Mark Zuckerberg is way past 32 bits in his valuation of Facebook. The guy thinks this thing is worth something like $10B, and the number grows every day. I guess he's getting ready to some seriously insane delusions of grandeur before the bubble bursts and washes away his pile of crap.
You don't understand. This is not a way "forward". No one will approve anything that breaks backward compat. The guy who's in charge of Windows now is legendary for building a huge org (Office) one of the primary areas of excellence of which was work avoidance. They spend nine months "planning" to do three months of coding. At Microsoft getting Office to do anything for you is about as easy as getting a bear to ride a bicycle.
Besides, what are you going to do with the code that's already built on top of the old kernel? Rewrite it? Deprecate it? Do you even begin to comprehend how difficult it is to do at this point if you want solid app compat (which I assure you is a top priority for Microsoft - they don't want to push folks towards Linux by making apps incompatible with the new OS).
The only way forward now is to start over and do something other than same old NT and support NT as a subsystem a-la POSIX NT subsystem.
Einstein said "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." This applies to Windows in its current state very well, and they are at the limits of their ability as it is. It's a heck of a lot easier to tangle something than untangle it.
Take it from a former Microserf - this "internal project" will be taken to the nearest corner and shot (and maybe also mutilated and spat on). When you have a huge turd of a codebase dating back 15 years in some places, the last thing you want to do is dramatically rehash it. Projects like this are DOA at Microsoft after the WinFS fiasco.
Just emit the right wavelength and find a dark spot moving in the sky (i.e. absence of normal atmospheric backscatter). Then launch a rocket with multi-spectral guidance system. It'll either see it visually, or through a radar (when it's close), or in infrared (it's warm, it burns fuel, you see). Check out C-400 Triumph. It shoots down anything and everything, whether it's in the stratosphere or close to the ground within the radius of 250 miles. Russians have no qualms selling this stuff to Arabs and the Chinese, either, so don't expect F-22 to ever be deployed over UAE or China. Or at least don't expect it to be deployed for long.
>> Christian nutcases don't in general have murder and mayhem on their mind
Three hundred thousand dead Iraqis may disagree with you on that one. The christian nutcase currently in charge of this country seems pretty bloodthirsty, too.
Now replace "mullah" with "evangelical Christian", and it all applies on our neck of the woods as well. People somehow forget that this country was founded by religious nutcases.
1. They'll HAVE to release an ultraportable. People have been waiting for it for too long. 2. They'd need a state of the art handwriting recognition system. Microsoft has one (in Tablet), but quite obviously licensing it is out of the question. Apple can't create one on their own, since they've disbanded their Advanced Technology Group (research) a decade ago. And you need PhDs to work on machine learning. 3. Why would I want a PDA if I already have an iPhone and MacBook Pro?
If they're stupid enough to release it (with InkWell), it'll be a market flop second only to AppleTV.
And while they're at it, they should get law-guaranteed overtime for my wife (who is an accountant), too. Otherwise there's just too much leeway for shitty management.
"Sure we can make a few mistakes here and there, we'll just force the peons to work weekends for a month before a major deadline while we kick back with a beer at home. Oh, and we'll book them at 130% capacity, so that they work 10-12 hour days during "non crunch" time, too. Ourselves, we'll work 9 to 5, of course, most of the time 10 to 4, actually."
Depending on the legal interpretation. On one hand as a government agency all work done by DARPA should be public domain. On the other hand they somehow managed to patent this. Does this mean that this is an anti-patent, i.e. no one else can patent this anymore and everyone can use it? Or did they find a legal loophole which could prevent everyone else from using the tech? If it's the latter, it's pretty horrible. DARPA pays for a heck of a lot of fundamental innovation each year (with taxpayer money, of course). If they start patenting it a lot of things will come to a grinding halt.
Papers sometimes don't explain things well enough. A lot of them are written to meet the acceptance bar for the conference. So even if the idea is simple, it'll be buried under a mountain of (often unnecessary) math and funky notations. When presenting papers, however, researchers tend to explain things as simply as possible so that the audience understands them better.
People waste thousands of dollars every year going to conferences, etc. And then they have to sit through presentations whether they want to or not because, well, they've already paid for it. And then, the conference is only once a year. And then, not everything gets accepted (which is a good thing, mostly, but some decent papers don't get accepted either).
Personally, I think researchers owe it to yourselves to buy a decent HD camera (Canon HV20, for example) and a piece of software that will encode their videos with decent quality. That one you usually don't even have to buy. Want to present your work? Present it in front of a camera and send it to your contacts in scientific community, or just put it on the web. That way I can view the "dense" parts several times and ask better questions through email, which is crucial for understanding.
