You are right that the sales force helps, however if you're selling a solution you can either have the customer pay the Microsoft Tax, or you can sell an OSS solution and keep the difference for yourself. I think there is plenty of incentive out there for solutions providers and consultants to leverage gnu-linux and OSS.
Anyone who thinks MS is going to allow.NET to be an open standard is living in a fantasy world. And BTW, only the CLR is a standard. This completely excludes all the APIs which is what someone would actually use to write an application. The GUI is not included in the CLR either.
Microsoft has a pretty strong incentive to standardize the.NET... one of the main reasons they're developing it is to fix a lot of the problems associated with multiple versions of DLLs, dependence on various versions of windows APIs, etc.
If you're in doubt, look at the Mono project. Soon there will be.NET available for Linux, etc. Then we'll find companies like HP selling the Microsoft solution but implementing their projects with Mono and Linux and making more money in the process.
.NET web services use XML for all data transfer. Thus, you can access them from any platform that supports XML. It's pretty obvious why XML is cross-platform and standards-compliant, so I won't explain that.
A lot of people will complain "Boo hoo, I wish HP would invest $50Million in Linux. I hate Microsoft". The fact is, HP has invested a lot of money in Linux so far, and will continue to do so..NET web services are a standards-compliant improvement to previously existing technology that will IF ANYTHING help to promote cross-platform solutions: In other words this will help HP deliver enterprise solutions involving both Microsoft products AND gnu-linux.
If Linux was really 10 steps ahead of Microsoft, markets would recognize that fact much more than they have. The fact is, there are some areas where linux shines and some areas where commercial software shines.
To me, this is a good thing, since it will raise the bar on standards compliance in the industry and create more niche areas for linux to make its way into the enterprise.
The original article on the Atkins diet from the times makes some very valid points, however I think it misleads the reader in one respect: by showing evidence that the low-fat high-carb food pyramid is flawed and then concluding that the logical alternative is to eat a high-fat low-carb diet, a la Dr. Atkins.
In reality, studies have shown that both high-carb and high-fat diets can lead to health problems.
Keep in mind, the original food pyramid myth was promoted because of discoveries during the Vietnam war that American 18 year olds had tons of plaque built up on their arteries and 18 year-old Vietnamese did not. The conclusion that was drawn was that the American high-fat diet was the cluprit. Hence, the food pyramid as we know it.
However, if you think about what the research has actually shown, the ideal diet is as follows:
Lots of vegetables, some high-fiber grains, and a small amount of meat, preferably fatty fish.
Now think for a moment about the nutritional conditions that existed during the majority of human evolution. We were engineered by evolution to consume a diet very much like the ideal diet described above. Of course, exercise is critical to health as well, and our ancestors got plenty of that in the course of their daily lives.
Kernighan and Ritchie wouldn't have suggested Hungarian notation, they're not that stupid.
I disagree. I think Kernighan and Ritchie would really like Hungarian Notation, when it is appropriate. I don't believe it's always appropriate, however there are some situations when it can make code much more readable.
Also, let's try not to get too nostalgic for the days when C compilers only distinguished identifiers in their first 8 characters...
Doesn't Python have 'em too... It's really nothing other than treating strings, ints, long ints, and floats as Objects and having smart methods handle numerical operations.
Someone might have said the same thing about a lot of other ideas that have been successful. That is my point.
So maybe it doesn't end up being banner ads. Maybe instead it's a 33 second Flash (tm) commercial, and during the time that it's playing you are prevented from sending/receiving any packets. It's the idea that has potential. Yes, banner ads are lame, but the idea of an ad-supported wireless network has some potential, particularly if someone can figure out how to force people to actually watch the ads.
Please note, technology that forces people to watch ads is something that most content-providers would probably love to see take place very soon.
In other words, I'd happily watch a couple of ads per hour in exchange for free wireless access.
One thing about Slashdot is that no matter how innovative your idea, someone on Slashdot will always confidently shoot it down on the basis of a host of logical-sounding points.
