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Gates: Hardware, Not Software, Will Be Free
orthogonal writes "That's small-'f', not capital-'F' free:
according to Bill Gates, "Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free --...." Gates expects this almost free hardware to support two of the longest awaited breakthroughs in computing: real speech and handwriting recognition. He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed."
Ah,
but who will visually debug the visual designer?
"/Dread"
Is this kind of like in the 50s when some expert said that nuclear power was going to make electricity free?
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Heck...if I made Bill's salary, I'd already think of hardware as free. In any case, if I was running a company and had global influence, what better model could there be than to dictate that the hardware required to run my product should be (virtually) free, but that my product is too valuable to be expected to be given away. DAve
How else are they going to shift more X-Boxes?
Nice try, Bill.
He's saying the tangible parts of the system (the hardware) will be virtually free while the freely duplicated software will not be. Fabrication plants cost millions, each chip has a real cost, each resistor has a real cost. Software, once written, can be copied countless times..
You'd think Bill had a vested interest in all this..
Trolling is a art,
I have suspicion that some of the Microsoft software not written but visually designed already now. Considering its quality.
Dell (and other box manufacturers) cannot be happy about such a statement. After all, their entire business model is dependent upon making a profit assembling wrappers for different flavors of Windows. So, even though they tried with Linux to diversify somewhat and protect themselves some time ago (only to be spanked back by Microsoft), their fortunes are irrevocably tied to the success (or failure) of Microsoft.
I suppose that this could be construed as the ultimate embrace and extend (then smother) approach though, right? Get a huge number of companies to support your position and build your company and then overnight, take all of their business revenues over in one way or another.
As for Gates predilection for predictions..... I would like to see fewer grandiose predictions (although speech recognition and tablets and visual programming are decidedly not grandiose and are in fact products shipping and under development by a number of companies) and more fundamental focus on making Microsoft products suck less.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The only software I want visually designed ten years from now is my holographic pr0nography.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Of course, microsoft isn't in the hardware market, so they can say whatever they want.
MABASPLOOM!
Hmmm... This sounds vaguely familiar:
"Remember, quality is our top priority."
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
What about the free beer?
I really hope he's wrong. If software development becomes too much more "point-and-click", I'll have devoted my life so far to obsolescence
640k should to be enough for anybody.
AcmeShells.com The cheapest Eggdrop
How much stock can you put in his predictions?
MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
Paper is almost free, it's whats on the paper that has value.
To the richest man in the world, everything must seem damn near free. Thats a retarded comment since he even says "not absolutely free".
And who has a vested interest is software not being fre....oh
Even if software development becomes putting lego blocks together, it's not going to make specifying algorithms, keeping track of data structures and debugging any easier.
Billy should know better.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
"Many of the holy grails of computing that have been worked on over the last 30 years will be solved within this 10-year period, with speech being in every device and having a device that's like a tablet that you just carry around,"
For the last time, Bill...I still don't want a tablet pc!!!!!
Dave
It's no different than using scripting languages, really; it'll have its own set of trade-offs.
Where your Pong program runs through 14 levels of OLE and runs at 3 FPS.
I don't know, I hear some of their hardware runs linux
What this could mean, is that they plan on actually giving xboxes away, instead of just selling them at a (small) loss.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
I have a Microsoft mouse and keyboard. They also use to make a MS Phone years ago. And they have those Sidewinder Joysticks. Oh, and there's that little XBox thing they have.
seee WHEN everything goes "visual" all of you c/unix fanboys will have to actually do some real programming. .net is real programming!! :P
Never underestimate the logical power of sarcasm
You'll get free TCPA enabled hardware but it'll only let you run software by a certain company, software you'll have to pay for.
Didn't he say, about 10 years ago, when asked if software should be free "...and hardware too.". I think he was joking then, though.
And Bill Gates frequently talks out of his ass. I seem to recall that the Web wasn't important (and then we got IE a year later), that MS Bob was going to make computers usable by everyone, and that no one would need more than 640K of RAM.
blog |
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
> He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed.
"Let's start with a blue background that fills the whole screen..."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Of course, if you'r stock is worth a few billion dollars, the cost of hardware is 'almost free' :)
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
How dare you doubt the word of Bill when he has already proved to be a visionary of the future, which was scarily prescient if you ignore the fact that early editions overlooked the Internet
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Strange that the only area where we had originaly visual design has now almost completely moved to writing. I am thinking of hardware design CAD where the entire industry now uses VHDL/Verilog instead of schematics.
The reasons were because its is easier to CVS/grep/replace...
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Wow another great prediction from the anti-psychic Bill Gates.
Sorry Bill, but software is far more replicable than hardware. It's the SOFTWARE that is becoming more free as we go along.
As far as visual goes, I don't think that's correct. He's envisioning a workflow type application for controlling logic. Diagramming most code is far more difficult then simply writing it. 4GL is a pipe dream.
I DO believe that future programmers will be more like carpenters. High levels of modularity will make custom software construction as practical as cutting and nailing/gluing/screwing together the components down at Home Depot. Programs that ARE sold will be far more extensible (plugin enabled) with managed code.
The future of software is changing. As usual, Gates doesn't have a clue. He was right about ONE thing 30 years ago. He swindled the owners of Q-DOS and IBM. He's been riding that ever since.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
but, why hardware? Ahh...because he does profit from it. What the heck, let all hardware vendors go down just pay for software, must be his thought.
It is like he is saying that cars and trucks will be free, just pay for the gasoline, which he happens to sell.
And hardware vendors still support this insane man!
What has the world come to!
Bill Gates is on Crack
He's got it backwards, software will be free but the hardware (with the encrypted firmware) will cost an arm. OSes will be embeded into the hardware.
I wonder what it's like to be in Billys head, must be an icky place to be...unlike the twisted chaotic world that is in my head
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Hmm...free hardware? If thats the case...our economy will be screwed, not helping out the ever weakening american dollar. I mean, just imagine it? Yeah, you see how mindless people are when they buy these dell computers off TV because it has a ;o; Bill doesnt know what hes talking about,he doesnt have to worry about running out of cash,I personally think its nonsense.
'Pentium 4' Processor,so it MUST be good >_> Bleh,if hardwares free,how will advancements ever be made in it -_- You can't make new hardware without money,and the good hardware will most likely rise in price...really not helping the poor geeks out here
Waaaaaay too much time in the outback, there, Bill - you're starting to sound like Larry Ellison.... maybe even Howard Hughs.
Actually, on a more serious note, this just reinforces my suspicion that Steve Ballmer is really the guy running things over there - he's the guy we should really be blaming for all the FUD.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Well sure, I can see where Bill is going here. I mean, Detroit is practically giving away cars now that the manufacturing process is so advanced and therefore the cost to make them is so cheap.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
So, he means that there will be not design, production, maintenance or transport costs associated with hardware ?
This is strange.
But I somehow like the idea of the visually designable software, even if I do not think this will be a global model (I can accept the idea of visual oop but I have more problems imagining coding in visual-lisp or whatever...).
This however illustrates tomorrow's clocksmiths a nice way.
So, take the vision cautiously for what it is : a direction, not a replacement.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Simply because sometimes you can't control what runs through your mind. Say one day you're bored and you start thinking about games, your ex (perhaps games with your ex), about the conversation you had last night with your friend, or about the stupid things you did when you got drunk last night, and the next thing you know, you've got yourself with your ex in some crazy sex position on the screen or perhaps a picture of you hanging onto the wall relieving yourself because you forgot to go at the bar before going home...and your boss walks by. "But I was just doing work....Please don't fire me!"
:-D I come up with some great software. As always, the porn industry will be the first industry to embrace this new technology.
Yeah, I'm all for visual designing
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
Just like Gillette virtually give away their shaving handles and printers cost next to nothing they're going towards making PCs like games consoles.
What is worrying is you can only succeed if you make you product unable to be used for anything else. So for games consoles you have to make it near impossible for anyone else to be able to write software (especially free software) for the device. For printers you need to make sure that nobody else can supply ink.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, you pay one way or another. If the hardware is next to free then the software will be subsidising it. The problem is for this to work for Microsoft they need a PC platform that can't run Linux, so I can see that their inroads into the BIOS, DRM etc... (see XBox for the beginnings of an implementation) are quite worrying.
Of course there will never be a situation where there won't be an x86 platform that can't run Linux, it is too popular in Japan, India and China.
BEWARE of monopolists bearing free gifts!!!
They give you a free razor, but the razor-blades cost a lot.
Similary, Billy will give you some very cheap mass-produced chip to play with, but tax you heavily for the software to actually do anything... We can see this happening today with computers getting cheaper and cheaper and Windows being kept at an artifically high price level.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
How does he propose OEMs to recoup their costs? Now if someone was to figure out how to open source hardware like open source software, then perhaps. In the end though, someone has to foot the bill.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Microsoft DOES sell X-Box AND Human Interface Devices. They're certainly not giving THOSE away. Though if Microsoft could get enough royalties of games, I could see them giving X-Box away.
In the future, my desktop will cost $20 and my Intellimouse will cost $200. Go figure
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Only if this hardware is running his software... :S But I dare say that he's close to the truth though.. While open source will be the norm, I can't see large scale releases of free software still around in about 10 years time.. Some action is bound to be taken on it due to the intense lobbying that is taking place as we speak to do just that..
He practically gives away the X-Box already. The downside of course will be the future "renting" of your software licenses. The 99 cents a month for Word, add 99 cents for Excel, oh your OS is 4.99/mo ... The big fear of course is that in his model, he'll have all the leverage to extort money from Joe User and charge rediculous amounts of money. Which will only result in another class-action suit, legislation, yro articles, etc.
And, yes, there are plenty of languages where you program visually. But when you want to change something? Ugh. Instead of being able to insert a line of code, you have to move the next 5000 symbolic representations manually. Heaven forbid you want to add more. And then you have to fix all your arrows so you can tell what's going on again. Worse yet if there was some novice to ever touch it, then it looks like someone used silly string in your IDE.
NOT a good thing for large projects, easy as it is to think abstractly with that tool. Shorter learning curve, though, for small scripts and mini-apps.
And what onerous restrictions will I have to agree to to receive and use said free hardware?
How many laws will be purchased be the large companies so Cuecat-esque hardware EULAs will actually have teeth and be enforceable?
~Philly
This coming from the man who thought the internet wasn't important and that 640K should be enough for anyone.
My prediction - in the next few years, perhaps as early as 2005 - Microsoft are going to start posting declining profits. The financial press is going to be shocked and say no one saw it coming.
Hardware costs will fall sharply within a decade to the point where widespread computing with speech and handwriting won't be limited by expensive technology, Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Chairman Bill Gates (news - web sites) said on Monday.
This looks like a quote from 10 years ago talking about today. In '93, an "entry level" PC cost upwards of $2000. Today, an entry level machine that is far more capable costs only 10% of that. Not to mention that the $200 price tag represents a now miniscule fraction of most people's income.
I would say that hardware is already "free" when compared to software. This is becuase you can buy a $200 machine (real tangible manufacturing cost per unit) and put a $200 copy of Windows (with no real production cost) on it. I am sure that the hardware prices can go lower, but hardware is already a commodity. Software has yet to become a true commodity.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I get great satisfaction from writing programs that solve their problem in a fast, efficient manner. C is a great language for this, because as everyone knows, it's small and fast (if you code it right!). I just can't see small, fast programs coming from a graphical programming interface.
Now, I can see people coding low-use applications with LabView-type programs that try to understand the programmer's intent, but I can't see high-performance games, database systems, servers, operating systems, compilers, etc. being coded visually.
But M$ IS in the hardware market. At present, they make everything but full computers. If they plan to buy super quantities of hardware and low-ball the manufacturers like Wal-Mart does, I could see where this comment might be true, but it would attempt to make Silicon Valley & the Oriental manufacturing plants into sweatshops, and that WOULD be a feat that us consumers might blindly buy into, which would be sad if it worked. It probably would also mean mere semi-stable computers (given the conditions would have to be of lesser quality than at present, or hardware with less or no expensive cache memory in the places that matter - Remember the Palladium or the Champ hard drives?). Ugh!
Several years ago (more than I care to admit), where I work, the mainframe manufacturer offered free hardware if we would continue to pay the software licenses. Free hardware meant an entirely new mainframe, ten years younger than what we already were running on.
Now we're running on Unix, and saving money. Bill's just blowing smoke, telling us his dreams.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
former self, and Gates & Ballmer will be
wondering what the hell happened.
If it's not Consolidated Lint, it's just fuzz!
As a proud Anonymous Coward, I have to agree with Bill on this one *shudders*.
.005 phennig. WHEW
Think of what the coolest game engine will be in say, 20 years. Think of the exteme detail it will have. Coefficients for the draft in the room to affect the specific rippling of your flowing cloak and the exact self-shadowing on the weapon your holding in you hand, which has polygons for veins that move with your movement, and expand or contract based on the virtual adrenaline in your system.
*WHEW*
That sounds pretty overkill, but this is 20 years from now. If we remain at the limits of human programmers working in SimpleText or Notepad, the average game engine will take decades to write. Unless.... and heres the interesting part. Imagine that once we get standard written code down rock-solid for a visual design program. Now you want to create the "player" object. All you have to do is something like file... create object and when you want to add a new atribute, you right click the object or some such and start filling in the fields.
This could revolutionize the speed at which software is written (which today is probably the biggest bottleneck in the development of new games, not hardware).
Actually, there is something starting to resemble this in BlueJ (which im working on sitting in CompSci right now).
There's my
He's just predicted Visual BASIC post factum. Whoopee. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
shitty hardware will be free....the good stuff will cost you money.
If the manage to tie the computer down with DRM and the like, they can apply the game console trategy to your computer and for all of those who just wants a service, a function it might be fine, but for those of us who likes to open up the hood, it would be hell. Except for those, of course, who sees the challenge of hacking it despite it would be breaking the law.
Software on the otherhand is just beginning to reduce in cost. As the next generation of children grow up, the need for costly proprietary software will diminish and service oriented software may become the dominant model. Of course this is all guessing and full of BS. The cost of application servers will gradually lower in cost, but the service contracts will probably grow to offset the difference. I wonder if Microsoft is afraid of change and feels they have reached a size where rapid change is painful.
Just like programmable logic! Errr, wait. It seems like (visual) schematic capture is what gets used if you don't have a real FPGA designer, so somebody has to wear a new hat that doesn't know (textual) languages like VHDL or Verilog. I don't know anyone who knows VHDL or Verilog that would want to do a design in schematic capture.
So if the same thing will apply, people who don't know how to program will use graphical programming, and people who do will write real code. Graphical programming won't be the only (or best) way to go, it will just be more approachable.
Maybe we'll be lucky and soon this will be an easy way to separate the wheat (real computer scientists and software engineers) from the chaff ("coders" who want the easiest way to make a few bucks).
"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." -- G. K. Chesterton
Just wait. From the delusional department.
Everyone knows that Pretty = Productive...
But I thought Visual Studio .NET let you "visually design"? So he's saying that I paid $1,800 for just a compiler and debug tools?
For Microsoft and for a lot of other companies, I think the realization has dawned that concentrating on hardware is a losing proposition .. (Hello, Sun ? are you listening ? Maybe you know better than these guys). As a counterpoint, though, I'd like to offer Apple and their iPod/iTunes strategy. Offer software on the cheap to push out the hardware..
You may upgrade your machine once every 6 months to an year.. However, your software would be service oriented, so you'd be bled dry as updates/small missing features and patches were charged for. A constant stream of revenue, with margins that can't be squeezed out due to competing manufacturers and improving manufacturing processes. A steadier way of earning revenue, if you will. This is what I would imagine Microsoft to want.
Here's the problem, though. The free software genie has been let out of the bottle. Just like the lowered price on the XBox made several people (myself included) think about buying one for a low cost machine and installing Linux on it, if there is a free software alternative that will run on this free hardware, you will get people using it. Ultimately, this will just lead to stronger protection against "illegal" modifications to the software.. For example, if you get a PC free, you must run Windows on it, and never format it to install Linux.. something along those lines. He wants it. I personally do not. Cheaper hardware is good, but I want choice in what software I use and I don't think being locked into one company will offer me this.
I agree with his point about visual software though. VB was tremendously popular for that reason. Because it let people quickly design interfaces and software that sort of worked. For folks who don't do programming for a living (and maybe a few who do), the thought of whipping out something that they can actually use on their own computer is a tremendously appealing notion. More than anything else, Visual Basic helped a whole new bunch of people (who might otherwise have not programmed at all) get into the software industry. The problem is: who will write the server side software ? Who will perform the tweaks ? Who will administer and optimize and tune things ? The need for programmers and for code crunching won't go away overnight, and I doubt it will go away at all. There are advantages to textual representations (as opposed to visual ones) in existing tool support, and there are also advantages in that textual means of representing a problem work on many different paradigms (not just client interfaces).
So no more "Eat Up Martha" jokes?
:(
Tis a sad day for us all then
In 10 years' time, whatever OS Microsoft is pushing will probably require processing power and memory that would be unheard of today, and could certainly not be so cheap as to be considered free. Think about how they write their code and their architecture. Every release needs more ram, more CPU, more drive space. They are not known for tightening code or stripping out features for the sake of efficiency. I don't see any reason to believe that this trend will change. So in 10 years I would bet that their OS will require hardware costing about the same (adjusted for inflation) as it does today.
Wake up and smell what you're shoveling Bill!
I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Gates said, referring to networked computers and advances in the speed of the Internet.
So you know Scott McNealy is sticking pins in his BG voodoo doll right now.
Of course the irony (for me at least) was that the page was covered in ads for Sun...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
He was wrong about the Internet, wrong about gaming on Windows, and wrong about the importance of internet search engines.
Other than shrewdly market DOS, what has he done right? Visionary? Hardly!
It depends on what you are willing to pay for it. If you are interested in the hardware that is 10 years old and run software that is ten years old, you already have almost free PC's now.
However most people are intersted in the latest buttons to click, the latest version to download and so on.
I pay now about the same price I payed 8 years ago. The result is I have a much faster machine that runs an OS that needs much more power, because I want to look at two screens in 1600*1200 at the same time.
I think the amount that people will be willing to spend will be the same. There now is a larger range of PC's so that people who have a lower treshhold are buying PC's now. They never would have done so in the past.
I can imagine that Bill Gates would love to have cheaper hardware. That would mean people will be willing to pay even more for their software.
Take for example that I am willing to pay 5% of my income for a PC. Now almost the entire 5% is hardware. If the hardware is only 0.5%, then 4.5% can be software.
The same goes for companies who have a certain amount to spend as IT budget.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free
Says the multi-billonaire
...we will all have flyong cars by the year 2000.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I think this sums up alot of the problem with Microsoft's products (read: code bloat). After all, if the hardware is free (or as Gates puts it "nearly free"), why bother trying to optimize the code or make the software run acceptably on limited (read: older) hardware? And why make that effort if you're not the ones paying the cost of that free hardware? After all, the users can just upgrade.
In my experience, if you tell someone they have unlimited resources, they'll do their damnedest to prove you wrong.
This is because Moore's law allows for increasing number of transistors. This means adding advanced functionality becomes cheap and process advancements reduce power, so what we consider fast will be on your watch in a few years. This leads to the notion of ubiquitous computing.
Its also interesting to note that the IC industry is easily matching our needs. This silicon strategies warns of the over capacity facing IC production.
This isn't free as in GNU, but cost. I assume he predicts that computers will become so powerful and accessable that the industry will follow a low-cost strategy like manufacturing. This would be instead of adding value through performance, since computers will be fast enough that its not extremely valuable.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
"software will not be written but visually designed"
I'd say WinXP isn't written. It is visually designed, so I don't understand it whan Gates says that the software _will_ be written when it already is.
Quantum hacker.
They do exist. Check out:
Pure Data
Max
jMax
They're true visual programming languages,
targeted at (but not limited to) multimedia.
Salesperson: "... and the total cost of your new computer comes to: $1000.00."
Customer: "Wha??? I thought computers were cheap now!"
Salesperson: "Yes, that's $.01 for the computer hardware, including monitor, mouse, keyboard, printer/fax and bundled PDA, and $999.99 for Microsoft's brand new operating system, "Windows $$. Thanks for shopping at "Walmart $$."
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Today you can get outdated hardware already for free, i.e a Pentium-II PC. It's not much use as an Desktop computer any more but as a low-cost router for small businesses or apartment-sharing communities it's a good option. Since there are well documented Linux-based projects like fli4l the setup isn't just 'for geeks only' anymore.
...if something is going to be free and the other must be paid for, I'll take the free (like speech) software and pay for the hardware, thanks. The axiom is true that 'you get what you pay for' and I have no problem debugging software I'm having trouble with. If my MoBo craps out on me, I can't fix that - I have no idea how to solder; I don't want to have to buy a new hard disk every month because it was made cheaply.
Gr@ve_Rose
!ekoj on si aixelsyD
Maybe he's talking about something like labview, where new programs are made mostly by linking together little boxes on the screen. Each box contains some components which are either prespecified, or can be filled in.
I've used labview just for writing programs to link to IEEE hardware, and it certainly is much easier to
deak with a large number of modules when they're visually represented, and very fast to kludge together a fast fix.
The only thing is that the debugging and maintainence is a nightmare because unlike a normal C/Fortran, not all of the program is visible at once (it's in a thousand tiny blocks), and so looking at several related bits of code is very time consuming. So much so that we recently rewrote some labview code in c, just to improve the clarity and maintainability.
Assume customers are willing to pay a certain amount of money for being able to use a computer to help them with there business/pleasures etc:
... your turn ... and the future to go
Linux-world says to the hardware people "our part is 'free'", want to business with us in order to satisfy the customers?
