EA is just pissed that they're not clever enough to make money off XBL.
Not quite right. EA could very easily make pantloads of money off of XBox Live. The problem is that they've already reinvented the wheel that XBox Live provides for developers, and are scared that they'll lose more money on that if they move to XBox Live. As well, they don't seem bright enough to design a way for their system to interact nicely with XBox Live. If they could do that, they'd win -- how'd you like to kick PS2 ass in Madden from your XBox Live account?
Terrarium is badly coded peer to peer application. I don't understand why Microsoft is promoting it. It is an embarrassment to Microsoft.
Because it's not supposed to be an example of the greatest P2P app ever. Last time I checked, Terrarium was not a Shared Source project, so how do you know how badly it's coded? I guess you could disassemble the assemblies and parse through the IL, but you're probably just assuming that Microsoft == badly coded software. It's a proof of concept, an interesting programming game (reminiscent of crobots/jrobots, corewars, and all the other old programming games), and a good stress test for the.NET framework.
I thought DirectX 9 had a managed interface? If that's not good enough, you can go for interop with GDI+ and kill your portability (well, DX9 probably kills your portability, but assuming that its namespace is well-defined, I could see an SDL/OpenGL backend being written for Mono under that namespace). Also,.NET is only at version 1.0 (version 1.1, if you're on the VS 2003 or Windows Server 2003 betas, or have played around with Terrarium lately). Give it time. Most likely, hardcore graphic manipulation APIs were lower priority for the initial release.
meanwhile, people were still developing Playstation 1 games long past the time when it was _obvious_ that the Playstation 1 was the three year old PC equivalent of what their grandmother is using.
"Were"? Try "are". By my count (based on GameStop's "coming soon" list), there are currently 12 titles coming soon. Most importantly, Final Fantasy 1 gets a makeover and Final Fantasy 2 japanese will finally make it to the US in Final Fantasy Origins. And considering that the PS2 has decent PS1 backwards compatibility, it's not a bad idea for game developers to still make PS1 games (budget titles, children's titles, titles that don't need the flash of PS2-level graphics).
By contrast, there are no Nintendo 64 titles, Dreamcast titles, or Gameboy titles still in development. As much as I prefer the XBox to the Playstation 2, Sony apparently did something right with the Playstation 1 if titles are still in development for it.
This really is a friendly implementation. I much prefer it to the feature implemented by the other guys.
But why? The only functional difference between this and IE's implementation is that IE defaults to having it turned on rather than off. It's just as easy to turn it off (Tools->Internet Options...->Advanced (tab)->Enabled Automatic Image Resizing), and IE even gives you a nice little widget to expand/contract the image, once you've focused on the image (ie, click on the image, now you have a little widget that will expand if the image is contracted, and contract if it's expanded. Click away to remove the widget). To me, that sounds better than Mozilla's implementation (caveat: haven't used Mozilla in a while, so I don't know how this works in practice; just going by what the parent said), where it seems there's no way to contract the image again after expanding (does clicking again after expanding re-contract?), and it's not immediately obvious that clicking the image will expand it.
Furthermore, Office's new collaboration featres will only work with users who are also running Office 2003 (requiring Windows 2000 or 2003) that are connecting over XP servers.
Excuse me if I don't take this article seriously, but the author apparently knows nothing about Windows. Office 2003 will only work on Windows 2000 or 2003? Not Windows XP? Maybe he meant that the collaboration servers require Windows 2000 servers or Windows Server 2003 servers, since there is no XP Server. And speaking of XP, what exactly does he mean by "connecting over XP servers"? That's simply impossible -- there is no server version of XP, only Home and Pro.
As for Microsoft not supporting Office on the obsolete Win9x platforms, good for them. It's past time for Win9x to be killed off once and for all. Not supporting it in Office is a good step forward.
People still use MFC? Why? I don't know anybody who still uses MFC. I guess MFC7 (with VS.NET) isn't so bad, but it's still a horrifically old framework. Most people I know use C# and WinForms these days, but if you're not on the.NET bandwagon yet you can always use VB for RAD (doing performance-critical work in C++ DLLs), or ATL/WTL for a more modern C++ experience while still being able to quickly (once you pick up some of the tips and tricks for ATL) develop professional GUIs. And of course, once you've developed a good bag of tricks for Win32 code, you can usually write GUIs in Win32 and C in about the same time it would take in MFC. Requires a bit of time investment on your part, though, to build up your library of reuseable code.
