What is reasonable and affordable for a small Swedish company certainly isn't for a big behemoth like Oracle. There are now many, many more layers to feed with the product. The time for this decision has passed.
Give them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan's_Cosmos DVDs to watch. Greatest science gift for kids ever! (With the possible corollary that if they don't interest them, they are already lost:) ).
One interesting and yet unexplored scenario with FreeBSD is using it for the ZFS in small "appliance" devices, like ARM-based NAS servers. Give it enough RAM and there appears a very interesting opportunity.
I'd say the problems we saw were the effects of unfortunate interactions between a kernel that was designed to be frugal on resources (e.g. because of its 20-something years heritage) and a kernel-level system (ZFS) which was designed on "resources be damned! full speed ahead!" principles. I know there have been efforts to throttle down ZFS memory greediness after it was imported but for some reasons they were not successful and eventually a newer version was imported and the resource limits were increased just in case. The problem is - ZFS is greedy in unexpected ways. Of course, there have always been users for which ZFS has always worked without any problems at all - on various architectures and amounts of RAM - but as far as I know there isn't any correlation between them that would be telling why they have it smooth and others cannot do anything with it without jumping hoops. Solaris and FreeBSD are different enough that "conventional wisdom" from one system isn't applicable to the other.
I'd say that statistically, ZFS is now safe to use from the point of memory allocation failures simply because the number of user reports to it has fallen off dramatically after the new version and resource limit patches got in (which was significantly before 8.0-release so there was plenty of time to observe the effects).
There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic.
I'd rather look at the cause of this "issue" - i.e. *why* does it exist. And I'll offer an answer - because it is harder and harder to get rich quickly while staying legal. The fact that I download movies all the time didn't influence my moviegoing one bit - I still go out to the movies every week or two because of the experience and the company of friends - both of which suck over DIVX. My problem is that there usually isn't anything good out there to see. Some nights, we don't remember what we watched around 5 minutes after leaving the cinema! I doubt the problem is with a lack of quality writers or actors or directors - I think most of it comes from producers and other financiers trying to cram in special effects, political correctness and crowd-pleasing stories (especially endings) to try to maximize the profits, like art can be expressed by equations. I don't feel one bit bad about downloading "2012" but I watched Inglorious Basterds and Watchmen twice (just a recent example) and I have a hefty collection of (legal, bought) DVDs of good films and TV shows. My point is that that a significant part of the piracy issue (not all of it!) is the direct result of the fall in quality and resorting to formulaic "this script equals this much $$$" thinking on the part of producers.
I'm sure the same thing goes for music.
One other large thing is convenience - sometimes people just don't feel like going to the movies and it's easier to download the film right now and watch it than waiting months for it to come on DVDs, etc. It is human nature - the baby wants what it wants. There are surely more problems, but I have a feeling these two combined are the cause of over 50% of the piracy issues. Heck, solve the distribution issue (make it cheap and easy and at the same time worldwide as the cinema releases) and I'd bet that 40% of all piracy would simply disappear over night.
To get on the comment-your-ass-about-something-you-can't-possibly-change bandwagon - what *is* a shame in all this is that ChromeOS wasn't developed *earlier*. Atom based netbooks are already too slow for anything *but* web surfing. Ana a few bucks could be shaved by dropping the HDD. Other things could be minimized too - 1 GB RAM is actually OK if all the machine does is being a thin-ish web client, maybe 512 MB could also be enough. A SD slot would of course be useful. The video system doesn't have to be anything special as long as it support flash decently (i.e. not the old Intel graphics chip - nVidia ION would probably be minimum), etc. All this could bring down battery consumption, etc.
It's a nice concept.
Of course it goes *completely* against what both MS and Intel are doing today...
If the GUI changes aren't controversial enough the fact that it is based on Mono will probably kill it.
