
However, my excitement quickly changed to dismay this week, when I received my Trim-Slice and set out to gather the tools needed for low-level software development. What I found is that while CompuLab may be committed to open source, NVIDIA clearly is not. (Continued)
It’s an interesting question. If you are truly a believer in Christ, and in Christianity on the whole, then your answer must be a resounding YES! And not just for Anne Frank, you must also include the 6 million slaughtered by the Nazi’s in WWII, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Sammy Davis Jr., Howie Mandel, George Burns, The Beastie Boys, the list goes on and on. Jews do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah and do not “accept Him as their Lord and Savior”. Both of those points are the central to all of Christianity. You could go as far, and it wouldn’t be a stretch, to say that without accepting those two points you can’t be a Christian and you can’t be saved. Period.
Yet as Hermant points out, and you can verify for yourself in the comments to Ms. Evans’ post, most “Christians” completely sidestep the question. Rather than standing up for what they have been taught, for what they claim they believe in, what they tell me personally when they find out I am an atheist, that yes, because Jews don’t accept JC as their Savior they will all be dining in the fire, they waffle and resort to vague statements about “I can’t say, God decides.”
How disingenuous is that? I, as an atheist, am going to hell because I don’t believe in and worship Christ but if you are a Jew with the exact same belief you get some vague, politically correct, “don’t call me an anti-Semite”, BS response. The fact of the matter is, if you are a Christian, a true Christian, if you believe in the Bible, it’s teachings, then you are, you must be, at least a little anti-Semitic. At least if you class “knowing” all Jews are going to hell as anti-Semitic.
In the end, no matter how you look at it, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, etc., are ALL equally damned in the eyes of Christians. They do not, by definition, “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior” and do not believe he is, was, or ever will be, the Messiah.
So for everyone who worries about my “eternal soul” and wants me to “let Christ into my heart” I have only one response for you, assuming you are right, then just like the Jews, God decides who gets into heaven and apparently that is NOT based on the basic cornerstone of your religion.
Back in the day (yeah, I am getting old) the place was an “imaginarium” in every sense of the word. The stores were a wall to wall tinkerer’s wet dream. You would walk in for a few resistors, a diode, and a relay, a simple 5 minute ordeal, only to walk out an hour later having spent $40 on stuff you never knew existed (or that you NEEDED). Additionally, the people who worked there were just like you. They were interested in and excited by building “stuff”. Often times they would be able to suggest ideas for your project, alternate parts in the rare event they didn’t carry something, and they had the ability to get something if the alternate wasn’t acceptable. They could answer technical questions. They could educate and inspire.
Fast forward to today. Any components they have are relegated to the back corner and usually only comprise a few small bins. The people who work there are ignorant as to the use of any of them. To them they are relics taking up space in the store. All they want to know is if they can sell you a mobile phone contract.
In a move that hardly surprised anyone the Texas Education Agency, or TEA, has moved on from Social Studies and taken on the subject of arithmetic and determined what Texas students will learn over the next 10 years. Some points from the discussion:
TEA members have declared multiplication “bullshit”. One board member said, “Times is obviously a liberal, commie plot to take the thunder away from plus”. Another commented, “Why waste time learning multiplication tables we God gave us addition? What is so hard about adding 3 to itself 1000 times to come up with 3000? If the Lord had intended brevity we wouldn’t have to sit through chapter upon chapter of ‘Urgon begat Smideon who begat Lupus.’”
It was decided to move all discussion of “Pi” to home economics. A further amendment to force only the discussion of Conservative American “Apple Pi” was defeated at the last minute by the liberal “Blueberry Pi” faction present on the board.
The “Pythagorean Theorem” was renamed to the “(Fred) Phelps Theorem” in order to give more credence to his arguments that “the sum of the squares of the sides of an upside-down pink triangle proves that God hates fags.”
As much as I dislike Apple as a company I do tend to like John Gruber and his analysis. He is an ass like me most of the time which probably helps. This time though he goes to far. He points out that some tests with Flash on the Android found that it could stream Flash video (H.264) over WiFi for well over 3 hours. He then links to the Android specs and comments:
First off, while I don’t like that Apple doesn’t offer flash on the iPhone/iPod, I have no love for it either. I am not defending Flash here. However, John is twisting facts and I am pretty sure he knows it. “7 hours of video playback time” is not equal to “7 hours of streaming internet HD video”. I would be surprised if, using a non-Flash source like the HTML5 <video> tag, the times would be much if any better. The drag on the battery due to the WiFi will make the drain attributed to Flash seem very insignificant.
By Gruber’s reasoning then I would like to see him explain why, when the iPod Touch specs say I am supposed to get “up to 30 hours” of music playback time I only get roughly 8 hours in one charge when listening to Pandora. I will tell you why “jackass”, it’s because of the WiFi. While I won’t deny that Flash will drain the battery faster than the internal player we can’t blame it (solely) here.
It’s the same reason my wife’s Kindle can run forever with the WiFi disabled but won’t last a day with it on. No Flash there, just soul sucking, battery draining internet access.
In case you have been asking yourself what Dolph Lundgren has been up to lately. It looks like a little singing, a little dance, a little drumming, a little board and ice breaking.
I suppose it could be worse. For those that don’t remember Ivan Drago was Rocky‘s nemesis in Rocky IV.
Étoilé OS: “Get Yourself Together, or Fall Apart”
Once the last, great hope for a modern, usable, GNUstep desktop, the future of the Étoilé project now appears to be in doubt. After at least 5 years of development, it seems that the developers have lost their focus and have allowed themselves to be consumed by endless futzing around with low-level aspects of the platform and other diversions, at the expense of putting something usable in the hands of users. In their own words,:
Let’s face it: without a usable desktop environment available, nobody cares if you have managed to take a foreign programming paradigm and bolt it onto Objective-C or make Objective-C code (sort of) run on the Javascript runtime. This is how projects fail, or at least manage to forever languish in obscurity.
I hate to say it, but the fate of the Étoilé project now seems doomed to follow that of the GNUstep project itself, which, while technically impressive, has repeatedly failed to produce a practical system for users, despite nearly 20 years of ongoing software development (sound familiar?). As it stands today, the GNUstep UI is basically an imperfect clone of the outdated 25 year old NeXT UI, even though it’s still not nearly as usable or solid as the NeXT was in 1992 (I know, support for themes is in the works, but it doesn’t appear to be of practical use today).
Don’t mistake my point here—I would love to be proven wrong. I have been hoping to see GNUstep succeed for the past 15 years (and for a while there at the end of the 90′s, when OPENSTEP was poised to enter the mainstream, I actually thought it had a very good chance). But I have grown very weary of waiting for a utopia that has never materialized.
What do I think Étoilé/GNUstep need to do to succeed? It’s simple. (Continued)