Actually, you can use Mono in practice. It's my understanding that, from now on, both Red Hat and Suse (and probably some other distros) will be shipping with software written in C# that runs on Mono installed by default -- for instance, the Beagle desktop search facility.
Can you reliably code everything using Mono that you could code in Java? No. But it is usable.
That said, I just forgot about the whole Windows-only thing because I was thinking in the abstract, i.e. "ability to get a task done," not "ability to get a task done using Linux."
By all accounts, C# is a good language. The worst things anyone has ever said about it are (1) that giving you the "easy out" of unsafe code is going to encourage bad coding practices; and (2) that it's derivative of Java. Well guess what? Java wasn't designed in a vacuum either, and it was designed by a single company just like C# was. We just tend to like Sun better than Microsoft. (Or do we? I lose track from time to time.)
The OP said that he is efficient in C# because of the.Net class library and the development environment, by which I assume he means Visual Studio. Both are things that, if you're an anti-Windows bigot and you never code on that platform, you probably don't have anything meaningful to say about.
I talk to a lot of developers, though, and in my experience even people who aren't pro-Windows bigots, if they're open minded, will say that Visual Studio is one of the best development environments around, if not the best. Sure, if all you want to do is program in Java, then Visual Studio won't help you much. But all that means is that you've made up your mind without trying out your options, so you don't really have anything to contribute to a discussion about the relative merits of developer tools.
If he was really so giving, why doesn't he donate off 20 billion or so?
Sure. And did you give blood last month? You did? Well what the hell is the matter with you? You could have given twice and saved double the amount of people. But you didn't. Because you're selfish. Thanks a lot, jerk.
Translation for the sarcastically impaired: What Bill Gates does with his money is none of your business. People who work in the nonprofit sector don't have your attitude. The idea is to appreciate it when people go out of their way to support your efforts -- not to shit on them for it.
Are you sure that's true? I don't remember ever hearing that Gates has donated anything but cold, hard cash. Microsoft has given donations of Windows licenses, but that's different. When we're talking about all the billions of dollars that Gates has given to charity, we're talking about his personal finances.
It sounds to me like the article summary isn't assuming anything. It's stating the position of the lawsuit. The EFF is suing over illegal wire taps -- that's a fact. What hasn't been decided yet is whether the lawsuit has any merit. We'll need a court hearing to know for sure.
Believe it or not, though, trusting the New York Times, even after a couple of unfortunate incidents, is still pretty good practice. What's scarier is people like you, who can't seem to separate the concepts of somebody explaining facts to you and somebody telling you what to think. Don't worry, dude... nobody at the New York Times is trying to keep you from making up your own opinions. That's not what the news is for.
I think it's great that the X Prize foundation is finally going to get to the bottom of the genetic causes of Asperger's Syndrome. Kudos.
Re:Obesity comes from a simple condition...
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Obesity Contagious?
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Thin people who never exercise and eat whatever they want are just as much of a rarity as fat people who eat responsibly and work out.
And the ones who fit that description may have a secret weapon. Even if they eat whatever they want, a lot probably depends on what they really want to eat.
I'm a basically skinny dude. I, like a lot of people who fit that description, would have described myself as a ravenous garbage disposal for food when I was in my teens and early twenties. But when people say that they usually mean they would eat huge steaks, or giant hamburgers or piles of chicken. They don't usually mean they ate a candy bar and three sodas in between breakfast and lunch, finished off their meals with a pint of ice cream, and had a bag of Cheet-Ohs on hand the whole time they were watching TV. I thought I ate a lot, but when I actually started to observe how a lot of people lived their day-to-day lives, my habits seemed a lot less extreme.
For example: A staple diet of the teenage male might be breakfast cereal. It's fast, it's easy, and it lets you fill up on a big pile of food right away. Certainly went for me anyway. But my parents were sly. We never had Captain Crunch in the house. Thus, to this day my idea of mowing down a giant bowl of cereal means a giant bowl of Grape Nuts, or Spoon-Sized Shredded Wheat -- no sugar, fat-free milk. My parents forced that habit on me and I guess I owe them one for it. Cuz to this day a handful of Captain Crunch seems like dessert to me, not a meal in and of itself.
A lot of people don't think that way. A lot of people's comfort food is a pile of sugar. Mine just happens to be a big pile of fiber-rich whole grain.
