Schools aren't connected with buzzword compliant social networking crap because there's no reason to think that it would help kids learn! I've worked in an education department's IT division before, and every time somebody tried to push through some sort of "social" or "connected learning" crap it was a total failure. It was underused and pointless. Nobody could ever demonstrate the slightest benefit, but the costs were massive.
Meanwhile, the real problems that could be solved with technology are being ignored. For example, I have this great statistic that shows that the further away a school is from the city centre the fewer books it has per student. That's insane! What does the physical location of a student have to their with the propensity to read? Why should schools in the country have fewer books? If books could be delivered electronically, students everywhere would have equal and fair access to literature, but noooo... the politicians are totally spineless, and don't have the nerve to tell the publishers to provide digital copies of their works. Copyright this, renegotiate that, it's so much effort... so fuck the kids, let the country bumpkins stay illiterate, what matters is that the honourable senator's kids go to a private school with a library that has three floors and subscribes to fifty journals.
The summary is wrong (isn't it always) -- essentially nobody will be getting 1Gbps on the NBN, at least not for the first decade or so. The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split, so each house will be getting 100Mbps maximum. I certainly haven't heard of any ISPs offering more than 100Mbps, so even if the fibre can physically transmit more than that, you can't buy it as a service.
Apartment complexes can receive a dedicated fibre with more than 100Mbps capacity, but that's till split up between the apartments, the difference is that the splitter is on the premises. I think this caused a lot of confusion, because some of the logical diagrams showed a 1 Gbps fibre going to a building, and journalists didn't notice that only 100Mbps connections were going to each apartment.
One interesting issue with the NBN is that while we're going to have plenty of bandwidth, our latency to most services is still terrible. America is 200ms away, and there's not a lot in the English-speaking corner of the Internet that's closer. I hope Google, Amazon, and Microsoft start building data centres locally, or the upgrade will be largely unnoticeable for anything other than video streaming.
In the days of analog archival formats, the longevity of a certain medium was critical, because copies couldn't be made without degradation. Hence, lots of bureaucracies came up with rules such as "archival media must be usable for at least 'n' decades". This is a good rule, because otherwise people would do idiotic things like keep long-term archives polaroid photos or fax paper, and then they'd be in for a nasty shock when umpteen years later they'd find that their archives had faded away completely.
But since those ancient times, we've had this shiny newfangled technology called "digital" that you may have heard of. It has this amazing property that copies do not degrade at all. You can copy a tape over and over and over, from one generation to the next, and never lose a single bit of data. Hence, the new rule ought to be "copy all data every 'n' years to newer media" instead of some fixed longetivity. Not only does this massively reduce long-term storage costs as media bit density increases, it's also a good opportunity to verify data integrity. On top of this, media with a shorter lifetime can be used instead of more expensive "archive grade" media, further reducing costs.
If you're insisting that your backup tapes last 20 years instead of simply setting up a scheduled copy in your backup software, then you're doing it wrong. You should never need to go back three generations of tapes. This is not the fault of the tape hardware vendors not meeting your requirements, instead, the fault is your flawed requirements stemming from outdated practices.
To put things in perspective, LTO-1 is only 12 years old, and is already difficult to read. To go back 20 years, you'd be looking at DDS-2, a tape format with a 4GB capacity. You could fit an archive of about a thousand DDS-2 tapes onto a single LTO-6 tape!
Which means that an LTO4 drive is not mandated to be able to read an LTO1 tape
You should look into a recent development in tape technology I've heard about, where formerly write-only tapes can now also be read back out, allowing them to be copied to newer media!
There's zero benefit to transparent screens in the vast majority of use-cases, but there's a huge downside: loss of contrast ratio. In an era where contrast ratios as high as 10000:1 are achievable, why would want to go back to something as poor as 10:1 or even lower? The only use-case where transparent screens might be useful is vehicle heads-up displays, but even there it's not quite the right solution, because the focal plane is all wrong. Take a look at vehicles that do have HUDs: they all use reflection with an angled surface because it allows for the use of optics that projects a virtual display at a focal depth much further out than the surface itself. A display embedded into a windshield would appear fuzzy and out of focus if you look out at the road through it.
Most of the time, gadgets and technology in movies are designed simply to look cool, not for actual practicality, and the result is often pretty but stupid. The GUI in Minority Report is a great example of this: nobody can hold their arms up in front of them for more than a few minutes! Try it: get out a stopwatch and hold your arms out level for ten minutes. After the painful burning in your shoulders stops, take a minute and think about doing that for an eight hour workday. No matter how cool it looks, the mechanical advantage of our shoulders just isn't great enough to allow this kind of interface, and never will unless we all become cyborgs first.
Just because you saw something in a sci-fi movie doesn't automatically mean that it's the "future" and only the required technology developments are holding us back. It's not like script writers and directors have some sort of personal revelation of the One True Future that we must all aspire to.
They actually say exactly that in the patent itself:
In an effort to gain the advantages conferred by operating on a floating point basis, some prior art systems have attempted to perform floating point through software emulation, but on a fixed point hardware platform. However, this approach is extremely slow, due to the fact that the software emulation relies upon the use of a general purpose CPU...
But as advances in semiconductor and computer technology enable greater processing power and faster speeds; as prices drop; and as graphical applications grow in sophistication and precision, it has been discovered by the present inventors that it is now practical to implement some portions or even the entire rasterization process by hardware in a floating point format.
In other words, they admit that they've seen prior art where others have tried and failed. Instead of inventing a faster method for implementing floating point, SGI just waited until silicon caught up, and hey look, they "invented" floating point graphics. It's in the patent text that they did nothing but wait for Moore's law to solve their problem for them! How was this approved by the patent office!?
I have this mental image of a lone clerk in the patent office somewhere, mindlessly whacking a rubber stamp on everything shoved in front of his face, while staring off into the distance with glazed-over eyes.
At first, I assumed that this was about some complex algorithm like finding the greatest common subsets in a large set of static values or something similarly esoteric, but nope, it's trivial:
The preloader identifies all <clinit> methods and play executes these methods to determine the static initialization performed by them. The preloader then creates an expression indicating the static initialization performed by the <clinit> method and stores this expression in the.mclass file, replacing the <clinit> method. As such, the code of the <clinit> method, containing many instructions, is replaced by a single expression instructing the virtual machine to perform static initialization, thus saving a significant amount of memory. The virtual machine is modified to recognize this expression and perform the appropriate static initialization of an array.
It's so trivial that you don't even need to read the body of the patent to completely understand it! I can even boil it down to just three words: compile-time memoization,
Not only that, but this is hardly a concept unique to Java, there's even a Wiki article for it! Maybe Oracle should sue the inventors of the D Language, and the C++ committees too while they're at it, because if you use template meta-programming to initialise a static variable, then you've infringed -- or close enough anyway to be sued into bankruptcy.
The reason few (if any) compilers used static initializer memoization before 1998 is because most of the commonly used general-purpose languages with a concept of "static" weren't safe back then, so the compiler couldn't execute small arbitrary chunks of code without risking a crash or strange side-effects. The only reason Java could introduce this feature is because of a convenient side-effect of compiling a safe language -- not because someone had invented either compile-time evaluation, memoization, or the combination of the two. That, and nobody had over-used static values sufficiently while simultaneously caring enough about startup performance to bother implementing such a complex feature given the marginal performance advantage. You could probably demonstrate prior art by just pointing out that most compilers evaluate constant expressions at compile time, so "static int foo = 5 + 5" is basically the same thing as what the patent is claiming.
