I guess this means French file sharers will be moving to anonymous p2p programs like FreeNet, GnuNet, etc and darknets.
This is silly, bring it all out in the open, money can be made if the price is low and service good, for example allofmp3.com.
No rubbish about the artists will be cheated, they are badly cheated in the existing system:
Trent Reznor : "One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they'll sign anything'
Lets make a new system and pay the artists the lion share and let them own their music. Where an artists work can be got from multiple competing vendors. The artists and their fans is the more important thing. These fat middle men need to go on a slimfast diet and get the hell out the way. As for TV, Mark Pesce told the world that in 2005 http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html. Movies the same, plus we are still going to go to the cinema.
There are many ways this could work, but the world has changed and law makers legal world offers a tiny fraction of what this new world has to offer. Are they just too old fashioned? Still struggling with email let alone file sharing and hooking up the TV with the computer...
Free software's diversity is it's strength. Each part can be replaced with a competing component. It's all glued together with open standards. This makes things more modular and enforces the Unix philosophy "Write programs that do one thing and do it well." It's an ecosystem, competition fueling evolution. Forking into more competing versions when people disagree.
Some crazy people even replace the Linux kernel with a BSD/Solaris even Hurd!
Anyone one thinks there should only be one Linux distro doesn't get it at all.
Users require very different documentation, as unrelated from the code as possible. I don't think anyone sane would argue against that can of documentation. The documentation I'm against is where it's the code in english form, that is stupid because it will never match the code, either because it will drift out of date or because it was what it was meant to do not what it does.
x86 netbook, short battery life and big.
ARM netbook, long battery life and small.
x86 netbook is Windows, looks like Linux lost on that battle field, not wholey fairly either....
ARM netbook is Linux, far more functional then a WinCE netbook could ever be. What's the point of Windows where you can't run your normal apps?
MS one the x86 battle, but will they win the netbook war? It depends what exactly a netbook is for. If it's to be a mini general purpose PC where people run the apps they know, ARM and Linux loose. If it's to be a travel mini PC for web surfing and the odd jobs (and for Linux people, anything) ARM and Linux are in with a chance. Linux nearly succeed with x86, so maybe longer battery life will swing it.....
Personally, I want x86/Windows monopoly to be broken, I want competition on the OS and chip fronts, but I think they have such critical mass the market alone won't do it. People learn only Windows and don't realize how limiting that is, thus no real competition, and no real competition, means slow and fat.....oh wait that's been happening for years. Windows main competition is old versions of Windows and that sucks. It's just kept good enough that most people don't look desperately for something else. There is at least some competition on the chip front, as long as it's x86....
I would love to see ARM/Linux win, but I'm not feeling hopeful. Still I'll get myself a ARM netbook as a full pocket linux and a powerful media player in one.:-)
I commented when it is needed. A pet hate of mine of is over commented code.
Sane naming is much better than comments.
I'm not against a comment above the function explaining the function's roll. That doesn't get in the way.
And of course this is often for automatic documentation.
Wine I feel is an example of getting it right, not too much, not too little, http://source.winehq.org/
Anyone who duplicates code in comment form needs to be shot!
Can they not read code? If not, what the hell are they doing writing it!
I have see code so heavy commented you couldn't read the code. I've seen code where the function is called GetName with a comment telling you it gets the name.
I wish I was joking.
It will be slow and fat making Windows apps, that are already slow and fat, even worse.
Dotnet apps also have a terrible habbit of being fat and slow, which is crap for desktop machines where more hardware is not a solution. That will be even worse on a netbook!
Going back to Win32, I believe WINE can already been hooked up so WINE client apps can be in an emulated environment and the WINE server native.... So if all the work of the apps is actually in system calls, it might run ok....
But by far and away the best solution is an open source solution so they can compiled for the native architecture and have any fat cut out. Windows and it's apps can go hang.
And finish hashing out the whole new/dev/, dbus, etc. and settle the API down enough to document the damned thing. I know UNIX, but this new stuff totally confuses me. WHere does one go to even find out how it is supposed to work? Which of course isn't how it currently DOES sorta work. How does one even know if a particular piece of documentation, sketchy and incomplete as it will certainly be, documents what was, what currently is or what is intended to be?
