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Windows, Linux 25 Year Old "Clunkers"?
Phil817 writes to tell us that Bob Metcalfe recently gave a TV interview in which he stated that current operating systems (Windows and Linux) are outdated clunkers that wont be able to adequately handle the coming of "video internet" and suggests that new operating systems need to be developed to take hold in a few years. Also, when asked if current deals in the works like eBay's purchase of Skype were an indication of more investment hype he replied with "I'm looking forward to the next Internet bubble. I don't know what everyone's so negative about. The last bubble was lots of fun.". Let us at least hope we learned a few things from the last bubble.
I couldn't watch video ?
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
To say that the post was lacking substance would be an understatement.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
disturbing...
All your base are belong to Google.
So...this article is basically stating is that we need to build an entirely new O/S to streamline our viewing of pr0n?
Cool.
I, for one, welcome our new video internet overvixens.
"The last bubble was lots of fun"
tell that to the people that have lost their jobs.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Talk about a story with no content.
Apart from the "no link" stuff, I don't see what the fuss is all about. An OS is an OS, its role is to provide user applications with an access to the underlying hardware.
In that sense, I don't see anywhere that Linux/Windows/*BSD/whatever will not be up to the task.
Video internet, whatever that is, is bandwidth limited. The OS of the systems on each end of the cable makes virtually no difference to the deliverable bandwidth.
What does this guy know? If you want an OS to stream video, then what does it better than a *BSD? If you want to watch streaming video then surely that is an application issue?
I'd rather serve or recieve anything using an OS with 20 years debugging than an untried untested product of an Internet bubble.
However, if anyone wants to buy shares in my new dot-com, then email me at "mailto:investments@pop.rip-off.scam"
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
and that new OS will be the Google OS baby!
My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Linux and Windows pass out at 31 Flavors last night! So I guess it must be pretty serious...
Game dev and music blog
Educated guess anyway.
All your base are belong to Google.
What exactly does he mean by video internet?
With the growth of high speed Internet services, it's perfectly possible for users to stream video at a fairly nice level of quality. Modern operating systems handle this just fine in general.
Would be nice to have some links though!
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Weird, Windows and Linux seem to handle pretty much any task I need handled. Not bad for a couple of clunkers.
Who knows? Maybe he's right. Personally, I think the concept of television networks is a clunker of an idea waaay past its time. I suggest that in this age of the Internet, we should all be watching on-demand content provided directly by the content makers that's financed by micropayments paid by the consumers, and we receive our "signal" via high-speed Internet connections to the content providers.
Boy, it sure is easy for me to sit back and say that. But where the rubber meets the road—actually making these brave new ideas come to pass... Well, that's the challenge, isn't it? Until someone can cough up the resources to invest into creating, distributing, and marketing BobOS and my IP television studios, I guess we'll just have to keep talking about how nice it would be, and make the best of the clunkers that I suppose are working well enough for now.
But seriously, if you want to invest in my IP television studio, let me know...
I don't understand how he can say that current operating systems can't handle "video internet", my computer runs high def video super fine and I can't even stream anything higher than 150KB/sec via the internet, yet. This article is much too vague to have enough merit to be a headline, in my opinion. Sure, better operating systems would be nice, but there's always going to be room for improvement. Besides, by the time this "video internet" is fully implemented, Windows Vista will most likely be available... Possibly even Windows Lemonbuttersauce or whatever they're going to call it ten operating systems from now.
There really should be a threshold to what kind of articles one could see, like there is for replies.
So here we have yet another article about somebody's narrowminded concept of what the future is going to be like. Who bloody cares about 'video internet'? Yes, the big Hollywood factories that produce entertainment on assembly lines are keen to have all that on the internet so they can roll out their anal-retentive DRM and pay=per-view schemes, and that's all. We on the consumer side will get no real benefits from this 'video internet', on the contrary.
"I'm looking forward to the next Internet bubble. I don't know what everyone's so negative about. The last bubble was lots of fun."
What an idiot. Look at the carnage afterwards. Nevermind the few people that lost their jobs, tragic as that is, the real damage is the money from pension and investment funds that was squandered. That is people having their entire retirement thrown away.
What's wrong with the internet as it is now?
Video, for what reqason? Do they mean more like flash?
With interactive animations, or something different?
What i can see happening is animated or even worse, video adds.
And I'll tell all of you, i'm not looking foreward to that.
I think that's a reason enough to be negative.
Wasting bandwidth for damn stupids adds.
I guess it wouldn't bother me so much if we still had unlimited cable. This "unlimited" cable shits me, all because internet service providers want to promote their own content delivery.
How well do those scissors you have in your desk work. Are they the product of a real recent redesign? What about that crescent wrench?
New and different isn't always better. Sometimes it is. But sometimes small incremental changes to something with a fundamentally old design is the best there is for quite a while.
If video is the future, then I'm afraid that it's Ethernet that's going to be the clunker - not our operating systems. We need the mass deployment of protocols that give us QoS guarantees (e.g. ATM).
Everytime someone talks about video internet, God kills a kitten.
See?!?! You made me make God kill a kitten just now by talking about video interne... damn!
And you know what? By the time this thread is done with, tens of thousands of kittens will have died. How many at the hands of "In Soviet Russia" jokes alone, I do not know, but I shudder to think.
Frankly, I am saddend at the massive loss of furry lifeforms about to take place, all for the sake of a mental circlejerk about "all porn all the time all online". You're all just sick.
If Windows and Linux are outdated, then what about x86 microchip architectures?
May the Maths Be with you!
It's your internet-incapable Windows/Linux/BSD/Plan 9/HURD/Be/Zeta/Symbian/AmigaOS* system not being able to handle the new Unicorn&Sasquatch Video Experience that is embedded in the story.
*: AmigaOS had this capability from day one, but a lack of advertising means I'm unaware of this fact.
"If you want an OS to stream video, then what does it better than a *BSD?"
BeOS?
The only specific thing he mentions is that both Windows and Linux are 25 year old... let me see:
Windows NT (which is the base for all the current Windowses) was first released in 1993. (Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, but that was not 25 years ago and has little to do with current ones (like, a copletely different codebase and technology))
Linux began in 1991, but if you really want to dig to the roots, UNIX was created in 1969.
and, of course, the problems "video internet" has (though these are not critical, as demonstrated by porn sites) these are related to the network, not to the OSes.
So, Metcalfe is talking BS as usually.
Real life is overrated.
If you need a hookup, I've got 1,039 contacts.
MS dummed down and corporatized up the desktop, hacking and patching their way to profit.
For 20 years a generation sold out to MS and failed to get anything back.
Fonts, networking, printing, "security" ect. where all just bolted on top when needed.
But today we have the bandwidth, storage and hopefully 20 years of "how not to do it".
Now just as we have what we need - it will all be lock down with DRM via Vista.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Well, I'm an MIT engineer, and although it turns out that I have degrees from Harvard, the reason I never mention them is that I hated Harvard. And one of the reasons I hated Harvard is that I was one of the few people in the history of the world who's had their PhD dissertation rejected in their last year
This has to be the most mind-boggling articles I've seen on Slashdot.
This link as well didn't help.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
"I'm looking forward to the next Internet bubble. I don't know what everyone's so negative about. The last bubble was lots of fun."
Possibly he's of this opinion since he was one of the very few who didn't get burned by it? I know several people who got really badly burnt when the bubble popped.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
How old is Slashdot? And how will they handle new bubbles like del.icio.us and digg.com ?
My future-viewing terminal informs me that that the Video Internet will be deployed just a few years after the widespread availablility of wall-mounted Video Telephones, but just before Honda release their premiere Flying Automobile.
I can only hope that our spinlock model is flexible enough for these paradigm-shattering technological earthquakes!
