Microsoft's problem isn't really Vista, the bit of software.
Their major problem is their lack of understanding that good operating systems can't be created overnight and chucked on the shelves like white goods items under pressure of Sales and Marketing... not even in a 3-year "overnight". Operating systems evolve into being good, and once they're getting close to being usable then you don't chuck them out just because you want new product in the catalog. Not if you're half sane.
And MS also seems to misunderstand the longevity of operating systems, the attachment that users form with them, people's reluctance to change, and the simple fact that something that works doesn't need to be replaced... software doesn't wear out, nor obsoleted given incremental upgrades. The "all change" paradigm that seems to hold in MS is in total disregard of commonsense.
And lastly, MS has a real problem in understanding that people buy operating systems to serve their own needs, not to serve the needs of 3rd party content providers --- that's a severe requirements mismatch.
Vista also has technical issues of course, but MS has plenty of manpower to fix those. What I'm not sure it does have the ability to fix is its totally backwards perception of what they should be doing in this area.
Without education, you'll be a poor computer tech
on
IT Job Without a Degree?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Qualifications aren't just for show, they mean that you've extended your knowledge in the area and that someone has verified it.
There's a lot more to computing than writing a few programs that do something useful without crashing. That's important too, but it barely figures on the wider scale of merit of a computing professional.
What a CompSci education gives you is tons and tons of theory and context: theory so that you have a large portfolio of logically sound techniques upon which to draw instead of reinventing them and doing so badly, and context so that you understand why you're doing something, why you should not do something else, and how your solutions fit in with all the other methods and systems in the subject area.
Without an education in this field, you won't even know when you're making a mistake, owing to lack of theory and context. Your boss may like you because you'll always be saying "Yes" (until everything falls apart), but nobody else will appreciate it, not even you yourself in time. And you'll feel dumb every time that you come into contact with other computer people, as well as getting a bad rep because you can't hide ignorance in tech.
Just don't.
Take the time and make the effort to get yourself a proper CompSci education. You won't regret it.
You're right, but people picked you apart as your first line was too broad. Try this instead:
There is no sustainable market for selling a commodity with a zero marginal cost of production.
When the marginal (ie. incremental) cost per unit is zero, this directly implies that no proprietary resources or secret sauce were required in its production, which in turn implies that effectively anyone can produce the commodity. Thus, while there is always a market initially for something new, there can be no sustainable market for an item with a zero marginal cost since it will eventually spread into public production. The answer for producers isn't to panic, but just to keep designing new items.
The same will apply to physical goods one day when they can be assembled with atomic precision from the elements around us.
I like your observation that community is the key ingredient that gives an MMO longevity. It makes me wonder if an open-source MMO might one day not only rival the current big commercial ones, but even become far more long lived than any of them because its community would last forever, and it could never get shut down, regardless of perceived success or failure.
The easy attack on that idea is simply that "server farms cost a ton of money", but MMOs don't have to be programmed to require centralized server farms, and many FPS communities are more than happy to put up a server for public use anyway. There's no reason why such machines couldn't be confederated to underpin a community MMO.
What's more, there are MMO models that require very little in the way of centralized computing power. For example, Guild Wars has a heavily instanced framework, so that once in a fighting zone, there can never be more than 8 people playing together, which requires very little power from server systems --- in fact an instanced MMO programmed like that could even be run in P2P mode while in the instance, merely sending occasional game state updates to a central point, a very low centralized power requirement.
Yet, you still interact with vast numbers of people when in town or in your guild or when messaging across the world, so the MMO feeling is there despite the server requirements being not much different to those of an IRC server. Technically, this approach is definitely possible for a community-run MMO without any commercial backing.
We have all the open-source components for making both the client and server sides of a community MMO, and community-developed online games are announced occasionally, but we don't really hear of any success stories. Is it that none of them are any good, or just that the commercial ones get all the attention?
It sure would be nice to put one's investment of game time into a community-developed and community-run MMO instead of into a commercial one, both to avoid draining the wallet and to ensure that your favourite world exists forever. There must be huge merit to having such a community game world, if only it could be got off the ground in a flexible enough form.
Javascripts vary in quality, but the latest ones are pretty fast: for example, Javascript V8 (the Javascript from Google's Chrome browser project) is nearly as fast as Lua, which is the fastest widely used scripting language at the moment.
Here are some basic timings I made just to give a rough feel for the relative speeds (don't read too much into them). The first entry provides the timings for C, which is obviously compiled, purely as a basis for comparison with the scripting languages. Note that the times for C are in milliseconds, while the rest are in seconds, lower is better:
Execution times for recursive F/P factorial(n) to/dev/null Langs @ 2008 Times: n=1 n=170 difference
C 0.000 ms 0.090 ms 0.090 ms Lua 0.001 s 0.005 s 0.004 s Parrot-opt/iterative 0.013 s 0.018 s 0.005 s Parrot/iterative 0.014 s 0.019 s 0.005 s V8-Javascript 0.007 s 0.013 s 0.006 s Ocaml 0.022 s 0.029 s 0.007 s Python 0.013 s 0.027 s 0.014 s Parrot-opt/recursive 0.013 s 0.029 s 0.016 s Mozilla-Javascript 0.001 s 0.018 s 0.017 s Perl 0.002 s 0.021 s 0.019 s Nickle 0.031 s 0.065 s 0.034 s Parrot/recursive 0.014 s 0.056 s 0.042 s Ruby 0.041 s 0.095 s 0.054 s Lua_on_Parrot 0.303 s 1.314 s 1.011 s
Although every scripting language is still at least some 50 times slower than compiled C, interpreters and language VMs in general have been improving steadily over recent years, and Javascript in particular is getting a lot of attention now, with more optimizations in the pipeline from all the major players.
The gap will shrink, guaranteed.
[Sorry about the Code posting mode, it's not very easy on the eyes... but Slashdot no longer accepts the <pre> tag in HTML mode for displaying formatted output.]
