It's worth noting that Apple's Software Update always asks for user confirmation before installing anything. This is substantively different from Microsoft's strategy of installing any and all updates without asking until the user uses the control panel to change the policy.
While this difference doesn't change the number of suckers using each respective platform, Apple's the vendor that makes it easy to put off updates until they've been in the wild for a while. It's also much less presumptive of Apple. (Though their update process with the iPhone offsets any goodwill they may have gotten from that.)
Umm... Pretty much by definition, blue screens can't be user error, unless that "user error" involves something like disconnecting the hard drive while it's in use. If the user can reliably cause a blue screen through software methods, then that is a bug in the software, and not the user's fault.
The fact that you think you can dismiss most blue screens as user or hardware errors shows that your standards have been lowered so far that you're pretty much incapable of making a meaningful judgment on the issue. (In my experience, most blue screens are caused by buggy drivers, and thus not entirely Microsoft's fault, either.)
It's not so hard to factor a 32-bit number with a 64-bit computer. It is very hard to efficiently factor a 2048-bit number with a 64-bit computer. Even if you had a list of all prime numbers that can be expressed in 2k or fewer bits, streaming all that data to your CPU would take a lot of bandwidth.
In Vista, the DWM prevents GDI commands from being accelerated, which represents a regression relative to XP. The compositing does mean that moving windows can be smoother, but when the contents of the window change, Vista is liable to be slower (in addition to using twice as much memory for that window due to a pixel format mismatch between DirectX and GDI). Thus, legacy applications are not likely to be able to draw any faster on Vista than on XP.
Compare this with Quartz 2d Extreme, now known as Quartz GL (and not abandoned as you say). Existing applications can have their drawing accelerated at the cost of a potential for glitches or performance problems (due to limited bandwidth from the CPU to the GPU), and new applications can enable acceleration at the discretion of the developer.
High school makes people act like idiots. In other (less opressive) environments, most kids seem a lot smarter and more educable.
As for your anecdotal evidence concerning friends who had taken Calculus, any mathematician or computer scientist can tell you that success in Calculus is not at all a predictor of success in formal discrete mathematics. That's not news, and I don't think that anybody is trying to say it isn't true.
If you look at how universities teach their undergrad math majors these days, a lot of them include a transition class that comes during or after the basic calculus classes. The purpose of such a class is to teach students set theory, logic, induction, and other tools of formal math before sending them on to analysis or abstract algebra. If you look at what kind of math those classes use to teach formal methods, you'll realize that the prerequisite knowledge is actually just plain old algebra, which a lot of students get in middle school these days. Math departments have known for decades that they can't expect high school graduates to know any of the basics of math. Hence the mandatory remedial classes. Without them, it's hit-or-miss as to whether any given student will be able to pick up formal techniques as they struggle through the first few weeks of analysis.
The ACM clearly recognizes that much of the above applies to computer science as well. If you try to teach programming to students that have had no introduction to discrete math, lots of them will flunk out not due to lack of ability but lack of experience. In effect, the way most universities teach CS weeds out all but those who teach themselves the most important bits.
Exactly. Most people using computers today have a deeply flawed conceptual model of what's going on under the hood, and are thus helpless to solve even the most basic problems that extend beyond their experience. Even a simple graphical programming tool like Alice can go a long way toward helping somebody understand what a program really is, and Alice has been proven to work for average middle school students.
The core computer science topics won't be obsolete anytime soon - consider that many places still teach the basics using Lisp, a language that's been around since 1958. Computer architectures haven't changed much either. Sure, instruction sets have evolved, but we're still using von Neumann archtectures. None of the paradigms used to program them is ever really obsoleted.
Do SSDs have caches? Certainly, for hard drives, fragmentation can increase cache misses. If a drive can prefetch the rest of a file, then it may be able to stream it out of a cache with higher transfer speeds than the main storage, be it flash or hard disk platters.
The re-routing necessary to compensate for this kind of thing doesn't usually happen until money changes hands. There's a difference between having a link to a network and having an agreement for transit through a network.
