While I share your enthusiasm, maybe we should wait until they have at least one successful launch before holding them up as the template for success and the future of space flight. So far they're just a really, really expensive fireworks company.
I think the parent poster was trying to differentiate between an RTG (like Voyager has) which relies on the natural decay of radioactive isotopes and a full-bore nuclear fission reactor which induces decay with a neutron chain reaction.
That's only true in the very last stage of bidding on government contracts. The key is to have the requirements written "properly". I put the last word in quotes because every contractor wants their special value-add to be made a requirement of all bid requests-- that way they're always cheapest and win the final bid. By the time the final wording is written into any request for proposals, the winner is usually no surprise.
That is an oversimplification that clouds the debate. p2p generally refers to end-user clients also being servers. Most of the internet (or more specifically the web) is not set up like this. Most information is hosted in major hosting centers and flows unidirectionally out to clients. That is a fundamentally different use case than having lots of phones sending files to other phones on-demand.
Actually, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had more to do with it.
The Church, if anything, managed to save some of the knowledge that would otherwise would have been lost.
That's true if by "The Church" you are referring to Islam. Most of the knowledge and advances that came through that era came out of Islamic works. They had the advantage of being located between Greece and India, and fused the knowledge of each of those cultures into new practices such as algebra and algorithmic analysis. While Europe degenerated into small city-states.
Indeed. The average yearly population increase for the last 5 years was about 77M people a year. I would be surprised if humanity ever manages to ship that many people per year offworld into a colony. And if they decided to colonize, they'd probably start with the ocean rather than space.
Yeah, but remember what happened when he left before?
As I recall, Apple grew for a decade afterwards, while Jobs went off to form NeXT which struggled to survive and faced imminent demise before being bought back out by Apple. It's true that Apple faltered for the few years before Jobs re-joined the company, but it had a pretty good run from 1985 (when Jobs left) to 1995 (when Apple lost its GUI IP fight on a technicality and Windows 95 cemented Microsoft's GUI dominance).
I'm not saying that Jobs hasn't been wonderful-- much better than I would have expected-- for Apple and its shareholders. But bringing in another Sculley wouldn't exactly be the worst thing in the world, although I'd much prefer an Ive.
You must not be very familiar with the FSF. The entire point of the FSF is to remove the freedom of choice and eventually force everyone to publish everything they've done for free.
Software *is not* math. Software is a creative expression, an instruction manual, or a machine with many variable parts. It is as much "math" as the steam engine or the airplane. Yes, there are mathematical constructs that can explain it, but that doesn't make it equivalent. I think that point was made fairly well in the DeCSS case by Dr. David Touretzsky when he said that source code is a creative work covered by the 1st amendment.
IMHO, there is no significant difference between patenting a machine or a perfect computer simulation of that machine. If you can patent a physical device that sorts letters, I don't understand why there's a line drawn such that a virtual machine that sorts virtual letters is unpatentable.
Apples own open source contributions are pretty lame IMHO - Safari is closed source, even though web browsers are a commodity and there's nothing especially innovative in there. WebKit is open source because they based it on KHTML but I remember when it first came out, the KHTML developers were pretty frustrated by Apples minimal-compliance unusable patch dumps.
I'm tired of this meme and hope it dies soon. Apple is one of the more prolific contributors to open source out there... certainly vastly more open than Microsoft in this regard.
From another post recently, so I don't have to type it all again:
"Apple has started quite a few open source projects. Probably the best known are the Darwin Streaming Server (formerly Quicktime Streaming Server). And while Darwin includes a FreeBSD kernel it includes many Apple-developed components (IOKit, launchd, gajillions of others), which they contributed to the public domain that, since the kernel was BSD, they were under no obligation to do.
Other notable Apple-initiated open source projects include Bonjour, clang (for LLVM), CalendarServer (CalDAV), and others. Less well-known ones include OpenPlay, an entire implementation of CDSA security, and BridgeSupport. They've significantly contributed to X11 (XQuartz), ZFS, LLVM, FreeBSD, KHTML, and probably many others.
It's popular on SlashDot to point out the areas in which Apple holds things close to the vest and use DRM and legal maneuvers to keep things closed. But they only do that in the areas in which they perceive a critical need. In many other areas they are hugely open and have significantly contributed to the state of the art in open source software."
How are you measuring "capable"? How much time it takes to accomplish real-world tasks? How much entertainment value you derive from it? How well it integrates into your travel kit? How easy it is to manipulate with one hand and 1/10th of your mental attention? How easy it is to sync it, load it, etc?
You wouldn't write a web app in C++, so why would you want to write it in a language that was designed to replace C++?
