Gnome 3.0 has its faults but taken in its entirety it is a bold and will be ultimately successful in making the desktop more task centric and attractive. As I said it has problems, some of which I've ranted about myself but I believe given a.1 release or two people will be wondering what the fuss was about. Same goes for Unity. I'm sure some masochists would prefer to use Window Maker or similar, but hey Linux allows that too.
Virtually every hotel these days has security cameras dotted around the place. I can imagine that one shot of her entering the room in a normal manner to clean it, or the door being slammed, or her emerging in a state of distress, or screaming or being comforted by other staff and that's it for him.
It bears similarity to a pyramid scheme. Get in early, mine a bunch of coins, extol how the infallible scheme cannot possibly fail, sell all your bitcoins for USD (e.g. by setting up an exchange) and exit before things go pear shaped. It will be the people who buy in late who have the most to lose.
.NET requires you write in C# or some other.NET CLR compatible language. Which is fine if you're writing from scratch. It's not so fine if you have a 200,000 line program written in C/C++.
What I'm suggesting is DevStudio should have a build target analogous to LLVM. When you choose to build the app to this target the compiler spits out a low level language which is converted to native assembly at runtime. Each version of Windows 8 would provide runtime support for the virtualized hardware so the same compiled app will run on anywhere. It is IMO the only way MS will persuade devs in the absence of x86 emulation of supporting ARM. Having to build and support 2 architectures will fail this time just as surely as it failed in the past when NT was running on Alpha, Mips, Itanium and PowerPC. Such an approach would even benefit x86 devices where we are already seeing some projects having to go through the effort of building an packaging 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same code.
I expect Apple will choose LLVM for their approach when they start using ARM in laptops. Previously they used fat binaries but with LLVM (which is Apple sponsored) there really is no need for them either.
Given that its for tablets with a touch UI. I doubt there's a huge demand for x86 software from the 1990s to run natively on such devices. Most of the apps they'll run are likely to be web-based with processing performed on the remote machine.
That depends. I can see the benefit of a tablet which has a touch screen UI while you're carrying it around but which reverts to a full desktop when you dock it.
As for apps, I doubt there are many enterprise orgs which don't have at least 1 application either thick client or browser based app with an ActiveX control or hardcoded IE6/7 dependencies in it. By ignoring reality Microsoft run a serious risk of alienating people most inclined to use the device.
I hope for Microsoft's sake that they're working on something akin to LLVM so that C++/C apps can be rebuilt in an architecture neutral manner. There really shouldn't be a need these days for most apps, with the exception of performance critical ones to really care what they're running on.
Bitcoin.org could be lawyered right off the face of the Earth and it wouldn't make any difference. You'd still be able to trade BTC for USD (or vice versa) with any of the thousands of other Bitcoin owners. It's all P2P, remember?
Good luck trying to get dollars for your bitcoins when every single other bitcoin owner is clamouring to exchange theirs too. If real governments started demanding taxes in real money from transactions made in bitcoins or went further and banned it completely that would be the end of it. The exchanges would close, no new currency would enter the system, nobody would trade in it any more. It would make schemes like liberty dollars look fiscally sound by comparison. At least a liberty dollar is made of precious metal which means if it were banned / outlawed you could still sell it even if you couldn't use it as currency for goods & services.
From what I can understand about BitCoin is that all the "easily mined" BTC is gone, and now you need a powerful GPU cluster to actually get anything substantial. It's analogous to the rivers and streams running out of easily panned gold, now the only people still being able to extract it are the large scale hydraulic mining operations who are able to invest in the machinery to get at the gold locked deep underground in the rock.
Well quite. There is little incentive for the individual to bother mining because it becomes prohibitively expensive over time in CPU power vs reward. Of course someone like Google or whatnot could probably write a hasher into their search results which did a couple of hashes in a web worker thread or similar and do it in a distributed fashion using other people's CPU. Who would stop them? Maybe some popular iPhone / Android apps could surreptitiously do the same too.
