I don't see how patenting algorithms is absurd. Really, that's about the only kind of legitimate software patent I can think of. Patenting an algorithm is patenting a process of doing something... similar to patenting the process or recipe of creating a new drug, etc. What is absurd when someone patents something overly broad, like "One Click e-commerce" or, "Something we already do, but on teh InterWeb!!!" Or something blindingly obvious, like Verizon and "translating IP addresses into phone numbers." Algorithm patents are very reasonable compared to those issues.
There are actually some uses of this connection that none of you are considering. Everyone sees the obvious "Watch TV, download movies," BUT does anyone here notice the potential for application developers? Currently a lot of us developers have moved to using the Internet for our applications, because it solves a lot of our deployment problems. However, the downside of Internet applications is that their performance is far inferior to that of desktop applications (both graphically and otherwise). We are currently hamstrung by our inability to quickly send information to a users PC. We end up using almost all our bandwidth to send down data, with a small amount to prettify the page a little, but this sort of bandwidth could allow us to run beautiful, full featured applications remotely, thus avoiding the distribution problems of standalone apps AND avoiding the current throttling problems Internet apps have currently.
Look at it this way... connection speeds like that would be for all intents and purposes just as fast as a hard drive is today, and you could treat them as such. Currently, when a computer runs an app, it pulls data/program off slow hard drive, puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. In the future, computer pulls data/program off network (at speeds as good as a hard drive), puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. The possibilities are amazing!
Sadly, DotComBurst 2.0 could easilly happen, though probably not to the extent of the first one. The first time around, investors were just throwing money at anything with a.com at the end of the name, even things with no business plan that never were profitable. Today, money flies at things declaring themselves "Web 2.0", whether or not they are profitable or have a way of making money. Just look at YouTube. That thing has never turned a profit, yet money gets thrown at it like crazy, especially by Google. Is there a way to make it profitable? Maybe, but is still looks like dangerous amounts of money are being put in it and other similar sites with no demonstration that any return on investment will be generated. Worse, since Web 2.0 sites are typically defined as sites where users contribute, they not only face the normal business difficulties of generating a profit, but they ALSO face extremely high chances of being instantly destroyed at any time by a single lawsuit, brought against them due to the enourmous amount of copyrighted material users post on such sites. Sure, those sites are all pretty and fun, but such enormous obstacles to long term success make the current frenzy over them a bit disturbing, and can give one a good case of deja vu.
Was the site slashdotted? I tried to read the review and it didn't work out for me. One thing's for sure: they need to get themselves a security expert on the double to take a look at their web code. Spitting out this sort of error
DB function failed with error number 1194 Table 'mos_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired SQL=SELECT session_id FROM mos_session WHERE session_id=MD5('108d0db7bccc40f825c348105525c6c8') SQL = SELECT session_id FROM mos_session WHERE session_id=MD5('108d0db7bccc40f825c348105525c6c8')
I want to go on record as being very much in favor of Net neutrality. As a computer engineer/computer science graduate who makes my living programming web applications, I can say with certainty that allowing the ISPs to create tiered models of services would destroy the ability of myself and others to innovate.
Let me give an example. In the early days of the World Wide Web, the typical content we had was static pages with maybe an image or two. Network performance continued to be upgraded, however, and as that happened new innovators took advantage of the increase in bandwidth to begin making interactive and interesting web pages. These pages became richer and richer, and content became larger and continually more complex and interesting. You began to have web sites in which users could communicate with each other and participate in collaborative projects. As these new innovations occurred, peoples' expectations web applications rose, demand for Internet connectivity increased, more people subscribed to broadband, and this in turn caused ISPs to update their network architectures. Thus a virtuous cycle was created: more bandwidth increased what developers such as myself could create on the Internet, which interested more people, which caused more of them to subscribe to ISPs, which gave the ISPs money to add even more bandwidth, etc.
Now the situation we are looking at is different. Rather than add network capacity to increasingly allow richer content on the web, the ISPs will be able to charge based on different types of media. IPTV, for instance, will require an addition of considerable bandwidth to the Internet in order to have high quality transmissions. However, by abolishing net neutrality, the ISPs will be able to deliver that performance by giving most of the bandwidth to services like IPTV and throttling other forms of traffic. Rather than spend the money we pay as subscribers for things like bandwidth upgrades, they will just reduce some forms of service and pocket the money. That is NOT what we are paying for.
