I'll agree that PC hardware is commoditized. The downside is that no one can afford to move away from the architecture we all got locked into 20 years ago.
Tough. You were stating (and I agree) that market driven standards are better than committee driven standards. You don't get to argue one way when it suits you but another way when it doesn't.
Arguing that standards enforced by Microsoft's hegemony are bad while extolling the standards set by the PC architecture hegemony isn't consistent.
The PC hegemony is set by market forces. The Microsoft hegemony is set by Microsoft. If you can't see that there's a difference then you're blind.
Lots of vendors supply parts to auto manufacturers, but there are only a handful of auto manufacturers. Trying to draw parallels between U.S. auto makers and Linux distributions is silly.
Huh? I seem to recall *you* brought up the analogy between auto manufacturers and the software industry. I didn't say anything about Linux in the context of your analogy.
How do you know more PC vendors exist today> Got numbers?
Yes, I do. In 1980 there was one PC vendor if you only count IBM-PC, or perhaps a few dozen if you count all variants of hobbyist PC. I would estimate there are at least 5,000 manufacturers of IBM-PC compatibles in Australia alone; every white-box computer shop counts. Customers have choice in terms of manufacturer and components. That's testimony to the benefits of standards.
Even if that is accrate, they're all selling the same thing.
That's what "standard" means. Perhaps you don't grok the benefit?
The standards that exist in the PC market are entirely cutomer and market driven, which, I believe, supports my contention that customers really dislike competing "standards" that don't appear to offer any tangible beneiftsto them.
I didn't dispute that the first time. Raising it a second time is pointless.
The industry consolidated around the specific architecture of the IBM PC alost 20 years ago, leaving many vendors of DOS PC's with other architectures in the dust. My earlier point was that in the initial days of the PC, in the early 80's, companies marketed PC's that ran DOS without mimicing the architecture of the IBM PC. As software vendors reacted to the growing market represented by IBM's PC's, they coded specifcially to that architecture, not to DOS standards. In other words, they followed market standards, not committee standards, with the side effect that consolidation of the PC hardware market accelerated. (And caused 20-years worth of failure to innovate. We're all still running AT's.)
You're still arguing this "committee standards" vs "market standards" when I never disputed this. I said that standards are better, fullstop. I was specifically mentioning the benefits of multiple vendors competing in the marketspace vs a single company producing everything. Your insistence on arguing "committee" vs "market" is baffling.
Finally, the reason you can buy "dop in" hardware replacements is that everyone is making the same bloody thing. Your "choices" are illusory.
You seem to have it backwards. If the hardware replacements weren't "drop-in" then there wouldn't be any benefit. It's only because the hardware is interoperable that the market is working. Think of commodities like wheat and juice. The PC hardware market works a lot like that. The PC *software* market does not. That's the point.
So why do we keep having wars? why does slavery still go on? Why do we keep repeating ourselves over and over again?
Because people make mistakes.
Because History is pointless,people dont want to learn from their mistakes.
This is obviously wrong. People wouldn't study history if they thought it was pointless.
Technology has progressed well but social progress hasnt progressed at all, people still act like animals,
I disagree. Society has significantly improved in the past few centuries. There are always going to be exceptions but modern civilised society has mostly stamped out religious persecution, slavery and torture. You have a reasonable expectation of social welfare, medical help, secondary education and police protection, no matter what your social standing or economic position. You have access to judicial representation and legal assistance. If you lived in Europe during the 1400s and you were not royalty or obscenely wealthy, then you would have none of this.
why are people aggressive? Why do we have wars? Why do people abuse power, and human rights?
I don't particularly agree, but even if I did it seems to me that there is a dynamic that drives the software industry to consolidate in a few large. monolithic corporations. This is the same dynamic that drove the consolidation of the American auto industry in the early 20th century. At one time, hundreds of auto manufacturers existed. But, within a few decades, all but a handful were out of business or had been absorbed by one of the survivors.
