Yeah, their "choices": Run windows, buy Apple or get stuck in the quagmire known as Linux.
Right, those are three valid choices. There are others if you look. And each can send email and browse web sites just about as well as the next. So it is now the user's personal preference which OS he would like to use; his choice is no longer dictated by software compatibility concerns.
You simply blew it off as "I never claimed it [Linux] was [a threat to MS]" but your hailing OSS as an alternative to MS speaks otherwise.
Of course I blew it off, because it was irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. Do you understand the difference between 'alternative' and 'threat'? What's new here is that before Microsoft didn't have to really care whether its customers were happy or not -- they were pretty much forced to use Windows whether they liked it or not. Now that there is competition, Microsoft has to compete if they don't want to start losing customers -- they can no longer rely on customer lock-in to give them a captive market.
As for firefox; how does that trouble MS?
It's not Firefox in particular that's significant, it's the fact that decent web browsers are available for every OS, and more and more applications are being implemented as web sites rather than Windows executables. If you keep all your email inside Outlook and your database in Access, then it's fairly difficult to migrate away from Windows. OTOH, if you are using GMail for your mail and a web-based database service to keep your data, then you can stop using Windows any time you want to. Microsoft no longer has coercive power over you, because if they charge too much or don't satisfy your needs, it's trivial to switch to something else that works better for you.
. I don't see how that's going to be seen as an OSS victory.
Again, you keep trying to turn the discussion into the traditional slashdot "OSS vs Microsoft" battle, but that's not the point at all. The actual distinction to make is "customer lock-in vs open standards". Even if Linux disappeared tomorrow, Microsoft still wouldn't be "scary" again, because people whose data is stored in open formats or on web sites could still use MacOS/X or Unix or BeOS or any other OS to get their work done.
That depends on what task you were trying to accomplish. If your goal was to sell mass-market software and make a profit, then for quite a while Windows was the only practical choice of target platforms. Other platforms wouldn't generate enough sales to cover your development costs.
Web based services still require a PC, PCs still require an OS. Windows is still has the largest market share of any OS
Yes, but the crucial point is now it doesn't matter which OS you use. Any OS will run Firefox now, so you can use Windows if you want to, or something else if you want to. Contrast with the 90's, where for most things you had to run a.exe file and to do that you had to own a copy of Microsoft Windows.
Sorry, but the Linux factor still isn't a threat.
I never claimed it was. What I said was: people now have a choice. If they feel the need to run something else, they can. Even if most people stick with Windows, the fact that they don't have to serves as a natural check against Microsoft's more predatory impulses. That's why Microsoft is less "scary" now.
For all we know computing as we know it would be years ahead if it wasnt for Microsoft and Bill Gates.
Or, for all we know computing would be years behind if it wasn't for Microsoft and Bill Gates. Evil as it was, Microsoft did provide a (sort of) "standard" for the software market to coalesce around. Instead of five or six different operating systems all competing for market share, and everybody having to deal with the fact that they run OS "foo" while the software they want to use only runs on OS "bar", they could just walk into the local store, buy a piece of software off the shelf, and more-or-less expect it to work with their computer. As an ex-Amiga user and die-hard BeOS user (I'm typing this into NetPositive now:^)) I'm as aware as anybody about the beautiful OS's that Microsoft crushed out of the market. But to speculate on what the world would have been like without Microsoft's misbehaviour is so error-prone as to be pointless. Nobody could possibly understand all the various interplays of cause and effect well enough to come up with anything likely to be correct, and even if they did, that knowledge doesn't really help us now.
A killer does not become better in any way by saving equal amounts of lives as he has killed.
Yeah? What if he saves more lives than he killed? Wouldn't that make him better than a killer who killed but didn't later go on to save anyone? I think you are oversimplifying.
At the same time, Gates no longer cuts the profile he once did as a high-tech titan. While he's still respected, he's no longer scary--and the totemic company he built from scratch seems increasingly ordinary, even irrelevant
What the article doesn't go into is why Gates and Microsoft are no longer seen as scary. It's because their products are no longer the only choice. It used to be that for many things, you had to deal with Microsoft, because all the stuff you wanted to do required Windows to run. That meant that you had to agree to whatever terms Microsoft cared to offer, and they could be pretty onerous (and expensive). These days, with the easy availability of open source alternatives and the shift to web-based services, people are no longer compelled to accept lousy deals from Microsoft. If they don't like what Microsoft has to offer, they are free to go with something else. That means that (a) Microsoft has to treat its customers better if it wants to keep selling product, and (b) customers no longer have to live in fear of doing something that would anger the giant in Redmond.
