I think the rise of the cheap ARM linux netbook is something that scares both Intel and Microsoft. As consumers we will be the winners of the resulting battles. Personally, I can't wait for a linx netbook with a ARM length battery life. Just don't see what the Wintel world could offer me that could possibly compete. Maybe MS could try WinCE on ARM, but that won't have the world of software ARM linux has. If all the software is portable you can go for what ever processor architecture best for the job.
With out the source, the job is not realistically possible.
Having the source for a large project is useful, I use source.winehq.org all the time when msdn fails me.
Also money == some motivation. If I wasn't paid I wouldn't be working on what I am now for fun.
If the source is out there, it can always be resurrected, or at least used as reference for a reimplementation.
'my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.'"
Which is why closed is a gamble. If they had the source, they could hire some programmers to keep it ticking over (porting to new platforms etc), or pay some IT company to do it for them. You can't kill software when the source is free to all.
Perhaps it would be possible to:
Attach a usb hub.
Attach a usb audio device to hub.
Attach a usb tv out device to hub.
Attach a usb harddisc to device.
Install Apache.
It can then be the low-power, always-on, web-site hosting, media Linux machine I've always wanted.:-)
This decision might not help. I was on holiday recently with 12 non-nerds. The computer in the holiday villa had both firefox and IE. Everyone bar me choice IE every time. It was because of it's name, "Internet Explorer". Imagine you know nothing about computers, and want to explorer the internet, what do you click on? Having other browsers won't help unless they are grouped under internet browsers or something. If it's icons in the desktop, people are going to read the names and use the one that fits best. For true competition, you need people to know what does what, or they don't know they have options.
and that's when you need comments.
The 'what' should be clear from the function/class naming.
The 'how' should be clear from the code.
The 'why' is what should be commented.
I hate code where the code is unreadable because of so much commenting of the 'how'. Writing an essay in your code is never the right thing. Above the function, ok, but never never never mixed in, and never just a 'human' version of the code.
True true. But I'm a bit pissed of recently have when I don't have documentation or source. When I do have documentation it's not always good enough. When I do have source, the lack of documentation is something I can get past.
as long as it is a manifestation of a line in the sand that consists of nothing but arbitrary age
I'm sorry but age is a lot less arbitrary then any kind of maturity test. She might be fully developed, but she's 14, or she's a genius, but 10. Stay the hell away. Age is a good line in the sand for both approximating physical and metal age. I feel we sexulize children far too much already. Educate them about sex and let them know everything (the good, the bad and the ugly) but also let them know there is no rush. The young girls are not prey, they are people's daughters.
What does perhaps need addressing is where girls lie about their age and are believed. It seams a bit unfair for that to result in someone going on a sex register or to jail. But I don't have a solution for that because it relies on the girl saying she lied and it being a believable mistake, which is all very fuzzy.
This sounds to me like a reverse RiscPC! Like the RiscPC the other half will have to have emulated hardware. If Dell don't release with this, someone will do it for them. It will be too useful not to be done. Unlike the RiscPC, you can boot straight into either half. This could be great for showing people (who aren't technical) Linux. I can see people speed booting into Linux and setting Windows booting in the VM and surfing the web while Windows boots, then asking themselves, acturally, do I need Windows and Office, they are expensive? The answer is increasly, no.
My only slight fear is though it will show to people Linux can run on many architectures and boot quickly, if the Linux is just running on the ARM, the less informed users will think Linux is less powerful than Windows (which is running on the faster x86).
Good, more competition. If Intel stop them through patent law then it shows there is a problem with patent law, or the set up of the x86 market. Competition and variation are the keys to progress. Look at nature. In the future I hope there will be real competition with desktop chip architectures. WINE with a x86 emulator could handle closed legacy x86 Windows apps..... Pretty much all *nix apps are portable and those that aren't can be made so as they are generally open.
