I've always found the People-magazine like fawning over the "stars" of Open Sourcedom alternately nauseating and amusing.
I'm not trying to take anything away from the accomplishments of Alan or anyone else. And there are times where features of people are worthwhile, but only when they've done or said something noteworthy. "Alan Cox went to class today" isn't one of them. "Alan Cox gets a crew cut", however, would be..
God, I'm always amazed at the people who blow some solid scam, good for a reliable source of money. A couple of $K per month would be perfect and, over time, would be a huge amount of money that could substantially increase one's standard of living. In 5 years at $2k per month, you'd have over a hundred thousand dollars, tax free!
If you used it to pay off your mortgage, the savings would be even larger -- potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. At that point the weatlh effect would be trivial.
Ahh, it's all about needling the US and looking for things to criticize. It's not hard, naturally, even (especially?) internally to find things to criticize.
Unfortunately the same attitude takes the things that are good for granted or delibertately underplays them.
Oh well. At least we've got good teeth, a functional healthcare system, and a constitution. But don't worry -- we're working hard to eliminate all of those things, don't you worry!
I'm sure its something that has gone on forever, but it seemed particularly bad in the mid-late 90s when the expectations of computer system development accelerated.
IT people didn't need unionization at all until maybe the late 80s or early 90s. Until that point, a lot of IT work was seen more along the lines of scientific-style engineering -- college-educated guys in suits, some with graduate degrees, working with multimillion dollar equipment that looked like and often literally was "rocket science". These were talented professionals who were usually treated as such, and unionization was neither necessary from a job perspective nor considered socially compatible with its workforce.
Once the PC took off, and the demand for PC software soared, there was still too much demand for software and programming for industries and businesses that never had it. Computers were foreign and something like a database required real work, and there was enough of it at high wages that unionization seemed foolhardy.
It was only in the mid to late 90s when "Office Space" style management demanded uncompensated long hours, began seeking guest workers, outsourcing and other mass-production techniques which lowered the once lofty profession to assembly line status did unionization even START to feel like a reasonable conclusion. But even then, there was a sense of denial about joining a union since it made one feel less white collar and more blue collar, which for many has dramatic self-image and social consequences. Furthemore, the dot-com demand for IT workers duped many into believing they belonged to a new priviledged class who simply surfed from job to job or project to project, and that this, like double-digit stock market returns, was just another part of the new economy.
You could probably form a union (or more appropriately, a guild), but it would have to do more than focus on the traditional labor-management conflicts over pay and work rules, it would have to offer something to management, such as supplying members with bonafide skills (no paper MC*Es or others who flooded the IT market in the late 90s), supplying tech support for its members or products produced by its members (a more organized version of on-line support), and so on.
But I don't expect it to happen soon; there's still too many good IT jobs out there, and too much self-identification with white-collar professional status for it to succeed. Although perhaps another 5 years of jobless recovery combined with massive immigration and outsourcing, and there may be a change in attitude.
Still at least it's not as hypocritical as Clinton's reskilling platitudes when blue collar workers lost their jobs in manufacturing.
While the expected outcome of retraining for some segments of the blue collar workforce (older, less skilled) may have been overly optimistic, the idea wasn't at all hypocritical, it was logical -- a guy that worked with machines might likely have become retraied for running a more sophisticated machine tool or something.
Unfortunately, retraining can't take into account the zeal at which corporate management has decided to move ANY job which pays more than minimum wage overseas. In an era in which Wall Street considers a company with jobs that pay something akin to middle-class wages as having "uncompetitively high labor costs", then there will be nothing to retrain for, except operating the fryer at the local corporate fast food place.
In that reality, retraining is fruitless. But we're racing to the bottom, creating a plutocratic society where government and industry collude to create a handful of very wealthy people and a sea of working poor, with little in between.
From what I've read on the AVS plasma forums, burn-in is pretty much a non-issue for typical television watching, especially if you watch 4:3 content in one of the 16:9 stretch/zoom modes the sets support. We have two plasmas in our conference room and they're used significantly with presentations (you know, long-winded marketers that have a logo in the bottom right the whole 3 hour meeting..), and they show no signs of burn in. My concern with plasma is longevity -- there are some concerns about how long a plasma display can last.
