>>The thing is, they aren't being forced. >>They could drop out of society. >We aren't? There is a place in our country we can >go where we can put whatever substances in our >bodies that we chose and live with the consequences >of that?
San Francisco?
I kid, actually there are plenty of places you can go with much more lenient laws. Practically speaking, the drug laws anywhere don't punish users, they punish dealers and traffickers, but in some places they will outright ignore possession even if there are laws on the books against it. It's trafficking and the drug industry itself that society sees as a major threat.
The drug industry is kind of like walmart. Once it takes hold, it pushes all other businesses out of the area. Specifically, it tends to devastate the local economy. Lots of heroin fiends prowling the neighborhood looking for cash for their next fix is not good for business. Neither are gang bangers.
Once the local economy is devastated, the only place to get work is in the drug trade, which starts a vicious cycle.
Note that I'm not talking about pot here, I'm talking about dope and crack. Arguably, we could change our laws on pot, since it isn't any more addictive or harmful than current legal substances, and supposedly much less addictive than cigarettes. However, libertarians traditionally advocate not just legalizing marijuana, but also the hard drugs, and there's practical reasons why that can't be done.
>You don't seem to know what a libertarian is.
An anarchist?
Libertarians always think they have the cure to all of societies ills, in the same way that communists think they have the cure (even if they are on opposite ends of the left right political spectrum). However, just as communism is despotism in practice, libertarianism is anarchy is practice.
Libertarianism if a form of political extremism without concern for the realpolitik. Practical concerns are swept aside in favor of ideological dogmatism.
>1. Give me the ability to turn aero completely off damn it! >I don't need all of that resource gluttonous crap running at all period. >Even if I do run the Win2K look!
I agree with most of your complaints; however, I'd just like to point out that you *can* turn off aero completely through the control panel (you have to do a little hunting to find the switch) and go back to the win2k look in Vista. This is, in fact, what I did to try to help improve performance.
There does seem to be platform lockin involved here. However, this isn't the first time developers have had to worry about porting between platforms! I think we all know the solution.
What we need is a wrapper around S3 and google datastore that exposes a high level API that they can both support. Then, this proprietary platform suddenly transforms into a commodity.
That said, I'm sure that isn't what google is hoping will happen. They don't want to be just another hosting company competing with all the others.
>It's actually nothing like EC2--EC2 is a virtualization platform. >You run an entire machine image of your choice on Amazon's infrastructure, >and there's no explicit persistent storage except through the Ec2 interface.
It is geared towards solving some of the same problems as EC2 and S3 (how to deploy scalable web sites without having to build and maintain your own datacenters); however, it takes a different approach.
EC2 and S3 make you design your web stack from the ground up, choose your operating system, etc. They also let you run whatever kind of task you want, including stuff that runs in the background.
In contrast google app store limits your options, and provides it's own web framework, but is probably easy to get started with since they already handle things like load balancing for you, and starts your service up on a new machine if one crashes automatically, etc.
A lot of people have noted that you have to use python to develop, and that is one way that it lacks the flexibility of amazon's offering, but it is by far the least important! Google will doubtless add support for things like java and ruby in the future, as for them it is just an issue or wrapping an API.
The biggest concern that most people are missing is that this is a essentially a really big web server that they are letting you put your software on, and *just* a web server. From "http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html":
"when an application is called to serve a web request, it must issue a response within a few seconds. If the application takes too long, the process is terminated and the server returns an error code to the user."
That means you can perform *no* computationally expensive operations on their service. Most interesting web applications don't just process web requests, they use data that has complicated processing done as part of batch tasks. Internet search is the best example of this. It's not enough to have a database with the whole internet in it, you also need to generate an index, and that is an incredibly expensive batch job that must run on an enourmous cluster. That means if you wanted to implement something big like search on google app engine, you would need to roll your own cluster and then upload your stuff to google, *over the internet*. This is not practical because the terabytes of data involved may be quick to transfer across a lan in a data center, it will take a long time to transfer them across the internet...
In comparison, amazon will let you use the same service and data store both for interactive web applications, and backend batch processes. You could theoretically reimplement google search on top of EC2 and S3, but probably not on top of google app engine.
That said, I think that google is going to kick everyone's ass in this space in the long run. Google hasn't come out with every feature necessary for building big apps without having to worry about scaling, but for the features they have implemented, they've done it right, making it much smoother for the developer by handling administrative tasks. In comparison amazon's efforts give you all of the primitive tools you need, but then require you to roll a lot more of your own code.
When they get around to letting external developers run mapreduces (http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html) and similar long term distributed tasks by paying for CPU usage, they will have the opportunity to move into this space in a big way.
Aside from that, they need to provide better tools to migrate existing web apps to their service. Most people aren't going to write something serious for google from scratch, but might be willing to port an existing app that is facing scaling issues to explore cost/benefits of google's service. Right now, porting is much easier with EC2 since you can just image your existing servers and build on that.
Google needs to provide: 1. Some kind of language independence. Right now, it sounds like (although I do not kn
What I'd like to see is a more concerted effort to address the problems with Vista. Microsoft could make Vista as fast and usable as XP today if they would just get through their thick heads that some of the policies they came up with for vista are bone headed.