Porsches are like iMacs. It looks purdy, but it runs like shit on the road.
Only if you're into drag racing. (Street racing and stoplight dragging is simply stupid.) On the track, while most Porsches may not be able to hang on with higher horsepower cars in the straights, they'll blow away almost anything on the curves. Since races are won in the curves, draw your own conclusions...
I consider myself a pretty big geek, being thoroughly integrated into the Slashdot hive mind and all. I'm on top of CVS gaim, xine/totem, Mozilla, and GNOME (hoping it won't suck eventually) because they seem to become noticeably better by the day. But the kernel? Could someone please explain why?
Like I said, I was on that kernel upgrade treadmill, and I think it's a bit of an addiction. You want the bragging rights to say that you're running whatever the latest and greatest version of the kernel happens to be. For most people, it's about showing off and making themselves feel superior because they're running the latest stuff. I think it goes the same for the rest of the stuff you mentioned as well. Once those projects get to the "good enough" point, what do you gain by using the CVS nightly drop vs. a released version? Why not Mozilla 1.1 (or whatever Mozilla is at now) rather than CVS? I used to do the same thing with Microsoft stuff. I ran various betas of Internet Explorer (IE4, IE5, IE6), and even had various RC releases (all legally acquired) of XP and Win2K (even back before Win2K was Win2K). Now, though, I'd rather get my work done instead of futzing with my system.
which debian dselect or the gentoo or source mage ports systems handle with darn easy interfaces?
Which would be great, except my firewall system has been around longer than two out of the three things you listed. And back then, debian was a bit of a mess as well. If I were to do it all over again, I would install debian or similar and have an easy upgrade route (though once you start customizing stuff, upgrades aren't so easy -- an upgrade could easily blow away or break customizations you've made, and therefore you need to be more careful). However, hindsight is always 20/20. The system I have now runs and runs well, and the kernel and packages are sufficiently new to avoid currently-known security problems. I've got a shitload of other stuff to do, and can't be bothered with taking down my personal firewall machine for a day/weekend to rebuild it to be "better". If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Firewall boxen like this aren't the normal thing your grandmother runs.
My grandmother doesn't even use a computer, let alone Linux. However, that's not the point. The question was, why would you stay with a 2.2 kernel, and my answer was a perfectly valid reason why. There are reasons to not stay with a 2.2 kernel as well, but sometimes (often) the reasons to stay outweigh the reasons to upgrade.
He might not be rich. He could just be an overspender. It's hard to tell, as most rich people aren't very extravagent.
I wouldn't say "overspender" so much as "still young an amassing the things necessary for a comfortable life". My current DVD player will at least last me until I upgrade my current TV, and I doubt I'll be doing that within 5 years at least. The appliances part goes along with buying a house, which is considered a wise investment rather than overspending (unless of course you over-reached on what you can afford, which I certainly didn't). Sure, the car is a little extravagant, but dammit I'm young, I can afford it, and I deserve to have a little fun. And I'll still have that car in 10 years.
If/when I get married and have to deal with spousal control, it's highly unlikely I'll be allowed to make these kinds of purchases any more. Therefore, I'm getting it out of my system while I can, and when I have to "settle down" later in life, I'll already have the things I want.
The box that still runs 2.2 is a very old, very bastardized version of SuSE 6.3. In other words, upgrading it is not as simple as "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade", else I would. My other linux box is debian unstable, but even then I tend not to touch the kernel unless I really have to. Depending on your needs, I'd say either the latest 2.2 (anything with the most recent security patches) or later 2.4 kernels would be good. I'm running 2.2.19 with the bridged firewall backport and 2.4.19 from SGI's XFS CVS. They work just fine for me.
Hey, check out RennList [rennlist.com] for an active community of Porsche owners.
Already know about it. Being that my Porsche is a "Porsche with panties" as Ralphie Ciffaretto so eloquently called it on The Sopranos (why do you think they whacked him, eh?), I tend to hang out at Porsche Pete's Boxster Board more often (I post as "Todd in Seattle" on occassion).
