True enough. All the press I get out of Gnome these days gives me the feeling that these guys are the pre X11 fork project leaders.. Completely disconnected from the real world and their user base. I won't hold my breath from any meaningful reform from these guys.
Being a Java dev, I found Eclipse to do truely amazing things, and combine it with free well supported plugins, my productivity becomes amazingly high. I can't say if you're aiming your discussion fully at C/C++/C# development, but for like for like features, I'd say Eclipse with common plugins becomes at least parity.
Games are a big win, but its also somewhat vulnerable to many publishers / studios at least dipping their toes into cross platform support for their new catelogs.
Device drivers have little do do with Microsoft (besides their strong arming for top level support) and have everything to do with the manufacturers. AMD does crappy crappy Linux support, and Intel by and large does really good linux support for their platforms. Once again, this comes from market factors. If Microsoft wants to make in road into 'mobile' computing beyond their rather pathetic current offerings, they're going to need plenty of Manufacturer and OEM buy in, which at this point they absolutely don't have.
As discussed earlier, SQL server may own the middle markets, but MySQL/Postgress for the low end (aka free) and IBM/Oracle for the top enterprise markets means that SQL server will be relegated to where they are for a long time unless they decide to change a lot (like cross playform support).
Xbox and Kinect are definitely novel and they are having success in those markets, but I hear their profits in those areas aren't great. I'd be nice for them to keep with it, because having mutiple players in the game generally brings down prices.
Any publisher considering a port to OSX, should also consider the Linux port as a candidate *if* the ecosystem is in place. The difference of even 5% of a game's profits could be the breaking point of people developing for Windows-only or to support OSX/Linux/Andoid?/Tablet/etc... The publishers need good numbers to decide if the potential market is ripe for their types of games, and if nothing else, Steam provides that to their publisher making the decision for development on other platforms more consistent. Good numbers == more profits == More games == Happy gamers.
Don't get me wrong, I don't see Apple disappearing any time soon, but you could've carbon copied the paragraph for MS 10 years ago and it would read out similarly. Now adays, MS is a walking corpse relying on its fat and entrenched corporate market with its now slightly dwindling desktop market.
Apples is itself a little bit more at risk simply because consumers are fickle, and if they start seeing iPhones like Razr's, their market situation could be in serious jeopardy.
Not the headers no, but considering you can't use the Linux scsi core subsystem without Linux, the operating system, I would consider that a derivative (unless there's another OS that their subsystem can also be compiled to run into, maybe). That said, they do hold the copyright for all files they wrote, and if there was a large body of code which was OS platform independent, I'd assume that those pieces could be used in other closed source competing products. The fact that their other 'closed source'; version of code is also running on Linux is definitely a non-trivial knot to address in regards to what parts are and what parts aren't 'derived' in the closed source version of the sub-system.
When Android says we're not back porting feature XYZ then either people have to suffer, or they get the drivers / features and wire them in themselves. Android is OPEN SOURCE. CyanogenMod does exactly the things you so openly disparage. The other note you failed to mention is that Android is a 0 dollar upgrade (assuming the manufacturer supports it, which is no different from an old video card vendor dropping support, and neither OpenHandset's nor Google's responsibility).
When Linux doesn't support kernel feature XYZ (brtfs IS in 2.6 btw), one can back port most changes if they're skilled and creative enough put it in themselves becase its OPEN SOURCE.
When Microsoft says that they're not back porting 11.1a or another periferal feature to Windows 7, you're all but completely S.O.L. unless you write an entire set of DirectX wrappers that fill in the missing holes yourself, with Microsoft's public documentation as a reference, and no hardware driver support... Good times..
Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with support or the sort. Microsoft wants to ween people into new versions of the OS, and you'll have more reason to, because it adds something very incremental that a ton of rabbid gaming fan boys jump up and down for (well thins upgrade looks like a lame duck, so so sorry for them). If this was.NET, silverlight, a new SQL server, etc.. release, you can sure dollars for donuts that they'd paint the entire supported OS's with hacks to get the beasts in, compatability safe or not.
The new Google Nexus phones are shipping with 2GB of ram, and its conceivable that tablets will being shipping with > 4GB of ram within a few years. It just looks like Samsung is covering their bases for the future.