Consider:
1. Drivers. There's no reason Vista can't be made compatible with XP's faster video drivers, except that Microsoft is being stubborn.
2. 64 bit support. Microsoft has willfully hamstrung Vista 64 by not providing compatibility with 32 bit drivers, and by making the Vista 64 driver model more restrictive than the Vista 32 bit. If you look at Apple's systems, they have a much better model where 32 bit drivers work *fine* on a 64 bit system. There's no reason your video card driver needs to be 64 bit anyway...
3. Background tasks. Here's a hint: Let us easily turn them the fuck off. There should be some kind of Windows performance control panel that provides a central place to switch off file indexing, and the endless other miscellaneous tasks that spin the drive on Vista *constantly*.
Until those issues are addressed, it's stupid to expect gamers who need good graphics drivers, and laptop users who can't have the spinning harddrive wearing down the battery constantly to take a second look at Vista.
I gave Vista a good 6 months, and really did appreciate things like not having to run as administrator constantly. I felt much more secure running with lower privileges user like I do on my Ubuntu and OSX installs. However, dispite the fact that I tweaked the hell out of my system (including turning off file indexing and switching off aero in favor of the win2k look), and the fact that my system *should* be ridiculously overpowered by looking at the hardware specs, the background services made my system run like a *dog*.
I've switched back to XP, and it is like night and day. Suddenly, my machine no longer locks up doing some stupid task in the background. Suddenly, the stutter is gone from my games. Suddenly, everything is snappier.
What's more, I now actually get to run with file indexing ON, by using the google desktop. This gives me all of the same search functionality as I got on vista, but with no noticeable performance overhead. Hell, I could probably start running as a non admin user on XP, now that applications have finally been forced to learn to live with reduced permissions for Vista compatibility...
>>What about current and next gen games? >>How do I get those to work? >This wikipedia link [link to playstation 3] should help.
So your answer on how to get PC games to work on Linux, is to not play PC games? I'm just *not allowed* to play starcraft II when it comes out?
Many people own PC's specifically for playing games, and don't do much else with them. Is your solution for them, that they don't need a computer at all? Or maybe they should put Linux on their computer, and then throw it in the closet and never look at it again?
Blind evangelism isn't helping Linux... it turns people off when they are given bad advice by people with an agenda.
hearing someone on slashdot call this guy a Microsoft "fanboy." There are none who so slavishly worship their operating system, even to the point of defending it's faults as features, than Linux users.
I probably shouldn't put a dig against Linux fanboys in my opening paragraph on a post on slashdot (0, flaimbait anyone?), but what can I say? I'm tired of seeing childish Microsoft bashing like, "It's funny to watch a fanboy admit Microsoft is following Apple, but it would be nice for him to also admit that Apple followed free software and Unix practices."
That said, I also noticed the contradiction. I think he was trying to make his article sound more impressive by declaring that Win 7 would be "partially source, but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows." But then he turns right around and says that Win 7 will "allow the majority of legacy applications to run perfectly."
Maybe he means run perfectly *after* recompiling? If he means they are ending support for the old ABI, that would be a more impressive thing to say. However, he is too vague, and doesn't sound particularly knowledgeable.
The author also *implies* but does not *say* that Win 7 will use virtualization to run vista and xp win32 applications. This indicates to me that he doesn't actually know, and is just blowing smoke out of his ass.
Also, he seems to imply that.NET is a legacy framework that is going to also require legacy support through a "monolithic library." First of all, I don't know what he means by monolithic library, and I don't think that he does either. It sounds like 2nd hand knowledge. Second,.NET doesn't require any kind of special legacy support... it already runs in a virtual machine. All they have to do is port the VM to Win 7. The only things that would be an issue would be libraries like Windows forms that are tightly integrated with win32.
If microsoft is going to revamp win32, which would be nice since the core windowing routines are pretty ugly to use compared to modern GUI libraries, then win forms which lets you basically plug into win32 by creating WindProc and handling messages, etc, would need some translation to the underlying API. Mono in particular had some trouble making WindProcs work on top of X.
although that is going to be quite a while from what I hear.
The first application that supported offline use was google reader (reader.google.com). Now it sounds like their javascript "word clone" (does anyone even use that thing? It crashes firefox on me whenever I try to use it).
I think thirdparty people are also supposed to be able to use the plugin that backs their offline access.
but lets stop kidding around and imagining that google docs are going to unseat Word...
I mean, does anyone here even use google docs? The last few times I tried them, they crashed firefox over and over again while I was trying to write simple text documents.
Then there's the issues of writing a major word processors in javascript... shudder...
"Also adobe gets a look at gimp code, but not the other way. This puts limits, given that adobe can pay engineers to have at least equally good understanding of computers as gimp. So photoshop is always going to be AT LEAST as good as gimp, but the gimp can be worse than photoshop, virtually assuring that it will, in fact, be less good."
No adobe developers are going to look at GIMP code, both for legal reasons and because it wouldn't actually be helpful. Stealing code between code bases is usually impossible for practical reasons. Copying algorithms is usually pointless, because these graphics algorithms are largely published as part of academic papers.
