The internet is not a magazine stand, where people belly up, pay 0.50 and get a paper. It's a medium, and for the largest period of it's lifetime, it was noncommercial. That is, the dollars used to fund the bandwidth were collected off-line.
Even today, "making money" with the exchange of information is a slowly losing game. There's an effect going on everywhere:
- The internet platform's complexity in delivering content for money keeps the general user in a pay-per-play system.
- Tools are written to bypass such complexity. They are "hacks" that keep to the fringe for a while.
- The general populace becomes more educated about the platform + the tools become more commoditized.
- Finally, the exchange of information no longer requires the pay-per-play system, as a free rebust tool exists to do the same thing.
- Let me add: The tool is enhanced and grown to push the market in ways nobody expected. A collaborative beauty appears.
Let me point out a few examples:
- Online publishing of any digital media whatsoever. Video, Music, Text, Instructional content, directions, games, etc.
- Protocols/Forums to facilitate user-to-user communication and user-to-user file transfers.
- News copy, opinion, debate and mediums for assigning authenticity to information sources are growing in the public sphere.
So, this guy's clinging to said pay-to-play system is only going to push the public domain further, faster to bypass and envelope the content he is delivering. I wish there was more than Adblock, but a site that collected the busniess that have contracted DoubleClick, so that people could boycott the.
MS proves the point that FOSS is the only real way to ensure one's system isn't going to be ripped out from under you. Ironically, as they themselves are eroded as the server platform of choice by repeatedly asking consumers to hop to their nextbigthing every few years. Plus, all the "lessons learned" shops have to endure as MS finally "gets it".
MS may have finally gotten the ideas of "the web", "security", "portal" and so many other trumps to their idea factory, but they have yet to understand how to build an enterprise server that doesn't need to migrate to a entirely new OS every 5 years. However, the 2000 shops are slowly letting them know...
If you extract dissolved gas through a centrafuge, you're going to get all the gas in the water. This may or may not be analogous to just "air".
Secondly, by creating the gas under varying pressure, you are dealing with a complex concept:
- The mechanism creating the gas must work with (an almost static) pressurized fluid - water as input.
- After sealing and then while spinning, the gas inhabits the area nearest the axis, and floats up to the top of the chamber. The water is in a vortex. The attitude of the chamber distorts the shape of the vortex and changes the rate gas can be extracted.
- After spinning, the gas must be collected without including the water. This would then be pumped into a chamber for storage.
- Defeat the consumption of gas in the storage chamber. At depth, less gas is dissolved per unit of fluid, and this make the aparatus worker harder to keep up. Also, your "dried" water source must be flushed.
- Key to this would be a constant-fed system that kept spinning while accepting fluid and delivering gas. Side issues are the buildup of sediment (while gas is being separated, so are things heavier than water), and the seawater encapsulation issues.
- You can enter "dead zones" in open water, where the type or amount of dissolved gas is not able to support life. This would be a big danger. One's storage mechanism would need to cover for just such an emergency. Enough to surface, with decomp time if warranted.
Personally, I think they should research more into completely bypassing lungs in the system. Folks could elect for bypass surgery that installed a machine in their chests, and blood would undergo the CO2/O2 exchange in the internal machine. The machine would expose plugs to the skin, and rechargeable devices could feed the required gasses. The ingredients could be varied based on heart rate. Stopping the breathing reflex may not be possible, so a small mouth-based device might be necessary (just an unprocessed recirculation system). The volumes of gas we're talking about in this instance are much less than lung capacity. Also, compromised lung function (through smoking/pollution/defect) would not apply.
The physiological effects of the human body underpressre are numerous. Different topic entirely
I have to ask...at some point there's diminishing returns. For example, what web sites does "person under regime" want to access and what good will it do?
Even if someone in China reads about the philosophy of democracy, wouldn't it be better to simply talk it over with fellow countrymen? Howabout anonymously leaving printed material around the neighborhood?
In the end, it's not getting the information thats important, it's doing something with it. For current day changes, I don't advise a protest, but slowly working up inside the system and dismantling it. However, either can work.
