171–180 of 202 posts
Meredith Patterson's astonishing CCC talk on computing and linguistics. It's a tour de force, presenting a systematic and practical proposal for how we can build an open and secure future for computing. I can't imagine a better example of the joys of inter-disciplinary thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY
Gosh, thank you!
Meredith Patterson's astonishing CCC talk on computing and linguistics. It's a tour de force, presenting a systematic and practical proposal for how we can build an open and secure future for computing. I can't imagine a better example of the joys of inter-disciplinary thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY
This is a great talk, although maybe a little bit too precious (but this is common to a lot of [security] conference talks so I don't hold it against her). Pushing people towards using more formal methods to generate and accept protocols is always good. That said, I thought the argument against length fields was somewhat.. weak. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the context. The question at the end was not answered sati…
The fact that it is trivial to maliciously craft the length field makes it cheap for the attacker to try to exhaust receiver memory, overflow buffers or make DDoS attack more effective. If you use a delimiter, the attacker has to at least spend the required bandwidth to try to exhaust resources.
I suspect that if your protocol specification bounds the length field to some finite amount, then your language can be classified as a regular language for verification purposes, just with a FSM branch for each possible value of the length field.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, so you are arguing exactly what Kay argued, and what the Adobe guys argued. I am saying that is wrong for the reasons above (i.e., exactly what Tim Berner's Lee argued). Anyway, Kay basically attributed it to ignorance and stupidity on the part of the TBL and the web's designers, which I think is incredibly arrogant, especially since he is wrong. You didn't really address the arguments above -- you're basicall…
You're absolutely right that historically, it wouldn't have worked. But the web has since moved beyond plain old static documents. What was good for a 1989 web isn't what's good for a 2013 web. The design by committee of the W3C has resulted in overcomplicated yet at the same time underpowered designs. The model where an ivory tower mandates new things from the top down rarely works well. How many man years does it t…
I also don't agree in 2013 that moving say HTML5 to a VM is a good idea. There's nothing stopping anyone from releasing a VM now. You could release a new VM and an application platform. I mean that is essentially what, say, Android is. But even Android clients will always be a subset of all web clients.
I think people proposing this mythical VM don't have a clear understanding of what VMs are. They are fairly specific devices. Do you think Dalvik, something like v8, or the JVM, or .NET, can form the basis for all future computing? It's an impossible task for a single VM. Even Microsoft is taking more than 10 years to move a decent amount of their own software to their own VM, on a single platform. All VMs necessitate design decisions that are not right for all devices. Even Sun had diverging VMs for desktop and mobile.
Guy Steele's "Growing a Language". A very cool idea for a talk! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
Great talk. One of the best. His talk with Gabriel, 50 in 50, is not as good, but still quite fun. Well worth watching, but it is much better in person than on video (saw it at HOPL): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc
Single best is difficult, here are some favourites of mine: "You and your research" by Richard Hamming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw "How to design a good API and why it matters" by Joschua Bloch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw Google TechTalk on Git by Linus Torvalds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 All talks ever given by Alan Kay, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg…
Doug Engelbart's mother of all demos (1968): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY This is the talk that, according to Wikipedia, included the first public demonstration of the following technologies: the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. Pretty good for one…
"And observe that if I forget to tell the computer to save my work, it loses it!" furious scribbling in the audience as everyone takes notes I'm so glad we're finally getting away from this paradigm after four decades. For example, the iPhone notepad (and now Mac TextEdit) doesn't wait for a cue from the user to write the few dozen bytes of new input to persistent storage.
Good software doesn't lose anything ever, but even with "average" (i.e., unacceptably bad if you think about it critically) tools I've had sudden power cuts where I lost just a few words because of this habit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"And observe that if I forget to tell the computer to save my work, it loses it!" furious scribbling in the audience as everyone takes notes I'm so glad we're finally getting away from this paradigm after four decades. For example, the iPhone notepad (and now Mac TextEdit) doesn't wait for a cue from the user to write the few dozen bytes of new input to persistent storage.
After some incidents in my shool years, I've noticed that I unconciously tend to hit ctrl-s every few dozen keystrokes without even noticing it. Good software doesn't lose anything ever, but even with "average" (i.e., unacceptably bad if you think about it critically) tools I've had sudden power cuts where I lost just a few words because of this habit.
That is exactly how I learned too. Years later, ctrl-s is still a reflex action.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're absolutely right that historically, it wouldn't have worked. But the web has since moved beyond plain old static documents. What was good for a 1989 web isn't what's good for a 2013 web. The design by committee of the W3C has resulted in overcomplicated yet at the same time underpowered designs. The model where an ivory tower mandates new things from the top down rarely works well. How many man years does it t…
I agree with the problems, i.e. that web standards and implementations are messy, but not with the solutions. It just seems like a big pipe dream -- "oh I wish we could start over from scratch, rewrite the web, and make things clean". Will never happen. I also don't agree in 2013 that moving say HTML5 to a VM is a good idea. There's nothing stopping anyone from releasing a VM now. You could release a new VM and an ap…
You don't need to start from scratch and force everybody to adopt, W3C style. You can build the initial version as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that only the VM implementors have to take care of hiding the mess, and application developers can build on top of that. With current improvements in JS VMs and things like WebGL this is slowly becoming feasible. If that is successful, you can implement a high performance version natively.
This is inevitable. We won't be using HTML+CSS+JS in 100 years, other than for archaeological purposes. The question is how soon will it happen.
