I know people who own four or five PCs, and one or no media players.
Funny, I don't know anyone who owns zero media players. Most of them have a car stereo. All have a television. Almost all a DVD player and/or a VCR. Most a clock radio. Most a cell phone. Some a Playstation. I'll bet my average friend who doesn't own an iPod still averages 4-5 "media players".
Everything I've read about EFI suggests that it'll have a compatibility mode to boot BIOS operating systems, but I don't know enough to know if that's a requirement or just a suggestion for implementing EFI on IA32 systems. In any case, I'd hardly call it "highly unlikely".
" Lincoln hated blacks (he wanted to deport them to Haiti and wrote the Illinois law banning black immigration)."
I think this is a overly strong statement. Earlier in the century, Haiti had declared their independence and established themselves as a "black" country. Many leaders on the topic, from Abraham Lincoln to Malcom X, at various times advocated a separation of black and white peoples as the solution to race issues in this country, and Haiti was often a suggested destination.
In any case, Lincoln was elected on a platform that included segregation and unequal rights, and often gave speeches in which he denied his plan was to try to equalize status and opportunity. However, in his private writings it's apparent he struggled with the issue, and with the contradictions between the United States policy and the Declaration of Independence. In the end, he did emancipate the slaves, and fought the civil war largely over that issue. Afterwards, black people in America would remain better off than they had been since the the first North American colonies, and would be until Woodrow Wilson re-imposed harsh policies against them in the early 1900's.
It wasn't until the 1960's, when most of the former openly racist politicians either changed their tune or concentrated themselves into the then-less-powerful Republican party, when the country appears to have gotten serious about encoding equal opportunity and rights into law. So the earlier poster's assertion of 160 years of black freedom is hardly fair.
"Poor performance, but awsome tech support and familiar interface."
While the performance of MacOS X as a MySQL server was well-documented by Anandtech to be sub-par, I haven't seen any benchmarks showing any performance problems with the xRAID/xServe combination as a file server. And last I checked, it was extremely competitive on a dollar-per-GB basis for the claimed performance and reliability levels. If they just need something to store lots of files online, and have it be easy to administer, it doesn't seem like a bad deal.
"Within a couple of months, I had fixed about 90 memory handling bugs, which type safety did absolutely nothing to guard against."
Let me guess... 89 of them were where people used "delete[]" instead of "delete" or vice-versa. There are definitely weaknesses of the C++ language, many of them in regards to allocation and deallocation. Since the article specifically mentions that as an area they're working on, perhaps things are looking up.
I'm curious what his equations would reveal about dinosaur locomotion. I've seen a lot of people claim that dinosaurs could never move under today's Earth gravity, or that pterodactyls could never fly. Wouldn't this guy's equations tell us not only whether or not they could, but how fast they'd likely travel and what they're walking, swimming, and flying capabilities might have been?
don't see how this is any different from what Sony is trying to do. They are going to use their dominance in the console market to try to make Blu-Ray the defacto standard. Microsoft is backing HD-DVD for the same reason. Both are equally good or bad. There is no difference.
There is one difference. Sony does not have a monopoly in any market, including the console market. Microsoft has had a federal court decree that it has a monopoly in the operating system market.
While I don't know about the motivations of the original poster, I'll answer your question if you want. I've developed in Visual Studio, CodeWarrior, emacs/gcc, CodeGuide, IntelliJ IDEA, and many of the older packages. In my humble opinion, Xcode is the worst development environment out there that's being actively maintained. Worse, it is being touted by Apple as the preferred development environment for Macintoshes. I can't imagine a better way to discourage developers. Combine it with Objective C, which while somewhat elegant has a cryptic, unapproachable syntax and for all practical purposes locks you into the Macintosh, and you have an anchor on your software development community.
But back to the question at hand...
