From what you read about MS on this site, you'd think it's demise is pretty imminent. Actually, no. For every Twitter, there are several Microsoft Astroturfers and a Genuine Believer here or there.
There are so many different Twitter accounts, maybe you're confused. I can count on one hand the number of distinct Slashdot posters who predict that and I have fingers left to spare.
Personally, I have no opinion as to whether Balmer stays on or not, as there is nothing Microsoft "sells" that I find compelling to lease on a computer, and I find their system ugly and non-productive and choose to use something different.
Microsoft has set back innovation in computer software by decades, but hey, the market place has "chosen".
Can you imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these things?
"The Argonne Blue Gene/P supercomputer is one of the largest and fastest supercomputers in the world," said Fisher, a Flash Center Research Scientist. "It has massive computational resources that are not available on smaller platforms elsewhere." Desktop computers typically contain only one or two processors; Blue Gene/P has more than 160,000 processors. What a desktop computer could accomplish in a thousand years, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer can perform in three days. Oh wait...
xe.com says the Canadian dollar is now worth less than the US dollar? Clearly, I have been smoking too much crack or sniffing too much glue or something like that. Never mind.
Well I'm sorry, but not really. When you say 1k in the context of computers, it means 1024. When you say 1$ it means something different in every country that uses $ and dollar to denote their currency. USA, Canada, and Singapore to name three.
I find the notations that stupid people have derived to work around the base two versus base ten issue confusing. Better to put it in stark terms. A disk drive with capacity 50GM base 10 is like 50 US dollars. A disk drive with capacity 50G base 2 is like 50 Canadian dollars. Got it?
I can't read old English well enough to comment on the grammatical structure of Shakespeare, but there's nothing wrong with Rowling's syntax. Shakespeare's plays as versus his stand-alone poetry was never meant to be read. They were meant to be viewed. A fair comparison would be to use the script of one of the Harry Potters movies and compare that.
Personally I find the Harry Potter movies tedious and I love Shakespeare, especially when accompanied by a clueful explanation.
There's all kinds of historical context required to appreciate Shakespeare. It's the same in any language/culture. At Kabuki (traditional Japanese stage), they provide headsets with narration in both English and Japanese as nearly all Kabuki comes from a Japan that doesn't exist any more, just like Shakespeare's England.
I can't claim to know enough about Shakespearean-era life to give an informed response Whatever. If you're going to do a clueless comparison like that, you missed one. In 4 centuries will Harry Potter and JK Rowling be appreciated or forgotten?
I'll answer the other two: 400 years from now, Shakespeare will still be considered classic. Orson Scott Card will be remembered as a gifted but over-worked author who wrote too much. Most of his work was banal, but in a fit of genius wrote one of the all-time classics "Ender's Game".
King David and Bathsheba? The Song of Solomon? Or maybe something kinky like the scene in one of the gospels where a woman washes Jesus' feet with her hair? Wouldn't that titilate a foot fetisher?
Many things can be considered obscene and I'll bet that Powell guy has plenty of it in a technical bookstore. I'm sure he has books with explicit screens shots of <whisper>the two letter v-word editor</whisper>. I don't know about you, but I don't want my kids exposed to filth like that and neither should yours.
Even if we as humans are unable to understand the problem while we are playing World of Warcraft 40,000 in our brain cells Whatever. I didn't bother to read any of the rest of your post because I'm too busy trying to find a tank for my raid group. Damn Blizzard for nerfing Intergalactic Warriors in the 39,999 patch. Damn them!
There is a third possible answer - that the ecological niches in the galaxy tend to be already filled with entities that are hostile to such exponential growth. An excellent point.
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." -Larry Niven Likely true. One thing we are sure about is that the earth experiences periodic and sometimes drastic changes in temperature and enivronment.
How certain are we of the data on stars like our own Sun, since we have so little of it? To add to the subject line, "he ignores distance and SCALE." The Sun's output is certainly constant over a large enough scale, but apparently not constant on a scale that can make wide variations in temperatures on Earth. Climate change of some sort got the dinosaurs, but have we found any evidence that it was because they chose to overdevelop technology such that the earth became drier and colder?
I choose to remain hopeful. I also choose to believe that our best chances of survival are what the human race is best at - making babies and expanding to fill every available area. That this is a minority opinion could possibly be the "Great Filter" the author is searching for.
Xenix and early SCO were fairly popular and very stable systems. The corpse part didn't come until much later. Up until around the mid 1990's, SCO Unix was an excellent choice for a proprietary Unix.
Had IBM held onto x86 Microsoft as we know it would still be making stoplight-software. You have more than two errors there. IBM chose the 8088 as their first PC chip. It was Intel's own documentation for that chip that suggested it was best used for controlling traffic lights (the docs I had recommended 8086 for regular microcomputer usage). And if Microsoft had been doing traffic light software, there would have a boom in the ambulance-chasing lawyer industry like you wouldn't believe. Oh wait...
I know what you mean. Now I fly to work, wear a shirt that says "My other mount is a NetherDrake". If anyone looks at me strangely, it's Hunter's Mark, attack with the pig and start blasting away. The best part is, everyone now looks at me as if I really do have hooves, horns and a tail. W00t!
I used a similar method to get around a setuid() problem (whereby dropping a setuid program into the local uid meant it was unable to regain the "elevated", setuid, privilege again) in version 2.4 of a program I released on 20/06/1990: I fork()ed off a server process before dropping the uid of the process to that of the real user. Obvious prior art. That technique has been used for decades.
I always liked the stories of friends from Cal. Tech. of setting up a scavenger hunt where to find the next clue you have to solve some geo/spatial problem That sounds like ditch day. Yeah, those were fun.
Considering that Star Trek classic was filmed before Apple existed, it's not a far stretch to assume that one never appeared on the show. Moving forward one series, I draw your attention to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708798/ which is clearly analogous to World of Warcraft on a Macintosh.
I use Windows XP at home and OpenBSD at work as desktop OS. I can't stand Linux as a desktop OS. Mac OS X seems like a perfect merge of a great GUI and the power of UNIX, running on solid, proven Intel hardware. With a Mac I have the best of both worlds. I use Linux at work and Linux at home. I've been happy with desktop Unix for several decades.
I tried to give my wife a Microsoft Windows box, (Microsoft Windows XP Media Edition), but she hates it because it crashes all the time. She loves the Mac PowerBook though.
I think that's why so-called Mac fanboi-ism is so hated here. Macs are perfect for domestic tranquility. Give your wife a Mac and be happy or since this is Slashdot, give a random woman on the street a Mac and ask her for a date.
Furthermore, I don't have the luxury of rewriting millions of lines of existing code. I document the parts I touch and I try not to make anything worse, but rewriting "crap code" is not always an option. I'm fully aware of that. I've been doing software development for a very long time and I was responsible for XEmacs for a long time and Emacs source code is without a doubt the poorest code (style and maintenance wise) that I've ever had to deal with. And as in your case, rewriting the worst code (the multi thousand line functions with 5 or 6 levels of nested ifs) is still not an option.
For you and the idiot who modded me as "troll", I suggest reading the timeless "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Plauger as that quote was more or less lifted from there.
Full tab indentation has the side effect of forcing deeply nested code off the right side of the screen. This is one of the reasons that some of the oldest operating system code (the BSDs and Linux) continue to attract new programmers.
I also suggest Brook's Mythical Man Month. He has a classic example of horrible code including ascii art arrows pointing to the destination of gotos (what's funny is that he uses that as an example of _good_ style).
Slashdot Mirror
There are so many different Twitter accounts, maybe you're confused. I can count on one hand the number of distinct Slashdot posters who predict that and I have fingers left to spare.
Personally, I have no opinion as to whether Balmer stays on or not, as there is nothing Microsoft "sells" that I find compelling to lease on a computer, and I find their system ugly and non-productive and choose to use something different.
Microsoft has set back innovation in computer software by decades, but hey, the market place has "chosen".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/VAX
"Aspirin"?
http://www.aspirin.com/faq_en.html
Protect a trademark or lose it.
This was "invented" decades ago. Prior art is the Anopticon described by Isaac Asimov. See http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/enhanced_20non_20optic_20camera
(you have to go all the way down to the bottom to see the reference. And thank you Disney that Marooned Off Vesta isn't in the public domain now.)
xe.com says the Canadian dollar is now worth less than the US dollar? Clearly, I have been smoking too much crack or sniffing too much glue or something like that. Never mind.
typo, sorry.