That is, friends, the main problem with self-styled "Smart People": They can always think of a dozen good reasons why something won't work. This reflex is poison to the particular kind of intelligence that characterizes successful entrepreneurs.
So please strongly consider looking elsewhere for advice on this issue.
the language is forcing work that should be automated (by strong type checking etc.)
As a general rule you're correct, however in this case it's actually the other way around. Languages that support a 'variant' data type do not require type checking (strong or weak) because type conversions are handled automatically (you never have to cast anything or even worry about what type anything is. 99% of the time the compiler figures out what you meant based on the code you typed in. This leads us to the usefulness of Hungarian Notation:
Hungarian Notation allows the code to be more meaningful to the reader. This creates less work for the programmer because in languages with a 'variant' data type more work is already being done by the compiler. If you are adding an integer to a string, but the string happens to contain a number, then the compiler will automatically calculate the value that is the sum. The sum can then be concatenated to another string or added to another number, whatever you choose. Of course, the risk with this kind of thing is that you accidentally write code that means the wrong thing and the compiler doesn't complain. That's where Hungarian notation comes in: It forces you to think about what the code means when you are writing it. I think that for most people this is a Good Thing.
He meant "it was wrong" in the sense of being illegal. Having sufficient awareness of the world to get into MIT does indeed imply that a person would have sufficient awareness of the world (and therefore copyright law) to understand that breaking it constitutes a crime that one may be punished for.
A better question to ask that person would be: "How long would it have taken you, working at the greatest wage you are able to earn, to earn the amount of money necessary to buy the music legally?"
My guess is that it took him at least 1/100th of the time to do it illegally, but then again he could earn 8 figures and just happen to be an anti-property activist, however somehow I doubt it.
My next question would be: "How often do you listen to each song, and how much effort does it take to listen to a particular song once you decide that you feel like listening to it?"
A shoebox full of burned CDs is a highly inefficient way to archive anything important enough to retrieve semi-regularly. I think it's safe to say that the individual in question would probably have still preferred pirated music even if he could have purchased the songs for 25 cents each, since it seems to me that few people would really be able to justify purchasing any songs after the first gigabyte, since he would have likely purchased them in roughly the order of his preference.
If Kernighan and Ritchie had suggested Hungarian notation, you'd find lots of evangelists for it on Slashdot.
If you are clueless about what it is, then read the msdn info and decide for yourself. Don't buy into Chrisd's characterization uncritically.
As for me, I don't use it often, but occasionally I find it useful especially when writing code in a language that supports automatic type conversion and a variant data type.
I generally agree with your statement, however I think the majority of the 'evolutionary time' during which the human species evolved was pre-agricultural. Refined carbohydrates and domesticated livestock create a drastic divergence from the diet around which our species evolved.
The article you cite from the times makes some very valid points, however I think it misleads the reader in one respect: by showing evidence that the low-fat high-carb food pyramid is flawed and then concluding that the logical alternative is to eat a high-fat low-carb diet, a la Dr. Atkins.
In reality, studies have shown that both high-carb and high-fat diets can lead to health problems.
Keep in mind, the original food pyramid myth was promoted because of discoveries during the Vietnam war that American 18 year olds had tons of plaque built up on their arteries and 18 year-old Vietnamese did not. The conclusion that was drawn was that the American high-fat diet was the cluprit. Hence, the food pyramid as we know it.
However, if you think about what the research has actually shown, the ideal diet is as follows:
Lots of vegetables, some high-fiber grains, and a small amount of meat, preferably fatty fish.
Now think for a moment about the nutritional conditions that existed during the majority of human evolution. We were engineered by evolution to consume a diet very much like the ideal diet described above. Of course, exercise is critical to health as well, and our ancestors got plenty of that in the course of their daily lives.
Even if you think modchips are a Good Thing, that doesn't mean you should take a job at Microsoft creating DRM stuff.