In addition, this will break the virtuous cycle I mentioned above. Because ISPs can throttle a lot of different kinds of web traffic, they will be able to avoid raising bandwidth. And without the extra bandwidth, we as developers won't be able to push new limits with our programs as we have in the past. Continuing to make richer content requires more bandwidth, and our efforts will be starved in that area. In addition, innovative start ups won't have the money to pay for the increased bandwidth they need to compete with big, established sites. Thus, while they may have good ideas, they probably won't catch on because their sites will be made artificially slower by the packet shapers. We need to keep the Internet a level playing field for everyone.
In closing, I would urge you to look at the history of the Internet. Though brief, it has in a short time profoundly changed the way we live our lives, and made possible advances in science only dreamed of in previous decades. During all this time of astounding development, the Internet was neutral. Given how well the Internet, commerce, science, and everything else are performing under the current system, why would we want to change it? Things don't get any better than they are now (unless you stand to profit by charging more for preferred services).
Lol, unless you are an ordinary user living at a research institution. My university (Iowa State) was connected, and so because I lived in the dorms I was easilly able to connect to all kinds of things over Internet2. Downloading huge Linux distros was a dream. Lol, if all your friends were at universities with connections, you could even get some great gaming in over it:D.
And ext3 actually is just ext2 with journaling. Hence the reason the Linux command for formatting a partition with ext2 is "mk2fs", and ext3 is "mk2fs -j".
I fail to see the reason why the article poster is complaining that HFS+ is nearly 10 years old. Age really doesn't matter. If something is a good product, why not use it for 50 years. I'm not saying HFS+ is necessarilly such a product, but heck, even ext2 is 15 years old. People still use that, and no one complains about the age.
Net neatrality is in the media, but unfortunately not the way we would like. Rather than being covered by reporters who would (hopefully) make some attempt at valid coverage, it is simply covered by the ISPs themselves, who have a vested interest in getting rid of net neatrality.
Example: Who here lives in the midwest and has Mediacom for their ISP? In Iowa and a number of other midwestern states, Mediacom is the big cable company, providing Internet and Television (and they are your only choice, unless you live in an area that can provide DSL). Mediacom (of course) runs commercials about itself on all of its channels for free whenever it feels like it. They are CONSTANTLY running a commercial about net neatrality, in which they do NOTHING but attempt to scare people into it without providing any real information. They never devote even one word to explaining what it is or what it means. Instead, they just make this lie (I'm probably not quite word for word, but I'm 95% there... this is almost exactly what they say, and the last sentence is the exact ending.):
"Net neatrality is a scheme by which the big business multimillion dollar corporations can take more of your money. Just remember: Net neatrality means YOU pay!" (emphasis NOT added by me) Oh, I should also point out that while making this lie, they show a picture of an executive throwing himself down on his bed with money literally raining down all over him.
So yeah, I don't even know what to do about this sort of thing. The companies that control the Internet control the content on it, and when they are willing to constantly bombard users with blatant lies... I just don't know what you do about that or how you combat it. Sure, we can all talk about it freely on slashdot, but how do you tell Joe Voter to wake up and fight this if the only thing he sees are lying, one sided commercials every night when he watches his five hours of (corporate provided) TV. All I can say is that this situation really sucks for us.
In addition, mathematical models show that more than 16 cores actually HURT performance in most applications. This chip would likely only be useful if we had a better parallel programming paradigm (maybe Intel built the chip so they could study that) and we had a specific application it was useful for (something that could use tons of parallel processors). For most applications, 80 cores will probably hurt performance, and at the very least will be idling and wasting power doing NOPs most of the time.
This is going to stop a lot of software companies from opening up German software houses. Just trying to maintain any computer network for regular developers would probably be illegal under these rules, because a lot of network maintanence tools could be considered "hacking tools" under this definition. Without those tools, it would be prohibitive to try to support an enterprise infrastructure.
Then modify the jobs. What I find happening many times is that when something NEW is rolled out or in development, people have it alert them to anything and everything including success but never change it when it has stabilized or gone live.
