I can assure you it'll cost more than that if Microsoft does it:)
There's quite a few stream things going on, in small set-top-boxes that also allow you to stream videos from a PC (running a DLNA server, like the free and good Tvmobili or PS3MediaServer). Some of these also transparently stream video from the internet too, like youtube and BBC iPlayer.
Canonical wants to do anything that gains then revenue - they can;t exist without that after all.
So, cloud computing - nice to do, everyone else is doing it after all, even Microsoft sees a nice revenue-generating bandwagon to jump on.
So I welcome that, if people want to use their cloud facilities, good for them. It makes the company more stable and that's ultimately what's needed for Linux adoption. Busineses aren't run by geeks, they're run by people who need to know their money isn't going to be wasted because their supplier's gone bust. (wasted because their supplier has brought out a new versions and demands you upgrade, that's ok though:) )
Many people were caught out by the change in Office - I'm not a n00b but I remember searching high and low to print my Word documents, never thinking for a second that the 'orb' was in fact the new version of the 'file' menu.
I notice that I wasn't the only one as Office 2010 has replace the orb with a big orange menu called 'File'. Crazy huh.
But there's a lot more like this in modern Windows - a lack of consistency that used to be there and demonstrated that it was actually designed, now you feel its just kludged together by different groups who want to do things differently. eg. I used to change the back window colour from white to a ever so slightly pale cream, almost so you wouldn't notice but that would take the edge off the glare. Go to display properties, click the window back colour, edit it and every window suddenly was easier to look at. Today, you'll find many windows don't respect that colour - even explorer doesn't let you change the font! You have a choice of.. no choice. This is the new order of Windows - a lack of internal consistency that makes Linux's distributed development look like perfection.
Windows used to be held up as a system that you could learn once and forever understand - every app had the menu bar, every app had a file menu. This is no longer true, and it only makes sense that companies are starting to realise this as they see the bill from MS for licences for new OSs that cost even more in training (not just for users, think of how the control panel has changed - your tech support needs to understand how to set an IP address in the new Network and Sharing Center, not the ancient-but-worked network properties)
I see this in the phone software - no-one cares about Microsoft as a brand, when they have the chance they go with alternatives. I hope this will continue to break up that desktop monopoly.
sure, taking the last 10 years of numbers isn't particularly useful, but its mroe useful than taking the 10 yeras previous to that and tryign to infer something about today's market.
the last year's numbers might tell you something, but again, not much.
i'm sure the last bit was just 'feel good' fluff - if you'd done this, you'd have loads of money now, so read more of my articles and feel richer!
who cares about ancient history. Now if you can tell me what $1000 invested today will be in 10 years time, I'll be listening....
of course you can;t, the best you can do is show the last few years and say "well, we reckon it'll be sortof along these lines". Going back to 1985 really is meaningless to what the company, and therefore the price will do tomorrow.
You're still probably better off buying ARM shares though - as with Win8 running on Arm chips, it won't matter so much whether MSFT or AAPL does better:)
No, people won't be buying WinPho7 because they *do* know better - they know Windows, they know Microsoft. They use it every day at work. They know how slow, buggy and unstable it is.. and given the choice of smartphone, they're already showing what they think of the brand.
since when was i4i a patent troll? They actually made a product (admittedly only 1) which MS then proceeded to totally and blatantly steal. So now they have no product whcih makes them a patent troll in the eyes of the uninformed, but they are only sueing over their patent for their product that they got ripped off on.
Its a pity this patent was chosen as the one to go to court over. MS is guilty as hell here, whereas the patent awarded to Eolas (the browser embedding object one) who was a real patent troll would haver been a much more worthy case.
"The 11.7% rise in food costs reflected growing demand, a shrinking pool of young workers â" pushing up agricultural wages â" and supply chain problems, said Arthur Kroeber of economic consultancy GaveKal-Dragonomics."
They realise they cannot live on exporting stuff to US consumers who increasingly have less money to spend, especially when the status quo results in inflation within China - and a yuan that wants to float but cannot becuase they hold such a large amount of US dollars. Getting rid of those dollars anyway they can makes a huge amount of sense.
just take his salary and bonuses and expenses and stock options and health insurance and company car and suchlike and say that's what they're spending as a minimum. Best add up all the lawyer's salaries unless they can prove they have no input whatsoever on the case.
Iceland didn't fail because the lent too much, they failed because they lent too much with loans based off of high value currencies compared to their own
if the currency held its value, no problem. If the currencies they lent against others, and accepted repayments in those currencies - no problem even if those currencies grew against the Krona. The only problem you have here is if you lend against the UKP (say) and only accept repayments in Krona - if the Krona slumped against the Pound then your debt would cost you a lot more to service. But the Krona didn't slump until *after* the crisis hit.
