I didn't say that it was. Why does everyone stop to listen properly when this name comes up? I just said that even they got it...
Why do you guys think that everyone is either an OS fanatic or a Microsoft zealot? The world is bigger than that, you know. Technically people *are* allowed to have an opinion based on facts rather than some type of blood oath that forces them to choose one side and stick with it for all eternity.
XML is just a file format, and besides, everyone does it now. If we have a way of unifying those 1000 different Unix config and script file formats, then I say go for it, if only because today Unix configuration is a totally non-uniform mess. Why not XML? Even Apache uses it (with some limitations, but it's the thought that counts. well, at least they have angle brackets, that's a start I guess)...
The problem with "how Unix works" is that there are some tasks that cannot be done by one single, simple tool. Some of those tasks cannot be done by combining existing tools either, because program interaction on a Unix system seldomly goes beyond parsing the other app's text output for some keywords and then acting on it - which is cool in some way, but mainly it's all a big ugly hack.
It's reasonable to re-think the way application startup is done, the current/etc/rc.d (or/etc/init.d on most Linux systems) is a huge mess that's hurting startup time and performance. I think it's time for Unix people to realize that the whole application landscape severely suffers from integration problems. Take Monad for example, this is where Microsoft took the "Unix way" and implemented it for modern computing - think about it, friggin' Microsoft got this, and Unix geeks are still debating whether it's time to replace the ancient startup daemon that their fathers used!
Though coming from a Unix background myself, I can see why Dave Cutler hated it so much, so he basically took his ideas and created NT. Why hasn't Unix been able to catch up in all this time? We could have done it, but ironically it's the community that makes Unix strong and at the same time kills innovation completely.
...time was not a dimension in the sense that spacial dimensions were. That's going to be a much harder line of reasoning to maintain, now, because clearly time DOES behave in the same way as a spacial dimension, when it comes to diffraction.
I don't think this has anything to do with the properties of time per se. As I understood the effect, it has to do with the spatial "probability field" of tiny objects. If there is *any* uncertainty which path a small object will take, the entire probable space will act as a wave function that determines the actual path.
In theory, you should be able to produce this effect with any setup that induces uncertainty of position at that scale. The experiment proves something about the properties of uncertainty and probability - it doesn't actually say anything about the nature of space, time, or types of particles.
Most of quantum physics isn't as counter-intuitive as some quantum physicists want people to believe. Its reputation is mainly based on the usage of confusing metaphors and misleading statements.
(Like the ambigous implication that observing something changes the outcome, which is not true. They really talk about the theoretical possibility of observing something, which is a moot point in most probability scenarios anyway. Often there is an unqualified human-centric touch to those statements, which are clearly just designed for sensationalism. Particles don't care whether you can actually measure their state or not. Often the real question is, whether that actual state really exists in the first place. Most people don't seem to be able to distinguish between a model of something and the real thing.)
My company was bought recently, and is in the process of becoming a C# VisualStudio shop. I said thanks, but no thanks and left. Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?
The short answer is: yes, you are.
Given the crappy state of the industry as it is right now, quitting a high paying job over a (minor?) technology direction change is probably not a very bright idea. It sounds even worse if you factor in your apparent lack of experience with the new environment - you don't even stick around long enough to give it a try, right?
That being said, I can understand your choice. I don't particularly like the MS tools style, always have been more of a Borland type. But it goes deeper than this:
There are really two types of developers, namely the mercenaries and the artists. Most people are mercenaries. They just come to work, and as long as things are not absolutely terrible, they just do exactly what was specified. Then, after 8 hours, they pack up and leave their workplace to do whatever their real interests are. If you're a mercenary, it's totally stupid for you to quit over a tools issue like this.
The Artists, on the other hand, are people who shape the projects they implement. They are the ones with the vision, the ones who invest their soul into the product. If you're an artist, commands from management, like a change in technology or tools, can have a huge impact. Such a change can make your environment hostile, especially if the new direction conflicts with your ideals. Frankly, you don't sound like an artist, but if you are one, you have to quit over this and start over somewhere new where management shares your values and ideals.
Most companies really frown on the artist thing. They'd rather hire 5 mercenaries than 1 artist. Artists are difficult to manage traditionally, and they impose a constant danger of doing things that run contrary to the pointy-haired-boss school of business.
Games are a part of culture and as such reflect all kinds of aspects of that culture. That includes the representation of concepts of morality, renderings that run contrary to the accepted value system, as well as work that exists outside of any recognizable morality system. Games reflect the interests and desires of our culture.
Because games are both the "output" of our creative people, as well as a kind of cultural "input" for all people, they should effectively considered to be in the same category as literature or art.
