My point exactly. "IPv6 will be popular". So will 64-bit computing. Maybe not yesterday (HP-US, Alpha), maybe not today (Sparc, Itanium) and maybe not tomorrow (extended x86). But face it, it will be popular. Who cares if Cringely can "predict" this? IPv6 is necessary, thus it will be popular.
And as for the Wal-Mart prediction? He was wrong, but who cares? Wal-Mart has routinely trampled every retail sector it has entered (with the notable exceptions of Costco and iTunes). It doesn't take a business genius to predict that Wal-Mart will have a huge effect on the online music market. In fact, business is the only category where predictions are MORE useless and ridiculous than technology (with the notable exception of religion).
Gates should stick to "vision" or whatever. (As others have pointed out this prediction is a marketing kind of "vision".) And Cringely should stick to...well, whatever the heck it is he does. Despising things and being proud of himself, I guess.
Isn't it obvious that DVDs won't be the primary distribution medium in 2014? Gates isn't saying we'll all have tablet PC's (or flying cars). He's saying that the CD format, now widely available for 20+ years, won't last another 10.
Of course he's wrong on this point: true OSS fanatics will still be using Linux on bootable DVDs on their obsolete hardware. And I still have some cassette tapes floating around.
But really, who cares? Gates isn't in the business of making predictions. And the people who are in that business, like Cringely make equally stupid predictions such as "IPv6 will be popular" and "Wal-Mart will take over the online music market". Who cares?
You're missing the obvious in favor of the nitpicking. I'm guessing you're in management. Giving grammar corrections on slashdot? What hubris!
To wit: why would you use printf()--which uses runtime-dependent varargs--to display a string literal? puts() is a much, much better choice in C. If you want all that fancy-shmancy dynamic crap just go ahead and cout the damned greeting.
Oh, and here's a comma splice for you, just because I'm feeling generous.
There's too much bickering about whether the movie is liberal propogandist BS or whether's it's an accurate indictment of the current President. The fact remains that if no one sympathized with this movie no one would have noticed it. Don't believe me? Search for "DC 9/11" on IMDB. The right made their own film about the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And guess what? No one noticed.
I, for one, am slightly ashamed to be a citizen of a country which is loathed and ridiculed worldwide. And I'm horrified to have a President who confuses America with God.
Airports shouldn't be selling internet access. While $6.95 isn't a heady chunk of change in my budget it's not something I'm gonna pay when I need to save my batteries for that 4-hour cross country. And finding an open, accessible power socket in an airport is like finding a Krispy Kreme in the Friday bagel basket.
Why do I want net access in an airport? To check flight times when I'm picking someone up. To check e-mail for a few minutes, maybe. But seven bucks for a 45-minute layover? Give me a break.
If, say, Topeka International had free, casual wireless access and Fargo International didn't I'd be more likely to book my flights through Topeka. What would Topeka get? My landing fees (which is their core business.) My undying dedication to FooBar Air, who uses--and is more likely to maintain--Topeka as their hub. And happy passengers.
IBM gives away an OS because they want to sell hardware and consulting services. Stick to your core business. Giving away wifi is inexpensive and high-profile.
As if you Brits have never changed your language. Can you read Beowulf? Maybe Chaucer? And how many words did Shakespeare just make up? This is not to mention all the French that made its way in with Charlemagne. Why is it that so many people think English is derived from Latin when it's actually a Germanic tongue?
English is NOT English and has not been since the day Dr. Johnson decided to write it all down. The entire point of the OED is to catalog how the language was used at that moment in time (thus the citations from texts.) (NB: I placed the PERIOD in the previous sentence inside the PARENTHESES because I'm a FREAKING MERKIN!)
Just because we "Yanks" are doing a better job of mutating "your" language than you are doesn't mean we're using it incorrectly. If you want to be a stuck-up git about your language then move your stick and your butt across the canal. They'd love you in France.
Speculation: very cool. Lots of registers, yes, but the Register Stack Engine makes it feel like you never run out: there are automagically more. EPIC: bundles are actually between 3 and 5 instructions. Rotating registers: most important for passing parameters. Predicated instructions? 128 of them.
