Sounds like a great way to lock OS X, or macOS or whatever they call it these days, solidly back to Apple hardware and preclude any possibility of running on stock x86 hardware. Though there's less and less reason to run a hacintosh all the time (it was always a maintenance nightmare). Though virtualization might be a way of getting around that. I've often thought Apple should sell a complete OS X (excuse me, macOS) vm for Windows users as it would provide an easy way to woo users to the platform. However the VM on your average Windows machine would probably outperform the Mac Pro, given Apple's commitment to high end users these days.
Yes OO and LO are definitely viable replacements for Office for many people. And I can believe they are making inroads, particularly in small businesses. But I have not seen any evidence that alternatives are making a dent in the overall Office hegemony, despite your anecdote. Sorry. Large organizations still use Office and Exchange for a lot of things. MS Office is going to be with us in its various forms for a long time, I'm afraid. In many large organizations it's just part of the annual MS site license that they pay the big bucks for.
To put it politely, it's wishful thinking to claim that Office competitors like iWork, LibreOffice, and Google Docs have significantly impacted MS Office's market share. Office has not gone from 100% share to 1.8% share in any real sense. Perpetual licenses for MS Office are still available and, I presume, selling well, particularly in the 99% of the market that is the business world.
What they have shown is that of the home user crowd, the relatively small number of users outside the business world, users are apparently unwilling to pay the subscription model, perhaps given the alternatives like Google Docs of LibreOffice. Or pirated copies. Or even 10 year old licenses of Office.
But make no mistake. The MS Office hegemony is still strong and is still making MS a lot of money. And if you think about it, corporate licensing is already a de facto subscription. So it's not like they are not making money hand over fist still.
Sure if you cut open a cable and placed your multimeter inline with the power wire. Decent cables aren't cheap either. So it seems a lot easier and more fool-proof to buy a purpose-made monitor, and you'd come out nearly the same.
Actually the lack of "progress" in automobiles is partly a result of heavy safety regulation. There are lots of ideas for changing things that would probably be more usable than the current system, but they are not likely to be brought to market anytime soon due to these safety regulations. I remember seeing years ago about a design to use side sticks to control a car and they found they were quite a natural and more precise method of controlling the car. However it's unlikely the benefit outweighed the risks to clueless drivers.
Current laws include the placement of the pedals and the placement of gear positions on an automatic transmission shift lever. PRNDL is a matter of law, in case you wondered.
Okay I'll bite. How does MS emulate 32-bit x86 on 64-bit machines? I've got 64-bit Windows 10 on a couple of machines. I've not seen any evidence that these are 32-bit machines in disguise. Many apps out there are still 32-bit, probably for compatibility (32-bit is still supported as a platform), but many are 64-bit native. Are you telling me the software installed in Program Files--as opposed to Program Files (x86)--are all 32-bit?
Wine currently depends on certain Linux kernel features to load the COFF binaries that the WSL may or may not have emulated yet. But there's no technical reason Wine couldn't run under the WSL as Wine is a userpace program that doesn't require drivers or ring-0 instructions.
I know you're being funny, but no you really couldn't ever run virtualbox on Wine, even if Wine was 99% compatible. Just like the poorly named Windows Subsytem for Linux could not ever run VirtualBox for Linux. Neither system ships with an OS kernel. Rather they translate the system calls into the native kernel. Both systems are really aimed at providing the userspace needed to run these foreign binaries on a foreign kernel.
ReactOS on the other hand is an open-source Windows NT-compatible kernel that borrows from Wine for userspace API support. Some day ReactOS could get to the point where it could run VirtualBox because it has a real kernel with real installable drivers.
And that's the problem here. No one wants to use Edge, but MS keeps resetting the default browser back to Edge. And many users don't really know how to change this back to their preferred browser, or change it back to the browser that their grandchild set up for them that they are familiar with. It's true one can just run firefox and firefox will ask you if you want it to be the default browser. But many users probably don't really understand what the default browser means or is.
That's not what I meant. I know there are distros for each of these boards. What's lacking is any kind of standard for the platform like we have in the PC world. I don't want to run some custom hack of debian with a special kernel on each board. Arm boards will be infinitely more useful when I can download one ISO from the distro web site such as debian.org, and have it boot and run on each of these Arm boards. Right now there's no standards for boot loader let alone device tree. It's a mess.