No, they played with too much borrowed money that could never realistically be repaid. Simple as that.
I agree that China is probably going to go the way of Japan in the 80s - everyone thought it was the ultimate powerhouse economy that could do no wrong. Eventually everyone saw through the doddery asset inflation and its economy is still practically collapsed.
China... the country that wants to float its currency but cannot as it would bankrupt both it and the US (as it hold an eyewateringly large number of dollars), China that has such excellent infrastructure and a truly incredible property bubble (especially in Beijing)
I think the world needs to prepare for the Chinese disaster to come, I think the world's politicians already know about it and are trying to manage it already.
There is a solution of kinds.... China needs to take chunks of its manufacturing and relocate it to the USA - thus keeping the products, the currency input, and also reducing its reliance on exports to the US. The US will also benefit - it'd be just a balancing of global trade that has become dangerously unstable over the last decade or so. They would get rid of some of their dollars then - in payment for supplies and wages, would help to reduce the inflation that China is struggling with at the moment. Sound sensible?
it might be an inconvenience to you , having to add up different blocks of currency, but to an accountant its just another day at the office. And to his computer systems, its just another number to log.
Iceland failed because they lent too much, not because of the currency they received back.
I was just thinking that from TFS: a quarter of his taxes goes on healthcare, and yet you guys still have to buy health insurance if anything happens to you?! I don't spend a quarter of my taxes on healthcare, and I get free care if I need it.
I'm sure your health provider industry is happy though.
I go to Amazon and fill in a form to set up an account, but first I need to get my boss to sign off on the purchase cose, and as its a recurring billing and cannot be explained under capital expenditure, he needs to get a sign off from his boss but it doesn't fall under his budget so he sends it to the MIS department for sign-off, but they don't see the need to run someone else's computers as they already provide server resources in a virtualised on-demand system but eventually we persuade them that it's a necessary business expenditure so they decide that they need to organise and 'own' the cloud systems but they like Microsoft products so they obtain an account for Azure which doesn't fulfill my needs, so I go to my boss and explain the need to run our own instance of a cloud account under Amazon but he still needs his boss to sign off on it as its a recurring subscription and he signs it off and sends it to corprate accounts who match it up with the already-authorised account that MIS arranged and reject it as an unnecessary duplication of resources, so I have to take it to the CIO who demands a report on what cloud computing is and why we need it, and after that we need to run a side-by-side comparison with MIS about the competitive differences between Azure and Amazon before he'll sign off on the need for the Amazon instance I originally wanted, but as he now understands the need for cloud provisioning, he contacts the MIS manager and orders him to start arranging cloud provision for the entire company, so he takes on the Amazon cloud as well as the Azure cloud which mean that now I need to fill out a form from MIS to provision my new cloud instances but as they have decided that Azure is the corporate standard, they insist that any Amazon provisioning needs sign-off from a manager so I take the form to my boss who signs off the Amazon request as necessary and MIS then sets up the image for me!
you're forgetting the whole point of Cloud platforms.... a monthly subscription to store all your customer's data. Profit!!!!
There's next to none in letting those pesky customers run their own clouds, I mean, apart from a licence to run a server and a few CALs, that's it. Pathetic - where will your corporate growth come from then?
So basically VMWare is sticking it to Microsoft, again. Virtual PC used to be a licenced product until VMWare Server appeared for free. VMWare took virtualisation and made it a commonplace thing. Now it looks like they'll do the same for clouds.
but you are suggesting that regular objects be implemented using the mechanics of primitive types:)
autoboxing et al are just hacks, if the langugaes had a decent generic system (eg like C++s) then autoboxing would not be needed (and I doubt anyone uses it now that C# has a generic feature)
Some C++ STL String implementations used CoW, they've all dumped them - in the end the cost of memory copying was smaller than the (rather huge) penalty for making sure it worked correctly in a multi-threaded, thread safe environment.
Turns out its quite hard to do fast CoW if you have to lock the contents before writing to it.
but we can't overload operators (even the + or ==) when it would make sense... same as the lack of multiple inheritance and the stupidity of interfaces as a work-around.
And anyone who thinks the lack of the above features is a good thing should pack it all in and become a VB programmer, so not to hurt themselves.
Making everything behave like an object can make things much cleaner
In a perfect world probably. But have you considered that there's a reason why primitive types are left as primitives even in C# (which had the opportunity to correct the mistakes Java made).