You're right about the "underfeatured" angle, but that's only visible now because of the ever-rising prices of these devices.
What happened in netbooks to cause this is that Asus did a "bait and switch" on consumers. (And of course all other manufacturers followed.)
The original Eee PC was announced at a very low price, almost competing with the increased price of the OLPC, but ever since then the company has been adding features and raising model prices to the point where this product series is no longer the same thing, but is now a low-end laptop instead. And when compared against a low-end laptop, it's clearly underfeatured.
This is inevitable, because the whole point of netbooks was long battery life, low weight and low prices, and you can't have any of those when extra features suck power, add weight and raise cost!
So yes, this whole market niche is in danger of becoming a dodo, but it's entirely due to crummy marketting / product design moving the price point upwards instead of downwards. At $150 or $120, lack of features becomes irrelevant or even a bonus, since it extends battery life.
From my perspective (I've used and bought Suns for decades), Sun is heading full tilt down a path towards the cliff edge. What they're doing is 100% wrong.
Their interest in open source is fine, but it's not a good strategy for business profits unless they want to become another RedHat providing Linux services and support --- a role in which they would be coming up from behind very slowly. It's a role for which they're not cut out, because their reputation in the open source world is marginal at best because they've always been half-hearted about it.
Sun needs to stop thinking of open source as a business strategy, because for them it's merely what's referred to as a hygiene factor in social sciences --- it's not a benefit when it's exercised, but it's a severe demerit when it's not exercised. In other words, yes, be fully open with software, but not because it's a source of profits, but because you'll be shunned without it.
For profits, capitalize on what you have: awesome hardware and competent Professional Services. Invest more in your CPU division with its great Niagara processors, so that when Intel is offering 16-core CPUs and talking about 64, you can be offering 256-core and talking about 4096. Take on nVidia and AMD on the SIMD front, so that while they're toying with noddy graphics cards for GPGPU, you can offer 64k SIMD stream processors far more tightly coupled to your host cores.
We've recently entered the Age of Multicore, and you (Sun) have a good reputation in that area, and you know how to build good hardware (nobody has ever marked you down for that). Why not capitalize on your existing skills, resources and reputation in this area, instead of chasing rainbows?
There's a danger with the word "open", as it carries such good connotations for us here. However, just because we like "open" doesn't mean that whatever is coming from Google is going to match our expectations, let alone our desires.
You have to remember that Google is a very different beast to RedHat for example. Google's business M.O. is like that of no other corporation, so it's hard to draw comparisons, but nobody would ever suggest that they are "an open source company" (not even close), despite the many open source projects that they host, promote, support, and of course use. At best, they are a "somewhat open source friendly" company, and undoubtedly they also know that being open is becoming increasingly important, so they're responding to that.
Note that Google's main products are all closed, and most of them possess a few annoying "features" that would have been fixed by now if they were an open source company --- I'm sure that we can all point to some "feature/bugs" that irritate us personally.:-) In fact they're not even very good at responding to popular feature requests (almost apathetic), so true wide-scale openness is really a long way off for Google.
Given the above, I think that some caution is required when interpreting highly non-specific words spoken by Google execs. While we would like them to become massively more open, their openness may not come in a form that the FOSS community would find particularly attractive. In particular, any thought that Google is going to cede huge amounts of control over to open source developers is almost certainly sheer fantasy.
He said that the web doesn't exist, not the Internet.
It wasn't good logic though, for either of them. Both the web and the Internet are only loosely interconnected, the web through HTML links and the Internet through linking routers and other devices.
They can both be seen as a mass of separated islands (ie. websites and LANs, respectively), but in both cases the virtual system that the links create ensures that the web and Internet do actually exist in practice, as long as the links work when required. And they do.
The most interesting thing by far for the next polar (or near-polar) Mars lander to do would be to watch the winter ice caps develop around it.
After all, every single Mars mission mentions the possibility of life and water in the history of Mars, so that does seem to be important to us. Yet, there are millions of tons of water ice at the Martian poles, and given the amazing adaptability of life to extreme conditions on Earth, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility for life (of some sort) to exist at the poles of Mars despite the absence of water in liquid phase.
It's worth noting that liquid water isn't needed *permanently* for life to survive, but only occasionally for certain processes to proceed. There's not much water in space after all, yet some fairly high-level organisms manage to survive the hard vacuum for extended periods of time. Life seems to be amazingly resilient when needed.
But a polar Mars mission designed to survive and operate throughout the winter would need atomic power, and that's the big problem. Are we likely to see public anti-nuclear sentiment loosen up a little anytime in the next 20 years, to allow a series of such probes to be built and launched?
Perhaps someone needs to take a step back and think about the principles involved. Then they might see that there isn't actually a problem at all, other than that their desktop is not really doing much.
The "can't find my document" issue is just a proper consequence of data classification and access control, and what he sees is evidence that it is doing its job well.
If every document were stored in the same directory, you could never fail to find a file if you knew its name. That strategy would create other problems instead though, like collisions and selection overload, which is why we use a hierarchical storage space to segregate the files. In effect, this gives each plain file a hierarchical classification prefix that is directly supported by the operating system.
The fact that you can no longer access a file if you know only its name but not its "classification prefix" (in other words its parent directory pathname) is not a problem, it's an essential part of managing the data space and avoiding a file glut nightmare. Without it, our esteemed Mr Shuttleworth would instead be complaining about collisions and data overload.
Is there a solution? Of course there is: multiple views. (And one could improve good old-fashioned searching as well.)
In Unix, Linux, *BSD and similar systems, the name of a file is just a link to its actual contents, and you can have any number of names linked to the same file content. This can be used very easily to provide quick file access for forgetful desktop users through auxiliary views.
