Here's the URL for ABCNews.com's feedback page. They even provide a handy "Factual Error" category for his repetition of the "Red Hat == Linux" fallacy and his subsequent bad math.
What's the over/under on how many days before the boot-licking mea culpa column appears?
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Actually, if you look farther down the article*, you'll see a picture of a Memory Stick Duo with a little plastic extender/adapter that allows it to fit regular Memory Stick slots. Sony is at least compatible with itself, even if they think the rest of the industry can goto Hell.
*: which will be rather difficult, considering that the Slashdot Effect has now kicked in. I was going to quote the article, but....
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Guessing the domain of a sports team can be quite an adventure. pirates.com? pittsburghpirates.com? Try pirateball.com.
I think the leagues should get involved, and allow each team to have a subdomain of the league's domain, in the form team.league.com. Thus, the unintuitive pirateball.com becomes pirates.majorleaguebaseball.com. Want to see the Vancouver Grizzlies?* grizzlies.nba.com. Want to prevent namespace collisions with sacred texts? corinthians.insert Brazilian league here.com.
*: Seek professional help, or make the drive to Seattle to see the Sonics.:-)
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
There is no other explanation for 80+ MPG cars existing but not being marketed or alternative fuel vehicals existing but not being properly marketed, if at all.
Sure there is: Marginal cost to the consumer.
The US government and the Big 2.5 (Ford, General Motors, and the German subsidiary formerly known as Chrysler) have been collaborating on something called PNGV, the Partnership for the Next Generation of Vehicles (or something like that). The goal is for all three companies to eventually develop production cars that can acheive 80MPG, while matching the performance and capabilities of existing popular cars. The baseline models were, IIRC, Ford Taurus, Chevy Lumina, and Chrysler Concorde.
Check out this page on DaimlerChrysler's Dodge ESX3 concept. It's the third generation of their PNGV concept, which has typically previewed the next generation Dodge Intrepid. The first ESX was introduced in 1996. It would have retailed for about US$80,000, 4x the cost of an Intrepid. The '98 ESX2 lowered the price to about $US35,000, and the new ESX3 lowers it even more, to about US$27,500. Not unreasonable compared to the market in general, but that's still around US$7,000 more than a typical 2000 Intrepid.
Collectively, we Americans will not pay significantly more for environment-friendly options on our cars, unless there's a real fuel crisis to force us to. Nor will we sacrifice power for efficiency. Hybrids like Honda Insight or Toyota Prius are sold at a loss, in the hopes that they'll make enough inroads to justify future development. They make good city cars, but we won't buy city cars if we think we'll ever need to pull on to a freeway. We want to have our cake and eat it too.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Once again, I find myself wading through screen after screen of breathlessly eloquent Katzian hyperbole, only to find that I've summarized it in my head to a simple sentence or two that should be patently obvious to anyone with enough brain cells to type Slashdot's URL.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
This is a rather hazy, IANAL, train of thought, but bear with me.
Say I walk into my local Giant Eagle, and find on the shelf shrink-wrapped twin packs of Head & Shoulders shampoo and conditioner. It is two products from the same company, packaged as a unit by that company. Giant Eagle has to sell it as one unit, because that's the way it entered their inventory. Also, when you see a family-size or bulk package labled "Contents not labled for individual sale", they often mean it. Just this morning, for example, I went to the closet for a new bar of soap. It was from a bulk pack, and the bar's wrapper was simple white, with the soap's name written in diagonal stripes. No UPC barcode, no FDA-required ingredients list. Those were all printed on the shrinkwrap.
Compare this to buying a new PC. Intel mobo, Kingston memory, Creative sound card, Seagate hard drive, Sony DVD-ROM, ATI video card, Microsoft operating system, etc, etc, etc. The company you buy the PC from is a Value Added Reseller (VAR). The Added Value comes from assembling and configuring all those components so you have a pleasant out-of-box experience. But the keyword in VAR is Reseller. They buy the components, then resell them to you in completed PC form. This appears to be the key point in the German court's decision. By selling to a VAR, Microsoft gives up right of authorship on their products, and the VAR can resell the products any way they please, with or without a new PC.
The good news is that the spirit of US law supports the German court decision, and there is legal precedent in US cases. The bad news is that the US court system has become increasingly overwhelmed and confused about copyright law.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
We appear to have reached a point of diminishing returns in widget research. Most of the "new" ideas coming out now are just old ideas adapted to different shapes or sizes of real estate.