I think the world is waking up that these kind of practices are anti-competitive in any market. For too long people seamed to think IT was an exception and ignored 'nerds' pointing to problems with anti-competitive practices. I think MS are going to find foul play harder and harder to get away with. They will be forced to competitive on equal terms. Lack of competition equals expensive and rubbish, which even the most docile consumer will notice. One day the question will come up how can you ever compete equally with a company's software if they do the operating system too. As for MS targeting Ubuntu, no publicity is bad publicity, and people will question why are they so bothered?
I've been thinking this for some time. No matter how slowly, Linux is growing and at some point it will hit critical mass. For me that doesn't feel far away, it seams like I'm meeting more and more Linux users. Some of the artists who have switched, it is exactly because of Vista eating their machine and they don't want to stand still.
When it does reach critical mass, how does MS compete? If WINE and Mono reach critical mass the same kind of time, you could end up being able to run more Windows software under Linux than Windows (Windows 9x and 3.1 stuff that doesn't run under Windows already is likely to run under WINE). Why would anyone buy Windows at that point?
OpenOffice is also a real problem for MS.
The whole of the open source ecosystem seams to be going critical mass. Just as Encyclopedia Britanica is having become like Wikipedia to compete (no matter what it said before hand), MS will have to go open source. It's going to be interesting to watch how long they can hold out. Got to love the GPL.
They won't know or care it's Linux. It's just the operating system that came with their cheap computer. Normal users don't install operating systems, they don't even install browsers. But that will give it critical mass and the spec of computer you can buy it with just go up and up. Some distro, maybe Ubuntu, will get all the credit. Shuttleworth is not stupid. Which ever distro becomes >the distro, will win big. All us Linux people will know it's not the only choice, but others won't.
Everyone really is terrified by the idea of the Linux desktop aren't they.
Linux is use is growing here for people home use, even among non-programmers. It's free and fast. That's winning people. I think Linux is going main stream, and the more it does the more it will. It's coming up from the notebooks and down from the servers. It really does seam like the whole of the GNU/Linux world is going critical mass. Sorry Windows guys, you worse fears are coming.;-)
If torrents where legal, surely it's easy to make money.
1) Make sure you only have one torrent for each thing.
2) Index sensibly. Hyperlink related/reference/influenced by/influences items.
3) Burn in your own logo top right on each movie/episode.
4) Charge a tiny amount for each download.
Or (better perhaps) charge for advertising space.
Why don't people learn from AllOfMp3? If it's cheap enough and a good service, people can't be bothered to pirate. If just looking at the site is generating income, even better.
Sure people will copy among themselves, but you can't stop that, and will cause problems for yourself it you try. If there is a logo burnt in, it's just free advertising anyway.
Distribute the advertising income according to where people are spending their time on the site (i.e. hit show).
. One only has to look at the relative successes of Linus Torvalds versus Richard Stallman as a prime example.
The GPL is more important than Linux. With out GPL there would be no Linux, it never would have taken off. The GPL makes open source projects sticky, making it easier to hit critical mass. It's why GNU/Linux is bigger than BSD. Sometimes pedantic is the long term pragmatic.
Having said that, I think Firefox is right to support innerHTML, and OpenOffice is right to read/write doc files.
I feel part of the reason Microsoft have got away with a lot of their bad practices is because no one with any power to do anything about it cared.
Now these people of power are waking up. It's not just the wining of nerds and does matter. Computers are like anything else competition is required or things become expensive and broken.
Closed source is broken anyway, but to have a company to make closed software on a closed platform, how can that ever be a level playing field?
Exactly. Why do we keep believing this lying little bast*rd who keeps telling us their is a wolf when there isn't. Surely at some point it doesn't matter if there is or not because we just won't believe the little sh*t. Let him get eaten, he works in marketing anyway.
Of course the computer should come with a browser (or two). But why should that be only be IE?
In Linux it's not just Firefox. Many distros come with many browsers. Windows should be the same, different distros come with different pre-installed apps. Different brands provide different bundles. Get some real competition going.
