it could easily be a case of narcissim with a little naivete thrown in.
Good point. Rabid optimism seems very common among scientists. Too much SF, no doubt.
Say, for all the talk about atomic holography, I can find absolutely nothing specific about it on Meystre's site. When he talks about copying objects, he's not talking about molecular synthesis, is he? He's probably only discussing something like what the current generation of three-D copiers can already do, with a special material that can be formed into any shape. People here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that it means the instant synthesis of organic molecules. Too much Star Trek, no doubt.
Hmm. Professor Meystre says, "All of the individual steps to do this with nonlinear atom optics have been demonstrated. It's just a matter of making it work all together. I think it will happen in the next two or three years."
Which is a pretty remarkable prediction, considering that at present, atom holography is one of the projects at the Gedanken Laboratory, which means that it is currently only a theoretical speculation. In fact, most of the way-out stuff being discussed here is in the Gedanken Lab at present.
From pure theory to experimental demonstration in two or three years is a little hard to believe. I think I spy with my little eye a bit of self-promotion here, but it may just be unbounded scientific optimism.
the performance variability due to different programmers... is on average as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages
In other words, if engineers spent more time studying best practices and efficient algorithm design, that might well improve performance more than spending time in religious wars about the merits of pet languages.
In my experience, basic performance tuning can easily create an order of magnitude improvement regardless of the language. And in my experience, most engineers don't know how to do basic performance tuning. That's got to be more important than language selection in the average case.
I'm aware of it. It's been there for more than a year and hasn't gone anywhere.
It also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. You can't make a user-friendly system by slapping a front-end on something written to a command-line standard. You can't make a user-friendly word processor by starting with troff and slapping a GUI on it. It will turn out that the assumptions in the substrate don't support the needs of a user-centered design. It's well known now that usability has to come first and the core technology needs to be written to support the demands of the design, not the other way around.
XUL was designed without concern for the user scenarios of authoring, and as a result any authoring GUI slapped on it will always be weak. Ditto HTML. You can't do serious HTML design without memorizing the text-based language and its tags, and something like Dreamweaver is just a shim which in practice is ignored in favor of editing the text.
Mozilla is meant to be an application development platform, to be sure. However, XUL has not exactly been making waves, and basic issues like application packaging haven't been dealt with yet. It seems the current model is that every application using XUL needs to include its own XUL interpreteter, which is effectively almost a whole Mozilla distro. There doesn't seem to be any provision for a shared interpreter with small application packages.
Given the myriad of small interface bugs in Mozilla, which have recently been exciting comment on MozillaZine, one has to wonder whether XUL is a robust UI language. Bugs like text off the edge of the window should be easy to fix, but somehow they linger on build after build. It is unclear to me whether this is a technical or cultural issue, though.
XUL has also been significantly overpromised -- for instance, remote XUL is alternately either promised or denied depending on where you go at mozilla.org, but the real answer is that remote XUL is too much of a security risk, and would require a better downloading/caching story. Java remote UI software has largely solved the security problem, but it has a similar download problem.
Finally, the lack of any WYSIWYG editor for XUL means that it does not address the most serious problem in UI development, which is that designers who are not programmers should be able to create their own interfaces. The current model in which designers create specs and prototypes which are then implemented by programmers is expensive and unreliable. These two groups rarely get along well and the implementers rarely have any interest in understanding the design principles behind the specification. The result is that good design specifications often make terrible implemented interfaces, and do so at great cost. Breaking the dependence on the programmer is the best way to address the problem, and that can't be addressed by a system like XUL, which the W3C noted is an obscure mix of several different programming language paradigms.
So, what's the bug number for the report you filed with them, so that they can fix it? I'd like to try it again after the fix is done, and to do that, I need to track the bug's progress through Sun.
Good luck. I searched for "report bug" and "report StarOffice bug" and didn't find anything. I went to the StarOffice main page and looked for a bug reporting link; also nothing. I went to three different StarOffice FAQs, but none of them had any questions relating to how to report bugs. I looked at the patches page and found some bug numbers, but they were just static text with no links to the bug reports. If there's a bug reporting feature, they've hidden it pretty well.
Very good turn back! I'm impressed. You took what was described as the startup time, replied to as the startup time, and compared it to TCO, thus turning me into the fool. I AM impressed.