Wow, this comment I think wins the Best Java Troll on SlashDot for this month. There are so many logical fallacies in such a short sentence it almost boggles my mind to try to construct a response that sets the record straight. But to try to cut to the essence, Java solves many problems very well and is thus very widely used, and its technically pedigree is neither particularly rooted in C++ nor is it relevant to the decision to use the language.
That seems like a somewhat shallow definition. I've heard commercial software called a "de-facto standard" while a competing open-source project who don't give CVS/repository access to anyone "proprietary". Is PDF proprietary or "open"? Has it changed state? I've heard APIs be called proprietary even when they're freely published and unencumbered by patent if they're not attached to a standards body...
Basically, the word means little more than "bad" these days.
Apple has started quite a few open source projects. Probably the best known are the Darwin Streaming Server (formerly Quicktime Streaming Server). And while Darwin includes a FreeBSD kernel it includes many Apple-developed components (IOKit, launchd, gajillions of others), which they contributed to the public domain that, since the kernel was BSD, they were under no obligation to do.
Other notable Apple-initiated open source projects include Bonjour, clang (for LLVM), CalendarServer (CalDAV), and others. Less well-known ones include OpenPlay, an entire implementation of CDSA security, and BridgeSupport. They've significantly contributed to X11 (XQuartz), ZFS, LLVM, FreeBSD, KHTML, and probably many others.
It's popular on SlashDot to point out the areas in which Apple holds things close to the vest and use DRM and legal maneuvers to keep things closed. But they only do that in the areas in which they perceive a critical need. In many other areas they are hugely open and have significantly contributed to the state of the art in open source software.
(If this seems too gushy... well, I've got plenty of criticisms of Apple, but this sure isn't one of them.)
I'm not sure what your point is in the first two paragraphs. You're correct that Apple saw financial benefit from jump-starting their development with open-source code, then gave back in turn by releasing vast numbers of bugfixes and feature upgrades to those projects. Isn't that how it's supposed to work? I would consider WebKit one of the top-tier open source projects in history and it's being led by Apple.
Yes, Apple does lots of things that are proprietary. They often care more about user experience, time to market, and cost than they do about making sure their file formats (which these days are usually based on an embedded relational database) are fully documented for every third party developer. But they give away their development environment at no extra charge and it's pretty easy to use, so it's only really a problem if you insist on trying to reproduce it all without just buying a Mac and getting on with life...
As for comparing it to FireFox... I'd say that WebKit has probably driven FireFox more than vice-versa. WebKit really started pushing boundaries in new feature adoption and old feature conformance sooner than FireFox did. And I don't think the FireFox guys really want to get into a pissing match on JavaScript performance with SquirrelFish in the WebKit nightlies.
Agile, "extreme", and other iterative development models go back more than 10 years... that's just when Extreme Programming was the buzzword and made it big. It's pretty much always been a waterfall vs. spiral world in software project planning.
And none of it has anything whatsoever to do with web 2.0.
Getting things in front of users fast is key to user acceptance. However, it has to be managed well. Users often don't actually know their requirements, and everyone has emotions and priorities that are disproportionately represented relative to their actual value. You can really easily end up chasing your own tail or always being behind the ball because you're always reacting instead of acting.
Although I'm not sure why this is relevant, it might be worth noting that the Nokia N60 uses WebKit (the same engine as Safari) by default, as will all the Android phones. It's also at the core of many other applications. What's more, there have been several reports that Safari has the highest mobile market share in terms of actual use, rather than mere installed base.
The word "proprietary" is a very vague term that's usually used to connote some sort of "them", where the "us" are the good guys.
The bottom line is that wherever there is value, someone will find a way to charge for it. If this "cloud computing" really has no model under which anyone finds it valuable enough to commercialize it, then it's probably not going to be very popular anyway.
You're making a lot of assumptions about needs, uptime, costs, and levels of in-house expertise when you make those blanket statements. There's always a balance between "relying on third parties" and "not invented here syndrome". In the latter case, you'll have people attempting things way outside their area of expertise and reliability or uptime will be significantly worse than if they'd let the experts do their job and paid a fair price.
Touch is not a good choice for a desktop device because you must take your hands away from the keyboard, wave them in front of a monitor, get fingerprints all over it, and make your arms tired. It's poor ergonomically for this sort of device. Do you want to hunch over a display and stare down at it so that you can use your desktop or laptop? Touch screens are also costly.
While I don't disagree with your conclusion, it's interesting to note that most of these arguments were used against mice. I had a friend who vehemently defended DOS to my hippie Mac freak ways in the 80's because mice took your hands away from the keyboard and slowed you down.
