Apple managed to make PowerPC emulation work on x86 chips. It wasn't fast, but it ran acceptably. It only required a processor with about 2x the performance -- the same ratio as these ARMs are to Atoms.
Bear in mind that most applications actually spend most of their time sitting around waiting for user input, and a lot of the rest of their code is simply API calls for which native implementations can be provided. We're talking about things like Quicken here, not the latest games.
It could well be feasible to provide a solution that worked adequately for a significant subset of programs -- particularly for the kinds of domain-specific application where it's particularly unlikely that an alternative program will exist.
Netbooks running Linux on an ARM processor with insanely long battery life and a true dedicated mobile operating system may be what it takes to get people to realize that netbooks were not intended to be merely smaller laptops.
Maybe the people who designed the first netbook didn't expect it to be a smaller laptop. But the fact is that the vast majority of people who buy a netbook want a smaller laptop.
Selling people what they want is the most reliable way of making money. Convincing people that they ought to want what you're selling generally only works for "lifestyle" products like carbonated sugar water or clothes with expensive logos printed on them.
Planets are a very poor analogy. It is literally utterly impossible, as of today, for me to switch to a different planet, which is not true of operating systems.
A better analogy would be countries. There are many different countries in the world. Most people prefer the one they're used to. It's possible to switch to a different country, but it involves some work, and there can be compatibility problems, so most people don't think of it as a serious option. But people do it, even enduring severe hardships in the process, if it offers them real benefits. That's why the Pilgrim Fathers aren't still sitting around on Plymouth docks bitching about how the local religion only gives them 3 hours of battery life.
It's hard to make any firm conclusions based on sales figures.
I've seen a number of people mention buying the cheaper Linux model and then installing Windows on it. And I myself have done the reverse: even though there was a Linux version of my netbook available, I bought a more expensive model with Windows on it, and immediately replaced it with Linux. (The Windows version had a higher resolution display, is why.)
(a) Apple managed to switch essentially all their customers from PowerPC to x86, despite the fact that when they started the process, 100% of the most popular Mac apps were only available for PowerPC.
(b) Increasingly, people are tending to use apps that aren't architecture-dependent at all. As more and more computing moves to the web, it matters less and less what processor you use.
The same goes for apps written in Java,.Net, Python, etc. Unless they go out of their way to call native code, they will be portable to anything that can run the correct VM.
(c) Most of the programs that still require native code running locally -- things like Photoshop, HD video editing, and graphically-intense 3D games -- aren't the kind of things people are going to want to run on a netbook in any case.
That's like saying anyone developing a new video recording system should take a tip from Betamax.
The Alpha was a great chip. But running Windows didn't help it. It still lost to x86 in the end, despite being a superior product in almost every respect.
Trying to run a netbook the same way you run your desktop (let's be fair, laptops are already "baby desktops"), is doomed to frustration.
Works fine for me.
Just as using a netbook as a primary computer is misguided (sometimes circumstances require it, but a netbook is, at best, a temporary hold-me-over until you can replace it with a real computer).
I have two real computers. I also have a netbook. I use the netbook as my primary computer because it's the most convenient.
It's great having a machine so light it can be safely picked up with two fingers, so small it fits in any bag, and with such long battery life I don't need to spend half my time hunting for power sockets. The keyboard is fine for typing, the screen is large enough for working, and the processor is fast enough for anything short of games or HD video. What's the problem supposed to be?
For a netbook as a "baby PC", Intel and Windows is pretty much a requirement.
Damn, I never realised I required Windows! Thank you for telling me. I should have realised something was wrong when I managed to install a driver for my wireless card and connect to my router immediately without even needing to reboot.
People think it because it often does. Survival of this species has partially depended upon the ability to reocgnize patterns and make decisions with limited information.
And our natural tendency to assume that correlation implies causation has also left much of the population convinced that the world will end if they drop a mirror after tripping over a black cat and falling under a ladder on Friday 13th.
