Same here. I think Win 7 is great. I was all ready to upgrade every machine in the house (that's 4 computers) because the home networking stuff is actually really useful. I even went to pre-order with my credit card ready. Then I found out:
a) no pre-order discount for Australian residents b) list price almost double that of US (after exchange rate conversion).
WTF? AUD$400 (USD320) just to upgrade to a decent version of the OS? No home / family / multi-license offer? $400 is more than most of the computers in my house are worth!
I think Microsoft is making a possibly fatal mistake here with this bizarre pricing. If they offered Win7 for a reasonable price they could start a genuine renaissance and reverse the tide of Mac growth. Instead they're taking all the karma they gained from the quality of Win7 and the excellent beta / RC program and trashing it.
The horrible fonts were what drove me away from Ubuntu after I installed it recently, hoping to use it as my primary desktop. I'm sure you've managed to fix up your fonts somehow, but let me tell you, a default ubuntu install (from the 8.x series, haven't tried more recent) produced such an eyeball searing ugliness in FireFox that it almost single handedly convinced me that Ubuntu wasn't ready yet (for me). The fact that a few searches with Google reveal hundreds of various ways to improve the fonts actually makes it even worse.
Since you'll undoubtably deny this having not witnessed it yourself, just search on google and see the thousands of perplexed newbies being driven away from linux by the fonts you think are so beautiful:
As I indicated by quoting the section of your comment I was replying to, I'm not advocating about laws either way, I'm just telling you that your assertion that nobody gets any benefit from a ramp unless disabled people are customers is false.
But thanks for the insults anyway. I'll be sure next time I see a pregnant woman struggling to lift a stroller up some steps not to help her since that would make her a "lazy crump".
> What about recreational running shops? Do they benefit from their ramp? Are they exempt?
I might have said the same as you a few years ago. Then I had a child. Now I can tell you that having an easy entrance ramp where a stroller or similar can go up pretty much very often determines whether I bother to go into a store or not. And yes, families spend a lot of money, on things like shoes, no less.
The primary effect of code reviews has nothing to do with finding problems during the review itself. It improves quality before the code ever gets to review, because people care far more about what they do in the first place if they know there is even a chance others will see and criticize them later for doing it wrong.
This is why stores put up fake security cameras. The notion that they have someone sitting there watching the camera continuously is ridiculous, yet a camera has a huge effect on people's tendency to commit crimes nonetheless.
I did the same test on a vintage Win2K / IE install which I run in a VM specifically because I have to test against ancient versions of windows and IE. This 2000 era environment directed me straight to bing.com to do my search as well - so yes, there are going to be a lot of people using bing to do their searches by default.
Having said that, I have no idea why anybody thinks it's strange that bing is having a surge and then a fall in patronage - isn't that what happens with just about any new product on the planet??? We'll know in 6 months if bing was a success. A day or even a month's data means nothing. As far as quality of results go, I think bing is a big success merely because it is not noticeably worse than Google - that's a huge achievement.
I think you overlook cause and effect here, and suffer from a lack of imagination. The fact is, we have largely not developed applications that can use parallel processing because we haven't had parallel processing to do it with. Many existing design patterns (eg: MVC or Document / View) are actually contortions of parallel algorithms to deal with the fact that our programming paradigms are not parallel. Once mainstream languages incorporate parallel processing in their core as primitives we may think very differently about many existing computing problems, and probably will see very different designs emerge, and whole new classes of application that we never thought of before.
1. Offer them a real lowball offer - like $200. Enough to cover their cost of holding the domain, but no more. There's a good chance that after you go away for a while they'll come back to you and accept it. But not until they're completely convinced you've given up and gone elsewhere.
2. Realize that evidence has shown that real english words in domain names are less effective and less memorable than made up ones. For example, email.com has not been a particularly good domain, while plenty of other email providers with completely made up names have done just fine. Don't be obsessed with getting real words in your domain.
No you're not the only one by far. iTunes is just about the only piece of software left that sends me into a flying rage just about every time I open it. There is truly just about nothing they couldn't have made worse - from the single threaded locked UI that goes unresponsive for seconds or even minutes with every single click to the complete denial of my ability to do even the simplest things and most obvious things via direct UI actions like add a podcast to my ipod touch, or to the bizarre assumption that I keep my entire photo collection in one single place and that iTunes should go nuts scanning that folder (over a slow network) every time I want to get a single new podcast onto my touch.