I don't think this analyst is completely wrong, though. I could imagine a laptop (and laptops are already >50% of all sales) that has an embedded iPod Touch in it instead of a trackpad. The iPod touch is really nice for casual web surfing. Not having to keep a mouse pointed anywhere and just touching whatever you want is neat. And putting an LCD under a laptop's trackpad enables all sorts of Nintendo DS (which is the example I'd have used instead of Wii) scenarios.
In any case, within 5 years devices like the iPod Touch are going to start to seriously displace laptops for many casual uses anyway, so while I doubt a desktop will ship without a mouse for at least 10-20 years, I think computing may start to move beyond desktops.
Really? I applied as an individual developer without any released Apple products, and have paid my $99 and got in. They were very restrictive until release day, but at this point I don't know anyone who's applied who hasn't gotten the invitation email. I got my email the day after the App Store was opened, and am halfway done with my first app.
And as there are enough applications in the Apple Store already that it's hard to track them all, I don't think lack of apps is anything anyone's worrying about. Jailbreaking will definitely be good for GPL fanatics (as that's the only one of the open source licenses that's incompatible), but I suspect 99% of the users won't care and will stick with the convenience, support, and variety of the official store.
The executive branch of the US government has no power to change the two party system. It would require a Constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to assume the power to force states to conduct their elections in specific ways, which requires 2/3 of Congress and a ratification by the states.
So if you're looking at changing out one of the two parties for an alternate pair of parties, by all means vote for a third party for president and get at least 1/3 of the country to do the same somehow. But if you actually want to move the US away from a two-party system, start finding Congressional representatives to vote for and in the meantime don't throw your presidential vote away since you, in all practicality, have no hope of getting a third party elected (and, in fact, will only take votes away from whichever of the viable candidates most closely matches your position).
No, my attitude is just the opposite. A "how to" is asking about accomplishing a certain task, not for a specific implementation of a specific technical feature. How tos that just tell users why they shouldn't want what they want is only slightly less frustrating to me than how to's that tell users how easy things are. (Whether a step is "easy" or not is not an analysis a document writer should be making. If it's easy for the user, it's wasted space, and if it's not, it's just frustrating and demeaning.)
Slashdot Mirror
While I share your enthusiasm, maybe we should wait until they have at least one successful launch before holding them up as the template for success and the future of space flight. So far they're just a really, really expensive fireworks company.
I think the parent poster was trying to differentiate between an RTG (like Voyager has) which relies on the natural decay of radioactive isotopes and a full-bore nuclear fission reactor which induces decay with a neutron chain reaction.
That's only true in the very last stage of bidding on government contracts. The key is to have the requirements written "properly". I put the last word in quotes because every contractor wants their special value-add to be made a requirement of all bid requests-- that way they're always cheapest and win the final bid. By the time the final wording is written into any request for proposals, the winner is usually no surprise.
Seriously... don't we toss thousands of cellphones a day-- each more powerful than an Apple ][, into landfills?
That is an oversimplification that clouds the debate. p2p generally refers to end-user clients also being servers. Most of the internet (or more specifically the web) is not set up like this. Most information is hosted in major hosting centers and flows unidirectionally out to clients. That is a fundamentally different use case than having lots of phones sending files to other phones on-demand.
Actually, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had more to do with it.
The Church, if anything, managed to save some of the knowledge that would otherwise would have been lost.
That's true if by "The Church" you are referring to Islam. Most of the knowledge and advances that came through that era came out of Islamic works. They had the advantage of being located between Greece and India, and fused the knowledge of each of those cultures into new practices such as algebra and algorithmic analysis. While Europe degenerated into small city-states.
Indeed. The average yearly population increase for the last 5 years was about 77M people a year. I would be surprised if humanity ever manages to ship that many people per year offworld into a colony. And if they decided to colonize, they'd probably start with the ocean rather than space.
Yeah, but remember what happened when he left before?
As I recall, Apple grew for a decade afterwards, while Jobs went off to form NeXT which struggled to survive and faced imminent demise before being bought back out by Apple. It's true that Apple faltered for the few years before Jobs re-joined the company, but it had a pretty good run from 1985 (when Jobs left) to 1995 (when Apple lost its GUI IP fight on a technicality and Windows 95 cemented Microsoft's GUI dominance).
I'm not saying that Jobs hasn't been wonderful-- much better than I would have expected-- for Apple and its shareholders. But bringing in another Sculley wouldn't exactly be the worst thing in the world, although I'd much prefer an Ive.
You must not be very familiar with the FSF. The entire point of the FSF is to remove the freedom of choice and eventually force everyone to publish everything they've done for free.