Lamping is a serious technology problem for DLP, LCoS and LCD rear projections, and each technology has some particular issues unique to it, such as the DLP colorwheel and LCD reaction times.
I personally expect direct-view plasma to become a more popular option, and a cheaper one. It has a very bright image, is thin, and does not require any lamping. I think in a couple of years 42" HD plasmas will be easily available for $2000 and ED models for even less.
I personally bought a Sony LCD RP. Cheaper than plasma today, and I think a superior image to my eyes than DLP. There really aren't many LCoS sets on the market now, or at least few at a price point competitive with alternatives like LCD or DLP.
Perhaps an organizational change is entirely appropriate and the right thing. I don't think that anyone would seriously argue that MS doesn't have any good developers.
What they seem plagued by are marketing-driven technologies that keep getting bolted on to Windows, broadening the code base and making the overall focus of the development harder for anyone to see. This level of integration may make IIS faster or enable easier functionality for some third party development, also makes it hard to define what Windows core is and who's responsible for it.
A group of developers focused on the core of Windows (kernel, networking, filesystem) should be able to better focus on making it work well and keep security at a higher level, among other things.
The real challenge will be who defines what the core of Windows is, and what they define it to be. If they allow the scope of Windows core to be everything you get in C:\ after installing the OS, it won't be more than cosmetic. However, if they define it succintly and at least internally acknowledge that the kernel, the filesystem and the networking code is the core, and other stuff like IIS or Internet Explorer is not, this could mean real benefits for Windows.
The problem is that there are perfectly good alternatives without DRM technology. Why would anyone by something new that restricts their existing options? Even worse, why would a consumer pay the extra $x for their media player to buy the rights from a DRM patents company?
The only scenerio that makes *any* sense to me is if some new DRM device came on the scene and had inexpensive access to a massive library of content. Such as a set-top box with access to nearly every movie or TV show ever made -- no restrictions on when you watch them, how often you watch them, as long as you paid your monthly fee.
The problem is the DRM pushers want expensive usage fees, content packages, content limits and all kinds of other restrictions that make it undesirable AND they want to DRM it.
I think they'll be able to sell DRM once they realize that the flat fee and a huge library will make people notice the DRM less. Until then...
It's probably a bitch to try to incorporate it into many ISPs infrastructures, particularly if they have multiple upstreams located on different portions of their network, or making use of big aggregation routers where a lot of traffic moves between networks without actually being filterable.
And then there's ISPs who may be trying to prevent usage-based bottlenecks deep in their network (like I presume how cable works), who would need perhaps tens of these units out in the field where they aren't placable for cost or environmental reasons.
It's a more sensible way than some hard cap, but its not always possible without some significant re-engineering that may potentially damage reliability or throughput (such as forcing all traffic back out an ethernet interface for passthrough to a rate limiter and then back in another interface).
o Multiple libraries. I'd like to put some types of music in a different library. This would also help the performance, as I agree that larger libraries do slow down performance.
o Smart Playlists. These are cool, but I wish there was a way to limit the number of appearances in a playlist by a specific artist/style/etc. I have a huge amount of material by a couple of artists, and while I like it all, a "mix" that has 2/3s of its materials from two artists ain't much of a mix.
Beyond that, it's very nearly perfect. Perhaps some enhancement of the "style" field to better integrate sub-styles (eg, hard rock vs. alternative rock), but it's not necessary.
What? Maybe you're thinking of Quake2. Quake was playable on my P-90 with S3 Trio64 (no 3D acceleration) graphics card. Quake2 is what really upped the ante in the minimum hardware department. I remember even after I upgraded to the PII-400 with Matrox Mystique G200, Quake2 was still a bit of a dog. Granted, the GL support on the G series chips was complete crap in those days (they used some bogus GL to Direct3D translation layer in the drivers). OTOH, Quake3 was surprisingly playable on the G200 under FreeBSD, so who knows.