And of course, it's gotta be skinnable!:-) Although, to be serious, this may be where the cutting edge is. Now that we've worked out the architectural and navigational features, in theory and (more or less) practice, it's time to let the user give everything an element of personal style. Granted, people can come up with some pretty ugly, hard-to-read, hard-to-navigate themes. But eventually, the cream rises to the top, and you can find themes that achieve a critical mass of style and substance.
Where the action is right now is, IMHO, organizing personal information. It's the one thing "personal" computers have circled and circled around, without ever landing. There's projects and documents and appointments and to-do lists and contacts and deadlines and dates and bookmarks and playlists and news and sports and weather and stock portfolios and spreadsheets and pictures and savegames and bills and oil changes and e-this and mobile that and (gasp, gasp) they're all over the place! There's lots of objects, representing volumes of information, but very little glue to hold it all together in some form that one can quickly and easily manage.
That's where the next frontier is: Automating and organizing the seemingly infinite amount of stuff that orbits around us in our daily lives. We've spent years building up the parts of it all (office suites, PIMs, file managers, etc.). Now, we need to pull all that together in a way that allows the user to track it all, but also in a way that conforms to the user's ideas, skills, work habits, and goals. Not a simple task, or else we'd all be doing it now.
But we've made a start. If you look at portals, digital dashboards, and the occasional leaked screenshot of Microsoft prototypes, like Neptune and Whistler, you can see some of that come together. And Microsoft's blue-sky plans for.NET may be the ultimate evolution*. But I'm more interested in the intermediate steps that would be of more immediate value. Never mind.NET. Let's start building.DESK!
* After two name changes, and three versions for Microsoft to get it right.:-)
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
AFAIK, MSN sits on TCP/IP and Internet Explorer. Using IE for presentation may be "secret sauce" design, but the network layer is the same published APIs everyone else uses. And even if MSN uses its own protocols, who cares? Bandwidth is still the limiting factor for consumer public network access, so it's protocol vs. protocol, may the best man win.
AOL chose their own proprietary network code that sinks its hooks way too deep into 9x's net architecture. AOL decided to implement their system using APIs and infrastructure known to be incompatible between the 9x and NT implementations of Win32. Never mind undoc'd APIs. AOL can't get the doc'd ones right.
Besides, that layer of AOL-specific net BS is what caused so many users to lose their existing ISP settings when they installed AOL 5. So while AOL can try to justify their actions as "fighting back" against Microsoft, consumers still end up getting screwed. MS.Wrong + AOL.Wrong != Right
Note: Just to set the record straight, I think MSN and AOL both suck. AOL just sucks more.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
CASE IN POINT: Even while the court was coming to a verdict, Msft released Windows 2000 - suddenly AOL is broken but MSN works great!!
Here's a news flash for you: AOL 5.0 is not compatible with any variant of Windows NT, including Windows 2000! I just checked AOL.com, and as far as I can tell, the only AOL client that looks like it will work with NT is, get this, AOL 4.0 for Windows 3.1.
Here's why. Have you ever seen what sort of sinister things an AOL install does to Windows 9x? AOL 5.0 is so self-important, it seems to think it needs its own virtual network adapter, instead of opening a TCP port. Or better yet, a COM port, which is what older AOL clients did before Steve Case thought he was bigger than Jesus. The whole thing is heavily dependent on 9x's specific network components. (And by calling them network components, I'm paying Microsoft a far greater compliment than they deserve.) AOL 5.0 isn't compatible with 2000 in the same way 9x video drivers aren't compatible with 2000.
Fact is, AOL doesn't make a client that gets along with NT/2000. No grand conspiracies, just poor software.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I am a Windows-head, and I'm not going to tell you to go with the flow.
It sounds like there's a lot of stupidity and/or ignorance in the upper ranks, which is bad enough. But your mindless MS Drone boss is aggresively stupid, which is even worse. You're not likely to find any more satisfaction in your job, unless someone has an epiphany. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that epiphany will come in the form of a fertilizer/turbine collision.
If I were you, I'd get the resume in order, and go find a job someplace where intelligence and open-mindedness haven't been downsized.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Actually, the fixed(var){} function locks the memory away from GC. unsafe defines the security of the method interface. If I'm reading the example right.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Better intrinsic types: C# has unsigned types, 64-bit integers, and a decimal type that doesn't appear to be a glorified Variant.
Everything is an object: 'nuff said.
Un/Boxing: Next best thing to parameterized types, I guess.
unsafe: Pointers in VB are as close as one can come to a nervous breakdown in code.
Single-block property functions: Much better than separate blocks for Property Let and Property Get.