Although it got better with 2.1, XCode suffers seriously from configuration problems. Determining where to go to set something, where a setting is overridden, or what it actually does is insane. A simple comparison with CodeWarrior is enough to show how far development has fallen for the Mac in this respect. Then there's the plist and such files that are an inevitable part of Mac development these days. Why can't there be some better editor for that sort of thing with a nice GUI? ResEdit from the 1980's beats it. Then there's the error window. You click "compile" and you get a "ding!"... then you hunt for what happened. When you find it, you get a difficult to use pane of errors buried below, but in the same pane as, your project. Huh? Then there's the editor... having lots of files open is a pain compared to almost any other IDE. Then search... for the company that produced Spotlight, searching is amazing primitive in XCode. The general layout is a mess, the build outputs are annoying to keep track of, and things like the class browser aren't nearly as helpful as something like IDEA or even CodeWarrior. Then if you compare it to many of the Java development advantages (since we're including the old ObjectiveC language in the rant,) you start to miss out on TONS of refactoring options that Eclipse and IDEA both offer. Those types of things become essential for keeping code maintainable over the long-term. Things like xgrid for distributed compiling are near-useless for most small developers, so I hope they didn't take away any resources to develop those features, either.
In short, I think the Macintosh community would have been much better served if Apple had simply bought CodeWarrior and wrote a gcc4 plug-in for it for PPC/x86 codegen. Then they could start adding some of the intelligent refactoring, assuming such things are possible in Objective C. Alternately, they could start over with Java or even Mono/C# and provide an environment that would let you create Mac apps quickly and efficiently, as well as being able to use the same code on Mac, Win, and Linux.
"There is nothing worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE."
There are a LOT of things worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE. In fact, that's a triviality compared to everything else about programmers that can cause problems in an organization. And although I can use emacs and such fairly fluently, I still think anyone who's not more productive in a parsing IDE just hasn't taken the time to learn the IDE very well. In addition, I find that developers who use the IDEs tend to produce more correct, maintainable code because of the IDE's assistance. I'm referring especially to IDE's like IntelliJ IDEA, but also Eclipse.
"It's also fairly difficult to beat the iMac (although it can be matched) G5's dollar-for-mip, at $1700 for a 64 bit machine with a 20" wide-screen LCD included."
What if I never want to put more than 4GB of RAM in it (and therefore only need 32 bits), and already have monitors? Then it's really easy to beat it.
"OTOH, if you're just implementing a simple shopping cart to integrate with Paypal for the few products your work-at-home company sells,"...
then don't do it. Buy a storefront with Yahoo or Google or one of the many others that have solved this problem, don't waste your time and money on it, and focus on whatever you do best. If you're going to go into the "sell shopping carts to other people" business, write a shopping cart. If not, buy a shopping cart.
"No. I will take up arms far before then. Bring on civil war, if that is what it takes. Bring on pain and suffering, if that is what it takes. Bring on loss of not only my life, but everyone I love and care about, if that is what it takes."
Name one war in which the subsequently occupied area was immediately freer than before the war. By gun or by voting, the only way to create a freer society is a lot of time, hard work, and getting good people in leadership. Notions such as yours, which are also popularized by the NRA and similar organizations, purport that somehow guns are the ultimate protector of rights, when the evidence doesn't ever seem to back it up. (Why doesn't the TSA issue guns to ALL people boarding airplanes instead of taking them away, if it's so much safer?)
Go ahead and stay in the NRA, but I'd advise also joining the ACLU or you'll find you'll have no choice but to use your guns... against the government's tanks.
So you're comparing a 720p signal that's converted to 1080i against one that's being displayed in its native resolution? There are some televisions that display 720p natively, and it looks great. I think one of the best showcases for HDTV in the early days was the show Alias on ABC.
In fact, the music industry would LOVE it if Apple freely license FairPlay. Then they win, and consumers lose. Right now FairPlay is keeping RIAA in check because it's basically a choice between FairPlay or stolen music for 90% of digital music player customers... so you get things like 0.99/track and such. If Apple freely licensed FairPlay, it would be you against the record labels directly, and they'd be free to charge $4.99/track for the latest pop crap because if one service didn't license it for that price, another would.
In effect, Apple's monopoly is working against the music labels' monopoly. If you take Apple's DRM monopoly away, consumers get screwed.
So does that mean every blank blu-ray disc comes with its own rootkit?