My other comfort food is fat. I love me a big pile of bacon. Fat's not good for you, but I'll wager it's better for you than sugar. Fat sticks with you. It metabolizes slowly and it leaves you feeling full. Sugar, on the other hand, gives you a crazy rush and then disippates quickly, leaving you hungry for another "hit." Plus, although I may be game to eat eggs benedict on any given morning, there's one thing I cannot do and that's eat it three meals a day. Certain comfort foods have more limiting factors built in than others.
Re:Obesity comes from a simple condition...
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Obesity Contagious?
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The thin people who never exercise only get to feel morally superior for a while. And then they die.
And the real shame of it is, the same is true for people who exercise.
It's odd that the idea that a virus can contribute to, or even be a causation of obesity is so poorly received here.
Agreed.
I mean, it makes perfect sense to me. Picture you're a virus. You don't live long sitting on a piece of bare metal... you'd much rather have a host body to live in. Nice host body, you can breed a whole family and live in there for generations. So go figure all those sucker viruses out there that actually kill their hosts. I mean, what the fizzle?
I once heard of a virus that knocks out the host's immune system. Sounds smart on the surface, right? No immune system, no antibodies to come getcha. But wouldn't you know it, next thing you know the host comes down with pneumonia and it's game over. That's no way to run a virus either.
Nah, wouldn't it be a lot smarter to be the kind of virus that makes the host eat too much, or the kind of virus that tricks the host into storing away calories as fat instead of burning them up? Wouldn't that be a lot smarter than, oh I don't know, eating holes in the host's brain or making its blood leak out of its skin? Sounds wicked clever if you ask me.
Actually, two modern dual core CPU's and 4GB of RAM is several times more powerful than the DB2 server that powered our company through the Dot Com boom.
Good point. Extremely good point.
I'm wondering to what extent IBM and the others are banking on the due diligence process to win them their licenses... in other words, "I can get a DB2 server with two CPUs and 4GB RAM for const NOTHING or I can pay $SOMETHING and get eight CPUs and infinite RAM and a lifetime contract with Global Services." The company is under no requirement to spend absolutely nothing, so not spending anything starts to sound like poor due diligence. You spend the money and you get the latest greatest whiz-bang machine... which might be great for running the Vista UI but is really more than you need for your Web site.
- New programming framework (WinFX) based on.NET 2.0, WPF, and a host of other new technologies
Whee, *another* new framework. It will also be available on WinXP.
Actually no. It will be partially backported to XP. The full WinFX API will only be available on Vista (per Jim Allchin).
Overall summary of your post: You don't care about the new features in Vista, even though lots and lots of the customers who count will.
Not really related to your post exactly, but I was a little surprised to open a copy of New Scientist a week or two ago and find an editorial penned by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (paid link, summary only), talking about what his administration has been doing about climate control. Schwarzenegger is a Republican who appears to have bought into global warming wholeheartedly. I'm not well-versed enough in his policies to really be able to analyze whether his views are all just smoke and mirrors, but New Scientist is not really all that well read in the United States vs. the UK. As such, I just thought it was interesting.
What the hell are you talking about. That LCD would be a *second screen*. Windows as-is already supports multiple screens, so add a driver for the LCD!
Boy, really not reading much today. The second screen works while the laptop is in suspend. I'm still waiting for you to explain how that's done without OS modifications.
WTF? Last I looked current touchscreens can draw anything they want on it. So I guess they improved the driver, but I suspect they could have put this into XP just as easily.
I'm sure they could have. But whaddaya know... they didn't.
Um, NO! The LCD projector thing is "hardware in the projector to pick up the wireless signal!" Are you claiming that this could not be done with existing Windows if a hardware manufacturer built such a device?
You'd neeed the equivalent of a VNC client in the projector or something, and I don't think that's how they're doing it.
But hey, what's your point, anyway? Even if you're right and every single one of these things could have been done in XP (and I don't agree that they could have been)... they weren't. Hence, a reason to upgrade to Vista.
I mean, Jesus Christ, people... damned if you do and damned if you don't. I tell you about some new features, you say those features should have been in XP. I say but they're going to be in Vista, you tell me Vista has no new features. Talk about a snake chasing its own tail! One thing's for sure: nothing I mentioned is present in either Linux or Mac OS X out of the box. Is that what's really galling you?