Firefox is not a replacement either, because it does not implement any of the interfaces that the IE framework does (even though they could go to MSDN and implement them, but we're talking about a lot of work here.)
Just to be clear, and I know you're not really suggesting this, but it's an insane amount of work for very platform specific work. I'm replacing just a small part of explorer now because there is no way of overloading it in the way I want. There is little documentation, and in many cases none. What do you do with no documentation or source? Stab in the dark with trial and error is what. Yes there is the wine source that implements it, and it has been useful, however, wine doesn't always implement things in the same way, so sometimes it is misleading. Trying to implement the interfaces yourself is a lesson on why closed source sucks.
Addendum: In order for this to work, you need source-level access to the entire software stack from the OS upwards.
Er no. Once you have the source of the app, you can port it to different APIs, or make a wrapper to replace old APIs it uses. Of course if the APIs aren't open source, you have to rely on the documentation, if there is no documentation then you have to work on deduction.
It's better if everything is open, of course, but it doesn't all fall down if one bit isn't. Because the rest is open, you can always replace the bit that isn't.
Many "normal" people play games for hours everynight now. Doesn't make them nerds. In fact I would argue the opposite or they would get bored.
Many people are socially awkward, doesn't make them nerds.
I don't think of the definition of a nerd is anything to do with someone who avoids new experiences.
Nerd != Loser.
A nerd is someone who takes intense interest things, things that bored others. Computers is a natural place for us as not only is it a good subject it itself, it opens so much information to other things.
Without nerds we would still be banging rocks together.
There are loser nerds, but there are non-loser nerds, so loser isn't anything to do with being a nerd. Trying caving or something out door on the non-cool side, I've found many on the same wave length as myself there.
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I think the rise of the cheap ARM linux netbook is something that scares both Intel and Microsoft. As consumers we will be the winners of the resulting battles. Personally, I can't wait for a linx netbook with a ARM length battery life. Just don't see what the Wintel world could offer me that could possibly compete. Maybe MS could try WinCE on ARM, but that won't have the world of software ARM linux has. If all the software is portable you can go for what ever processor architecture best for the job.
With out the source, the job is not realistically possible.
Having the source for a large project is useful, I use source.winehq.org all the time when msdn fails me.
Also money == some motivation. If I wasn't paid I wouldn't be working on what I am now for fun.
If the source is out there, it can always be resurrected, or at least used as reference for a reimplementation.
'my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.'"
Which is why closed is a gamble. If they had the source, they could hire some programmers to keep it ticking over (porting to new platforms etc), or pay some IT company to do it for them. You can't kill software when the source is free to all.
Perhaps it would be possible to: Attach a usb hub. Attach a usb audio device to hub. Attach a usb tv out device to hub. Attach a usb harddisc to device. Install Apache. It can then be the low-power, always-on, web-site hosting, media Linux machine I've always wanted. :-)
This decision might not help. I was on holiday recently with 12 non-nerds. The computer in the holiday villa had both firefox and IE. Everyone bar me choice IE every time. It was because of it's name, "Internet Explorer". Imagine you know nothing about computers, and want to explorer the internet, what do you click on? Having other browsers won't help unless they are grouped under internet browsers or something. If it's icons in the desktop, people are going to read the names and use the one that fits best. For true competition, you need people to know what does what, or they don't know they have options.
Both our comments are too polarizing.
I don't mean to say you don't need documentation at all. But not having the code is a real problem when the documentation fails you or is absent.
and that's when you need comments. The 'what' should be clear from the function/class naming. The 'how' should be clear from the code. The 'why' is what should be commented. I hate code where the code is unreadable because of so much commenting of the 'how'. Writing an essay in your code is never the right thing. Above the function, ok, but never never never mixed in, and never just a 'human' version of the code.
True true. But I'm a bit pissed of recently have when I don't have documentation or source. When I do have documentation it's not always good enough. When I do have source, the lack of documentation is something I can get past.