Why not enjoy the sport of it and let the best hacker win. That's what it's all about, isn't it? Not about turning down perfectly good dollars so that technology can stay "easy" to mod.
I might as well plug the band I was in during college. We were called Boy and Shark.
We have a couple of MP3s available on the site.
Oddly, the web stats show that we are getting thousands of downloads of these songs each month, most of which are from Italy. Yes I find this strange. It must be kind of like how David Hasslehoff is popular in Germany.
CF is not going to be helpful in refereeing scientific papers
I disagree. You say the following:
CF can be good to predict the individual preference over an item but not the quality of the item.
My point is that an individual's preference is equivalent to his perception of the quality of the item. Sure, if you had only two ratings for each item the system wouldn't work, but think of it this way:
If an academic writes a paper (let's call it Paper X), we could assume (at least) that several of his colleagues are likely to read it. If the paper received a high rating from the initial reviewers, it would appear on the 'radar screen' of other like-minded individuals at other institutions. By 'like-minded' I mean people who would find the paper a worthy and interesting contribution to the literature in the field.
Over time, more people would review the paper, perhaps some people in neighboring fields, some of whom would find it MORE relevant/interesting, and some of whom would find it LESS relevant an interesting. This would add intelligence to the system.
Now, suppose that you logged on and rated a few papers, and that it turned out that your intellectual disposition was such that you tended to take interest in the ideas presented in Paper X. You would be shown Paper X on a "recommended reading list".
The concept of a "recommended reading list" is precisely what I think makes CF extremely well suited to the scientific community. Right now, each field contains its own body of cannonical literature, and over time that body is expanded as articles are published in the field's prestigious journals by the field's prestigious academics. CF would allow for several occurrences that would serve to benefit mankind (and academia). I'm not sure if you would consider them weaknesses, but here they are:
1. Looser constraints over whose ideas are exposed to mainstream scientists: An 8th grader could feasibly write a paper that would end up on the "recommended reading list" of an MIT professor, so long as the system had enough preference data to make the connection, but this would surely happen before long.
2. Better cross-fertilization between fields: Preference data from individuals with inter-disciplinary interests would help the system recommend articles from fields outside an individual's primary expertise. I've known grad students who have never visited the University Library, relying instead upon a bookshelf in their faculty advisor's office. The intelligence developed by a CF recommender system may find some interesting bridges between fields. At the very least, it would put the information out there. Of course, if an individual consistently low-rated articles outside of his field, he would soon stop receiving recommendations for them.
At any rate, I think it would work. It would take some time before the CF 'intelligence' was operating at its peak, but in the meantime the rating data could be used to show results based upon popularity.
Well, there are technologies like collaborative filtering that go a long way toward solving the problem much more efficiently than moderation + metamoderation.
With collaborative filtering, an individual's preferences over a small set of data are used to predict likely preferences over a large set of data. So to take an example that is successfully in use here, one could rate 15-20 movies and have the system predict with a fair bit of accuracy that person's ratings of most any movie. Of course, you need a lot of people's preference data to do this, but I'm sure it wouldn't be a major hurdle to acceptance of Brown's idea, since he has so many researchers' signatures already.
Plus, with a system such as CF, one could view the articles that the system determined he/she would find most useful, OR, one could view articles only based upon aggregate ratings, etc.
The article doesn't mention who would be the peer review board in the online journal system.
I think Brown could learn a lot from the open discussion forum used by/.
Anyone could "publish" an article. People would receive alerts when an article was published in a topic area of their interest. Readers would be able to rate the article on several points, and would be able to add commentary, notes, etc.
Commentary, ratings, etc., could be sorted according to the evaluators' verified academic credentials (maybe I only care about what Harvard academics think of article X on particle physics, but someone else may be interested in what the general public, or for that matter 8th graders think of article X).
Any new system would have to preserve the aspect of the status quo that generally dictates that unless the big shots in your field think you are onto something, you don't get recognition.