The hundreds of auto manufacturers still exist, you just don't have to deal with it. Look in your car. Who made the stereo? It wasn't Ford. Who made the steering wheel? Not General Motors. Who made the gaskets? The alternator? The alloys? The spark leads? The EFI computer? Dozens of companies are making these components. There's HUGE competition in the car market. You don't see it because you buy "distributions" from Ford and General Motors; basically a compilation of bits from 100s of smaller vendors, slapped together with some name branding and glitzy marketting.
In the software industry this is also possible and actually desirable. Unfortunately the market is shifting strongly towards the "Microsoft model" of one single vendor owning and producing all of the software. This isn't a desirable outcome. It is good news for Microsoft but terrible news for small vendors in the IT industry.
Even with the DOS world, a brief window of opportunity existed for hardware vendors whose PC's ran DOS but were not duplicates of the IBM PC. As the market inevitably consolidated, they vanished.
There are more PC vendors now than there ever were before. Why? Because of standards. You can buy motherboards from a dozen vendors, CPUs from at least three vendors, RAM from a dozen vendors, cases from a dozen vendors, disks from at least four vendors, and a packaged solution from 1000s of companies that assemble these components. The PC market is the strongest it has ever been and it's all due to standards.
Yet you look at software and the choice isn't so rosy. There's only one vendor for Windows and don't feed me any lines about MacOS or Linux; you and I know fully well that those aren't drop-in replacements. That's the significant difference. In the hardware market I can purchase replacement hardware from a dozen vendors. In the software market I'm regularly tied to a single vendor.
So, the pros and PhDs tend to use FreeBSD, not only for the above mentioned issues but also due to the clean design, tight codebase and modern algorithms.
Actually my experience is that many people use FreeBSD so they can brag about it. They never say "I use FreeBSD". They always say "I use FreeBSD because it is used by PhDs and it's better than Linux and I'm way smarter than you and Linux is mainstream and FreeBSD is awesome because it isn't mainstream and elite people don't use Linux and your mother wears army boots". Thankfully I know that this sort of bragging indicates a FreeBSD *wannabe* who can be ignored.
Hate to say this, but this is exactly I like the Windows OS. While I'm completely familiar and happy with command-line work, I dislike *nix simply because to get a desktop system running to my standards of happiness, I have to look all around the web to find the right apps to install. And not just applications like media players or graphics software, but even (what I consider) low-level stuff like the windowing system, the fonts (for crissake!), the pre-emptive kernel patch so it doesn't lock important operations, the right drivers for all the hardware, etc. ad. infinitem.
If you're installing preemptive kernel patches then you are intentionally making life difficult for yourself. It certainly has nothing to do with *nix. I've never had to do anything like that and I have used Linux for 11 years and *nix for 16 years.
If I was to complain that Windows XP is too hard because I was mucking in the registry with regedit while trying to enable an undocumented (and unsupported) feature for a system DLL that I'd downloaded and installed with regsvr32 so my desktop could authenticate against a NIS+ server - because that's what *I* expect from a desktop to reach *my* standards of happiness - would you think I was making a valid point or being an idiot? So try and guess what my opinion is of you for making the exact same point with the roles of Linux/Windows reversed.
His argument would be more convincing if he cited more than this single case of a big company pulling the rug out from a little company. (Yes, they exist, but they are few compared with the number of working developers.)
It's not a single case, and you know that, so don't degrade his statement by pretending that's what he said.
Big vendors are regularly pulling the rug out from under the little companies. The browser was the first taste of "freedom" that little vendors had access to and they flocked to it.
The decommoditisation of operating systems is the only hope for the future of little companies. A little company that flocks to.NET or WinForms is cutting their own throat, in the long run.
I would also question the way certain questions are posed... there's a lot of rhetorical bull$hit going on here. Don't even try to convince me this is some kind of nonpartisan "let me help you decide who to vote for" public service. Propaganda Propaganda Propaganda!!
If you say it three times, it must be true!
Anyway, I fed my preferences into it and it gave GWB a 4% rating. That's accurate enough for me.