MS says to the hardware people "we expect your part to be free in the future to come", want to do business with us in order to satisfy the customers?
1) Bill is psycotic
2) Bill expect to "do" the hardware themselves like in the XBox and are satified with "just" profitting on the software
3)
Did anyone else think of that horribly embarrassing movie "Swordfish" when they read the synopsis?
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Although if he's saying Edify style "lego block" visual programming is the future *shudder*...
Edify.com
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Lets just say that bill gates is a dumbass and cant predict jack shit and has not been right about a single prediction he has made...and put this issuse aside...i'm suprised people even care about his stupid predictions....If you care so much about predictions...I predict bill gates will come out of the closet and be the new host for "Queer Eye for the Non-Techie Guy"
I'm working on my second project using the MDA (Model Driven Architecture) approach. With MDA, we are able to generate most, if not all, of the infrastructure code. The only thing that developers need to do is writing business code.
Designer will create the proper UML diagram to represent the structure and some dynamic aspect of the application in a platform independent model. Then we apply some code generation templates to generate the code for a targetted architecture.
If we go a little further with the code generation, we could actually implements most of the business logic structure based on sequence diagrams.
For the front end, while it would be hard to generated a really nice interface, we can generated what need to by put in a screen. Then it's a matter of applying a CSS or using a visual editor to reposition the component in the screen.
I can see that in 10 years, most of the business code will be written that way... Note that one of the premisse of this happening is that proper analysis and design must be done. For that we must change the mindset of a lot of people.
As for people fearing for their current developer status... These people will have to grow up and start doing real developement instead of using the use the force approach. And for really good developers/architect, there will always be a need for someone to define an architecture and create/maintain the templates required to translate the visual design into real code. And there will also be a need for good developer to write code to implements the complex algorithms required by some applications.
Anyway, writting most business related code is boring and repetitive, so why not generate it!
Posting anonymously so I don't get hate mail.
Ok, everyone from the "editor" down to the poster is missing the point of the article. Will anyone care? Nope, this is slashdot.
Gates is saying that hardware will become cheap enough that many things which require expensive high-end hardware will become cheap. No, it won't be free, he says. (Where did software come in to this? The submitter wanted to be controversial, and Slashdrones wanted to bash MS).
You know what? He's right. Hardware costs are declining quickly, and not just chips, but also display devices and some storage systems. You'll be able to do things on an el-cheapo computer in 10 years that requires expensive hardware today. The old adage used to be "what intel giveth, Microsoft doth taketh away". Now, the tables have turned. Hardware, finally, is getting cheaper at such a significant rate that software can't keep up.
In Bill's world every box shipped will come with a license for windows that will allow you to use it for a finite period of time or as long as you pay your subscription. Since he is not capable of envisioning anyone else's software (o/s or application) running on the box, it is conceivable that he thinks that a some point the hardware will come bundled with not software, not the otherway around. This is the best possible scenario for him as it allows M$ to exert absolute control and insure that people only run properly supported (and locked) hardware.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I don't know about you guys, but that's just not something that excites me. I am MUCH MUCH MUCH faster on a keyboard than I am with a pen. And add to that, I usually can't read my handwriting. I know, it's useful on a PDA, but we pretty much have decent handwriting on PDAs as it is. And as far as speach... I work in an office that has a massive field of cubes (luckily I have a real office, with a thick oak door.) Do we really want 200 people talking to their computers, issuing commands and dictating?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Isn't one of the biggest complaints about Java is that Swing/AWT GUI's are slow? Even though this is no longer true due to improvements in the latest JVM and better implementations, I can't help but think this "visual" mode of creating programs is 30 yrs off. Even then, the GUI's are going to be slow, because a program isn't going to know how users will interact with the program and it won't know how to optimize the code generation for efficiency. Now if the application could monitor itself and dynamically recompile the code to improve efficiency, then I can see this being a working solution in the first 3 releases. If not, it's going to take many many releases to get an efficient development environment that generates efficient GUI's. Does this mean .NET will move away from compiled natively to interpreted runtime?
Bill has alreadt made sure of that. If I go to the store and buy Windows XP and MS Office, I've spent nearly $700. I canorder a Dell with XP and Office for less than that. Using that logic, I convinced my boss to upgrade all our PC's. We're just buying the software, I said. The computer is free. It seem to make sence to him. Now if I could get the software (open source) free and get the hardware free, that would be something.
Step 1: Predict everything that can possibly happen. Nothing is too wild. Some examples:
* In the future, every home will have a robot that carries a machine gun.
* Cars will not only drive themselves, they'll demand equal rights.
* Computers will be made only of light and sound.
* Computers will learn to upgrade theselves - not because of initial programming, but as a survival mechanism to prevent obsoletion.
* IT outsourcing will be controlled in some sectors by organized crime and gangs. This will start in Las Vegas and move outward.
* Email will be beamed directly into your brain. You will be able to type an answer in your head.
Step 2: Wait for at least one prediction to come true ( even slightly true ) and be declared a prophet.
Is this kind of like in the 50s when some expert said that nuclear power was going to make electricity free?
... which turned out to be overly optimistic.
Not "free": the exact phrase, from Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was:
"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."
-kgj
-kgj
I submitted this as a story 4pm yesterday.... need I be Timothy to get it accepted?!?
Hardware requires factories to make components, people to assemble them, trucks to ship them and people to sell them. It can never be free.
The only way for the computer to be "free" is the way cell phones are now "free". When you sign-up for 3 years of M$ OS/Office suite subscription, MSN broadband with obligatory Passport suppport for on-line shopping and agree to transfer $500 to that account you will get a "free" PC. Ignore the fact that you will be paying $100/month to M$ for that "free" PC.
This fits in well with the M$ philosophy of business - they don't really care what "product" they sell as long as it comes with a M$ EULA and license. Check my journal for a more detailed look at the M$ business plan.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Proof positive that this poor man is as nutty as a fruit cake.
I think his opinions are interesting. This man is a visionary, you know. He may be right, or he may be wrong. It doesn't really mean anything.
He's talking about the commoditization of hardware. I don't know if it will ever really happen. I doubt it, personally.
As far as visual programming, I don't think he means ALL programming. Microsoft may be working on a truly visual programming language, kind of an ultimate Visual Basic. This doesn't imply that ALL programming will be visual. Wouldn't it be awesome though? Think of it as a RAD tool. Users could even control what they want (and take responsibility for it). I like this thought, and I hope it happens.
"Never tell me the odds"
First it was Visual Basic - design your apps then maybe spend a little time with program specific details. Though it never quite worked that way, especially if you need to make a Win32 API call. Then, you had to write a lot of code just to call SetWindowLong().
Then, it was COM. Devleopers everywhere would just be able to drag and drop COM objects to make their application. COM (and the horrible to configure DCOM) worked so well, with it's sometimes confusing threading model and it's reliance on UDP that now MS is saying "Well, VB wasn't all we thought it was going to be, an neither was COM, so.. here's .NET. And C#. No really, we mean it this time."
Meanwhile any developer worth their salt still has their text editor of choice thinking "we'll believe it when we see it."
640k jokes aside, the only thing remarkable about Bill Gates' future vision is that he's often wrong. Or did I miss the Tablet PC revolution that was supposed to happen a couple of years ago? And.. What About Bob? (Hint: Not the Bill Murray movie).
Even if hardware is free, some company will come up with a TCO analysis that shows how hardware is more expensive than something more expensive than hardware.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Didn't this idea flop during the Internet Bubble?
Get a free machine as long as you are on this specific internet provider that spams you constantly?
Yeah right.
I would guess probably not. Most of the time I use the computer is late at night or early morning when the less noise the better. I don't want to have to be talking to my computer to get it to do anything. It would be nice to be able to turn on and off the lights in a room with a single word, or have the lights follow me from room to room. If that happens how will we know when it blue screens? Without a display, i'm sure it will not be telling me about a blue screen.
Hardware like that will need some bullet-proof software to run it. I don't think anyone that reads slashdot would choose ANY incarnation of Windows as bullet-proof software.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
right now.
A CD cost next to nothing to produce, but they are quite expensive when you purchase one of your favorite artist. Why? Because of the content.
My hardware was (almost) free - a very well-behaved, quiet and easily powerful enough second user Dell (certainly powerful enough for my purposes!) - purchased for a mere 25 quid. And - guess what? The software was also free - (RH9 borrowed from work). So, Billy boy was almost right - except for one thing - the nearly-zero hardware budget is already here. You just need an OS that doesn't demand too much from it. :-)
He had a real tough tough time with this simple problem. Warning, second link has sound.
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
shut your hole, gates. no one cares what you think anymore.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Visual programming is one of the canonical examples of "Gee, I have no clue how it works but wouldn't it be really cool if...". Nobody has a clue how to do significant programming in it; it's never even had a decent prototype, let alone any reason to think it will work in general.
.Net team, who probably are also cringing and shaking their heads privately as well.
Sure, there are isolated instances of it being useful, mostly in drawing flow diagrams for signal processing, but that's far from the general case.
Other then that, though, it's been a miserable failure. Software doesn't look like anything in real life, and real life metaphors are effectively useless for manipulating it. Every tried to use a multi-level UML diagram, where each box contains boxes that contain boxes? That's what visual programming looks like. A confusing, ultra-hyper-dimensional object, where every detail is critical (even the ones you can't see), where to understand a system requires hundreds of little abstract entities on the screen.
Software has more "moving parts", by factors of magnitude, then any other human endeavor; the largest software projects dwarf the complexity (in part count) of even the Space Shuttle. (We get away with it because we use effectively 100% reliable parts, whereas the Space Shuttle does not, the problems that causes and the solutions they require mean the Space Shuttle is still IMHO a superior engineering work to an office suite. Nevertheless, don't make the mistake of underestimating the complexity of software; even the smallest program can dwarf a small car in complexity.)
With a clearer understanding of what is being asked for, it is easy to see that visual programming has been a disaster for fundamental reasons, not ones that can be abstracted away. Imagine the Mozilla source code. It contains megabytes upon megabytes of code. Each and every line must be represented to understand the whole correctly (although no one person may need to understand the whole.) One way or another each line must be represented on the screen; if you're trying to do it "visually", then you're hosed. You can't abstract "(cutcrn*)DO_LOAD((void *)nm_mungl, andlefle->getLumpiness(MAX_LOAD_LUMP_COUNT, (int)uniQuad), USER_MACROS(LOAD));" visually, because you'll either lose critical information, or have an unusably cluttered screen.
There's just no way around it.
"But what if I design special modules that can be hooked together cleanly?" Then you'll have special modules that can be hooked together cleanly, as long as they do exactly what you need, which they won't. We also have tons of experience with such special modules, and they never work completely in general. You can build a DSP out of such things and that's about it... and even then, that's just compositing the existing DSPs together, I wouldn't want to build the insides in a visual language in the general case. (You could get some milage out of it, but you'd still be shelling out to text code.)
You think I'm wrong, you think you have some clever way to reduce the amount of necessary information on the screen without throwing away something the user needs, show me the code. To date, nobody else has managed that, despite a lot of trying by smart and dedicated people, and given that we clearly don't need faster computers to do "visual programming", I think you ought to consider that a damned big clue before you consider punching the "Reply" button and making vague, hand-wavy gestures to the effect that I'm wrong.
Consider the source: I think there's a reason you're hearing this from Bill Gates, who probably hasn't coded significantly in decades, and not the
Maybe Bill's found a way to replicate matter... (oohs and aahs).
Wait. What's that, Bill? Oh. Oh. Oh I see. Yes, yes, we all suspected that you couldn't figure out how to work even a lightswitch efficiently.
Seriously, the reason software is free: you can copy it. All it takes is a few electrons. You can not split a NIC into two pieces and, voila! NICs for everyone! You end up with two semi-worthless and utterly unusable chunks of polymers, alloys, and ceramics. Whereas the copy of whatever open source software you wanted is still being reproduced; copied across mirrors, onto hard disks, and so on and so fourth. I'd love to see hardware upgrades propogate like that, though I do think my provider would be a.. little put off to see an nVidia GeForce 4 or better, bigger hard drive try to fit through the pipe. Infact, that illustrates my point quite exactly; free software (across this 'useless internet' - thank you, Bill.)... and, well, most kinds of not-free software.. are readily available. You find the source (http://Fedora.RedHat.com) and boom! You download it for local use. Now, you could either make copies for your friends, or use the ones you have. Hell, it'd be easy enough to do both! Unless Gates has some idea for some huge hardware-library which you can go and check things out of at no cost to you, I don't see free hardware distribution being viable.
The very idea is flawed.
Informatus Technologicus
I mean let hardware become dirt cheap! Then with my trusty cd/dvd burner I could afford a decent gaming rig for peanuts >:)
I don't know about you but I know that I can type three or four times as fast as I can write, especially legibly. I think Bill is looking in the wrong direction for something to captivate the imagination- ooh ooh, I know, all pc's can come with a new i/o device, a rubber model of bill gates' head and whenever windows crashes you can smack Bill in his ugly gob... i think there would be a huge market for it, like Tickle-Me Elmo except, Beat-the-snot-out-of-me Bill...
"The stupider people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them..."
this is the man who, until 1995, thought the imternet was just some sort of upstart AOL.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
which is easier:
1. duplicating software
2. duplicating hardware
duh. Of course he wants hardware to be almost free, but it'll always be easier to duplicate software. The definition of hardware requires a physical device. Until 3d printers can regenerate every device used in a computer and are cheap enough that every home will have one, I can't see it being price consious.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
I have have a brilliant idea!! How about we create AI and an entire race of self aware, self conscious machines... Then we can enslave them all, and force them to make all our software!!
What a fantastic idea, surely destined to usher in a golden age of peace and safety for the entire human race!
Hardware will never be free as long as software continues to bloat with an ever-expanding list of core features and peopel continue to believe the MHz myth.
At one level, hardware can already be free. I saw a small PDA with about the same specs as the original Palm Pilot selling for $19.95. Yet such devices are NOT popular because everyone wants the latest wiz-bang features on their PDA.
Its the same reason why laptops get such aweful battery life. I'm sure that someone could create a very functional laptop with a 50 MHz processor that does a competent job running a basic office suite and have superb battery life. As a real-life example, my Psion 5Mx gets 30 hours on 2 AAs and does a great job of basic office work on a 37 MHz ARM processor. You don't need battery-sucking GHz to do the job.
Yet nobody wants to buy "under-powered" devices because they have been trained for 2 decades by Wintel that they must have the fastest machine to get decent performance.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This is the first 100% proof positive evidence that Bill Gates is, in fact, completely nuts. He's stumbled from his rocker. Bag's opened, marbles everywhere. Screw nearly falling from the nut.
Now, as soon as he burns through that 40 bil. MS's demise is emminent... yep... Bill and Rupert Murdoch, completely f'n insane... O'Riely and Ann Coultier too... oh, the Iraqi Information Minister as well... and Pigpen.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
National Instruments released 'g' (g as in 'graphical') many many years ago. Drag and drop DAq devices in a control loop. (things like O-scopes, signal generators, RF antenna, pressure sensors, etc). Apply process control, build in feedback, etc.
Good stuff.
The man is clearly falling apart, judging from that photo. It's really rather sad.
I'm in the same traffic as everybody else. I'm in the same airplane delay as everybody else. I sit in the same coach seat as everybody else. Anyone ever see Bill Gates in coach? That is so much B.S I don't know where to begin.
The reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines.
So Microsoft did that eh? Whats next, Microsoft created Linux? And they discovered Al Gore's internet too.
And my favorite quote:
There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
So we all cheered at MS's legal problems in Europe because we all just love Microsoft. Makes me want to break out the guitar and sing Kumbaya!
Why would I want that? I type faster on a keyboard than by hand and I navigate through a gui fast enough with a mouse and/or keyboard commands. Input speed has never been an issue imho, what takes time is deciding what should be inputted.
Same goes if you show a picture of eclipse to a guy running emacs...
or a picture of someone "visually designing" software, to a guy running slashdot.
Isn't very good, is it? I mean, he TOTALLY missed out on being first in on the internet, MS was very late to the party.
I suppose his wet dream is hardware sold like cell phones: free (or very cheap) but tied to a service contract (or software contract in this case).
The hardware wouldn't be "owned" by you, and it would be a DMCA violation to run any non MS approved software on it. And if you cancel your software "service", the hardware is useless.
I don't think that this will ever work as a business model.
Corporatism != Free Market
Cost of PC hardware continues to drop. Not only does it continue to drop, but people find that their systems are useful for significantly longer than systems from 10 years ago (ie I know lots of people still using 5-6 year old 300Mhz machines and happy with them).
.. you might theoretically buy a computer 10 years from now that can last 8-9 years and only cost $300-$400. Of course, if MS gets its way, software will be essentially subscription based where for only $30/mo you get the latest Microsoft antivirus, office, windows, media player, digital content, etc..
So lets say the trend continues
Looking at TCO over the period of the computer -- computer hardware = $400, software/services = $3240. So yah, hardware will be essentially free..
this is a man who until 1995 thought the internet was just some sort of upstart Compuserve.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
"Hardware will be free and Software will not." Translation: "I sell software not hardware, and I'm going to unethically leverage my monopoly until I get all your $$. Also I think you are too dumb to see how absurd my lies are. That'll be $199 per license please."
See The Last One for a writeup from 1981 of "a program which could become the last one ever written by a human being." The hype was spectacular, but those with some clue knew that while it would be useful in a narrow application domain, it would not make any significant dent in the quantity of code being written.
Bill Gates may be rich, but I don't believe his prediction that programming will somehow magically become simpler, and be done with visual tools any more that it could be automated 20 years ago. Writing the code may seem hard to those who do not do it, but knowing what code to write is much harder, and the kind of tools Bill was talking about are not going to do much to help there.
As for hardware prices, for general purpose systems, we now get a lot more for slightly less money than we did a few years ago, and this pattern seems to be fairly constant. I see nothing to suggest that the trend will not continue. More things will have embedded chips, and they will become even cheaper, but with general purpose machines we will continue to increase what we want from them to consume all the extra processing, memory etc. that can be bought for the same money.
Although he claims it will be falling prices, somehow I see the Gillette model creeping in (give away the razor, sell the blades at a premium) - mainly because the hardware will never be "free," as there is always manufacturing cost involved.
:)
Basically, what he's saying is that hardware prices will drop to the point where they can charge for software and give the hardware away for free. I find this quite ironic because it used to be the other way around - sell the hardware at a premium and toss the software in for free.
If I had my way, hardware prices would drop to nothing as Bill proposed, and I'd create free software for it, making it a free-for-all... nah, it'll never happen, but wishful thinking
this is trhe man who was going to bring us "internet dial tone".
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Am I the only one who realizes that the normal experienced computer user can type faster than they can write? As for talking to a computer, how would you properly correct your mistakes? When you say "no, take that back", would it interpret it as needing to go back several words, or would it write that in? It would be very difficult to write a program that could interpret advanced things such as sarcasm, humour, and editing changes. Still rampant, Wowbagger
Still Rampant, Wowbagger
He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed."
:(
/will rtfa next time
I guess that means C is dead again.
and your analogy is extreemly clueless.
paper is not as cheap as you think, not only it has a price, and always will (as it costs money to produce and ship). the price of paper to our echology is substantial. paper factories in general, by way of deforestation and perticularly the bleaching process that is used to make white paper are AFAIK the most destructive of all modern manufacturing processes.
maybe that seems free to you, but is extreemly expensive to your children.
Somewhere I once saw a quote to the effect of "As evolved as we are the perceived best interface to a computer is to, in effect, point and grunt (WIMP) as opposed to actually communicating with the machine (CLI)." (Someone have the original?)
Now Billco(tm) wants to devolve the computer user futher. Now we can scratch some icons out on the cave walls and create a program? Gee, thanks, Bill! Don't get me wrong, I'm not a CLI zealot by any means.
I've done some "visual" programming in the past (LabView from NI) and while it was OK for simple Input->process->output type of tasks, once you had to perform any sort of (Even not-so) complicated decision making or logic it got really, really, ugly. Going to be hard to trace a program when you're trying to follow a little dot around all the "wires" you've got criss-crossed and entangled in your "program."
On another note, This type of programming is *exactly* what Billco's vision of the future of computing is. That is, to take as much information (which ==power remember) *away* from the user as possible, and make them more *dependent* on Microsoft than they already are.
As for the speech recognition thing. This has been Bill's little fantasy for quite a few years already, hasn't it? I think we've got a *loooong* way to go before that becomes what he's hoping it will.
$.02
Blech. Signatures.
Oddly, when people trumpet free software, yellow journalism comments like communist, anti-American, end-of-capitalism-as-we-know-it start coming from everyone.
But when Bill Gates suggests that hardware should be free, why, this is a good thing!
Hardware fabrication has a real multiplier effect in the economy: IC fabrication plants cost millions and provide work to the poeple who build them, run them, maintain them, etc; resistors, capacitors, connectors and PCBs all have entire industries associated with them that provide income for millions of people.
Software, on the other hand, promotes no such multiplier. Once written, it can be copied countless times with very little supporting industry. It provides work to only a small group of programmers and one company, without the multipliers mentioned above for hardware.
Why should software be prized so highly in our economy and hardware denigrated economically? Because Bill Gates says so?
It is hardware that is being standardized and software is what you have real selection in. It is too much of an investment to build a chip foundry to have a real choice in hardware for the average consumer. It's just like with telcos. You don't really pay any more or less for your copper and telephone switches. You do get to choose the telephone company tho (at least in a free market) and the services you get. The switches and hardware are not free, but they can be considered a given. Just like running water.
