All Microsoft (and, indeed, any business) cares about is money.
Allow me to clarify: All the Microsoft stockholders care about is money. A point frequently made by Lawrence Lessig (I just read Future of Ideas and Free Culture, mind you) is that the people behind any corporation (Ballmer & co. in the case of Microsoft) has a bunch of people whose only interest is in the survival and prosperity of the company/corporation - the stockholders. No company, despite its size or market share, is inherently evil - but if it isn't trying its best to make money and keep its market share, it can't expect its shares to keep their value. Heck, every Ltd./corporation has these "problems".
I read an very truthful-sounding (as well as depressingly down-to-earth) advice on new ideas that goes like this: "Don't worry if anyone will steal your ideas... if they're any good you'll have a hard time showing them down people's throats anyway."
"Now, if you look up to the left, that's the road we could've taken to the lungs, but for this tour we'll descend down the esophagus and finally take a quick peek at the functions of the human stomach."
Oh, those ideas will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Ah, but he was pretty successful - I guess the moral is that if you tell the world that the margins are too small for your brilliant idea/plan/scheme, eventually someone will come up with a device ten times more complex and complicated to achieve the same thing as yours did.
Each step along the chain takes a performance hit.
Of course every step along the abstraction chain incurs a performance hit - but using that fact as an argument against abstraction altogether is like saying we shouldn't use Java because it's bytecode and not assembled into native whatever.
By that reasoning, we might as well regress back to nuts, bolts, light bulbs and mechanical switches. Except that would overburden the developers - which brings me to my point, that every iteration/abstraction serves to convert extra CPU cycles to minimised effort in development.
It's the recurring decision about payoffs, akin to the common consideration of time vs. space (why we compress data, for instance), that we decide that the perpetually improving processors and the extra clock cycles they yield may be better spent when the application is developed.
Ten years ago, it wouldn't have made sense to run an application/framework like Wave in a browser, but today it offers quicker development cycles for applications that run within it, compared to the equivalent applications in C or C++ with optimised bits in asm, but without significantly reduced response times in the final application.
Slashdot Mirror
We have the ability to genetically engineer a human today.
Sure we do: Eugenics! Why leave it to science to experiment, when you can do all the work as easy as selective breeding?
All Microsoft (and, indeed, any business) cares about is money.
Allow me to clarify: All the Microsoft stockholders care about is money. A point frequently made by Lawrence Lessig (I just read Future of Ideas and Free Culture, mind you) is that the people behind any corporation (Ballmer & co. in the case of Microsoft) has a bunch of people whose only interest is in the survival and prosperity of the company/corporation - the stockholders. No company, despite its size or market share, is inherently evil - but if it isn't trying its best to make money and keep its market share, it can't expect its shares to keep their value. Heck, every Ltd./corporation has these "problems".
I'm currently using IE7, [. . .] It. Is. Bad.
I hate to ask this, but... why are you still using it?
I read an very truthful-sounding (as well as depressingly down-to-earth) advice on new ideas that goes like this: "Don't worry if anyone will steal your ideas... if they're any good you'll have a hard time showing them down people's throats anyway."
"Now, if you look up to the left, that's the road we could've taken to the lungs, but for this tour we'll descend down the esophagus and finally take a quick peek at the functions of the human stomach."
Oh, those ideas will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Worked for Fermat for 400 years.
Ah, but he was pretty successful - I guess the moral is that if you tell the world that the margins are too small for your brilliant idea/plan/scheme, eventually someone will come up with a device ten times more complex and complicated to achieve the same thing as yours did.
And while I know I will ultimately lose this battle, thomasdz, YOUR Slashdot ID (178114) is too high. :)
Look who's complaining about high IDs, yeah it's the guy with the high karma! Too high, I might even add!
Of course every step along the abstraction chain incurs a performance hit - but using that fact as an argument against abstraction altogether is like saying we shouldn't use Java because it's bytecode and not assembled into native whatever.
By that reasoning, we might as well regress back to nuts, bolts, light bulbs and mechanical switches. Except that would overburden the developers - which brings me to my point, that every iteration/abstraction serves to convert extra CPU cycles to minimised effort in development.
It's the recurring decision about payoffs, akin to the common consideration of time vs. space (why we compress data, for instance), that we decide that the perpetually improving processors and the extra clock cycles they yield may be better spent when the application is developed.
Ten years ago, it wouldn't have made sense to run an application/framework like Wave in a browser, but today it offers quicker development cycles for applications that run within it, compared to the equivalent applications in C or C++ with optimised bits in asm, but without significantly reduced response times in the final application.
from __future__ import antigravity;