Just create a new "view" directory (say "LAST_USED_FILES_VIEW") in a standard place, and use links to populate it with names derived from the filenames used by applications. The desktop just needs to ensure that newly created or opened files get an additional link to them placed there, which can be done automatically. A desktop application could then file away its documents in sensibly-chosen hierarchical storage space, yet its application files would also be immediately accessible within "LAST_USED_FILES_VIEW" (and it wouldn't be a desktop fiction, but the real thing at O/S level). This is quite easy to implement with the help of the inotify(7) mechanism to keep the desktop informed of changes in the filestore, for example.
Not being able to find a file doesn't mean that there is a problem with applications nor that operating systems are inadequate. It merely indicates that your desktop hasn't done enough to make items easy to find.
"Sorry sir, you are on a terrorist watch list. You can't fly with us today. Next!..."
The catchall is deliberate.
By offering only "limited options for classifying entries" as per TFA, this allows them to call any ol' tom, dick and harry who doesn't tow the line a "terrorist", using this utterly trivial technicality as an excuse. Limiting the options increases their power to control people by expanding terror labelling to the general community, and reduces their accountability for it.
It's almost as if they were getting ready to suppress a community uprising or something. I just can't imagine why that would be necessary...
The reason why EVE is lagging is because the architecture of a sol is not distributed at all. Each sol is a monolithic process.
Any given IBM blade can run any number of sols, but the fewest it can run is 1, not a fraction of 1. Second Life has this same problem, a non-scalable architecture in which several sims can be run on one CPU, but the fewest you can ever run is 1, and it's not possible for N different CPUs to carry the load of 1 sim. That places a limit on the activity within any 1 given sim, or sol here.
When any given sol can be run across N blades in EVE, then we'll have a decent scalable architecture, and not before.
Improving the I/O speed with Infiniband will help, sure, but it's not the answer to non-scalability of sol activity. That can only be done by total redesign of the sol process to make it distributable over an arbitrary number of blades.
Either open-source the Skype engine or abandon it.
Skype devices could still be manufactured only under license, so their profit stream wouldn't dry up. No doubt it's all trademarked and copyrighted and patented to hell and back by the company anyway, so open-sourcing wouldn't be giving free reign to the competition.
But if they want to retain a trusting customer base, the only option now is to open-source the Skype engine and protocol, otherwise it's end of game.
I'll certainly be letting all my friends know about this. While they may be discussing only granny's Xmas presents or their boyfriends' vital measurements, it's no business of the snoop agencies to hear it.
Meanwhile, it's not as if VoIP didn't have any open alternatives. There is no need to support a vendor that cannot be trusted.
Science consists of two halves which combine in the "scientific method":
(i) A mathematical modelling half in which proofs are in the domain of logic and mathematics. The (entirely theoretical) models can be proven mathematically to be self-consistent or not, subject only to the constraints of Godel and the state of the art in mathematics; and
(ii) An empirical half in which predictive hypotheses generated from the above mathematical models are tested against physical reality through observation and measurement. Under specific conditions related to error bounds and other statistical properties, these measurement can unambiguously declare a hypothesis to be unsupported by observation, and therefore its associated model to be declared invalid.
When a model of Science has yielded a very large number of tested hypotheses but no observation has yet managed to invalidate it, it is then tentatively elevated to the exhalted heights of a Theory of science. But it can still fall at any time.
So, speaking with more precision than we tend to get in these ID threads (:-) :
1) YEC is not a model of mathematics nor logic and therefore cannot be demonstrated to be logically self-consistent; 2) YEC is not a model of mathematics nor logic and therefore cannot yield a logically linked hypothesis for testing; 3) Since YEC doesn't even have a hypothesis to test, it doesn't even reach the rank of a failed model, let alone a tentative one.
I think the whole thing can be summarized as just "funny". Why is the human race even discussing this still in 2008?
Your advice equates to "Broaden your background", so I support that thoroughly.
The most depressing thing about this whole thread for me is that nobody else (yet) has brought up computer science or software engineering. By implication, they're not relevant to a career in programming, and that's a disastrous indictment of the nature of this occupation currently.
The person in TFA will be getting some training in programming, probably focussed on gaining proficiency in one specific language, but will have no theoretical background whatsoever. And this is supposed to yield a good developer?
Computer programming is an engineering discipline, with a very extensive background and a deep theoretical foundation in CompSci. What that person will become, at best, is a hack mechanic, since he will have none of the foundation to become an engineer.
This is precisely why "bridges are falling down" all around us in software, daily.
Programming is currently in its deepest Dark Ages, and most practitioners don't even realize it. That person should at least read some simple background on algorithms.
In a real democracy, a "legal war" would be one in which the population has voted for it. Full stop. (Some countries even have a framework for it, emergency decisions by referendum, but rarely used.)
Of course, reality doesn't work that way in most places because people in government are always self-centred control freaks, and the whole idea of "democracy" (even representative democracy) is in reality just a fraud, in the west at least.
Of course, governments make up other definitions of "legal war" to suit themselves, but if you accept those then you're just buying into the agendas set by your masters, who in a real democracy would of course be your servants.
Shortly thereafter, the Industry Standard again turned its attention to Deletionpedia, reporting that deletion of the article in Wikipedia about Deletionpedia was itself under discussion, suggesting that the article was not being considered for deletion based on "insignificance of the site" but rather "due to perceived criticism of Wikipedia itself."
If the highlighted phrase is true, then it indicates that the high priests at Wikipedia are totally beyond control and beyond the pale.
There is no more important function in a community encyclopedia than self-criticism. It is part of its foundation, a self-referential examination of its integrity and transparency.
I am really hoping that that line from TFA is false, and that the discussion about deleting the Deletionpedia page from Wikipedia is unambiguously declared invalid by WP editors.
What science knows today stays. They just might know more tomorrow to make their theories even more detailed and accurate.
