Imagine how horrible Google Maps would be if you had to wait two seconds for the whole page to refresh every time you dragged the map a quarter of an inch.
Yeah, then it would be MapQuest... (Or what MapQuest used to be, anyway.) We don't have to imagine, we've all used it before.
This isn't about FUN it is about being part of something greater, and the fun you sacrifice to be part of it instead of going nowhere by yourself is reaped tenfold when you get to the end and see what a huge impact you *helped* to create.
And therein lies the problem with your post. To many open source developers, it is about fun. Maybe not in the strictest sense of the word, but these are people who, for the most part, are spending their own free time doing something that they want to do. Telling them that their efforts would be better spent somewhere else is far more likely to drive them off entirely than to get them to contribute work that they aren't interested in doing. You mentioned Ubuntu; Ubuntu is succeeding where others have failed because some guy with a lot of money to burn started paying people to do what he wanted to get done, not because he somehow convinced a bunch of hobby programmers that what he wanted done was more important than their hobby project.
I'm not sure I agree with that. The reason that I feel "AJAX" has died is that, even though I still hear it used semi-regularly, it has degenerated to the point that it means exactly the same thing as DHTML. To most people I talk to, (at least the ones who actually use that word) all "AJAX" means is "stuff moved around on the page", regardless of whether any server interaction ever happened. It no longer has any meaning of its own.
I was thinking more along the lines of laptops and workstation class computers- you know, computers that you might buy from Dell. (I know Dell sells servers too, but those have been available with Linux for a while). Most distributions these days come with SMP aware kernels as an option if not the default. If you're dealing with tediously specific hardware or embedded systems, you a) probably have you're own install image of whatever OS you use, so the preinstalled OS doesn't really matter, and b) probably aren't buying Dell branded computers.
That basically leaves clustering, and while you do have a point there, I would have guessed that people building clusters are typically using server class hardware, which (while I didn't specifically state it) was outside the scope of my comment. I have compiled new kernels for servers several times over the past few years, hence my qualifier of "Linux kernel" in the previous post - the servers I've been using lately are FreeBSD.
Last time I had a land line (about 2-3 years ago), my monthly bill of "$23.99" approached $40/month. And that was just for the land line. I know DSL has it's own taxes as well, but it's been a long time since I've had DSL, so I don't remember what they are. Perhaps the tax/fee structure has changed since then, or maybe AT&T is better about advertising actual prices than Quest (wouldn't surprise me, but I had similar experience with Ameritech / SBC when I lived in Chicago as well.)
Regardless, I have no intention of getting another land line any time soon. Cable Internet isn't the cheapest, but at least I feel confident that the price advertised is the price that I'm actually paying, and it means not having to deal with the local ILEC, which has never been a pleasant experience anywhere I've lived.
Yeah, my bad. Sorry. I started to second guess myself after I posted and had to go look it up. I know that "speed of sound at altitude X" (must have been 30,000 feet, because now that I think about it, 60,000 wouldn't have made much sense) used to be used as a baseline for something, because I remember an air force officer telling me when I was much younger that most planes capable of breaking the sound barrier (at the time anyway) typically flew at or above that altitude anyway. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it was anymore.
Commercial aircraft aren't allowed to break the sound barrier. I imagine military planes do it quite frequently. Anyway, at the altitude that the blackbird flies at, I imagine that the sonic boom would be barely noticeable by the time it reaches the ground.
Not really. Mach is defined to be the speed of sound at a specific altitude (60,000 feet, IIRc, or maybe 30,000), and is somewhere around 660 miles per hour. So a low flying aircraft might be flying over mach 1 (~660mph), but still under the speed of sound (~710mph at sea level).
While I imagine you are right, there are companies out there that do provide tech support for Linux; Dell could outsource their Linux support to them without much difficulty, and the price difference would probably still be less the cost of a Windows license.
With ATI being bought out, the market has lost TWO major vendors, not one.
The market hasn't lost any major vendors yet...
