That was the mantra for a long time. However, polling strongly indicates that enough people currently hold a picture in their head of an obstructionist republican party causing the crappy economy to persist.
While I appreciate the sentiment, no human endeavor is executed without ideology seeping in and influencing things. In this case, there is almost certainly some sentiment of pride and distaste for people turning it into something Apple did not like. There may be rationalization that it helps business, but I doubt there is enough real data to back up that assertion in a purely rational world.
The alternative would be a system with an out-of-the-box experience like you ascribe to Apple devices, but with the capability to modify to your needs. Done well, a 'casual' user need not ever know the possibilities inherent in the platform, but still provide them to those that want to do more. I doubt there is strong proof that this is infeasible, and in fact Android's relative success I think speaks volumes that obsessive vendor control of a platform is not a prerequisite for commercial success.
Well, one, Honeycomb is not open source, so there's that. For another, believe it or not, Apple fans consider Apple's lock-in and outright *inability* to do a lot of things a feature. They feel that Apple has decided the most appropriate experience and to consider anything else would just make their lives too complicated. They don't buy the "you can ignore capability if you want" argument, they think if it is possible to do something, you *must* do it. So "you can write python apps" somehow transforms in their minds to "you must write python apps". When they see one single model of iPhone, they feel comfortable, when they see a sea of Android devices with varying price points and features, they get outright repulsed.
I agree the reality is the 4S *shouldn't* be doing well, but rabid fans have already bought them all out. The iPhone user at work openly mocks the rest of us for buying non-apple, even though my device has better * everything* than his iPhone4 which cost him more. Higher resolution,,higher bandwidth, faster processors, more ram, more storage, microSD slot, all the apps I could ever want, but somehow I'm stupid for having a phone that doesn't 'just work' somehow. He assures me one day my phone won't work and I'll have to root it to get some weird debug interface to repair it, and his iPhone will never need that. This is what many Apple users actually believe. Inicdentally, if I *had* shown him a root shell whether I 'needed' it or not, he actually considers having that capability a weakness and proof that a platform doesn't "just work" becuase that entails never needing a shell prompt.
They aren't buying it as competition for other non-Apple devices, they are so brand-loyal that they think any non-Apple devices will kill their family and so they only compare specs within Apple's own line.
Conversely, I'm skeptical on 10" tablets (actually, I'm skeptical about the whole market, but 10" in particular). After using an iPad2, that thing is monstrously heavy, and I could find no comfortable way to hold it. Sure, you can put it up on a stand, but once it's that awkward, a laptop would serve just as well. I could imagine 7" being a bit more manageable.
All we have to go on is one analyst's guess at component cost, and that guess is 5% more than price. I've been involved with projects of significant scale and without being a party to the whole situation, you cannot accurately assess the negotiated prices of all the components. The figure I saw quoted was 209.63, and I would not be surprised to find that Amazon had shaved 5% to sell at cost and make profit off the advertising (199 is the ad-subsidized price).
Even assuming Metro stuff was fundamentally not.NET, we are talking about a technology that isn't going to be in anyone's production environment for over a year or two. People have stuff to get done today.
The whole "my work *better* be worth more than a dollar per consumer" ideology is a good way to screw yourself over as a business. With essentially limitless supply, you can play all sorts of games with per unit price and volume sold to maximize revenue. If that price point is 50 cents, so be it.
The problem as the first article points out is the author who does most of the heavy lifting gets only 35% at that pricing tier with amazon. This is insane, and the remedy for that is not to play by amazon's game and price yourself into the next tier for a favorable cut, it's to *really* self publish. Get yourself some hosting and sell direct to people. If you even only managed to move the *same* volume at 0.99, you'd probably break even given how much you get to keep. This is what I've failed to understand, in the age of digital distribution people still latch onto monolithic distributor relationships.
Never having sold through amazon, do they demand that you never sell it elsewhere? Could you put your work in the kindle store at a higher cost to offset Amazon's cut and then self-host and undercut amazon?
Apple's relationship with Java started at slightly more than token and has recently markedly declined as they realized they can charge people to develop and market iApps in a walled garden and Java doesn't play into their strategy.
