I don't understand why data is so hugely expensive in the US anyway. In Europe, you get unlimited data plans starting at EU 5/month (EU 25/month for unlimited 3.5G usage). Or you can buy 3G access day-by-day for EU 2.50/day. Some plans have international data roaming caps anywhere within Europe at EU 15/day.
Seriously, though: having lived in Europe and the US, I have to say: while privacy and liberty is out of fashion everywhere, the US is still one of the freest nations on earth. The US is getting so much bad press because Americans complain about laws and government actions that pass without much controversy in other nations.
Because there is no survival imperative requiring us to do so.
There is, for 80% of the world's population.
We'd rather use the bulky low tech solution than put a lot of effort into making a more compact and efficient solution unless it gives us dramatically better results/is the only way we can survive.
Numerous societies in earth's history have exterminated themselves despite having plenty of solutions available.
Furthermore, Titan and Mars are so dramatically more hostile than anything on Earth that anything that you can do on those planets to survive would be really easy to do Earth.
But we simply do not know any cheaper way of making energy than by burning coal. Wind and solar may become competitive, but they require a huge infrastructure just to produce the necessary equipment. How are you going to get the semiconductor foundries, mining, etc. on Mars or Titan? Who is going to feed the millions of people necessary?
People already go into a tizzy here when the price of eggs or apples goes up slightly, and they almost produce themselves.
Mac OS wasn't ahead of its time, it was behind the times--way behind the times.
When Mac OS came out, people at Xerox already had developed Smalltalk, a system that's like Objective-C and Cocoa, only better and complete with graphical, interactive development tools, code browsers, and version control. There were several other companies around at the time doing really great things.
Those other systems would have run fine on Mac 512k hardware. The reason Apple won was because they managed to squeeze out a low-end 128k system a couple of years earlier and kill off the competition. The long term consequence was that we were saddled with Apple's horrible toolbox (and Microsoft's even more horrible imitation) instead of programming in something like Cocoa two decades ago.
Yeah, that would be the decade when Jobs was out of Apple
You like OS X and Cocoa? That was the kind of platform that Xerox PARC had developed in the 1970's, only what PARC had was even easier to develop for and better integrated.
Jobs ripped off the appearance and functionality of PARC's systems, but none of the elegant underlying architecture. The result was the Macintosh and its assembly language toolboxes. It gave Apple a quick time to market, driving out of business all the companies with better designs, but left them with a lousy architectural legacy.
Jobs then left and ripped off PARC again, this time with NeXT. NeXT copied more of PARC's software architecture (although he still didn't quite get it right). That then became OS X and Cocoa.
And these days, we have to listen to how Jobs supposedly revolutionized the computer industry. But if Apple hadn't ripped off PARC in the 1980's, we could have had other companies ship the equivalent of OS X and Cocoa in the late 80's/early 90's instead of Apple shipping it a decade later.
Such an idea is right at home in a country like China, but surely it flies in the face of the idea that "all men are created equal".
I don't see the contradiction. Why should I, as an organ donor, not be able to determine who my body parts go to? What moral right does some bureaucracy have to determine what happens to my body parts? What right do you have to view my body parts as a natural resource? And if I want to sell my liver to the highest bidder after my death, why not?
He created jobs, but there may have been an opportunity cost in all the companies that Apple drove out of business and all the things that didn't happen because Apple occupies the market niche that they occupy.
Apple is not a big employer, they outsource a lot overseas, and Apple actually invests very little in basic research compared to other companies. Technologically, the limitations of the MacOS architecture (and its Microsoft imitations) held back the industry for at least a decade.
On balance, Jobs may have been a net negative for the economy and jobs relative to other alternatives.
Why does this in particular make you angry? How is a liver transplant different from any other kind of comfort or security you can buy with money?
Furthermore, what Jobs bought here is well within the reach of many middle class families. It's not like he bought the liver itself (which he could well have done, legally even, by going outside the country).
