There are some other sites which have had support for a while now, such as omploader [omploader.org]. It would be nice if some big sites like youtube get rid of flash too, but I'm not holding my breath.
Right, offering ogg video at least as an alternative on youtube would be a real blow against evil, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, the don't be evil part of google left with this guy while Eric, Larry and Sergie never really found it expedient to buy into that concept.
Until Jaunty with KDE, the Vista of Ubuntu. Not happy with the amount of work it's going to take to revert THAT.
I run KDE 4 on Jaunty. It is perfectly usable. Indeed there are some rough spots, but there are also compelling improvements. For example, in Kate, the programmer's editor I prefer, you can now change the order of documents in the edit list by drag and drop. A small improvement I use a lot, and now find the lack of it in earlier, tried and true versions, more than a little irritating.
My general impression is, KDE 4 is a few bug reports away from a very slick offering. On the whole, I am productive and happy with it.
While I am not a supporter of any particular person, I think a CTO doesnt need to be a specialist but should have the breadth of understanding across a range of issues around technologies, have the strong analytical sense so that he or she can organize problems and solutions in a structure that makes decision making possible. I think it is structured thinking and a demonstrated love for technology that are important not advanced knowledge of a particular focussed discipline.
This is the usual argument in support of the proposition that management is a generic skill that can be applied to any area of endeavor without specific expertise in that domain. In practice, a high level manager of technology with no technology background will be a disaster every time.
The poster child for this is John Sculley, parachuted in from Pepsi to be CEO of Apple and nearly driving it into the ground. There are many other examples. Color me highly skeptical of the proposition that management without understanding ever makes sense. At best, a nontechnical CTO will try to get by with good advice. But this is inefficient, and no substitute for first hand knowledge. Furthermore, management by committee as this strategy amounts to tends to degenerate into a scramble to serve non-technical, you could say political, issues, pushing good technological policy to the side.
Imagine how a country might fare at war if civilians were its generals.
This is what happens when all your engineers are too smart... they build things for their level of skill, and then when something goes wrong there's nobody even smarter to call in to fix it.
You're close, but actually the problem is, you have a company full of people who are too smart to do actual work. After all, work is not what gets you ahead at Google.
I watch a youtube video because someone told me it was cool. He watched it because someone told him...... Now if each had to wade the the rigmarole of signing up, paying, keep the piggy bank full,.... the chain would break. Somewhere, anywhere. And the recommendation wouldn't reach me. So I wouldn't watch.
Spot on. By analogy, Google never links pay-for news sites because it just annoys viewers when they follow a news link and it lands on a subscription beg or "free" signup. I don't know about you, but I automatically hit the back button, then I read Yahoo news for a while.
Anyway, the flash-based Youtube interface is pathetically limited and irritating. It is sometimes worth it for free, but not always.
On a slightly different note... it is amazing how the Youtube user interface never got any significant improvements after the Google buy. You'd think, with so many smart people ready to descend on it and so much money invested... Or actually, since I've seen how engineering works at Google, it's not that amazing after all. If you're smart enough to get hired by Google, you're smart enough to figure out how to avoid doing actual work. Emailing and complaining about quality of the catering gets you so much much further in your career than pointing out obvious flaws that should have been fixed years ago.
I am deeply skeptical that a non-technologist can perform as well in this role as a similarly qualified candidate that additionally has a technology background. I am equally skeptical that no such candidate could be found.
The people I know that have PS3s (about 7) have never had to send their system in for repair.
Well, let me fix that for you. First and second generation PS3 blu-ray drive failure rate (90 nm generation) is high. Nobody knows how high because Sony has not admitted the problem. Sony charges $150 to fix it, and pretends they do not know exactly what what failed and why. It is just amazing to me that somebody at Sony thinks it makes business sense to burn its early adopters this way.
Ummm, what you were discussing in that link has nothing to do with what this firmware is fixing. You were discussing performance decreases over time through ordinary use. This firmware fixes a bug that (so far) has only been able to be replicated under certain benchmark conditions, and has not yet appeared under real world conditions.
I have no idea what you are talking about. The issue discussed in the post and the issue addressed by intel in the new firmware are the same by all appearances.