Ok, lets put the MS concept out there, following a pattern we've already seen [in brackets]:
- MS proposes an industry-wide standard for cell phone and music-service interoptability. The market already has several proposals on the table, but MS's does in fact win some vendors. [IE HTML]
- MS uses an "open standard" to transport and identify payloads, but with "extensions" that lock platforms to their releases. Several platforms, especially the MS Phones, accept this standard without the extensions. [OFFICE XML]
- Music bought through MS-hosted services use their licensing scheme, and require MS-based phones for basic and/or extended capabilities (like the ability to offload the data out of the phone). [MEDIA PLAYER 10]
- Vendors, including hardware from Seimens, Motorola, etc and software from Apple, Sun, MS and content from Vivendi, Disney, Turner slowly start lay out the best options for new versions of the mulitple standards, including transforms, security. We approach convergence.
- At this point, other convergence models from the consumer market are expecting new behaviors from phones, one or more being: VOIP, Electronic Keys, Car/Home Alarms, GPS transceivers, language translators, health monitors, projectors, electronic wallets and identification devices. Modular phones become the norm, with sizes of the base hardware shrinking to a matchbox. Multiple modules can be connected, instigating a wrapper layer around the prior standards.
- The standards are eclipsed by another transmission protocol entirely, which support the transfer specifics necessary to get all these new behaviors. Transfers are now completely swarm-based, as these devices are supplanting or ebedded in almost all prior active/passive devices: cars, locks, switches, meters, telephones, remote controls, keys, headphones, microphones, rings, watches, shoes and hats - all now carry "intelligent" information in new and competative ways. The transfer of this information is easy and ubiquitous.
- These points become yet another set of sites within Internet 2, and one can google opt-in points for statistics on anything. These statistics are used for interesting trivia and occasional political battles regarding trade/taxes or "protecting the children"
- Finally...MS proposes a new standard, whereby their "Intelligent Life" platform is completely integrated with their single protocol proposal, which they're submitted to the market to be "open" (but immediately extensible). Most vendors balk, one or two are discounted into adoption. And So, we start all over again...
This looks like a motorized version of distrubuted processing.
Essentially, load 10 boxes with the software to move a few motors, once they link via a protocol (let's say wireless), they accept signals from the existing "head". Remember, all software, including the "head" code is on all machines. Motors wiggle based on general commands from the head, translated to physical movements by the box attached to the motor.
Now add a few more boxes, preloaded, to the space. They contact and join, following the single "head" directions.
Then finally, split the network into two heads, agreeing not to talk to each other's boxes.
I do find the physical movement quite hypnotic though. I doubt this would scale to anything useful.
I this the questioner is referring to the MS C++ and VB compatabilities that happened when DLL's were 16bit on 32bit windows.
Well, if you're using low level code still, like Win32 constructs and other windows C++ specific data types, you may indeed be faced with work to do. I remember arguments passing from 16bit OLE interfaces into 32bit C++ EXEs that was troublesome. However in this switch, the code should run fairly fine.
If my above assumption is indeed your worry, I would recommend rebuilding your C++ projects with the.NET studio or raw compiler begin to learn C#. The C++ datatypes in MS Visual Studio should be defined adequately for your port.
Overall though, the problems you ask about are no longer problems for the languages and platforms used today. Even lower languages have mapped their types pretty well, and the world is indeed deep into the conversion. Also read up on distributed systems, web services, and SOA in general, since these are trends that are going to impact your designs more than just a 64bit platform.
Hmmm. I'm wondering how each state will implement the "mature" rating. Violence? Violence with blood? boobies? children dying? santanic symbolism? guns? killing of living things?
WHATEVER! People have to realize it's a COMPUTER. I mean, primetime TV has all of these things and it's depicted by live-action, but still acting.
Then you just open the newspaper/newsite and there's plenty of violent/sex-laden/anti-christian/gun-toting news for everyone. Are we labelling news of the Iraq war unfit for children now?
I like plain, simple information. I like reading it from multiple sources. I eschew editorial content, and hence avoid a lot of blatently biased sources.
If the NYT wants to squeeze their readership, they will lose some, but not all. It's a losing game, given that news, as information, wants to be free. Most of what the NYT publishes aren't secrets.
