I thought that Google's strategy was not to build a monopoly like Apple, but instead to build a diverse ecosystem that creates competition between manufacturers, resulting in long term value for customers, a robust platform, and influence for Google in directing that platform.
Therefore, comparing a couple of Android phones that are clearly initial products closer to "proof of concept" than mass market devices, doesn't seem meaningful. The only conclusion I'd draw from Android's 3% is that they're actually managing to take market share without a mature product on the market.
Whilst Apple is doing pretty well with the iPhone (I own one), I don't think Google set out to make a fast buck on this. Give it a few years, then we'll be able to see how Android is doing. I hope that when my iPhone contract expires, I'll be able to buy an Android phone next time around.
Whilst removing the shell is obviously going to break the OS, and therefore nonsensical, I think the spirit of this post is worthwhile. Can a user survive without the CLI in Ubuntu, for example?
My experience is: not really. It's not that far off, but it's not perfect. People who argue that Linux users spend all their time configuring things on the commandline are exaggerating, but equally it's unrealistic to say that a GUI can be used for all configuration.
In my current Ubuntu install, I've had a wireless problem that I've fixed with a small amount of messing around in the shell. Besides that, I've not been forced to use it. Having said that, previously I've had X Server issues that have required lots of CLI use to resolve.
I'm not interested in "my OS is more user-friendly than your OS" arguments, but I'd prefer it if people didn't big up / write off Linux on the basis of exaggeration.
Taking a long time to shutdown does matter, as it is often necessary to reboot in order to install new hardware drivers or sometimes even simple user-space programs. It's very frustrating to want to reboot the PC (after, for example, Windows updates insists you must) and then watch it hang.
So, it is a big improvement, although I'd prefer not to have to reboot.
"I've run the same windows system with just OS upgrades (95-2000-XP Pro), no fresh installs, for about 12 years now."
If that's the case, then surely you've upgraded the motherboard at some point? In my experience, a change to the motherboard results in a Windows that just won't boot - isn't this a deliberate feature of Windows to prevent people copying installations between PCs?
I'm quite interested by this debate, mainly because my music is in OGG-Vorbis and I'm quite encouraged by the idea that major browsers might starting supporting a similarly open standard. It has to be a good thing.
It seems that Apple and Nokia are against Ogg Theora, whereas Mozilla and Google are pro-Theora.
Apple and Nokia's main arguments: H.264 is better (for example, consumes less bandwidth), there are no good hardware implementations around, and there is a risk of submarine patents.
I don't believe these objections for a minute. Apple is simply against an open format because they're lobbying for control of the market. This is clearly underlined by past behaviour (blaming music companies for the use of DRM in iTunes is a brilliant piece of deflection, but I can't believe anyone who understands the business world would really buy that).
Technical superiority is not that important: clearly Google would not be in favour of Theora if there weren't other overriding concerns of open standards. A.N.Other format can always come along. We just need something that works ok, is simple to implement, and nice and open so everyone gets the same experience on the web.
If hardware implementations were really an issue, we'd have every hardware manufacturer in the world complaining about it. No, hardware implementations follow standards and popularity - we'll get great hardware designs if necessary. It's not a problem.
The patent issue just seems to be FUD. A great example of why such patents shouldn't be permitted, but as it is every single piece of software is open to such problems.
I'm not an Apple-hater, I admire the iPhone's interface (I own one) and some of their design work is awesome. But they need to open up - if they try to lock things down in this way, long-term they will lose (see Microsoft's decline, particularly in the browser market) and we're all going to suffer. For God's sake, anyone want to see the introduction of Flash on the iPhone? Thought not. Apple fans - please do everyone a favour and convince the company to change tact.
What is going on here? Why are we neglecting Bletchley Park?
As a Brit and a CS PhD student, I am absolutely appalled by the Government's behaviour. Do they not understand, or are they trying to ignore what happened to Turing?
Surely, the time has come for some form of protest? Anyone got any ideas?
Sun may have overlooked one thing: Apple don't actually make much money from the app store, at least according to this article.
Presumably, it makes business sense for Apple as the app store contributes to the appeal of the iPhone. Sun won't be selling the PCs that are running these apps, and as others have pointed out the expense of reviewing full applications rather than small iPhone apps will be much greater.