Photoshop is better than GIMP because the people working on it have consistently done a better job. Give praise where praise is due.
I think it's kind of a shame that Novell is doing so poorly. They actually had *negative* income in 2007, and are still largely making their money from selling *netware* despite all their Linux investments.
A lot of the stuff they are working on is pretty cool, especially Mono.
However, I think it's clear that there just isn't room in the market place for another distro.
I wish your post was labeled +5 "funny" instead of "interesting" which indicates that people take the idea seriously.
The idea that Novell is going to seed "microsoft" code into Linux is ridiculous on the face of it. You can't just copy paste windows device driver code into Linux and expect it to work... and windows coding styles vs linux coding styles are so different that it would be obvious in an instant if such a thing happened.
Seriously, not everything that Microsoft does is part of some big conspiracy to eat your babies. I think the reasoning behind their partnership is fairly clear.
Linux *does* have a strong position in the server market, and for practical reasons Microsoft *has* to be able to interoperate with at least *some* Linux distros. This isn't a position that they are super happy to be in, and the fact that they made this deal to support operation with Suse should be seen as a *victory* by Linux in the marketplace.
Microsoft is trying to do damage control by positioning some Linux vendors as partners instead of competitors. If Linux becomes any more successful than it is, you can expect to see Microsoft try to make deals with other Linux vendors like Red Hat, to try to insure that Linux is used in *conjunction* with Microsoft server products, rather than risk having Microsoft be cut out of the market entirely.
>It doesn't matter if the woman sends any signals. >If she's pretty and witty he's intersted. >If she's ugly and witty he ONLY wants to be her friend. >If she's ugly and stupid he doesn't know her.
Yes... it is truly bizarre that men aren't interest in ugly and boring women. Maybe something is wrong with us?
Seriuosly though, this is 1. a two way street 2. the only real way to judge a mate
The world is filled with mediocre people that are upset that the world doesn't understand how wonderful they are in some secret and unverifiable way.
>I'm a student on computer science at the moment and all they teach in any depth is Java.
My school does the same thing, and I recommend that. Java is a relatively simple language, good for explaining fundamental data structures and algorithms issues in. When you move into upper division courses you will probably end up doing a lot of C and C++. After all, there's no way to teach an operating systems course in Java, and graphics courses and graphics industry jobs are C++ oriented.
That said, I think the problem you see in school's is that students learn Java, Scheme, or Python or some such relatively simple language as an introductory measure, and then when they get into upper division courses they are thrown head first into C and C++ without a lot of prep, and I think that is the problem that Stroustrup runs into a lot.
Both C and C++ require a lot of idioms related to memory management and the nature of how C++ compiles things, that don't exist in other programming language. Even something as trivial as returning large objects from a function, which you do like this in Java
String method(String input);//signature
String myString = obj.method("asdf");
Doesn't work the same in C++! In C++ there are no fewer than 3 ways to return an object from a function.
By value (a bad idea for potentially large objects like strings): std::string my_string = func("asdf");
By pointer (potentially a bad idea because it requires you to answer the question, who is responsible for deallocating this pointer?):
std::string* my_string_ptr = func("asdf");
And, what is usually the correct answer (is efficient and has the least headaches associated with it), by output parameters:
Output parameters are technically possible in java, but not used nearly as often. However, in C++ they are probably the most common idiom, depending on the quality of the code base.
Issues like this are difficult to teach because they require a level of concern over areas like efficiency and code readability that may be common in industry, but which academics concerned with research rarely have cause to exercise. They also require in dept knowledge of the language in way that is rarely necessary in Java.
Everyone knows that biometric data can be stolen, just like every other means of identifying yourself. I thought the point of biometric data was that it added one *more* piece of data that would have to be stolen before someone could successfully impersonate you.
So in addition to needing to know a pin or password, someone also needs to have stolen my fingerprint in order to take money out of my bank account. Isn't this what is called two factor authentication? Isn't that a good thing that makes it that much more difficult to steal an identity?
they contain both fingerprint data, and a picture of the person. Thus, to steal your identity, a person would have to steal your passport, look like you, and also steal your fingerprint. This actually seems like a pretty good system that would prevent someone from using a stolen passport to steal the rightful owners identity. Without the fingerprint data, an identity theft doesn't need to do as much work.
That said, I'm not from germany, so maybe there additional nuances about this thing that I'm missing.
>that's hogwash. you don't use a compiler that you don't have the sources to.
The grand parent was making a reference to a historical case where a compiler binary was created that would create a back door in compiled software. Editing the compiler sources in this case would normally help, except that the compiler was designed to detect that it was recompiling itself and reinsert the code that had been removed from the sources.
>>CMYK, Pantone in particular but mostly it's down to the horrible interface that GIMP comes with. >>Gimp is basically a programmers idea of how a creative tool should look.
>The two missing features I'll give you. >Although one is just a licensing issue, >and the other is only relevant if you are working on images that are intended for print
For photographers and other professionals doing graphics work, CMYK and color accuracy are deal breakers. Excuses don't matter to people who build their careers on a tool, if GIMP doesn't have what they need to do their job, then they won't consider using it.