Indexers: A nice break from VB's rigid object.method() syntax.
interface: VB's use of Class Modules to do the same thing is a hideous kludge. An explicit interface declaration has been sorely needed in VB for some time.
Inheritance: Sure, it's only single inheritance, but you can inherit and implement at the same time, so it's a little more flexible.
Versioning: VB's other nervous breakdown generator.
Reflection: A huge hole in VB.
The bad:
Oddball.WriteLine syntax: What's wrong with %s? Will {0} be formatable?
3.ToString(): I kid you not. Since literals are instances of objects, you can call methods on them. How illegible will code end up being with this in the hands of bad coders?
unsafe: How bad will Microsoft botch the implementation of this?
Event handlers: A bit of culture shock compared to VB's simple event syntax. Looks like it should be more powerful in the long run.
struct: Looks like worthless syntax sugar. They even admit they're less-than-optimal.
Same damn "cast" syntax for interfaces: Dim bar As CBar: Dim foo As IFoo: Set foo = bar. What's wrong with (IFoo)bar?
No parameterized types or templates.
No threads (apparently).
Visual Basic 7: Enough new features are coming in VB7 to make much of this academic.
If Microsoft allows C# to be used interchangebly with VB behind forms, this might just be compelling enough to succeed. Of course, if Microsoft fscks up the "standard" to their advantage, it's doomed to fail. My, what interesting times we live in.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Nowadays, COM's overhead is swallowed up by the OS anyway, so it's not as killer as it looks. And I certainly hope that MS optimizes internal or private classes out of COM and into the runtime.
And declarations are resolved symbolically.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
C# forces you to encapsulate any pointer-manipulative code in a function explicitly declared with the unsafe keyword. I'm not sure about exactly how it works (damn firewall cached 27K of the lang. ref., then died), but I certainly hope that unsafe functions must be, or are implicitly, private. From there, it's just a matter of the compiler and/or runtime enforcing safety, just like Java.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
The docs appear to be rather vague on this point. According to the "Variables and Parameters" section of the Introduction doc, the following code will not work, because x has no value:
int x; int y = 42; int z = x + y;
This is the desired behaviour, for you, me, and everybody. The statement that variables are automatically initialized directly contradicts this.
Maybe the "environment" will initialize at run-time, for languages that expect something other than garbage, while the C# language will enforce the assignment-before-use rule upon compilation.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
VB was slow back in the 2.0-3.0 days. But now, VB is fast enough for just about anything. Still not as fast as well written C++, but fast enough.
And by "well written C++", I mean, well, "anything but MFC." Try MFC for a day, and you'll run screaming. It's awful. Truly awful. It adds far too much complexity and bloat to a project, and I'm pretty sure it alone is the cause of 90% of "DLL Hell" problems in Windows.
Of course, straight Win32 API in C will win, unless you're unhinged enough to try Win32 API in assembler. But it will take longer. Much longer.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Take it from a Visual Basic programmer. The models are too far apart. Theoretically, if VB can compile to its own p-code, it can compile to Java bytecode. But the resulting executable would simply blow goats. VB always was, and always will be, a Windows-only development tool. This has allowed MS to highly optimize VB for Windows. It's not meant to be portable.
Besides, Microsoft is leaning more toward C++ with VB. Starting with 5.0, VB added native x86 support by compiling down to VC++'s object format, then using VC++'s linker to produce the.EXE. Visual Studio 7.0 will put Basic, C++, and InterDev in the same IDE, with mixed projects. And improvements to the actual language will give VB7 real objects, with inheritance, polymorphism, structured exception handling, and more.
Here's the final nail in the coffin. I just came back from VBITS, and Microsoft's VStudio product manager was there. He delivered Monday's keynote, which was a preview of VB7, and moderated a Q&A that night. When asked about the future of "Java" at Microsoft, he said this:
J++ is in limbo right now.
Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft (which is, admit it, nothing more than a pissing contest) has J++ tied up in knots right now. Microsoft can't make a move in the Java space without conceding to Sun, which billg's pride won't let him do. Therefore, C#. All of the language benefits of Java, without Scott McNeally's MS-wannabe oneupsmanship.
Of course, all of this talk about C# is speculation right now. I'm eager to see the details, especially considering that there was not a word about C# at VBITS. Plenty of SOAP (which is a very Good Thing, BTW), but no C#.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I think the movie in question was Blue Skies. Jessica Lange was nominated for Best Actress before anyone could point out that the movie came from HBO.
That's probably AMPAS' motivation for this statement. They consider the Internet to be a broadcast media, just like TV, and they don't want to see something get nominated, then have to take the nomination away because it hit Atom Films first.