Documen-what? Use the source Luke. This is big part why I love open source. Source is the ultimate documentation. I can read how anything I fancy works! Documentation is always going to have problems keeping up with the source. Source should be written to read (or at least refactored to read, or at least commented when neither is possible). I know it sounds crazy, but I honestly find http://source.winehq.org/ some of the best COM/Win32 documentation. It sometimes suffers from not matching the exact behaviour, or not being implemented, but that's about the same as msdn.;-)
Just wish I could drop Windows entirely and still get paid....
Doesn't matter what Windows it is. Windows on ARM won't have any software. It can't use the mountain of x86 Windows software, which has always been it's advantage until now. Because of the closed nature of the platform, it's not like everything can just be recompiled for ARM. Linux on the other hand has been multi-platform for a long time, all the software is open source, so most stuff was changed so it can compile on other platforms (including ARM). Linux comes to the table very strong on ARM, where as Windows without Windows software is pointless.
AMD, VIA or any x86 manufacturer would love Intel to go. The void would be filled fast, pooring money into Intel competition, which Intel wouldn't want as it makes for stronger competition.
Maybe AMD can compete with Intel dumping in the market in the same way, but doesn't look like it at the moment. But even if they can, what about others in the market? You end up with only those with deep enough pocket to survive, little to do with the product.
Just out of interest, do you have a problem with evolution? Look at nature and see why true competition is important. It's what drives progress. In this case progress being not a faster gazelle, but a faster/cheaper processor. No Cheetahs means no speed based gazelle competition, means slow fat gazelles. No other x86 vendor means no pressing need to increase speed or reduce prices, means a suckier x86 computer.
And when a nice lean company comes in and challenges you, you die of a heart attack.
Nope, you do the same again to the lean company as it just doesn't have the money to out survive you.
Monopolies can be hard/impossible to shift by market forces alone, which is why regulation is required to stop any fish getting so big it >is the pond. I think people are just waking up to the fact monopolies in computers are as bad as monopolies in any market.
It's not just about Intel and AMD, it's about the whole market. This kind of behaviour hampers competition, which in the long run hurts users. If some little company comes in with a wonder chip, we all want it to be in a market where it can succeed, not where it is unfairly squashed by this kind of behaviour.
I don't think anyone would argue that you can't over do Hungarian Notation. But there are things from it that I think are useful. For instance, when I look at code I want to know where a variable is defined. I don't want to keep moving the mouse over it to see where it is defined. With member and global names you can see at a glance what things are coming from where.
It can be useful to make glance reading easier, but it must be used with a light touch or you start to loose the benefit. Like most things it's a balence, get it right and it pays.
But your competitors down stream can't change the licence. So doesn't that mean they can't place restrictions of those down stream not to pass around the modified code?
Because easier development means more features and more robust software. I'm capable of writing big apps in several flavors of assembler, but the cost is much slower development that keeps customers from getting the features they want on a schedule they're happy with.
No they don't. A tiny subset of geeks with a RAM optimization fetish wants that, but no one else cares as long as the requirements aren't absolutely insane. I have never, ever heard a graphic designer bitch that Photoshop uses too much RAM. Instead, they'll bitch that their machine needs more RAM so that Photoshop runs better. In their opinion, the fact that it sucks down bytes like a crackhead locked into an evidence room is evidence that it's doing difficult stuff and that they need a good computer to support it.
The artists I work with will bitch if you app uses loads of RAM because that interterfers with Photoshop/Max/Maya. If the previous version used a handful of meg, and the new 100 they are going to bitch, and rightly so. It's also more wide scale, if a app A has roughly the features of app B, but is much faster, then they will state app A is better and use it. It's one of the things that impresses the Max/Maya artists about Blender. (Yes I know Blender has loads of python, but it's done in the right way)
I've never written a Python program that didn't address all of the bottlenecks in C, which is the language my Python interpreter is written in. It's all about the algorithms. I'll take an O(1) function in "slow" Python over an O(n!) function in hand-rolled multi-threaded assembler any day of the week.
You clearly aren't one of the problem programmers then.