Clean, clear code is the best documentation.
Why write everything twice? The text version always falls out of date anyway.
http://source.winehq.org/ is the best Win32 documentation I know (providing what you are after has been implemented).
as long as it is a manifestation of a line in the sand that consists of nothing but arbitrary age
I'm sorry but age is a lot less arbitrary then any kind of maturity test. She might be fully developed, but she's 14, or she's a genius, but 10. Stay the hell away. Age is a good line in the sand for both approximating physical and metal age. I feel we sexulize children far too much already. Educate them about sex and let them know everything (the good, the bad and the ugly) but also let them know there is no rush. The young girls are not prey, they are people's daughters.
What does perhaps need addressing is where girls lie about their age and are believed. It seams a bit unfair for that to result in someone going on a sex register or to jail. But I don't have a solution for that because it relies on the girl saying she lied and it being a believable mistake, which is all very fuzzy.
This sounds to me like a reverse RiscPC! Like the RiscPC the other half will have to have emulated hardware. If Dell don't release with this, someone will do it for them. It will be too useful not to be done. Unlike the RiscPC, you can boot straight into either half. This could be great for showing people (who aren't technical) Linux. I can see people speed booting into Linux and setting Windows booting in the VM and surfing the web while Windows boots, then asking themselves, acturally, do I need Windows and Office, they are expensive? The answer is increasly, no.
My only slight fear is though it will show to people Linux can run on many architectures and boot quickly, if the Linux is just running on the ARM, the less informed users will think Linux is less powerful than Windows (which is running on the faster x86).
Good, more competition. If Intel stop them through patent law then it shows there is a problem with patent law, or the set up of the x86 market. Competition and variation are the keys to progress. Look at nature. In the future I hope there will be real competition with desktop chip architectures. WINE with a x86 emulator could handle closed legacy x86 Windows apps..... Pretty much all *nix apps are portable and those that aren't can be made so as they are generally open.
I think the world is waking up that these kind of practices are anti-competitive in any market. For too long people seamed to think IT was an exception and ignored 'nerds' pointing to problems with anti-competitive practices. I think MS are going to find foul play harder and harder to get away with. They will be forced to competitive on equal terms. Lack of competition equals expensive and rubbish, which even the most docile consumer will notice. One day the question will come up how can you ever compete equally with a company's software if they do the operating system too. As for MS targeting Ubuntu, no publicity is bad publicity, and people will question why are they so bothered?
I've been thinking this for some time. No matter how slowly, Linux is growing and at some point it will hit critical mass. For me that doesn't feel far away, it seams like I'm meeting more and more Linux users. Some of the artists who have switched, it is exactly because of Vista eating their machine and they don't want to stand still.
When it does reach critical mass, how does MS compete? If WINE and Mono reach critical mass the same kind of time, you could end up being able to run more Windows software under Linux than Windows (Windows 9x and 3.1 stuff that doesn't run under Windows already is likely to run under WINE). Why would anyone buy Windows at that point?
OpenOffice is also a real problem for MS.
The whole of the open source ecosystem seams to be going critical mass. Just as Encyclopedia Britanica is having become like Wikipedia to compete (no matter what it said before hand), MS will have to go open source. It's going to be interesting to watch how long they can hold out. Got to love the GPL.
They won't know or care it's Linux. It's just the operating system that came with their cheap computer. Normal users don't install operating systems, they don't even install browsers. But that will give it critical mass and the spec of computer you can buy it with just go up and up. Some distro, maybe Ubuntu, will get all the credit. Shuttleworth is not stupid. Which ever distro becomes >the distro, will win big. All us Linux people will know it's not the only choice, but others won't.
Everyone really is terrified by the idea of the Linux desktop aren't they.
;-)
Linux is use is growing here for people home use, even among non-programmers. It's free and fast. That's winning people. I think Linux is going main stream, and the more it does the more it will. It's coming up from the notebooks and down from the servers. It really does seam like the whole of the GNU/Linux world is going critical mass. Sorry Windows guys, you worse fears are coming.