That's not really true, strictly speaking, because "more detailed and accurate" sounds like mere refinement, and that's not really what happens. More accurately, tomorrow's theories are broadly consistent with those of yesterday (they have to be, because they need to support the same observations), but the underlying models can be utterly different from today to tomorrow.
For example, there is no inherent continuity between classical physics and quantum mechanics, beyond the fact that they both predict similar behaviour in their area of overlap. The underlying models are utterly different. The new one isn't just a refinement of the older one, but a fundamental change in underlying concept, and they just converge to yield roughly the same predictions.
This happens in all areas of science to different degrees, but especially in physics and chemistry where we don't *really* know the reality down at that level, but instead we merely talk about the behaviour of the elements in our model de jour, ie. the atoms and electrons and quarks and so on. We don't even know what mass is, so where there used to be empty space we conjure up quantum vacuum and Higgs bosons etc. The predictions we make remain broadly similar, but the models are not.
In other words, our models do not express continuity of understanding at all. That's under continuous change, not refinement. What does get more and more refined is the fit that our changing models make with our observations of reality. The correlations between theories and measurements get ever better, but "what science knows today" definitely "goes away tomorrow", because that knowledge is expressed through our models.
And that's what makes Science so interesting. If all we did was to refine our understanding rather than totally revise our theoretical models, Science would become more boring with each passing year, but there's no chance of that happening at all.:-)
Although Pandora is often seen as the little guy fighting the big bad music industry, Pandora just repackages the output of that industry, so it's feeding the monster and helping to ensure that the money-grabbing evil continues. If we want the monster to die, we need to stop feeding it. Pandora doesn't want the monster to die, it merely wants it to eat less.
So it's make-your-mind-up time, if you want to influence the evolution of music.
If you really want a sea change to occur, try listening to Creative Commons music instead of commercial output. The immense repositories at Jamendo (11,955 albums) and at Archive.org (53,088 concerts, 310,685 recordings) should be enough to keep you busy for the rest of your life, but there's lots more out there.
It's hard work, because there is nobody around to tell you what you must like, as the industry has been doing to us through radio and TV all these years. The diversity and sheer scale of Commons music is astounding, and exploring its uncharted vastness isn't quick nor easy, but ultimately your voyage will be very rewarding. Mine has been.
But you have to take that first step yourself, nobody can help you, short of handing you a few links.
The future really is in your hands. If everyone were to stop buying label output today, the Big 4 and the RIAA would disappear as soon as their coffers dry up, and the small labels would adapt perfectly happily because they're agile. You *can* drop your favourite chart bands if you try --- the discomfort doesn't last long, because there is no shortage of very high quality replacements. The Commons is vast, and the creativity amazing.
His WWW would never have blossomed the way it did under such Big Brother conditions, and we'd all be a lot poorer for it. The control freaks just don't understand the benefit of emergent systems, and that freedom has a price. Sure, we suffer a few annoyances and some real crimes, but it's still infinitely better than everybody living in a police state.
I speak as a member of "IT" as well, so I'm accusing myself here too, fairly and squarely.
I don't know (nor care) about the non-technical professions, but the standard of professionalism in Computing is a lot lower than in Engineering.
I can say that with confidence after a long career spanning both Electrical/Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, both in academia (PhD, postdoc, lecturer) and in industry. It took me the better part of a decade in the computing industry to realize that I had been (unwittingly) deluding my Software Engineering students when I taught them "Do it like this, or you will be laughed at as amateurs when you get out into industry." The sad fact is that 98% of computing in industry is utterly amateurish, as I eventually discovered for myself. Even huge, "properly" managed projects are in practice just hacks like all the rest, but with better documentation and QA/testing.
While computing is my current love, and bread provider, I recognize that we're at the stage of gazing at chicken entrails in this discipline. It's a bit sad, although I still love it. But when they say "Bridges would fall down every other day if they were built like we build software", they are 100% right. Looking at it from the perspective of my old engineering days, it's a bit distressing, but that's how it is.
We're still in the early days of Computing, and to call it a professional discipline is stretching the definition rather severely.
Joe Bloggs is getting entirely the wrong idea about String Theory, owing to the misunderstood statement that "we can't test it".
String Theory is perfectly testable. It's just not testable by us RIGHT NOW, at the energy levels we can currently generate. (Although the LHC might provide some very early hints in that area.) In due course though, we'll be testing it alright, fully, and having a good laugh if it's way off target, or dishing out Nobel Prizes if it matches scientific observations.
This contrasts markedly with alleged "explanations" such as done by religion, which are not testable ever, even if we live a billion years.
Expect several lectures on the nature of filters, how digital cameras really work and how photographs aren't 'real science'. But don't expect to be satisfied with any other explanation.
I won't fall for the bait, since you know that all digital camera sensors (even Foveon X3 with its integrated filtering) are actually monochrome, and it takes extra processing to generate a colour image.:-)
However, it *IS* worth pointing out that Phoenix's panoramic camera sensor resolution is very low compared to the consumer cameras of today (just 1024x1024 each). While this is by design and comes bundled with goodies like stereo imaging, full panning in horizontal and vertical, and 12-position colour wheel, nevertheless the fundamental 1-megapixel restriction exists and does affect images taken. Single shots from Phoenix are never going to rival a $50 compact camera of today in resolution and hence in immediate impact. But of course Phoenix isn't restricted to single shots.:-)
As Mars-Earth communication bandwidths increase, we'll be able to afford higher resolution single frames in the future.
Try Sins of a Solar Empire, one of the best games of the year that has no copy protection.
Is having no copy protection enough to call a game "DRM-free" though? (I'm just asking, wondering which kind of digital restrictions come under "DRM" and which don't.)
For example, Guild Wars has no copy protection, and you can trivially copy it onto all your machines and use any of them at any time, with any GW account (your own, a friends's, or anyone else's), without any re-registration nor any re-enabling required. However, ONCE ONLY you have to register each campaign upgrade you buy as belonging to a specific account (by entering a long key), and it's tied to that account, not to your box.
