This me, committing to try to avoid buying HP for some time to come. These kind of tactics are immature, reckless, and generally indicative of people who are not fit to be making informed decisions.
Those decisions are likewise reflected in the HP product line.
Unfortunately, that pretty much leaves nobody with likely reliable equipment.
So what's that make Redhat? Ubuntu but with a fork in the eye if you want to change anything?
Snark aside, upgrading an RPM system still makes me nervous - not as nervous as rebuilding a BSD system's ports or something similar on Gentoo or slackware, but certainly more so than on Debian. Even Ubuntu is less of a nightmare when it breaks.
OK, I'll grant you that it's an innovation, but it isn't a technological one. It's a marketing/sales innovation (realization).
People have done economy of scale, but not for a tablet. People have made tablets with ARM CPUs and other very low-power, low-cost materials ( just usually marking them up a lot for custom markets). People have not made tablets in scale at low cost for consumers - until Apple came along.
So yes, that is Apple's significant innovation in this regard. It's not technological, it's good business savvy. IE it's what Microsoft did 25 years ago with DOS; it's the same thing Japan did in the 1980s with their cheap electronics; and the same thing China has done with pretty much every other segment of the market since - IE saturate the hell out of it so purchase costs are low while cutting overhead.
It still falls short from the clear intent demonstrated in my original challenge for an actual innovation, however. (Apparently the technological vein of my challenge was lost?)
It does - except when using the latest Atom CPU core (moorestown, I think?), which has two cores in teh same TDP as a Snapdragon single core CPU. Yes, that's for the entire Atom SoC, not just the CPU.
Well, if it's not being imprisoned in a characterless classroom, an uncomfortable desk, with disdainful teachers - in an animalistic pecking order (ie public school) - there could certainly still be a plausible, rational explanation.
* Stress/anxiety brought on by intense boredom. Yes, I believe this happens.
* Gee, they're kids: it's all always new and stressful. That can have similar symptoms.
* CFLs. Many people are sensitive to the frequency of strobing in a CFL. Half the IT people in my office are, and are unable to get any work done with the damn things on (myself included). (Incandescents, on the other hand, are a different story. There are a couple guys with floor lamps in their rooms due to not having windows.)
* Air quality. These days it seems most schools are air conditioned and are cloistered off from the outdoors all year long. They're made out of relatively unbreathable materials (cement, steel, etc.) and the students are confined in them in close proximity and high numbers. There's a possibility they're suffering from mild CO2 poisoning, or just the accumulation of waste/pollution.
* Not enough exercise/being forced to sit in a desk all day. That can certainly result in kids not being able to sleep at night. Skin rashes could likewise be caused by sitting on an uncomfortable desk all day. And, gee: ya think some kids might be a little hyperactive after sitting like lumps for 6 hours?
* Something new in the school lunches?
* A combination of the above.
* Oh yeah, and they're kids: many of those 'symptoms' are part of being kids (which people foolishly call 'misbehaving' or the like). Hyperactivity? Memory loss and lack of concentration (not paying attention/listening/etc.)? Seriously?
But, honestly: I'd say it has to be something environmental in the schools. Lighting, a cleaning product, food, air quality, and the way the students interact with the environment (sitting vs. running, for instance) for 6 hours a day can make a huge difference in almost everything. The questions to ask: are these new complains, were they triggered by something political if they are new, and what has changed environmentally?
I'd bet some stupid school official made a budget decision that changes something for the worst in the school's environment and nobody's bothering/able to think about it.
Isn't that what innovation is? You take an existing idea, see how it falls short with regards to demand and functionality, and improve upon it. Voila! Innovation! Often, this innovation is simply taking a smattering of smaller, disassociated innovations and turning it into a Finished Product.