The only decent frame rates I could get out of Quake were at low resolutions. Maybe it was just the bad VESA support in my Diamond card, who knows. However, Q2 ran fine with my Voodoo card on my K6 233. Never ran Q3.
EDTV is just 480p and some will decode 720p and 1080i, but downrez them to 480p. And 480p is just a slightly better way of displaying vanilla NTSC, which is 480i.
I almost bought a 480p plasma, but the technology's lifespan scares me a little, and it was actually cheaper to get a true HDTV capable TV for less money. The jury's out, however, on whether I should have just bought a 32" glass tube and spent the rest of the money on something else.
I don't know if anyone actually promised these but:
OLED TVs HD Tivo Widespread HD adoption
The latter is *almost* here, in that I can get Discovery, a couple of the locals, HBO and Showtime in HD on my local cable system, but I wouldn't call a whopping 6-7 channels and a manditory paid installation a symptom of "widespread adoption".
It's kind of lame, but it's not that bad. If you want to reach the next level of game engine performance from the user's perspective, you have to be able to do things that can't be done very well on today's best hardware, and also assume that a new game engine will take a lot of time to write, meaning that your next generation hardware demands will largely be met by the time it hits the street.
In the case of Doom3, perhaps they went too far in new game engine capabilities and desktop CPU just hasn't caught up yet to what's considered acceptable for engine performance. But it's not like this was totally unprecedented. When Quake came out, it was all but unplayable on my P166 system except at the lowest resolutions. It took a voodoo card to make it even playable.
Is there a quantum leap in performance like the Voodoo cards in the next six months?
By now it should be clear that globalism and multinationalism is something for the benefit of corporations -- cheaper labor, differential market pricing. It's not for consumer benefit at all.
I've taken my Kawasaki Concours up to about 115 MPH a few times, and while the bike itself feels OK at those speeds,I don't like doing it.
Most roads where 115 MPH is even option are in poor condition. What's kind of a barely noticable glitch at 65 can be a real pain at high speeds, and some could throw you.
They also have poor sightlines and visibility. Things come at you very, very quickly at high speed, and while you can get more or less accustomed to it, the roads themselves aren't built with enough long, straight stretches for those speeds. Many ordinary curves (or intersections!) become scary/blind at those speeds. My high speed runs were done on highway 61 in the Mississippi delta of northern Missouri -- the road elevated slightly over the surrounding farm land, which wasn't growing anything more than 3 ft high. Long, straight stretches of no traffic, no obstructions and noplace for things to hide.
And hiding things is what scares me the most -- I had a deer jump out at me about 25 miles south of Washburn, WI one fall. Its front hooves landed 3 ft laterally from my handlebars. Had it jumped about 25 ms sooner, I would have caught it as it bounded off its back hooves. I literally pulled over to piss I was so scared.
Anyway, with all the shit on the roads, it's really hard to maintain high speeds. I find about 90 on the interstate is all you can do, and that's if there's no traffic.
I always wonder about large systems like that. They develop procedures and policies and a whole layer of bureaucracy to try and keep a firm grip on them, but they always seem to become an entity unto themselves that just *seems* to be under control, when it reality no two or three guys have enough access and enough experience with the thing to know exactly what's there.
I hate Sheraton, too, and all the other lame ass Starwood hotels that fall under the same umbrella. But someone in the parent company got a new car or something for making us all stay in them. The W Court bites (although the bedding was real nice), and the Royalton does too. Weird furniture and really bad food.
This hotel has normal food and doesn't think that turning out all the hallway lights makes you trendy, but the rooms are kinda small and the TV sucks.
I don't care what the general public calls it. Among the cognescenti "surf the web" sounds kind of moronic. Or do you still call it "Data Processing", too?
You must be new here. This is "Slashdot, News for nerds." I think you need to "surf the web" back over to MSN or something where they don't use big complicated words you don't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always found the People-magazine like fawning over the "stars" of Open Sourcedom alternately nauseating and amusing.