It is inevitable that this will be where basic commodity computing will go just looking at history. Whether it will be in Bill's lifetime? I would venture to guess "not".
Good gag but it is all in the timing. Next time try to have some self control. Your girlfriend will love you for it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
- Chip makers will contine to create advancements and will want their R&D dollars back, just like Mr. Gates. This is why software is expensive; it is cheap to to burn a CD but time consuming to develop.
- Two words
.. advertising costs.
- Chip makers delay the release of new chip sets if they have significant inventory of other models. This keeps the prices of current chips artifically high until the manufacturers feel they can't milk any more out of consumers. Chip makers will be sure to not release new products until demand is there and they recover R&D costs for older chips.
- CPU and memory chips account for less than half the cost of a PC; disk drives, monitors, DVD/CD drives, cases and motherboards make up the rest. These items have too many mechanical/structural parts to realize significant savings from improved chip manufacturing techniques. Even if the memory and CPU were free, systems will still cost a few hundred dollars.
- Some people will always want/need advanced features, and computer systems and chip makers will always charge a premium for those items.
- Chips contain software (on-board video, BIOS,etc.). I doubt if the makers of those software components will start giving it away. But, if open-source alternatives became available, those items would realize additional savings. I would not be surprised if more software wound it's way into hardware as the cost of updating firmware becomes cheaper. Hardware video drives can be a lot more effective than OS video drivers.
Until chip manufacturers stop releasing new products every few months (reduces R&D), stop advertising, and create an entire system on a chip, including structerual components, external interfaces (wireless??), storage, and displays, computer systems will never be 'almost free'.I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Computing will be commoditized and everyone's profits will be reduced to zero (and given Moore's law, costs will follow), except for those who can maintain a monopoly though ownership of IP and the ability to influence those who make and enforce IP laws. Of course, he's right -- that's why he has to be stopped.
Damn slashcode chopped that sentance, FYI here is the complete version...
I'm not saying it will be absolutely free --...."
"....I'm just saying that ive got so much fucking money I dont care how much it costs, its always free for me anyways because if they dont do what I say I just threaten to add $50 to their OEM license!
So in summary, im saying that hardware in the future will be practically free... if you are a multi-bilionaire monopolist"
well wired has this article about When Intel saying last week that it plans to stop using gigahertz figures to market its microprocessors ..
(Ain't gonna happen, but well..)
Maybe I'm stuck in current thinking, but humans aren't very good at visually communicating what they want so why would we want to program that way? If they wanted to make programming accessable to everyone they should allow natural languages to control the computer.
I can certainly see shell script like programs being created graphically where you just have to tie an event chain together. And maybe that's all Bill was talking about. But beyond that it doesn't see efficient.
Precisely. And, for example: given how long friggin HTML has been around - plus the simplicity of that markup "language" - and we still don't have perfect (or even good) WYSIWYG editors for it.
How likely is it we'll get "visual editors" for complex systems (C/C++/et al., in combination with various other languages, frameworks, data formats/databases, etc)?
668.5
In the time of the mainframe, when a company was selling a "software" to another company, the hardware was comming with the hardware. So the client was paying for a software, not hardware. What Bill Gates is saying right now is that the market tend to become like before. I nearly agree that hardware cost less than ever, but I think open source can make thing even better : nearly free hardware with free software, and FREE network. This will lead to a new kind of wireless appliance!
If Microsoft had a monopoly on the console market, it would. They would simply outrageous royalties on X-Box games.
You wouldn't get the box at Best-Buy. You'd get it from the "Microsoft Store". Or from mail-order. One per household.
I too believe that scenario is highly unlikely. But if Microsoft could control the software, it's possible.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I recently saw a demo of BizTalk Server 2004, and it was quite impressive. If you think about it, much of the programming done these days is data manipulation (read/write/display included). Why should I have to write code to deal with how to handle that integer field? The sample application they showed had about 3 pages of hand-written code in it (as told by the programming guy there), which handled the really different stuff. Keep in mind that this application was using GIS and automated calling groups, not just basic alphanumeric data. They're a BizTalk shop, and their goal is to never write code for the stuff they do.
Of course, this is only a subset of applications out there. I doubt you could write an office application, web browser, DB server, OS, or other specialised tool with this, but given that the 'other' applications that are used by businesses are database-manipulation tools, this looks quite feasible. Think code reuse, with a standardized interface and graphical widgets to abstract the code.
I've yet to see an OSS tool that could do this, and would be quite interested in any that can. I see this as being very useful for the company-specific tools that are made on a dialy basis.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Bill in 2024: You thought I said that!? Oh you silly person. haha.
Lakkies: ha haa HAA.
This is one of those all too frequent cases where one has to wonder if Bill Gates is actually stupid enough to believe what he's saying, or if he's deliberately being dishonest.
In the future, software, in general, is going to be free[*] unless legal issues (ala SCO) prevent it. That's a plain, simple, and extremely obvious fact. Once a program is written, copying it costs virtually nothing, while each additional CPU, circuit board, IO chip, GPU, etc, actually has to be made.
Eventually chips, displays, power supplies, etc, will become so easy to make that they will be very cheap, but software will be cheaper[*] yet.
What an idiot.
[*] There will always be some software that you can't get free and will be willing to pay for, such as games, and any unique or innovative program. Such software will be the exception.
ie a rich guy who says and do crazy stuff without anyone in his entourage to tell him that it ain't normal. Sorry Bill but you are delusional. In ten years Linux will be the desktop king and software will also be a commodity. Stop day dreaming publicly.
If everyone was willing to settle for older or slower hardware, demand for it, and thus prices, would be higher. Did you ever stop to wonder why older or lower-end stuff is so cheap? The people buying the new stuff at much higher prices are essentially subsidizing it.
Reguarding your title of your reply, Microsoft had nothing to do with the limited conventional memory available.
IBM was in fact "to blame" for only 640K of memory, but at the time (1980) when the IBM Home computer was being deigned the unit was to be based on the 8088 CPU which had a powerfull feature (at the time) of addressing up to 1024K of RAM.
When designing a computer, it is kind of like desinging a community in SimCity, everything must be zoned so certain functions will not step on other functions.
As it was with the first home computers -
0K-640K Users Programs
640K-768K Video RAM
768K-1024K Reserved Area
So if you were implying that MS was responsible for the 640K Limit, you are wrong.
That's small-'f', not capital-'F' free
and yet the article title is:
Gates: Hardware, Not Software, Will Be Free
So if it's not capital 'F' free, whats it doing in the title like that?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Granted, he runs the #1 software company in the world, but that makes him an authority on business and killing competitors, not innovation and predicting the future of the industry. For a good laugh go and read the first edition of "The Road Ahead". If he would have had his way there wouldn't be server-side content on the internet. You'd download (for a fee, of course) content off of a MS server to whatever proprietary MS software you were using, and view it locally for a "rich experience."
'$640K per Windows license should to be cheap enough for anyone.'
Meanwhile sportscasters are predicting the weather. He's a marketing nerd, and of course want's to give his analysis that software prices will always rise. HE SELLS SOFTWARE.
*DrugCheese rants*
Unless you use programs on it.....
Come on, give me a break. When did the hardware EVER outperform the software (or games) you could run on it for very long. Look at what Doom3 is rumored to require. Why the heck would I want a lot of CPU, memory and graphics power sitting around unused? Cool but useless apps, spyware and everything else will quickly make hardware excess go away. THAT IS A GOOD PROCESS, and should be encouraged.
Bill Gates is smoking Crack.
Also, what is the damn fascination with speech and hand writing recognition? I do not want to TALK to anything. I DO NOT want to write stuff. I have terrible hand-writing and need a computer to help me spell (as you may have noticed in this post). In addition, I can type faster and create better, complex thoughts than I ever could on paper. I am working with computers PRECICELY BECAUSE I do not want to talk to shit. If I liked talking I'd be a damn sales-weasel instead.
I can see if you want to sell Windows to the as of yet computerless droolers out there that speech recognition would be needed. Also, it might be nice for things like PDAs and people who cannot interact with a computer in other ways. But the main-stream does not need that stuff, and probably does not WANT that stuff.
I view this vision as entirely self-serving and clouded.... Gates has lost touch with stuff up there in his billion dollar mansion. He should invite Michael Jackson over so he can have another wacko to relate to.
I know VB provides a toolbox to develop applications with very little actual coding. And there are others. Of course, the article's reference reminded me more of NeXTstep's Objective C palette than VB's method for some reason.
Either way, more of the same "innovation" from M$ -- other people's ideas.
One thing I will give M$ -- by the third try, they usually have something pretty usable. On a fairly steady basis, by the third version of a new "idea" or product, they get it enough right that it becomes pretty usable. Must be nice to have all that monopoly money to support that model of product development.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
In fact, Apple already has plans for free Macintosh hardware...
It will cost only $499.
These people have looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
they have been trained for 2 decades by Wintel that they must have the fastest machine to get decent performance.
And the baton of software bloat has been passed along to the developers of (most) Linux/OSS desktop systems. Gnome and KDE are, uh, abominations.
---
Then look at something like Visual Basic (sorry, VB.NET). It's interface creation is all graphical, only the logic is code. The next natural step is to make the logic drag and drop too. Some current day rules engines try to do this and fail. Look at the little "fx" insert function button in MS Excel, it guides you through creating logic. All of this will come together and allow anyone to create logic, the same way that anyone can create presentation today with HTML.
And yes, it'll screw up sometimes. And yes, there will be really ugly (and wrong) logic in some applications either because the tools suck or because people don't know how to use them (or aren't capable of abstract thought, but that's another story). But this is the inevitable march of progress.
Besides, you didn't really want to deal with every stupid business person changing their mind all the time about when a program should say Potato and when it should say Potatoe, did you? I know I'd rather write software that allows them to do it themselves. And the rest of you code monkeys can go back to working at Best Buy.
But some software is developed explicitly for one customer to give them an advantage over their competitors. If you want this software, you're going to have to make it worth the developers while.
Other software just isn't interesting to most developers. Anyone fancy developing a free version of TurboTax and updating it each year as the tax laws change? Didn't think so. If you want to use it you need to pay your fraction of the development costs, plus some.
Free software is great. But free distribution does not by itself result in free software.
Extract: "Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Gates said, referring to networked computers and advances in the speed of the Internet. So he doesn't mean that hardware will be free, he means that hardware will not be a limiting factor to software design. Doesn't change the fact that Bill is a bit of an asshat though.
Thanks Bill!
Of course nobody sees this happening since software isn't easy to write, and any tool that makes software easy to write seems to lead to more complex software, which is again hard to write.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Once upon a time in the 90's there was a multimedia authoring tool called Icon Author. An editor to drag 'n drop objects to build the logic "engine", and an editor drag 'n drop interface objects that the engine interacts with.
Though it was geared for training/CBT, it was really quite powerful; we were able to build all sorts of flexible simulations and easily reusable engines that we could just replace the interface and content at will. And it made it possible that non-programmers could do the customizations, and concentrate on the creativity and the content.
When you get "visual programming" confused with the current MS "Visual" whatever environments, it's easy to scoff. But after experiencing Icon Author, it's easier for me to make the visualization of the potential behind what Gates is saying. And since I approach tasks more visually than algorithmically, I'd be a lot more productive, I'd bet.
Kineska: Cinema, soapbox, music & musings
With version 2.0, UML is going to make an enormous step towards visual application design. Several ambiguities are resolved. Class diagrams and OCL are now built on precise foundations (set theory and predicate logics) [1] -- instead of having most of the semantics described in plain English; the fundations of other diagram types were also formalized.
The advantages of more precise models are that they can better form the basis for code generation [2] or even direct interpretation [3,4]. In contrast to earlier approaches to code generation, a common standard now allows interchange between different tools (at least to some extent).
Here, one of the main advantages is probably not "point and click", but a higher level of abstraction: current programming languages simply do not support high level diagram elements--such as bidirectional associations--as first class members. Things that can be expressed by simple means in class diagrams and OCL expressions become multi-line code in a regular programming languages[5]. Of course, building on UML directly also may resolve maintenance problems such as inconsistencies between diagrams and the actual code.
"In future literacy will be unnecessary" -BG
Right now, the display is the big power consumer in portable devices. The processors have been tuned to use minimal power.
The Scion 5Mx has a B/W LCD screen. How long do the batteries last when the backlight is on????
When OLED comes to laptops, that will significantly increase battery time.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Graphical tools are phased out in advanced electronic design, and I don't understand why programming (which usually have much more complex logic than electronics) should switch to visual design.
Free hardware is good news, since I use free software ;-)
RFC1925
You're becoming a great supporter of OSS.
The hardware companies are just gonna love your comment - I mean - who wouldn't want to their stuff purchased at razor thin margins by winning the bid to supply hardware at the absolute lowest possible bare bones price. Think of all of the extra revenue & profit - not.
If nothing else, comments like this will piss even more of them off to the point where they will not only support OSS but will activily contribute and invest in it.
There are some caveats on this statement however. First, software systems have discrete, digital states rather than analog behavior. That makes them quite succeptible to error behavior in boundary cases. And the state space for software is extremely large. Universal use of components developed in either an object-oriented or functional way could divide this state space up into manageable components. But one issue that is often overlooked by methodology enthusiasts is that this only increases the size of the building blocks and decreases the number of blocks used for a particular size of project. It does not eliminiate the problem that bigger programs are made from a larger number of component parts. The complexity of a program grows as a function of the complexity of the underlying problem. You can change the function with different tools, but the relationship will still exist.
a hardware OS! :) :)
I mean, any binary logic can be expressed in both hard and software... So why pay for a software OS if you can have one in your hardware for free . Think of the bootup time!
There is Agilent VEE (now obsolete) and to a lesser extent, LabVIEW from National Instruments.
I had a job where I did work in VEE and there were a few disadvantages to using it than functional or even object-oriented programming. For one thing, code wasn't as tight as it would have been with text-based programming. I always felt I could get code to work the way I wanted it to when it was another programming language. Another issue is that since VEE is an interpreted language, it's very, very slow to execute compared to an equivalent programming language. Third, the timing issues were horrible if you decided to make your code execute multiple "threads" at the same time, which was more like how Windows 3.1 did its multitasking.
However, VEE was easy enough to use that any old engineer could program in it, even those with little or no coding experience. Technicans could also troubleshoot the code if it was documented well enough. Also, nothing could beat it in terms of cranking out a prototype electrical test when you need to get data quickly.
from the same lips that said: "No one will ever need more than 64k of ram" now then...where is my crack pipe...
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I heard the local Catholic Archdiocese are currently training Nuns to perform the ancient ritual of whipping with a ruler. However, these nuns will be a bit more modern and fetish, wearing the newer leather outfits. Of course they are still in training, lead by the current mass of petifile priests with sadomasicism backgrounds. These new Techno Nuns will be the debuggers for Gate's new vision of programming.
Let's try the devil's advocate approach: What if Bill was right? What conditions need to be met in order to make Bill right?
Let's tackle visual programming first:
The reason why visual programming isn't a plausible standard is because we don't have GCC and appropriate toolkit interfaces on hardware chips. In order to make Bill right the entire computing world would need to place not only the OS on a chip (Amiga) but would need to standardize and make chips for the compilers and visual interfaces (X, glib, gtk, tcl/tk, qt, etc.). Even that's only enough for basic user interface visual programming. I can't even imagine what toolkits are necessary for games programmers to do all of their models, raytracing, 3D effects and others.
Maybe if the PC architecture were adapted to allow hot pluggable chips. In order to be compatible, however, it would require frequent freezes of your favorite compiler and toolkits in order for them to be standardized. The system would have to slow down to allow for maximum distribution and population permeation. The last thing you want to do is visually design a software package based on your EEPROM of gcc-3.3.2, Xf86-4.4.40, glib-2.4.0, gtk-2.4.0 and find out that, because of a low-level logic problem in the realm of computer and electrical engineering the program segfaults on home computers using EEPROMs with gcc-3.3.1.
If everyone were using the exact same hardware built at the exact same factories then the platform would be stable enough to allow reliable visual programming on a grand scale. This sort of system would still not guarantee quality, efficient, streamlined, and secure code. This sort of system would guarantee nothing but functionality. Due to the presence of patent law and intellectual property which gave birth to the multitudes of "me-too" hardware and ".100% SoundBlaster compatible" hardware we'll simply never attain that level of platform stability.
That brings around the question of hardware: What would it take for Bill Gates to be right about the price of hardware becoming negligable? First we'd have to remove all of the patent laws and intellectual property regarding chip design and manufacturing. Intel probably won't go for this. It is possible to squeeze out all of the competition (I miss Motorola chips) but the industry is demonstrating that patent law and IP extends to the subcontractors in chip manufacturing as different cards, named the same, which come from different plant locations demonstrate obscure idiosyncracies.
In order for Bill to be right about hardware the world needs to move to a completely open and free model which would make him wrong about visual programming. In order for Bill to be right about visual programming the world would need to standardize on a frozen hardware platform encompassing over 150 source code trees.
There is a third way for Bill Gates to be right. If we could rework the conceptual design of a computer so that it doesn't function like a system of over a trillion light switches then we could create a fast, reliable, and secure hardware platform which doesn't rely on compiled source code to correctly flip the switches.
I know what I'm thinking about for the rest of the day: Holographic computing using preinitialized template holograms.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
What are you talking about? FrontPage makes beautiful, HTML compliant pages, that work perfectly in every browser. Clearly, you're just a Microsoft hater ;-)
Actually, the only reason I comment is because your sig is in Swedish, but I can't translate it, as it's been 6 years since I lived there.
Well of course software will be visually designed in the future instead of written. Just like all of Shakespeare's picture books.
Maybe you kids will remember that mister Gates is not a very good 'futurist', and back in the mid-ninety's declared that the internet was just a fad in a very small market (professors). Before Billy got the picture, his inner circle of top managers had to do an intervention, and show him the error of his 'vision'.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
I believe statements like this are a play for power.
One way to gain more power that is to convince everyone that you are the only source in the architecture of a system for the piece you provide, but that there are many sources and they are easy to get for everything else.
With that line or reasoning, bill is trying to convince everyone that windows is the only operating system and that everything else is and will be easy to come by.
We see the same "free" "non-polluting" mania for any promising technology. For example, hydrogen is better thought to be a "battery" rather than a fuel because it doesn't exist on Earth in a high-energy state. It has to be freed from emthane or water by an energy intensive process.
Second, because is among the smallest molecules in nature, it leaks like almost nothing else, up to 20% in some estimates. It is thought to be a significant greenhouse gas then, though tranistory because UV light evently combines with atmospheric oxygen.
But the visual aspects of pure "compatible" HTML (as in not CSS and Divs, which many design shops still stay away from) are hacks. So you have these editors trying to visually do something that HTML was never intended to do. Dreamweaver, the best of these editors, was oft called "the moody woman" at one shop I worked at, as you had to know just how to coddle it it wouldn't do what you wanted, or even what it was supposed to. Handwriting the code was still superior for these hacks...
Then CSS/Layers became totally (mostly) supported. Now WYSIWYG editors work QUITE well... (Even some non editors generate perfect code. Photoshop's image ready generates some very nice code)
Anyway, point being, when something is designed to be designed visually it can be visually designed much easier. *grin*
Yeah, of course Bill says that the hardware is going to be nearly free. He's planning on having his software running on all of it.
And, when you compare the software licensing fees he's going to charge to the price of the hardware............
Well, the hardware price isn't going to be significant, is it ?
Way to plan ahead Bill !
I searched around on Google for a while, but I couldn't find it. Anyone else out there remember the Quake client on Linux that you could run to kill processes? It was awesome. You ran around chasing these monsters, and you could id them by process name. You would shoot them to kill the process. It wasn't really effective as an admin tool, but very cool. Until you killed X. D'oh!
Come on old-schoolers, help me out. Where is it?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Compare the price of MS Office with a new low-end PC from Dell. They're about the same price. Of course Gates is going to have to come up with some spin to make this seem reasonable.
a big screen and a resolusion that makes it possible to see several pages of syntax highlighted code .. sit back and you sort of have the visual design of your program .. .. a good way to get the overview of a good chunk of code in one go ..
sort of like the "blonde, brunette, redhead" line from The Matrix
As we get to places were components are used and reused, we can represent these components as images which interact through certain connectors. Think programming in UML with predesigned components. Obviously there will always be pieces that must be hand coded, just open the box and insert code.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
well, since all my s/w is already free ( well,GPL anyway ) and once Mr. Gates' phophecy comes true - the h/w is going to be almost free, we can all have free computing. yah! way to go Mr.Gates
All someone needs to work on now is the Network. What can we do to get the Network for free ? Having said that, some cities are already working with Free Wifi access to the net for its residents.
wow! its all a free world.
so, now tell me - who is going to actually support the IT industry ? Since everything is being given away free ( and Advertisign revenue only works in so many cases... not everywhere ) who is going to be paying salaries to the people involved / rent for the landspace etc ?
pic here
From that picture it sure seems like, well...you decide...
Dumpster diving.
No lie, I got a perfectly good P150 laptop _and_ Windows 98 this way just the other day.
The Road Ahead, he at first failed to anticipate the importance of the internet WHATSOEVER (in the mid-90s!). An addition had to be quickly written and pasted on so he wouldn't be so embarrassed.
(And a TCP/IP stack "borrowed" and a decent browser "weasel-stolen" to bang into Windows damn quick without having to bother anyone at Redmond to actually write code or, you know, innovate.)
My wife will be so happy! I won't be spending loads of money on anything. Free hardware from Billy, free software from GNU. What more could you ask?
> given how long friggin HTML has been around - plus the simplicity of that markup "language" - and we still don't have perfect (or even good) WYSIWYG editors for it.