Software *is not* math. Software is a creative expression, an instruction manual, or a machine with many variable parts. It is as much "math" as the steam engine or the airplane. Yes, there are mathematical constructs that can explain it, but that doesn't make it equivalent. I think that point was made fairly well in the DeCSS case by Dr. David Touretzsky when he said that source code is a creative work covered by the 1st amendment.
IMHO, there is no significant difference between patenting a machine or a perfect computer simulation of that machine. If you can patent a physical device that sorts letters, I don't understand why there's a line drawn such that a virtual machine that sorts virtual letters is unpatentable.
Apples own open source contributions are pretty lame IMHO - Safari is closed source, even though web browsers are a commodity and there's nothing especially innovative in there. WebKit is open source because they based it on KHTML but I remember when it first came out, the KHTML developers were pretty frustrated by Apples minimal-compliance unusable patch dumps.
I'm tired of this meme and hope it dies soon. Apple is one of the more prolific contributors to open source out there... certainly vastly more open than Microsoft in this regard.
From another post recently, so I don't have to type it all again:
"Apple has started quite a few open source projects. Probably the best known are the Darwin Streaming Server (formerly Quicktime Streaming Server). And while Darwin includes a FreeBSD kernel it includes many Apple-developed components (IOKit, launchd, gajillions of others), which they contributed to the public domain that, since the kernel was BSD, they were under no obligation to do.
Other notable Apple-initiated open source projects include Bonjour, clang (for LLVM), CalendarServer (CalDAV), and others. Less well-known ones include OpenPlay, an entire implementation of CDSA security, and BridgeSupport. They've significantly contributed to X11 (XQuartz), ZFS, LLVM, FreeBSD, KHTML, and probably many others.
It's popular on SlashDot to point out the areas in which Apple holds things close to the vest and use DRM and legal maneuvers to keep things closed. But they only do that in the areas in which they perceive a critical need. In many other areas they are hugely open and have significantly contributed to the state of the art in open source software."
How are you measuring "capable"? How much time it takes to accomplish real-world tasks? How much entertainment value you derive from it? How well it integrates into your travel kit? How easy it is to manipulate with one hand and 1/10th of your mental attention? How easy it is to sync it, load it, etc?
Or are you going by specs?
You wouldn't write a web app in C++, so why would you want to write it in a language that was designed to replace C++?
Wow, this comment I think wins the Best Java Troll on SlashDot for this month. There are so many logical fallacies in such a short sentence it almost boggles my mind to try to construct a response that sets the record straight. But to try to cut to the essence, Java solves many problems very well and is thus very widely used, and its technically pedigree is neither particularly rooted in C++ nor is it relevant to the decision to use the language.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6611814 ... and virtually all other computer-related results from a full-text patent search on the word "list"
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5424524
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6249773
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5201010
http://www.google.com/patents?id=7OsfAAAAEBAJ
That seems like a somewhat shallow definition. I've heard commercial software called a "de-facto standard" while a competing open-source project who don't give CVS/repository access to anyone "proprietary". Is PDF proprietary or "open"? Has it changed state? I've heard APIs be called proprietary even when they're freely published and unencumbered by patent if they're not attached to a standards body...
Basically, the word means little more than "bad" these days.
Apple has started quite a few open source projects. Probably the best known are the Darwin Streaming Server (formerly Quicktime Streaming Server). And while Darwin includes a FreeBSD kernel it includes many Apple-developed components (IOKit, launchd, gajillions of others), which they contributed to the public domain that, since the kernel was BSD, they were under no obligation to do.
Other notable Apple-initiated open source projects include Bonjour, clang (for LLVM), CalendarServer (CalDAV), and others. Less well-known ones include OpenPlay, an entire implementation of CDSA security, and BridgeSupport. They've significantly contributed to X11 (XQuartz), ZFS, LLVM, FreeBSD, KHTML, and probably many others.
It's popular on SlashDot to point out the areas in which Apple holds things close to the vest and use DRM and legal maneuvers to keep things closed. But they only do that in the areas in which they perceive a critical need. In many other areas they are hugely open and have significantly contributed to the state of the art in open source software.
(If this seems too gushy... well, I've got plenty of criticisms of Apple, but this sure isn't one of them.)
I'm not sure what your point is in the first two paragraphs. You're correct that Apple saw financial benefit from jump-starting their development with open-source code, then gave back in turn by releasing vast numbers of bugfixes and feature upgrades to those projects. Isn't that how it's supposed to work? I would consider WebKit one of the top-tier open source projects in history and it's being led by Apple.