System 7 had a way better UI than Win3.1, however it also crashed a lot more. Thus, for me it would be a near-tie but I'd probably choose MacOS 7 and learn to live with the crashes.
BTW, Win95 is without a doubt superior to system 7.
If you want to deal with all the incompatibilities that exist between various pieces of hardware and their drivers, then yes, you can build a system on the cheap
I don't think you've built an x86 PC from scratch lately. These days it's all plug-n-play, and most mainstream hardware works out of the box in Windows and Linux.
You'd be stupid to pay $2041 or even $1741 for that machine.
Slashdot Mirror
for the rest of us to move to Itanium.
Anyone who thinks MS is going to allow .NET to be an open standard is living in a fantasy world. And BTW, only the CLR is a standard. This completely excludes all the APIs which is what someone would actually use to write an application. The GUI is not included in the CLR either.
Microsoft has a pretty strong incentive to standardize the .NET... one of the main reasons they're developing it is to fix a lot of the problems associated with multiple versions of DLLs, dependence on various versions of windows APIs, etc.
If you're in doubt, look at the Mono project. Soon there will be .NET available for Linux, etc. Then we'll find companies like HP selling the Microsoft solution but implementing their projects with Mono and Linux and making more money in the process.
.NET web services use XML for all data transfer. Thus, you can access them from any platform that supports XML. It's pretty obvious why XML is cross-platform and standards-compliant, so I won't explain that.
A lot of people will complain "Boo hoo, I wish HP would invest $50Million in Linux. I hate Microsoft". The fact is, HP has invested a lot of money in Linux so far, and will continue to do so. .NET web services are a standards-compliant improvement to previously existing technology that will IF ANYTHING help to promote cross-platform solutions: In other words this will help HP deliver enterprise solutions involving both Microsoft products AND gnu-linux.
If Linux was really 10 steps ahead of Microsoft, markets would recognize that fact much more than they have. The fact is, there are some areas where linux shines and some areas where commercial software shines.
To me, this is a good thing, since it will raise the bar on standards compliance in the industry and create more niche areas for linux to make its way into the enterprise.
The original article on the Atkins diet from the times makes some very valid points, however I think it misleads the reader in one respect: by showing evidence that the low-fat high-carb food pyramid is flawed and then concluding that the logical alternative is to eat a high-fat low-carb diet, a la Dr. Atkins.
In reality, studies have shown that both high-carb and high-fat diets can lead to health problems.
Keep in mind, the original food pyramid myth was promoted because of discoveries during the Vietnam war that American 18 year olds had tons of plaque built up on their arteries and 18 year-old Vietnamese did not. The conclusion that was drawn was that the American high-fat diet was the cluprit. Hence, the food pyramid as we know it.
However, if you think about what the research has actually shown, the ideal diet is as follows:
Lots of vegetables, some high-fiber grains, and a small amount of meat, preferably fatty fish.
Now think for a moment about the nutritional conditions that existed during the majority of human evolution. We were engineered by evolution to consume a diet very much like the ideal diet described above. Of course, exercise is critical to health as well, and our ancestors got plenty of that in the course of their daily lives.
I disagree. I think Kernighan and Ritchie would really like Hungarian Notation, when it is appropriate. I don't believe it's always appropriate, however there are some situations when it can make code much more readable.
Also, let's try not to get too nostalgic for the days when C compilers only distinguished identifiers in their first 8 characters...
Doesn't Python have 'em too... It's really nothing other than treating strings, ints, long ints, and floats as Objects and having smart methods handle numerical operations.
So maybe it doesn't end up being banner ads. Maybe instead it's a 33 second Flash (tm) commercial, and during the time that it's playing you are prevented from sending/receiving any packets. It's the idea that has potential. Yes, banner ads are lame, but the idea of an ad-supported wireless network has some potential, particularly if someone can figure out how to force people to actually watch the ads.
Please note, technology that forces people to watch ads is something that most content-providers would probably love to see take place very soon.