Seriously, though. This article is a bunch of nonsense. Not only was I able to think of innovation within several large tech corporations, but I was able to think of some within their "do not innovate" list:
* Intel and AMD: been paying much attention? We've got a bunch of changes here: Intel has ULP Atom CPUs that rival the traditional power-sipping ARM processors now, and in the past 5 years both Intel and AMD have made use of AMD's 64 bit and VT CPU extensions. * Nvidia and ATI: GPCPUs and CUDA, we're seeing some crazy advances here. * Oracle (well, Sun): they brought us ZFS, BrandZ/zones, dtrace, and have been large contributors to Xen. How are these not innovative products? There's nothing else out there which is quite like them. * Microsoft - let's be fair here. These guys have had some pretty innovative products over the years, even in recent times when their products have trended for quality improvement over feature improvement..NET was a fairly innovative approach (which, yes, they largely "copied" from other ideas, but approached differently). Silverlight, likewise. Meanwhile, there have been incremental improvements of fair significance in Microsoft's desktop and server products: even though I don't like their Office ribbon crap, it's still innovation, and many people like it once they get used to it. That's little different than Apple feature superiority snobbery (which I can't stand, either). * Nintendo: they're a pretty large company, and yet we got the Wii out of them - arguably a gaming game-changer in many regards. * Citrix, VMWare, and VirtualBox have all seen significant improvements - innovations.
Is this innovation wrapped in fancy consumer marketing and sold in a shiny box? No, not always. Who cares? It's still tech industry innovation.
If this isn't innovation, ask yourself: how much of an innovation is the iPad, really? It isn't, really, considering how many similar devices came before it and how quickly everyone else was on their tail. The only thing truly 'innovative' about Apple since the inception of the MacOS X has been it's marketing and vertical integration in a nice consumer "appliance": plenty of tablets have come and gone long before Apple did it.
I challenge anyone to name one feature in the iPad (or iPhone, for that matter) which is truly 'innovative' and hasn't been done (often ad-nausea) many times before and which isn't just an OEM bundle with a pretty skin. Just one! I've yet to see one.
They might lack skills, but general logic and the ability to think independently isn't something that has to be learned. Indeed, too often formal education removes that characteristic. My family had a whole lot of sharp people who, by growing up in poverty had no access to education beyond the 5th grade. Oddly enough, they weren't droolers.
I didn't say anything about formal education; I said "taught poorly". In my mind, formal education - particularly when perpetrated by the state - does indeed remove the ability to think and reason.
The gangs won't be out of business - they'll just be doing other things which are profitable, like:
* politics (yep, same basic people, they just wear suits) * prostitution * robbery and burglary * more complex schemes
Just because the drugs are legal does not mean that criminals will stop trying to take advantage of a situation "too good to be true". No, there won't be as much profit in it (except for the government), so yes, it'll probably end up getting more violent between gangs.
Of course, political bureaucrats will likely gain the most from such a silly idea through taxes. Somehow, giving ineffective, corrupt, and usually incompetent and malevolent people lots of money who also happen to have the ability to make laws seems like a bad idea. It typically is, as the most significant thing government provides is more government.
Feature for feature, you can find an AMD AM3 board for significantly less than an Intel board - often, the boards have more features (more SATA ports, for instance).
Let's be fair, here: it's not just Intel that has kept x86 going.
In no small part, AMD has done a hell of a lot in this department, and if it had been left up to Intel, x86 would be dead (or stagnant) by now, as both VT and x64 came from AMD first, only to be later used by Intel due to licenses. Before AMD started making outside-the-box renovations, Intel was falling fairly flat on improvements and moving strongly towards the refinement stage for things like power management (which is awesome and beneficial, but not what you necessarily want if you want a large machine to do work).
Companies like Via (with their public key cryptography in-CPU on the C7) have also done a fair amount to make x86 relevant.
Frankly, I'd love to see a different architecture spring up. It's probably not going to happen - they'll find a way to keep x86 alive and in the forefront because it's Good to have a single hardware platform for all tiers of the market (mainframe through mobile).
The biggest performance bottleneck is still harddrives. So rather than focusing on faster CPUs, I'd love to see fast SSDs come down in price. I also can't wait until 16 gigs of RAM is standard.
Agreed, except I'd like to disagree on your preference: I'd love to have slow SSDs come down in price and go up in capacity. It will be Good Enough, or at least significantly better.
