From what I've read it takes a few months to train a raw recruit to become a soldier. It takes years to train a high school graduate to write competent software. Who do you think adds more value to our country?
The poll was administered by a computer security industry consortium, and the results boil down to "the government should pay private industry to come up with better computer security" - who'd a thunk it? You don't think they would tailor the questions to get the answers they're looking for, do you?
I think you are correct that there are two camps, but I would define them differently. There are scientific/educational/industrial users that are already running multithreaded software. And there are home users that are about to get a lot of new multithreaded software.
There isn't much that can be done to improve the performance of a single-threaded CPU with current technology. Both Intel and AMD have recently announced or released dual-core chips that will start making their way into home systems. The big iron vendors have been working on this for years. In the very near future home users will notice big performance differences between newer multi-threaded apps and their older software.
The most popular game in 2030...
on
Pac-Man Turns 25
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
will be Duke Nukem Forever. Especially the fully immersive strip bar.
I think home computer use depends more on what the machine is capable of than anything else. All current major OSes are already multithreaded and many home users already have systems that are powerful enough for multitasking.
Home users now work with lots of media files that require encoding, decoding, filters, and other compute-intensive tasks. These are mostly "trivially parallelizable" computations; they perform repetitive operations on lots of discrete data. I believe many game-related operations fall into the same category. We will see more optimized software now that dual-core chips are shipping.
Home users run multiple apps simultaneously as well. They expect to use their mail, browser and office productivity tools at the same time. And they have a host of background processes running at all times; virus scanners, wizards, trojans, etc.
When I was a freshman my friend had a 386 with a 2400 baud modem; he had the fastest internet connection I knew of. It took 4 minutes to download one crappy gif. My friend kept his pRon collection on floppy disks. And yet somehow we managed to get our schoolwork done.
From my perspective it seems like students who can't even take a few basic measures to respect others on their free broadband internet connection get exactly what they deserve.
I have a particular PC that has served as my workstation, HTPC (home theater PC) and is currently a file server. I have been using Win XP Pro for all of these purposes. XP Pro is fine for workstations, but not that great for HTPCs or servers. I really needed Media Center for the HTPC and 2k3 for my server.
A PC often gets retasked during its lifetime. It would be great if you could just flip a few administrative switches and get the behavior you want. Windows will never do this because M$ makes too much money selling differentiated OSes. Linux would be good at this if anyone was willing to expend the effort to come up with these functions in just one distro (or maybe someone has?) Solaris and MacOS are both all inclusive, but they have certain functional gaps.
Whether I pay taxes to fund internet service or a monthly bill, I am still paying cash. How much cash depends on how efficient the service provider is. You can babble about the efficiency of the private sector, but the last time I checked the various telcos are pulling in billions of dollars in profit every year. That profit is money that we paid for service, and that the telcos did not spend on said service. Besides, if you don't like the public service I'm sure the telcos will be more than happy to take your money. If all these laws against public service stand we won't even have a choice.
The TV networks won't upload any content without DRM, hence its inclusion by Google. The interesting question is price.
If the networks are stupid they will assume that downloads can only cannibalize their DVD sales. This is a natural assumption. TV series on DVD appear to be a hot commodity recently. The natural resolution to this assumption is that downloads should appear months after DVD release and cost a lot.
If they are smart they will realize that they are actually competing against P2P networks. This means any revenue is better than none. If the networks release decent quality videos immediately at a relatively low cost then they have a chance against P2P alternatives.
I didn't like the way you started each level with the same fleet you finished the last level with. I ended up redoing levels I successfully completed just so I would have more ships in the next level. This may be more realistic but it makes for repetitious game play. Starting each level with a predetermined fleet means you just have to worry about finishing the level you're on.
What are the design constraints of a bridge? It generally solves a simply stated problem - get X lanes of traffic from point A to point B. And failure is not acceptable. Due to these constraints millions of dollars and years of planning and construction are available. This might be comparable to the Shuttle software discussed a few weeks ago, but not any projects I have worked on.
Consider the construction of a house, or an addition to an existing domicile. Price is a significant factor, and the customer has many arbitrary constraints (call them "aesthetics"). In many cases the customer isn't sure what they want until they see what they don't want, which requires rework. There is no official certification process for most construction trades - only specialties like electrical wiring. So it is difficult to know how good a crew is until you work with them. Many (if not most) construction projects like this run over budget or over schedule.
I think writing business software is more like building a house. The constraints are unique and vague. The workers vary in their abilities. And the customers are cheap bastards. Projects in this environment have very little chance of coming in under budget and on time.
I installed NT4 recently and it was a real bitch installing all the patches. Ironically the first one I had to install was IE6 so that Windows Update would work:)
David Benioff also wrote 25th Hour, which was an interesting movie. I guess all the geniuses here on Slashdot are too smart to bother spending 30 seconds on IMDB for more comprehensive information.
