Don't forget that a lot of unauthorized software copying happens in businesses. I wonder if it's just that so many questionable sites are now riddled with spyware, that nobody wants to take the risk to crack a copy of some commercial software. They're willing to spend a little extra time learning or deploying an OSS package. Even if you crack it today, trying to crack the upgraded version next month could put your whole network (and therefore operation) at risk.
I don't think this is the case. You're not talking about just genius programmers when you mention "new, unexpected stuff" -- you're talking about brilliant programmers who happen to be creative geniuses. I think that the push away from CS as a major has to do with the exact thing that's wrong with your above statement.
Chinese, Indian, Albanian,... any other programmer may be able to write computer code very well, but in both an anecdotal and (what I beleive to be) a measurable sense, the United States and specific European countries actually teach their students how to be creative and competent at their jobs. It probably has a lot to do with the learning culture, and a lot to do with how people from these societies learn to cope with risk.
In my opinion, what you will find is that many of the creative genius programmers sense that the software culture in the US is no longer very concerned with innovation. There is definitely a perception that IT salaries are lower, and that will change with time, but the more relevant perception is that (because of IP laws in the US, and coming soon to a government near you) unless you're working for a top-10 employer (Google, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, etc.) whose business is IP, they don't want you to be creative. And if you don't work for a top-10, your creativity may bring the wrath of litigation down upon your head.
People are more willing to take 'normal' jobs and use their free time to express their creative ideas. Individuals who are truly interested in expressing themselves creatively, often care little or nothing about monetary recompense. The individuals we really need in Computer Science, the creative geniuses, don't need the hassles of the IT industry to find a creative outlet, and I'm sure many of them are just as happy to write stories and design video game maps in their off-time instead of using it as a primary means of income.
The jobs whose salaries were referred to are just that -- jobs. They pay a salary, and they can find a foreign programmer who can code to spec faster and for more money. If you really love what you do, why would you want to compete on that level and concede the commoditization of your talent?
This is a common misconception. MTBF is not very useful when you're only talking about a few drives. It's better to use failure rates, since this is how manufacturers compute MTBF anyway. They test 100 drives for 1 year, and 2 fail. That's a failure rate of 2% per year. Then they figure out, from that, how many years would pass at that initial failure rate before all the drives had failed, and take the mean of the lifetimes. Consider this: If two drives each have a 98% probability of surviving the first year, then the two drives in a RAID-0 will have a survival probability of (98%) = 96.04%. That's almost twice the probability of data-destroying failure. And it will be worse each successive year.
MTBF is more useful for budgeting -- Like, how many hard drives will we have to buy, on average, per year? Remember that failure rates go up as time progresses, and businesses usually use this as a measure of how many drives will fail before the expected end of useful life. If he's keeping worthwhile data on a RAID 0, he'd better start backing up.
My wife, currently looking for work, was required to submit her resume in Word format to about half of the employers she's interviewed with. Monster.com won't accept PDF or any other resume types except for pasted text. There is a lot of very focused discrimination working in favor of MS Office. It was a pain, too.
Her resume was on a super-professional looking HTML/CSS template that I designed for my own resume, so we had HTML and PDF versions. It renders properly in every CSS-capable browser I've tried it with, and even on my cellphone's browser, but Word (surprise!) couldn't import the document without mangling it. We ended up re-doing the document from scratch on Word for OS X (which has decent stylesheet support, unlike the Windows versions) and battling with the tables.
Your point about Word not working with anything is more than valid. It can't import HTML, RTF, or just about any other format properly, so why are we surprised when it can't read its own file format just right? But at the end of the day, Word 2000 reads Word 2000 files pretty well -- not perfectly, but none of the corporate users know to expect better from an office document format. Word XP has 'issues' reading Word 2000 files, and so on, ad infinitum. This is by design, and the poor end-users who either can't afford Office or can't keep up with the upgrade cycle, are being looked over for certain jobs.
Luckily for us, the choice to put the document in another format was for convenience and interoperability, not because we didn't have or couldn't use Word. Like (I think) most people on Slashdot, I'm not calling for an end to the Microsoft Office Hegemony. I just think that unless they can find a way to work with at least one feature-rich document format besides their own, I will have to join the cry for revolution.
Well, they haven't got enough data to claim that they can accurately predict how people will respond to a song. Remember that their metric so far has been the Billboard charts. So, all they're saying is, they've written a program to replace the decisions of RIAA Execs, not the music consumer. When we can write software to appreciate music, or at least put up a convincing approximation thereof, I think we'll have stumbled upon bigger problems than predicting / writing hit records.
They want subscribers so that they can tie downloads to unique users, and so they can measure their age/income/gender demographics. Ideally, the tracker, stats and user logins should belong to a third party, so that the networks don't control their own ratings statistics.
Because 'l337 d00d' would have already uploaded the show an hour after it aired. If they want to push revenues, they need to include ads and have a controlling tracker that will allow a spaced-out 95-99% of the show to be seeded in the first several hours before the show airs, then start seeding the final bits a few minutes before the show comes on TV. Introduce a branded (but compliant to some broad standard) client that allows a secure login to the tracker, and 'push' the torrents to subscribed users.
