As long as Sony continues to be run by the record label division, Sony, the consumer electronics innovator, is going to die. The article forgets to mention the idiotic copy restrictions that MiniDisc players have along with the mentioned ATRAC/soundstage/can't drag 'n drop files limitations. They are basically shooting themselves in the foot because the record label is paranoid about copying. Nevermind MD, whatever happened to my cheap DAT device? If Sony wants to survive as a consumer electronics company it should split from the music label.
You are so off the mark it is not even funny. Let's start by debunking your basic premise. The proper metric is not absolute traffic accidents (or fatalities) per year, but rather traffic accidents/fatalities per distance traveled. The U.S. (and I will argue that proximity means Canadian rates are about the same) has a lower rate of fatalities per distance travelled than Germany (one example: http://usww.com/homepage/starteam/speed.html#s12). Oops! Traffic accidents are mostly a result of human error (by a wide margin). The mechanical argument is so old and wrong you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it. In the U.S, the majority of car accidents are alcohol related (http://www.nh-dwi.com/caip-206.htm). I don't know if Canada has the same problem. For the U.S at least, severely punsihing DUI would go much further than layering on useless bureaucratic hassles like "car certification" and draconian licensing schemes which are essentially just money milking machines.
Browsing enhancements dedicated to porn surfing are commendable but what you need to really free the lizard is free, high quality, FireFox only porn material. MS would have a hard time matching move like that.
The best, easiest and cheapest way for Firefox to boost its popularity into the stratosphere is to bundle free access to porn. To avoid being labelled as smut vendors, an "independent" developer can come up with a plug-in to do this.
Target offers, now, a lady's handbag with a battery powered bright white LED that lights up when the magnetic clasp is opened. Maybe it is not as "sexy" as the bag in the article but it is simpler, cheaper, more practicle and more environmentally friendly (no solar cells and special linings). It is also more practicle in the sense that it will last just long enough until the owner drops it in favor of the latest fashion.
I have nothing against Nintendo. I actually think their game titles are welcome relief from the cookie cutter games washing over the industry. That being said, I just can't see people using this device very much. Part of the allure of video games is being able to veg out and play with the minimal amount of movement. Having to wildly gesture for every game would just tire people out. It requires too much physical involvement. I hope they design a "standard" controller as well...
Anti-aircraft missiles are not intended to hit their targets, that is too difficult. They explode in proximity to the target and bring it down with shrapnel. As such, they would be just as deadly for an airship, filling it with thousands of little and not so little holes.
I believe St. Augustine is credited with being the first self loathing, sex-is-dirty type christian. Unfortunately, he set the tone for all those that followed.
All this product offers is a rechargable battery. Other than the battery, it is cheaper to buy the RAM, stick it on your motherboard and create a RAM disk with the OS. For most configurations it would probably be faster! To fix the battery problem, buy a UPS for the price of the card.
No, he did not change his mind but now he is a self confessed criminal under the DMCA and he should be thrown in jail. Maybe then will he appreciate what he advocates.
Makes you wonder why a company going down the tubes is paying its top executives a combined $2.7m. They are obviously dismal at their jobs and could have trimmed the company's losses by 12% if they were paid based on their performance.
You are confusing massive trends with individual ability. There is a reason there are well known SW engineers while there are no famous janitors known for their janitorial work. Some SW engineers are simply better at their craft and are not as easily replaceable. The famous ones are extreme examples of this.
Actually, the conclusion is very important. If programming, or any other activity, is not art and requires no human imagination that it can be automated and mass produced. If it is an art, an inexact flight of creativity, then it can't be mass produced, you can't have interchangable developers and you are stuck with an activity that can't be reduced to a neat little process to be executed by automata.
In your example, Janitors are 100% interchangable because no art or skill is required. All janitors are the same. SW engineers can be replaced but not all are equal. Not all SW engineers are the same.
From the article "At one point during the CMT summit, I stuck my hand up and asked: is there anything that in principle doesn't scale with multithreading? There wasn't a lot that leapt to the minds' eyes, except for compiler code."
Any application where latency is important (high performance network servers and proxies, for instance) will either not gain or often suffer from multi-threading for two reasons:
multi-threading requires synchronization which always consumes extra CPU cycles.
switching execution from thread to thread is an OS task switch and is generally an expensive operation consuming many CPU cycles. It is possible that CMT mitigates this problem but I doubt it completely solves it.
In other words, the manufcaturing cost to Apple is the same as it is for Dell because both of them out source manufacturing to the same Taiwanese companies.