The actual quote is Windows and Linux, are 25 years old -- they're going to need updating to adequately carry video - so he's not really implying "They're dinosaurs and need to die out & be replaced", more "They're not yet ready for future demands" - which is pretty much a given: How can you create functionality for something that doesn't exist yet?
So.. it has come to this
Here comes the return of the Monolithic versus Microkernel debate. *goan*
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I thought we already had video internet, and it was called TV. Honestly, video content is worthless. Sure, it'd be kind of fun to watch the numa numa kid in high definition with no buffering, but does it really matter? No. Is there any substance to that? Hell no. If TV is even a tiny implication of what more video content would mean, then the last thing I want is more video content in the net.
If you want an OS to stream video, then what does it better than a *BSD?
Clearly the linked article was just a hits generator, totally lacking in substance.
In any case, it made the very dumb assumption that operating systems are somehow set in stone. They're not, and while we cannot predict MS's plans for the future, we can certainly guarantee that Linux and the BSDs will evolve in whatever way their communities want.
And that includes handling the streaming world with max efficiency.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
From TFA:
"There'll be new operating systems required; the clunkers we have, you know Windows and Linux, are 25 years old -- they're going to need updating to adequately carry video," Metcalfe says. "What they're doing now is lame."
"The internet will soon go spectaculary supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse"
He promised to "eat his words" if he was wrong
So, in early 1997, at a technical conference he ate
(from "Computer Networks" by Tanenbaum)
No Sympathy here. Whoever buys into a scheme that is supposed to double/tripe/quadruple their money overnight deserves the "Experience" they get. Playing the stock market is like every other form of gambling: The house always wins. You lose.
And by the way: this wonderful "Video Internet" Mr. Metcalfe is fantasizing about ... Who needs it? the consumers? Or could it be ... Who else would be interested in a broad roll-out of DRM-locked viewers?
Expect a flurry of new, draconian laws protecting "Content Ownership" to be written and enacted during the boom phase. And we'll be stuck with these laws, even after this particular bubble bursts.
Well, he's right. Windows is based, more or less, on the old VAX/VMS model. Linux is a modern OS kernel, but it's designed to run a variant of the Unix operating system, which was shiny and new before the Star Trek with Captain Kirk went into syndication.
The same can be said for MacOS X and the BSD's... hell, for pretty much every OS under the sun. BeOS and Plan 9 were the last attempts at someone trying something new with any technical success, and their lessons were largely lost on the industry.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
There are acres of room for improvement, but the current paradigms aren't keeping up. Part of the problem is the PC architecture... it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited. It's shackling the industry to a very limiting hardware model, trading innovation in effciency and effectiveness for better benchmarks at the same old stuff.
Someone's going to need to design and market a new platform... OS and Hardware, that manages your data better with less effort across more devices, before we can get things moving again.
Otherwise I foresee more of the same... computers completing benchmarks faster, but not doing anything new and innovative.
Linux is a very nice unix, perhaps the pinnacle of achievement for the Unix Way, but the Unix Way isn't all that special anymore, and is really showing its age. Windows is an order of magnitude in worse shape. It's just that no-one with an industry presence is willing to try anything new anymore, and companies like SGI and HP are going broke sticking to the old model long after it's stopped working for them.
SoupIsGood Food
I think we should be allowed to mod the stories as well as the comments. This way we could get rid of both the dupes and the trolls like the current story.
Let us at least hope we learned a few things from the last bubble.
You can certainly hope so, but i would advice not to count on it.
I do not believe that I have seen such a completely misleading and or misinformed statement in a very long time. If you have no idea what you are doing, yeah, you could get burned. If you are smart, do your research and invest wisely, such as by diversifying, you can come out pretty darn well.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
What I am wondering is that, how can something become so important if there is no platform for it? Operating systems do not change because something is developed, things change because operating systems allow them to or develop themselves ... all in my opinion of course.
-------
Userfriendly? Sure it is, unless you aren't computerfriendly!
/me to a classmate on FreeBSD
And it's called BeOS.
"I'm looking forward to the next Internet bubble. I don't know what everyone's so negative about. The last bubble was lots of fun."
Translation: I made lots of money in the late 1990s, didn't YOU?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Wow, that must by a huge operation you have going on. You have your own TLD .scam. Where can I register my companies so I can loose a bit more money to the maintainers of the TLDs?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
I vaguely remember him saying something about Windows 2000 putting the nail in the coffin for Linux way back in 99.
I believe it was also posted on Slashdot then as well but I am too lazy to look.
It's so cool. With OS4, you just need to drop unicorn_sasquatch.library into Libs, and automatically, all your apps are Video Internet ready.
All we need now is some hardware to run it on.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Great, all we *really* need is an ultra slick, ultra fast shiny new OS that allows us to be spoonfed more crap. We don't need reliabilty, a plethora of tools and applications or extensive API. No, no, no if they can stream us more channels then we're really cooking. Complete mince.
I don't know if the world is ready for video internet or television as some scientists call it.
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
"Great Scott!"
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
It seems like every six months or so we get more blathering from this asshole. He doesn't get it and he hasn't for fifteen years. Metcalfe is just another idiot venture capitalist (who has a hard-on for another bubble [do I need to explain the problems with a bubble?]). He's batting about the same average as that moron Dvorak, who for some inexplicable reason gets posted here.
Also, Metcalfe's law is a joke- it greatly overvalues networks once the network grows to large numbers.
I give it a life expectentcy of 3 days before the traffic causes it to choke, gag, and implode - consuming itself, anus first.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It's hard to take seriously a sob story involving stock options and Hummers. Anyone who makes a few bucks and decides that the first thing they need is a military vehicle for the commute to work can go fuck themselves.
Maybe it's time to block ScuttleMonkey too. His stories are starting to creep into Zonk-levels of stupidity.
rooooar
There are many POTENTIAL operating systems out there, including modular ones (my favorite, does not waste resources with what you don't need), the undeveloped Sphere OS (Modular in a VMWare sort of way), Forth OS (It's a start), eye-candy Zeta. Of course, while we're at at, let's entirely re-think the clunky Graphical User Interface. The GUI really has not improved since the early Mac Days. We could work on that too. Ideas? Could we do away with the seperate programs to the end-user idea and the big-ego screens? john666seven@yahoo.com
John W....
Whohooo! Look, I've this new OS in mind which will solve all the problems of the world... it's called Hurd on L4... oh, no, wait...
42.
He just made my foe's list. What a lamer.
No Sympathy here. Whoever buys into a scheme where you get offered an overpaid, underworked job and expects it to last forever deserves the "Experience" they get.
I'll agree with you on the "video-internet". Mr. Metcalf seems to have confused the computer with consumer electronics. Sure, the former can do the latter, but that's not it's strong suit. Computational efficiency for doing work just happens to work well with compressed digital video. Coincidence, not purpose.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What the hell are Clunkers anyway? In my language it means testicles, but I don't think that's what he means.
Dude, you are late
back in 1993/94 MS had Tiger System, that did VOD to clients over IP.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
PC's are likely to stick with their current OS's until x86 is changed, and even then, there's a good chance someone will just port the existing OS's over. When they need to handle the high speed video services, people will just bolt on features and add a better video card. Changing the OS will take a lot more than video, maybe when quantum computing becomes a reality.
If you want something that's crying out for a better OS, try cell phones. Palm seems to be in a downward spiral, windows based systems are too resource intensive, RIM is getting tied up in patent disputes, and linux is only becoming popular there because the others are so bad. Find a good OS for smart phones that multi-tasks, easily and securely communicates with other devices, implements a simple UI that can be navigated with one thumb, easily runs applications like PIM/email/mp3, doesn't kill batteries, and doesn't have a big licensing fee, and people will be lining up.