FUSE is interesting and nerdy. Scaremongering about how an operating system update may not work as advertised isn't particularly interesting, even if it is indicative of a QA failure on the part of the vendor.
Regarding office software, I'm quite sure it will come for whatever it's worth. I've never seen anyone actually do anything genuinely useful to a word, excel or powerpoint file on a PDA or smartphone - and I'm pretty geeky about this stuff. It's a nice checkbox feature that never actually gets used. I had the ability on my last PDA and I never once used it. I can't even think of a situation where I would use it. Maybe you actually do but that would make you very unusual.
I frequently find myself away from a computer but wanting to refer to some piece of information out of a Word document that's attached to some email I got. Often, it's minutes from a meeting. Being able to read (and preferably search, too) Word documents is pretty useful. I've never felt the urge to compose or edit a Word doc on a phone or PDA, though. Simple spreadsheets occasionally, but I usually am better off using a clipboard and typing the data in later.
I guess that, as they did for the mp3 player marker, Apple has shown the world that customers do care about quality a lot more than the established manufacturers give them credit for.
Once the competitors take that into account, Apple's market share will start to decline. But it may keep going up for quite a while before the competition catches up.
Cyan's the kind of company that might actually attach a free license to their textures and models. One of the major settings in Uru is an underground city. Only a small portion of it is accessible, but Cyan's already tacitly endorsed fans building more areas of the city. (So far, they've prohibited fans from modeling any part of the city that's important to Cyan's plot.) It wouldn't be at all surprising if Cyan decided that fans should be able to build new areas of that city in the style of what we already have, using existing assets.
The engine Uru is based on (Plasma) was acquired by Cyan from a startup that hadn't released any products with it yet. Cyan bought it expressly for building what eventually became Uru. Along the way, they did make RealMyst, a fully 3d remake of the original Myst.
RealMyst and Uru were the first Myst games that weren't all pre-rendered graphics. The previous games (Myst 1-4) were built with various technologies, and by various 3rd parties. Myst 5, however, was built off the Plasma engine, because the content of the game had originally been planned to be part of Uru.
The Cell architecture is mentioned in the intro section of the spec as an example of what OpenCL might be good for. The language is generic enough that most any vector processor should work as a target.
Python can't replace Fortran, but C can (and to a large extent, is). For most serious scientific computation, the initial software is written in a language like MATLAB or Python, which make use of number crunching libraries written in C or Fortran. When that code needs to be modified to run on a supercomputer instead of a workstation, it is usually converted to pure C or Fortran.
Interpreted and interactive languages like MATLAB and Python make it easy to prototype and test a new algorithm, but C and Fortran are still necessary to make an efficient implementation.
(Disclosure: I am a mathematician, currently using all the above languages for ongoing research, though I am studiously avoiding having to write any Fortran myself.)
I think the transition from Classical to soundtrack music was a bit more gradual than your first paragraph implies. Guys like Gershwin, Bernstein, and Copland wrote pieces for both the concert hall and the cinema, before people like John Williams came along. There was good symphonic music in both venues for many decades before the best composers stopped writing standalone pieces.
I haven't used Vista, but I'm pretty sure that as of XP SP2, the TCP stack in Windows didn't fit that definition of modern.
For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't really matter whether that's a flaw inherent in the protocol, or just a bug in the implementation with 90% market share. A real network will still have very sub-optimal performance under load if some of the important links have high latency, even if the bandwidth is high.
TCP is a good all-around protocol, but there are a lot of situations where it ends up sucking, and not all of those situations are obscure corner cases.
Detecting maximum throughput via packet dropping is really bad in high-latency links and in applications that need low latency. It is also apparently easy to implement TCP in such a way that overall transfer speed takes a nosedive when latency gets high, as evinced by Microsoft having done just that.
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It's worth noting that Apple's Software Update always asks for user confirmation before installing anything. This is substantively different from Microsoft's strategy of installing any and all updates without asking until the user uses the control panel to change the policy.