So does this upgrade-activation by key fall under "DRM", or is the game "DRM-free" because there is no copy protection?
It's just a matter of definition, but we should all be using the same definition for the discussion about "DRM-free games" to make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's problem isn't really Vista, the bit of software.
Their major problem is their lack of understanding that good operating systems can't be created overnight and chucked on the shelves like white goods items under pressure of Sales and Marketing ... not even in a 3-year "overnight". Operating systems evolve into being good, and once they're getting close to being usable then you don't chuck them out just because you want new product in the catalog. Not if you're half sane.
And MS also seems to misunderstand the longevity of operating systems, the attachment that users form with them, people's reluctance to change, and the simple fact that something that works doesn't need to be replaced ... software doesn't wear out, nor obsoleted given incremental upgrades. The "all change" paradigm that seems to hold in MS is in total disregard of commonsense.
And lastly, MS has a real problem in understanding that people buy operating systems to serve their own needs, not to serve the needs of 3rd party content providers --- that's a severe requirements mismatch.
Vista also has technical issues of course, but MS has plenty of manpower to fix those. What I'm not sure it does have the ability to fix is its totally backwards perception of what they should be doing in this area.
Qualifications aren't just for show, they mean that you've extended your knowledge in the area and that someone has verified it.
There's a lot more to computing than writing a few programs that do something useful without crashing. That's important too, but it barely figures on the wider scale of merit of a computing professional.
What a CompSci education gives you is tons and tons of theory and context: theory so that you have a large portfolio of logically sound techniques upon which to draw instead of reinventing them and doing so badly, and context so that you understand why you're doing something, why you should not do something else, and how your solutions fit in with all the other methods and systems in the subject area.
Without an education in this field, you won't even know when you're making a mistake, owing to lack of theory and context. Your boss may like you because you'll always be saying "Yes" (until everything falls apart), but nobody else will appreciate it, not even you yourself in time. And you'll feel dumb every time that you come into contact with other computer people, as well as getting a bad rep because you can't hide ignorance in tech.
Just don't.
Take the time and make the effort to get yourself a proper CompSci education. You won't regret it.
You're right, but people picked you apart as your first line was too broad. Try this instead:
There is no sustainable market for selling a commodity with a zero marginal cost of production.
When the marginal (ie. incremental) cost per unit is zero, this directly implies that no proprietary resources or secret sauce were required in its production, which in turn implies that effectively anyone can produce the commodity. Thus, while there is always a market initially for something new, there can be no sustainable market for an item with a zero marginal cost since it will eventually spread into public production. The answer for producers isn't to panic, but just to keep designing new items.
The same will apply to physical goods one day when they can be assembled with atomic precision from the elements around us.
I like your observation that community is the key ingredient that gives an MMO longevity. It makes me wonder if an open-source MMO might one day not only rival the current big commercial ones, but even become far more long lived than any of them because its community would last forever, and it could never get shut down, regardless of perceived success or failure.
The easy attack on that idea is simply that "server farms cost a ton of money", but MMOs don't have to be programmed to require centralized server farms, and many FPS communities are more than happy to put up a server for public use anyway. There's no reason why such machines couldn't be confederated to underpin a community MMO.
What's more, there are MMO models that require very little in the way of centralized computing power. For example, Guild Wars has a heavily instanced framework, so that once in a fighting zone, there can never be more than 8 people playing together, which requires very little power from server systems --- in fact an instanced MMO programmed like that could even be run in P2P mode while in the instance, merely sending occasional game state updates to a central point, a very low centralized power requirement.
Yet, you still interact with vast numbers of people when in town or in your guild or when messaging across the world, so the MMO feeling is there despite the server requirements being not much different to those of an IRC server. Technically, this approach is definitely possible for a community-run MMO without any commercial backing.
We have all the open-source components for making both the client and server sides of a community MMO, and community-developed online games are announced occasionally, but we don't really hear of any success stories. Is it that none of them are any good, or just that the commercial ones get all the attention?
It sure would be nice to put one's investment of game time into a community-developed and community-run MMO instead of into a commercial one, both to avoid draining the wallet and to ensure that your favourite world exists forever. There must be huge merit to having such a community game world, if only it could be got off the ground in a flexible enough form.
Javascripts vary in quality, but the latest ones are pretty fast: for example, Javascript V8 (the Javascript from Google's Chrome browser project) is nearly as fast as Lua, which is the fastest widely used scripting language at the moment.
/dev/null
... but Slashdot no longer accepts the <pre> tag in HTML mode for displaying formatted output.]
Here are some basic timings I made just to give a rough feel for the relative speeds (don't read too much into them). The first entry provides the timings for C, which is obviously compiled, purely as a basis for comparison with the scripting languages. Note that the times for C are in milliseconds, while the rest are in seconds, lower is better:
Execution times for recursive F/P factorial(n) to
Langs @ 2008 Times: n=1 n=170 difference
C 0.000 ms 0.090 ms 0.090 ms
Lua 0.001 s 0.005 s 0.004 s
Parrot-opt/iterative 0.013 s 0.018 s 0.005 s
Parrot/iterative 0.014 s 0.019 s 0.005 s
V8-Javascript 0.007 s 0.013 s 0.006 s
Ocaml 0.022 s 0.029 s 0.007 s
Python 0.013 s 0.027 s 0.014 s
Parrot-opt/recursive 0.013 s 0.029 s 0.016 s
Mozilla-Javascript 0.001 s 0.018 s 0.017 s
Perl 0.002 s 0.021 s 0.019 s
Nickle 0.031 s 0.065 s 0.034 s
Parrot/recursive 0.014 s 0.056 s 0.042 s
Ruby 0.041 s 0.095 s 0.054 s
Lua_on_Parrot 0.303 s 1.314 s 1.011 s
Although every scripting language is still at least some 50 times slower than compiled C, interpreters and language VMs in general have been improving steadily over recent years, and Javascript in particular is getting a lot of attention now, with more optimizations in the pipeline from all the major players.
