The x86 instruction set has evolved over time and it isn't that uncommon for modern apps (especially games and media apps, but also sometimes just run-of-the-mill desktop apps) to assume you have SSE extentions, at a minimum, and not offer a fallback if you don't. That makes a super-fast 386 very impractical for Joe Q Public running Windows and thus makes it not nearly worth the engineering effort required to produce such a chip.
They could possibly get away with a super fast 386 in the Open Source world where you can just recompile everything to your CPU's specs, but if that's the only market you want to hit and you're going to force recompiles, why bother with half-assed old x86 compatibility anyway? In that situation just make whatever instruction set you want, create a backend for the open source compilers and just do your best to keep things source code compatible with the x86 (eg. make it little endian, etc).
In this specific case, all Google has to do is look for domain==pi.edu, if true, reduce page rankings. Granted, this wouldn't scale if they were fighting against wide open abuse of edu domains, but that isn't happening now and is unlikely to happen due to the rules for getting an.edu (which this case shows can be circumvented, but doing so is still enough of a pain that it isn't something that is going to become widespread).
And yet other people forget that before $140 domains, domain registrations were free, first-come first-served. I still own a couple of domains that I registered for free and didn't pay any fees on for the first few years I owned them.
Re:KDE is not the problem, commercial use is
on
Nokia Buys Trolltech
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· Score: 1
Qt *can* go closed source. This wouldn't impact the source already released as GPL and would likely lead to a very public forking of Qt, but Nokia now owns the copyright to the code and they can license future versions in whatever manner they want.
Linus speaks for himself. When have you ever heard him claim he's speaking for the entire Linux community? Just because he's now inexorably linked to the Linux kernel, he's never allowed to have a personal opinion on open source politics again? Don't be a retard.
I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option
Open sourcing office is their ONLY option? What about the second option, the one that involves keeping it closed source and continuing to generate billions of dollars in profit off of it each quarter?
Buying a core ($300) and the 120 gb HD ($180) is about the same price as an Elite, give or take 10 dollars. But if you buy the core and the HD, not only will you not get HDMI, you won't get a wireless controller (you'll get a wired one), a voice chat headset for Xbox Live, an ethernet cable (no big whoop, I guess) or component cables (the Core only comes with an old school composite RCA cable, not the dual composite/component that the Premium and Elite have).
So the Elite is really a better option for the vast majority of people if they are choosing between core + HDD and Elite, though the reason for this is because the stand-alone HDD is overpriced.
Remember when Windows XP was going to cause the downfall of the Internet due to the fact that it implemented support for raw sockets? Oh, Windows, you wily little thing! Always trying to destroy the Internet!
Google isn't relevant. If a new search engine comes out and it works better than the rest, there is no friction holding you back from using it, you can just start using it right away. A comparison to operating systems is more relevant than one to search engines because there is a huge network effect there because of all the linking and subcommunities. The more people use Myspace, the more other people are more likely to use it as well, so there is this huge friction in any other site getting the users because they all have to move or nobody movies. Myspace is the Windows of social networking sites, not the Altavista of search.
Yeah, that's probably about right. I imagine most of the GNU development was done under Solaris, NextStep, and AIX... in that order.
Actually, a lot of the machines at the AI Lab/FSF back in that era were DECStations running Ultrix. There was at least one AIX box (hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu, IIRC) and handful of HP/UX boxes, some BSD4.3 and a smattering of SGI boxes running IRIX. Most of the Sun boxes were still running SunOS 4.x and not Solaris. There was one NeXT cube that I remember.
What makes software development so hard?... What makes anyone think software development should be easy? It is simply an inherently difficult job that very few people are truly talented at, just as with any other inherently difficult job. All of these people who think software would be easy if people just followed process X,Y and Z would cause Fred Brooks to spin in his grave... if he were dead.