Developing GUI applications in year 2010 in C/C++ is a serious candidate for *massive fail*. If there isn't a good alternative to Mono from the FOSS community and what's more the current "best thing" is a copy of Microsoft's idea, who's to blame?
Do guns kill people? Do bullets? Do people kill people?
This looks like a very gray area - is the gun and bullet factory to blame for each murder? Did the programmers have direct positive benefit from the code besides their salaries? Who is actually "running" the "black box" - the programmers? The sysadmins? Madoff? His company?... ethical mine field.
Isn't this turning into a "would you blame the gun factory for murder" kind of thing? If they did what they've been asked / payed to do, from given specification, what exactly are they guilty of?
OTOH, is a sysadmin taking care of a server (the usual - network, power, disk drives, backups, etc.) guilty if he knows the server issues fraudulent bank orders and doesn't report it? Seems kind of gray area. Possibly varies across jurisdictions.
The root of all this is that it's still unclear just *how* to earn money from the service(s) Facebook provides, both for Facebook itself and for app developers. Apparently, showing ads down people's throats in one way (web) or the other (shady toolbar apps) is currently the only way.
PostgreSQL at least, and probably other databases, has a generic "key-value store" data type: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/datatype.html. With it, rows can contain some strictly-typed data (such as IDs, types, other metadata) and also contain a field (or many fields) which store all other loosely-typed data. And since it's PostgreSQL, all data is safe, can be replicated, you can have complex indexes, full text search, etc.
As Apple took FreeBSD and Mach and slapped a pretty GUI on top, making millions on the new product, [...]
So it was the year of FreeBSD on the desktop:-)
Yes, this was my point:)
When the "year of Linux on desktops" actually happens, the actual product used will most likely not be called "Linux" and the users are only see the GUI side... which *isn't* bad.
As Apple took FreeBSD and Mach and slapped a pretty GUI on top, making millions on the new product, so now it happens with Android and ChromeOS. On the other hand we have Gnome and KDE and Linux distributions that use them like Ubuntu and SUSE, which constantly fail to take foothold with users.
Some things clearly need both money and firm guidance...
There's a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this - Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It's really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).
It looks like Palm seriously needs to find some old timer from the Days of IIIc and give him a blank cheque just to tell them what they have forgotten about the business of making a platform popular.
All this nonsense about a central app store (which was IIRC started by no other than Apple) needs to stop and stop soon because it's an unprecedented level of lock-in. Imagine if Microsoft announced every Application, every.EXE file running on Windows 7 needs to be downloaded from Microsoft Store? (which, by the way, they look like they've already preparing to do something like that soon). At least Google had the decency to say that while they would prefer the apps go through their store, they won't go medieval on the developers and users who bypass it.
Seriously, when in the history of computing (except in game consoles - which is just another reason to avoid them) has a vendor of generic computers said that you absolutely must not install any software but the ones blessed by the said vendor? See IBM, 1981. and what came from the PC.
It looks like there is less interest in prototyping today. Back in the day before Ford, it would have been worth it to build a complete new car from the bottom up, and it would have been a success - reporters would come to talk to the inventor, books would be written about him - all this to notify people from far away what he did. The car would have been clunky and unique and not very good but to people riding horses it would be Progress.
Today, if you don't build a new Facebook with instant millions of users, it's hardly worth mentioning your pet project on a slow news day on Slashdot. If your hardware isn't as cheap as it gets (or, in case of Apple, you don't get a good handle on the wealthier part of the population and invest millions in marketing) and mass sold in hundreds of thousands, you're bankrupt (see OLPC for a sort-of example).
I don't know, maybe it's because of the uncanny valley effect on a larger scale but these new games seem increasingly unrealistic to me. I see it takes a lot of skill and C/GPU power to do a real-time image like this: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/rage_quakecon2009.jpg but realistic? I don't know - something's missing there. Sometimes I think Q3A was more "realistic" than Fallout3 and newer games. *shrug*
IdeaStorm looks completely useless as the top ideas (>100,000 votes) have been summarily discarded - actually any and all good, radical ideas have been discarded and it looks like the most common reason is "we make more money this way".