Let's hear your suggestions on which stuff should be removed.
Remove pass-by-reference. I'm not joking. It's the most useless feature of the language. Plus so many people pass-by-reference for "efficiency" over pass-by-value then forget to cast it with const, so the compiler generates extremely inefficient code. If you really need pass-by-reference then use a pointer, just like C. Pass-by-reference is an abomination.
Remember that no matter what you choose, people somewhere are currently using it, and you will break their code.
Tough. I'd say that C++ is a Frankenstein's monster, but even that monster had the proper number of limbs. C++ has 17 arms and 29 legs and 4 heads. Unfortunately using arm number 15 at the same time as leg number 6 causes head number 2 to leak memory. It's a stupid language. Far too complex for mortal humans to grok. Cutting out deadwood is necessary to make it useful again.
The house my family is building just burn down 2 weeks before competition. Now that the insurance is paying out some money, I am seriously considering installing Halon system at home because the house comes with a server room and I will be having at least 10 computers running in the house. I would like to know if anyone has experience with Halon system as well as the feasibility of installing such system at home.
You don't need to consider the feasibility; just consider the economics. It's far cheaper to insure the hardware and backup the data. Trying to save a computer with a halon system is spending a pound to save a penny.
2000 - Lens flare
2001 - Motion blur
2002 - Cel shading
2003 - bullet time
2004 - ?
Well, lens flare was in at least NFS:HS which was... 1999? and bullet time was in Max Payne from... 2001? But yeah, your point is still valid. There certainly appears to be trends and fads within the gaming industry.
If this was a post about Windows getting shadows, there'd be dozens of posts listing the zillion OSes that already have shadows and bitching about Microsoft's lack of innovation.
When GTK2 gets it, it's cool.
Such is life.
Actually, last time it got mentioned w.r.t Windows there were people arguing both for and against it. Now, that it's available for GNOME, there are once again people arguing both for and against it. I know it's fun to pretend that Linux advocates are hypocrites, but the reality is that DIFFERENT PEOPLE have DIFFERENT OPINIONS.
However, Welsh politician Valdo Funning was more dismissive, saying: "I was brought up with Treasure Island and Wordsworth and all the great poets, and it gave me a love of those which I still have today at 67. Literature gives you a lifetime of pleasure. I wouldn't have that if I had been playing on a PlayStation."
I grew up with Treasure Island and Lewis Carroll and I loved them. I also grew up with console games and I loved those too. But this dickhead would have you believe that games are inferior. It's the worst form of arrogance; the idea that because he doesn't like it, it mustn't be any good.
Games are just like books, comics, movies, poetry and any form of entertainment. The great works can influence you for a lifetime.
Over 600 million each donated to child health, and HIV/AIDS/TB. As staggering as the absolute magnitude of those numbers are, even in percentage terms they are quite remarkable. Given his total career earnings of, say, $50 billion or so (to date), this represents more than 1% to each of those causes.
To put it in perspective, do you know any other moderately well off computer geek, who may make $3 million in their career, pledging 1% ($30,000) to each of those causes?
I donate 2% of my salary to charities; my boss convinced me it was the right thing to do (he has been doing it for years). I may not make millions of dollars per year but does that matter?
This is my main nitpick with people who nitpick time travel stories. THERE ARE NO RULES!
These people watch Back to the Future and they think they've "figured it out" with regards to the rules of time travel. As you say, any fan of scifi knows that there are 100s of different rule sets. The author gets to decide, not the viewer who has convinced themselves that BTTF defines reality.
The majority of Aussies? Probably VB (Victoria Bitter). Though it's pretty horrible stuff. Nasty chemical aftertaste. It's very cheap and available almost everywhere.
XXXX is apparently very popular up north (eg, Queensland) but it's just as bad as VB. I've only had it once and that was once too often.
Most popular Aussie beer that is halfway decent is Coopers. They make a range of ales and stouts. I'm fond of the Coopers Pale Ale.
Slashdot Mirror
To be moderated insightful I would have expected to read an insight. How about Redundant: -1, next time.
