Seriously, based on the article Oracle probably could have chosen to go all copyright infringement lawsuit-happy on every Linux vendor known to man. But instead they relicensed the old code under a free license...*checks the temperature in Hell*
Oracle not being evil? Yeah, I tried to check the temperature down there, too. Unfortunately, all of my equipment loses too much precision in the microkelvin range.
It's something that people got accustomed to, and if you want them to switch, then you need to offer them similar appearance , at least. Out of all this pile of computer users, a very low percentage are technical enough or interested enough to care about the Linux Window Manager's superiority. Roughly, they don't give a rat's ass on that. They don't want more efficient guts, they want the pretty. And Linux window managers rarely provide "the pretty" - they provide the "not unbearably ugly" interface instead.
I've never understood why there is so much focus on getting Windows users to comfortably switch. I see no inherent value in making an OS that makes Windows users feel at home because there is already an OS that does that. It's called Windows. If Windows users really want something that they find extremely familiar, they can buy another copy of Windows. Frankly, I think that the basic assumption that attracting Windows users is inherently valuable has been harmful to the Linux community because it basically implies an effort to spend time and effort creating something worse that would be created if most people just said "F- Windows. Let's just create something awesome without regard for familiarity for users of some other software in some other conceptual ecosystem." Obviously, if whoever made the Win7 theme in the article thinks it's cool, then more power to him. The Open Source Way is alla bout people doing stuff they find interesting. OTOH, I think that the KDE project with their "parts" and whatnot have been trying to invent some reallyc ool stuff that I personally find much more interesting.
Having participated in the first of the Student Cluster Challenges at SC07 when I was still in undergrad, I can attest that there's far more to this than what the summary lets on. Not only are you limited to 26 Amps, which is the significant limiting factor, but you're located on the show floor and running your system for 36 hours straight in front of the conference attendees. Moreover, all hardware must be in production and unmodified and fit within a single rack. The Taiwanese team lucked out in this regard as they were using the (then new) 45nm Intel Xeons that were announced the day before the competition started. The only thing you can modify is the code for the programs you have to run (except for the HPC benchmarks).
The "unmodified, in production" seems kind of confusing to me. At that point, it sort of seems like a competition of who can buy the nicest hardware, rather than coming up withs something clever and new. Still, sounds like it would be a fun competition.
And, it seems like the "1 rack" limitation would be hard for most teams to stretch to the limit, with only 3 kW. Does anybody actually get anywhere near filling up the whole rack?
So with that Logicl, If I install Java/Qt to Windows so they run over NT operating system, the software system is not anymore Windows can not be counted to be using NT operating system, because I can run Qt/Java software while "official" Windows and NT version what it use, can not run them.
If you fiddle with the boot process so that it goes straight into a Java/Qt shell, and users can only run your Java/Qt apps, and you can swap out the kernel without users ever noticing the difference because no native apps are allowed to run, wouldn't it be really misleading to market such a device as a Windows computer?
Back in the days of Linux on 68k Macs, you used to need to boot partly into Mac OS 7.x, hit a bootloader system extension, and then switch to booting Linux. Once booted into Linux, applications had no way to know that Mac OS had been running, but Linux was sort of like a Mac OS Application. Would one count the machine as running Mac OS or Linux?
My modern Linux box boots via grub. Grub has to load Linux. Again, apps can't know or care about the fact that grub was running before Linux. This seems analogous to the days of Win 3.1 which loaded via DOS. Yet, we said that the Windows machines (despite running a multitasking 32 bit kernel that I think was remarkably complex for the day) were running DOS as the OS, and my modern machine is running Linux as the OS. The line can be incredibly fuzzy at certain points.
IMO, Dalvik is a Linux App, but it is entirely debatable if Android makes sense to think of as a Linux OS. It's in a grey are between apps/users can't know about the kernel, and apps/users have to know about the kernel. Native code is allowed, but it requires a special bytecode entrypoint to be able to run the native code. Kind of like if you could embed Win32 code in an NES ROM so that the game could break out of the emulator and display additional windows when you run it on a PC. Neither just Windows nor a plain hardware NES would be able to start and fully run such a game.