That might be true for toy desktop applications. On the server side, it's almost always false. It's far more cost effective to throw more hardware at the problem (assuming that the program's written well with good algorithms and simply can't be made faster in its current language) then paying staff to learn and maintain a multi-language implementation.
I'm only talking of desktop applications. That's what I deal with.
Algorithms. Algorithms. Algorithms. I don't like Java and have zero interest in.NET, but I guarantee that you can write tight, efficient code in either of them. I also guarantee that the same universities could crank out crappy assembler programmers if they decided to shift focus.
Well, yes, but I would boil that down a bit and say, caching, latency, caching. But that's app performance. A desktop app is part of a ecosystem of other desktop apps, it shouldn't use more memory then it needs for the sake other desktop apps. I'm sick of fat apps that seam to think they are going to be the only thing running. As I said.NET seam to be the worse for this.
The problem with languages with like python/Java/.NET is that it's not in the users interest. Why do users care about making the developers life easier? They just want fast apps the use as little memory as possible. Don't get me wrong, I really love python, but I don't like running big apps written in python. There are big python apps that don't suck, and that's because the bottle necks have been moved into C. There should not be a problem, everyone should be doing this. I grew up on RiscOS, in general RiscOS apps where fast and thin, yet a great many of them had large amounts of BBC BASIC, why this wasn't a problem is the same as above, bottle neck code got moved, in this case into ARM. It really annoys me when programmers complain they have done all they can for the app in the language it's in, THEN DAMN WELL LEARN A LOWER LANGUAGE AND MOVE PROBLEM PARTS!.NET programmers I find are the worse for this, but from what I read there is the same problem with Java programmers coming out of some universities.
Listen-to/watch him on the 1998 Deposition. No amount of charity PR is going to make me think he is a good honest man. He is not someone to admire or even respect. It's not ok to do anything you can get away with to make money. Becoming rich doesn't make everything ok. If I was religious man I would point to old text on camels, the eye of needles and damnation, but I'm not, but what I'll say is society couldn't function if it was filled with people like this.
But have you ever looked into traffic laws? Do you know a single person who doesn't speed regularly? The amount of people who pirate movies is nothing in comparison. WHO IS THE LAW SERVING THEN! OMG PANIC!
Stevecrox post covered the speeding ticket very well, read his post. I don't agree 100% agree with him, but his post is good and he doesn't state anything concrete I disagree with.
How? Taxing the media that "might" be used for piracy like so many non-US countries do? No thanks; I've never bought a blank DVD or CD with the intent of pirating something in my life, and I sure as hell aren't going to pay extra for it.
Eh? No, you tax the site providing a service. No solid idea of how it should work, but I just want the goverment to get their cut for schools/education, hospitals/health-care, infastructure, etc. Would be so much easier to work this kind of thing with a world goverment.....;-)
allofmp3.com only made money because the people who actually *created* the product, the people who actually deserved the money, got jack-shit. Also they were run by the Russian mafia and probably mostly used for money laundering. That's not a good example for other companies to follow.
Show me proof the money went to Russian mafia? As far as I know, it was lagit in Russian until the Russians where strong-armed by the lovely Bush government in world trade talks. People seam to automaticly assume that internet+Russia=Russian mafia, and that is rubbish. As far as I know allofmp3.com was trying to pay via this Russian system but the payment was refused because they didn't want to support the system. It had many people paying money for music in the first time in a long time, and now they don't again.
So you're saying go the "80s saturday morning cartoon" route and make every show/movie just a commercial for toys? Bye-bye what little art and craft remains in the medium.
Oh come on. Yes, for rubbish kids movies, LIKE THE NEW STAR WARS MOVIES;-), but for grown up stuff that will never work, it will be product placement (think iRobot or Back-To-The-Future-with-a-sane-company), burnt in overlay adverts (something already in many torrents copied from TV), movie experiences (including going to cinemas), gift sets and collections items, etc etc. It's not hard, it's all happening now.
£7 for a album is still quite a lot, much more than it would have been on allofmp3.com. A great many of the users I know were former-pirates who found allofmp3.com so good and so cheap it was worth it. A great many of the users have now gone back to piracy, all of the ones I know. Now both of us can make stuff up, but what is required is a real study, which is impossible when it's all underground.