Anyone for an "academy" of indie films? Something that could stay true to the spirit of independence, while allowing filmmakers to take full advantage of all available outlets, whether they be traditional film, Internet studios, or cable outlets like Independent Film Channel or SciFi's "Exposure" series.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
While I can imagine someone setting out to make a worse class library than MFC, I'd like to think that nobody would.
Whatever Metacreations/Ghost Effects/Curious Labs/whoever used for Poser 4. Downright unfriendly. Turns a decent Mac app into an almost unusable Windows app.
If you're doing Windows programming and you're not using MFC, then the suits complain....for most shops Windows programming means MFC programming just like it means using Microsoft C++ or Visual BASIC
The suits probably don't care about the FC part, just the M. Nobody ever got fired for buying [insert monopolist here]. You can easily push for VB and win. Kids fresh out of college can produce MFC-quality apps in VB. In the hands of competent programmers, VB can produce better apps than MFC. If you can find a smart VB programmer, you probably won't even need C++.
Oh, and if you can't win, get your CV in order, and quick; you are working for morons.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Has Anonymous considered submitting this to the Times? It is an opinion section, so you can use the testimony to support your opinion that Mr. Valenti is a less-than-authoritative source.*
*: <rude>Jack is full of $#1t, clue-impaired, or both.</rude>
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I remember a similar program for the Sinclair ZX81 that used a similar technique. It combined Apple's black and white pixel position tricks with flicker just slightly out of phase with the TV's refresh rate to create color. On an NTSC set, it was more like shades of gray with a slight tint. Word was it looked better on PAL. Either way, it needed big 16x16 px blocks to work, so the color bleed was far worse than a Spectrum's 8x8 px blocks. (IIRC. And by px, I mean real pixels, not the big 1/4-character pseudo-pixels the ZX81 used.)
Wow, this is the second Slashdot story in the past week to remind me of those halcyon American-using-Sinclair days. Probably explains the Police kick I've been on lately. Ahh, the '80s!:-)
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
A Best Brains production?
on
Open Grill
·
· Score: 1
Ya know, the more I listen to Cowboy Neal, the more I think he's really Tom Servo. That would explain why there are no pictures on Slashdot. How's Rob gonna explain the talking gumball machine?
BTW, the Thunderbird didn't start to really suck until the '70s. I just hope old Fords aren't a trend for AMD. Granada, Maverick, and LTD II are not what I would consider confidence-inspiring. Maybe Cordoba. Yeah, it's a Chrysler name, but then they could get Ricardo Montalban to sing the praises of it's "rich Corinthian L2 cache."
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Microsoft wasn't the 800 lb. gorilla we know and loathe today. Since the 8-bit systems were closed (essentially game consoles with keyboards and external floppy drives), they couldn't Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. They had to compete on merit.
It wasn't much better than the existing systems of the day. Z80 CPU, 64-128KB memory, 5 1/4" floppy.* All in an era when the Commodore 64, Atari 800, and (in Europe, at least) Sinclair Spectrum had super-saturated the market to the point that their own upscale models (C-128, 1200XL, Speccy 128K+3) weren't selling well. Microsoft showed up at the party, but couldn't get past the velvet rope. And anyone who wanted a serious computer bought an Apple II, anyway.
The arrival of 16-bit computing. Anyone who wanted something better than 8-bits jumped right over MSX to those new 68000-based systems. Compared to Amiga's flashy graphics and sound, ST's MIDI ports and low price, and the nascent Mac-inspired desktop publishing boom, MSX looked like a toy.
The confusing hardware. Microsoft defined a baseline MSX system, and individual licensees could extend their hardware with special brand-specific features. The only system I remember is a Yahama that featured, above and beyond MSX spec, an enhanced sound chip, two MIDI ports, and two mixing-board-like sliders to the left of the keyboard. BTW, that sound chip was also used on the ST, and the Timex-Sinclair 2068! (This I remember because I had one. Those were the days. But I digress....) This may not seem like a big deal in this era of device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, and PC parts banks. But MSX had none of these, leaving the burden of supporting the (potentially) wide variety of special hardware features on the developers. Developers who were used to the stable, game-console-like hardware specs of the current crop of 8-bit systems.
Ultimately, MSX was seen as too much, too late. By the time anyone paid it any attention, the industry had un-converged those 8-bit systems back into personal systems (Apple IIgs, Amiga, ST, and ultimately Mac and x86 PC) and game consoles (Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and the occasional also-ran).