It would be almost impossible for us to do, and this is a philosophical decision. We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they'll get rewarded for it. As soon as we give more equal rewards across the board, for a lot of players it will diminish the accomplishment of killing something like Nefarian. My favorite times in the development cycle are when there are encounters that are close to being defeated but have not yet been beaten. It really creates a sense of awe among the players that there is something big and truly dangerous in the world. But it would be very disappointing if the items found on Nefarian were the same thing you could get in your nightly Stratholme run. [Stratholme is a much easier five-person dungeon.]
Sure, a lot of the stuff I mentioned ia hardware improvements. But what you're missing is that it's Microsoft driving the hardware improvements in many cases, and providing the OS software to make them run. That's more than even Apple does, and Apple owns its hardware.
- A secondary LCD screen that offers limited, PDA-like functionality while the main OS is in Suspend. How would you do that with XP? Or Linux? It's not anything you can write in user mode.
- Touch screens are hardware improvements. But Vista will bring software from Microsoft that makes it easier to use your finger to do things that would normally need a mouse. So you take your big old fat finger and stab the screen with it. A little circle appears, kind of like a radar screen, and it figures out which icon you meant to press. Current touchscreens can't do that. Rocket-science innovation? Maybe not, but Vista will have it and previous versions of Windows Tablet PC won't.
- The Power modes thing, I'm still not totally sold on how it works. But I'm interested in seeing it.
- The LCD projector thing -- that's not OS? How would you do that with your current-generation video driver?
Yeah, sure, it's a way to sell people stuff. Allchin said as much. Microsoft is using this as an opportunity to drive profits into the entire PC hardware industry. They want you to want to buy new computers to run this OS and get all the whiz-bang features. But you know what? I'm pretty much sold. If half of it works by ship date it's going to be really cool.
Agreed. I saw Allchin's latest Vista demo and I walked away for it confident that I will, under no uncertain terms, be buying a new laptop in early 2007 to run Vista on.
There's lots of things in Vista that nobody has even started talking about yet, particularly in the area of mobility.
- Laptops will start shipping with a secondary LCD screen that's accessible when the machine is closed. So you will be able to do things like checking the status of your e-mail, IM, stocks, weather, whatever -- without taking the machine out of sleep mode, spinning up the hard drives, etc.
- Tablet PCs will have touch screen functionality in addition to just pen-based input. In addition, the handwriting recognition will "learn" from the files that Vista has indexed on your hard drive -- so if you're a doctor and you're always using words like "phenylketonuria," it will pick that up and recognize those words more readily.
- As I mentioned in another post, Vista will ship with Windows Collaboration, a Groove-like networking feature that lets wireless users quickly form ad-hoc network and share files and even screen real estate in an easy way.
- Microsoft will stop talking about power states like "Standby" and "Hibernate" when Vista ships. There will only be "on" or "off." When you hit the power button on your laptop, essentially it goes into Standby. Meanwhile it will be writing out a Hibernate file. After it figures out you won't be coming back, it sinks into Hibernate mode. But (and I'm a little unclear on this) even then it will still be sending a trickle of power to the memory only to keep the memory alive. The idea is that fast on and off will be a way of life and people won't be rebooting their computers all the time.
- You will be able to associate with a new generation of LCD projectors wirelessly. No more showing up to a meeting and fumbling with monitor cables etc. Just find the projector and route PowerPoint through it.
Outside of all that, WinFX should be a huge deal and there are a number of APIs that will be shipping in or be closely related to Vista that represent really serious innovations. I know the/. crowd hates to hear that word when talking about Microsoft, but I just call it how I see it.
Vista is going to be a major, major upgrade... way more than anybody is giving it credit for yet and enough so that Apple should definitely be looking over its shoulder. Maybe Microsoft still won't be able to offer customers anything to compare with the iPod experience on a Mac, but business users in particular are going to be all over this.
If this is the Windows Collaboration feature they're talking about, then it doesn't automatically connect everybody. You can invite the people you choose. And it's not a peer to peer filesharing network or even a standard Windows network. It's a Groove-like system that allows you to share files and screen real estate among the connected peers. So if you're showing a presentation from your laptop, you can let me connect to your projector using your laptop over the network and show my presentation from my hard drive, using your screen in a sense. I can also push the same file to everybody in the ad hoc "network" so that they can view it. Optionally I can also send them a copy of the file, but I don't have to... that kind of thing. It's actually pretty neat.