However your post, and my post, are wasted on/. These people will always hate Itanium because it's not kewl. But they're not the ones who will be buying the processors.
Microsoft has already release a.NET framework for MacOS X and FreeBSD: rotor. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, people still use C++. Maybe they're waiting for the Linux kernel to be compiled on Mono in ECMA-standard C#?
As it says on the downloads page: "Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP". The page also points out that it does try to install.NET (not that anyone reads the page...)
The problem you had appears to be with the Compaq driver. The biggest problem of maintaining an OS is the impression some ISV's have that if something works, it's correct. There's something called "undefined behavior" and you can't rely on it. But people do, all the time.
Where I work, we discovered that Windows XP won't reboot on Compaq AS 1000 (I think) systems. Firmware problem. Compaq assumed things which weren't guaranteed. They don't care: obsolete hardware (yet good enough to run XP, so not *that* old.)
Granted, the biggest problem with writing for an OS is not knowing what's defined and what's undefined. But while MS documentation may not be the end-all-be-all it's not a problem unique to Windows.
My advice? Don't use Compqa RAID arrays. Oh, wait, you can't: the company doesn't exist anymore. I wonder why???
Furthermore, Al Gore, as is common amongst politicians, was trying to capitalize on his father's legacy as the senator who secured funding for the interstate highway system. Note that the senior Gore did not by any means invent nor claim to invent the interstate highway system. It was, like the internet, a military project meant to help to efficiently kill people (provided they had landed on American soil with big nasty guns.)
Al felt that by securing funding for the information highway (though, I believe, that buzzword was years away) that he could capitalize on daddy's good juju.
Unfortunately, this only works for Republicans, who seem to be in control of the media people actually pay attention to: talk radio.
Why not the Borg icon? The story is about Microsoft, thus inviting yet another round of mindless MS-bashing. Most of the comments are about how this recommendation does/does not fit into Evil Scheme.NET. Slashdotters don't see this as a technology/IT story. Stick the right icon on it and let the flamethrowers loose!
I'd disagree. I think Microsoft sucks less now than it did previously.
Microsoft's worst (alleged or proven, I don't care) dirty trick, IMHO, was Windows telling me that Digital Research DOS was incompatible. That kind of behavior made me a happy OS/2 user for years until I had it pounded in my brain (by IBM, nonetheless) that IBM really is a big, nasty corporation.
I actually don't see anything wrong with MS's attitude toward OSS or Shared Source. They're afraid of the GPL for the same reason that Apple (all worship Apple, benevolent charity and protector of good!) built OS X on top of BSD. Microsoft--get this--is in it for the money. Just like RedHat is. If RMS could sue Microsoft for having GPL'd code in the NT source base it would really cramp MS's style. That, frankly, is frightening to anyone who doesn't totally subscribe to RMS' goal of eliminating software copyrights wholesale.
As for the interview with the ex-developer (NB: here I go again with ad hominem arguments) don't you think that it's a little easier to criticize Microsoft after you've worked there 10 years? MS probably made that guy filthy rich. Give me millions of dollars and I'll gladly drive the high moral ground in my brand-new gold plated gas guzzling SUV.
This is not to say there are no "arrogant assholes" at MS: the interview appears to be written by a prime example. Many sales people (your contacts) also fit that bill. This is merely to point out that MS, as a corporation, has similar goals to those of most corporations. (Similarly, Slashdot, like Usenet in the grand old days, is filled with self-righteous idiots. Oops, ad hominem again! Or is that ad homini?)
Yes, they did a lot more than "communicate" with Sendo. I'm not terribly familiar with the details of this issue as opposed to the issue I commented on: Mono. You'll note that I haven't posted with regard to Sendo. I have little use for internet cell phones and such nonsense.
The rest of this post is cut&paste from the Mono FAQ. Maybe if you inform yourself of a few facts before posting you won't seem like such a zealous idiot. I'm not posting to convince people like you that Microsoft is a fantastic social force. I'm posting to provide a little bit of reality to these discussions. It just so happens that the MS topics are so often the ones in the worst need of a reality check.