The gap will shrink, guaranteed.
[Sorry about the Code posting mode, it's not very easy on the eyes
You're right about the "underfeatured" angle, but that's only visible now because of the ever-rising prices of these devices.
What happened in netbooks to cause this is that Asus did a "bait and switch" on consumers. (And of course all other manufacturers followed.)
The original Eee PC was announced at a very low price, almost competing with the increased price of the OLPC, but ever since then the company has been adding features and raising model prices to the point where this product series is no longer the same thing, but is now a low-end laptop instead. And when compared against a low-end laptop, it's clearly underfeatured.
This is inevitable, because the whole point of netbooks was long battery life, low weight and low prices, and you can't have any of those when extra features suck power, add weight and raise cost!
So yes, this whole market niche is in danger of becoming a dodo, but it's entirely due to crummy marketting / product design moving the price point upwards instead of downwards. At $150 or $120, lack of features becomes irrelevant or even a bonus, since it extends battery life.
From my perspective (I've used and bought Suns for decades), Sun is heading full tilt down a path towards the cliff edge. What they're doing is 100% wrong.
Their interest in open source is fine, but it's not a good strategy for business profits unless they want to become another RedHat providing Linux services and support --- a role in which they would be coming up from behind very slowly. It's a role for which they're not cut out, because their reputation in the open source world is marginal at best because they've always been half-hearted about it.
Sun needs to stop thinking of open source as a business strategy, because for them it's merely what's referred to as a hygiene factor in social sciences --- it's not a benefit when it's exercised, but it's a severe demerit when it's not exercised. In other words, yes, be fully open with software, but not because it's a source of profits, but because you'll be shunned without it.
For profits, capitalize on what you have: awesome hardware and competent Professional Services. Invest more in your CPU division with its great Niagara processors, so that when Intel is offering 16-core CPUs and talking about 64, you can be offering 256-core and talking about 4096. Take on nVidia and AMD on the SIMD front, so that while they're toying with noddy graphics cards for GPGPU, you can offer 64k SIMD stream processors far more tightly coupled to your host cores.
We've recently entered the Age of Multicore, and you (Sun) have a good reputation in that area, and you know how to build good hardware (nobody has ever marked you down for that). Why not capitalize on your existing skills, resources and reputation in this area, instead of chasing rainbows?
There's a danger with the word "open", as it carries such good connotations for us here. However, just because we like "open" doesn't mean that whatever is coming from Google is going to match our expectations, let alone our desires.
You have to remember that Google is a very different beast to RedHat for example. Google's business M.O. is like that of no other corporation, so it's hard to draw comparisons, but nobody would ever suggest that they are "an open source company" (not even close), despite the many open source projects that they host, promote, support, and of course use. At best, they are a "somewhat open source friendly" company, and undoubtedly they also know that being open is becoming increasingly important, so they're responding to that.
Note that Google's main products are all closed, and most of them possess a few annoying "features" that would have been fixed by now if they were an open source company --- I'm sure that we can all point to some "feature/bugs" that irritate us personally. :-) In fact they're not even very good at responding to popular feature requests (almost apathetic), so true wide-scale openness is really a long way off for Google.
Given the above, I think that some caution is required when interpreting highly non-specific words spoken by Google execs. While we would like them to become massively more open, their openness may not come in a form that the FOSS community would find particularly attractive. In particular, any thought that Google is going to cede huge amounts of control over to open source developers is almost certainly sheer fantasy.
He said that the web doesn't exist, not the Internet.
It wasn't good logic though, for either of them. Both the web and the Internet are only loosely interconnected, the web through HTML links and the Internet through linking routers and other devices.
They can both be seen as a mass of separated islands (ie. websites and LANs, respectively), but in both cases the virtual system that the links create ensures that the web and Internet do actually exist in practice, as long as the links work when required. And they do.
The most interesting thing by far for the next polar (or near-polar) Mars lander to do would be to watch the winter ice caps develop around it.
After all, every single Mars mission mentions the possibility of life and water in the history of Mars, so that does seem to be important to us. Yet, there are millions of tons of water ice at the Martian poles, and given the amazing adaptability of life to extreme conditions on Earth, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility for life (of some sort) to exist at the poles of Mars despite the absence of water in liquid phase.
It's worth noting that liquid water isn't needed *permanently* for life to survive, but only occasionally for certain processes to proceed. There's not much water in space after all, yet some fairly high-level organisms manage to survive the hard vacuum for extended periods of time. Life seems to be amazingly resilient when needed.
But a polar Mars mission designed to survive and operate throughout the winter would need atomic power, and that's the big problem. Are we likely to see public anti-nuclear sentiment loosen up a little anytime in the next 20 years, to allow a series of such probes to be built and launched?
Perhaps someone needs to take a step back and think about the principles involved. Then they might see that there isn't actually a problem at all, other than that their desktop is not really doing much.
The "can't find my document" issue is just a proper consequence of data classification and access control, and what he sees is evidence that it is doing its job well.
If every document were stored in the same directory, you could never fail to find a file if you knew its name. That strategy would create other problems instead though, like collisions and selection overload, which is why we use a hierarchical storage space to segregate the files. In effect, this gives each plain file a hierarchical classification prefix that is directly supported by the operating system.
The fact that you can no longer access a file if you know only its name but not its "classification prefix" (in other words its parent directory pathname) is not a problem, it's an essential part of managing the data space and avoiding a file glut nightmare. Without it, our esteemed Mr Shuttleworth would instead be complaining about collisions and data overload.
Is there a solution? Of course there is: multiple views. (And one could improve good old-fashioned searching as well.)