I mean, seriously: does the common desktop really need secondary storage which has higher throughput than the majority of DDR memory? There are SATA 6GB/s disks out there with >400MB/s rates, whereas DDR 400 only maxed out at 400MB/s. That's freaking INCREDIBLE.
Even introducing slower 200MB/s SSDs at a lower price than current 400GB models w/ higher capacity would be significantly appreciated.
That said, SSDs are going down in price - enough that the demand has increased again, pushing memory prices up in the past week (meh, look at Newegg if you don't believe me. 2x2GB DDR3 Crucial was $42 last week; this week it jumped up significantly for the same part #.)
That's an understatement. Some of the performance metrics on FreeBSD 8.1 ZFS are so poor that they're not even comparable to OSol. A 10th the performance, maybe?
Nevermind the FreeBSD implementation is shoddy, at best in terms of stability and hardware utilization in other areas: high CPU, high memory use, a couple versions behind 'official' ZFS, inexplicable instability (particularly when the filesystem is nearing capacity, but I had my test fbsd zfs system reboot itself - twice - during bonnie++ tests), and a handful of other matters.
And no, don't tell me "it'll be fixed in the next version via higher pool version support". Fix what you did before implementing something new.
Each new major version of FreeBSD since 6 seems to have taken a couple steps back where there shouldn't have been change until it worked (USB, I'm looking at you). FreeBSD is awesome for network devices and code projects, but it's kinda a wretched nightmare as a general purpose or storage OS.
ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
I do, but cutting it down would be hard. 7 just isn't made for embedded devices
Neither was XP, but XPe runs fairly decently on some fairly thin machines. Hell, XP has been gotten to 'work' (with no code modification) on 8MHz systems with 20MB of RAM: link
There's also tiny7 (made by hobbyists w/o any recompilation), which retains most if not all of the Windows 7 functionality and can run on quite a few last-generation setups (ie 256MB of RAM). I do not doubt that the w7 kernel itself could be pruned down to run on some truly archaic x86 hardware - even by a hobbyist.
Replacing and/or refining a couple subsystems by Microsoft could certainly get W7 running on pretty much anything - just as has been done with Linux.
When? When in living memory did the majority of young people actually respect their elders?
I can't speak for other families, but I know my mom, my dad, my wife's mom, and wife's dad all "respect their elders" and look/looked up to them. Our parents are in their early-mid 50s. I know my grandparents, in my family, didn't think my parents' generation was a bunch of slobs, mostly: while they thought some were bad apples, they didn't think the generation was a wash.
Now, there are a couple good apples, with a barrel of rotten ones.
If there's a problem, it's not with the gene pool of the kids or their abilities. It's caused by well-meaning but catastrophically stupid policies that prevent the removal of problem students from classes, and the elimination of ability-based tracking. This means that normal kids are surrounded by juvenile delinquents and children who don't even speak English. If you remove those students (who would have not taken the test in prior generations) from the scoring, I wonder how the stats would play out.
This I can agree with completely.
In other words - it's not that the kids are getting stupid. It's that our schools are completely failing them.
Yet, if over a lifetime a person is taught poorly - or worse and seemingly more likely, taught incorrectly - he or she is going to be a bit of a simpleton by the time they reach adulthood. They'll lack any coherent reasoning ability, and will essentially be useless to the advancement of society. You know the type: able to do basic manual labor/"shit jobs" and consume, but not all too useful otherwise, even to themselves. That qualifies as "stupid" to me.
Regardless of which language picked, it's not going to be a perfect fix. For instance, perl + library bindings would likely fit the goals of many.NET projects, as well as many java projects. And there's python as well, which has similar if not greater applicability. Both of which are very stable and well developed.
I also have to wonder how the lack of IronRuby makes.NET any less viable. Could someone else not develop IronRuby? I see no reason why not, as I believe the same has been done for perl, python, etc. for.NET, outside of Microsoft. I doubt MS wants or needs the burden of supporting Ruby, anyway..NET is, IMO, the best thing Microsoft has come out with in some time. There are toolkits similar to it, but for what can be done w/.NET vs. other languages in a similar amount of time is simply incredible. The fact that the code is all mostly architecture portable (provided there's a CLR interpreter for it) is pretty cool, too.