Question 35: Is Microsoft helping Ximian with this project?
There is no high level communication between Ximian and Microsoft at this point, but engineers who work on.NET or the ECMA groups have been very friendly, and very nice to answer our questions, or clarify part of the specification for us.
Microsoft is interested in other implementations of.NET and are willing to help make the ECMA spec more accurate for this purpose.
Ximian was also invited to participate in the ECMA committee meetings for C# and the CLI.
Question 36: Is Microsoft or Corel paying Ximian to do this?
No.
Question 37: Do you fear that Microsoft will change the spec and render Mono useless?
No. Microsoft proved with the CLI and the C# language that it was possible to create a powerful foundation for many languages to inter-operate. We will always have that.
Even if changes happened in the platform which were undocumented, the existing platform would a value on its own.
Microsoft has already written.NET for another platform (Rotor, for BSD.) And Microsoft has communicated with Miguel many times with regards to Mono. An interview with him on the topic is hosted on MSDN! This does not appear to be a prelude to a lawsuit.
What's the news item here? Fear-mongering about the Evil Microsoft? If you're worried about big companies with riduculous patents ruining society, worry about Amazon.
So I can freely copy the Perl library-on-CD that O'Reilly publishes? And the Unix Powertools CD? This is great news. The money I save on technical references will enable me to "upgrade" my music collection to actual CD's!
Most of the spam I receive is addressed to XXX@u.washington.edu. One of the reasons Washington state is so actively fighting spam is because spammers got e-mail addresses of state employees under the freedom of information act and other sunshine laws a few years back. Ironic, but idiotically true.
Any spammer who claims s/he "didn't know I was breaking a law" is full of crap. This is as ridiculous as Jeff Freaking Bezos claiming he can't keep track of tax rates in 50 states even though he can keep track of ISBN's for millions of out-of-print books. You're running a business? Do your homework.
Distributed Front End may be a bit of a misnomer. It appears this is a distributed preprocessor (article says it farms out preprocessed source to different copies of gcc.) Gcc presumably puts the preprocessed source through its own front end (parser), back end (optimizer), and produces binaries which are then linked on the main machine.
What's the problem? Optimizations are probably limited to each separately compiled module. Most optimizations will perform better across a larger code base. (Read the Dragon Book chapter 10 before telling me I'm wrong.) This method may produce valid code optimized by module but the code is nowhere as good as it could be. Making debuggable code is another challenge.
(If the ARE doing multiprocess optimization then I'm duly impressed. I doubt it, though.)
And I don't think you're going to get much sympathy by whining "but how do I know what state you're in, if I'm indiscriminately spamming you"?
Considering > 95% comes from my University of Washington account (owned by the State of Washington) that argument doesn't garner a lot of sympathy. I get a significant number of e-mails telling me that it has not been sent to a resident of Washington. Oh, wait...they might be confusing it with Washington University in St. Louis.
Go, Christine Gregoire! You have my votes for the next thousand general elections!
7. Microsoft pays loads in taxes According to information found on Yahoo Financials, Microsoft paid $1.288 billion dollars in income taxes for the fiscal quarter ended March 31.
Ten years ago I was unable to afford 2**32 bits of memory let alone 2**64. Heck, I was excited to see the Buck & Meg ads in Computer Shopper (300 meg HDD for $300.)
Now is the time for 64-bit machines. The early innovator is often not the winner in the market because they are innovating before the need exists. Right now, when the world "needs" 64-bit machines (in the way we "need" X-box, HDTV and USB2), is what will determine the winners.
As for AMD vs IA64, AMD will take the Aunt Edna market because of its fast procs and cheap prices. IA64 will take the serious business server market because of its superior proc design for handling *huge* apps like MS SQL. People buying IA64's probably don't care if they can play Death Match III when the IA64 market dries up.
