It is still used in new projects. IMO, Perl 6 being finished probably would kill the language. The reason perl5 is appealing is precisely because people are not screwing around with it in incompatble ways (they are inflicting that on perl6). The stabliity/compatibility, accumulated set of languages, and the fact the syntax is perfectly serviceable makes for a very solid scripting language choice, even for new projects.
Just because some people do not view it as 'hip', doesn't mean it isn't a good, reasonable choice for new development.
The reason I like perl is that it is 'good enough' and the people that would screw with it to make it inconsistent are all off on either perl6 windmill chasing or other languages. I will admit to some unfortunate ignorance of ruby, but at least with python, while I find it a commendable language, they have been much more aggressive about incompatible changes than perl5. A program written against perl 5.4 runs fine with perl 5.16. However, in my experience code written against python 3.0 might not work quite right with 3.2 without some tweaks.
In terms of *nix friendly scripting languages, ruby, perl, and python are the only choices with a sufficiently rich set of libraries available to do things.
Besides that, perl is serviceable. It allows programmers to employ unreadable syntax, but coding discipline can mitigate that. Generally poorly readable perl code can be written readably. Part of this is terse syntax to enable simple one-liners in a *nix pipe chain. Python isn't exactly a language amenable to that. However, perl syntax accomodates more verbose, readable style to be comparable to python in more sophisticated scripts. Compare this with awk, which also has excellent properties on CLI, but doesn't scale up to a 'real' program so well.
Critically, the spread of 3 *roughly* equal browsers is healthy. Any monoculture would be (was) bad. If you have to make your site reasonably render in Firefox, Chrome, and IE, there's a good chance you'll figure out the 'easy' way that's more likely to work with everything (rather than the hard way where you have lots of 'if chrome, do this, else if firefox, do that, else if ie, do something else', which seemed unavoidable in the IE6 days...)
Intel is not threatened by technical advantages of ARM per se, it is more about the business logistics inherent in the ARM ecosystem. If x86 is a requirement, your choices are Intel, AMD, and a distant third VIA. If ARM is acceptable, suddenly Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, TI, nVidia, Freescale, and literally dozens more become options, mixing and matching with a few fabrication companies. By and large, business concerns over not being held over a barrel by your supplier has made the concept of avoiding the x86 space very appealing.
Intel should probably consider a smartphone-targeted ARM processor, to break into that specific market that now has gobs of pre-compiled applications for ARM. However, I think the strategy for tablets and larger would be more aggressive licensing of x86 to more providers. x86 still carries a lot of weight in backward compatibility, and the non-iPad tablet market isn't exactly particularly cemented quite yet.
In theory I could see how the argument could work, but in practice, the patent system is both prohibitively expensive and incredibly slow. The cost and delay renders it mostly only usable by big players. Exacerbated by big companies having gigantic, practically unknowable portfolios at their disposal (many companies have a practice of making employees try to patent anything they can think of, regardless of plans to actually implement them, leaving a company with gobs of patents no one even really knows about....
At least they scaled back the window borders a tad, I thought the borders were unforgiveably large.
However, the window borders still look pretty gigantic compared to other platforms. At least the Aero look helped mitigate the borders by making them translucent, though that wasn't much of a comfort.
More importantly, energy to accomplish a particular task is what really matters
Actually, power also matters in many scenarios. If you need more than ~10 amps from a 110V circuit, that's not real practical for home use regardless of the kWh-efficiency the solution gets. Also, for interactive tasks idle power matters critically because most of the time is not bound by performance of your computer bits, but by the human considering what's on the screen. Cell phones mostly fall into the latter category.
My perception is similar to yours, but I also recognize the circles I run in have changed. My job has caused me to be more associated with professional techies and less with random people. This means that while average technical ability has increased, it means the available disposable income is also significantly higher than when I was a teenager/college.
Also, the assumption that 'techies' pirate is false. It's not a particularly technically difficult thing to do anymore. Before it was mostly about people who were both savvy and short on disposable income, but now it's generally just about the latter. People can afford to pay generally chose to. Some people pirate out of impatience of release schedule, frustration with DRM, insane disparity between pricing on pure electronic delivery vs. media based product, but mostly just cause they can't reasonably afford it at all. Sure there are some people pirating who would pay if they couldn't pirate, but by and large the target audience is not a realistic market opportunity.