I'm not trying to take anything away from the accomplishments of Alan or anyone else. And there are times where features of people are worthwhile, but only when they've done or said something noteworthy. "Alan Cox went to class today" isn't one of them. "Alan Cox gets a crew cut", however, would be..
7 - 5 = 2
God, I'm always amazed at the people who blow some solid scam, good for a reliable source of money. A couple of $K per month would be perfect and, over time, would be a huge amount of money that could substantially increase one's standard of living. In 5 years at $2k per month, you'd have over a hundred thousand dollars, tax free!
If you used it to pay off your mortgage, the savings would be even larger -- potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. At that point the weatlh effect would be trivial.
Ahh, it's all about needling the US and looking for things to criticize. It's not hard, naturally, even (especially?) internally to find things to criticize.
Unfortunately the same attitude takes the things that are good for granted or delibertately underplays them.
Oh well. At least we've got good teeth, a functional healthcare system, and a constitution. But don't worry -- we're working hard to eliminate all of those things, don't you worry!
I'm sure its something that has gone on forever, but it seemed particularly bad in the mid-late 90s when the expectations of computer system development accelerated.
IT people didn't need unionization at all until maybe the late 80s or early 90s. Until that point, a lot of IT work was seen more along the lines of scientific-style engineering -- college-educated guys in suits, some with graduate degrees, working with multimillion dollar equipment that looked like and often literally was "rocket science". These were talented professionals who were usually treated as such, and unionization was neither necessary from a job perspective nor considered socially compatible with its workforce.
Once the PC took off, and the demand for PC software soared, there was still too much demand for software and programming for industries and businesses that never had it. Computers were foreign and something like a database required real work, and there was enough of it at high wages that unionization seemed foolhardy.
It was only in the mid to late 90s when "Office Space" style management demanded uncompensated long hours, began seeking guest workers, outsourcing and other mass-production techniques which lowered the once lofty profession to assembly line status did unionization even START to feel like a reasonable conclusion. But even then, there was a sense of denial about joining a union since it made one feel less white collar and more blue collar, which for many has dramatic self-image and social consequences. Furthemore, the dot-com demand for IT workers duped many into believing they belonged to a new priviledged class who simply surfed from job to job or project to project, and that this, like double-digit stock market returns, was just another part of the new economy.
You could probably form a union (or more appropriately, a guild), but it would have to do more than focus on the traditional labor-management conflicts over pay and work rules, it would have to offer something to management, such as supplying members with bonafide skills (no paper MC*Es or others who flooded the IT market in the late 90s), supplying tech support for its members or products produced by its members (a more organized version of on-line support), and so on.
But I don't expect it to happen soon; there's still too many good IT jobs out there, and too much self-identification with white-collar professional status for it to succeed. Although perhaps another 5 years of jobless recovery combined with massive immigration and outsourcing, and there may be a change in attitude.
Still at least it's not as hypocritical as Clinton's reskilling platitudes when blue collar workers lost their jobs in manufacturing.
While the expected outcome of retraining for some segments of the blue collar workforce (older, less skilled) may have been overly optimistic, the idea wasn't at all hypocritical, it was logical -- a guy that worked with machines might likely have become retraied for running a more sophisticated machine tool or something.
Unfortunately, retraining can't take into account the zeal at which corporate management has decided to move ANY job which pays more than minimum wage overseas. In an era in which Wall Street considers a company with jobs that pay something akin to middle-class wages as having "uncompetitively high labor costs", then there will be nothing to retrain for, except operating the fryer at the local corporate fast food place.
In that reality, retraining is fruitless. But we're racing to the bottom, creating a plutocratic society where government and industry collude to create a handful of very wealthy people and a sea of working poor, with little in between.
I found that kerosene poured into the hills worked just as well, and only required one treatment.
You can say the same about cars, knives, guns and just about anything else.
Especially dihydrogen monoxide.
From what I've read on the AVS plasma forums, burn-in is pretty much a non-issue for typical television watching, especially if you watch 4:3 content in one of the 16:9 stretch/zoom modes the sets support. We have two plasmas in our conference room and they're used significantly with presentations (you know, long-winded marketers that have a logo in the bottom right the whole 3 hour meeting..), and they show no signs of burn in. My concern with plasma is longevity -- there are some concerns about how long a plasma display can last.