If they familiarize Joe Public with the technology, what's going to stop him from taking an interest in getting the show from another source?
I can relate to this. My wife made me replace an excellent digital camera (which I really liked) because the color temperature of the flash was too high (blue) for her complexion. Outdoor pics were fine, but when the flash was used, she always hated how she looked in the resulting pictures. People are very picky about color temperatures, often without realizing it.
I don't recall really wanting to play video files or MP3's on my Zire 71, or view color photos. Or open PDF's. Or transfer files / connect to my phone via bluetooth.
Let's break it down:
Video Files: No Hard Drive. What, I'm gonna watch a feature-length movie re-encoded at 256x128px? No? Maybe I can squeeze one 30-minute episode of a TV show on my SD Card, but it takes longer to re-encode the show than it does to watch.
Music Files: No Hard Drive. Again, what? 3 albums available to listen to? 3 hours of battery life, if I'm lucky, after which I can't access business apps? No thanks.
Color Photos: Why? If I need to show off photos, my website rocks for that. For casual show-off, my camera has as big a screen and is faster to display photos. If you feel the need to (repeatedly) pop out a spontaneous slideshow for strangers at work on your PDA, I think that's kinda strange. Otherwise, it's an entirely redundant function. Same with the built-in camera.
PDF's: Slow as Molasses. Slower. I think the major issue is the lack of an FPU on most mobiles (My SE P910 is just as guilty). People have written dedicated MP3 and video decoding that works without it, but it's a serious problem -- and not just for PDF's. Almost all your multimedia content suffers from a combination of the lack of an FPU and deficiencies in algorithms used to circumvent the need for one.
Connect via Bluetooth: Your phone? Since the phone & PDA sync to the same PC, I assume this is to get high-priced internet access from your PDA? Wireless carriers in the US have done everything in their power, including (for some) breaking the law and infringing on their customers' fair use rights, to prevent people from doing just that. Most bluetooth phones sold stateside don't even have the proper software.
Contacts / Calendar / ToDo: Mobile phone. If you can sync them, they belong on your mobile phone. Having contacts on the PDA is no use when you have to re-enter the number. Having alarms doesn't help you, because you'll have the PDA with you less often than the phone, and the PDA's alarm buzzers are often chintzy.
Simply put, there isn't anything the PDA does that a mobile or a media player (with WiFi, maybe) can't do better. But if you find a PDA with an FPU or DSP (for decoding JPEG, playing movies, and rendering PDF's), a 20+GB Hard Disk, and a battery that will give me enough juice to make it through a day of multimedia, we'll talk. Until then, the mobile and an iPod will take care of everything I need on the go.
I don't know, maybe they just want a donation. They've got a PayPal "Contribute" button. Since I haven't listened to an original, physical CD in years (except for the trip home from the store before the original is ripped), I've got no need for physical media.
I donated less than the cost of gas for me to drive to a store in the next town to buy the CD, and the group will keep a hell of a lot more money than if they sold me a CD through the RIAA. I downloaded via BitTorrent, so the bandwidth costs for them weren't that high. I feel pretty good about this as a distribution medium, and hope that others here are willing to abide by an honor system in the long run.
I'm looking forward to the Rolex(tm) Edition iPod nano, with 10k gold-plated clickwheel, obsidian faceplate, and quartz lens (the back will probably be polished titanium). It'll weigh about 2-3 times what the nano does now, and cost ten times as much, but it won't scratch.
Seriously, guys. It's a cheap gadget. It's a REALLY cheap gadget. Last time I checked, you couldn't BUY removable flash memory for the same $/GB as the 4GB nano. Unless you're in the Vertu (fancy-schmancy cellphones) crowd, just expect that an uber-cool gadget that you can afford might have a few flaws. It's still a good value on the grounds of functionality. If you want a super-flashy fashion statement, either wait for another vendor to copy what Apple has done, or protect what you have a little better.
I've done this. I have a lib (not ready to share yet) that takes an XML document and assimilates it into the current document as XHTML. There's a corresponding pair of objects in my PHP toolkit, XMLPage and XHTMLPage -- XHTMLPage extends XMLPage -- that I can use to return content in a full page, or atomically to the rewrite module, using the same subroutines.
Here's what happens: (JS) Rewrite.load(url[, postdata[, callbackfn]]); (PHP) Create XML document:
The rewrite module then uses the XML DOM Tree to merge the response into the document. Each browser has to be handled differently, but the module is still only about 6-7kb. It keeps a queue to manage requests, so that there is never more than one active request.
It works GREAT. If you're thinking of developing a similar toolkit, it's a good investment.
a post-Intel future where each application is a CPU-affine process, and each widget has its own independent thread with asynchronous communication. Reportedly, the system will have 4 primary chips, each a consumer-level descendent of Sun's upcoming Niagara series processors. Each of the new chips will have 64 discrete processing units on-die (256 sets of registers per physical chip for thread execution, for a total of 1024 actively running threads on the machine). The chips will use an optical interconnect among themselves to transfer memory contents, and send messages to each other using the on-chip 10,000 base-T Ethernet.