I can't. That's why I mentioned in my earlier post that I have no control over a lot of these boxes. My job itself does only generates emails if it gets an exception (as a.Net program, if you put an exception handler in the web.config it will do that for any exception of any kind, period, because it bubbles up the stack and gets sent by the framework). However, we have an automated scheduler by another company that runs jobs we write, and that scheduler is the one always sending out success and failure emails. I sure as heck don't need a failure email, because.Net is already going to send me a much more detailed email with the exception code in it, and I don't need a success email either. But I don't have any admin rights to configure it, and I think on that system it may be a machine wide setting they leave on for everyone anyway (i.e.- a checkbox saying "notify job owners of successful job completion."). We have a number of jobs that run several times a day, so I get completely inundated with emails proclaiming "SUCCESS!"
You make the point that a success email could be useful, because then you know a job just finished and isn't long running. My counter-point would be that it isn't worth it, because for every one of those (I haven't had one yet), my email box will be flooded by thousands of success messages, driving down useful communication, bug notifications, and other things that I actually need to see. The time spent wading through them all just isn't worth it. (This is why I have a junk job output folder and an email rule that sends them straight there, where they get deleted.)
Very true, and I actually let those through because they do from time to time affect me. One innovative approach I've seen a team take in that area though is to have one person (usually the newest developer) that they make responsible for reading those and communicating to the group anything that might affect them. That way most of the team doesn't even have to read those emails, and only the really important stuff gets through.
I actually have to agree with this talk about bancruptcy. Honestly, email has gotten to the point where I can't keep up with it either. I'm a software developer, and I get so many emails at work that it can take me at least a couple hours in the morning just to read them all. When you only have an 8 hour workday, and two hours of it is spent emailing, that's clearly bad for the company. I delete 50% of them at least without even looking at more than the subject and senders name, because if it appears to be just another one of those FYI emails, I'm sure not wasting my time. Also, I know that email is not used for really critical communication. I know I can just delete the email, because if it is something really urgent, someone will call me about it.
Two other thoughts:
Automated emails by machines should be banned, or at least restricted. As a developer, I am constantly getting emails from servers telling me that some job has run successfully, or that some automated procedure is done, and I couldn't care less. I just want to know when things fail. Unfortunately, I (like probably most developers) don't have any real control over the boxes I touch, and to make matters worse, much of these notification type things are the default behavior of systems.
This situation also extends to phones and voicemail boxes. Ever since cell phones have come around, I have been so connected that I can't get away. People call all the time and can reach you anywhere, and if for some reason they can't get you, they leave a big long voice mail that you have to listen to later to catch up on. To get some control of my life back from these devices, I've taken to disabling voicemail and not answering my cell phone much of the time. I am not going to allow my life and my time be held hostage by my boss or whoever else wants to reach me at any time of the day, and that goes for email to.
One last thought: If you work in an office and use a modern email system like outlook, email rules/filters are your BEST FRIEND. I went from getting hundreds of emails a day to about 10 now due to how heavilly I filter things (and I'm not talking about spam; that's already removed by corporate spam filters and I never see any). I've essientially built such a wall around my inbox that only the high priority stuff gets through. And you know what? I've never once had anyone complain about me dodging email. Why no complaints, even though I really do ignore most people's emails? Because most email literally is so unimportant and trivial (and mass-mailed to so many people anyway), that ignoring it doesn't effect ANYTHING.
In thinking more about this issue, I had to ask myself the question: Is Sony going to be driven out of the video games market (at least for this generation of consoles)? Their sales all already really low, they were late out of the gate as compared to Microsoft, their games are expensive and hard to develop (so they don't have all that many), and now their whole console could be barred from production over this, depriving them of the last of the few sales they are getting. And they lose money on every PS3 sold anyway... so seriously, maybe from a business perspective they ought to just cut their losses and move one. If production stops over this issue, I just don't see how they will be able to make up enough ground or get enough market share to ever catch up.
Well, I know which Hi-Def player I should NOT get now, at least until this is settled. And if Sony loses this case, it will lose the movie format war again. I suppose that could be good for consumers though, because format wars just discourage adoption of useful technology.
C still has many uses in low-level coding, operating system development, embedded system design, etc., because as a language it is about one step above assembly. You still find it very commonly taught in good engineering schools. In fact, about half my classes in my computer engineering program were in C (all the ones that focused on the before mentioned topics).