Let's face it -- while superstition is occasionally correct, that is only by accident. Pretty much all "alternative" therapies are based on superstition, and any successes they have rely on a combination of the placebo effect and the body's natural ability to heal itself without effective intervention.
All you have to do to not break something, generally speaking, is to not touch it.
That's speaking very generally. Consider a moving vehicle, a boiling saucepan, or a young child playing, for just three everday examples of things that can easily cause problems unless someone is monitoring them and intervening when necessary.
Oh, please. That was a single isolated case of mistaken identity, occuring two weeks after real terrorists had murdered more than fifty people on the same transport system, and just one day after another set of real terrorists had attempted to commit another similar atrocity.
You may, if you are determined to believe that the mistake was deliberately covered up, consider it "hateful"; but it is not a "policy" by any stretch of the imagination.
Translation: "Boy, this argument looks hard to win. I better find me a straw man!"
Certainly Slashdot would be more sympathetic to OOo in such a case. We mostly hate software patents, after all, so we will normally leap to defend anyone accused of infringing one. This case is different because Microsoft themselves are vocal advocates of software patents, and indeed have a history of abusing them themselves. Live by the sword...
That sounds reasonable. It's not really fair for OEMs to suffer for Microsoft's misdeeds, but likewise it would not be acceptable for Microsoft to dodge reasonable injunctions just because they would inconvenience OEMs.
"Too big to be illegal" is a ludicrous concept. It makes "too big to fail" look positively sensible.
I'm looking forward to the day when people who are drowsy while driving get 15 years in prison instead of just a fine.
In Britain, at least, there is already a crime of "causing death by dangerous driving" which is punished by a moderate jail sentence. For example, a couple of years ago a guy got 7 years for causing a fatal accident after nodding off at the wheel.
British punishments are typically much more lenient than those meted out in the USA; do Americans really get off with just a fine for killing people?
Indeed, but there's a difference between "some random language somewhere" and "the national language of the world's most populous nation".
Nobody's too worried about Basque, Ainu, or Pitjantjatjara. But you can reasonably expect companies at least to avoid negative meanings in Chinese, Spanish, English, and Arabic, if they want to sell a product all over the world.
Well, that's kind of meaningless, since ultimately you can simply use virtualisation to run Linux itself in Windows. It's a question of convenience. If you want to run UNIX-type software, that's a hell of a lot easier in Linux.
Performance is an issue of course. You can run X11 apps at a decent speed in Linux; I've never managed to get that to happen in Windows, even with expensive commercial X servers.
You probably meant that to be sarcasm, but it's actually the correct response. Let's give up on looking for silver bullets. Let's abandon the stupid idea that slavishly following the latest fashionable religion^Wmethodology is going to produce perfect code.
Instead, let's recognise the truth: development is hard, and the best programmers are orders of magnitude better than the worst. Let's employ the best, pay them decent wages, give them decent work environments, and let them get on with the goddamn job instead of forcing them to play silly mind games.
With OSS, you can easily see what kind of support is available: just look in the bug tracker to see how quickly issues are resolved. With commercial software, the entire process is normally totally opaque.
With OSS, you get what you pay for. With commercial software, you pay anyway, and then the vendor decides whether you get anything at all.
It boils down to: only choose commercial software when it does the job better. Don't pay for off-the-shelf software under the mistaken belief that it has something magical called "support", because unless you have a signed contract that gives you a guaranteed level of service, you cannot expect to get any help at all from the vendor.
Heresy! You dare to suggest that instead of GodZip, the Almighty should have chosen BeelZebub2 or, heaven forbid, a LuciferZip Mephistophelian Archive?!
If you know what the best action is, then you will follow that course of action.
It is simplistic to assume that there is always a single best course of action, or that someone who knew what that was would inevitably choose it.