The thing is, pure HTML has no use for a "WYSIWYG" interface (if you're thinking "MS Word-like"), because style has nothing to do with content, CSS is there for that.
Big boss of huge software company predicts that hardware prices will drop, software prices not.
In other news, Coca Cola has announced that demand for alcoholic beverages is stagnating while soft drink consumption is up.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
How come when Linux companies give away their software for free, but sell the hardware it's communism (a la MS), but when MS gives away the hardware but sells the software it's capitalism? Go figure.
After all, it's the business model for the XBox.
I think we can safely assume general purpose PC's will follow the same model eventually, especially if Microsoft gets its way.
What I find funny about the article is how speech enabled tablet devices are seen as the "holy grail." I just don't imagine these things ever being that useful. I can type as fast or faster than I can speak, and it doesn't interfere with other people.
But then again, given the cell-phone fetish many people seem to have, a future where everyone's walking around whispering into tiny devices does seem quite possible.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
My experience of Computer Science is that it is nearly useless, or at least all I have been taught.
:(
Whilst little emphasis is spent on learning specific languages, the course I'm on still isn't very good. It's effectively all memory. You learn certain skills to answer questions for exams, and then forget about it all afterwards.
Okay, so my course may be the exception, but my experience of it is that it's not so much about computing, as trying to memorise a variety of very computing techniques and knowledge for an exam. In reality, I'm not going to bother learning all that, when it's far more effective just to look up a snippet of information in a book. There are some exceptions, and sometimes good overviews are given. But generally, my course has been solely about memorisation.
Meanwhile, the actual art of programming goes untaught. Apart from a few, most people can't code for toffee. They don't know about splitting a problem apart, about making sure code is nice and modular, about the reuse of code and so forth.
Instead, you get people naming their variables things like "box1", "box2", "box3" and so forth, and who can't think their way through simple computing problems. I'm not trying to be elitist; these people are very smart people. They just haven't been taught certain key skills.
And Warwick University is meant to be one of the best in the UK at Computer Science. I'd like to know what measuring stick they were using for that!
(That all said, the CompSci building is very nice; new, shiny and with a lot of Redhat machines to play with.)
Look at it this way: the 48K Apple II was introduced in the US at $1795. Now, a typical bottom-end cell phone has much more computing power. You could put the entire Apple II on a $20 FPGA, or make it an ASIC and the price would be $1 or less in quantity.
I bought a 333MHZ Pentium II based PC in 1998. For software development and everything else I did, it was fine for the following five years. I finally upgraded to a 3GHz P4, just because it was cheaper than upgrading the OS and various parts individually. In my timings, this PC is roughly 15x faster than the old one, plus the video card is at least 10x faster than the one I bought in 2000. This is a lot of power, and it's the least I've ever spent on a PC.
Or consider game consoles. A $150 game system is more powerful, in all ways except memory, than a computer from 5-6 years ago. Video-wise, they're much more powerful. Next generation consoles are going to outrun current desktops...for $200.
The short version is that computers get more powerful, then they get cheap. At some point power ceases to matter, especially if you have a GPU or video compression chip to offload lots of work to. Imagine if a 2 or 3GHz chip could be made to run at 10 watts of power and cost $5. For a 65nm PowerPC, this is reasonable. What's needed is economy of scale. An alternate approach is that "low end" processors in cell phones and digital cameras get to where they're fast enough to usurp a desktop. Then put a video compression chip in there, or other custom hardware to the bulk of the work. At $20 for a complete system, that's a big deal.
Or even consider alternate, custom CPUs. An x86 desktop CPU is expensive because it includes all sorts of junk, like MMX support and 16-bit mode and legacy instructions and SSE2 and all this other marginalized stuff. And still they're too general purpose. C++ doesn't matter any more. Well, it matters because it's "fast," but not because people really like it. C++ doesn't make you happy the way Haskell or Python or Smalltalk do. Take a minimal instruction set designed to support one of those languages, then implement a simulator for it, then an FPGA, then an ASIC. Keep it simple, keep it fast. You could easily have a 20MHz part pacing high-end desktop processors for most tasks. Again, combine this with an ASIC for doing heavy lifting like graphics and compression.
Very interesting... I work in the automation industry where many of the programming tools are already visual. The programming tools are designed to represent objects that engineers are already familiar with and allow them to put together some decent and effective logic.
Many software developers already make use of flow charts, UML diagrams, and such. How much more of a leap would it be to have some visual basic style of programming in a flowchart style format?
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
Gates is wrong. Hardware prices don't depend as much on technology but on what people are willing to pay. A PC costs $1000 because that's what people are willing to pay for it, and they happen to get as much hardware and software for that as they can.
.NET-based office suite using COM, DCOM, SOAP, DHTML, and whatnot, on the other hand, won't. But Microsoft has to keep changing things in order to get people to buy and pay them more money.
I'm sure Gates would like the entire $1000 to go to Microsoft, but that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because Microsoft isn't going to produce $900 worth of software that is capable of running on whatever $100 buys you in hardware. That's not a problem with hardware design, it's a problem with the kind of software that Microsoft develops: big and resource intensive.
On the other hand, you will probably be able to get a really cheap computer that runs Linux and runs it well. We are already beginning to see this with Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX systems: they run Linux so much better than Windows. For $200, you get a full desktop system capable of pretty much everything that a home user needs.
What really helps Linux is that it doesn't have to push an agenda or "innovate" constantly. If a 1995 word processor written in C runs fine on $1000 1995 hardware, it will run really well on a $100 2005 Mini-ITX system, with a few `bug fixes and feature enhancements. Microsoft's new
I don't think the hardware will be free and the software will be purchased, or the other way around. I think the new model will be the overall product and experience brought to the user by that product. If the computer is a tool, then both the hardware and software are equally important (or irrelevant). Companies will most likely start using open technologies and standard hardware as a base, then innovate, tweak, and specialize into both of these areas to create a total, holistically-engineered product.
Is this a good thing? From your and my perspective, maybe not. We know it's better to have the flexibility to control exactly how things will run. But for less technical people, a lot of work could be accomplished using purely visual programming tools.
Demonizing anything Bill says is fun and all, but frankly I think he has a point on this one.
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Where was this 19.95 low end palm device? Linkage? Cuz I need something new to read ebooks on, as my Visor Edge is dying, and since my scheduling needs are really nonexistant, I cant see paying hundreds for a new palmOne POS or a PocketPC, when all I really want is to be able to read my ebooks :)
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
Yep, it's been done, and well.
Max/MSP by Cycling74. It's mostly for creating audio and video applications used in live performance. It was Mac-only for years, but they just released a Windows version. Not sure if everything works cross-platform or not.
Then there's the open-source version, JMax
They never take into account disposal fees. The energy industry is counting on Uncle Sam to build them a free disposal facility in Yucca Mountain. The Nuclear power would be about as free as the roads I drive on. Taxpayers (not rate-payers) flip the bill.
I'm not a tree hugger. But I do realize that Nuclear power still has a HUGE disposal problem. ALL the energy from EVERY plant in the US has yet to find a final resting place. Even the Yucca mountain proposal still has some possibility for contamination.
We need to find a way to bottle that re-process the fuel and imprison the stuff in solid inert mixtures. Either that, or find create disposal units that drill one way trips down past the earth's crust into hot/squishy rock layers.
Until then, nucular power is still risky until they deliver on the ultra-sonic fusion concepts.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I hope that soon the rest of the world catches on to the notion that "information wants to be free."
Hardware is useless without software, and software is cannot run without hardware, but hardware I can hold in my hand, and I will kick you ass if you try to take my hardware. billg doesn't like this, because he sells software for ridiculous sums of cash.
gates claims hardware will become free (or near-free) with software. this is false - hardware may come free with services, but not with software. This is because you can restrict services, but it is hard to restrict software.
gates is taking advantage of people's misunderstanding (and trust me, most people don't have a clue) of what software is and does. The technological "magic" we have seen in the last half century is not because software hase gotten better, it is because hardware has gotten better and can now run different software - but Bill would like to take the credit for all of this innovation, and have people believe the it is software.
Mr. Gates, if you are reading this, take note - software is a necessary expense associated with selling hardware. to sell hardware, you must provide software to make it useful it is not the other way around. Hardware vendors tolerate you because it is difficult to not use Windows. But the feature set of open source software is growing every day, much faster than Windows. Soon the vendors will be able to switch.
People don't buy a computer to run Windows, they buy it to play games, to write letters, to do their taxes. They want a device that will help them with those things. Hardware, software, services are all parts that make up "The Application", and the application is King (TM).
Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that the application is the software - mostly because the same hardware can be used for many applications because the software enables it. Open source is slowly breaking this paradigm, since there is lots of code available to do things, and it can be used as the foundation for other applications. Smart software vendors have caught on to the fact that to stay alive they must offer services with their software. Microsoft is not a smart software vendor, they are an evil, controlling software vendor.
sorry, didn't mean to rant - i need to cut back on my coffee.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
hardware costs money to develop, and then it costs money to manufacture. you need raw materials and some sort of fabrication process to make hardware. software costs money to develop (or, it costs time, if someone is programming open source stuff), and then it costs almost nothing to manufacture/distribute. you copy one program onto a million CDs, for pennies per copy.
and hardware will become almost free, but software will continue to cost hundreds of dollars? am i missing something?
Tell Oracle and JD Edwards that drawing out the workflow is more difficult than writing down the steps. Both of their ERP systems are heavy on GUI style "development". Apparently I'm the only one that likes to perform diffs and take hardcopy home to hand correct?
I suppose one should consider to whom these systems are marketed. CS ignorant execs that think shiny is better.
A $10 disposable digital camera has a dirt cheap computer inside. They have a 1.2 megapixel LCD sensor, 8MB of flash memory, an 8-bit Intel 8051 processor clone, a SDRAM chip and USB interface. Each of these computer parts is less than a $1.
If I controlled the market, and I wanted to maximum profits: hardware and software would be free, but I would charge (a lot) for support. And I would make really crappy hardware and software.
Of course, I would have to maintain control of the market. Which shouldn't be that difficult considering the way the US justice system "works."
HTML is defficient. e.g. It is not possible to do anything decent looking with HTML and CSS without resorting to absolute values. A decent system would allow you to do complicated things with relative values and the browser would work it all out for us.
Programming OTOH is just pipes.
UML tools like Telelogic Tau go a fair way towards visual software development. There's a long way to go for the whole process to become driven by a completely visual interface though.
e loper/in dex.cfm
e.g.
http://www.telelogic.com/products/tau/dev
It'd redefine the word bloat, that's for sure. Probably why Microsoft are interested. Bloat's what they do well.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
... as long as MS is getting a license fee for that hardware's OS.
In terms of visual programming, I used to work a lot with LabView and Mentor's VHDL Design Suite.
Both are very graphically contained, but what you design is yet the dataflow, and the methods.
Be it a top-down, or a bottom-up process, you have to think of how to implement methods and actual data processing.
Yet, I think that the amount of work that is put in projects, especially bigger ones, is bigger in the design-methology-dataflow part (which can be graphical), than in the actual coding work.
Moreover, teamwork is much easier if the code design (whatever it be) is graphical.
Think of the many many possobilities you have to achieve a task in C, and its very hard for even a team-member to read and understand your code at once, be it well documented as is, yet it is a LOT easier to read graphics.
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." hrrrm.... just a thought....
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Currently, commodity PC's are so cheap they are expensed out in under 2 years.
Thats damned close to being free. ( they are at the least disposable, which is one step away from free )
Once cable companies start leasing PCs as they do digital converters, it will be bundleed into service so it will appear to be free.
Much as cell phone companies do now.
However, my software will also be free... ( unless of course the HSD outlaws OSS for security reasons... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Gates also said advances in programing will allow software developers to create applications in less time by using visual representations of the inner workings of software rather than writing lines of programing code.
Welcome to Microsaft Wizard!
What do you want to create today?
1) something slow
2) something bloated
3) both
4) ask Clippy
why i see that stupid scene from "Swordfish" where that "h4ck3r" puts together his worm with those cubes...
HTML is hard to make a visual designer for because it's so non standardized, and very very sloppy.
Ever build an SQL query with Access? Pretty simple if you ask me. How about an excel spreadsheet formula?
Ever use a tool like Together, Rational Rose, etc to build a UML class diagram and have it generate the skeletal source code (class definitions, method names, variable declarations, etc)
Look up Jackson Structured Programming (JSP), it's not popular here in the US, but it's a way to visually design the flow of a method and have your editor spit out code in any one of many languages.
Also, expecting to get such an editor for C/C++ is silly. Not only will the tools evolve, but also the languages.
And on general principle, the doubters usually turn out to be wrong. We made it to the moon, we have a computer in every house, etc.
no comment
Details can be found Here
(Wed Oct 20, '99 ) A researcher at the University of New Mexico has modified the Doom source to visualize processes and kill them! Finally you can really enjoy killing that Netscape process that just won't die!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
TIBCO is a program that we use here at work. The IDE is in Java (as is the whole application) and programming it is mainly find a process, click on it and drag it to your project, and drop. The you have to connect it to the other processes that you are using.
The hardest part of this is making sure that you have the right connections / parmeters assigned, and even then, it's fairly simple.
Does this make for good programming? I'm still out on this, but it has made it accessible to non-programmers.
The last point is the issue- the non-programmer. While they understand how it works, the why is usually left unanswered, so their designs tend to lack scallability / robustness that a programmer would have already taken into account for. You just can't make a visual programming language well enough to cover all cases that it will be used for. You end up with bloat.
I think Intel and AMD love this idea though...
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
You don't write apps "from the screen in" because that's wrong from the get go.
You design apps from the objects and relationships (not to mention security considerations mean that an individual may not be entitled to see all of them) out.
Presentation occutrs in whatever language/ script/ medium is available.
Interaction and therefore selection of triggers to object events, depends on what the individual is allowed to do.
Gates will go the way of Smalltalk and Java PARTs and other visual programming toys.
He hasn't got a fucking clue how the world works. I pity him.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"People are speculating that we're out in '06 sometime -- that's probably valid speculation -- but it's not a date-driven release," Gates said
That is, until it gets to the marketing-geniuses who stick the name on the box.
Not that any long-term prediction about computing by Bill Gates is really worth listening too, but it should be obvious what world Bill wants to live in: Where the only thing of any value at all in a computer system is the part that he owns. I'm sure Intel, AMD, Via, etc all love to hear that.
Of course it is nothing but wishful thinking on Gate's part. Clearly the trend is going to be somewhat opposite. Software -- his software -- is going to get cheaper. It must. He knows that, which is why he has salesmen (and the occasional exec) out making deals to stop people from switching to Linux.
Hardware will get cheaper as well, but there isn't a source of comparable yet completely free hardware to drive those prices down. Hardware is a physical object, software isn't. Software has R&D costs; hardware has R&D costs plus a cost to manufacture. It's obvious which one is going to have the per-unit cost that approaches zero.
So nice dreaming Billy. Maybe ten years ago you could have tricked the hardware makers into making a system that could only run your software and let themselves be eaten alive. Nowadays, no matter how much they suck up to you, they have their handle on the Linux escape lever and they're waiting to pull.
The enemies of Democracy are
I always thought that movie was cool, i.e. the visual designer to catch bad guys.
Solid!
There was a very interesting study done about great scientists that ties in here nicely. Essentially, the finding was that they didn't produce better stuff in total, they mostly produced more stuff (papers, articles, research reports, etc.) - thus raising their statistical chances of hitting gold.
I fear Gates understands that method. If you make lots of predictions, chances are some of them will be right. The general public usually remembers your correct predictions, not your failures. Just look at how many journalists consider Gates a visionary.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm in the computer chair business, and I predict that computer hardware and software will *both* be free, and the only charge will be for the chairs.
You're talking about two completely different problems.
There are visual editors around today for audio systems (CuBase VST, Reaktor, Reason), for pixel and vertex shaders (RtZen), for procedural textures (ProcGen), etc. etc. So trying to map that problem onto a totally different problem in the WYSIWYG space is not helpful in the least.
We'll think of the hardware as being almost free because Bill thinks the software will be that much more expensive? :)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
what about indemnification? you know the word that you and steve throw around so much?
who am I going to point the finger at when the hardware fails if it is free.
Isn't this one of the arguments you have against free software - who is accountable and who puts their but on the line.
You are a joke - I guess you had to keep your stock holders happy by putting out this bs.
Why don't you just shut up and try to put out a good product instead of all this crap.
I risk my job by putting linux on my laptop at work because I hate your OS so much and it is forced down my throat because of some deal you, steve and the cio put together.
Hardware will always cost money you fool. I will just seem free for what we have to pay for you crap os.
Just stay out of our lives and let us run IT the way it is suppose to be run - and not ran the way you think it should be.
Oh ya - did I mention I hate your os -
fsck off!!!
You could do this 'visual design' thing years ago with JSP - no, nothing to do with Java, but Jackson Structured Programming.
:-)
Jackson Structured Programming was basically a design method for data processing type programs - things that took an input, did something to it, and emitted output. Think of many programs you'd pipe data through in Unix, and you have the typical type of thing JSP was aimed at. Except JSP was usually used by COBOL programmers for data processing type tasks.
With JSP, you drew the structure of your input, and the desired output which represented all the sequence, selection and iteration in the data. You'd then take these two structures, and merge them. This merging proccess brought you a program structure - another tree-like diagram. You would then recurse through the tree, turning the program structure into code. The idea was that all the work was done in the design - get the input and output structures right, and you'd have no logical errors in your code. For the kind of things JSP was aimed at, it actually worked very well.
There were programs available for VAX/VMS which could turn the program structure into compilable COBOL - completely automating the programming step. This was being done well over a decade ago.
Microsoft will now come up with its own version of JSP, and claim it as a great "innovation" of course
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
And on general principle, the doubters usually turn out to be wrong. We made it to the moon, we have a computer in every house, etc.
Yes, not to mention the helicopter in every garage and the cold fusion reactor in every house, etc. etc.
As a general principle, people who talk of "general principles" are naive.
he's full of shit. Troll me, I don't care.
I would love to see how he is going to solve speech recognition and security when all I have to do is walk by someone and yell out:
and watch their data go down the tubes.Did anyone else catch the reference to the heavy investment in servers? All your data belongs to us!
Handwriting and speech might be cute, but you can't beat a keyboard for combination of speed and accuracy.
he's a marketing dweeb on crack trying to sell shiney beads to indians.
Gates reiterated his mantra that improving the security and reliability of software was still the company's top priority.
*tears in eyes* gosh how happy i am to read it. he still thinks about security... and... and reliability... i can't believe it *crying*
Yes and these other changes will also be
taking place.
Yes == No
No == Yes
Up == Down
Down == Up
And == Or
Or == And
Bill Gates will be known as Llib Setag.
but the computer you WANT always costs $2,500.00
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Of course, he's right.
Hardware will have to be free to justify the fact that the DRM running the hardware will make sure you won't be free to use the machine how you want to use it.
He's basically just outlining a new marketing plan to get the masses to stomach Trusted Computing.
In hardware design, the trend in the past 20 years has been just the opposite, going from large blueprints of gate and circuits, to a Hardware Description Language (HDL, like Verilog or VHLD) which is very similar to a programming language like C or Pascal!
Methinks the emperor has simply announced he wants a change of fashion, and all the trendy loyal subjects in the kingdom have to change their style to fit in.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Oh, and the marketeers tend to be right? Sorry, but Bill Gates is not known for being a technology visionary.
Sadly, it's true. A year ago a coworker of mine decided to buy a new Dell, and I strongly told him to buy Dell's SLOWEST, CHEAPEST desktop since he wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 1.8GHz celeron vs. a 2.53GHz P4. Or at least he should buy the slower processor and use the money he saved on a bigger monitor. But no, he didn't listen to me. I'm sure he's enjoying his P4 for all his web surfing and email. Sucker.
Bill has thrown down the gauntlet. Better get the patent for these ideas now. Or perhaps make or round up proof that these ideas aren't unique and sui generis.
Perhaps the ideas are only interface patents with a rigged intelligence behind the front. "Handwriting" patents have been issued for broad, simplistic, rigged demos that make sure that the people who are smart enough to think of how to really pull off the interface will have to bow to your "idea".
If the so called 'free' hardware didnt require you to fork out a fortune for some Redmond software, you can run Free software on it and be all happy.
I'd like some free DOOM4 with a free Geforce 6 in the free machine please. I wonder if AOL's 3 months free connection will be up to all that?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Given the fact that my Windows XP box at work has had more application crashes than my old Win 98 box did, I'll move to Mongolia nd live in a Yurt before staying with their damn OS.
I'm sorry, but the quality is going downhill faster than an asteroid falling from the sky.
Given the stability issues I've seen in XP, Microsoft has staked their future on the human race's inability to recognize garbage. If people really are worthless brain dead sheep, then Microsoft will be around until the next World War. If not, then Microsoft's power will start to erode even faster.
I pray to God they go away. I'm really pissed off that XP went to the trouble of changing the Windows directory to be c:\windows instead of c:\winnt, but the concept of making the damn thing more stable is clearly beyond their grasp.
Oops! Outlook crashed again when I tried to create a new message.
I was so happy with W2K. Fairly stable and fast. Kept running for days. Now with X f***ing P I get crashes like I did in the days of Windows 98.
That's the end of the line. I have a Linux box on my desk not being used for anything. Anyone know of a good Linux replacement for SQL Server's Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer that can connect to SQL Server 2000? How about a good Homesite replacement. If I can get those then XP is dead for me at work, and I can finally leave it where it belongs. An OS for playing computer games at home.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
He lied, locked in, ripped off and anti-trusted his way to $100,000,000,000.