A lot of people seem to be getting really bent out of shape considering that all that has really happened is that a few analysts have speculated that AMD might continue doing something that it has already been doing for a while- i.e. outsourcing more of its low end chips to third party fabs.
But you're incorrect that it's the major parties which would most fight elimination of the electoral college. Rather, it's every state which has only two votes in the electoral college, since it's those states which would suffer in its absence.
In that case, there wouldn't be any opposition at all, since every state has at least 3 electoral votes.
I'm talking voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, advanced call forwarding, the ability to take your phone number (including area code) with you when you travel or move...
Yeah, I get those, too... On my cell phone.
I don't have either a landline or VOIP, and I don't see a need for either. Really, if you have to have a cell phone as a "backup" in case your internet connection goes out, why not just use the cell as your regular phone and ditch your home phone entirely?
Fairness? If I drive my Corolla an average of four miles to work once a week, why should I be paying the same for street maintenance as somebody else who drives the same car 30 miles every day?
Of course, as it is now, I'm probably paying more than that hypothetical person who drives their car in to work every day. Most of the city's street maintenance budget comes from property taxes, not fuel taxes, and I payed significantly more for my house to live somewhere where my wife and I could both get to work without a car. Personally, I'd prefer to see higher fuel taxes, because short of actually tracking the number of miles people drive, it seems to be the best way to get the people who are actually using the roads to pay for them.
I don't get why Apple thinks the average Windows user would want a significantly altered browser that looks nothing like the rest of the operating system he or she is using.
I take it you haven't actually seen IE7 yet? Besides, somehow or other, they've convinced people to actually use iTunes on Windows, so maybe there is hope...
"Many website developers" that I know love Firefox, because of the utter dearth of useful web development tools for IE. In my experience, it's often easier to write a site for Firefox first and then hack it to work on both IE and Firefox than it is to write the same site using only IE. If I got a new project, and was told flat out from the start, "This will only ever be used in IE, no matter what, and we couldn't care less about browser compatibility," I'd still write the site for Firefox first...
The problem is simply that Safari doesn't have Firefox's market share yet, so web developers who code all their sites with Firefox and IE in mind don't necessarily check to make sure they work well in Safari too.
The fact that up until now, Safari has only been available on a Mac may have been a factor there. I am all for cross browser compatibility, but since (up until now) there has never been an easy way for me to test sites that I am working on in Safari, so generally I don't bother until somebody reports a bug in Safari. Now that Safari is available for Windows, I'll probably try at least as hard to make sure that my sites work in Safari as they do in IE (which isn't saying all that much, I suppose, but at least I have QA to catch IE bugs).
I suspect that in the grand scheme of things, this move is less about getting any significant number of Windows users to use Safari as their regular browser, and more about getting Web developers who may care about cross browser compatibility, but not enough to bother getting a Mac, to actually test the stuff they write against Safari. (I know that I'll fix bugs on Safari when they are reported, but I won't go out of my way to look for them while I'm developing.)
The fact that it sounds like the only way to write 3rd party apps for the iPhone is going to be to write them as Safari apps / widgets makes this seem even more likely, as it means that a working version of Safari would basically be a prerequisite for any kind of iPhone development.
I think you missed the point. If Adobe wasn't so incredibly lax on the rampant piracy of Photoshop, programs like The Gimp, and many of Photoshop's one time competitors that long ago faded into oblivion, would probably be a lot more advanced, because there would be real incentive to work on them. As it is, anyone who wants a copy of Photoshop can get it without hardly trying, and Adobe still rakes in the bucks because any significantly large company knows better than to get caught with their pants down on software licensing.
JavaScript doesn't suck, unless you expect it to act like C++/C#/Java... The problem is there there are far too few programmers who are willing to treat JavaScript as a fully fledged language in its own right, and just view it as a crippled version of whatever language they do their "real" programming in.
You are correct, but the "troll" does have a valid point. If Apple had planned all along to release an SDK, either at launch or some time later, why did they spend months saying that they would not support 3rd party application development on the iPhone? Regardless of whether they could have had an SDK ready at launch, their other statements up until this point make this look more like backpedaling and damage control than anything else.