*: My recollection of the hardware specs is hazy at best.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I think they were using the word "standard" metaphorically, not architecturally. Then again, this is Sony, creators of the Betamax, DAT, and MiniDisc "standards".:-)
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Good thing I have my trusty, well-worn NT 4 Workstation Resource Kit nearby.
I admit that I had a knee-jerk reaction against a "registry" - sorry, it's a conditioned fear and pain response:) A central configuration system would be neat, but....
Remember one of the fundamentals of good UI design: segregation of data and presentation. An ideal situation would be a Microsoft Management Console-like app for Linux, with a plugin architecture for wrapping various text config files. Power users can still edit text files to their hearts' content without ever leaving an xterm (or launching X, for that matter), while NT admins will be more easily converted by the comfort of an easy-to-use GUI.
Does Windows NT ship with a JFS?
Microsoft describes NTFS as a "recoverable" FS, using transaction logging with cached lazy-commits. Checkpoints in the transaction log determine what is committed or rolled back in the event of a crash. Which, of course, never happens.:-)
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the URL for ABCNews.com's feedback page. They even provide a handy "Factual Error" category for his repetition of the "Red Hat == Linux" fallacy and his subsequent bad math.
What's the over/under on how many days before the boot-licking mea culpa column appears?
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Actually, if you look farther down the article*, you'll see a picture of a Memory Stick Duo with a little plastic extender/adapter that allows it to fit regular Memory Stick slots. Sony is at least compatible with itself, even if they think the rest of the industry can goto Hell.
*: which will be rather difficult, considering that the Slashdot Effect has now kicked in. I was going to quote the article, but....
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Guessing the domain of a sports team can be quite an adventure. pirates.com? pittsburghpirates.com? Try pirateball.com.
:-)
I think the leagues should get involved, and allow each team to have a subdomain of the league's domain, in the form team.league.com. Thus, the unintuitive pirateball.com becomes pirates.majorleaguebaseball.com. Want to see the Vancouver Grizzlies?* grizzlies.nba.com. Want to prevent namespace collisions with sacred texts? corinthians.insert Brazilian league here.com.
*: Seek professional help, or make the drive to Seattle to see the Sonics.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
The US government and the Big 2.5 (Ford, General Motors, and the German subsidiary formerly known as Chrysler) have been collaborating on something called PNGV, the Partnership for the Next Generation of Vehicles (or something like that). The goal is for all three companies to eventually develop production cars that can acheive 80MPG, while matching the performance and capabilities of existing popular cars. The baseline models were, IIRC, Ford Taurus, Chevy Lumina, and Chrysler Concorde.
Check out this page on DaimlerChrysler's Dodge ESX3 concept. It's the third generation of their PNGV concept, which has typically previewed the next generation Dodge Intrepid. The first ESX was introduced in 1996. It would have retailed for about US$80,000, 4x the cost of an Intrepid. The '98 ESX2 lowered the price to about $US35,000, and the new ESX3 lowers it even more, to about US$27,500. Not unreasonable compared to the market in general, but that's still around US$7,000 more than a typical 2000 Intrepid.
Collectively, we Americans will not pay significantly more for environment-friendly options on our cars, unless there's a real fuel crisis to force us to. Nor will we sacrifice power for efficiency. Hybrids like Honda Insight or Toyota Prius are sold at a loss, in the hopes that they'll make enough inroads to justify future development. They make good city cars, but we won't buy city cars if we think we'll ever need to pull on to a freeway. We want to have our cake and eat it too.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Stop the press! There's a generation gap!
Once again, I find myself wading through screen after screen of breathlessly eloquent Katzian hyperbole, only to find that I've summarized it in my head to a simple sentence or two that should be patently obvious to anyone with enough brain cells to type Slashdot's URL.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
This is a rather hazy, IANAL, train of thought, but bear with me.
Say I walk into my local Giant Eagle, and find on the shelf shrink-wrapped twin packs of Head & Shoulders shampoo and conditioner. It is two products from the same company, packaged as a unit by that company. Giant Eagle has to sell it as one unit, because that's the way it entered their inventory. Also, when you see a family-size or bulk package labled "Contents not labled for individual sale", they often mean it. Just this morning, for example, I went to the closet for a new bar of soap. It was from a bulk pack, and the bar's wrapper was simple white, with the soap's name written in diagonal stripes. No UPC barcode, no FDA-required ingredients list. Those were all printed on the shrinkwrap.