Somewhere in the same spectrum of arguments is a TIVO. It runs a Linux kernel, but that fact doesn't tell you anything interesting about what you can do with the device.
So historically speaking there is a notion of "scope" or "reach" (as typified by "long arm of the law"). As we get more technology, it becomes easier to become a victim of government. Even if they don't act on what they know about you (cost-benefit) they can still use it at a later date. Most of us I am sure have some unflattering FBI files, collected opportunistically. Drunken Facebook postings and blog posts, its all there to be compiled and added to your dossier...
Whenever there is a scope, there is scope-creep.
It's as true in government as it is with development. The general rule of thumb is that any branch of government will eventually grow until it can send mail... Or something like that.
Look at his first reply, about the cat possibly being lying injured somewhere - what a pointlessy cruel and horrible thing to say. The owner of the cat is most likely upset enough without this moron winding her up with a comment along the lines of "oh hahaha isn't it funny, your cat is probably lying hurt and needing help lol". No, it's not funny. I get the idea that he's trying to hit back at people trying to "waste his time" by asking him to do freebies. So, why did he waste over a day tormenting the owner of the missing cat?
What a noxious little prick.
Yeah, I don't like cats at all, but I think a better answer was just "No. I have too much other stuff going on right now to be able to help. Good luck." The cat owner obviously thought he was actually going to help her, and that's just cruel. When somebody is genuinely scared and worried and you decide it would be amusing to be a jackass, the last thing you should want to do is post proof of it on the internet showing just how mean you were.
I pay the airline, and the airline pays the airport, the fuel service, etc. The airline owes me if they don't deliver me to my destination on time; if it is somebody else's fault, the airline can go after their suppliers, vendors, etc. to recoup their costs (presumably they have that type of thing in their contracts).
Yeah. If my rent is late, my landlord has an issue with me. It doesn't matter if I got paid, or if my paycheck bounced, or if it has been a slow quarter for sales of the new FooBar 2000. The landlord doesn't have to sue my boss, or the HR department, or the customers who aren't buying our product, or my company's landlord who took all their money for rent. My landlord only has a problem with me. I may then have to sue the company where I work in order to get compensation for the fact that my paycheck bounced and it resulted in my landlord suing me.
If the airport promised the airline a working tower, then the airline can sue them. If the airline promised me a flight, I can sue them. I really don't think we should have all these special aristocracy-style exceptions in the law for specific types of corporations. The airline could operate their own fueling hardware and invest in a backup tower if they didn't trust the existing infrastructure. The decision not to do that was by the management, and they sure as hell aren't deities. Regardless of what the law says.
Of course it has worse compression...but "a really huge bitrate for lousy quality" goes too far. DV is, in its essence, very similar to MJPEG (the latter probably slightly better usually) - is DV really "lousy quality"? And with a "really huge bitrate" MJPEG might be really fine for most stuff.
That's beside the point of curse how it is on its way out; perhaps except in Nikon cameras, so far.
Don't get me wrong - there's a time and a place for MJPEG. But, DV is on of the trivially easy examples for showing how much better modern technologies perform, considering that HDV works in exactly the same bitrate and tape format, and squashes a *lot* more pixels into the image. HDV isn't even particularly modern technology -- just more modern than DV. When you eliminate tape's need for a constant bitrate and move to a modern file based workflow, many of the AVCHD devices pathologically conpress full 1080p HD into a much lower bitrate than DV while looking just fine for most uses. Seriously, if the AVCHD devices used a bitrate as high as DV, the quality of the output would start to compete with the more expensive professional gear.
Though, the real future is in something like RedcodeRaw. A codec that focuses on being very good at storing sample data from the sensor is one thing that apparently hasn't been much explored in open standards, but it would offer the best performance. When somebody comes out with a DSLR that shoots video in a high bitrate, well-documented sensor-oriented format, they'll own a lot of production overnight.
The right to keep and bear arms is in the Constitution, the right to get drunk or high is not.
The fact that Congress doesn't have the authority to damage the right to bear arms is explicitly in the Constitution. The fact that the Congress doesn't have any authority not expressly granted to it is also in the Constitution. The fact that drugs aren't specifically mentioned does not automatically imply that the Congress has authority in that area.