I'm not sure what wasn't clear when I was comparing costs of GCC to those of CodeWarrior. I was talking about compile speed, which is a TCO factor, not a startup cost factor. GCC has a lower up-front cost but a much higher TCO.
Dealing with a commercial, closed source vendor, you don't have any leverage (unless you've got deep pockets) to get any particular bug fixed.
All depends on the vendor. In my experience most commercial software vendors are pretty good at fixing major bugs reported by their customers. OTOH, lots of open source developers complain about their fixes for open source bugs being stonewalled -- there have been some notable/. threads on the subject.
The other thing usability design takes, which you neglect to mention, is users. More importantly, users who will tell you why your design sucks or is great. Those are in even shorter supply than money for the OS community (heck, from the money aspect, we've got IBM, Sun, HP, etc, trying to help out). But users who will provide feedback about the interface? Go find me five of them, and I'll be shocked.
I do it all the time. It's part of my job as user experience lead. The answer is, you pay them, or you pay a recruiting firm to find them and pay them. It's not free, and so it doesn't fit into the free software development model.
So, I await word on how your non-programmer, non-admin father (or wife) got along with the Linux Router configuration.
My dad? He got me to install it. But he knew he needed one. My wife? Won't go near the computer anymore, hates it because I use it too much.
Then you go to the instructions. They're six pages long, they use a command line (which lets out your wife and your dad right there), and they're full of non-human-readable stuff like:
Uncomment the module(s) needed for your ethernet card(s). All modules
listed in the file are already on your LRP disk. If you are using ne.o,
ne2k-pci.o, or e2100.o, you will also need to uncomment 8390.o
Yeah, that's really easy -- for a UNIX system administrator, that is. It's not for ordinary mortals. It shares that with almost all the open source software in the world. that's why, contra the claim in the article, consumers don't prefer open source.
Aside from being slow, incompatible, and nonconforming to platform UI standards you mean? Well, I just downloaded it (had to work through a bug on Sun's download web page to do that) and launched the installer. "Program Error: so-5_2-ga-bin-w.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows." An installer crash is about as broken as you can get.
Average developer: $60/hour (prolly less, but this makes it easier). $1/minute. With CodeWarrior, you claim 30 seconds to go, and gcc, 5 minutes to go. That's great! You've just saved me $4.50/developer! So, lessee, licensing of CodeWarrior: $200+/seat. Licensing of GCC: $0/seat. Oh, shit, there just went $195.50/developer.
Brilliant TCO analysis! It's very applicable to the case of a single-programmer team who uses the software exactly once. I'm sure that's the most common case. Remind you to include you if we do a CFO search.
Now, how do I get bugs fixed? CodeWarrior: Submit the bug to them, hope they fix it, pay for upgrade. GCC: Grab the source, find the bug, fix it, and start using it. Give it back to the steering committee while I'm at it, since that's probably a requirement (if I'm distributing it).
Even starting to fix a single bug in a big project like the Linux kernel, GCC, or Mozilla will take weeks of startup time familiarizing yourself with the idiosyncracies of the source. If you haven't been on the chat rooms or mailing lists with the core team for months, they won't even look at your bug fixes. The supposed ease of fixing bugs in open source software is one of the community's Big Lies.
Perhaps you could pass along some of those titles? I'd actually like to read them, and think they could be useful
Try anything by Deborah J. Mayhew.
Personally, I hate designing interfaces. I know that what I want in one is nothing like what everybody else wants in one (not even other developers). Find for me a user interface expert who can help me design a better one, and will work for the same terms I do when developing Open Source: Free. They're in kinda short supply, if you know what I mean?
My point exactly. Good user experience design takes money. That money is not to be found in the open source or free software development model. Therefore, those models are not capable of making the paradigm shift to user-centered design. Usability labs do not grow on trees and good design is not something you can do sitting by yourself on your home computer.
Hmmm, how about that. My dad is a system administrator. He'd be surprised to know that, since he works as an RN on the 3rd floor of the local hospital, and couldn't tell you most of anything about firewalls. But, he does know that he needs one to protect his machine from getting hacked, and he knows it's better to have it be external.
Please. We were talking about someone who configured a Linux router, not someone who just knows vaguely what a firewall is. These are silly arguments that you're making.
You heard about the latest virus which will hit your machine from the internet and wipe out your drives? I guarantee that most of the people in the room will be asking how to stop it, and I can mention the firewall/router then.
(Just FYI, firewalls don't usually have much to do with viruses. Firewalls are mostly about DoS and intrusion prevention.)
So, I await word on how your non-programmer, non-admin father (or wife) got along with the Linux Router configuration.
Yes, it is. If I buy Microsoft Office, I am buying software that works. If I download StarOffice, I am getting software that doesn't work. If I download some random utility from FreshMeat, I am downloading something that is almost guaranteed not to work and to be held together with hooks and bailing wire. Denial about the flakiness of open source software is one of the most serious problems in the community.
In the Price versus performance ratio Linux wins.
No, not from a total cost of ownership perspective. Tools exist to increase productivity -- that's a basic law of economics. Slower tools hurt productivity relative to faster tools. Any manager who wouldn't prefer to spend a few hundred dollars to get his or her programmers compiling in thirty seconds with CodeWarrior rather than five minutes with GCC for "free" can't do simple math. Thousands of dollars would be wasted every week by the "free" solution.
Attractiveness is not all that important but is a plus to have and Linux will need more work in that area especially in user friendliness. Lets not forget that with development Linux can easily overcome these small hurdles and it will.
No, user friendliness is not a "small hurdle." It's a paradigm shift that requires an entirely different development model. The problem is well studied and I could recommend you some books if I thought you'd actually read them. It is a shift that free software has not made. Due to the insistence on programmers designing their own interfaces, it is a shift that the free software community can not make.
And i'm not a tinkerer. I needed a stable router/firewall for my 486 hence i'm using LRP (Linux Router Project). Saving the environment and saving me money too.
What's wrong with this statement? "I'm not a tinkerer. I needed a stable router/firewall." You are not a software consumer -- you are a system administrator. Your needs and desires for software are nothing like those of the other 99+% of humanity. You consider it fun to spend two days slaving over configuration files to get a router to work. Most people have never even heard of a router, would not be able to configure one, and would not want to spend the time doing so if they could.
Do you hang out with non-programmers and non-administrators? Do you date them? Try this experiment. At your next non-geek social affair, casually bring up the subject of router configuration....
The answer is that if left to market forces Open Source will inevitably prevail, simply because the consumers prefer it over the legacy proprietary binary-only model.
They do? That must be why Windows has a desktop market share of around 95% while Linux has a desktop market share well under 1%.
Oh wait, there's an explanation:
But the technology markets were not being left to market forces. The government is playing an increasing role at the urging of the major global publishing organizations.
Apparently the reason Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, etc. software is preferred by the market is due to government interference. That makes sense. I hear the government has been trying to help Microsoft for years, especially the Justice Department!
In all seriousness, consumers do not prefer free software or open source, unless by consumers we mean the tiny community of open source system administrators. The reason is that commercial software is superior to free software in features, friendliness, attractiveness, performance, and reliability. Free software appeals to tinkerers and hobbyists, who represent a very small portion of the market.
Just because the material can't be found from a Google search doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I didn't ask for a link. I asked for a reference. If you know of a reference to such a clinical trial, whether in print or on the Web, I would be happy to examine it.
It's also grossly unfair to those who are working on this technology.
Those who stand to benefit from the technology bear the burden of proof in demonstrating its safety, if there is any credible reason to question its safety.
To evaluate the safety of this product, it would be necessary to do double-blind, controlled, peer-reviewed clinical studies which compared a test group who used the product under real-world conditions -- which is to say, several hours a days for weeks or months -- with a control group who did not use the product. The comparison would need to test for eyestrain, visual acuity degradation, and other possible effects on the visual system, as well as potential neurological or psychological effects such as headaches. I haven't seen anything remotely like this.
There are two studies which could be mistaken for something like this on the site. One is Laser Safety Analysis of a Retinal Scanning Display System. This does not do any clinical evaluation, though -- it's just a comparison of the power output of the system to established laser safety standards. As I mentioned in my first post, it doesn't deal with issues of prolonged exposure from everyday use or possible effects of raster scanning. It takes standards created for an entirely different laser usage mode and applies them to this new product category. It doesn't do any clinical testing for visual or other problems.
The other is Decreased Flicker Sensitivity with a Scanned Laser Display, but it's actually not about safety or health effects at all. It just compares one aspect of visual acuity between traditional displays and retinal scanning displays.
There are also some papers on the safety of laser ophthalmoscopes, but since those aren't used for hours a day for extended periods of time, again it's a whole different usage mode.
