The Mac hardware thing is mostly a red herring, I'm guessing.
Here's my guess: Sun is considering the idea of dumping SPARC in favor of POWER. As things stand, they're way back in the raw performance game. Why continue investing R&D money into their own line of chips, if this is what it buys them?
Note that I'm not suggesting that they would become a pure software company -- my guess would be that they still design and build their own systems, just not their own chips.
What we really need is a ubiquitous standard like SMTP, for IM. That way, any person can start up their own service, and everyone else could still get the messages.
Such a thing is already on the way. Incidentally, Microsoft's Live Communication Server (which is the basis for this new interoperability) already uses SIP/SIMPLE as the basis for the protocol. From what I've heard, IBM is going in that direction for its next enterprise IM product, too. The standard isn't completely defined, yet, and every vendor has quirks. It's about like HTML was several years ago. But it's coming.
Lots of programming doesn't involve math, at least on the surface. But I think that a good grounding in mathematics can improve your programming ability in much the way that it's said that learning LISP can improve your programming in any language.
Why? Well, most programming does involve a significant amount of logic and careful reasoning. And reading and writing proofs (as one ought to be doing in any decent college-level math class) is the most distilled form of that sort of reasoning that I'm aware of.
It's been pretty rare in my career that I've directly applied any of the math I studied in college. But it's a rare day that I don't use the reasoning skills that I developed (or at least sharpened) writing proofs for those classes.
Nobody would argue that functional defects can't be introduced at design time -- clearly, they can, and given the expense of fixing a design flaw late in the dev cycle, good software engineers put a lot of effort into getting the design right. (Unless they're using an 'agile' process, which simply isn't appropriate for larger projects.)
Why are problems with resource consumption (CPU and storage) any different than functional defects? Why do so many people adhere to the dogma that you shouldn't think about performance until late in development?
Yeah, every book and every instructor may say "optimize last", but only neophytes who've never worked on a real software project of any size take it to mean "don't think about performance at first".
DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*.
Which is going to allow more people to seriously consider Linux as their primary OS? The ability to play most of the games out there, or the ability to run software for CAD, data visualization, etc.
Where did he present this as some sort of secret conspiracy?
And a draft need not be huge; It could just be enough to get manpower up to the recruiting targets. For which there is surely enough training capacity.
They have dumbass. They have either closed, or development became so expensive and unprofitable that they've been bought out by larger manufacturers.
I suppose you missed the word 'all' in the post you were responding to?
The remaining larger manufacturers still design and develop new cars. Innovation still happens (e.g. hybrids). I'd love to see you try to show that innovation in the auto industry is slower now than it was 50 years ago.
Further, you've cited not one scrap of evidence that it is specifically regulation that has caused the industry consolidation. There are lots of reasons why the barriers to entry are high in the automotive industry, and why it's hard for smaller players to stay afloat. Regulation is only one, and not a very large one.
Re:iPods, are they audio devices? are they jewelry
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iPod Mini Sells Out
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iPods are part useful music playing device, and part jewelry. Why would someone give up 80% of the capacity to save only 15%?
Look at this from the perspective of someone with a music collection small enough to fit comfortably in 4 GB, or who doesn't feel the need to carry their entire collection with them: Why pay 20% more and carry around something 66% larger, just to get a greater capacity for which you have no use? For such a person, the value of the extra 11 GB is close to zero, and thus easily outweighed by the $50 price difference and space/weight savings.
If Apple bothers Gates so much, then why does MS continue to sell Office for the Mac? In fact, Microsoft even gives away some pretty useful software for the Mac. If that RDC client didn't exist, my decision to stick with the Mac at home after I started working in a Windows shop would have been much harder.
...what's to say that M$ won't just turn around and use similar tactics to do away with SCO?
Probably the fact that SCO poses no threat to MS, short-term or long-term.
Besides that, it's not as if the people running SCO at this point are worried about the company's long-term viability. Why would they care if SCO dies, once they get their money?
I would argue that the dominance of procedural languages grows not out of efficiency of execution, so much out of inertia and network effects.