Perhaps there are other benefits for Sun, but from a short-term profit-making perspective it won't work.
Having said that, a package-manager-esque software distribution method for Windows is a no-brainer. Microsoft are probably the best company to implement that, though.
SoundBlaster Live! - couldn't get it to work on XP, even after downloading drivers from Creative. Must have spent ~ 10 hours trying, in the end I just gave up.
Ubuntu, worked out the box.
Conclusion: anecdotal evidence is pretty meaningless.
Firstly, contrary to some of the other posts, I'd strongly advise that if you're an academic then you should invest the time to learn LaTeX. When reviewing papers, it is obvious where LaTeX hasn't been used. I've seen both academic papers and books written in MS Word and they look terrible, usually they're full of formatting problems - especially with unusual characters such as mathematical symbols and tabular layouts. Your science might be great, but the document will look amateurish and this will be reflected in how people perceive your work, which matters a great deal in the peer review process. Some documents have been rendered unintelligible by Word problems.
Second point is that Kile is not given much attention as a LaTeX editor, but I've been using it to write papers and larger documents for a few years and have found it to be a great tool. Often I fix other people's LaTeX documents by importing them into Kile to quickly find and fix the problem. So I'd recommend you give it a go.
Third, as some other posts have mentioned, I'd stay away from SVN. I've been using it for a couple of years and recently I've found it to be seriously lacking when multiple users are working on the same files regularly. It's also not very robust - I've had some network problems (dropped packets) and SVN has been unable to cope. This has cost me days of time spent to fix the problems. I've heard some good things about git etc., so I plan to check them out, but at the moment I can't recommend them.
If anyone is looking at Joomla etc. right now and trying to decide on which CMS to use, please take my advice:
If you're a competent programmer, appreciate good design, know PHP to some extent, etc. then use *Drupal*. It has taken me 6 painful months to learn how frustrating the other systems can be if you already have these skills.
Joomla et. al seem to be designed for people without a strong technical background. Drupal is a tool that speeds up the process of building sites for technical literate designers without constraining them too much.
It's true, as many other posts have pointed out, that didactic lectures are pointless. You'll learn just as much from reading a book, or watching a video of the lecture. This has been known for certain since at least the 1970s.
The reason we still have lectures is obvious: they are a cheap way of disseminating information to a large number of students, and in the UK the word "cheap" is very important as we currently have a huge funding gap in Higher Education. Classes will get larger and we will see figures approaching those at MIT
After spending quite a lot of time researching this issue, I realised that lectures were an inevitable feature of university teaching for the foreseeable future, but also that they can be very productive. It is the way that a lecture is taught that makes it useless, the insistence on many lecturers (MIT's OpenCourseware lecturers included) on a purely one-way lecturing style.
Lectures can be interactive, engaging and useful even with 500 students. The secret is to involve the students ffs! Other posters have noted how they could hide in the crowd amongst 499 others... but there are many methods and techniques that can transform such situations into lectures that are both incredibly useful and very enjoyable and engaging for the students.
So, my two cents, is that lecturers must change their style... the didactic lecture is just a convenient charade that allows the students to sleep and gives the lecturer no fear that he/she will be challenged by their audience.
I've used Vista on a friend's laptop and I've found it to be usable enough for browsing the web, with its default settings. The laptop is a 400 UKP model from Dell.
On the flip side: over a few hours use, it has bluescreened on me once (I can't remember the last time Ubuntu crashed).
As for the owners, my female friend hates it (she hates the UAC and the UI) and her husband gets along with it juts fine.
As for security? Which is easier to audit and verify? A random pool of code and libraries distributed across hundreds of websites and maintainers, or a cohesive operating system whos entire codebase is in exactly one place?
Does such cohesion imply that BSD development is closer to the Cathedral than Linux is?
I would have thought that auditing and verifying code en masse would be a niche application (e.g. within critical systems) - even still, isn't there a strong argument that the Bazaar produces better code than any attempt at centralisation, that more eyes are better?
Not sure if you meant How to Solve it: Modern Heuristics but I would thoroughly recommend this book - for me it's up with SICP in changing the way you think.
For anyone who's not familiar with heuristic search, this book will give you a great introduction to an alternative method of problem-solving.
To equate "pointless" and "of no commercial value" makes no sense. Academic research is certainly not pointless, but often it is of no commercial value, even in the long term.