How did "of the people, by the people, for the people" turn into "of the inept, by the litigious, for the corrupt"?
It would be 'life changing' in a data center. How much do they waste in electricity going into heat? How much air con is that on top of the computers themselves? Instead of needing megawatts to run data centers you need as much as say a couple houses today with full on AC in the middle of the summer. Yet still have the same compute power.
That kind of thing is not "life changing though". Think about it -- we've had a factor of 100,000x reduction in watts/mips over the last few decades, yet datacentres require more heat and power than they used to!
Even if some room-temperature superconductor allowed another 1000x fold reduction in power usage (which is huge), all you would see is 1000x as much computer equipment stuffed into the data centre.
The OP was asking what life and social changes would we expect. My point was that at least initially, not much.
Most people think of superconductors as merely a "perfectly efficient" conductor. While this is true, it just scratches the surface of what's possible with superconductors. Using superconductors just to improve efficiency wouldn't be that big a deal by itself. It would improve battery life a little bit, and maybe drop bulk electricity transmission overheads, but not by much, and certainly not immediately. Making most superconductors into high-tensile wire is a non-trivial exercise, even if cooling isn't a problem -- and it will be! Just because a material is discovered that can conduct at "room" temperature isn't helpful for wire outdoors in direct sunlight, or in a hot environment inside high-temperature machinery. Last but not least, superconductors have current and magnetic field limits that increase as they are cooled past the transition temperature. A superconductor with a transition temperature of 26C would probably have only a few limited applications above 20C.
The other uses are more interesting, and often more amenable to thermal control:
The Meissner_effect provides magnetic shielding, which is useful for all sorts of things, like amplifiers, or for protecting sensitive electronics. This is also what causes magnets to levitate above Type 2 superconductors. I assume that a room-temperature superconductor would be Type 2, so levitation would likely be possible.
The London moment could be used in gyroscopes and the like.
Josephson junctions provide all sorts of functions, like ultra-sensitive magnetic field sensors (think hard-drives and MRIs).
Still, all of that is a bit... meh. I mean sure, you get less noise in your now ultra-sensitive amplifier, and electricity will cost 10% less than it would have otherwise in 30 years. Is this life changing? Probably not really.
A much more interesting potential application than all of those combined is Rapid Single Flux Quantum digital circuitry. That stuff makes silicon look like vacuum tubes. Think 100GHz+, self-clocking, 1000x as efficient as CMOS, and manufacturable now, with only the cooling requirement the big down-side. If RSFQ could be made to work at room-temperature (or even near it), you could be looking at a sudden massive leap forward in computer power like never before. For example, with a power draw 1000x lower, it would be possible to stack every chip in a typical computer into a little "cube", with much shorter wire lengths, and hence, latencies. We can't do this now, because that cube would literally melt in seconds form the heat.
The reality-check of all this is that many MRI machines are still cooled by liquid helium, even though superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen temperatures have been available for a while. This tells you a lot about the limitations that might restrict the application of even a hypothetical room-temperature superconductor. For example, ultra-sensitive sensors and RSFQ may not work at all, because the tiny signal quanta may be swamped by the background thermal noise. Similarly, manufacturability of wire and maximum magnetic field strength is a key requirement for a lot of applications, like MRIs and electric motors.
Personally, I suspect that the first room-temperature superconductor will be initially manufacturable in bulk only as a thin-film, so expect the first decade or two to be mostly about improved circuitry and sensors more than anything else. This might be closer than people think. For example, there's a harmless quack who claims to have achieved superconductivity at 28C by manufacturing extremely complex copper-based crystals as a thin layer between two different traditional copper-based superconductors. Assuming for a second that he's onto something, it gives you an idea
The manufacturing energy & strip-mining of new materials & toxic chemicals plus shipping from the other side of the planet would far-exceed anything I would save by switching to LCD or a new iCore CPU.
That's probably not true.
I've heard this kind of thing said a number of time before, for example about electric cars, the theory being that it somehow costs more energy to manufacture a battery pack than it will ever save compared to an ICE engine.
However, a simple economic analysis shows this to be false in many cases. Energy is largely fungible, that is, it doesn't really matter if you're using electricity or oil, it's all pretty much just watt-hours at some fairly equal cost. There's variances of course -- electricity is cheaper near a hydroelectric dam, oil is cheaper in some countries, and both is cheaper to buy in bulk.
Manufacturers pay for energy the same as everyone else, and they're not just going to ignore that cost out of the goodness of their hearts, it's going to be baked right into the cost of manufacture. So, looking at the cost of a good gives you an idea of the maximum amount of energy it could have taken to produce. You don't need to know anything about the specifics of its manufacturing process, just the cost.
You can get a 23" Dell LED backlit LCD monitor for USD 170 delivered. Now, at most half of that is the manufacturing cost, because Dell has to pay taxes, make a profit, and this is the RRP that resellers can also make a profit on. Hence, lets say $85 manufacturing cost, including all design, materials, factory and equipment depreciation, etc... Of that, at most $40 would be energy costs, directly or indirectly, the other half would be paying for "man hours" in one way or another. These are rough numbers, but bear with me.
Now, taking that estimated $40 worth of energy, we can figure that at a typical cost of $0.15 per kWh, it cost 280 kWh of energy to make that monitor. Now, an energy efficiency review shows that that model uses 16.65W of power when on, so that means that after 9,930 hours of operation, it will have made back its own manufacturing energy cost in savings compared to your current 50W CRT. At 8 hours per day, that's just over 3 years, and you've had your CRT for 6 years.
Admittedly, this won't make it cost effective for you to personally purchase this monitor based on energy saving alone, that would take well over a decade of usage. However, it shows that it isn't wasteful environmentally to buy a new monitor, and you do get a new monitor that would look much better than your old CRT. Better colour gamut, no flicker, always perfectly sharp, no distortion, etc...
Your example of CFLs is even more clear, in which case you would be personally saving money quite quickly by switching away from incandescent bulbs. That's been true for pretty much all models of CFLs for years now, and LED lights promise to improve on those savings even further.
Having a copy of the source provides only minimal protection. See for example the Underhanded C Code Contest.
It would be an almost trivial exercise to introduce a vulnerability into a code base that wouldn't be picked up easily by either human or mechanical inspection. Even if such a vulnerability was detected, the vendor could simply claim that it was a coding error, fix it, and get away with it unpunished. By adding a few dozen such vulnerabilities, the vendor could play this game for years without anyone ever being able to prove wrongdoing.
There's no hope of isolating the equipment or software from the Internet either, because the use-case here is a National Broadband Network, the whole point of which is to create a new public Internet backbone.
You don't even have a name for what you believe in!
Do you have any idea how utterly ridiculous this sounds to anyone with a clue? To be even remotely plausible, let alone scientific, there must be a method that can quantify this "something".
Homeopathy has been around, for what, two hundred years? In all that time, none of its crackpot proponents have even begun to answer the most basic questions a scientist would investigate about this "something", let alone come up with actual falsifiable predictions.