Blu-Ray doesn't require it for DRM like CompactDisc does, so no, it doesn't mean anything of the sort. In fact, the "core" DRM is exactly the same in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, although Blu-Ray has a few extra technologies added on beyond that and, as far as I'm aware, doesn't require (only offers as an option in the standard) content providers to allow copying onto a computer. (Thus, IMHO, you're more likely to see a Sony rootkit if HD-DVD wins and Sony is forced to publish in that standard.)
As I recall, Microsoft has never been near the top on a per-year basis, so they have no chance of being at the top overall. I would be surprised if they ever broke the top-20 patenters on a per-year basis, let alone be even in the top-50 cumulative. (From my googling, they appear to have been in 29th place for last year.) Microsoft's reputation as an innovator was historically earned mostly in the marketing and sales arenas, not the technological one, although in recent years they've acquired a lot of talent. We'll see what they make of it in the future.
IBM has been in first place for the last 12 years straight, is the only company ever to break 2,000 patents per year (in 2004 they got 3,277), and last year got about 2/3 more patents than the 2nd place finisher.
Rebates are a loan from you to the company you purchased the product from. You agree to loan them the money for a couple months, then in return you get the product cheaper (possibly even cheaper than the depreciation of the product over those months, but doubtful.) Sometimes you never get the rebate, or some fine print, expiration date, or bizarre filing rules "disqualifies" you, but by then you're generally stuck with the product unless you want to pay restocking fee.
The bottom line is that when price comparing, compare the prices without the rebates-- you'll probably come out ahead in the end.
What they call "fastogl" is just a port of the Quake2 code to use display lists instead of direct OpenGL vertex calls. The non-"fastogl" version is a direct, line-by-line port of the original. They both use JOGL.
... I would give this guy research lab and resources to create java-based DirectX library. For game developers, it would be just great to write once and sell on Windows on Linux on Mac on Playstation (don't know about XBox). Even without Sun's support, it would be great fot 3rd party to sell such engine/framework.
Since almost everyone already has a good OpenGL library, including Java, why not just write for that and deploy on everything that supports it, and give people a research lab and resources to maintain XBox and Playstation versions of OpenGL?
Patents are about having the confidence to share your methods and ideas while still being able to profit off them. Without patents, you choose between either publishing your ideas OR making money. Patents allow both. But since money usually rules such decisions, without software patents you'll tend to get a lot of secretive inventions and methods, and less overall innovation because people can't build on each others' work. They are inherently litigation-prone, since only the court determines whether a competitor's project infringes, but as the author says, they set up land mines in the path of anyone trying to take advantage of your invention without paying you. I don't think it's coincidence that the nations with solid IP laws tend to do better economically.
As to patents and open source, well, obviously if open source fails to innovate they are at constant risk of infringing on other people's patents, and have a vested interest in abolishing patent law as it stands. The common cry of "why doesn't someone write an open-source version of that app/service/technology" is an admission that closed-source was the innovator in that realm-- and I hear that a lot.
Instead of eliminating method patents on software methods, I think basically only two things need to happen: 1. The threshold of "non-obvious to one trained in the art" needs to be way higher than it is today, and 2. The primary detractors of software patents (ie. open source) need to start leading innovation instead of following it, thus either acquiring their own patent library or putting enough in the public domain that patent worries in a given area are irrelevant.
My previous company used it extensively talking to developers and QA people in Moscow and Pakistan. The voice quality was dramatically better than regular phone lines, more reliable, and cheaper ("free" w/ internet access, and broadband is available almost everywhere now.)
The bottom line is that companies that use it are going to save money and be more competitive, beating out the companies that don't. Unless that changes, they'll accept any of the mentioned risks even if the report was 100% true (which it's obviously not.)
But the WHOLE POINT of the article is that you can't even judge that anymore. Even going by the names instead of the model #s, is the Pentium M in the same family as the Pentium 4-M? or the Celeron M? A Pentium 4 at twice the clockspeed is still in the same performance ballpark as a Pentium M, and future faster chips will branch from the Pentium M tree, so I think your assertion is wrong now and getting wronger by the day.
I'd venture to say that QM has come too far to be "disproved"... it could certainly be refined or integrated into a superset of a theory. But it simply describes too many observations with too great a precision and accuracy for it to be wholly wrong. Even if there exists new and unaccounted for forces, states of matter, or effects, QM describes too accurately what we've measured so far that QM would probably become the starting point for the next bigger theory.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have any mod points, but someone mod the parent up since it's the only one in this thread that has actual data.