They bought Sun for Java - you know how many other companies Oracle might have by the short and curlies now?
You may be correct, but you're also wrong - if only due to incompleteness.
Oracle bought Sun for the same reason Oracle does anything: to get more licensing fees paid. Licensing has been what Oracle has sold since day one, and they'll do anything to get those fees. They've also been very protective of the licensed products as a result of this.
I think we can expect to see more of this happening, with other projects. I'd imagine anything GPL licensed would be safe, thankfully.
I hate to tell you, but our parents' generation thought we were idiots too, I'm sure. I know their parents thought they were.
While it's true that just because they thought it doesn't mean it's true, the opposite is likewise valid: just because many previous generations thought it, does not make it false.
What about the repetition and passing of time makes their opinions necessarily false? It used to be that wisdom of age was respected and revered, even taken to heart. And yet, now we ignore it. Is doing so folly?
We're talking about basic, first grade mathematics concepts here. How is this "not getting stupid"?
Back to your statement: those previous generations usually thought the following generation was foolish/foolhardy, not stupid. The last couple generations, however, have been increasingly "stupid" in the "can't solve for x" sense. Test scores clearly prove this.
I'm sorry, I don't understand. How is this "non-standard notation"?
It should be trivially simple for a student of 11 to 14 (not sure where they're placing the bar for this kind of thing, these days) to complete any of the following:
4+3+2=x+2 4+3+2=()+2 - what number goes in the ()? x+2 = 4+3+2 4 + 3 = x
This is elementary mathematics. You should be able to figure this out by 5th grade, even if you were never taught it. I switched schools in 3rd grade and, while I'm a bit brighter than most kids, was thrown into mathematics (at a private school) a year or two above the public schools I was coming from. It was hard, but with a little (little!) effort these things were solvable.
Do kids simply not understand that numbers represent things in real life, or something? I can't see what else it might be that makes an equation like this difficult. The above examples should, I think, be solvable by an 8 year old. (At 6, my son has received very little formal numeric instruction - yet he can count, do basic addition, subtraction, and even multiplication. If I were to explain the symbols, I'm fairly certain he'd have something like this figured out within an hour.)
Part of me has to wonder if social instruction has bled too deeply into peoples' consciousness, disabling their ability to think in a logically, concise manner.
Simply, they're unable to think logically because they've been trained to think relatively from a very, very young age. Something or someone isn't "better" or "worse than another thing, they're all 'equally good'.
When equality is relative, there can't be a correct, provable answer.
I know it's a bit of a far cry, but you can see this kind of thinking demonstrated all the damn time in public life today. It really wouldn't be surprising if it's made concrete sciences difficult for students to understand. "What, you mean this is absolute? I thought there are no absolutes?"
It's happened many times before. Of particularly interesting note are the legends of "the gods" from various societies which have arisen shortly after periods of relatively poor advancement.
The solar storms output huge amounts of radiation - electromagnetic as well as other frequencies. Being as the earth is, essentially, a large (but significantly smaller than the sun) magnet, the interference with the Earth's magnetic/electrical field will quite certainly have observable effects: increased/more intense storm activity, more geologic disturbances (volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.) and so on.
When it comes down to it, it's all just a complex series of positively and negatively charged ions: when a positive or negative charge is applied from outside the system, weird things are going to happen.
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This me, committing to try to avoid buying HP for some time to come. These kind of tactics are immature, reckless, and generally indicative of people who are not fit to be making informed decisions.
Those decisions are likewise reflected in the HP product line.
Unfortunately, that pretty much leaves nobody with likely reliable equipment.
Hey, hey, that's not it at all.
It's just that next year, Debian will be legal. :)
So what's that make Redhat? Ubuntu but with a fork in the eye if you want to change anything?