I think what they mean is that C is dying as a general purpose language that your average programmer would use to do day to day programming. It used to be used for absolutely everything, including writing GUI programs on early versions of Windows using the Windows API. Now, though, C is no longer used for everything, and is having to settle for the niche of lower level coding. Nevertheless, I think once C gets in that niche, it is going to stay there for quite a while without usage falling further. When you really need to intimately work with the hardware and write small footprint, efficient code, I have yet to see anything better suited to the task than C.
Look, here's the deal. Let's just look at this from a numbers perspective. And IPv4 address is a 32 bit number. As such, it is capable of holding a bit over 4 billion addresses. There are currently an estimated 6.6 billion people in the world. At some point, each of them are going to get a computer... even in developing nations, because of things like the one laptop per child initiative. There are NOT enough number in this address space to accomodate humanity, even if they could be re-allocated in such a way that not one IP address was wasted. You might buy yourself a few years time, but when countries like China and India (with a good third of the world's population between them) are having economic booms and rapidly going online, you won't get very many extra years, and you may not even get many extra months. In fact, I would say it is actually unlikely you get any extra time at all, because by the time you get through all the legal hassles, whining, etc. that are going to happen with reallocation, we will have already hit the wall. We might as well just get started on IPv6 and not waste any time on reallocation schemes, because it is the only real solution given the paces of Internet enable device expansion.
Note: To pre-empt the argument that we can use NATs to create private addresses and subnets, and that therefore all those new devices won't need IP addresses, let me point this out: I've only considered one computer per person so far. Let's start talking about cell phones, PDAs, cars, heck, even refrigerators, because everything is going online these days. Especially in the case of mobile items, such as phones, these devices are often out in public and can't be kept behind any NAT because they keep moving around huge geographic areas. Even if you could somehow get some of them behind a NAT, when you have a computer per person, a cell phone per person (that alone takes you to over 13 billion devices), a video game console per person (DS, Wii, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360, take your pick, they are all online), a work PC/laptop per person, etc., it just becomes clear that there is no way that any reallocation of our 4 billion addresses can possibly handle demand that could easilly be upwards of 30 billion devices. We just need to bit the bullet and move to another protocol. And if there are reasons that IPv6 is unpalatable then we need to hurry up and design IPv7 or something, because especially with China and India going online, nothing is going to hold back this tide for long.
Rather than being a huge fanboy from hicksville or something, I'm a developer working for a Fortune 500 corporation. I understand there is griping about having to initially make the switch. I've heard it myself. But I have yet to hear ONE negative comment after one week or so of adoption. All you ever hear is praise. That's not to say people don't get a little frustrated after one week if they can't find something, but they don't complain about it anymore. The reason is that by then they've seen how many of the UI improvements have help them do things more accurately, more quickly, with less mouse clicks, and have empowered them to use features that they couldn't find before; features that only the "experts" knew how to use. That sort of thing puts a smile on a lot of people's faces.
As for the university, you have a couple problems:
No one has given the students any kind of a demo, so they have no idea what is now possible or why they might want to learn the new system.
The vast majority of college students are incredibly lazy. I just graduated in December, lived in the dorms 4.5 years, so I think I ought to know. Most college students are either getting drunk or barricading themselves in their room with mountain dew and dorritos so that they will have enough fuel to play yet another 12 hour stretch of WoW. The problem isn't that Office 2007 is worse than Office 2003 (because it isn't), it's that they took at most a five second look at it, saw the UI was different, immediately said, "This sucks, it's too hard to learn," and then threw it in the trash without even attempting to use it. Again, I've seen this sort of behaivior over and over in college with students, whether it be a software product, some new gadget, their homework, etc. Give it to an office worker though, along with a quick demo of the highlights, and they'll be all smiles very quickly.
The way MS phrased their statement (and previous statements) is stupid and doesn't make a lot of sense. They made it sound like they had a list of patents, and now say they don't. However, the statement I think they were trying to say is, "We have so many patents that we know that some open source software somewhere must be infringing on something we've patented." Then they tried to clarify that they haven't actually made a list of them all because, "it would take way too much administrative time to find out which ones they are and list them all." Stated that way, their statement would make a lot more sense, and it would probably be true.