You see, functional languages just don't offer that much of an advantage over procedural languages. Sure they can allow you to express algorithms much more concisely. But the biggest problem in most real-world programming efforts is not quickly implementing a particular algorithm, but rather, figuring out what algorithm is the right one to implement. Functional can help you a bit here, by making it easier to try out a variety of approaches and contribute empirical data into that decision, but all that really means is that you raise the complexity threshold at which the iterative approach becomes untenable; You never eliminate that threshold.
I was a huge functional language fan, for a long time, but now, actually working as a programmer, I don't find myself thinking that using a functional language would make my job easier or more fun.
It is irrelevant. The debate is over closed source versus open source. In either case, we're talking about the software actually being available. Google's software isn't available as either closed source binaries or as compilable source code. If Google released a closed source binary of their software, they would lose their advantage just the same.
Look, the original assertion was that Google's founders were examples of how open source could be profitable. You can quibble all you want over whether or not they're 'closed source', but the software that is the source of most of their value sure as hell isn't open, and they certainly aren't an argument in favor of open source's profitability.
You're fixating on low-level details to try to artificially constrain the debate. The terms "open source", "closed source", in this debate, are really about control. To be open source, as it's commonly understood around here, requires that the creator give up most of the control that the law grants him over his creation. Certainly he will end up with much less control than either Microsoft or Google have over their creations. And both MS and Google have made quite a bit more money by keeping that control than others who give it up have made by their choice.
This doesn't make them superior in any absolute sense. But so far open-source is way behind as a money-making proposition, and coming up with weak or simply false examples like Google just looks desperate.
In fact, here is a link where Gates says that 'Open Source' and the GPL "destroy the ecosystem" that is the world of software.
The above an inaccurate paraphrase of Gates' comments in the article. His criticisms are targeted very carefully at the GPL, not at open source in general.
I disagree with his opinion of the GPL, but what he's saying cannot be fairly construed as a condemnation of all open-source or non-proprietary software.
This is an official viewpoint, and I'm sure Gates sees things the same way-----
Look, Gates, Balmer, Mundie, and the rest of the MS upper management do not share a collective consciousness. They are not the Borg. If Gates really thinks this way, you should have no problem coming up with direct quotes from the man himself to substantiate it.
Name one piece of software he's written that isn't?
C'mon, head of the world's largest software company, thousands of different software products... if their owner wanted to release open software, you'd think somebody would have noticed it by now.
None of this is even remotely relevant. RMS pushes free software as a moral imperative for all developers. Gates doesn't, so far as I have seen. That he choses to live his life one way does not mean that he thinks those who make other choices are wrong. But RMS has certainly said that he thinks that those who write and sell non-free software are wrong to do so.
It didn't seem relevant, but, yeah, I admire Gates quite a bit.
Maybe Gates seems like an evil bastard to many here, but compared to most of the monarchs of yesteryear and most of the super-rich of today, he's an absolute paragon of virtue. Yeah, yeah, I know philanthropy is a big hobby among the wealthy, but few plan, as Gates does, to give away the vast majority of their wealth, to leave their children with only a small fraction of a percent (granted, still a lot of money in Gates' case) of their estate.
Google doesn't distribute their search software, so trying to apply the closed vs. open source argument is illogical. Google sells offers services, some of which are free, others of which cost money. Their software is limited to in-house use and is irrelevant to to the debate.
It's not irrelevant. The fact that their software is not freely available gives them a competitive advantage. Suppose Google were to release all their software as open-source. Then, any would-be competitor would simply have to build and maintain a large infrastructure for delivering the services that Google does. Suddenly, Google is competing simply on its ability to build and maintain the service-delivery infrastructure. While they're apparently quite good at this, their edge here isn't nearly as significant as their edge in search algorithms.
Would you like to be like Linus, a rich man who is loved and admired by hundreds of thousands of people? Or would you like to be like Mr. Gates, a "rich" man who cannot buy the things that really matter?
If you don't think that Gates has hundreds of thousands of admirers, you're fooling yourself.
Well, here's another take on it: Acknowledging that you work on software primarily for money makes it much easier to keep the time you spend on it under control, to balance it with other activities, and to become a well-rounded person.
I worked for two open-source based companies in a row. My job was my life at those places. Both companies went out of business. Now I'm working for a closed-source shop. I put in a solid 40-45 hours a week (and I accomplish more in that time than I did on one of the much more intensive-feeling weeks at the other jobs), but when I leave the office, work stays there. I do other stuff, exert and develop other parts of my mind and body, have more fun.