Snark aside, upgrading an RPM system still makes me nervous - not as nervous as rebuilding a BSD system's ports or something similar on Gentoo or slackware, but certainly more so than on Debian. Even Ubuntu is less of a nightmare when it breaks.
Nonsense. Ubuntu is that one based on Debian, but with more crap and less clean.
OK, I'll grant you that it's an innovation, but it isn't a technological one. It's a marketing/sales innovation (realization).
People have done economy of scale, but not for a tablet. People have made tablets with ARM CPUs and other very low-power, low-cost materials ( just usually marking them up a lot for custom markets). People have not made tablets in scale at low cost for consumers - until Apple came along.
So yes, that is Apple's significant innovation in this regard. It's not technological, it's good business savvy. IE it's what Microsoft did 25 years ago with DOS; it's the same thing Japan did in the 1980s with their cheap electronics; and the same thing China has done with pretty much every other segment of the market since - IE saturate the hell out of it so purchase costs are low while cutting overhead.
It still falls short from the clear intent demonstrated in my original challenge for an actual innovation, however. (Apparently the technological vein of my challenge was lost?)
It does - except when using the latest Atom CPU core (moorestown, I think?), which has two cores in teh same TDP as a Snapdragon single core CPU. Yes, that's for the entire Atom SoC, not just the CPU.
I'm sorry, what? How is that innovative?
If it were innovative, it'd not be so damn easy to beat (as all the Android tablets appear to be demonstrating).
Well, if it's not being imprisoned in a characterless classroom, an uncomfortable desk, with disdainful teachers - in an animalistic pecking order (ie public school) - there could certainly still be a plausible, rational explanation.
* Stress/anxiety brought on by intense boredom. Yes, I believe this happens.
* Gee, they're kids: it's all always new and stressful. That can have similar symptoms.
* CFLs. Many people are sensitive to the frequency of strobing in a CFL. Half the IT people in my office are, and are unable to get any work done with the damn things on (myself included). (Incandescents, on the other hand, are a different story. There are a couple guys with floor lamps in their rooms due to not having windows.)
* Air quality. These days it seems most schools are air conditioned and are cloistered off from the outdoors all year long. They're made out of relatively unbreathable materials (cement, steel, etc.) and the students are confined in them in close proximity and high numbers. There's a possibility they're suffering from mild CO2 poisoning, or just the accumulation of waste/pollution.
* Not enough exercise/being forced to sit in a desk all day. That can certainly result in kids not being able to sleep at night. Skin rashes could likewise be caused by sitting on an uncomfortable desk all day. And, gee: ya think some kids might be a little hyperactive after sitting like lumps for 6 hours?
* Something new in the school lunches?
* A combination of the above.
* Oh yeah, and they're kids: many of those 'symptoms' are part of being kids (which people foolishly call 'misbehaving' or the like). Hyperactivity? Memory loss and lack of concentration (not paying attention/listening/etc.)? Seriously?
But, honestly: I'd say it has to be something environmental in the schools. Lighting, a cleaning product, food, air quality, and the way the students interact with the environment (sitting vs. running, for instance) for 6 hours a day can make a huge difference in almost everything. The questions to ask: are these new complains, were they triggered by something political if they are new, and what has changed environmentally?
I'd bet some stupid school official made a budget decision that changes something for the worst in the school's environment and nobody's bothering/able to think about it.
Isn't that what innovation is? You take an existing idea, see how it falls short with regards to demand and functionality, and improve upon it. Voila! Innovation! Often, this innovation is simply taking a smattering of smaller, disassociated innovations and turning it into a Finished Product.
Seriously, though. This article is a bunch of nonsense. Not only was I able to think of innovation within several large tech corporations, but I was able to think of some within their "do not innovate" list:
* Intel and AMD: been paying much attention? We've got a bunch of changes here: Intel has ULP Atom CPUs that rival the traditional power-sipping ARM processors now, and in the past 5 years both Intel and AMD have made use of AMD's 64 bit and VT CPU extensions. .NET was a fairly innovative approach (which, yes, they largely "copied" from other ideas, but approached differently). Silverlight, likewise. Meanwhile, there have been incremental improvements of fair significance in Microsoft's desktop and server products: even though I don't like their Office ribbon crap, it's still innovation, and many people like it once they get used to it. That's little different than Apple feature superiority snobbery (which I can't stand, either).