The really funny part of this story is you also can't watch those videos if you've got the version of Windows Vista with media player ripped out due to the EU's antitrust rulings (unless you download media player or some other WMV-capable player, of course). Hah hah.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the tech industry has heard this same argument in different forms since just about forever. Larry Ellison was going to sell us all network computers to replace our Windows 95 boxes, because Windows was obsolete. Sun seems to pull out this idea once a year to spit polish it, toss it out there, and hope somebody will pay some attention to them, etc. Even if there may be some truth to the argument behind this, after hearing it for so long and having all previous claims be proven completely wrong, you just can't help but filter it out, ala the boy crying wolf story... I look forward to reading about how Windows Vista 2010 Special Edition will be the last version of Windows when the time comes.
The Zapper was at least bundled with (some) NES consoles. The Classic Controller will not be.
IIRC, the Wii can use the GameCube controller as an alternate for the 'Classic Controller'. Of course, not everyone who buys a Wii will have owned a GameCube but its probably a large enough number to get support, even if the new 'Classic' controller doesn't sell that well.
The fact that an album costs as much on Allofmp3 as it does at Tower Records or Amazon doesn't really have any impact on the argument, if the copyright owners and creators of the album aren't seeing a penny of the allofmp3 sale, and they aren't. I'm as anti-RIAA as the next guy, but this site is clearly illegal here in the United States and it SHOULD be. I can't really understand why people even use it because if you're willing to be in a situation where the content creator gets absolutely no cut of the money, why not just pirate the music outright from usenet or bittorrent? Why pay 10 cents a song for what amounts to pirated (here in the US and most of the western world) content anyway?
1. Take a $15 keyboard design. 2. Save money by not lettering the keyboards. 3. Sell it to losers that need something like this to prove how much more 'l33t' they are than everyone else for... Profit! (?)
Seriously.. anyone who buys a Das Keyboard (1 or 2) is a stupid, retarded loser that deserved all of the wedgies they got in high school. Period.
The software and bridges/houses argument is as stupid as it is old. Do you know what the cost of software would be if it had to be as failsafe as you want it to be? You'll be paying several orders of magnitude more than $500 for your copy of Adobe Photoshop if it has to be certified crashproof, and honestly the price just wouldn't be worth it. It isn't that nobody knows how to make nearly defect-free software.. there are companies that specialize in this while writing software for applications where peoples lives are on the line (control system for spacecraft, etc), the problem is that creating software like that is RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE, and there is no silver bullet that will fix that. Are YOU going to pay the costs of all that reliablity? Do YOU want to deal with the stagnation in, say, videocards, due to the fact that every videocard driver has to be 100% crash-free, and the time lag that such engineering would involve?
I don't think you've thought this thing through to the real world economic implications.
I guess I don't understand how this is a cop out. Please note that this isn't only an open source thing. Working as a software developer, I very often see situations where someone on the QA team or some manager or whatever complains about XYZ and is told "it is fixed in the source", when.. well, it IS fixed in the source, but the internal release process is such that a new full build won't be available until the next day (at a good shop, maybe longer at some place that doesn't do daily builds).
"It is fixed in the source/CVS" conveys the proper amount of information -- yes, the bug is fixed, but unfortunately you will not see the fix until the next release, unless you want to build it yourself.
It wasn't hard to predict that the Slashdot-hive-mind reaction to this would be to attack the government, the FDA and/or make jokes about them regulating nanobots... But there is a very serious side to this. There are nanoparticles being placed into things like cleaners and other household products right now despite the fact that various studies show there is a high likelyhood that these nanoparticles can do severe, unrepairable damage to the lungs of people who are exposed to them. This story only seems ridiculous because "nanotech" is such a broad field that covers just about everything. Some aspects of regulation (making sure these nanoparticle-containing products are safe to inhale in quantities that people are likely to be exposed to if they use them, for example) absolutely should fall under the FDA.
This guy is a real world troll. The more attention he gets on sites like this and the linked sites, the more he'll go around saying stupid things. Why humor him? He is best left ignored.
On the one hand, this is bad for America. On the other hand, I've been getting more cold-calls per week from companies and recruiters based off a 3 year old resume than I've gotten since the golden years of 1998-2000. The job market for programmers is red hot, at least around me here in San Diego.