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, so it's a vendor lockin situation :)
What is reasonable and affordable for a small Swedish company certainly isn't for a big behemoth like Oracle. There are now many, many more layers to feed with the product. The time for this decision has passed.
Give them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan's_Cosmos DVDs to watch. Greatest science gift for kids ever! (With the possible corollary that if they don't interest them, they are already lost :) ).
One interesting and yet unexplored scenario with FreeBSD is using it for the ZFS in small "appliance" devices, like ARM-based NAS servers. Give it enough RAM and there appears a very interesting opportunity.
I'd say that statistically, ZFS is now safe to use from the point of memory allocation failures simply because the number of user reports to it has fallen off dramatically after the new version and resource limit patches got in (which was significantly before 8.0-release so there was plenty of time to observe the effects).
There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic.
I'd rather look at the cause of this "issue" - i.e. *why* does it exist. And I'll offer an answer - because it is harder and harder to get rich quickly while staying legal. The fact that I download movies all the time didn't influence my moviegoing one bit - I still go out to the movies every week or two because of the experience and the company of friends - both of which suck over DIVX. My problem is that there usually isn't anything good out there to see. Some nights, we don't remember what we watched around 5 minutes after leaving the cinema! I doubt the problem is with a lack of quality writers or actors or directors - I think most of it comes from producers and other financiers trying to cram in special effects, political correctness and crowd-pleasing stories (especially endings) to try to maximize the profits, like art can be expressed by equations. I don't feel one bit bad about downloading "2012" but I watched Inglorious Basterds and Watchmen twice (just a recent example) and I have a hefty collection of (legal, bought) DVDs of good films and TV shows. My point is that that a significant part of the piracy issue (not all of it!) is the direct result of the fall in quality and resorting to formulaic "this script equals this much $$$" thinking on the part of producers.
I'm sure the same thing goes for music.
One other large thing is convenience - sometimes people just don't feel like going to the movies and it's easier to download the film right now and watch it than waiting months for it to come on DVDs, etc. It is human nature - the baby wants what it wants. There are surely more problems, but I have a feeling these two combined are the cause of over 50% of the piracy issues. Heck, solve the distribution issue (make it cheap and easy and at the same time worldwide as the cinema releases) and I'd bet that 40% of all piracy would simply disappear over night.
To get on the comment-your-ass-about-something-you-can't-possibly-change bandwagon - what *is* a shame in all this is that ChromeOS wasn't developed *earlier*. Atom based netbooks are already too slow for anything *but* web surfing. Ana a few bucks could be shaved by dropping the HDD. Other things could be minimized too - 1 GB RAM is actually OK if all the machine does is being a thin-ish web client, maybe 512 MB could also be enough. A SD slot would of course be useful. The video system doesn't have to be anything special as long as it support flash decently (i.e. not the old Intel graphics chip - nVidia ION would probably be minimum), etc. All this could bring down battery consumption, etc.
It's a nice concept.
Of course it goes *completely* against what both MS and Intel are doing today...
If the GUI changes aren't controversial enough the fact that it is based on Mono will probably kill it.
Developing GUI applications in year 2010 in C/C++ is a serious candidate for *massive fail*. If there isn't a good alternative to Mono from the FOSS community and what's more the current "best thing" is a copy of Microsoft's idea, who's to blame?
Ask yourself, why the hell is Wave coming from Google, instead of us?
Because Google has the money?
Do guns kill people? Do bullets? Do people kill people?
This looks like a very gray area - is the gun and bullet factory to blame for each murder? Did the programmers have direct positive benefit from the code besides their salaries? Who is actually "running" the "black box" - the programmers? The sysadmins? Madoff? His company? ... ethical mine field.
Isn't this turning into a "would you blame the gun factory for murder" kind of thing? If they did what they've been asked / payed to do, from given specification, what exactly are they guilty of?