Just checked some of my certificates that I use on my own server and domain. They are all signed by my own personal CA. Looks like they are signed with SHA-512, which is part of the SHA-2 family. Been that way for 5 years, maybe 10 now. Guess I accidentally did something right when I created those certs years ago.
Does this new board run a stock, off-the-shelf Linux distribution with a stock distro kernel? Is the bootloader open source and easy to use to boot any kernel and OS? If not, then it's really of little consequence.
I think these devices are neat and have a lot of potential, but sadly until we see the kind of standardization in terms of booting and hardware interfacing, these devices are way beneath their potential. Even the Pi, as popular and useful as it is, is hobbled to a degree without this standardization. I'd like to run the same distribution (whatever that is) on my Pi3 as on my Pine64. Or this board. Or some generic chinese SoC board.
You've obviously not used Python before. It's very easy to comment out a block of code and it doesn't require indenting anything, and it doesn't require an if (0) kludge. Your criticism and claim of being error-prone is not valid in this case. Python has a lot of gotchas and warts, but what you describe isn't one of them.
Sure but that wasn't what the original poster was talking about. Whether or not it has a fraction of the success of Ruby, as long as someone somewhere wants to maintain it, it will live on.
The example code I've seen from Nim reminds me a bit of Pascal. At least the use of the keywords proc and var. Glad they went with Python-style blocks instead of Pascal-style begin and end.
But nim does look like a nice language. The fact that it generates C code and compiles with a C compiler means that it could be integrated quite smoothly into projects using other languages.
Nim is on my list of languages to try some time if I ever need to write C-compatible code.
Interesting how personal preference plays into it. But it also sounds like you haven't spent any real time with Python. Because it doesn't take long to get past the whitespace syntax and get on with programming. For most Python programmers, the block syntax is one of the things they like the most. It's true that a bad copy and paste or accidentally deleting some spaces in the wrong place can break things badly and potentially lead to subtle bugs. But in practice, that doesn't seem to be a significant problem. The fact is you should be indenting consistently anyway, so braces and semicolons are superfluous, and ugly.
I find I can write several pages of Python code and often it runs the first time without issue, which was never the case with any of the other languages I worked with, including C++. Invariably I'd forget some closing brace somewhere and a semicolon. Compile errors on first run are almost expected with C-like languages.
Python's real gotchas emerge more from its dynamic nature than its syntax; dynamic typing is a two-edged sword. Test-driven development is pretty much required for large applications.
Nim of course is statically-typed and has some measure of compile-time safety.
Actually Windows 10 works quite well on tablets with both tablet-style apps and conventional win32 apps. In some respects it is the best of both worlds. Metro apps (aka universal apps) are the most most comfortable on the tablet, but normal win32 desktop apps are actually fairly usable. I was surprised how well it worked. This is coming from a confirmed Linux user.
Been using systemd for nearly 5 years now and have never had a boot problem from it yet. I hear scattered reports of the occasional problem but there's nothing like the problems you claim to experience on a regular basis.
Short shell scripts? Have you even looked at an an init script the last 10 years? Init scripts are anything but short and simple. There are good reasons all the commercial Unixes moved away from SysV init long before Linux did. Systemd logging is actually quite good and verbose. I still run a syslogger as well. I'm just happy not to have to write error-prone init scripts anymore.
It sucks that you have so many problems with your systems. I'm not convinced systemd is causing them, but I'm sure there are solutions and wish I knew what they were. Your experience is not the usual experience across the board, though, no matter what the slashdot anti-systemd echo chamber claims.
Yeah for sure. I've often thought that as well. At least Google does allow you to remove suggestions now. Part of Google's problem comes from having such a large dictionary full of colloquial words and names that I'll never use.
The article talked about their phone have a large screen with no bezel, edge to edge. Am I the only one that thinks that is not desirable? Surely too much of anything is not a good thing. I already have troubles on some phones with small bezels with my fingers activating things on the screen while holding the phone. I'm not a two-thumb person (don't really understand how people can actually use two thumbs at once to type out messages on an onscreen keyboard... I can't do it); I hold the phone in one hand and use my finger of the other hand. The lack of bezel makes this a lot harder!
I just shake my head at where phones are going these days. Super thin and awkward seems to be the destination. No wonder AI is going to be so important in the future to help us use these things!
Slashdot Mirror
Can you provide a citation?
