Right you are. Floppies have been "obsolete" for at least a decade, in the sense that they're too small for any useful data exchange. But as long as the IBM architecture remains the model for commodity computers, people will continue to have floppy drives. You may go for years without using yours, but when you need it, you need it bad.
Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery. Talk about your long term enterprise data storage. Some of those buggers made it thousands of years!
Yeah, maybe they will, maybe they won't. Does it really matter? This isn't the first delay, or even the tenth. They have glitch after glitch, and if that doesn't change, the shuttle program will end a lot sooner than currently planned. Plus, every glitch makes the next manned vehicle program that much harder to fund.
Language features are kind of beside the point. The whole Java strategy was based on the assumption that programmers would slap themselves on the forehead and say, "Java is so much better! Why am I wasting my time on C++/Visual Basic/Fortran/Whatever?" Even if Java had had all the features that people wanted (and the whole point of Java was to resist feature bloat!), they still would have been reluctant to abandon familiar tools.
Microsoft must have had that in mind when they decided that.NET would support programming in "legacy" languages, not just Microsoft Java, I mean C#. Which is not to say that CLR support for C++ or Visual Basic is as good as Microsoft claims...
You're right, textbooks do serve a purpose when you're teaching a well-defined set of skills, such as math or laboratory science. But that's maybe 1/3 of the curriculum. For History, English, and similar topics, standard textbooks are a bad idea, for the reasons I've already mentioned. And even for non-laboratory science textbooks suck. They don't teach the critical thinking skills that should be part of a science education.
But printouts instead of laptops? Jeez, that's easily several hundred bucks per student over a four years. Still maybe $400 less than a laptop -- but there are other reasons for students to have their own computers, which I've already covered.
There's these kneejerk attitude towards technology in schools: "Another expensive boondoggle!" It's not expensive, and it's not a boondoggle. Laptops add a few hundred bucks to an education that costs tens of thousands per year. And the benefits are enormous.
So you didn't teach from the book, but you still consider textbooks useful. For what? To save yourself making photocopies of math problems? There are cheaper ways to do that. To help students with their reading skills? For that, you want a book that wasn't written by a committee.
Good idea? As far as large software makers go, it probably doesn't matter. Adobe's Mac developers have all learned Objective C already.
When I interviewed at Apple in 97, the party line was that Java was going to replace Objective C as the standard language for accessing the NeXTSTEP APIs. But some of the NeXTSTEP people who came over to Apple after the buyout seemed less than convinced.
I haven't had much to to with NeXTSTEP/OS X since then, but your comments make me reconstruct the Java/Cocoa story as follows: after adopting NextSTEP as the basis for OS X, Apple management decides Objective C as a fringe language, and that Java, which was then being hyped as the language of the future, was an easier sell. But, as always, the developer community went with the tools it knew how to use, so Objective C never lost its dominance in OS X development. This latest move is just management bowing to that reality.
All the money is being spent on "tech in schools"...
...is partly offset in this case by not buying all those overpriced textbooks.
Here's what's wrong with textbooks: they peddle an oversimplified, predigested, emasculated version of whatever they're trying to teach. You say the solution is better teachers? Good teachers hate textbooks. Good teachers know that the job is to teach student to do actual thinking -- a process not assisted by the unchallenging, anti-thought-provoking crap standard textbooks contain.
Teachers have been trying trying to find alternatives to textbooks for decades. Thirty-odd years ago, I had a really good high-school history class (20th century U.S.) where the teachers tossed out the textbooks and replaced them with all the serious reading they could legally photocopy. Nowadays, they would just point us at the Internet, and save a lot of time and money in the process.
Anyway, computers are an essential part of modern education. Aside from computer skills being a basic element of modern literacy, they just do a hell of lot to help with the process. If nothing else, they make writing a lot easier -- I mean jeez, no sane person does real writing by hand or typewriter any more. And writing is two thirds of a real education.