I think Unison is probably still the best tool for bidirectional sync of directory trees. Unfortunately, it's written in OCAML. In principle, OCAML is a nice language, but Unison is written in a pretty awful style, and, more importantly, the whole thing is kind of hard to port.
What exactly is a "tech grad"? A student with a degree in computer science? Is a university computer science education now supposed to be job training for the tech industry?
I wouldn't consider Android's choice of a new and incompatible graphics toolkit to be "innovation". Android could have easily been built on top of existing approaches. What Google's choice did mean was faster time-to-market and lower overhead interacting with other developers. That's a mixed blessing because it may also hurt the mobile Linux market big time.
Also, Android is good for gimmicky web applications and E-mail clients, but anything involving native code is a PITA. That may well come back to haunt the platform in the long term.
I think that if Android is going to have a long-term future, it's probably going to get an X server one way or another: either the existing Android UI is going to be put on top of X, or it's going to get an X server like Weird X that allows regular Linux applications to run on it.
I don't see anything forward looking about creating a stripped down X server that is incompatible with tens of thousands of applications. You may not use X11's old 2D graphics functions, but a lot of people still are. And a lot of people still will be using them for decades to come. Supporting them isn't hard and doesn't need to take a lot of code. If you want to do some good, help clean up the X11 codebase, don't start from scratch with something that, when all is said and done, will do less than the current X11 server.
X is architecturally inferior to WindowServer and Windows' display layer for desktop-oriented tasks. A simplified windowing system that puts graphics first and drops the cruft would go a long way in making linux seem modern and easy to maintain.
The graphics subsystem in Windows is a frame buffer graphics library poorly retrofitted for asynchronous calls. X was designed from the start for asynchronous client/server communications and operation in a separate "window server". X got it right 20 years ago. After two decades and several rewrites, both Microsoft and Apple have finally arrived at an X-like architecture.
There are some parts of X that aren't being used much and where desktops like Gnome have their own systems (e.g., Gnome configuration data and DBUS communication). The solutions adopted by the desktops are generally still inferior to the original X mechanisms.
If anything should change, it's that people should take a good hard look at Gnome and KDE and get rid of some of their windows-inspired cruft and replace it with better X-based solutions. This may involve an overhaul of some X mechanisms (X properties and events probably aren't up to the demands of a modern desktop, but that's fixable), but the principles and approaches embodied by X are superior to the "single user desktop PC" view of Windows and its clones.
I don't know about KDE, but Ubuntu's version of Gnome has been making steady progress: no radical changes, but improvements over time. My (non-technical) family has not complained (and often barely noticed) when I have upgraded their machines.
Compared to Ubuntu, Windows and Macintosh both have been making more radical changes in theming, and even more significant changes in the interface itself. With Vista, for example, Microsoft changed networking dialog and the entire system preferences in confusing ways.
Ubuntu Gnome has been making steady progress: small, user-visible changes and significant improvements behind the scenes. That's the way desktops should evolve. Microsoft and Apple: take notice.
If there is no native code in Sothink, then it's effectively source-available. So, the only question is one of license. But if it incorporates GPL code, it automatically falls under the GPL.
All the reports about Green Dam I have read have said that computers only need to "ship with" it. In fact, some reports said that it was OK for manufacturers to just stick a CD in the package. That doesn't mean people are required to use it, merely that they have the software available if they want to.
So, what's the deal? Are PCs merely required to "ship with" the software, or are they required to install it? Are are people required to use it?
Germans are pretty conservative and mainstream and I don't see something called a "pirate party" succeeding.
Germany has a liberal party (FDP) that stands for smaller government and more personal freedoms; they also opposed this law. And they have mainstream appeal. It would seem to me that they would be a better choice to join than the "pirate party".
After twenty years of Microsoft corrupting the industry and colluding with other companies to place their products, how can anybody take such statements seriously? Nvidia has strong ties to Microsoft, and when Microsoft tells them to jump, they simply ask "how high".