So yes, Gates and Microsoft are no longer as scary as they used to be. But it's more because of the actions of Torvalds, Stallman, Jobs, and Berners-Lee than any change of heart by Gates.
The US army already uses men in it's fight against freedom. 2000+ dead already in Iraq
Actually, the number of people dead is somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000. It's hard to know the exact number because the U.S. government doesn't keep a count of Iraqi casualties. The 2000+ figure refers to the deaths of American soldiers, which is tragic but only a small portion of the total loss of life (and of course as soldiers they were all volunteer combatants).
But how do you anticipate whether a guerilla war will precipitate in the first place? The Bush administration didn't anticipate the mess in Iraq
His father certainly did. Here's a quote George H. W. Bush, from back in 1991:
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. [...] Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
That's because regardless of whatever the new technology does, the politicians or the military or the evil profit-mongers will still need people to work for them and get things done, and that means that those people have power.
You're assuming that the politicians can't get unquestioning machinery to work for them and get things done instead. At some point, they could even have machinery to fix and maintain the machinery, at which point those messy subordinate humans can be cut out of the loop entirely.
I wouldn't use it for treasure detecting, as it would ruin the point, it would make it to easy, and it would soon be over.
Is the point of treasure detecting to spend as much time as possible looking for treasure, or to find as much treasure as possible in a given amount of time?
I also wonder whatever happened to holographic solid state memory that was supposed to hold TBs of data
I think the problem was that the capacity and cost of "traditional" hard drives has improved so rapidly over the past decade that holographic memory, like lots of other potentially revolutionary alternatives, simply didn't look like it would be able to compete any time in the forseeable future. Without a likely market for the product, research funding dried up.
With solid state memory, won't you never have to reboot the OS?
There are plenty of people who never (or almost never) reboot their OS now... they just leave their machine on 24/7 possibly with an automatic sleep mode or perhaps without. I agree that having solid state memory would probably do away with "reboots" almost entirely, but that situation wouldn't be that much different from how it is now...
Don't reject the entire idea quite yet -- the "thing somewhere" could be your own PC back at your house (via the Internet), or it could even be your laptop/cell-phone/PDA across the room in your briefcase (which you use for more intensive stuff, but the thin client is more convenient for quick google searches, IM, etc)
There's nothing about this idea that says you have to let some corporation or government hold your data for you.
With some of the larger wind turbines, they discovered that the blades were producing some very powerful subsonic frequencies that were making people sick.
... and don't forget that the electromagnetic fields emanating from the high voltage power lines themselves have been alleged to cause cancer. In both cases the claims are highly questionable.
Mostly the problem is that people accept the status quo, but find reasons to reject anything new. To put it another way: people will continue to pay high prices for traditional energy sources because they used to doing that, and they will put up with more pollution and global warming because those things increase so slowly, but they will be quick to blame all kinds of things on windmills because those are new and different, and therefore suspect.
Where have you been? The 'Mighty Mouse' has 4 'buttons' already
In my experience, the 'Mighty Mouse' is difficult to use as a two-button mouse, because if you have a finger resting on the "left-button region" of the mouse, tapping on the "right-button region" gets interpreted as left-clicking rather than right-clicking. In order to successfully do a right-click, you have to remember to lift your finger off of the left-button region first, which is really unintuitive and annoying.
Have other people noticed this problem also, or am I doing something wrong?
If such methods are better, why has no animal evolved them?
It could be just "bad luck" -- evolution isn't guaranteed to find the best solution to anything, only a solution that is "good enough" to guarantee survival of the species (otherwise the species would have gone extinct). But putting that aside, there are probably structural reasons why animals never evolved wheels -- for example, how would do you connect nerves or blood vessels to an appendage that needs to be able to rotate freely?
Finally, it could be that in nature wheels aren't actually "better" after all. There wouldn't be much use in being able to roll down a freeway at 50MPH if there are no freeways, and your snazzy evolved bio-wheels keep getting stuck in the mud...
With a JIT language, you distribute the IL and the virtual machine "compiles" the IL into assembly every time the user runs it.