Funny, I don't know anyone who owns zero media players. Most of them have a car stereo. All have a television. Almost all a DVD player and/or a VCR. Most a clock radio. Most a cell phone. Some a Playstation. I'll bet my average friend who doesn't own an iPod still averages 4-5 "media players".
Everything I've read about EFI suggests that it'll have a compatibility mode to boot BIOS operating systems, but I don't know enough to know if that's a requirement or just a suggestion for implementing EFI on IA32 systems. In any case, I'd hardly call it "highly unlikely".
" Lincoln hated blacks (he wanted to deport them to Haiti and wrote the Illinois law banning black immigration)."
I think this is a overly strong statement. Earlier in the century, Haiti had declared their independence and established themselves as a "black" country. Many leaders on the topic, from Abraham Lincoln to Malcom X, at various times advocated a separation of black and white peoples as the solution to race issues in this country, and Haiti was often a suggested destination.
In any case, Lincoln was elected on a platform that included segregation and unequal rights, and often gave speeches in which he denied his plan was to try to equalize status and opportunity. However, in his private writings it's apparent he struggled with the issue, and with the contradictions between the United States policy and the Declaration of Independence. In the end, he did emancipate the slaves, and fought the civil war largely over that issue. Afterwards, black people in America would remain better off than they had been since the the first North American colonies, and would be until Woodrow Wilson re-imposed harsh policies against them in the early 1900's.
It wasn't until the 1960's, when most of the former openly racist politicians either changed their tune or concentrated themselves into the then-less-powerful Republican party, when the country appears to have gotten serious about encoding equal opportunity and rights into law. So the earlier poster's assertion of 160 years of black freedom is hardly fair.
"Poor performance, but awsome tech support and familiar interface."
While the performance of MacOS X as a MySQL server was well-documented by Anandtech to be sub-par, I haven't seen any benchmarks showing any performance problems with the xRAID/xServe combination as a file server. And last I checked, it was extremely competitive on a dollar-per-GB basis for the claimed performance and reliability levels. If they just need something to store lots of files online, and have it be easy to administer, it doesn't seem like a bad deal.
"Within a couple of months, I had fixed about 90 memory handling bugs, which type safety did absolutely nothing to guard against."
Let me guess... 89 of them were where people used "delete[]" instead of "delete" or vice-versa. There are definitely weaknesses of the C++ language, many of them in regards to allocation and deallocation. Since the article specifically mentions that as an area they're working on, perhaps things are looking up.
I'm curious what his equations would reveal about dinosaur locomotion. I've seen a lot of people claim that dinosaurs could never move under today's Earth gravity, or that pterodactyls could never fly. Wouldn't this guy's equations tell us not only whether or not they could, but how fast they'd likely travel and what they're walking, swimming, and flying capabilities might have been?
There is one difference. Sony does not have a monopoly in any market, including the console market. Microsoft has had a federal court decree that it has a monopoly in the operating system market.
While I don't know about the motivations of the original poster, I'll answer your question if you want. I've developed in Visual Studio, CodeWarrior, emacs/gcc, CodeGuide, IntelliJ IDEA, and many of the older packages. In my humble opinion, Xcode is the worst development environment out there that's being actively maintained. Worse, it is being touted by Apple as the preferred development environment for Macintoshes. I can't imagine a better way to discourage developers. Combine it with Objective C, which while somewhat elegant has a cryptic, unapproachable syntax and for all practical purposes locks you into the Macintosh, and you have an anchor on your software development community.
But back to the question at hand...