And, frankly, yeah, that's made me more attractive to women.
Only the second and later pieces of plastic cost $0.10 to make. The first one can cost tens or even hundreds of millions. Who'd buy that?
It's fantastically disingenous to consider only the marginal cost of media to a piece of software's price tag, and to ignore the economic reality that developing a piece of software the scale of what MS delivers requires a huge up-front R&D investement.
Does all software need to be proprietary? Again, of course not. Stallman on one end and Gates on the other are both fanatics. (It's a pity that we live in a society that categorizes the former as a fanatic but gives the latter a free pass, but that's a whole 'nother argument.)
Has Gates ever actually come out and said that he thinks all software 'should' be proprietary? Maybe he's criticized free and open-source software on apparently pragmatic grounds, but that's not the same thing as pushing proprietary software as a moral imperative. So there is a qualitative difference between Gates and Stallman; They aren't the mirror images you seem to think.
I have to disagree with you on this -- as both a composer and programmer in several languages - coding is not the same as creating artworks. In order for computer code to be useful, it has to make sense and operate logically. Art is in direct opposition to this -- it exists on the border (and sometimes across the border) of interpretation and the abstract. Computer code is not open to interpretation - it runs the way it was written to run.
I don't agree with this. Software is open to interpretation. Not by the computer that executes it, but by the people who use it.
Sure, the software must follow rules in its execution. But that's like saying that a building's structure must obey the laws of physics; Would you argue that architects (the old-fashioned kind) can't be artists? Buildings must obey physics and software must function within the deterministic rules dictated by the platform on which it runs, but in each case there's still a role for interpretation as humans interact with the structure.
Mind you, I'm not convinced that software is an art, either; I find something something distinctly self-aggrandizing in most of the claims that it is. But I don't think your argument against its being art works, either.
Imagine a world where almost everyone is scientifically literate, open-minded, and artistic. Don't you want to help everyone else get there?
Sure. But the way to do that isn't to change the way mass media portrays certain groups, but to get people to pay the mass media less mind. It's better for us that the mass media continue to portray the scientifically able as one-dimensional geeks, so that we can become living examples of why the mass media is not to be trusted.
Because, you see, the mass media doesn't want the average person to become literate (scientifically and otherwise), open-minded, and artistic. Because if the average person did take on those qualities, the mass media would lose power. Mass media doesn't want you going to art museums or studying a new language in night classes or learning to throw a frisbee forehand or to paddle a canoe or going to live music shows or worse yet learning to play an instrument or writing software as a hobby or visiting a local observatory to get a closer look at Mars. All the time you spend on those things is time that you won't spend helping to contribute to the ratings with which they justify the rates that they charge to advertisers. Time that you won't spend letting them tell you what is and is not true.
What you're hoping is that the mass media will help to demolish the foundations of its own power. Not gonna happen.
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The Mac hardware thing is mostly a red herring, I'm guessing.
Here's my guess: Sun is considering the idea of dumping SPARC in favor of POWER. As things stand, they're way back in the raw performance game. Why continue investing R&D money into their own line of chips, if this is what it buys them?
Note that I'm not suggesting that they would become a pure software company -- my guess would be that they still design and build their own systems, just not their own chips.
Such a thing is already on the way. Incidentally, Microsoft's Live Communication Server (which is the basis for this new interoperability) already uses SIP/SIMPLE as the basis for the protocol. From what I've heard, IBM is going in that direction for its next enterprise IM product, too. The standard isn't completely defined, yet, and every vendor has quirks. It's about like HTML was several years ago. But it's coming.
Lots of programming doesn't involve math, at least on the surface. But I think that a good grounding in mathematics can improve your programming ability in much the way that it's said that learning LISP can improve your programming in any language.
Why? Well, most programming does involve a significant amount of logic and careful reasoning. And reading and writing proofs (as one ought to be doing in any decent college-level math class) is the most distilled form of that sort of reasoning that I'm aware of.
It's been pretty rare in my career that I've directly applied any of the math I studied in college. But it's a rare day that I don't use the reasoning skills that I developed (or at least sharpened) writing proofs for those classes.