Primitives are kept because they are fast, and objects are blinking slow. You don't notice this when you use a relatively few objects, even then because they contain primitives themselves. Turn those into nested object hierarcies (as you'd get if even an int was an object) and your app'd run slower than 1.0 Java in an interpreter on a 200Mhz machine!
that's the main reason, there's also another case that objects everywhere don;t necessarily make for maintainable programs, in theory yes, but in practice call stacks like spaghetti is seen too often.
If you want to clean things up, then altering the concept of an object is probably what's needed - you want to separate data from functionality, so your data can be small and tight; then you need a nice way to associate methods with the data. Classes do it at the moment in a particular way, but there's no reason why the compiler cannot do it a different way under the covers.
there's a point where 'total security' becomes 'lock yourself in a bunker'. Sending one-time-pad codes over SMS is acceptable for the majority of your daily transactions - eg internet banking - because the attackers are not going to be so sophisticated they can intercept, track and match your transactions to the SMS code.
However, what we're talking about on/. is the bigger picture, the one where you are tracked by people who do have that kind of resources and are very prepared to use it. the kind of people who are right now locking up and torturing people in various countries for daring to say anything bad about the ruling classes, just in case they turn out to be one of those pesky "revolutionaries". Countries like Iran, Libya, Yemen, United States, Syria, etc.
who cares how long its retained for? I don't really mind if someone wants to know where I was on Tuesday the 8th 1986. No, its them knowing where I am today that worries me more.
the learning time needed is mainly down to the platform, the API, the "way things are done" on the new platform. The language... almost an irrelevance.
The disadvantage, huge disadvantage, of coding everything in the language that no-one else uses for this platform's development is that you cannot find too many examples, sample code, and tutorials to help your devs get to speed with the new platform. That will cost you much, much more in the long run than you save in the short-term by trying to re-use your existing skills.
Now, I can see it being useful for C# shops that want a quick n' not-so-good Android port of their app.
maybe he's expecting an implicit conversion to a 0 value, and use the HasValue operation if you need to know if the variable was null. I'd like that - it'd make coding easier for the majority of the time I use a nullable type and don't really care if its null or 0.
Slashdot Mirror
They have Nigella on the food network now?
I can assure you it'll cost more than that if Microsoft does it :)
There's quite a few stream things going on, in small set-top-boxes that also allow you to stream videos from a PC (running a DLNA server, like the free and good Tvmobili or PS3MediaServer). Some of these also transparently stream video from the internet too, like youtube and BBC iPlayer.
Canonical wants to do anything that gains then revenue - they can;t exist without that after all.
So, cloud computing - nice to do, everyone else is doing it after all, even Microsoft sees a nice revenue-generating bandwagon to jump on.
So I welcome that, if people want to use their cloud facilities, good for them. It makes the company more stable and that's ultimately what's needed for Linux adoption. Busineses aren't run by geeks, they're run by people who need to know their money isn't going to be wasted because their supplier's gone bust. (wasted because their supplier has brought out a new versions and demands you upgrade, that's ok though :) )
Many people were caught out by the change in Office - I'm not a n00b but I remember searching high and low to print my Word documents, never thinking for a second that the 'orb' was in fact the new version of the 'file' menu.
I notice that I wasn't the only one as Office 2010 has replace the orb with a big orange menu called 'File'. Crazy huh.
But there's a lot more like this in modern Windows - a lack of consistency that used to be there and demonstrated that it was actually designed, now you feel its just kludged together by different groups who want to do things differently. eg. I used to change the back window colour from white to a ever so slightly pale cream, almost so you wouldn't notice but that would take the edge off the glare. Go to display properties, click the window back colour, edit it and every window suddenly was easier to look at. Today, you'll find many windows don't respect that colour - even explorer doesn't let you change the font! You have a choice of.. no choice. This is the new order of Windows - a lack of internal consistency that makes Linux's distributed development look like perfection.
Windows used to be held up as a system that you could learn once and forever understand - every app had the menu bar, every app had a file menu. This is no longer true, and it only makes sense that companies are starting to realise this as they see the bill from MS for licences for new OSs that cost even more in training (not just for users, think of how the control panel has changed - your tech support needs to understand how to set an IP address in the new Network and Sharing Center, not the ancient-but-worked network properties)
I see this in the phone software - no-one cares about Microsoft as a brand, when they have the chance they go with alternatives. I hope this will continue to break up that desktop monopoly.
sure, taking the last 10 years of numbers isn't particularly useful, but its mroe useful than taking the 10 yeras previous to that and tryign to infer something about today's market.
the last year's numbers might tell you something, but again, not much.
i'm sure the last bit was just 'feel good' fluff - if you'd done this, you'd have loads of money now, so read more of my articles and feel richer!
who cares about ancient history. Now if you can tell me what $1000 invested today will be in 10 years time, I'll be listening....
of course you can;t, the best you can do is show the last few years and say "well, we reckon it'll be sortof along these lines". Going back to 1985 really is meaningless to what the company, and therefore the price will do tomorrow.
