The Xbox360 came out a full year earlier, and it is still selling 100k more units per month?
Well, the PS2 came out almost 7 years ago, and, at least as of May, was still outselling the PS3 and XBox360 put together each month. As the PS3 price comes down, it will be interesting to see if Sony can convert a substantial portion of the PS2 buyers into PS3 owners down the road. And while it's true that the PS3 has little exclusive content yet, I can't wait for the first virtual world-style game (Maybe a GTA?) that uses the Blu-Ray capacity to offer an order of magnitude richer world than you can get on anything else.
In other words, the game isn't over-- it's hardly begun.
Although I could have gone any of the 3 ways (the Wii seems fun but lacking in features, the 360 seems like it has a good online feature but lackluster specs, and the PS3 is expensive but featureful), I don't regret the PS3. Blu-Ray movies look awesome, the machine has horsepower out the wazoo, the LAN features just work-- it has everything I need for a long time. And it plays my PS2 games so I don't have to go out and buy hundreds of dollars in new games to have a little fun.
More to the point, the primary users of this system would probably be in class A airspace (above 18000ft), where you need to be on instruments already. Below that, and you have every ma and pa cropduster without even a radio, let alone a GPS, flying around (I don't know why it surprises some people that a radio is not essential equipment in an airplane-- they're not very aerodynamic).
The only one being petty and vindictive that I can see is RMS. He's managed to win the PR fight somehow by getting people to call his new restrictions "closing loopholes". Anyway, your point is valid about TiVo redistributing GCC, but certainly there are many people who love GPLv2 but for which GPLv3 is unpalatable. Thus, I would be amazed if almost every single product going to GPLv3 didn't fork or have some BSD-style replacement in the coming year. Even if Apple's LLVM work is in its infancy, I'm sure it will accelerate as more people jump on board this as a replacement for their own GCC needs in order to lessen their exposure to RMS's whims.
I got it from here (PDF). While they call "obsoleting GCC" a "non-goal", it's almost certainly a goal of other folks that the FSF has targeted, such as TiVo, and therefore I could see people using Apple's work as a starting point.
I happen to think they were wrong about every single one. Even laserdisc-- who wants to pay $50 instead of $5 for a movie? And NeXTStep was certainly not better than BeOS-- Jobs was better than Gassee. (Heck, even today MacOS X is hobbled by NeXTstep's ObjectiveC slowness.)
You're spot-on with VHS vs Beta. I remember getting my hands on a pirated version of Star Wars on BetaMax-- which took 3-4 tapes. Swapping out tapes in the middle of a movie? No thanks, I'll take VHS.
And I wouldn't say DTS has lost any format wars. Not yet, anyway.
Yes, but you don't need GCC at all in order to use LLVM to compile all the way from source to binary, once you have a new front-end. Now that Apple has such a front-end for the languages they use (and one which, from early benchmarks, performs significantly better than GCC), I see GCC's days as being numbered at Apple. Add to that the fact that there is certainly no consensus on GPLv3 yet, and GCC could easily deprecate its popularity by jumping to GPLv3.
I don't know of any fork of GCC happening, but I know that Apple now has their own C/C++/ObjC front-end to LLVM that can compile down to binary, and thus it seems will soon be able to avoid using GCC altogether. And since they appear to be prepared to open source it, perhaps there won't be a fork of GCC, but instead this may be the beginning of the end of GCC's dominance.
I'm no big MS proponent, but I don't have a problem with this as long as they don't successfully buy themselves a monopoly in the console/home entertainment industry
Which is exactly what they're in the process of doing. This division has lost billions and never made a profit. Which means, of course, everything from the original XBox to the Zune is sold at a loss and paid for by Vista and Office profits. Leveraging one monopoly to create another is conceptually illegal, but in practicality there's nothing really illegal about what they're doing, and gamers seem to be falling for it. Soon the console market will be like the desktop operating system market, with XBox (running a derivative of WinNT) subsidized into dominance and PS3 (running Linux) relegated to relative obscurity.