If torrents where legal, surely it's easy to make money.
1) Make sure you only have one torrent for each thing.
2) Index sensibly. Hyperlink related/reference/influenced by/influences items.
3) Burn in your own logo top right on each movie/episode.
4) Charge a tiny amount for each download. Or (better perhaps) charge for advertising space.
Why don't people learn from AllOfMp3? If it's cheap enough and a good service, people can't be bothered to pirate. If just looking at the site is generating income, even better.
Sure people will copy among themselves, but you can't stop that, and will cause problems for yourself it you try. If there is a logo burnt in, it's just free advertising anyway.
Distribute the advertising income according to where people are spending their time on the site (i.e. hit show).
. One only has to look at the relative successes of Linus Torvalds versus Richard Stallman as a prime example.
The GPL is more important than Linux. With out GPL there would be no Linux, it never would have taken off. The GPL makes open source projects sticky, making it easier to hit critical mass. It's why GNU/Linux is bigger than BSD. Sometimes pedantic is the long term pragmatic.
Having said that, I think Firefox is right to support innerHTML, and OpenOffice is right to read/write doc files.
Even assuming there is enough documentation to match the exact behaviour of their implementation, you will always be playing catch up.
Personally I don't believe you can have a closed reference implementation control by one company who controls the standard. It just can't work.
I feel part of the reason Microsoft have got away with a lot of their bad practices is because no one with any power to do anything about it cared.
Now these people of power are waking up. It's not just the wining of nerds and does matter. Computers are like anything else competition is required or things become expensive and broken.
Closed source is broken anyway, but to have a company to make closed software on a closed platform, how can that ever be a level playing field?
Exactly. Why do we keep believing this lying little bast*rd who keeps telling us their is a wolf when there isn't. Surely at some point it doesn't matter if there is or not because we just won't believe the little sh*t. Let him get eaten, he works in marketing anyway.
I don't think you get it.
Of course the computer should come with a browser (or two). But why should that be only be IE?
In Linux it's not just Firefox. Many distros come with many browsers. Windows should be the same, different distros come with different pre-installed apps. Different brands provide different bundles. Get some real competition going.
Firefox is not a replacement either, because it does not implement any of the interfaces that the IE framework does (even though they could go to MSDN and implement them, but we're talking about a lot of work here.)
Just to be clear, and I know you're not really suggesting this, but it's an insane amount of work for very platform specific work. I'm replacing just a small part of explorer now because there is no way of overloading it in the way I want. There is little documentation, and in many cases none. What do you do with no documentation or source? Stab in the dark with trial and error is what. Yes there is the wine source that implements it, and it has been useful, however, wine doesn't always implement things in the same way, so sometimes it is misleading. Trying to implement the interfaces yourself is a lesson on why closed source sucks.
Addendum: In order for this to work, you need source-level access to the entire software stack from the OS upwards.
Er no. Once you have the source of the app, you can port it to different APIs, or make a wrapper to replace old APIs it uses. Of course if the APIs aren't open source, you have to rely on the documentation, if there is no documentation then you have to work on deduction.
It's better if everything is open, of course, but it doesn't all fall down if one bit isn't. Because the rest is open, you can always replace the bit that isn't.
Many "normal" people play games for hours everynight now. Doesn't make them nerds. In fact I would argue the opposite or they would get bored.
Many people are socially awkward, doesn't make them nerds.
I don't think of the definition of a nerd is anything to do with someone who avoids new experiences.
Nerd != Loser.
A nerd is someone who takes intense interest things, things that bored others. Computers is a natural place for us as not only is it a good subject it itself, it opens so much information to other things.
Without nerds we would still be banging rocks together.
There are loser nerds, but there are non-loser nerds, so loser isn't anything to do with being a nerd. Trying caving or something out door on the non-cool side, I've found many on the same wave length as myself there.