Well I'm sorry, but not really. When you say 1k in the context of computers, it means 1024. When you say 1$ it means something different in every country that uses $ and dollar to denote their currency. USA, Canada, and Singapore to name three.
I find the notations that stupid people have derived to work around the base two versus base ten issue confusing. Better to put it in stark terms. A disk drive with capacity 50GM base 10 is like 50 US dollars. A disk drive with capacity 50G base 2 is like 50 Canadian dollars. Got it?
Personally I find the Harry Potter movies tedious and I love Shakespeare, especially when accompanied by a clueful explanation.
There's all kinds of historical context required to appreciate Shakespeare. It's the same in any language/culture. At Kabuki (traditional Japanese stage), they provide headsets with narration in both English and Japanese as nearly all Kabuki comes from a Japan that doesn't exist any more, just like Shakespeare's England. I can't claim to know enough about Shakespearean-era life to give an informed response Whatever. If you're going to do a clueless comparison like that, you missed one. In 4 centuries will Harry Potter and JK Rowling be appreciated or forgotten?
I'll answer the other two: 400 years from now, Shakespeare will still be considered classic. Orson Scott Card will be remembered as a gifted but over-worked author who wrote too much. Most of his work was banal, but in a fit of genius wrote one of the all-time classics "Ender's Game".
King David and Bathsheba? The Song of Solomon? Or maybe something kinky like the scene in one of the gospels where a woman washes Jesus' feet with her hair? Wouldn't that titilate a foot fetisher?
Many things can be considered obscene and I'll bet that Powell guy has plenty of it in a technical bookstore. I'm sure he has books with explicit screens shots of <whisper>the two letter v-word editor</whisper>. I don't know about you, but I don't want my kids exposed to filth like that and neither should yours.
Kraken - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/07/kraken_botnet_menace/
How certain are we of the data on stars like our own Sun, since we have so little of it? To add to the subject line, "he ignores distance and SCALE." The Sun's output is certainly constant over a large enough scale, but apparently not constant on a scale that can make wide variations in temperatures on Earth. Climate change of some sort got the dinosaurs, but have we found any evidence that it was because they chose to overdevelop technology such that the earth became drier and colder?
I choose to remain hopeful. I also choose to believe that our best chances of survival are what the human race is best at - making babies and expanding to fill every available area. That this is a minority opinion could possibly be the "Great Filter" the author is searching for.
Xenix and early SCO were fairly popular and very stable systems. The corpse part didn't come until much later. Up until around the mid 1990's, SCO Unix was an excellent choice for a proprietary Unix.
Let's just say he was best friends with the goatse guy. 'Nuf said?
I know what you mean. Now I fly to work, wear a shirt that says "My other mount is a NetherDrake". If anyone looks at me strangely, it's Hunter's Mark, attack with the pig and start blasting away. The best part is, everyone now looks at me as if I really do have hooves, horns and a tail. W00t!
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html#msg
(from http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/25/1421227 )
Considering that Star Trek classic was filmed before Apple existed, it's not a far stretch to assume that one never appeared on the show. Moving forward one series, I draw your attention to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708798/
which is clearly analogous to World of Warcraft on a Macintosh.
I tried to give my wife a Microsoft Windows box, (Microsoft Windows XP Media Edition), but she hates it because it crashes all the time. She loves the Mac PowerBook though.
I think that's why so-called Mac fanboi-ism is so hated here. Macs are perfect for domestic tranquility. Give your wife a Mac and be happy or since this is Slashdot, give a random woman on the street a Mac and ask her for a date.
For you and the idiot who modded me as "troll", I suggest reading the timeless "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Plauger as that quote was more or less lifted from there.
Full tab indentation has the side effect of forcing deeply nested code off the right side of the screen. This is one of the reasons that some of the oldest operating system code (the BSDs and Linux) continue to attract new programmers.
I also suggest Brook's Mythical Man Month. He has a classic example of horrible code including ascii art arrows pointing to the destination of gotos (what's funny is that he uses that as an example of _good_ style).