No, I don't think the distinction is very important. The bottom line is that regardless of the mechanism, if things appear to send signals faster than light across our universe's space, it violates all sorts of causality and reletivistic notions. The mechanism might be interesting in that FTL communications could also have serious repercussions on the conservation of energy principles as well. But the bottom line is that if "instantaneous" communication is possible, then spacetime isn't relative-- there exists simultaneity.
You make a good point. The fact that there is not a single virus or worm in the wild for MacOS X probably does make this bigger news (assuming the unsubstantiated report is real and it ever makes it into the wild) than it would otherwise be. I'm not sure how much Apple's statements on the matter really affect it, but the fact that someone succeeded in creating such a worm for MacOS X really is pretty big news, I guess. That is, as long as the news organizations don't try to portray MacOS as being as vulnerable as Windows.
I'm sure you're trying to be sarcastic, but it would DEFINITELY be a good idea to include everyone from your random teenage mom's basement hacker to Theo de Raadt in the discussion. Just because someone has done great things for the community it doesn't mean he's going about addressing exploits in the best way.
I don't have a link, but Scientific American had an article a few years back about another use of laughter. Apparently, even when forced laughter allows the brain to hold two opposing concepts at the same time... the experiment used the "is it a vase or is it faces" and "old woman/young woman" pictures, and found that laughing people could see both simultaneously, but other almost always had to flip back and forth.
Likewise, I'm sure fear has plenty of levels of usefulness. As anyone with migraines or anxiety with panic disorder knows, the balance between seratonin, adrenalin, and other chemicals in your body don't just affect your mood. They affect sleep, digestion, learning, and even pain. Attacking fear with a sledgehammer-like approach is probably useful as a research tool, but would probably have insane side-effects if used as a medicine.
The idea that journalists would be "sullied" by being called a tech writer is pretty amusing. You need significantly more training to be a good tech writer, and you're significantly more likely to have a deep understanding of the issues involved in the tech world. The author of this article needs to step back and consider if the people he's slandering might just have a point.
You seem to have missed the point of the parent poster. His point was that while BeOS's multithreading certainly improved its responsiveness, it was more due to the fact that BeOS had very little capabilities that were tying up its resources. There is a real question whether if BeOS had become commercially viable whether it would have been able to keep its performance. So the question isn't really whether other OSes need to be rewritten to be as responsive as BeOS, but where in the middle they'd all meet.
In any case, MacOS X with each release has improved its threading, and I expect that to continue to the point where someday it's more multi-threaded than BeOS was.
I'd just like to clarify that "programming" has as much to do with CS as it does IT. It's a required skill for both, but programming is not CS. If you want to become a "Computer Programmer" that's a 2-year associates degree at your local community college. Neither is it Software Engineering, which is the practical approach to organizing and developing software, or Computer Engineering, which is the study of hardware principles.
Computer Science is a study of principles, algorithms, formalizations, and generally a way to get a deeper understanding of the characteristics of software. One of the most important 400-level classes at Carnegie Mellon was Algorithms, and we didn't write any runnable code at all the whole semester.
Right... the product should be named GNU/MIT/X/IBM/Linux, because of COURSE you should add the creators of all your userland software to the beginning of your OS's product name. Give me a break. It's called "Linux", because that's what it's creator, Linus Torvalds, called it. "GNU/Linux" is a figment of RMS's imagination. He suggested it be called that, and Linus rejected his suggestion-- end of story.
Somebody's a fan-boy here, but it isn't me. I like both the Wii and the PS3 as game systems. But the fact is, the Wii is old technology and Nintendo STILL can't build them. If the PS3 is out-selling the Wii because of the Wii's lack of availability, it means more PS3's are being produced than Wiis. Why on Earth would that be?
In any case, before the $100 price drop, it wasn't true. PS3's were selling pretty badly. Now they're #1. I don't understand how that simple fact can be seen as a "Troll" unless you're really emotionally invested in your Wii and hating Sony.
Agreed! Sony obviously did the right move with the $100 price cut-- The PS3 has led the Amazon "videogames" best-sellers list (with the Blu-Ray remote #2 and extra controller #3) ever since the announcement. They're not going to undo that.