Lamping is a serious technology problem for DLP, LCoS and LCD rear projections, and each technology has some particular issues unique to it, such as the DLP colorwheel and LCD reaction times.
I personally expect direct-view plasma to become a more popular option, and a cheaper one. It has a very bright image, is thin, and does not require any lamping. I think in a couple of years 42" HD plasmas will be easily available for $2000 and ED models for even less.
I personally bought a Sony LCD RP. Cheaper than plasma today, and I think a superior image to my eyes than DLP. There really aren't many LCoS sets on the market now, or at least few at a price point competitive with alternatives like LCD or DLP.
Perhaps an organizational change is entirely appropriate and the right thing. I don't think that anyone would seriously argue that MS doesn't have any good developers.
What they seem plagued by are marketing-driven technologies that keep getting bolted on to Windows, broadening the code base and making the overall focus of the development harder for anyone to see. This level of integration may make IIS faster or enable easier functionality for some third party development, also makes it hard to define what Windows core is and who's responsible for it.
A group of developers focused on the core of Windows (kernel, networking, filesystem) should be able to better focus on making it work well and keep security at a higher level, among other things.
The real challenge will be who defines what the core of Windows is, and what they define it to be. If they allow the scope of Windows core to be everything you get in C:\ after installing the OS, it won't be more than cosmetic. However, if they define it succintly and at least internally acknowledge that the kernel, the filesystem and the networking code is the core, and other stuff like IIS or Internet Explorer is not, this could mean real benefits for Windows.
The problem is that there are perfectly good alternatives without DRM technology. Why would anyone by something new that restricts their existing options? Even worse, why would a consumer pay the extra $x for their media player to buy the rights from a DRM patents company?
The only scenerio that makes *any* sense to me is if some new DRM device came on the scene and had inexpensive access to a massive library of content. Such as a set-top box with access to nearly every movie or TV show ever made -- no restrictions on when you watch them, how often you watch them, as long as you paid your monthly fee.
The problem is the DRM pushers want expensive usage fees, content packages, content limits and all kinds of other restrictions that make it undesirable AND they want to DRM it.
I think they'll be able to sell DRM once they realize that the flat fee and a huge library will make people notice the DRM less. Until then...
There's a story about this in the business section of the New York Times today. Google link.
It's probably a bitch to try to incorporate it into many ISPs infrastructures, particularly if they have multiple upstreams located on different portions of their network, or making use of big aggregation routers where a lot of traffic moves between networks without actually being filterable.
And then there's ISPs who may be trying to prevent usage-based bottlenecks deep in their network (like I presume how cable works), who would need perhaps tens of these units out in the field where they aren't placable for cost or environmental reasons.
It's a more sensible way than some hard cap, but its not always possible without some significant re-engineering that may potentially damage reliability or throughput (such as forcing all traffic back out an ethernet interface for passthrough to a rate limiter and then back in another interface).
o Multiple libraries. I'd like to put some types of music in a different library. This would also help the performance, as I agree that larger libraries do slow down performance.
o Smart Playlists. These are cool, but I wish there was a way to limit the number of appearances in a playlist by a specific artist/style/etc. I have a huge amount of material by a couple of artists, and while I like it all, a "mix" that has 2/3s of its materials from two artists ain't much of a mix.
Beyond that, it's very nearly perfect. Perhaps some enhancement of the "style" field to better integrate sub-styles (eg, hard rock vs. alternative rock), but it's not necessary.
What? Maybe you're thinking of Quake2. Quake was playable on my P-90 with S3 Trio64 (no 3D acceleration) graphics card. Quake2 is what really upped the ante in the minimum hardware department. I remember even after I upgraded to the PII-400 with Matrox Mystique G200, Quake2 was still a bit of a dog. Granted, the GL support on the G series chips was complete crap in those days (they used some bogus GL to Direct3D translation layer in the drivers). OTOH, Quake3 was surprisingly playable on the G200 under FreeBSD, so who knows.