The point of this is, please please please if you are an engineering manager, when you make a collective booboo, no smoke screen please! It is unlikely to go unnoticed, and nothing positive will be achieved for you, your company, your potential customers or your tech audience. Instead, just come clean, admit the problem and get busy on the fix. Down that path lies increased trust, whereas the doublespeak path only erodes credibility. I certainly will be double checking any future claims, because of how this played out.
Anyway, big props to the team for implementing what appears to be a superior solution. Hey, how about just open sourcing that firmware and let everybody help make it even better? Just a thought.
As far as I know most or at least major parts of most of the the articles are licensed from other encyclopaedias, so they are not really free to just give them out.
According to Wikpedia although the original content from Funk & Wagnalls was non-exclusive, Microsoft later purchased Collier's and New Merit Scholar encyclopedias, so at least some of the content would be free for Microsoft to donate. Should it happen to discover a shred of genuine generosity somewhere in its cold little heart.
Naturally Microsoft, being a self-described good corporate citizen and having no further profit motive for doing otherwise, will proceed to do the right thing and donate all the Encarta articles and images to the commons. Won't they? Won't they?
Let's just sum up the state of the three major browsers:
Chrome Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab. Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser. Quick and responsive native UI.
IE Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab. Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser. Quick and responsive native UI.
Firefox All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser Clunky and slow crossplatform UI implementation
The latest IE 8's absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their shit together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.
High five Firefox devs!
Well given that that AC's post is technically accurate I don't really think it's a troll. It's true, Firefox failed to advance in many respects, the way it should have giving its high level of funding. It leaks like a sieve, everybody knows that. I too have to restart it every couple of days or it ooms my machine. Keyboard navigation is still very dodgy. It has big problems with spinning on on web pages that konq just loads gracefully. Etc.
Yes, you can say it's better than IE 5/6/7. I don't know about IE 8, jury is out.
i imagine the above poster is in the same boat. maybe working 50 or 60 hours a week at a job... it is kind of hard to justify to yourself putting in another 20 hacking the kernel.
now, someone posted 'well if you did that, maybe you would get a job hacking the kernel'. yeah, well, maybe you wouldnt.
Very true. Definitely do not get into kernel hacking because you think it pays well. Only do it because you find it fascinating and a reward in itself. Otherwise, there are much easier ways to make money, think about being an actuary or a dentist for example. That said, good kernel hackers tend to land in well paying kernel jobs if they want them. Not all do, some prefer that work not intrude on their real life.
Are we about to hear yet another lecture on how being a so-called "convicted" monopoly means that MS can't take a shit without clearing it with DOJ and the EU?
You can express it crudely if you like, that about sums it up. Just remember one thing in business: obey the law, or go to jail.
the entire point of software patents is to make monopolies, so perhaps this is just what's supposed to be happening.
Monopolies in themselves are not illegal, but abuse of monopoly power is illegal. So, is Microsoft abusing its monopoly power? Can you quantify that? Do you know who to complain to about that, in America and/or Europe?
Wasn't Tux a kernel-based webserver? And now Tux3 is a file system?
You may be thinking of TUX, an unrelated project. Tux3 is the successor to Tux2 which I prototyped and announced in 1998, well before there was any TUX kernel web server project. Tux2 was based on Ext2... Ext2 => Tux2. Now, Ext3 is Tux3's closest relative in terms of functionality.
Incidentally, I think that is where the pattern ends. The successor to Tux3 will be Tux3 version 2, unless we break backward compatibility, which is not in our plans. We probably will change the logging format from time to time, but the base filesystem tree structure is so simple it will be easy to maintain compatibility with it forever.
Try replacing your direct function call with a function pointer instead. Assign the function pointer the address of your function during runtime. It will be many orders of magnitude slower.
It goes faster as an indirect functional call if anything. Go figure.
Anyway... orders of magnitude difference? Under some other rules of physics maybe. It would probably be a good idea to compile and time your program, as I did.
Function calls are not free. Especially in kernel space. Everything costs time. You need to do the most you can with the least instructions. 100 lines of inline code will probably run faster than a function call.