Although it got better with 2.1, XCode suffers seriously from configuration problems. Determining where to go to set something, where a setting is overridden, or what it actually does is insane. A simple comparison with CodeWarrior is enough to show how far development has fallen for the Mac in this respect. Then there's the plist and such files that are an inevitable part of Mac development these days. Why can't there be some better editor for that sort of thing with a nice GUI? ResEdit from the 1980's beats it. Then there's the error window. You click "compile" and you get a "ding!"... then you hunt for what happened. When you find it, you get a difficult to use pane of errors buried below, but in the same pane as, your project. Huh? Then there's the editor... having lots of files open is a pain compared to almost any other IDE. Then search... for the company that produced Spotlight, searching is amazing primitive in XCode. The general layout is a mess, the build outputs are annoying to keep track of, and things like the class browser aren't nearly as helpful as something like IDEA or even CodeWarrior. Then if you compare it to many of the Java development advantages (since we're including the old ObjectiveC language in the rant,) you start to miss out on TONS of refactoring options that Eclipse and IDEA both offer. Those types of things become essential for keeping code maintainable over the long-term. Things like xgrid for distributed compiling are near-useless for most small developers, so I hope they didn't take away any resources to develop those features, either.
In short, I think the Macintosh community would have been much better served if Apple had simply bought CodeWarrior and wrote a gcc4 plug-in for it for PPC/x86 codegen. Then they could start adding some of the intelligent refactoring, assuming such things are possible in Objective C. Alternately, they could start over with Java or even Mono/C# and provide an environment that would let you create Mac apps quickly and efficiently, as well as being able to use the same code on Mac, Win, and Linux.
"There is nothing worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE."
There are a LOT of things worse than a programmer who can only use an IDE. In fact, that's a triviality compared to everything else about programmers that can cause problems in an organization. And although I can use emacs and such fairly fluently, I still think anyone who's not more productive in a parsing IDE just hasn't taken the time to learn the IDE very well. In addition, I find that developers who use the IDEs tend to produce more correct, maintainable code because of the IDE's assistance. I'm referring especially to IDE's like IntelliJ IDEA, but also Eclipse.
"It's also fairly difficult to beat the iMac (although it can be matched) G5's dollar-for-mip, at $1700 for a 64 bit machine with a 20" wide-screen LCD included."
What if I never want to put more than 4GB of RAM in it (and therefore only need 32 bits), and already have monitors? Then it's really easy to beat it.
I can't wait for Intel PowerBooks, though.
"OTOH, if you're just implementing a simple shopping cart to integrate with Paypal for the few products your work-at-home company sells,"...
then don't do it. Buy a storefront with Yahoo or Google or one of the many others that have solved this problem, don't waste your time and money on it, and focus on whatever you do best. If you're going to go into the "sell shopping carts to other people" business, write a shopping cart. If not, buy a shopping cart.
"No. I will take up arms far before then. Bring on civil war, if that is what it takes. Bring on pain and suffering, if that is what it takes. Bring on loss of not only my life, but everyone I love and care about, if that is what it takes."
Name one war in which the subsequently occupied area was immediately freer than before the war. By gun or by voting, the only way to create a freer society is a lot of time, hard work, and getting good people in leadership. Notions such as yours, which are also popularized by the NRA and similar organizations, purport that somehow guns are the ultimate protector of rights, when the evidence doesn't ever seem to back it up. (Why doesn't the TSA issue guns to ALL people boarding airplanes instead of taking them away, if it's so much safer?)
Go ahead and stay in the NRA, but I'd advise also joining the ACLU or you'll find you'll have no choice but to use your guns... against the government's tanks.
"In the game of chess, it's important to never let your opponent see your pieces."
So you're comparing a 720p signal that's converted to 1080i against one that's being displayed in its native resolution? There are some televisions that display 720p natively, and it looks great. I think one of the best showcases for HDTV in the early days was the show Alias on ABC.
In fact, the music industry would LOVE it if Apple freely license FairPlay. Then they win, and consumers lose. Right now FairPlay is keeping RIAA in check because it's basically a choice between FairPlay or stolen music for 90% of digital music player customers... so you get things like 0.99/track and such. If Apple freely licensed FairPlay, it would be you against the record labels directly, and they'd be free to charge $4.99/track for the latest pop crap because if one service didn't license it for that price, another would.
In effect, Apple's monopoly is working against the music labels' monopoly. If you take Apple's DRM monopoly away, consumers get screwed.
So does that mean every blank blu-ray disc comes with its own rootkit?