When was the last time you upgraded your VCR? DVD-Player? Microwave oven? How about your automobile? Washing machine? Refrigerator?
VCR? People still use VCRs? As for the rest:
DVD Player: I upgraded last year. Got ~7 months out of my old Sony DVD player before I decided I needed more (progressive scan), so I upgraded to a Panasonic. Gave the Sony to my parents, since it was still an awesome player (sans progscan). As far as I know, they're still using it (though they too upgraded to an HDTV since then, so they may have upgraded their DVD player).
Appliances: Hrm. Doing that next month. But I guess that goes along with buying a house.
Car: Did that last year, too. I got a little over two years out of my Monte Carlo before I decided I needed more, so I bought a Porsche.
I understand your point, just trying to show that you'd be surprised at how often people upgrade the kind of things you're talking about. However, now that I have a good set of stuff (DVD player, car, appliances), I don't see me upgrading for a few years at least. I'll probably just work on upgrading my home theater system instead.
more likely, are not educated on the benefits of upgrading.
And those benefits would be...? I was on the kernel upgrade treadmill for years, getting new versions as they were released, upgrading to 2.2 with the very first version, etc. It gained me very little. I reached a point where staying on top of kernel upgrades was more pain than it was worth, and stopped. Now I only upgrade if I need some new feature, better support for an existing feature, or for security reasons. Aside from security patches (which I would hope all of the "Windows Update"-ish tools would handle for these users already), 99.95% of all Linux users have no reason to upgrade their kernel, so long as they're using a sufficiently modern one to begin with. Why, then, is it such a bad thing that these users don't know how to upgrade their kernel? If anything, I'd say it's a testament to Linux that users running it can get by without ever having to touch the kernel (aside from maybe loading a module or two when they get new hardware, though even that could/should be automated).
This is a real question not flame bait. Why would you keep 2.2? What is there in 2.4 that makes it so bad? It seems like it's pretty mature now so what's wrong with it?
Better yet, why would you upgrade if 2.2 does everything you need? Any security patches will be back-ported, and that's the only time you really need to upgrade your kernel so long as it does everything you need already. For example, my bridge/firewall machine (P200MMX) is running a 2.2 kernel, and with the 2.4 bridging code backport, it works perfectly fine. I have absolutely no desire to spend a day with my firewall machine down while I upgrade all of the kernel dependencies, configure and build a 2.4 kernel, rewrite my firewall scripts for iptables (yeah, I know you can use the old ipchains interface with 2.4, but if you're going to do the upgrade, do the upgrade), and then work out all the gremlins from running "new" code.
Desktops are different, because nobody cares if you have downtime with them. Servers on the other hand can cause pain when they're down, and even for a personal server the downtime is not worth the upgrade. You gain nothing, and lose quite a bit of time.
Eventually, I'll decomission the P200 and bring the celeryonion 433 up as my bridge/firewall machine, but that's going to be timed with a move (when the machines will have to be down anyway, and it'll be a week or two before the new place has internet access). Doing it before then is pointless.
Both paths are being pursued by two different teams, but I am sure they could use more contributors.
I have a... conflict of interest... if you're trying to recruit me:) Even so, I still think it'll be nice to write multi-platform GUI C# code (IMHO, GTK# doesn't cut it right now, because GTK+ sucks on Windows). It's good to hear that work is being done to investigate both paths, and may the best code win.
And of course, my opinions are my own, and not those of my... conflict of interest.
Mono, Gnome and Gtk# are a very powerful platform.
Now please, please, please implement WinForms for Mono! I know it's not part of the ECMA standard, but IMHO it's necessary for proper portability of.NET/Mono client code (consider the same plea for ASP.NET and WebForms). GTK# is there, now just wrap it in the System.Windows.Forms namespace.
When car companies make concept cars, some features may trickle down into production cars.
A number of car companies are doing better than that these days -- they actually produce their concept cars. For example, the Porsche Boxster concept was little different than the eventual production vehicle. Same for Audi's TT. As well, Ford went from concept to production on the new Thunderbird in what I would consider record time (something like two years?), and are planning on doing the same for their GT Concept. Hopefully this trend continues, because many concept cars are more exciting than their production brethren.
Yes, how much extraneous [kernel.org] crap [gnu.org] do programmers [sourceforge.net] write just for kicks [freshmeat.net]?
It'd be interesting to do a poll of those developers to see how many are currently employed as programming professionals, and how many are students or employed in some other field and only program in their spare time (or unemployed). I'm willing to bet that the percentage of the former is quite small.
You seem to have missed the point. The technologies you mentioned are great when you don't know whether or not the person is there. However, it's difficult to have a conversation over e-mail or voice mail, and that's where IM shines. IM is not about leaving a message for somebody, but engaging them in conversation when you can't speak to them in person. Yes, you could use the telephone, but you don't know for sure if they're there or not, and that also involves interrupting whatever you happen to be doing at the moment. IM let's you know when somebody is available, and you can ping back and forth without having to walk across the building or stop your work to pick up the phone.
A good example of IM technology being used in a "business" would be my college job as a computer lab sitter. During each shift, there were sitters at all of the different labs on campus, and we were all in contact through an internal IRC server. It made it very easy to keep in touch with other sitters, and even managers. We could ask questions of the other sitters when we didn't know the answer, and doing it over IRC was a lot less disruptive than telling the user, "Hold on while I call over to another lab." One advantage this system has over IM is that for a small group, we were all in the same channel (chat room, conference, party line, whatever you want to call it), so if one sitter was away from his desk, any of the others could still see the question and help out.
DirectDraw and Direct3D have pretty much merged last I checked
More like DirectDraw "went away", while developers developed ways of doing 2D-ish stuff in D3D (like billboarding). However, the nature of DirectX and COM (DirectX being a COM-based architecture, of course) means that DirectDraw will always be available for you to use, if you can remember how to program DX circa DX7.
Well, for one, their chipsets have traditionally been built around OpenGL.
Nope. nVidia learned early on to develop API-agnostic hardware. They also learned not to waste time developing their own proprietary API (a la 3[Dd]fx's Glide), and instead choose to support whatever APIs are currently the most popular. That means DirectX and OpenGL (they would've supported Glide back in the day, had 3dfx allowed them, or had they purchased 3dfx before Glide was moot). From day one (well, Riva128 days, anyway), nVidia has supported DirectX and OpenGL. And lately, given nVidia's close relationship with Microsoft (XBox, DX8 shader implementation), one would be inclined to think that nVidia builds their hardware around DX rather than OGL. Is that bad? IMHO, no, but make your own decision.
As another poster mentioned, theCarmack almost single-handedly popularized OpenGL for game work, and the popularity of Id games and engines means that modern video card companies must support OpenGL. Neither nVidia nor ATi will be giving up on OpenGL any time soon, especially with Doom3 right around the corner.
Yeah, just like Microsoft split Windows XP into two separate new versions: Windows 98/ME for home and desktop users, and Windows NT for professional and server use.
Or back in the real world, XP is Microsoft's current desktop OS, split into two separate versions for Home users and Professionals (there is some overlap, in that many home users like to have the extra functionality of Pro, but XP Home will never be used in a corporate environment because it won't talk to an Active Directory server -- because who really needs that at home?). Or how about the separation between Windows 2000 Professional and the Windows 2000 servers (Server, Advanced Server, Data Center)? Or how about Windows XP as the desktop OS v. Windows Server 2003 (Web Server, Standard, Enterprise, Data Center) as the server OS? Or going back to NT4, how about NT 4 Workstation v. NT 4 Server?
Would you care to give any actual reasons for your bold statement above ?
I'm not the original poster, but I'll give you reasons. Aside from the fact that the workstation/server OS split is common in the industry (see Microsoft, Apple), how about the fact that workstations have different requirements than servers? You don't need to support more than 2 (or 4, if you're really that hardcore) CPUs on a workstation, and you can modify your kernel to take advantage of that. Workstations need a useable, responsive UI, while servers don't. You can get by with an ssh commandline or an 8bpp, 640x480 terminal server session for your server, but that just won't cut it for a workstation. There are adjustments that can be made to make UIs more responsive that really don't apply to servers (or at the least, give only minimal benefit). Similarly, there are tweaks you can do for a server OS that would negatively impact a workstation. Trying to shoehorn both a desktop OS and a server OS into one package will end badly in the long run -- you'll never be great at both, and you'll have the desktop guys complaining on one side and the server guys on the other.
The split has worked well for Linux in the embedded/RTOS sector. Redhat et al aren't trying to roll embedded support into their offerings. If they decided to branch out, I'm sure you'd see a "Redhat Embedded Linux" distro targetted towards that. Why are you against doing similar with server v. desktop? Get "Redhat Linux Server Edition" for your server, and "Redhat Linux Workstation" for your desktop. (Note that I'm not advocating Redhat in favor of other distributions, nor am I saying such products exist, though if they do and have the same names it's simply coincidence because I'm too lazy to look up what Redhat currently offers. Also, I realize the original poster was advocating a split in the kernel, while I'm advocating splitting at the distro level, but given distributors' history of adding kernel patches to the kernels they ship, it would work out to effectively the same thing.)
you mean instead of the really proper form of would HAVE could HAVE Shold HAVE
No, I don't mean that. While contractions may not be accepted in the most formal forms of writing, they are accepted everywhere else. Would it be better to use the non-contraction forms? That's not for me to decide. However, whichever you decide to use, the word "of" should never come into play. "Of" is a preposition, meaning (among other things) "derived or coming from". "Have", on the other hand, is a verb meaning (again, among other things) "to be in possession of". "Could of" is meaningless", "could've" and "could have" are not.
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Not quite right. EA could very easily make pantloads of money off of XBox Live. The problem is that they've already reinvented the wheel that XBox Live provides for developers, and are scared that they'll lose more money on that if they move to XBox Live. As well, they don't seem bright enough to design a way for their system to interact nicely with XBox Live. If they could do that, they'd win -- how'd you like to kick PS2 ass in Madden from your XBox Live account?
Because it's not supposed to be an example of the greatest P2P app ever. Last time I checked, Terrarium was not a Shared Source project, so how do you know how badly it's coded? I guess you could disassemble the assemblies and parse through the IL, but you're probably just assuming that Microsoft == badly coded software. It's a proof of concept, an interesting programming game (reminiscent of crobots/jrobots, corewars, and all the other old programming games), and a good stress test for the .NET framework.
I thought DirectX 9 had a managed interface? If that's not good enough, you can go for interop with GDI+ and kill your portability (well, DX9 probably kills your portability, but assuming that its namespace is well-defined, I could see an SDL/OpenGL backend being written for Mono under that namespace). Also, .NET is only at version 1.0 (version 1.1, if you're on the VS 2003 or Windows Server 2003 betas, or have played around with Terrarium lately). Give it time. Most likely, hardcore graphic manipulation APIs were lower priority for the initial release.
"Were"? Try "are". By my count (based on GameStop's "coming soon" list), there are currently 12 titles coming soon. Most importantly, Final Fantasy 1 gets a makeover and Final Fantasy 2 japanese will finally make it to the US in Final Fantasy Origins. And considering that the PS2 has decent PS1 backwards compatibility, it's not a bad idea for game developers to still make PS1 games (budget titles, children's titles, titles that don't need the flash of PS2-level graphics).
By contrast, there are no Nintendo 64 titles, Dreamcast titles, or Gameboy titles still in development. As much as I prefer the XBox to the Playstation 2, Sony apparently did something right with the Playstation 1 if titles are still in development for it.
But why? The only functional difference between this and IE's implementation is that IE defaults to having it turned on rather than off. It's just as easy to turn it off (Tools->Internet Options...->Advanced (tab)->Enabled Automatic Image Resizing), and IE even gives you a nice little widget to expand/contract the image, once you've focused on the image (ie, click on the image, now you have a little widget that will expand if the image is contracted, and contract if it's expanded. Click away to remove the widget). To me, that sounds better than Mozilla's implementation (caveat: haven't used Mozilla in a while, so I don't know how this works in practice; just going by what the parent said), where it seems there's no way to contract the image again after expanding (does clicking again after expanding re-contract?), and it's not immediately obvious that clicking the image will expand it.