I mean, Apple pioneered using the GPU to parallelize GUI action, why not just take it to the extreme and start targeting the desktop with throughput-based computing? We'll need it eventually.
I know what you mean. I just developed a live GPS Fleet-Tracking software package for Google Earth. IMO, it kicks ass mostly because it does everything it can to stay within data plan limits, and manages to squeeze a month's worth of 14-hour driving days into the 5MB the carrier provides with a 5-second polling interval. It took a week to devise and implement a custom, UDP-based protocol to save the TCP/IP overhead, and I spent even more weeks testing and tweaking to get the data usage down.
NEXTEL, who is the carrier for the phones it runs on, charges $20 per month for 5MB of data. Think about that. That's not even ONE mp3 file sometimes! It's $4 per megabyte (roughly 1 minute of song time)!! If you go over that amount, it's TEN DOLLARS per MB. Not exactly the environment for a rich media experience, is it? It's not even a good environment for business apps.
Who's gonna care about applications they can't afford to deploy or use?
If we're comparing these two languages for security, I'll suggest an easy fix for Sun:
Introduce a Secure Mode runtime environment on the server side (for Enterprise JavaBeans and whatnot), and then enforce the same security rules on apps that connect to it. Sure, you'll give users the option of breaking some key classes, but it'd be too difficult to force an update for security. This would give developers the option of increased security without hurting them too much. Java has been about forcing developers to adhere to good-practices design from the beginning, so get hopping on Java 5.0 Security Edition!
Easy. Apple has a brand-new compiler in the pipe, and developers need to use it to be compatible with Mac-On-Intel. If Apple is enforcing compiler constraints now to ensure that generated code fits the new processor's optimization profile, it wins. Current binaries would be ensured not to choke on the new proc's worst-case operations. Remember when the Pentium 4 came out and many old applications had to be rewritten to get out of the pipeline's way?
Parts of the code that relate to pipeline issues and parallel processing, are usually nothing more than hints or comments inserted into the machine code stream. ALL Apple would have to do is release an updated version of its compiler BEFORE the main MacTel product launch, and tell its developers that this version is necessary to avoid some bugs with forthcoming processors. It would be trivial, and I think unnoticable, to insert cache-preload, thread-related, branch-hint, and core-affinity code now, in anticipation of improved processor technology.
Ignoring the possibility of 'enhanced' binaries that would run on today's hardware, Apple's Universal Binary format and their tighter OS release schedule mean that OS X is likely to see 'fat' binaries for {Mac, Intel, Next-Gen Intel} processors sooner rather than later. OS X has a modular approach to architecture support -- An application defines a set of architectures it runs on, provides binaries for those architectures, and the OS tries to find the most appropriate supported environment (physical, virtual (eg, Java), or emulated) to run it on. It already does this for the G3/G4/G5 families of processors.
You think Windows users (especially business users) are going to mail-order a freshly-compiled copy of Windows XP from Microsoft, AND pony up for Word 2006 to get increased performance?
It's far from the most comment-worthy on the list, but since the other topics have been addressed, and this is a topic close to my heart, I'll take The Newton for $500, please.
The Newton was good for a laugh, but it was also a good lesson for future manufacturers of PDAs. Without Apple's failure, would we really have seen Palm's success?
I think that should be revised. The original Newton MessagePad was a failure, because it exposed serious flaws in what was (at that time) still the most heavily researched and well-thought-out touchscreen interface of the time. Plus, it was a little slow. However, you're missing about 4-5 years of history in which the MessagePad started to succeed, and it was this success that not only inspired Palm, but allowed them to make their initial money as a software developer for the Newton platform.
As someone who developed for the MessagePad as a teenager, I can tell you that it was not only highly technically advanced, but was a great learning platform. The Newton OS was based on a bytecode, object-oriented solution that was similar to, but of a smaller scope than, Java. The development environment for Newton was, 10 years ago, what NetBeans 4.1 has just started to become for mobile apps today, and native development was available as well. That's why there's still an active developer community.
On technical merit, Apple put a lot of innovation into this machine, and it paid off by allowing easy-to-use applications on a PDA that could print (w/WYSIWYG preview!), fax, email -- whatever. There are still things I could do with a MessagePad (eg, receive a fax, or write and edit a heirarchical checklist) that either don't work at all or don't work right on current PDA's, even with third-party software and annoying hardware dongles.
The processor in the first few generations wasn't quite up to the load of running an interpreted OS, a problem that was remedied quite nicely by the MP2000 series -- they used a 190MHz StrongARM, the first of its kind to become available. A few months after their release, Jobs came back to Apple and gave the Newton the axe.
But, from the release of the Newton 2.0 Operating System (which many older machines could be upgraded with), the UI bugs had been worked out. Handwriting recognition was excellent. There was an accessory keyboard that was great, if a little noisy. And the built-in notetaking application has yet to find an equal among newer PDA's. And, even at $800 a pop, it was selling.
In summation, your point about the Newton is patently false. It should read:
The Newton was good for a laugh, but then it improved and was shut down in its prime due to internal politics. Without the Newton's late-life success and the ensuing market vacuum when it was axed, would we really have seen Palm's success?