When you approach the stock market in the fashion the poster said, yes, you lose in the long run. Buying Google stock is like gambling in that it will be worth a small fraction of the current price in the future, but you're betting that a greater fool will come before then and buy the stock for more than you paid. Looks a lot like tulip mania mentality to me.
If you want almost sure profits, diversify (say, put 1/3rd into an international fund, 1/6th into a small cap index fund, and 1/2 into an S&P 500 fund) and wait at least 10 years.
Pretty much any new machine you buy nowadays will have enough CPU to decode 1080i in realtime. They might have problems with 1080p, but there isn't any content in that format available. I don't think the ATSC standards even allow it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I love the fact that he only mentions two OS:s...
We need a transcript, I'd like to read/hear more about this.
REAL men use sed.
Clear, Dark Skies
Backwards compatibility (or inertia) is always killing us. Yes, getting current standards has been hard so everybody wants to keep them. Even when they aren't the best choice. That's strictly technical, it has ugly consequences but we're not supposed to fall in an "argumentum ad consequentiam", at least we should be able to clearly enunciate problems. No heresy there, just a chance to think about issues and eventually fix them :-P
And it gets worse when you look at the protocols and languages. Can't you see it? Web 2.0? Thats CRAP! That must be the most convoluted way to get a job done. We're using many old tools in pretty new (and bizarre, and sub-optimal) ways. Look at Gmail or any other "Web Application". Think about it, think about how it works, in detail, from HTTP queries to XHTML messages and JavaScript execution. Would YOU design it THAT way from scratch??? It's scary. If you really know HTTP, you will probably find some clunky issues around.
Web 2.0 is like x86. It's just a bunch of clever tricks to recycle many old standards, and JavaScript is not even a standard language so different browsers have to be supported one by one. Its technically HORRIBLE. You can call it a great hack so it sounds cooler. And it works and almost everybody is pretty excited with this "new technology", just like they almost faint when I say that current browsers and web applications should be rewritten from scratch, with no drugs around. Hey, truth does not need to be nice.
Try Ubuntu GNU/Linux, it's great!!!
nono, if it was a non-commercialized military vehicle, it would be a-ok. first thing i would do if i hit it huge would be drop some cash for a military transport truck or maybe a light apc. talk about living like a king... no fancy shmancy hummer, better showing of the powarrrr of military might!
cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And it always will be...
Clear, Dark Skies
Yeah, I bought this stuff from an email that was supposed to do that and .. oh .. money.
Never mind.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I must have totally missed the point, as there's no point or substance in the article.
Does this mean he somehow has an intrinsic credibility in making sweeping statements which are ultimately baseless? That is akin to saying “hey look, I wrote fetchmail, therefore I am an authority on the social-political issues surrounding software development.”
Join Tor today!
Every OS Sucks! (Requires a computer that can play video, D'OH!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Correct me if i'm wrong here... but my OS isn't palying the video. Other software I have installed is. All the OS is doing is channeling the neccesary data through the correct ports. i.e. when I watch a DVD using WinDVD the OS is controlling the drive, and the video card and channeling the data through. But the software that is actually doing the work is WinDVD, Not my OS. Right? Besides, the only real problem I have had so far watching streaming video, (through realPlayer or Quicktime, (neither of which is my OS,)) is when there is lag on the net. And when I have 6mb/s download and I'm watching a video stream that is coming down at 256k/s, and windows has no trouble handling the 200mb/s of my local area network, I don't see where the problem would be with the OS. some lag on the net, yeah. but not enough to make it unviewable. (BTW the stream mentioned was a 600x480 video) It's not Hi-Def, but so what? I have cable and sattelite for Hi-Def. On-Demand is great.
but not Linux. The kernel has progressed and matured notably in the past decade. It can support many of the high-bandwidth applications that were previously only reachable by systems running IRIX, UNICOS, etc.
The distros, on the other hand, for the most part are simply trying to copy Windows. And not from a media/entertainment perspective, but from a boring old "office productivity" stance. BeOS was a great idea, and Mac OS X gives us extreme "iApps" integration, so the media that excites people about computing these days seems a more pervasive part of the experience. Linux distros need to stop trying to be the corporate desktop and adopt a more Be/Mac-like stance. Right now, the experience sucks.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
http://world.honda.com/jet/
I want one. But I'll settle for video pr0n.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
It wasn't meant as a sob story...
If you want the sob story, I can lay it on nice'n'thick: 7 months of unemployment. Throwing away 90% of what I owned, selling 8% and packing myself, my dog & the last 2% in my car to make a frantic 3 day cross country drive then spending 7 days homeless living out of my car.
Now, I left out the phone calls to request info on rooms for rent that included one older gent calling me a druggie and a whole lot of other names when I said I didn't have the 3 months worth of upfront rent he wanted for a trashed out room. Oh yea, and the landlord that I rented from moving out in the middle of the night only to have all the utilities turned off 2 days later... Not a fun experience and all due to a company laying me off. That has been the most humbling experience of my life.
I'm STILL paying off debt from 3 years ago.
There's more, but I don't think I need to go there.
Hah! Anyone bothering to read the article over at lightreading.com would notice this man has stakes just to mention the video inet concept is making his bucks spin ...
free dom(inion) - free energy - free your mind - whee!
back in the 1990's - "Plan 9" and Inferno come to mind, others have mentioned BeOS. Plan 9 in particular was fascinating because it completely changed the underlying ideas of an operating system (for example, multiple machines worked together transparently, advertising their capabilities to the network. When you ran an app, you had no idea - and didn't care - which machine was actually running it.)
But both Plan 9 and Inferno seem to have been killed by the various shake ups of the telecom industry and an unwillingness to let "valuable IP" go open source.
I have no idea what the current status of either OS is.
Clear, Dark Skies
yeah, let's just toss the last 25 years of debugging and write a whole new OS... that *surely* won't have any holes in it
He is right.. Windows AND Linux are both clunkers.. Everyone knows GEOS is king. :o)
And I have to say I agree with Metcalfe--it was a lot of fun. In 9 months the company went from 10 employees to 100, and back down to 25. 3 months later it was dead. I was employee #12 and helped build a cool Web site in a well-funded, fun environment, working with mostly happy, smart, effective people. And we laughed behind our backs at the fakes and blowhards.
Yes it sucked to get laid off. But I stayed in touch with co-workers and eventually it led to my current, very stable job.
And the "dotcom scars" are a badge of honor that will only increase in value as I get older. I was there at the turbulent founding of an industry. It's like an exclusive club--"yeah I got axed in December 2000 right before the holidays", "hey me too!"
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
There haven't been any improvements in memory and IO bandwidth in 20 years! That's why we think gigabyte sized word processors are slow and bloated!
Clear, Dark Skies
Bob Metcalfe recently gave a TV interview in which he stated that current operating systems (Windows and Linux) are outdated clunkers that wont be able to adequately handle the coming of Duke Nukem Forever and suggests that new operating systems need to be developed to take hold in a few years.
This guy is a complete clueless moron. And video internet... I love it.... transforms people back from producers to pure consumers again, specially with the huge bandwidth asymmetries we are seeing.
You're right in some ways, but I don't think it's because Linux (distros) are backwards.
If the Distro's were copying windows, it would be a nightmare of crippleware, spyware, and any other idea they could dream up to scam your money away. Stuff like OpenOffice can out do Win Office because it's an on-going open source project. But how could you do something like that with things like games? None of the big corperations want to port their games over to Linux simply because there is no money in it for them and all their supporters (MS, Intel, etc), and that would be the only way to increase that side of entertainment.
I find Linux Distros *much* more intersting than windows, and I have been with Linux for over 5 years now.
Mr. Metcalf seems to have confused the computer with consumer electronics. Sure, the former can do the latter, but that's not it's strong suit.