Larry Niven deserves the praise he gets as a writer, but he writes fiction, not science. His books have some fine plots and plenty of inventive ideas, but that doesn't mean that everything he writes is wisdom of the profoundest order.
It's somewhat related to Java (Scala programs execute with the JVM).
IIRC it was originally intended to be able to use the JVM or Microsoft's CLR; they just finished the JVM version first and that's what's being promoted.
It's certainly a terse language. That's both good and bad.
Terseness is largely irrelevant. The right question is not "does this language let me express something in the minimal number of keypresses", but rather "does this language force me to repeat myself endlessly".
Scala has good support for abstracting code; Java, for example, does not. That means that code written in Scala could well be more maintainable (changes need to be made in fewer places), and it also means it's likely to be better quality (people are less likely to copy and paste if it's just as easy to do it properly).
I ran into this just today. I had a bunch of copy-and-pasted code that I was trying to refactor into a sane design, and Java thwarted me at every step. I could see why the original coder had given up! Eventually I had to resort to a hack using reflection, which of course lost me all the benefits of static typing. Thanks, Java. But at least the core algorithm is now stored in exactly one place, instead of there being ten copies of it scattered across as many files.
Now graphics are at a point where we can move characters around in something akin to what we'd see in a CG movie. We've hit a peek where cartoonish graphics can't really get much better.
People have been saying this for at least 10 years, you know. Then the next system comes out and, whaddya know, graphics get better!
It's only natural; we get used to what we see, and we can't imagine what we haven't seen. I still remember looking at Doom, and thinking "How can Quake look any better than this?"
Again we've hit a peek, where the worlds are so expansive that by the time you've explored everything you're either addicted (like an MMO), or you've spent so much time doing the same things that the gameplay becomes repetitive.
If you're spending all your time doing the same things, then there's clearly plenty of scope for sandbox games to introduce more things to do.
And which way is the trend actually going? Consider the Elder Scrolls games, a standard example of the sandbox-style RPG. The game worlds have become progressively smaller through the series.
Then we've got games that take months to learn all the possible moves and combos.
You say it like you think it's a recent development. But there have always been complex games around. PC flight simulators used to come with manuals the size of a phone directory.
Basically, your comment could have been posted at any time in the last 20 years. And it frequently has been. I remember reading Usenet postings saying very similar things in the mid-1990s. There is nothing new under the sun.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean "GNU Emacs" (the product Emacs from GNU), not "GNU/Emacs" (the GNU operating system with Emacs as its kernel).
Though many vi users seem to believe that the latter is only a matter of time. ;)
Apple managed to make PowerPC emulation work on x86 chips. It wasn't fast, but it ran acceptably. It only required a processor with about 2x the performance -- the same ratio as these ARMs are to Atoms.
Bear in mind that most applications actually spend most of their time sitting around waiting for user input, and a lot of the rest of their code is simply API calls for which native implementations can be provided. We're talking about things like Quicken here, not the latest games.
It could well be feasible to provide a solution that worked adequately for a significant subset of programs -- particularly for the kinds of domain-specific application where it's particularly unlikely that an alternative program will exist.
Maybe the people who designed the first netbook didn't expect it to be a smaller laptop. But the fact is that the vast majority of people who buy a netbook want a smaller laptop.
Selling people what they want is the most reliable way of making money. Convincing people that they ought to want what you're selling generally only works for "lifestyle" products like carbonated sugar water or clothes with expensive logos printed on them.
Planets are a very poor analogy. It is literally utterly impossible, as of today, for me to switch to a different planet, which is not true of operating systems.
A better analogy would be countries. There are many different countries in the world. Most people prefer the one they're used to. It's possible to switch to a different country, but it involves some work, and there can be compatibility problems, so most people don't think of it as a serious option. But people do it, even enduring severe hardships in the process, if it offers them real benefits. That's why the Pilgrim Fathers aren't still sitting around on Plymouth docks bitching about how the local religion only gives them 3 hours of battery life.