Let me get you started:
* Is this "something" affected by temperature? If so, what is the response-curve from near absolute zero up to the dissociation temperature of steam? * How about pressure? * Is it also present in other liquids? If not, why not? * Is it present in ice? * Steam? * How about heavy water? * Tritiated water? * How is it affected by impurities? * How is it "reset"? * How is it set? * At what rate? * Under what conditions? Under atmospheric pressure? Magnetic fields? Electric fields? Radiation? What fields strengths? Frequency spectra?
Or most importantly: * How can it be even measured? * With what units?
Let me give you a basic problem with homeopathy: if its claims were true, then all water would automatically cure you of most of your ills, since all water contains traces of damned near everything. Even if you were to accept that the method of preparation matters, the problem is that the water used to perform the dilution already contains impurities, and is hence a homeopathic cure itself.
I mean, how can you possibly take this gibberish seriously? How? I really want to know! Do you seriously believe in diluted duck liver as an effective anti-viral agent? Do you read Harry Potter novels for recipe ideas? Have you ever collected eye of newt at midnight, or prepared a potion with virgin's tears? Why not? It might cure cancer!
I love how your evidence for group think and self-delusion can cut both ways. Have you applied your critical thinking to your own beliefs, or just those of others? Are you really on the right side of the fence?
Many of the most promising healing modalities are not just ignored by conventional medicine; they are in fact ridiculed. Homeopathy comes to mind. Homeopathy is discredited simply because the defenders of conventional medicine have no understanding of the mechanism by which homeopathic remedies work
The mechanism is bullshit, it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be completely false. This doesn't surprise anyone, because homepathic remedies are just water. At best, homepathic remedies might be good for rehydration, but aren't even that best at that, because real scientists understand what actually happens in the human body and have developed rehydration formulas that are better than water.
What homeopathy is good for is finding poor experimental methods. Anyone who can demonstrate different results between two treatments, where one is water, and the other is also water has fucked up something very badly.
LENR is another good example that demonstrates just how difficult it is to get calorimetric measurements right, especially at low energy levels. The Rossi team in Italy for example seem to have missed the detail that the energy contained in wet steam is something like one-tenth of the energy in dry steam. That error is all it takes to completely delude themselves and their investors. That they have ignored advice that pointed out this error and continued to believe in whatever they want to believe is exactly the point that I think you were trying to make. So, who's deluded? The Rossi team, or the scientists who politely explained that a key measurement is incorrect by an order of magnitude?
All Rossi has to do is turn his machine into a loop so that it provides its own input energy, and sell the excess to the grid. He doesn't need investors, he doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. Anyone with the slightest common sense sitting on 'free energy' technology would require less than a decade to start the 'Fusion Energy Electricity Company' and make billions.
So why are all the LENR advocates still poor? Is "the man" keeping them down? Or is it more likely that their machines simply fail to work?
Why aren't psychics making billions on the stock market, or millions at poker tournaments?
You don't even need a business incentive, the scientific community regularly hands out Nobel prizes to people that can demonstrate that the mainstream thinking is wrong.
Java 7 has a Closeable interface that is analogous to the.NET IDisposable interface. It can be used in a block of code similar to a "try-catch" block that is equivalent to the C# "using" block, and guarantees cleanup. This is on top of the automatic cleanup that happens anyway, after a delay. For comparison, while in principle C++ code can be made robust against resource and memory leaks, in practice the use of C-like APIs and third-party libraries makes this a very difficult goal to achieve.
You're also conflating memory management and timely release of resources. In C++ those are treated as more or less the same thing, but in managed languages like Java and C#, they're somewhat independent. Programmers shouldn't care exactly when the garbage collector kicks in to release memory because the vast majority of the time it doesn't matter, and when it does matter, there are API calls and configuration parameters that can be used to alter GC behaviour. The Closeable/IDisposable interfaces provide a structured method for resource cleanup when it does matter, such as connections and handles. This is surprisingly rare -- out of the thousands of classes in the Java SDK API, there's only a little over a hundred that implement the Closeable interface.
Writing C++ code that uses complex control flow such threading, events or closures can be challenging, and programmers can becoming pre-occupied with resource lifetime management. I've seen many C++ programmers make the incorrect assumption that because their experience is that the advanced language features of C++ make an this complex problem somewhat simpler and safer to solve, then other languages that don't have equivalent features must in some way be flawed. Of course, this is because they don't realise that in other languages it's not a significant problem. It's a form of projection, just like alcoholics often think everybody else has a problem with their drinking too.
Linux does have comparable remote-access protocols to RDP, all of which have had plenty of remote exploits in past. For example have a look at CERT advisories on SSH and X11. Don't even get me started on VNC, which is often not updated automatically because it's an installable add-on instead of a system component.
Really? How many servers have you built using a touch interface? Tried typing command-line parameters using a touch keyboard? Tried dictating symbols to a voice control system recently?
Accessing servers from a tablet is a gimmick for anything other than perhaps a dashboard-type interface, most of which are web applications anyway and aren't typically accessed using the local desktop of the server.
I figured that I'd just do what I did with Vista, and run the server edition of Windows 8 instead of the consumer edition, so that I can have all the new capabilities without the tablet UI.
No such luck.
I ran up the beta and got a few things up and running on it, and it's just mind-blowing to experience how horrendously unusable it is first hand. This is the server edition, mind you, and it had animations, things sliding around, the start menu is gone, and some notification popped up that said something like "tap here to view details". Tap? On a server? Are you kidding me? Everything is a tablet now?
The strangest thing is that the PowerShell 3 command line is so fantastically good* that I almost don't care that they've fucked up the GUI, but for most people any improvements are going to be swamped by the atrocious user interface.
They've stuffed up everything. Things like the new Server Manager look pretty, but it does odd things like adding new menu items after a delay. After clicking some item like a server role, at first maybe only three or four menu items would be shown, so you think, ah well, nothing I can do here... and then after two seconds more menu items appear out of nowhere. If you're like me and click fast, you can miss critical things because some idiot decided to lather on the WinRT asynchronous APIs without any thought to the impact on usability. It's one thing if a placeholder changes after a delay, but to keep structure hidden until an arbitrary delay is a huge design flaw. And why the fuck is it asynchronous in the first place, anyway? Why aren't menu items known ahead of time, like you know... in all other software ever made by man?
Everything has cute tiles now, none of which are big enough to show their text content, so you find yourself having to choose between "Active Direct...", "Active Direct...", or "Active Direct...". It doesn't help that the icons are all cool and Metro and lack distinguishing characteristics.
I love the nested scrollbars, where the horizontal and vertical scrollbars are attached to two different controls with different sizes, where one of them can be used to scroll the other scrollbar into an invisible location.
Of course, everybody has covered the idiocy of Microsoft deciding to eliminate the Start menu, but on Windows Server it's particularly bad because there's a vaguely similar looking icon in its place! If you don't click exactly in the corner of the screen, you launch Server Manager instead, which is not a lightweight app, and can take a while to launch even on an SSD. Expect to learn quickly from your mistakes, because you'll be punished for making them. A lot.
I still haven't figured out how to quickly get a list of all start menu items, without first searching for something and then erasing the search term so that everything matches. I'm sure there's a better way, but it's not obvious to me.