Might be a valid thought, though if you can't even make 50% of a real population change their schedule for the sake of an experiment, what does that imply for the practicality of results? If in theory changing human behavior would help, but in practice you can't make that happen, that's less than useful....
Not quite. You type 'profile preferences' and it tries to invoke the profile preferences menu item from gnome terminal. ALT-F2 invokes applications, not menu items. However, when I tried it, it didn't even work (it seemed able to enumerate the menue items, but didn't invoke them much of the time).
In the Ubuntu case, they are doing the same thing Fedora did in 17. If it can't be hardware accelerated, use the CPU to do the graphics operations. And yes, it is as slow as it sounds, contrary to various advocates swearing it's good enough.
They noticed that the browser based games they are pushing happen to work fine in Linux systems without any work at all. That's the only sort of game they are enabling. They aren't doing anything with their 3D game engine sort of stuff. Basically, Linux is a side-effect of pursuing the casual gamer market through browsers.
but you guys hand pick your hardware, you're in the minority.
Except that most people who even kind of care stick with brand names like 'Radeon' and 'nVidia' that do 'just work' in windows and linux distributions that are practical about helping with binary blobs (e.g. fedora isn't 'just work' until you add fusion, but ubuntu just works). Intel integrated as of *late* also just works (in more places) though it's unimpressively slow. In theory you can get non-AMD, non-nVidia, non-Intel graphics, but I'm hard pressed to think of a *consumer* product that does that anymore.
His example specifically called out virtual machines. The emulated graphics cards *frequently* won't do what is needed for a reasonable 3D situation. Now there is an emulated path (e.g. at least fedora 17 can do gnome shell in a VM even), but the experience is atrocious (CPU load is massive and that's another thing that is constrained in a VM). Even with my not quite-that-ancient integrated AMD graphics, compiz causes mythfrontend to crawl, whereas it is serviceable without compositing.
We'll get there a lot quicker by building 'useless' projects like this.
I doubt it. If taking this project at face value (which is dubious since "a systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years" is a credential gobs of random people could claim), then it is a trillion dollars just to build the thing. That's more than 6 fold the cost of building *and* operating the ISS for 15 years. The result is a single facility that isn't particularly efficient at any specific task that seems to incur a high cost simply for the vanity of resembling an oversized variant of a science fiction construct. It also means that one accident and *poof*, a trillion in resources down the drain.
I would imagine that multiple, purpose oriented projects could more practically meet the same ends. The 'coolness' of a few decades old sci-fi show isn't enough to offset the sticker shock delta between practical endeavors and this.
and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from Star Trek.
Not according to the picture. The picture depicts it as longer than Burj Khalifa is tall. That means it is about 3 times bigger than the enterprise was supposed to be.
The "wait your turn" stuff doesn't work these days when a kid might have 4 hours at most
For one, this is nothing new. For another, 4 hours of idle time is actually significant. Buying enough video games so that each kid can spend 4 hours a *day* playing seems counterproductive. There are other things a kid should do in that 4 hours to get them used to the nature of life, like chores. Not many adults get 4 hours a day of worry-free recreation. Besides, even with recreational time I think it's unwise to commonly let a kid use all their time on a singular recreational activity.
At the very least it is counterproductive toward the goal of actually seeing new content generated. It does not take anything away from anyone that was already theirs, but don't expect new big budget productions if everyone always illegally copies rather than purchases content. Things work today because some people pay for the content, and their unfairly bear the burden even as other people also enjoy the content without contributing anything of significance back.
The studios are as much to blame as the copiers. It used to be that a bootleg was of obvious lower quality than official copies. Now the situation is reversed, and for the most part the studios are not reasonably responding to that. Putting the issue of price aside, the scene is demonstrating that for no budget, the studios' archaic methods can be put to severe shame for end-user quality. Add pricing in and observe that buying a movie on Vevo usually costs *more* than the physical media, and things are just insane....
I disagree with this, at least from the perspective that 'security' is not a simple one-dimensional aspect of any piece of software. A Linux system with very strict SELinux policies is far better than any other platform at keeping a program from doing unexpected things. So while anti-virus software has the lowest attach rate among linux users (and probably 99% of anti-virus on linux is on things like mail and file servers to protect windows clients, the capabilities available to the administrator to guard against unknown threats are currently without peer).