I agree. Take a lot of the Bible as general, (often good!) principles for making people participate in a successful society, but don't say that this or that will literally happen because it's written about in the Bible. The Bible is a long-running story, but at the same time it's a general commentary on what people discovered about human nature in the course of 5,000+ years of recorded history. It also deals with a society (the Israelites) who kept meticulous records, protected them, and valued education.
So, I agree with the parent that it's not prophecy as much as retelling. But remember that it doesn't render the text meaningless. Rather, it just makes it that much more forceful. It's as if someone is trying to say, in a way that common men will heed, "All the rules we've given you for society are good, in our judgement and those of our fathers. Here, we present elements of human nature that people will exhibit in large groups -- and which you, as a society, will have to battle collectively to ensure your survival."
I can imagine that this probably occurred dozens, if not hundreds of times. And since it got written down in this context, take it for the sincerest warning it is.
Here, here! There's also the common wisdom that Macs can stay relevant even long after all support for them is dropped. As long as there aren't a thousand exploits and viruses for your equipment, most of your incentive to upgrade is removed. While I think the OP's original statement about software going Intel-Only is patently false, viruses and exploits for PPC machines will probably die instantaneously.
Heck, my mother still uses a Motorola 68040 Mac that's more than 10 years old, because my father insisted on replacing it with a PC. She doesn't buy new peripherals and software anymore, but it works like it did the day she bought it. The PC, however, is only two years old and is frustratingly crapped up to the gills with virus scanners, adware and popup blockers, and is therefore fast approaching zero utility.
[To the OP:] Consider how important it is to have the absolute newest software versus how important it is to have the absolute newest hardware. FAT binaries will probably live on for at least 4-5 years. But also remember you won't be getting appropriate performance until the Intel version of your software is ready and made available. And have fun running software in emulation on a laptop -- we'll see what happens to your battery life. If you want to dance the razor's edge on hardware, wait for MacTel. But don't expect software to be an advantage when you do.
This raises an excellent point, which I had hoped (considering the title) would be explored in TFA. How much should one charge for software, especially for mission-critical applications? Is it equitable for a developer to charge a portion of the potential benefits? Should the developer set the price of sales based on the cost of initial development (and hence replacement)? Let's explore the issue.
Say I'm contracting for a company (with an option to resell the software later to other companies) who needs a program to assist management in analysing and managing all the facets of their business. The company stands to benefit from this software -- by changing some job descriptions, by managing laborers better, by scheduling operations more efficiently, shipping more product on time, etc. -- on the order of about US$500,000.00 per month.
On the other hand, the company will be required to purchase complimentary services -- Internet connectivity for its office and salespeople, internet plans for many employees' mobile phones, zipcode database subscriptions, etc. -- and complimentary software and will spend a significant number of employee hours bringing the new system into operation.
As an employee, the pricing is simple: write the software in the course of your job. As a contractor or software reseller, should I price the software at the cost of original creation, perhaps on an annual-salary basis? Support services will be offered later, as is expected in the software industry.
What we see is this: There is a huge disparity between the actual cost of producing the software (about 1 year's salary) and the amount one could expect to benefit from it in a reasonable period of time under a recovery model. Say, if the business wanted to recoup their investment in 6 months, they have an upper cap of about $3 million for the software. But, assuming they can find and hire a good developer, they could re-produce the software in about 1 year for less than $100,000.00. (Lost profits would be huge for that time, but we'll leave that out of the picture.)
Any guidance for a fair and ethical pricing model? Are there any accepted formulae for this?
Retail Employees don't even enter into the equation. You are educated by the corporation, instructed by the corporation, and acting as an agent thereof. When you have a conversation with a customer, you are basically a proxy for the company.
People who behave like the grandparent poster are doing society a service. Losing sales (or public protest! as if!) is the only message that we, as individuals, can send back to the company after hearing a trained-parrot spiel on company policy. In great enough numbers, people can reward the good companies and punish the bad ones. I'll state this again from the opposite direction: don't mistake the store manager for someone who can affect change. If they even ask for your phone number, you have every right in the world to walk away. Don't trouble a manager over it, because you're not helping anyone.
It seems like not enough people today understand their rights and responsibilities in a capitalist society. That's why we have so many of the deplorable, sheepish kind of consumer and too few empowered ones. If capitalism is going to work for us, just like democracy, people have to care enough to vote.
Not at all. I even bought a really nice messenger-style bag for myself on a recent trip. It's just that stateside, if I'm not actively carrying a laptop in it, people call it a purse. And I have to prove to them that it's being used as a laptop bag before they will stop laughing. Idiotic Americans.
What world are you living in?.... Floppies are utterly disposable. Pass them out like candy and don't care if they come back.
What world are YOU living in? Pass out a URL with a directory- or file-specific password, save yourself the time and expense of creating the floppies, and then nobody throws anything away.
Instead of a 1-hour drive to work, you can have a 1-hour train ride to work, and will be able to watch entire television shows or significant portions of movies during transit. It gives you an excuse to own a video-capable player.
However, considering that shoulder bags are an acceptable accoutrement for men over there, perhaps you'd be happier with the new Archos PMP with the 7" screen...