Maybe I'm missing something, but unless the 6-core system is clocked slower than the 4-core one, the 6-core system should outperform it easily in all tasks.
In practice, chips with more cores are almost always going to be avalable at a lower clock speed than those with fewer cores. 12 Core chips currently top out at like 2.2 GHz, for example.
Try it some time. I picketed a computer store that took a $300 deposit on a $3,000 computer, with a promised delivery date, missed the date, then admitted they couldn't deliver it and wanted to make substitutions, and wouldn't refund the money. I handed out flyers to every customer who walked in the door. They called the cops. I told the cops I was exercising my constitutional right to free speech and wasn't impeding people from entering or exiting. They called their supervisor - who turned out to have had a similar bad experience with that store. Got the refund within the hour.
Sounds kind of like a place I used to work. I even heard about a guy picketing in front of one of our locations during the period I worked there. Good for you, they probably deserved it.
Not to mention that Moore's Law would cause runaway inflation. And wouldn't people with access to supercomputers (University profs and students) become disproportionately wealthy?
Yes, in exactly the same way that people who buy heavy mining equipment and land in mineral rich areas are disproportionately wealthy. Supercomputers don't just magically appear, and nobody gets them on accident. They can invest in supercomputers and "mine" virtual currency and hope that the payoff is enough to justify buying the supercomputer.
What they SHOULD be doing is generating currency by doing computational WORK for another node that will act as an employer. The currency can be in denominations of estimated processor cycles or whatever. Valuation is the big issue. There are still a lot of issues to work out, but at least it would make more sense than just burning cycles to create arbitrary crypto tokens.
But, then what does the "employer" pay with? If the only medium of exchange is barter of CPU cycles, then the employer would have to work on some problem the employee needs computed while the employee works on some problem the employer needs computed. The two sides could just work on their own problem to exactly the same accomplishment. By generating some arbitrary medium of exchange, you can increase the liquidity of a market, which is basically zero in a barter system with only a single good. Without some liquid capital to get things moving at the start, you don't have anything interesting happening.
Nokia, on the other hand, bought Symbian which at the time was mostly a feature phone OS, introduced Maemo which used GTK, then acquired Trolltech which was Qt, then ported Qt to Maemo and dropped GTK, then started porting Qt to next version of Symbian, then dropped Maemo and started work on Meego. Now, what next?
You are over thinking it. The issue of GTK vs. Qt on Maemo is just like on Desktop Linux. App developer can use whichever they want, and most users won't be able to tell the difference. It's like on Windows with Win32 API vs. MFC. The users never cared, and Win32 wasn't "dropped" when MS was pushing MFC. If you want, you can write raw Xlib calls for Maemo.
As for dropping Maemo, and working on Meego, the two are so similar that it won't matter to most people. The only significant change is that devs will need to package with.rpm's instead of.deb's. They can continue to use either Qt or GTK, or raw Xlib, or WX or whatever they want for writing apps. Qt is, and continues to be, an API with excellent cross platform support, so you can naturally write an app using Qt and make it work on Windows, OS-X, desktop Linux, Maemo, Meego, Symbian, Android (slightly inconvenient since you would need a small Java loader to execute the native Qt app, but that's not a big deal. The android port is admittedly still very immature.)
I don't know if you've noticed this, but the capabilities of technology tend to filter done the price scale rather quickly. 2010's $500 device is 2012's $100 device is 2014's "get two free when you switch to our network" device. It won't be long before just about every phone for sale is a smart phone.
By one standard, almost every phone sold today already is a smart phone. Somewhere along the line, a funny thing happened, and "Smartphone" got redefined to only refer to the highest end phones available at the moment, with what would have been a smartphone the year before now being called something like a "Featurephone."
There will always be some sort of market for high end $500+ devices, but as you point out, it'll just get harder and harder to justify spending that much on a mobile device when the lesser, cheaper models can do so much.
I have never owned or even driven one save for a golf cart. My experience with the golf cart leaves me doubt as to whether an electric car can deliver enough torque to climb steep inclines.
My experience with graphing calculators leaves me doubt as to whether a multisocket server is capable of hosting a website.