Without looking hard, I can buy a cheap laptop for $500. A year and a half ago, bottom end laptops cost $1000. Over 2 years ago, you couldn't find any laptops below $1500. To me it looks like PCs are fast turning into commodities. We may see blister packaged laptops sooner than either one of us expects.
When you produce a Wintel PC, you are a generic PC manufacturer. Putting bells and whistles on it doesn't change the basic fact that your machine is interchangable with the beige box next to it. Attempts to produce "better" boxes at a premium have historically failed in the industry and the vendors you mention are tiny next to Apple which is tiny next to Dell.
Actually, Apple Senior Vice President, Phil Schiller said Macs would be able to run Windows, as quoted here. At least that is my interpretation of what he said. Anyway way, it would be trivial for MS to make it happen if they chose to.
Cringley is missing an important part of the puzzle. Apple cannot survive as a generic PC manufacturer unless it can beat everyone else on price, including Dell. Apple has only one lever to do this with. The relative cost of HW to SW is shrinking to the point where the MS tax is beginning to equal the price of HW. As HW becomes even cheaper, the cost of Windows will surpass that of the HW - probably within a year or two. Apple can bundle the OS at cost while Dell and friends are hobbled by the MS tax. This leads Apple into direct competition with Dell and friends and indirectly with MS. The question is if they can pull it off and if they do, for how long.
First a public health announcement: you should not spend hours reading slashdot comments.
Do you want concrete examples? I can provide them.
Example one:
All CIFS messages are byte misaligned. In other words, instead of 2 byte or 4 byte words being properly aligned on a 2 or 4 byte boundary, they are typically at an _odd_ offset. Why is this important? Most CPUs do not support accessing unaligned words so the compiler needs to generate extra instructions to reconstruct the word (in effect fetch the bytes individually and reconstruct the word in a register). End result is that instead of a single instruction to load the word into a register, the compiler generates many instructions to load the one word. Intel's x86 ISA is one of the few that does support unaligned word access at the cost of a CPU cycle penalty. So your performace still suffers because of poor MS engineering.
The CIFS protocol along with MSs implementation of Active Directory/LDAP/Kerberos is sufficiently understood by the Samba team as well as other people that MS's antics don't make much of a difference.
The real reason MS doesn't want to share information about the CIFS protocol is that it would expose their shoddy engineering for all to see;)
Slashdot Mirror
As long as Sony continues to be run by the record label division, Sony, the consumer electronics innovator, is going to die.
The article forgets to mention the idiotic copy restrictions that MiniDisc players have along with the mentioned ATRAC/soundstage/can't drag 'n drop files limitations. They are basically shooting themselves in the foot because the record label is paranoid about copying. Nevermind MD, whatever happened to my cheap DAT device?
If Sony wants to survive as a consumer electronics company it should split from the music label.
You are so off the mark it is not even funny.. Oops!
Let's start by debunking your basic premise. The proper metric is not absolute traffic accidents (or fatalities) per year, but rather traffic accidents/fatalities per distance traveled. The U.S. (and I will argue that proximity means Canadian rates are about the same) has a lower rate of fatalities per distance travelled than Germany (one example: http://usww.com/homepage/starteam/speed.html#s12)
Traffic accidents are mostly a result of human error (by a wide margin). The mechanical argument is so old and wrong you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it.
In the U.S, the majority of car accidents are alcohol related (http://www.nh-dwi.com/caip-206.htm). I don't know if Canada has the same problem.
For the U.S at least, severely punsihing DUI would go much further than layering on useless bureaucratic hassles like "car certification" and draconian licensing schemes which are essentially just money milking machines.
Browsing enhancements dedicated to porn surfing are commendable but what you need to really free the lizard is free, high quality, FireFox only porn material.
MS would have a hard time matching move like that.
The best, easiest and cheapest way for Firefox to boost its popularity into the stratosphere is to bundle free access to porn.
To avoid being labelled as smut vendors, an "independent" developer can come up with a plug-in to do this.
Target offers, now, a lady's handbag with a battery powered bright white LED that lights up when the magnetic clasp is opened. Maybe it is not as "sexy" as the bag in the article but it is simpler, cheaper, more practicle and more environmentally friendly (no solar cells and special linings). It is also more practicle in the sense that it will last just long enough until the owner drops it in favor of the latest fashion.
I have nothing against Nintendo. I actually think their game titles are welcome relief from the cookie cutter games washing over the industry.
That being said, I just can't see people using this device very much. Part of the allure of video games is being able to veg out and play with the minimal amount of movement. Having to wildly gesture for every game would just tire people out. It requires too much physical involvement.
I hope they design a "standard" controller as well...