I guess there is some form of human life for which iTunes is intuitive, but it certainly isn't anywhere close to my genetic branch of it.
I already wrote this in a comment somewhere else, but surely your answer is to wrap this whole sucker up in some kind of virtual machine image, isn't it?
I routinely run these images just to test IE6 - licensing aside, it's simple and almost optimal way to run some software (basically anything I don't trust not to foul up my registry with crap). After all, support for the OSes that run IE6 is going to end one day. You're gonna have to deal with this some time. Not to mention that Win7 comes with it XP and virtualization built in.
What about a simpler plan which seems obvious to me but obviously has some fatal flaw:
1. offer virtualized IE6 environment for running stupid legacy app
Whatever happens all these companies are looking down the barrel in a few years when XP support starts to end (since XP is the last platform where you can run IE6 at all). Already Win2K is falling off a cliff, which I hope spurs some amount of migration forward as people realize they have the choice of upgrading to an OS that is already almost 8 years old or going to something newer and end up on Vista or 7 (sans IE6).
> That's kind of misleading.... All the upcoming versions of browsers that aren't IE are getting support for parts of HTML5
Speaking of misleading - IE8 already supports parts of HTML5 and Microsoft have committed to support it "in full" in future versions. Can we tone the bias down a little?
I think the answer is partly that the different communities involved have mindsets that won't accept that kind of compromise. Suggest to a Ruby coder that they should introduce into Ruby any feature that slows them down or stops them doing "magic" with the language and they'll laugh you out of town. They (as a community) despise it. Key features of various frameworks they use rely on such foibles as modifying types on the fly at run time which make such optimization somewhere between hard and impossible. So they've already rationalized themselves into a position that performance doesn't matter and developer productivity is far more important. It's very hard to back down from there after so many people have bought into this mindset.
The best hope is with new languages. C# does well, and I think Scala is very promising - it shows well in the graph here but it could do massively better if not for some of the outliers being addressed. Scala is a very young language and actually does exactly what you suggest - it lets you optionally bring in enough "verbosity" to allow the compiler (or JVM, in this case) to optimize the heck out of the code. The important thing is that the community around it has not idealogically rejected either performance or developer productivity as primary and are actively going after both. So it's well situated to do better than most.
I actually always wondered about this. One could easily:
a) travel into the country on temporary visa b) give passport to American citizen who looks enough like you to pass and exits on your documents c) American citizen comes back in after a nice holiday on their own passport
At worst immigration might be suspicious because the American citizen is not shown as exiting the country, but they really have no choice but to allow them back in, and the net result is that you have imported one person permanently into the country and immigration have no idea who it is, if they can tell it happened at all.
While I completely disagree with the fingerprinting, I suspect this might be a legitimate problem that they are trying to figure out.
Yep. I like Vista quite a lot, use windows as my main desktop, I'm no Windows hater (also use plenty of linux for all kinds of servers).
But I was dumbfounded to find after installing Vista Business that it wouldn't play a simple DVD out of the box. This is a pretty freakin expensive operating system - off the shelf, hundreds of dollars. How can it not play a simple DVD!!?! Do business people not work with DVDs? How is it that a Home version of windows has this capability and a business version doesn't?
I absolutely detest what MS has done with the fragmentation of the different versions of windows. It's one of their worst decisions IMHO and has a lot more to do with the failure of Vista than people realize.
> But giving money back on "great products?" Is that like discounts on MS software, or some other silly gimmick? Smells faintly like desperation, that does
No, it smells like MS selling your search details and privacy to advertisers for a quick buck. I'm actually open minded enough to try a search engine from MS if they really turn a new leaf with it, but that statement had me running for the hills.
Thanks... I'm so sick of hearing the misconception that mandatory filtering was a labour "promise" at the election. Quite the opposite. They "promised" any filtering scheme would be optional at the individual subscriber level (opt-out, but optional none-the-less) and it was only 6 months after being elected that they suddenly came up with mandatory. (And coincidentally, Senator Nutjob Fielding passed a raft of legislation the next week, inexplicably reversing his position on several issues).