In Unix, Linux, *BSD and similar systems, the name of a file is just a link to its actual contents, and you can have any number of names linked to the same file content. This can be used very easily to provide quick file access for forgetful desktop users through auxiliary views.
Just create a new "view" directory (say "LAST_USED_FILES_VIEW") in a standard place, and use links to populate it with names derived from the filenames used by applications. The desktop just needs to ensure that newly created or opened files get an additional link to them placed there, which can be done automatically. A desktop application could then file away its documents in sensibly-chosen hierarchical storage space, yet its application files would also be immediately accessible within "LAST_USED_FILES_VIEW" (and it wouldn't be a desktop fiction, but the real thing at O/S level). This is quite easy to implement with the help of the inotify(7) mechanism to keep the desktop informed of changes in the filestore, for example.
Not being able to find a file doesn't mean that there is a problem with applications nor that operating systems are inadequate. It merely indicates that your desktop hasn't done enough to make items easy to find.
The catchall is deliberate.
By offering only "limited options for classifying entries" as per TFA, this allows them to call any ol' tom, dick and harry who doesn't tow the line a "terrorist", using this utterly trivial technicality as an excuse. Limiting the options increases their power to control people by expanding terror labelling to the general community, and reduces their accountability for it.
It's almost as if they were getting ready to suppress a community uprising or something. I just can't imagine why that would be necessary ...
The reason why EVE is lagging is because the architecture of a sol is not distributed at all. Each sol is a monolithic process.
Any given IBM blade can run any number of sols, but the fewest it can run is 1, not a fraction of 1. Second Life has this same problem, a non-scalable architecture in which several sims can be run on one CPU, but the fewest you can ever run is 1, and it's not possible for N different CPUs to carry the load of 1 sim. That places a limit on the activity within any 1 given sim, or sol here.
When any given sol can be run across N blades in EVE, then we'll have a decent scalable architecture, and not before.
Improving the I/O speed with Infiniband will help, sure, but it's not the answer to non-scalability of sol activity. That can only be done by total redesign of the sol process to make it distributable over an arbitrary number of blades.
Either open-source the Skype engine or abandon it.
Skype devices could still be manufactured only under license, so their profit stream wouldn't dry up. No doubt it's all trademarked and copyrighted and patented to hell and back by the company anyway, so open-sourcing wouldn't be giving free reign to the competition.
But if they want to retain a trusting customer base, the only option now is to open-source the Skype engine and protocol, otherwise it's end of game.
I'll certainly be letting all my friends know about this. While they may be discussing only granny's Xmas presents or their boyfriends' vital measurements, it's no business of the snoop agencies to hear it.
Meanwhile, it's not as if VoIP didn't have any open alternatives. There is no need to support a vendor that cannot be trusted.
The correct way to phrase it is as follows:
Science consists of two halves which combine in the "scientific method":
(i) A mathematical modelling half in which proofs are in the domain of logic and mathematics. The (entirely theoretical) models can be proven mathematically to be self-consistent or not, subject only to the constraints of Godel and the state of the art in mathematics; and
(ii) An empirical half in which predictive hypotheses generated from the above mathematical models are tested against physical reality through observation and measurement. Under specific conditions related to error bounds and other statistical properties, these measurement can unambiguously declare a hypothesis to be unsupported by observation, and therefore its associated model to be declared invalid.
When a model of Science has yielded a very large number of tested hypotheses but no observation has yet managed to invalidate it, it is then tentatively elevated to the exhalted heights of a Theory of science. But it can still fall at any time.
So, speaking with more precision than we tend to get in these ID threads (:-) :
1) YEC is not a model of mathematics nor logic and therefore cannot be demonstrated to be logically self-consistent;
2) YEC is not a model of mathematics nor logic and therefore cannot yield a logically linked hypothesis for testing;
3) Since YEC doesn't even have a hypothesis to test, it doesn't even reach the rank of a failed model, let alone a tentative one.
I think the whole thing can be summarized as just "funny". Why is the human race even discussing this still in 2008?
Your advice equates to "Broaden your background", so I support that thoroughly.
The most depressing thing about this whole thread for me is that nobody else (yet) has brought up computer science or software engineering. By implication, they're not relevant to a career in programming, and that's a disastrous indictment of the nature of this occupation currently.
The person in TFA will be getting some training in programming, probably focussed on gaining proficiency in one specific language, but will have no theoretical background whatsoever. And this is supposed to yield a good developer?
Computer programming is an engineering discipline, with a very extensive background and a deep theoretical foundation in CompSci. What that person will become, at best, is a hack mechanic, since he will have none of the foundation to become an engineer.
This is precisely why "bridges are falling down" all around us in software, daily.
Programming is currently in its deepest Dark Ages, and most practitioners don't even realize it. That person should at least read some simple background on algorithms.
In a real democracy, a "legal war" would be one in which the population has voted for it. Full stop. (Some countries even have a framework for it, emergency decisions by referendum, but rarely used.)
Of course, reality doesn't work that way in most places because people in government are always self-centred control freaks, and the whole idea of "democracy" (even representative democracy) is in reality just a fraud, in the west at least.
Of course, governments make up other definitions of "legal war" to suit themselves, but if you accept those then you're just buying into the agendas set by your masters, who in a real democracy would of course be your servants.
If the highlighted phrase is true, then it indicates that the high priests at Wikipedia are totally beyond control and beyond the pale.
There is no more important function in a community encyclopedia than self-criticism. It is part of its foundation, a self-referential examination of its integrity and transparency.
I am really hoping that that line from TFA is false, and that the discussion about deleting the Deletionpedia page from Wikipedia is unambiguously declared invalid by WP editors.
That's not really true, strictly speaking, because "more detailed and accurate" sounds like mere refinement, and that's not really what happens. More accurately, tomorrow's theories are broadly consistent with those of yesterday (they have to be, because they need to support the same observations), but the underlying models can be utterly different from today to tomorrow.