Never having been one to accept unsupported claims at face value, I just tested that assertion on a Pentim-M here, with a small C program that either calls a function to increment a counter, or directly increments the counter a number of times. I compiled with O0 to be sure gcc does not change around my code at all. Just the instructions, thanks. Funny thing? A hundred increments runs within 1% of the speed of 100 calls to a function to do the increment. And yes I unrolled those calls to isolate the cost of what I was measuring. So... rather surprisingly, the cost of these function calls is as close as doesn't matter, to exactly zero.
Loops on the other hand... cost a huge amount. I won't get into details. But Intel clearly does something to optimize function calls in microcode, or probably even hardware. Function calls just don't cost what you think they do. In many cases, the function call will cost less by not trashing as much of that incredibly valuable L1 instruction cache.
While Tux3 is not yet ready to run on your desktop, and won't be for a good many months, it is relatively trim at around 6K lines, and is expected to be somewhere around 10K complete with versioning, recovery and proper code comments. Of course, that will still be significant growth in a few months, and nothing says it won't just keep growing. But Tux3 is starting much smaller than its peers, and already has a pretty good range of "big filesystem" features. One of our guiding principles is to keep it tight, therefore leaving fewer places for bugs to hide.
This is completely believable, I have corroborate it. My 4 year old had her own PC from age of two, because she was causing too much havoc on mine, crashing Firefox regularly with the mouse before learning to walk. She would turn the mini laptop mouse around and use it backwards so she could push the buttons with the palm of her little hand. At three she was able to drag and drop the mustache icons on Mr Potato Guy, with the mouse speed suitably slowed down. At four she has mastered Tuxpaint and is moving on to Inkscape. None of this is the slightest exaggeration. Oh, and don't accept her challenge to two player Snakeball, she will frag you repeatedly.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some other sites which have had support for a while now, such as omploader [omploader.org]. It would be nice if some big sites like youtube get rid of flash too, but I'm not holding my breath.
Right, offering ogg video at least as an alternative on youtube would be a real blow against evil, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, the don't be evil part of google left with this guy while Eric, Larry and Sergie never really found it expedient to buy into that concept.
Until Jaunty with KDE, the Vista of Ubuntu. Not happy with the amount of work it's going to take to revert THAT.
I run KDE 4 on Jaunty. It is perfectly usable. Indeed there are some rough spots, but there are also compelling improvements. For example, in Kate, the programmer's editor I prefer, you can now change the order of documents in the edit list by drag and drop. A small improvement I use a lot, and now find the lack of it in earlier, tried and true versions, more than a little irritating.
My general impression is, KDE 4 is a few bug reports away from a very slick offering. On the whole, I am productive and happy with it.
"Need not be overly technically savvy, just be able to understand the basic ideas and make a fair choice."
You need to be technically savvy to understand the basic ideas of information technology and make fair choices.
While I am not a supporter of any particular person, I think a CTO doesnt need to be a specialist but should have the breadth of understanding across a range of issues around technologies, have the strong analytical sense so that he or she can organize problems and solutions in a structure that makes decision making possible. I think it is structured thinking and a demonstrated love for technology that are important not advanced knowledge of a particular focussed discipline.
This is the usual argument in support of the proposition that management is a generic skill that can be applied to any area of endeavor without specific expertise in that domain. In practice, a high level manager of technology with no technology background will be a disaster every time.
The poster child for this is John Sculley, parachuted in from Pepsi to be CEO of Apple and nearly driving it into the ground. There are many other examples. Color me highly skeptical of the proposition that management without understanding ever makes sense. At best, a nontechnical CTO will try to get by with good advice. But this is inefficient, and no substitute for first hand knowledge. Furthermore, management by committee as this strategy amounts to tends to degenerate into a scramble to serve non-technical, you could say political, issues, pushing good technological policy to the side.
Imagine how a country might fare at war if civilians were its generals.
This is what happens when all your engineers are too smart... they build things for their level of skill, and then when something goes wrong there's nobody even smarter to call in to fix it.
You're close, but actually the problem is, you have a company full of people who are too smart to do actual work. After all, work is not what gets you ahead at Google.
You somehow overlooked "paytube.com"
I watch a youtube video because someone told me it was cool. He watched it because someone told him...... Now if each had to wade the the rigmarole of signing up, paying, keep the piggy bank full, .... the chain would break. Somewhere, anywhere. And the recommendation wouldn't reach me. So I wouldn't watch.