The content providers have got it backward. They're not going to find their panacea with a completely-secure, uncrackable DRM scheme. They're going to start making lots more money when they work out two things:
A pricing plan that can compete. This is not trivial. Remember that they're competing with P2P networks and BitTorrent at this point, since they didn't do anything when the technology was younger.
DRM that doesn't fly in the face of consumers' fair use rights. If the consumer feels like they're really losing something by buying a paid-for product as opposed to downloading, they will always go for the lower-priced product with greater actual value.
At this point, it looks like Apple did a good job of balancing all the pro's and con's. It still bothers some consumers who don't have an iPod, or want to use Linux, but they can always buy CD's. Or download MP3's. Whatever DRM model comes up, people will crack it. Some people will circumvent it. Some people will ignore it. The trick is the business model and pricing that convince the consumer to invest.
Of course, you'll never hear that from Microsoft. If the RIAA and MPAA wisened up to what's really going on, Microsoft wouldn't get a penny from them.
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Don't forget that a lot of unauthorized software copying happens in businesses. I wonder if it's just that so many questionable sites are now riddled with spyware, that nobody wants to take the risk to crack a copy of some commercial software. They're willing to spend a little extra time learning or deploying an OSS package. Even if you crack it today, trying to crack the upgraded version next month could put your whole network (and therefore operation) at risk.
Jasin NataelI don't think this is the case. You're not talking about just genius programmers when you mention "new, unexpected stuff" -- you're talking about brilliant programmers who happen to be creative geniuses. I think that the push away from CS as a major has to do with the exact thing that's wrong with your above statement.
Chinese, Indian, Albanian, ... any other programmer may be able to write computer code very well, but in both an anecdotal and (what I beleive to be) a measurable sense, the United States and specific European countries actually teach their students how to be creative and competent at their jobs. It probably has a lot to do with the learning culture, and a lot to do with how people from these societies learn to cope with risk.
In my opinion, what you will find is that many of the creative genius programmers sense that the software culture in the US is no longer very concerned with innovation. There is definitely a perception that IT salaries are lower, and that will change with time, but the more relevant perception is that (because of IP laws in the US, and coming soon to a government near you) unless you're working for a top-10 employer (Google, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, etc.) whose business is IP, they don't want you to be creative. And if you don't work for a top-10, your creativity may bring the wrath of litigation down upon your head.
People are more willing to take 'normal' jobs and use their free time to express their creative ideas. Individuals who are truly interested in expressing themselves creatively, often care little or nothing about monetary recompense. The individuals we really need in Computer Science, the creative geniuses, don't need the hassles of the IT industry to find a creative outlet, and I'm sure many of them are just as happy to write stories and design video game maps in their off-time instead of using it as a primary means of income.
The jobs whose salaries were referred to are just that -- jobs. They pay a salary, and they can find a foreign programmer who can code to spec faster and for more money. If you really love what you do, why would you want to compete on that level and concede the commoditization of your talent?
Jasin NataelThis is a common misconception. MTBF is not very useful when you're only talking about a few drives. It's better to use failure rates, since this is how manufacturers compute MTBF anyway. They test 100 drives for 1 year, and 2 fail. That's a failure rate of 2% per year. Then they figure out, from that, how many years would pass at that initial failure rate before all the drives had failed, and take the mean of the lifetimes. Consider this: If two drives each have a 98% probability of surviving the first year, then the two drives in a RAID-0 will have a survival probability of (98%) = 96.04%. That's almost twice the probability of data-destroying failure. And it will be worse each successive year.
MTBF is more useful for budgeting -- Like, how many hard drives will we have to buy, on average, per year? Remember that failure rates go up as time progresses, and businesses usually use this as a measure of how many drives will fail before the expected end of useful life. If he's keeping worthwhile data on a RAID 0, he'd better start backing up.
Jasin NataelMy wife, currently looking for work, was required to submit her resume in Word format to about half of the employers she's interviewed with. Monster.com won't accept PDF or any other resume types except for pasted text. There is a lot of very focused discrimination working in favor of MS Office. It was a pain, too.
Her resume was on a super-professional looking HTML/CSS template that I designed for my own resume, so we had HTML and PDF versions. It renders properly in every CSS-capable browser I've tried it with, and even on my cellphone's browser, but Word (surprise!) couldn't import the document without mangling it. We ended up re-doing the document from scratch on Word for OS X (which has decent stylesheet support, unlike the Windows versions) and battling with the tables.
Your point about Word not working with anything is more than valid. It can't import HTML, RTF, or just about any other format properly, so why are we surprised when it can't read its own file format just right? But at the end of the day, Word 2000 reads Word 2000 files pretty well -- not perfectly, but none of the corporate users know to expect better from an office document format. Word XP has 'issues' reading Word 2000 files, and so on, ad infinitum. This is by design, and the poor end-users who either can't afford Office or can't keep up with the upgrade cycle, are being looked over for certain jobs.
Luckily for us, the choice to put the document in another format was for convenience and interoperability, not because we didn't have or couldn't use Word. Like (I think) most people on Slashdot, I'm not calling for an end to the Microsoft Office Hegemony. I just think that unless they can find a way to work with at least one feature-rich document format besides their own, I will have to join the cry for revolution.
--Jasin NataelWell, they haven't got enough data to claim that they can accurately predict how people will respond to a song. Remember that their metric so far has been the Billboard charts. So, all they're saying is, they've written a program to replace the decisions of RIAA Execs, not the music consumer. When we can write software to appreciate music, or at least put up a convincing approximation thereof, I think we'll have stumbled upon bigger problems than predicting / writing hit records.
--Jasin NataelThey want subscribers so that they can tie downloads to unique users, and so they can measure their age/income/gender demographics. Ideally, the tracker, stats and user logins should belong to a third party, so that the networks don't control their own ratings statistics.
--Jasin NataelBecause 'l337 d00d' would have already uploaded the show an hour after it aired. If they want to push revenues, they need to include ads and have a controlling tracker that will allow a spaced-out 95-99% of the show to be seeded in the first several hours before the show airs, then start seeding the final bits a few minutes before the show comes on TV. Introduce a branded (but compliant to some broad standard) client that allows a secure login to the tracker, and 'push' the torrents to subscribed users.
If they familiarize Joe Public with the technology, what's going to stop him from taking an interest in getting the show from another source?
--Jasin NataelI can relate to this. My wife made me replace an excellent digital camera (which I really liked) because the color temperature of the flash was too high (blue) for her complexion. Outdoor pics were fine, but when the flash was used, she always hated how she looked in the resulting pictures. People are very picky about color temperatures, often without realizing it.
--Jasin NataelI don't recall really wanting to play video files or MP3's on my Zire 71, or view color photos. Or open PDF's. Or transfer files / connect to my phone via bluetooth.
Let's break it down:
Simply put, there isn't anything the PDA does that a mobile or a media player (with WiFi, maybe) can't do better. But if you find a PDA with an FPU or DSP (for decoding JPEG, playing movies, and rendering PDF's), a 20+GB Hard Disk, and a battery that will give me enough juice to make it through a day of multimedia, we'll talk. Until then, the mobile and an iPod will take care of everything I need on the go.
Jastin NataelI don't know, maybe they just want a donation. They've got a PayPal "Contribute" button. Since I haven't listened to an original, physical CD in years (except for the trip home from the store before the original is ripped), I've got no need for physical media.
I donated less than the cost of gas for me to drive to a store in the next town to buy the CD, and the group will keep a hell of a lot more money than if they sold me a CD through the RIAA. I downloaded via BitTorrent, so the bandwidth costs for them weren't that high. I feel pretty good about this as a distribution medium, and hope that others here are willing to abide by an honor system in the long run.
--Jasin NataelI'm looking forward to the Rolex(tm) Edition iPod nano, with 10k gold-plated clickwheel, obsidian faceplate, and quartz lens (the back will probably be polished titanium). It'll weigh about 2-3 times what the nano does now, and cost ten times as much, but it won't scratch.
Seriously, guys. It's a cheap gadget. It's a REALLY cheap gadget. Last time I checked, you couldn't BUY removable flash memory for the same $/GB as the 4GB nano. Unless you're in the Vertu (fancy-schmancy cellphones) crowd, just expect that an uber-cool gadget that you can afford might have a few flaws. It's still a good value on the grounds of functionality. If you want a super-flashy fashion statement, either wait for another vendor to copy what Apple has done, or protect what you have a little better.
--Jasin Natael
Here's what happens:
(JS) Rewrite.load(url[, postdata[, callbackfn]]);
(PHP) Create XML document:The rewrite module then uses the XML DOM Tree to merge the response into the document. Each browser has to be handled differently, but the module is still only about 6-7kb. It keeps a queue to manage requests, so that there is never more than one active request.
It works GREAT. If you're thinking of developing a similar toolkit, it's a good investment.
--Jasin Natael
a post-Intel future where each application is a CPU-affine process, and each widget has its own independent thread with asynchronous communication. Reportedly, the system will have 4 primary chips, each a consumer-level descendent of Sun's upcoming Niagara series processors. Each of the new chips will have 64 discrete processing units on-die (256 sets of registers per physical chip for thread execution, for a total of 1024 actively running threads on the machine). The chips will use an optical interconnect among themselves to transfer memory contents, and send messages to each other using the on-chip 10,000 base-T Ethernet.
I mean, Apple pioneered using the GPU to parallelize GUI action, why not just take it to the extreme and start targeting the desktop with throughput-based computing? We'll need it eventually.
--Jasin NataelI know what you mean. I just developed a live GPS Fleet-Tracking software package for Google Earth. IMO, it kicks ass mostly because it does everything it can to stay within data plan limits, and manages to squeeze a month's worth of 14-hour driving days into the 5MB the carrier provides with a 5-second polling interval. It took a week to devise and implement a custom, UDP-based protocol to save the TCP/IP overhead, and I spent even more weeks testing and tweaking to get the data usage down.
NEXTEL, who is the carrier for the phones it runs on, charges $20 per month for 5MB of data. Think about that. That's not even ONE mp3 file sometimes! It's $4 per megabyte (roughly 1 minute of song time)!! If you go over that amount, it's TEN DOLLARS per MB. Not exactly the environment for a rich media experience, is it? It's not even a good environment for business apps.