Excuse me if I don't take this article seriously, but the author apparently knows nothing about Windows. Office 2003 will only work on Windows 2000 or 2003? Not Windows XP? Maybe he meant that the collaboration servers require Windows 2000 servers or Windows Server 2003 servers, since there is no XP Server. And speaking of XP, what exactly does he mean by "connecting over XP servers"? That's simply impossible -- there is no server version of XP, only Home and Pro.
As for Microsoft not supporting Office on the obsolete Win9x platforms, good for them. It's past time for Win9x to be killed off once and for all. Not supporting it in Office is a good step forward.
People still use MFC? Why? I don't know anybody who still uses MFC. I guess MFC7 (with VS.NET) isn't so bad, but it's still a horrifically old framework. Most people I know use C# and WinForms these days, but if you're not on the .NET bandwagon yet you can always use VB for RAD (doing performance-critical work in C++ DLLs), or ATL/WTL for a more modern C++ experience while still being able to quickly (once you pick up some of the tips and tricks for ATL) develop professional GUIs. And of course, once you've developed a good bag of tricks for Win32 code, you can usually write GUIs in Win32 and C in about the same time it would take in MFC. Requires a bit of time investment on your part, though, to build up your library of reuseable code.
Only if you're into drag racing. (Street racing and stoplight dragging is simply stupid.) On the track, while most Porsches may not be able to hang on with higher horsepower cars in the straights, they'll blow away almost anything on the curves. Since races are won in the curves, draw your own conclusions ...
Like I said, I was on that kernel upgrade treadmill, and I think it's a bit of an addiction. You want the bragging rights to say that you're running whatever the latest and greatest version of the kernel happens to be. For most people, it's about showing off and making themselves feel superior because they're running the latest stuff. I think it goes the same for the rest of the stuff you mentioned as well. Once those projects get to the "good enough" point, what do you gain by using the CVS nightly drop vs. a released version? Why not Mozilla 1.1 (or whatever Mozilla is at now) rather than CVS? I used to do the same thing with Microsoft stuff. I ran various betas of Internet Explorer (IE4, IE5, IE6), and even had various RC releases (all legally acquired) of XP and Win2K (even back before Win2K was Win2K). Now, though, I'd rather get my work done instead of futzing with my system.
Which would be great, except my firewall system has been around longer than two out of the three things you listed. And back then, debian was a bit of a mess as well. If I were to do it all over again, I would install debian or similar and have an easy upgrade route (though once you start customizing stuff, upgrades aren't so easy -- an upgrade could easily blow away or break customizations you've made, and therefore you need to be more careful). However, hindsight is always 20/20. The system I have now runs and runs well, and the kernel and packages are sufficiently new to avoid currently-known security problems. I've got a shitload of other stuff to do, and can't be bothered with taking down my personal firewall machine for a day/weekend to rebuild it to be "better". If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My grandmother doesn't even use a computer, let alone Linux. However, that's not the point. The question was, why would you stay with a 2.2 kernel, and my answer was a perfectly valid reason why. There are reasons to not stay with a 2.2 kernel as well, but sometimes (often) the reasons to stay outweigh the reasons to upgrade.
I wouldn't say "overspender" so much as "still young an amassing the things necessary for a comfortable life". My current DVD player will at least last me until I upgrade my current TV, and I doubt I'll be doing that within 5 years at least. The appliances part goes along with buying a house, which is considered a wise investment rather than overspending (unless of course you over-reached on what you can afford, which I certainly didn't). Sure, the car is a little extravagant, but dammit I'm young, I can afford it, and I deserve to have a little fun. And I'll still have that car in 10 years.
If/when I get married and have to deal with spousal control, it's highly unlikely I'll be allowed to make these kinds of purchases any more. Therefore, I'm getting it out of my system while I can, and when I have to "settle down" later in life, I'll already have the things I want.
The box that still runs 2.2 is a very old, very bastardized version of SuSE 6.3. In other words, upgrading it is not as simple as "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade", else I would. My other linux box is debian unstable, but even then I tend not to touch the kernel unless I really have to. Depending on your needs, I'd say either the latest 2.2 (anything with the most recent security patches) or later 2.4 kernels would be good. I'm running 2.2.19 with the bridged firewall backport and 2.4.19 from SGI's XFS CVS. They work just fine for me.