Spot on. By analogy, Google never links pay-for news sites because it just annoys viewers when they follow a news link and it lands on a subscription beg or "free" signup. I don't know about you, but I automatically hit the back button, then I read Yahoo news for a while.
Anyway, the flash-based Youtube interface is pathetically limited and irritating. It is sometimes worth it for free, but not always.
On a slightly different note... it is amazing how the Youtube user interface never got any significant improvements after the Google buy. You'd think, with so many smart people ready to descend on it and so much money invested... Or actually, since I've seen how engineering works at Google, it's not that amazing after all. If you're smart enough to get hired by Google, you're smart enough to figure out how to avoid doing actual work. Emailing and complaining about quality of the catering gets you so much much further in your career than pointing out obvious flaws that should have been fixed years ago.
I am deeply skeptical that a non-technologist can perform as well in this role as a similarly qualified candidate that additionally has a technology background. I am equally skeptical that no such candidate could be found.
The people I know that have PS3s (about 7) have never had to send their system in for repair.
Well, let me fix that for you. First and second generation PS3 blu-ray drive failure rate (90 nm generation) is high. Nobody knows how high because Sony has not admitted the problem. Sony charges $150 to fix it, and pretends they do not know exactly what what failed and why. It is just amazing to me that somebody at Sony thinks it makes business sense to burn its early adopters this way.
Ummm, what you were discussing in that link has nothing to do with what this firmware is fixing. You were discussing performance decreases over time through ordinary use. This firmware fixes a bug that (so far) has only been able to be replicated under certain benchmark conditions, and has not yet appeared under real world conditions.
I have no idea what you are talking about. The issue discussed in the post and the issue addressed by intel in the new firmware are the same by all appearances.
This was forseen: Intel will ultimately be forced to redesign their flash write algorithms
The point of this is, please please please if you are an engineering manager, when you make a collective booboo, no smoke screen please! It is unlikely to go unnoticed, and nothing positive will be achieved for you, your company, your potential customers or your tech audience. Instead, just come clean, admit the problem and get busy on the fix. Down that path lies increased trust, whereas the doublespeak path only erodes credibility. I certainly will be double checking any future claims, because of how this played out.
Anyway, big props to the team for implementing what appears to be a superior solution. Hey, how about just open sourcing that firmware and let everybody help make it even better? Just a thought.
As far as I know most or at least major parts of most of the the articles are licensed from other encyclopaedias, so they are not really free to just give them out.
According to Wikpedia although the original content from Funk & Wagnalls was non-exclusive, Microsoft later purchased Collier's and New Merit Scholar encyclopedias, so at least some of the content would be free for Microsoft to donate. Should it happen to discover a shred of genuine generosity somewhere in its cold little heart.
Naturally Microsoft, being a self-described good corporate citizen and having no further profit motive for doing otherwise, will proceed to do the right thing and donate all the Encarta articles and images to the commons. Won't they? Won't they?
Let's just sum up the state of the three major browsers:
Chrome
Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
Quick and responsive native UI.
IE
Multithreaded Javascript and code for each tab.
Memory protection for each tab so no single tab can take down the browser.
Quick and responsive native UI.
Firefox
All tabs and Javascript run in one giant mess. One execution heavy tab drags down the performance of the entire browser
No memory protection. Everything is in one gigantic soup of data. One tab crashes, down goes the whole browser
Clunky and slow crossplatform UI implementation
The latest IE 8's absolutely smoke Firefox in performance and stability. What an absolute humiliation for the Firefox developers. They had years to get their shit together. But they sat on their asses and now they have been left in the technological dust by both Google and Microsoft.
High five Firefox devs!
Well given that that AC's post is technically accurate I don't really think it's a troll. It's true, Firefox failed to advance in many respects, the way it should have giving its high level of funding. It leaks like a sieve, everybody knows that. I too have to restart it every couple of days or it ooms my machine. Keyboard navigation is still very dodgy. It has big problems with spinning on on web pages that konq just loads gracefully. Etc.
Yes, you can say it's better than IE 5/6/7. I don't know about IE 8, jury is out.
i imagine the above poster is in the same boat. maybe working 50 or 60 hours a week at a job... it is kind of hard to justify to yourself putting in another 20 hacking the kernel.
now, someone posted 'well if you did that, maybe you would get a job hacking the kernel'. yeah, well, maybe you wouldnt.
Very true. Definitely do not get into kernel hacking because you think it pays well. Only do it because you find it fascinating and a reward in itself. Otherwise, there are much easier ways to make money, think about being an actuary or a dentist for example. That said, good kernel hackers tend to land in well paying kernel jobs if they want them. Not all do, some prefer that work not intrude on their real life.
A computer science expert from Princeton University says he has done what the Microsoft Corporation insists is impossible
Are we about to hear yet another lecture on how being a so-called "convicted" monopoly means that MS can't take a shit without clearing it with DOJ and the EU?
You can express it crudely if you like, that about sums it up. Just remember one thing in business: obey the law, or go to jail.
Ballmer was absolutely correct in emphasizing the one thing that really matters for any platform.
I bet Monkey Boy would give his left testicle right now to have that $6 billion back.
The patent is valid, and MS has a duty to its shareholders to collect the revenue.
Does Microsoft have a duty to its shareholders to engage in illegal trust-making activity?
the entire point of software patents is to make monopolies, so perhaps this is just what's supposed to be happening.
Monopolies in themselves are not illegal, but abuse of monopoly power is illegal. So, is Microsoft abusing its monopoly power? Can you quantify that? Do you know who to complain to about that, in America and/or Europe?
Wasn't Tux a kernel-based webserver? And now Tux3 is a file system?
You may be thinking of TUX, an unrelated project. Tux3 is the successor to Tux2 which I prototyped and announced in 1998, well before there was any TUX kernel web server project. Tux2 was based on Ext2... Ext2 => Tux2. Now, Ext3 is Tux3's closest relative in terms of functionality.
Incidentally, I think that is where the pattern ends. The successor to Tux3 will be Tux3 version 2, unless we break backward compatibility, which is not in our plans. We probably will change the logging format from time to time, but the base filesystem tree structure is so simple it will be easy to maintain compatibility with it forever.
Try replacing your direct function call with a function pointer instead. Assign the function pointer the address of your function during runtime. It will be many orders of magnitude slower.
It goes faster as an indirect functional call if anything. Go figure.
Anyway... orders of magnitude difference? Under some other rules of physics maybe. It would probably be a good idea to compile and time your program, as I did.
Function calls are not free. Especially in kernel space. Everything costs time. You need to do the most you can with the least instructions. 100 lines of inline code will probably run faster than a function call.
Never having been one to accept unsupported claims at face value, I just tested that assertion on a Pentim-M here, with a small C program that either calls a function to increment a counter, or directly increments the counter a number of times. I compiled with O0 to be sure gcc does not change around my code at all. Just the instructions, thanks. Funny thing? A hundred increments runs within 1% of the speed of 100 calls to a function to do the increment. And yes I unrolled those calls to isolate the cost of what I was measuring. So... rather surprisingly, the cost of these function calls is as close as doesn't matter, to exactly zero.
Loops on the other hand... cost a huge amount. I won't get into details. But Intel clearly does something to optimize function calls in microcode, or probably even hardware. Function calls just don't cost what you think they do. In many cases, the function call will cost less by not trashing as much of that incredibly valuable L1 instruction cache.
While Tux3 is not yet ready to run on your desktop, and won't be for a good many months, it is relatively trim at around 6K lines, and is expected to be somewhere around 10K complete with versioning, recovery and proper code comments. Of course, that will still be significant growth in a few months, and nothing says it won't just keep growing. But Tux3 is starting much smaller than its peers, and already has a pretty good range of "big filesystem" features. One of our guiding principles is to keep it tight, therefore leaving fewer places for bugs to hide.
This is completely believable, I have corroborate it. My 4 year old had her own PC from age of two, because she was causing too much havoc on mine, crashing Firefox regularly with the mouse before learning to walk. She would turn the mini laptop mouse around and use it backwards so she could push the buttons with the palm of her little hand. At three she was able to drag and drop the mustache icons on Mr Potato Guy, with the mouse speed suitably slowed down. At four she has mastered Tuxpaint and is moving on to Inkscape. None of this is the slightest exaggeration. Oh, and don't accept her challenge to two player Snakeball, she will frag you repeatedly.