Who's gonna care about applications they can't afford to deploy or use?
--Jasin NataelIf we're comparing these two languages for security, I'll suggest an easy fix for Sun:
Introduce a Secure Mode runtime environment on the server side (for Enterprise JavaBeans and whatnot), and then enforce the same security rules on apps that connect to it. Sure, you'll give users the option of breaking some key classes, but it'd be too difficult to force an update for security. This would give developers the option of increased security without hurting them too much. Java has been about forcing developers to adhere to good-practices design from the beginning, so get hopping on Java 5.0 Security Edition!
Jasin NataelEasy. Apple has a brand-new compiler in the pipe, and developers need to use it to be compatible with Mac-On-Intel. If Apple is enforcing compiler constraints now to ensure that generated code fits the new processor's optimization profile, it wins. Current binaries would be ensured not to choke on the new proc's worst-case operations. Remember when the Pentium 4 came out and many old applications had to be rewritten to get out of the pipeline's way?
Parts of the code that relate to pipeline issues and parallel processing, are usually nothing more than hints or comments inserted into the machine code stream. ALL Apple would have to do is release an updated version of its compiler BEFORE the main MacTel product launch, and tell its developers that this version is necessary to avoid some bugs with forthcoming processors. It would be trivial, and I think unnoticable, to insert cache-preload, thread-related, branch-hint, and core-affinity code now, in anticipation of improved processor technology.
Ignoring the possibility of 'enhanced' binaries that would run on today's hardware, Apple's Universal Binary format and their tighter OS release schedule mean that OS X is likely to see 'fat' binaries for {Mac, Intel, Next-Gen Intel} processors sooner rather than later. OS X has a modular approach to architecture support -- An application defines a set of architectures it runs on, provides binaries for those architectures, and the OS tries to find the most appropriate supported environment (physical, virtual (eg, Java), or emulated) to run it on. It already does this for the G3/G4/G5 families of processors.
You think Windows users (especially business users) are going to mail-order a freshly-compiled copy of Windows XP from Microsoft, AND pony up for Word 2006 to get increased performance?
--Jasin NataelIt's far from the most comment-worthy on the list, but since the other topics have been addressed, and this is a topic close to my heart, I'll take The Newton for $500, please.
I think that should be revised. The original Newton MessagePad was a failure, because it exposed serious flaws in what was (at that time) still the most heavily researched and well-thought-out touchscreen interface of the time. Plus, it was a little slow. However, you're missing about 4-5 years of history in which the MessagePad started to succeed, and it was this success that not only inspired Palm, but allowed them to make their initial money as a software developer for the Newton platform.
As someone who developed for the MessagePad as a teenager, I can tell you that it was not only highly technically advanced, but was a great learning platform. The Newton OS was based on a bytecode, object-oriented solution that was similar to, but of a smaller scope than, Java. The development environment for Newton was, 10 years ago, what NetBeans 4.1 has just started to become for mobile apps today, and native development was available as well. That's why there's still an active developer community.
On technical merit, Apple put a lot of innovation into this machine, and it paid off by allowing easy-to-use applications on a PDA that could print (w/WYSIWYG preview!), fax, email -- whatever. There are still things I could do with a MessagePad (eg, receive a fax, or write and edit a heirarchical checklist) that either don't work at all or don't work right on current PDA's, even with third-party software and annoying hardware dongles.
The processor in the first few generations wasn't quite up to the load of running an interpreted OS, a problem that was remedied quite nicely by the MP2000 series -- they used a 190MHz StrongARM, the first of its kind to become available. A few months after their release, Jobs came back to Apple and gave the Newton the axe.
But, from the release of the Newton 2.0 Operating System (which many older machines could be upgraded with), the UI bugs had been worked out. Handwriting recognition was excellent. There was an accessory keyboard that was great, if a little noisy. And the built-in notetaking application has yet to find an equal among newer PDA's. And, even at $800 a pop, it was selling.
In summation, your point about the Newton is patently false. It should read:
Jasin NataelI agree. Take a lot of the Bible as general, (often good!) principles for making people participate in a successful society, but don't say that this or that will literally happen because it's written about in the Bible. The Bible is a long-running story, but at the same time it's a general commentary on what people discovered about human nature in the course of 5,000+ years of recorded history. It also deals with a society (the Israelites) who kept meticulous records, protected them, and valued education.
So, I agree with the parent that it's not prophecy as much as retelling. But remember that it doesn't render the text meaningless. Rather, it just makes it that much more forceful. It's as if someone is trying to say, in a way that common men will heed, "All the rules we've given you for society are good, in our judgement and those of our fathers. Here, we present elements of human nature that people will exhibit in large groups -- and which you, as a society, will have to battle collectively to ensure your survival."
I can imagine that this probably occurred dozens, if not hundreds of times. And since it got written down in this context, take it for the sincerest warning it is.