Technically it's not possible to stop p2p, and the harder you try, the tougher it becomes. My fear is as that happens, it all gets pushed further and further underground. There are millions and millions of teens and youngsters involved. As it all moves to anonymous p2p and darknets, what these kids are exposed to along side the music/games/films is going to get more and more worrying. There is already a lot of porn along side torrents. Maybe this is what the copyright enforcers want to use to strengthen their moral argument, call it gateway data or something.
There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark....
I say bring it all out in the open so it can be regulated and taxed. Money can still be made, if the service is good enough and the price is reasonable enough, people will pay, allofmp3.com demonstrated this, as do many private torrent sites. On top of this, people will always want real world stuff to go with their data (think how much money the Star Wars toys made). On top of that, advertising worked well for existing TV. Good money can be made if free downloading is brought out in the open.
Before you all slate the ARM for performance vs the Atom, have you looked at numbers other then clockspeed?
Clockspeed is frankly a stupid way of comparing processors, especially ones so wildly different as ARM and x86.
Mips are no good either because the instructions sets are so different. For instance many ARM instruction can be conditional and you can also shifts and rotates into the data processing instructions. It takes different amount of instructions to do the same thing. Read : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
"This results in the typical ARM program being denser than expected with fewer memory accesses; thus the pipeline is used more efficiently. Even though the ARM runs at what many would consider to be low speeds, it nevertheless competes quite well with much more complex CPU designs."
I can't find a good way of comparing the performance. I've no doubt Atom is faster then it's contemporary ARM processes, but honestly, I don't have any idea of the gap. Really we need the machines in front of us running the same bench marks.
I want a ARM-netbook as a pocket linux-machine/glorified-mp3-player. I don't care about x86 compatibility or Windows, I don't care if it's not quite as fast as a x86 option if the battery life is so much longer, that's more important.
Related to this, I wonder if anyone has some advice for me.
I have no degree. I dropped out of a Virtual Reality Design course when it became clear to me they wouldn't teach me what I would need. I felt the bar was too low and the lecturers didn't know enough. Plus being a dyslexic I probably had a education chip on my shoulder. I had been programming since I was a kid, but had come to this degree after doing an art course at college. After dropping out I got work as a C++ programmer speeding up a start ups 3D engine. It was abroad and I wasn't able to learn the language and missed my family and friends, so after 7 months I left. I got another job at a big games middleware company back in the UK and worked there for 4 and half years doing tools, examples, development and technical support. After that I've spent over 4 years at a large independent game studio doing mainly tools. In the last year I have got heavily into shell extensions and virtual filesystems and so am now finding Windows a painful platform to work on. I've being educating myself on Unix history, including Plan 9, Linux and the Free software movement in general. I want out of Windows development and out of games (not that I've ever had much to do with the games ends of things).
Wasn't the desktop never meant to happen? Won't we all meant to be using thin clients?
This never happened, and may never happen because the bandwidth speed isn't going up faster than computers speed.
Maybe we will reach a point where all the user input and computer output can be piped about and the latency isn't a problem, but even then I'm not sure people will want it. The freedom implications seams sinister to me, and I'm untrusting of storing stuff only online as I've had data lost for me before (ok, ten years ago, but still).
I think things will continue as today, fat clients. I can do whatever I want the limits being only myself, time and my machine specs.
Scales nicely too.
I don't see where I work will rush to digital distribution. That equals piracy, which is what makes the PC much less profitable to develop for.
At the moment Wii/PS2 are the most profitable platforms to develop for. Development costs are lower, and the markets are very large. With the PS3 and XB360 with internet connections, it's amazing piracy hasn't already turned next gen console development to the same as PC.
Music has concerts. Movies have cinema. What do games and TV have?
Forget fighting piracy, you can't, and if you try you cause the user to hate you and you fail anyway.
Money has to be made from advertising and/or charging so little and providing such a good service, customers can't be bothered to pirate (think allofmp3).