There's a reason why people pay enormous sums for copies of photoshop even when there's plenty of cheap or free tools that do 60% of what photoshop does, and that's because every pro is going to have at least one feature missing from the 60% product that is a total show stopper for them.
This is a lesson on half assed software, that's good enough for the developer that wrote it, but not good enough for the market. Coding to your personal needs isn't good enough for products that are going to non developers. Linus doesn't say "well, there are some problems with Linux on big IBM mainframes, but I don't personally use a mainframe, so I won't work on that fix." When you are serious about software, you talk to the people that will be *using* your software, and you code to *their* standards in addition to your own.
>What is label overhead? And why is it way more than the artist gets, even in a best case scenario?
What do you mean what is overhead? What kind of question is that?
Where does the overhead in selling a boxed copy of your favorite video game go to, if you take out the salaries for the programmers and artists? Where does the overhead for a box of wheaties go, once you take out the cost of production. Remember, there's non brand name wheato's right next to those wheaties and there's a big price gap between them.
The answer is that the money goes to marketing and numerous support functions. If the artists doesn't want to pay for that, then they can sell on itunes and pretty much keep all of that overhead money. There's nothing *forcing* anyone to sign with a label, and arguably some people shouldn't, but those who do obviously think it is worth the cost.
Again, I don't think Walmart is a villain here. The idea that there are such things as heroes and villains is childish. The real world is a lot more complicated than these comic book archetypes are. The news, especially disreputable news sources like slashdot, like to rewrite the news so that it becomes a story that fits into a simplistic world view where there are a bunch of guys without flaws fighting a bunch of guys without redeeming character traits, but the truth is that doesn't represent anyone in the real world.
>I agree that Walmart is the "hero" of this particular story, but to me, the real villain is the record buying public.
How is Walmart the hero? This is another story in Walmart's long history of pushing competitors out of the marketplace and then squeezing suppliers. Walmart is the ultimate middleman in that they have more leverage than either producers, consumers, or even their own workers. That said, I don't even really think that Walmart is a villain exactly (most of the time), they are just an extremely well run business optimizing their profits.
What I think is very wrong is the interpretation that anyone that screws the record industry, the movie industry, or the software industry is somehow a hero. Somehow the slashdot crowd has gotten the impression that these industries are composed completely of useless middlemen who don't deserve to make any profit from their work.
However, this is less and less true since now artists can sell their work fairly independently. This was probably never true with the software industry, where even smaller publishers like Stardock can make it onto Walmart shelves, and the movie industry where actors, writers and directors all get paid pretty handsomely.
The truth is that you can't take money out of the "record industries" pockets without taking money out of artists pockets, especially now that artists have access to smaller or self created labels and the ability to sell their stuff over the internet.
Personally, I buy products at the lowest price I can get them, but I don't go around cheering when the producers get shortchanged.
>I have worked at/with both sides of that fence. Medicine is a heck of a lot harder than engineering. >The complexity of biological systems is typically orders higher than most engineering projects,
That's a fallacious argument because no one designs, or even understands to a very high degree, how biological systems work. The discussion wasn't about whether it is harder to understand computers or biology, which is a moot point because *no one* understands how any biological system works to the degree that I understand how my computer works, it was whether it is harder to succeed in a biology, medical, or an engineering program.
This is a much more difficult question to answer. I suspect it isn't that hard to get a bachelors in biology compared to a BS in CS, but becoming an MD requires more years and may require more effort. However, I think it also changes depending on where you go to school, and what kind of job you are aiming for when you come out. Also, if you are going to be a physician, I doubt it requires the kind of analytical capacity that many engineering tasks require, but on the other hand the same thing can be said of being a low level code monkey, since those guys often don't know the theory behind computer science anyway.
So, the question is really too vague to answer. Computer science and much of engineering has theoretical and analytical aspects that don't really exist in biology, whereas biology has complexity and a need to memorize vast amounts of facts. Also, since I'm not actually an MD, it's hard for me to say if I'm missing an important part of the field.
I'd say that simply as a matter of years, although this is not a great measure, it is harder to get the degree necessary to be a physician than it is to be a code monkey. Technically you don't even need to go to school to get some kinds of programming jobs.
>Yes. There has been a fully functional NTFS driver for a while now. Are you saying that they use the NTFS-3G driver in this project from personal knowledge, or are you just pointing out that such a driver exists?
consider that the vast majority would be replacing internet explorer with safari, not replacing firefox. This is bundling, but bundling was only against the rules in Microsoft's case because they were using it to extend a monopoly.
That said, it is annoying when you must opt out of installing things.
Slashdot Mirror
>Explain the situation with marijuana.
The situation with marijuana is irrational, since it isn't that harmful or addictive compared to cigarettes and alcohol, which are both legal.
However, please don't equate legalizing marijuana with legalizing drugs.
Heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines don't just kill people, they kill communities. Legalizing heroin is like legalizing zombies.
You might think, oh hey, cool. I want to have a pet zombie. But, then one day it escapes, and the whole city turns into the walking dead.
>>The thing is, they aren't being forced.
>>They could drop out of society.