Point being it will be other people who benefit. They're the ones who'll hoard the bitcoins before selling up and getting the hell out while the going is good.
What exactly gives a Bitcoin its value? At least with a dollar, I can pay my taxes and not be imprisoned.
Bitcoins have great value if you operate a bitcoin exchange. People give you real dollars. You give them Disney dollars. When the system collapses, gets legislated out of existence, or gets hacked they're the ones holding worthless bits not you.
Mac and Windows offer considerably more config options than either Unity or GNOME 3.0. In both you can choose where your dock goes and also it's hide / show behaviour. Apple actually received a heap of criticism for its first incarnations of the dock and will-it/won't-it spatial behaviour and fixed it. It seems these two OS X wannabes didn't get the memo and are repeating the exact same mistakes.
How can the general direction of Sony be region locking when the current generation is considerably more liberal than the ones that preceded it?
As for Blu Ray region locking, that is a function of the studios & distributors demanding it. Movie rights are hideously complex and some distributors use locking to stop movies from leaking outside the region they have rights to distribute into. This seems more prevalent on European / Art house movies than mainstream productions. Where issues don't exist, the movie is usually region free. The one exception is Disney and I suspect their reasoning for region locking has more to do with how they stagger releases. For example Tangled has been out in the US for a while but won't appear in Europe on DVD / BD until the end of May. As it happens virtually all Sony discs (with the exception of distribution issue ones) are region free.
In the past GNOME has offered a fair and sensible set of configuration options and relegated the remainder off to an advanced config tool like GConf. This is the way it should be as opposed to KDE which throws the kitchen sink at you and the simple settings get lost amongst a bunch of esoteric ones.
In GNOME 3, even things like the default font are not configurable as are some of the other behaviours in the shell that should be.
Nintendo has had more region free gaming across the board than any other company they've competed again. Their portable systems never had any region locking which has allowed me and others to buy Gameboy and DS games from across the world. They did introduce region locking on the DSi download games but that is certainly no worse than MS or Sony.
PSP games weren't region locked and neither are virtually any PS3 games. IIRC one region locked title was a special edition of Stranglehold which had a copy of Hard Boiled the movie on it which had distribution issues. I'd add that you can purchase content from any region on PSN as well.
So it isn't the case they're better than Sony is, they're distinctly worse. Not to say Sony won't do the same thing in time with the NGP of course but I expect they'd create more problems than they'd solve by doing it.
I can see that NaCl would be restrictive given that it's tied to a particular architecture but not PNaCl. LLVM would not preclude anything over any modern processor, the kinds that run web browsers.
The LLVM instruction set is somewhat analogous to the intermediate language RTL used by GCC. Each expresses a low level representation of the program which is subsequently translated into native instructions. The major difference is gcc generates the native code during a build while LLVM defers code generation until some time later, e.g. during installation or prior to first run execution. At the end of the day any platform which has an implementation of llc is going to execute the app at similar speeds to native code and it will be portable.
I also think it's the esoteric platforms which stand to gain the most from platform neutrality and that includes Linux. If PNaCl apps don't care what OS or architecture is running them then the OS / architecture can be anything. I could write an app, e.g. something which hits a database and it would work regardless of my users being on Linux, Windows, OS X or anything else. It would level the playing field and make networks far more heterogenous than they are now. At least in theory.
That's because the classic desktop is GNOME 2.0. It's the failsafe if your hardware doesn't have proper 3D acceleration but you can make it the default desktop too. There is a Unity-2D package which works on older hardware but at this stage I think classic is probably the more useful environment.
I also welcome Ubuntu upgrading to GNOME 3.0 on the basis that it motivates Ubuntu & GNOME to share tech and will probably work out better in the end when dists dump X and go to Wayland or similar.
Because end users hate it when they upgrade their OS only to find it doesn't look completely different
Unity is sound in theory, it's just the implementation which is crap. They took a shell primarily designed for tiny netbook screens and didn't put in the functionality that would make it useful on large screens. It's not configurable enough, the defaults are extremely annoying and the intent behind some functionality such as the bizarro Ubuntu expanding panel is just unfathomable. Click on the Ubuntu icon and you get a large panel with some huge icons. Click on the expand icon within this panel and it fills the full screen by making the icons supermassive. What the fuck is it for? The apps launching panel is also horrible, where before you had a nice hierarchical list of apps, now you must filter them to see what you want.
I hope for the next release they focus on a preference dialog that allows the position and hide behaviour of the dock to be configured in realtime, for the global menu to be disabled. As I said I think the concept is fine - GNOME 2 is looking long in the tooth and is wholly inappropriate for the transition to 3D and surface based windowing, but the implementation is just not there yet.
IMO GNOME 3.0 looks incredibly attractive by comparison. It's clear a lot of thought has gone into it. However it screws things up just as badly in its own way. Why is the dock on a separate screen that I have to do some Expose like stuff to access? Why can't I just drag and drop icons around like I could in the good old days and enjoy spatial and contextual functionality? Why did they see fit to remove (not just hide) the minimize / maximize buttons and force me to complete a drag operation on the window to the top where I used to just have to do a single click? Where are the configuration options?
I think GNOME 3.0 is more radical than Unity. I think both are on the right tracks to being useful desktops but its obvious they both need a lot of work. It would be nice if the projects would actually cooperate on things like infrastructure. People shouldn't be forced to take sides to have a useful desktop.
I'm quite aware what LLVM is. I was implying that a runtime could be written over LLVM that would allow Linux apps to compile and link and see the low level APIs they expect to see but instead of being compiled to a processor architecture they're compiled to bitcode. It means the userland could be running over pretty much anything at all, any OS, any architecture.
A LLVM based game doesn't even have to care if you're running X11 or not. It would just see OpenGL / OpenGL ES 2.0 API and some APIs for game controllers and that would be it. Behind the scenes the runtime would set things up in X or Windows or Aqua or whatnot and the game would be oblivious.
Let's say your space ship accelerates and is flying through space at 20% the speed of light or similar. How is it meant to slow down to snag an asteroid which is hurtling in some other random direction? It would take years to decelerate and would expend massive amounts of fuel. Drones don't make the problem easier since they have exactly the same issue and after years mining the asteroid would have to catch up with the mother ship which means when they accelerate (hauling their booty) to even higher velocities (and then decelerate again) in order to catch up with it.
If you're making a beeline to another star system there won't be any stops along the way. I suppose a few asteroids or comets could be slung in the same direction as you're traveling to rendezvous en route but that implies they're decked out with rockets of their own and their trajectory is precisely timed to coincide along the route.
It's more habitable by not being 20 light years away and for being an extensively mapped and analysed planet. It's feasible (though not necessarily practical or economical) to send people to Mars and for them to live on the planet, albeit shielded from the environment in domes or heavy structures.
I doubt you're going to be mining asteroids unless the asteroid is going exactly the same direction and velocity as your own ship. Which sort of implies it set off at the same time as you too.
Welcome to 2011, 110% of you taxes and more goes directly to banks, and none of it gets spent on 'society'
You must have clicked submit too soon because you were about to explain how you have no publicly funded roads, bridges, air traffic control, police, army / navy / airforce, prisons, firefighters, justice system, schools, health care, welfare, parks & recreation facilities, sanitation or water supply where you live.
In theory you could do the same with Google's native client and you'd get close to native speeds too. I don't think it will be too long before we see games, utilities etc all built with Native Client and runnable with a click from the browser. It would be pretty interesting to see what comes of it.
When you think about it, most user land applications should be targetting a virtual machine. If Linux shipped with an LLVM runtime, all the userland apps could be built the once regardless of hardware and they would execute against the runtime. Behind the scenes the runtime would compile and cache a native binary on first invocation but it would be completely seamless and transparent to the user. Performance would be exactly the same as if the app had been natively compiled in the first place. The runtime could even be ported to Windows or OS X or QNX or some funky hypervisor from VMWare / Redhat whatever and be running over PPC, MIPS, ARM, x86 and they'd still run. The potential for this is enormous.
I get a feeling that Apple will soon have native LLVM support in OS X in preparation for their move to ARM and it would not surprise me if Windows got some kind of analog too. Therefore I wonder if it's time for Linux to be considering likewise.
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Gnome 3.0 has its faults but taken in its entirety it is a bold and will be ultimately successful in making the desktop more task centric and attractive. As I said it has problems, some of which I've ranted about myself but I believe given a .1 release or two people will be wondering what the fuss was about. Same goes for Unity. I'm sure some masochists would prefer to use Window Maker or similar, but hey Linux allows that too.
Virtually every hotel these days has security cameras dotted around the place. I can imagine that one shot of her entering the room in a normal manner to clean it, or the door being slammed, or her emerging in a state of distress, or screaming or being comforted by other staff and that's it for him.
It bears similarity to a pyramid scheme. Get in early, mine a bunch of coins, extol how the infallible scheme cannot possibly fail, sell all your bitcoins for USD (e.g. by setting up an exchange) and exit before things go pear shaped. It will be the people who buy in late who have the most to lose.
What I'm suggesting is DevStudio should have a build target analogous to LLVM. When you choose to build the app to this target the compiler spits out a low level language which is converted to native assembly at runtime. Each version of Windows 8 would provide runtime support for the virtualized hardware so the same compiled app will run on anywhere. It is IMO the only way MS will persuade devs in the absence of x86 emulation of supporting ARM. Having to build and support 2 architectures will fail this time just as surely as it failed in the past when NT was running on Alpha, Mips, Itanium and PowerPC. Such an approach would even benefit x86 devices where we are already seeing some projects having to go through the effort of building an packaging 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same code.
I expect Apple will choose LLVM for their approach when they start using ARM in laptops. Previously they used fat binaries but with LLVM (which is Apple sponsored) there really is no need for them either.
Given that its for tablets with a touch UI. I doubt there's a huge demand for x86 software from the 1990s to run natively on such devices. Most of the apps they'll run are likely to be web-based with processing performed on the remote machine.
That depends. I can see the benefit of a tablet which has a touch screen UI while you're carrying it around but which reverts to a full desktop when you dock it.
As for apps, I doubt there are many enterprise orgs which don't have at least 1 application either thick client or browser based app with an ActiveX control or hardcoded IE6/7 dependencies in it. By ignoring reality Microsoft run a serious risk of alienating people most inclined to use the device.
I hope for Microsoft's sake that they're working on something akin to LLVM so that C++/C apps can be rebuilt in an architecture neutral manner. There really shouldn't be a need these days for most apps, with the exception of performance critical ones to really care what they're running on.
Bitcoin.org could be lawyered right off the face of the Earth and it wouldn't make any difference. You'd still be able to trade BTC for USD (or vice versa) with any of the thousands of other Bitcoin owners. It's all P2P, remember?
Good luck trying to get dollars for your bitcoins when every single other bitcoin owner is clamouring to exchange theirs too. If real governments started demanding taxes in real money from transactions made in bitcoins or went further and banned it completely that would be the end of it. The exchanges would close, no new currency would enter the system, nobody would trade in it any more. It would make schemes like liberty dollars look fiscally sound by comparison. At least a liberty dollar is made of precious metal which means if it were banned / outlawed you could still sell it even if you couldn't use it as currency for goods & services.
From what I can understand about BitCoin is that all the "easily mined" BTC is gone, and now you need a powerful GPU cluster to actually get anything substantial. It's analogous to the rivers and streams running out of easily panned gold, now the only people still being able to extract it are the large scale hydraulic mining operations who are able to invest in the machinery to get at the gold locked deep underground in the rock.
Well quite. There is little incentive for the individual to bother mining because it becomes prohibitively expensive over time in CPU power vs reward. Of course someone like Google or whatnot could probably write a hasher into their search results which did a couple of hashes in a web worker thread or similar and do it in a distributed fashion using other people's CPU. Who would stop them? Maybe some popular iPhone / Android apps could surreptitiously do the same too.
Point being it will be other people who benefit. They're the ones who'll hoard the bitcoins before selling up and getting the hell out while the going is good.
What exactly gives a Bitcoin its value? At least with a dollar, I can pay my taxes and not be imprisoned.
Bitcoins have great value if you operate a bitcoin exchange. People give you real dollars. You give them Disney dollars. When the system collapses, gets legislated out of existence, or gets hacked they're the ones holding worthless bits not you.
Mac and Windows offer considerably more config options than either Unity or GNOME 3.0. In both you can choose where your dock goes and also it's hide / show behaviour. Apple actually received a heap of criticism for its first incarnations of the dock and will-it/won't-it spatial behaviour and fixed it. It seems these two OS X wannabes didn't get the memo and are repeating the exact same mistakes.
Sorry you're right, I should have read it more carefully.
As for Blu Ray region locking, that is a function of the studios & distributors demanding it. Movie rights are hideously complex and some distributors use locking to stop movies from leaking outside the region they have rights to distribute into. This seems more prevalent on European / Art house movies than mainstream productions. Where issues don't exist, the movie is usually region free. The one exception is Disney and I suspect their reasoning for region locking has more to do with how they stagger releases. For example Tangled has been out in the US for a while but won't appear in Europe on DVD / BD until the end of May. As it happens virtually all Sony discs (with the exception of distribution issue ones) are region free.
In GNOME 3, even things like the default font are not configurable as are some of the other behaviours in the shell that should be.
Nintendo has had more region free gaming across the board than any other company they've competed again. Their portable systems never had any region locking which has allowed me and others to buy Gameboy and DS games from across the world. They did introduce region locking on the DSi download games but that is certainly no worse than MS or Sony.
PSP games weren't region locked and neither are virtually any PS3 games. IIRC one region locked title was a special edition of Stranglehold which had a copy of Hard Boiled the movie on it which had distribution issues. I'd add that you can purchase content from any region on PSN as well.
So it isn't the case they're better than Sony is, they're distinctly worse. Not to say Sony won't do the same thing in time with the NGP of course but I expect they'd create more problems than they'd solve by doing it.
There is easy way to test this clause. Take a picture of your balls in 3D and see if it turns up in any Nintendo promotional material.
The LLVM instruction set is somewhat analogous to the intermediate language RTL used by GCC. Each expresses a low level representation of the program which is subsequently translated into native instructions. The major difference is gcc generates the native code during a build while LLVM defers code generation until some time later, e.g. during installation or prior to first run execution. At the end of the day any platform which has an implementation of llc is going to execute the app at similar speeds to native code and it will be portable.
I also think it's the esoteric platforms which stand to gain the most from platform neutrality and that includes Linux. If PNaCl apps don't care what OS or architecture is running them then the OS / architecture can be anything. I could write an app, e.g. something which hits a database and it would work regardless of my users being on Linux, Windows, OS X or anything else. It would level the playing field and make networks far more heterogenous than they are now. At least in theory.
I also welcome Ubuntu upgrading to GNOME 3.0 on the basis that it motivates Ubuntu & GNOME to share tech and will probably work out better in the end when dists dump X and go to Wayland or similar.