It's also funny when a man kicks a man in the genitals, or when a monkey does it. Generally, comedy isn't harmed by danger, unless the audience perceives the dangers as being directed towards them. With the right (flat, serious) delivery, the following dialog can also be hilarious on stage:
"Well, Mr. Johnson, I have bad news. The cancer has returned, and you only have seven days left to live. I'd suggest going and having a good time for your last days, but you are of course expected in court next week to defend yourself against the claims of emotional distress filed by all the people who violently raped you."
That sort of thing shouldn't be funny, but it really is. We are a terrible species, and probably deserve to have a monkey kick us in the balls.
I want video-capable screen update times, full and vibrant color under all types of lighting conditions that I could otherwise comfortably read a normal book in, and not have the requirement that under any of them I might have to feel like I'm reading while staring into a flashlight.
Basically, it sounds like you are asking for a reflective color display with no backlight. They exist, but they aren't particularly popular, so it'll be very expensive. Most people are used to having to adjust a lamp to be able to read a book, but expect to be able to see their laptop screen in cases where reading a book wouldn't be particularly convenient.
the interface has not been "fixed" because there is nothing wrong with it in the first place, the window behavior is unintuitive and annoying on microsoft windows because despite it's name, windows has really shitty window management.
Except that on X, the interesting Windows Managers we had ten years ago have mostly given way to WM's that have gone out of heir way to be similar to Windows behaviors in many ways in order to be more familiar to people who are used to Windows.
Just because a design decision was 100% correct ten years ago, doesn't mean it can't be re-evaluated today. (P.S. Classic Windows style MDI sucks harder than current GIMP. Don't do that to 'fix' things!)
Meh. The dad was borderline. He told the kid it wasn't going to last forever. He made sure the kid didn't stick his fingers in his mouth to bother the dental work. He explained that it was because of the medicine. It's also quite possible that all of this was explained to the kid repeatedly before the video, and he just wasn't in a state where repeating it was going to make it sink in. The day could certainly have been a little more sensitive, and I'm sure a lot of people out there could have done a better job of keeping the kid happy. But, I can't really fault the guy.
What market? Comcast was given a government-granted monopoly inside Detroit. No other company can provide cable TV. No choice == no free market
The hilarious thing is that the only real question is *which* government granted Comcast the current monopoly in Detroit. Was it the city or the State... Oddly, there is a market. It's levels of governments competing to offer the best deal to the company.
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Oracle not being evil? Yeah, I tried to check the temperature down there, too. Unfortunately, all of my equipment loses too much precision in the microkelvin range.
I've never understood why there is so much focus on getting Windows users to comfortably switch. I see no inherent value in making an OS that makes Windows users feel at home because there is already an OS that does that. It's called Windows. If Windows users really want something that they find extremely familiar, they can buy another copy of Windows. Frankly, I think that the basic assumption that attracting Windows users is inherently valuable has been harmful to the Linux community because it basically implies an effort to spend time and effort creating something worse that would be created if most people just said "F- Windows. Let's just create something awesome without regard for familiarity for users of some other software in some other conceptual ecosystem." Obviously, if whoever made the Win7 theme in the article thinks it's cool, then more power to him. The Open Source Way is alla bout people doing stuff they find interesting. OTOH, I think that the KDE project with their "parts" and whatnot have been trying to invent some reallyc ool stuff that I personally find much more interesting.
The "unmodified, in production" seems kind of confusing to me. At that point, it sort of seems like a competition of who can buy the nicest hardware, rather than coming up withs something clever and new. Still, sounds like it would be a fun competition.
And, it seems like the "1 rack" limitation would be hard for most teams to stretch to the limit, with only 3 kW. Does anybody actually get anywhere near filling up the whole rack?
and guys who want to take out a hit on the burglars!
It all sort of balances out.
If you fiddle with the boot process so that it goes straight into a Java/Qt shell, and users can only run your Java/Qt apps, and you can swap out the kernel without users ever noticing the difference because no native apps are allowed to run, wouldn't it be really misleading to market such a device as a Windows computer?