In other words, I'd happily watch a couple of ads per hour in exchange for free wireless access.
That is, friends, the main problem with self-styled "Smart People": They can always think of a dozen good reasons why something won't work. This reflex is poison to the particular kind of intelligence that characterizes successful entrepreneurs.
So please strongly consider looking elsewhere for advice on this issue.
As a general rule you're correct, however in this case it's actually the other way around. Languages that support a 'variant' data type do not require type checking (strong or weak) because type conversions are handled automatically (you never have to cast anything or even worry about what type anything is. 99% of the time the compiler figures out what you meant based on the code you typed in. This leads us to the usefulness of Hungarian Notation:
Hungarian Notation allows the code to be more meaningful to the reader. This creates less work for the programmer because in languages with a 'variant' data type more work is already being done by the compiler. If you are adding an integer to a string, but the string happens to contain a number, then the compiler will automatically calculate the value that is the sum. The sum can then be concatenated to another string or added to another number, whatever you choose. Of course, the risk with this kind of thing is that you accidentally write code that means the wrong thing and the compiler doesn't complain. That's where Hungarian notation comes in: It forces you to think about what the code means when you are writing it. I think that for most people this is a Good Thing.
You were intelligent enough to know it was wrong
He meant "it was wrong" in the sense of being illegal. Having sufficient awareness of the world to get into MIT does indeed imply that a person would have sufficient awareness of the world (and therefore copyright law) to understand that breaking it constitutes a crime that one may be punished for.
It's not a twist of logic at all.
My guess is that it took him at least 1/100th of the time to do it illegally, but then again he could earn 8 figures and just happen to be an anti-property activist, however somehow I doubt it.
My next question would be: "How often do you listen to each song, and how much effort does it take to listen to a particular song once you decide that you feel like listening to it?"
A shoebox full of burned CDs is a highly inefficient way to archive anything important enough to retrieve semi-regularly. I think it's safe to say that the individual in question would probably have still preferred pirated music even if he could have purchased the songs for 25 cents each, since it seems to me that few people would really be able to justify purchasing any songs after the first gigabyte, since he would have likely purchased them in roughly the order of his preference.
If you are clueless about what it is, then read the msdn info and decide for yourself. Don't buy into Chrisd's characterization uncritically.
As for me, I don't use it often, but occasionally I find it useful especially when writing code in a language that supports automatic type conversion and a variant data type.
I generally agree with your statement, however I think the majority of the 'evolutionary time' during which the human species evolved was pre-agricultural. Refined carbohydrates and domesticated livestock create a drastic divergence from the diet around which our species evolved.
The article you cite from the times makes some very valid points, however I think it misleads the reader in one respect: by showing evidence that the low-fat high-carb food pyramid is flawed and then concluding that the logical alternative is to eat a high-fat low-carb diet, a la Dr. Atkins.
In reality, studies have shown that both high-carb and high-fat diets can lead to health problems.
Keep in mind, the original food pyramid myth was promoted because of discoveries during the Vietnam war that American 18 year olds had tons of plaque built up on their arteries and 18 year-old Vietnamese did not. The conclusion that was drawn was that the American high-fat diet was the cluprit. Hence, the food pyramid as we know it.
However, if you think about what the research has actually shown, the ideal diet is as follows:
Lots of vegetables, some high-fiber grains, and a small amount of meat, preferably fatty fish.
Now think for a moment about the nutritional conditions that existed during the majority of human evolution. We were engineered by evolution to consume a diet very much like the ideal diet described above. Of course, exercise is critical to health as well, and our ancestors got plenty of that in the course of their daily lives.
You must be looking for Slashdot Pro. You can sign up for just $99/mo. You've reached Slashdot (lite) by mistake.
Apple did the same thing when it created Mac. Where was support for Apple II software?
Why not enjoy the sport of it and let the best hacker win. That's what it's all about, isn't it? Not about turning down perfectly good dollars so that technology can stay "easy" to mod.