Exactly.
Nobody would argue that functional defects can't be introduced at design time -- clearly, they can, and given the expense of fixing a design flaw late in the dev cycle, good software engineers put a lot of effort into getting the design right. (Unless they're using an 'agile' process, which simply isn't appropriate for larger projects.)
Why are problems with resource consumption (CPU and storage) any different than functional defects? Why do so many people adhere to the dogma that you shouldn't think about performance until late in development?
Yeah, every book and every instructor may say "optimize last", but only neophytes who've never worked on a real software project of any size take it to mean "don't think about performance at first".
Which is going to allow more people to seriously consider Linux as their primary OS? The ability to play most of the games out there, or the ability to run software for CAD, data visualization, etc.
Where did he present this as some sort of secret conspiracy?
And a draft need not be huge; It could just be enough to get manpower up to the recruiting targets. For which there is surely enough training capacity.
I suppose you missed the word 'all' in the post you were responding to?
The remaining larger manufacturers still design and develop new cars. Innovation still happens (e.g. hybrids). I'd love to see you try to show that innovation in the auto industry is slower now than it was 50 years ago.
Further, you've cited not one scrap of evidence that it is specifically regulation that has caused the industry consolidation. There are lots of reasons why the barriers to entry are high in the automotive industry, and why it's hard for smaller players to stay afloat. Regulation is only one, and not a very large one.
Look at this from the perspective of someone with a music collection small enough to fit comfortably in 4 GB, or who doesn't feel the need to carry their entire collection with them: Why pay 20% more and carry around something 66% larger, just to get a greater capacity for which you have no use? For such a person, the value of the extra 11 GB is close to zero, and thus easily outweighed by the $50 price difference and space/weight savings.
If Apple bothers Gates so much, then why does MS continue to sell Office for the Mac? In fact, Microsoft even gives away some pretty useful software for the Mac. If that RDC client didn't exist, my decision to stick with the Mac at home after I started working in a Windows shop would have been much harder.
Probably the fact that SCO poses no threat to MS, short-term or long-term.
Besides that, it's not as if the people running SCO at this point are worried about the company's long-term viability. Why would they care if SCO dies, once they get their money?
I would argue that the dominance of procedural languages grows not out of efficiency of execution, so much out of inertia and network effects.
You see, functional languages just don't offer that much of an advantage over procedural languages. Sure they can allow you to express algorithms much more concisely. But the biggest problem in most real-world programming efforts is not quickly implementing a particular algorithm, but rather, figuring out what algorithm is the right one to implement. Functional can help you a bit here, by making it easier to try out a variety of approaches and contribute empirical data into that decision, but all that really means is that you raise the complexity threshold at which the iterative approach becomes untenable; You never eliminate that threshold.
I was a huge functional language fan, for a long time, but now, actually working as a programmer, I don't find myself thinking that using a functional language would make my job easier or more fun.
"You talk of food? I have no taste for food--what I really crave is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men!" -- Homer, _The Illiad_
Look, the original assertion was that Google's founders were examples of how open source could be profitable. You can quibble all you want over whether or not they're 'closed source', but the software that is the source of most of their value sure as hell isn't open, and they certainly aren't an argument in favor of open source's profitability.
You're fixating on low-level details to try to artificially constrain the debate. The terms "open source", "closed source", in this debate, are really about control. To be open source, as it's commonly understood around here, requires that the creator give up most of the control that the law grants him over his creation. Certainly he will end up with much less control than either Microsoft or Google have over their creations. And both MS and Google have made quite a bit more money by keeping that control than others who give it up have made by their choice.
This doesn't make them superior in any absolute sense. But so far open-source is way behind as a money-making proposition, and coming up with weak or simply false examples like Google just looks desperate.
The above an inaccurate paraphrase of Gates' comments in the article. His criticisms are targeted very carefully at the GPL, not at open source in general.
I disagree with his opinion of the GPL, but what he's saying cannot be fairly construed as a condemnation of all open-source or non-proprietary software.
Look, Gates, Balmer, Mundie, and the rest of the MS upper management do not share a collective consciousness. They are not the Borg. If Gates really thinks this way, you should have no problem coming up with direct quotes from the man himself to substantiate it.