On Amazon, the PS3 has been outselling the Wii since the price cut, and the XBox 360 is all the way down at #20. (Even the PS2 is outselling the XBox 360 on Amazon.)
Before people go nuts about never buying anything PS3/Sony/blah blah blah again, why don't you wait to see what ACTUALLY happens?
(It's also interesting that Blu-Ray remotes for PS3 appear to be selling more units than all the HD DVD players combined... another thing that Sony is not going to endanger with a boneheaded move...)
I liked the size of the world in SA you could traverse without load pauses. It was impressive. And I hope in GTA IV they use the Blu-Ray to the fullest extent to go even further (hopefully they won't hobble it to only the capabilities of the XBox 360).
My favorite GTA flying experience was actually the "Dodo" in GTA III, which with careful practice you could fly around the whole map.
Two points: 1. It is advisable for projects to require copyright to be signed over to the coordinating authority upon submission. That allows the project managers to change the license in the future (ie. from "GPL version 2" to "GPL versions 2 or 3") without requiring permission from every submitting individual. That largely satisfies your concern, I think. 2. The FSF (aka "Richard Stallman") has already shown a great deal of disregard for individual's concerns during the GPLv3 process. Who knows what holy wars he will try to wage with GPLv4, or where the FSF will go once he retires/gets hit by a bus/wins the lottery and doesn't care/whatever. Unless you have 100% confidence that the FSF will forever act in your interests, adding "or later" to your license is sheer stupidity. Heck, I doubt it's even legally clear what would happen if *I* went and published a new license named "GPL version 100". The only way to ensure that your code stays free is to not include "or later", and explicitly specify the versions of the GPL you are distributing your code under.
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The Xbox360 came out a full year earlier, and it is still selling 100k more units per month?
Well, the PS2 came out almost 7 years ago, and, at least as of May, was still outselling the PS3 and XBox360 put together each month. As the PS3 price comes down, it will be interesting to see if Sony can convert a substantial portion of the PS2 buyers into PS3 owners down the road. And while it's true that the PS3 has little exclusive content yet, I can't wait for the first virtual world-style game (Maybe a GTA?) that uses the Blu-Ray capacity to offer an order of magnitude richer world than you can get on anything else.
In other words, the game isn't over-- it's hardly begun.
Although I could have gone any of the 3 ways (the Wii seems fun but lacking in features, the 360 seems like it has a good online feature but lackluster specs, and the PS3 is expensive but featureful), I don't regret the PS3. Blu-Ray movies look awesome, the machine has horsepower out the wazoo, the LAN features just work-- it has everything I need for a long time. And it plays my PS2 games so I don't have to go out and buy hundreds of dollars in new games to have a little fun.
More to the point, the primary users of this system would probably be in class A airspace (above 18000ft), where you need to be on instruments already. Below that, and you have every ma and pa cropduster without even a radio, let alone a GPS, flying around (I don't know why it surprises some people that a radio is not essential equipment in an airplane-- they're not very aerodynamic).
The only one being petty and vindictive that I can see is RMS. He's managed to win the PR fight somehow by getting people to call his new restrictions "closing loopholes". Anyway, your point is valid about TiVo redistributing GCC, but certainly there are many people who love GPLv2 but for which GPLv3 is unpalatable. Thus, I would be amazed if almost every single product going to GPLv3 didn't fork or have some BSD-style replacement in the coming year. Even if Apple's LLVM work is in its infancy, I'm sure it will accelerate as more people jump on board this as a replacement for their own GCC needs in order to lessen their exposure to RMS's whims.
I got it from here (PDF). While they call "obsoleting GCC" a "non-goal", it's almost certainly a goal of other folks that the FSF has targeted, such as TiVo, and therefore I could see people using Apple's work as a starting point.
I happen to think they were wrong about every single one. Even laserdisc-- who wants to pay $50 instead of $5 for a movie? And NeXTStep was certainly not better than BeOS-- Jobs was better than Gassee. (Heck, even today MacOS X is hobbled by NeXTstep's ObjectiveC slowness.)