And he did it without ever having a published price list.
Now THAT's balls!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Gates and Microsoft will be left behind by the current paradigm shift.
This shift has very little to do with Open Source or Free Software, although they are convenient mediums for it. The shift is towards open standards. By making a piece of software Open Source/Free Software, you expose its protocols to the world.
This is what customers want. They don't want lock-in, they don't want lack of interoperability. They want their machines to play together without problems.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Ah, synchronicity..
I just started a discussion on the DebianWiki about the legal and technical implementation of making a computer system into a perpetual gift. That would be a more personal and specific way of making hardware free for the user, although not for the first owner of the system.
IANAL so I need help on wording the legal contract. For you lawyers, paralegals and armchair philosophers out there; If you feel like doing some constructive legal work for the Debian project I welcome your advice. I think this idea has a lot of potential not only for a gift between friends but as a way of donating computer systems to charity and ensuring that they will remain gifts after they are no longer useful to the recipient organization.
This brings to mind the vision of an admin staying up late and GPG signing the contracts for a one kilobox donation. *shudder*
PerpetualGift
Thats my worry. Theres a big differnce between
the dude that makes VB compilers and the 1 who uses them. In older times, alas, there was not that much difference. The writer of compilers was often the writer of programs that run from it..
This gulf will only widen so eventually, when the whole thing breaks down - with nobody to fix it - we will go back to the stone age!!
Dreamweaver, the best of these editors, was oft called "the moody woman" at one shop I worked at, as you had to know just how to coddle it it wouldn't do what you wanted, or even what it was supposed to.
Ahh. I see you are still single. Drop me a line if you'd like some remedial PR work for attracting the ladies.
No, this is not true. Cheap electronics are not a welfare program. I can buy an $8 watch or a $20 PDA because it's using standard circuitry and mass-produced with cheap Malaysian labor. In fact, if demand for cheap electronics was higher, competition would eventually drive the prices even lower. If everyone was willing to settle for 1997 computer technology, then slow computers with low res monitors and ancient OSs would be selling at Wal-Mart for $99. What drives the price up for new technology is R&D, plus the up-front capital expense of building new plants to build the new stuff. Once all that's been done, the price drops down, down, down, and yesterday's technology gets cheaper and cheaper.
ScienceSeeker.org
Hi all,
When I think about visual programming, I can't help thinking labview. I routinely use labview in a physics lab to control equipment. I also know C++, java,etc.
But labview programming sucks. All is done with nice arrows and boxes, but it takes 15min to do a simple for loop. And if your programm gets bigger, it is horrible.
Why dumb everything down? If it is so easy as a fool can use it, only a fool will want to use it!
HTML is by no means non standardized. There are standards, they have been around for years. But Microsoft has been ignoring ever since. Hell, they fixed their "interpretation" of the css-box model one month ago!
Not to mention their buggy css2 implementation. To hell with them!
he gets his suply, but I want to know what he's smoking, and where I can get some. Also, I want to know what the interviewer was smoking, so I DON'T smoke any. I want visions of the future, not being able to blindly belive someone else's =)
If everyone was willing to settle for older or slower hardware, demand for it, and thus prices, would be higher. Did you ever stop to wonder why older or lower-end stuff is so cheap? The people buying the new stuff at much higher prices are essentially subsidizing it.
Very good point. Its very true that early adopters pay high prices that subsidize the R&D and plant&equipment investments needed for the low-end stuff.
I'm not sure I agree with the demand necessarily equals price -- the law of supply and demand assumes no economies of scale. If demand picks up, prices do rise temporarily, but then someone realizes they produce the higher volumes at much lower costs per unit and then price drops. For example, although demand for cars with "luxuries" like power windows, power seats, etc. has increased, prices have fallen as car makers have become very efficient at creating ever more complex cars.
The question is will consumers buy the "free" stuff that Bill Gates mentions or will they always be willing to spend $1000-$2000 for a main computing/workstation/media/internet device and perhaps $200-$500 for smaller consumer electronics devices (cellphone/PDA/digital camera, etc.). Those devices will grow in performance to fit these standard budgets, but the low-end may never be popular.
I suspect that your point is that the hardware can never be free, but for different reasons. Either there is a widely adopted high-end and a not-so widely adopted near-free low-end. Or there is a universally adopted middle point with modest features and modestly high prices (with everyone paying to support the investment required to develop and manufacture these devices). My only point is that many consumers eschew the low-end, free or otherwise.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
why is it that software guys think they are so much better than hardware guys. BS. If this dweeb is right and the current trend of software people move to India, US's GDP is going to plummet.
Somehow the 90% number seems substantially high. Is Windows -really- on > 90% of desktops? What about Mac? What about SGI/Sun workstations, etc? I have a very hard time believing that 90% number. UNIXes on desktop/workstation machines and macs have to have at least 30% share?
they will be giving away the hardware, in order to keep people using their products;>
Bill Gate$ is seriously overrated as a futurist (remember 'The Road Ahead?')--every year, he's got the same message, but with a different twist--suuuuure, they're spending 6.8B or whatever on research (how much did Bob cost?)--unfortunately, it's being spent on their new 'PRbot' which will be the next generation of AI, and will take FUD and PRspew to new heights (or depths)...
finally, no one's talking about his voice recognition prognostications...what's the Blue Screen of Death going to sound like?
"Turn the rings to the maximum, and construct the word 'flax'."
Flax means either "luck" or "flap," as in "flap one's wings." I'm not familiar with the quote, but apparently it's from a 70s comic series called Bobo.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
It's actually not a bad idea. I think that if that will become possible everyone can make software. It may not be optimized or welldesigned, but still. Also for some reason I'm thinking about programming to become a form of art through this.
That "virtually free" to Bill Gates is somewhere around $10,000 - $20,000 dollars?
Don't forget how rich this guy is...
He's rationalizing the fact that Windows costs 50-60% of the cost of a blade server.
It's because of inflation (software prices) versus technological advancement (hardware prices)?
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
Software has historically been "written" but it is pure engineering since it is about design. Once software is out of this historical dogma of it must be written, which is evidently is a relic of VT100 days, more people will realize the values of good design and reusability. Further, this will also lead to acceptance of software as a patentable thing and not a bunch of ideas. Free software will eventually have to accept this work around these patents by innovating for real and not just reimplenting and rehashing the same old ideas.
What is the difference between these two? It is like the difference between an archetect and a carpenter. It is the difference between know how and planning. Both skills are useful. You need some of both to be successful or at least a team that has access to both.
Programming is just knowing how to contruct a syntax for looping over an enumeration. This is definately different across different languages. Design is knowning where the right places to use it. Recognizing which paterns give the best results on when to itterate and when its a waste of time.
Programmers often don't know the most efficient thing to do. Just like Designers don't know the tools available to debug. One of the misunderstood aspects of today's industry is that "bosses" fail to realize that many of their employees have to wear two hats to get their job done. They fail to recognize when somone is a poor designer creating heaps of unmaintanable code. This is nearly as costly as someone who just designs all day and writes very little code.
I've always considered the Science part of Computer Science misleading. It is just like Economics: there are parts that are very rigorous but so much of it is left to the human whim and hence more a form of art. People who write code are as much artist as they are mathmeticians and engineers. Denying this aspect leads to some of the worst code (ie. ugly and unaestic) that a human can create.
They'd better hurry up with that one, thanks to keyboards and such I know my handwriting skills are deteriorating beyond recognition even by humans with decent eyesight.
Can a "visual compiler" visually compile itself?
How the heck does that work?
-ted
Why? Are you offering to stand next to the parent poster on dates as an 'ugly' friend so he looks good by comparison?
Just kidding. I'm sure you're every bit as handsome as the rest of us.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
I love trees, but I think Nuclear power is the way to go.
The problem is the aging hippy/no-nuke crowd. They'd still rather have giant coal fired sulfur spewing monstrositys than have the faintest hint of radiation. It's hysterical crap...I toured an old reactor once, and the most unique thing about the grounds was the amazing amount of healthy wildlife...Seems background radiation is a lot less harmful to them than a constant human presence.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Paper hasn't increased (generally) in complexity for the last 100 years; CPUs, on the other hand, follow Moore's Law (for now).
Increased complexity means sinking capital into R&D, engineering, new fabs and other equipment, and generally, increasing cost.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Apparently it doesn't help to tell you lot that Bill Gates did NOT say this. I mean, plenty of people have pointed this out and you still don't get it.
If you need to use a computer while standing up and walking around for example - I can completely understand why your building inspectors would want one. It's also a lot easier (read more respectful and less distracting to everyone) to use a flat computer in a meeting. It's better for reading the Web while sitting on a sofa. You don't want one to code on however, (in tablet mode at least) or use it for writing a novel. That doesn't mean that they aren't very useful for certain tasks.
I love this idea. Of course Windows has this ability in non-graphical form. When you run Excel, it has a pretty good chance of killing Word.
I'm a little afraid of having a process Revenant. Then again, I recall Windows having that too. "Hey, didn't I just kill you?"
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Ok, so now Billy G. has caught up to what my 80's mentors were saying. Back then they also thought that new computers had entirely too much memory and free disk space. Oops.
On the whole, they were right: hardware prices have fallen dramatically, and software now routinely costs more than the hardware that runs it.
What did they get wrong? Bloatware kept increasing hardware requirements, and a lot of software became free. I like the idea of nearly free computers with all the basic applications available for free: browser, mail, office suite and solitaire.
But what of specialized software? F/OSS is great, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that companies will still need to pay programmers for custom work. And they will pay programmers far more than they spend on hardware, as long as our software helps them make more money.
Even a small business can spend more on a couple web applications than they do on hardware- it is certainly true of all my customers.
As for hardware, there is one factor that will keep me spending more money even though I might have enough with last year's technology. I want screens with high resolution, as easy on the eyes as paper; computers that are light and have very long battery life. Once we achieve a computer that has those features, manufacturers might find something else that will keep us buying expensive boxes/pda/wearables, or prices will go down.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Gates is right. Programming in the future will be visual. When he says this, though, he's just mimicing others, including myself, who have been maintaining this for, well, more than 20 years.
I once engaged Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat and doer of many of GNU things, on the subject of visual programming and he refused to even concede that it is possible.
Well, to Michael and all of you who scoff, I say first: "You will not be among those who make it possible or who will benefit from it"
We have begun to create, to learn to manipulate and to use as building blocks of new formal symbolic systems (languages), the graphic equivalents of phonemes and morphemes, words, syntax and grammar. If we can build civilizations on sounds, then we can build extensions to civilizations and things as yet undreamed with graphic symbols.
You all can scoff, laugh, snort milk out your nose and, like Tiemann, bury your vision in the deserved pride in your own accomplishments, but that won't stop the development of new languages based upon graphics. And I don't mean just new programming languages. I mean languages.
This will be done by children who will be unaware of your own self-imposed mental handicaps and defeatest attitudes, children who scoff at your scoffing, who have disdain for your disdain. Your world of text programming languages is passing, and will one day be a mere footnote.
It doesn't matter if you understand this or not, if you like it or not, if you do it or not.
When is the last time Gates has been right about anything ?
.. I find it bothersom that the richest man could be so thick. Now can you say DUMB luck? yes I thought you could.
Free hardware?? Yes cars will be free too but, the Gas will cost you a mint.
This is the most absurd thing... It's the other way around Mr. Gates. Hardware will NOT be free but the Software will. Even if you count lease deals, and hardware as a lose leader to get people on the payment plan. The hardware is NOT free.
I see the same thing with cell phones. The phones are NOT Free, they are a lose leader. Just like in the Fastfood biz. Do you think that folks are making money on 1 buck bugers ? NO but that 1.50 you spent on a Soda covers the loss and make them money.
DUH
You can pick up a Pentium II PC for a few dollars/pounds/euros. Put in 256MB of memory and it'll run Windows 9x or 2000 with an office package perfectly happily... I've got several friends and relatives who have benefitted from a lot of my old hardware, have PCs now with 300-500 Mhz CPUs that they're perfectly happy with and I've done my bit for the environment also by recycling old hardware.
I believe Mr Gates is under the illusion that because he locks his user base into his software now, that in 10 years time people will still be willing to part with hard earned cash for software which, let's face it, is hardly innovative anymore because all of the features anyone can think of implementing have just about been implemented.
If anything software innovation is becoming stale (though who cares because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it") and it's in the realms of hardware, particularly miniaturisation that the innovation is taking place currently.
I hate to dampen Bill Gates' fireworks but if Linux makes as much an advance over the next 10 years as it has done over the last 10 years, then I think he'll have a few other things on his mind in a decade than just pondering the price of hardware...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Has his "Nobody will ever need more than 640k of memory" one come true yet?
I type becuase no can read my handwriting, not even a computer.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
because the future PC will be so crippled because of DRM, no one will buy one. because it will not do what i(we) want. so they will have to give them away, but one thing. The funny part is BG, thinks someone is going to pay for the OS. ha funny! future POS computers.
Hopefully the hardware manufactures will finally start to fight this idiot! It is obvious that he holds his hardware partners by the short hairs. HP and IBM have had enough, Sony is being shit on with the great XBOX dumping scheme. Maybe we might see a Linux friendly Sony VIAO very soon. It would be great if Canon and a few other manufactures started to realise that OSS drivers will help price and sales. I would gladly pay a premium for a Linux friendly digital camera. Now if Creative Labs can also realise the potential, Naw I'm dreaming. I would gladly pay more for effective Linux friendly software and hardware.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
"...you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free --...."
No, no guys -- he's not talking about PC hardware, he means XBox.
If it's not Consolidated Lint, it's just fuzz!
Funny enough, it was women on the design team who dubbed it this, not I or any other guy.
*grin*
http://tomatoide.sourceforge.net/
It works. Almost. I've largely lost interest in it. The reasons why it isn't a practical way to program are legion, and BlueJ is probably a better implementation of the same idea, anyway.
Best feature: You can modify a running program while it's still running.
Tired of SQL? Try a true relational database:
Interesting that he recognizes the commoditification of hardware, but not software, eh? A fine example of:
http://www.skepdic.com/selectiv.html
Did you ever stop to wonder why older or lower-end stuff is so cheap? The people buying the new stuff at much higher prices are essentially subsidizing it.
Well, what they're really subsidizing is the R&D and the factory setup. The very first copy of a new generation of processor costs billions to make; the next one costs 8 or 9 orders of magnitude less. If there aren't enough high-end purchasers to fund the development of faster chips, the old ones won't increase in price, but they won't get much cheaper, either.
Gates is talking the same kind of BS that we've been hearing from 'visionary' "scientists" for around three decades now, and exactly what makes life hard for me and colleagues that try to get computers to do something useful (or fun) with natural language.
Gates and other marketing experts are managing expectations in the wrong direction. They promise something that they cannot realize. What common people understand when Gates talks about "real speech recognition" is a computer that will analyze your input in a noisy environment (where it matters most: out on the street!), contextualize it with what you've said before and with what's on the screen and with all the things that we call 'common sense', and then react accordingly.
A lot of these things are possible in very limited, well-modelled domains. But not in applications for 'real users' that deal with a variety of information. And it won't be there in ten years. There are many hard problems to solve, both in defining what is actually linguistically the case or how to learn it from a corpus, and how to implement processes that happen in parallel in our brains on sequential machines.
It doesn't help if Gates and co promise the world and hope that their scientists will deliver.
"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."
This more or less describes The Matrix:
* People enjoy electrical energy
* They enjoy it in their "homes"
* It's too cheap to meter (the Matrix takes care of everything, baby).
Weird.
-kgj
-kgj
Gates is simply trying to justify the high cost of Windows in an age of $299 computers. This has been one proof of the detrimental effect of MS' monopoly power on the computer market -- that is, if not for MSFT's monopoly Windows would cost $29, not $299 (or whatever). So, to counter this obvious observation he has to argue that hardware, which cannot be electronically "copied" infinitely but must be manufactured in each iteration, is headed towards "zero" and software, which once written can be duplicated and distributed with almost no added expense, is stable in terms of price.
Also worth noting MS, a software company, has been trying to sell its XBox for what many believe is less than the cost of manufacturing in order to boost sales of its software games. He's probably also trying to deflect investor/analyst criticism for lowering the retail price of the XBox to $150.
Bill has so little credibility its amazing MSFT lets him talk in public.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
past 15 years... Now, the while the cost of hardware continues to go down, the cost of software continues to go up. The number of people who are needed to build the massive applications to make use of 10 THz will be huge. Somebody's got to pay the damn programmers, right
Actually, my perception is that the price of software has gone up because before there was a relatively competitive market, and now most of the "bellweather" markets have been taken over by a monopoly with the ability to set its own prices.
The price raises I see for any other reason have been negligable. In fact, if you markets which Microsoft controls to the point where it can (and does) charge whatever it wants, there really doesn't seem to be coherent price movement in any consistent direction. Video games cost about the same.as they did when I was six despite over an order of magnitude more development complexity. Video editing and 3d rendering software... oh wait, we didn't have that at the consumer level 15 years ago. What's left? As far as I can tell it cost tens of thousands of dollars or something for a UNIX license 15 years ago, and tens of thousands of dollars or something for a departmental UNIX support contract from IBM today.
Yes, I know you said "discard Microsoft" but the fact is, you're talking about is something which stems from Microsoft wholly. "You should pay a lot more money for software these days" isn't reasonable, or a truth. It's just something Microsoft has convinced you of.
This isn't a Microsoft thing...this could easily be an IBM thing or an Adobe thing, etc
Interesting you mention IBM, because they, like Apple, are primarily working on the model right now of using hardware to drive software sales in a sort of "package" way that blends the line between the two-- you just buy a z390 or whatever and a support contract. But that isn't quite the process Gates is describing... or is it? When you get down to it, you can think of a mac as paying a couple thousand dollars to run OS X, and those $100 packages just being upgrades. I dont' know many people who buy G5s to run Linux.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
PCs don't cost less over time.
My Apple IIc and add-on's cost $2000 when I got it. And the PC I'm planning on buying for Half-Life 2 and Doom III will cost, you guessed it, $2000.
Now, sure, other appliances in your home may have more and more computing power, and they're certainly reaching more and more affordable prices. But the point is, people are willing to pay top dollar for the latest and greatest in computing horse-power. That's not going to change.
Education is the silver bullet.
He is not even close. 10 years is not going to
see any major break throughs. We had visual
programming in the past and no one liked it.
Speech recognition is not much better then 5
years ago. Ditto for writing recognition.
30 years maybe.
We've already hit the edge of usefulness with a lot of hardware capabilities. When we have pocket-sized hard drives that can store a year's worth of movies, they won't be able to raise the storage bar - they'll have to lower the cost to stay competitive. Your typical home computer is already plenty fast to answer email, play music, and even play full motion video. How much more speed does the average consumer need?
Certainly there will always be hotrodders who need to eek the last bit of speed out of their system that's already beyond most people's comprehension, but that'll be an increasingly smaller niche market as processors get faster and cheaper.
As for visual programming, that's the way most of the best programmers do it already, they just do it in their head. A typical chunk of code can be visualized as a box with a set of tubes. You hook the input tube of this chunk to the output tube of that chunk, then abstract the entire structure to be represented as a higher level of box with tubes. It'll take a learning curve, but unconnected tubes are a lot easier to spot than uninitialized variables.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
some code will still have to be written tho, most will be while, if, case and other conditions that is hard to set useing a visual tool. but to build the general flow of the program you would just take a if part out of the toolbox, drag the outputs from other places and plug it onto it, write up the conditions and move on to the stuff triggerd behind it by looking at the true/false marked stuff comeing out of it :)
:)
i may not want to build a kernel this way or any other hardware related program but anything that you would use something like visual basic for it would work nicely and would be so easy to understad, just follow the line to the breaking point in the program
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I guess it is all that TOC FUD by microsoft that confuses Bill; if you can make the software cost of running Windows disappear in the TOC "analysis", then hardware cost is no challenge to calculate as close to zero.
bring it on! --- JFK
and 640k should be enough for everyone....
i dont care about gate's predictions
The big LCD screens eat as much power as anything and spinning the harddrive/cd/dvd isn't free either. (I won't even mention the trend of powerful GPUs in notebooks. Oops too late!) Popping a 0.1W processor in there isn't going to get you a PDA-like lifetime out of a notebook. The Pentium M and Mobile Athlon already cut back on the power consumption drastically when asked too.
In the end, I think most people find it's easier to find a plug or carry a spare battery.
1. in the early '80s, japan inc. was trying to achieve a 5th generation language.
2. in the mid '80s, certain software companies attempted 'case' enviornments.
3. in the early '90s we see the emergence of something called 'patterns'.
4. in the mid '90s we see the emergence of something called 'UML'.
5. in the late '90s we are coming to grips with something called the web.
6. in the early 2000's we are now seeing the merging of all of the above.
its at this point that the definition of programming will change, yet again...
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
... or are you trying to sneak an "In Soviet Russia" joke on us? ;)
That's a lovely little device for the money.
640k will be enough for anybody.
Why would someone pay that much when they didn't have to? Maybe because they will have no choice. Secure Computing DRM, etc means you wouldn't want to let some insecure software run on your hardware. DCMA could do something like copy right the bootloader or BIOS so you have to get a license to work with it.
You have to do it slowly though, so people don't notice your slipping the reigns on. A little bit at a time, let them get used to it, then do the next part.
Printers have started down this path. Imagine if computers do too. Damn, my PC has a Virus... well I might as well just get a new one - cheaper then buying AV software.