Grading on a curve, the current status quo is great compared to the failures of cross-distro standardization up into the filesystem, library and packaging decisions.
Besides, even if all the Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux/Oracle Linux, Gentoo, Sorceror, Mint, Arch, Debian, Slackware, Mandriva, etc etc users were perfectly standard, EA still wouldn't give a rat's ass. At this point, the sum of all users non-Ubuntu 'compatible' distributions is negligible compared to Ubuntu use, which itself is too small to warrant the attention of EA for developing a major title.
Frankly, I'm not particularly excited about the way Hulu works already. I'd much rather have a standardized set of video streaming interfaces that would be implemented similarly across various decentralized websites. If NBC wants to change a policy, go right ahead without impacting content from CBS. A content producer wishes to distribute directly to consumers instead of going through a 'network'? Go right ahead. ABC wants to be more ad-supported while FOX goes ad-free with premium subscription, great. All the while, a standardized set of interfaces means my XBMC box can stream from any of the above using its much better interface, decode and render capabilities compared to flash or silverlight designed websites. You don't need to fund an android and an iphone and a windows phone/tablet client, the community will construct one.
Really, such a beast would be the holy grail of a la carte content that most cable critics have long called for.
The tragedy is that as great as all that you propose is, it's very much illegal and truly isn't fair to the content producers.
It's a real damn shame too, the experience of that sort of content is many times more pleasant than any legitimate means of acquiring said content. No streaming restrictions limiting the bitrate of the quality or incuring significant buffering times. No DRM to mysteriously cock up somewhere in the line and erroneously or intentionally block legitimate use. No juggling of optical discs to watch the specific content you want....
If I could have a solution analagous to Amazon or iTunes mp3 situation, I'd be all over it in a heartbeat. Alas, the studios won't relent on the imaginary benefit of DRM.
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It is still used in new projects. IMO, Perl 6 being finished probably would kill the language. The reason perl5 is appealing is precisely because people are not screwing around with it in incompatble ways (they are inflicting that on perl6). The stabliity/compatibility, accumulated set of languages, and the fact the syntax is perfectly serviceable makes for a very solid scripting language choice, even for new projects.
Just because some people do not view it as 'hip', doesn't mean it isn't a good, reasonable choice for new development.
The reason I like perl is that it is 'good enough' and the people that would screw with it to make it inconsistent are all off on either perl6 windmill chasing or other languages. I will admit to some unfortunate ignorance of ruby, but at least with python, while I find it a commendable language, they have been much more aggressive about incompatible changes than perl5. A program written against perl 5.4 runs fine with perl 5.16. However, in my experience code written against python 3.0 might not work quite right with 3.2 without some tweaks.
In terms of *nix friendly scripting languages, ruby, perl, and python are the only choices with a sufficiently rich set of libraries available to do things.
Besides that, perl is serviceable. It allows programmers to employ unreadable syntax, but coding discipline can mitigate that. Generally poorly readable perl code can be written readably. Part of this is terse syntax to enable simple one-liners in a *nix pipe chain. Python isn't exactly a language amenable to that. However, perl syntax accomodates more verbose, readable style to be comparable to python in more sophisticated scripts. Compare this with awk, which also has excellent properties on CLI, but doesn't scale up to a 'real' program so well.
Critically, the spread of 3 *roughly* equal browsers is healthy. Any monoculture would be (was) bad. If you have to make your site reasonably render in Firefox, Chrome, and IE, there's a good chance you'll figure out the 'easy' way that's more likely to work with everything (rather than the hard way where you have lots of 'if chrome, do this, else if firefox, do that, else if ie, do something else', which seemed unavoidable in the IE6 days...)
Intel is not threatened by technical advantages of ARM per se, it is more about the business logistics inherent in the ARM ecosystem. If x86 is a requirement, your choices are Intel, AMD, and a distant third VIA. If ARM is acceptable, suddenly Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, TI, nVidia, Freescale, and literally dozens more become options, mixing and matching with a few fabrication companies. By and large, business concerns over not being held over a barrel by your supplier has made the concept of avoiding the x86 space very appealing.