It's hard to make any firm conclusions based on sales figures.
I've seen a number of people mention buying the cheaper Linux model and then installing Windows on it. And I myself have done the reverse: even though there was a Linux version of my netbook available, I bought a more expensive model with Windows on it, and immediately replaced it with Linux. (The Windows version had a higher resolution display, is why.)
It's really not as bad as you make it sound.
(a) Apple managed to switch essentially all their customers from PowerPC to x86, despite the fact that when they started the process, 100% of the most popular Mac apps were only available for PowerPC.
(b) Increasingly, people are tending to use apps that aren't architecture-dependent at all. As more and more computing moves to the web, it matters less and less what processor you use.
The same goes for apps written in Java, .Net, Python, etc. Unless they go out of their way to call native code, they will be portable to anything that can run the correct VM.
(c) Most of the programs that still require native code running locally -- things like Photoshop, HD video editing, and graphically-intense 3D games -- aren't the kind of things people are going to want to run on a netbook in any case.
That's like saying anyone developing a new video recording system should take a tip from Betamax.
The Alpha was a great chip. But running Windows didn't help it. It still lost to x86 in the end, despite being a superior product in almost every respect.
On what grounds do you base this claim?
Works fine for me.
I have two real computers. I also have a netbook. I use the netbook as my primary computer because it's the most convenient.
It's great having a machine so light it can be safely picked up with two fingers, so small it fits in any bag, and with such long battery life I don't need to spend half my time hunting for power sockets. The keyboard is fine for typing, the screen is large enough for working, and the processor is fast enough for anything short of games or HD video. What's the problem supposed to be?
Damn, I never realised I required Windows! Thank you for telling me. I should have realised something was wrong when I managed to install a driver for my wireless card and connect to my router immediately without even needing to reboot.
And our natural tendency to assume that correlation implies causation has also left much of the population convinced that the world will end if they drop a mirror after tripping over a black cat and falling under a ladder on Friday 13th.
Let's face it -- while superstition is occasionally correct, that is only by accident. Pretty much all "alternative" therapies are based on superstition, and any successes they have rely on a combination of the placebo effect and the body's natural ability to heal itself without effective intervention.
That's speaking very generally. Consider a moving vehicle, a boiling saucepan, or a young child playing, for just three everday examples of things that can easily cause problems unless someone is monitoring them and intervening when necessary.
We don't use the word "woman" any more. The term you're looking for is Womb Resources.
Oh, please. That was a single isolated case of mistaken identity, occuring two weeks after real terrorists had murdered more than fifty people on the same transport system, and just one day after another set of real terrorists had attempted to commit another similar atrocity.
You may, if you are determined to believe that the mistake was deliberately covered up, consider it "hateful"; but it is not a "policy" by any stretch of the imagination.
Translation: "Boy, this argument looks hard to win. I better find me a straw man!"
Certainly Slashdot would be more sympathetic to OOo in such a case. We mostly hate software patents, after all, so we will normally leap to defend anyone accused of infringing one. This case is different because Microsoft themselves are vocal advocates of software patents, and indeed have a history of abusing them themselves. Live by the sword...
That sounds reasonable. It's not really fair for OEMs to suffer for Microsoft's misdeeds, but likewise it would not be acceptable for Microsoft to dodge reasonable injunctions just because they would inconvenience OEMs.
"Too big to be illegal" is a ludicrous concept. It makes "too big to fail" look positively sensible.
In Britain, at least, there is already a crime of "causing death by dangerous driving" which is punished by a moderate jail sentence. For example, a couple of years ago a guy got 7 years for causing a fatal accident after nodding off at the wheel.
British punishments are typically much more lenient than those meted out in the USA; do Americans really get off with just a fine for killing people?
Indeed, but there's a difference between "some random language somewhere" and "the national language of the world's most populous nation".