Actually he's not to far off... from 1995 and WebTV. Go back and read some of the visionary statements about interactive TV, look into some of the remarkable trials (such as US West aka Qwest and its interactive TV pilot in Omaha Nebraska) and all those who thought passive couch potato viewers wanted to interact.
I've found those who are proponents of interactive tv are too closely connected to advertisers who believe the audience is dying to be able to click on goods displayed in their program and discover a whole new consuming experience. As if you're curious about the bottle of beer that your favorite crime detective is holding just as he's about to figure out the mystery of this week's espisode. As unrealistic as this sounds, a good many advertisers believe it's the next step beyond product placement.
And yes, Metcalf makes the predictable argument about general purpose operating systems being... general purpose. Still, as long as the majority of PC manufacturers and OS developers are designing for a broad office user role, this isn't likely to change. Sure we'll see consumer game systems out there but to expect a new video OS & gaming console on my desk at work is just absurd.
coming of "video internet" also known as
TV or the high bandwidth version cable TV
It was called BeOS. It was a nice OS in many respects, but failed due both to technical and business issues. Perhaps if it had a 25 year headstart to "clunk" and mature it might still be around, who knows.
Sure current OS'es are crap at handling large data files that essentlially just have to be passed through, I got a linux machine that seems to love eating up all the available memory and my windows machine can never seem to grasp the concept of giving the video app priority to the HD.
So when I recently downloaded my first high def video clip (interlaced) I had a severe problem playing it. The dual P3 Linux had problems as it was an offbeat codec and could not handle it at full speed.
Windows P4 HT 2.8ghz didn't fare much better. Despite that fact that it had double the memory, less crap in the background and fewer active filters and had a cpu 3-4 times faster it could barely keep up. As soon as I tried to deinterlace it it started to get choppy with random freezing as MS could apperantly not supply the data fast enough.
No I don't have virusses or trojans and the hardware on both platforms is pretty decent.
The answer is really simple both OS'es at the core were never designed for this task. For that matter the hardware isn't either. Almost everything in the design is geared towards multitasking.
It reminds me of the days when side scrolling games were still available and how badly the PC would always struggle with them even when it was clear that in pure crunching power the PC beat the pants of the consoles. Wich was very clear when consoles tried to do 3D (ala doom1) wich was the strong horse of the PC.
I don't think there is any clear mechanism at the moment where you can easily dictate wich application gets priority access to the resources available. This would be far more then "nice". After all video device that gets super high priority would then falter because "system" wich does the reading from HD does not get enough cpu time.
Perhaps the move to multicore pc's will solve some of this. My P3 despite being only 800mhz can still keep up aminzgly well considering a p4 2.8 fails as well.
What I don't see however is how a new OS is going to solve this. Sure it is easy to make a new OS that does just video. They already exist, inside your stand alone dvd player. For that matter inside the iPod and similar devices. The consoles are an other example. Yes they do a lot better performance wise in displaying video then their PC counterparts. So?
One of the things I noticed is that USB is a bitch for cpu whoring. Joysticks especially can cost you more frames then switching all the options on. Perhaps I just got the wrong sticks but I have noticed this for several years with different makes.
A PC can do a dozen tasks, that makes it slow but it also is what makes it so fucking usefull. Most users do not want to watch just 1 video. They want their RSS streams and check their email and be safe from virusses and be chatting with their mates etc etc etc.
Saying the Windows/Linux are old clunkers and that you could make a faster video OS is like saying that Volvo's are clunkers and you could make a faster race car. Well yeah. F1 cars are very very fast. I just wouldn't like to take one on a trip. A recent promo in Amsterdam had a F1 car driving through the city streets. Very exciting but it was very clear the car was barely under control and totally useless as a form of transport.
The device that does it all will never be able to compete directly with a single purpose device. The PC is as multi purpose as it can be and for the last few decades has defeated all new comers. I don't see this going to change.
Oh and didn't we have this whole video internet before? The constant dream that people will next year have fat pipes to their doorsteps at cheap prices? I have heard that dream for over a decade and still download at a trickle. Current internet would be hardpushed to saturate a iPod. My half a decade old machine can easily deal with internet streaming. It ain't the OS, it is the net, fix that and the OS will follow.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I agree with people who invested directly. I remember one client in particular who was burning 70 million a year selling t-shirts. Not even selling them, selling them on consignment. Didn't take a genius to figure out that it was a point of diminishing returns.
But it's not quite as simple as that is it? Many people who lost money didn't invest directly in it.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
To hell with the OS not being up to date to handle a video internet. First off, you ain't getting video internet without the network infrastructure. Video and content-rich media takes up loads of bandwidth, even when it's been compressed. Without the bandwidth you're not going to be ready for "video internet"
Our current OS will handle it fine. Our current global network structure just can't do it. HTTP wasn't really designed to handle such massive amounts of data, yet we manage with sites like yousendit.com for sending stuff up to 1 gig in size to other people. (Half of the times I use it my file breaks)
How about we work on new protocols for this "video internet" like VSTP (Video Stream Transfer Protocol, I know it probably doesn't exist, just making an example.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Every few years ol Bob comes out with some doozies like the Internet is going to collapse and end, like all operating systems are doomed to failure, like Vulcan mind meld networking is the wave of the future.
OK you you invented a crucial technology decades ago. Now do a Doug Englebart and be quiet.
I'd believe it. The beer is a bad example. What about the music? CSI makes a big deal about music - every episode has numerous lab scenes with jumpily edited footage of people doing lab things set to a thumping classic rock song. What if they had a deal with iTuns wherein consumers could purchase said thumping song on site?
Lots of companies have gotten very far by providing consumers with things they never knew they wanted. Look at the rise (and fall) of the SUV.
That sounds like the real-estate craze that's going on. Everyone's rushing to buy overpriced real estate (at least in NY and LA metro areas where I live), including a ton of amateurs who are hoping to get rich quickly. The problem is they're coming late in the game with NO experience.
I heard a real estate analyst say that you know things are approaching a breaking point when you hear grocery store clerks and postal employees giving real estate investment advice. That same analyst also compared the real estate market to a game of polo - there's a game being played by professionals, then a bunch of amateurs rush onto the field throwing their mallets around recklessly, taking down themselves and some of the seasoned professionals.
I have not heard a single feature customers NEED from "video internet" that they're not already getting one way or another, exactly as they like it. All we'd see from this new method is that it'd be easier to get the content you want, but it'll cost more and not always work and you may or may not be able to store it. What we'll end up with is a lot more paid advertisements built into everything, a lot more content restrictions, and less control over how we use the internet (usually dumbed to the LCD).
As soon as the broadband companies are forced into only being able to supply bandwidth, we may actually see another "bubble". Until then it's too scary to have the 500lb gorilla trying to take your lunch money every time you se a feature he should be adding. Keep your money in the bank for this one.
Guess you learned a few things about a sane approach to finances.
Blar.
Don't kid yourself. The "seasoned professionals" are doing as much
of the wild mallet swinging as anyone else. They create the circus in
the first place.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Playing the stock market is gambling where you on average get 108 pennies for every dollar you risk. This is why it is prudent to "gamble" on stocks instead of playing the lottery, where you get on average 60 pennies for every dollar you risk.
Work bio at MMWD
I nominate the acronym "SADC"; Singing And Dancing Crap, for excessive multi-features that are beyond the expectaions or tolerance level of anyone sane. Somebody send that to the jargon file?
As long as Bob Metcalfe is talking smack about Windows and Linux purely on a basis of their age, we should also mention Ethernet is "pre-clunker" at an age of 31.
And predicted that open source would fail.
The guy is a moron, riding his notoreity for working on one popular peice of technology into a career as a pundit who can't see past his own ass.