Our studio works on franchise games (safe money) and those will be some of the last games to stop being sold physically, because our games tend to be bought for other people as gifts on the back of the franchise (I'm under no illusion). Like DVDs in that respect. No body burns a downloaded rip as a gift.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this means French file sharers will be moving to anonymous p2p programs like FreeNet, GnuNet, etc and darknets. This is silly, bring it all out in the open, money can be made if the price is low and service good, for example allofmp3.com. No rubbish about the artists will be cheated, they are badly cheated in the existing system:
Trent Reznor : "One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they'll sign anything'
Lets make a new system and pay the artists the lion share and let them own their music. Where an artists work can be got from multiple competing vendors. The artists and their fans is the more important thing. These fat middle men need to go on a slimfast diet and get the hell out the way. As for TV, Mark Pesce told the world that in 2005 http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html. Movies the same, plus we are still going to go to the cinema.
There are many ways this could work, but the world has changed and law makers legal world offers a tiny fraction of what this new world has to offer. Are they just too old fashioned? Still struggling with email let alone file sharing and hooking up the TV with the computer...
Exactly!
Free software's diversity is it's strength. Each part can be replaced with a competing component. It's all glued together with open standards. This makes things more modular and enforces the Unix philosophy "Write programs that do one thing and do it well." It's an ecosystem, competition fueling evolution. Forking into more competing versions when people disagree.
Some crazy people even replace the Linux kernel with a BSD/Solaris even Hurd!
Anyone one thinks there should only be one Linux distro doesn't get it at all.
Until Apple do a netbook it's case anyway.
Users require very different documentation, as unrelated from the code as possible. I don't think anyone sane would argue against that can of documentation. The documentation I'm against is where it's the code in english form, that is stupid because it will never match the code, either because it will drift out of date or because it was what it was meant to do not what it does.
x86 netbook, short battery life and big.
:-)
ARM netbook, long battery life and small.
x86 netbook is Windows, looks like Linux lost on that battle field, not wholey fairly either....
ARM netbook is Linux, far more functional then a WinCE netbook could ever be. What's the point of Windows where you can't run your normal apps?
MS one the x86 battle, but will they win the netbook war? It depends what exactly a netbook is for. If it's to be a mini general purpose PC where people run the apps they know, ARM and Linux loose. If it's to be a travel mini PC for web surfing and the odd jobs (and for Linux people, anything) ARM and Linux are in with a chance. Linux nearly succeed with x86, so maybe longer battery life will swing it.....
Personally, I want x86/Windows monopoly to be broken, I want competition on the OS and chip fronts, but I think they have such critical mass the market alone won't do it. People learn only Windows and don't realize how limiting that is, thus no real competition, and no real competition, means slow and fat.....oh wait that's been happening for years. Windows main competition is old versions of Windows and that sucks. It's just kept good enough that most people don't look desperately for something else. There is at least some competition on the chip front, as long as it's x86....
I would love to see ARM/Linux win, but I'm not feeling hopeful. Still I'll get myself a ARM netbook as a full pocket linux and a powerful media player in one.
I commented when it is needed. A pet hate of mine of is over commented code. Sane naming is much better than comments.
I'm not against a comment above the function explaining the function's roll. That doesn't get in the way.
And of course this is often for automatic documentation.
Wine I feel is an example of getting it right, not too much, not too little, http://source.winehq.org/
Anyone who duplicates code in comment form needs to be shot!
Can they not read code? If not, what the hell are they doing writing it!
I have see code so heavy commented you couldn't read the code. I've seen code where the function is called GetName with a comment telling you it gets the name. I wish I was joking.
It will be slow and fat making Windows apps, that are already slow and fat, even worse.
Dotnet apps also have a terrible habbit of being fat and slow, which is crap for desktop machines where more hardware is not a solution. That will be even worse on a netbook!
Going back to Win32, I believe WINE can already been hooked up so WINE client apps can be in an emulated environment and the WINE server native.... So if all the work of the apps is actually in system calls, it might run ok....
But by far and away the best solution is an open source solution so they can compiled for the native architecture and have any fat cut out. Windows and it's apps can go hang.
And finish hashing out the whole new /dev/, dbus, etc. and settle the API down enough to document the damned thing. I know UNIX, but this new stuff totally confuses me. WHere does one go to even find out how it is supposed to work? Which of course isn't how it currently DOES sorta work. How does one even know if a particular piece of documentation, sketchy and incomplete as it will certainly be, documents what was, what currently is or what is intended to be?