Slashdot Mirror
The x86 instruction set has evolved over time and it isn't that uncommon for modern apps (especially games and media apps, but also sometimes just run-of-the-mill desktop apps) to assume you have SSE extentions, at a minimum, and not offer a fallback if you don't. That makes a super-fast 386 very impractical for Joe Q Public running Windows and thus makes it not nearly worth the engineering effort required to produce such a chip.
They could possibly get away with a super fast 386 in the Open Source world where you can just recompile everything to your CPU's specs, but if that's the only market you want to hit and you're going to force recompiles, why bother with half-assed old x86 compatibility anyway? In that situation just make whatever instruction set you want, create a backend for the open source compilers and just do your best to keep things source code compatible with the x86 (eg. make it little endian, etc).
In this specific case, all Google has to do is look for domain==pi.edu, if true, reduce page rankings. Granted, this wouldn't scale if they were fighting against wide open abuse of edu domains, but that isn't happening now and is unlikely to happen due to the rules for getting an .edu (which this case shows can be circumvented, but doing so is still enough of a pain that it isn't something that is going to become widespread).
And yet other people forget that before $140 domains, domain registrations were free, first-come first-served. I still own a couple of domains that I registered for free and didn't pay any fees on for the first few years I owned them.
Qt *can* go closed source. This wouldn't impact the source already released as GPL and would likely lead to a very public forking of Qt, but Nokia now owns the copyright to the code and they can license future versions in whatever manner they want.
Linus speaks for himself. When have you ever heard him claim he's speaking for the entire Linux community? Just because he's now inexorably linked to the Linux kernel, he's never allowed to have a personal opinion on open source politics again? Don't be a retard.
I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option
Open sourcing office is their ONLY option? What about the second option, the one that involves keeping it closed source and continuing to generate billions of dollars in profit off of it each quarter?
Buying a core ($300) and the 120 gb HD ($180) is about the same price as an Elite, give or take 10 dollars. But if you buy the core and the HD, not only will you not get HDMI, you won't get a wireless controller (you'll get a wired one), a voice chat headset for Xbox Live, an ethernet cable (no big whoop, I guess) or component cables (the Core only comes with an old school composite RCA cable, not the dual composite/component that the Premium and Elite have).
So the Elite is really a better option for the vast majority of people if they are choosing between core + HDD and Elite, though the reason for this is because the stand-alone HDD is overpriced.
Remember when Windows XP was going to cause the downfall of the Internet due to the fact that it implemented support for raw sockets? Oh, Windows, you wily little thing! Always trying to destroy the Internet!
Google isn't relevant. If a new search engine comes out and it works better than the rest, there is no friction holding you back from using it, you can just start using it right away. A comparison to operating systems is more relevant than one to search engines because there is a huge network effect there because of all the linking and subcommunities. The more people use Myspace, the more other people are more likely to use it as well, so there is this huge friction in any other site getting the users because they all have to move or nobody movies. Myspace is the Windows of social networking sites, not the Altavista of search.
Yeah, that's probably about right. I imagine most of the GNU development was done under Solaris, NextStep, and AIX... in that order.
Actually, a lot of the machines at the AI Lab/FSF back in that era were DECStations running Ultrix. There was at least one AIX box (hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu, IIRC) and handful of HP/UX boxes, some BSD4.3 and a smattering of SGI boxes running IRIX. Most of the Sun boxes were still running SunOS 4.x and not Solaris. There was one NeXT cube that I remember.
What makes software development so hard?... What makes anyone think software development should be easy? It is simply an inherently difficult job that very few people are truly talented at, just as with any other inherently difficult job. All of these people who think software would be easy if people just followed process X,Y and Z would cause Fred Brooks to spin in his grave... if he were dead.
The really funny part of this story is you also can't watch those videos if you've got the version of Windows Vista with media player ripped out due to the EU's antitrust rulings (unless you download media player or some other WMV-capable player, of course). Hah hah.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the tech industry has heard this same argument in different forms since just about forever. Larry Ellison was going to sell us all network computers to replace our Windows 95 boxes, because Windows was obsolete. Sun seems to pull out this idea once a year to spit polish it, toss it out there, and hope somebody will pay some attention to them, etc. Even if there may be some truth to the argument behind this, after hearing it for so long and having all previous claims be proven completely wrong, you just can't help but filter it out, ala the boy crying wolf story... I look forward to reading about how Windows Vista 2010 Special Edition will be the last version of Windows when the time comes.