Thus mandatory filtering is a broken promise, not a promise kept.
Yeah, the summary should really be corrected to read:
"The new Zune will be based on a custom version of the *massively deployed* and *well established* Windows CE with *tens of thousands of applications*, while the iPod Touch runs on the popular iPhone platform, for which *only* thousands of applications are available."
There should be some kind of penalty - equivalent to fraud / perjury for knowingly making false claims in a patent application like that. Or - it should be grounds to invalidate the patent later on with punitive damages to other parties affected by the patent. The only reasonable explanation for such a sentence in the application is an attempt to mislead the examiner into thinking that the 'invention' is more novel than it is.
> The idea of an "App Store" is appealing, even when you're not forced into using it.
The irony is that until a year ago when Apple popularised it, nobody in their right mind trying to promote an open development platform would have considered making their own "app store". To do so would have been to invite accusations of monopoly, evil and would have driven developers away fearing discrimination and extortion or other unfair practices from the vendor controlling the platform. Suddenly because Apple did it on their *already closed* platform, people are assuming this model will work for *already open* platforms. IMHO, the concept is just as evil as it always has been and should die a horrible death (hopefully it will for Apple too). The last thing we need is vendors having top-to-bottom control over their platforms.
Actually it's not free, it's "Free". That might seem a small distinction, but the minute you want to license your own code that talks to MySQL commerically it will bite you in the ass in a rather unpleasant way (as in, call your Oracle sales-rep).
All that you say is true, but there is something not credible about the length of time that it has taken for them to get this done. It seems to have taken longer for them to do the linux port than it did for them to build the entire windows version.
Having said that, I don't really suspect there's anything sinister going on here... something tells me it is more to do with there being fundamentally more difficult challenges on linux than windows. When I compare Firefox across ubuntu and windows it is noticeably slower and uglier in linux - there's no two ways about it. I strongly suspect that Google is being a perfectionist here and are simply not willing to release something that doesn't meet the incredibly high bar they have set for chrome.
> So in OSS when you buy a product you don't really get too much do you?
I think they got a lot from it: Monty is completely hamstrung because he doesn't own a line of the code in his new "Open" database. Unless he rewrites from scratch he is stuck with GPL even if he wants to give his code to his own wife. And that also means that no serious commercial company can use it because even the drivers are GPL (*not* LGPL) which means as soon as you touch it even to open a connection your own product turns to GPL (unless you buy a license from Oracle).
IMHO, the first thing that needs to happen (and which should have happened years ago) is that the MySQL GPL drivers need to be clean-room rewritten so at least you can link non-GPL code with it. Until then I've got no interest in it and it loses to PostgreSQL before I even get to thinking about a technical comparison (and please note: I've got nothing against GPL in general, I just don't want it forced inside my own processes by my database).
> If society doesn't reward people for their time, they're going to stop doing it
And there's your answer. Stop. Just stop doing it. If society needs the book then demand will build up and *some* means will evolve for funding it to be created. It may be that it falls back to the the age old method whereby the interested parties (eg: colleges) band together to sponsor the book to be published and students are charged an up front fee to cover the publishing of text books as part of their course work. Or maybe some other model will evolve. But something *will* happen if the book is needed, and if it's not then we're all better off if you stop whining and do something productive that society does need.
It's not about threading - all the features you describe relate to dealing with concurrency in a small scale. New concurrent languages are targeted at algorithms that use concurrency as a fundamental building block - a language construct, if you like - which let you use completely different algorithms to what you would use otherwise.
Totally contrived example: imagine you want to count the number of upper case characters in a large string. You could zip through it in a loop in a single thread. But that would only use a single CPU on a single node. Instead, break it into a thousand parts and create concurrent jobs to compute the number of upper case characters in each one, then sum them all together at the end. Doing that would take some serious thought to do correctly using threads, and it would be very inefficient. These new concurrent languages are built with primitives that allow you to do this kind of thing quickly and safely and in a scalable way to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. I think Win 7 is great. I was all ready to upgrade every machine in the house (that's 4 computers) because the home networking stuff is actually really useful. I even went to pre-order with my credit card ready. Then I found out:
a) no pre-order discount for Australian residents
b) list price almost double that of US (after exchange rate conversion).