Beh. ATM was a dog. It was supposed to be this voice/data/video panacea but all it ended up being was an incredibly inefficient way to pass data around.
And the world's greatest proponent of ATM came within a cat's whisker of being your intrepid CIC on 2001-09-11.
That's exagerated. 25 years ago we didn't have 386 processors yet (for which Linux was first built).
I'd say it is about half that age (1993? I'm too lazy to look it up right now).
Now Unix, that's a whole different story.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Bob Metcalfe's fortune telling abilities have been put to the test in the past and he has constantly proven to not have a clue. Remember him saying the internet was going to roll over and die due to it's own weight within a year??? That didn't happen - and everything else he's GUESSED about has been pretty much wrong too.
Summary: Move on - nothing to see here!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Windows and Linux are today's operating systems. Who knows what will come along tomorrow. Look at the differences in Windows and Linux from five or ten years ago. They are entirely different than when they first cam on market! The trouble is that they are added on to and asked to do things that were not originally envisioned when they were first developed. The fact that they are doing what they are doing today is a testament to their versatility (and, their good foundation).
There will come a time when something else will come along - the evolution will happen like it has happened in every other industry. Ford quit making Model T's a long time ago and some day, Windows and Linux will be seen as out-dated operating systems that was loaded into primitive personal computers. In my mind's eye, I can see a computing future where computers interact with us in everyday life helping us with almost every task we do. Do any of us doubt that this marriage of technology and life won't continue to grow?
Look how far we have gone in the past few years and think of what could be done in the next ten or twenty and you can start to understand why someone would think that these operating systems may begin to sag under the weight of new and additional features. In a sense, the operating system is middleware. It sits between hardware and applications. Both sides aren't remaining static, the hardware gets new features and is faster and more powerful, the applications do more, do new and sometimes unthought of things. The o/s is in a tug-of-war between these two entities and tries very hard to make everything work. When the current part of the operating system that handles say video is being stretched to its limit by the demands of either the hardware or the software it is either patched or replaced. Over time, these fixes make the operating system like a house that has been remodeled too many times. It may become inefficient although it remains functional - when this happens, it may be best to tear the whole thing down and start all over again.
Please note that I am not saying that either Windows or Linux have reached the point where they ought to be scrapped but a realistic look forward has to consider that as a possibility. Tomorrow's hardware and tomorrow's applications are bound to place heavy demands on whatever operating system there is. We live in interesting times and it is hard to predict what the future will look like ten years from now. Are we going to have windowed interfaces or is something else going to come along? Where will speech recognition be? Will the keyboard continue to exist? Part of me wants to think that at some point we will communicate with our digital servants almost like we communicate with our human counterparts, through speech, body movements, and eye contact. But like the rocket-cars envisioned in the fifties, that may be a long way off track because I do not have a crystal ball that works.
I can see how a "networked everything" might be nice-- where a resource (CPU, hard drive, memory, etc) appears exactly the same whether it's a local resource or a networked resource. We're a long way from the from the management tools needed to make all this easy enough for the computer barely-literate, and even farther from the security model that'll make it all workable.
I think the problem will be this: Linux and MS-Windows and Mac OS X are all "good enough." For the forseeable future, there's little incentive to create a consumer edition of a Plan 9 knock-off. Hell, it's hard enough to get Linux into widespread use, and Linux is pretty much just like MS-Windows (vis-a-vis some hypothetical advanced networked-everything OS).
It'd be a lot of fun to develop, though.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The last bubble was lots of fun.
Yeah, tell that to the tens of thousands of people who lost their jobs. What a troll.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
overvixens .... ;-)
That's a catchy name. I did a search on Google and didn't find any match (in plural) except for an Overvixen as a kick . You might have cornerned a nice new "hip" word for our age.
Vi - not a chance - emacs emacs rah rah rah
Not only was this story submitted and accepted without a useful link, but this interview happened back in July.
did anybody even try to find the page instead of complaining about it?
9 712_0_4_0_C
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P
i googled "Bob Metcalfe" clunkers, that link was the second option after slashdot.
and i'm curious to know where he gets the idea that a secure, advanced operating system can be built in the next few years. these 25-year-old clunkers still have a lot of work to do.
So in the future, the intarweb is gonna be like TV?
Cool!
Oh wait, don't we already have TV?
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
honestly. well except for the idiot investors that didnt get out. what was wrong with. people spending money, lots of money to be made. tons of employment, IPOs etc.
sounds pretty good to me as long as im not a moron expecting it to last forever.
But it's not that Windows and Linux are flawed, it's that they need better video codecs, appplications, cameras, etc.
About 10 years ago MP3's hit and overnight computers went from devices where music was hard, scarse and alien to the place where all music came from and went to (at least for me). Video is still alien, hard, and scarse on computers. A revolutionary free codec becoming widely adopted could go a long way to fixing this but it will take the right mix of bandwidth, processing power, storage capacity, capture ability and codecs for video to really hit.
The problem is there are now powerful forces alligned to prevent those things from happeneing.
One of our bigest sources of video these days is DVD and the efforts to keep people from accessing the content on a DVD the way the user wants as opposed to how the publisher wants have gone all the way to purchasing votes of senators and congressman and slamming the DMCA down our throats.
Most of our content comes not from DVD's though but from cable tv. These days, a lot of it even comes encoded digitally but they wont let you anywhere near that MPEG2 stream.
Cable companies are similarly the biggest source of broadband (the only one where I live) and they treat upstream bandwith like a necessary evil, limiting it as much as possible. They want people to consume content, not provide it. Providing content is *their* job.
Video codecs are big business and have been for ages. The struggle to get MP3 (an officially open standardized format) free, didn't work as people scrambled to assert control over what started as an apparently open format. Once it's money making potential became apparent, pattents were generated that closed the open format and allowed a company to capitalize on it's success. The same land grab exists pre-emptively now in the video world which will make it hard for a new free standard to take hold. An Ogg Theora like open source codec seems like our best hope but there is so much inertia behind the current standards and the companies that produce them that it's hard for outside formats to get any traction.
All these things are lined up to prevent video from being easy, convenient, controlable and they are all fighting to keep customers from doing things that they want to do and are *willing to pay for*. Every industry who fights to prevent their customers from doing what they want eventually relises the spectacular waste of effort and missed oportunity. It will happen for the *AAs and it will happen for the cable companies, probably about the time Verizon or some Google powered internet TV device steals all their customers.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
IMHO, we do need a new OS paradigm. Linux, BSD, Windows....they all suck. They are useful, sure, but god-damn, they all do have problems. I'm not going to even list examples....I am sure you can all think of at least 10 problems with each OS. We need to fundementally change the way in which we interact with computers. Like Scotty said, "a keyboard...how quaint". I mean, good grief, I haven't even seen a consumer level touch screen for a computer.
Why does everyone want to turn my computer into a television?!?!
Sure, Win32 sucks, but that's just a layer on top of the Windows NT kernel. And besides, it sucks mainly because it's buggy, not because it's non-functional.
Fact is, the core operating system requirements (memory management, process scheduling, i/o) never change. Everything else is cruft that can be added/removed/replaced as required.
What groundbreaking technology is coming along that is going to require such a core re-write of the entire o/s model that it will render Linux/Windows unusable as a base to build on?
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
IMO, Metcalfe is just slightly below Dvorak in terms of credibility.
He did great work long ago, and has been on the rubber chicken circuit too long.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
That's still not going to make current operating systems obsolete. You're in the Microsoft way of thinking that a new shell and a few drivers is a new O/S (eg, windows 2000 vs XP). At the end of the day, it's still basic I/O once you write a driver for it.
I'd even wager that it's quite probable that any new input method you care to name (or invent) could simply be added as a kernel module to kernel 2.6 (or 2.4, 2.0, etc) - and that's only if it couldn't be done in user-space :)
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Playing the stock market is gambling where you on average get 108 pennies for every dollar you risk.
That's quite an unsupported assertion. How about backing it up. Hint: You won't be able to, because it isn't true.
Here in the US, the trend for ever-higher bandwidth per $ has stagnated. I've read of other countries that have surpassed the 7-15Mb range as typical, but here that range seems to be the "high speed" spec.
Computers are plenty powerful, dual core and faster lines to/from mobile devices are churning. Storage is still getting better, content is smearing to new legit protocols, but bandwidth hasn't increased.
Like the cable company wars, net connectivity seems to be bound by the few providers (DSL/Cable/Sat) that reach the home. The separation of physical line from service provider has not taken hold. I would expect that every 5 years or so, bandwidth should go up by about 50% for the same price. Nope.
Now that the Net seems to be integral to many lifestyles, monopolistic interests have locked the market, it seems.
Also, repeating the oft-repeated "chicken/egg" bit, there's gotta be content out there for me to pull to want higher bandwidth. Right now, very rarely do i max the line, since there's little video I'm intersested in.
Video internet, whatever that is, is copyright limited. The OS of the systems on each end of the cable makes virtually no difference to the deliverable intellectual property.
There, fixed that for you. You rights are being digitally managed, and the digit doing the managing is a giant anthropomorphic middle finger in a gimp mask.
As a Lisp programmer, I find this artificial distinction between the OS, application, transmission medium, and content amusing.
That is all.
As I recall, originally ethernet was pretty lousy standard, IBM tried to improve performance with Token Ring (had it's own issues), but somehow the lowest common denominator, like Windows, succeeded. Or with IDE vs. SCSI.
Metcalfe, who comes across as a man who has never known defeat, took up writing in 1990 after losing a boardroom skirmish at 3Com. The board of directors chose Eric Benhamou, a soft-spoken engineer nine years Metcalfe's junior, to run the networking company he had founded in his Palo Alto apartment in 1979.
"Benhamou is a nerd who can't give a presentation," says Metcalfe, still irritated eight years after the fact. "He's not horrible, but he's not charismatic." But Metcalfe acknowledges that it was Benhamou, not he, who won 3Com entry into the Fortune 500 and grew it into a US$5 billion powerhouse.
I hear real estate agents all over the place saying "now is an excellent time to buy real estate because interest rates are still historically low, and housing isn't like the stock market where people can quickly sell off." Of course it's an excellent time for someone to buy an overpriced house when you're the one selling it to them, especially considering the 6% commission you get.
I'm having a hard time understanding how 'average' people afford homes in hot markets. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the average home price is around $750,000. What's the average salary? Google and Yahoo pay well but not enough to afford a $750,000 house, even if there are two people in a household earning the same salary. I heard a general guideline that your house should be no more than two and a half times your gross salary. That means that you'd need roughly $300,000 a year to buy an average house. Do most households in the Bay Area make that kind of money? I think I'm doing fairly well, but I couldn't afford something like that. Am I just grossly underpaid, or are people crazy?
Are we going to see a lot of defaulting mortgages in 3-5 years when these silly interest-only periods expire and principal has to be repaid?
http://www.finfacts.com/stockperf.htm/ shows a historical average, but the original data is not on public sites. and it shows if you assume a one year hold time a return of 111pennies from every dollar you risk.
Duke http://www.duke.edu/~charvey/Classes/ba350/histor
Personally I believe that penny stocks and companies oscilitating between public and private reduce the average to closer to my 108 pennies return for every dollar risked.
but I have not run the numbers myself, but http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/research/crsp/products
Work bio at MMWD
"Even so, any OS worth anything can play video."
I understand what you mean, but I hope you can think of a few usefull OS's that can't play video.
"Expect a flurry of new, draconian laws protecting "Content Ownership" to be written and enacted during the boom phase. And we'll be stuck with these laws, even after this particular bubble bursts."
And expect people to ignore them like they always do when a bad law is passed.
Lossy compression of video implies variable bit rate - in other words, you can guess your bandwidth requirements, but you will never know for sure.
That's precisely the point. Where you need an efficient embedded system, there are variants of Unix and Windows just for that purpose. I mean, embedded Unix systems have been around for decades, and if you want something really lean there are OSs like vxWorks. Metcalf comes off as someone who doesn't have the foggiest idea what he's talking about. He seems very confused on the particular aspects of any given platform. The whole point behind using a variant of a common, long-standing operating system is that you don't have to retrain developers, a lot of the skills are cross-compatible so that if someone was developing on one variant of Windows or Unix, moving to another embedded variant ought to be a good deal faster and less error-prone.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That, and even if you pick your stocks by throwing darts, you have an even or slightly-slightly-better-than-even chance of making money.
The stock market always goes up over long periods of time, so playing it is like playing roulette, but with say 0.01% advantage, instead of the -2% advantage that you get in the casino.
It's 9am, I'm meant to be at work but I've got a hangover. My PC alarm starts buzzing. Damn! someone is calling me. Mmm, hokay. I make a grab for the PC next to the bed and unroll it. My boss, Alice, is IMing me. I press the "lights camera action" button on the IM portal. The lights in my room brighten, the cameras switch on, and my home network swings into action to make the picture of me look quite a lot better than I am at the moment. For one thing, I'm wearing clothes in the picture in a picture that I see. For another the PC has removed the giant blown up porn image that I put above the bed last week. It's showing me in the office. Smart PC - must say thanks to it.
"Hey Bob", Alice smiles.
"Hi Alice - wassup?"
"I was hoping I could get a look at the work package for MacIntyre this morning."
"Yeah, no problem", I lie, "Gimme a sec - call you back in 5."
I throw the bedclothes off and walk out of my room into the living room. The lights don't brighten because I'm just walking through the space, and the wallscreen stays muted. Down the stairs and into my office which has activated before I get there. My PC was listening to the conversation, so it's got the MacIntyre portal open and a line ready to call back.
I sit down at the table. It's got an active surface and a small flat widescreen, but I get most of my work done on the wallscreen which has got a bunch of portals grouped. The PC has gathered that I'm not at my best and it's put on some low glow lighting on the wallscreen. Kinda like those light shows that were once popular; I've been getting all retro in the last few months.
Mmm, okay. I grab one of the interface pens that are lying around. It's got a 3D accelerometer built in, so it knows all about it's orientation and stuff. Actually, I dunno how it works, but it knows when it's being used. I use it on the desk to enter the MacIntyre portal. I say portal: it's kind of a glowing door that that my point of view travels through to get into a new workspace.
To my left are a pile of files, and to my right is the pile of clips. I've been working on a presentation all week. It's right in front of me. I point at the IM link on the wallscreen and open it. In a moment Alice is there. I pull her into the MacIntyre portal, and now we are both on the wallscreen.
Alice looks pretty good this morning for someone who was at a party until 4 hours ago. I guess being virtual over three locations, means that some people haven't been to bed yet. I don't know where Alice is physically at the moment. A couple of months ago, she was in Tokyo. Maybe she still is.
I pull my dressing gown tight and walk over to the wall; being near naked in front of your boss is kind of a no-no, even if she can't see it that way. As I get closer to the wall, the resolution changes; the pixels are getting smaller and adding detail. Alice is wearing a dress with really small red mandeldots, which are slowly moving. Evidently she is also dressed virtually, or maybe she's really got an active fabric dress; it's pretty hard to tell these days.
"You ready?" I ask Alice. She nods and taps on the MacIntyre presentation.
It folds open and starts playing.
"It's best if it's immersive", I laser the wall portal to expand and it uses up most of the wall space.
We are standing in an amusement park; MacIntyre own Disney and a bunch of other parks. For the last 6 months I've been designing a new ride for the new park in Gaza. The image we are looking at is beamed in from Gaza, which, pretty amazingly has become the new playground of the middle east. There are kids all around us and grown ups. The PC has inserted our images in the video. I use the pencil to walk us towards the North side of the square, which is where we can see what the new ride will look like. My PC (well actually my grid) is generating the image by compositing images from cameras around the square. Actually that's underplaying it a bit: it's using the images to build a 3D m
with mac os x tiger, core audio, core image, and core video are built into the os. any app can integrate video and video manipulation seamlessly and elegantly.
i hate it when discussions of OS ignore Macs! Bah!
You need to add a paragraph:
RIAA/MPAA for Teh Win. Mentioning the RIAA/MPAA as evil, greedy, price-gouging corporations is good for an automatic +5, regardless of whether it's ontopic or not. Mention that you pirate music or videos as a form of protest, and you'll be Friended by every cheap pro-copyright infringement adolescent on Slashdot, which is good for Karma in the future, as they tend to blindly mod up posts from people on their Friends list - all you need to do is get on their good side. Throw in a few soundbites such as "the copyright system is being abused" or "the evil corporations are abusing the artists" or "it's all commercialized crap anyway" or "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" or "copyright infringement isn't stealing" and your Karma will skyrocket. For maximum effect, reply to your own post, and state "I know it's not good form to reply to one's own posts, but...", and break the above down into 2 or 3 posts - someone with mod points is sure to miss one or two and mod up another.
Investing is entirely different than "playing the stock market". You guys are both right. You can use your brokerage account to invest or to gamble. During the internet boom, most of the tech investors and day traders were gambling, not investing.
Finally, I woke up this morning, mysteriously transported to the year 2016. Does this mean I can start wearing my jeans inside out? Or was that so last year?
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Basically, what he wants is possible today using OSes like BeOS and QNX. When this stuff becomes important, Linux will adapt, just as it has started to with the low-latency patches.
Having said that, what Bob Metcalfe doesn't realise is that the kind of dream OS that he's after is difficult to realise on the Intel architecture. All server/workstation CPUs which have been designed from scratch in the last 20 years have had support for cheap address space switching, such as tagged TLBs which don't require flushing etc. The IA32, for which multitasking OSes were an afterthought, does not. Instead, the IA32 solution is to throw more resources (cache, prefetch etc) at the problem. The upshot is that if you write a modern kind of operating system for an IA32 chip, real-time applications go better but traditional batch/server/enterprise applications go worse. And this still makes up the bulk of the workload.
(The dramatic irony of all this is that the argument also holds for Metcalfe's baby: Ethernet. Until virtual circuit-type loads are more common than datagrams, it'll always be better to make Ethernet faster than move to ATM.)
So while we use 20-year-old CPUs and run 20-year-old workloads on them, we must also use 20-year-old operating systems.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Video killed the..
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The stock market return is overstated because it doesn't count bankruptcies or companies that fall out of a given index.
Real estate investment tends to use leveraged dollars to increase return. That only doesn't work if you buy at the peak of a market and then have to sell before the next upswing (which is how flippers usually mess up).
Personally, I've made about an order of magnitude more money with real esate investments, with approximately equal dollars between stocks and real estate, over 25 years.
But I still have to work. Dammit. Should have put all the dollars into real estate.
Oracle and unix guy.
You mean, like, TV?
>My copy of Windows XP 'leverages' paralellism just fine, as my CPU is dual core. The OS gets both CPUs working, all the time.
No argument. But would it scale to a thousand processors, or a hundred thousand? That's the sort of architecture supercomputers have today. My friend at one of the national supercomputing centers is really unhappy with the state of available operating systmes for today's supercomputers (next decade's personal computers, 2020's cellphones).
Why don't you have that kind of architecture on your desktop? Partly price, partly it's too early (same thing really), and partly you'd get very little advantage from it.
My objection is that Linux is running the Googleplex today, which is hugely parallel and handles quantities of data for which our language doesn't have adjectives. Any OS that can do that is decently future-proof.
Seriously, so long as the underlying OS can do I/O semi-efficiently then any "Video Internet" is going to depend on the applications that run on top.
Technologies like annodex are going to be the ones that help drive the "Video Internet".
I most certainly hope not. Can you imagine what would happen to the economy if a large percentage of the home owning populace defaults on their mortgages?
It could very likely create a rush on the banks the likes of which haven't been seen since just prior to The Great Depression.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Yes it does but PCs are not perfect but we are stuck with them.
1. Is the X86 ISA really the best that we can do? It is is very register starved in 32 bit mode. The tacked on 64bit mode helps but it means you have to compile a program in 64bit mode to use those extra registers. On the Power and Sparc a program that doesn't need a 64bit address space will run faster if it is compiled as a 32 bit program. It will also use less space.
2. Real-time scheduling. Both Linux and Windows do not seem to handle realtime tasks very well. Video and audio going out of sync seems very common.
3. Inconsistent APIs. To actually write code for Windows to handle things like the modem through TAPI is a nightmare. Under Linux if you want to write a program to use audio do you write for OSS or Alsa?
4. Lack of security. When the WindowsNT kernel was written the idea that millions of systems would be exposed on the Internet just wasn't on the radar.
They very idea that the PC is the best that we can do is just depressing.
"Wait, I thought the problem was with the PC architecture - now it's data management? Moving data between various devices is the job of applications. If the applications aren't written to intemperate and share data intelligently, there's nothing the OS can do to fix that."
What level do you want to have interoperatbility? Many things that used to be applications has been moved to the OS. The MacOS has a system wide spell checker, and address book. Windows claims that the browser is port of the OS. The OS is the mediator between applications and devices. To me it seems like the perfect place to deal with interoperability.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And your statement is not misinformed?
Every investor diversifies (except for total morons). And there has been no "smart" investors found, who can consistently (as opposed to randomly) outperform the market.
Stupid cnelzie likes to think he is smarter than all other investors. He likes to think that he knows something noone else does. Ha-ha.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The Hummer is not a military vehicle.
The HMMWV IS a military vehicle.
They do not share parts. The Hummer is a Tahoe-in-drag blingmobile for people too dumb to know the difference.
I played the market once in my life, and did as you are suggesting (and a bit more). Perhaps you are old enough to remember this time, it was known as Black Thursday.
If you pick a dozen stocks at random and wait thirty years, you will have about a 99% chance of having made money, after inflation.
In gambling, the odds are against you by a few percent. With investments, the odds are with you by a few percent. This makes a profound difference.
Bob Metcalfe said "I'm looking forward to the next Internet bubble. I don't know what everyone's so negative about. The last bubble was lots of fun.". Let us at least hope we learned a few things from the last bubble.
Since the Bubble was just that, investment deals and stock prices buoyed by nothing more than hot air, if we did "learn a few things from the last bubble" there wont be another one.
Yeah, they say the same thing about horses.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
in this column:
"I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
"Without efficient micropayments, there will be little Internet commerce, except, maybe, but probably not, some advertising."
"Even if, as Nielsen just reported, 37 million North Americans tried the Internet in the last three months, we'll discover in 1996 that the vast majority surfed for several hours and then went back to watching TV."
"[T]he Internet's naive flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won't be, so no problem."
"So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will emerge as the information superhighway. Instead of an Internet brimming with Web pages under construction, too few of us will haunt ghost pages."
I learned not to quit an IT job days before the bubble breaks.