Anti-aircraft missiles are not intended to hit their targets, that is too difficult. They explode in proximity to the target and bring it down with shrapnel.
As such, they would be just as deadly for an airship, filling it with thousands of little and not so little holes.
Apparently a relatively large chunk of their revenues is derived from domain park
I believe St. Augustine is credited with being the first self loathing, sex-is-dirty type christian.
Unfortunately, he set the tone for all those that followed.
All this product offers is a rechargable battery. Other than the battery, it is cheaper to buy the RAM, stick it on your motherboard and create a RAM disk with the OS. For most configurations it would probably be faster!
To fix the battery problem, buy a UPS for the price of the card.
No, he did not change his mind but now he is a self confessed criminal under the DMCA and he should be thrown in jail.
Maybe then will he appreciate what he advocates.
Makes you wonder why a company going down the tubes is paying its top executives a combined $2.7m.
They are obviously dismal at their jobs and could have trimmed the company's losses by 12% if they were paid based on their performance.
You are confusing massive trends with individual ability.
There is a reason there are well known SW engineers while there are no famous janitors known for their janitorial work.
Some SW engineers are simply better at their craft and are not as easily replaceable. The famous ones are extreme examples of this.
Actually, the conclusion is very important.
If programming, or any other activity, is not art and requires no human imagination that it can be automated and mass produced.
If it is an art, an inexact flight of creativity, then it can't be mass produced, you can't have interchangable developers and you are stuck with an activity that can't be reduced to a neat little process to be executed by automata.
In your example, Janitors are 100% interchangable because no art or skill is required. All janitors are the same.
SW engineers can be replaced but not all are equal. Not all SW engineers are the same.
From the article "At one point during the CMT summit, I stuck my hand up and asked: is there anything that in principle doesn't scale with multithreading? There wasn't a lot that leapt to the minds' eyes, except for compiler code."
Any application where latency is important (high performance network servers and proxies, for instance) will either not gain or often suffer from multi-threading for two reasons:In other words, the manufcaturing cost to Apple is the same as it is for Dell because both of them out source manufacturing to the same Taiwanese companies.
Without looking hard, I can buy a cheap laptop for $500. A year and a half ago, bottom end laptops cost $1000. Over 2 years ago, you couldn't find any laptops below $1500. To me it looks like PCs are fast turning into commodities.
We may see blister packaged laptops sooner than either one of us expects.
When you produce a Wintel PC, you are a generic PC manufacturer. Putting bells and whistles on it doesn't change the basic fact that your machine is interchangable with the beige box next to it. Attempts to produce "better" boxes at a premium have historically failed in the industry and the vendors you mention are tiny next to Apple which is tiny next to Dell.
Actually, Apple Senior Vice President, Phil Schiller said Macs would be able to run Windows, as quoted here. At least that is my interpretation of what he said.
Anyway way, it would be trivial for MS to make it happen if they chose to.
Cringley is missing an important part of the puzzle.
Apple cannot survive as a generic PC manufacturer unless it can beat everyone else on price, including Dell. Apple has only one lever to do this with.
The relative cost of HW to SW is shrinking to the point where the MS tax is beginning to equal the price of HW. As HW becomes even cheaper, the cost of Windows will surpass that of the HW - probably within a year or two.
Apple can bundle the OS at cost while Dell and friends are hobbled by the MS tax.
This leads Apple into direct competition with Dell and friends and indirectly with MS.
The question is if they can pull it off and if they do, for how long.
First a public health announcement: you should not spend hours reading slashdot comments.
Do you want concrete examples? I can provide them.
Example one:
All CIFS messages are byte misaligned. In other words, instead of 2 byte or 4 byte words being properly aligned on a 2 or 4 byte boundary, they are typically at an _odd_ offset. Why is this important? Most CPUs do not support accessing unaligned words so the compiler needs to generate extra instructions to reconstruct the word (in effect fetch the bytes individually and reconstruct the word in a register). End result is that instead of a single instruction to load the word into a register, the compiler generates many instructions to load the one word.
Intel's x86 ISA is one of the few that does support unaligned word access at the cost of a CPU cycle penalty. So your performace still suffers because of poor MS engineering.
The CIFS protocol along with MSs implementation of Active Directory/LDAP/Kerberos is sufficiently understood by the Samba team as well as other people that MS's antics don't make much of a difference.
;)
The real reason MS doesn't want to share information about the CIFS protocol is that it would expose their shoddy engineering for all to see
Wait until you get married...
It is ironic that most of these websites use images or other obfuscation methods on their contact email addresses... Assholes!
Why not buy a cheap laptop and achieve the same thing with a much longer battery life and monitor for free.