Google invested a lot of money to get their Application client stacks to work very well with a sane OpenGL implementation, and OEM's shipping Android make sure that there are sane OpenGL implementations on Linux. The later cannot be said for any of the desktop players that have dropped the ball due to lack of interest for well over a decade.
Android proves that graphics on Linux can be quite successful functional, but it also proves at how little interest existing industry heavy weights have at supporting Linux in general. The question now looms, can AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and co continually give half hearted attempts at supporting Linux when their markets are now in more danger than they ever have before? Can they continually look a blind eye to one of the fastest growing consumer electronics segments in a long while? Time will tell, and the drivers (and standards bodies) will be the tell tale sign that they can truely embrase a world outside Windows PC's.
If there are enough people willing to throw a ton of money at a product then they're doing a good job pricing their products. Nobody asks if Apple products are expensive. They sell like crazy so the price works. If anything, Apple should charge more for their products until they've maximized their profit supply curve (they've probably extrapolated this already).
All this said, do I think that Microsoft has a hope in hell selling to the niche high en crowd? No, but that being said, I thought the Xbox was a boondoggle as well, and look where that got them.
tape killed records (effectively), CD's killed tape, InternetAudio is killing CD's VHS killed BETA, DVD killed VHS, VideoDisc killed nothing, BluRay clipped but hasn't kill DVD HD killed SD, 3D didn't kill anyone, 4K has yet to kill anything PC's killed the MAC classic / UNIX workstations, Laptops clipped (desktop) PC's, Netbooks killed nothing, Tablets have yet to kill anything really dumb cell phones clipped POTS, dumb cell phones killed really dumb cell phones and pagers, Smart phones killed dumb cell phones digital video cameras killed film video camera's (effectively) Video killed the radio star
"Big Brother" has been tracking your cell phone for at least 15 years now, so I fail to see how tracking of a person's location could ever get more intrusive. This is an added benefit for law enforcement's real problem of tracking auto-theft / toll dodgers.
Make sure true-motion or whatever they call it in your TV (motion compensation) is turned right off. A lot of my friends have complained about feeling nautious having it on when viewing. Also 3:2 pulldown has caused similar swiming in my stomach from time to time sadly =/ The easy one is to usually enable 'game' modes which usually turn off all TV correction techniques.
I only met you 12 years ago, but I've been obsessed with you ever since. Its been so long, that I just had to say something now.. Please please don't jump the shark like so many others these days... I just love you the way you are!
Last I heard, major revisions of Windows / Mac tend to fck things up also, maybe to a slightly lesser degree. Anyways, there are plenty of Linux distros that don't hump the bleeding edge, and plenty of spins of popular distros which have DE's that don't decide to change their paradigms on a dime. But of course, this does take more than a few minutes of research to investigate, so...
I don't know if it has more to do with fuel efficiency in cars or not, but it seems that fuel usage in the US has gone down at least from 2006-2011... maybe US citizens are just driving less == fewer accidents? No idea.
64 bit java works just fine for me. The only issue I could see is in JNI applications which were only compiled for 32 or 64. The think that performs like death has been with random bugs in Java7 and OpenJDK (reliably dies on many commonly used programs...)
I always assumed people wanted a piece of software that worked, and did what you want from it. If a desktop operating system can't do simple tasks that a normal user is assustomed to, then it is a failure.
From a personal value judgement, if you have to sacrafice functionality (regarless of if its the way YOU work) for a design philosophy, you'ew probably going to alienate a ton of people who will abandon your endeavors. There are many many reasons for 'new' Linux users that have nothing to do with crazy odd-ball UI changes that make the OS look flashy. A rock solid simple desktop OS that doesn't 'get in my way' is awsome in itself.
Thirdly, Fedora is and has been the testbed for RHEL releases that follow. If they're considering MATE as another (possibly main) desktop environment, then there's a really good chance thay they're getting push back from their customers (you know, the people who actually pay money for their choice in software). Of course, this may just be yet another alternative to appease the masses who are generally diss-satisfied with G3. It all depends on what the default deployment options for F18, F19 will be to see how much people are for/against the DE.
That's a defect of the console deployment scheme, not the fact that it has to download something really big. Have a choice to pre-order X, or buy it immediately. The downloads start in the background. If you turn off the console, it continues in low power mode to keep a CPU core, ram, hard-drive, and network interface (maybe USB) alive in order to facilitate the transfer. When its done, console goes into full suspend.
This will take a long time (maybe a whole night), but the alternative is to drive to the store, store wasting gas, time, all the fixed costs of producing the box, the gas wasted shipping that box to the store, the sales guy's wages, the store's rental fee, the mall AC, etc... on something that you could spend a few more hours and get for a substantially more efficient net energy transfer mechanism.
The best of this situation is that you pre-ordered a game and it just works a few seconds after its release date using some fun decryption like how steam rolls out pre-orders.
Maybe so, but outside of Slashdot, I've never heard someone decide to change away from Java because they were worried about Oracle in the least. I've seen companies open parallel.NET shops to work with customers in that ecosystem, but never just up and quit Java (and none that even considered it because of any perceived legal problems).
Yes, and it has nothing to do with the fact that the original poster uploaded them to begin with because its a good distribution platform regardless of any profits held by YouTube? Nobody put a gun to these people's heads.
I host my own sites, and guess what kids, They cost money! If you want the right to ad free video sharing, then you're going to pony up and pay for the right to do so.
You give some nice points, but I think they're better directed for software in general. Regarding big projects, I see the rationale on both sides of the argument. A project has a mission, and that mission is to get things done as fast as possible within the scoped bounds of the project. Unless the modularization of the code pieces makes development faster (must more often cleaner, but far less often faster), then a PM or senior development lead will have to make desicion if its worth chopping off pieces of code into modules/libraries which can be more easily worked with afterward. Given the amount of realistic buffer time a project has between development time and project end dates, the most likely answer will be that its not worth the time in 'getting it right'.
The sad thing about this tradeoff is that it will often bleed into subsequent projects. Those projects will inherit the technical debt that came with doing it sloppier but faster in the prior projects. That's why large companies really should have passionate architects that are outside but in advisory roles for projects, so that they can make the unbiased opinion of what's good for the project vs. what's good for the company.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough. All the press I get out of Gnome these days gives me the feeling that these guys are the pre X11 fork project leaders.. Completely disconnected from the real world and their user base. I won't hold my breath from any meaningful reform from these guys.
Being a Java dev, I found Eclipse to do truely amazing things, and combine it with free well supported plugins, my productivity becomes amazingly high. I can't say if you're aiming your discussion fully at C/C++/C# development, but for like for like features, I'd say Eclipse with common plugins becomes at least parity.
Games are a big win, but its also somewhat vulnerable to many publishers / studios at least dipping their toes into cross platform support for their new catelogs.
Device drivers have little do do with Microsoft (besides their strong arming for top level support) and have everything to do with the manufacturers. AMD does crappy crappy Linux support, and Intel by and large does really good linux support for their platforms. Once again, this comes from market factors. If Microsoft wants to make in road into 'mobile' computing beyond their rather pathetic current offerings, they're going to need plenty of Manufacturer and OEM buy in, which at this point they absolutely don't have.
As discussed earlier, SQL server may own the middle markets, but MySQL/Postgress for the low end (aka free) and IBM/Oracle for the top enterprise markets means that SQL server will be relegated to where they are for a long time unless they decide to change a lot (like cross playform support).
Xbox and Kinect are definitely novel and they are having success in those markets, but I hear their profits in those areas aren't great. I'd be nice for them to keep with it, because having mutiple players in the game generally brings down prices.
Any publisher considering a port to OSX, should also consider the Linux port as a candidate *if* the ecosystem is in place. The difference of even 5% of a game's profits could be the breaking point of people developing for Windows-only or to support OSX/Linux/Andoid?/Tablet/etc... The publishers need good numbers to decide if the potential market is ripe for their types of games, and if nothing else, Steam provides that to their publisher making the decision for development on other platforms more consistent. Good numbers == more profits == More games == Happy gamers.
Don't get me wrong, I don't see Apple disappearing any time soon, but you could've carbon copied the paragraph for MS 10 years ago and it would read out similarly. Now adays, MS is a walking corpse relying on its fat and entrenched corporate market with its now slightly dwindling desktop market.
Apples is itself a little bit more at risk simply because consumers are fickle, and if they start seeing iPhones like Razr's, their market situation could be in serious jeopardy.