With support from any enterprise-class vendor? To my knowledge, neither Red Hat nor Novell ships a distribution for Sparc. Both support IA-64. I don't know if any Linux distribution will run on UltraSparc IV -- maybe you know better. But I kind of doubt any company is going to sink significant dollars into a high-end UltraSparc IV setup for mission-critical computing and then run an unsupported version of Debian on it. It just doesn't make any sense.
As for where you buy the server, sure you can buy an itanium box from many vendors, but the cpu will only come from intel. With sparc the processor and/or the entire system can come from Fujitsu or Sun, you actually have _MORE_ choice if you go with Sparc...
OK, so Sun and Fujitsu sell Sparc systems. And that's more choice than Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, NEC, SGI, and Unisys? Your math is funny.
But hey, you don't have to believe me. I'm just telling you guys what the Itanium Solutions Alliance is selling. If you guys never buy an Itanium system as long as you live, it's no skin off my nose.
It's all over the media, during late night shows, in movies, in TV shows. How Asian leads are there in any show or movie here?
Would Americans be willing to watch a movie about Asians in an Asian language that doesn't deal with Kung Fu? Chinese people are much more open-minded when it comes to watching Americans on the screen. Why don't you guys fix the racist culture in your country first before complaining about human rights? It's as if you want to complain about other cultures and places so you can feel superior.
You're trying to sound like you're from some other country but I'm willing to bet you live in the United States right now and have for most of your formative years. How do I know? Because only an American would equate human rights abuses in China with the "injustice" of not being able to get a starring role on a TV show.
Say you have a very expensive carpet in your house and you want people to take their shoes off when entering. Google is taking its shoes off, but some crowd outside jeering, protesting Google because it respects your rules. WTF!
It's a nice analogy but unfortunately we're not talking about carpets here, we're talking about people.
It's more like you have a very expensive carpet in your house, so you lock your children into small cages so they won't soil the carpet. When your children complain about this, you beat them. Google comes over and takes its shoes off, and as it's doing so, a little hand pushes a note out from between the bars in one of the cages. You see the note and your face turns bright red. Google, so as not to shame you in your own house, throws the note in the trash.
Google is a business, a business with shareholders who demand results, results which include expanding into other markets via legal means.
Sure, if you subscribe to an ideology that exalts the amoral corporation above all other societal concerns. There's nothing in any corporate charter that says a company has to expand into global markets. There's lots of corporations that never do. Google can stay home and cater to American customers if it wants. Or, if it wanted to, it could do business with foreign governments on the condition that those business deals wouldn't compromise its corporate ethics.
Even if, as you say, it isn't the responsibility of Google to affect change on the government of China, that doesn't mean Google shouldn't act based on a Western standard of morality and ethics. It's kind of like saying you'd never be a vegetarian because the meat industry is so huge that your decision not to buy meat would never have an impact on it. True; if destroying the meat industry were your goal, that would be a pretty futile way to do it. If, on the other hand, you wanted to have personal integrity and act out of the conviction of your own ethics, then becoming a vegetarian (if that's what you believe in) makes perfect sense.
And you could go even further and say, if Google won't put pressure on the Chinese government to change its ways, then who will? Multinational corporations are among the most powerful societal forces in the world today -- some would say much more powerful than governments. Maybe we shouldn't sit idly by and accept the notion that the ideal corporation is an aloof, amoral money-machine. Maybe it would be better if corporations started acting like responsible citizens of a global village and based their decisions on the ethical standards of their shareholders?
Presumably there are few Google shareholders who, if asked, would say they are actually in favor of the Chinese stand on human rights. If you're going to tell me that there isn't so much as a chance in hell that the majority of those shareholders might actually favor using the influence of their money to persuade China to modify its policies... well, then I'd say you are a very cynical person. I'd say it's very possible. Maybe nobody has put the question to them yet, because the kneejerk policy is just to act how corporations always act: Get the money and fuck the ethics.
Something smells fishy to me. $10 billion is alot of money for a marketing campaign.