IBM and SAP I'll give you are very attached to Java, but I don't see that doing much for "Java everywhere". Java in the enterprise is there and will continue to be there, but the goal in this article was Java *everywhere*. In the consumer market, Java plays a negligible client role, and an ever reducing role in internet services.
I'm no fan of Java, but I run into it all the time.
On the other.NET is really lightweight,
So far as I have seen, most of the *appearance* of lightweight is achieved through preload. Conversely, most of the criticism of Java as bloated stems from a decade old impression and crappy app coders.
.You also get access to some devices that Java doesn't support
This is mostly a natural consequence of supporting many platforms. Platforms aren't different just for the fun of it, and supporting them all means mostly settling for the subset of ubiquitous capability. This applies to most scripting languages as well, though those typically get extended by platform-specific modules as they don't carry the stigma of being Java.
Also, Visual Studio is much better development IDE than any other.
Maybe for medium/large projects, but for quick stuff I still haven't found an IDE I like after trying visual studio/eclipse/etc/etc. Nothing beats vim and a compiler sometimes.
First, you would have to get every vendor to agree to this. Not a single one will. Oracle has spent time making enemies of most people required for such a plan to succeed, and their mission statement completely conflicts with the goals of the rest of the people that would be needed.
Oracle has been too confrontational with Google to get their help on anything that would advance Oracle's motives.
Since Oracle's angle is in effect reducing platform differentiation, Microsoft and Apple are not about to give them the time of day as success would simply erode whatever value they could possibly construct.
Open source communities have been sufficiently alienated by Oracle's goings on that they don't have a prayer in Firefox or other open source browsers either.
Combine this political obstacle with the simple fact that there isn't a large need to be filled. Between Flash and Javascript+HTML5, there isn't much to add to the web experience and for things like smartphone and desktop applications, the respective vendors have it too good right now in their walled gardens to relinquish control.
This didn't happen in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's not going to happen now.
Hell, it's basically a mistake of history and circumstance that it's so widely available.
Herein lies the reason why javascript is not 'just a fad'. No matter your opinion of the DOM and javascript syntax, it is *capable* of being used to get the job done and it is everywhere. Other than making tasks absolutely impossible, it's hard to offset in difficulty the benefit of being everywhere. No other language will be everywhere so long as javascript is 'good enough'. Any browser attempting to bring their own favored child in will not meet with adoption because Javascript will work too and on other browsers. Short of getting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Firefox to adopt the language with *zero* footprint to start with, nothing will change.
In a normal program in traditional desktop programming, state information in ram cannot be disposed of willy-nilly. Notably, Android took the opportunity of a new platform to declare out-of-view applications as having ram content considered disposable by default to get this benefit in 'normal' programs'. Hard for Windows to realistically do that. On the other hand, as an Android user, it is sometimes painfully obvious when an app I was 'running' in the background was killed by Android, so despite the promise of how seamless it is, it has warts depending on application implementation of saving and restoring state data.
With many services, memory resident state information is less important and you also have a smaller, better defined population to roll through. Also, if you are in the multi-window mode, you can't reasonably kill background applications, you never know when the user might be eyeballing it despite window manager focus. With a service, you know it's needed because some IO entry point got tickled.
Surprised that it took them this long to get inetd though...
Too many people view 'free' memory as a good thing and would complain if IO cache was reduced to improve the 'free' memory. However, they can find a measure to soothe their worries. I assume it is also the case in Windows, but in Linux, for example, the categorization of memory usage as disposable cache is clearly delineated (though some cached memory can't be disposed and it's hard to tell what *that* value is, which is a problem). If free memory is under pressure, cache is safely dropped and it was as if the memory was 'free', just it nominally helped. A user bitching can be pointed to the second line of free and told to get over it.
Now to say the browser memory usage scenario is ok, that is problematic. Sure, caching content is great, but if your cache is in your RSS and other processes on the system have no way to get your disposable content to drop out for the sake of memory it needs to absolutely operate, that's a problem. If a webpage you haven't visited in 4 hours has a cached rendering taking up 64 MB and another process dies because it needed to alloc 40 MB, that's not good (values pulled out of ass for illustrative purposes). Incidentally, this is also an issue in virtualization, since a guests cached pages becomes indistinguishable from other content by the hypervisor, various weird hacks go into place for the guest to coordinate this with the host.
people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want.