Some of these things might be a bit nitpicky, but from what I've seen the flaws are pervasive, and it's a bad sign that even the most commonly used GUI screens have glaring usability problems despite having what appears to be final layout and artwork.
It's one thing to grumble and have to get used to something new and different if it's better, but it's a whole different story when I'm forced to get used to something that is not only objectively worse, but also totally inappropriate for the type of product: "tap here" on Windows Server Datacenter Edition tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's myopic vision.
*) While they've added some impressive features to PowerShell 3, they've fixed none of the bugs. For example, (Get-ADUser "invalidusername" -EA SilentlyContinue) still throws an exception even though it was told to fail silently. This bug affects a lot of different things and was reported to Microsoft back when PowerShell 2 was still beta! I'm going to whip my crystal ball out and predict that this bug will not get fixed until, lets say, PowerShell 5 Service Pack 2, at which point nobody will care because we'll all be using Apple computers and Google cloud services instead.
Think of programming as a Mathematician developing a new maths proof. The Mathematician may not know how to get to his goal, but that doesn't mean that the solution isn't robust, or that he needs a calculator at every step.
Similarly, a good programmer can develop robust and easy-to-maintain code even without an a-priori design, or automated assistance.
Where machine-assistance comes in is that I can see situations where a computer can assist the Mathematician in a way that a calculator can't -- through things like formal proof verifying software, or software like Mathematica that can be used to perform difficult and error-prone symbol manipulation steps like simplification, factorisation, integration, etc... Also, it's possible to use computers to perform brute-force numeric verification, and even reverse-engineering, which can give useful hints. There's software methods for taking a numeric result, and "guessing" what symbolic expression could have produced it, which can be very useful for someone who's become stuck and just needs a hint of the form of an expression.
Similar methods have been applied by programmers for years. Think syntax highlighting, live error checking, or static code analysis. With sufficient computer power, these methods could be extended further. For example, wouldn't it be great if code could be given random inputs (or recorded inputs), run bunch of times, and then each section of the code highlighted based on hit-rate or time taken? A profiler can do that for you now offline, but I'd say we have the CPU performance to do this live with small blocks of code.
You may disagree with the vision, but you can't disagree that there is a method behind the madness.
The problem with Microsoft, and a lot of us have been around long enough to see it repeatedly, is that when they decide that something is shiny and new, they drop all ongoing development of everything else like it doesn't even exist any more, even if the new thing is not a suitable replacement for the old thing.
When Microsoft decided that XAML was the "Way Forward" for rich web applications, they moved all but one guy off the IE team and into the Visual Studio and Expression teams to develop things like the improved XML editor, the designers, etc... Now, as a developer, I find those improvements very useful, but meanwhile there was one guy left of the IE 'team' doing just security fixes for years. This is why there was such a huge gap between IE6 and IE7, and why IE7 was such a small improvement compared to the progress made by Firefox and WebKit in the same time period.
Now, if you're a XAML-only programmer, then Microsoft was being innovative and moving forward. To HTML-based web application programmers they were being stupid and counter-productive, dragging the entire Internet down to the lowest common denominator that was IE6. That made a lot of people very upset with them, and rightly so. There was no way XAML could ever replace HTML, because it was tied to the.NET Framework in practice, which is not cross platform. A HTML replacement has to be cross-platform. That didn't stop them from ignoring HTML for half a decade.
With Windows 8, Microsoft is doing the exact same thing again. If you're a phone or tablet programmer, then Microsoft is innovative and moving forward. For desktop users -- Microsoft's biggest market -- they are being stupid and counter-productive, dragging the entire Desktop world down to a lowest common denominator with limited devices that don't have keyboards and mice. The walled garden of WinRT applications can never replace desktop applications, because the APIs are deliberately limited to suit the tablet environment. They have to be, otherwise apps would kill battery life or introduce vulnerabilities. A new framework has to be more than just a Tablet API or GUI, but that won't stop Microsoft from ignoring "classic" Windows applications for the next half a decade.
It's not just the GUI, Microsoft's other technologies have been suffering too from a lack of newness an shinyness. For example, their C++ standards compliance is woeful: the next release amounts to little more than some additional header files -- basically whatever one of their interns could whip up in a month, instead of a real revamp of the core compiler technology to have significantly new features. This is because they were too busy coming up with yet another bastardised non-standard version of C++ so that they can call WinRT APIs efficiently. Don't even think of asking for C99 support!
Sure, nobody is being forced to use WinRT, or tiles, or tablets, but if you're not using them, then you're using APIs and systems that will basically stop dead in the water, which in the computer world is the same as going backwards. Microsoft is atrocious at "seeing things through", because of their short attention span. For example, did you know that both Vista and Windows 7 natively support higher color depths than 24-bit, and GUI scaling? Had Microsoft kept going with that, our desktops could have had "double resolution" just like tablets, 36-bit deep color, wider gamuts, 200 DPI, and a bunch of things by now. But nooo... it was shiny then for a couple of years, and then Microsoft got bored and dropped all ongoing development of that as a feature. They even have a JPG-like image format that supports all of those better color features, but they never had more than some demo code written. Meanwhile, Apple demonstrated the value of technology that Microsoft had been sitting on for years, and suddenly everybody wants an iPad 3 with a Retina Display. Sigh...
Full, descriptive names are the only sane way to name servers.
Alphanumerical gibberish is a system promoted by suit wearing idiots who's job it is to track corporate assets, not the people who's job it is to press the "OK" button on the "Are you sure you want to destroy this 5 TB volume?" dialog box.
No, you don't need the operating system platform in the server name, or the room code, rack number, owner, or anything else. Learn to use spreadsheets, asset tags, and description fields like a normal person. Name servers something clear and simple, like "ProdFile1" or "DmzDns2", and put the unrelated meta data where it belongs: elsewhere. Don't be afraid of CamelCasing either, just because server names are case insensitive doesn't mean they are not case preserving.
I've been at a site recently where there were wildly unrelated servers distinguished only by a single character, using both the numeral '1' and the letter 'I' in the same position. I saw, with my own two eyes, one of their senior admins moving the mouse cursor towards the "OK" on the "Are you sure you want to permanently delete this VM" prompt, and they had the wrong server! I corrected the guy before it was too late, so he then promptly found a second, also incorrect, server to delete.
Re:Hopefully this will usher in higher-res monitor
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Sure, for $50,000, and you have to call Sony so that their representative can explain to you why your hospital needs their specialist displays for viewing medical X-Rays.
Ooohh... you meant consumer displays at a reasonable price? Then no, no you can't. I've checked.
I phrased that part of my point somewhat poorly: my point was that Erlang looks good to programmers used to shitty languages like PHP. Erlang itself is a good language that is well designed for a specific task.
When you're used to using only a single blunt instrument, everything looks better in comparison, even a tool that's still not the appropriate one for the task at hand.
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Schools aren't connected with buzzword compliant social networking crap because there's no reason to think that it would help kids learn! I've worked in an education department's IT division before, and every time somebody tried to push through some sort of "social" or "connected learning" crap it was a total failure. It was underused and pointless. Nobody could ever demonstrate the slightest benefit, but the costs were massive.
Meanwhile, the real problems that could be solved with technology are being ignored. For example, I have this great statistic that shows that the further away a school is from the city centre the fewer books it has per student. That's insane! What does the physical location of a student have to their with the propensity to read? Why should schools in the country have fewer books? If books could be delivered electronically, students everywhere would have equal and fair access to literature, but noooo... the politicians are totally spineless, and don't have the nerve to tell the publishers to provide digital copies of their works. Copyright this, renegotiate that, it's so much effort... so fuck the kids, let the country bumpkins stay illiterate, what matters is that the honourable senator's kids go to a private school with a library that has three floors and subscribes to fifty journals.
The summary is wrong (isn't it always) -- essentially nobody will be getting 1Gbps on the NBN, at least not for the first decade or so. The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split, so each house will be getting 100Mbps maximum. I certainly haven't heard of any ISPs offering more than 100Mbps, so even if the fibre can physically transmit more than that, you can't buy it as a service.
Apartment complexes can receive a dedicated fibre with more than 100Mbps capacity, but that's till split up between the apartments, the difference is that the splitter is on the premises. I think this caused a lot of confusion, because some of the logical diagrams showed a 1 Gbps fibre going to a building, and journalists didn't notice that only 100Mbps connections were going to each apartment.
One interesting issue with the NBN is that while we're going to have plenty of bandwidth, our latency to most services is still terrible. America is 200ms away, and there's not a lot in the English-speaking corner of the Internet that's closer. I hope Google, Amazon, and Microsoft start building data centres locally, or the upgrade will be largely unnoticeable for anything other than video streaming.
That arbitrary number of "20 years" says a lot.
In the days of analog archival formats, the longevity of a certain medium was critical, because copies couldn't be made without degradation. Hence, lots of bureaucracies came up with rules such as "archival media must be usable for at least 'n' decades". This is a good rule, because otherwise people would do idiotic things like keep long-term archives polaroid photos or fax paper, and then they'd be in for a nasty shock when umpteen years later they'd find that their archives had faded away completely.
But since those ancient times, we've had this shiny newfangled technology called "digital" that you may have heard of. It has this amazing property that copies do not degrade at all. You can copy a tape over and over and over, from one generation to the next, and never lose a single bit of data. Hence, the new rule ought to be "copy all data every 'n' years to newer media" instead of some fixed longetivity. Not only does this massively reduce long-term storage costs as media bit density increases, it's also a good opportunity to verify data integrity. On top of this, media with a shorter lifetime can be used instead of more expensive "archive grade" media, further reducing costs.
If you're insisting that your backup tapes last 20 years instead of simply setting up a scheduled copy in your backup software, then you're doing it wrong. You should never need to go back three generations of tapes. This is not the fault of the tape hardware vendors not meeting your requirements, instead, the fault is your flawed requirements stemming from outdated practices.
To put things in perspective, LTO-1 is only 12 years old, and is already difficult to read. To go back 20 years, you'd be looking at DDS-2, a tape format with a 4GB capacity. You could fit an archive of about a thousand DDS-2 tapes onto a single LTO-6 tape!
Which means that an LTO4 drive is not mandated to be able to read an LTO1 tape
You should look into a recent development in tape technology I've heard about, where formerly write-only tapes can now also be read back out, allowing them to be copied to newer media!
There's zero benefit to transparent screens in the vast majority of use-cases, but there's a huge downside: loss of contrast ratio. In an era where contrast ratios as high as 10000:1 are achievable, why would want to go back to something as poor as 10:1 or even lower? The only use-case where transparent screens might be useful is vehicle heads-up displays, but even there it's not quite the right solution, because the focal plane is all wrong. Take a look at vehicles that do have HUDs: they all use reflection with an angled surface because it allows for the use of optics that projects a virtual display at a focal depth much further out than the surface itself. A display embedded into a windshield would appear fuzzy and out of focus if you look out at the road through it.
Most of the time, gadgets and technology in movies are designed simply to look cool, not for actual practicality, and the result is often pretty but stupid. The GUI in Minority Report is a great example of this: nobody can hold their arms up in front of them for more than a few minutes! Try it: get out a stopwatch and hold your arms out level for ten minutes. After the painful burning in your shoulders stops, take a minute and think about doing that for an eight hour workday. No matter how cool it looks, the mechanical advantage of our shoulders just isn't great enough to allow this kind of interface, and never will unless we all become cyborgs first.
Just because you saw something in a sci-fi movie doesn't automatically mean that it's the "future" and only the required technology developments are holding us back. It's not like script writers and directors have some sort of personal revelation of the One True Future that we must all aspire to.
They actually say exactly that in the patent itself:
In an effort to gain the advantages conferred by operating on a floating point basis, some prior art systems have attempted to perform floating point through software emulation, but on a fixed point hardware platform. However, this approach is extremely slow, due to the fact that the software emulation relies upon the use of a general purpose CPU...
But as advances in semiconductor and computer technology enable greater processing power and faster speeds; as prices drop; and as graphical applications grow in sophistication and precision, it has been discovered by the present inventors that it is now practical to implement some portions or even the entire rasterization process by hardware in a floating point format.
In other words, they admit that they've seen prior art where others have tried and failed. Instead of inventing a faster method for implementing floating point, SGI just waited until silicon caught up, and hey look, they "invented" floating point graphics. It's in the patent text that they did nothing but wait for Moore's law to solve their problem for them! How was this approved by the patent office!?
I have this mental image of a lone clerk in the patent office somewhere, mindlessly whacking a rubber stamp on everything shoved in front of his face, while staring off into the distance with glazed-over eyes.
At first, I assumed that this was about some complex algorithm like finding the greatest common subsets in a large set of static values or something similarly esoteric, but nope, it's trivial:
The preloader identifies all <clinit> methods and play executes these methods to determine the static initialization performed by them. The preloader then creates an expression indicating the static initialization performed by the <clinit> method and stores this expression in the .mclass file, replacing the <clinit> method. As such, the code of the <clinit> method, containing many instructions, is replaced by a single expression instructing the virtual machine to perform static initialization, thus saving a significant amount of memory. The virtual machine is modified to recognize this expression and perform the appropriate static initialization of an array.
It's so trivial that you don't even need to read the body of the patent to completely understand it! I can even boil it down to just three words: compile-time memoization,
Not only that, but this is hardly a concept unique to Java, there's even a Wiki article for it! Maybe Oracle should sue the inventors of the D Language, and the C++ committees too while they're at it, because if you use template meta-programming to initialise a static variable, then you've infringed -- or close enough anyway to be sued into bankruptcy.
The reason few (if any) compilers used static initializer memoization before 1998 is because most of the commonly used general-purpose languages with a concept of "static" weren't safe back then, so the compiler couldn't execute small arbitrary chunks of code without risking a crash or strange side-effects. The only reason Java could introduce this feature is because of a convenient side-effect of compiling a safe language -- not because someone had invented either compile-time evaluation, memoization, or the combination of the two. That, and nobody had over-used static values sufficiently while simultaneously caring enough about startup performance to bother implementing such a complex feature given the marginal performance advantage. You could probably demonstrate prior art by just pointing out that most compilers evaluate constant expressions at compile time, so "static int foo = 5 + 5" is basically the same thing as what the patent is claiming.
How did "of the people, by the people, for the people" turn into "of the inept, by the litigious, for the corrupt"?
Seconded.
I've been thinking about this for a year now, and it cracks me up that there's a law that names this effect!