...Sci-Fi channel's huge investment (28 films for $21 million) for original B movies...
That's not a "huge investment", that simply Sci-Fi filling up its schedule without spending a lot of money. In its heyday, Sci Fi Channel spent more than a million bucks an hour for programs like Farscape. They can't afford that any more, so they're spending less than half that per hour for cheapo movies.
It has some form of protected memory and so when applications crash the OS stays alive (well, most of the time).That only matters if you're running multiple applications at once. Not something you usually do on a PDA. And recovering-without-rebooting usually is more time consuming and complicated than just resetting your Palm system.
It looks better, more modern, than PalmOS. Support for Clear Type.Cleartype is kind of secondary, since Palm doesn't even support vector fonts. But when your screen is only big for maybe 20 words of text, bitmap fonts are perfectly fine.
Runs on faster XScale hardware than PalmOS usually.Fast processors are not desirable for PDAs. They drain the battery, and all they're really good for is heavy-duty gaming. If you need one of those, get a PSP.
DirectX/3D support, more multimedia capable.See above.
Apps use the full 320x240 resolution (instead of the 160x160 that most PalmOS apps use and double-pixel at 320x320)Given the size of a PDA screen, there's not a lot you can do with that extra resolution.
Better office format compliancy, MS Office is usually bundled with the PDA. A good point -- if Microsoft did a decent job of maintaining format compatibility between the two platforms. I have not experience one way or the other, but their track record for that sort of thing is not good -- as anybody who has dealt with Office upgrades can tell you.
Programming APIs similar to Win32, porting is easy, development too.If your definition of "easy" is "not having to learn anything new". Mine is "a simple API that's well documented and well suited to the job at hand." Good PDA apps are not shrunken desktop apps!
Basic and.NET available if C/C++ is not desired.There are plenty of alternative to C/C++ programming for PalmOS. Including several basic development environments. As for.NET -- if you consider that a must-have for developement, there's not a lot I can say!
More PocketPC devices include a microphone for voice notes. Again, I prefer a separate device. Digital voice recorders are not expensive.
Usually more expensive than basic PalmOS devices, however prices go downAnd Palm hardware prices go down too.
Having said all that, I find I'm pretty disillusioned with the Palm. I don't disagree with most of Eugenia's criticisms, and I have a few of my own.
What finally made me terminally cynical was the famous USB bug. This makes some Palms unable to sync without resetting the USB parameters. For some stupid reason, a hard reset doesn't accomplish this: you have to open up the system and disconnect the battery. I did this -- and the input matrix got screwed up somehow. Pretty much makes Fitally (my preferred input method) useless.
Still, I probably won't switch to PPC systems -- as bad as Palm has gotten, anything from Microsoft has to be 10 times more buggy. I'll probably just stick to cheap Palm PDAs, so it doesn't hurt so much when I have to replace them.
Yeah, certifications mean nothing to people who know anything about the craft of software engineering.
True, but totally offtopic. Leaving aside the fact that we're talking about IT jobs, not software engineering, the fact remains that certifications are essential to most resumes. You can talk all you want about how people should be evaluated according to their individual merits. (I'd certainly like to be, since my formal credentials suck.) Doesn't change the fact that degrees, certficiations and other pieces of paper are what HR gatekeepers and hiring managers look for.
The computer industry has gotten more bureaucratic. Which means the day is past when a smart guy can land a good job just by talking about what he knows and has accomplished. It's not a good thing, but it's not going to change, either.
During the dot-com hype in the late 90's, they were pushing case design and graphics demos as justification for overpaying for their hardware.
They were pushing case design and graphics demos. But the justification for their overpriced hardware was the same reason it was overpriced: it was MIPS-based. They were caught up in the logic Apple only recently rejected and many Slashdotters still adhere to: if your processor and other technology is superior, it doesn't matter if it costs more.