Compare this to buying a new PC. Intel mobo, Kingston memory, Creative sound card, Seagate hard drive, Sony DVD-ROM, ATI video card, Microsoft operating system, etc, etc, etc. The company you buy the PC from is a Value Added Reseller (VAR). The Added Value comes from assembling and configuring all those components so you have a pleasant out-of-box experience. But the keyword in VAR is Reseller. They buy the components, then resell them to you in completed PC form. This appears to be the key point in the German court's decision. By selling to a VAR, Microsoft gives up right of authorship on their products, and the VAR can resell the products any way they please, with or without a new PC.
The good news is that the spirit of US law supports the German court decision, and there is legal precedent in US cases. The bad news is that the US court system has become increasingly overwhelmed and confused about copyright law.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
We appear to have reached a point of diminishing returns in widget research. Most of the "new" ideas coming out now are just old ideas adapted to different shapes or sizes of real estate.
:-) Although, to be serious, this may be where the cutting edge is. Now that we've worked out the architectural and navigational features, in theory and (more or less) practice, it's time to let the user give everything an element of personal style. Granted, people can come up with some pretty ugly, hard-to-read, hard-to-navigate themes. But eventually, the cream rises to the top, and you can find themes that achieve a critical mass of style and substance.
.NET may be the ultimate evolution*. But I'm more interested in the intermediate steps that would be of more immediate value. Never mind .NET. Let's start building .DESK!
:-)
And of course, it's gotta be skinnable!
Where the action is right now is, IMHO, organizing personal information . It's the one thing "personal" computers have circled and circled around, without ever landing. There's projects and documents and appointments and to-do lists and contacts and deadlines and dates and bookmarks and playlists and news and sports and weather and stock portfolios and spreadsheets and pictures and savegames and bills and oil changes and e-this and mobile that and (gasp, gasp) they're all over the place! There's lots of objects, representing volumes of information, but very little glue to hold it all together in some form that one can quickly and easily manage.
That's where the next frontier is: Automating and organizing the seemingly infinite amount of stuff that orbits around us in our daily lives. We've spent years building up the parts of it all (office suites, PIMs, file managers, etc.). Now, we need to pull all that together in a way that allows the user to track it all, but also in a way that conforms to the user's ideas, skills, work habits, and goals. Not a simple task, or else we'd all be doing it now.
But we've made a start. If you look at portals, digital dashboards, and the occasional leaked screenshot of Microsoft prototypes, like Neptune and Whistler, you can see some of that come together. And Microsoft's blue-sky plans for
* After two name changes, and three versions for Microsoft to get it right.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
AFAIK, MSN sits on TCP/IP and Internet Explorer. Using IE for presentation may be "secret sauce" design, but the network layer is the same published APIs everyone else uses. And even if MSN uses its own protocols, who cares? Bandwidth is still the limiting factor for consumer public network access, so it's protocol vs. protocol, may the best man win.
AOL chose their own proprietary network code that sinks its hooks way too deep into 9x's net architecture. AOL decided to implement their system using APIs and infrastructure known to be incompatible between the 9x and NT implementations of Win32. Never mind undoc'd APIs. AOL can't get the doc'd ones right.
Besides, that layer of AOL-specific net BS is what caused so many users to lose their existing ISP settings when they installed AOL 5. So while AOL can try to justify their actions as "fighting back" against Microsoft, consumers still end up getting screwed. MS.Wrong + AOL.Wrong != Right
Note: Just to set the record straight, I think MSN and AOL both suck. AOL just sucks more.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Here's why. Have you ever seen what sort of sinister things an AOL install does to Windows 9x? AOL 5.0 is so self-important, it seems to think it needs its own virtual network adapter, instead of opening a TCP port. Or better yet, a COM port, which is what older AOL clients did before Steve Case thought he was bigger than Jesus. The whole thing is heavily dependent on 9x's specific network components. (And by calling them network components, I'm paying Microsoft a far greater compliment than they deserve.) AOL 5.0 isn't compatible with 2000 in the same way 9x video drivers aren't compatible with 2000.
Fact is, AOL doesn't make a client that gets along with NT/2000. No grand conspiracies, just poor software.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I am a Windows-head, and I'm not going to tell you to go with the flow.
It sounds like there's a lot of stupidity and/or ignorance in the upper ranks, which is bad enough. But your mindless MS Drone boss is aggresively stupid, which is even worse. You're not likely to find any more satisfaction in your job, unless someone has an epiphany. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that epiphany will come in the form of a fertilizer/turbine collision.
If I were you, I'd get the resume in order, and go find a job someplace where intelligence and open-mindedness haven't been downsized.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Actually, the fixed(var){} function locks the memory away from GC. unsafe defines the security of the method interface. If I'm reading the example right.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
- Better intrinsic types: C# has unsigned types, 64-bit integers, and a decimal type that doesn't appear to be a glorified Variant.