Name one piece of software he's written that isn't?
C'mon, head of the world's largest software company, thousands of different software products... if their owner wanted to release open software, you'd think somebody would have noticed it by now.
None of this is even remotely relevant. RMS pushes free software as a moral imperative for all developers. Gates doesn't, so far as I have seen. That he choses to live his life one way does not mean that he thinks those who make other choices are wrong. But RMS has certainly said that he thinks that those who write and sell non-free software are wrong to do so.
It didn't seem relevant, but, yeah, I admire Gates quite a bit.
Maybe Gates seems like an evil bastard to many here, but compared to most of the monarchs of yesteryear and most of the super-rich of today, he's an absolute paragon of virtue. Yeah, yeah, I know philanthropy is a big hobby among the wealthy, but few plan, as Gates does, to give away the vast majority of their wealth, to leave their children with only a small fraction of a percent (granted, still a lot of money in Gates' case) of their estate.
It's not irrelevant. The fact that their software is not freely available gives them a competitive advantage. Suppose Google were to release all their software as open-source. Then, any would-be competitor would simply have to build and maintain a large infrastructure for delivering the services that Google does. Suddenly, Google is competing simply on its ability to build and maintain the service-delivery infrastructure. While they're apparently quite good at this, their edge here isn't nearly as significant as their edge in search algorithms.
If you don't think that Gates has hundreds of thousands of admirers, you're fooling yourself.
Well, here's another take on it: Acknowledging that you work on software primarily for money makes it much easier to keep the time you spend on it under control, to balance it with other activities, and to become a well-rounded person.
I worked for two open-source based companies in a row. My job was my life at those places. Both companies went out of business. Now I'm working for a closed-source shop. I put in a solid 40-45 hours a week (and I accomplish more in that time than I did on one of the much more intensive-feeling weeks at the other jobs), but when I leave the office, work stays there. I do other stuff, exert and develop other parts of my mind and body, have more fun.
And, frankly, yeah, that's made me more attractive to women.
The exact same argument could be applied to, say, IBM's open-source contributions.
Only the second and later pieces of plastic cost $0.10 to make. The first one can cost tens or even hundreds of millions. Who'd buy that?
It's fantastically disingenous to consider only the marginal cost of media to a piece of software's price tag, and to ignore the economic reality that developing a piece of software the scale of what MS delivers requires a huge up-front R&D investement.
Has Gates ever actually come out and said that he thinks all software 'should' be proprietary? Maybe he's criticized free and open-source software on apparently pragmatic grounds, but that's not the same thing as pushing proprietary software as a moral imperative. So there is a qualitative difference between Gates and Stallman; They aren't the mirror images you seem to think.
I don't agree with this. Software is open to interpretation. Not by the computer that executes it, but by the people who use it.
Sure, the software must follow rules in its execution. But that's like saying that a building's structure must obey the laws of physics; Would you argue that architects (the old-fashioned kind) can't be artists? Buildings must obey physics and software must function within the deterministic rules dictated by the platform on which it runs, but in each case there's still a role for interpretation as humans interact with the structure.
Mind you, I'm not convinced that software is an art, either; I find something something distinctly self-aggrandizing in most of the claims that it is. But I don't think your argument against its being art works, either.
Sure. But the way to do that isn't to change the way mass media portrays certain groups, but to get people to pay the mass media less mind. It's better for us that the mass media continue to portray the scientifically able as one-dimensional geeks, so that we can become living examples of why the mass media is not to be trusted.
Because, you see, the mass media doesn't want the average person to become literate (scientifically and otherwise), open-minded, and artistic. Because if the average person did take on those qualities, the mass media would lose power. Mass media doesn't want you going to art museums or studying a new language in night classes or learning to throw a frisbee forehand or to paddle a canoe or going to live music shows or worse yet learning to play an instrument or writing software as a hobby or visiting a local observatory to get a closer look at Mars. All the time you spend on those things is time that you won't spend helping to contribute to the ratings with which they justify the rates that they charge to advertisers. Time that you won't spend letting them tell you what is and is not true.
What you're hoping is that the mass media will help to demolish the foundations of its own power. Not gonna happen.