You misunderstand the nature of the investment. $10 billion is the amount of money currently on the table from all of the members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance combined, in terms of commitments to produce Itanium hardware, software, and support options. Probably some fraction of that amount will be spent on marketing, but most of it is going to be spent on R&D and manufacturing.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you reliably code everything using Mono that you could code in Java? No. But it is usable.
That said, I just forgot about the whole Windows-only thing because I was thinking in the abstract, i.e. "ability to get a task done," not "ability to get a task done using Linux."
If your own personal experience isn't a valid basis for forming your own opinion, then what is? Slashdot consensus?
Laughable? How so?
.Net class library and the development environment, by which I assume he means Visual Studio. Both are things that, if you're an anti-Windows bigot and you never code on that platform, you probably don't have anything meaningful to say about.
By all accounts, C# is a good language. The worst things anyone has ever said about it are (1) that giving you the "easy out" of unsafe code is going to encourage bad coding practices; and (2) that it's derivative of Java. Well guess what? Java wasn't designed in a vacuum either, and it was designed by a single company just like C# was. We just tend to like Sun better than Microsoft. (Or do we? I lose track from time to time.)
The OP said that he is efficient in C# because of the
I talk to a lot of developers, though, and in my experience even people who aren't pro-Windows bigots, if they're open minded, will say that Visual Studio is one of the best development environments around, if not the best. Sure, if all you want to do is program in Java, then Visual Studio won't help you much. But all that means is that you've made up your mind without trying out your options, so you don't really have anything to contribute to a discussion about the relative merits of developer tools.
Translation for the sarcastically impaired: What Bill Gates does with his money is none of your business. People who work in the nonprofit sector don't have your attitude. The idea is to appreciate it when people go out of their way to support your efforts -- not to shit on them for it.
Are you sure that's true? I don't remember ever hearing that Gates has donated anything but cold, hard cash. Microsoft has given donations of Windows licenses, but that's different. When we're talking about all the billions of dollars that Gates has given to charity, we're talking about his personal finances.
It sounds to me like the article summary isn't assuming anything. It's stating the position of the lawsuit. The EFF is suing over illegal wire taps -- that's a fact. What hasn't been decided yet is whether the lawsuit has any merit. We'll need a court hearing to know for sure.
... nobody at the New York Times is trying to keep you from making up your own opinions. That's not what the news is for.
Believe it or not, though, trusting the New York Times, even after a couple of unfortunate incidents, is still pretty good practice. What's scarier is people like you, who can't seem to separate the concepts of somebody explaining facts to you and somebody telling you what to think. Don't worry, dude
Repeat after me: Being informed is good.
I think it's great that the X Prize foundation is finally going to get to the bottom of the genetic causes of Asperger's Syndrome. Kudos.
I'm a basically skinny dude. I, like a lot of people who fit that description, would have described myself as a ravenous garbage disposal for food when I was in my teens and early twenties. But when people say that they usually mean they would eat huge steaks, or giant hamburgers or piles of chicken. They don't usually mean they ate a candy bar and three sodas in between breakfast and lunch, finished off their meals with a pint of ice cream, and had a bag of Cheet-Ohs on hand the whole time they were watching TV. I thought I ate a lot, but when I actually started to observe how a lot of people lived their day-to-day lives, my habits seemed a lot less extreme.
For example: A staple diet of the teenage male might be breakfast cereal. It's fast, it's easy, and it lets you fill up on a big pile of food right away. Certainly went for me anyway. But my parents were sly. We never had Captain Crunch in the house. Thus, to this day my idea of mowing down a giant bowl of cereal means a giant bowl of Grape Nuts, or Spoon-Sized Shredded Wheat -- no sugar, fat-free milk. My parents forced that habit on me and I guess I owe them one for it. Cuz to this day a handful of Captain Crunch seems like dessert to me, not a meal in and of itself.
A lot of people don't think that way. A lot of people's comfort food is a pile of sugar. Mine just happens to be a big pile of fiber-rich whole grain.
My other comfort food is fat. I love me a big pile of bacon. Fat's not good for you, but I'll wager it's better for you than sugar. Fat sticks with you. It metabolizes slowly and it leaves you feeling full. Sugar, on the other hand, gives you a crazy rush and then disippates quickly, leaving you hungry for another "hit." Plus, although I may be game to eat eggs benedict on any given morning, there's one thing I cannot do and that's eat it three meals a day. Certain comfort foods have more limiting factors built in than others.