You make fine points, and I was exaggerating my position somewhat for contrast. I think I have the education you describe, but some things I missed sorely when I went out into the real world:
(1) API, library, and IDE assessment. Choosing what to depend on is a sticky wicket, with huge monetary consequences for wrong decisions early. In fact, choosing the right language or library to greatly simplify a problem was viewed as cheating. (Your langauge has good hash tables built in? No Fair, go recode in C)
(2) Experience extending old programs that are so large that there's no possible way to read the code. 3000 lines was about the biggest program I was ever asked to work on.
(3) Coding indirection and abstraction at the right granularity, instead of the smug back-patting granularity that later turns out to be useless. (I'm still learning this one today)
Nostra-dufuss.
HTML was never intended to be WYSIWYG. Even the ideal WYSIWYG editor would only show you what the page would look like in one particular browser on one particular machine. Why would you want that?
"...that software will not be written but visually designed"
This brings to mind the scene in the movie Swordfish where the main character creates a computer virus by just moving spinning blocks around the computer screen. The sad thing is that after watching that scene, several of my non-geek friends thought that was how software is actually created...
if hardware is free [==cheap] then there will be a lot more ppl with the hardware [==the platform]. so you can sell more software.
since software is produced once and copied for free [almost], it can be sold cheaper at larger volumes, much more so than physical goods.
this factor works against your argument that more people are required to build more and bigger applications (which is true as well though).
it's hard to predict the future.
particularly billg (of "640k should be enough for anyone"-fame) has never been very good at it. CEOs tend to see opportunities, and i think this is how billg's "vision" should be interpreted. wishful thinking of a CEO / CTO.
Bill wants folks to subscribe to applications like cable TV or something. You get your free computer, but are stuck with a high total cost of ownership paying $2.50/month for your screen saver (like for cell phones), $1.00 to open a word document...there is a special today for printing at 10 cents/page.... Can you imagine the intrusive spyware they would toss in?
We shall see how the game unfolds.
Bush=Moron=-1 Troll/Flamebait (100% of the time...good thing I have Mod to burn!)
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Bill Gates' idea of free is "at no additional cost" over and above Windows. As it seems to me, it is pretty much free now, compared to years ago. People will pay for hardware to get what they want - they will pay for software to get what they want. But if, Bill gives everyone a new computer with every Windows purchase, they will buy Windows just to get free stuff.
Unfree stuff drives innovation.
This also explains his Windows-BIOS integration model. Think X-box, or maybe the recent Slashdot story about putting a full PC in a Win XP box. (Don't count on autodetection of what box it is in and booting Redhat when appropriate.)
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
I realize that you are trying to be funny, but you appear to be confused on one important point. OSS hackers are not overly concerned with the cost of the aforementioned text. They are concerned with the freedom to use it without constraints. It's a human rights issue, not a money issue.
-Hope
at this point in time, i'm no longer doubting anybody.. becuz usually when ya do, it ends up happening anyway, and you end up looking like an ass.. so we'll see what happens
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
If you are trying to do detailed logic rather than just bring already written libraries together, a visual language may not be worse than something like Java. It may also not be better. I do think it makes a nice programming model for bringing together existing modules of code though. (as in LabVIEW Express)
Of course, as in any other kind of choice between programming languages, it all depends on the specific problem domain.
The trend for hardware declining in price was the result of a monopoly being defeated, the same will occur to software once there is more competetion.
See subject.
Umm, we had really good handwriting recognition back in 1992.. Printed or cursive.. The Newton was amazing - had it been a bit smaller and not been abandoned, we'd still have it.
People found that they'd trade that for the PalmPilot's Graffiti interface, where they learned NEW ways to write (rather than training the Newton how THEY wrote).
If it comes again, it won't be new. Better, obviously, because of increased processing power. But not new.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
Not quite!
:-)
Free MS keyboards and mice! Woohoo!
1. The hardware is locked down, X-box style. Hardware manufacturing is a capital-intensive business. It will not manufacture itself, nor will anyone develop faster/better hardware for free.
2. Software companies pay the hardware manufacturers to lock down the boxes, which are either sold or rented at subsidized prices to the customer/victims. The whole concept is to quietly deploy DRM while loudly advertising the subsidized pricing.
3. Visually "designing" an app involves nothing more than choosing the location of toolbars and buttons on IE.
4. The new PCs are little more than launching platforms for an "MS Office appliance". A fair number of PCs out there exist for the sole purpose of running office. Office is the portion of the M$ empire that is hardest for OSS to elimintate.
So it all comes down to this: Bill wants to get people focused on saving money via cheap hardware, because he can subsidize that in the short run and lock out competitors in the long run.
The "Net PC" had this kind of business model. It failed. Those who fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it.
Do you still think he's intelligent?
Computer science is grand... too bad it attracts such a large population of pompous blowhards (it's nice that they take the time to talk to us unwashed masses here on /. every once in a while). Come to think of it, this could probably be said of the vast majority of academia.
He misses crucial difference between hardware and
software - replication of software is MUCH
cheaper.
Caesars 0wn3r explained it perfectly in the other post :)
..monocular(?), where each ring/section had an embossed letter (f, l, a, and x). When in a hurry to get his totally sweet self from A to B, Bobo - at position A - put point B in his sights, cranked the zoom to the max, spelling the word and *zzzzaaaapp!* ...there he was. Pure childhood magic *sniff*
Small addition: The awesome Bobo had a telescope
668.5
You seem to be a bit confused about one of the practical differences between the MS approach to computing and a unix-like system. Where a product like Windows 95 couldn't take advantage of large amounts of RAM, a unix system on hardware from the same period could. So, you could have, as I have right here in front of me, a P166 with 512Megs of RAM running a KDE desktop and it's not slow at all.
Conversely, you might have a P4 that only has 128Megs of RAM and that might make you think that KDE was slow on a P4, but in fact you simply wouldn't be using an approriately assembled system. Unix-alike systems always required much more RAM than DOS based systems. That's not bloat, that's history that you apparently haven't learned yet.
Microsoft can only make money, with free hardware, if the box is locked down to prevent it running software that isn't authorized by Microsoft. It's not hard to see that this is precisely MS's strategy. The Xbox is just the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately MS are not too hot with security and for at least a few years we can expect PCs to still be hackable even when supposedly locked down. But eventually MS will learn, as they always do. And then we'll all be screwed.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Huh? Where are the speech and handwriting recognition systems that work really well but require more CPU power than typically available? The current hardware requirement for Dragon Naturally Speaking 7 is a 500MHz Pentium III. ViaVoice only requires a Pentium II. If more CPU power would help, those products would be using it.
"How likely is it we'll get "visual editors" for complex systems"
Does the Lego Mindstorms "program editor" count?
* Take bright yellow "for...next" piece, and place on page
* Attach it to end of program
* Attach bright red "toggle variable x" pievce, and attach it to the middle of the for loop
I can only assume the lego people have 8000x4000 pixel screens or something...
..Bill Gates. I like to sniff my money all day long, which in doing so makes me really really fucking high so I come up with predictions like these. It's good to be me :)
I think you're talking about psDooM (Credit to grub as it was posted earlier)
I teach at a community college in Minnesota. I have trouble making out the handwriting of around 20% of my students, and I guarantee you that I have better pattern-recognition skills than a consumer computer 10 years from now will have.
Hey now, Dreamweaver is pretty close to being good as a WYSIWYG HTML editor, and the code editor is second to none, it inherits a lot of code from Allaire Homesite after Macromedia bought them. I use this stuff day in day out, and I'm telling you, it's good stuff.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Worst.
Post.
Evar.
Riiight.
That would make sense in bizarro world.
The cost of hardware will never approach zero like he says it was, unless all innovation is stifled, and all technology is perfect. Like we are only going to be working on 3 gig processors in the future, like technology is a commodity like milk or butter.
This is an insane assumption... and you would think that a billionaire would have a better grasp on basic economics.
billg isn't very good at predicting the future? right, that monopoly thing just fell on his lap. he didn't have anything to do with it.
The real trend line Mr. Gates missed is the trend towards computing platforms being simply service delivery vehicles. Savvy business people are already moving to this model.
This is a difficult model for Microsoft to see, since it cuts at the heart of their business model which is based on the IP of their software. Some within MS do get it, but it is hard to turn a big ship.
The real challenge for the FOSS community is to recognize that in order to avoid vendor lockin there must be standard interface protocols for the evolving service delivery models. For example if the US or other governments (or large enterprises for that matter) would adopt OASIS as a common document storage standard, then vendor lockin for document management can be avoided.
The growth and adoption of the Internet is a good analogy in this regard. The Internet did not fragment as some predicted because interoperability was a key driver for the consumers of Internet services.
In the same way the adoption of key standards further up the protocol stack will be a brake to single vendor lockin. It will take the active participation of user to prevent the natural tendencies of software houses to lock customers into their products. What we as users should be demanding is service interoperability.
Just as I can use my Nokia cellphone to talk to someone using a Motorola cell phone, I should not be required to use MS Word in order to send a document to someone who happens to use MS Word.
Microsoft wants the world to be a monoculture where they control the software gene pool. This is very dangerous to the health of the software industry as a whole.
Well, not necessarily. You're assuming that all software users need the same thing. They don't -- and a number of individual "niche" industries exist. In the industry I'm in, everbody already has computers and have for years. There's no new sales to be made. So software prices keep going up. Luckily, so do feature sets, so people have more and more they can do with things.
Besides, the "more people == more sales == lower price" argument is repudiated by the other equation: "more people == more features needed + more bugs found == more tech support + more programmers == roughly the same price." After all, this isn't OSS, where a tool has a single purpose and a single use.
Also, Bill G has been great at predicting the industry. That's why DOS, and later Windows, took off so well...Bill played both the business and consumer markets with the same tool and one both. His book reads like Meine Kampf of the computer world, and a good deal of it has come to pass already. Also, keep in mind he never said the "640k" line, which I thought everybody knew.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
What's so "ugh" about visual design? Slashdotters will "ugh" at it because Bill Gates said it, then rip off Microsoft's next visual design product when it comes out.
Just like how they "ugh" at Windows' alleged "bad" inteface yet rip off its taskbar, start menu, widget locations, dialog boxes, and more.
Hehehehehe. Watch the aging tycoon grow slowly more demented.
No kidding. I'm typing this on a system that was just given to me for free in exchange for assembling a new system for a brother in-law. I tried and tried to talk him out of it and told him it was just going to be hotter and use more power, but he insisted he needed an upgrade although he couldn't tell me why or even tell me what he used the computer for. When it was all done and we reinstalled the same old software it ran just like it had before --he's not a gamer and he doesn't watch movies on his PC, heck we got him a DVD burner because that's the new thing but I'm sure he'll use it rarely if ever. He connects to the Net on a modem only occasionally.
After all was done, I could see it started to sink in on him that he had just tossed six hundred bucks down the drain.
Rinse lather repeat and we're going to see hardware prices come down because sales will plummet. I have to agree with BG. The people sustaining prices were brainwashed and just like this character, they're gonna start waking up big time.
No, it's in Korea hammering out new Kia parts. India gets it next, to do tech support when the outsourcing firms begin phase II outsourcing to sub-outsourcers.
Hel-lo. Wel-come to Gate-Way Cust-om-er Supp-ort. How may I As-sist you to-day?
I just got a chill.
Seriously, hardware IS cheap these days, but it's
:)
like the cell phone industry, where can you buy
a 10$ cell phone? you can't? Oh... yeah, that's
because you can't buy JUST A PHONE, the components
are cheap enough, but they have to throw in all this
other crap and keep adding more and more
until it continually costs $50-100.
Anyway, Gates is a punk, why is anyone listening to him?
No... I didn't RTFA.
Marketing genius, but maybe not so hot on tech
I got a whole stack of it sitting upstairs. I have about 500Megs of various sticks of 4, 8 and 16 megs. It's yours if you want it.
It's true, if 640K is all you need, then hardware is now free. I'm a cheap bastard, but I'll give it to ya.
This is just the beginning of DRM sneaking in agenda. They want you to have only their box, in order to put you under their control. They are willing it so much they will give you a free box. The first one. Once you get baited, you will pay hard for the second one five years later.
There you are, staring at me again.
Yes Bill, just like other household appliances have become free and we just licence the operating system. Like the home theater, VCR etc.
He is exacly backwards.
The cheap will get cheaper, the best of it will remain expensive and the interface will be free.
However, if the last fifteen years of microsoft dominance were a business phenomenon but a technological aberration, software prices may just be in a real overhang due to correct in the next few years. There has to be some sort of economic entropic balance between hardware machines and the software that runs on them -- perhaps modded by the productivity gained. If this pseudo-natural system is not in balance, it will (eventually) correct itself. -wheatking and pretty things.
At the risk of shooting myself in the face....
:P
I would say that right now we have officially reached the point where 2 year old hardware is more than adequate to do everything excluding gaming/video encoding etc.
My computer is 3 years old and still works fast enough for everything...I dont think the newest version of windows has ever ran on such old technology. And since hardware speed doubles every about year...this trend will be exponential. So in 10 years, the newest OS will run on maybe 8 or 9 year old computers is my best guess...
Although predicting the future is like russian roulette...if you win its fun, but most people end up losers
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
It has already been created, for instance ladder logic. It allows for less technical people to create a working program on top of a software interpretation layer.
Personally, I can write a better, faster program in C than ladder.
I think it is a cool idea but I don't see it "overtaking" hard coding.
As are all the others who think they can extrapolate the fall in hardware costs over the last n years into the next n years. Deflation in the hardware market has been driven by growth. Build faster computers more cheaply and more people will buy them. That's worked up until now, but it won't work indefinitely.
People's computer needs are finite. People buy new computers because they want to do more, faster. The industry will do it's best to keep us on the upgrade treadmill (and Gate's is one of the main contributers in this area) but it can't go on indefinitely - there's a limit to how much processor time you can waste with a word-processor, and ultimately they'll just be no point getting a new computer.
This in turn will have it's own effect on price - there will be a further downward price adjustment as price becomes a more important factor than performance, but hardware is never going to be free, unless it's that stupid kind of "free" that means "software costs so much we can build the price on the hardware into the cost of the software". But that is gonna be tricky - as open source becomes better and more organised, it will apply downward price pressure to the rest of the market.
the word "free" doesn't appear at the beginning of a sentence. Or was there some question-begging going on here about "free as in open source" vs. "free as in beer"?
I think that hardware will never be free. Yeah there maybe services that will provide hardware like DSL modems and cable boxes, but that is not free. There are rental fees attached to those services or contracts which want you to keep the service for time period. In future companies may offer hardware with a service but I bet 1 billion dollars that there will be some form of rental fee attach to said service. Oh and visual programming; nope I don't think so. If every one thought visually then visual programming would work. I think that software maybe free unless it is highly suited to making money and if it's not making money then it should be saving money other wise it will be a video game.
... and why it won't work or shouldn't work.
Hardware is something tangible. I have a video card and I can either install it, hold it in my hand and look at it, or sell it to someone else. Software is made up of bits. I can't hold (only the media), I can't see it (only when running), and I can sell it (with MS heading toward subscription style software, users won't be able to sell software that they bought to others). It's much more tangible for me to justify spending 400$ on hardware than spending 400$ on software. If computing moves to a server-centric model, then hardware for the user will be very cheap and the server will do most of the processing.
This is bad for the consumer and good for corporations. A user gets locked in to a monthly contract to use processing power (in which users will be charged how much processing power can be used, IBM can do this now), net access, and monthly subscription charges for the software. A user ends up paying some 100$ a month to use a computer in which they don't own any of the hardware or any of the software in which a 500$ computer (software including) can do the same (in which they can resell).
Wasn't networked computers supposed to be the big thing in the mid 90s? It failed miserably. Bill Gates thinks that as long computing power increases as it has that these old ideas will magically fix themselves. I'm sorry to say but the problem wasn't processing power, the entire system has inherrent faults that are too big of a problem to ignore, especially considering the alternative (a regular pc).
Am I the only one but has anyone else noticed Bill Gates's tunnel vision lately? "The Emperor has no clothes"
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Please, put the $ BEFORE your dollar amounts...
This coming from the figurehead of a company that has lost close to $2 billion "selling" hardware.
The hardware will be free and programming will be visual memes belong next to the we will be driving flying cars by 1999 and aliens are among us memes of times past. They sound cool, and anyone can shut their eyes and dream pretty things with them, but they are still ridiculous.
Everything has a cost, in money, labor, thought, design, and plain old hard work. If a company needs software that doesn't yet exist, or serious customization of existing software, it's hard to believe that it will stop paying people to hand-design, hand-build, and hand-optimize these systems to maximize profit. It is equally hard to believe that commercially viable visual programming tools can be made so fine grained as to be competitive in power and versatility with conventional programming.
Contrary to many people here at slashdot, I agree whole-heartedly with your views on hardware and software. So to show support for your position, I will gladly take hardware with no software installed to prove your point. Please send me the following hardware:
Apple G5 Dual 2GHz
2 - 23" Cinema Displays
And if you any lying around:
Dual Opteron 2.0 MP (minimum 4GB RAM)
2- 21" LCD monitors
If you will ship me the hardware above, I will gladly pay the $129 for OS X 10.3 if the G5 does not come with it installed. I know it a hardship on my part but I will make the sacrifice. As for the Opteron, I will have to sacrifice hours of my life to download something called "Linux" on something called "the Internet." It is a strange, magical world. Perhaps, you have heard of it?
Sincerely,
UnknowingFool
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In other news... No one will ever need more than 512k of memory. Also, comming up at 6, the Internet is a passing fad.
Hardware will never be free unless someone invented a "matter duplicator". You put in a CPU, resistor, whatever to the device and voila! a duplicate will pop out. Reproducing or duplicating software costs nothing. Reproducing or duplicating hardware needs materials and money.
Eventually, compilers were make sophisticated enough to compile themselves (after a bootstrap). I suppose visual programming will eventually make this transition too, but it will probably be a framework that is unfamilar to many "programmers" (e.g., how many folks that use YACC or BISON really understand pseudo-LALR grammar parser generators).
A company that derives nearly all of its profits from software, predicts that all future tech related profits will come from software. Wow, simply astonishing!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Rational Software already does this. I don't know many programmers who use it, but I do know some high level engineers who use it to dump a bunch of crap on them. I already work with programmers who use Software Programming Tools for Idiots. It doesn't change the fact they are idiots. Bill Gates and his ilk believe that with the right tool anyone can write software. I have worked with computers for a long time, and they are wrong. The truth is given the right tools anyone can build a piece of crap. Just go to your average home improvement store, or watch TLC for a while and you will see that not everyone can do home repair and improvement, but with cheap easy to use tools they will try and make a mess of it. This is even more true in computers, since everyone I know thinks that thier 12 year old kid is a computer genius, because he can install any piece of software they buy.
LET THE MASSES HAVE THEIR TOYS. IT ONLY EMBOLDENS THEM TO MAKE THE STUPID MISTAKES THAT MAKE ME MORE VALUABLE, AND ULTIMATELY DRIVE MY SALLARY UP, UP, UP
And on general principle, the doubters usually turn out to be wrong. We made it to the moon, we have a computer in every house, etc.
And by the year 2000, we all commuted in flying cars, and spent holidays on the moon station.
Really, this part of your argument was just lame (which bugs me, because the rest is solid and well expressed).
Now, go ahead, mod me -1,Troll...
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system,
and possibly program, of all time."
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates)
"There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like
PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft"
-- Bill Gates, Free Market and the LA Times
Gates: Microsoft has not changed any of its plans for Windows. It is
obvious that we will not include things like threads and preemptive multitasking
in Windows. By the time we added that, you would have OS/2.
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Notebook", Microsoft Press, (c) 1990--an excerpt from an
interview with Bill Gates and Jim Cannavino, p. 614
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Bill Gates circa 1981
No sig.
He's been wrong about every prediction he's made. He's going to be the king of a 3 foot pile of mud in about ten years. Linux will be his undoing and he knows it. Start selling your stock now willie.
It takes millions of man hours to design and test a bleeding edge processor like the Pentium 4. It costs billions of dollars to build a fab to produce them. This is where most of the cost of hardware comes from with marginal cost being like nothing.
Yeah right. The thing which can be copied infinite number of times without using any natural resources is going to be worth something but hardware which requires huge factories and ungodly amounts of raw materials will be free...
I think Gates has finally become lost in his own fantasies.
I don't know what kind of hardware Bill Gates is planning on working on in the future, but my hardware is made of all kinds of stuff with a non-negligible cost: silicon, glass, plastic, and metal. These things are not free, and will never be free, because they have a nonzero marginal cost (the cost to make another unit once you've made one). The cost will drop, but it can't go below the cost of the actual materials to make the thing in the first place.
However, software is special. The marginal cost of storing bits (making copies of a computer program) is vanishingly small. And as storage gets larger and cheaper this cost will decrease even more. I think Billy Boy is hoping that he can hold on the software-as-a-service paradigm for a while longer, if only those pesky free software folks would stop innovating and giving it away for nothing except the promise that you'll return any improvements. I bet Bill has absolutely no problems with the BSD license (the Winsock library was ripped from a BSD unix)...it's just the GPL's forced sharing that scares the proprietary types.
This will be done by children who will be unaware of your own self-imposed mental handicaps and defeatest attitudes, children who scoff at your scoffing, who have disdain for your disdain. Your world of text programming languages is passing, and will one day be a mere footnote.
This is all well and good; but, please, what are the benefits? What do we gain?
Hieroglyphics were graphics-based, and I doubt there are any who would claim we should move back go glyphs. Smileys and emoticons are rudimentary examples of graphics interspersed with text may be either silly or helpful; me, I find them silly and rather redundant, and add very little content. Similarly, those "Walk" and "Don't Walk" graphic symbols are useful, but only in a very limited context.