Slashdot Mirror
My point exactly. "IPv6 will be popular". So will 64-bit computing. Maybe not yesterday (HP-US, Alpha), maybe not today (Sparc, Itanium) and maybe not tomorrow (extended x86). But face it, it will be popular. Who cares if Cringely can "predict" this? IPv6 is necessary, thus it will be popular.
And as for the Wal-Mart prediction? He was wrong, but who cares? Wal-Mart has routinely trampled every retail sector it has entered (with the notable exceptions of Costco and iTunes). It doesn't take a business genius to predict that Wal-Mart will have a huge effect on the online music market. In fact, business is the only category where predictions are MORE useless and ridiculous than technology (with the notable exception of religion).
Gates should stick to "vision" or whatever. (As others have pointed out this prediction is a marketing kind of "vision".) And Cringely should stick to...well, whatever the heck it is he does. Despising things and being proud of himself, I guess.
Isn't it obvious that DVDs won't be the primary distribution medium in 2014? Gates isn't saying we'll all have tablet PC's (or flying cars). He's saying that the CD format, now widely available for 20+ years, won't last another 10.
Of course he's wrong on this point: true OSS fanatics will still be using Linux on bootable DVDs on their obsolete hardware. And I still have some cassette tapes floating around.
But really, who cares? Gates isn't in the business of making predictions. And the people who are in that business, like Cringely make equally stupid predictions such as "IPv6 will be popular" and "Wal-Mart will take over the online music market". Who cares?
You're missing the obvious in favor of the nitpicking. I'm guessing you're in management. Giving grammar corrections on slashdot? What hubris!
To wit: why would you use printf()--which uses runtime-dependent varargs--to display a string literal? puts() is a much, much better choice in C. If you want all that fancy-shmancy dynamic crap just go ahead and cout the damned greeting.
Oh, and here's a comma splice for you, just because I'm feeling generous.
There's too much bickering about whether the movie is liberal propogandist BS or whether's it's an accurate indictment of the current President. The fact remains that if no one sympathized with this movie no one would have noticed it. Don't believe me? Search for "DC 9/11" on IMDB. The right made their own film about the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And guess what? No one noticed.
I, for one, am slightly ashamed to be a citizen of a country which is loathed and ridiculed worldwide. And I'm horrified to have a President who confuses America with God.
Airports shouldn't be selling internet access. While $6.95 isn't a heady chunk of change in my budget it's not something I'm gonna pay when I need to save my batteries for that 4-hour cross country. And finding an open, accessible power socket in an airport is like finding a Krispy Kreme in the Friday bagel basket.
Why do I want net access in an airport? To check flight times when I'm picking someone up. To check e-mail for a few minutes, maybe. But seven bucks for a 45-minute layover? Give me a break.
If, say, Topeka International had free, casual wireless access and Fargo International didn't I'd be more likely to book my flights through Topeka. What would Topeka get? My landing fees (which is their core business.) My undying dedication to FooBar Air, who uses--and is more likely to maintain--Topeka as their hub. And happy passengers.
IBM gives away an OS because they want to sell hardware and consulting services. Stick to your core business. Giving away wifi is inexpensive and high-profile.
As if you Brits have never changed your language. Can you read Beowulf? Maybe Chaucer? And how many words did Shakespeare just make up? This is not to mention all the French that made its way in with Charlemagne. Why is it that so many people think English is derived from Latin when it's actually a Germanic tongue?
English is NOT English and has not been since the day Dr. Johnson decided to write it all down. The entire point of the OED is to catalog how the language was used at that moment in time (thus the citations from texts.) (NB: I placed the PERIOD in the previous sentence inside the PARENTHESES because I'm a FREAKING MERKIN!)
Just because we "Yanks" are doing a better job of mutating "your" language than you are doesn't mean we're using it incorrectly. If you want to be a stuck-up git about your language then move your stick and your butt across the canal. They'd love you in France.
Speculation: very cool. Lots of registers, yes, but the Register Stack Engine makes it feel like you never run out: there are automagically more. EPIC: bundles are actually between 3 and 5 instructions. Rotating registers: most important for passing parameters. Predicated instructions? 128 of them.