Documen-what? Use the source Luke. This is big part why I love open source. Source is the ultimate documentation. I can read how anything I fancy works! Documentation is always going to have problems keeping up with the source. Source should be written to read (or at least refactored to read, or at least commented when neither is possible). I know it sounds crazy, but I honestly find http://source.winehq.org/ some of the best COM/Win32 documentation. It sometimes suffers from not matching the exact behaviour, or not being implemented, but that's about the same as msdn. ;-)
Just wish I could drop Windows entirely and still get paid....
Doesn't matter what Windows it is. Windows on ARM won't have any software. It can't use the mountain of x86 Windows software, which has always been it's advantage until now. Because of the closed nature of the platform, it's not like everything can just be recompiled for ARM. Linux on the other hand has been multi-platform for a long time, all the software is open source, so most stuff was changed so it can compile on other platforms (including ARM). Linux comes to the table very strong on ARM, where as Windows without Windows software is pointless.
AMD, VIA or any x86 manufacturer would love Intel to go. The void would be filled fast, pooring money into Intel competition, which Intel wouldn't want as it makes for stronger competition.
Maybe AMD can compete with Intel dumping in the market in the same way, but doesn't look like it at the moment. But even if they can, what about others in the market? You end up with only those with deep enough pocket to survive, little to do with the product.
Just out of interest, do you have a problem with evolution? Look at nature and see why true competition is important. It's what drives progress. In this case progress being not a faster gazelle, but a faster/cheaper processor. No Cheetahs means no speed based gazelle competition, means slow fat gazelles. No other x86 vendor means no pressing need to increase speed or reduce prices, means a suckier x86 computer.
And when a nice lean company comes in and challenges you, you die of a heart attack.
Nope, you do the same again to the lean company as it just doesn't have the money to out survive you. Monopolies can be hard/impossible to shift by market forces alone, which is why regulation is required to stop any fish getting so big it >is the pond. I think people are just waking up to the fact monopolies in computers are as bad as monopolies in any market.
It's not just about Intel and AMD, it's about the whole market. This kind of behaviour hampers competition, which in the long run hurts users. If some little company comes in with a wonder chip, we all want it to be in a market where it can succeed, not where it is unfairly squashed by this kind of behaviour.
I don't think anyone would argue that you can't over do Hungarian Notation. But there are things from it that I think are useful. For instance, when I look at code I want to know where a variable is defined. I don't want to keep moving the mouse over it to see where it is defined. With member and global names you can see at a glance what things are coming from where.
It can be useful to make glance reading easier, but it must be used with a light touch or you start to loose the benefit. Like most things it's a balence, get it right and it pays.
But your competitors down stream can't change the licence. So doesn't that mean they can't place restrictions of those down stream not to pass around the modified code?
Because easier development means more features and more robust software. I'm capable of writing big apps in several flavors of assembler, but the cost is much slower development that keeps customers from getting the features they want on a schedule they're happy with. No they don't. A tiny subset of geeks with a RAM optimization fetish wants that, but no one else cares as long as the requirements aren't absolutely insane. I have never, ever heard a graphic designer bitch that Photoshop uses too much RAM. Instead, they'll bitch that their machine needs more RAM so that Photoshop runs better. In their opinion, the fact that it sucks down bytes like a crackhead locked into an evidence room is evidence that it's doing difficult stuff and that they need a good computer to support it.
The artists I work with will bitch if you app uses loads of RAM because that interterfers with Photoshop/Max/Maya. If the previous version used a handful of meg, and the new 100 they are going to bitch, and rightly so. It's also more wide scale, if a app A has roughly the features of app B, but is much faster, then they will state app A is better and use it. It's one of the things that impresses the Max/Maya artists about Blender. (Yes I know Blender has loads of python, but it's done in the right way)
I've never written a Python program that didn't address all of the bottlenecks in C, which is the language my Python interpreter is written in. It's all about the algorithms. I'll take an O(1) function in "slow" Python over an O(n!) function in hand-rolled multi-threaded assembler any day of the week.
You clearly aren't one of the problem programmers then.