Intel should probably consider a smartphone-targeted ARM processor, to break into that specific market that now has gobs of pre-compiled applications for ARM. However, I think the strategy for tablets and larger would be more aggressive licensing of x86 to more providers. x86 still carries a lot of weight in backward compatibility, and the non-iPad tablet market isn't exactly particularly cemented quite yet.
In theory I could see how the argument could work, but in practice, the patent system is both prohibitively expensive and incredibly slow. The cost and delay renders it mostly only usable by big players. Exacerbated by big companies having gigantic, practically unknowable portfolios at their disposal (many companies have a practice of making employees try to patent anything they can think of, regardless of plans to actually implement them, leaving a company with gobs of patents no one even really knows about....
At least they scaled back the window borders a tad, I thought the borders were unforgiveably large.
However, the window borders still look pretty gigantic compared to other platforms. At least the Aero look helped mitigate the borders by making them translucent, though that wasn't much of a comfort.
how else might one write it?
Different indentation maybe?
More importantly, energy to accomplish a particular task is what really matters
Actually, power also matters in many scenarios. If you need more than ~10 amps from a 110V circuit, that's not real practical for home use regardless of the kWh-efficiency the solution gets. Also, for interactive tasks idle power matters critically because most of the time is not bound by performance of your computer bits, but by the human considering what's on the screen. Cell phones mostly fall into the latter category.
seeing the horrible work on W7
Eh? Win7 was a pretty sound success for MS. W*P*7 on the other hand.....
My perception is similar to yours, but I also recognize the circles I run in have changed. My job has caused me to be more associated with professional techies and less with random people. This means that while average technical ability has increased, it means the available disposable income is also significantly higher than when I was a teenager/college.
Also, the assumption that 'techies' pirate is false. It's not a particularly technically difficult thing to do anymore. Before it was mostly about people who were both savvy and short on disposable income, but now it's generally just about the latter. People can afford to pay generally chose to. Some people pirate out of impatience of release schedule, frustration with DRM, insane disparity between pricing on pure electronic delivery vs. media based product, but mostly just cause they can't reasonably afford it at all. Sure there are some people pirating who would pay if they couldn't pirate, but by and large the target audience is not a realistic market opportunity.
Might be a valid thought, though if you can't even make 50% of a real population change their schedule for the sake of an experiment, what does that imply for the practicality of results? If in theory changing human behavior would help, but in practice you can't make that happen, that's less than useful....
Hey, my car still has hand crank windows.
Not quite. You type 'profile preferences' and it tries to invoke the profile preferences menu item from gnome terminal. ALT-F2 invokes applications, not menu items. However, when I tried it, it didn't even work (it seemed able to enumerate the menue items, but didn't invoke them much of the time).
In the Ubuntu case, they are doing the same thing Fedora did in 17. If it can't be hardware accelerated, use the CPU to do the graphics operations. And yes, it is as slow as it sounds, contrary to various advocates swearing it's good enough.
is that EA has even noticed Linux.
They noticed that the browser based games they are pushing happen to work fine in Linux systems without any work at all. That's the only sort of game they are enabling. They aren't doing anything with their 3D game engine sort of stuff. Basically, Linux is a side-effect of pursuing the casual gamer market through browsers.
but you guys hand pick your hardware, you're in the minority.
Except that most people who even kind of care stick with brand names like 'Radeon' and 'nVidia' that do 'just work' in windows and linux distributions that are practical about helping with binary blobs (e.g. fedora isn't 'just work' until you add fusion, but ubuntu just works). Intel integrated as of *late* also just works (in more places) though it's unimpressively slow. In theory you can get non-AMD, non-nVidia, non-Intel graphics, but I'm hard pressed to think of a *consumer* product that does that anymore.
His example specifically called out virtual machines. The emulated graphics cards *frequently* won't do what is needed for a reasonable 3D situation. Now there is an emulated path (e.g. at least fedora 17 can do gnome shell in a VM even), but the experience is atrocious (CPU load is massive and that's another thing that is constrained in a VM). Even with my not quite-that-ancient integrated AMD graphics, compiz causes mythfrontend to crawl, whereas it is serviceable without compositing.
It does happen though, and quite severely. For example, roundcube got thoroughly busted on an upgrade when using sqlite:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/roundcube/+bug/900190
This may have bitten debian as well though, so I don't know if Debian fared any better (e.g. the last comment in that bug).