Actually, the NT-based workstation that came out in 1999 was quite reasonably priced, compared to similar NT-based graphics workstations -- about $2K, if I remember correctly. A little high for most users, but pretty competitive compared to other serious graphics workstations -- including comparable Apple boxes.
(Running NT may be uncool, but it doesn't mean the system is cheaply made or not powerful.)
Unfortunately, they waited too long to get into the NT market. By 1999, other companies had it sewn up. So competitive price or not, they couldn't find the sales channels.
...not being insane enough to download a book-length PDF linked off the newest story on/.
Only took me a few minutes over my DSL connection. Actually reading this thing is more problematic. It's 1600-odd pages, and consists of a section-by-section (in some places, sentence-by-sentence) commentary on the C standard. There's no PDF bookmarks or other navigation aids. Apparently you're supposed to print out the whole damn thing and read it side-by-side with the standard! Kind of arrogant to assume that anybody would go to that much trouble just read your rants.
Another example of PDF abuse. If you're going a large work available online, you need to make it browseable. You can make PDF files browseable, though usually a set of HTML pages works much better. (HTML would be particularly appropriate in this case, with hundreds of short topics.) But generating browseable PDF and HTML both require foresight, planning, a bit of work, and consideration for the needs of your readers.
A good C programmer will know this info already...
So what about bad C programmers? God knows there's enough of those!
I find your argument a little weird. Nobody should write books about things their target audience should already know? "Should" and "do" are two different things. That's what keeps writers in business!
There were several operating systems that had quite a bit of software and still failed.
The most famous being CP/M, which famously lost its chance to be the standard PC OS, because DR's decision makers wouldn't sign IBM's NDA! When I think of the aggravation we might have avoided...
Which is one reason I can't make myself too angry at Microsoft. Yes, they have a nasty attitude and their stuff is often mediocre. But that just means their competitors had all the more opportunity to do it better--and still failed.
I avoid the Microsoft-is-evil attitude myself, but only because it's unproductive. It still galls me that they too made all the mistakes that everybody else made -- and still ended up on top. The difference is that by accident they ended up selling the standard OS for IBM compatibles. This gave them a huge, reliable revenue stream that allowed them to write off huge, expensive screwups.
Whenever I hear a hyper-libertarian assert that the marketplace is our Darwinian bulwark against waste and stupidity, I think of Microsoft.
You talk about the Mac as if it somehow broke the Microsoft monopoly. Not what happened. Back in '84, when the Mac was introduced, Microsoft did not dominate the desktop OS market the way it does now. The PC, which would be MS's ticket to monopoly, still hadn't been widely adopted. People were using a bunch of different incompatible platforms -- it wasn't obvious to anybody that IBM had created the "commodity computer" that would Microsoft's meal ticket. (Least of all IBM or Microsoft!) Apple was considered the market leader, with its Apple II and Lisa, so the Mac actually had something of a head start.
If you measure MacOS's success by market share, it's a disaster -- until very recently, it consistently lost ground to MS-DOS and Windows. Apple only makes a living because the total market has gotten so much bigger. MacOS has survived by holding on to a tiny part of its early lead -- not by penetrating the Microsoft monoculture.
I think new OSes might catch on if they're marketed more toward people who...
No matter how well they're marketed, people won't use them for the same reason you gave up on BeOS: nobody's writing software for it. And nobody will write software for an OS until it has users. Catch 22.
This problem has been obvious every since Microsoft started dominating the desktop OS market 20+ years ago, destroying a half-dozen competing (and mostly superior) platforms in the process. Yet people continue to insist that a new OS (or an old one with a few tweaks) can magically get past the no users/no developers/no users paradox just by virtue of being technically superior. A tribute to wishful thinking, I guess.
A pre-made chat cord costs $30. Hard to undercut that. Besides, Hackers love to share.