You're spot-on with VHS vs Beta. I remember getting my hands on a pirated version of Star Wars on BetaMax-- which took 3-4 tapes. Swapping out tapes in the middle of a movie? No thanks, I'll take VHS.
And I wouldn't say DTS has lost any format wars. Not yet, anyway.
Yes, but you don't need GCC at all in order to use LLVM to compile all the way from source to binary, once you have a new front-end. Now that Apple has such a front-end for the languages they use (and one which, from early benchmarks, performs significantly better than GCC), I see GCC's days as being numbered at Apple. Add to that the fact that there is certainly no consensus on GPLv3 yet, and GCC could easily deprecate its popularity by jumping to GPLv3.
I don't know of any fork of GCC happening, but I know that Apple now has their own C/C++/ObjC front-end to LLVM that can compile down to binary, and thus it seems will soon be able to avoid using GCC altogether. And since they appear to be prepared to open source it, perhaps there won't be a fork of GCC, but instead this may be the beginning of the end of GCC's dominance.
when he starts getting those Apple fanboy death threats.
You mean when hack journalists start reporting unsubstantiated rumors of death threats.
(Flamebait??? My post was on-topic and completely true.)
I'm no big MS proponent, but I don't have a problem with this as long as they don't successfully buy themselves a monopoly in the console/home entertainment industry
Which is exactly what they're in the process of doing. This division has lost billions and never made a profit. Which means, of course, everything from the original XBox to the Zune is sold at a loss and paid for by Vista and Office profits. Leveraging one monopoly to create another is conceptually illegal, but in practicality there's nothing really illegal about what they're doing, and gamers seem to be falling for it. Soon the console market will be like the desktop operating system market, with XBox (running a derivative of WinNT) subsidized into dominance and PS3 (running Linux) relegated to relative obscurity.
No, I don't think the distinction is very important. The bottom line is that regardless of the mechanism, if things appear to send signals faster than light across our universe's space, it violates all sorts of causality and reletivistic notions. The mechanism might be interesting in that FTL communications could also have serious repercussions on the conservation of energy principles as well. But the bottom line is that if "instantaneous" communication is possible, then spacetime isn't relative-- there exists simultaneity.
You make a good point. The fact that there is not a single virus or worm in the wild for MacOS X probably does make this bigger news (assuming the unsubstantiated report is real and it ever makes it into the wild) than it would otherwise be. I'm not sure how much Apple's statements on the matter really affect it, but the fact that someone succeeded in creating such a worm for MacOS X really is pretty big news, I guess. That is, as long as the news organizations don't try to portray MacOS as being as vulnerable as Windows.
I'm sure you're trying to be sarcastic, but it would DEFINITELY be a good idea to include everyone from your random teenage mom's basement hacker to Theo de Raadt in the discussion. Just because someone has done great things for the community it doesn't mean he's going about addressing exploits in the best way.
I don't have a link, but Scientific American had an article a few years back about another use of laughter. Apparently, even when forced laughter allows the brain to hold two opposing concepts at the same time... the experiment used the "is it a vase or is it faces" and "old woman/young woman" pictures, and found that laughing people could see both simultaneously, but other almost always had to flip back and forth.
Likewise, I'm sure fear has plenty of levels of usefulness. As anyone with migraines or anxiety with panic disorder knows, the balance between seratonin, adrenalin, and other chemicals in your body don't just affect your mood. They affect sleep, digestion, learning, and even pain. Attacking fear with a sledgehammer-like approach is probably useful as a research tool, but would probably have insane side-effects if used as a medicine.
The idea that journalists would be "sullied" by being called a tech writer is pretty amusing. You need significantly more training to be a good tech writer, and you're significantly more likely to have a deep understanding of the issues involved in the tech world. The author of this article needs to step back and consider if the people he's slandering might just have a point.