We'll get there a lot quicker by building 'useless' projects like this.
I doubt it. If taking this project at face value (which is dubious since "a systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years" is a credential gobs of random people could claim), then it is a trillion dollars just to build the thing. That's more than 6 fold the cost of building *and* operating the ISS for 15 years. The result is a single facility that isn't particularly efficient at any specific task that seems to incur a high cost simply for the vanity of resembling an oversized variant of a science fiction construct. It also means that one accident and *poof*, a trillion in resources down the drain.
I would imagine that multiple, purpose oriented projects could more practically meet the same ends. The 'coolness' of a few decades old sci-fi show isn't enough to offset the sticker shock delta between practical endeavors and this.
and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from Star Trek.
Not according to the picture. The picture depicts it as longer than Burj Khalifa is tall. That means it is about 3 times bigger than the enterprise was supposed to be.
The "wait your turn" stuff doesn't work these days when a kid might have 4 hours at most
For one, this is nothing new. For another, 4 hours of idle time is actually significant. Buying enough video games so that each kid can spend 4 hours a *day* playing seems counterproductive. There are other things a kid should do in that 4 hours to get them used to the nature of life, like chores. Not many adults get 4 hours a day of worry-free recreation. Besides, even with recreational time I think it's unwise to commonly let a kid use all their time on a singular recreational activity.
(and forgoing profit is not "harm").
At the very least it is counterproductive toward the goal of actually seeing new content generated. It does not take anything away from anyone that was already theirs, but don't expect new big budget productions if everyone always illegally copies rather than purchases content. Things work today because some people pay for the content, and their unfairly bear the burden even as other people also enjoy the content without contributing anything of significance back.
The studios are as much to blame as the copiers. It used to be that a bootleg was of obvious lower quality than official copies. Now the situation is reversed, and for the most part the studios are not reasonably responding to that. Putting the issue of price aside, the scene is demonstrating that for no budget, the studios' archaic methods can be put to severe shame for end-user quality. Add pricing in and observe that buying a movie on Vevo usually costs *more* than the physical media, and things are just insane....
Linux is the least secure of all of them.
I disagree with this, at least from the perspective that 'security' is not a simple one-dimensional aspect of any piece of software. A Linux system with very strict SELinux policies is far better than any other platform at keeping a program from doing unexpected things. So while anti-virus software has the lowest attach rate among linux users (and probably 99% of anti-virus on linux is on things like mail and file servers to protect windows clients, the capabilities available to the administrator to guard against unknown threats are currently without peer).
Grading on a curve, the current status quo is great compared to the failures of cross-distro standardization up into the filesystem, library and packaging decisions.
Besides, even if all the Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux/Oracle Linux, Gentoo, Sorceror, Mint, Arch, Debian, Slackware, Mandriva, etc etc users were perfectly standard, EA still wouldn't give a rat's ass. At this point, the sum of all users non-Ubuntu 'compatible' distributions is negligible compared to Ubuntu use, which itself is too small to warrant the attention of EA for developing a major title.
Frankly, I'm not particularly excited about the way Hulu works already. I'd much rather have a standardized set of video streaming interfaces that would be implemented similarly across various decentralized websites. If NBC wants to change a policy, go right ahead without impacting content from CBS. A content producer wishes to distribute directly to consumers instead of going through a 'network'? Go right ahead. ABC wants to be more ad-supported while FOX goes ad-free with premium subscription, great. All the while, a standardized set of interfaces means my XBMC box can stream from any of the above using its much better interface, decode and render capabilities compared to flash or silverlight designed websites. You don't need to fund an android and an iphone and a windows phone/tablet client, the community will construct one.
Really, such a beast would be the holy grail of a la carte content that most cable critics have long called for.
The tragedy is that as great as all that you propose is, it's very much illegal and truly isn't fair to the content producers.
It's a real damn shame too, the experience of that sort of content is many times more pleasant than any legitimate means of acquiring said content. No streaming restrictions limiting the bitrate of the quality or incuring significant buffering times. No DRM to mysteriously cock up somewhere in the line and erroneously or intentionally block legitimate use. No juggling of optical discs to watch the specific content you want....
If I could have a solution analagous to Amazon or iTunes mp3 situation, I'd be all over it in a heartbeat. Alas, the studios won't relent on the imaginary benefit of DRM.