Tough. You were stating (and I agree) that market driven standards are better than committee driven standards. You don't get to argue one way when it suits you but another way when it doesn't.
The PC hegemony is set by market forces. The Microsoft hegemony is set by Microsoft. If you can't see that there's a difference then you're blind.
This is silly. Google for "war" and "mistake" and stop wasting my time.
Huh? I seem to recall *you* brought up the analogy between auto manufacturers and the software industry. I didn't say anything about Linux in the context of your analogy.
Yes, I do. In 1980 there was one PC vendor if you only count IBM-PC, or perhaps a few dozen if you count all variants of hobbyist PC. I would estimate there are at least 5,000 manufacturers of IBM-PC compatibles in Australia alone; every white-box computer shop counts. Customers have choice in terms of manufacturer and components. That's testimony to the benefits of standards.
That's what "standard" means. Perhaps you don't grok the benefit?
I didn't dispute that the first time. Raising it a second time is pointless.
You're still arguing this "committee standards" vs "market standards" when I never disputed this. I said that standards are better, fullstop. I was specifically mentioning the benefits of multiple vendors competing in the marketspace vs a single company producing everything. Your insistence on arguing "committee" vs "market" is baffling.
You seem to have it backwards. If the hardware replacements weren't "drop-in" then there wouldn't be any benefit. It's only because the hardware is interoperable that the market is working. Think of commodities like wheat and juice. The PC hardware market works a lot like that. The PC *software* market does not. That's the point.
War is always a mistake.
Because people make mistakes.
This is obviously wrong. People wouldn't study history if they thought it was pointless.
I disagree. Society has significantly improved in the past few centuries. There are always going to be exceptions but modern civilised society has mostly stamped out religious persecution, slavery and torture. You have a reasonable expectation of social welfare, medical help, secondary education and police protection, no matter what your social standing or economic position. You have access to judicial representation and legal assistance. If you lived in Europe during the 1400s and you were not royalty or obscenely wealthy, then you would have none of this.
Because people make mistakes.
The hundreds of auto manufacturers still exist, you just don't have to deal with it. Look in your car. Who made the stereo? It wasn't Ford. Who made the steering wheel? Not General Motors. Who made the gaskets? The alternator? The alloys? The spark leads? The EFI computer? Dozens of companies are making these components. There's HUGE competition in the car market. You don't see it because you buy "distributions" from Ford and General Motors; basically a compilation of bits from 100s of smaller vendors, slapped together with some name branding and glitzy marketting.
In the software industry this is also possible and actually desirable. Unfortunately the market is shifting strongly towards the "Microsoft model" of one single vendor owning and producing all of the software. This isn't a desirable outcome. It is good news for Microsoft but terrible news for small vendors in the IT industry.
There are more PC vendors now than there ever were before. Why? Because of standards. You can buy motherboards from a dozen vendors, CPUs from at least three vendors, RAM from a dozen vendors, cases from a dozen vendors, disks from at least four vendors, and a packaged solution from 1000s of companies that assemble these components. The PC market is the strongest it has ever been and it's all due to standards.
Yet you look at software and the choice isn't so rosy. There's only one vendor for Windows and don't feed me any lines about MacOS or Linux; you and I know fully well that those aren't drop-in replacements. That's the significant difference. In the hardware market I can purchase replacement hardware from a dozen vendors. In the software market I'm regularly tied to a single vendor.
Actually my experience is that many people use FreeBSD so they can brag about it. They never say "I use FreeBSD". They always say "I use FreeBSD because it is used by PhDs and it's better than Linux and I'm way smarter than you and Linux is mainstream and FreeBSD is awesome because it isn't mainstream and elite people don't use Linux and your mother wears army boots". Thankfully I know that this sort of bragging indicates a FreeBSD *wannabe* who can be ignored.
If you're installing preemptive kernel patches then you are intentionally making life difficult for yourself. It certainly has nothing to do with *nix. I've never had to do anything like that and I have used Linux for 11 years and *nix for 16 years.