So if they don't know which patents might be infringed upon - and find it too difficult to research it - then where did that attack against Linux come from? Pure fantasy, of course. It's probably actionable fantasy, too - all the elements of libel are present in Microsoft's "Linux infringes on Microsoft patents". Say - that might be interesting; to defend against a libel charge they'd have to prove that their statement was true.
Problem is, their statement probably is true. Sure, it was a stupid statement, and sure, they don't seem to have a clue about which patents Open Source infringes on. But for OSS to come back and call libel would probably be false and at any rate would be very risky. Given the vast number of patents MS has, it is almost unthinkable that some little bit of code somewhere doesn't tread on one. MS may not want to take the time now to figure out what code violates their patents, but faced with a big payout in a libel lawsuit, they might just take the time to figure it out, and then countersue for infringement after winning the libel suit. Typically, when it comes to software giants and patents, its better just to mind your own business and stay out of that arena unless your hand is forced. They just have too many patents to avoid hitting something, and trying to research prior art and defend yourself is expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how patenting algorithms is absurd. Really, that's about the only kind of legitimate software patent I can think of. Patenting an algorithm is patenting a process of doing something... similar to patenting the process or recipe of creating a new drug, etc. What is absurd when someone patents something overly broad, like "One Click e-commerce" or, "Something we already do, but on teh InterWeb!!!" Or something blindingly obvious, like Verizon and "translating IP addresses into phone numbers." Algorithm patents are very reasonable compared to those issues.
There are actually some uses of this connection that none of you are considering. Everyone sees the obvious "Watch TV, download movies," BUT does anyone here notice the potential for application developers? Currently a lot of us developers have moved to using the Internet for our applications, because it solves a lot of our deployment problems. However, the downside of Internet applications is that their performance is far inferior to that of desktop applications (both graphically and otherwise). We are currently hamstrung by our inability to quickly send information to a users PC. We end up using almost all our bandwidth to send down data, with a small amount to prettify the page a little, but this sort of bandwidth could allow us to run beautiful, full featured applications remotely, thus avoiding the distribution problems of standalone apps AND avoiding the current throttling problems Internet apps have currently.
Look at it this way... connection speeds like that would be for all intents and purposes just as fast as a hard drive is today, and you could treat them as such. Currently, when a computer runs an app, it pulls data/program off slow hard drive, puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. In the future, computer pulls data/program off network (at speeds as good as a hard drive), puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. The possibilities are amazing!
Sadly, DotComBurst 2.0 could easilly happen, though probably not to the extent of the first one. The first time around, investors were just throwing money at anything with a .com at the end of the name, even things with no business plan that never were profitable. Today, money flies at things declaring themselves "Web 2.0", whether or not they are profitable or have a way of making money. Just look at YouTube. That thing has never turned a profit, yet money gets thrown at it like crazy, especially by Google. Is there a way to make it profitable? Maybe, but is still looks like dangerous amounts of money are being put in it and other similar sites with no demonstration that any return on investment will be generated. Worse, since Web 2.0 sites are typically defined as sites where users contribute, they not only face the normal business difficulties of generating a profit, but they ALSO face extremely high chances of being instantly destroyed at any time by a single lawsuit, brought against them due to the enourmous amount of copyrighted material users post on such sites. Sure, those sites are all pretty and fun, but such enormous obstacles to long term success make the current frenzy over them a bit disturbing, and can give one a good case of deja vu.
Was the site slashdotted? I tried to read the review and it didn't work out for me. One thing's for sure: they need to get themselves a security expert on the double to take a look at their web code. Spitting out this sort of error
is a very bad thing.
I want to go on record as being very much in favor of Net neutrality. As a computer engineer/computer science graduate who makes my living programming web applications, I can say with certainty that allowing the ISPs to create tiered models of services would destroy the ability of myself and others to innovate.
Let me give an example. In the early days of the World Wide Web, the typical content we had was static pages with maybe an image or two. Network performance continued to be upgraded, however, and as that happened new innovators took advantage of the increase in bandwidth to begin making interactive and interesting web pages. These pages became richer and richer, and content became larger and continually more complex and interesting. You began to have web sites in which users could communicate with each other and participate in collaborative projects. As these new innovations occurred, peoples' expectations web applications rose, demand for Internet connectivity increased, more people subscribed to broadband, and this in turn caused ISPs to update their network architectures. Thus a virtuous cycle was created: more bandwidth increased what developers such as myself could create on the Internet, which interested more people, which caused more of them to subscribe to ISPs, which gave the ISPs money to add even more bandwidth, etc.