If you admit that, why do you refuse to give people what they want?
I want to convert my media into various formats for playback on various devices without DRM fouling the process.
I want to import your media into my video library and never have to physically sort through media to watch what I want (though I do like having shelved copies of media to see, I don't actually want to have to deal with them day to day).
I want to play your content locally, rather than streaming it over my internet connection and incur the wrath of lower bitrates, slow seeking, and service outages right when I want to watch something.
I want to manage all my content in a single place and not have to open a different application or website depending on which publisher/distributer just happened to kind of/sort of give it to me.
Currently, I can have *all* of this, but only if I either go through the tedium of keeping up with how to remove DRM which frequently requires peculiar setups I may or may not have, or download it from someone who has too much time on their hands and breaks your DRM anyway. For me the problem is not that I don't want to pay for the content, it's that the quality of the illegal content is higher than the legal. I do actually refrain entirely because I just don't feel like going through the trouble legally or illegally, it's just not worth my time and energy. That could easily change if movies were as manageable as mp3s purchased through itunes or amazon.
It doesn't have filesystem code *but* it doesn't read kernel/initrd from any filesystem that UEFI does not understand. So while it doesn't have any driver, it does require it be in a vfat partition or tftp area, but does not need to do anything like be re-embedded in an MBR to handle an update, an update to the config file is sufficient. I don't know if elilo is so much a rewrite(which in and of itself would be significant) or a project inspired by and named after lilo, but not actually coming from the same place. I have always thought the former.
Incidentally, the elilo maintainers don't consider elilo a place for active development these days, and points people at grub2. However, elilo is the only game in town for linux kernel load over UEFI PXE (well, *technically* the EFI hacekd up grub-legacy can, but it's fairly insane). A shame, as far as I'm concerned, since grub I think of as riskier approach (you must correctly implement all the filesystems) vs. something like elilo, which just settles for whatever UEFI will drive and that means nothing more ambitious than vfat. lilo I don't like because it reads data out of the filesystem without anything really *understanding* the filesystem, elilo is a nice medium, a real, if limited filesystem everyone understands.
No, that's an 'advanced' function that requires a modifier key. There is a.css snippet to bring it back to sanity, but a novice user is pretty well screwed.
Dear god I miss wmaker. If they had composting to let me preview windows and search them, I'd be back there so fast... I've just gotten too attached to searching for my desired window.
wmaker's dock was more reliable at application grouping years ago than KDE or gnome 2, or gnome 3 is today.
Window title search in the window preview mode. Someone hacked up something like it but *without* live previews, which is significantly less useful.
When I hover my cursor over an applications 'dock' icon, I'd like it to preview that apps windows. Like compiz scale only windows belonging to this app. Same sort of usefulness of hovering over the 'superbar' in windows, but using more screen real estate to to so since all the windows are already in 'preview' mode anyway.
I think I'd be largely placated by just those two enhancements. I'm not crazy about the look, and hope to see some themeing (e.g. get rid of those rounded corners on the top panel).
No, Unity is differnt, though cut from the same cloth. Both have a hard-on for tablet-only interaction and sacrifice desktop usability toward that end.
If you neglect to do that, then you are toast. If we ever get btrfs boot and btrfs does content indexed storage, it might not be amenable to lilo strategy (or several other fancy filesystem tricks).
However, having a boot loader maintain filesystem support independent of the kernel is a tad worrisome. probably just say 'use vfat for/boot' and be done with it.
It doesn't though. The interactive capabilities are piss-poor, no EFI support, if you did anything that might change block location of kernel, it would fail. This means 'clever' filesystems might be fundamentally incompatible with LILO (if your kernel gets deduped and pointer moves, there was no user cue to go and update lilo). Having to re-run lilo every time is a sufficient indicator of a problem.
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That was the mantra for a long time. However, polling strongly indicates that enough people currently hold a picture in their head of an obstructionist republican party causing the crappy economy to persist.