Blu-Ray doesn't require it for DRM like CompactDisc does, so no, it doesn't mean anything of the sort. In fact, the "core" DRM is exactly the same in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, although Blu-Ray has a few extra technologies added on beyond that and, as far as I'm aware, doesn't require (only offers as an option in the standard) content providers to allow copying onto a computer. (Thus, IMHO, you're more likely to see a Sony rootkit if HD-DVD wins and Sony is forced to publish in that standard.)
As I recall, Microsoft has never been near the top on a per-year basis, so they have no chance of being at the top overall. I would be surprised if they ever broke the top-20 patenters on a per-year basis, let alone be even in the top-50 cumulative. (From my googling, they appear to have been in 29th place for last year.) Microsoft's reputation as an innovator was historically earned mostly in the marketing and sales arenas, not the technological one, although in recent years they've acquired a lot of talent. We'll see what they make of it in the future.
5 _Scorecard.pdf
IBM has been in first place for the last 12 years straight, is the only company ever to break 2,000 patents per year (in 2004 they got 3,277), and last year got about 2/3 more patents than the 2nd place finisher.
http://www.iptoday.com/pdf_current/Reports/Rprt_0
Rebates are a loan from you to the company you purchased the product from. You agree to loan them the money for a couple months, then in return you get the product cheaper (possibly even cheaper than the depreciation of the product over those months, but doubtful.) Sometimes you never get the rebate, or some fine print, expiration date, or bizarre filing rules "disqualifies" you, but by then you're generally stuck with the product unless you want to pay restocking fee.
The bottom line is that when price comparing, compare the prices without the rebates-- you'll probably come out ahead in the end.
What they call "fastogl" is just a port of the Quake2 code to use display lists instead of direct OpenGL vertex calls. The non-"fastogl" version is a direct, line-by-line port of the original. They both use JOGL.
Since almost everyone already has a good OpenGL library, including Java, why not just write for that and deploy on everything that supports it, and give people a research lab and resources to maintain XBox and Playstation versions of OpenGL?
Patents are about having the confidence to share your methods and ideas while still being able to profit off them. Without patents, you choose between either publishing your ideas OR making money. Patents allow both. But since money usually rules such decisions, without software patents you'll tend to get a lot of secretive inventions and methods, and less overall innovation because people can't build on each others' work. They are inherently litigation-prone, since only the court determines whether a competitor's project infringes, but as the author says, they set up land mines in the path of anyone trying to take advantage of your invention without paying you. I don't think it's coincidence that the nations with solid IP laws tend to do better economically.
As to patents and open source, well, obviously if open source fails to innovate they are at constant risk of infringing on other people's patents, and have a vested interest in abolishing patent law as it stands. The common cry of "why doesn't someone write an open-source version of that app/service/technology" is an admission that closed-source was the innovator in that realm-- and I hear that a lot.
Instead of eliminating method patents on software methods, I think basically only two things need to happen: 1. The threshold of "non-obvious to one trained in the art" needs to be way higher than it is today, and 2. The primary detractors of software patents (ie. open source) need to start leading innovation instead of following it, thus either acquiring their own patent library or putting enough in the public domain that patent worries in a given area are irrelevant.
My previous company used it extensively talking to developers and QA people in Moscow and Pakistan. The voice quality was dramatically better than regular phone lines, more reliable, and cheaper ("free" w/ internet access, and broadband is available almost everywhere now.)
The bottom line is that companies that use it are going to save money and be more competitive, beating out the companies that don't. Unless that changes, they'll accept any of the mentioned risks even if the report was 100% true (which it's obviously not.)
But the WHOLE POINT of the article is that you can't even judge that anymore. Even going by the names instead of the model #s, is the Pentium M in the same family as the Pentium 4-M? or the Celeron M? A Pentium 4 at twice the clockspeed is still in the same performance ballpark as a Pentium M, and future faster chips will branch from the Pentium M tree, so I think your assertion is wrong now and getting wronger by the day.
I'd venture to say that QM has come too far to be "disproved"... it could certainly be refined or integrated into a superset of a theory. But it simply describes too many observations with too great a precision and accuracy for it to be wholly wrong. Even if there exists new and unaccounted for forces, states of matter, or effects, QM describes too accurately what we've measured so far that QM would probably become the starting point for the next bigger theory.