Now the situation we are looking at is different. Rather than add network capacity to increasingly allow richer content on the web, the ISPs will be able to charge based on different types of media. IPTV, for instance, will require an addition of considerable bandwidth to the Internet in order to have high quality transmissions. However, by abolishing net neutrality, the ISPs will be able to deliver that performance by giving most of the bandwidth to services like IPTV and throttling other forms of traffic. Rather than spend the money we pay as subscribers for things like bandwidth upgrades, they will just reduce some forms of service and pocket the money. That is NOT what we are paying for.
In addition, this will break the virtuous cycle I mentioned above. Because ISPs can throttle a lot of different kinds of web traffic, they will be able to avoid raising bandwidth. And without the extra bandwidth, we as developers won't be able to push new limits with our programs as we have in the past. Continuing to make richer content requires more bandwidth, and our efforts will be starved in that area. In addition, innovative start ups won't have the money to pay for the increased bandwidth they need to compete with big, established sites. Thus, while they may have good ideas, they probably won't catch on because their sites will be made artificially slower by the packet shapers. We need to keep the Internet a level playing field for everyone.
In closing, I would urge you to look at the history of the Internet. Though brief, it has in a short time profoundly changed the way we live our lives, and made possible advances in science only dreamed of in previous decades. During all this time of astounding development, the Internet was neutral. Given how well the Internet, commerce, science, and everything else are performing under the current system, why would we want to change it? Things don't get any better than they are now (unless you stand to profit by charging more for preferred services).
Lol, unless you are an ordinary user living at a research institution. My university (Iowa State) was connected, and so because I lived in the dorms I was easilly able to connect to all kinds of things over Internet2. Downloading huge Linux distros was a dream. Lol, if all your friends were at universities with connections, you could even get some great gaming in over it :D.
It was in the Leapord beta. I think that's a fairly good reason to make that assumption.
And ext3 actually is just ext2 with journaling. Hence the reason the Linux command for formatting a partition with ext2 is "mk2fs", and ext3 is "mk2fs -j".
I fail to see the reason why the article poster is complaining that HFS+ is nearly 10 years old. Age really doesn't matter. If something is a good product, why not use it for 50 years. I'm not saying HFS+ is necessarilly such a product, but heck, even ext2 is 15 years old. People still use that, and no one complains about the age.
Net neatrality is in the media, but unfortunately not the way we would like. Rather than being covered by reporters who would (hopefully) make some attempt at valid coverage, it is simply covered by the ISPs themselves, who have a vested interest in getting rid of net neatrality.
Example: Who here lives in the midwest and has Mediacom for their ISP? In Iowa and a number of other midwestern states, Mediacom is the big cable company, providing Internet and Television (and they are your only choice, unless you live in an area that can provide DSL). Mediacom (of course) runs commercials about itself on all of its channels for free whenever it feels like it. They are CONSTANTLY running a commercial about net neatrality, in which they do NOTHING but attempt to scare people into it without providing any real information. They never devote even one word to explaining what it is or what it means. Instead, they just make this lie (I'm probably not quite word for word, but I'm 95% there... this is almost exactly what they say, and the last sentence is the exact ending.):
"Net neatrality is a scheme by which the big business multimillion dollar corporations can take more of your money. Just remember: Net neatrality means YOU pay!" (emphasis NOT added by me) Oh, I should also point out that while making this lie, they show a picture of an executive throwing himself down on his bed with money literally raining down all over him.So yeah, I don't even know what to do about this sort of thing. The companies that control the Internet control the content on it, and when they are willing to constantly bombard users with blatant lies... I just don't know what you do about that or how you combat it. Sure, we can all talk about it freely on slashdot, but how do you tell Joe Voter to wake up and fight this if the only thing he sees are lying, one sided commercials every night when he watches his five hours of (corporate provided) TV. All I can say is that this situation really sucks for us.
Geez... even a massive operating system like Vista was developed in only five years. This is a freekin' TEXT EDITOR!! SIX YEARS? What the heck???
