I think you slightly under estimate the difficulty of building a system that can withstand real world demands. It's just like saying that because you can setup a POP3 server on a Linux box in 20 minutes you could implement and deploy Hotmail in the same length of time.
But yeah, whether it's 77 or 79.5 people trying to "market" the techology that the other couple people are working on, it is a bit lopsided against the development of useful technology...
Luckily now that the tech bubble has popped more companies have to actually produce something to survive.
This illustrates the problem with technology: it is only valuable if you can build something that is not easily imitated or replaced.
If you hire the ten sharpest people around and you take a year to develop something and then stand still, your competition is going to have no trouble catching up, even if it takes them a little longer or more resources. This is how many popular open source projects such as GIMP and OpenOffice are surviving. They've caught up with the real thing; not entirely, but to the point that they're good enough for a number of users.
Of those 80 people at RealNames, how many were driving technology forward? Did their entire technology consist of a database mapping keywords to URLs? Three people at Microsoft could probably do that--and scale--in six months.
The page mentioned that the Microsoft contact got moved to the Natural Language group; maybe MS is coming out with technology that allows you to type natural language queries instead of having to know the exact static keyword. Now that's technology that is not easily imitated or replaced, and it's already here in one form: the Search Assistant in XP.
I feel sorry for the employees of RealNames that have to find jobs in this economy (which is hopefully picking up!), but it is not Microsoft's job to singlehandedly sustain an unsustainable business, and based on the web page in the article that's what was going on.
One side note: If RealNames had acquired a patent on their "technology"--the kind we all love to hate--they could have survived if MS is planning on replacing it and not just ditching it altogether.
About a year ago I was at a restaurant with a group of friends, and one of them had an XBox jacket. The waiter who served us started pontificating about how the XBox was going to be a failure...
The main difference between the XBox developers and the people dissing it is that at least the XBox devs are fucking trying: trying to build a great product, trying to enter a highly competitive market where previous wins are irrelevant (Windows, Office). The same goes for the Pocket PC, MSN, SQL Server -- and Linux, RedHat, Lindows, KDE, MySQL, Java, etc.
I have enormous respect for those people and companies who get off their asses and actually try to produce something. Usually they will fail; the majority of projects (and small businesses) inevitably do. But to have tried is the main thing. It's so much easier to be an armchair cynic, but the cynic is the real loser.
Another option -- and I can't recommend this highly enough -- is eshell for emacs. It's the best interactive shell I have ever used (by a long shot, and I've used many), and it's especially nice on NT/Win2k/XP because emacs is an infintely better terminal environment than the standard command windows you have to run cmd, tcsh, or bash
in.
Eshell is so good that I can see myself giving up emacs as an editor and keeping it for the shell. And that's saying something.
The above port of tcsh would be my next choice, followed by Cygwin's bash. You'll want Cygwin so you can have the full set of commands under eshell anyway, but bash isn't as well integrated with Windows as eshell and the tcsh port.
Yeah, where are all my mod points when I need them?
I call these things Hype-Oriented Programming.
OOP, AOP, Design Patterns, CASE tools, eXtreme Programming, yadda, yadda, yadda. The problem is they are usually valuable and make significant contributions to the body of knowledge in CS and software engineering, but even the successful ones (OOP) never live up to the hype.
The solution is to stay informed and keep up with new ideas and techniques, but point your fingers and laugh at people who jump from trend to trend, often never getting around to producing anything!
(The worse is eXtreme Programming, but don't get me started; don't even get me started.)
The main problem with hydrogen is that it takes a lot more energy to produce and store than it generates. Electrolysis is especially inefficient and you end up polluting anyway (power plant) so it's not clean energy. The story also left out an important detail:
. . . the company is confident a $100 refill could be delivered anywhere in the United States within two days.
And I thought laptop batteries were expensive. At $8,000 + $100 for each 10 hours to power just a few pieces of equipment we'll all be riding Segways long before this is practical for every day use.