- Everything is an object: 'nuff said.
- Un/Boxing: Next best thing to parameterized types, I guess.
- unsafe: Pointers in VB are as close as one can come to a nervous breakdown in code.
- Single-block property functions: Much better than separate blocks for Property Let and Property Get.
- Indexers: A nice break from VB's rigid object.method() syntax.
- interface: VB's use of Class Modules to do the same thing is a hideous kludge. An explicit interface declaration has been sorely needed in VB for some time.
- Inheritance: Sure, it's only single inheritance, but you can inherit and implement at the same time, so it's a little more flexible.
- Versioning: VB's other nervous breakdown generator.
- Reflection: A huge hole in VB.
The bad:- Oddball
.WriteLine syntax: What's wrong with %s? Will {0} be formatable? - 3.ToString(): I kid you not. Since literals are instances of objects, you can call methods on them. How illegible will code end up being with this in the hands of bad coders?
- unsafe: How bad will Microsoft botch the implementation of this?
- Event handlers: A bit of culture shock compared to VB's simple event syntax. Looks like it should be more powerful in the long run.
- struct: Looks like worthless syntax sugar. They even admit they're less-than-optimal.
- Same damn "cast" syntax for interfaces: Dim bar As CBar: Dim foo As IFoo: Set foo = bar. What's wrong with (IFoo)bar?
- No parameterized types or templates.
- No threads (apparently).
- Visual Basic 7: Enough new features are coming in VB7 to make much of this academic.
If Microsoft allows C# to be used interchangebly with VB behind forms, this might just be compelling enough to succeed. Of course, if Microsoft fscks up the "standard" to their advantage, it's doomed to fail. My, what interesting times we live in.Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Nowadays, COM's overhead is swallowed up by the OS anyway, so it's not as killer as it looks. And I certainly hope that MS optimizes internal or private classes out of COM and into the runtime.
And declarations are resolved symbolically.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
C# forces you to encapsulate any pointer-manipulative code in a function explicitly declared with the unsafe keyword. I'm not sure about exactly how it works (damn firewall cached 27K of the lang. ref., then died), but I certainly hope that unsafe functions must be, or are implicitly, private. From there, it's just a matter of the compiler and/or runtime enforcing safety, just like Java.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
The docs appear to be rather vague on this point. According to the "Variables and Parameters" section of the Introduction doc, the following code will not work, because x has no value:
int x;
int y = 42;
int z = x + y;
This is the desired behaviour, for you, me, and everybody. The statement that variables are automatically initialized directly contradicts this.
Maybe the "environment" will initialize at run-time, for languages that expect something other than garbage, while the C# language will enforce the assignment-before-use rule upon compilation.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
VB was slow back in the 2.0-3.0 days. But now, VB is fast enough for just about anything. Still not as fast as well written C++, but fast enough.
And by "well written C++", I mean, well, "anything but MFC." Try MFC for a day, and you'll run screaming. It's awful. Truly awful. It adds far too much complexity and bloat to a project, and I'm pretty sure it alone is the cause of 90% of "DLL Hell" problems in Windows.
Of course, straight Win32 API in C will win, unless you're unhinged enough to try Win32 API in assembler. But it will take longer. Much longer.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Take it from a Visual Basic programmer. The models are too far apart. Theoretically, if VB can compile to its own p-code, it can compile to Java bytecode. But the resulting executable would simply blow goats. VB always was, and always will be, a Windows-only development tool. This has allowed MS to highly optimize VB for Windows. It's not meant to be portable.
Besides, Microsoft is leaning more toward C++ with VB. Starting with 5.0, VB added native x86 support by compiling down to VC++'s object format, then using VC++'s linker to produce the
Here's the final nail in the coffin. I just came back from VBITS, and Microsoft's VStudio product manager was there. He delivered Monday's keynote, which was a preview of VB7, and moderated a Q&A that night. When asked about the future of "Java" at Microsoft, he said this: Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft (which is, admit it, nothing more than a pissing contest) has J++ tied up in knots right now. Microsoft can't make a move in the Java space without conceding to Sun, which billg's pride won't let him do. Therefore, C#. All of the language benefits of Java, without Scott McNeally's MS-wannabe oneupsmanship.
Of course, all of this talk about C# is speculation right now. I'm eager to see the details, especially considering that there was not a word about C# at VBITS. Plenty of SOAP (which is a very Good Thing, BTW), but no C#.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I think the movie in question was Blue Skies. Jessica Lange was nominated for Best Actress before anyone could point out that the movie came from HBO.