Sounds like a great way to lock OS X, or macOS or whatever they call it these days, solidly back to Apple hardware and preclude any possibility of running on stock x86 hardware. Though there's less and less reason to run a hacintosh all the time (it was always a maintenance nightmare). Though virtualization might be a way of getting around that. I've often thought Apple should sell a complete OS X (excuse me, macOS) vm for Windows users as it would provide an easy way to woo users to the platform. However the VM on your average Windows machine would probably outperform the Mac Pro, given Apple's commitment to high end users these days.
Yes OO and LO are definitely viable replacements for Office for many people. And I can believe they are making inroads, particularly in small businesses. But I have not seen any evidence that alternatives are making a dent in the overall Office hegemony, despite your anecdote. Sorry. Large organizations still use Office and Exchange for a lot of things. MS Office is going to be with us in its various forms for a long time, I'm afraid. In many large organizations it's just part of the annual MS site license that they pay the big bucks for.
To put it politely, it's wishful thinking to claim that Office competitors like iWork, LibreOffice, and Google Docs have significantly impacted MS Office's market share. Office has not gone from 100% share to 1.8% share in any real sense. Perpetual licenses for MS Office are still available and, I presume, selling well, particularly in the 99% of the market that is the business world.
What they have shown is that of the home user crowd, the relatively small number of users outside the business world, users are apparently unwilling to pay the subscription model, perhaps given the alternatives like Google Docs of LibreOffice. Or pirated copies. Or even 10 year old licenses of Office.
But make no mistake. The MS Office hegemony is still strong and is still making MS a lot of money. And if you think about it, corporate licensing is already a de facto subscription. So it's not like they are not making money hand over fist still.
Sure if you cut open a cable and placed your multimeter inline with the power wire. Decent cables aren't cheap either. So it seems a lot easier and more fool-proof to buy a purpose-made monitor, and you'd come out nearly the same.
Actually the lack of "progress" in automobiles is partly a result of heavy safety regulation. There are lots of ideas for changing things that would probably be more usable than the current system, but they are not likely to be brought to market anytime soon due to these safety regulations. I remember seeing years ago about a design to use side sticks to control a car and they found they were quite a natural and more precise method of controlling the car. However it's unlikely the benefit outweighed the risks to clueless drivers.
Current laws include the placement of the pedals and the placement of gear positions on an automatic transmission shift lever. PRNDL is a matter of law, in case you wondered.
Okay I'll bite. How does MS emulate 32-bit x86 on 64-bit machines? I've got 64-bit Windows 10 on a couple of machines. I've not seen any evidence that these are 32-bit machines in disguise. Many apps out there are still 32-bit, probably for compatibility (32-bit is still supported as a platform), but many are 64-bit native. Are you telling me the software installed in Program Files--as opposed to Program Files (x86)--are all 32-bit?
Wine currently depends on certain Linux kernel features to load the COFF binaries that the WSL may or may not have emulated yet. But there's no technical reason Wine couldn't run under the WSL as Wine is a userpace program that doesn't require drivers or ring-0 instructions.
I know you're being funny, but no you really couldn't ever run virtualbox on Wine, even if Wine was 99% compatible. Just like the poorly named Windows Subsytem for Linux could not ever run VirtualBox for Linux. Neither system ships with an OS kernel. Rather they translate the system calls into the native kernel. Both systems are really aimed at providing the userspace needed to run these foreign binaries on a foreign kernel.
ReactOS on the other hand is an open-source Windows NT-compatible kernel that borrows from Wine for userspace API support. Some day ReactOS could get to the point where it could run VirtualBox because it has a real kernel with real installable drivers.
And that's the problem here. No one wants to use Edge, but MS keeps resetting the default browser back to Edge. And many users don't really know how to change this back to their preferred browser, or change it back to the browser that their grandchild set up for them that they are familiar with. It's true one can just run firefox and firefox will ask you if you want it to be the default browser. But many users probably don't really understand what the default browser means or is.
That's not what I meant. I know there are distros for each of these boards. What's lacking is any kind of standard for the platform like we have in the PC world. I don't want to run some custom hack of debian with a special kernel on each board. Arm boards will be infinitely more useful when I can download one ISO from the distro web site such as debian.org, and have it boot and run on each of these Arm boards. Right now there's no standards for boot loader let alone device tree. It's a mess.
Just checked some of my certificates that I use on my own server and domain. They are all signed by my own personal CA. Looks like they are signed with SHA-512, which is part of the SHA-2 family. Been that way for 5 years, maybe 10 now. Guess I accidentally did something right when I created those certs years ago.