Whilst I know plenty of Linux developers and users would love to see the demise of Microsoft caused by the rise of Linux (myself included), I'm not sure if the Linux-Windows issue is that important.
In terms of Desktop users, Linux is almost irrelevant to MS. Apple is far more important and a realistic threat to their customer base.
Sure, in the server market Linux has taken significant market share, but this does not necessarily create a large headache for MS.
In many ways, the development of Linux has taken place with complete disregard to MS. Linux has continually improved, following reasonable development paths not dictated by the whims of executives or fashionable buzzwords of the day. I think that's because the Linux community is not chasing market share, just trying to make a decent O/S.
Perhaps the biggest threat from Linux for MS is that it may be a distraction. "Competing" with Linux isn't really possible - you can't put Linux out of business, because it is not a business. But time and effort wasted on fighting Linux in small markets may mean MS fail to see the real threat coming from other sources such as Apple and online Apps.
I think this article brings up a general issue that is facing CS departments at the moment.
Computer Science courses have two main audiences:
students heading for academia, or other positions requiring extensive theoretical knowledge
students headed for industry with a focus on software development
These categories overlap to a degree dependent on the University.
The two audiences have been diverging more and more in the last decade or so, and it appears that many departments are now in a position where they have to choose to stop catering to one, or split their courses into programming/software development and more mathematical/theoretical alternatives.
I also think that this separation of mindsets is the fundamental cause of many debates between students and their professors, kernel hackers and academics. There is a misunderstanding caused by the different focus each party has, where your approach really depends on what you are trying to achieve (do you want to write software that does the job? or is elegant? something immediately useful, or that demonstrates a different way of doing things?).
It's quite sensible that students should learn several languages in a CS degree, although Ada is becoming very much a niche language (my University still teaches it, mainly for real-time programming). It's also useful to have an understanding of lower level subjects such as electronics and logic circuitry.
Exactly where universities draw the line is a very difficult decision, but with CS applications falling rapidly in the UK at least, I think that a major change to course structure or separation of courses is required to modernise the system.
Slashdot Mirror
iPhone has Skype, though it can be used only over wifi iirc.
I thought that Google's strategy was not to build a monopoly like Apple, but instead to build a diverse ecosystem that creates competition between manufacturers, resulting in long term value for customers, a robust platform, and influence for Google in directing that platform.
Therefore, comparing a couple of Android phones that are clearly initial products closer to "proof of concept" than mass market devices, doesn't seem meaningful. The only conclusion I'd draw from Android's 3% is that they're actually managing to take market share without a mature product on the market.
Whilst Apple is doing pretty well with the iPhone (I own one), I don't think Google set out to make a fast buck on this. Give it a few years, then we'll be able to see how Android is doing. I hope that when my iPhone contract expires, I'll be able to buy an Android phone next time around.
Whilst removing the shell is obviously going to break the OS, and therefore nonsensical, I think the spirit of this post is worthwhile. Can a user survive without the CLI in Ubuntu, for example?
My experience is: not really. It's not that far off, but it's not perfect. People who argue that Linux users spend all their time configuring things on the commandline are exaggerating, but equally it's unrealistic to say that a GUI can be used for all configuration.
In my current Ubuntu install, I've had a wireless problem that I've fixed with a small amount of messing around in the shell. Besides that, I've not been forced to use it. Having said that, previously I've had X Server issues that have required lots of CLI use to resolve.
I'm not interested in "my OS is more user-friendly than your OS" arguments, but I'd prefer it if people didn't big up / write off Linux on the basis of exaggeration.
RS
Taking a long time to shutdown does matter, as it is often necessary to reboot in order to install new hardware drivers or sometimes even simple user-space programs. It's very frustrating to want to reboot the PC (after, for example, Windows updates insists you must) and then watch it hang.
So, it is a big improvement, although I'd prefer not to have to reboot.
RS
"I've run the same windows system with just OS upgrades (95-2000-XP Pro), no fresh installs, for about 12 years now."
If that's the case, then surely you've upgraded the motherboard at some point? In my experience, a change to the motherboard results in a Windows that just won't boot - isn't this a deliberate feature of Windows to prevent people copying installations between PCs?
Maybe you hacked it somehow?