I was under the impression that very few lawyers rely heavily on Microsoft products. The law profession is (or was not so long ago) about the only place in the world where WordPerfect is alive and kicking, and I've never gotten the impression that was likely to change any time soon.
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Yeah, then it would be MapQuest... (Or what MapQuest used to be, anyway.) We don't have to imagine, we've all used it before.
And therein lies the problem with your post. To many open source developers, it is about fun. Maybe not in the strictest sense of the word, but these are people who, for the most part, are spending their own free time doing something that they want to do. Telling them that their efforts would be better spent somewhere else is far more likely to drive them off entirely than to get them to contribute work that they aren't interested in doing. You mentioned Ubuntu; Ubuntu is succeeding where others have failed because some guy with a lot of money to burn started paying people to do what he wanted to get done, not because he somehow convinced a bunch of hobby programmers that what he wanted done was more important than their hobby project.
I'm not sure I agree with that. The reason that I feel "AJAX" has died is that, even though I still hear it used semi-regularly, it has degenerated to the point that it means exactly the same thing as DHTML. To most people I talk to, (at least the ones who actually use that word) all "AJAX" means is "stuff moved around on the page", regardless of whether any server interaction ever happened. It no longer has any meaning of its own.
I was thinking more along the lines of laptops and workstation class computers- you know, computers that you might buy from Dell. (I know Dell sells servers too, but those have been available with Linux for a while). Most distributions these days come with SMP aware kernels as an option if not the default. If you're dealing with tediously specific hardware or embedded systems, you a) probably have you're own install image of whatever OS you use, so the preinstalled OS doesn't really matter, and b) probably aren't buying Dell branded computers.
That basically leaves clustering, and while you do have a point there, I would have guessed that people building clusters are typically using server class hardware, which (while I didn't specifically state it) was outside the scope of my comment. I have compiled new kernels for servers several times over the past few years, hence my qualifier of "Linux kernel" in the previous post - the servers I've been using lately are FreeBSD.
Last time I had a land line (about 2-3 years ago), my monthly bill of "$23.99" approached $40/month. And that was just for the land line. I know DSL has it's own taxes as well, but it's been a long time since I've had DSL, so I don't remember what they are. Perhaps the tax/fee structure has changed since then, or maybe AT&T is better about advertising actual prices than Quest (wouldn't surprise me, but I had similar experience with Ameritech / SBC when I lived in Chicago as well.)
Regardless, I have no intention of getting another land line any time soon. Cable Internet isn't the cheapest, but at least I feel confident that the price advertised is the price that I'm actually paying, and it means not having to deal with the local ILEC, which has never been a pleasant experience anywhere I've lived.
Yeah, my bad. Sorry. I started to second guess myself after I posted and had to go look it up. I know that "speed of sound at altitude X" (must have been 30,000 feet, because now that I think about it, 60,000 wouldn't have made much sense) used to be used as a baseline for something, because I remember an air force officer telling me when I was much younger that most planes capable of breaking the sound barrier (at the time anyway) typically flew at or above that altitude anyway. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it was anymore.
Funny, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing the word "cookie" long before I had ever heard of the Internet.
Too bad that "Ajax" didn't make the list. I'm glad that one has pretty much died by now.
Commercial aircraft aren't allowed to break the sound barrier. I imagine military planes do it quite frequently. Anyway, at the altitude that the blackbird flies at, I imagine that the sonic boom would be barely noticeable by the time it reaches the ground.
Not really. Mach is defined to be the speed of sound at a specific altitude (60,000 feet, IIRc, or maybe 30,000), and is somewhere around 660 miles per hour. So a low flying aircraft might be flying over mach 1 (~660mph), but still under the speed of sound (~710mph at sea level).
While I imagine you are right, there are companies out there that do provide tech support for Linux; Dell could outsource their Linux support to them without much difficulty, and the price difference would probably still be less the cost of a Windows license.
A decade ago that may have been a problem, but not today. I haven't recompiled a (Linux) kernel in at least 5 years, probably more.