Already know about it. Being that my Porsche is a "Porsche with panties" as Ralphie Ciffaretto so eloquently called it on The Sopranos (why do you think they whacked him, eh?), I tend to hang out at Porsche Pete's Boxster Board more often (I post as "Todd in Seattle" on occassion).
VCR? People still use VCRs? As for the rest:
I understand your point, just trying to show that you'd be surprised at how often people upgrade the kind of things you're talking about. However, now that I have a good set of stuff (DVD player, car, appliances), I don't see me upgrading for a few years at least. I'll probably just work on upgrading my home theater system instead.
And those benefits would be ...? I was on the kernel upgrade treadmill for years, getting new versions as they were released, upgrading to 2.2 with the very first version, etc. It gained me very little. I reached a point where staying on top of kernel upgrades was more pain than it was worth, and stopped. Now I only upgrade if I need some new feature, better support for an existing feature, or for security reasons. Aside from security patches (which I would hope all of the "Windows Update"-ish tools would handle for these users already), 99.95% of all Linux users have no reason to upgrade their kernel, so long as they're using a sufficiently modern one to begin with. Why, then, is it such a bad thing that these users don't know how to upgrade their kernel? If anything, I'd say it's a testament to Linux that users running it can get by without ever having to touch the kernel (aside from maybe loading a module or two when they get new hardware, though even that could/should be automated).
Better yet, why would you upgrade if 2.2 does everything you need? Any security patches will be back-ported, and that's the only time you really need to upgrade your kernel so long as it does everything you need already. For example, my bridge/firewall machine (P200MMX) is running a 2.2 kernel, and with the 2.4 bridging code backport, it works perfectly fine. I have absolutely no desire to spend a day with my firewall machine down while I upgrade all of the kernel dependencies, configure and build a 2.4 kernel, rewrite my firewall scripts for iptables (yeah, I know you can use the old ipchains interface with 2.4, but if you're going to do the upgrade, do the upgrade), and then work out all the gremlins from running "new" code.
Desktops are different, because nobody cares if you have downtime with them. Servers on the other hand can cause pain when they're down, and even for a personal server the downtime is not worth the upgrade. You gain nothing, and lose quite a bit of time.
Eventually, I'll decomission the P200 and bring the celeryonion 433 up as my bridge/firewall machine, but that's going to be timed with a move (when the machines will have to be down anyway, and it'll be a week or two before the new place has internet access). Doing it before then is pointless.
I have a ... conflict of interest ... if you're trying to recruit me :) Even so, I still think it'll be nice to write multi-platform GUI C# code (IMHO, GTK# doesn't cut it right now, because GTK+ sucks on Windows). It's good to hear that work is being done to investigate both paths, and may the best code win.
And of course, my opinions are my own, and not those of my ... conflict of interest.
Now please, please, please implement WinForms for Mono! I know it's not part of the ECMA standard, but IMHO it's necessary for proper portability of .NET/Mono client code (consider the same plea for ASP.NET and WebForms). GTK# is there, now just wrap it in the System.Windows.Forms namespace.
A number of car companies are doing better than that these days -- they actually produce their concept cars. For example, the Porsche Boxster concept was little different than the eventual production vehicle. Same for Audi's TT. As well, Ford went from concept to production on the new Thunderbird in what I would consider record time (something like two years?), and are planning on doing the same for their GT Concept. Hopefully this trend continues, because many concept cars are more exciting than their production brethren.
It'd be interesting to do a poll of those developers to see how many are currently employed as programming professionals, and how many are students or employed in some other field and only program in their spare time (or unemployed). I'm willing to bet that the percentage of the former is quite small.
You seem to have missed the point. The technologies you mentioned are great when you don't know whether or not the person is there. However, it's difficult to have a conversation over e-mail or voice mail, and that's where IM shines. IM is not about leaving a message for somebody, but engaging them in conversation when you can't speak to them in person. Yes, you could use the telephone, but you don't know for sure if they're there or not, and that also involves interrupting whatever you happen to be doing at the moment. IM let's you know when somebody is available, and you can ping back and forth without having to walk across the building or stop your work to pick up the phone.