So, it's a big site and it's possible I missed something. If there has been such a clinical trial, I'd appreciate a specific reference. Thanks.
Thanks. Could you provide a more specific link to clinical trials of the technology, though? The links you provided are top-level and a quick search didn't turn anything up.
I couldn't find much in the way of specifics on the web about MicroVision product safety. It appears that the company considers it sufficient to demonstrate that the power output of its lasers is below established safety maximums. However, this does not seem an adequate level of testing for an entirely new product category, which involves by its nature long-term exposure and a unique retinal rastering effect.
Quarterly Report -- "Our products may be subject to future health and safety regulation that could increase our development and production costs. Products incorporating retinal scanning display technology could become subject to new health and safety regulations that would reduce our ability to commercialize the retinal scanning display technology. Compliance with any such new regulations would likely increase our cost to develop and produce products using the retinal scanning display technology and adversely affect our financial results."
I wish I could report that the company was taking the possible health risks of its product seriously, but that is not the impression that I get from my web search. There is no word on controlled clinical studies of the product's effects on people with normal vision, for example.
I thought the point of a good compiler was to speed up the run time performance. If compiling a program now takes twice as long but the resultant binary is now 30% faster wouldn't that be a good thing?
That's one point of a good compiler. Another point is to improve programmer productivity. If the "free" compiler is ten times slower than the commercial compiler (as the poster above stated in comparing GCC to MSVC), then it only takes a few weeks at most for the loss in programmer productivity from excessive wait times to more than cancel out the cost savings up front.
And if fast compilations are important aren't there optimizers etc that you can turn off?
Yes. The ordinary compile-link-run-cycle should disable optimizations for this reason. But that doesn't mean GCC in this fast mode will outperform CodeWarrior or MSVC in their own fast modes. I would like to see some competitive benchmarks.
It's the RIAA! The RIAA, I tell you! They're trying to recoup their Napster losses by forcing everyone to buy multiple copies of the same CD! Let's all boycott Metallica!
Tim
PS. All right, I admit that it might have been Steve Ballmer.
Disabling RealPlayer in AOL would clearly not be in the interest of consumers. This demand was an attempt to use Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop OS market to restrict trade by suppressing a competitor, RealNetworks.
Microsoft seems to have decided that it has nothing to fear from the court, and unfortunately it may be correct. However, I prefer to think that the court of appeals hinted that it would not break up the company in order to see how Microsoft behaved once the pressure was off, and that they are taking careful note of the fact that the company is continuing to engage in plainly anticompetitive practices based on its monopoly power.
Tim
Re:how a supernova explodes
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The core flies off because the explosion is not perfectly symmetrical.
Tim
Re:how a supernova explodes
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Close, but in a supernova, the collapse is catastrophic, not gradual. It takes place in a matter of hours.
Your "Intellectual Property is bunk" position still fails to address the obvious question of what will motivate organisations such as drug companies to develop new treatments if they cannot recover costs, let alone make a profit.
Yep. It's strange to me to see people sweeping aside the fact that patents are meant to foster innovation, and that they have been quite effective at doing that. It takes money to do research, and it takes research to create inventions. In a capitalistic system, the primary incentive for research funding is the prospect of making money from inventions. Without some way of protecting the intellectual property, there is no longer any economic incentive to do research, and innovation declines.
To quote the US Constitution, Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It made sense then and it makes just as much sense now. Except, apparently, on/.
Tim
Re:pressures and densities of the sun
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Here's a link on the neutron star collision theory. Sorry for the double post -- couldn't find the link at first.
Tim
Re:pressures and densities of the sun
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Straight fusion can produce elements as heavy as iron. Anything heavier than that requires a supernova.
Actually, no. It turns out that supernovae don't make enough gold to account for the noted percentage in the universe, so scientists have been hunting for another source. Just recently, the likely culprit was confirmed to be neutron star collisions.
Of course, the neutron stars came from supernovae to start with -- but the gold from the collision is not produced during the supernova event. Supernova events produce only a small amount of gold compared to collision events.
Tim
Re:how a supernova explodes
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Oh yeah, and the core becomes a neutron star, and flies off at nearly the speed of light.
Tim
how a supernova explodes
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But a supernovae happens when a star starts running out of fuel. I don't know the exact process (I'm sure someone around here does).