Or it could just compile the IL into assembly the first time the user runs the app, and cache the resulting executable for quicker loading next time -- somewhat analogous to what Python does with its automatic.pyc file generation. In either case though, I don't see why this is a problem -- it could actually allow an efficiency improvement, since doing the final "compilation" step on the target CPU means that you can enable all the appropriate processor-specific optimizations, whereas if you compile to machine code on the developer's PC you are typically limited to the common denominator to ensure compatibility with older processors.
From a business perspective, with IL, I do need to use an obfuscator with my Java or.NET app, which I don't really need to do with more traditional languages that do not use an IL.
So the problem is that the bytecode isn't "obfuscated enough" in its natural state, and therefore you have to run an obfuscator on it? Putting aside for the moment the fact that in most situations obfuscation is considered a bad thing (because it makes the code harder to work with), I still don't see any real problem here -- if it bothers you, run your code through an obfuscator and be happy.
Are you kidding? It's genius! The entire history of dolls has been monopolized by kitschy-cooing sweet girly things, and the only place you could find any kind of doll-based evil Machiavellian backstabbing at all was in the "Chucky" movies. But now this technology has finally made evil dolls available to the common man! And this is only the first generation... as technology progresses would should see the state of the art grow to include everything from the traditional cymbal-playing monkeys and child-eating clowns to (someday) fulfilling the dream of owning my own full-fledged Terminator.
It's still interpreted, it's just interpreted all at once before execution
I'm confused. How is "interpreted all at once before execution" different from "compiled"? Because the computer invokes the compilation-step automatically, instead of forcing the user to type "make"? That seems like a rather trivial distinction...
Objective C is pretty nice to use, but I think Apple really needs to come up with a language that doesn't require memory management
That would be nice, but I have to say that even in the cold, uncaring world of ObjC/C++, memory management can generally be handled quite easily. All you need is a good templated reference-count class, and then you can allocate your object, attach it to a ref-count object, pass ref-count objects around by value willy-nilly, and yet still rest assured that your object will be deleted when everybody is done with it.
(the only potential "gotcha", of course, is that if there are cycles in the refcounts' dependency graph than you will still leak... but in my experience this problem rarely if ever comes up)
I don't regard him as "visionary". I regard him as "A.D.D". Whatever the latest thing that catches his eye has to be assigned... then forgotten. But a new shiney idea has to be assigned
How to handle people like that: write each task you are planning to do on a separate piece of paper. Stack the papers on your desk in the order that you plan to do them, with the next task on top and the last task on the bottom. When ADD-man comes in to tell you about the big new thing, tell him to write it down on a slip of paper and insert it into the proper position on the stack. Tell him that when you finish your current task, you will take the next slip of paper from the top of the stack and do what it says, and repeat until the stack is empty.
This way he can come with as many bright ideas as he wants without interrupting your work, and he will be forced to prioritize the new tasks relative to the existing tasks, instead of expecting you to somehow magically complete them all first.
Gamma, capture their mascot, watch out, they have decoys all over.
This is off-topic even with respect to the off-topic parent post, but... there is a strict "mouse exclusion principle" enforced at each park: only one mouse character is allowed to be walking around the park at any given time. This avoids any possibility of children being traumatized by seeing two copies of the same character at the same time....:^)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no, now you've done it. Countdown to thread destruction in: 3... 2... 1... <poof!>
Right, those are three valid choices. There are others if you look. And each can send email and browse web sites just about as well as the next. So it is now the user's personal preference which OS he would like to use; his choice is no longer dictated by software compatibility concerns.
You simply blew it off as "I never claimed it [Linux] was [a threat to MS]" but your hailing OSS as an alternative to MS speaks otherwise.
Of course I blew it off, because it was irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. Do you understand the difference between 'alternative' and 'threat'? What's new here is that before Microsoft didn't have to really care whether its customers were happy or not -- they were pretty much forced to use Windows whether they liked it or not. Now that there is competition, Microsoft has to compete if they don't want to start losing customers -- they can no longer rely on customer lock-in to give them a captive market.
As for firefox; how does that trouble MS?
It's not Firefox in particular that's significant, it's the fact that decent web browsers are available for every OS, and more and more applications are being implemented as web sites rather than Windows executables. If you keep all your email inside Outlook and your database in Access, then it's fairly difficult to migrate away from Windows. OTOH, if you are using GMail for your mail and a web-based database service to keep your data, then you can stop using Windows any time you want to. Microsoft no longer has coercive power over you, because if they charge too much or don't satisfy your needs, it's trivial to switch to something else that works better for you.
. I don't see how that's going to be seen as an OSS victory.
Again, you keep trying to turn the discussion into the traditional slashdot "OSS vs Microsoft" battle, but that's not the point at all. The actual distinction to make is "customer lock-in vs open standards". Even if Linux disappeared tomorrow, Microsoft still wouldn't be "scary" again, because people whose data is stored in open formats or on web sites could still use MacOS/X or Unix or BeOS or any other OS to get their work done.
That depends on what task you were trying to accomplish. If your goal was to sell mass-market software and make a profit, then for quite a while Windows was the only practical choice of target platforms. Other platforms wouldn't generate enough sales to cover your development costs.
Web based services still require a PC, PCs still require an OS. Windows is still has the largest market share of any OS
Yes, but the crucial point is now it doesn't matter which OS you use. Any OS will run Firefox now, so you can use Windows if you want to, or something else if you want to. Contrast with the 90's, where for most things you had to run a
Sorry, but the Linux factor still isn't a threat.
I never claimed it was. What I said was: people now have a choice. If they feel the need to run something else, they can. Even if most people stick with Windows, the fact that they don't have to serves as a natural check against Microsoft's more predatory impulses. That's why Microsoft is less "scary" now.
Only if you assume that women are inferior to men, and therefore sharing an honor with a woman is emasculating.
Or, for all we know computing would be years behind if it wasn't for Microsoft and Bill Gates. Evil as it was, Microsoft did provide a (sort of) "standard" for the software market to coalesce around. Instead of five or six different operating systems all competing for market share, and everybody having to deal with the fact that they run OS "foo" while the software they want to use only runs on OS "bar", they could just walk into the local store, buy a piece of software off the shelf, and more-or-less expect it to work with their computer. As an ex-Amiga user and die-hard BeOS user (I'm typing this into NetPositive now
A killer does not become better in any way by saving equal amounts of lives as he has killed.
Yeah? What if he saves more lives than he killed? Wouldn't that make him better than a killer who killed but didn't later go on to save anyone? I think you are oversimplifying.
At the same time, Gates no longer cuts the profile he once did as a high-tech titan. While he's still respected, he's no longer scary--and the totemic company he built from scratch seems increasingly ordinary, even irrelevant
What the article doesn't go into is why Gates and Microsoft are no longer seen as scary. It's because their products are no longer the only choice. It used to be that for many things, you had to deal with Microsoft, because all the stuff you wanted to do required Windows to run. That meant that you had to agree to whatever terms Microsoft cared to offer, and they could be pretty onerous (and expensive). These days, with the easy availability of open source alternatives and the shift to web-based services, people are no longer compelled to accept lousy deals from Microsoft. If they don't like what Microsoft has to offer, they are free to go with something else. That means that (a) Microsoft has to treat its customers better if it wants to keep selling product, and (b) customers no longer have to live in fear of doing something that would anger the giant in Redmond.
So yes, Gates and Microsoft are no longer as scary as they used to be. But it's more because of the actions of Torvalds, Stallman, Jobs, and Berners-Lee than any change of heart by Gates.
Actually, the number of people dead is somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000. It's hard to know the exact number because the U.S. government doesn't keep a count of Iraqi casualties. The 2000+ figure refers to the deaths of American soldiers, which is tragic but only a small portion of the total loss of life (and of course as soldiers they were all volunteer combatants).
His father certainly did. Here's a quote George H. W. Bush, from back in 1991:
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. [...] Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
You're assuming that the politicians can't get unquestioning machinery to work for them and get things done instead. At some point, they could even have machinery to fix and maintain the machinery, at which point those messy subordinate humans can be cut out of the loop entirely.
Yeah, yeah, not anytime soon though
Is the point of treasure detecting to spend as much time as possible looking for treasure, or to find as much treasure as possible in a given amount of time?
I think the problem was that the capacity and cost of "traditional" hard drives has improved so rapidly over the past decade that holographic memory, like lots of other potentially revolutionary alternatives, simply didn't look like it would be able to compete any time in the forseeable future. Without a likely market for the product, research funding dried up.