Back in the days of Linux on 68k Macs, you used to need to boot partly into Mac OS 7.x, hit a bootloader system extension, and then switch to booting Linux. Once booted into Linux, applications had no way to know that Mac OS had been running, but Linux was sort of like a Mac OS Application. Would one count the machine as running Mac OS or Linux?
My modern Linux box boots via grub. Grub has to load Linux. Again, apps can't know or care about the fact that grub was running before Linux. This seems analogous to the days of Win 3.1 which loaded via DOS. Yet, we said that the Windows machines (despite running a multitasking 32 bit kernel that I think was remarkably complex for the day) were running DOS as the OS, and my modern machine is running Linux as the OS. The line can be incredibly fuzzy at certain points.
IMO, Dalvik is a Linux App, but it is entirely debatable if Android makes sense to think of as a Linux OS. It's in a grey are between apps/users can't know about the kernel, and apps/users have to know about the kernel. Native code is allowed, but it requires a special bytecode entrypoint to be able to run the native code. Kind of like if you could embed Win32 code in an NES ROM so that the game could break out of the emulator and display additional windows when you run it on a PC. Neither just Windows nor a plain hardware NES would be able to start and fully run such a game.
Somewhere in the same spectrum of arguments is a TIVO. It runs a Linux kernel, but that fact doesn't tell you anything interesting about what you can do with the device.
Wax expectations always seem to melt away once you become more familiar with the subject.
Whenever there is a scope, there is scope-creep.
It's as true in government as it is with development. The general rule of thumb is that any branch of government will eventually grow until it can send mail... Or something like that.
Yeah, I don't like cats at all, but I think a better answer was just "No. I have too much other stuff going on right now to be able to help. Good luck." The cat owner obviously thought he was actually going to help her, and that's just cruel. When somebody is genuinely scared and worried and you decide it would be amusing to be a jackass, the last thing you should want to do is post proof of it on the internet showing just how mean you were.
Yeah. If my rent is late, my landlord has an issue with me. It doesn't matter if I got paid, or if my paycheck bounced, or if it has been a slow quarter for sales of the new FooBar 2000. The landlord doesn't have to sue my boss, or the HR department, or the customers who aren't buying our product, or my company's landlord who took all their money for rent. My landlord only has a problem with me. I may then have to sue the company where I work in order to get compensation for the fact that my paycheck bounced and it resulted in my landlord suing me.
If the airport promised the airline a working tower, then the airline can sue them. If the airline promised me a flight, I can sue them. I really don't think we should have all these special aristocracy-style exceptions in the law for specific types of corporations. The airline could operate their own fueling hardware and invest in a backup tower if they didn't trust the existing infrastructure. The decision not to do that was by the management, and they sure as hell aren't deities. Regardless of what the law says.
Don't get me wrong - there's a time and a place for MJPEG. But, DV is on of the trivially easy examples for showing how much better modern technologies perform, considering that HDV works in exactly the same bitrate and tape format, and squashes a *lot* more pixels into the image. HDV isn't even particularly modern technology -- just more modern than DV. When you eliminate tape's need for a constant bitrate and move to a modern file based workflow, many of the AVCHD devices pathologically conpress full 1080p HD into a much lower bitrate than DV while looking just fine for most uses. Seriously, if the AVCHD devices used a bitrate as high as DV, the quality of the output would start to compete with the more expensive professional gear.
Though, the real future is in something like RedcodeRaw. A codec that focuses on being very good at storing sample data from the sensor is one thing that apparently hasn't been much explored in open standards, but it would offer the best performance. When somebody comes out with a DSLR that shoots video in a high bitrate, well-documented sensor-oriented format, they'll own a lot of production overnight.
The fact that Congress doesn't have the authority to damage the right to bear arms is explicitly in the Constitution. The fact that the Congress doesn't have any authority not expressly granted to it is also in the Constitution. The fact that drugs aren't specifically mentioned does not automatically imply that the Congress has authority in that area.
In practice, chips with more cores are almost always going to be avalable at a lower clock speed than those with fewer cores. 12 Core chips currently top out at like 2.2 GHz, for example.
It lacks i18n.
No. Do you put oil on your fish?