For example, there is no inherent continuity between classical physics and quantum mechanics, beyond the fact that they both predict similar behaviour in their area of overlap. The underlying models are utterly different. The new one isn't just a refinement of the older one, but a fundamental change in underlying concept, and they just converge to yield roughly the same predictions.
This happens in all areas of science to different degrees, but especially in physics and chemistry where we don't *really* know the reality down at that level, but instead we merely talk about the behaviour of the elements in our model de jour, ie. the atoms and electrons and quarks and so on. We don't even know what mass is, so where there used to be empty space we conjure up quantum vacuum and Higgs bosons etc. The predictions we make remain broadly similar, but the models are not.
In other words, our models do not express continuity of understanding at all. That's under continuous change, not refinement. What does get more and more refined is the fit that our changing models make with our observations of reality. The correlations between theories and measurements get ever better, but "what science knows today" definitely "goes away tomorrow", because that knowledge is expressed through our models.
And that's what makes Science so interesting. If all we did was to refine our understanding rather than totally revise our theoretical models, Science would become more boring with each passing year, but there's no chance of that happening at all. :-)
Although Pandora is often seen as the little guy fighting the big bad music industry, Pandora just repackages the output of that industry, so it's feeding the monster and helping to ensure that the money-grabbing evil continues. If we want the monster to die, we need to stop feeding it. Pandora doesn't want the monster to die, it merely wants it to eat less.
So it's make-your-mind-up time, if you want to influence the evolution of music.
If you really want a sea change to occur, try listening to Creative Commons music instead of commercial output. The immense repositories at Jamendo (11,955 albums) and at Archive.org (53,088 concerts, 310,685 recordings) should be enough to keep you busy for the rest of your life, but there's lots more out there.
It's hard work, because there is nobody around to tell you what you must like, as the industry has been doing to us through radio and TV all these years. The diversity and sheer scale of Commons music is astounding, and exploring its uncharted vastness isn't quick nor easy, but ultimately your voyage will be very rewarding. Mine has been.
But you have to take that first step yourself, nobody can help you, short of handing you a few links.
The future really is in your hands. If everyone were to stop buying label output today, the Big 4 and the RIAA would disappear as soon as their coffers dry up, and the small labels would adapt perfectly happily because they're agile. You *can* drop your favourite chart bands if you try --- the discomfort doesn't last long, because there is no shortage of very high quality replacements. The Commons is vast, and the creativity amazing.
The future really is in your hands.
I suggest that Tim uses his influence and backing from the new foundation to fight this latest China-inspired UN move to provide IP traceback and lose anonymity across the net.
His WWW would never have blossomed the way it did under such Big Brother conditions, and we'd all be a lot poorer for it. The control freaks just don't understand the benefit of emergent systems, and that freedom has a price. Sure, we suffer a few annoyances and some real crimes, but it's still infinitely better than everybody living in a police state.
I speak as a member of "IT" as well, so I'm accusing myself here too, fairly and squarely.
I don't know (nor care) about the non-technical professions, but the standard of professionalism in Computing is a lot lower than in Engineering.
I can say that with confidence after a long career spanning both Electrical/Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, both in academia (PhD, postdoc, lecturer) and in industry. It took me the better part of a decade in the computing industry to realize that I had been (unwittingly) deluding my Software Engineering students when I taught them "Do it like this, or you will be laughed at as amateurs when you get out into industry." The sad fact is that 98% of computing in industry is utterly amateurish, as I eventually discovered for myself. Even huge, "properly" managed projects are in practice just hacks like all the rest, but with better documentation and QA/testing.
While computing is my current love, and bread provider, I recognize that we're at the stage of gazing at chicken entrails in this discipline. It's a bit sad, although I still love it. But when they say "Bridges would fall down every other day if they were built like we build software", they are 100% right. Looking at it from the perspective of my old engineering days, it's a bit distressing, but that's how it is.
We're still in the early days of Computing, and to call it a professional discipline is stretching the definition rather severely.
Joe Bloggs is getting entirely the wrong idea about String Theory, owing to the misunderstood statement that "we can't test it".
String Theory is perfectly testable. It's just not testable by us RIGHT NOW, at the energy levels we can currently generate. (Although the LHC might provide some very early hints in that area.) In due course though, we'll be testing it alright, fully, and having a good laugh if it's way off target, or dishing out Nobel Prizes if it matches scientific observations.
This contrasts markedly with alleged "explanations" such as done by religion, which are not testable ever, even if we live a billion years.
I won't fall for the bait, since you know that all digital camera sensors (even Foveon X3 with its integrated filtering) are actually monochrome, and it takes extra processing to generate a colour image. :-)
However, it *IS* worth pointing out that Phoenix's panoramic camera sensor resolution is very low compared to the consumer cameras of today (just 1024x1024 each). While this is by design and comes bundled with goodies like stereo imaging, full panning in horizontal and vertical, and 12-position colour wheel, nevertheless the fundamental 1-megapixel restriction exists and does affect images taken. Single shots from Phoenix are never going to rival a $50 compact camera of today in resolution and hence in immediate impact. But of course Phoenix isn't restricted to single shots. :-)
As Mars-Earth communication bandwidths increase, we'll be able to afford higher resolution single frames in the future.
Is having no copy protection enough to call a game "DRM-free" though? (I'm just asking, wondering which kind of digital restrictions come under "DRM" and which don't.)
For example, Guild Wars has no copy protection, and you can trivially copy it onto all your machines and use any of them at any time, with any GW account (your own, a friends's, or anyone else's), without any re-registration nor any re-enabling required. However, ONCE ONLY you have to register each campaign upgrade you buy as belonging to a specific account (by entering a long key), and it's tied to that account, not to your box.
So does this upgrade-activation by key fall under "DRM", or is the game "DRM-free" because there is no copy protection?
It's just a matter of definition, but we should all be using the same definition for the discussion about "DRM-free games" to make sense.