Will I let Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc put blinky ads on my web pages (and then filter them out?) why...yes! Someone is paying for the information delivery. I certainly wouldn't.
Do I pay for the NPR my radio spits out, or listen to the commercials on other talk radio? Sure, since I appreciate the convenient delivery mechanism.
So why not let *some* folks send money to newspapers for writing the same 'ole thing? Because of *freedom of choice* to get information as you want it. Wrapped in opinion or printed as paper, nobody should really care.
But seriously...4GL's that survive today have big followings, and are just another market. Who's to say that platforms must be consolidated and homogenized?
Even though they all strive to complete the same goals (and all try to balance generalization, approachability and brand) - there isn't anything wrong with having them around, to me.
Think of all the 4GLs and embedded languages that could be replaced with a standard...but then think about all the "standard" tools. Um, how many "standards" do we have today? Perl, Python, C/C++, Java, shells, PHP, JS, etc.
Languages aren't the problem. The FOSS world needs to make commodities out of common solution patterns. Regardless of languages, if they support the access flavor of the decade (lib, shared lib, COM/CORBA, classfile, SOAP, webservice, etc) then it'll be useful to any platform. The richer and more reliable those modules are, the more these integration languages not need to be so complex. This is a hypothesis, yes.
Anyway, when I see enterprise corporations mulling decisions like Subversion over PVCS for example, I'm tickled that FOSS is slowly scraping away the fallacy of (some, sorry RJS) software as "property" and more just "concept".
MS is risking quite a bit in hoping that all programs (nay, the entire OS) will want to pump 3D.
If I really want to swing my windows around...I'll try the inside of a sphere: http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/screenshots.htm...or any of the other existing funky desktops. As for the rest of the eye candy, I'll take simplicity and speed for 1000, alex. I do agree however, that a lot of people who've never seen an Apple will drool over the aeroglass desktop.
With this, folks who'd like to maximize the use of their processor (and now main memory!?) for other tasks (think servers), MS should provide a simple CLI.
I also expect dozens of simple-minded newebs writing awful-look graphics programs, but now in 3D. Just like when we saw shareware games written in VB. Yeesh.
Users that participate on the network and yet cannot account for their computers' actions should be banned.
Default out: Virus/Malware scanners that can register with an isolated server the version and state of the user machine can participate. Until then, they are banned. Simple enough. I think some of the enterprise versions do just this.
In a DIY world...have users sign an agreement putting conditions of their connection to accounting for network usage. If you are caught with malicious payloads, you are banned.
You'll have to catch payload origins after they get in but before the network starts to really bog. Ban the perps and impose ever-increasing bans. 1st offense: 1 week ban, 2nd, etc. This should be in their agreement.
OR - just let it bog to a crawl. When they buy new machines, buy their old "slow" ones and resell them on eBay. Sounds like a great money maker!
I, for one, after reading this, wouldn't trust the opinion of anyone who says in their blog that they like Longhorn...
So you trust the opinions of other bloggers?
Look, there are NO valid assumptions about the validity of ANY personal content, or even a most one-off commercial content.
It's not until the power of the internet as a facilitator for *groups* does truth start to appear, and even then there's no guarantee and no clear path on how it'll appear. And when I say "truth", I mean only Historical Record, not philosophical endeavors.
The Lewinski scandal was Drudge's first break, and some say his last. But it's just a "first" when the story wasn't interesting until *multiple sources* began to corroborate the initial story.
I read a lot of stuff online. I can't trust everything I read. But like most people, I don't try to validate it either. I keep an attitude of "if this is true, it's certainly interesting to me."
Getting to Longhorn, why CARE about a paid blog media outlet? Lots of better-informed, independently-verifiable sources are going to be hammering on the software - once out. Until then, just read whatever with a grain of salt. MS doesn't have a perfect OS any more than they did last time - it just a collection of features that most FOSS users can already collect and integrate on their own.
Longhorn's Release is a giant media and consumer event, not a huge technical one. Confusing that is going to just waste people's breath.
If MS is going to try and wow a market with some new desktop icons and some alpha tricks, they better tout the bigger benefits louder. I'm in no mood to consider a new desktop interface a new OS; I don't want a longhorn demo to be someone pointing out shadows on dialogs. sheesh. I'm kinda miffed they don't make the whole desktop interface more replaceable anyway.
Well, if you are sharing...your choices between god and "random" are limited. There are others:
My opinion is that the perceived "orderliness" of anything in nature, from the macro to micro level, is superimposed by us as observers.
If you model any limited "universe" using technology, or even just your imagination, you can decide on the base level rules and relationships, constants and affinities. Tweaking any of them causes a whole new model universe to exist. Each one of these universes has a beauty and mystery to it. Some sets of rules cause the model to collapse, but of course we as observer wouldn't be able to count them in our list, since we don't know they're possible.
But of the existing possibilities, there are many concepts that appear so complex and "architected" as to suggest purposeful design (or "intelligence"), when really, the math just makes it appear that way.
If you read Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science" you'll find that even in his simple building blocks, by simply changing miniscule details, a whole "realm" is devised. Then, within a single realm, further tweaking of the relationships makes for amazing complexities and so on.
And so in our universe, if subatomic particles, quantum nuiances and other yet-to-be-known building blocks all have stable states and instable states, they are leaning towards forming the very universe we have at the moment. But changing just one of those rules makes for a vastly different Other universe.
Now I know one from your opinion may object, saying "but who has decided those states, and which are stable?" but again physics, or a should say math, comes into play again. All states which are not self-contradictory are possible, and affinities towards states which make for the longest existance of this collective as a whole are the trend. Within alllll those possibilities, many collapse to the building blocks we have, and their higher-level properties. Rush up the big chain to matter/energy behaviors we observe in the Newtonian world, and voila! Some sort of "design" seems apparent. But really, we're just terming it such.
Really, it's simply because we have an opinion at all that we see the "ghost in the machine". The observer has not only influenced the reality, he's termed it. But to term it "from an intelligence" brushes over math we already know and rely on. Remember, this math is reliable and comprises many of the things you use every day. Subatomic/Atomic/Molecular patterns for the most part, are now quite predictable. They combine to, say, let you post here on/.
I do wish those things were OS-based, as you assume. However, many of our packages key from the Universal Time coming from the system clock, then translate it to the Time Zone the user has selected for "viewing from" at any moment. This allows different views to look at different Time Zones in their time.
As far as I can see, we have 3 Oracle SP's, 1 Sql Server SP, and 1 small C# method. These changes would mean re-releasing several systems, hitting about 12 applications and 5 interfaces. This is a large bit of regression testing. Since many of them are in our real-time applications, this has business impact as well.
Also, look into.NET web services DATE parameter passing. All times are expected to go from local, get translated into GMT automatically, and then decoded on the recipient into local again. This is applied even if you want no translation. It's a "feature". So, dates are converted to strings and back for us. Quite annoying.
There was a time when USB didn't exist. There will be a time when 2.x is supplanted by 3.x, etc. Line strength, ee considerations, connector size/design are sloving evolving, but they do evolve. By having a multitude of designs, each device can solve the problem as they best see fit. Adherance to a connectivity standard is but one design issue. I like USB 2.0, but when 3.0 comes out, I sure don't want my device to wait for a "market shift" before I can get one. I want them to compete ruthlessly for ever-better designs.
it's a wireless device The real question isn't the physical characteristics of communication, but the digital. Your phone is meant to be wireless, remember? Shouldn't you be able to sync via it's internet capabilities? The medium has better hurdles to span in making it's digital connectivity faster, richer and more universal.
Answering the original question, I work in the power industry as a developer. I can watch the local load curve and do a bit of my own research about supposed "energy savings" by artificially making the sun set later in the day. BoooOogus. The savings would be low.
You all know this: The devil is in the details. The programming impact would be larger than anticipated. Power is usually tracking in "hour ending" and various participants use a 23 and 25-hour day when necessary, defined as "relative hour of the day". Because of this, date conversions abound and the the "first sunday in april/last sunday in october" algorithm is in quite a few places. The impact would be high.
I think it's political hot air. Why not just ask people to pay more for oil? The markets know how to react.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is a huge difference:
The internet is not a magazine stand, where people belly up, pay 0.50 and get a paper. It's a medium, and for the largest period of it's lifetime, it was noncommercial. That is, the dollars used to fund the bandwidth were collected off-line.