While this difference doesn't change the number of suckers using each respective platform, Apple's the vendor that makes it easy to put off updates until they've been in the wild for a while. It's also much less presumptive of Apple. (Though their update process with the iPhone offsets any goodwill they may have gotten from that.)
Umm... Pretty much by definition, blue screens can't be user error, unless that "user error" involves something like disconnecting the hard drive while it's in use. If the user can reliably cause a blue screen through software methods, then that is a bug in the software, and not the user's fault.
The fact that you think you can dismiss most blue screens as user or hardware errors shows that your standards have been lowered so far that you're pretty much incapable of making a meaningful judgment on the issue. (In my experience, most blue screens are caused by buggy drivers, and thus not entirely Microsoft's fault, either.)
It's not so hard to factor a 32-bit number with a 64-bit computer. It is very hard to efficiently factor a 2048-bit number with a 64-bit computer. Even if you had a list of all prime numbers that can be expressed in 2k or fewer bits, streaming all that data to your CPU would take a lot of bandwidth.
In Vista, the DWM prevents GDI commands from being accelerated, which represents a regression relative to XP. The compositing does mean that moving windows can be smoother, but when the contents of the window change, Vista is liable to be slower (in addition to using twice as much memory for that window due to a pixel format mismatch between DirectX and GDI). Thus, legacy applications are not likely to be able to draw any faster on Vista than on XP.
Compare this with Quartz 2d Extreme, now known as Quartz GL (and not abandoned as you say). Existing applications can have their drawing accelerated at the cost of a potential for glitches or performance problems (due to limited bandwidth from the CPU to the GPU), and new applications can enable acceleration at the discretion of the developer.
High school makes people act like idiots. In other (less opressive) environments, most kids seem a lot smarter and more educable.
As for your anecdotal evidence concerning friends who had taken Calculus, any mathematician or computer scientist can tell you that success in Calculus is not at all a predictor of success in formal discrete mathematics. That's not news, and I don't think that anybody is trying to say it isn't true.
If you look at how universities teach their undergrad math majors these days, a lot of them include a transition class that comes during or after the basic calculus classes. The purpose of such a class is to teach students set theory, logic, induction, and other tools of formal math before sending them on to analysis or abstract algebra. If you look at what kind of math those classes use to teach formal methods, you'll realize that the prerequisite knowledge is actually just plain old algebra, which a lot of students get in middle school these days. Math departments have known for decades that they can't expect high school graduates to know any of the basics of math. Hence the mandatory remedial classes. Without them, it's hit-or-miss as to whether any given student will be able to pick up formal techniques as they struggle through the first few weeks of analysis.
The ACM clearly recognizes that much of the above applies to computer science as well. If you try to teach programming to students that have had no introduction to discrete math, lots of them will flunk out not due to lack of ability but lack of experience. In effect, the way most universities teach CS weeds out all but those who teach themselves the most important bits.
Exactly. Most people using computers today have a deeply flawed conceptual model of what's going on under the hood, and are thus helpless to solve even the most basic problems that extend beyond their experience. Even a simple graphical programming tool like Alice can go a long way toward helping somebody understand what a program really is, and Alice has been proven to work for average middle school students.
The core computer science topics won't be obsolete anytime soon - consider that many places still teach the basics using Lisp, a language that's been around since 1958. Computer architectures haven't changed much either. Sure, instruction sets have evolved, but we're still using von Neumann archtectures. None of the paradigms used to program them is ever really obsoleted.
I guess you missed my submission from less than 2 weeks ago: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/13/041200
Do SSDs have caches? Certainly, for hard drives, fragmentation can increase cache misses. If a drive can prefetch the rest of a file, then it may be able to stream it out of a cache with higher transfer speeds than the main storage, be it flash or hard disk platters.
Even with negligible seek times, defragging can improve the effectiveness of prefetching.
The re-routing necessary to compensate for this kind of thing doesn't usually happen until money changes hands. There's a difference between having a link to a network and having an agreement for transit through a network.
Wouldn't inserting a repeater capable of man-in-the-middle attacks introduce a change in latency that the ISP could notice?