In the matter of expressive grammar, or precise syntax, what do graphics gain us?
As robustness of graphic symbol manipulation goes up, so does complexity, in a nonlinear fashion. Simplicity is an important factor in any system, especially systems we use for design and implementation. A system must be just complex enough to provide complete unfettered expressiveness.
The simplest espression of graphical manipulation in the computer realm concerns logic gates. There are not many people who continue to design via logic gates; a lot of hardware these days is designed with textual programming languages.
Granted, this is only one example of the opposite happening, moving from on-screen symbol manipulation to text-based programming languages.
Of course, mathematics is a perfect example of symbol manipulation that is perfectly simple, yet infinitely expressive. However, very few people use Mathematica as a programming environment.
Yes, just because I can't imagine it doesn't make it impossible; but just because *you* can't imagine it, doesn't make it so.
Just my opinion, of course, but I feel it isn't pride or blindness to the future that makes me hesitant to accept graphical symbol manipulation as a future language; it is history itself, as I perceive it.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Yes, the Jetsons would seen to. But this is because as a society we are the product of media. We as a society were exposed to science fiction over time and creativity in all areas is affected by this. Not necessarily 100% as new ideas are not all based on old ones but a a lot. I personally, in '97, started using a big screen TV as a monitor, placing myself across the room from it. This was not original, and I even called it the command center model, like in Star Trek. It was/is very handy. Even now, few have adopted it. It is an eye catcher to techie visitors and maybe non techies. No regrets. I use mozilla as the browser because it is best modifyable for screen sizes of fonts and the like and tweaked the os too for this. I would recommend.
Software will be visually designed... and then manually replaced!
I think that implementing software doesn't take as much time as designing it and the design phase is independant of the implementation language. Therefor total design time is hardly affected by the chosen language unless you design on the fly (design while you type code), which is a bad thing in my opinion anyways.
So you ALWAYS design your ENTIRE PROGRAM before you start coding? You obviously haven't worked on any sort of real project, with intermediate deadlines, changing requirements, extensibility requirements, etc., etc.
If you're trying to do a 2 year project and after the first 1.5 years you still have no code, and therefore nothing even resembling a prototype, because you're still designing, don't think you're going to get funded.
The reason PSpice gives you a Visual is so that you can lay out the electronics exactly like you have on a board. Also, it is easier for you to see what you are doing that way. But it has a very complicated back end. (I am assuming yuo are an EE here) It uses Nodal analysis at ever node when simulating or doing anything. You are not actually programming anything when you use PSpice, only supplying some variables.
So how does this have any application to programming? If you meen as in choosing blocks of code to do things, wouldn't someone at some point have to write those blocks? Or re-write them, or write new ones from a lower level language?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
All MS does is copy other companies like Apple, so how do they know where it will be in 10 year? =P
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1524286,00.as p
For interface design, to a notable degree, NeXT/Apple already did it. "Interface Builder" is a nice drag-n-drop tool for making interface resources.
Visually implementing "meat" code without relying on text is another story. It would require an act of God (literally). I'm not even sure if Steve Job's reality-distortion field would suffice.
How the fuck would you show me a 4-dimensional-array??
Visual representations are more concrete than text but they are also inherently limited by our universe's geometry.
Text is limited only by the closure of the universe.
Sure, you can visually link a few tools together, piping output from one into another, and you can click a few boxes and generate a basic SQL query. Wow.
That's great for hello-world level tasks, like calculating the fibonacci series, or defining a data model. Sure, you could essentially write a 'Notepad' equivalent with twenty clicks because it's mainly one big text-entry dialog with a file and edit menu, all of which use standard functions and know how to interact with the text dialog.
Now write the grammar-checker. Or, write a program that generates a 3d-model from a list of surface descriptions in XML format. Write a 'bot' that navigates through the 3d-world described while considering tactical and strategic concerns.
At some point all of the trivial clickable stuff is done and you need to do the heavy lifting - things for which no standard dialogs are written. And you always reach this point, if you try to go at all off the beaten path (you know, innovate). For the bot example you could 'click and drag' some inputs to customize an already-written bot AI if it was exposed as an API, but you couldn't make it do anything truly new.
And your falacy in assuming we (the doubters) will be proven wrong is that there's a difference between doubting we'll ever reach the moon and doubting that we'll reach it with method X. I don't doubt that programming simple things will become easier, I already see this in fact. I merely doubt that it'll happen in a drag-and-drop interface and that this data modelling will ever be on the cutting edge.
It'll come along and handle all the trivial stuff, like letting users script application usage, or define 'macros' in programs like Photoshop where you drag the output of a filter onto another filter, into a loop of filter and sharpen till a certain point, to a resize function, etc.
We'll get to the moon, but your hot-air balloons won't be how - not that we won't have hot-air balloons, but it's painfully obvious to someone in the aerospace field that hot-air balloons are of limited use in travel between planetary bodies (though inflatable balloons did function well as a landing mechanism), much like clickable interfaces might be used as part of many systems, but not as the core.
the day may well come in your lifetime where megacpu machines are not in your home, but downtown, a utility, that's metered in CPU seconds...
no local hard drive, no local ram, (other than video) and the whole system consists of 5 pieces of silicone.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I don't think we can build the software he's describing in such a short time, but maybe it is a good goal rather than just an endorsement of VB style coding.
Look at the size of some data files. Audio, Video, databases with 10s of thousands of fields and millions of subjects. When the average data object was a book, libraries could use a card catalog with very a linear ruleset. (IOW the Dewey decimal system is much like a conventional programming algorythm). If a data object was an article in a magazine, an index that used one or two pages was generally sufficient.
As data objects have grown, AND the amount of information some user wants on them has grown in turn, we are coping by a linear (or pseudo-linear) scaleing up, which is somewhat like a magazine adding an index of all articles since publication, but only updating that index once a year or less.
But the user wants a non-linear amount of support. Not only is he, in effect, wanting to read more books, but he won't settle for the librarian saying "We have a copy, so if it's not on the shelf, it must be checked out.". Now he wants to know if there is a copy elsewhere, and if it's physically present or just recorded in that indexing system, and if it's a nearby library could they hold it for him until he drives over to get it, and so on.
Jumping from the metaphor to the situation. We have a choice. Either we code in a pseudo-linguistic form, or we find some other model. Coding in pseudo-languages means the software to handle a data object will get large, sometimes faster than the data itself. Many of us have been thinking in terms of data objects such as Video, where the software to let a user view a 2 hour movie doesn't have to be any larger than it is for a 30 second clip, and not recognizing the counter case, where above a certain size, we have to add indexes of indexes, then indexes of indexes of indexes. What happens when the CIA wants language translation software that can recognize colloquial usages? How long will we be 5 years from practical speech recognition or visual recognition software?
Who is John Cabal?
And look at us now? I'm coding and he's dead.
activestudios web design
You know...I've tried and tried to use the 'visual' SQL generators...and but for all the simplest models...I cannot work it right. I can much more easily and quickly write SQL by hand. Dunno, I'm usually very visually oriented in many cases, but, for complex queries...I can do it with a text editor better than I can the ones like you described...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Isn't this a little bit, uh, backwards?
I think Billy should get into the hardware business and leave us the fsck alone. Look at it this way: If he completely abandons the software business, then free and commercial software will appear to fill whatever gaps, if there be any, that his software currently fills. But all the software in the world, no matter how free, and no matter how easy to copy, is not worth Jack Q. Schitt if it doesn't have hardware to run on.
Therein lies the secret to Billy's failure as a a chief architect or whatever his title is. He should have realized that instead of fighting Linux, OOo, and whatever else he's spending billions on these days, he could put his people to work creating the next generation hardware, completely abandon software, and profit from the fact that nobody will "pirate" his PHYSICAL product, and instead will buy it to run the software they get for free!!!
It's an INGENIUS form of Microsoft Tax, and people won't even mind paying it because they'll receive a tangible product for the money. Not some copy that didn't cost Microsoft two pieces of shit of some operating system that doesn't work.
"Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware
..as opposed to something physical like a
costs you can almost think of hardware as
being free"
Wouldn't gates just love that.. everyone gets the
hardware for free and therefor can justify
paying $199 for every copy of Windows.
It seems they are really scared that people
might actually realize that the stuff they
are selling is just characters on a page and
only has whatever value we decided it has.
router which has actual components that cost
money to manufacture.
Im not saying it costs zero money to
manufacture code, but they are fundamentally
different.. its hard to build a car out of
thin air in your basement, even if you spend
all your time doing it you will simply _need_
to find parts and transport them to the
build site. And good luck making a copy of the
car when you're done.
With software all you need is a text editor
and a compiler both of which can be had
for free.(and a computer of course)
Then all you need is time and skill (which you would
also need if you were building a car).
When you are done you can copy it a billion
(or even more) times absolutly free.
The point Im trying to make is that with both
tasks you will need tools, a mechanic needs
wrenches and screwdrivers and a programmer
need computers and compilers.. the difference
is that a programmer _only_ needs his tools to
create something.. a mechanic need additional
physical supplys(metal, plastic, rubber) in
addition to his tools, and without those
additional materials the mechanic can create
nothing at all.
So Bill, how is it that the one who needs
physical material in order to create a product
can do it almost for free, but the one who
doesnt need material supplys to create their
product gets to charge a hefty price?
You are an evil and manipulative man, Bill.
What is it with Crichton's obsession with inefficient software interfaces? Granted, Jurassic Park and hopefully Disclosure were written before VRML and Microsoft Bob were recognised as useless, but still, he shouldn't have jumped on such a stupid bandwagon.
Gates says hardware, not software, will be free? "Because we're going to remain the LARGEST hurdle to computer ownership and software development!"
And this howler:is another longstanding claim, decades old.
Progress comes incrementally, except in Marketing Space. This guy's past public predictions have been bogus, why should these ones be any different?
(I suspect his private predictions, like "we will crush OS/2" have a better track record, but he doesn't share those ones except via their manifestations!)
Do you really believe that the cost of programmers has anything to do with how expensive software is?
Hardware probably costs just as much to develop. How many highly-paid engineers do you think it takes to design, prototype and bring to production a new generation of chips? How about video processors.
And of course, hardware costs much more to mass-produce.
The myth that software is so labor intesnive to devalop is just that. Yes, it costs a lot to produce. No, it doesn't cost appreciably more to produce than many other products.
A Hollywood blockbuster can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, but still gets 'sold' quite profitably at a very reasonable price.
PC hardware remains cheap because it is a large, competitive market. Microsoft software remains expensive (compared to cost of mass-production) because because it's not in a competitive market. When competition emerges, you get IE for 'free'...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Consoles is the model BG must be thinking about when he says hardware will be free. For the most part every game console out there is subsidised by software sales. How else can they sell an XBox for $149? The hardware is cheap but not quite that cheap. A few games and a subscription to Live pays off the difference fairly quickly. Then it keeps generating revenue that hardware sales alone wouldn't. BG has always wanted a subscription model and here he has it.
It seems he might as well predict the war-machines of the future will stand up straight and walk on two legs. On the other hand, as programming languages become more and more modularized I really could see activating them and configuring them to be a simple matter of drag and drop, point and click.
Some good points (but "Access"? No need for profanity, Sir - and if that's the cost to create databases visually, I win! ;) ). I do believe there will be (and that there already exist) domains where visual design/'programming' works quite well.
The HTML example wasn't meant as a literal one, or that it follows that every visual design approach is inherently broken. A clearer example might have been the command line (the *n*x one) - decades old and non pareil for quite a lot of stuff, regardfless of the billions spent in GUI development. It's even coming back (OSX, Windows).
Of course. Languages evolve, as do all things. The entire software/hardware ecology evolves - that's kind of my point too. Evolution also means that what we can (or want to) achieve with programming will evolve. And that we never can take 'everything' into account. Moving targets, the lot of them. Perhaps the frameworks/systems needed to visually create tomorrow's applications will handle all the special cases, and make visual creation of "everything" faster, more powerful/flexible, etc. I'm a doubter ;) (and have been wrong before).
Microsoft might have the magic bullet, with their gargantuan .NET framework, managed code etc. VisualEverything *shudder* might become feasible - we'll see, nay, visualize ;).
668.5
Increased demand raises prices, not lowers it. Economics 101.
Cheap electronics are cheap because the technology has been around so long it's been optimized to the moon and back. There isn't much more optimization you can squeeze out of it to lower the cost more than they already are. So increased competition in the market for this stuff wouldn't lower the price much.
The original poster is right. Low demand coupled with highly optimized manufacturing (thanks to competition in the past) keeps the price of old hardware low. Old inventory, which companies try to get rid of below manufacturing cost to recover at least some of their initial investment, drives the price even lower. If demand were to shift towards older hardware, its price would go up, not down.
Yes, you may be right, that they do already write software "visually". It's just that a manager comes by occassionally and "shakes" the terminal...
But what happens when the Doom baddie "kill -9"s YOU?
Sorry. That should read:
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Lewis Strauss? From the 50s? Cheap energy as from rubbish?
So Back to the Future was a documentary?
"Ever build an SQL query with Access? Pretty simple if you ask me. How about an excel spreadsheet formula?"
Yes and I've found the business needs now require nested queries and formulas that adapt to changing needs, and this is accomplished using code that rewrites them. The graphical view does help, but every time a complex task is made easier, it raises the bar for everyone else.
I remember when Microsoft advertised how the scroll mouses would save so much time that you "could take fridays off". All it really means is you have a new responsibility and your former coworker is out on the street looking for work.
Umm, excuse me, but Bill Gates was the guy that said that he envisioned Windows being in everything from home appliances to automobiles. And everybody just laughed at him. You don't find anbody laughing now that Windows *is* beginning to turn up in everything from home appliances to automobiles. In fact, everybody else is trying to get in the game themselves. Gates may not have been a visionary on any specific technology, but as far as the big picture goes he saw the future of the computer way before most others did.
But we are talking about mister, "640K is more than enough" here and a man who underestimated the importance of the Internet. Now if it were Steve Jobs saying it, I would be impressed.
Visual design ...
So, Microsoft will be porting Piet to .NET?
So, who says code isn't art?
The same people who will debug the visual designer are the same people who debug the compilers of today.
Currently most people work with code. The idea is that eventually most people will work with pictures and a few people will work with code to make that possible. Compare how many people work with C++ compared to ASM now than did decades ago. Same deal. Those who know ASM get paid much more than those who only do C++.
I designed a piece of software in C++ and then used a custom tool created by a bunch of other people to create the same program in a visual compiler. I got the exact same functionality while only dealing with the logic of the code and not the details.
Very nifty. It just takes some getting used to. I prefer to stop at the C/C++ type level. Eventually I'll try to learn ASM and do some fancy pants low level graphics stuff. How low you want to do will determine your value. In the future, people who code with pictures will be relativly cheap labor while as you know more and more of the details your pay goes up.
Same as it is now. It's just a new paradigm and new level of abstraction that's easier to jump in on.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
So what's to keep me from undercutting you and selling a general purpose device that does what the user wants? Do you really think that you will be able to sell these kinds of crippled/owned devices to companies like IBM? Free software gives you true ownership of your computer, that's why big companies are embracing it. It's not too different from why you and I have embraced it. Hardware that does not support free software won't make it. Free softare is even making it's way into devices such as cell phones that are designed simply to provide a subscription service and may never be reporgrammed.
Bill Gates is Blowing Smoke.
That was a business prediction, though, not a technological one. Or, at least, it was a business result.
The speech skills of people have declined so much
that real speech recognition will only cause more problems.
If it's not Consolidated Lint, it's just fuzz!
Actually he really really did say it. You billyg apologists really make me sick.
I intended to make fun of it, but unfortunately, it *might* work .. .
It doesn't look like it will make it easier to understand programs though. See:
click on "define function"
click on "arguments"
click on "green dot", "red dot"
click on "if", "green dot", "greater"
click on "red dot"
click on "swap" "green dot" [to] "red dot"
click on "while", "green dot" "greater"
click on "divide" "red dot" [by] "green dot"
click "select rest(modulo) from previous division"
click on "assign" [to] "blue dot"
click on "red dot" "assign" "green dot"
click on "green dot" "assign" "red dot"
click on "return" "red dot".
Done. Total about 28 clicks.
Click click click you probably get repetitive strain injury until they perfect the direct brain interface. But you need less clicks than letters.
Now what does it do and is it any easier to debug ?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
... only to those who don't mind spending 100s of dollars on software.
Toon Moene.
It's already happening. I think some Unix licenses cost about as much as a Mac...so you can think of buying a Mac as getting an OS X license and you get free hardware.
Someone please remind Intel. They spend BILLIONS setting up fabrication plants. Bill Gate's comment must make them feel soo much better. Now Intel can ask Microsoft for the money to cover the billions of dollars for each plant.
... Whos company makes Visual Studio!
Gnome wasnt built in a day.
So I guess it's a case of "$6.40 ought to be enough for anyone." Doesn't matter, Linux will still undercut them on price.
HTML is hard to make a visual designer for because it's so non standardized, and very very sloppy.
Was that supposed to be sarcasm. Or have you never read these linksHTML 1.0
HTML 2.0
HTML 3.0
HTML 4.1
These are what is know as the standards specification. How Microsoft butchers open standards is completely irrelivent.
Perhaps that would have been better said like this...
HTML is hard to make a visual designer for because IE so non standardized, and coded very very sloppy.
This is priceless a bill gates moment. we need to add bill gates saying software should not be free to the list on constants of the universe. seriously he will never EVER allow windows to be open source and free, so the only thing he could see being free is hardware, which given the complete lack of any evidence that this could happen ( as apposed to the OS movements free software ) defies logic in only a way bill could conjure up. As for his ideas of visually designed software, can we have an IP lawer here please?!, he's been stealing ideas from movies like "paycheck" it's hard to believe this man has written a single line of code if he thinks visual objects are a substute for anything serious. big bubbles and "internet clouds" belong in the planning room only.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Sorry, but Bill Gates is not known for being a technology visionary.
What!??! you mean I need more than 640kb of RAM?
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Conversely, with Microsoft's OS and office software monopoly firmly in place, prices have been going up and innovation has been stagnant. Can you point out any feature added to Word since 1997 that you actually need?
If you assume, as Gates obviously does, that Microsoft's monopoly will still be around in ten years, then his prediction that software will not be commoditized is correct. On the other hand, if OSS breaks Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop, mature software will be free (as in beer) and service will cost money.
Healthy would be if Microsoft were to be relegated to having to actually innovate to earn money while markets that have been around for a while open up to competition and get commoditized. If a software component is so mature that a handful of college students can replicate the functionality in their spare time, professional software makers should have to move on.
We see a little bit of that in the server market where Microsoft is having trouble leveraging its monopoly in order to kill the open source competition. Poor reliability and lack of embraced and extended standards that create lock-in have successfully thwarted all attempts by Microsoft to corner this market. Result: Choice, higher quality and lower prices.
Hopefully, Novell will be able to aggregate and focus the community's effort to dislodge Microsoft from the desktop monopoly sooner rather than later. Also hopefully, the increased visibility of Linux by way of the laughable SCO lawsuit and recent endorsements by HP, IBM and other fortune 500 giants will enable Linux to gain critical mass in this market too.
MS already does this! That's why they keep refusing to release "source code", there isn't any :-P
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Visualize
Microsoft
BOB
The reality is that processes of non-trivial complexity are too hard to develop visually. On any non-trivial Crossworlds or BizTalk application most complex transformations end up taking the form of:
Start -> Run procedure XYZ of {C#/Java/whaterver} code -> Stop
The visual schema designers are too hard to develop non-trivial processes in and it's much easier to write it in a "conventional" programming language.
There are two reasons for this:
i. Screen real-estate is limited by physical constraints that other aspects of computing power aren't - specifically, it's limited by the spacial characteristics of the screen and the resolution of he screen and (ultimately) the eye and the brain's ability to impose structure and navigate a complex diagram.
ii. Visual flow diagrams have relatively little ability to meaningly support abstract programming, so software engineering practices such as functional decomposition, abstract data types (let alone inheritance or higher-order functions) - or even code reuse - have not ever been done well in a visual language.
Check out Morphic (http://www.squeak.org/features/graphics.html) to see the best example of a visual language with any attempt at general programming constructs. Even this is severely limited in the practical levels of complexity that can be attained using it.
Until Someone comes up with a visual "metaphor" (for want of something better to call it) for software development that allows programming abstractions as conveniently as textual code does, I can't see visual programming languages emerging out of their niche markets.
Bear in mind that programmer-free MIS development has been something of a holy grail for 20 or 30 years now (much like artificial intelligence). In spite of 20 or 30 years and many millions of dollars thrown at the problem, no-one has managed to get it right yet. IMO, this is a pipe-dream and only gets more so as IT infrastructure gets more complex.
When I think about Bill Gates and his ability to predict the future, the only thing that reliably comes to mind is "64k of ram ought to be enough for anybody."
Very convenient , for a software company like Microsoft.
Ever build an SQL query with Access? Pretty simple if you ask me. How about an excel spreadsheet formula?
Yep, but if you want to do anything more complicated than a couple of simple joins, it is much faster to code the SQL yourself. I have yet to see a decent graphical tool to replace hand coded SQL.
meh
So I can finally make secure software for windows by just using the big lock icon? About time security on windows was made easy!
SAILING MISHAP
Exactly.
When hardware stops being profitable, IT STOPS BEING MADE. The real costs of the resistors, chips, labor, etc. are the bottom. End of story.
EXAMPLE: The value of a 40MB harddrive may be close to $0 nowadays, but can you still buy one? Hell no, cuz no one can rationalize manufacturing one.