>We aren't? There is a place in our country we can
>go where we can put whatever substances in our
>bodies that we chose and live with the consequences
>of that?
San Francisco?
I kid, actually there are plenty of places you can go with much more lenient laws. Practically speaking, the drug laws anywhere don't punish users, they punish dealers and traffickers, but in some places they will outright ignore possession even if there are laws on the books against it. It's trafficking and the drug industry itself that society sees as a major threat.
The drug industry is kind of like walmart. Once it takes hold, it pushes all other businesses out of the area. Specifically, it tends to devastate the local economy. Lots of heroin fiends prowling the neighborhood looking for cash for their next fix is not good for business. Neither are gang bangers.
Once the local economy is devastated, the only place to get work is in the drug trade, which starts a vicious cycle.
Note that I'm not talking about pot here, I'm talking about dope and crack. Arguably, we could change our laws on pot, since it isn't any more addictive or harmful than current legal substances, and supposedly much less addictive than cigarettes. However, libertarians traditionally advocate not just legalizing marijuana, but also the hard drugs, and there's practical reasons why that can't be done.
>You don't seem to know what a libertarian is.
An anarchist?
Libertarians always think they have the cure to all of societies ills, in the same way that communists think they have the cure (even if they are on opposite ends of the left right political spectrum). However, just as communism is despotism in practice, libertarianism is anarchy is practice.
Libertarianism if a form of political extremism without concern for the realpolitik. Practical concerns are swept aside in favor of ideological dogmatism.
>1. Give me the ability to turn aero completely off damn it!
>I don't need all of that resource gluttonous crap running at all period.
>Even if I do run the Win2K look!
I agree with most of your complaints; however, I'd just like to point out that you *can* turn off aero completely through the control panel (you have to do a little hunting to find the switch) and go back to the win2k look in Vista. This is, in fact, what I did to try to help improve performance.
There does seem to be platform lockin involved here. However, this isn't the first time developers have had to worry about porting between platforms! I think we all know the solution.
What we need is a wrapper around S3 and google datastore that exposes a high level API that they can both support. Then, this proprietary platform suddenly transforms into a commodity.
That said, I'm sure that isn't what google is hoping will happen. They don't want to be just another hosting company competing with all the others.
>It's actually nothing like EC2--EC2 is a virtualization platform.
>You run an entire machine image of your choice on Amazon's infrastructure,
>and there's no explicit persistent storage except through the Ec2 interface.
It is geared towards solving some of the same problems as EC2 and S3 (how to deploy scalable web sites without having to build and maintain your own datacenters); however, it takes a different approach.
EC2 and S3 make you design your web stack from the ground up, choose your operating system, etc. They also let you run whatever kind of task you want, including stuff that runs in the background.
In contrast google app store limits your options, and provides it's own web framework, but is probably easy to get started with since they already handle things like load balancing for you, and starts your service up on a new machine if one crashes automatically, etc.
A lot of people have noted that you have to use python to develop, and that is one way that it lacks the flexibility of amazon's offering, but it is by far the least important! Google will doubtless add support for things like java and ruby in the future, as for them it is just an issue or wrapping an API.
The biggest concern that most people are missing is that this is a essentially a really big web server that they are letting you put your software on, and *just* a web server. From "http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html":
"when an application is called to serve a web request, it must issue a response within a few seconds. If the application takes too long, the process is terminated and the server returns an error code to the user."
That means you can perform *no* computationally expensive operations on their service. Most interesting web applications don't just process web requests, they use data that has complicated processing done as part of batch tasks. Internet search is the best example of this. It's not enough to have a database with the whole internet in it, you also need to generate an index, and that is an incredibly expensive batch job that must run on an enourmous cluster. That means if you wanted to implement something big like search on google app engine, you would need to roll your own cluster and then upload your stuff to google, *over the internet*. This is not practical because the terabytes of data involved may be quick to transfer across a lan in a data center, it will take a long time to transfer them across the internet...
In comparison, amazon will let you use the same service and data store both for interactive web applications, and backend batch processes. You could theoretically reimplement google search on top of EC2 and S3, but probably not on top of google app engine.
That said, I think that google is going to kick everyone's ass in this space in the long run. Google hasn't come out with every feature necessary for building big apps without having to worry about scaling, but for the features they have implemented, they've done it right, making it much smoother for the developer by handling administrative tasks. In comparison amazon's efforts give you all of the primitive tools you need, but then require you to roll a lot more of your own code.
When they get around to letting external developers run mapreduces (http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html) and similar long term distributed tasks by paying for CPU usage, they will have the opportunity to move into this space in a big way.
Aside from that, they need to provide better tools to migrate existing web apps to their service. Most people aren't going to write something serious for google from scratch, but might be willing to port an existing app that is facing scaling issues to explore cost/benefits of google's service. Right now, porting is much easier with EC2 since you can just image your existing servers and build on that.
Google needs to provide:
1. Some kind of language independence. Right now, it sounds like (although I do not kn
What I'd like to see is a more concerted effort to address the problems with Vista. Microsoft could make Vista as fast and usable as XP today if they would just get through their thick heads that some of the policies they came up with for vista are bone headed.