The only decent frame rates I could get out of Quake were at low resolutions. Maybe it was just the bad VESA support in my Diamond card, who knows. However, Q2 ran fine with my Voodoo card on my K6 233. Never ran Q3.
EDTV is just 480p and some will decode 720p and 1080i, but downrez them to 480p. And 480p is just a slightly better way of displaying vanilla NTSC, which is 480i.
I almost bought a 480p plasma, but the technology's lifespan scares me a little, and it was actually cheaper to get a true HDTV capable TV for less money. The jury's out, however, on whether I should have just bought a 32" glass tube and spent the rest of the money on something else.
I don't know if anyone actually promised these but:
OLED TVs
HD Tivo
Widespread HD adoption
The latter is *almost* here, in that I can get Discovery, a couple of the locals, HBO and Showtime in HD on my local cable system, but I wouldn't call a whopping 6-7 channels and a manditory paid installation a symptom of "widespread adoption".
It's kind of lame, but it's not that bad. If you want to reach the next level of game engine performance from the user's perspective, you have to be able to do things that can't be done very well on today's best hardware, and also assume that a new game engine will take a lot of time to write, meaning that your next generation hardware demands will largely be met by the time it hits the street.
In the case of Doom3, perhaps they went too far in new game engine capabilities and desktop CPU just hasn't caught up yet to what's considered acceptable for engine performance. But it's not like this was totally unprecedented. When Quake came out, it was all but unplayable on my P166 system except at the lowest resolutions. It took a voodoo card to make it even playable.
Is there a quantum leap in performance like the Voodoo cards in the next six months?
By now it should be clear that globalism and multinationalism is something for the benefit of corporations -- cheaper labor, differential market pricing. It's not for consumer benefit at all.
I've taken my Kawasaki Concours up to about 115 MPH a few times, and while the bike itself feels OK at those speeds,I don't like doing it.
Most roads where 115 MPH is even option are in poor condition. What's kind of a barely noticable glitch at 65 can be a real pain at high speeds, and some could throw you.
They also have poor sightlines and visibility. Things come at you very, very quickly at high speed, and while you can get more or less accustomed to it, the roads themselves aren't built with enough long, straight stretches for those speeds. Many ordinary curves (or intersections!) become scary/blind at those speeds. My high speed runs were done on highway 61 in the Mississippi delta of northern Missouri -- the road elevated slightly over the surrounding farm land, which wasn't growing anything more than 3 ft high. Long, straight stretches of no traffic, no obstructions and noplace for things to hide.
And hiding things is what scares me the most -- I had a deer jump out at me about 25 miles south of Washburn, WI one fall. Its front hooves landed 3 ft laterally from my handlebars. Had it jumped about 25 ms sooner, I would have caught it as it bounded off its back hooves. I literally pulled over to piss I was so scared.
Anyway, with all the shit on the roads, it's really hard to maintain high speeds. I find about 90 on the interstate is all you can do, and that's if there's no traffic.
I always wonder about large systems like that. They develop procedures and policies and a whole layer of bureaucracy to try and keep a firm grip on them, but they always seem to become an entity unto themselves that just *seems* to be under control, when it reality no two or three guys have enough access and enough experience with the thing to know exactly what's there.
Or maybe I just lack imagination...
I hate Sheraton, too, and all the other lame ass Starwood hotels that fall under the same umbrella. But someone in the parent company got a new car or something for making us all stay in them. The W Court bites (although the bedding was real nice), and the Royalton does too. Weird furniture and really bad food.
This hotel has normal food and doesn't think that turning out all the hallway lights makes you trendy, but the rooms are kinda small and the TV sucks.
I prefer the NY Palace....
I don't care what the general public calls it. Among the cognescenti "surf the web" sounds kind of moronic. Or do you still call it "Data Processing", too?
You must be new here. This is "Slashdot, News for nerds." I think you need to "surf the web" back over to MSN or something where they don't use big complicated words you don't understand.