Not the headers no, but considering you can't use the Linux scsi core subsystem without Linux, the operating system, I would consider that a derivative (unless there's another OS that their subsystem can also be compiled to run into, maybe). That said, they do hold the copyright for all files they wrote, and if there was a large body of code which was OS platform independent, I'd assume that those pieces could be used in other closed source competing products. The fact that their other 'closed source'; version of code is also running on Linux is definitely a non-trivial knot to address in regards to what parts are and what parts aren't 'derived' in the closed source version of the sub-system.
When Android says we're not back porting feature XYZ then either people have to suffer, or they get the drivers / features and wire them in themselves. Android is OPEN SOURCE. CyanogenMod does exactly the things you so openly disparage. The other note you failed to mention is that Android is a 0 dollar upgrade (assuming the manufacturer supports it, which is no different from an old video card vendor dropping support, and neither OpenHandset's nor Google's responsibility).
When Linux doesn't support kernel feature XYZ (brtfs IS in 2.6 btw), one can back port most changes if they're skilled and creative enough put it in themselves becase its OPEN SOURCE.
When Microsoft says that they're not back porting 11.1a or another periferal feature to Windows 7, you're all but completely S.O.L. unless you write an entire set of DirectX wrappers that fill in the missing holes yourself, with Microsoft's public documentation as a reference, and no hardware driver support... Good times..
Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with support or the sort. Microsoft wants to ween people into new versions of the OS, and you'll have more reason to, because it adds something very incremental that a ton of rabbid gaming fan boys jump up and down for (well thins upgrade looks like a lame duck, so so sorry for them). If this was .NET, silverlight, a new SQL server, etc.. release, you can sure dollars for donuts that they'd paint the entire supported OS's with hacks to get the beasts in, compatability safe or not.
The new Google Nexus phones are shipping with 2GB of ram, and its conceivable that tablets will being shipping with > 4GB of ram within a few years. It just looks like Samsung is covering their bases for the future.
Google invested a lot of money to get their Application client stacks to work very well with a sane OpenGL implementation, and OEM's shipping Android make sure that there are sane OpenGL implementations on Linux. The later cannot be said for any of the desktop players that have dropped the ball due to lack of interest for well over a decade.
Android proves that graphics on Linux can be quite successful functional, but it also proves at how little interest existing industry heavy weights have at supporting Linux in general. The question now looms, can AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and co continually give half hearted attempts at supporting Linux when their markets are now in more danger than they ever have before? Can they continually look a blind eye to one of the fastest growing consumer electronics segments in a long while? Time will tell, and the drivers (and standards bodies) will be the tell tale sign that they can truely embrase a world outside Windows PC's.
If there are enough people willing to throw a ton of money at a product then they're doing a good job pricing their products. Nobody asks if Apple products are expensive. They sell like crazy so the price works. If anything, Apple should charge more for their products until they've maximized their profit supply curve (they've probably extrapolated this already).
All this said, do I think that Microsoft has a hope in hell selling to the niche high en crowd? No, but that being said, I thought the Xbox was a boondoggle as well, and look where that got them.
tape killed records (effectively), CD's killed tape, InternetAudio is killing CD's
VHS killed BETA, DVD killed VHS, VideoDisc killed nothing, BluRay clipped but hasn't kill DVD
HD killed SD, 3D didn't kill anyone, 4K has yet to kill anything
PC's killed the MAC classic / UNIX workstations, Laptops clipped (desktop) PC's, Netbooks killed nothing, Tablets have yet to kill anything
really dumb cell phones clipped POTS, dumb cell phones killed really dumb cell phones and pagers, Smart phones killed dumb cell phones
digital video cameras killed film video camera's (effectively)
Video killed the radio star
"Big Brother" has been tracking your cell phone for at least 15 years now, so I fail to see how tracking of a person's location could ever get more intrusive. This is an added benefit for law enforcement's real problem of tracking auto-theft / toll dodgers.
Make sure true-motion or whatever they call it in your TV (motion compensation) is turned right off. A lot of my friends have complained about feeling nautious having it on when viewing. Also 3:2 pulldown has caused similar swiming in my stomach from time to time sadly =/ The easy one is to usually enable 'game' modes which usually turn off all TV correction techniques.
I only met you 12 years ago, but I've been obsessed with you ever since. Its been so long, that I just had to say something now.. Please please don't jump the shark like so many others these days... I just love you the way you are!
Last I heard, major revisions of Windows / Mac tend to fck things up also, maybe to a slightly lesser degree. Anyways, there are plenty of Linux distros that don't hump the bleeding edge, and plenty of spins of popular distros which have DE's that don't decide to change their paradigms on a dime. But of course, this does take more than a few minutes of research to investigate, so...
One Note: No right click!
Well, you canif you buy a third party mouse, but all the mac lovers will ridicule you forever after.
Problem
"And don't even get me started about how unsecure your fingertips are."
Solution:
Hot irons
I don't know if it has more to do with fuel efficiency in cars or not, but it seems that fuel usage in the US has gone down at least from 2006-2011... maybe US citizens are just driving less == fewer accidents? No idea.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_d_r10_mbblpd_a_cur-5.htm
64 bit java works just fine for me. The only issue I could see is in JNI applications which were only compiled for 32 or 64.
The think that performs like death has been with random bugs in Java7 and OpenJDK (reliably dies on many commonly used programs...)
As in field of dreams, "if you build it, they will come"!
The more important question would be if Google blesses the port for use with the Play Market at all.
I always assumed people wanted a piece of software that worked, and did what you want from it. If a desktop operating system can't do simple tasks that a normal user is assustomed to, then it is a failure.
From a personal value judgement, if you have to sacrafice functionality (regarless of if its the way YOU work) for a design philosophy, you'ew probably going to alienate a ton of people who will abandon your endeavors. There are many many reasons for 'new' Linux users that have nothing to do with crazy odd-ball UI changes that make the OS look flashy. A rock solid simple desktop OS that doesn't 'get in my way' is awsome in itself.
Thirdly, Fedora is and has been the testbed for RHEL releases that follow. If they're considering MATE as another (possibly main) desktop environment, then there's a really good chance thay they're getting push back from their customers (you know, the people who actually pay money for their choice in software). Of course, this may just be yet another alternative to appease the masses who are generally diss-satisfied with G3. It all depends on what the default deployment options for F18, F19 will be to see how much people are for/against the DE.
That's a defect of the console deployment scheme, not the fact that it has to download something really big. Have a choice to pre-order X, or buy it immediately. The downloads start in the background. If you turn off the console, it continues in low power mode to keep a CPU core, ram, hard-drive, and network interface (maybe USB) alive in order to facilitate the transfer. When its done, console goes into full suspend.
This will take a long time (maybe a whole night), but the alternative is to drive to the store, store wasting gas, time, all the fixed costs of producing the box, the gas wasted shipping that box to the store, the sales guy's wages, the store's rental fee, the mall AC, etc... on something that you could spend a few more hours and get for a substantially more efficient net energy transfer mechanism.
The best of this situation is that you pre-ordered a game and it just works a few seconds after its release date using some fun decryption like how steam rolls out pre-orders.
Valve (Steam) gives me the option to TURN OFF ADS! And their UI doesn't look like it was designed by a grade 12 comp sci. final project.
Maybe so, but outside of Slashdot, I've never heard someone decide to change away from Java because they were worried about Oracle in the least. I've seen companies open parallel .NET shops to work with customers in that ecosystem, but never just up and quit Java (and none that even considered it because of any perceived legal problems).
Yes, and it has nothing to do with the fact that the original poster uploaded them to begin with because its a good distribution platform regardless of any profits held by YouTube? Nobody put a gun to these people's heads.
I host my own sites, and guess what kids, They cost money! If you want the right to ad free video sharing, then you're going to pony up and pay for the right to do so.
You give some nice points, but I think they're better directed for software in general. Regarding big projects, I see the rationale on both sides of the argument. A project has a mission, and that mission is to get things done as fast as possible within the scoped bounds of the project. Unless the modularization of the code pieces makes development faster (must more often cleaner, but far less often faster), then a PM or senior development lead will have to make desicion if its worth chopping off pieces of code into modules/libraries which can be more easily worked with afterward. Given the amount of realistic buffer time a project has between development time and project end dates, the most likely answer will be that its not worth the time in 'getting it right'.
The sad thing about this tradeoff is that it will often bleed into subsequent projects. Those projects will inherit the technical debt that came with doing it sloppier but faster in the prior projects. That's why large companies really should have passionate architects that are outside but in advisory roles for projects, so that they can make the unbiased opinion of what's good for the project vs. what's good for the company.