Another idea is to create a wiki where edit rights are for people with scientific credentials only, so that they could upload their videos and answer questions right there without duplication, and a layman could read and watch the interesting bits, too.
Granted in a lot of research orgs conferences are perceived as a perk and researchers don't pay for their trips themselves, but I do believe that we should be using technical advances and broaden the circle to include folks who don't have $10K a year to visit three conferences.
Jesus Christ, will someone please rip off ASP.NET? I've looked at all the crazy proliferation of Java web frameworks and they all pretty much suck. You have to maintain a bunch of XML files for things that ASP.NET just figures out on its own, docs suck, architecture is bizarre. It's all just a giant, productivity draining mess. Why can't I just have transparent interaction between the page and code? Why do I have to "register" crap (through XML file) that should just be available transparently from page code? Why do I have to create "navigation rules"? Why do I have to "declare beans"?
No wonder turds like Ruby on Rails are so popular. I'd rather shoot myself than use Java for web development.
You're forgetting that a lot of these patents are by US companies that have research centers in China. IBM, Microsoft, Nokia - those are on the first page of what Google returns for "research centers in beijing".
While engineers at Microsoft don't hold anything against FOSS (mostly), there are plenty of non-engineering people who won't pass up an opportunity to screw FOSS over as bad as they can. Legal, marketing, mid-to-upper management - all pretty powerful people. And engineers will mostly just do what they're told to do since 90% of them are there for a paycheck.
This is not to say that MSFT doesn't deserve respect for _some_ of its products (W2K, XP, Office 2007, Visual Studio, dev tools, SQL 2005), just don't be careless. There are people there whose day job is to screw FOSS over.
1. Get Logitech Trackman Marble FX - the old, wired version with large ball (I have three - hands down the best input device ever created) 2. Get a couple of different, but comfortable mice (I have a wireless laser MS mouse and wired optical MS mouse) 3. Get a couple of different, but comfortable keyboards (I have MS Natural Ergonomic 4000 and Kinesis The Essential, in addition to MacBook Pro keyboard) 4. If you draw, buy a WACOM tablet (I have a 9x12" Intuos 3)
Switch between your mice and keyboards regularly. Remember, its _repetitive_ stress injury. If you use a different device, you get different kinds of stress in your wrist, and it doesn't build up and doesn't cause inflammation, so RSI goes away (if it's not a clinical case). Finally, don't work 16 hours a day. Get a life. Read a book. Take breaks during your work day. Play a musical instrument. Think about your lifestyle and whether or not it's sustainable long term. If not, make changes.
Folks below seem to justify it with IQ and whatnot, but I believe it's much simpler than that. I lacked (and still do, to a degree) social skills, I almost never went to parties (see #1), I wasn't "bad" enough for girls to like me, and I tried too hard to get them to like me. Let me tell you, helping a girl with her homework won't get you laid - I'm speaking from experience. NOT helping with homework and beating someone into a bloody pulp might, though.
And those who say they "didn't have interest" - please, guys, give me a break. I remember myself when I was 15. I'd get a boner just from being close to a girl. When you're 15, things like this are really out of your control and you'd jump at the first opportunity to bang someone if you weren't so scared or if there was in fact an opportunity.
It's like if you'd just learned to ride a bicycle and said that it sucked. OF COURSE first time ALWAYS sucks. You don't know how to do it yet. Once you do know how to do it, though, you'll understand the hype. There's a learning curve. Do it a hundred times and you'll get a hang of it.
They've been working on this FOREVER. I remember seeing little wireless Shuttle cubes strewn all over the campus 3 or 4 years back. Good to see another Microsoft Research technology end up in a product.
Here's why releasing a new OS where the backwards compat is provided only through VM is suicidal: 1. Why would I buy it, if I can buy the exact same thing today in any Apple store? There won't be any apps (excluding Office) or drivers for the new OS, at least not within the first year. 2. What are you gonna do with legacy server software when it's time to release the server version of the OS? Run it in VM? Virtual Server users will tell you that running SQL Server on it is nothing less than torture - the IO crawls.
The biggest problem is that if you want to _replace_ your flagship OS you'd have to get the new one RIGHT on the first try. Microsoft never gets anything right on the first try. Therefore, the only viable means of releasing a new OS for them is doing what they did with NT - ship the new OS side by side with the old and graft backwards compat (and POSIX layer, of course) onto the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Mark Zuckerberg is way past 32 bits in his valuation of Facebook. The guy thinks this thing is worth something like $10B, and the number grows every day. I guess he's getting ready to some seriously insane delusions of grandeur before the bubble bursts and washes away his pile of crap.