While I appreciate the sentiment, no human endeavor is executed without ideology seeping in and influencing things. In this case, there is almost certainly some sentiment of pride and distaste for people turning it into something Apple did not like. There may be rationalization that it helps business, but I doubt there is enough real data to back up that assertion in a purely rational world.
The alternative would be a system with an out-of-the-box experience like you ascribe to Apple devices, but with the capability to modify to your needs. Done well, a 'casual' user need not ever know the possibilities inherent in the platform, but still provide them to those that want to do more. I doubt there is strong proof that this is infeasible, and in fact Android's relative success I think speaks volumes that obsessive vendor control of a platform is not a prerequisite for commercial success.
Well, one, Honeycomb is not open source, so there's that. For another, believe it or not, Apple fans consider Apple's lock-in and outright *inability* to do a lot of things a feature. They feel that Apple has decided the most appropriate experience and to consider anything else would just make their lives too complicated. They don't buy the "you can ignore capability if you want" argument, they think if it is possible to do something, you *must* do it. So "you can write python apps" somehow transforms in their minds to "you must write python apps". When they see one single model of iPhone, they feel comfortable, when they see a sea of Android devices with varying price points and features, they get outright repulsed.
I agree the reality is the 4S *shouldn't* be doing well, but rabid fans have already bought them all out. The iPhone user at work openly mocks the rest of us for buying non-apple, even though my device has better * everything* than his iPhone4 which cost him more. Higher resolution, ,higher bandwidth, faster processors, more ram, more storage, microSD slot, all the apps I could ever want, but somehow I'm stupid for having a phone that doesn't 'just work' somehow. He assures me one day my phone won't work and I'll have to root it to get some weird debug interface to repair it, and his iPhone will never need that. This is what many Apple users actually believe. Inicdentally, if I *had* shown him a root shell whether I 'needed' it or not, he actually considers having that capability a weakness and proof that a platform doesn't "just work" becuase that entails never needing a shell prompt.
They aren't buying it as competition for other non-Apple devices, they are so brand-loyal that they think any non-Apple devices will kill their family and so they only compare specs within Apple's own line.
Conversely, I'm skeptical on 10" tablets (actually, I'm skeptical about the whole market, but 10" in particular). After using an iPad2, that thing is monstrously heavy, and I could find no comfortable way to hold it. Sure, you can put it up on a stand, but once it's that awkward, a laptop would serve just as well. I could imagine 7" being a bit more manageable.
All we have to go on is one analyst's guess at component cost, and that guess is 5% more than price. I've been involved with projects of significant scale and without being a party to the whole situation, you cannot accurately assess the negotiated prices of all the components. The figure I saw quoted was 209.63, and I would not be surprised to find that Amazon had shaved 5% to sell at cost and make profit off the advertising (199 is the ad-subsidized price).
Even assuming Metro stuff was fundamentally not .NET, we are talking about a technology that isn't going to be in anyone's production environment for over a year or two. People have stuff to get done today.
Hard for windows *desktop* apps to work like that.
I'm still dubious on it as I'd give Android apps at best 50/50 in terms of seamlessly surviving termination and restart.
The whole "my work *better* be worth more than a dollar per consumer" ideology is a good way to screw yourself over as a business. With essentially limitless supply, you can play all sorts of games with per unit price and volume sold to maximize revenue. If that price point is 50 cents, so be it.
The problem as the first article points out is the author who does most of the heavy lifting gets only 35% at that pricing tier with amazon. This is insane, and the remedy for that is not to play by amazon's game and price yourself into the next tier for a favorable cut, it's to *really* self publish. Get yourself some hosting and sell direct to people. If you even only managed to move the *same* volume at 0.99, you'd probably break even given how much you get to keep. This is what I've failed to understand, in the age of digital distribution people still latch onto monolithic distributor relationships.
Never having sold through amazon, do they demand that you never sell it elsewhere? Could you put your work in the kindle store at a higher cost to offset Amazon's cut and then self-host and undercut amazon?
Apple's relationship with Java started at slightly more than token and has recently markedly declined as they realized they can charge people to develop and market iApps in a walled garden and Java doesn't play into their strategy.