A supernova has sufficient mass to heat its core to roughly a trillion degrees as elements fuse through multiple stages. When the core fuses to iron, fusion ceases to be an energy-producing process, and the chain of fusion to higher elements stops. Within the course of a very short time, the iron core cools. The outward radiation pressure stops since the core is no longer radiating, and the outer layers of the star that had been held up by radiation pressure collapse onto the core of the star.
The energy of the impact smashes into the core of the star, compressing its degenerate iron into neutronium as protons and electrons join into neutrons. This phase shift is accompanied by an incredible wave of neutrinos. A neutrino is a kind of ghost particle that interacts weakly with ordinary matter. It would fly through light-years of solid lead without pausing, but there are so many neutrinos released in the phase shift that they form a powerful explosion and blow the collapsing outer shell back off the neutronium core. The turbulence in the exploding gas cloud is so intense that it can cause fusion to atomic weights even higher than iron's. The explosion, while it lasts, briefly outshines the entire rest of the visible universe.
Eventually the expanding gas cloud becomes a nebula and takes place in later generation star and planet formation processes.
With all this discussion of privacy issues, it's strange to see no discussion of the liability issues. Large companies are increasingly leery of storing any unnecessary information for fear it could be the target of a subpoena. If Microsoft and the Reagan White House had not backed up their emails, they'd have done much better before the courts and the Congress. A large, cached, search engine database would be very likely to contain embarassing material. For this reason, the commercial potential of the system seems limited.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. And AI still "between five and 500 years".
it could easily be a case of narcissim with a little naivete thrown in.
Good point. Rabid optimism seems very common among scientists. Too much SF, no doubt.
Say, for all the talk about atomic holography, I can find absolutely nothing specific about it on Meystre's site. When he talks about copying objects, he's not talking about molecular synthesis, is he? He's probably only discussing something like what the current generation of three-D copiers can already do, with a special material that can be formed into any shape. People here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that it means the instant synthesis of organic molecules. Too much Star Trek, no doubt.
Tim
Which is a pretty remarkable prediction, considering that at present, atom holography is one of the projects at the Gedanken Laboratory, which means that it is currently only a theoretical speculation. In fact, most of the way-out stuff being discussed here is in the Gedanken Lab at present.
From pure theory to experimental demonstration in two or three years is a little hard to believe. I think I spy with my little eye a bit of self-promotion here, but it may just be unbounded scientific optimism.
Tim
In other words, if engineers spent more time studying best practices and efficient algorithm design, that might well improve performance more than spending time in religious wars about the merits of pet languages.
In my experience, basic performance tuning can easily create an order of magnitude improvement regardless of the language. And in my experience, most engineers don't know how to do basic performance tuning. That's got to be more important than language selection in the average case.
Tim
It also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. You can't make a user-friendly system by slapping a front-end on something written to a command-line standard. You can't make a user-friendly word processor by starting with troff and slapping a GUI on it. It will turn out that the assumptions in the substrate don't support the needs of a user-centered design. It's well known now that usability has to come first and the core technology needs to be written to support the demands of the design, not the other way around.
XUL was designed without concern for the user scenarios of authoring, and as a result any authoring GUI slapped on it will always be weak. Ditto HTML. You can't do serious HTML design without memorizing the text-based language and its tags, and something like Dreamweaver is just a shim which in practice is ignored in favor of editing the text.
Tim
Mozilla is meant to be an application development platform, to be sure. However, XUL has not exactly been making waves, and basic issues like application packaging haven't been dealt with yet. It seems the current model is that every application using XUL needs to include its own XUL interpreteter, which is effectively almost a whole Mozilla distro. There doesn't seem to be any provision for a shared interpreter with small application packages.
Given the myriad of small interface bugs in Mozilla, which have recently been exciting comment on MozillaZine, one has to wonder whether XUL is a robust UI language. Bugs like text off the edge of the window should be easy to fix, but somehow they linger on build after build. It is unclear to me whether this is a technical or cultural issue, though.
XUL has also been significantly overpromised -- for instance, remote XUL is alternately either promised or denied depending on where you go at mozilla.org, but the real answer is that remote XUL is too much of a security risk, and would require a better downloading/caching story. Java remote UI software has largely solved the security problem, but it has a similar download problem.
Finally, the lack of any WYSIWYG editor for XUL means that it does not address the most serious problem in UI development, which is that designers who are not programmers should be able to create their own interfaces. The current model in which designers create specs and prototypes which are then implemented by programmers is expensive and unreliable. These two groups rarely get along well and the implementers rarely have any interest in understanding the design principles behind the specification. The result is that good design specifications often make terrible implemented interfaces, and do so at great cost. Breaking the dependence on the programmer is the best way to address the problem, and that can't be addressed by a system like XUL, which the W3C noted is an obscure mix of several different programming language paradigms.