We have a couple of MP3s available on the site.
Oddly, the web stats show that we are getting thousands of downloads of these songs each month, most of which are from Italy. Yes I find this strange. It must be kind of like how David Hasslehoff is popular in Germany.
I disagree. You say the following:
CF can be good to predict the individual preference over an item but not the quality of the item.
My point is that an individual's preference is equivalent to his perception of the quality of the item. Sure, if you had only two ratings for each item the system wouldn't work, but think of it this way:
If an academic writes a paper (let's call it Paper X), we could assume (at least) that several of his colleagues are likely to read it. If the paper received a high rating from the initial reviewers, it would appear on the 'radar screen' of other like-minded individuals at other institutions. By 'like-minded' I mean people who would find the paper a worthy and interesting contribution to the literature in the field.
Over time, more people would review the paper, perhaps some people in neighboring fields, some of whom would find it MORE relevant/interesting, and some of whom would find it LESS relevant an interesting. This would add intelligence to the system.
Now, suppose that you logged on and rated a few papers, and that it turned out that your intellectual disposition was such that you tended to take interest in the ideas presented in Paper X. You would be shown Paper X on a "recommended reading list".
The concept of a "recommended reading list" is precisely what I think makes CF extremely well suited to the scientific community. Right now, each field contains its own body of cannonical literature, and over time that body is expanded as articles are published in the field's prestigious journals by the field's prestigious academics. CF would allow for several occurrences that would serve to benefit mankind (and academia). I'm not sure if you would consider them weaknesses, but here they are:
1. Looser constraints over whose ideas are exposed to mainstream scientists: An 8th grader could feasibly write a paper that would end up on the "recommended reading list" of an MIT professor, so long as the system had enough preference data to make the connection, but this would surely happen before long.
2. Better cross-fertilization between fields: Preference data from individuals with inter-disciplinary interests would help the system recommend articles from fields outside an individual's primary expertise. I've known grad students who have never visited the University Library, relying instead upon a bookshelf in their faculty advisor's office. The intelligence developed by a CF recommender system may find some interesting bridges between fields. At the very least, it would put the information out there. Of course, if an individual consistently low-rated articles outside of his field, he would soon stop receiving recommendations for them.
At any rate, I think it would work. It would take some time before the CF 'intelligence' was operating at its peak, but in the meantime the rating data could be used to show results based upon popularity.
With collaborative filtering, an individual's preferences over a small set of data are used to predict likely preferences over a large set of data. So to take an example that is successfully in use here, one could rate 15-20 movies and have the system predict with a fair bit of accuracy that person's ratings of most any movie. Of course, you need a lot of people's preference data to do this, but I'm sure it wouldn't be a major hurdle to acceptance of Brown's idea, since he has so many researchers' signatures already.
Plus, with a system such as CF, one could view the articles that the system determined he/she would find most useful, OR, one could view articles only based upon aggregate ratings, etc.
The article doesn't mention who would be the peer review board in the online journal system.
/.
I think Brown could learn a lot from the open discussion forum used by
Anyone could "publish" an article. People would receive alerts when an article was published in a topic area of their interest. Readers would be able to rate the article on several points, and would be able to add commentary, notes, etc.
Commentary, ratings, etc., could be sorted according to the evaluators' verified academic credentials (maybe I only care about what Harvard academics think of article X on particle physics, but someone else may be interested in what the general public, or for that matter 8th graders think of article X).
Any new system would have to preserve the aspect of the status quo that generally dictates that unless the big shots in your field think you are onto something, you don't get recognition.
BTW, Win95 is without a doubt superior to system 7.
It seems likely to me that someone is using a news crawler to catch information about Mozilla, and just happened to 'catch' this story.
It is more interesting than most news about Mozilla, I must say.
I don't think you've built an x86 PC from scratch lately. These days it's all plug-n-play, and most mainstream hardware works out of the box in Windows and Linux.
You'd be stupid to pay $2041 or even $1741 for that machine.