There are plenty of people who never (or almost never) reboot their OS now... they just leave their machine on 24/7 possibly with an automatic sleep mode or perhaps without. I agree that having solid state memory would probably do away with "reboots" almost entirely, but that situation wouldn't be that much different from how it is now...
There's nothing about this idea that says you have to let some corporation or government hold your data for you.
So the question becomes, is there a benefit in making the trade?
Mostly the problem is that people accept the status quo, but find reasons to reject anything new. To put it another way: people will continue to pay high prices for traditional energy sources because they used to doing that, and they will put up with more pollution and global warming because those things increase so slowly, but they will be quick to blame all kinds of things on windmills because those are new and different, and therefore suspect.
In my experience, the 'Mighty Mouse' is difficult to use as a two-button mouse, because if you have a finger resting on the "left-button region" of the mouse, tapping on the "right-button region" gets interpreted as left-clicking rather than right-clicking. In order to successfully do a right-click, you have to remember to lift your finger off of the left-button region first, which is really unintuitive and annoying.
Have other people noticed this problem also, or am I doing something wrong?
It could be just "bad luck" -- evolution isn't guaranteed to find the best solution to anything, only a solution that is "good enough" to guarantee survival of the species (otherwise the species would have gone extinct). But putting that aside, there are probably structural reasons why animals never evolved wheels -- for example, how would do you connect nerves or blood vessels to an appendage that needs to be able to rotate freely?
Finally, it could be that in nature wheels aren't actually "better" after all. There wouldn't be much use in being able to roll down a freeway at 50MPH if there are no freeways, and your snazzy evolved bio-wheels keep getting stuck in the mud...
I'm no physicist, but intuitively I'd think that the fact that air is compressable (and water is not) would have some effect on the process...
Exactly how much science is being done on the ISS now? And how many rich tourists have been flown there?
Or it could just compile the IL into assembly the first time the user runs the app, and cache the resulting executable for quicker loading next time -- somewhat analogous to what Python does with its automatic
From a business perspective, with IL, I do need to use an obfuscator with my Java or
So the problem is that the bytecode isn't "obfuscated enough" in its natural state, and therefore you have to run an obfuscator on it? Putting aside for the moment the fact that in most situations obfuscation is considered a bad thing (because it makes the code harder to work with), I still don't see any real problem here -- if it bothers you, run your code through an obfuscator and be happy.
Are you kidding? It's genius! The entire history of dolls has been monopolized by kitschy-cooing sweet girly things, and the only place you could find any kind of doll-based evil Machiavellian backstabbing at all was in the "Chucky" movies. But now this technology has finally made evil dolls available to the common man! And this is only the first generation... as technology progresses would should see the state of the art grow to include everything from the traditional cymbal-playing monkeys and child-eating clowns to (someday) fulfilling the dream of owning my own full-fledged Terminator.
It's truly a great time to be alive.
I'm confused. How is "interpreted all at once before execution" different from "compiled"? Because the computer invokes the compilation-step automatically, instead of forcing the user to type "make"? That seems like a rather trivial distinction...
That would be nice, but I have to say that even in the cold, uncaring world of ObjC/C++, memory management can generally be handled quite easily. All you need is a good templated reference-count class, and then you can allocate your object, attach it to a ref-count object, pass ref-count objects around by value willy-nilly, and yet still rest assured that your object will be deleted when everybody is done with it.
(the only potential "gotcha", of course, is that if there are cycles in the refcounts' dependency graph than you will still leak... but in my experience this problem rarely if ever comes up)
How to handle people like that: write each task you are planning to do on a separate piece of paper. Stack the papers on your desk in the order that you plan to do them, with the next task on top and the last task on the bottom. When ADD-man comes in to tell you about the big new thing, tell him to write it down on a slip of paper and insert it into the proper position on the stack. Tell him that when you finish your current task, you will take the next slip of paper from the top of the stack and do what it says, and repeat until the stack is empty.
This way he can come with as many bright ideas as he wants without interrupting your work, and he will be forced to prioritize the new tasks relative to the existing tasks, instead of expecting you to somehow magically complete them all first.
This is off-topic even with respect to the off-topic parent post, but... there is a strict "mouse exclusion principle" enforced at each park: only one mouse character is allowed to be walking around the park at any given time. This avoids any possibility of children being traumatized by seeing two copies of the same character at the same time....