/. These people will always hate Itanium because it's not kewl. But they're not the ones who will be buying the processors.
However your post, and my post, are wasted on
You're right: In the event of a violation Hotmail users should get a credit toward more free e-mail.
Try using the link /lib switch. It offers the exact same functionality as lib.exe.
Microsoft has already release a .NET framework for MacOS X and FreeBSD: rotor. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, people still use C++. Maybe they're waiting for the Linux kernel to be compiled on Mono in ECMA-standard C#?
As it says on the downloads page: "Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP". The page also points out that it does try to install .NET (not that anyone reads the page...)
21 stories on the front page now, 5 about Microsoft. If Microsoft didn't exist, Slashdot wouldn't have a reason to continue.
The problem you had appears to be with the Compaq driver. The biggest problem of maintaining an OS is the impression some ISV's have that if something works, it's correct. There's something called "undefined behavior" and you can't rely on it. But people do, all the time.
Where I work, we discovered that Windows XP won't reboot on Compaq AS 1000 (I think) systems. Firmware problem. Compaq assumed things which weren't guaranteed. They don't care: obsolete hardware (yet good enough to run XP, so not *that* old.)
Granted, the biggest problem with writing for an OS is not knowing what's defined and what's undefined. But while MS documentation may not be the end-all-be-all it's not a problem unique to Windows.
My advice? Don't use Compqa RAID arrays. Oh, wait, you can't: the company doesn't exist anymore. I wonder why???
Furthermore, Al Gore, as is common amongst politicians, was trying to capitalize on his father's legacy as the senator who secured funding for the interstate highway system. Note that the senior Gore did not by any means invent nor claim to invent the interstate highway system. It was, like the internet, a military project meant to help to efficiently kill people (provided they had landed on American soil with big nasty guns.)
Al felt that by securing funding for the information highway (though, I believe, that buzzword was years away) that he could capitalize on daddy's good juju.
Unfortunately, this only works for Republicans, who seem to be in control of the media people actually pay attention to: talk radio.
Why not the Borg icon? The story is about Microsoft, thus inviting yet another round of mindless MS-bashing. Most of the comments are about how this recommendation does/does not fit into Evil Scheme .NET. Slashdotters don't see this as a technology/IT story. Stick the right icon on it and let the flamethrowers loose!
I don't think they ran afoul of any law so much as they ran afoul of a lemma.
I'd disagree. I think Microsoft sucks less now than it did previously.
Microsoft's worst (alleged or proven, I don't care) dirty trick, IMHO, was Windows telling me that Digital Research DOS was incompatible. That kind of behavior made me a happy OS/2 user for years until I had it pounded in my brain (by IBM, nonetheless) that IBM really is a big, nasty corporation.
I actually don't see anything wrong with MS's attitude toward OSS or Shared Source. They're afraid of the GPL for the same reason that Apple (all worship Apple, benevolent charity and protector of good!) built OS X on top of BSD. Microsoft--get this--is in it for the money. Just like RedHat is. If RMS could sue Microsoft for having GPL'd code in the NT source base it would really cramp MS's style. That, frankly, is frightening to anyone who doesn't totally subscribe to RMS' goal of eliminating software copyrights wholesale.
As for the interview with the ex-developer (NB: here I go again with ad hominem arguments) don't you think that it's a little easier to criticize Microsoft after you've worked there 10 years? MS probably made that guy filthy rich. Give me millions of dollars and I'll gladly drive the high moral ground in my brand-new gold plated gas guzzling SUV.
This is not to say there are no "arrogant assholes" at MS: the interview appears to be written by a prime example. Many sales people (your contacts) also fit that bill. This is merely to point out that MS, as a corporation, has similar goals to those of most corporations. (Similarly, Slashdot, like Usenet in the grand old days, is filled with self-righteous idiots. Oops, ad hominem again! Or is that ad homini?)
Yes, they did a lot more than "communicate" with Sendo. I'm not terribly familiar with the details of this issue as opposed to the issue I commented on: Mono. You'll note that I haven't posted with regard to Sendo. I have little use for internet cell phones and such nonsense.