Lets see some recent Slashdot headlines:
Can Translucency Save Privacy In the Cloud?
No.
When Social Media Meets TV, Are the Results Worth Watching?
No.
Will Mobile Wallets Replace Their Traditional Counterparts?
No.
Is It Time For the US Government To Back Fusion At NIF Over ITER?
No.
Any Smart Phones Made Under Worker-Friendly Conditions?
No. -- it's the first +5 comment!
It would be 'life changing' in a data center. How much do they waste in electricity going into heat? How much air con is that on top of the computers themselves? Instead of needing megawatts to run data centers you need as much as say a couple houses today with full on AC in the middle of the summer. Yet still have the same compute power.
That kind of thing is not "life changing though". Think about it -- we've had a factor of 100,000x reduction in watts/mips over the last few decades, yet datacentres require more heat and power than they used to!
Even if some room-temperature superconductor allowed another 1000x fold reduction in power usage (which is huge), all you would see is 1000x as much computer equipment stuffed into the data centre.
The OP was asking what life and social changes would we expect. My point was that at least initially, not much.
Most people think of superconductors as merely a "perfectly efficient" conductor. While this is true, it just scratches the surface of what's possible with superconductors. Using superconductors just to improve efficiency wouldn't be that big a deal by itself. It would improve battery life a little bit, and maybe drop bulk electricity transmission overheads, but not by much, and certainly not immediately. Making most superconductors into high-tensile wire is a non-trivial exercise, even if cooling isn't a problem -- and it will be! Just because a material is discovered that can conduct at "room" temperature isn't helpful for wire outdoors in direct sunlight, or in a hot environment inside high-temperature machinery. Last but not least, superconductors have current and magnetic field limits that increase as they are cooled past the transition temperature. A superconductor with a transition temperature of 26C would probably have only a few limited applications above 20C.
The other uses are more interesting, and often more amenable to thermal control:
The Meissner_effect provides magnetic shielding, which is useful for all sorts of things, like amplifiers, or for protecting sensitive electronics. This is also what causes magnets to levitate above Type 2 superconductors. I assume that a room-temperature superconductor would be Type 2, so levitation would likely be possible.
The London moment could be used in gyroscopes and the like.
Josephson junctions provide all sorts of functions, like ultra-sensitive magnetic field sensors (think hard-drives and MRIs).
Still, all of that is a bit... meh. I mean sure, you get less noise in your now ultra-sensitive amplifier, and electricity will cost 10% less than it would have otherwise in 30 years. Is this life changing? Probably not really.
A much more interesting potential application than all of those combined is Rapid Single Flux Quantum digital circuitry. That stuff makes silicon look like vacuum tubes. Think 100GHz+, self-clocking, 1000x as efficient as CMOS, and manufacturable now, with only the cooling requirement the big down-side. If RSFQ could be made to work at room-temperature (or even near it), you could be looking at a sudden massive leap forward in computer power like never before. For example, with a power draw 1000x lower, it would be possible to stack every chip in a typical computer into a little "cube", with much shorter wire lengths, and hence, latencies. We can't do this now, because that cube would literally melt in seconds form the heat.
The reality-check of all this is that many MRI machines are still cooled by liquid helium, even though superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen temperatures have been available for a while. This tells you a lot about the limitations that might restrict the application of even a hypothetical room-temperature superconductor. For example, ultra-sensitive sensors and RSFQ may not work at all, because the tiny signal quanta may be swamped by the background thermal noise. Similarly, manufacturability of wire and maximum magnetic field strength is a key requirement for a lot of applications, like MRIs and electric motors.
Personally, I suspect that the first room-temperature superconductor will be initially manufacturable in bulk only as a thin-film, so expect the first decade or two to be mostly about improved circuitry and sensors more than anything else. This might be closer than people think. For example, there's a harmless quack who claims to have achieved superconductivity at 28C by manufacturing extremely complex copper-based crystals as a thin layer between two different traditional copper-based superconductors. Assuming for a second that he's onto something, it gives you an idea
The manufacturing energy & strip-mining of new materials & toxic chemicals plus shipping from the other side of the planet would far-exceed anything I would save by switching to LCD or a new iCore CPU.
That's probably not true.
I've heard this kind of thing said a number of time before, for example about electric cars, the theory being that it somehow costs more energy to manufacture a battery pack than it will ever save compared to an ICE engine.
However, a simple economic analysis shows this to be false in many cases. Energy is largely fungible, that is, it doesn't really matter if you're using electricity or oil, it's all pretty much just watt-hours at some fairly equal cost. There's variances of course -- electricity is cheaper near a hydroelectric dam, oil is cheaper in some countries, and both is cheaper to buy in bulk.
Manufacturers pay for energy the same as everyone else, and they're not just going to ignore that cost out of the goodness of their hearts, it's going to be baked right into the cost of manufacture. So, looking at the cost of a good gives you an idea of the maximum amount of energy it could have taken to produce. You don't need to know anything about the specifics of its manufacturing process, just the cost.
You can get a 23" Dell LED backlit LCD monitor for USD 170 delivered. Now, at most half of that is the manufacturing cost, because Dell has to pay taxes, make a profit, and this is the RRP that resellers can also make a profit on. Hence, lets say $85 manufacturing cost, including all design, materials, factory and equipment depreciation, etc... Of that, at most $40 would be energy costs, directly or indirectly, the other half would be paying for "man hours" in one way or another. These are rough numbers, but bear with me.
Now, taking that estimated $40 worth of energy, we can figure that at a typical cost of $0.15 per kWh, it cost 280 kWh of energy to make that monitor. Now, an energy efficiency review shows that that model uses 16.65W of power when on, so that means that after 9,930 hours of operation, it will have made back its own manufacturing energy cost in savings compared to your current 50W CRT. At 8 hours per day, that's just over 3 years, and you've had your CRT for 6 years.
Admittedly, this won't make it cost effective for you to personally purchase this monitor based on energy saving alone, that would take well over a decade of usage. However, it shows that it isn't wasteful environmentally to buy a new monitor, and you do get a new monitor that would look much better than your old CRT. Better colour gamut, no flicker, always perfectly sharp, no distortion, etc...
Your example of CFLs is even more clear, in which case you would be personally saving money quite quickly by switching away from incandescent bulbs. That's been true for pretty much all models of CFLs for years now, and LED lights promise to improve on those savings even further.
Having a copy of the source provides only minimal protection. See for example the Underhanded C Code Contest.
It would be an almost trivial exercise to introduce a vulnerability into a code base that wouldn't be picked up easily by either human or mechanical inspection. Even if such a vulnerability was detected, the vendor could simply claim that it was a coding error, fix it, and get away with it unpunished. By adding a few dozen such vulnerabilities, the vendor could play this game for years without anyone ever being able to prove wrongdoing.
There's no hope of isolating the equipment or software from the Internet either, because the use-case here is a National Broadband Network, the whole point of which is to create a new public Internet backbone.
"Something"?
You don't even have a name for what you believe in!
Do you have any idea how utterly ridiculous this sounds to anyone with a clue? To be even remotely plausible, let alone scientific, there must be a method that can quantify this "something".
Homeopathy has been around, for what, two hundred years? In all that time, none of its crackpot proponents have even begun to answer the most basic questions a scientist would investigate about this "something", let alone come up with actual falsifiable predictions.