Sounds kind of like a place I used to work. I even heard about a guy picketing in front of one of our locations during the period I worked there. Good for you, they probably deserved it.
Yes, in exactly the same way that people who buy heavy mining equipment and land in mineral rich areas are disproportionately wealthy. Supercomputers don't just magically appear, and nobody gets them on accident. They can invest in supercomputers and "mine" virtual currency and hope that the payoff is enough to justify buying the supercomputer.
But, then what does the "employer" pay with? If the only medium of exchange is barter of CPU cycles, then the employer would have to work on some problem the employee needs computed while the employee works on some problem the employer needs computed. The two sides could just work on their own problem to exactly the same accomplishment. By generating some arbitrary medium of exchange, you can increase the liquidity of a market, which is basically zero in a barter system with only a single good. Without some liquid capital to get things moving at the start, you don't have anything interesting happening.
You are over thinking it. The issue of GTK vs. Qt on Maemo is just like on Desktop Linux. App developer can use whichever they want, and most users won't be able to tell the difference. It's like on Windows with Win32 API vs. MFC. The users never cared, and Win32 wasn't "dropped" when MS was pushing MFC. If you want, you can write raw Xlib calls for Maemo.
As for dropping Maemo, and working on Meego, the two are so similar that it won't matter to most people. The only significant change is that devs will need to package with .rpm's instead of .deb's. They can continue to use either Qt or GTK, or raw Xlib, or WX or whatever they want for writing apps. Qt is, and continues to be, an API with excellent cross platform support, so you can naturally write an app using Qt and make it work on Windows, OS-X, desktop Linux, Maemo, Meego, Symbian, Android (slightly inconvenient since you would need a small Java loader to execute the native Qt app, but that's not a big deal. The android port is admittedly still very immature.)
By one standard, almost every phone sold today already is a smart phone. Somewhere along the line, a funny thing happened, and "Smartphone" got redefined to only refer to the highest end phones available at the moment, with what would have been a smartphone the year before now being called something like a "Featurephone."
There will always be some sort of market for high end $500+ devices, but as you point out, it'll just get harder and harder to justify spending that much on a mobile device when the lesser, cheaper models can do so much.
My experience with graphing calculators leaves me doubt as to whether a multisocket server is capable of hosting a website.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
It's also funny when a man kicks a man in the genitals, or when a monkey does it. Generally, comedy isn't harmed by danger, unless the audience perceives the dangers as being directed towards them. With the right (flat, serious) delivery, the following dialog can also be hilarious on stage:
"Well, Mr. Johnson, I have bad news. The cancer has returned, and you only have seven days left to live. I'd suggest going and having a good time for your last days, but you are of course expected in court next week to defend yourself against the claims of emotional distress filed by all the people who violently raped you."
That sort of thing shouldn't be funny, but it really is. We are a terrible species, and probably deserve to have a monkey kick us in the balls.
Basically, it sounds like you are asking for a reflective color display with no backlight. They exist, but they aren't particularly popular, so it'll be very expensive. Most people are used to having to adjust a lamp to be able to read a book, but expect to be able to see their laptop screen in cases where reading a book wouldn't be particularly convenient.
Except that on X, the interesting Windows Managers we had ten years ago have mostly given way to WM's that have gone out of heir way to be similar to Windows behaviors in many ways in order to be more familiar to people who are used to Windows.
Just because a design decision was 100% correct ten years ago, doesn't mean it can't be re-evaluated today. (P.S. Classic Windows style MDI sucks harder than current GIMP. Don't do that to 'fix' things!)
Meh. The dad was borderline. He told the kid it wasn't going to last forever. He made sure the kid didn't stick his fingers in his mouth to bother the dental work. He explained that it was because of the medicine. It's also quite possible that all of this was explained to the kid repeatedly before the video, and he just wasn't in a state where repeating it was going to make it sink in. The day could certainly have been a little more sensitive, and I'm sure a lot of people out there could have done a better job of keeping the kid happy. But, I can't really fault the guy.
The hilarious thing is that the only real question is *which* government granted Comcast the current monopoly in Detroit. Was it the city or the State... Oddly, there is a market. It's levels of governments competing to offer the best deal to the company.