I mean, it makes perfect sense to me. Picture you're a virus. You don't live long sitting on a piece of bare metal... you'd much rather have a host body to live in. Nice host body, you can breed a whole family and live in there for generations. So go figure all those sucker viruses out there that actually kill their hosts. I mean, what the fizzle?
I once heard of a virus that knocks out the host's immune system. Sounds smart on the surface, right? No immune system, no antibodies to come getcha. But wouldn't you know it, next thing you know the host comes down with pneumonia and it's game over. That's no way to run a virus either.
Nah, wouldn't it be a lot smarter to be the kind of virus that makes the host eat too much, or the kind of virus that tricks the host into storing away calories as fat instead of burning them up? Wouldn't that be a lot smarter than, oh I don't know, eating holes in the host's brain or making its blood leak out of its skin? Sounds wicked clever if you ask me.
I'm wondering to what extent IBM and the others are banking on the due diligence process to win them their licenses... in other words, "I can get a DB2 server with two CPUs and 4GB RAM for const NOTHING or I can pay $SOMETHING and get eight CPUs and infinite RAM and a lifetime contract with Global Services." The company is under no requirement to spend absolutely nothing, so not spending anything starts to sound like poor due diligence. You spend the money and you get the latest greatest whiz-bang machine ... which might be great for running the Vista UI but is really more than you need for your Web site.
Overall summary of your post: You don't care about the new features in Vista, even though lots and lots of the customers who count will.
Not really related to your post exactly, but I was a little surprised to open a copy of New Scientist a week or two ago and find an editorial penned by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (paid link, summary only), talking about what his administration has been doing about climate control. Schwarzenegger is a Republican who appears to have bought into global warming wholeheartedly. I'm not well-versed enough in his policies to really be able to analyze whether his views are all just smoke and mirrors, but New Scientist is not really all that well read in the United States vs. the UK. As such, I just thought it was interesting.
And Mussolini made the trains run on time.
I think we fundamentally diagree on the issues of human rights and representative government, that's all.
All I can say is ... wow. You, sir, win the prize. I will go to bed tonight grinning and shaking my head. Wow.
But hey, what's your point, anyway? Even if you're right and every single one of these things could have been done in XP (and I don't agree that they could have been) ... they weren't. Hence, a reason to upgrade to Vista.
I mean, Jesus Christ, people ... damned if you do and damned if you don't. I tell you about some new features, you say those features should have been in XP. I say but they're going to be in Vista, you tell me Vista has no new features. Talk about a snake chasing its own tail! One thing's for sure: nothing I mentioned is present in either Linux or Mac OS X out of the box. Is that what's really galling you?
Sure, a lot of the stuff I mentioned ia hardware improvements. But what you're missing is that it's Microsoft driving the hardware improvements in many cases, and providing the OS software to make them run. That's more than even Apple does, and Apple owns its hardware.
- A secondary LCD screen that offers limited, PDA-like functionality while the main OS is in Suspend. How would you do that with XP? Or Linux? It's not anything you can write in user mode.
- Touch screens are hardware improvements. But Vista will bring software from Microsoft that makes it easier to use your finger to do things that would normally need a mouse. So you take your big old fat finger and stab the screen with it. A little circle appears, kind of like a radar screen, and it figures out which icon you meant to press. Current touchscreens can't do that. Rocket-science innovation? Maybe not, but Vista will have it and previous versions of Windows Tablet PC won't.
- The Power modes thing, I'm still not totally sold on how it works. But I'm interested in seeing it.
- The LCD projector thing -- that's not OS? How would you do that with your current-generation video driver?
Yeah, sure, it's a way to sell people stuff. Allchin said as much. Microsoft is using this as an opportunity to drive profits into the entire PC hardware industry. They want you to want to buy new computers to run this OS and get all the whiz-bang features. But you know what? I'm pretty much sold. If half of it works by ship date it's going to be really cool.
Agreed. I saw Allchin's latest Vista demo and I walked away for it confident that I will, under no uncertain terms, be buying a new laptop in early 2007 to run Vista on.
/. crowd hates to hear that word when talking about Microsoft, but I just call it how I see it.