RS
I'm quite interested by this debate, mainly because my music is in OGG-Vorbis and I'm quite encouraged by the idea that major browsers might starting supporting a similarly open standard. It has to be a good thing.
(you can read more about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_controversy)
It seems that Apple and Nokia are against Ogg Theora, whereas Mozilla and Google are pro-Theora.
Apple and Nokia's main arguments: H.264 is better (for example, consumes less bandwidth), there are no good hardware implementations around, and there is a risk of submarine patents.
I don't believe these objections for a minute. Apple is simply against an open format because they're lobbying for control of the market. This is clearly underlined by past behaviour (blaming music companies for the use of DRM in iTunes is a brilliant piece of deflection, but I can't believe anyone who understands the business world would really buy that).
Technical superiority is not that important: clearly Google would not be in favour of Theora if there weren't other overriding concerns of open standards. A.N.Other format can always come along. We just need something that works ok, is simple to implement, and nice and open so everyone gets the same experience on the web.
If hardware implementations were really an issue, we'd have every hardware manufacturer in the world complaining about it. No, hardware implementations follow standards and popularity - we'll get great hardware designs if necessary. It's not a problem.
The patent issue just seems to be FUD. A great example of why such patents shouldn't be permitted, but as it is every single piece of software is open to such problems.
I'm not an Apple-hater, I admire the iPhone's interface (I own one) and some of their design work is awesome. But they need to open up - if they try to lock things down in this way, long-term they will lose (see Microsoft's decline, particularly in the browser market) and we're all going to suffer. For God's sake, anyone want to see the introduction of Flash on the iPhone? Thought not. Apple fans - please do everyone a favour and convince the company to change tact.
What is going on here? Why are we neglecting Bletchley Park?
As a Brit and a CS PhD student, I am absolutely appalled by the Government's behaviour. Do they not understand, or are they trying to ignore what happened to Turing?
Surely, the time has come for some form of protest? Anyone got any ideas?
RS
Sun may have overlooked one thing: Apple don't actually make much money from the app store, at least according to this article.
Presumably, it makes business sense for Apple as the app store contributes to the appeal of the iPhone. Sun won't be selling the PCs that are running these apps, and as others have pointed out the expense of reviewing full applications rather than small iPhone apps will be much greater.
Perhaps there are other benefits for Sun, but from a short-term profit-making perspective it won't work.
Having said that, a package-manager-esque software distribution method for Windows is a no-brainer. Microsoft are probably the best company to implement that, though.
RS
I'll add in an anecdote.
SoundBlaster Live! - couldn't get it to work on XP, even after downloading drivers from Creative. Must have spent ~ 10 hours trying, in the end I just gave up.
Ubuntu, worked out the box.
Conclusion: anecdotal evidence is pretty meaningless.
Firstly, contrary to some of the other posts, I'd strongly advise that if you're an academic then you should invest the time to learn LaTeX. When reviewing papers, it is obvious where LaTeX hasn't been used. I've seen both academic papers and books written in MS Word and they look terrible, usually they're full of formatting problems - especially with unusual characters such as mathematical symbols and tabular layouts. Your science might be great, but the document will look amateurish and this will be reflected in how people perceive your work, which matters a great deal in the peer review process. Some documents have been rendered unintelligible by Word problems.
Second point is that Kile is not given much attention as a LaTeX editor, but I've been using it to write papers and larger documents for a few years and have found it to be a great tool. Often I fix other people's LaTeX documents by importing them into Kile to quickly find and fix the problem. So I'd recommend you give it a go.
Third, as some other posts have mentioned, I'd stay away from SVN. I've been using it for a couple of years and recently I've found it to be seriously lacking when multiple users are working on the same files regularly. It's also not very robust - I've had some network problems (dropped packets) and SVN has been unable to cope. This has cost me days of time spent to fix the problems. I've heard some good things about git etc., so I plan to check them out, but at the moment I can't recommend them.
RS
Hi All,
If anyone is looking at Joomla etc. right now and trying to decide on which CMS to use, please take my advice:
If you're a competent programmer, appreciate good design, know PHP to some extent, etc. then use *Drupal*. It has taken me 6 painful months to learn how frustrating the other systems can be if you already have these skills.
Joomla et. al seem to be designed for people without a strong technical background. Drupal is a tool that speeds up the process of building sites for technical literate designers without constraining them too much.