You're still probably better off buying ARM shares though - as with Win8 running on Arm chips, it won't matter so much whether MSFT or AAPL does better :)
No, people won't be buying WinPho7 because they *do* know better - they know Windows, they know Microsoft. They use it every day at work. They know how slow, buggy and unstable it is.. and given the choice of smartphone, they're already showing what they think of the brand.
since when was i4i a patent troll? They actually made a product (admittedly only 1) which MS then proceeded to totally and blatantly steal. So now they have no product whcih makes them a patent troll in the eyes of the uninformed, but they are only sueing over their patent for their product that they got ripped off on.
Its a pity this patent was chosen as the one to go to court over. MS is guilty as hell here, whereas the patent awarded to Eolas (the browser embedding object one) who was a real patent troll would haver been a much more worthy case.
How about http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/apr/15/chinese-economic-growth-slows
"The 11.7% rise in food costs reflected growing demand, a shrinking pool of young workers â" pushing up agricultural wages â" and supply chain problems, said Arthur Kroeber of economic consultancy GaveKal-Dragonomics."
They realise they cannot live on exporting stuff to US consumers who increasingly have less money to spend, especially when the status quo results in inflation within China - and a yuan that wants to float but cannot becuase they hold such a large amount of US dollars. Getting rid of those dollars anyway they can makes a huge amount of sense.
They sued Arstechnica over an image they used, Ars will tell you of the legalities Righthaven got wrong.
just take his salary and bonuses and expenses and stock options and health insurance and company car and suchlike and say that's what they're spending as a minimum. Best add up all the lawyer's salaries unless they can prove they have no input whatsoever on the case.
eh?
Iceland didn't fail because the lent too much, they failed because they lent too much with loans based off of high value currencies compared to their own
if the currency held its value, no problem. If the currencies they lent against others, and accepted repayments in those currencies - no problem even if those currencies grew against the Krona. The only problem you have here is if you lend against the UKP (say) and only accept repayments in Krona - if the Krona slumped against the Pound then your debt would cost you a lot more to service. But the Krona didn't slump until *after* the crisis hit.
No, they played with too much borrowed money that could never realistically be repaid. Simple as that.
I agree that China is probably going to go the way of Japan in the 80s - everyone thought it was the ultimate powerhouse economy that could do no wrong. Eventually everyone saw through the doddery asset inflation and its economy is still practically collapsed.
China... the country that wants to float its currency but cannot as it would bankrupt both it and the US (as it hold an eyewateringly large number of dollars), China that has such excellent infrastructure and a truly incredible property bubble (especially in Beijing)
I think the world needs to prepare for the Chinese disaster to come, I think the world's politicians already know about it and are trying to manage it already.
There is a solution of kinds.... China needs to take chunks of its manufacturing and relocate it to the USA - thus keeping the products, the currency input, and also reducing its reliance on exports to the US. The US will also benefit - it'd be just a balancing of global trade that has become dangerously unstable over the last decade or so. They would get rid of some of their dollars then - in payment for supplies and wages, would help to reduce the inflation that China is struggling with at the moment. Sound sensible?
it might be an inconvenience to you , having to add up different blocks of currency, but to an accountant its just another day at the office. And to his computer systems, its just another number to log.
Iceland failed because they lent too much, not because of the currency they received back.
I was just thinking that from TFS: a quarter of his taxes goes on healthcare, and yet you guys still have to buy health insurance if anything happens to you?! I don't spend a quarter of my taxes on healthcare, and I get free care if I need it.