WTF? AUD$400 (USD320) just to upgrade to a decent version of the OS? No home / family / multi-license offer? $400 is more than most of the computers in my house are worth!
I think Microsoft is making a possibly fatal mistake here with this bizarre pricing. If they offered Win7 for a reasonable price they could start a genuine renaissance and reverse the tide of Mac growth. Instead they're taking all the karma they gained from the quality of Win7 and the excellent beta / RC program and trashing it.
The horrible fonts were what drove me away from Ubuntu after I installed it recently, hoping to use it as my primary desktop. I'm sure you've managed to fix up your fonts somehow, but let me tell you, a default ubuntu install (from the 8.x series, haven't tried more recent) produced such an eyeball searing ugliness in FireFox that it almost single handedly convinced me that Ubuntu wasn't ready yet (for me). The fact that a few searches with Google reveal hundreds of various ways to improve the fonts actually makes it even worse.
Since you'll undoubtably deny this having not witnessed it yourself, just search on google and see the thousands of perplexed newbies being driven away from linux by the fonts you think are so beautiful:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+firefox+ugly+font
As I indicated by quoting the section of your comment I was replying to, I'm not advocating about laws either way, I'm just telling you that your assertion that nobody gets any benefit from a ramp unless disabled people are customers is false.
But thanks for the insults anyway. I'll be sure next time I see a pregnant woman struggling to lift a stroller up some steps not to help her since that would make her a "lazy crump".
> What about recreational running shops? Do they benefit from their ramp? Are they exempt?
I might have said the same as you a few years ago. Then I had a child. Now I can tell you that having an easy entrance ramp where a stroller or similar can go up pretty much very often determines whether I bother to go into a store or not. And yes, families spend a lot of money, on things like shoes, no less.
The primary effect of code reviews has nothing to do with finding problems during the review itself. It improves quality before the code ever gets to review, because people care far more about what they do in the first place if they know there is even a chance others will see and criticize them later for doing it wrong.
This is why stores put up fake security cameras. The notion that they have someone sitting there watching the camera continuously is ridiculous, yet a camera has a huge effect on people's tendency to commit crimes nonetheless.
I did the same test on a vintage Win2K / IE install which I run in a VM specifically because I have to test against ancient versions of windows and IE. This 2000 era environment directed me straight to bing.com to do my search as well - so yes, there are going to be a lot of people using bing to do their searches by default.
Having said that, I have no idea why anybody thinks it's strange that bing is having a surge and then a fall in patronage - isn't that what happens with just about any new product on the planet??? We'll know in 6 months if bing was a success. A day or even a month's data means nothing. As far as quality of results go, I think bing is a big success merely because it is not noticeably worse than Google - that's a huge achievement.
I think you overlook cause and effect here, and suffer from a lack of imagination. The fact is, we have largely not developed applications that can use parallel processing because we haven't had parallel processing to do it with. Many existing design patterns (eg: MVC or Document / View) are actually contortions of parallel algorithms to deal with the fact that our programming paradigms are not parallel. Once mainstream languages incorporate parallel processing in their core as primitives we may think very differently about many existing computing problems, and probably will see very different designs emerge, and whole new classes of application that we never thought of before.
1. Offer them a real lowball offer - like $200. Enough to cover their cost of holding the domain, but no more. There's a good chance that after you go away for a while they'll come back to you and accept it. But not until they're completely convinced you've given up and gone elsewhere.
2. Realize that evidence has shown that real english words in domain names are less effective and less memorable than made up ones. For example, email.com has not been a particularly good domain, while plenty of other email providers with completely made up names have done just fine. Don't be obsessed with getting real words in your domain.
No you're not the only one by far. iTunes is just about the only piece of software left that sends me into a flying rage just about every time I open it. There is truly just about nothing they couldn't have made worse - from the single threaded locked UI that goes unresponsive for seconds or even minutes with every single click to the complete denial of my ability to do even the simplest things and most obvious things via direct UI actions like add a podcast to my ipod touch, or to the bizarre assumption that I keep my entire photo collection in one single place and that iTunes should go nuts scanning that folder (over a slow network) every time I want to get a single new podcast onto my touch.