Let me get you started:
* Is this "something" affected by temperature? If so, what is the response-curve from near absolute zero up to the dissociation temperature of steam?
* How about pressure?
* Is it also present in other liquids? If not, why not?
* Is it present in ice?
* Steam?
* How about heavy water?
* Tritiated water?
* How is it affected by impurities?
* How is it "reset"?
* How is it set?
* At what rate?
* Under what conditions? Under atmospheric pressure? Magnetic fields? Electric fields? Radiation? What fields strengths? Frequency spectra?
Or most importantly:
* How can it be even measured?
* With what units?
Let me give you a basic problem with homeopathy: if its claims were true, then all water would automatically cure you of most of your ills, since all water contains traces of damned near everything. Even if you were to accept that the method of preparation matters, the problem is that the water used to perform the dilution already contains impurities, and is hence a homeopathic cure itself.
I mean, how can you possibly take this gibberish seriously? How? I really want to know! Do you seriously believe in diluted duck liver as an effective anti-viral agent? Do you read Harry Potter novels for recipe ideas? Have you ever collected eye of newt at midnight, or prepared a potion with virgin's tears? Why not? It might cure cancer!
I love how your evidence for group think and self-delusion can cut both ways. Have you applied your critical thinking to your own beliefs, or just those of others? Are you really on the right side of the fence?
A quote from one of your links:
Many of the most promising healing modalities are not just ignored by conventional medicine; they are in fact ridiculed. Homeopathy comes to mind. Homeopathy is discredited simply because the defenders of conventional medicine have no understanding of the mechanism by which homeopathic remedies work
The mechanism is bullshit, it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be completely false. This doesn't surprise anyone, because homepathic remedies are just water. At best, homepathic remedies might be good for rehydration, but aren't even that best at that, because real scientists understand what actually happens in the human body and have developed rehydration formulas that are better than water.
What homeopathy is good for is finding poor experimental methods. Anyone who can demonstrate different results between two treatments, where one is water, and the other is also water has fucked up something very badly.
LENR is another good example that demonstrates just how difficult it is to get calorimetric measurements right, especially at low energy levels. The Rossi team in Italy for example seem to have missed the detail that the energy contained in wet steam is something like one-tenth of the energy in dry steam. That error is all it takes to completely delude themselves and their investors. That they have ignored advice that pointed out this error and continued to believe in whatever they want to believe is exactly the point that I think you were trying to make. So, who's deluded? The Rossi team, or the scientists who politely explained that a key measurement is incorrect by an order of magnitude?
Before you reply, look at my educational link first: the economic argument.
All Rossi has to do is turn his machine into a loop so that it provides its own input energy, and sell the excess to the grid. He doesn't need investors, he doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. Anyone with the slightest common sense sitting on 'free energy' technology would require less than a decade to start the 'Fusion Energy Electricity Company' and make billions.
So why are all the LENR advocates still poor? Is "the man" keeping them down? Or is it more likely that their machines simply fail to work?
Why aren't psychics making billions on the stock market, or millions at poker tournaments?
My favourite example is Astrology. When people use actual numbers, it has no results whatsoever.
You don't even need a business incentive, the scientific community regularly hands out Nobel prizes to people that can demonstrate that the mainstream thinking is wrong.
Java 7 has a Closeable interface that is analogous to the .NET IDisposable interface. It can be used in a block of code similar to a "try-catch" block that is equivalent to the C# "using" block, and guarantees cleanup. This is on top of the automatic cleanup that happens anyway, after a delay. For comparison, while in principle C++ code can be made robust against resource and memory leaks, in practice the use of C-like APIs and third-party libraries makes this a very difficult goal to achieve.
You're also conflating memory management and timely release of resources. In C++ those are treated as more or less the same thing, but in managed languages like Java and C#, they're somewhat independent. Programmers shouldn't care exactly when the garbage collector kicks in to release memory because the vast majority of the time it doesn't matter, and when it does matter, there are API calls and configuration parameters that can be used to alter GC behaviour. The Closeable/IDisposable interfaces provide a structured method for resource cleanup when it does matter, such as connections and handles. This is surprisingly rare -- out of the thousands of classes in the Java SDK API, there's only a little over a hundred that implement the Closeable interface.
Writing C++ code that uses complex control flow such threading, events or closures can be challenging, and programmers can becoming pre-occupied with resource lifetime management. I've seen many C++ programmers make the incorrect assumption that because their experience is that the advanced language features of C++ make an this complex problem somewhat simpler and safer to solve, then other languages that don't have equivalent features must in some way be flawed. Of course, this is because they don't realise that in other languages it's not a significant problem. It's a form of projection, just like alcoholics often think everybody else has a problem with their drinking too.
Nothing stops you from using Windows Remote Management to do exactly the same thing with Windows.
It could happen to Linux as well. But it doesn't.
Linux does have comparable remote-access protocols to RDP, all of which have had plenty of remote exploits in past. For example have a look at CERT advisories on SSH and X11. Don't even get me started on VNC, which is often not updated automatically because it's an installable add-on instead of a system component.
Really? How many servers have you built using a touch interface? Tried typing command-line parameters using a touch keyboard? Tried dictating symbols to a voice control system recently?
Accessing servers from a tablet is a gimmick for anything other than perhaps a dashboard-type interface, most of which are web applications anyway and aren't typically accessed using the local desktop of the server.
I figured that I'd just do what I did with Vista, and run the server edition of Windows 8 instead of the consumer edition, so that I can have all the new capabilities without the tablet UI.
No such luck.
I ran up the beta and got a few things up and running on it, and it's just mind-blowing to experience how horrendously unusable it is first hand. This is the server edition, mind you, and it had animations, things sliding around, the start menu is gone, and some notification popped up that said something like "tap here to view details". Tap? On a server? Are you kidding me? Everything is a tablet now?
The strangest thing is that the PowerShell 3 command line is so fantastically good* that I almost don't care that they've fucked up the GUI, but for most people any improvements are going to be swamped by the atrocious user interface.
They've stuffed up everything. Things like the new Server Manager look pretty, but it does odd things like adding new menu items after a delay. After clicking some item like a server role, at first maybe only three or four menu items would be shown, so you think, ah well, nothing I can do here... and then after two seconds more menu items appear out of nowhere. If you're like me and click fast, you can miss critical things because some idiot decided to lather on the WinRT asynchronous APIs without any thought to the impact on usability. It's one thing if a placeholder changes after a delay, but to keep structure hidden until an arbitrary delay is a huge design flaw. And why the fuck is it asynchronous in the first place, anyway? Why aren't menu items known ahead of time, like you know... in all other software ever made by man?
Everything has cute tiles now, none of which are big enough to show their text content, so you find yourself having to choose between "Active Direct...", "Active Direct...", or "Active Direct...". It doesn't help that the icons are all cool and Metro and lack distinguishing characteristics.
I love the nested scrollbars, where the horizontal and vertical scrollbars are attached to two different controls with different sizes, where one of them can be used to scroll the other scrollbar into an invisible location.
Of course, everybody has covered the idiocy of Microsoft deciding to eliminate the Start menu, but on Windows Server it's particularly bad because there's a vaguely similar looking icon in its place! If you don't click exactly in the corner of the screen, you launch Server Manager instead, which is not a lightweight app, and can take a while to launch even on an SSD. Expect to learn quickly from your mistakes, because you'll be punished for making them. A lot.