.NET or the ECMA groups have been very friendly, and very nice to answer our questions, or clarify part of the specification for us.
.NET and are willing to help make the ECMA spec more accurate for this purpose.
The rest of this post is cut&paste from the Mono FAQ. Maybe if you inform yourself of a few facts before posting you won't seem like such a zealous idiot. I'm not posting to convince people like you that Microsoft is a fantastic social force. I'm posting to provide a little bit of reality to these discussions. It just so happens that the MS topics are so often the ones in the worst need of a reality check.
Question 35: Is Microsoft helping Ximian with this project?
There is no high level communication between Ximian and Microsoft at this point, but engineers who work on
Microsoft is interested in other implementations of
Ximian was also invited to participate in the ECMA committee meetings for C# and the CLI.
Question 36: Is Microsoft or Corel paying Ximian to do this?
No.
Question 37: Do you fear that Microsoft will change the spec and render Mono useless?
No. Microsoft proved with the CLI and the C# language that it was possible to create a powerful foundation for many languages to inter-operate. We will always have that.
Even if changes happened in the platform which were undocumented, the existing platform would a value on its own.
Microsoft has already written .NET for another platform (Rotor, for BSD.) And Microsoft has communicated with Miguel many times with regards to Mono. An interview with him on the topic is hosted on MSDN! This does not appear to be a prelude to a lawsuit.
What's the news item here? Fear-mongering about the Evil Microsoft? If you're worried about big companies with riduculous patents ruining society, worry about Amazon.
So I can freely copy the Perl library-on-CD that O'Reilly publishes? And the Unix Powertools CD? This is great news. The money I save on technical references will enable me to "upgrade" my music collection to actual CD's!
Most of the spam I receive is addressed to XXX@u.washington.edu. One of the reasons Washington state is so actively fighting spam is because spammers got e-mail addresses of state employees under the freedom of information act and other sunshine laws a few years back. Ironic, but idiotically true.
Any spammer who claims s/he "didn't know I was breaking a law" is full of crap. This is as ridiculous as Jeff Freaking Bezos claiming he can't keep track of tax rates in 50 states even though he can keep track of ISBN's for millions of out-of-print books. You're running a business? Do your homework.
Distributed Front End may be a bit of a misnomer. It appears this is a distributed preprocessor (article says it farms out preprocessed source to different copies of gcc.) Gcc presumably puts the preprocessed source through its own front end (parser), back end (optimizer), and produces binaries which are then linked on the main machine.
What's the problem? Optimizations are probably limited to each separately compiled module. Most optimizations will perform better across a larger code base. (Read the Dragon Book chapter 10 before telling me I'm wrong.) This method may produce valid code optimized by module but the code is nowhere as good as it could be. Making debuggable code is another challenge.
(If the ARE doing multiprocess optimization then I'm duly impressed. I doubt it, though.)
Considering > 95% comes from my University of Washington account (owned by the State of Washington) that argument doesn't garner a lot of sympathy. I get a significant number of e-mails telling me that it has not been sent to a resident of Washington. Oh, wait...they might be confusing it with Washington University in St. Louis.
Go, Christine Gregoire! You have my votes for the next thousand general elections!
From http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-946250.html
7. Microsoft pays loads in taxes
According to information found on Yahoo Financials, Microsoft paid $1.288 billion dollars in income taxes for the fiscal quarter ended March 31.
Ten years ago I was unable to afford 2**32 bits of memory let alone 2**64. Heck, I was excited to see the Buck & Meg ads in Computer Shopper (300 meg HDD for $300.)
Now is the time for 64-bit machines. The early innovator is often not the winner in the market because they are innovating before the need exists. Right now, when the world "needs" 64-bit machines (in the way we "need" X-box, HDTV and USB2), is what will determine the winners.
As for AMD vs IA64, AMD will take the Aunt Edna market because of its fast procs and cheap prices. IA64 will take the serious business server market because of its superior proc design for handling *huge* apps like MS SQL. People buying IA64's probably don't care if they can play Death Match III when the IA64 market dries up.