If I was to complain that Windows XP is too hard because I was mucking in the registry with regedit while trying to enable an undocumented (and unsupported) feature for a system DLL that I'd downloaded and installed with regsvr32 so my desktop could authenticate against a NIS+ server - because that's what *I* expect from a desktop to reach *my* standards of happiness - would you think I was making a valid point or being an idiot? So try and guess what my opinion is of you for making the exact same point with the roles of Linux/Windows reversed.
It's not a single case, and you know that, so don't degrade his statement by pretending that's what he said.
Big vendors are regularly pulling the rug out from under the little companies. The browser was the first taste of "freedom" that little vendors had access to and they flocked to it.
The decommoditisation of operating systems is the only hope for the future of little companies. A little company that flocks to .NET or WinForms is cutting their own throat, in the long run.
If you say it three times, it must be true!
Anyway, I fed my preferences into it and it gave GWB a 4% rating. That's accurate enough for me.
You really know you're a geek when you can read the opcodes without referring to the assembly.
Sure, they laughed at Marconi and his "crazy" ideas, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown. Sometimes an idiot is simply an idiot.
Remove pass-by-reference. I'm not joking. It's the most useless feature of the language. Plus so many people pass-by-reference for "efficiency" over pass-by-value then forget to cast it with const, so the compiler generates extremely inefficient code. If you really need pass-by-reference then use a pointer, just like C. Pass-by-reference is an abomination.
Tough. I'd say that C++ is a Frankenstein's monster, but even that monster had the proper number of limbs. C++ has 17 arms and 29 legs and 4 heads. Unfortunately using arm number 15 at the same time as leg number 6 causes head number 2 to leak memory. It's a stupid language. Far too complex for mortal humans to grok. Cutting out deadwood is necessary to make it useful again.
You don't need to consider the feasibility; just consider the economics. It's far cheaper to insure the hardware and backup the data. Trying to save a computer with a halon system is spending a pound to save a penny.
Well, lens flare was in at least NFS:HS which was... 1999? and bullet time was in Max Payne from... 2001? But yeah, your point is still valid. There certainly appears to be trends and fads within the gaming industry.
You must be pretty retarded if you think a game is part of the OS.
GNU libc is.
Actually, last time it got mentioned w.r.t Windows there were people arguing both for and against it. Now, that it's available for GNOME, there are once again people arguing both for and against it. I know it's fun to pretend that Linux advocates are hypocrites, but the reality is that DIFFERENT PEOPLE have DIFFERENT OPINIONS.
I do believe the eventual successor will be a mobile/pda/handheld combo, but it's definitely not going to be the N-gage. That thing is stillborn.
I grew up with Treasure Island and Lewis Carroll and I loved them. I also grew up with console games and I loved those too. But this dickhead would have you believe that games are inferior. It's the worst form of arrogance; the idea that because he doesn't like it, it mustn't be any good.
Games are just like books, comics, movies, poetry and any form of entertainment. The great works can influence you for a lifetime.
Yes, because folding a device in half is an obvious way to make a long device fit into your pocket. Carpenter rulers have been doing it for centuries.
Not a very good one.
I donate 2% of my salary to charities; my boss convinced me it was the right thing to do (he has been doing it for years). I may not make millions of dollars per year but does that matter?
These people watch Back to the Future and they think they've "figured it out" with regards to the rules of time travel. As you say, any fan of scifi knows that there are 100s of different rule sets. The author gets to decide, not the viewer who has convinced themselves that BTTF defines reality.
The majority of Aussies? Probably VB (Victoria Bitter). Though it's pretty horrible stuff. Nasty chemical aftertaste. It's very cheap and available almost everywhere.
XXXX is apparently very popular up north (eg, Queensland) but it's just as bad as VB. I've only had it once and that was once too often.
Most popular Aussie beer that is halfway decent is Coopers. They make a range of ales and stouts. I'm fond of the Coopers Pale Ale.
I shop in Australia.
I'm gonna guess you're American.