FUSE is interesting and nerdy. Scaremongering about how an operating system update may not work as advertised isn't particularly interesting, even if it is indicative of a QA failure on the part of the vendor.
I guess I misread "useful to" as "useful with". Subtle point.
Regarding office software, I'm quite sure it will come for whatever it's worth. I've never seen anyone actually do anything genuinely useful to a word, excel or powerpoint file on a PDA or smartphone - and I'm pretty geeky about this stuff. It's a nice checkbox feature that never actually gets used. I had the ability on my last PDA and I never once used it. I can't even think of a situation where I would use it. Maybe you actually do but that would make you very unusual.
I frequently find myself away from a computer but wanting to refer to some piece of information out of a Word document that's attached to some email I got. Often, it's minutes from a meeting. Being able to read (and preferably search, too) Word documents is pretty useful. I've never felt the urge to compose or edit a Word doc on a phone or PDA, though. Simple spreadsheets occasionally, but I usually am better off using a clipboard and typing the data in later.
I guess that, as they did for the mp3 player marker, Apple has shown the world that customers do care about quality a lot more than the established manufacturers give them credit for.
Once the competitors take that into account, Apple's market share will start to decline. But it may keep going up for quite a while before the competition catches up.
Cyan's the kind of company that might actually attach a free license to their textures and models. One of the major settings in Uru is an underground city. Only a small portion of it is accessible, but Cyan's already tacitly endorsed fans building more areas of the city. (So far, they've prohibited fans from modeling any part of the city that's important to Cyan's plot.) It wouldn't be at all surprising if Cyan decided that fans should be able to build new areas of that city in the style of what we already have, using existing assets.
The engine Uru is based on (Plasma) was acquired by Cyan from a startup that hadn't released any products with it yet. Cyan bought it expressly for building what eventually became Uru. Along the way, they did make RealMyst, a fully 3d remake of the original Myst.
RealMyst and Uru were the first Myst games that weren't all pre-rendered graphics. The previous games (Myst 1-4) were built with various technologies, and by various 3rd parties. Myst 5, however, was built off the Plasma engine, because the content of the game had originally been planned to be part of Uru.
Or there are lots of questions that are not getting voted on.
Khronos isn't in the business of implementing their specs. They just define them. And OpenVG was just updated.
The Cell architecture is mentioned in the intro section of the spec as an example of what OpenCL might be good for. The language is generic enough that most any vector processor should work as a target.
Python can't replace Fortran, but C can (and to a large extent, is). For most serious scientific computation, the initial software is written in a language like MATLAB or Python, which make use of number crunching libraries written in C or Fortran. When that code needs to be modified to run on a supercomputer instead of a workstation, it is usually converted to pure C or Fortran.
Interpreted and interactive languages like MATLAB and Python make it easy to prototype and test a new algorithm, but C and Fortran are still necessary to make an efficient implementation.
(Disclosure: I am a mathematician, currently using all the above languages for ongoing research, though I am studiously avoiding having to write any Fortran myself.)
I think the transition from Classical to soundtrack music was a bit more gradual than your first paragraph implies. Guys like Gershwin, Bernstein, and Copland wrote pieces for both the concert hall and the cinema, before people like John Williams came along. There was good symphonic music in both venues for many decades before the best composers stopped writing standalone pieces.
I haven't used Vista, but I'm pretty sure that as of XP SP2, the TCP stack in Windows didn't fit that definition of modern.
For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't really matter whether that's a flaw inherent in the protocol, or just a bug in the implementation with 90% market share. A real network will still have very sub-optimal performance under load if some of the important links have high latency, even if the bandwidth is high.
TCP is a good all-around protocol, but there are a lot of situations where it ends up sucking, and not all of those situations are obscure corner cases.
Detecting maximum throughput via packet dropping is really bad in high-latency links and in applications that need low latency. It is also apparently easy to implement TCP in such a way that overall transfer speed takes a nosedive when latency gets high, as evinced by Microsoft having done just that.