Tim
Good luck. I searched for "report bug" and "report StarOffice bug" and didn't find anything. I went to the StarOffice main page and looked for a bug reporting link; also nothing. I went to three different StarOffice FAQs, but none of them had any questions relating to how to report bugs. I looked at the patches page and found some bug numbers, but they were just static text with no links to the bug reports. If there's a bug reporting feature, they've hidden it pretty well.
Very good turn back! I'm impressed. You took what was described as the startup time, replied to as the startup time, and compared it to TCO, thus turning me into the fool. I AM impressed.
I'm not sure what wasn't clear when I was comparing costs of GCC to those of CodeWarrior. I was talking about compile speed, which is a TCO factor, not a startup cost factor. GCC has a lower up-front cost but a much higher TCO.
Dealing with a commercial, closed source vendor, you don't have any leverage (unless you've got deep pockets) to get any particular bug fixed.
All depends on the vendor. In my experience most commercial software vendors are pretty good at fixing major bugs reported by their customers. OTOH, lots of open source developers complain about their fixes for open source bugs being stonewalled -- there have been some notable /. threads on the subject.
The other thing usability design takes, which you neglect to mention, is users. More importantly, users who will tell you why your design sucks or is great. Those are in even shorter supply than money for the OS community (heck, from the money aspect, we've got IBM, Sun, HP, etc, trying to help out). But users who will provide feedback about the interface? Go find me five of them, and I'll be shocked.
I do it all the time. It's part of my job as user experience lead. The answer is, you pay them, or you pay a recruiting firm to find them and pay them. It's not free, and so it doesn't fit into the free software development model.
My dad? He got me to install it. But he knew he needed one. My wife? Won't go near the computer anymore, hates it because I use it too much.
Good thing you did it -- they wouldn't have been able to. I took a look at Free Linux-based Floppy-Boot Firewall, which is supposedly easy.
Then you go to the instructions. They're six pages long, they use a command line (which lets out your wife and your dad right there), and they're full of non-human-readable stuff like:
Yeah, that's really easy -- for a UNIX system administrator, that is. It's not for ordinary mortals. It shares that with almost all the open source software in the world. that's why, contra the claim in the article, consumers don't prefer open source.
Tim
Aside from being slow, incompatible, and nonconforming to platform UI standards you mean? Well, I just downloaded it (had to work through a bug on Sun's download web page to do that) and launched the installer. "Program Error: so-5_2-ga-bin-w.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows." An installer crash is about as broken as you can get.
Average developer: $60/hour (prolly less, but this makes it easier). $1/minute. With CodeWarrior, you claim 30 seconds to go, and gcc, 5 minutes to go. That's great! You've just saved me $4.50/developer! So, lessee, licensing of CodeWarrior: $200+/seat. Licensing of GCC: $0/seat. Oh, shit, there just went $195.50/developer.
Brilliant TCO analysis! It's very applicable to the case of a single-programmer team who uses the software exactly once. I'm sure that's the most common case. Remind you to include you if we do a CFO search.
Now, how do I get bugs fixed? CodeWarrior: Submit the bug to them, hope they fix it, pay for upgrade. GCC: Grab the source, find the bug, fix it, and start using it. Give it back to the steering committee while I'm at it, since that's probably a requirement (if I'm distributing it).
Even starting to fix a single bug in a big project like the Linux kernel, GCC, or Mozilla will take weeks of startup time familiarizing yourself with the idiosyncracies of the source. If you haven't been on the chat rooms or mailing lists with the core team for months, they won't even look at your bug fixes. The supposed ease of fixing bugs in open source software is one of the community's Big Lies.
Perhaps you could pass along some of those titles? I'd actually like to read them, and think they could be useful
Try anything by Deborah J. Mayhew.
Personally, I hate designing interfaces. I know that what I want in one is nothing like what everybody else wants in one (not even other developers). Find for me a user interface expert who can help me design a better one, and will work for the same terms I do when developing Open Source: Free. They're in kinda short supply, if you know what I mean?