There's lots of things in Vista that nobody has even started talking about yet, particularly in the area of mobility.
- Laptops will start shipping with a secondary LCD screen that's accessible when the machine is closed. So you will be able to do things like checking the status of your e-mail, IM, stocks, weather, whatever -- without taking the machine out of sleep mode, spinning up the hard drives, etc.
- Tablet PCs will have touch screen functionality in addition to just pen-based input. In addition, the handwriting recognition will "learn" from the files that Vista has indexed on your hard drive -- so if you're a doctor and you're always using words like "phenylketonuria," it will pick that up and recognize those words more readily.
- As I mentioned in another post, Vista will ship with Windows Collaboration, a Groove-like networking feature that lets wireless users quickly form ad-hoc network and share files and even screen real estate in an easy way.
- Microsoft will stop talking about power states like "Standby" and "Hibernate" when Vista ships. There will only be "on" or "off." When you hit the power button on your laptop, essentially it goes into Standby. Meanwhile it will be writing out a Hibernate file. After it figures out you won't be coming back, it sinks into Hibernate mode. But (and I'm a little unclear on this) even then it will still be sending a trickle of power to the memory only to keep the memory alive. The idea is that fast on and off will be a way of life and people won't be rebooting their computers all the time.
- You will be able to associate with a new generation of LCD projectors wirelessly. No more showing up to a meeting and fumbling with monitor cables etc. Just find the projector and route PowerPoint through it.
Outside of all that, WinFX should be a huge deal and there are a number of APIs that will be shipping in or be closely related to Vista that represent really serious innovations. I know the
Vista is going to be a major, major upgrade... way more than anybody is giving it credit for yet and enough so that Apple should definitely be looking over its shoulder. Maybe Microsoft still won't be able to offer customers anything to compare with the iPod experience on a Mac, but business users in particular are going to be all over this.
If this is the Windows Collaboration feature they're talking about, then it doesn't automatically connect everybody. You can invite the people you choose. And it's not a peer to peer filesharing network or even a standard Windows network. It's a Groove-like system that allows you to share files and screen real estate among the connected peers. So if you're showing a presentation from your laptop, you can let me connect to your projector using your laptop over the network and show my presentation from my hard drive, using your screen in a sense. I can also push the same file to everybody in the ad hoc "network" so that they can view it. Optionally I can also send them a copy of the file, but I don't have to... that kind of thing. It's actually pretty neat.
But hey, you don't have to believe me. I'm just telling you guys what the Itanium Solutions Alliance is selling. If you guys never buy an Itanium system as long as you live, it's no skin off my nose.
It's more like you have a very expensive carpet in your house, so you lock your children into small cages so they won't soil the carpet. When your children complain about this, you beat them. Google comes over and takes its shoes off, and as it's doing so, a little hand pushes a note out from between the bars in one of the cages. You see the note and your face turns bright red. Google, so as not to shame you in your own house, throws the note in the trash.
Even if, as you say, it isn't the responsibility of Google to affect change on the government of China, that doesn't mean Google shouldn't act based on a Western standard of morality and ethics. It's kind of like saying you'd never be a vegetarian because the meat industry is so huge that your decision not to buy meat would never have an impact on it. True; if destroying the meat industry were your goal, that would be a pretty futile way to do it. If, on the other hand, you wanted to have personal integrity and act out of the conviction of your own ethics, then becoming a vegetarian (if that's what you believe in) makes perfect sense.
And you could go even further and say, if Google won't put pressure on the Chinese government to change its ways, then who will? Multinational corporations are among the most powerful societal forces in the world today -- some would say much more powerful than governments. Maybe we shouldn't sit idly by and accept the notion that the ideal corporation is an aloof, amoral money-machine. Maybe it would be better if corporations started acting like responsible citizens of a global village and based their decisions on the ethical standards of their shareholders?
Presumably there are few Google shareholders who, if asked, would say they are actually in favor of the Chinese stand on human rights. If you're going to tell me that there isn't so much as a chance in hell that the majority of those shareholders might actually favor using the influence of their money to persuade China to modify its policies ... well, then I'd say you are a very cynical person. I'd say it's very possible. Maybe nobody has put the question to them yet, because the kneejerk policy is just to act how corporations always act: Get the money and fuck the ethics.