IBM and SAP I'll give you are very attached to Java, but I don't see that doing much for "Java everywhere". Java in the enterprise is there and will continue to be there, but the goal in this article was Java *everywhere*. In the consumer market, Java plays a negligible client role, and an ever reducing role in internet services.
I'm no fan of Java, but I run into it all the time.
On the other .NET is really lightweight,
So far as I have seen, most of the *appearance* of lightweight is achieved through preload. Conversely, most of the criticism of Java as bloated stems from a decade old impression and crappy app coders.
.You also get access to some devices that Java doesn't support
This is mostly a natural consequence of supporting many platforms. Platforms aren't different just for the fun of it, and supporting them all means mostly settling for the subset of ubiquitous capability. This applies to most scripting languages as well, though those typically get extended by platform-specific modules as they don't carry the stigma of being Java.
Also, Visual Studio is much better development IDE than any other.
Maybe for medium/large projects, but for quick stuff I still haven't found an IDE I like after trying visual studio/eclipse/etc/etc. Nothing beats vim and a compiler sometimes.
First, you would have to get every vendor to agree to this. Not a single one will. Oracle has spent time making enemies of most people required for such a plan to succeed, and their mission statement completely conflicts with the goals of the rest of the people that would be needed.
Oracle has been too confrontational with Google to get their help on anything that would advance Oracle's motives.
Since Oracle's angle is in effect reducing platform differentiation, Microsoft and Apple are not about to give them the time of day as success would simply erode whatever value they could possibly construct.
Open source communities have been sufficiently alienated by Oracle's goings on that they don't have a prayer in Firefox or other open source browsers either.
Combine this political obstacle with the simple fact that there isn't a large need to be filled. Between Flash and Javascript+HTML5, there isn't much to add to the web experience and for things like smartphone and desktop applications, the respective vendors have it too good right now in their walled gardens to relinquish control.
This didn't happen in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's not going to happen now.
Hell, it's basically a mistake of history and circumstance that it's so widely available.
Herein lies the reason why javascript is not 'just a fad'. No matter your opinion of the DOM and javascript syntax, it is *capable* of being used to get the job done and it is everywhere. Other than making tasks absolutely impossible, it's hard to offset in difficulty the benefit of being everywhere. No other language will be everywhere so long as javascript is 'good enough'. Any browser attempting to bring their own favored child in will not meet with adoption because Javascript will work too and on other browsers. Short of getting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Firefox to adopt the language with *zero* footprint to start with, nothing will change.
"Windows 8 is going to use less memory"
"Oh yeah? Well Linux can run in javascript, ha!"
In a normal program in traditional desktop programming, state information in ram cannot be disposed of willy-nilly. Notably, Android took the opportunity of a new platform to declare out-of-view applications as having ram content considered disposable by default to get this benefit in 'normal' programs'. Hard for Windows to realistically do that. On the other hand, as an Android user, it is sometimes painfully obvious when an app I was 'running' in the background was killed by Android, so despite the promise of how seamless it is, it has warts depending on application implementation of saving and restoring state data.
With many services, memory resident state information is less important and you also have a smaller, better defined population to roll through. Also, if you are in the multi-window mode, you can't reasonably kill background applications, you never know when the user might be eyeballing it despite window manager focus. With a service, you know it's needed because some IO entry point got tickled.
Surprised that it took them this long to get inetd though...
Too many people view 'free' memory as a good thing and would complain if IO cache was reduced to improve the 'free' memory. However, they can find a measure to soothe their worries. I assume it is also the case in Windows, but in Linux, for example, the categorization of memory usage as disposable cache is clearly delineated (though some cached memory can't be disposed and it's hard to tell what *that* value is, which is a problem). If free memory is under pressure, cache is safely dropped and it was as if the memory was 'free', just it nominally helped. A user bitching can be pointed to the second line of free and told to get over it.