Does this new board run a stock, off-the-shelf Linux distribution with a stock distro kernel? Is the bootloader open source and easy to use to boot any kernel and OS? If not, then it's really of little consequence.
I think these devices are neat and have a lot of potential, but sadly until we see the kind of standardization in terms of booting and hardware interfacing, these devices are way beneath their potential. Even the Pi, as popular and useful as it is, is hobbled to a degree without this standardization. I'd like to run the same distribution (whatever that is) on my Pi3 as on my Pine64. Or this board. Or some generic chinese SoC board.
You've obviously not used Python before. It's very easy to comment out a block of code and it doesn't require indenting anything, and it doesn't require an if (0) kludge. Your criticism and claim of being error-prone is not valid in this case. Python has a lot of gotchas and warts, but what you describe isn't one of them.
Like I said, this is rarely a problem in practice.
Sure but that wasn't what the original poster was talking about. Whether or not it has a fraction of the success of Ruby, as long as someone somewhere wants to maintain it, it will live on.
The example code I've seen from Nim reminds me a bit of Pascal. At least the use of the keywords proc and var. Glad they went with Python-style blocks instead of Pascal-style begin and end.
But nim does look like a nice language. The fact that it generates C code and compiles with a C compiler means that it could be integrated quite smoothly into projects using other languages.
Nim is on my list of languages to try some time if I ever need to write C-compatible code.
Interesting how personal preference plays into it. But it also sounds like you haven't spent any real time with Python. Because it doesn't take long to get past the whitespace syntax and get on with programming. For most Python programmers, the block syntax is one of the things they like the most. It's true that a bad copy and paste or accidentally deleting some spaces in the wrong place can break things badly and potentially lead to subtle bugs. But in practice, that doesn't seem to be a significant problem. The fact is you should be indenting consistently anyway, so braces and semicolons are superfluous, and ugly.
I find I can write several pages of Python code and often it runs the first time without issue, which was never the case with any of the other languages I worked with, including C++. Invariably I'd forget some closing brace somewhere and a semicolon. Compile errors on first run are almost expected with C-like languages.
Python's real gotchas emerge more from its dynamic nature than its syntax; dynamic typing is a two-edged sword. Test-driven development is pretty much required for large applications.
Nim of course is statically-typed and has some measure of compile-time safety.
Seeing as it's been around and alive for nearly 10 years, I'd say your prediction is not going to be true.
No to both questions. Which is curious given the British wanting to arrest him.
Actually Windows 10 works quite well on tablets with both tablet-style apps and conventional win32 apps. In some respects it is the best of both worlds. Metro apps (aka universal apps) are the most most comfortable on the tablet, but normal win32 desktop apps are actually fairly usable. I was surprised how well it worked. This is coming from a confirmed Linux user.
Been using systemd for nearly 5 years now and have never had a boot problem from it yet. I hear scattered reports of the occasional problem but there's nothing like the problems you claim to experience on a regular basis.
Short shell scripts? Have you even looked at an an init script the last 10 years? Init scripts are anything but short and simple. There are good reasons all the commercial Unixes moved away from SysV init long before Linux did. Systemd logging is actually quite good and verbose. I still run a syslogger as well. I'm just happy not to have to write error-prone init scripts anymore.
It sucks that you have so many problems with your systems. I'm not convinced systemd is causing them, but I'm sure there are solutions and wish I knew what they were. Your experience is not the usual experience across the board, though, no matter what the slashdot anti-systemd echo chamber claims.
Yeah for sure. I've often thought that as well. At least Google does allow you to remove suggestions now. Part of Google's problem comes from having such a large dictionary full of colloquial words and names that I'll never use.
Umm, nope. Not even close. I have been swiping since the beginning. Still don't understand how people use thumbs though. I swipe with my finger.
By the way, Google's keyboard is getting worse and worse at finding the correct word to match my swipe. About ready to switch back to Swype.
The article talked about their phone have a large screen with no bezel, edge to edge. Am I the only one that thinks that is not desirable? Surely too much of anything is not a good thing. I already have troubles on some phones with small bezels with my fingers activating things on the screen while holding the phone. I'm not a two-thumb person (don't really understand how people can actually use two thumbs at once to type out messages on an onscreen keyboard... I can't do it); I hold the phone in one hand and use my finger of the other hand. The lack of bezel makes this a lot harder!
I just shake my head at where phones are going these days. Super thin and awkward seems to be the destination. No wonder AI is going to be so important in the future to help us use these things!