That might be true for toy desktop applications. On the server side, it's almost always false. It's far more cost effective to throw more hardware at the problem (assuming that the program's written well with good algorithms and simply can't be made faster in its current language) then paying staff to learn and maintain a multi-language implementation.
I'm only talking of desktop applications. That's what I deal with.
Algorithms. Algorithms. Algorithms. I don't like Java and have zero interest in .NET, but I guarantee that you can write tight, efficient code in either of them. I also guarantee that the same universities could crank out crappy assembler programmers if they decided to shift focus.
Well, yes, but I would boil that down a bit and say, caching, latency, caching. But that's app performance. A desktop app is part of a ecosystem of other desktop apps, it shouldn't use more memory then it needs for the sake other desktop apps. I'm sick of fat apps that seam to think they are going to be the only thing running. As I said .NET seam to be the worse for this.
The problem with languages with like python/Java/.NET is that it's not in the users interest. Why do users care about making the developers life easier? They just want fast apps the use as little memory as possible. Don't get me wrong, I really love python, but I don't like running big apps written in python. There are big python apps that don't suck, and that's because the bottle necks have been moved into C. There should not be a problem, everyone should be doing this. I grew up on RiscOS, in general RiscOS apps where fast and thin, yet a great many of them had large amounts of BBC BASIC, why this wasn't a problem is the same as above, bottle neck code got moved, in this case into ARM. It really annoys me when programmers complain they have done all they can for the app in the language it's in, THEN DAMN WELL LEARN A LOWER LANGUAGE AND MOVE PROBLEM PARTS! .NET programmers I find are the worse for this, but from what I read there is the same problem with Java programmers coming out of some universities.
Listen-to/watch him on the 1998 Deposition. No amount of charity PR is going to make me think he is a good honest man. He is not someone to admire or even respect. It's not ok to do anything you can get away with to make money. Becoming rich doesn't make everything ok. If I was religious man I would point to old text on camels, the eye of needles and damnation, but I'm not, but what I'll say is society couldn't function if it was filled with people like this.
But have you ever looked into traffic laws? Do you know a single person who doesn't speed regularly? The amount of people who pirate movies is nothing in comparison. WHO IS THE LAW SERVING THEN! OMG PANIC!
Stevecrox post covered the speeding ticket very well, read his post. I don't agree 100% agree with him, but his post is good and he doesn't state anything concrete I disagree with.
How? Taxing the media that "might" be used for piracy like so many non-US countries do? No thanks; I've never bought a blank DVD or CD with the intent of pirating something in my life, and I sure as hell aren't going to pay extra for it.
Eh? No, you tax the site providing a service. No solid idea of how it should work, but I just want the goverment to get their cut for schools/education, hospitals/health-care, infastructure, etc. Would be so much easier to work this kind of thing with a world goverment..... ;-)
allofmp3.com only made money because the people who actually *created* the product, the people who actually deserved the money, got jack-shit. Also they were run by the Russian mafia and probably mostly used for money laundering. That's not a good example for other companies to follow.
Show me proof the money went to Russian mafia? As far as I know, it was lagit in Russian until the Russians where strong-armed by the lovely Bush government in world trade talks. People seam to automaticly assume that internet+Russia=Russian mafia, and that is rubbish. As far as I know allofmp3.com was trying to pay via this Russian system but the payment was refused because they didn't want to support the system. It had many people paying money for music in the first time in a long time, and now they don't again.
So you're saying go the "80s saturday morning cartoon" route and make every show/movie just a commercial for toys? Bye-bye what little art and craft remains in the medium.
Oh come on. Yes, for rubbish kids movies, LIKE THE NEW STAR WARS MOVIES ;-), but for grown up stuff that will never work, it will be product placement (think iRobot or Back-To-The-Future-with-a-sane-company), burnt in overlay adverts (something already in many torrents copied from TV), movie experiences (including going to cinemas), gift sets and collections items, etc etc. It's not hard, it's all happening now.
£7 for a album is still quite a lot, much more than it would have been on allofmp3.com. A great many of the users I know were former-pirates who found allofmp3.com so good and so cheap it was worth it. A great many of the users have now gone back to piracy, all of the ones I know. Now both of us can make stuff up, but what is required is a real study, which is impossible when it's all underground.