Yeah!! DOWN with teh flash and javascript! Time to move on to something better. Silverlight, here I come!!!11!one :D.
In addition, mathematical models show that more than 16 cores actually HURT performance in most applications. This chip would likely only be useful if we had a better parallel programming paradigm (maybe Intel built the chip so they could study that) and we had a specific application it was useful for (something that could use tons of parallel processors). For most applications, 80 cores will probably hurt performance, and at the very least will be idling and wasting power doing NOPs most of the time.
This is going to stop a lot of software companies from opening up German software houses. Just trying to maintain any computer network for regular developers would probably be illegal under these rules, because a lot of network maintanence tools could be considered "hacking tools" under this definition. Without those tools, it would be prohibitive to try to support an enterprise infrastructure.
I can't. That's why I mentioned in my earlier post that I have no control over a lot of these boxes. My job itself does only generates emails if it gets an exception (as a .Net program, if you put an exception handler in the web.config it will do that for any exception of any kind, period, because it bubbles up the stack and gets sent by the framework). However, we have an automated scheduler by another company that runs jobs we write, and that scheduler is the one always sending out success and failure emails. I sure as heck don't need a failure email, because .Net is already going to send me a much more detailed email with the exception code in it, and I don't need a success email either. But I don't have any admin rights to configure it, and I think on that system it may be a machine wide setting they leave on for everyone anyway (i.e.- a checkbox saying "notify job owners of successful job completion."). We have a number of jobs that run several times a day, so I get completely inundated with emails proclaiming "SUCCESS!"
You make the point that a success email could be useful, because then you know a job just finished and isn't long running. My counter-point would be that it isn't worth it, because for every one of those (I haven't had one yet), my email box will be flooded by thousands of success messages, driving down useful communication, bug notifications, and other things that I actually need to see. The time spent wading through them all just isn't worth it. (This is why I have a junk job output folder and an email rule that sends them straight there, where they get deleted.)
Very true, and I actually let those through because they do from time to time affect me. One innovative approach I've seen a team take in that area though is to have one person (usually the newest developer) that they make responsible for reading those and communicating to the group anything that might affect them. That way most of the team doesn't even have to read those emails, and only the really important stuff gets through.
I actually have to agree with this talk about bancruptcy. Honestly, email has gotten to the point where I can't keep up with it either. I'm a software developer, and I get so many emails at work that it can take me at least a couple hours in the morning just to read them all. When you only have an 8 hour workday, and two hours of it is spent emailing, that's clearly bad for the company. I delete 50% of them at least without even looking at more than the subject and senders name, because if it appears to be just another one of those FYI emails, I'm sure not wasting my time. Also, I know that email is not used for really critical communication. I know I can just delete the email, because if it is something really urgent, someone will call me about it.
Two other thoughts:
One last thought: If you work in an office and use a modern email system like outlook, email rules/filters are your BEST FRIEND. I went from getting hundreds of emails a day to about 10 now due to how heavilly I filter things (and I'm not talking about spam; that's already removed by corporate spam filters and I never see any). I've essientially built such a wall around my inbox that only the high priority stuff gets through. And you know what? I've never once had anyone complain about me dodging email. Why no complaints, even though I really do ignore most people's emails? Because most email literally is so unimportant and trivial (and mass-mailed to so many people anyway), that ignoring it doesn't effect ANYTHING .
In thinking more about this issue, I had to ask myself the question: Is Sony going to be driven out of the video games market (at least for this generation of consoles)? Their sales all already really low, they were late out of the gate as compared to Microsoft, their games are expensive and hard to develop (so they don't have all that many), and now their whole console could be barred from production over this, depriving them of the last of the few sales they are getting. And they lose money on every PS3 sold anyway... so seriously, maybe from a business perspective they ought to just cut their losses and move one. If production stops over this issue, I just don't see how they will be able to make up enough ground or get enough market share to ever catch up.
Well, I know which Hi-Def player I should NOT get now, at least until this is settled. And if Sony loses this case, it will lose the movie format war again. I suppose that could be good for consumers though, because format wars just discourage adoption of useful technology.
C still has many uses in low-level coding, operating system development, embedded system design, etc., because as a language it is about one step above assembly. You still find it very commonly taught in good engineering schools. In fact, about half my classes in my computer engineering program were in C (all the ones that focused on the before mentioned topics).