I'm sure your health provider industry is happy though.
in the Corporate world it is even easier:
I go to Amazon and fill in a form to set up an account, but first I need to get my boss to sign off on the purchase cose, and as its a recurring billing and cannot be explained under capital expenditure, he needs to get a sign off from his boss but it doesn't fall under his budget so he sends it to the MIS department for sign-off, but they don't see the need to run someone else's computers as they already provide server resources in a virtualised on-demand system but eventually we persuade them that it's a necessary business expenditure so they decide that they need to organise and 'own' the cloud systems but they like Microsoft products so they obtain an account for Azure which doesn't fulfill my needs, so I go to my boss and explain the need to run our own instance of a cloud account under Amazon but he still needs his boss to sign off on it as its a recurring subscription and he signs it off and sends it to corprate accounts who match it up with the already-authorised account that MIS arranged and reject it as an unnecessary duplication of resources, so I have to take it to the CIO who demands a report on what cloud computing is and why we need it, and after that we need to run a side-by-side comparison with MIS about the competitive differences between Azure and Amazon before he'll sign off on the need for the Amazon instance I originally wanted, but as he now understands the need for cloud provisioning, he contacts the MIS manager and orders him to start arranging cloud provision for the entire company, so he takes on the Amazon cloud as well as the Azure cloud which mean that now I need to fill out a form from MIS to provision my new cloud instances but as they have decided that Azure is the corporate standard, they insist that any Amazon provisioning needs sign-off from a manager so I take the form to my boss who signs off the Amazon request as necessary and MIS then sets up the image for me!
What could be easier :)
you're forgetting the whole point of Cloud platforms.... a monthly subscription to store all your customer's data. Profit!!!!
There's next to none in letting those pesky customers run their own clouds, I mean, apart from a licence to run a server and a few CALs, that's it. Pathetic - where will your corporate growth come from then?
So basically VMWare is sticking it to Microsoft, again. Virtual PC used to be a licenced product until VMWare Server appeared for free. VMWare took virtualisation and made it a commonplace thing. Now it looks like they'll do the same for clouds.
but you are suggesting that regular objects be implemented using the mechanics of primitive types :)
autoboxing et al are just hacks, if the langugaes had a decent generic system (eg like C++s) then autoboxing would not be needed (and I doubt anyone uses it now that C# has a generic feature)
Some C++ STL String implementations used CoW, they've all dumped them - in the end the cost of memory copying was smaller than the (rather huge) penalty for making sure it worked correctly in a multi-threaded, thread safe environment.
Turns out its quite hard to do fast CoW if you have to lock the contents before writing to it.
but we can't overload operators (even the + or ==) when it would make sense ... same as the lack of multiple inheritance and the stupidity of interfaces as a work-around.
And anyone who thinks the lack of the above features is a good thing should pack it all in and become a VB programmer, so not to hurt themselves.
Making everything behave like an object can make things much cleaner
In a perfect world probably. But have you considered that there's a reason why primitive types are left as primitives even in C# (which had the opportunity to correct the mistakes Java made).
Primitives are kept because they are fast, and objects are blinking slow. You don't notice this when you use a relatively few objects, even then because they contain primitives themselves. Turn those into nested object hierarcies (as you'd get if even an int was an object) and your app'd run slower than 1.0 Java in an interpreter on a 200Mhz machine!
that's the main reason, there's also another case that objects everywhere don;t necessarily make for maintainable programs, in theory yes, but in practice call stacks like spaghetti is seen too often.
If you want to clean things up, then altering the concept of an object is probably what's needed - you want to separate data from functionality, so your data can be small and tight; then you need a nice way to associate methods with the data. Classes do it at the moment in a particular way, but there's no reason why the compiler cannot do it a different way under the covers.
there's a point where 'total security' becomes 'lock yourself in a bunker'. Sending one-time-pad codes over SMS is acceptable for the majority of your daily transactions - eg internet banking - because the attackers are not going to be so sophisticated they can intercept, track and match your transactions to the SMS code.
However, what we're talking about on /. is the bigger picture, the one where you are tracked by people who do have that kind of resources and are very prepared to use it. the kind of people who are right now locking up and torturing people in various countries for daring to say anything bad about the ruling classes, just in case they turn out to be one of those pesky "revolutionaries". Countries like Iran, Libya, Yemen, United States, Syria, etc.
who cares how long its retained for? I don't really mind if someone wants to know where I was on Tuesday the 8th 1986. No, its them knowing where I am today that worries me more.
the learning time needed is mainly down to the platform, the API, the "way things are done" on the new platform. The language ... almost an irrelevance.
The disadvantage, huge disadvantage, of coding everything in the language that no-one else uses for this platform's development is that you cannot find too many examples, sample code, and tutorials to help your devs get to speed with the new platform. That will cost you much, much more in the long run than you save in the short-term by trying to re-use your existing skills.
Now, I can see it being useful for C# shops that want a quick n' not-so-good Android port of their app.
maybe he's expecting an implicit conversion to a 0 value, and use the HasValue operation if you need to know if the variable was null. I'd like that - it'd make coding easier for the majority of the time I use a nullable type and don't really care if its null or 0.