You seem to have missed the point of the parent poster. His point was that while BeOS's multithreading certainly improved its responsiveness, it was more due to the fact that BeOS had very little capabilities that were tying up its resources. There is a real question whether if BeOS had become commercially viable whether it would have been able to keep its performance. So the question isn't really whether other OSes need to be rewritten to be as responsive as BeOS, but where in the middle they'd all meet.
In any case, MacOS X with each release has improved its threading, and I expect that to continue to the point where someday it's more multi-threaded than BeOS was.
I'd just like to clarify that "programming" has as much to do with CS as it does IT. It's a required skill for both, but programming is not CS. If you want to become a "Computer Programmer" that's a 2-year associates degree at your local community college. Neither is it Software Engineering, which is the practical approach to organizing and developing software, or Computer Engineering, which is the study of hardware principles.
Computer Science is a study of principles, algorithms, formalizations, and generally a way to get a deeper understanding of the characteristics of software. One of the most important 400-level classes at Carnegie Mellon was Algorithms, and we didn't write any runnable code at all the whole semester.
Can someone offer up a Flamebait mod point for the parent post's aggressive stupidity?
Right... the product should be named GNU/MIT/X/IBM/Linux, because of COURSE you should add the creators of all your userland software to the beginning of your OS's product name. Give me a break. It's called "Linux", because that's what it's creator, Linus Torvalds, called it. "GNU/Linux" is a figment of RMS's imagination. He suggested it be called that, and Linus rejected his suggestion-- end of story.
Somebody's a fan-boy here, but it isn't me. I like both the Wii and the PS3 as game systems. But the fact is, the Wii is old technology and Nintendo STILL can't build them. If the PS3 is out-selling the Wii because of the Wii's lack of availability, it means more PS3's are being produced than Wiis. Why on Earth would that be?
In any case, before the $100 price drop, it wasn't true. PS3's were selling pretty badly. Now they're #1. I don't understand how that simple fact can be seen as a "Troll" unless you're really emotionally invested in your Wii and hating Sony.
How else do you recommend one buy a Wii? If you eliminate the resales, I doubt the Wii would even be on the top-seller's list.
Agreed! Sony obviously did the right move with the $100 price cut-- The PS3 has led the Amazon "videogames" best-sellers list (with the Blu-Ray remote #2 and extra controller #3) ever since the announcement. They're not going to undo that.
On Amazon, the PS3 has been outselling the Wii since the price cut, and the XBox 360 is all the way down at #20. (Even the PS2 is outselling the XBox 360 on Amazon.)
Before people go nuts about never buying anything PS3/Sony/blah blah blah again, why don't you wait to see what ACTUALLY happens?
(It's also interesting that Blu-Ray remotes for PS3 appear to be selling more units than all the HD DVD players combined... another thing that Sony is not going to endanger with a boneheaded move...)
I liked the size of the world in SA you could traverse without load pauses. It was impressive. And I hope in GTA IV they use the Blu-Ray to the fullest extent to go even further (hopefully they won't hobble it to only the capabilities of the XBox 360).
My favorite GTA flying experience was actually the "Dodo" in GTA III, which with careful practice you could fly around the whole map.
Perhaps you're right. Fortunately CUPS isn't an "or later" project, so we don't have to worry about that.
Two points:
1. It is advisable for projects to require copyright to be signed over to the coordinating authority upon submission. That allows the project managers to change the license in the future (ie. from "GPL version 2" to "GPL versions 2 or 3") without requiring permission from every submitting individual. That largely satisfies your concern, I think.
2. The FSF (aka "Richard Stallman") has already shown a great deal of disregard for individual's concerns during the GPLv3 process. Who knows what holy wars he will try to wage with GPLv4, or where the FSF will go once he retires/gets hit by a bus/wins the lottery and doesn't care/whatever. Unless you have 100% confidence that the FSF will forever act in your interests, adding "or later" to your license is sheer stupidity. Heck, I doubt it's even legally clear what would happen if *I* went and published a new license named "GPL version 100". The only way to ensure that your code stays free is to not include "or later", and explicitly specify the versions of the GPL you are distributing your code under.