* Nvidia and ATI: GPCPUs and CUDA, we're seeing some crazy advances here.
* Oracle (well, Sun): they brought us ZFS, BrandZ/zones, dtrace, and have been large contributors to Xen. How are these not innovative products? There's nothing else out there which is quite like them.
* Microsoft - let's be fair here. These guys have had some pretty innovative products over the years, even in recent times when their products have trended for quality improvement over feature improvement.
* Nintendo: they're a pretty large company, and yet we got the Wii out of them - arguably a gaming game-changer in many regards.
* Citrix, VMWare, and VirtualBox have all seen significant improvements - innovations.
Is this innovation wrapped in fancy consumer marketing and sold in a shiny box? No, not always. Who cares? It's still tech industry innovation.
If this isn't innovation, ask yourself: how much of an innovation is the iPad, really? It isn't, really, considering how many similar devices came before it and how quickly everyone else was on their tail. The only thing truly 'innovative' about Apple since the inception of the MacOS X has been it's marketing and vertical integration in a nice consumer "appliance": plenty of tablets have come and gone long before Apple did it.
I challenge anyone to name one feature in the iPad (or iPhone, for that matter) which is truly 'innovative' and hasn't been done (often ad-nausea) many times before and which isn't just an OEM bundle with a pretty skin. Just one! I've yet to see one.
They might lack skills, but general logic and the ability to think independently isn't something that has to be learned. Indeed, too often formal education removes that characteristic. My family had a whole lot of sharp people who, by growing up in poverty had no access to education beyond the 5th grade. Oddly enough, they weren't droolers.
I didn't say anything about formal education; I said "taught poorly". In my mind, formal education - particularly when perpetrated by the state - does indeed remove the ability to think and reason.
Someone hasn't been paying attention...
For starters, OCZ, Intel, and Crucial/Micron have had the better performing SSDs for some time now, and they're not even on your review's list.
The gangs won't be out of business - they'll just be doing other things which are profitable, like:
* politics (yep, same basic people, they just wear suits)
* prostitution
* robbery and burglary
* more complex schemes
Just because the drugs are legal does not mean that criminals will stop trying to take advantage of a situation "too good to be true". No, there won't be as much profit in it (except for the government), so yes, it'll probably end up getting more violent between gangs.
Of course, political bureaucrats will likely gain the most from such a silly idea through taxes. Somehow, giving ineffective, corrupt, and usually incompetent and malevolent people lots of money who also happen to have the ability to make laws seems like a bad idea. It typically is, as the most significant thing government provides is more government.
"Race to the bottom"?
Feature for feature, you can find an AMD AM3 board for significantly less than an Intel board - often, the boards have more features (more SATA ports, for instance).
Let's be fair, here: it's not just Intel that has kept x86 going.
In no small part, AMD has done a hell of a lot in this department, and if it had been left up to Intel, x86 would be dead (or stagnant) by now, as both VT and x64 came from AMD first, only to be later used by Intel due to licenses. Before AMD started making outside-the-box renovations, Intel was falling fairly flat on improvements and moving strongly towards the refinement stage for things like power management (which is awesome and beneficial, but not what you necessarily want if you want a large machine to do work).
Companies like Via (with their public key cryptography in-CPU on the C7) have also done a fair amount to make x86 relevant.
Frankly, I'd love to see a different architecture spring up. It's probably not going to happen - they'll find a way to keep x86 alive and in the forefront because it's Good to have a single hardware platform for all tiers of the market (mainframe through mobile).
The biggest performance bottleneck is still harddrives. So rather than focusing on faster CPUs, I'd love to see fast SSDs come down in price. I also can't wait until 16 gigs of RAM is standard.
Agreed, except I'd like to disagree on your preference: I'd love to have slow SSDs come down in price and go up in capacity. It will be Good Enough, or at least significantly better.