Personally, I think Android is not a very good choice for netbooks; Ubuntu Netbook edition is a much better choice. But Windows CE wouldn't even make my list of a usable netbook operating system.
That's a specifically American obsession. In Europe, for $30/mo, you get:
- up to 4 SIM cards that you can use with whatever device you want - tethering, no tethering, smart phone, dumb phone, modem, whatever - 5G of data at high speed, unlimited at GPRS speeds - speeds up to 7 Mbps in metropolitan areas (yes, for real)
I think a lot of these bogus patent filings from Microsoft simply show that the people at Microsoft have not the slightest idea of what is going on in the real world. Microsoft is designing software for the last century. Even Bing is merely a Google clone.
Granted the system is full of abuse, but at least this one is well intentioned and could save a life.
A patent means that fewer companies can implement the technique than if Apple hadn't applied for a patent. So, in fact, this is saying "screw you and die" to non-iPhone users.
You should not talk so authoritatively when you are so obviously ignorant of the subject.
Funny, neither should you.
Like you point out, there is lot of bad hardware out there. What you overlook is that existing filesystems have no facilities to catch, much less correct such errors or corruption; that is why it is called silent data corruption.
I don't "overlook" that at all; since that's what real-world hardware is like, real-world fault tolerant software needs to deal with it.
Those improvements will only allow the possibility to recover to a consistent state, but data will still be lost.
Data that doesn't ever get written will obviously be lost. However, it appears that ZFS problems with such hardware go beyond that.
Python doesn't "do it that way" any more than Matlab or Fortran does. Python has many different ways of solving linear systems; if you choose to use inv(A)*b, that's your business. The PEP in question was a discussion whether Python should get a "\" operator.
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I don't understand why data is so hugely expensive in the US anyway. In Europe, you get unlimited data plans starting at EU 5/month (EU 25/month for unlimited 3.5G usage). Or you can buy 3G access day-by-day for EU 2.50/day. Some plans have international data roaming caps anywhere within Europe at EU 15/day.
Obviously, you should move to Somalia.
Seriously, though: having lived in Europe and the US, I have to say: while privacy and liberty is out of fashion everywhere, the US is still one of the freest nations on earth. The US is getting so much bad press because Americans complain about laws and government actions that pass without much controversy in other nations.
Not the industry, the economy.
How has Microsoft been good for the economy? By increasing the cost of doing business?
And yes, at least if you look at how many people they employ, their activity and the consequences.
Microsoft doesn't employ a lot of people relative to their revenue. If all companies were like Microsoft, we'd be in trouble.
Because there is no survival imperative requiring us to do so.
There is, for 80% of the world's population.
We'd rather use the bulky low tech solution than put a lot of effort into making a more compact and efficient solution unless it gives us dramatically better results/is the only way we can survive.
Numerous societies in earth's history have exterminated themselves despite having plenty of solutions available.
Furthermore, Titan and Mars are so dramatically more hostile than anything on Earth that anything that you can do on those planets to survive would be really easy to do Earth.
But we simply do not know any cheaper way of making energy than by burning coal. Wind and solar may become competitive, but they require a huge infrastructure just to produce the necessary equipment. How are you going to get the semiconductor foundries, mining, etc. on Mars or Titan? Who is going to feed the millions of people necessary?
People already go into a tizzy here when the price of eggs or apples goes up slightly, and they almost produce themselves.
Mac OS wasn't ahead of its time, it was behind the times--way behind the times.
When Mac OS came out, people at Xerox already had developed Smalltalk, a system that's like Objective-C and Cocoa, only better and complete with graphical, interactive development tools, code browsers, and version control. There were several other companies around at the time doing really great things.
Those other systems would have run fine on Mac 512k hardware. The reason Apple won was because they managed to squeeze out a low-end 128k system a couple of years earlier and kill off the competition. The long term consequence was that we were saddled with Apple's horrible toolbox (and Microsoft's even more horrible imitation) instead of programming in something like Cocoa two decades ago.
Yeah, that would be the decade when Jobs was out of Apple
You like OS X and Cocoa? That was the kind of platform that Xerox PARC had developed in the 1970's, only what PARC had was even easier to develop for and better integrated.
Jobs ripped off the appearance and functionality of PARC's systems, but none of the elegant underlying architecture. The result was the Macintosh and its assembly language toolboxes. It gave Apple a quick time to market, driving out of business all the companies with better designs, but left them with a lousy architectural legacy.
Jobs then left and ripped off PARC again, this time with NeXT. NeXT copied more of PARC's software architecture (although he still didn't quite get it right). That then became OS X and Cocoa.
And these days, we have to listen to how Jobs supposedly revolutionized the computer industry. But if Apple hadn't ripped off PARC in the 1980's, we could have had other companies ship the equivalent of OS X and Cocoa in the late 80's/early 90's instead of Apple shipping it a decade later.
That's what you should feel anger at.
Pfft yeah right. You can spin it as hard as you just tried that's just not holding up.
So, if Apple/Jobs was good for the industry, then Microsoft must have been a ten times as good, right? I don't think so.
I've known and used Apple since the 70's. The company has done a lot of evil things over the years and killed a lot of innovation.
Such an idea is right at home in a country like China, but surely it flies in the face of the idea that "all men are created equal".
I don't see the contradiction. Why should I, as an organ donor, not be able to determine who my body parts go to? What moral right does some bureaucracy have to determine what happens to my body parts? What right do you have to view my body parts as a natural resource? And if I want to sell my liver to the highest bidder after my death, why not?
He's created jobs, lots of them
He created jobs, but there may have been an opportunity cost in all the companies that Apple drove out of business and all the things that didn't happen because Apple occupies the market niche that they occupy.
Apple is not a big employer, they outsource a lot overseas, and Apple actually invests very little in basic research compared to other companies. Technologically, the limitations of the MacOS architecture (and its Microsoft imitations) held back the industry for at least a decade.
On balance, Jobs may have been a net negative for the economy and jobs relative to other alternatives.
Life just is not fair.
Why does this in particular make you angry? How is a liver transplant different from any other kind of comfort or security you can buy with money?
Furthermore, what Jobs bought here is well within the reach of many middle class families. It's not like he bought the liver itself (which he could well have done, legally even, by going outside the country).
I think Unison is probably still the best tool for bidirectional sync of directory trees. Unfortunately, it's written in OCAML. In principle, OCAML is a nice language, but Unison is written in a pretty awful style, and, more importantly, the whole thing is kind of hard to port.
What exactly is a "tech grad"? A student with a degree in computer science? Is a university computer science education now supposed to be job training for the tech industry?
I wouldn't consider Android's choice of a new and incompatible graphics toolkit to be "innovation". Android could have easily been built on top of existing approaches. What Google's choice did mean was faster time-to-market and lower overhead interacting with other developers. That's a mixed blessing because it may also hurt the mobile Linux market big time.
Also, Android is good for gimmicky web applications and E-mail clients, but anything involving native code is a PITA. That may well come back to haunt the platform in the long term.
I think that if Android is going to have a long-term future, it's probably going to get an X server one way or another: either the existing Android UI is going to be put on top of X, or it's going to get an X server like Weird X that allows regular Linux applications to run on it.
Support forward-thinking projects like Wayland
I don't see anything forward looking about creating a stripped down X server that is incompatible with tens of thousands of applications. You may not use X11's old 2D graphics functions, but a lot of people still are. And a lot of people still will be using them for decades to come. Supporting them isn't hard and doesn't need to take a lot of code. If you want to do some good, help clean up the X11 codebase, don't start from scratch with something that, when all is said and done, will do less than the current X11 server.
X is architecturally inferior to WindowServer and Windows' display layer for desktop-oriented tasks. A simplified windowing system that puts graphics first and drops the cruft would go a long way in making linux seem modern and easy to maintain.
The graphics subsystem in Windows is a frame buffer graphics library poorly retrofitted for asynchronous calls. X was designed from the start for asynchronous client/server communications and operation in a separate "window server". X got it right 20 years ago. After two decades and several rewrites, both Microsoft and Apple have finally arrived at an X-like architecture.
There are some parts of X that aren't being used much and where desktops like Gnome have their own systems (e.g., Gnome configuration data and DBUS communication). The solutions adopted by the desktops are generally still inferior to the original X mechanisms.
If anything should change, it's that people should take a good hard look at Gnome and KDE and get rid of some of their windows-inspired cruft and replace it with better X-based solutions. This may involve an overhaul of some X mechanisms (X properties and events probably aren't up to the demands of a modern desktop, but that's fixable), but the principles and approaches embodied by X are superior to the "single user desktop PC" view of Windows and its clones.
I don't know about KDE, but Ubuntu's version of Gnome has been making steady progress: no radical changes, but improvements over time. My (non-technical) family has not complained (and often barely noticed) when I have upgraded their machines.
Compared to Ubuntu, Windows and Macintosh both have been making more radical changes in theming, and even more significant changes in the interface itself. With Vista, for example, Microsoft changed networking dialog and the entire system preferences in confusing ways.
Ubuntu Gnome has been making steady progress: small, user-visible changes and significant improvements behind the scenes. That's the way desktops should evolve. Microsoft and Apple: take notice.
If there is no native code in Sothink, then it's effectively source-available. So, the only question is one of license. But if it incorporates GPL code, it automatically falls under the GPL.
All the reports about Green Dam I have read have said that computers only need to "ship with" it. In fact, some reports said that it was OK for manufacturers to just stick a CD in the package. That doesn't mean people are required to use it, merely that they have the software available if they want to.
So, what's the deal? Are PCs merely required to "ship with" the software, or are they required to install it? Are are people required to use it?
Germans are pretty conservative and mainstream and I don't see something called a "pirate party" succeeding.
Germany has a liberal party (FDP) that stands for smaller government and more personal freedoms; they also opposed this law. And they have mainstream appeal. It would seem to me that they would be a better choice to join than the "pirate party".
After twenty years of Microsoft corrupting the industry and colluding with other companies to place their products, how can anybody take such statements seriously? Nvidia has strong ties to Microsoft, and when Microsoft tells them to jump, they simply ask "how high".
Personally, I think Android is not a very good choice for netbooks; Ubuntu Netbook edition is a much better choice. But Windows CE wouldn't even make my list of a usable netbook operating system.
That's a specifically American obsession. In Europe, for $30/mo, you get:
- up to 4 SIM cards that you can use with whatever device you want
- tethering, no tethering, smart phone, dumb phone, modem, whatever
- 5G of data at high speed, unlimited at GPRS speeds
- speeds up to 7 Mbps in metropolitan areas (yes, for real)
I think a lot of these bogus patent filings from Microsoft simply show that the people at Microsoft have not the slightest idea of what is going on in the real world. Microsoft is designing software for the last century. Even Bing is merely a Google clone.
Granted the system is full of abuse, but at least this one is well intentioned and could save a life.
A patent means that fewer companies can implement the technique than if Apple hadn't applied for a patent. So, in fact, this is saying "screw you and die" to non-iPhone users.
You should not talk so authoritatively when you are so obviously ignorant of the subject.
Funny, neither should you.
Like you point out, there is lot of bad hardware out there. What you overlook is that existing filesystems have no facilities to catch, much less correct such errors or corruption; that is why it is called silent data corruption.
I don't "overlook" that at all; since that's what real-world hardware is like, real-world fault tolerant software needs to deal with it.
Those improvements will only allow the possibility to recover to a consistent state, but data will still be lost.
Data that doesn't ever get written will obviously be lost. However, it appears that ZFS problems with such hardware go beyond that.
Python doesn't "do it that way" any more than Matlab or Fortran does. Python has many different ways of solving linear systems; if you choose to use inv(A)*b, that's your business. The PEP in question was a discussion whether Python should get a "\" operator.