Technically it's not possible to stop p2p, and the harder you try, the tougher it becomes. My fear is as that happens, it all gets pushed further and further underground. There are millions and millions of teens and youngsters involved. As it all moves to anonymous p2p and darknets, what these kids are exposed to along side the music/games/films is going to get more and more worrying. There is already a lot of porn along side torrents. Maybe this is what the copyright enforcers want to use to strengthen their moral argument, call it gateway data or something.
There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark....
I say bring it all out in the open so it can be regulated and taxed. Money can still be made, if the service is good enough and the price is reasonable enough, people will pay, allofmp3.com demonstrated this, as do many private torrent sites. On top of this, people will always want real world stuff to go with their data (think how much money the Star Wars toys made). On top of that, advertising worked well for existing TV. Good money can be made if free downloading is brought out in the open.
Before you all slate the ARM for performance vs the Atom, have you looked at numbers other then clockspeed? Clockspeed is frankly a stupid way of comparing processors, especially ones so wildly different as ARM and x86.
Mips are no good either because the instructions sets are so different. For instance many ARM instruction can be conditional and you can also shifts and rotates into the data processing instructions. It takes different amount of instructions to do the same thing. Read : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
"This results in the typical ARM program being denser than expected with fewer memory accesses; thus the pipeline is used more efficiently. Even though the ARM runs at what many would consider to be low speeds, it nevertheless competes quite well with much more complex CPU designs."
I can't find a good way of comparing the performance. I've no doubt Atom is faster then it's contemporary ARM processes, but honestly, I don't have any idea of the gap. Really we need the machines in front of us running the same bench marks.
I want a ARM-netbook as a pocket linux-machine/glorified-mp3-player. I don't care about x86 compatibility or Windows, I don't care if it's not quite as fast as a x86 option if the battery life is so much longer, that's more important.
Related to this, I wonder if anyone has some advice for me.
I have no degree. I dropped out of a Virtual Reality Design course when it became clear to me they wouldn't teach me what I would need. I felt the bar was too low and the lecturers didn't know enough. Plus being a dyslexic I probably had a education chip on my shoulder. I had been programming since I was a kid, but had come to this degree after doing an art course at college. After dropping out I got work as a C++ programmer speeding up a start ups 3D engine. It was abroad and I wasn't able to learn the language and missed my family and friends, so after 7 months I left. I got another job at a big games middleware company back in the UK and worked there for 4 and half years doing tools, examples, development and technical support. After that I've spent over 4 years at a large independent game studio doing mainly tools. In the last year I have got heavily into shell extensions and virtual filesystems and so am now finding Windows a painful platform to work on. I've being educating myself on Unix history, including Plan 9, Linux and the Free software movement in general. I want out of Windows development and out of games (not that I've ever had much to do with the games ends of things).
Any advice?
Wasn't the desktop never meant to happen? Won't we all meant to be using thin clients?
This never happened, and may never happen because the bandwidth speed isn't going up faster than computers speed. Maybe we will reach a point where all the user input and computer output can be piped about and the latency isn't a problem, but even then I'm not sure people will want it. The freedom implications seams sinister to me, and I'm untrusting of storing stuff only online as I've had data lost for me before (ok, ten years ago, but still).
I think things will continue as today, fat clients. I can do whatever I want the limits being only myself, time and my machine specs.
Scales nicely too.
I don't see where I work will rush to digital distribution. That equals piracy, which is what makes the PC much less profitable to develop for.
At the moment Wii/PS2 are the most profitable platforms to develop for. Development costs are lower, and the markets are very large. With the PS3 and XB360 with internet connections, it's amazing piracy hasn't already turned next gen console development to the same as PC.
Music has concerts. Movies have cinema. What do games and TV have?
Forget fighting piracy, you can't, and if you try you cause the user to hate you and you fail anyway.
Money has to be made from advertising and/or charging so little and providing such a good service, customers can't be bothered to pirate (think allofmp3).
Our studio works on franchise games (safe money) and those will be some of the last games to stop being sold physically, because our games tend to be bought for other people as gifts on the back of the franchise (I'm under no illusion). Like DVDs in that respect. No body burns a downloaded rip as a gift.