UniPress Emacs is priced from $395 per workstation
C/C++macs and FortranEmacs are priced at $695 per workstation
AdaEmacs is priced at $995 per workstation
Source code is available for an additional $600
Site licenses, special university pricing and discounts are available
To whet your appetite, a little excerpt from the beginning about how quickly machines get attacked:
Surely, no one will discover a computer slipped onto the Internet, right? Think again. The Windows 2000 test site was found almost immediately, and here's how it happened... Someone was scanning the external IP addresses owned by Microsoft. That person found a new live IP address; obviously, a new computer had been set up. The person then probed various ports to see what ports were open, an activity commonly called port scanning. One such open port was port 80, so the person issued an HTTP HEAD request to see what the server was; it was an Internet IIS 5 server. However, IIS 5 had not shipped yet. Next the person loaded a Web browser and entered the server's IP address, noting that it was a test site sponsored by the Windows 2000 test team and that its DNS name was www.windows2000test.com. Finally the person posted a note on www.slashdot.org, and within a few hours the server was being probed and flooded with IP-level attacks.
This is not normal behavior, there is something wrong on your machine. Make sure you turn on the option to see the "bluescreen" and you may be able to tell from the module list which one is faulty.
... you could have learned some of the basics. As a techie you should constantly be trying to learn, both inside and outside of your specific domain. Learn what interests you.
Sysadmins are probably better off with perl, shell scripts, and WSH first. Then, if you want to push yourself, learn a language like C++.
Asm should come later, and most people gan get along just being able to read it. Learn about the registers, the stack, and addressing; then learn the most fequently used instructions such as mov, conditional branches, jumps, and call. After that just look up the ones you don't know when you run into them.
Disclaimer: I don't use VB and I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but maybe I can clarify a few things...
Most COM/ActiveX objects are easy to use: simply CoCreate the object and start calling the methods. You may have to QI for the appropriate interfaces, but that's no sweat. It's barely harder than using a regular C++ object.
If the object only supports the IDispatch interface, which is probably the case for VB, then things get a little more tedious. Packaging up DISPPARAMS and calling Invoke() is a PITA. Fortunately there are helper classes. MFC has COleDispatchDriver, and the MFC dependencies can be removed, such as with XYDispDriver.
#import will also build the wrappers for you if you have a typelib.
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What the hell happened to Slashdot, where putting linux on the dreamcast is cool, just because it can be done, yet the Segway is "just a scooter." What the hell?
Yeah, it's sad. I think this and its predecessor, the iBot, is extremely innovative. Unfortunately, unless it has something to do with Linux or Open Source, it automatically gets sorted into the 'lame or irrelevant' bucket in about 2/3 of Slashdotter's heads.
Of course, being a mountain biker, if I see any of these on the bike paths, I will be throwing magnets at you.. let's see your fancy gyromajig work then. AHAR!
Of course, being a hiker, if I see you on a hiking path I will be throwing large rocks at you.. let's see your fancy bike work then. AHAR!
The students want to use Maya because it makes them more marketable. My boss and I would like to move away from a commercial package so the students would focus more on content rather than software proficiency. . . My boss and I have talked about at the end of our software license contract moving the whole lab to Linux and using Blender and gimp as our primary tools.
Are you INSANE? You have an animation lab with software such as Maya and you want to switch to Blender and Gimp? Sure, those are decent packages if you're an amature on a low-low budget, but if I were a student interested in computer animation I'd raise a huge ruckus if some open-source advocate switched the lab from Maya to those inferior tools without a really, really, really good reason.
This isn't a troll. A few years ago I was seriously interested in computer animation at one time and got to wet my feet with Lightwave and Alias|Wavefront (before it became Maya). I still play around, even though my object modeling skills have stagnated. I've tried nearly all free and inexpensive commercial 3D packages (including the latest Blender as of about 3 weeks ago) and none can come close to even early versions of Lightwave. Unfortunately that does matter, as inferior tools put a low ceiling on students' creativity.
And it should be noted that Microsoft just canceled browser plugins (for future versions of IE). So we aren't going to be seeing any features in web browsers that Microsoft doesn't approve anyhow.
Wrongo. IE has beaucoup extensibility through ActiveX controls, Browser Helper Objects, an extensive DOM accessible from dozens of languages, and so on. You can add toolbars, buttons, explorer bars, etc. You can embed pieces of IE inside your own app. Almost nobody used the ancient legacy plugin architecture, that's why it was removed.
It's not the operating system's job to be making copy and paste work! Or even to be rendering fonts. All of this stuff should be and is taken care of by other programs on linux.
Which is why Linux is so much better at allowing users to copy and paste of complex objects between applications, and why antialiasing and ClearType (should you want to use them) have been universally available in Linux for quite some time.
Oh, wait a second, it's the other way around!
The operating system is a platform, no more, no less. What you are calling the OS is really just the kernel. The entire purpose of the OS is to provide a common foundation upon which developers can build applications. Cut and paste and font rendering is built in to the OS because almost every program needs that functionality. An HTML rendering engine is built in because many developers want that capability. The list goes on and on.
Don't get me wrong -- there is nothing wrong with these core pieces being pluggable, but that does not necessarily make them less part of the OS.
I like OO as much as the next guy (more, actually), but this is untrue. Since you bring it up, let's use Java as an example: do you use Swing or any of the Java 1.2 APIs? If so, you're not compatible with 1.1, so you have to make sure all your customers upgrade to the right version.
For projects where you have 100 users that's not a big deal, but once you have millions it becomes a huge deal. It becomes a bigger deal when the you're thinking about using system APIs not available on older versions of the OS.
Usually the solution is to dynamically use the library and only offer the feature on newer platforms (LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress on Win32), but after a certain point that leads to the mess the author was talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? I could do it in 20 minutes.
I think you slightly under estimate the difficulty of building a system that can withstand real world demands. It's just like saying that because you can setup a POP3 server on a Linux box in 20 minutes you could implement and deploy Hotmail in the same length of time.
But yeah, whether it's 77 or 79.5 people trying to "market" the techology that the other couple people are working on, it is a bit lopsided against the development of useful technology...
Luckily now that the tech bubble has popped more companies have to actually produce something to survive.
This illustrates the problem with technology: it is only valuable if you can build something that is not easily imitated or replaced.
If you hire the ten sharpest people around and you take a year to develop something and then stand still, your competition is going to have no trouble catching up, even if it takes them a little longer or more resources. This is how many popular open source projects such as GIMP and OpenOffice are surviving. They've caught up with the real thing; not entirely, but to the point that they're good enough for a number of users.
Of those 80 people at RealNames, how many were driving technology forward? Did their entire technology consist of a database mapping keywords to URLs? Three people at Microsoft could probably do that--and scale--in six months.
The page mentioned that the Microsoft contact got moved to the Natural Language group; maybe MS is coming out with technology that allows you to type natural language queries instead of having to know the exact static keyword. Now that's technology that is not easily imitated or replaced, and it's already here in one form: the Search Assistant in XP.
I feel sorry for the employees of RealNames that have to find jobs in this economy (which is hopefully picking up!), but it is not Microsoft's job to singlehandedly sustain an unsustainable business, and based on the web page in the article that's what was going on.
One side note: If RealNames had acquired a patent on their "technology"--the kind we all love to hate--they could have survived if MS is planning on replacing it and not just ditching it altogether.
Or you could just tell them to read Slashdot.
Case in point.
About a year ago I was at a restaurant with a group of friends, and one of them had an XBox jacket. The waiter who served us started pontificating about how the XBox was going to be a failure...
The main difference between the XBox developers and the people dissing it is that at least the XBox devs are fucking trying: trying to build a great product, trying to enter a highly competitive market where previous wins are irrelevant (Windows, Office). The same goes for the Pocket PC, MSN, SQL Server -- and Linux, RedHat, Lindows, KDE, MySQL, Java, etc.
I have enormous respect for those people and companies who get off their asses and actually try to produce something. Usually they will fail; the majority of projects (and small businesses) inevitably do. But to have tried is the main thing. It's so much easier to be an armchair cynic, but the cynic is the real loser.
Another option -- and I can't recommend this highly enough -- is eshell for emacs. It's the best interactive shell I have ever used (by a long shot, and I've used many), and it's especially nice on NT/Win2k/XP because emacs is an infintely better terminal environment than the standard command windows you have to run cmd, tcsh, or bash in.
Eshell is so good that I can see myself giving up emacs as an editor and keeping it for the shell. And that's saying something.
The above port of tcsh would be my next choice, followed by Cygwin's bash. You'll want Cygwin so you can have the full set of commands under eshell anyway, but bash isn't as well integrated with Windows as eshell and the tcsh port.
Yeah, where are all my mod points when I need them?
I call these things Hype-Oriented Programming.
OOP, AOP, Design Patterns, CASE tools, eXtreme Programming, yadda, yadda, yadda. The problem is they are usually valuable and make significant contributions to the body of knowledge in CS and software engineering, but even the successful ones (OOP) never live up to the hype.
The solution is to stay informed and keep up with new ideas and techniques, but point your fingers and laugh at people who jump from trend to trend, often never getting around to producing anything!
(The worse is eXtreme Programming, but don't get me started; don't even get me started.)
I hate it when that happens.
The main problem with hydrogen is that it takes a lot more energy to produce and store than it generates. Electrolysis is especially inefficient and you end up polluting anyway (power plant) so it's not clean energy. The story also left out an important detail:
. . . the company is confident a $100 refill could be delivered anywhere in the United States within two days.
And I thought laptop batteries were expensive. At $8,000 + $100 for each 10 hours to power just a few pieces of equipment we'll all be riding Segways long before this is practical for every day use.
From the UniPress site (ca. 1995):
UniPress Emacs is priced from $395 per workstation
C/C++macs and FortranEmacs are priced at $695 per workstation
AdaEmacs is priced at $995 per workstation
Source code is available for an additional $600
Site licenses, special university pricing and discounts are available
;-)
To whet your appetite, a little excerpt from the beginning about how quickly machines get attacked:
Surely, no one will discover a computer slipped onto the Internet, right? Think again. The Windows 2000 test site was found almost immediately, and here's how it happened... Someone was scanning the external IP addresses owned by Microsoft. That person found a new live IP address; obviously, a new computer had been set up. The person then probed various ports to see what ports were open, an activity commonly called port scanning. One such open port was port 80, so the person issued an HTTP HEAD request to see what the server was; it was an Internet IIS 5 server. However, IIS 5 had not shipped yet. Next the person loaded a Web browser and entered the server's IP address, noting that it was a test site sponsored by the Windows 2000 test team and that its DNS name was www.windows2000test.com. Finally the person posted a note on www.slashdot.org, and within a few hours the server was being probed and flooded with IP-level attacks.
This is not normal behavior, there is something wrong on your machine. Make sure you turn on the option to see the "bluescreen" and you may be able to tell from the module list which one is faulty.
... you could have learned some of the basics. As a techie you should constantly be trying to learn, both inside and outside of your specific domain. Learn what interests you.
Sysadmins are probably better off with perl, shell scripts, and WSH first. Then, if you want to push yourself, learn a language like C++.
Asm should come later, and most people gan get along just being able to read it. Learn about the registers, the stack, and addressing; then learn the most fequently used instructions such as mov, conditional branches, jumps, and call. After that just look up the ones you don't know when you run into them.
Ollydbg is a neat freeware asm debugger for Windows.
(Oh, as for the sig, please don't "persecute" us. Don't prosecute either.)
Most COM/ActiveX objects are easy to use: simply CoCreate the object and start calling the methods. You may have to QI for the appropriate interfaces, but that's no sweat. It's barely harder than using a regular C++ object.
If the object only supports the IDispatch interface, which is probably the case for VB, then things get a little more tedious. Packaging up DISPPARAMS and calling Invoke() is a PITA. Fortunately there are helper classes. MFC has COleDispatchDriver, and the MFC dependencies can be removed, such as with XYDispDriver.
#import will also build the wrappers for you if you have a typelib.
What the hell happened to Slashdot, where putting linux on the dreamcast is cool, just because it can be done, yet the Segway is "just a scooter." What the hell?
Yeah, it's sad. I think this and its predecessor, the iBot, is extremely innovative. Unfortunately, unless it has something to do with Linux or Open Source, it automatically gets sorted into the 'lame or irrelevant' bucket in about 2/3 of Slashdotter's heads.
Of course, being a mountain biker, if I see any of these on the bike paths, I will be throwing magnets at you .. let's see your fancy gyromajig work then. AHAR!
Of course, being a hiker, if I see you on a hiking path I will be throwing large rocks at you .. let's see your fancy bike work then. AHAR!
The students want to use Maya because it makes them more marketable. My boss and I would like to move away from a commercial package so the students would focus more on content rather than software proficiency. . . My boss and I have talked about at the end of our software license contract moving the whole lab to Linux and using Blender and gimp as our primary tools.
Are you INSANE? You have an animation lab with software such as Maya and you want to switch to Blender and Gimp? Sure, those are decent packages if you're an amature on a low-low budget, but if I were a student interested in computer animation I'd raise a huge ruckus if some open-source advocate switched the lab from Maya to those inferior tools without a really, really, really good reason.
This isn't a troll. A few years ago I was seriously interested in computer animation at one time and got to wet my feet with Lightwave and Alias|Wavefront (before it became Maya). I still play around, even though my object modeling skills have stagnated. I've tried nearly all free and inexpensive commercial 3D packages (including the latest Blender as of about 3 weeks ago) and none can come close to even early versions of Lightwave. Unfortunately that does matter, as inferior tools put a low ceiling on students' creativity.
Perhaps you forgot that Sun sued Microsoft so they can't use any recent versions of Java.
Emu48CE, an HP48 emulator.
RPN Calc. Very nice and supports RPN like all good calculators should. No graphing capability.
Maxima. Looks interesting, port of a GPL symbolic manipulation program. (This guy has emacs, gluplot, and other stuff running under CE as well.)
There's a lot more stuff out there if you search, but no real killer calculator yet that I can see.
And it should be noted that Microsoft just canceled browser plugins (for future versions of IE). So we aren't going to be seeing any features in web browsers that Microsoft doesn't approve anyhow.
Wrongo. IE has beaucoup extensibility through ActiveX controls, Browser Helper Objects, an extensive DOM accessible from dozens of languages, and so on. You can add toolbars, buttons, explorer bars, etc. You can embed pieces of IE inside your own app. Almost nobody used the ancient legacy plugin architecture, that's why it was removed.
It's not the operating system's job to be making copy and paste work! Or even to be rendering fonts. All of this stuff should be and is taken care of by other programs on linux.
Which is why Linux is so much better at allowing users to copy and paste of complex objects between applications, and why antialiasing and ClearType (should you want to use them) have been universally available in Linux for quite some time.
Oh, wait a second, it's the other way around!
The operating system is a platform, no more, no less. What you are calling the OS is really just the kernel. The entire purpose of the OS is to provide a common foundation upon which developers can build applications. Cut and paste and font rendering is built in to the OS because almost every program needs that functionality. An HTML rendering engine is built in because many developers want that capability. The list goes on and on.
Don't get me wrong -- there is nothing wrong with these core pieces being pluggable, but that does not necessarily make them less part of the OS.
Aaaaaahhhhbulshitchoooo!
I like OO as much as the next guy (more, actually), but this is untrue. Since you bring it up, let's use Java as an example: do you use Swing or any of the Java 1.2 APIs? If so, you're not compatible with 1.1, so you have to make sure all your customers upgrade to the right version.
For projects where you have 100 users that's not a big deal, but once you have millions it becomes a huge deal. It becomes a bigger deal when the you're thinking about using system APIs not available on older versions of the OS.
Usually the solution is to dynamically use the library and only offer the feature on newer platforms (LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress on Win32), but after a certain point that leads to the mess the author was talking about.
There are some that would agree. Interesting reading: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
Very good, very controversial paper. There's probably been a story on it here, I'm just too lazy to look.
Yeah, whatever. The technologies are completely different.
Remedial overview: How Do Optical Mice Work?
Aligent, a spinoff of HP, created the optical mouse sensor.
AFAIK Microsoft was the first to actually build and sell an mouse using a modern (Aligent's) optical sensor.