Even today, "making money" with the exchange of information is a slowly losing game. There's an effect going on everywhere:
- The internet platform's complexity in delivering content for money keeps the general user in a pay-per-play system.
- Tools are written to bypass such complexity. They are "hacks" that keep to the fringe for a while.
- The general populace becomes more educated about the platform + the tools become more commoditized.
- Finally, the exchange of information no longer requires the pay-per-play system, as a free rebust tool exists to do the same thing.
- Let me add: The tool is enhanced and grown to push the market in ways nobody expected. A collaborative beauty appears.
Let me point out a few examples:
- Online publishing of any digital media whatsoever. Video, Music, Text, Instructional content, directions, games, etc.
- Protocols/Forums to facilitate user-to-user communication and user-to-user file transfers.
- News copy, opinion, debate and mediums for assigning authenticity to information sources are growing in the public sphere.
So, this guy's clinging to said pay-to-play system is only going to push the public domain further, faster to bypass and envelope the content he is delivering. I wish there was more than Adblock, but a site that collected the busniess that have contracted DoubleClick, so that people could boycott the.
MS proves the point that FOSS is the only real way to ensure one's system isn't going to be ripped out from under you. Ironically, as they themselves are eroded as the server platform of choice by repeatedly asking consumers to hop to their nextbigthing every few years. Plus, all the "lessons learned" shops have to endure as MS finally "gets it".
MS may have finally gotten the ideas of "the web", "security", "portal" and so many other trumps to their idea factory, but they have yet to understand how to build an enterprise server that doesn't need to migrate to a entirely new OS every 5 years. However, the 2000 shops are slowly letting them know...
It may be more efficient to just put the fridge in doorway, seal the sides and keep the refrigerator door open all day.
If you extract dissolved gas through a centrafuge, you're going to get all the gas in the water. This may or may not be analogous to just "air".
.
Secondly, by creating the gas under varying pressure, you are dealing with a complex concept:
- The mechanism creating the gas must work with (an almost static) pressurized fluid - water as input.
- After sealing and then while spinning, the gas inhabits the area nearest the axis, and floats up to the top of the chamber. The water is in a vortex. The attitude of the chamber distorts the shape of the vortex and changes the rate gas can be extracted.
- After spinning, the gas must be collected without including the water. This would then be pumped into a chamber for storage.
- Defeat the consumption of gas in the storage chamber. At depth, less gas is dissolved per unit of fluid, and this make the aparatus worker harder to keep up. Also, your "dried" water source must be flushed.
- Key to this would be a constant-fed system that kept spinning while accepting fluid and delivering gas. Side issues are the buildup of sediment (while gas is being separated, so are things heavier than water), and the seawater encapsulation issues
- You can enter "dead zones" in open water, where the type or amount of dissolved gas is not able to support life. This would be a big danger. One's storage mechanism would need to cover for just such an emergency. Enough to surface, with decomp time if warranted.
Personally, I think they should research more into completely bypassing lungs in the system. Folks could elect for bypass surgery that installed a machine in their chests, and blood would undergo the CO2/O2 exchange in the internal machine. The machine would expose plugs to the skin, and rechargeable devices could feed the required gasses. The ingredients could be varied based on heart rate. Stopping the breathing reflex may not be possible, so a small mouth-based device might be necessary (just an unprocessed recirculation system). The volumes of gas we're talking about in this instance are much less than lung capacity. Also, compromised lung function (through smoking/pollution/defect) would not apply.
The physiological effects of the human body underpressre are numerous. Different topic entirely
So like the last 26 minutes was good?
Maybe I'll just wait for the DVD.
But wait, isn't $5US in Cuba something like $10,000? So per song, maybe this isn't news.
hmm.. maybe my math is off
I have to ask...at some point there's diminishing returns. For example, what web sites does "person under regime" want to access and what good will it do?
Even if someone in China reads about the philosophy of democracy, wouldn't it be better to simply talk it over with fellow countrymen? Howabout anonymously leaving printed material around the neighborhood?
In the end, it's not getting the information thats important, it's doing something with it. For current day changes, I don't advise a protest, but slowly working up inside the system and dismantling it. However, either can work.
Ok, lets put the MS concept out there, following a pattern we've already seen [in brackets]:
- MS proposes an industry-wide standard for cell phone and music-service interoptability. The market already has several proposals on the table, but MS's does in fact win some vendors. [IE HTML]
- MS uses an "open standard" to transport and identify payloads, but with "extensions" that lock platforms to their releases. Several platforms, especially the MS Phones, accept this standard without the extensions. [OFFICE XML]
- Music bought through MS-hosted services use their licensing scheme, and require MS-based phones for basic and/or extended capabilities (like the ability to offload the data out of the phone). [MEDIA PLAYER 10]
- Vendors, including hardware from Seimens, Motorola, etc and software from Apple, Sun, MS and content from Vivendi, Disney, Turner slowly start lay out the best options for new versions of the mulitple standards, including transforms, security. We approach convergence.
- At this point, other convergence models from the consumer market are expecting new behaviors from phones, one or more being: VOIP, Electronic Keys, Car/Home Alarms, GPS transceivers, language translators, health monitors, projectors, electronic wallets and identification devices. Modular phones become the norm, with sizes of the base hardware shrinking to a matchbox. Multiple modules can be connected, instigating a wrapper layer around the prior standards.
- The standards are eclipsed by another transmission protocol entirely, which support the transfer specifics necessary to get all these new behaviors. Transfers are now completely swarm-based, as these devices are supplanting or ebedded in almost all prior active/passive devices: cars, locks, switches, meters, telephones, remote controls, keys, headphones, microphones, rings, watches, shoes and hats - all now carry "intelligent" information in new and competative ways. The transfer of this information is easy and ubiquitous.
- These points become yet another set of sites within Internet 2, and one can google opt-in points for statistics on anything. These statistics are used for interesting trivia and occasional political battles regarding trade/taxes or "protecting the children"
- Finally...MS proposes a new standard, whereby their "Intelligent Life" platform is completely integrated with their single protocol proposal, which they're submitted to the market to be "open" (but immediately extensible). Most vendors balk, one or two are discounted into adoption. And So, we start all over again...
Never underestimate the power of the FORBES
This looks like a motorized version of distrubuted processing.
Essentially, load 10 boxes with the software to move a few motors, once they link via a protocol (let's say wireless), they accept signals from the existing "head". Remember, all software, including the "head" code is on all machines. Motors wiggle based on general commands from the head, translated to physical movements by the box attached to the motor.
Now add a few more boxes, preloaded, to the space. They contact and join, following the single "head" directions.
Then finally, split the network into two heads, agreeing not to talk to each other's boxes.
I do find the physical movement quite hypnotic though. I doubt this would scale to anything useful.
I this the questioner is referring to the MS C++ and VB compatabilities that happened when DLL's were 16bit on 32bit windows.
.NET studio or raw compiler begin to learn C#. The C++ datatypes in MS Visual Studio should be defined adequately for your port.
Well, if you're using low level code still, like Win32 constructs and other windows C++ specific data types, you may indeed be faced with work to do. I remember arguments passing from 16bit OLE interfaces into 32bit C++ EXEs that was troublesome. However in this switch, the code should run fairly fine.
If my above assumption is indeed your worry, I would recommend rebuilding your C++ projects with the
Overall though, the problems you ask about are no longer problems for the languages and platforms used today. Even lower languages have mapped their types pretty well, and the world is indeed deep into the conversion. Also read up on distributed systems, web services, and SOA in general, since these are trends that are going to impact your designs more than just a 64bit platform.
Hmmm. I'm wondering how each state will implement the "mature" rating.
Violence?
Violence with blood?
boobies?
children dying?
santanic symbolism?
guns?
killing of living things?
WHATEVER! People have to realize it's a COMPUTER. I mean, primetime TV has all of these things and it's depicted by live-action, but still acting.
Then you just open the newspaper/newsite and there's plenty of violent/sex-laden/anti-christian/gun-toting news for everyone. Are we labelling news of the Iraq war unfit for children now?
I like plain, simple information. I like reading it from multiple sources. I eschew editorial content, and hence avoid a lot of blatently biased sources.
If the NYT wants to squeeze their readership, they will lose some, but not all. It's a losing game, given that news, as information, wants to be free. Most of what the NYT publishes aren't secrets.
Will I let Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc put blinky ads on my web pages (and then filter them out?) why...yes! Someone is paying for the information delivery. I certainly wouldn't.
Do I pay for the NPR my radio spits out, or listen to the commercials on other talk radio? Sure, since I appreciate the convenient delivery mechanism.
So why not let *some* folks send money to newspapers for writing the same 'ole thing? Because of *freedom of choice* to get information as you want it. Wrapped in opinion or printed as paper, nobody should really care.
mug
...just kidding
...but then think about all the "standard" tools. Um, how many "standards" do we have today? Perl, Python, C/C++, Java, shells, PHP, JS, etc.
But seriously...4GL's that survive today have big followings, and are just another market. Who's to say that platforms must be consolidated and homogenized?
Even though they all strive to complete the same goals (and all try to balance generalization, approachability and brand) - there isn't anything wrong with having them around, to me.
Think of all the 4GLs and embedded languages that could be replaced with a standard
Languages aren't the problem. The FOSS world needs to make commodities out of common solution patterns. Regardless of languages, if they support the access flavor of the decade (lib, shared lib, COM/CORBA, classfile, SOAP, webservice, etc) then it'll be useful to any platform. The richer and more reliable those modules are, the more these integration languages not need to be so complex. This is a hypothesis, yes.
Anyway, when I see enterprise corporations mulling decisions like Subversion over PVCS for example, I'm tickled that FOSS is slowly scraping away the fallacy of (some, sorry RJS) software as "property" and more just "concept".
MS is risking quite a bit in hoping that all programs (nay, the entire OS) will want to pump 3D.
If I really want to swing my windows around...I'll try the inside of a sphere:
http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/screenshots.htm
With this, folks who'd like to maximize the use of their processor (and now main memory!?) for other tasks (think servers), MS should provide a simple CLI.
I also expect dozens of simple-minded newebs writing awful-look graphics programs, but now in 3D. Just like when we saw shareware games written in VB. Yeesh.
Users that participate on the network and yet cannot account for their computers' actions should be banned.
Default out: Virus/Malware scanners that can register with an isolated server the version and state of the user machine can participate. Until then, they are banned. Simple enough. I think some of the enterprise versions do just this.
In a DIY world...have users sign an agreement putting conditions of their connection to accounting for network usage. If you are caught with malicious payloads, you are banned.
You'll have to catch payload origins after they get in but before the network starts to really bog. Ban the perps and impose ever-increasing bans. 1st offense: 1 week ban, 2nd, etc. This should be in their agreement.
OR - just let it bog to a crawl. When they buy new machines, buy their old "slow" ones and resell them on eBay. Sounds like a great money maker!
I, for one, after reading this, wouldn't trust the opinion of anyone who says in their blog that they like Longhorn...
So you trust the opinions of other bloggers?
Look, there are NO valid assumptions about the validity of ANY personal content, or even a most one-off commercial content.
It's not until the power of the internet as a facilitator for *groups* does truth start to appear, and even then there's no guarantee and no clear path on how it'll appear. And when I say "truth", I mean only Historical Record, not philosophical endeavors.
The Lewinski scandal was Drudge's first break, and some say his last. But it's just a "first" when the story wasn't interesting until *multiple sources* began to corroborate the initial story.
I read a lot of stuff online. I can't trust everything I read. But like most people, I don't try to validate it either. I keep an attitude of "if this is true, it's certainly interesting to me."
Getting to Longhorn, why CARE about a paid blog media outlet? Lots of better-informed, independently-verifiable sources are going to be hammering on the software - once out. Until then, just read whatever with a grain of salt. MS doesn't have a perfect OS any more than they did last time - it just a collection of features that most FOSS users can already collect and integrate on their own.
Longhorn's Release is a giant media and consumer event, not a huge technical one. Confusing that is going to just waste people's breath.
mug
If MS is going to try and wow a market with some new desktop icons and some alpha tricks, they better tout the bigger benefits louder. I'm in no mood to consider a new desktop interface a new OS; I don't want a longhorn demo to be someone pointing out shadows on dialogs. sheesh. I'm kinda miffed they don't make the whole desktop interface more replaceable anyway.
Well, if you are sharing...your choices between god and "random" are limited. There are others:
/.
My opinion is that the perceived "orderliness" of anything in nature, from the macro to micro level, is superimposed by us as observers.
If you model any limited "universe" using technology, or even just your imagination, you can decide on the base level rules and relationships, constants and affinities. Tweaking any of them causes a whole new model universe to exist. Each one of these universes has a beauty and mystery to it. Some sets of rules cause the model to collapse, but of course we as observer wouldn't be able to count them in our list, since we don't know they're possible.
But of the existing possibilities, there are many concepts that appear so complex and "architected" as to suggest purposeful design (or "intelligence"), when really, the math just makes it appear that way.
If you read Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science" you'll find that even in his simple building blocks, by simply changing miniscule details, a whole "realm" is devised. Then, within a single realm, further tweaking of the relationships makes for amazing complexities and so on.
And so in our universe, if subatomic particles, quantum nuiances and other yet-to-be-known building blocks all have stable states and instable states, they are leaning towards forming the very universe we have at the moment. But changing just one of those rules makes for a vastly different Other universe.
Now I know one from your opinion may object, saying "but who has decided those states, and which are stable?" but again physics, or a should say math, comes into play again. All states which are not self-contradictory are possible, and affinities towards states which make for the longest existance of this collective as a whole are the trend. Within alllll those possibilities, many collapse to the building blocks we have, and their higher-level properties. Rush up the big chain to matter/energy behaviors we observe in the Newtonian world, and voila! Some sort of "design" seems apparent. But really, we're just terming it such.
Really, it's simply because we have an opinion at all that we see the "ghost in the machine". The observer has not only influenced the reality, he's termed it. But to term it "from an intelligence" brushes over math we already know and rely on. Remember, this math is reliable and comprises many of the things you use every day. Subatomic/Atomic/Molecular patterns for the most part, are now quite predictable. They combine to, say, let you post here on
PCM? Then you could store it all on CD!
OH, and by the way, don't let your employees read that post.
So does this mean you're trolling for a rise from these folks, or you've really committed your opinion to intelligent design?
I do wish those things were OS-based, as you assume. However, many of our packages key from the Universal Time coming from the system clock, then translate it to the Time Zone the user has selected for "viewing from" at any moment. This allows different views to look at different Time Zones in their time.
As far as I can see, we have 3 Oracle SP's, 1 Sql Server SP, and 1 small C# method. These changes would mean re-releasing several systems, hitting about 12 applications and 5 interfaces. This is a large bit of regression testing. Since many of them are in our real-time applications, this has business impact as well.
Also, look into
There was a time when USB didn't exist. There will be a time when 2.x is supplanted by 3.x, etc.
Line strength, ee considerations, connector size/design are sloving evolving, but they do evolve. By having a multitude of designs, each device can solve the problem as they best see fit. Adherance to a connectivity standard is but one design issue. I like USB 2.0, but when 3.0 comes out, I sure don't want my device to wait for a "market shift" before I can get one. I want them to compete ruthlessly for ever-better designs.
it's a wireless device
The real question isn't the physical characteristics of communication, but the digital. Your phone is meant to be wireless, remember? Shouldn't you be able to sync via it's internet capabilities? The medium has better hurdles to span in making it's digital connectivity faster, richer and more universal.
Answering the original question, I work in the power industry as a developer. I can watch the local load curve and do a bit of my own research about supposed "energy savings" by artificially making the sun set later in the day. BoooOogus. The savings would be low.
You all know this: The devil is in the details. The programming impact would be larger than anticipated. Power is usually tracking in "hour ending" and various participants use a 23 and 25-hour day when necessary, defined as "relative hour of the day". Because of this, date conversions abound and the the "first sunday in april/last sunday in october" algorithm is in quite a few places. The impact would be high.
I think it's political hot air. Why not just ask people to pay more for oil? The markets know how to react.