RS.
It's true, as many other posts have pointed out, that didactic lectures are pointless. You'll learn just as much from reading a book, or watching a video of the lecture. This has been known for certain since at least the 1970s.
The reason we still have lectures is obvious: they are a cheap way of disseminating information to a large number of students, and in the UK the word "cheap" is very important as we currently have a huge funding gap in Higher Education. Classes will get larger and we will see figures approaching those at MIT
After spending quite a lot of time researching this issue, I realised that lectures were an inevitable feature of university teaching for the foreseeable future, but also that they can be very productive. It is the way that a lecture is taught that makes it useless, the insistence on many lecturers (MIT's OpenCourseware lecturers included) on a purely one-way lecturing style.
Lectures can be interactive, engaging and useful even with 500 students. The secret is to involve the students ffs! Other posters have noted how they could hide in the crowd amongst 499 others... but there are many methods and techniques that can transform such situations into lectures that are both incredibly useful and very enjoyable and engaging for the students.
So, my two cents, is that lecturers must change their style... the didactic lecture is just a convenient charade that allows the students to sleep and gives the lecturer no fear that he/she will be challenged by their audience.
I've used Vista on a friend's laptop and I've found it to be usable enough for browsing the web, with its default settings. The laptop is a 400 UKP model from Dell. On the flip side: over a few hours use, it has bluescreened on me once (I can't remember the last time Ubuntu crashed). As for the owners, my female friend hates it (she hates the UAC and the UI) and her husband gets along with it juts fine.
Try last.fm for the above, for no charge.
As for security? Which is easier to audit and verify? A random pool of code and libraries distributed across hundreds of websites and maintainers, or a cohesive operating system whos entire codebase is in exactly one place?
Does such cohesion imply that BSD development is closer to the Cathedral than Linux is?
I would have thought that auditing and verifying code en masse would be a niche application (e.g. within critical systems) - even still, isn't there a strong argument that the Bazaar produces better code than any attempt at centralisation, that more eyes are better?
Not sure if you meant How to Solve it: Modern Heuristics but I would thoroughly recommend this book - for me it's up with SICP in changing the way you think. For anyone who's not familiar with heuristic search, this book will give you a great introduction to an alternative method of problem-solving.
To equate "pointless" and "of no commercial value" makes no sense. Academic research is certainly not pointless, but often it is of no commercial value, even in the long term.
Whilst I know plenty of Linux developers and users would love to see the demise of Microsoft caused by the rise of Linux (myself included), I'm not sure if the Linux-Windows issue is that important.
In terms of Desktop users, Linux is almost irrelevant to MS. Apple is far more important and a realistic threat to their customer base.
Sure, in the server market Linux has taken significant market share, but this does not necessarily create a large headache for MS.
In many ways, the development of Linux has taken place with complete disregard to MS. Linux has continually improved, following reasonable development paths not dictated by the whims of executives or fashionable buzzwords of the day. I think that's because the Linux community is not chasing market share, just trying to make a decent O/S.
Perhaps the biggest threat from Linux for MS is that it may be a distraction. "Competing" with Linux isn't really possible - you can't put Linux out of business, because it is not a business. But time and effort wasted on fighting Linux in small markets may mean MS fail to see the real threat coming from other sources such as Apple and online Apps.
I think this article brings up a general issue that is facing CS departments at the moment.
Computer Science courses have two main audiences:
These categories overlap to a degree dependent on the University.
The two audiences have been diverging more and more in the last decade or so, and it appears that many departments are now in a position where they have to choose to stop catering to one, or split their courses into programming/software development and more mathematical/theoretical alternatives.
I also think that this separation of mindsets is the fundamental cause of many debates between students and their professors, kernel hackers and academics. There is a misunderstanding caused by the different focus each party has, where your approach really depends on what you are trying to achieve (do you want to write software that does the job? or is elegant? something immediately useful, or that demonstrates a different way of doing things?).
It's quite sensible that students should learn several languages in a CS degree, although Ada is becoming very much a niche language (my University still teaches it, mainly for real-time programming). It's also useful to have an understanding of lower level subjects such as electronics and logic circuitry.
Exactly where universities draw the line is a very difficult decision, but with CS applications falling rapidly in the UK at least, I think that a major change to course structure or separation of courses is required to modernise the system.