OTOH, is a sysadmin taking care of a server (the usual - network, power, disk drives, backups, etc.) guilty if he knows the server issues fraudulent bank orders and doesn't report it? Seems kind of gray area. Possibly varies across jurisdictions.
The root of all this is that it's still unclear just *how* to earn money from the service(s) Facebook provides, both for Facebook itself and for app developers. Apparently, showing ads down people's throats in one way (web) or the other (shady toolbar apps) is currently the only way.
PostgreSQL at least, and probably other databases, has a generic "key-value store" data type: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/datatype.html. With it, rows can contain some strictly-typed data (such as IDs, types, other metadata) and also contain a field (or many fields) which store all other loosely-typed data. And since it's PostgreSQL, all data is safe, can be replicated, you can have complex indexes, full text search, etc.
ENOMONEY.
As Apple took FreeBSD and Mach and slapped a pretty GUI on top, making millions on the new product, [...]
So it was the year of FreeBSD on the desktop :-)
Yes, this was my point :)
When the "year of Linux on desktops" actually happens, the actual product used will most likely not be called "Linux" and the users are only see the GUI side... which *isn't* bad.
As Apple took FreeBSD and Mach and slapped a pretty GUI on top, making millions on the new product, so now it happens with Android and ChromeOS. On the other hand we have Gnome and KDE and Linux distributions that use them like Ubuntu and SUSE, which constantly fail to take foothold with users.
Some things clearly need both money and firm guidance...
There's an old example / argument about this issue and it goes like this: "Would you hire (or go to) a neurosurgeon who practices in his spare time?".
It's a little extreme but I feel it gets the point through - creative yet sensitive work makes people burn up faster.
There's a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this - Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It's really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).
It looks like Palm seriously needs to find some old timer from the Days of IIIc and give him a blank cheque just to tell them what they have forgotten about the business of making a platform popular.
All this nonsense about a central app store (which was IIRC started by no other than Apple) needs to stop and stop soon because it's an unprecedented level of lock-in. Imagine if Microsoft announced every Application, every .EXE file running on Windows 7 needs to be downloaded from Microsoft Store? (which, by the way, they look like they've already preparing to do something like that soon). At least Google had the decency to say that while they would prefer the apps go through their store, they won't go medieval on the developers and users who bypass it.
Seriously, when in the history of computing (except in game consoles - which is just another reason to avoid them) has a vendor of generic computers said that you absolutely must not install any software but the ones blessed by the said vendor? See IBM, 1981. and what came from the PC.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=swine_flu
It looks like there is less interest in prototyping today. Back in the day before Ford, it would have been worth it to build a complete new car from the bottom up, and it would have been a success - reporters would come to talk to the inventor, books would be written about him - all this to notify people from far away what he did. The car would have been clunky and unique and not very good but to people riding horses it would be Progress.
Today, if you don't build a new Facebook with instant millions of users, it's hardly worth mentioning your pet project on a slow news day on Slashdot. If your hardware isn't as cheap as it gets (or, in case of Apple, you don't get a good handle on the wealthier part of the population and invest millions in marketing) and mass sold in hundreds of thousands, you're bankrupt (see OLPC for a sort-of example).
Still no VIDEO tag? (or at least I can't find it in the release notes?)
In other words: "we can imagine much more than we can actually produce in this physical reality".
I don't know, maybe it's because of the uncanny valley effect on a larger scale but these new games seem increasingly unrealistic to me. I see it takes a lot of skill and C/GPU power to do a real-time image like this: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/rage_quakecon2009.jpg but realistic? I don't know - something's missing there. Sometimes I think Q3A was more "realistic" than Fallout3 and newer games. *shrug*
IdeaStorm looks completely useless as the top ideas (>100,000 votes) have been summarily discarded - actually any and all good, radical ideas have been discarded and it looks like the most common reason is "we make more money this way".