I mean, seriously: does the common desktop really need secondary storage which has higher throughput than the majority of DDR memory? There are SATA 6GB/s disks out there with >400MB/s rates, whereas DDR 400 only maxed out at 400MB/s. That's freaking INCREDIBLE.
Even introducing slower 200MB/s SSDs at a lower price than current 400GB models w/ higher capacity would be significantly appreciated.
That said, SSDs are going down in price - enough that the demand has increased again, pushing memory prices up in the past week (meh, look at Newegg if you don't believe me. 2x2GB DDR3 Crucial was $42 last week; this week it jumped up significantly for the same part #.)
its 'ok' on freebsd but not all that fast
That's an understatement. Some of the performance metrics on FreeBSD 8.1 ZFS are so poor that they're not even comparable to OSol. A 10th the performance, maybe?
Nevermind the FreeBSD implementation is shoddy, at best in terms of stability and hardware utilization in other areas: high CPU, high memory use, a couple versions behind 'official' ZFS, inexplicable instability (particularly when the filesystem is nearing capacity, but I had my test fbsd zfs system reboot itself - twice - during bonnie++ tests), and a handful of other matters.
And no, don't tell me "it'll be fixed in the next version via higher pool version support". Fix what you did before implementing something new.
Each new major version of FreeBSD since 6 seems to have taken a couple steps back where there shouldn't have been change until it worked (USB, I'm looking at you). FreeBSD is awesome for network devices and code projects, but it's kinda a wretched nightmare as a general purpose or storage OS.
ZFS in OpenSolaris is a huge loss. I just hope it's continued onward - albeit a little bit behind "official" solaris - in Nexenta and the other derivative projects. Is that even possible, legally speaking?
I do, but cutting it down would be hard. 7 just isn't made for embedded devices
Neither was XP, but XPe runs fairly decently on some fairly thin machines. Hell, XP has been gotten to 'work' (with no code modification) on 8MHz systems with 20MB of RAM: link
There's also tiny7 (made by hobbyists w/o any recompilation), which retains most if not all of the Windows 7 functionality and can run on quite a few last-generation setups (ie 256MB of RAM). I do not doubt that the w7 kernel itself could be pruned down to run on some truly archaic x86 hardware - even by a hobbyist.
Replacing and/or refining a couple subsystems by Microsoft could certainly get W7 running on pretty much anything - just as has been done with Linux.
When? When in living memory did the majority of young people actually respect their elders?
I can't speak for other families, but I know my mom, my dad, my wife's mom, and wife's dad all "respect their elders" and look/looked up to them. Our parents are in their early-mid 50s. I know my grandparents, in my family, didn't think my parents' generation was a bunch of slobs, mostly: while they thought some were bad apples, they didn't think the generation was a wash.
Now, there are a couple good apples, with a barrel of rotten ones.
If there's a problem, it's not with the gene pool of the kids or their abilities. It's caused by well-meaning but catastrophically stupid policies that prevent the removal of problem students from classes, and the elimination of ability-based tracking. This means that normal kids are surrounded by juvenile delinquents and children who don't even speak English. If you remove those students (who would have not taken the test in prior generations) from the scoring, I wonder how the stats would play out.
This I can agree with completely.
In other words - it's not that the kids are getting stupid. It's that our schools are completely failing them.
Yet, if over a lifetime a person is taught poorly - or worse and seemingly more likely, taught incorrectly - he or she is going to be a bit of a simpleton by the time they reach adulthood. They'll lack any coherent reasoning ability, and will essentially be useless to the advancement of society. You know the type: able to do basic manual labor/"shit jobs" and consume, but not all too useful otherwise, even to themselves. That qualifies as "stupid" to me.
Regardless of which language picked, it's not going to be a perfect fix. For instance, perl + library bindings would likely fit the goals of many .NET projects, as well as many java projects. And there's python as well, which has similar if not greater applicability. Both of which are very stable and well developed.