Although these were a very solid twenty mishaps that almost lead to nuclear war, why are they all tied to the U.S. & Russia?
Uh... because those were the only two countries that had more than enough ICBMs to actually result in a global world-ending nuclear war.
The Zapper was at least bundled with (some) NES consoles. The Classic Controller will not be.
IIRC, the Wii can use the GameCube controller as an alternate for the 'Classic Controller'. Of course, not everyone who buys a Wii will have owned a GameCube but its probably a large enough number to get support, even if the new 'Classic' controller doesn't sell that well.
So.. what you're saying is that Windows is a better OS than Linux for your casual user friends?
SHOCKING!!
I must get them clean!!!!
The fact that an album costs as much on Allofmp3 as it does at Tower Records or Amazon doesn't really have any impact on the argument, if the copyright owners and creators of the album aren't seeing a penny of the allofmp3 sale, and they aren't. I'm as anti-RIAA as the next guy, but this site is clearly illegal here in the United States and it SHOULD be. I can't really understand why people even use it because if you're willing to be in a situation where the content creator gets absolutely no cut of the money, why not just pirate the music outright from usenet or bittorrent? Why pay 10 cents a song for what amounts to pirated (here in the US and most of the western world) content anyway?
1. Take a $15 keyboard design.
2. Save money by not lettering the keyboards.
3. Sell it to losers that need something like this to prove how much more 'l33t' they are than everyone else for... Profit! (?)
Seriously.. anyone who buys a Das Keyboard (1 or 2) is a stupid, retarded loser that deserved all of the wedgies they got in high school. Period.
The software and bridges/houses argument is as stupid as it is old. Do you know what the cost of software would be if it had to be as failsafe as you want it to be? You'll be paying several orders of magnitude more than $500 for your copy of Adobe Photoshop if it has to be certified crashproof, and honestly the price just wouldn't be worth it. It isn't that nobody knows how to make nearly defect-free software.. there are companies that specialize in this while writing software for applications where peoples lives are on the line (control system for spacecraft, etc), the problem is that creating software like that is RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE, and there is no silver bullet that will fix that. Are YOU going to pay the costs of all that reliablity? Do YOU want to deal with the stagnation in, say, videocards, due to the fact that every videocard driver has to be 100% crash-free, and the time lag that such engineering would involve?
I don't think you've thought this thing through to the real world economic implications.
Or, you know, the requirement that you be a student, which shuts most people out of Summer of Code participation.
I guess I don't understand how this is a cop out. Please note that this isn't only an open source thing. Working as a software developer, I very often see situations where someone on the QA team or some manager or whatever complains about XYZ and is told "it is fixed in the source", when.. well, it IS fixed in the source, but the internal release process is such that a new full build won't be available until the next day (at a good shop, maybe longer at some place that doesn't do daily builds).
"It is fixed in the source/CVS" conveys the proper amount of information -- yes, the bug is fixed, but unfortunately you will not see the fix until the next release, unless you want to build it yourself.
It wasn't hard to predict that the Slashdot-hive-mind reaction to this would be to attack the government, the FDA and/or make jokes about them regulating nanobots... But there is a very serious side to this. There are nanoparticles being placed into things like cleaners and other household products right now despite the fact that various studies show there is a high likelyhood that these nanoparticles can do severe, unrepairable damage to the lungs of people who are exposed to them. This story only seems ridiculous because "nanotech" is such a broad field that covers just about everything. Some aspects of regulation (making sure these nanoparticle-containing products are safe to inhale in quantities that people are likely to be exposed to if they use them, for example) absolutely should fall under the FDA.
This guy is a real world troll. The more attention he gets on sites like this and the linked sites, the more he'll go around saying stupid things. Why humor him? He is best left ignored.
On the one hand, this is bad for America. On the other hand, I've been getting more cold-calls per week from companies and recruiters based off a 3 year old resume than I've gotten since the golden years of 1998-2000. The job market for programmers is red hot, at least around me here in San Diego.