My point exactly. Good user experience design takes money. That money is not to be found in the open source or free software development model. Therefore, those models are not capable of making the paradigm shift to user-centered design. Usability labs do not grow on trees and good design is not something you can do sitting by yourself on your home computer.
Hmmm, how about that. My dad is a system administrator. He'd be surprised to know that, since he works as an RN on the 3rd floor of the local hospital, and couldn't tell you most of anything about firewalls. But, he does know that he needs one to protect his machine from getting hacked, and he knows it's better to have it be external.
Please. We were talking about someone who configured a Linux router, not someone who just knows vaguely what a firewall is. These are silly arguments that you're making.
You heard about the latest virus which will hit your machine from the internet and wipe out your drives? I guarantee that most of the people in the room will be asking how to stop it, and I can mention the firewall/router then.
(Just FYI, firewalls don't usually have much to do with viruses. Firewalls are mostly about DoS and intrusion prevention.)
So, I await word on how your non-programmer, non-admin father (or wife) got along with the Linux Router configuration.
Tim
Yes, it is. If I buy Microsoft Office, I am buying software that works. If I download StarOffice, I am getting software that doesn't work. If I download some random utility from FreshMeat, I am downloading something that is almost guaranteed not to work and to be held together with hooks and bailing wire. Denial about the flakiness of open source software is one of the most serious problems in the community.
In the Price versus performance ratio Linux wins.
No, not from a total cost of ownership perspective. Tools exist to increase productivity -- that's a basic law of economics. Slower tools hurt productivity relative to faster tools. Any manager who wouldn't prefer to spend a few hundred dollars to get his or her programmers compiling in thirty seconds with CodeWarrior rather than five minutes with GCC for "free" can't do simple math. Thousands of dollars would be wasted every week by the "free" solution.
Attractiveness is not all that important but is a plus to have and Linux will need more work in that area especially in user friendliness. Lets not forget that with development Linux can easily overcome these small hurdles and it will.
No, user friendliness is not a "small hurdle." It's a paradigm shift that requires an entirely different development model. The problem is well studied and I could recommend you some books if I thought you'd actually read them. It is a shift that free software has not made. Due to the insistence on programmers designing their own interfaces, it is a shift that the free software community can not make.
And i'm not a tinkerer. I needed a stable router/firewall for my 486 hence i'm using LRP (Linux Router Project). Saving the environment and saving me money too.
What's wrong with this statement? "I'm not a tinkerer. I needed a stable router/firewall." You are not a software consumer -- you are a system administrator. Your needs and desires for software are nothing like those of the other 99+% of humanity. You consider it fun to spend two days slaving over configuration files to get a router to work. Most people have never even heard of a router, would not be able to configure one, and would not want to spend the time doing so if they could.
Do you hang out with non-programmers and non-administrators? Do you date them? Try this experiment. At your next non-geek social affair, casually bring up the subject of router configuration....
Tim
They do? That must be why Windows has a desktop market share of around 95% while Linux has a desktop market share well under 1%.
Oh wait, there's an explanation:
But the technology markets were not being left to market forces. The government is playing an increasing role at the urging of the major global publishing organizations.
Apparently the reason Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, etc. software is preferred by the market is due to government interference. That makes sense. I hear the government has been trying to help Microsoft for years, especially the Justice Department!
In all seriousness, consumers do not prefer free software or open source, unless by consumers we mean the tiny community of open source system administrators. The reason is that commercial software is superior to free software in features, friendliness, attractiveness, performance, and reliability. Free software appeals to tinkerers and hobbyists, who represent a very small portion of the market.
Tim
I didn't ask for a link. I asked for a reference. If you know of a reference to such a clinical trial, whether in print or on the Web, I would be happy to examine it.
It's also grossly unfair to those who are working on this technology.
Those who stand to benefit from the technology bear the burden of proof in demonstrating its safety, if there is any credible reason to question its safety.
Tim
To evaluate the safety of this product, it would be necessary to do double-blind, controlled, peer-reviewed clinical studies which compared a test group who used the product under real-world conditions -- which is to say, several hours a days for weeks or months -- with a control group who did not use the product. The comparison would need to test for eyestrain, visual acuity degradation, and other possible effects on the visual system, as well as potential neurological or psychological effects such as headaches. I haven't seen anything remotely like this.