Consider:
1. Drivers. There's no reason Vista can't be made compatible with XP's faster video drivers, except that Microsoft is being stubborn.
2. 64 bit support. Microsoft has willfully hamstrung Vista 64 by not providing compatibility with 32 bit drivers, and by making the Vista 64 driver model more restrictive than the Vista 32 bit. If you look at Apple's systems, they have a much better model where 32 bit drivers work *fine* on a 64 bit system. There's no reason your video card driver needs to be 64 bit anyway...
3. Background tasks. Here's a hint: Let us easily turn them the fuck off. There should be some kind of Windows performance control panel that provides a central place to switch off file indexing, and the endless other miscellaneous tasks that spin the drive on Vista *constantly*.
Until those issues are addressed, it's stupid to expect gamers who need good graphics drivers, and laptop users who can't have the spinning harddrive wearing down the battery constantly to take a second look at Vista.
I gave Vista a good 6 months, and really did appreciate things like not having to run as administrator constantly. I felt much more secure running with lower privileges user like I do on my Ubuntu and OSX installs. However, dispite the fact that I tweaked the hell out of my system (including turning off file indexing and switching off aero in favor of the win2k look), and the fact that my system *should* be ridiculously overpowered by looking at the hardware specs, the background services made my system run like a *dog*.
I've switched back to XP, and it is like night and day. Suddenly, my machine no longer locks up doing some stupid task in the background. Suddenly, the stutter is gone from my games. Suddenly, everything is snappier.
What's more, I now actually get to run with file indexing ON, by using the google desktop. This gives me all of the same search functionality as I got on vista, but with no noticeable performance overhead. Hell, I could probably start running as a non admin user on XP, now that applications have finally been forced to learn to live with reduced permissions for Vista compatibility...
>>What about current and next gen games?
>>How do I get those to work?
>This wikipedia link [link to playstation 3] should help.
So your answer on how to get PC games to work on Linux, is to not play PC games? I'm just *not allowed* to play starcraft II when it comes out?
Many people own PC's specifically for playing games, and don't do much else with them. Is your solution for them, that they don't need a computer at all? Or maybe they should put Linux on their computer, and then throw it in the closet and never look at it again?
Blind evangelism isn't helping Linux... it turns people off when they are given bad advice by people with an agenda.
hearing someone on slashdot call this guy a Microsoft "fanboy." There are none who so slavishly worship their operating system, even to the point of defending it's faults as features, than Linux users.
.NET is a legacy framework that is going to also require legacy support through a "monolithic library." First of all, I don't know what he means by monolithic library, and I don't think that he does either. It sounds like 2nd hand knowledge. Second, .NET doesn't require any kind of special legacy support... it already runs in a virtual machine. All they have to do is port the VM to Win 7. The only things that would be an issue would be libraries like Windows forms that are tightly integrated with win32.
I probably shouldn't put a dig against Linux fanboys in my opening paragraph on a post on slashdot (0, flaimbait anyone?), but what can I say? I'm tired of seeing childish Microsoft bashing like, "It's funny to watch a fanboy admit Microsoft is following Apple, but it would be nice for him to also admit that Apple followed free software and Unix practices."
That said, I also noticed the contradiction. I think he was trying to make his article sound more impressive by declaring that Win 7 would be "partially source, but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows." But then he turns right around and says that Win 7 will "allow the majority of legacy applications to run perfectly."
Maybe he means run perfectly *after* recompiling? If he means they are ending support for the old ABI, that would be a more impressive thing to say. However, he is too vague, and doesn't sound particularly knowledgeable.
The author also *implies* but does not *say* that Win 7 will use virtualization to run vista and xp win32 applications. This indicates to me that he doesn't actually know, and is just blowing smoke out of his ass.
Also, he seems to imply that
If microsoft is going to revamp win32, which would be nice since the core windowing routines are pretty ugly to use compared to modern GUI libraries, then win forms which lets you basically plug into win32 by creating WindProc and handling messages, etc, would need some translation to the underlying API. Mono in particular had some trouble making WindProcs work on top of X.
although that is going to be quite a while from what I hear.
The first application that supported offline use was google reader (reader.google.com). Now it sounds like their javascript "word clone" (does anyone even use that thing? It crashes firefox on me whenever I try to use it).
I think thirdparty people are also supposed to be able to use the plugin that backs their offline access.
but lets stop kidding around and imagining that google docs are going to unseat Word...
I mean, does anyone here even use google docs? The last few times I tried them, they crashed firefox over and over again while I was trying to write simple text documents.
Then there's the issues of writing a major word processors in javascript... shudder...
"Also adobe gets a look at gimp code, but not the other way. This puts limits, given that adobe can pay engineers to have at least equally good understanding of computers as gimp. So photoshop is always going to be AT LEAST as good as gimp, but the gimp can be worse than photoshop, virtually assuring that it will, in fact, be less good."
No adobe developers are going to look at GIMP code, both for legal reasons and because it wouldn't actually be helpful. Stealing code between code bases is usually impossible for practical reasons. Copying algorithms is usually pointless, because these graphics algorithms are largely published as part of academic papers.