--Jasin NataelHere, here! There's also the common wisdom that Macs can stay relevant even long after all support for them is dropped. As long as there aren't a thousand exploits and viruses for your equipment, most of your incentive to upgrade is removed. While I think the OP's original statement about software going Intel-Only is patently false, viruses and exploits for PPC machines will probably die instantaneously.
Heck, my mother still uses a Motorola 68040 Mac that's more than 10 years old, because my father insisted on replacing it with a PC. She doesn't buy new peripherals and software anymore, but it works like it did the day she bought it. The PC, however, is only two years old and is frustratingly crapped up to the gills with virus scanners, adware and popup blockers, and is therefore fast approaching zero utility.
[To the OP:] Consider how important it is to have the absolute newest software versus how important it is to have the absolute newest hardware. FAT binaries will probably live on for at least 4-5 years. But also remember you won't be getting appropriate performance until the Intel version of your software is ready and made available. And have fun running software in emulation on a laptop -- we'll see what happens to your battery life. If you want to dance the razor's edge on hardware, wait for MacTel. But don't expect software to be an advantage when you do.
Jasin NataelThis raises an excellent point, which I had hoped (considering the title) would be explored in TFA. How much should one charge for software, especially for mission-critical applications? Is it equitable for a developer to charge a portion of the potential benefits? Should the developer set the price of sales based on the cost of initial development (and hence replacement)? Let's explore the issue.
Say I'm contracting for a company (with an option to resell the software later to other companies) who needs a program to assist management in analysing and managing all the facets of their business. The company stands to benefit from this software -- by changing some job descriptions, by managing laborers better, by scheduling operations more efficiently, shipping more product on time, etc. -- on the order of about US$500,000.00 per month.
On the other hand, the company will be required to purchase complimentary services -- Internet connectivity for its office and salespeople, internet plans for many employees' mobile phones, zipcode database subscriptions, etc. -- and complimentary software and will spend a significant number of employee hours bringing the new system into operation.
As an employee, the pricing is simple: write the software in the course of your job. As a contractor or software reseller, should I price the software at the cost of original creation, perhaps on an annual-salary basis? Support services will be offered later, as is expected in the software industry.
What we see is this: There is a huge disparity between the actual cost of producing the software (about 1 year's salary) and the amount one could expect to benefit from it in a reasonable period of time under a recovery model. Say, if the business wanted to recoup their investment in 6 months, they have an upper cap of about $3 million for the software. But, assuming they can find and hire a good developer, they could re-produce the software in about 1 year for less than $100,000.00. (Lost profits would be huge for that time, but we'll leave that out of the picture.)
Any guidance for a fair and ethical pricing model? Are there any accepted formulae for this?
Jasin NataelRetail Employees don't even enter into the equation. You are educated by the corporation, instructed by the corporation, and acting as an agent thereof. When you have a conversation with a customer, you are basically a proxy for the company.
People who behave like the grandparent poster are doing society a service. Losing sales (or public protest! as if!) is the only message that we, as individuals, can send back to the company after hearing a trained-parrot spiel on company policy. In great enough numbers, people can reward the good companies and punish the bad ones. I'll state this again from the opposite direction: don't mistake the store manager for someone who can affect change. If they even ask for your phone number, you have every right in the world to walk away. Don't trouble a manager over it, because you're not helping anyone.
It seems like not enough people today understand their rights and responsibilities in a capitalist society. That's why we have so many of the deplorable, sheepish kind of consumer and too few empowered ones. If capitalism is going to work for us, just like democracy, people have to care enough to vote.
Jasin NataelNot at all. I even bought a really nice messenger-style bag for myself on a recent trip. It's just that stateside, if I'm not actively carrying a laptop in it, people call it a purse. And I have to prove to them that it's being used as a laptop bag before they will stop laughing. Idiotic Americans.
Jasin NataelWhat world are YOU living in? Pass out a URL with a directory- or file-specific password, save yourself the time and expense of creating the floppies, and then nobody throws anything away.
Jasin NataelReason #1131 to move to Japan!
Instead of a 1-hour drive to work, you can have a 1-hour train ride to work, and will be able to watch entire television shows or significant portions of movies during transit. It gives you an excuse to own a video-capable player.
However, considering that shoulder bags are an acceptable accoutrement for men over there, perhaps you'd be happier with the new Archos PMP with the 7" screen...
Jasin NataelThe content providers have got it backward. They're not going to find their panacea with a completely-secure, uncrackable DRM scheme. They're going to start making lots more money when they work out two things:
This is not trivial. Remember that they're competing with P2P networks and BitTorrent at this point, since they didn't do anything when the technology was younger.
If the consumer feels like they're really losing something by buying a paid-for product as opposed to downloading, they will always go for the lower-priced product with greater actual value.
At this point, it looks like Apple did a good job of balancing all the pro's and con's. It still bothers some consumers who don't have an iPod, or want to use Linux, but they can always buy CD's. Or download MP3's. Whatever DRM model comes up, people will crack it. Some people will circumvent it. Some people will ignore it. The trick is the business model and pricing that convince the consumer to invest.
Of course, you'll never hear that from Microsoft. If the RIAA and MPAA wisened up to what's really going on, Microsoft wouldn't get a penny from them.
Jasin Natael