I still haven't figured out how to quickly get a list of all start menu items, without first searching for something and then erasing the search term so that everything matches. I'm sure there's a better way, but it's not obvious to me.
Some of these things might be a bit nitpicky, but from what I've seen the flaws are pervasive, and it's a bad sign that even the most commonly used GUI screens have glaring usability problems despite having what appears to be final layout and artwork.
It's one thing to grumble and have to get used to something new and different if it's better, but it's a whole different story when I'm forced to get used to something that is not only objectively worse, but also totally inappropriate for the type of product: "tap here" on Windows Server Datacenter Edition tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's myopic vision.
*) While they've added some impressive features to PowerShell 3, they've fixed none of the bugs. For example, (Get-ADUser "invalidusername" -EA SilentlyContinue) still throws an exception even though it was told to fail silently. This bug affects a lot of different things and was reported to Microsoft back when PowerShell 2 was still beta! I'm going to whip my crystal ball out and predict that this bug will not get fixed until, lets say, PowerShell 5 Service Pack 2, at which point nobody will care because we'll all be using Apple computers and Google cloud services instead.
Maybe an analogy would actually be better...
Think of programming as a Mathematician developing a new maths proof. The Mathematician may not know how to get to his goal, but that doesn't mean that the solution isn't robust, or that he needs a calculator at every step.
Similarly, a good programmer can develop robust and easy-to-maintain code even without an a-priori design, or automated assistance.
Where machine-assistance comes in is that I can see situations where a computer can assist the Mathematician in a way that a calculator can't -- through things like formal proof verifying software, or software like Mathematica that can be used to perform difficult and error-prone symbol manipulation steps like simplification, factorisation, integration, etc... Also, it's possible to use computers to perform brute-force numeric verification, and even reverse-engineering, which can give useful hints. There's software methods for taking a numeric result, and "guessing" what symbolic expression could have produced it, which can be very useful for someone who's become stuck and just needs a hint of the form of an expression.
Similar methods have been applied by programmers for years. Think syntax highlighting, live error checking, or static code analysis. With sufficient computer power, these methods could be extended further. For example, wouldn't it be great if code could be given random inputs (or recorded inputs), run bunch of times, and then each section of the code highlighted based on hit-rate or time taken? A profiler can do that for you now offline, but I'd say we have the CPU performance to do this live with small blocks of code.
You may disagree with the vision, but you can't disagree that there is a method behind the madness.
The problem with Microsoft, and a lot of us have been around long enough to see it repeatedly, is that when they decide that something is shiny and new, they drop all ongoing development of everything else like it doesn't even exist any more, even if the new thing is not a suitable replacement for the old thing.
When Microsoft decided that XAML was the "Way Forward" for rich web applications, they moved all but one guy off the IE team and into the Visual Studio and Expression teams to develop things like the improved XML editor, the designers, etc... Now, as a developer, I find those improvements very useful, but meanwhile there was one guy left of the IE 'team' doing just security fixes for years. This is why there was such a huge gap between IE6 and IE7, and why IE7 was such a small improvement compared to the progress made by Firefox and WebKit in the same time period.
Now, if you're a XAML-only programmer, then Microsoft was being innovative and moving forward. To HTML-based web application programmers they were being stupid and counter-productive, dragging the entire Internet down to the lowest common denominator that was IE6. That made a lot of people very upset with them, and rightly so. There was no way XAML could ever replace HTML, because it was tied to the .NET Framework in practice, which is not cross platform. A HTML replacement has to be cross-platform. That didn't stop them from ignoring HTML for half a decade.
With Windows 8, Microsoft is doing the exact same thing again. If you're a phone or tablet programmer, then Microsoft is innovative and moving forward. For desktop users -- Microsoft's biggest market -- they are being stupid and counter-productive, dragging the entire Desktop world down to a lowest common denominator with limited devices that don't have keyboards and mice. The walled garden of WinRT applications can never replace desktop applications, because the APIs are deliberately limited to suit the tablet environment. They have to be, otherwise apps would kill battery life or introduce vulnerabilities. A new framework has to be more than just a Tablet API or GUI, but that won't stop Microsoft from ignoring "classic" Windows applications for the next half a decade.
It's not just the GUI, Microsoft's other technologies have been suffering too from a lack of newness an shinyness. For example, their C++ standards compliance is woeful: the next release amounts to little more than some additional header files -- basically whatever one of their interns could whip up in a month, instead of a real revamp of the core compiler technology to have significantly new features. This is because they were too busy coming up with yet another bastardised non-standard version of C++ so that they can call WinRT APIs efficiently. Don't even think of asking for C99 support!
Sure, nobody is being forced to use WinRT, or tiles, or tablets, but if you're not using them, then you're using APIs and systems that will basically stop dead in the water, which in the computer world is the same as going backwards. Microsoft is atrocious at "seeing things through", because of their short attention span. For example, did you know that both Vista and Windows 7 natively support higher color depths than 24-bit, and GUI scaling? Had Microsoft kept going with that, our desktops could have had "double resolution" just like tablets, 36-bit deep color, wider gamuts, 200 DPI, and a bunch of things by now. But nooo... it was shiny then for a couple of years, and then Microsoft got bored and dropped all ongoing development of that as a feature. They even have a JPG-like image format that supports all of those better color features, but they never had more than some demo code written. Meanwhile, Apple demonstrated the value of technology that Microsoft had been sitting on for years, and suddenly everybody wants an iPad 3 with a Retina Display. Sigh...
Then you grow a little bit, buy an additional box and distribute your VMs using cold migration.
Oops... you naming system is now a jumbled mess.
Try again.
Moderate parent up please!
Full, descriptive names are the only sane way to name servers.
Alphanumerical gibberish is a system promoted by suit wearing idiots who's job it is to track corporate assets, not the people who's job it is to press the "OK" button on the "Are you sure you want to destroy this 5 TB volume?" dialog box.
No, you don't need the operating system platform in the server name, or the room code, rack number, owner, or anything else. Learn to use spreadsheets, asset tags, and description fields like a normal person. Name servers something clear and simple, like "ProdFile1" or "DmzDns2", and put the unrelated meta data where it belongs: elsewhere. Don't be afraid of CamelCasing either, just because server names are case insensitive doesn't mean they are not case preserving.
I've been at a site recently where there were wildly unrelated servers distinguished only by a single character, using both the numeral '1' and the letter 'I' in the same position. I saw, with my own two eyes, one of their senior admins moving the mouse cursor towards the "OK" on the "Are you sure you want to permanently delete this VM" prompt, and they had the wrong server! I corrected the guy before it was too late, so he then promptly found a second, also incorrect, server to delete.
Sure, for $50,000, and you have to call Sony so that their representative can explain to you why your hospital needs their specialist displays for viewing medical X-Rays.
Ooohh... you meant consumer displays at a reasonable price? Then no, no you can't. I've checked.
I phrased that part of my point somewhat poorly: my point was that Erlang looks good to programmers used to shitty languages like PHP. Erlang itself is a good language that is well designed for a specific task.
When you're used to using only a single blunt instrument, everything looks better in comparison, even a tool that's still not the appropriate one for the task at hand.