A good example of IM technology being used in a "business" would be my college job as a computer lab sitter. During each shift, there were sitters at all of the different labs on campus, and we were all in contact through an internal IRC server. It made it very easy to keep in touch with other sitters, and even managers. We could ask questions of the other sitters when we didn't know the answer, and doing it over IRC was a lot less disruptive than telling the user, "Hold on while I call over to another lab." One advantage this system has over IM is that for a small group, we were all in the same channel (chat room, conference, party line, whatever you want to call it), so if one sitter was away from his desk, any of the others could still see the question and help out.
More like DirectDraw "went away", while developers developed ways of doing 2D-ish stuff in D3D (like billboarding). However, the nature of DirectX and COM (DirectX being a COM-based architecture, of course) means that DirectDraw will always be available for you to use, if you can remember how to program DX circa DX7.
Nope. nVidia learned early on to develop API-agnostic hardware. They also learned not to waste time developing their own proprietary API (a la 3[Dd]fx's Glide), and instead choose to support whatever APIs are currently the most popular. That means DirectX and OpenGL (they would've supported Glide back in the day, had 3dfx allowed them, or had they purchased 3dfx before Glide was moot). From day one (well, Riva128 days, anyway), nVidia has supported DirectX and OpenGL. And lately, given nVidia's close relationship with Microsoft (XBox, DX8 shader implementation), one would be inclined to think that nVidia builds their hardware around DX rather than OGL. Is that bad? IMHO, no, but make your own decision.
As another poster mentioned, theCarmack almost single-handedly popularized OpenGL for game work, and the popularity of Id games and engines means that modern video card companies must support OpenGL. Neither nVidia nor ATi will be giving up on OpenGL any time soon, especially with Doom3 right around the corner.
Or back in the real world, XP is Microsoft's current desktop OS, split into two separate versions for Home users and Professionals (there is some overlap, in that many home users like to have the extra functionality of Pro, but XP Home will never be used in a corporate environment because it won't talk to an Active Directory server -- because who really needs that at home?). Or how about the separation between Windows 2000 Professional and the Windows 2000 servers (Server, Advanced Server, Data Center)? Or how about Windows XP as the desktop OS v. Windows Server 2003 (Web Server, Standard, Enterprise, Data Center) as the server OS? Or going back to NT4, how about NT 4 Workstation v. NT 4 Server?
I'm not the original poster, but I'll give you reasons. Aside from the fact that the workstation/server OS split is common in the industry (see Microsoft, Apple), how about the fact that workstations have different requirements than servers? You don't need to support more than 2 (or 4, if you're really that hardcore) CPUs on a workstation, and you can modify your kernel to take advantage of that. Workstations need a useable, responsive UI, while servers don't. You can get by with an ssh commandline or an 8bpp, 640x480 terminal server session for your server, but that just won't cut it for a workstation. There are adjustments that can be made to make UIs more responsive that really don't apply to servers (or at the least, give only minimal benefit). Similarly, there are tweaks you can do for a server OS that would negatively impact a workstation. Trying to shoehorn both a desktop OS and a server OS into one package will end badly in the long run -- you'll never be great at both, and you'll have the desktop guys complaining on one side and the server guys on the other.
The split has worked well for Linux in the embedded/RTOS sector. Redhat et al aren't trying to roll embedded support into their offerings. If they decided to branch out, I'm sure you'd see a "Redhat Embedded Linux" distro targetted towards that. Why are you against doing similar with server v. desktop? Get "Redhat Linux Server Edition" for your server, and "Redhat Linux Workstation" for your desktop. (Note that I'm not advocating Redhat in favor of other distributions, nor am I saying such products exist, though if they do and have the same names it's simply coincidence because I'm too lazy to look up what Redhat currently offers. Also, I realize the original poster was advocating a split in the kernel, while I'm advocating splitting at the distro level, but given distributors' history of adding kernel patches to the kernels they ship, it would work out to effectively the same thing.)
No, I don't mean that. While contractions may not be accepted in the most formal forms of writing, they are accepted everywhere else. Would it be better to use the non-contraction forms? That's not for me to decide. However, whichever you decide to use, the word "of" should never come into play. "Of" is a preposition, meaning (among other things) "derived or coming from". "Have", on the other hand, is a verb meaning (again, among other things) "to be in possession of". "Could of" is meaningless", "could've" and "could have" are not.
PS. You misspelled "should".