Developing games is much more glamorous than online shopping carts or B2B data transfers. I'm sure millions of corporate developers would jump into game development if they could. The supply of game developers is too large for the demand for video games. Development studios don't have to pay top dollar to attract workers. And they can't afford to anyway. Most games probably never recoup their development expenses.
Consistently good game developers do make lots of money, as they should. Aspiring game developers work for the love of the art, not the cash. Folks on the business side (marketing, accounting, legal, etc) never love their work. They get paid extra because their jobs suck and they wouldn't do it otherwise.
I think that the latest incarnation of CSS may be the "standard", but since IE is by far and away the most popular browser its method of rendering pages is actually the de facto standard.
I don't know how many times I've read this statement from other people - "I like Firefox/Mozilla, but it doesn't render my bank/news/etc site correctly so I have to use IE." Or "I would use another browser but I support IE at work." A lot of people are stuck with IE because of its poor interoperability.
Now why would MS decide to spend money on extra development effort on a project that earns no revenue in order to increase interoperability, thereby incouraging web developers to fix their web sites so that competing browsers can render them correctly? This loses them both dollars and marketshare.
Code can migrate across forks for a while, until the code base grows apart. Then features need to be implemented from scratch in each fork. This is no different from how commercial products copy each other's features - you are aware that competing commercial software systems share features? If it weren't for closed systems like Windows and MacOS where would Gnome and KDE have gotten their desktop metaphors?
Competition is important - so is cooperation. Frankly I don't see anything revolutionary in either Gnome or KDE. They are both racing to adorn a wheel invented elsewhere.
Mice and keyboards need drivers when they implement non-standard features. Since the "standards" for these devices are so low it doesn't take much to require drivers.
Mice now come with more than two buttons and a scroll wheel. My mouse has four buttons and sometimes I wish I had more. My keyboard also has a few convenience buttons that are quite handy. These features are not essential, but a few seconds saved here and there every day adds up.
Windows 9x and Windows NT "forked" in the early 90's. MS hasn't devoted serious resources to the 9x codebase since Win 98. Virtually all of their new development has been on the NT codebase for many years now.
This is important because the real problem with forks is resource contention. Suppose there are 1000 competent Windows OS developers in the world. If Windows is forked then only a fraction of these developers will work on each branch. Neither fragment will be able to accomplish as much as the entire unified team.
Gnome and KDE are an excellent example. There are active development teams working on both systems, and there are application developers that have to choose one platform or the other. Neither desktop gets the full support of the community. I don't see how half the developers are going to be more than twice as productive in order to accelerate the rate of positive change for either desktop.
PS: Are you really complaining about the layout of the Start menu? I'm surprised that you managed to successfully install Linux if you can't figure out how to fix such a basic GUI element. I stumbled onto the Classic switch pretty quickly during my first session on XP.
Games could be the most popular software on Windows, but they are irrelevant when it comes to the desktop experience. The desktop part of an OS currently provides the user with the ability to manage multiple applications and/or documents. Games violate this abstraction by taking over the entire computing interface.
Most games take ignore higher level OS functions in order to maximize performance. They use low level APIs to directly manage graphics. They also use special APIs to take advantage of hardware accelerated audio. I suspect they perform their own memory management as well. The hosting OS virtually disappears when the game is played.
Virtually every new desktop PC is going to have the equivalent of 2Ghz of CPU power, if not more. This should be the standard of comparison for any system designated for desktop use. And from what I've seen the big computer makers are getting smarter about cooling design. Many computers I've seen recently are not loud at all. Additionally after pricing out single CPU Via boards I doubt this board will be cheaper than a low end conventional CPU/MB combo.
You are claiming that a 500Mhz machine is perfectly suitable for most desktop tasks.
My first rebuttal is that a desktop CPU must be suitable for ALL desktop tasks. You may think this is just semantics, but it is important to remember that a desktop is the most powerful (if not the only) computer available for any given user. If an app won't run acceptably on a desktop then it isn't available to the user.
My second rebuttal is that some desktop apps won't run acceptably on a 500Mhz machine. Most modern games won't, and believe it or not a huge segment of the PC owning population play some games. My mom brings Photoshop to its knees on a 1Ghz CPU. I spend hours of CPU time decompressing archives, ripping music, and performing other random compute-intensive tasks that are normal tasks for others as well.
So to summarize I think very few people are going to buy a desktop that won't run some of their apps just because it is smaller and quieter than the alternatives. This makes the dual Eden board a poor choice for a desktop system.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've read it takes a few months to train a raw recruit to become a soldier. It takes years to train a high school graduate to write competent software. Who do you think adds more value to our country?