I also have to wonder how the lack of IronRuby makes .NET any less viable. Could someone else not develop IronRuby? I see no reason why not, as I believe the same has been done for perl, python, etc. for .NET, outside of Microsoft. I doubt MS wants or needs the burden of supporting Ruby, anyway. .NET is, IMO, the best thing Microsoft has come out with in some time. There are toolkits similar to it, but for what can be done w/ .NET vs. other languages in a similar amount of time is simply incredible. The fact that the code is all mostly architecture portable (provided there's a CLR interpreter for it) is pretty cool, too.
Who cares if the OS has been commoditized, that's irrelevant to Oracle.
The significant things are that the OS is a good one, they own it, and can therefore control it.
Hasn't Oracle wanted to have a vertically integrated product for some time now?
They bought Sun for Java - you know how many other companies Oracle might have by the short and curlies now?
You may be correct, but you're also wrong - if only due to incompleteness.
Oracle bought Sun for the same reason Oracle does anything: to get more licensing fees paid. Licensing has been what Oracle has sold since day one, and they'll do anything to get those fees. They've also been very protective of the licensed products as a result of this.
I think we can expect to see more of this happening, with other projects. I'd imagine anything GPL licensed would be safe, thankfully.
I hate to tell you, but our parents' generation thought we were idiots too, I'm sure. I know their parents thought they were.
While it's true that just because they thought it doesn't mean it's true, the opposite is likewise valid: just because many previous generations thought it, does not make it false.
What about the repetition and passing of time makes their opinions necessarily false? It used to be that wisdom of age was respected and revered, even taken to heart. And yet, now we ignore it. Is doing so folly?
We're talking about basic, first grade mathematics concepts here. How is this "not getting stupid"?
Back to your statement: those previous generations usually thought the following generation was foolish/foolhardy, not stupid. The last couple generations, however, have been increasingly "stupid" in the "can't solve for x" sense. Test scores clearly prove this.
I'm sorry, I don't understand. How is this "non-standard notation"?
It should be trivially simple for a student of 11 to 14 (not sure where they're placing the bar for this kind of thing, these days) to complete any of the following:
4+3+2=x+2
4+3+2=()+2 - what number goes in the ()?
x+2 = 4+3+2
4 + 3 = x
This is elementary mathematics. You should be able to figure this out by 5th grade, even if you were never taught it. I switched schools in 3rd grade and, while I'm a bit brighter than most kids, was thrown into mathematics (at a private school) a year or two above the public schools I was coming from. It was hard, but with a little (little!) effort these things were solvable.
Do kids simply not understand that numbers represent things in real life, or something? I can't see what else it might be that makes an equation like this difficult. The above examples should, I think, be solvable by an 8 year old. (At 6, my son has received very little formal numeric instruction - yet he can count, do basic addition, subtraction, and even multiplication. If I were to explain the symbols, I'm fairly certain he'd have something like this figured out within an hour.)
Part of me has to wonder if social instruction has bled too deeply into peoples' consciousness, disabling their ability to think in a logically, concise manner.
Simply, they're unable to think logically because they've been trained to think relatively from a very, very young age. Something or someone isn't "better" or "worse than another thing, they're all 'equally good'.
When equality is relative, there can't be a correct, provable answer.
I know it's a bit of a far cry, but you can see this kind of thinking demonstrated all the damn time in public life today. It really wouldn't be surprising if it's made concrete sciences difficult for students to understand. "What, you mean this is absolute? I thought there are no absolutes?"
Thank you, Political Correctness.
It's happened many times before. Of particularly interesting note are the legends of "the gods" from various societies which have arisen shortly after periods of relatively poor advancement.
The solar storms output huge amounts of radiation - electromagnetic as well as other frequencies. Being as the earth is, essentially, a large (but significantly smaller than the sun) magnet, the interference with the Earth's magnetic/electrical field will quite certainly have observable effects: increased/more intense storm activity, more geologic disturbances (volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.) and so on.
When it comes down to it, it's all just a complex series of positively and negatively charged ions: when a positive or negative charge is applied from outside the system, weird things are going to happen.