Photoshop is better than GIMP because the people working on it have consistently done a better job. Give praise where praise is due.
I think it's kind of a shame that Novell is doing so poorly. They actually had *negative* income in 2007, and are still largely making their money from selling *netware* despite all their Linux investments.
A lot of the stuff they are working on is pretty cool, especially Mono.
However, I think it's clear that there just isn't room in the market place for another distro.
I wish your post was labeled +5 "funny" instead of "interesting" which indicates that people take the idea seriously.
The idea that Novell is going to seed "microsoft" code into Linux is ridiculous on the face of it. You can't just copy paste windows device driver code into Linux and expect it to work... and windows coding styles vs linux coding styles are so different that it would be obvious in an instant if such a thing happened.
Seriously, not everything that Microsoft does is part of some big conspiracy to eat your babies. I think the reasoning behind their partnership is fairly clear.
Linux *does* have a strong position in the server market, and for practical reasons Microsoft *has* to be able to interoperate with at least *some* Linux distros. This isn't a position that they are super happy to be in, and the fact that they made this deal to support operation with Suse should be seen as a *victory* by Linux in the marketplace.
Microsoft is trying to do damage control by positioning some Linux vendors as partners instead of competitors. If Linux becomes any more successful than it is, you can expect to see Microsoft try to make deals with other Linux vendors like Red Hat, to try to insure that Linux is used in *conjunction* with Microsoft server products, rather than risk having Microsoft be cut out of the market entirely.
>It doesn't matter if the woman sends any signals.
>If she's pretty and witty he's intersted.
>If she's ugly and witty he ONLY wants to be her friend.
>If she's ugly and stupid he doesn't know her.
Yes... it is truly bizarre that men aren't interest in ugly and boring women. Maybe something is wrong with us?
Seriuosly though, this is
1. a two way street
2. the only real way to judge a mate
The world is filled with mediocre people that are upset that the world doesn't understand how wonderful they are in some secret and unverifiable way.
>I'm a student on computer science at the moment and all they teach in any depth is Java.
//signature
My school does the same thing, and I recommend that. Java is a relatively simple language, good for explaining fundamental data structures and algorithms issues in. When you move into upper division courses you will probably end up doing a lot of C and C++. After all, there's no way to teach an operating systems course in Java, and graphics courses and graphics industry jobs are C++ oriented.
That said, I think the problem you see in school's is that students learn Java, Scheme, or Python or some such relatively simple language as an introductory measure, and then when they get into upper division courses they are thrown head first into C and C++ without a lot of prep, and I think that is the problem that Stroustrup runs into a lot.
Both C and C++ require a lot of idioms related to memory management and the nature of how C++ compiles things, that don't exist in other programming language. Even something as trivial as returning large objects from a function, which you do like this in Java
String method(String input);
String myString = obj.method("asdf");
Doesn't work the same in C++! In C++ there are no fewer than 3 ways to return an object from a function.
By value (a bad idea for potentially large objects like strings):
std::string my_string = func("asdf");
By pointer (potentially a bad idea because it requires you to answer the question, who is responsible for deallocating this pointer?):
std::string* my_string_ptr = func("asdf");
And, what is usually the correct answer (is efficient and has the least headaches associated with it), by output parameters:
std::string my_input_str;
std::string my_ouput_str;
func(my_input_str, &my_output_str);
Output parameters are technically possible in java, but not used nearly as often. However, in C++ they are probably the most common idiom, depending on the quality of the code base.
Issues like this are difficult to teach because they require a level of concern over areas like efficiency and code readability that may be common in industry, but which academics concerned with research rarely have cause to exercise. They also require in dept knowledge of the language in way that is rarely necessary in Java.
Everyone knows that biometric data can be stolen, just like every other means of identifying yourself. I thought the point of biometric data was that it added one *more* piece of data that would have to be stolen before someone could successfully impersonate you.
So in addition to needing to know a pin or password, someone also needs to have stolen my fingerprint in order to take money out of my bank account. Isn't this what is called two factor authentication? Isn't that a good thing that makes it that much more difficult to steal an identity?
According to this article Germany's new passports:
http://www.itsmig.de/best_practices/ePass_en.php
they contain both fingerprint data, and a picture of the person. Thus, to steal your identity, a person would have to steal your passport, look like you, and also steal your fingerprint. This actually seems like a pretty good system that would prevent someone from using a stolen passport to steal the rightful owners identity. Without the fingerprint data, an identity theft doesn't need to do as much work.
That said, I'm not from germany, so maybe there additional nuances about this thing that I'm missing.
>that's hogwash. you don't use a compiler that you don't have the sources to.
The grand parent was making a reference to a historical case where a compiler binary was created that would create a back door in compiled software. Editing the compiler sources in this case would normally help, except that the compiler was designed to detect that it was recompiling itself and reinsert the code that had been removed from the sources.
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/emergingtech/edge/archives/ken-thompson-and-the-selfreferencing-c-compiler-16142
In this case, it's impossible to determine the back door exists by reading the sources, or remove it by editing it.
>>CMYK, Pantone in particular but mostly it's down to the horrible interface that GIMP comes with. >>Gimp is basically a programmers idea of how a creative tool should look.