*DrugCheese rants*
seriously... it sucks for you, but fatsean speaks truth. if you're doing well enough to consider buying a hummer, you should have been putting that money away instead. i didn't make it big, i just spent and saved sanely... lived on about $20k over 2.5 years, and am now doing well. worked some lousy jobs. worked some fun ones that didn't pay much. gotta keep living.
were you one of those guys that wouldn't just get any job - eg, mcdonald's, walmart, etc - because that's "just not you"?
didn't you ever hear about keeping at least 6 months worth of financial backing around? if you keep that much around for living in the style you're used to, you can stretch it for at least 18 months if you switch to ultra-frugal the second you lose your job. i'm talking beans and rice, and i'm not talking canned beans. get a freaking $15 crock pot and lose your mental hangups about what you "deserve" and how "shitty" your life is.
yeah sorry, no actual sympathy here. next time spare yourself the trauma and behave like a functional human being.
Let us at least hope we learned a few things from the last bubble.
By and large, these are Americans we're talking about. They're ignorant sheep with the attention span of gnats who vote the way JEE-ZUZ supposedly tells them. If you think they remember five years ago, you're insane.
(Mod me to hell, I don't care.)
I think you've found the difference between "Playing the stock market" and investing.
See that "Preview" button?
"..it was (is) very annoying to see someone straight out of school, spend $30,000 or whatever to get an MCSE in 6 months and then drop straight into a $90,000 a year position when someone who has years of "real world" experience is still stuck in a $28,000 helpdesk position."
I have been in IT for over 15yrs and in the workforce for 30yrs. In IT I have worked mainly in development on large scale projects and have interviewed over a hundred applicants in that time. I have seen many people who are worse than useless at their job and I have on occasion hired some of them myself. I have never seen this happen, people with proven experience do not have to put up with being chained up to a call center phone for a pitance. If by "helpdesk" you mean third level support, then these people must be mature enough to deal with competing queries from multiple powerfull customers, they are normally well paid individuals with proven experience, the majority have some kind of tertiary qualification.
I myself have a BSc in computer science, it cost me ~$60K (mainly lost income) and three years of my time. I had been interested in computers since the late seventies, I did the degree for the specific reason of making "big bucks" from my hobby, it has proven to be worth far more than it cost. The "big-bucks" says I can now go back to acedimia and get payed to continue my hobby and teach others (the bucks are just too seductive right now and I have a new hobby). The vast majority of people who I have worked with have either had a related degree, doctorate or served a long "apprenticeship" in the mainframe days. Occasionally I have come across people who have unrelated degrees (eg: biology) but these people are usually found in testing, documentation or management.
"The ability to perform a job is the key thing..."
I would rephrase that as "potential", "ability" is what maintains your employment. If you don't have "a bit of paper" how do I know you have any potential? I can't interview every asshat who tells me "the answers to all problems are in this browser thingy", I need someone else to filter out this sort of noise and find some "qualified" applicants. There are simply too many people wanting the $90K job that I am offering on behalf of my employer. In any workplace bigger than a shop-front this filtering task is performed by the HR department or an external agency.
Now if the HR people send me their selection of applicants for a "senior developer with relevant tertiary qualifications" and I get five pimply kids with a shinny new MSCE stappled to their forehead, what do I do? I can either suck it up and watch the project go into the bit bucket or I can reject all of them.
After all the manhours expended to find these five teenage wiz-kids, HR will definitely want to know why they are unsuitable. It is the project managers function to acurately describe what they want, HR then go and find people who they think match the description. Sometimes HR have template job descriptions such as "senior software developer" but the hiring manager has the power to reject any/all applicants. I have only worked at one IT company that did not operate like this when it came to hiring people, that company employed 4 people including the married couple who owned it.
I am not saying that an unqualified person cannot do the job, I have seen worthy people migrate from low-paying jobs, often via company sponsored tertiary education. I'm asking why should I give anyone the time of day when I have not already personally witnessed their POTENTIAL? The answer is because I need to hire strangers. Before I actually meet the stranger face to face, a "bit of paper" is the only clue I get that says they might be suitable for the job.
"...and I've been able to find a great IT Manager position..."
So now it is your responsibility to hire great IT people, right? If you needed somebody to write trivial windows apps and did not want to spend days interviewing people, what experience and qualifications would you suggest HR look for when selecting applicants?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The stock market is inherently risky. You have absolutely no guarantees that you will turn a profit, or even avoid losing all of your money. It's not all up to knowledge either, you could just be massive unlucky and invest at just the wrong time (before a bubble bursts).
Anyone saying otherwise is a fool.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
has learned anything from Internet bubbles is invited to watch the herd at the VC blog and get cured of that delusion.
Tech Public Policy stuff
First you contradict yourself, by stating "Every investor diversifies" followed up "except for total morons".
Then you go and state a claim that I never made and is woefully inacurate, as I do not believe that I am smarter than all other investors.
Why do you even bother posting? You added nothing of value, only contradicted yourself and made false claims.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
"I'm having a hard time understanding how 'average' people afford homes in hot markets. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the average home price is around $750,000. What's the average salary? Google and Yahoo pay well but not enough to afford a $750,000 house, even if there are two people in a household earning the same salary. I heard a general guideline that your house should be no more than two and a half times your gross salary. That means that you'd need roughly $300,000 a year to buy an average house. Do most households in the Bay Area make that kind of money? I think I'm doing fairly well, but I couldn't afford something like that. Am I just grossly underpaid, or are people crazy?"
'Average' people buy houses they cannot afford, because they've bought into certain ideas, sometimes misleading. The most popular idea is leveraging your credit to buy real estate (mortgage) for a place to live or maybe serve as an investment. Another idea, one I think gets people into trouble, is that of 'keeping up with the Jones'. The Jones have an image of a really nice car, a beatiful house, kids, happy couple and maybe some pets. Everyone wants to live like the Jones so they go out and buy the house and car, without solid financial planning.
Your numbers (total house purchase price = 2.5 x gross salary) may work out to what I use (monthly payment on 15 year fixed = 25% x net monthly income). I did not do the math to verify this.
Like you say, most people in the Bay area aren't expected to bring in large amounts of money and live in OVERPRICED housing. What happens is people create a recipe for bankruptcy: a high mortgage, credit card bills and unexpected medical expenses. See this link for rising bankruptcy numbers: http://www.bankruptcyaction.com/USbankstats.htm
Look at the "Bankruptcy Profiles" section, "Slightly better educated than the general population". Does this mean that our education system and parents have failed to educate us? Well that's for another thread, I'm off topic anyway!
For example, a 30 year mortgage on a $350,000 loan (still not enough to buy a nice house in the Los Angeles area right now) comes out to be around $2150 a month. If you were paying interest-only at 5%, that's only $1450 for your interest-only period, then after that you'll be paying more than $2150 a month if you want to pay your home off. $700 extra per month is a lot of money, especially to the family with $50,000 in credit card debt and a shiny new BMW X5 sitting in the driveway right next to the Infiniti G35. I can't imagine the numbers on a $750,000+ home.
The 3 year ARMs from 2003 begin principle repayment in 2006. I'm thinking that some strange things will happen between now and 2010.
99% of legit or semi-legit HD content isn't going to be in MPEG4 AVC. It's going to be MPEG-2 Main Profile @ High Level (MP@HL) obtained from:
An ATSC OTA HD tuner in the US
A DVB tuner in Europe
A QAM cable tuner for unencrypted US cable channels (There are more of these than you may think)
Firewire from a cable or satellite box
No one uses MPEG4 for HD content unless they are archiving stuff that was originally obtained as MPEG-2 at a lower bitrate. It is most definately not currently available from more than a tiny handful of legitimate sources, if any. Any modern machine is more than capable of decoding 1080i MPEG-2, which is why it's now nearly impossible to buy HD tuner cards that do hardware decoding nowadays (whereas around 2 years ago, there was one HD tuner card that relied on software decoding and at least 5-6 ATSC cards that did HW decoding.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?