You don't understand. This is not a way "forward". No one will approve anything that breaks backward compat. The guy who's in charge of Windows now is legendary for building a huge org (Office) one of the primary areas of excellence of which was work avoidance. They spend nine months "planning" to do three months of coding. At Microsoft getting Office to do anything for you is about as easy as getting a bear to ride a bicycle.
Besides, what are you going to do with the code that's already built on top of the old kernel? Rewrite it? Deprecate it? Do you even begin to comprehend how difficult it is to do at this point if you want solid app compat (which I assure you is a top priority for Microsoft - they don't want to push folks towards Linux by making apps incompatible with the new OS).
The only way forward now is to start over and do something other than same old NT and support NT as a subsystem a-la POSIX NT subsystem.
Einstein said "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." This applies to Windows in its current state very well, and they are at the limits of their ability as it is. It's a heck of a lot easier to tangle something than untangle it.
Take it from a former Microserf - this "internal project" will be taken to the nearest corner and shot (and maybe also mutilated and spat on). When you have a huge turd of a codebase dating back 15 years in some places, the last thing you want to do is dramatically rehash it. Projects like this are DOA at Microsoft after the WinFS fiasco.
Nice. They should now reimburse licensors for the licensing fees they've unlawfully charged.
Just emit the right wavelength and find a dark spot moving in the sky (i.e. absence of normal atmospheric backscatter). Then launch a rocket with multi-spectral guidance system. It'll either see it visually, or through a radar (when it's close), or in infrared (it's warm, it burns fuel, you see). Check out C-400 Triumph. It shoots down anything and everything, whether it's in the stratosphere or close to the ground within the radius of 250 miles. Russians have no qualms selling this stuff to Arabs and the Chinese, either, so don't expect F-22 to ever be deployed over UAE or China. Or at least don't expect it to be deployed for long.
>> Christian nutcases don't in general have murder and mayhem on their mind
Three hundred thousand dead Iraqis may disagree with you on that one. The christian nutcase currently in charge of this country seems pretty bloodthirsty, too.
Now replace "mullah" with "evangelical Christian", and it all applies on our neck of the woods as well. People somehow forget that this country was founded by religious nutcases.
For several reasons:
1. They'll HAVE to release an ultraportable. People have been waiting for it for too long.
2. They'd need a state of the art handwriting recognition system. Microsoft has one (in Tablet), but quite obviously licensing it is out of the question. Apple can't create one on their own, since they've disbanded their Advanced Technology Group (research) a decade ago. And you need PhDs to work on machine learning.
3. Why would I want a PDA if I already have an iPhone and MacBook Pro?
If they're stupid enough to release it (with InkWell), it'll be a market flop second only to AppleTV.
And while they're at it, they should get law-guaranteed overtime for my wife (who is an accountant), too. Otherwise there's just too much leeway for shitty management.
"Sure we can make a few mistakes here and there, we'll just force the peons to work weekends for a month before a major deadline while we kick back with a beer at home. Oh, and we'll book them at 130% capacity, so that they work 10-12 hour days during "non crunch" time, too. Ourselves, we'll work 9 to 5, of course, most of the time 10 to 4, actually."
If DARPA was funding the research, it should own its results. If DARPA owns its results, they're public domain.
Depending on the legal interpretation. On one hand as a government agency all work done by DARPA should be public domain. On the other hand they somehow managed to patent this. Does this mean that this is an anti-patent, i.e. no one else can patent this anymore and everyone can use it? Or did they find a legal loophole which could prevent everyone else from using the tech? If it's the latter, it's pretty horrible. DARPA pays for a heck of a lot of fundamental innovation each year (with taxpayer money, of course). If they start patenting it a lot of things will come to a grinding halt.
Any lawyers on the thread?
Papers sometimes don't explain things well enough. A lot of them are written to meet the acceptance bar for the conference. So even if the idea is simple, it'll be buried under a mountain of (often unnecessary) math and funky notations. When presenting papers, however, researchers tend to explain things as simply as possible so that the audience understands them better.
People waste thousands of dollars every year going to conferences, etc. And then they have to sit through presentations whether they want to or not because, well, they've already paid for it. And then, the conference is only once a year. And then, not everything gets accepted (which is a good thing, mostly, but some decent papers don't get accepted either).
Personally, I think researchers owe it to yourselves to buy a decent HD camera (Canon HV20, for example) and a piece of software that will encode their videos with decent quality. That one you usually don't even have to buy. Want to present your work? Present it in front of a camera and send it to your contacts in scientific community, or just put it on the web. That way I can view the "dense" parts several times and ask better questions through email, which is crucial for understanding.