I think what they mean is that C is dying as a general purpose language that your average programmer would use to do day to day programming. It used to be used for absolutely everything, including writing GUI programs on early versions of Windows using the Windows API. Now, though, C is no longer used for everything, and is having to settle for the niche of lower level coding. Nevertheless, I think once C gets in that niche, it is going to stay there for quite a while without usage falling further. When you really need to intimately work with the hardware and write small footprint, efficient code, I have yet to see anything better suited to the task than C.
Look, here's the deal. Let's just look at this from a numbers perspective. And IPv4 address is a 32 bit number. As such, it is capable of holding a bit over 4 billion addresses. There are currently an estimated 6.6 billion people in the world. At some point, each of them are going to get a computer... even in developing nations, because of things like the one laptop per child initiative. There are NOT enough number in this address space to accomodate humanity, even if they could be re-allocated in such a way that not one IP address was wasted. You might buy yourself a few years time, but when countries like China and India (with a good third of the world's population between them) are having economic booms and rapidly going online, you won't get very many extra years, and you may not even get many extra months. In fact, I would say it is actually unlikely you get any extra time at all, because by the time you get through all the legal hassles, whining, etc. that are going to happen with reallocation, we will have already hit the wall. We might as well just get started on IPv6 and not waste any time on reallocation schemes, because it is the only real solution given the paces of Internet enable device expansion.
Note: To pre-empt the argument that we can use NATs to create private addresses and subnets, and that therefore all those new devices won't need IP addresses, let me point this out: I've only considered one computer per person so far. Let's start talking about cell phones, PDAs, cars, heck, even refrigerators, because everything is going online these days. Especially in the case of mobile items, such as phones, these devices are often out in public and can't be kept behind any NAT because they keep moving around huge geographic areas. Even if you could somehow get some of them behind a NAT, when you have a computer per person, a cell phone per person (that alone takes you to over 13 billion devices), a video game console per person (DS, Wii, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360, take your pick, they are all online), a work PC/laptop per person, etc., it just becomes clear that there is no way that any reallocation of our 4 billion addresses can possibly handle demand that could easilly be upwards of 30 billion devices. We just need to bit the bullet and move to another protocol. And if there are reasons that IPv6 is unpalatable then we need to hurry up and design IPv7 or something, because especially with China and India going online, nothing is going to hold back this tide for long.
This is the next Y2K.
What does FUD mean? Seriously... I've never seen the acronym spelled out (though I've seen it probably 100 times in the last day).
Rather than being a huge fanboy from hicksville or something, I'm a developer working for a Fortune 500 corporation. I understand there is griping about having to initially make the switch. I've heard it myself. But I have yet to hear ONE negative comment after one week or so of adoption. All you ever hear is praise. That's not to say people don't get a little frustrated after one week if they can't find something, but they don't complain about it anymore. The reason is that by then they've seen how many of the UI improvements have help them do things more accurately, more quickly, with less mouse clicks, and have empowered them to use features that they couldn't find before; features that only the "experts" knew how to use. That sort of thing puts a smile on a lot of people's faces.
As for the university, you have a couple problems:
The way MS phrased their statement (and previous statements) is stupid and doesn't make a lot of sense. They made it sound like they had a list of patents, and now say they don't. However, the statement I think they were trying to say is, "We have so many patents that we know that some open source software somewhere must be infringing on something we've patented." Then they tried to clarify that they haven't actually made a list of them all because, "it would take way too much administrative time to find out which ones they are and list them all." Stated that way, their statement would make a lot more sense, and it would probably be true.
Problem is, their statement probably is true. Sure, it was a stupid statement, and sure, they don't seem to have a clue about which patents Open Source infringes on. But for OSS to come back and call libel would probably be false and at any rate would be very risky. Given the vast number of patents MS has, it is almost unthinkable that some little bit of code somewhere doesn't tread on one. MS may not want to take the time now to figure out what code violates their patents, but faced with a big payout in a libel lawsuit, they might just take the time to figure it out, and then countersue for infringement after winning the libel suit. Typically, when it comes to software giants and patents, its better just to mind your own business and stay out of that arena unless your hand is forced. They just have too many patents to avoid hitting something, and trying to research prior art and defend yourself is expensive.