The poll was administered by a computer security industry consortium, and the results boil down to "the government should pay private industry to come up with better computer security" - who'd a thunk it? You don't think they would tailor the questions to get the answers they're looking for, do you?
Windows always gives you an option menu if you right-click-drag folders around. The default action is bolded.
I think you are correct that there are two camps, but I would define them differently. There are scientific/educational/industrial users that are already running multithreaded software. And there are home users that are about to get a lot of new multithreaded software.
There isn't much that can be done to improve the performance of a single-threaded CPU with current technology. Both Intel and AMD have recently announced or released dual-core chips that will start making their way into home systems. The big iron vendors have been working on this for years. In the very near future home users will notice big performance differences between newer multi-threaded apps and their older software.
will be Duke Nukem Forever. Especially the fully immersive strip bar.
I think home computer use depends more on what the machine is capable of than anything else. All current major OSes are already multithreaded and many home users already have systems that are powerful enough for multitasking.
Home users now work with lots of media files that require encoding, decoding, filters, and other compute-intensive tasks. These are mostly "trivially parallelizable" computations; they perform repetitive operations on lots of discrete data. I believe many game-related operations fall into the same category. We will see more optimized software now that dual-core chips are shipping.
Home users run multiple apps simultaneously as well. They expect to use their mail, browser and office productivity tools at the same time. And they have a host of background processes running at all times; virus scanners, wizards, trojans, etc.
When I was a freshman my friend had a 386 with a 2400 baud modem; he had the fastest internet connection I knew of. It took 4 minutes to download one crappy gif. My friend kept his pRon collection on floppy disks. And yet somehow we managed to get our schoolwork done.
From my perspective it seems like students who can't even take a few basic measures to respect others on their free broadband internet connection get exactly what they deserve.
I have a particular PC that has served as my workstation, HTPC (home theater PC) and is currently a file server. I have been using Win XP Pro for all of these purposes. XP Pro is fine for workstations, but not that great for HTPCs or servers. I really needed Media Center for the HTPC and 2k3 for my server.
A PC often gets retasked during its lifetime. It would be great if you could just flip a few administrative switches and get the behavior you want. Windows will never do this because M$ makes too much money selling differentiated OSes. Linux would be good at this if anyone was willing to expend the effort to come up with these functions in just one distro (or maybe someone has?) Solaris and MacOS are both all inclusive, but they have certain functional gaps.
Who actually pays for MS Office? Can't the school do what everyone else does - download it from a P2P client or borrow an install CD from work?
WTF would I want to read about the mundane details of yet another case mod? This thread is useless without pictures.
In a related story Microsoft announced that their search results "are going to be much Flakier going forward".
Whether I pay taxes to fund internet service or a monthly bill, I am still paying cash. How much cash depends on how efficient the service provider is. You can babble about the efficiency of the private sector, but the last time I checked the various telcos are pulling in billions of dollars in profit every year. That profit is money that we paid for service, and that the telcos did not spend on said service. Besides, if you don't like the public service I'm sure the telcos will be more than happy to take your money. If all these laws against public service stand we won't even have a choice.
OSX is so easy to use even a journalist can figure it out. Hence their infatuation for Apple.
The TV networks won't upload any content without DRM, hence its inclusion by Google. The interesting question is price.
If the networks are stupid they will assume that downloads can only cannibalize their DVD sales. This is a natural assumption. TV series on DVD appear to be a hot commodity recently. The natural resolution to this assumption is that downloads should appear months after DVD release and cost a lot.
If they are smart they will realize that they are actually competing against P2P networks. This means any revenue is better than none. If the networks release decent quality videos immediately at a relatively low cost then they have a chance against P2P alternatives.
I didn't like the way you started each level with the same fleet you finished the last level with. I ended up redoing levels I successfully completed just so I would have more ships in the next level. This may be more realistic but it makes for repetitious game play. Starting each level with a predetermined fleet means you just have to worry about finishing the level you're on.
What are the design constraints of a bridge? It generally solves a simply stated problem - get X lanes of traffic from point A to point B. And failure is not acceptable. Due to these constraints millions of dollars and years of planning and construction are available. This might be comparable to the Shuttle software discussed a few weeks ago, but not any projects I have worked on.
Consider the construction of a house, or an addition to an existing domicile. Price is a significant factor, and the customer has many arbitrary constraints (call them "aesthetics"). In many cases the customer isn't sure what they want until they see what they don't want, which requires rework. There is no official certification process for most construction trades - only specialties like electrical wiring. So it is difficult to know how good a crew is until you work with them. Many (if not most) construction projects like this run over budget or over schedule.
I think writing business software is more like building a house. The constraints are unique and vague. The workers vary in their abilities. And the customers are cheap bastards. Projects in this environment have very little chance of coming in under budget and on time.