Nobody's too worried about Basque, Ainu, or Pitjantjatjara. But you can reasonably expect companies at least to avoid negative meanings in Chinese, Spanish, English, and Arabic, if they want to sell a product all over the world.
Well, that's kind of meaningless, since ultimately you can simply use virtualisation to run Linux itself in Windows. It's a question of convenience. If you want to run UNIX-type software, that's a hell of a lot easier in Linux.
Performance is an issue of course. You can run X11 apps at a decent speed in Linux; I've never managed to get that to happen in Windows, even with expensive commercial X servers.
You probably meant that to be sarcasm, but it's actually the correct response. Let's give up on looking for silver bullets. Let's abandon the stupid idea that slavishly following the latest fashionable religion^Wmethodology is going to produce perfect code.
Instead, let's recognise the truth: development is hard, and the best programmers are orders of magnitude better than the worst. Let's employ the best, pay them decent wages, give them decent work environments, and let them get on with the goddamn job instead of forcing them to play silly mind games.
With OSS, you can easily see what kind of support is available: just look in the bug tracker to see how quickly issues are resolved. With commercial software, the entire process is normally totally opaque.
With OSS, you get what you pay for. With commercial software, you pay anyway, and then the vendor decides whether you get anything at all.
It boils down to: only choose commercial software when it does the job better. Don't pay for off-the-shelf software under the mistaken belief that it has something magical called "support", because unless you have a signed contract that gives you a guaranteed level of service, you cannot expect to get any help at all from the vendor.
Perl, too.
It's a small subset of open source projects, but it includes many of the biggest and highest-profile ones. Where they lead, others will follow.
I don't know that GNU will, necessarily, though. For example, GNU Emacs is currently moving to Bzr, though they do also provide git access.
Heresy! You dare to suggest that instead of GodZip, the Almighty should have chosen BeelZebub2 or, heaven forbid, a LuciferZip Mephistophelian Archive?!
It is simplistic to assume that there is always a single best course of action, or that someone who knew what that was would inevitably choose it.
Larry Niven deserves the praise he gets as a writer, but he writes fiction, not science. His books have some fine plots and plenty of inventive ideas, but that doesn't mean that everything he writes is wisdom of the profoundest order.
I find it slightly amusing that people object to Lisp on the grounds of "too many parentheses".
IIRC it was originally intended to be able to use the JVM or Microsoft's CLR; they just finished the JVM version first and that's what's being promoted.
Terseness is largely irrelevant. The right question is not "does this language let me express something in the minimal number of keypresses", but rather "does this language force me to repeat myself endlessly".
Scala has good support for abstracting code; Java, for example, does not. That means that code written in Scala could well be more maintainable (changes need to be made in fewer places), and it also means it's likely to be better quality (people are less likely to copy and paste if it's just as easy to do it properly).
I ran into this just today. I had a bunch of copy-and-pasted code that I was trying to refactor into a sane design, and Java thwarted me at every step. I could see why the original coder had given up! Eventually I had to resort to a hack using reflection, which of course lost me all the benefits of static typing. Thanks, Java. But at least the core algorithm is now stored in exactly one place, instead of there being ten copies of it scattered across as many files.
People have been saying this for at least 10 years, you know. Then the next system comes out and, whaddya know, graphics get better!
It's only natural; we get used to what we see, and we can't imagine what we haven't seen. I still remember looking at Doom, and thinking "How can Quake look any better than this?"
If you're spending all your time doing the same things, then there's clearly plenty of scope for sandbox games to introduce more things to do.
And which way is the trend actually going? Consider the Elder Scrolls games, a standard example of the sandbox-style RPG. The game worlds have become progressively smaller through the series.
You say it like you think it's a recent development. But there have always been complex games around. PC flight simulators used to come with manuals the size of a phone directory.
Basically, your comment could have been posted at any time in the last 20 years. And it frequently has been. I remember reading Usenet postings saying very similar things in the mid-1990s. There is nothing new under the sun.
Now get off my lawn.