Another idea is to create a wiki where edit rights are for people with scientific credentials only, so that they could upload their videos and answer questions right there without duplication, and a layman could read and watch the interesting bits, too.
Granted in a lot of research orgs conferences are perceived as a perk and researchers don't pay for their trips themselves, but I do believe that we should be using technical advances and broaden the circle to include folks who don't have $10K a year to visit three conferences.
Jesus Christ, will someone please rip off ASP.NET? I've looked at all the crazy proliferation of Java web frameworks and they all pretty much suck. You have to maintain a bunch of XML files for things that ASP.NET just figures out on its own, docs suck, architecture is bizarre. It's all just a giant, productivity draining mess. Why can't I just have transparent interaction between the page and code? Why do I have to "register" crap (through XML file) that should just be available transparently from page code? Why do I have to create "navigation rules"? Why do I have to "declare beans"?
No wonder turds like Ruby on Rails are so popular. I'd rather shoot myself than use Java for web development.
You're forgetting that a lot of these patents are by US companies that have research centers in China. IBM, Microsoft, Nokia - those are on the first page of what Google returns for "research centers in beijing".
While engineers at Microsoft don't hold anything against FOSS (mostly), there are plenty of non-engineering people who won't pass up an opportunity to screw FOSS over as bad as they can. Legal, marketing, mid-to-upper management - all pretty powerful people. And engineers will mostly just do what they're told to do since 90% of them are there for a paycheck.
This is not to say that MSFT doesn't deserve respect for _some_ of its products (W2K, XP, Office 2007, Visual Studio, dev tools, SQL 2005), just don't be careless. There are people there whose day job is to screw FOSS over.
Get ready then. It melts as we speak due to global warming.
1. Get Logitech Trackman Marble FX - the old, wired version with large ball (I have three - hands down the best input device ever created)
2. Get a couple of different, but comfortable mice (I have a wireless laser MS mouse and wired optical MS mouse)
3. Get a couple of different, but comfortable keyboards (I have MS Natural Ergonomic 4000 and Kinesis The Essential, in addition to MacBook Pro keyboard)
4. If you draw, buy a WACOM tablet (I have a 9x12" Intuos 3)
Switch between your mice and keyboards regularly. Remember, its _repetitive_ stress injury. If you use a different device, you get different kinds of stress in your wrist, and it doesn't build up and doesn't cause inflammation, so RSI goes away (if it's not a clinical case). Finally, don't work 16 hours a day. Get a life. Read a book. Take breaks during your work day. Play a musical instrument. Think about your lifestyle and whether or not it's sustainable long term. If not, make changes.
Folks below seem to justify it with IQ and whatnot, but I believe it's much simpler than that. I lacked (and still do, to a degree) social skills, I almost never went to parties (see #1), I wasn't "bad" enough for girls to like me, and I tried too hard to get them to like me. Let me tell you, helping a girl with her homework won't get you laid - I'm speaking from experience. NOT helping with homework and beating someone into a bloody pulp might, though.
And those who say they "didn't have interest" - please, guys, give me a break. I remember myself when I was 15. I'd get a boner just from being close to a girl. When you're 15, things like this are really out of your control and you'd jump at the first opportunity to bang someone if you weren't so scared or if there was in fact an opportunity.
It's like if you'd just learned to ride a bicycle and said that it sucked. OF COURSE first time ALWAYS sucks. You don't know how to do it yet. Once you do know how to do it, though, you'll understand the hype. There's a learning curve. Do it a hundred times and you'll get a hang of it.
They've been working on this FOREVER. I remember seeing little wireless Shuttle cubes strewn all over the campus 3 or 4 years back. Good to see another Microsoft Research technology end up in a product.
Here's why releasing a new OS where the backwards compat is provided only through VM is suicidal:
1. Why would I buy it, if I can buy the exact same thing today in any Apple store? There won't be any apps (excluding Office) or drivers for the new OS, at least not within the first year.
2. What are you gonna do with legacy server software when it's time to release the server version of the OS? Run it in VM? Virtual Server users will tell you that running SQL Server on it is nothing less than torture - the IO crawls.
The biggest problem is that if you want to _replace_ your flagship OS you'd have to get the new one RIGHT on the first try. Microsoft never gets anything right on the first try. Therefore, the only viable means of releasing a new OS for them is doing what they did with NT - ship the new OS side by side with the old and graft backwards compat (and POSIX layer, of course) onto the OS.
The only issue is that there aren't any games, and their controller sucks ass. I use my PS3 as a BluRay player. It works great.
PS3 with Nintendo controls, platformers and game designers. That console could own it all.
What will happen if you have it play against itself? It'll have to beat itself, right?