Now to say the browser memory usage scenario is ok, that is problematic. Sure, caching content is great, but if your cache is in your RSS and other processes on the system have no way to get your disposable content to drop out for the sake of memory it needs to absolutely operate, that's a problem. If a webpage you haven't visited in 4 hours has a cached rendering taking up 64 MB and another process dies because it needed to alloc 40 MB, that's not good (values pulled out of ass for illustrative purposes). Incidentally, this is also an issue in virtualization, since a guests cached pages becomes indistinguishable from other content by the hypervisor, various weird hacks go into place for the guest to coordinate this with the host.
people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want.
If you admit that, why do you refuse to give people what they want?
I want to convert my media into various formats for playback on various devices without DRM fouling the process.
I want to import your media into my video library and never have to physically sort through media to watch what I want (though I do like having shelved copies of media to see, I don't actually want to have to deal with them day to day).
I want to play your content locally, rather than streaming it over my internet connection and incur the wrath of lower bitrates, slow seeking, and service outages right when I want to watch something.
I want to manage all my content in a single place and not have to open a different application or website depending on which publisher/distributer just happened to kind of/sort of give it to me.
Currently, I can have *all* of this, but only if I either go through the tedium of keeping up with how to remove DRM which frequently requires peculiar setups I may or may not have, or download it from someone who has too much time on their hands and breaks your DRM anyway. For me the problem is not that I don't want to pay for the content, it's that the quality of the illegal content is higher than the legal. I do actually refrain entirely because I just don't feel like going through the trouble legally or illegally, it's just not worth my time and energy. That could easily change if movies were as manageable as mp3s purchased through itunes or amazon.
It doesn't have filesystem code *but* it doesn't read kernel/initrd from any filesystem that UEFI does not understand. So while it doesn't have any driver, it does require it be in a vfat partition or tftp area, but does not need to do anything like be re-embedded in an MBR to handle an update, an update to the config file is sufficient. I don't know if elilo is so much a rewrite(which in and of itself would be significant) or a project inspired by and named after lilo, but not actually coming from the same place. I have always thought the former.
Incidentally, the elilo maintainers don't consider elilo a place for active development these days, and points people at grub2. However, elilo is the only game in town for linux kernel load over UEFI PXE (well, *technically* the EFI hacekd up grub-legacy can, but it's fairly insane). A shame, as far as I'm concerned, since grub I think of as riskier approach (you must correctly implement all the filesystems) vs. something like elilo, which just settles for whatever UEFI will drive and that means nothing more ambitious than vfat. lilo I don't like because it reads data out of the filesystem without anything really *understanding* the filesystem, elilo is a nice medium, a real, if limited filesystem everyone understands.
elilo is a fundamentally different beast than lilo. The name is the only thing in common.
No, that's an 'advanced' function that requires a modifier key. There is a .css snippet to bring it back to sanity, but a novice user is pretty well screwed.
Dear god I miss wmaker. If they had composting to let me preview windows and search them, I'd be back there so fast... I've just gotten too attached to searching for my desired window.
wmaker's dock was more reliable at application grouping years ago than KDE or gnome 2, or gnome 3 is today.
Window title search in the window preview mode. Someone hacked up something like it but *without* live previews, which is significantly less useful.
When I hover my cursor over an applications 'dock' icon, I'd like it to preview that apps windows. Like compiz scale only windows belonging to this app. Same sort of usefulness of hovering over the 'superbar' in windows, but using more screen real estate to to so since all the windows are already in 'preview' mode anyway.
I think I'd be largely placated by just those two enhancements. I'm not crazy about the look, and hope to see some themeing (e.g. get rid of those rounded corners on the top panel).
No, Unity is differnt, though cut from the same cloth. Both have a hard-on for tablet-only interaction and sacrifice desktop usability toward that end.
If you neglect to do that, then you are toast. If we ever get btrfs boot and btrfs does content indexed storage, it might not be amenable to lilo strategy (or several other fancy filesystem tricks).
However, having a boot loader maintain filesystem support independent of the kernel is a tad worrisome. probably just say 'use vfat for /boot' and be done with it.
It doesn't though. The interactive capabilities are piss-poor, no EFI support, if you did anything that might change block location of kernel, it would fail. This means 'clever' filesystems might be fundamentally incompatible with LILO (if your kernel gets deduped and pointer moves, there was no user cue to go and update lilo). Having to re-run lilo every time is a sufficient indicator of a problem.