Yes, Apple does lots of things that are proprietary. They often care more about user experience, time to market, and cost than they do about making sure their file formats (which these days are usually based on an embedded relational database) are fully documented for every third party developer. But they give away their development environment at no extra charge and it's pretty easy to use, so it's only really a problem if you insist on trying to reproduce it all without just buying a Mac and getting on with life...
As for comparing it to FireFox... I'd say that WebKit has probably driven FireFox more than vice-versa. WebKit really started pushing boundaries in new feature adoption and old feature conformance sooner than FireFox did. And I don't think the FireFox guys really want to get into a pissing match on JavaScript performance with SquirrelFish in the WebKit nightlies.
Agile, "extreme", and other iterative development models go back more than 10 years... that's just when Extreme Programming was the buzzword and made it big. It's pretty much always been a waterfall vs. spiral world in software project planning.
And none of it has anything whatsoever to do with web 2.0.
Getting things in front of users fast is key to user acceptance. However, it has to be managed well. Users often don't actually know their requirements, and everyone has emotions and priorities that are disproportionately represented relative to their actual value. You can really easily end up chasing your own tail or always being behind the ball because you're always reacting instead of acting.
Although I'm not sure why this is relevant, it might be worth noting that the Nokia N60 uses WebKit (the same engine as Safari) by default, as will all the Android phones. It's also at the core of many other applications. What's more, there have been several reports that Safari has the highest mobile market share in terms of actual use, rather than mere installed base.
The word "proprietary" is a very vague term that's usually used to connote some sort of "them", where the "us" are the good guys.
The bottom line is that wherever there is value, someone will find a way to charge for it. If this "cloud computing" really has no model under which anyone finds it valuable enough to commercialize it, then it's probably not going to be very popular anyway.
You're making a lot of assumptions about needs, uptime, costs, and levels of in-house expertise when you make those blanket statements. There's always a balance between "relying on third parties" and "not invented here syndrome". In the latter case, you'll have people attempting things way outside their area of expertise and reliability or uptime will be significantly worse than if they'd let the experts do their job and paid a fair price.
Touch is not a good choice for a desktop device because you must take your hands away from the keyboard, wave them in front of a monitor, get fingerprints all over it, and make your arms tired. It's poor ergonomically for this sort of device. Do you want to hunch over a display and stare down at it so that you can use your desktop or laptop? Touch screens are also costly.
While I don't disagree with your conclusion, it's interesting to note that most of these arguments were used against mice. I had a friend who vehemently defended DOS to my hippie Mac freak ways in the 80's because mice took your hands away from the keyboard and slowed you down.
I don't think this analyst is completely wrong, though. I could imagine a laptop (and laptops are already >50% of all sales) that has an embedded iPod Touch in it instead of a trackpad. The iPod touch is really nice for casual web surfing. Not having to keep a mouse pointed anywhere and just touching whatever you want is neat. And putting an LCD under a laptop's trackpad enables all sorts of Nintendo DS (which is the example I'd have used instead of Wii) scenarios.
In any case, within 5 years devices like the iPod Touch are going to start to seriously displace laptops for many casual uses anyway, so while I doubt a desktop will ship without a mouse for at least 10-20 years, I think computing may start to move beyond desktops.
Really? I applied as an individual developer without any released Apple products, and have paid my $99 and got in. They were very restrictive until release day, but at this point I don't know anyone who's applied who hasn't gotten the invitation email. I got my email the day after the App Store was opened, and am halfway done with my first app.
And as there are enough applications in the Apple Store already that it's hard to track them all, I don't think lack of apps is anything anyone's worrying about. Jailbreaking will definitely be good for GPL fanatics (as that's the only one of the open source licenses that's incompatible), but I suspect 99% of the users won't care and will stick with the convenience, support, and variety of the official store.
The executive branch of the US government has no power to change the two party system. It would require a Constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to assume the power to force states to conduct their elections in specific ways, which requires 2/3 of Congress and a ratification by the states.
So if you're looking at changing out one of the two parties for an alternate pair of parties, by all means vote for a third party for president and get at least 1/3 of the country to do the same somehow. But if you actually want to move the US away from a two-party system, start finding Congressional representatives to vote for and in the meantime don't throw your presidential vote away since you, in all practicality, have no hope of getting a third party elected (and, in fact, will only take votes away from whichever of the viable candidates most closely matches your position).
No, my attitude is just the opposite. A "how to" is asking about accomplishing a certain task, not for a specific implementation of a specific technical feature. How tos that just tell users why they shouldn't want what they want is only slightly less frustrating to me than how to's that tell users how easy things are. (Whether a step is "easy" or not is not an analysis a document writer should be making. If it's easy for the user, it's wasted space, and if it's not, it's just frustrating and demeaning.)