Every story in Hardware Hacking gets at least one post by somebody who doesn't grasp that HH is not an economically sustainable activity. Mass produced electronics is too cheap for hand-made gadgets to compete. Hackers know this: they do it mainly for fun, and for self-education. Some are also broke enough to need to save the few extra bucks the off-the-shelf item costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Right you are. Floppies have been "obsolete" for at least a decade, in the sense that they're too small for any useful data exchange. But as long as the IBM architecture remains the model for commodity computers, people will continue to have floppy drives. You may go for years without using yours, but when you need it, you need it bad.
Why on earth link the Druge Report of all things? He doesn't have anything on this, just a link to a news site. It's not as if the jerk needs the pr.
Yeah, maybe they will, maybe they won't. Does it really matter? This isn't the first delay, or even the tenth. They have glitch after glitch, and if that doesn't change, the shuttle program will end a lot sooner than currently planned. Plus, every glitch makes the next manned vehicle program that much harder to fund.
Microsoft must have had that in mind when they decided that .NET would support programming in "legacy" languages, not just Microsoft Java, I mean C#. Which is not to say that CLR support for C++ or Visual Basic is as good as Microsoft claims...
But printouts instead of laptops? Jeez, that's easily several hundred bucks per student over a four years. Still maybe $400 less than a laptop -- but there are other reasons for students to have their own computers, which I've already covered.
There's these kneejerk attitude towards technology in schools: "Another expensive boondoggle!" It's not expensive, and it's not a boondoggle. Laptops add a few hundred bucks to an education that costs tens of thousands per year. And the benefits are enormous.
So you didn't teach from the book, but you still consider textbooks useful. For what? To save yourself making photocopies of math problems? There are cheaper ways to do that. To help students with their reading skills? For that, you want a book that wasn't written by a committee.
I haven't had much to to with NeXTSTEP/OS X since then, but your comments make me reconstruct the Java/Cocoa story as follows: after adopting NextSTEP as the basis for OS X, Apple management decides Objective C as a fringe language, and that Java, which was then being hyped as the language of the future, was an easier sell. But, as always, the developer community went with the tools it knew how to use, so Objective C never lost its dominance in OS X development. This latest move is just management bowing to that reality.
Here's what's wrong with textbooks: they peddle an oversimplified, predigested, emasculated version of whatever they're trying to teach. You say the solution is better teachers? Good teachers hate textbooks. Good teachers know that the job is to teach student to do actual thinking -- a process not assisted by the unchallenging, anti-thought-provoking crap standard textbooks contain.
Teachers have been trying trying to find alternatives to textbooks for decades. Thirty-odd years ago, I had a really good high-school history class (20th century U.S.) where the teachers tossed out the textbooks and replaced them with all the serious reading they could legally photocopy. Nowadays, they would just point us at the Internet, and save a lot of time and money in the process.
Anyway, computers are an essential part of modern education. Aside from computer skills being a basic element of modern literacy, they just do a hell of lot to help with the process. If nothing else, they make writing a lot easier -- I mean jeez, no sane person does real writing by hand or typewriter any more. And writing is two thirds of a real education.
- It has some form of protected memory and so when applications crash the OS stays alive (well, most of the time).That only matters if you're running multiple applications at once. Not something you usually do on a PDA. And recovering-without-rebooting usually is more time consuming and complicated than just resetting your Palm system.
- It looks better, more modern, than PalmOS. Support for Clear Type.Cleartype is kind of secondary, since Palm doesn't even support vector fonts. But when your screen is only big for maybe 20 words of text, bitmap fonts are perfectly fine.
- Runs on faster XScale hardware than PalmOS usually.Fast processors are not desirable for PDAs. They drain the battery, and all they're really good for is heavy-duty gaming. If you need one of those, get a PSP.
- DirectX/3D support, more multimedia capable.See above.
- Apps use the full 320x240 resolution (instead of the 160x160 that most PalmOS apps use and double-pixel at 320x320)Given the size of a PDA screen, there's not a lot you can do with that extra resolution.