The market hasn't lost any major vendors yet...
A lot of people seem to be getting really bent out of shape considering that all that has really happened is that a few analysts have speculated that AMD might continue doing something that it has already been doing for a while- i.e. outsourcing more of its low end chips to third party fabs.
In that case, there wouldn't be any opposition at all, since every state has at least 3 electoral votes.
You neglected to mention the $20/month in taxes, fees, and other charges that don't appear in the monthly rate...
Yeah, I get those, too... On my cell phone.
I don't have either a landline or VOIP, and I don't see a need for either. Really, if you have to have a cell phone as a "backup" in case your internet connection goes out, why not just use the cell as your regular phone and ditch your home phone entirely?
Fairness? If I drive my Corolla an average of four miles to work once a week, why should I be paying the same for street maintenance as somebody else who drives the same car 30 miles every day?
Of course, as it is now, I'm probably paying more than that hypothetical person who drives their car in to work every day. Most of the city's street maintenance budget comes from property taxes, not fuel taxes, and I payed significantly more for my house to live somewhere where my wife and I could both get to work without a car. Personally, I'd prefer to see higher fuel taxes, because short of actually tracking the number of miles people drive, it seems to be the best way to get the people who are actually using the roads to pay for them.
I take it you haven't actually seen IE7 yet? Besides, somehow or other, they've convinced people to actually use iTunes on Windows, so maybe there is hope...
"Many website developers" that I know love Firefox, because of the utter dearth of useful web development tools for IE. In my experience, it's often easier to write a site for Firefox first and then hack it to work on both IE and Firefox than it is to write the same site using only IE. If I got a new project, and was told flat out from the start, "This will only ever be used in IE, no matter what, and we couldn't care less about browser compatibility," I'd still write the site for Firefox first...
The fact that up until now, Safari has only been available on a Mac may have been a factor there. I am all for cross browser compatibility, but since (up until now) there has never been an easy way for me to test sites that I am working on in Safari, so generally I don't bother until somebody reports a bug in Safari. Now that Safari is available for Windows, I'll probably try at least as hard to make sure that my sites work in Safari as they do in IE (which isn't saying all that much, I suppose, but at least I have QA to catch IE bugs).
I suspect that in the grand scheme of things, this move is less about getting any significant number of Windows users to use Safari as their regular browser, and more about getting Web developers who may care about cross browser compatibility, but not enough to bother getting a Mac, to actually test the stuff they write against Safari. (I know that I'll fix bugs on Safari when they are reported, but I won't go out of my way to look for them while I'm developing.)
The fact that it sounds like the only way to write 3rd party apps for the iPhone is going to be to write them as Safari apps / widgets makes this seem even more likely, as it means that a working version of Safari would basically be a prerequisite for any kind of iPhone development.
I think you missed the point. If Adobe wasn't so incredibly lax on the rampant piracy of Photoshop, programs like The Gimp, and many of Photoshop's one time competitors that long ago faded into oblivion, would probably be a lot more advanced, because there would be real incentive to work on them. As it is, anyone who wants a copy of Photoshop can get it without hardly trying, and Adobe still rakes in the bucks because any significantly large company knows better than to get caught with their pants down on software licensing.
JavaScript doesn't suck, unless you expect it to act like C++/C#/Java... The problem is there there are far too few programmers who are willing to treat JavaScript as a fully fledged language in its own right, and just view it as a crippled version of whatever language they do their "real" programming in.
You are correct, but the "troll" does have a valid point. If Apple had planned all along to release an SDK, either at launch or some time later, why did they spend months saying that they would not support 3rd party application development on the iPhone? Regardless of whether they could have had an SDK ready at launch, their other statements up until this point make this look more like backpedaling and damage control than anything else.
I was under the impression that very few lawyers rely heavily on Microsoft products. The law profession is (or was not so long ago) about the only place in the world where WordPerfect is alive and kicking, and I've never gotten the impression that was likely to change any time soon.
Emacs- a solution only PHP could drive you to!