There are two studies which could be mistaken for something like this on the site. One is Laser Safety Analysis of a Retinal Scanning Display System. This does not do any clinical evaluation, though -- it's just a comparison of the power output of the system to established laser safety standards. As I mentioned in my first post, it doesn't deal with issues of prolonged exposure from everyday use or possible effects of raster scanning. It takes standards created for an entirely different laser usage mode and applies them to this new product category. It doesn't do any clinical testing for visual or other problems.
The other is Decreased Flicker Sensitivity with a Scanned Laser Display, but it's actually not about safety or health effects at all. It just compares one aspect of visual acuity between traditional displays and retinal scanning displays.
There are also some papers on the safety of laser ophthalmoscopes, but since those aren't used for hours a day for extended periods of time, again it's a whole different usage mode.
So, it's a big site and it's possible I missed something. If there has been such a clinical trial, I'd appreciate a specific reference. Thanks.
Tim
Thanks,
Tim
Here are some of the links that I found.
International Ophthalmology Expert Joins Microvision Advisory Panel
Eye Safety FAQ about Retinal Scanning Display Technology
Quarterly Report -- "Our products may be subject to future health and safety regulation that could increase our development and production costs. Products incorporating retinal scanning display technology could become subject to new health and safety regulations that would reduce our ability to commercialize the retinal scanning display technology. Compliance with any such new regulations would likely increase our cost to develop and produce products using the retinal scanning display technology and adversely affect our financial results."
I wish I could report that the company was taking the possible health risks of its product seriously, but that is not the impression that I get from my web search. There is no word on controlled clinical studies of the product's effects on people with normal vision, for example.
Tim
That's one point of a good compiler. Another point is to improve programmer productivity. If the "free" compiler is ten times slower than the commercial compiler (as the poster above stated in comparing GCC to MSVC), then it only takes a few weeks at most for the loss in programmer productivity from excessive wait times to more than cancel out the cost savings up front.
And if fast compilations are important aren't there optimizers etc that you can turn off?
Yes. The ordinary compile-link-run-cycle should disable optimizations for this reason. But that doesn't mean GCC in this fast mode will outperform CodeWarrior or MSVC in their own fast modes. I would like to see some competitive benchmarks.
Tim
Tim
Tim
PS. All right, I admit that it might have been Steve Ballmer.
Microsoft seems to have decided that it has nothing to fear from the court, and unfortunately it may be correct. However, I prefer to think that the court of appeals hinted that it would not break up the company in order to see how Microsoft behaved once the pressure was off, and that they are taking careful note of the fact that the company is continuing to engage in plainly anticompetitive practices based on its monopoly power.
Tim
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Tim
Yep. It's strange to me to see people sweeping aside the fact that patents are meant to foster innovation, and that they have been quite effective at doing that. It takes money to do research, and it takes research to create inventions. In a capitalistic system, the primary incentive for research funding is the prospect of making money from inventions. Without some way of protecting the intellectual property, there is no longer any economic incentive to do research, and innovation declines.
To quote the US Constitution, Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It made sense then and it makes just as much sense now. Except, apparently, on /.
Tim
Tim
Actually, no. It turns out that supernovae don't make enough gold to account for the noted percentage in the universe, so scientists have been hunting for another source. Just recently, the likely culprit was confirmed to be neutron star collisions.
Of course, the neutron stars came from supernovae to start with -- but the gold from the collision is not produced during the supernova event. Supernova events produce only a small amount of gold compared to collision events.
Tim
Tim
A supernova has sufficient mass to heat its core to roughly a trillion degrees as elements fuse through multiple stages. When the core fuses to iron, fusion ceases to be an energy-producing process, and the chain of fusion to higher elements stops. Within the course of a very short time, the iron core cools. The outward radiation pressure stops since the core is no longer radiating, and the outer layers of the star that had been held up by radiation pressure collapse onto the core of the star.
The energy of the impact smashes into the core of the star, compressing its degenerate iron into neutronium as protons and electrons join into neutrons. This phase shift is accompanied by an incredible wave of neutrinos. A neutrino is a kind of ghost particle that interacts weakly with ordinary matter. It would fly through light-years of solid lead without pausing, but there are so many neutrinos released in the phase shift that they form a powerful explosion and blow the collapsing outer shell back off the neutronium core. The turbulence in the exploding gas cloud is so intense that it can cause fusion to atomic weights even higher than iron's. The explosion, while it lasts, briefly outshines the entire rest of the visible universe.
Eventually the expanding gas cloud becomes a nebula and takes place in later generation star and planet formation processes.
Tim
Tim