That's probably AMPAS' motivation for this statement. They consider the Internet to be a broadcast media, just like TV, and they don't want to see something get nominated, then have to take the nomination away because it hit Atom Films first.
Anyone for an "academy" of indie films? Something that could stay true to the spirit of independence, while allowing filmmakers to take full advantage of all available outlets, whether they be traditional film, Internet studios, or cable outlets like Independent Film Channel or SciFi's "Exposure" series.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
The suits probably don't care about the FC part, just the M. Nobody ever got fired for buying [insert monopolist here]. You can easily push for VB and win. Kids fresh out of college can produce MFC-quality apps in VB. In the hands of competent programmers, VB can produce better apps than MFC . If you can find a smart VB programmer, you probably won't even need C++.
Oh, and if you can't win, get your CV in order, and quick; you are working for morons.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Has Anonymous considered submitting this to the Times? It is an opinion section, so you can use the testimony to support your opinion that Mr. Valenti is a less-than-authoritative source.*
*: <rude>Jack is full of $#1t, clue-impaired, or both.</rude>
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I remember a similar program for the Sinclair ZX81 that used a similar technique. It combined Apple's black and white pixel position tricks with flicker just slightly out of phase with the TV's refresh rate to create color. On an NTSC set, it was more like shades of gray with a slight tint. Word was it looked better on PAL. Either way, it needed big 16x16 px blocks to work, so the color bleed was far worse than a Spectrum's 8x8 px blocks. (IIRC. And by px, I mean real pixels, not the big 1/4-character pseudo-pixels the ZX81 used.)
:-)
Wow, this is the second Slashdot story in the past week to remind me of those halcyon American-using-Sinclair days. Probably explains the Police kick I've been on lately. Ahh, the '80s!
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Ya know, the more I listen to Cowboy Neal, the more I think he's really Tom Servo. That would explain why there are no pictures on Slashdot. How's Rob gonna explain the talking gumball machine?
BTW, the Thunderbird didn't start to really suck until the '70s. I just hope old Fords aren't a trend for AMD. Granada, Maverick, and LTD II are not what I would consider confidence-inspiring. Maybe Cordoba. Yeah, it's a Chrysler name, but then they could get Ricardo Montalban to sing the praises of it's "rich Corinthian L2 cache."
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
- Microsoft wasn't the 800 lb. gorilla we know and loathe today. Since the 8-bit systems were closed (essentially game consoles with keyboards and external floppy drives), they couldn't Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. They had to compete on merit.
- It wasn't much better than the existing systems of the day. Z80 CPU, 64-128KB memory, 5 1/4" floppy.* All in an era when the Commodore 64, Atari 800, and (in Europe, at least) Sinclair Spectrum had super-saturated the market to the point that their own upscale models (C-128, 1200XL, Speccy 128K+3) weren't selling well. Microsoft showed up at the party, but couldn't get past the velvet rope. And anyone who wanted a serious computer bought an Apple II, anyway.
- The arrival of 16-bit computing. Anyone who wanted something better than 8-bits jumped right over MSX to those new 68000-based systems. Compared to Amiga's flashy graphics and sound, ST's MIDI ports and low price, and the nascent Mac-inspired desktop publishing boom, MSX looked like a toy.
- The confusing hardware. Microsoft defined a baseline MSX system, and individual licensees could extend their hardware with special brand-specific features.
Ultimately, MSX was seen as too much, too late. By the time anyone paid it any attention, the industry had un-converged those 8-bit systems back into personal systems (Apple IIgs, Amiga, ST, and ultimately Mac and x86 PC) and game consoles (Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and the occasional also-ran).The only system I remember is a Yahama that featured, above and beyond MSX spec, an enhanced sound chip, two MIDI ports, and two mixing-board-like sliders to the left of the keyboard. BTW, that sound chip was also used on the ST, and the Timex-Sinclair 2068! (This I remember because I had one. Those were the days. But I digress....)
This may not seem like a big deal in this era of device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, and PC parts banks. But MSX had none of these, leaving the burden of supporting the (potentially) wide variety of special hardware features on the developers. Developers who were used to the stable, game-console-like hardware specs of the current crop of 8-bit systems.
*: My recollection of the hardware specs is hazy at best.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
I think they were using the word "standard" metaphorically, not architecturally. Then again, this is Sony, creators of the Betamax, DAT, and MiniDisc "standards". :-)
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
Microsoft describes NTFS as a "recoverable" FS, using transaction logging with cached lazy-commits. Checkpoints in the transaction log determine what is committed or rolled back in the event of a crash. Which, of course, never happens.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush