Bureaucracy and penny-pinching can often override logical technical decisions that would actually result in a good product that people are willing to buy.
I have a 17" laptop with a tiny, cramped, unusable keyboard on it that was clearly designed for a much smaller laptop. There's something like 6 cm of unused area on either side of the keyboard, but every key is mashed up against every other key to save millimeters of space that don't need saving.
If any employees of Dell, HP, or Asus are reading this, print this out, walk up to your boss, and show him: You've saved maybe 50 cents per laptop by re-using the same keyboard part across every model, but I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME.
To my knowledge, no such thing exists. Nobody is willing to take my money. Maybe I'm a unique and special flower, and too small a market to bother with, but I suspect that maybe, just maybe, there might be a few people out there who, you know... type things... with their laptop keyboards.
Once some dumbass starts the race to the bottom, and every company in a market is doing the same thing, it can be hard to break of the endless cycle of shaving features or quality to under-bid the other guy. It takes vision to come up with a "revolutionary" product -- which is often blindingly obvious -- to shift the market. An example is Apple: they demonstrated that mobile phones don't need to shave cents off by using teeny-tiny screens. Customers are perfectly willing to pay $1000 for a phone that isn't made to the lowest possible spec, and they're now giving that money to Apple instead of Nokia. Remember Nokia? They're the company that used to be the biggest phone manufacturer in the world.
PC Monitors are in the same boat. When Windows 7 was announced, I got all excited about "deep colour", improved high DPI support, etc... I looked into monitors and whatnot too see if I could get a significant upgrade. Turns out that there are something like 4 or 5 models total that support 30-bit colour, none that support 36-bit, and most only at 1920x1080 or below. You can have high-resolution and deep colour, but not in combination with 120Hz or 3D. Don't even bother looking, because Displayport cables can't transmit that much data, and the only HDMI displays that go that high are all TVs.
I'm amazed they thought that making the free compiler for windows metro-only was a good idea in the first place. At least they've overturned what would have been a big self-inflicted foot wound.
Had they gone ahead with the metro-only thing, I would have predicted not just a foot wound, but a slow death from sepsis.
If you block the next generation of starving uni students from developing on your platform, they will never grow up to become the kind of developers that can fork over $500 for a Visual Studio license without having to go without food for a month. No developers means no market for your platform, and that would have been the end of Microsoft. Not immediately, sure but it would be the beginning of the end.
Toms Hardware knows exactly what they are doing, because their experience precisely matches mine, and I've been a Windows developer since 3.1, so I think by now I've learned how to use the operating system.
There is no way to make Metro usable for a power user. If you find it better than the current UI in Windows 7, then I'm sorry, but you're just not a power user. Yes, you heard me right, you're just not. You're not like me, the kind of person that runs five virtual machines at once, with ten RDP sessions open, Visual Studio in the background, and fifty tabs across three browsers. You're just a consumer -- a casual user.
The first thing I did was install the Remote Server Admin Tools for Windows Server 8, so I can see what new admin features there. The problem is that the icons are mostly the same, and the dumbass fixed-size tile design doesn't provide enough room for the text. The result looks like an endless array of tiles that say things like:
[ICON] Active Director... [ICON] Active Director... [ICON] Active Director... [ICON] Active Director...
Guess which one was actually "Active Directory Sites and Services"! It's idiotic beyond belief, isn't it?
And don't you dare tell me about the "search" keyboard shortcuts, which can only possibly help users that have memorized the precise spelling of the distinguishing part of the text of each and every shortcut in the Start Menu. Tell me, right now, quickly and from memory, what keyword would you use to find the shortcut in the start menu for the Active Directory integrated Certificate Authority configuration admin console . Hint: It doesn't contain "Active", "Directory", "Certificate", or "Authority". Looking for "Acrobat Reader" by typing "Acro" in the search box? Bzzt! It's now called "Adobe Reader". Try again.
You paid Microsoft shills can go fuck off. I like Windows, I do. I run it on my laptop, I install it on servers for a living, and I write software for it. Despite this, it's obvious to me that Metro is an objectively, demonstrably bad user interface for a PC. If you disagree, post with a user account that's been around for more than a week, and try to use, you know... facts, like the screenshots in the Toms Hardware article.
It's a form of group think, like religion or certain aspects of politics. There have been great studies done that show that once someone has "bought into" an idea to a sufficient degree, evidence to the contrary actually re-affirms their belief instead of causing them to reconsider their position. Just imagine someone who is proud of successfully holding onto their cherished beliefs despite the constant assaults by nay-sayers.
The whole Metro thing is like this. Some twit of a manager came up with the concept without really thinking it through, then rammed it down the throats of everyone else at Microsoft. Internally this is easy -- most people just say 'yes' to whatever their boss tells them to do. I bet that there were a few engineers that disagreed vocally, but they were likely ignored, something managers are naturally good at doing.
Now it's too late. They're committed, and can't go back without losing face. It doesn't matter how logical the argument is against Metro, it can't possibly change their plans now, so the only thing they can do is ignore criticism, or pretend that it's somehow invalid. I bet their sales people have been talking a lot about "future direction", even though it is rather obvious to everyone that desktop PCs aren't magically going to morph into 10-inch tablets in the next nine months... or ever. Their vision has become so myopic that they even applied Metro to the server editions of Windows! I installed Windows Server 8 Datacenter Core, and the first thing I noted was an animated pop-up that said something like "tap here for more details". Ugh...
Meanwhile, the WinRT APIs, UI changes, and other associated work has sucked up all of their developer time, so there's very little new in either Windows 8 or Visual Studio, despite huge gaping holes in their feature sets. You're not going to see C99 support, and their C++11 support is a joke. Essentially, the only new features that were added were those that could be implemented by changing the standard library, not the compiler itself. WPF performance is still shit. Instead of expanding the.NET Framework, with WinRT it seems to be actually shrinking.
The only compelling new feature that I can see in Visual Studio 2012 for me is the "async" stuff, but even that seems half-baked. For example, limiting the concurrency of tasks is not straight forward. Java has had an elegant concurrency library for a decade now where this and related problems are easily handled, but Microsoft still doesn't get it. You can't just throw 10,000 asynchronous tasks at a disk, because it'll go crazy from all the seeking. You can't queue up 10,000 tasks with significant data, because your program will run out of memory. Look at the examples on the MSDN site for "async" programming. How many of the examples explicitly set some sort of maximum pending task queue length? I've found only two out of hundreds, and both required the use of semaphores or similar low-level thread programming.
I found a "DPC ping" tool which queues a simple Kernel task from User mode, and measures the response time as if it was an actual network ping.
I found it interesting that it was well correlated with both ping times and tested network throughput, and that the DPC ping time wasn't consistent. Some fast CPUs had terrible DPC pings, and some older slower models were much faster. The operating system also contributes significantly, I found some combinations where the average was OK, but there were regular spikes of high latency.
Now that I've done more benchmarks across more sites, I've been recommending jumbo frames much more often. Previously I though it was a nice-to-have, but these days I'm starting to be of the opinion that without it the money spent on "10 GbE to the server" is just wasted.
Even if a lot of research has been put into reducing the latencies of switching technology, the vast majority of real-world deployments are nowhere near where they should be. The result is corporations spending millions upgrading their core switching, and then the result is the same or worse than what they had with ordinary gigabit technology.
I've been to more than half a dozen sites recently with new installations of 10 GbE, but with terrible network performance. All too often, I'm seeing latencies as high as 1.3 milliseconds even for servers on the same switch. Read up on bandwidth-delay product too get an idea of why this would severely nerf throughput. The odd thing is that at a number of these sites, older servers with 1 GbE connected to the same switching infrastructure get 100% of wire speed without issues.
I don't know exactly what the root cause is, but I'm starting to suspect that the extra latency is coming from somewhere that network engineers don't usually test, like CPU power management taking an excessively long time to wake up a core to respond to a packet. What I think happens is something like this: - The fast network delivers a burst of data very quickly. - The receiver CPU starts to slowly wake up from sleep mode, while the sender is waiting for an ACK packet, because it has finished sending an entire TCP window. - The sender CPU goes to sleep, because it still has nothing to do. - The receiver CPU finally gets around to the packet, which it processes quickly and efficiently, sending the ACK back. - The receiver OS sees that the CPU is "0.1%" busy, has nothing to do now, so it sends it to back to sleep. - The sender CPU starts to slowly wake up, while the receiver is also asleep, waiting patiently for more data. - The cycle repeats, with more waiting at every step.
With slightly slower networks or CPUs, the CPUs never get a chance to be idle long enough to enter a sleep state, so everything is always ready for more data. I've seen 3x improvements in iPerf TCP throughput by simply running a busy-loop in a background process!
Other than the Oracle-owned btrfs, what ZFS alternatives are available and ready for use today?
The only serious filesystem with similar features (B-Trees everywhere, hashing for integrity, etc...) that I know of is Microsoft ReFS. It's still beta, and will be missing key features of even NTFS when released, so it won't exactly match up to a mature filesytem like ZFS.
Sure, except that then you can no longer migrate your VMs around, because they are tied to a specific PCI-e device.
You will also have to install vendor-specific network card drivers, somewhat reducing the "hardware independent" nature of virtualization, which is a big benefit in a lot of cases. For example, many virtual appliances come only with hypervisor drivers, and can't have additional drivers installed using a "supported" method.
On top of that, most cards capable of some sort of pass-through have limits to the number of connected VMs, often as low as eight VMs per NIC or somesuch. I've seen hypervisors run 300 small VMs, all of which needed low-latency networking. Think virtual desktops running a latency-sensitive application.
I recently worked on a system that had SR-IOV Intel cards, set up correctly and everything, and the performance was atrocious. I couldn't get pings below 800 microseconds! I searched for the NIC model name in various forums, and there were literally hundreds of posts complaining about poor performance, intermittent slowness, latency spikes, you name it.
Hardware pass-through in virtualization is very new, and very rough around the edges. You might get lucky, or you might not.
A lot of these are under the hood, and not very obvious to non-technical users, but they're there. Improved security is a big plus for corporations. For me personally, the most noticeable improvement is the new networking stack, which can get 100% of Ethernet wire speed in more circumstances, especially high-latency but high-bandwidth broadband links. Windows XP cannot ever get 100% of 1Gbps once the latency is on the order of one millisecond, or 100% of 100MBps with 10ms, etc...
Strange and funny. I have heard many people complain about their old software not working on the recent windows versions, but I've heard absolutely no one complaining about software not running on XP.
Selection bias.
They're only running software that works on XP because -- duh -- they can't run software on XP that doesn't run on XP!
There's software now that doesn't run on XP but does run on Windows 7, but -- of course -- nobody with an XP desktop would have that software running on their desktop.
Some things run on both, but run better on Windows 7. Some newer games make good use of the multi-threaded graphics APIs, and can fully utilize multiple cores, boosting performance. I saw some games double their average frame rate after upgrading to Windows 7.
There are a few "workloads" that just don't like to be virtualized for one reason or another.
Active Directory Domain Controllers -- these work better now under hypervisors, but older versions had a wonderful error message when starting up from a snapshot rollback: "Recovered using an unsupported method", which then resulted in a dead DC that would refuse to do anything until it was restored from a "supported" backup, usually tape. I used to put big "DO NOT SNAPSHOT" warnings on DCs, or even block snapshots with ACLs.
Time-rollback -- Some applications just can't take even a small roll-back in the system clock very well. These have problems when moved from host-to-host with a technology like vMotion. It's usually a coding error, where the system clock is used to "order" transactions, instead of using an incrementing transaction ID counter.
DRM -- lots of apps use hardware-integrated copy protection, like dongles. Some of them can be "made to work" using hardware pass-through, but then you lose the biggest virtualization benefit of being able to migrate VMs around during the day without outages.
Network Latency -- this is a "last but certainly not least". Some badly written applications are very sensitive to network latency because of the use of excessively chatty protocols. Examples are TFTP, reading SQL data row-by-row using cursors, or badly designed RPC protocols that enumerate big lists one item at a time over the wire. Most hypervisors add something like 20-100 microseconds for every packet, and then there are the overheads of context switches, cache thrashing, etc... You can end up with the application performance plummeting, despite faster CPUs and more RAM. I had one case where an application went from taking about an hour to run a report to something like five hours. The arithmetic is simple: Every microsecond of additional latency adds a full second of time per million network round-trips. I've seen applications that do ten billion round-trips to complete a process!
You're confusing a proposed solution to the problem, the Kyoto Protocol, with the existence of the problem in the first place.
I don't doubt that many (most?) of the solutions are guaranteed to be failures. Either they are too little too late, or just don't make economic or even physical sense. Carbon capture for example is a hilarious joke being played by energy companies on a general population that is too uneducated to realize that CO2 isn't some trace pollutant in the smoke produced by the burning of fossil fuels.
What I'm talking about are people who doubt that man is causing or can cause climate change. You hear every excuse: "but the Earth is so big", "it's just natural variation", "it's just just sun cycles". They behave as if they think that climatologists who have dedicated their entire lives to this problem haven't accounted for the most trivial aspects of their field. Can you imagine a field of science where its researches ignore the scale, mathematics, and primary inputs into a problem entirely? No, of course not, that's just stupid. Doesn't stop people believing things like that though, because to do otherwise would make them feel terribly guilty about the five ton truck they just purchased to drive down to the shops they could have walked to...
If you want to understand the mindset of people who don't understand evolution, look no further than the anti global warming crowd, which makes up a surprisingly large subset of the Slashdot community.
You might even be one of them.
It's exactly the same kind of mentality. People really don't want to believe in global warming, because they know full well that if it's true, then they are a) fucked, and if they are American, then b) it's probably mostly their fault. It's so much easier to just latch onto some soundbite from a shill on TV paid by an energy company than to... urgh... study the science. It's a choice between an unpleasant effort to find out something negative about themselves, versus zero effort to stay blissfully ignorant. You can tell that some less-bright people actually love it. They can smugly throw memorized quotes at their better educated peers like "It's just a sun cycle, didn't you know!". For once in their lives, they feel superior, like they know something those geeky eggheads don't. It's a good feeling, and the man in the expensive suit on TV agrees!
Religion and evolution is the same type of thinking. They don't want to know anything about evolution, because it directly discredits their holy book, starting with page one of chapter one! This is a book that gives them the same comfortable feeling of smug superiority over those "blasphemers" that unfortunately can no longer be stoned to death legally. Theists believe that they're the chosen people: the blessed ones that will get to go to heaven. Why on earth would they ever go out of their way and learn something about the science of evolution, when the only two possible results of that are that: a) they were right all along and now they've just wasted a bunch of their time learning about this filthy secular science stuff they hated so much when they were in school, or b) they were wrong all along and their entire life was based on a bunch of bullshit, and hence they aren't the special chosen people, and won't get to go to heaven.
This isn't a question of fossils, or DNA, or charts of CO2 absorption spectra. The same people will believe scientific evidence on other topics just fine. The problem is that to trying to convince these people of global warming or evolution is also in effect an attempt to convince them that they're bad people. This is an entirely different ball game, and is essentially insurmountable until their belief in the scientific truth will no longer have this effect on their self-perception.
Global warming will be popularly accepted after fossils fuels run out -- nobody will have a vested interest either way at that point, and the evidence will be lapping at their ankles. I suspect that even if several American cities are reclaimed by the rising waters, that still won't be enough to convince some people if fossil fuels are available and cheap at the time.
Evolution will be accepted after Abrahamic religions die out, or adapt and change to the point of unrecognizability -- we've had overwhelming evidence for evolution for what, 150 years? Has that been enough? Not even close. We've had germ theory for less than that, and everybody believes it. The atomic theory of matter is even more recent, but good luck finding an educated disbeliever. No, you'll find that evolution is special, because it contradicts the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an. It won't be commonly believed until the common people no longer have faith in something that contradicts it.
Why are there people living in the coldest parts of Siberia when they could move to the tropics? Why do people live on Pitcairn Island thousands of kilometers from civilization?
Because you can make a reasonable life for yourself in those places with nothing but stone, wood, and animal pelts, all of which are available in abundance.
Even so, I've seen many documentaries with interviews of people in those places complaining that the younger generation is moving to the cities, and abandoning their "cultural heritage", which is basically a hard life in a frozen hellhole.
Not everybody wants it comfortable... they're really just waiting for a space base mission to ask.
Fine, they can fund their own trip. Don't expect taxpayers to pick up the bill so that someone's else can wallow in their masochism. Good look scraping together enough crazy people to fund a ten trillion dollar Moon base.
As long as we send the right people they will thrive because it's the challenge and the difficulty of surviving that drives them.
There are difficult problems here, and those people would be most valuable here, not on some rock a light second away.
Well for one we'd have to make a really sustainable, closed ecosystem based on renewable energy.
No actually all that useful on Earth. Small ecosystems aren't what we have here. Renewable energy is easy, there's no need to actually go to the Moon to do that. Spend the money here for hundred-fold savings, and skip the sight-seeing tour.
A lot of that would probably have spin-offs
Still with the 99% waste. How do you not get this? Any spin-offs would be exactly the same as ordinary research done on Earth... except with the added multi-trillion dollar expense of sending some people to die on the Moon. Why would we do that? Why not just do the research directly?
each added person adds more self-sufficiency than cost
Every realistic estimate I've heard started at the tens of trillions of dollars before a colony could get to that point. Those were the more optimistic estimates. The pessimists start near the hundred trillion dollar mark.
Now ask yourself this: then what?
You've got a colony out there that no longer needs Earth, doesn't send us anything back except pictures, and won't want any more immigrants because it puts a strain on their environmental systems. Even if we could send more people, this won't solve anything (e.g.: overpopulation), because the cost of sending a person will likely exceed their lifetime earning potential.
You won't be able to afford to go there for a holiday. They won't have any exports with a sufficiently high value to justify the expense of sending it. They won't have any specially privileged insight into mathematics, or art, or computer programming, so any intellectual property they produce won't be all that special either.
Nobody here on Earth will gain anything even remotely worth the dollars spent basically by definition, because only the people on the Moon will be benefiting from 99% of the funds. They will be a tiny, tiny number of people, and you won't be one of them.
The Russians, Chinese, and Japanese are just talking about it, which is cheap. Practically free. Doing it is another matter.
Why would any government want to set up a trillion dollar base on what amounts to a lifeless rock in the middle of nowhere? Because you watched too much Star Trek as a kid, and want it really badly to be true?
We wouldn't get anything out of it, except things we could have gotten for a tiny fraction of the cost here on Earth! Spin-off technologies? That's like saying we should burn huge piles of money to stay warm in the winter. It's bureaucratic buzzword talk for "only 99% wasteful!".
If you think isolated cold rocks in a hard vacuum are so fantastic, why don't you move to Bouvet Island for the rest of your life? You can set yourself up a nice vacuum chamber there, sprinkle some radioactive isotopes around it to simulate the harsh radiation of outer space, and you have yourself a perfectly adequate simulation of life on the moon. For extra credit, take drugs that cause osteoporosis, and do all work outside the habitat in scuba gear. Make sure to carry your water, food and oxygen with you too -- no cheating! You're allowed supplies from the outside, except that you have to give $1000 to charity for each pound imported to the island.
Does that sound like something you want to do for the rest of your life? Would you want your family to live there like that, away from friends, family, and an "outside" that won't kill you in seconds? What would you do with your time there? Break rocks?
If you can't think of a good reason to move to Bouvet Island, then you don't have a good reason to live on the Moon either, which is a worse place to live, further away, and more expensive to get to.
The previous 500 articles about evidence of water on Mars just weren't sufficient to drive the point home. Anyone could have missed these articles that are posted. Every. Bloody. Month.
I suspect NASA has a PR department dedicated to nothing else other than churning out press releases about discoveries of water on Mars, and for some strange reason, every one of them must be reposted on Slashdot by some OCD person.
You think I'm exaggerating? Check this out! A search for "water" and "mars" restricted to the "nasa.gov" site yields over 842,000 hits. That PR department has been busy!
I can't wait for the MSL rover to arrive this August so that we can read even more fascinating press releases about hints of water on Mars.
Why don't you like my hammer? Can't you see how shiny it is? Every working man is getting one, clearly it is the tool of the future! You're just preducided against hammers because you don't appreciate how flexible and intuitive it is. It's so ergonomic, it fits the human hand so perfectly! Feel the weight of it, the balance. Don't you want one too? I bet you secretly do.
Sure, some people might insist that those old-style hydraulic drop hammers gets more hammering done, but they're so... loud... and heavy. Not all portable, or shiny. Who would want to use something like that? You clearly don't understand the manifest benefits of a light-weight, hand-held, ergonomic implement that anyone can use! So pretty to look at too -- you can see that mine is chrome plated and comes with a doe-skin suede hip holster. It's the latest style. You'll love it, trust me.
The market has clearly spoken: more people are purchasing shiny hand-held hammers than heavy and dull hydraulic drop hammers. You're just slow to get with the times. It's time for you to join the rest of us in the future.
It's not just the tariffs or the taxes. How do you explain that even cars made locally in Australia cost more than the same model in New Zealand? They have shipping costs, taxes, and tariffs too, yet a locally made car somehow costs more here!
I just found an informative page for importing a car into Australia. It has a worked example for importing a car worth $56K into Australia. The total payable tax plus tariffs is $11.5K. Doesn't exactly account for a BMW going from $60K to over $130K, does it? Where the hell did the other $60K increase in the price come from?
I once worked as an IT contractor for a car importer that had an exclusive deal with a manufacturer to import cars into Australia. I asked one of their senior staffers why cars were more expensive in Australia. He basically admitted that all of the importers jack up the price because they have an effective monopoly position (for their brands), and can get away with it. There's a sort of gentleman's agreement between them to maintain this status quo and not compete on price. This works because importers often import several brands, so there's only a few of them catering for the entire market. It's not the taxes, the shipping, the retailers, or the manufacturer. Nameless middle-men obtain exclusive rights to import, and then milk the market for everything that they can.
It's blatantly obvious if you know what to look for. For example, I wanted to get a nice sporty car, like the Nissan GT-R. Here in Australia, it's over double the cost of what it is in Japan or in the US. I worked out all the taxes, and it still didn't explain most of the difference. I looked into importing one direct from Japan -- I'd still have to pay all of the Australian taxes and tariffs and pay an additinal overhead for organising the whole thing, but the end result would still about 30-40% cheaper. However, it turns out that I wouldn't be be able to get my imported car serviced! The "official" importer also controls all of the parts and servicing, and they'll refuse to do business with you if you own a "grey" import. You can have it serviced elsewhere, but with a small-volume model like the GT-R, it's a risk. Compare that to, say, buying an iPad in America. Apple will repair it for you in Australia happily.
There's no way to do the equivalent in America because the market is too big, there's too many importers, and hence there's enough competition to prevent a successful collusion from forming.
This is why I don't buy anything except food and clothes from local retailers any more. I get all my gadgets and software online. Lots of other Australians shop online from overseas too. It's probably harming our local businesses, but fuck them and their greedy price gouging.
It's about time the ACCC started investigating this. First software, then I hope they look into cars next...
Sure, programmers are only human, and I know exactly what you're talking about.
I do the same thing when I work on toy projects at home for fun. Who cares if it leaks a bit of memory or doesn't sanitize inputs, I want to have fun!
On the other hand, at work, I usually self-impose a "two bug maximum". If I exceed two open issues, I stop adding features until the bugs are fixed. It's the only way to stop bugs accumulating or even becoming "features" that can't be easily found or removed. Pretty soon you are forced to become a "defensive coder" because it's the only way to make forward progress. It's much like being a good defensive driver is not just about reacting to accidents better, it's about avoiding risky situations in the first place. You learn the value of safe patterns like "auto_ptr" and its brethren just like you learn to keep a safe following distance on the road.
It's obvious that the Skyrim developers -- or their managers -- don't have this kind of discipline, because the game was chock full of blindingly obvious and visible bugs right from the start. Really ugly issues like Z-fighting (causes flickering), animation problems, horrible problems with shadows, etc... All of this stuff is clearly visible, happens all the time, and can be fixed without too much difficulty. I assumed they'd fix the issues in a patch or something, but from what I've heard, these are all consistent problems that have stayed in the engine for several entire games now, including their support cycles! That's just atrocious...
Back around 2000, I had a Sony Trinitron 21" monitor, a Sony MP3 player, a Sony digital camera, and a Sony HiFi system. Back then, Sony was the best within a reasonable consumer price range. Then LCD monitors came along, and I got a 24" Dell and chucked the Trinitron. Sony was making LCDs too, but Dell was selling the biggest consumer monitors by far, and for several thousand cheaper too than anyone else. The "MP3" player actually required every track to be transcoded into some proprietary format, and was replaced with a generic Taiwanese-made player that cost a digit less and stored ten times more on a generic flash card that cost 1/3rd as much per megabyte as a memory stick. The camera was replaced with a model that had interchangeable lenses and compact flash, because most Sony digital cameras (up until recently) had a single fixed lens and didn't take anything other than memory sticks. I was using the HiFi amp until recently, when I discovered that even though I was using it with only digital inputs, the output has a lot more noise than the headphone jack on the motherboard of my PC, fed by a built-in sound "card" that's probably a single chip that cost $2.
You watch, the same thing is going to happen to Apple too. Oh sure, they're making the best stuff now, but they'll go down the same way in a decade or so. Sure, an iPad is the best tablet on the market at the moment, but in a couple of years Asus or Samsung or whoever will be making something with twice the spec, half the price, and it won't be limited to Apple(r) Approved Quicktime Data Formats(tm) only.
Lots of things don't work on Windows XP. Just off the top of my head I can think of:
* Windows 2008 R2 RSAT Tools -- you can RDP to a server instead, but that's not always possible or recommended. * PowerShell Active Directory module -- very handy, but doesn't work on XP at all. * You mentioned DX11 * Internet Explorer 9 or later * Location APIs for HTML5 apps * Proper IPv6 support (XP has some experimental support, but in practice it's not very usable) * Any 64-bit only software like the SharePoint 2010 design tools -- I know there's a 64-bit XP edition, I used to use it myself, but few others did, and support for it by hardware vendors was never good and even less these days.
Sure, these are all small things, but they add up. To get an XP machine to "work" you need about a bazillion hotfixes, add-ons, extras, drivers, and even some scripts. On top of that, these days it's getting hard to buy a machine with "only" 4GB of memory, but that's the most XP supports, unless you're a masochist and want to run an unsupported decade-old 64-bit OS instead of just going straight to Windows 7 64-bit like a normal person.
Sure, its leg might not be broken, but it's limping pretty badly.
Your counter-example to my point uses an XML-based declarative UI file format with a strict validating schema.
I'm not sure what you mean by Interface Builder you mean the Apple tool, which uses.NIB or XIB files. Those formats are -- if anything -- closer to XAML than even the QT format, as they contain XML representations of the GUI document object model.
As far as I can see, neither format supports imperative concepts such as loops or other control flow.
That's a perfectly valid question, and the answer is not obvious at first.
When you come from a programming background, you have a very powerful hammer, and everything ends up looking like a nail, including GUIs. The problem with this approach is that you can never have either a non-programmer or a GUI tool help design your user interface. For trivial applications this isn't a problem, but it quickly becomes limiting on larger projects.
Microsoft had an interesting hack to make GUI design work with imperative languages -- split class files. One file would contain only a strict subset of the imperative language that the GUI designer could handle, the other matching file would contain the real code. This solution was fragile and would often result in the designer failing to open. This was already half way there to a declerative domain specific language, because the subset of the imperative language that the designer coud parse forbade any control flow. I first had the "lightbulb" moment when I saw Microsoft's next-gen XAML designers, where they basically formalized the GUI language into an explicitly declerative document format with a strict grammar. It allowed more complex GUI designs with well defined parsers, object models, design-time appearance, etc... All the problems just vanished.
This is by no means a Microsoft invention, declerative visual languages have always been more successful, flexible, and interoperable. A case in point is HTML, which is a purely declerative language, which has lots of advantages that has contributed to its success. Try putting yourself into the shoes of a search engine developer and imagine if instead of declerative SGML-derived pages, you had index imperative PostScript? Not just any old automatically generated PostScript intended for printing, but developer authored PostScript with as much complexity as a typical JavaScript library! How would you go about writing a designer for a language like that? You'd start by restricting the problem to some strict subset...
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Bureaucracy and penny-pinching can often override logical technical decisions that would actually result in a good product that people are willing to buy.
I have a 17" laptop with a tiny, cramped, unusable keyboard on it that was clearly designed for a much smaller laptop. There's something like 6 cm of unused area on either side of the keyboard, but every key is mashed up against every other key to save millimeters of space that don't need saving.
If any employees of Dell, HP, or Asus are reading this, print this out, walk up to your boss, and show him: You've saved maybe 50 cents per laptop by re-using the same keyboard part across every model, but I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME.
To my knowledge, no such thing exists. Nobody is willing to take my money. Maybe I'm a unique and special flower, and too small a market to bother with, but I suspect that maybe, just maybe, there might be a few people out there who, you know... type things... with their laptop keyboards.
Once some dumbass starts the race to the bottom, and every company in a market is doing the same thing, it can be hard to break of the endless cycle of shaving features or quality to under-bid the other guy. It takes vision to come up with a "revolutionary" product -- which is often blindingly obvious -- to shift the market. An example is Apple: they demonstrated that mobile phones don't need to shave cents off by using teeny-tiny screens. Customers are perfectly willing to pay $1000 for a phone that isn't made to the lowest possible spec, and they're now giving that money to Apple instead of Nokia. Remember Nokia? They're the company that used to be the biggest phone manufacturer in the world.
PC Monitors are in the same boat. When Windows 7 was announced, I got all excited about "deep colour", improved high DPI support, etc... I looked into monitors and whatnot too see if I could get a significant upgrade. Turns out that there are something like 4 or 5 models total that support 30-bit colour, none that support 36-bit, and most only at 1920x1080 or below. You can have high-resolution and deep colour, but not in combination with 120Hz or 3D. Don't even bother looking, because Displayport cables can't transmit that much data, and the only HDMI displays that go that high are all TVs.
I'm amazed they thought that making the free compiler for windows metro-only was a good idea in the first place. At least they've overturned what would have been a big self-inflicted foot wound.
Had they gone ahead with the metro-only thing, I would have predicted not just a foot wound, but a slow death from sepsis.
If you block the next generation of starving uni students from developing on your platform, they will never grow up to become the kind of developers that can fork over $500 for a Visual Studio license without having to go without food for a month. No developers means no market for your platform, and that would have been the end of Microsoft. Not immediately, sure but it would be the beginning of the end.
Toms Hardware knows exactly what they are doing, because their experience precisely matches mine, and I've been a Windows developer since 3.1, so I think by now I've learned how to use the operating system.
There is no way to make Metro usable for a power user. If you find it better than the current UI in Windows 7, then I'm sorry, but you're just not a power user. Yes, you heard me right, you're just not. You're not like me, the kind of person that runs five virtual machines at once, with ten RDP sessions open, Visual Studio in the background, and fifty tabs across three browsers. You're just a consumer -- a casual user.
The first thing I did was install the Remote Server Admin Tools for Windows Server 8, so I can see what new admin features there. The problem is that the icons are mostly the same, and the dumbass fixed-size tile design doesn't provide enough room for the text. The result looks like an endless array of tiles that say things like:
[ICON] Active Director...
[ICON] Active Director...
[ICON] Active Director...
[ICON] Active Director...
Guess which one was actually "Active Directory Sites and Services"! It's idiotic beyond belief, isn't it?
And don't you dare tell me about the "search" keyboard shortcuts, which can only possibly help users that have memorized the precise spelling of the distinguishing part of the text of each and every shortcut in the Start Menu. Tell me, right now, quickly and from memory, what keyword would you use to find the shortcut in the start menu for the Active Directory integrated Certificate Authority configuration admin console . Hint: It doesn't contain "Active", "Directory", "Certificate", or "Authority". Looking for "Acrobat Reader" by typing "Acro" in the search box? Bzzt! It's now called "Adobe Reader". Try again.
You paid Microsoft shills can go fuck off. I like Windows, I do. I run it on my laptop, I install it on servers for a living, and I write software for it. Despite this, it's obvious to me that Metro is an objectively, demonstrably bad user interface for a PC. If you disagree, post with a user account that's been around for more than a week, and try to use, you know... facts, like the screenshots in the Toms Hardware article.
It's a form of group think, like religion or certain aspects of politics. There have been great studies done that show that once someone has "bought into" an idea to a sufficient degree, evidence to the contrary actually re-affirms their belief instead of causing them to reconsider their position. Just imagine someone who is proud of successfully holding onto their cherished beliefs despite the constant assaults by nay-sayers.
The whole Metro thing is like this. Some twit of a manager came up with the concept without really thinking it through, then rammed it down the throats of everyone else at Microsoft. Internally this is easy -- most people just say 'yes' to whatever their boss tells them to do. I bet that there were a few engineers that disagreed vocally, but they were likely ignored, something managers are naturally good at doing.
Now it's too late. They're committed, and can't go back without losing face. It doesn't matter how logical the argument is against Metro, it can't possibly change their plans now, so the only thing they can do is ignore criticism, or pretend that it's somehow invalid. I bet their sales people have been talking a lot about "future direction", even though it is rather obvious to everyone that desktop PCs aren't magically going to morph into 10-inch tablets in the next nine months... or ever. Their vision has become so myopic that they even applied Metro to the server editions of Windows! I installed Windows Server 8 Datacenter Core, and the first thing I noted was an animated pop-up that said something like "tap here for more details". Ugh...
Meanwhile, the WinRT APIs, UI changes, and other associated work has sucked up all of their developer time, so there's very little new in either Windows 8 or Visual Studio, despite huge gaping holes in their feature sets. You're not going to see C99 support, and their C++11 support is a joke. Essentially, the only new features that were added were those that could be implemented by changing the standard library, not the compiler itself. WPF performance is still shit. Instead of expanding the .NET Framework, with WinRT it seems to be actually shrinking.
The only compelling new feature that I can see in Visual Studio 2012 for me is the "async" stuff, but even that seems half-baked. For example, limiting the concurrency of tasks is not straight forward. Java has had an elegant concurrency library for a decade now where this and related problems are easily handled, but Microsoft still doesn't get it. You can't just throw 10,000 asynchronous tasks at a disk, because it'll go crazy from all the seeking. You can't queue up 10,000 tasks with significant data, because your program will run out of memory. Look at the examples on the MSDN site for "async" programming. How many of the examples explicitly set some sort of maximum pending task queue length? I've found only two out of hundreds, and both required the use of semaphores or similar low-level thread programming.
That's similar to what I'm seeing.
I found a "DPC ping" tool which queues a simple Kernel task from User mode, and measures the response time as if it was an actual network ping.
I found it interesting that it was well correlated with both ping times and tested network throughput, and that the DPC ping time wasn't consistent. Some fast CPUs had terrible DPC pings, and some older slower models were much faster. The operating system also contributes significantly, I found some combinations where the average was OK, but there were regular spikes of high latency.
Now that I've done more benchmarks across more sites, I've been recommending jumbo frames much more often. Previously I though it was a nice-to-have, but these days I'm starting to be of the opinion that without it the money spent on "10 GbE to the server" is just wasted.
Even if a lot of research has been put into reducing the latencies of switching technology, the vast majority of real-world deployments are nowhere near where they should be. The result is corporations spending millions upgrading their core switching, and then the result is the same or worse than what they had with ordinary gigabit technology.
I've been to more than half a dozen sites recently with new installations of 10 GbE, but with terrible network performance. All too often, I'm seeing latencies as high as 1.3 milliseconds even for servers on the same switch. Read up on bandwidth-delay product too get an idea of why this would severely nerf throughput. The odd thing is that at a number of these sites, older servers with 1 GbE connected to the same switching infrastructure get 100% of wire speed without issues.
I don't know exactly what the root cause is, but I'm starting to suspect that the extra latency is coming from somewhere that network engineers don't usually test, like CPU power management taking an excessively long time to wake up a core to respond to a packet. What I think happens is something like this:
- The fast network delivers a burst of data very quickly.
- The receiver CPU starts to slowly wake up from sleep mode, while the sender is waiting for an ACK packet, because it has finished sending an entire TCP window.
- The sender CPU goes to sleep, because it still has nothing to do.
- The receiver CPU finally gets around to the packet, which it processes quickly and efficiently, sending the ACK back.
- The receiver OS sees that the CPU is "0.1%" busy, has nothing to do now, so it sends it to back to sleep.
- The sender CPU starts to slowly wake up, while the receiver is also asleep, waiting patiently for more data.
- The cycle repeats, with more waiting at every step.
With slightly slower networks or CPUs, the CPUs never get a chance to be idle long enough to enter a sleep state, so everything is always ready for more data. I've seen 3x improvements in iPerf TCP throughput by simply running a busy-loop in a background process!
Other than the Oracle-owned btrfs, what ZFS alternatives are available and ready for use today?
The only serious filesystem with similar features (B-Trees everywhere, hashing for integrity, etc...) that I know of is Microsoft ReFS. It's still beta, and will be missing key features of even NTFS when released, so it won't exactly match up to a mature filesytem like ZFS.
If the article heading is a question, then the answer is automatically...
NO.
Submit articles with real reporting please, the type that presents facts, instead of asking questions.
Sure, except that then you can no longer migrate your VMs around, because they are tied to a specific PCI-e device.
You will also have to install vendor-specific network card drivers, somewhat reducing the "hardware independent" nature of virtualization, which is a big benefit in a lot of cases. For example, many virtual appliances come only with hypervisor drivers, and can't have additional drivers installed using a "supported" method.
On top of that, most cards capable of some sort of pass-through have limits to the number of connected VMs, often as low as eight VMs per NIC or somesuch. I've seen hypervisors run 300 small VMs, all of which needed low-latency networking. Think virtual desktops running a latency-sensitive application.
I recently worked on a system that had SR-IOV Intel cards, set up correctly and everything, and the performance was atrocious. I couldn't get pings below 800 microseconds! I searched for the NIC model name in various forums, and there were literally hundreds of posts complaining about poor performance, intermittent slowness, latency spikes, you name it.
Hardware pass-through in virtualization is very new, and very rough around the edges. You might get lucky, or you might not.
What are the "1000 other modern abilities" that you seem to think are provided by Windows beyond NT/2000/XP?
The OP was exaggerating, but Wikipedia keeps a fairly comprehensive list of improvements, some of which are quite substantial:
Features new to Windows 7
Features new to Windows Vista
A lot of these are under the hood, and not very obvious to non-technical users, but they're there. Improved security is a big plus for corporations. For me personally, the most noticeable improvement is the new networking stack, which can get 100% of Ethernet wire speed in more circumstances, especially high-latency but high-bandwidth broadband links. Windows XP cannot ever get 100% of 1Gbps once the latency is on the order of one millisecond, or 100% of 100MBps with 10ms, etc...
Strange and funny. I have heard many people complain about their old software not working on the recent windows versions, but I've heard absolutely no one complaining about software not running on XP.
Selection bias.
They're only running software that works on XP because -- duh -- they can't run software on XP that doesn't run on XP!
There's software now that doesn't run on XP but does run on Windows 7, but -- of course -- nobody with an XP desktop would have that software running on their desktop.
Some things run on both, but run better on Windows 7. Some newer games make good use of the multi-threaded graphics APIs, and can fully utilize multiple cores, boosting performance. I saw some games double their average frame rate after upgrading to Windows 7.
There are a few "workloads" that just don't like to be virtualized for one reason or another.
Active Directory Domain Controllers -- these work better now under hypervisors, but older versions had a wonderful error message when starting up from a snapshot rollback: "Recovered using an unsupported method", which then resulted in a dead DC that would refuse to do anything until it was restored from a "supported" backup, usually tape. I used to put big "DO NOT SNAPSHOT" warnings on DCs, or even block snapshots with ACLs.
Time-rollback -- Some applications just can't take even a small roll-back in the system clock very well. These have problems when moved from host-to-host with a technology like vMotion. It's usually a coding error, where the system clock is used to "order" transactions, instead of using an incrementing transaction ID counter.
DRM -- lots of apps use hardware-integrated copy protection, like dongles. Some of them can be "made to work" using hardware pass-through, but then you lose the biggest virtualization benefit of being able to migrate VMs around during the day without outages.
Network Latency -- this is a "last but certainly not least". Some badly written applications are very sensitive to network latency because of the use of excessively chatty protocols. Examples are TFTP, reading SQL data row-by-row using cursors, or badly designed RPC protocols that enumerate big lists one item at a time over the wire. Most hypervisors add something like 20-100 microseconds for every packet, and then there are the overheads of context switches, cache thrashing, etc... You can end up with the application performance plummeting, despite faster CPUs and more RAM. I had one case where an application went from taking about an hour to run a report to something like five hours. The arithmetic is simple: Every microsecond of additional latency adds a full second of time per million network round-trips. I've seen applications that do ten billion round-trips to complete a process!
You're confusing a proposed solution to the problem, the Kyoto Protocol, with the existence of the problem in the first place.
I don't doubt that many (most?) of the solutions are guaranteed to be failures. Either they are too little too late, or just don't make economic or even physical sense. Carbon capture for example is a hilarious joke being played by energy companies on a general population that is too uneducated to realize that CO2 isn't some trace pollutant in the smoke produced by the burning of fossil fuels.
What I'm talking about are people who doubt that man is causing or can cause climate change. You hear every excuse: "but the Earth is so big", "it's just natural variation", "it's just just sun cycles". They behave as if they think that climatologists who have dedicated their entire lives to this problem haven't accounted for the most trivial aspects of their field. Can you imagine a field of science where its researches ignore the scale, mathematics, and primary inputs into a problem entirely? No, of course not, that's just stupid. Doesn't stop people believing things like that though, because to do otherwise would make them feel terribly guilty about the five ton truck they just purchased to drive down to the shops they could have walked to...
If you want to understand the mindset of people who don't understand evolution, look no further than the anti global warming crowd, which makes up a surprisingly large subset of the Slashdot community.
You might even be one of them.
It's exactly the same kind of mentality. People really don't want to believe in global warming, because they know full well that if it's true, then they are a) fucked, and if they are American, then b) it's probably mostly their fault. It's so much easier to just latch onto some soundbite from a shill on TV paid by an energy company than to... urgh... study the science. It's a choice between an unpleasant effort to find out something negative about themselves, versus zero effort to stay blissfully ignorant. You can tell that some less-bright people actually love it. They can smugly throw memorized quotes at their better educated peers like "It's just a sun cycle, didn't you know!". For once in their lives, they feel superior, like they know something those geeky eggheads don't. It's a good feeling, and the man in the expensive suit on TV agrees!
Religion and evolution is the same type of thinking. They don't want to know anything about evolution, because it directly discredits their holy book, starting with page one of chapter one! This is a book that gives them the same comfortable feeling of smug superiority over those "blasphemers" that unfortunately can no longer be stoned to death legally. Theists believe that they're the chosen people: the blessed ones that will get to go to heaven. Why on earth would they ever go out of their way and learn something about the science of evolution, when the only two possible results of that are that: a) they were right all along and now they've just wasted a bunch of their time learning about this filthy secular science stuff they hated so much when they were in school, or b) they were wrong all along and their entire life was based on a bunch of bullshit, and hence they aren't the special chosen people, and won't get to go to heaven.
This isn't a question of fossils, or DNA, or charts of CO2 absorption spectra. The same people will believe scientific evidence on other topics just fine. The problem is that to trying to convince these people of global warming or evolution is also in effect an attempt to convince them that they're bad people. This is an entirely different ball game, and is essentially insurmountable until their belief in the scientific truth will no longer have this effect on their self-perception.
Global warming will be popularly accepted after fossils fuels run out -- nobody will have a vested interest either way at that point, and the evidence will be lapping at their ankles. I suspect that even if several American cities are reclaimed by the rising waters, that still won't be enough to convince some people if fossil fuels are available and cheap at the time.
Evolution will be accepted after Abrahamic religions die out, or adapt and change to the point of unrecognizability -- we've had overwhelming evidence for evolution for what, 150 years? Has that been enough? Not even close. We've had germ theory for less than that, and everybody believes it. The atomic theory of matter is even more recent, but good luck finding an educated disbeliever. No, you'll find that evolution is special, because it contradicts the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an. It won't be commonly believed until the common people no longer have faith in something that contradicts it.
Why are there people living in the coldest parts of Siberia when they could move to the tropics? Why do people live on Pitcairn Island thousands of kilometers from civilization?
Because you can make a reasonable life for yourself in those places with nothing but stone, wood, and animal pelts, all of which are available in abundance.
Even so, I've seen many documentaries with interviews of people in those places complaining that the younger generation is moving to the cities, and abandoning their "cultural heritage", which is basically a hard life in a frozen hellhole.
Not everybody wants it comfortable... they're really just waiting for a space base mission to ask.
Fine, they can fund their own trip. Don't expect taxpayers to pick up the bill so that someone's else can wallow in their masochism. Good look scraping together enough crazy people to fund a ten trillion dollar Moon base.
As long as we send the right people they will thrive because it's the challenge and the difficulty of surviving that drives them.
There are difficult problems here, and those people would be most valuable here, not on some rock a light second away.
Well for one we'd have to make a really sustainable, closed ecosystem based on renewable energy.
No actually all that useful on Earth. Small ecosystems aren't what we have here. Renewable energy is easy, there's no need to actually go to the Moon to do that. Spend the money here for hundred-fold savings, and skip the sight-seeing tour.
A lot of that would probably have spin-offs
Still with the 99% waste. How do you not get this? Any spin-offs would be exactly the same as ordinary research done on Earth... except with the added multi-trillion dollar expense of sending some people to die on the Moon. Why would we do that? Why not just do the research directly?
each added person adds more self-sufficiency than cost
Every realistic estimate I've heard started at the tens of trillions of dollars before a colony could get to that point. Those were the more optimistic estimates. The pessimists start near the hundred trillion dollar mark.
Now ask yourself this: then what?
You've got a colony out there that no longer needs Earth, doesn't send us anything back except pictures, and won't want any more immigrants because it puts a strain on their environmental systems. Even if we could send more people, this won't solve anything (e.g.: overpopulation), because the cost of sending a person will likely exceed their lifetime earning potential.
You won't be able to afford to go there for a holiday. They won't have any exports with a sufficiently high value to justify the expense of sending it. They won't have any specially privileged insight into mathematics, or art, or computer programming, so any intellectual property they produce won't be all that special either.
Nobody here on Earth will gain anything even remotely worth the dollars spent basically by definition, because only the people on the Moon will be benefiting from 99% of the funds. They will be a tiny, tiny number of people, and you won't be one of them.
The Russians, Chinese, and Japanese are just talking about it, which is cheap. Practically free. Doing it is another matter.
Why would any government want to set up a trillion dollar base on what amounts to a lifeless rock in the middle of nowhere? Because you watched too much Star Trek as a kid, and want it really badly to be true?
We wouldn't get anything out of it, except things we could have gotten for a tiny fraction of the cost here on Earth! Spin-off technologies? That's like saying we should burn huge piles of money to stay warm in the winter. It's bureaucratic buzzword talk for "only 99% wasteful!".
If you think isolated cold rocks in a hard vacuum are so fantastic, why don't you move to Bouvet Island for the rest of your life? You can set yourself up a nice vacuum chamber there, sprinkle some radioactive isotopes around it to simulate the harsh radiation of outer space, and you have yourself a perfectly adequate simulation of life on the moon. For extra credit, take drugs that cause osteoporosis, and do all work outside the habitat in scuba gear. Make sure to carry your water, food and oxygen with you too -- no cheating! You're allowed supplies from the outside, except that you have to give $1000 to charity for each pound imported to the island.
Does that sound like something you want to do for the rest of your life? Would you want your family to live there like that, away from friends, family, and an "outside" that won't kill you in seconds? What would you do with your time there? Break rocks?
If you can't think of a good reason to move to Bouvet Island, then you don't have a good reason to live on the Moon either, which is a worse place to live, further away, and more expensive to get to.
Half of those "new" features are already in Windows 7, like AppLocker. I have USB3 support now. Sure, it's not "native", but it works, so who cares?
A lot more interesting are the new features under the hood of Windows 8 server. Take a look at this article for example: Optimizing for Latency-Sensitive Applications: scenario overview.
Sure, it's not visible or shiny, but wow those are some big changes!
The previous 500 articles about evidence of water on Mars just weren't sufficient to drive the point home. Anyone could have missed these articles that are posted. Every. Bloody. Month.
Mounting Evidence for Water on Mars
Surprising Further Evidence for a Wet Mars
Mars Images Reveal Evidence of Ancient Lakes
Strange Globs Could Signal Water On Mars
New Images Reveal Pure Water Ice On Mars
"Puddles" of Water Sighted on Mars
Positive Proof of Water on Mars
A Third of Mars Could Have Been Underwater
NASA Says Mars Once "Drenched With Water"
Recent Evidence Of Water On Mars Near Equator
NASA Announces Water Found On Mars
I suspect NASA has a PR department dedicated to nothing else other than churning out press releases about discoveries of water on Mars, and for some strange reason, every one of them must be reposted on Slashdot by some OCD person.
You think I'm exaggerating? Check this out! A search for "water" and "mars" restricted to the "nasa.gov" site yields over 842,000 hits. That PR department has been busy!
I can't wait for the MSL rover to arrive this August so that we can read even more fascinating press releases about hints of water on Mars.
Why don't you like my hammer? Can't you see how shiny it is? Every working man is getting one, clearly it is the tool of the future! You're just preducided against hammers because you don't appreciate how flexible and intuitive it is. It's so ergonomic, it fits the human hand so perfectly! Feel the weight of it, the balance. Don't you want one too? I bet you secretly do.
Sure, some people might insist that those old-style hydraulic drop hammers gets more hammering done, but they're so... loud... and heavy. Not all portable, or shiny. Who would want to use something like that? You clearly don't understand the manifest benefits of a light-weight, hand-held, ergonomic implement that anyone can use! So pretty to look at too -- you can see that mine is chrome plated and comes with a doe-skin suede hip holster. It's the latest style. You'll love it, trust me.
The market has clearly spoken: more people are purchasing shiny hand-held hammers than heavy and dull hydraulic drop hammers. You're just slow to get with the times. It's time for you to join the rest of us in the future.
It's not just the tariffs or the taxes. How do you explain that even cars made locally in Australia cost more than the same model in New Zealand? They have shipping costs, taxes, and tariffs too, yet a locally made car somehow costs more here!
I just found an informative page for importing a car into Australia. It has a worked example for importing a car worth $56K into Australia. The total payable tax plus tariffs is $11.5K. Doesn't exactly account for a BMW going from $60K to over $130K, does it? Where the hell did the other $60K increase in the price come from?
I once worked as an IT contractor for a car importer that had an exclusive deal with a manufacturer to import cars into Australia. I asked one of their senior staffers why cars were more expensive in Australia. He basically admitted that all of the importers jack up the price because they have an effective monopoly position (for their brands), and can get away with it. There's a sort of gentleman's agreement between them to maintain this status quo and not compete on price. This works because importers often import several brands, so there's only a few of them catering for the entire market. It's not the taxes, the shipping, the retailers, or the manufacturer. Nameless middle-men obtain exclusive rights to import, and then milk the market for everything that they can.
It's blatantly obvious if you know what to look for. For example, I wanted to get a nice sporty car, like the Nissan GT-R. Here in Australia, it's over double the cost of what it is in Japan or in the US. I worked out all the taxes, and it still didn't explain most of the difference. I looked into importing one direct from Japan -- I'd still have to pay all of the Australian taxes and tariffs and pay an additinal overhead for organising the whole thing, but the end result would still about 30-40% cheaper. However, it turns out that I wouldn't be be able to get my imported car serviced! The "official" importer also controls all of the parts and servicing, and they'll refuse to do business with you if you own a "grey" import. You can have it serviced elsewhere, but with a small-volume model like the GT-R, it's a risk. Compare that to, say, buying an iPad in America. Apple will repair it for you in Australia happily.
There's no way to do the equivalent in America because the market is too big, there's too many importers, and hence there's enough competition to prevent a successful collusion from forming.
This is why I don't buy anything except food and clothes from local retailers any more. I get all my gadgets and software online. Lots of other Australians shop online from overseas too. It's probably harming our local businesses, but fuck them and their greedy price gouging.
It's about time the ACCC started investigating this. First software, then I hope they look into cars next...
Who modded this informative?
VMware has mostly proprietary products. What little open source they have is there only because they are forced to by their use of Linux in ESX.
All of their core products are completely closed source, and released as binary only.
They are about as open source as Microsoft.
Sure, programmers are only human, and I know exactly what you're talking about.
I do the same thing when I work on toy projects at home for fun. Who cares if it leaks a bit of memory or doesn't sanitize inputs, I want to have fun!
On the other hand, at work, I usually self-impose a "two bug maximum". If I exceed two open issues, I stop adding features until the bugs are fixed. It's the only way to stop bugs accumulating or even becoming "features" that can't be easily found or removed. Pretty soon you are forced to become a "defensive coder" because it's the only way to make forward progress. It's much like being a good defensive driver is not just about reacting to accidents better, it's about avoiding risky situations in the first place. You learn the value of safe patterns like "auto_ptr" and its brethren just like you learn to keep a safe following distance on the road.
It's obvious that the Skyrim developers -- or their managers -- don't have this kind of discipline, because the game was chock full of blindingly obvious and visible bugs right from the start. Really ugly issues like Z-fighting (causes flickering), animation problems, horrible problems with shadows, etc... All of this stuff is clearly visible, happens all the time, and can be fixed without too much difficulty. I assumed they'd fix the issues in a patch or something, but from what I've heard, these are all consistent problems that have stayed in the engine for several entire games now, including their support cycles! That's just atrocious...
This.
Back around 2000, I had a Sony Trinitron 21" monitor, a Sony MP3 player, a Sony digital camera, and a Sony HiFi system. Back then, Sony was the best within a reasonable consumer price range. Then LCD monitors came along, and I got a 24" Dell and chucked the Trinitron. Sony was making LCDs too, but Dell was selling the biggest consumer monitors by far, and for several thousand cheaper too than anyone else. The "MP3" player actually required every track to be transcoded into some proprietary format, and was replaced with a generic Taiwanese-made player that cost a digit less and stored ten times more on a generic flash card that cost 1/3rd as much per megabyte as a memory stick. The camera was replaced with a model that had interchangeable lenses and compact flash, because most Sony digital cameras (up until recently) had a single fixed lens and didn't take anything other than memory sticks. I was using the HiFi amp until recently, when I discovered that even though I was using it with only digital inputs, the output has a lot more noise than the headphone jack on the motherboard of my PC, fed by a built-in sound "card" that's probably a single chip that cost $2.
You watch, the same thing is going to happen to Apple too. Oh sure, they're making the best stuff now, but they'll go down the same way in a decade or so. Sure, an iPad is the best tablet on the market at the moment, but in a couple of years Asus or Samsung or whoever will be making something with twice the spec, half the price, and it won't be limited to Apple(r) Approved Quicktime Data Formats(tm) only.
Lots of things don't work on Windows XP. Just off the top of my head I can think of:
* Windows 2008 R2 RSAT Tools -- you can RDP to a server instead, but that's not always possible or recommended.
* PowerShell Active Directory module -- very handy, but doesn't work on XP at all.
* You mentioned DX11
* Internet Explorer 9 or later
* Location APIs for HTML5 apps
* Proper IPv6 support (XP has some experimental support, but in practice it's not very usable)
* Any 64-bit only software like the SharePoint 2010 design tools -- I know there's a 64-bit XP edition, I used to use it myself, but few others did, and support for it by hardware vendors was never good and even less these days.
Sure, these are all small things, but they add up. To get an XP machine to "work" you need about a bazillion hotfixes, add-ons, extras, drivers, and even some scripts. On top of that, these days it's getting hard to buy a machine with "only" 4GB of memory, but that's the most XP supports, unless you're a masochist and want to run an unsupported decade-old 64-bit OS instead of just going straight to Windows 7 64-bit like a normal person.
Sure, its leg might not be broken, but it's limping pretty badly.
Less than a minute of Googling later: Qt Designer's UI File Format
Your counter-example to my point uses an XML-based declarative UI file format with a strict validating schema.
I'm not sure what you mean by Interface Builder you mean the Apple tool, which uses .NIB or XIB files. Those formats are -- if anything -- closer to XAML than even the QT format, as they contain XML representations of the GUI document object model.
As far as I can see, neither format supports imperative concepts such as loops or other control flow.
That's a perfectly valid question, and the answer is not obvious at first.
When you come from a programming background, you have a very powerful hammer, and everything ends up looking like a nail, including GUIs. The problem with this approach is that you can never have either a non-programmer or a GUI tool help design your user interface. For trivial applications this isn't a problem, but it quickly becomes limiting on larger projects.
Microsoft had an interesting hack to make GUI design work with imperative languages -- split class files. One file would contain only a strict subset of the imperative language that the GUI designer could handle, the other matching file would contain the real code. This solution was fragile and would often result in the designer failing to open. This was already half way there to a declerative domain specific language, because the subset of the imperative language that the designer coud parse forbade any control flow. I first had the "lightbulb" moment when I saw Microsoft's next-gen XAML designers, where they basically formalized the GUI language into an explicitly declerative document format with a strict grammar. It allowed more complex GUI designs with well defined parsers, object models, design-time appearance, etc... All the problems just vanished.
This is by no means a Microsoft invention, declerative visual languages have always been more successful, flexible, and interoperable. A case in point is HTML, which is a purely declerative language, which has lots of advantages that has contributed to its success. Try putting yourself into the shoes of a search engine developer and imagine if instead of declerative SGML-derived pages, you had index imperative PostScript? Not just any old automatically generated PostScript intended for printing, but developer authored PostScript with as much complexity as a typical JavaScript library! How would you go about writing a designer for a language like that? You'd start by restricting the problem to some strict subset...