>The two missing features I'll give you.
>Although one is just a licensing issue,
>and the other is only relevant if you are working on images that are intended for print
For photographers and other professionals doing graphics work, CMYK and color accuracy are deal breakers. Excuses don't matter to people who build their careers on a tool, if GIMP doesn't have what they need to do their job, then they won't consider using it.
There's a reason why people pay enormous sums for copies of photoshop even when there's plenty of cheap or free tools that do 60% of what photoshop does, and that's because every pro is going to have at least one feature missing from the 60% product that is a total show stopper for them.
This is a lesson on half assed software, that's good enough for the developer that wrote it, but not good enough for the market. Coding to your personal needs isn't good enough for products that are going to non developers. Linus doesn't say "well, there are some problems with Linux on big IBM mainframes, but I don't personally use a mainframe, so I won't work on that fix." When you are serious about software, you talk to the people that will be *using* your software, and you code to *their* standards in addition to your own.
>don't know anyone using AWS, which is part of why I'm looking for Slashdot reader feedback.
I smugmug www.smugmug.com uses AWS, or at least S3. This is a pretty big for pay photo sharing site.
on much more data, they just don't block people.
>What is label overhead? And why is it way more than the artist gets, even in a best case scenario?
What do you mean what is overhead? What kind of question is that?
Where does the overhead in selling a boxed copy of your favorite video game go to, if you take out the salaries for the programmers and artists? Where does the overhead for a box of wheaties go, once you take out the cost of production. Remember, there's non brand name wheato's right next to those wheaties and there's a big price gap between them.
The answer is that the money goes to marketing and numerous support functions. If the artists doesn't want to pay for that, then they can sell on itunes and pretty much keep all of that overhead money. There's nothing *forcing* anyone to sign with a label, and arguably some people shouldn't, but those who do obviously think it is worth the cost.
Again, I don't think Walmart is a villain here. The idea that there are such things as heroes and villains is childish. The real world is a lot more complicated than these comic book archetypes are. The news, especially disreputable news sources like slashdot, like to rewrite the news so that it becomes a story that fits into a simplistic world view where there are a bunch of guys without flaws fighting a bunch of guys without redeeming character traits, but the truth is that doesn't represent anyone in the real world.
>I agree that Walmart is the "hero" of this particular story, but to me, the real villain is the record buying public.
How is Walmart the hero? This is another story in Walmart's long history of pushing competitors out of the marketplace and then squeezing suppliers. Walmart is the ultimate middleman in that they have more leverage than either producers, consumers, or even their own workers. That said, I don't even really think that Walmart is a villain exactly (most of the time), they are just an extremely well run business optimizing their profits.
What I think is very wrong is the interpretation that anyone that screws the record industry, the movie industry, or the software industry is somehow a hero. Somehow the slashdot crowd has gotten the impression that these industries are composed completely of useless middlemen who don't deserve to make any profit from their work.
However, this is less and less true since now artists can sell their work fairly independently. This was probably never true with the software industry, where even smaller publishers like Stardock can make it onto Walmart shelves, and the movie industry where actors, writers and directors all get paid pretty handsomely.
The truth is that you can't take money out of the "record industries" pockets without taking money out of artists pockets, especially now that artists have access to smaller or self created labels and the ability to sell their stuff over the internet.
Personally, I buy products at the lowest price I can get them, but I don't go around cheering when the producers get shortchanged.
>I have worked at/with both sides of that fence. Medicine is a heck of a lot harder than engineering.
>The complexity of biological systems is typically orders higher than most engineering projects,
That's a fallacious argument because no one designs, or even understands to a very high degree, how biological systems work. The discussion wasn't about whether it is harder to understand computers or biology, which is a moot point because *no one* understands how any biological system works to the degree that I understand how my computer works, it was whether it is harder to succeed in a biology, medical, or an engineering program.
This is a much more difficult question to answer. I suspect it isn't that hard to get a bachelors in biology compared to a BS in CS, but becoming an MD requires more years and may require more effort. However, I think it also changes depending on where you go to school, and what kind of job you are aiming for when you come out. Also, if you are going to be a physician, I doubt it requires the kind of analytical capacity that many engineering tasks require, but on the other hand the same thing can be said of being a low level code monkey, since those guys often don't know the theory behind computer science anyway.
So, the question is really too vague to answer. Computer science and much of engineering has theoretical and analytical aspects that don't really exist in biology, whereas biology has complexity and a need to memorize vast amounts of facts. Also, since I'm not actually an MD, it's hard for me to say if I'm missing an important part of the field.
I'd say that simply as a matter of years, although this is not a great measure, it is harder to get the degree necessary to be a physician than it is to be a code monkey. Technically you don't even need to go to school to get some kinds of programming jobs.
>Yes. There has been a fully functional NTFS driver for a while now.
Are you saying that they use the NTFS-3G driver in this project from personal knowledge, or are you just pointing out that such a driver exists?
consider that the vast majority would be replacing internet explorer with safari, not replacing firefox. This is bundling, but bundling was only against the rules in Microsoft's case because they were using it to extend a monopoly.
That said, it is annoying when you must opt out of installing things.