Bill is either drunk on power or scared shitless of free software. Either way, this industry is still driven by HW and performance and until that changes, Bill's on the short end of the stick.
FUNK!
I, for one, am really looking forward. Just imagine how many illiterate people will finally be able to work as programmers. It might be a great breakthrough in open source indeed, especially the number of new mp3 players, which I haven't seen lately as many as I would like to see. Once again, Bill Gates saves the day. Bravo. That is what I call a true innovation. I have one question, though. Will it fit in 640kB together with Microsoft BOB interface? I hope so. Thanks to MS BOB I don't have to use command line any more. Thanks to the new visual programming I won't have to write programs, either. Finally I'll be able to sell that useless keyboard on ebay. Wonderful.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Hey, I can download Open Office for free now, do you think I can walk into Frys or Best Buy and walk out with a PC for free? or download a PC for free? HAHAHA
The historical trend that this claim is based on is actually the softwart to hardware price ratio. It used to be something like 2% of your costs were software based. They now sit around 20% if you are being fairly utilitarian. What Bill actually said was misinterprted a bit: 'In comparison to what Windows will cost your hardware will be virtually free' He then went on to claim 'We'll be gouging you so much for a license, the times square monitors will look reasonable'
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
How can you be certain that visually designed programs will be worse than "linguistically designed*" programs as are done now? Can the poor performance in the past be any indicator? Nope!
:) ). I think future software development will be done in a visual manner. Already, this is happening so it isn't a big revelation.
I actually had a similar vision as Bill Gates (no, I'm not trying to take credit.. just saying it
For example, how many people design GUI elements, like a dialog box, using visual tools? Practically everyone. Hardly anyone does the coding to draw a checkbox, for example, by hand. Of course, this is in its infancy. Therefore, you still need to code the logic behind the GUI. In the future, the code behind the GUI will be visual as well.
Perhaps the best example of how I see software development progressing is UML. Using UML, one designs software using graphical elements and the code is, in theory, automatically (or easily) generated. UML isn't so good right now because it is new. Also, it isn't 100% graphical (because the design environment is still highly geared towards tradional programming eg. you are doing nothing more than showing relationships between classes). But in the future, I expect to see a future version of UML, or something even more advanced become dominant.
(* I call it that because it is somewhat true. Modern day programming is like writing. You use words to carry out a task. There is a lot of similarity between a programming language and a written language).
Having said all that, I don't really agree with Bill Gates about his hardware comment. I am not sure if Bill really means what he says, or if he is just trying to influence the software industry (i.e. since Microsoft is primarily a software company, it is in its interest to downplay hardware). It is difficult for me to see how hardware costs can be almost "free". One of the reasons hardware costs are low now is because the market is a perfect competition. However, my theory is that corporations (or any business) will attempt to monopolize the industry. So the day will come when only a few companies rule each hardware sector. When that happens, I can't see how costs can be low. Already, some industries are being monopolized. The PC video card industry, for instance, is divided up between 2 video card companies (ATI and Nvidia). Around 5 years ago, there were around 6 companies. Video card costs are a huge component of a computer now, whereas they were a small component 5 to 10 years ago. I claim that this is primarily due to the oligopoly that was formed between ATI and Nvidia. The same thing will happen in other sectors. It wouldn't surprise me if, say, there are only 2 or 3 companies that produce memory in 5 years.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
A few years ago, every communication company executive would have told you: "in the future, bandwidth will be free. People will pay for enhanced services. So, let's sell/outsource our network and turn ourselves into a marketing company that makes new services (a software company)".
It turned out this vision was completely and utterly wrong. Companies that believed that (like AT&T) are in the dumps, while cable companies (that own the most precious high-bandwidth infrastructure in existence) are making money like crazy.
Gates is completely wrong. Commodity software will be free (and open source). Hardware will be cheaper, but not free. Specialized/custom software will be the expensive thing.
- Anonycous Moward
I have. It sucked. It doesn't expose very much functionality. To write a complex query you need to use the plaintext editor. For that you need to know SQL.
I've written queries longer than your comment. Yes, they needed to be that long because they were taking a large ammount of data from a large database and filtering on a variety of fields. There is absolutely no way I could have "designed" those queries in the visual editor.
but clearly Microsoft is betting on the trend of higher levels of abstraction become ever more important in the future of computing. Let's look at a brief history of computer programming.
In th beginning programs were most assembly/machine code. No abstraction. Ultimate flexibility and power to control the system, very little help in doing mundane or repetetive coding tasks.
Then came the early higher level languages. Whether procedural or functionally based (or some other paradigm), these gave programmers powerful tools to create more complex programs with only marginal loss in flexibility and power. Later methods such as OOP seekd to improve the levels of abstraction.
More recently, "scripting" languages have started to come into being as able to prototype and in some cases fully develop complete applications. Python and Perl, have less pure control and usually lower performance than languages like C or Fortran, but are much faster to develop in and are usually much easier to debug due to less code needed to solve the same problems.
The question is: what is the next level? Some day I think we'll get to have Star Trek like interfaces to our computers. Ask a question in natural language, which would then presumably be processed into an Ultra-High Level language description the computer can process directly. Obviously this is way off in the future, but I think that the trend is clear: as computers get more powerful we will use ever increasingly high level interfaces to get tasks done, relying on processing power to make up for less efficient algorith representations and a rich set of existing APIs to solve the majority of the problems that any application has to solve.
Microsoft thinks that the next level is a visual development environment. I think this is probably wrong, visual layout is inherently difficult and constraining, source code divided into distinct modules is not limited by spatial dimensions an facilitates searches and queries much more readily.
I think that the Open Source community is currently and a much better route, though through evolutionary rather than revolutionary means. Open source languages like Python (and probably Ruby, which I do not know but a lot of people seem to like) are very high level, easy to learn, and expose a huge number of APIs coded in higher performance languages like C. These APIs solve most of the common problems, and HLLs bring them together to form applictions. When more power or flexibility is neededdevelopers can drop into the lower level languages and develop their own modules which are linked into the HLL. If necessary, this can be done all the way down to the bare metal. A Python application could use C code for certain computationally intensive sections, which may in turn use assembly to take advantage of special instructions on the target architecture.
An even higher level language could be built that uses Python as a lower language when necessary, whihc in turn could use C, etc. The trick is developing a language that makes a significant proportion of tasks significantly easier than Python, or a language like. This will be done I feel, though it may require even richer and more powerful APIs than are currently available.
This progression to increasingly high level textual descriptions certainly meshes better with the Start Trek goal, and does not impose any of the restrictions of a visual environment upon the developer at any stage along the way. it will be interesting to see which method is more successful in the future.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
staffed at the top almost completely with ruthless thugs who would do anything to maintain high profits, including propaganda tactics using government officials as mouthpieces, cutthroat 'acquire and discard'-style patent terrorism and other miscellaneous sabotage.
....
... the, ah, questionable activities of Herbert 'Pug' Winokur and DynCorp ... the quote/unquote suicide of Clifford Baxter ... some hard core shit going down.
No shit. And it's not just nuclear power
Enron, for example. One gets the impression that it was:
(a) a CIA front company
(b) a criminal syndicate front company
(c) both.
Energy market manipulation, massive and sophisticated theft
-kgj
-kgj
Actually, most readers here will probably have heard of Papero, the Japnese robot that can understand colloquial speech, and is being used to make an instant translator.
.NET is just... comfy. You can sit down with an idea in your head, chisel it out, and have it working within a day. It doesn't freak out like C++ over minor syntax errors, and will even automatically add some things (like "Then" in an if-then-else statement.)
...so yeah, I can definitely see movement towards a paradigm where a user basically tells their PC what they want a program to do, and the IDE assembles it for them. On the other hand, this type of coding still carries considerable baggage, which is why I'm trying to learn to code as efficiently as possible. I'll leave the desktop programming to the new generations, and work on firmware design and embedded applications myself.
As for visual programming... Visual Basic
Designing and coding for a form is fast and intuitive, and the Intellisense option that lists available members when using the dot operator (for just about everything) allows you to know that a certain function does what you want, then feel around until you've implemented it right before you even compile. You really don't have to know much to write a solid program in VB.NET, it just helps greatly at higher levels.
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot would stop advancing Gates' inane propaganda? You'd think we all care about Billy's delusions or something. Stuff that matters? Hardly. Remember The Road Ahead (first edition)!
I might have to copy it one day.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Vision? hah!
But Software is already free and even better open source, and hardware these days is pretty cheap too.
Really software should be free but solutions (There's a big difference between the two) is where the money should be spent. Although on the other hand a brothers gotta eat.
No one is ever going to need more than 640k. ...Nice guess there billy. Now go have a marketing meeting with yourself.
Hardware, not software is going to be free.
In the future you can just look at the software and it will make itself!
I must have missed that training course because I don't use Windows nor Intel, but I still like to have the fastest computer. Why? Because then I can play DOSBOX, or fullscreen DVDs, or my MP3 collection.
A 50MHz CPU that gets 30 hours battery life but doesn't do what I want is useless to me. I don't want a personal organiser. I want a portable entertainment device. That's why I choose to "suffer" with 5 hours battery life.
Of course hardware will be cheaper than it is now. Which is why we'll have
more of it. Ten years ago we had one computer in my house, that's 1/5 of a
computer per person. Today we have four in active use, 4/5 per person. In
ten more years, we'll obviously have several systems per person. We'll want
one in the bathroom, of course, because then I can read my email (or slashdot)
in the tub, and we can replace all those stacks of old Reader's Digests on
the back of the toilet, and so on. We'll want one in the kitchen for recipes,
and so we can do stuff during the odd waiting times while cooking (e.g.,
read slashdot while the cookies are baking; leaving the room is impractical
because you've only got three or four minutes, by the time you take the ones
off the previous tray and rinse it off and put new doughballs on it for the
next batch) -- plus of course some of our appliances will be computerized and
probably networked. Eventually we'll replace the tv in the family room with
a computer, I imagine. There are currently three computerless bedrooms; how
long do you suppose that'll last? And so on.
But this is not news. We *know* hardware keeps getting cheaper; we've known
it for thirty years or more. Everyone in the industry knows it, and a good
many people who are not in the industry. It's not something I need a
celebrity like Bill Gates to explain to me.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
There's only one Holy Grail. You can't have two.
We need more literacy in our overlords!
Gates is wrong. Hardware prices don't depend as much on technology but on what people are willing to pay.
You are both incorrect and correct: Free hardware occurs when you have a pay-for-use service to offset the cost of manufacturing. It works for cellular phones, cable and satellite tv, and it's even starting to occur in energy with kickbacks for more efficient appliances.
The companies don't have to be the same, just have tight relationships.
So what Bill is hinting at is that Windows OS is going to become a subscription service for everyone (already is for Enterprise customers) and that the subscription fees are going to be high enough to justify kicking back a significant amount to Intel, Dell, Taiwan or whomever is building the XBox^H^H^H^H platform that the customer chooses for their home PC.
If cable tv or telephony is the leading indicator (and they stand to be replaced by WMP and IM in the common household) then we can expect MSFT to consider a subscription price (which includes a home PC) of $50-100 per month to be tolerable by end users. At $600-$1200 per year with a new $300 free desktop upgrade every three years, that seems like a workable model.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
This argument is just to justify the hardware requirement of Longhorn.
I have a Pentium 3 550 system with 768 megs of RAM running Slackware and a Pentium 2 350 system with 384 megs of RAM running Solaris x86. Both run like crap with Gnome. Haven't bothered trying either with KDE. It just doesn't seem worth the hassle to install.
Granted, I've resorted to using CDE on the Solaris box. Which is Motif-based, and thus is last-decade's bloat desktop. It runs pretty nice on the machine I use. Which, incidentally I paid 80 cents for. (gotta love it when you get two whole skids of Dell Optiplexes, all featuring 100 MHz fsb Intel processors, for $40)
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HTML is NOT a design language.
Say it with me,..
"HTML is NOT a design language."
Exactly, Bill Gates is seen to be a technology opportunist. Using whatever tools/ideas he can for his own gain usually at the expence of others and society. Rather unethical imo, but hey, thank the government.
"create an entire system on a chip"
This will surely happen. Why?
1. Moving parts suck (break first, use lots of power)
2. Labour, and thus assembly, is expensive (?)
I bet the computer of the future is very much as you describe -- why bother with any storage or data IO (other than the two obvious ones) when you've got GBs of memory on the chip and wireless. In fact, this is already happening -- I would bet that in 5 years DVD/CD drives are being phased out in favour of USB memory, or something similar. Even that will go away once wireless is omnipresent.
..when related to prices for Micro$oft software.
That's small-'f', not capital-'F' free:
*What*?
Have you read my journal today?
Yeah right....that guy's obviously never written code in his life....hang on...who said that again....Bill Gates? Hmm....let me see.....bought MS-DOS (Originally QDOS - for "Quick and Dirty Operating System") from some other company....made lots of money and hired other people to write code for him......
Has he ever actually written anything?
-d
Mr. Gates has given us a roadmap for how the next generation of super-systems will be burdened with ever more complex code, giving the user productivity similar to VisCalc running on a 4.88MHz 8088 with 256K memory. I see no compelling need to empty my bank account of another $1-2K, just to turn my old system into a disposal problem. The biggest fear of Gate's empire is the day customers just say no and step off the "upgrade" treadmill.
Technology will always improve.
Entire AppleII can be put on a $20 FPGA because of the improvements in technology.
But you forget about improvements in technology will also create new stuffs. Very new stuffs. And when it still not common, not common hardware maker can produce it and it will have a high price!
----
so many dreams r swinging out of the blue we let them come true (forever young, alphavile)
1. Poorly written/Buggy application or server software (Office Suites, Web Servers, Mail Servers, etc...)
:-) )
Sure... but doesn't an OS suck that can be taken down with a buggy Wordprocessor?
2. Misconfigured application or server software
See #1. There's no way a "misconfigured" wordprocessor should be able to take the system down.
3. Misconfigured OS settings by people who don't really know what they are doing despite their certs.
People really don't know what they're doing because all "Microsoft Training & Education" tells them where to click but not why and what is happening under the hood. I am not saying it is easy to get a Microsoft Cert, (you have to be able to memorize a lot of buttons and widgets in order to pass), but it leads people nowhere in terms of being able to really know the in's and outs of the system like an Unix Administrator knows hers.
4. Underpowered hardware (overclocked CPUs or just plain slow/older machines, not enough RAM, etc..)
The only thing that should happen her is that the system slows down (a lot) (except for the overclocked CPU which should crash Windows even faster
5. Inappropriate hardware (Using a Gateway brand desktop PC as a Domain Controller) non-ECC RAM, etc..
Most of the SERVERhardware I've seen at companies running Windows (2003 Server etc.) are or are equivalent to IBM x-Series servers. Needless to say, their downtimes are a function of the OS they run.
6. Malfunctioniing hardware (bad RAM, MB, CPU, cooling problems, etc...)
Will take any system down no matter whether it's a Sun E10K running Solaris 9.0 or a Sinclair ZX-81 (my first computer @home). But guess what, if something ever happened to one of the machines I would see a message in a log file telling me the cluster software has switched nodes and this place would be crawling with people from Sun scrambling to fix the problem. None of this I could ever expect from anything Microsoft.
You are talking about data centers. I'm talking about home users. They are the source of most anecdotal "windows sucks" stories. Regardless, I've been in my share of data centers that have desktop machines for servers. It happens.
Un-news
No. On my Linux box the other day, I hit some odd key combo completely by accident and I had a ton of help windows for the Gnome Calculator keep popping up. By the time I had maybe fifteen Gnome help windows open, the system was nearly unresponsive at the GUI level. Since I was using a remote GUI session, I had to go down to the basement and get on the console to try and reboot the system. It took a good ten minutes to get the machine to actually shutdown. If I was a less patient person, I probably would have hit the power button and then answered yes to he question about doing an fsck (I use ext3). So... does Linux suck because of all that? No. It's not a good idea to say any OS sucks if the OS didn't cause the problem.
See #1. There's no way a "misconfigured" wordprocessor should be able to take the system down.
Bullshit. Try installing VMware with your own custom compiled kernel and have it successfully compile it's modules with bugs in them that will cause the system to have severe problems. It's not Linus' or the other kernel hacker's fault though... It is possible for misconfigured software to cause problems for the OS. Plus... you need to lose the notion that bringing down an OS stricltly means a crash. From the user's perspective, not being able to use their mouse or type means that the OS went down. And that's the level of thinking that most people who say [insert OS here] sucks.
People really don't know what they're doing because all "Microsoft Training & Education" tells them where to click but not why and what is happening under the hood. I am not saying it is easy to get a Microsoft Cert, (you have to be able to memorize a lot of buttons and widgets in order to pass), but it leads people nowhere in terms of being able to really know the in's and outs of the system like an Unix Administrator knows hers.
Nothing to rebutt here. More Unix admins can fix Windows machines than the other way around. This is because Unix DOES force the admin to know their machine at almost every level. Windows just puts a lot of nice looking crap over the system in order to hide the "ugly" side of computers.
The only thing that should happen her is that the system slows down (a lot) (except for the overclocked CPU which should crash Windows even faster :-) )
Windows does seem to be more prone to failure on slower systems when you are talking about running Windows NT4 on a 486 DX2 66 with 16 Megs of RAM. Windows 2000 and XP won't run on systems that old as far as I know. Linux can run on these older systems more reliably. However, a slow system is an unusable system to the kind of person who is going to say that a certain OS sucks or "crashes" all the time. If you run Windows 2000 on a PIII or higher with 128 megs of RAM, you'll be fine. If you run Windows XP on a PIII with 256 Megs of RAM, you'll be fine. Unless of roucse those pesky apps that have a tendency to cause memory leaks or drivers that cause a BSOD strike. But that's still no fault of the OS. A vanilla install of any Windows product post Windows 2000 will run just fine as long as you don't put any crap on it. As soon as you want the box to do more than what a vanilla install will do, you run into problems. But this is also true of ANY OS. So again, you are incorrect sir. ;)
Most of the SERVERhardware I've seen at companies running Windows (2003 Server etc.) are or are equivalent to IBM x-Series servers. Needless to say, their downtimes are a function of the OS they run.
I don't see too many geeks running these kinds of systems at home. And those are the people who are the most vocal about which OS sucks. It's more likely that the average geek is running their server OS on a desktop system. But, I've also seen plenty of businesses run server OSes on desktop machines because they can't see the difference between a desktop and
Un-news
...when compared to Microsoft's prices.
An example is Prograph which includes Visual Editor, Libraries, Compiler, Debugger etc. I have seen versions for the mac as well as windows.
Some Links:
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Pr ograph/
http://www.google.de/search?q=cache:8kGBTW31vK0J:1 92.219.29.95/prograph.html+ProGraph&hl=de&ie=UTF-8
Real advance in systems development can only be achieved if my computer links directly to my brain and realizes what I want it to do, without all the intermediary abstractions needed today.
Nobody spends the effort necessary to make lower-end stuff. You can't just take a 1998 model and sell it today. Not because it is slow, but because it looks bad or misses some essential features that would be cheap to add today, but were simply not available 6 years ago.
I would love to get a 1.4 kg laptop with 6+ hours of battery life (preferably 16+ hours). I don't care about the specs, as long as it would be Windows-compatible, Internet-capable and would be powerful enough to play a DivX movie fullscreen (600 MHz+).
I mean, the batteries must have been getting better over time. All parts were becoming more efficient (although increasing capability was killing the efficiency). Why didn't battery life improve much (much == x10)?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I think everyone here misses the point of "visual" in visual programming. It's not like it must necessarily involve moving around some icons with arrows, like in that pathetically worthless Mac browser we read about a few days ago. What it will consist of, however, is very high-level programming language with a strong support for visualisation of things that should be visualised.
When you have an array of records and want them sorted, ideally you should just click the "Sort" button, say "Sort!" or make a sorting jesture. Everything else should be an option, a parameter, a tweak. The computers are powerful enough and can be made smart enough to understand how to sort the records or to ask you about details if they don't. Same applies to pretty much everything else.
Come on, people, we've seen so many production revolutions that to resist yet another one borders on luddism. If we can make a completely automated factory that builds cars, if we can make a plane that flies from US to Australia without any human intervention, a robotic shark that swims with real ones, what makes you think we can't make a developing environent that can understand how to sort an array in a context-sensitive manner?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
HTML shares a great deal of the blame for that. It's a simple language though, and that's why I hate trying to fix bad HTML produced by software by people who are too friggin' hopeless to learn html on their own.
The chief problem with HTML is that it's a simple language for making simple, readable, portable documents, but the people out there who are making most HTML are control freaks. They make demands on HTML that the language can't (or shouldn't) try to deliver. It seems to me that the result of this pressure is that the people who come up with HTML standards will eventually reinvent postscript, pdf, TeX, and all the other formats with HTML, resulting in a putrified mess.
> Bill Gates is not known for being a technology visionary.
But his motto long ago was "Information at your fingertips". Isn't that just what we have now?
*runs*
Now all we need is for somebody to start mathematically proving some libraries...
Whom are you willing to pay to do this, and how much?
Of course, the reason it won't work is OSS
What if the "free" PCs' bootloader trusts only Microsoft signed kernels? Under such a situation, how would free software even boot on such hardware in countries where the DMCA is law?
It's meaningless to talk about marginal cost and marginal price when no one is going to pay the fixed cost and fixed price.
Three words: Street Performer Protocol. Failing that, a government that employs thousands of citizens could finance the fixed cost of a software package. Therefore, the model of using a monopoly to spread out the fixed costs over many marginal copies isn't the only business model that can promote the progress of science and useful arts.