I guess there is some form of human life for which iTunes is intuitive, but it certainly isn't anywhere close to my genetic branch of it.
I already wrote this in a comment somewhere else, but surely your answer is to wrap this whole sucker up in some kind of virtual machine image, isn't it?
I routinely run these images just to test IE6 - licensing aside, it's simple and almost optimal way to run some software (basically anything I don't trust not to foul up my registry with crap). After all, support for the OSes that run IE6 is going to end one day. You're gonna have to deal with this some time. Not to mention that Win7 comes with it XP and virtualization built in.
What about a simpler plan which seems obvious to me but obviously has some fatal flaw:
1. offer virtualized IE6 environment for running stupid legacy app
Whatever happens all these companies are looking down the barrel in a few years when XP support starts to end (since XP is the last platform where you can run IE6 at all). Already Win2K is falling off a cliff, which I hope spurs some amount of migration forward as people realize they have the choice of upgrading to an OS that is already almost 8 years old or going to something newer and end up on Vista or 7 (sans IE6).
> That's kind of misleading .... All the upcoming versions of browsers that aren't IE are getting support for parts of HTML5
Speaking of misleading - IE8 already supports parts of HTML5 and Microsoft have committed to support it "in full" in future versions. Can we tone the bias down a little?
I think the answer is partly that the different communities involved have mindsets that won't accept that kind of compromise. Suggest to a Ruby coder that they should introduce into Ruby any feature that slows them down or stops them doing "magic" with the language and they'll laugh you out of town. They (as a community) despise it. Key features of various frameworks they use rely on such foibles as modifying types on the fly at run time which make such optimization somewhere between hard and impossible. So they've already rationalized themselves into a position that performance doesn't matter and developer productivity is far more important. It's very hard to back down from there after so many people have bought into this mindset.
The best hope is with new languages. C# does well, and I think Scala is very promising - it shows well in the graph here but it could do massively better if not for some of the outliers being addressed. Scala is a very young language and actually does exactly what you suggest - it lets you optionally bring in enough "verbosity" to allow the compiler (or JVM, in this case) to optimize the heck out of the code. The important thing is that the community around it has not idealogically rejected either performance or developer productivity as primary and are actively going after both. So it's well situated to do better than most.
I actually always wondered about this. One could easily:
a) travel into the country on temporary visa
b) give passport to American citizen who looks enough like you to pass and exits on your documents
c) American citizen comes back in after a nice holiday on their own passport
At worst immigration might be suspicious because the American citizen is not shown as exiting the country, but they really have no choice but to allow them back in, and the net result is that you have imported one person permanently into the country and immigration have no idea who it is, if they can tell it happened at all.
While I completely disagree with the fingerprinting, I suspect this might be a legitimate problem that they are trying to figure out.
Yep. I like Vista quite a lot, use windows as my main desktop, I'm no Windows hater (also use plenty of linux for all kinds of servers).
But I was dumbfounded to find after installing Vista Business that it wouldn't play a simple DVD out of the box. This is a pretty freakin expensive operating system - off the shelf, hundreds of dollars. How can it not play a simple DVD!!?! Do business people not work with DVDs? How is it that a Home version of windows has this capability and a business version doesn't?
I absolutely detest what MS has done with the fragmentation of the different versions of windows. It's one of their worst decisions IMHO and has a lot more to do with the failure of Vista than people realize.
> But giving money back on "great products?" Is that like discounts on MS software, or some other silly gimmick? Smells faintly like desperation, that does
No, it smells like MS selling your search details and privacy to advertisers for a quick buck. I'm actually open minded enough to try a search engine from MS if they really turn a new leaf with it, but that statement had me running for the hills.
Thanks ... I'm so sick of hearing the misconception that mandatory filtering was a labour "promise" at the election. Quite the opposite. They "promised" any filtering scheme would be optional at the individual subscriber level (opt-out, but optional none-the-less) and it was only 6 months after being elected that they suddenly came up with mandatory. (And coincidentally, Senator Nutjob Fielding passed a raft of legislation the next week, inexplicably reversing his position on several issues).