Because end users hate it when they upgrade their OS only to find it doesn't look completely different
Unity is sound in theory, it's just the implementation which is crap. They took a shell primarily designed for tiny netbook screens and didn't put in the functionality that would make it useful on large screens. It's not configurable enough, the defaults are extremely annoying and the intent behind some functionality such as the bizarro Ubuntu expanding panel is just unfathomable. Click on the Ubuntu icon and you get a large panel with some huge icons. Click on the expand icon within this panel and it fills the full screen by making the icons supermassive. What the fuck is it for? The apps launching panel is also horrible, where before you had a nice hierarchical list of apps, now you must filter them to see what you want.
I hope for the next release they focus on a preference dialog that allows the position and hide behaviour of the dock to be configured in realtime, for the global menu to be disabled. As I said I think the concept is fine - GNOME 2 is looking long in the tooth and is wholly inappropriate for the transition to 3D and surface based windowing, but the implementation is just not there yet.
IMO GNOME 3.0 looks incredibly attractive by comparison. It's clear a lot of thought has gone into it. However it screws things up just as badly in its own way. Why is the dock on a separate screen that I have to do some Expose like stuff to access? Why can't I just drag and drop icons around like I could in the good old days and enjoy spatial and contextual functionality? Why did they see fit to remove (not just hide) the minimize / maximize buttons and force me to complete a drag operation on the window to the top where I used to just have to do a single click? Where are the configuration options?
I think GNOME 3.0 is more radical than Unity. I think both are on the right tracks to being useful desktops but its obvious they both need a lot of work. It would be nice if the projects would actually cooperate on things like infrastructure. People shouldn't be forced to take sides to have a useful desktop.
I'm quite aware what LLVM is. I was implying that a runtime could be written over LLVM that would allow Linux apps to compile and link and see the low level APIs they expect to see but instead of being compiled to a processor architecture they're compiled to bitcode. It means the userland could be running over pretty much anything at all, any OS, any architecture.
A LLVM based game doesn't even have to care if you're running X11 or not. It would just see OpenGL / OpenGL ES 2.0 API and some APIs for game controllers and that would be it. Behind the scenes the runtime would set things up in X or Windows or Aqua or whatnot and the game would be oblivious.
If you're making a beeline to another star system there won't be any stops along the way. I suppose a few asteroids or comets could be slung in the same direction as you're traveling to rendezvous en route but that implies they're decked out with rockets of their own and their trajectory is precisely timed to coincide along the route.
It's more habitable by not being 20 light years away and for being an extensively mapped and analysed planet. It's feasible (though not necessarily practical or economical) to send people to Mars and for them to live on the planet, albeit shielded from the environment in domes or heavy structures.
I doubt you're going to be mining asteroids unless the asteroid is going exactly the same direction and velocity as your own ship. Which sort of implies it set off at the same time as you too.
It doesn't even have to be the perfect solution, just comparable than what is there at present using less rules.
Welcome to 2011, 110% of you taxes and more goes directly to banks, and none of it gets spent on 'society'
You must have clicked submit too soon because you were about to explain how you have no publicly funded roads, bridges, air traffic control, police, army / navy / airforce, prisons, firefighters, justice system, schools, health care, welfare, parks & recreation facilities, sanitation or water supply where you live.
When you think about it, most user land applications should be targetting a virtual machine. If Linux shipped with an LLVM runtime, all the userland apps could be built the once regardless of hardware and they would execute against the runtime. Behind the scenes the runtime would compile and cache a native binary on first invocation but it would be completely seamless and transparent to the user. Performance would be exactly the same as if the app had been natively compiled in the first place. The runtime could even be ported to Windows or OS X or QNX or some funky hypervisor from VMWare / Redhat whatever and be running over PPC, MIPS, ARM, x86 and they'd still run. The potential for this is enormous.
I get a feeling that Apple will soon have native LLVM support in OS X in preparation for their move to ARM and it would not surprise me if Windows got some kind of analog too. Therefore I wonder if it's time for Linux to be considering likewise.