I installed NT4 recently and it was a real bitch installing all the patches. Ironically the first one I had to install was IE6 so that Windows Update would work :)
David Benioff also wrote 25th Hour, which was an interesting movie. I guess all the geniuses here on Slashdot are too smart to bother spending 30 seconds on IMDB for more comprehensive information.
Developing games is much more glamorous than online shopping carts or B2B data transfers. I'm sure millions of corporate developers would jump into game development if they could. The supply of game developers is too large for the demand for video games. Development studios don't have to pay top dollar to attract workers. And they can't afford to anyway. Most games probably never recoup their development expenses.
Consistently good game developers do make lots of money, as they should. Aspiring game developers work for the love of the art, not the cash. Folks on the business side (marketing, accounting, legal, etc) never love their work. They get paid extra because their jobs suck and they wouldn't do it otherwise.
I think that the latest incarnation of CSS may be the "standard", but since IE is by far and away the most popular browser its method of rendering pages is actually the de facto standard.
I don't know how many times I've read this statement from other people - "I like Firefox/Mozilla, but it doesn't render my bank/news/etc site correctly so I have to use IE." Or "I would use another browser but I support IE at work." A lot of people are stuck with IE because of its poor interoperability.
Now why would MS decide to spend money on extra development effort on a project that earns no revenue in order to increase interoperability, thereby incouraging web developers to fix their web sites so that competing browsers can render them correctly? This loses them both dollars and marketshare.
Code can migrate across forks for a while, until the code base grows apart. Then features need to be implemented from scratch in each fork. This is no different from how commercial products copy each other's features - you are aware that competing commercial software systems share features? If it weren't for closed systems like Windows and MacOS where would Gnome and KDE have gotten their desktop metaphors?
Competition is important - so is cooperation. Frankly I don't see anything revolutionary in either Gnome or KDE. They are both racing to adorn a wheel invented elsewhere.
Mice and keyboards need drivers when they implement non-standard features. Since the "standards" for these devices are so low it doesn't take much to require drivers.
Mice now come with more than two buttons and a scroll wheel. My mouse has four buttons and sometimes I wish I had more. My keyboard also has a few convenience buttons that are quite handy. These features are not essential, but a few seconds saved here and there every day adds up.
Windows 9x and Windows NT "forked" in the early 90's. MS hasn't devoted serious resources to the 9x codebase since Win 98. Virtually all of their new development has been on the NT codebase for many years now.
This is important because the real problem with forks is resource contention. Suppose there are 1000 competent Windows OS developers in the world. If Windows is forked then only a fraction of these developers will work on each branch. Neither fragment will be able to accomplish as much as the entire unified team.
Gnome and KDE are an excellent example. There are active development teams working on both systems, and there are application developers that have to choose one platform or the other. Neither desktop gets the full support of the community. I don't see how half the developers are going to be more than twice as productive in order to accelerate the rate of positive change for either desktop.
PS: Are you really complaining about the layout of the Start menu? I'm surprised that you managed to successfully install Linux if you can't figure out how to fix such a basic GUI element. I stumbled onto the Classic switch pretty quickly during my first session on XP.
Games could be the most popular software on Windows, but they are irrelevant when it comes to the desktop experience. The desktop part of an OS currently provides the user with the ability to manage multiple applications and/or documents. Games violate this abstraction by taking over the entire computing interface.
Most games take ignore higher level OS functions in order to maximize performance. They use low level APIs to directly manage graphics. They also use special APIs to take advantage of hardware accelerated audio. I suspect they perform their own memory management as well. The hosting OS virtually disappears when the game is played.
Virtually every new desktop PC is going to have the equivalent of 2Ghz of CPU power, if not more. This should be the standard of comparison for any system designated for desktop use. And from what I've seen the big computer makers are getting smarter about cooling design. Many computers I've seen recently are not loud at all. Additionally after pricing out single CPU Via boards I doubt this board will be cheaper than a low end conventional CPU/MB combo.
You are claiming that a 500Mhz machine is perfectly suitable for most desktop tasks.
My first rebuttal is that a desktop CPU must be suitable for ALL desktop tasks. You may think this is just semantics, but it is important to remember that a desktop is the most powerful (if not the only) computer available for any given user. If an app won't run acceptably on a desktop then it isn't available to the user.
My second rebuttal is that some desktop apps won't run acceptably on a 500Mhz machine. Most modern games won't, and believe it or not a huge segment of the PC owning population play some games. My mom brings Photoshop to its knees on a 1Ghz CPU. I spend hours of CPU time decompressing archives, ripping music, and performing other random compute-intensive tasks that are normal tasks for others as well.
So to summarize I think very few people are going to buy a desktop that won't run some of their apps just because it is smaller and quieter than the alternatives. This makes the dual Eden board a poor choice for a desktop system.