- Better office format compliancy, MS Office is usually bundled with the PDA. A good point -- if Microsoft did a decent job of maintaining format compatibility between the two platforms. I have not experience one way or the other, but their track record for that sort of thing is not good -- as anybody who has dealt with Office upgrades can tell you.
- Programming APIs similar to Win32, porting is easy, development too.If your definition of "easy" is "not having to learn anything new". Mine is "a simple API that's well documented and well suited to the job at hand." Good PDA apps are not shrunken desktop apps!
- Basic and
.NET available if C/C++ is not desired.There are plenty of alternative to C/C++ programming for PalmOS. Including several basic development environments. As for .NET -- if you consider that a must-have for developement, there's not a lot I can say!
- More PocketPC devices include a microphone for voice notes. Again, I prefer a separate device. Digital voice recorders are not expensive.
- Usually more expensive than basic PalmOS devices, however prices go downAnd Palm hardware prices go down too.
Having said all that, I find I'm pretty disillusioned with the Palm. I don't disagree with most of Eugenia's criticisms, and I have a few of my own.What finally made me terminally cynical was the famous USB bug. This makes some Palms unable to sync without resetting the USB parameters. For some stupid reason, a hard reset doesn't accomplish this: you have to open up the system and disconnect the battery. I did this -- and the input matrix got screwed up somehow. Pretty much makes Fitally (my preferred input method) useless.
Still, I probably won't switch to PPC systems -- as bad as Palm has gotten, anything from Microsoft has to be 10 times more buggy. I'll probably just stick to cheap Palm PDAs, so it doesn't hurt so much when I have to replace them.
You're right, non-technical people don't care about OSs. But Slashdot isn't for non-technical people, is it?
Thus crossing the line between "geek" and "dork"...
The computer industry has gotten more bureaucratic. Which means the day is past when a smart guy can land a good job just by talking about what he knows and has accomplished. It's not a good thing, but it's not going to change, either.
(Running NT may be uncool, but it doesn't mean the system is cheaply made or not powerful.)
Unfortunately, they waited too long to get into the NT market. By 1999, other companies had it sewn up. So competitive price or not, they couldn't find the sales channels.
Another example of PDF abuse. If you're going a large work available online, you need to make it browseable. You can make PDF files browseable, though usually a set of HTML pages works much better. (HTML would be particularly appropriate in this case, with hundreds of short topics.) But generating browseable PDF and HTML both require foresight, planning, a bit of work, and consideration for the needs of your readers.
I find your argument a little weird. Nobody should write books about things their target audience should already know? "Should" and "do" are two different things. That's what keeps writers in business!
The Google translation is less informative, but more fun to read.
OK, I overstated Apple's dominance of the market in that time period. All the same, it wasn't the Microsoft monoculture it is now.
Whenever I hear a hyper-libertarian assert that the marketplace is our Darwinian bulwark against waste and stupidity, I think of Microsoft.
If you measure MacOS's success by market share, it's a disaster -- until very recently, it consistently lost ground to MS-DOS and Windows. Apple only makes a living because the total market has gotten so much bigger. MacOS has survived by holding on to a tiny part of its early lead -- not by penetrating the Microsoft monoculture.
This problem has been obvious every since Microsoft started dominating the desktop OS market 20+ years ago, destroying a half-dozen competing (and mostly superior) platforms in the process. Yet people continue to insist that a new OS (or an old one with a few tweaks) can magically get past the no users/no developers/no users paradox just by virtue of being technically superior. A tribute to wishful thinking, I guess.
Every story in Hardware Hacking gets at least one post by somebody who doesn't grasp that HH is not an economically sustainable activity. Mass produced electronics is too cheap for hand-made gadgets to compete. Hackers know this: they do it mainly for fun, and for self-education. Some are also broke enough to need to save the few extra bucks the off-the-shelf item costs.