Thus mandatory filtering is a broken promise, not a promise kept.
Yeah, the summary should really be corrected to read:
"The new Zune will be based on a custom version of the *massively deployed* and *well established* Windows CE with *tens of thousands of applications*, while the iPod Touch runs on the popular iPhone platform, for which *only* thousands of applications are available."
The [0008] clause is so wrong it's amazing.
There should be some kind of penalty - equivalent to fraud / perjury for knowingly making false claims in a patent application like that. Or - it should be grounds to invalidate the patent later on with punitive damages to other parties affected by the patent. The only reasonable explanation for such a sentence in the application is an attempt to mislead the examiner into thinking that the 'invention' is more novel than it is.
> The idea of an "App Store" is appealing, even when you're not forced into using it.
The irony is that until a year ago when Apple popularised it, nobody in their right mind trying to promote an open development platform would have considered making their own "app store". To do so would have been to invite accusations of monopoly, evil and would have driven developers away fearing discrimination and extortion or other unfair practices from the vendor controlling the platform. Suddenly because Apple did it on their *already closed* platform, people are assuming this model will work for *already open* platforms. IMHO, the concept is just as evil as it always has been and should die a horrible death (hopefully it will for Apple too). The last thing we need is vendors having top-to-bottom control over their platforms.
> MySQL is free and fairly reliable
Actually it's not free, it's "Free". That might seem a small distinction, but the minute you want to license your own code that talks to MySQL commerically it will bite you in the ass in a rather unpleasant way (as in, call your Oracle sales-rep).
All that you say is true, but there is something not credible about the length of time that it has taken for them to get this done. It seems to have taken longer for them to do the linux port than it did for them to build the entire windows version.
Having said that, I don't really suspect there's anything sinister going on here ... something tells me it is more to do with there being fundamentally more difficult challenges on linux than windows. When I compare Firefox across ubuntu and windows it is noticeably slower and uglier in linux - there's no two ways about it. I strongly suspect that Google is being a perfectionist here and are simply not willing to release something that doesn't meet the incredibly high bar they have set for chrome.
> So in OSS when you buy a product you don't really get too much do you?
I think they got a lot from it: Monty is completely hamstrung because he doesn't own a line of the code in his new "Open" database. Unless he rewrites from scratch he is stuck with GPL even if he wants to give his code to his own wife. And that also means that no serious commercial company can use it because even the drivers are GPL (*not* LGPL) which means as soon as you touch it even to open a connection your own product turns to GPL (unless you buy a license from Oracle).
IMHO, the first thing that needs to happen (and which should have happened years ago) is that the MySQL GPL drivers need to be clean-room rewritten so at least you can link non-GPL code with it. Until then I've got no interest in it and it loses to PostgreSQL before I even get to thinking about a technical comparison (and please note: I've got nothing against GPL in general, I just don't want it forced inside my own processes by my database).
> If society doesn't reward people for their time, they're going to stop doing it
And there's your answer. Stop. Just stop doing it. If society needs the book then demand will build up and *some* means will evolve for funding it to be created. It may be that it falls back to the the age old method whereby the interested parties (eg: colleges) band together to sponsor the book to be published and students are charged an up front fee to cover the publishing of text books as part of their course work. Or maybe some other model will evolve. But something *will* happen if the book is needed, and if it's not then we're all better off if you stop whining and do something productive that society does need.
It's not about threading - all the features you describe relate to dealing with concurrency in a small scale. New concurrent languages are targeted at algorithms that use concurrency as a fundamental building block - a language construct, if you like - which let you use completely different algorithms to what you would use otherwise.
Totally contrived example: imagine you want to count the number of upper case characters in a large string. You could zip through it in a loop in a single thread. But that would only use a single CPU on a single node. Instead, break it into a thousand parts and create concurrent jobs to compute the number of upper case characters in each one, then sum them all together at the end. Doing that would take some serious thought to do correctly using threads, and it would be very inefficient. These new concurrent languages are built with primitives that allow you to do this kind of thing quickly and safely and in a scalable way to boot.