Does an artist or writer have a moral obligation to reinforce the value system of her society? Does she have an obligation to teach people about critical thoughts of that system? No, there are not, and must not, be any moral or ($entity forbid) legal obligations for a content creator to take a specific stance toward accepted social values.
Seriously, who comes up with stuff like this? If you don't like the content that's out there, create your own and see how many fans you get. This is a frigging free society, or is it - ?
There is enough evidence and precedence in the history of patent suits that suggests it may very well be in violation of any number of patents - simply because it IS a kernel. The same is true with user interfaces and network technology. There is literally nothing in these commonly used technologies that isn't already patented by someone.
If you're a software developer, the only question really is "is my project important enough to one of the big boys to actually sue me to oblivion?"
Soon, Europe will join in on this great American tradition. It's inevitable, because there is no money or influence to effectively counter-lobby this development. One of these days, the law *will* be passed, thereby sealing the fate of the independent software industry of all western countries. If the European "hole" in patent law is closed, big companies can finally reign unchecked on an international scale. Which will be a sad state of affairs that will eventually facilitate the handing over of "our" technological leadership position to developing countries.
It's hard to tell between strong opinion and a solid troll these days, but I'd go with the opinion part. Yes, Jef Raskin hated everything the Mac stood and still stands for. That's visionaries for you...
It's strange what death does to your opponents. I wrote strongly about how I hated Raskin's Humane Interface, but now I feel all bad about it. It's not that I disrepected him or his lifetime achievement. I just didn't agree. Anyone here feel the same?
Not likely. But astronomically speaking, Mars is so near Earth, that it is very likely Earth already seeded it with microbes somewhere during the past 2 billion years. Space is not sterile. Planets do not provide good bio containment. Also, there is also a slight chance that the seeding may have occurred the other way around...
Longhorn is *not* a core rewrite, it will still use the NT kernel. (Seems Cutler was right when he predicted that NT would be the last time someone would create a core OS from scratch.)
No, the architecture of today will still be around in Longhorn. It's just a bunch of new features. Note that with that massive commitment to backwards compatibility and a gazillion APIs out there, Microsoft really has no chance to "clear out the cruft" or whatever.
To compare the Internet to the highway system, you would have to have a highway system that was unpoliced, where highwaymen with guns shoot at you, or try to run you off the road in order to steal your car and your credit cards, money, first born, etc. daily.
We don't have an internet police respectively, because no police can be trusted to safeguard information in a neutral way without succumbing to the temptations of power. Now, real-life highways are not a political or economical battle ground, they are already part of the service infrastructure of a certain country. The beauty of the internet is that it transcends countries and other mechanisms of power control (mostly). It needs to be largely unregulated in order to be valuable.
And yes, Windows doesn't suck that much. I wouldn't attach *any* machine directly to the internet without a firewall. The jury's still out on the question whether Windows is more vulnerable per se or just a more worthwhile target because of its huge market share. Then again, it exposes its features much more promiscuously than any OS I have ever seen...
If there was a way to legally download all the fresh shows that I want to see, I'd pay a few bucks per episode. But that isn't going to happen because of market segmentation politics. See, I live in Germany, where shows only come up on TV a few years after they aired in the States, which really sucks.
By downloading them off the net, I can get them now, without the sucky translation - but it's also illegal. It's lose-lose all the way. I have given up hope of enjoying the shows just like a normal viewer in the USA can, long ago. DRM is going to make us pay very thoroughly. And by paying I don't only mean money but also the freedom to choose content you want in a format you want.
Despite all this stuff like MythTV, thinks aren't exactly looking so bright on the consumer front.
Not really, Microsoft has always been developing software for Mac OS, you know. It makes kind of sense. Back in the days, they were actually pretty close...
Though it has been "rumored" that the GUI of Mac OS inspired the MS people to look more into this whole Icons & Windows thing. *cough* (Though I really think that it would have been catastrophic to overall industry progress if the GUI idea had been legally restricted to only one company.)
When "the US will be so cheap that foreigners will snap up the family jewels for 10 cents on the dollar"... the US will find itself on the providing end of Outsourcing - thereby completing the circle.
From personal observations of customers and business people I can attest that, yes, Linux (and OSS in general) is widely known and most people take it seriously.
However, I guess many slashdotters (myself included) are already thinking about desktop. And that's still a long way to go. Even Firefox has still a long way ahead of itself, and I consider it to be one of the most well-known OSS applications out there. It will be a long time until non-geek people start using OSS seriously on the desktop.
Then again, I live in Germany, the clocks work differently here - maybe it's different elsewhere?
Yep, process separation, operating system does it for free, pretty much old news. The thing that bugs me about some Java developers is how they take those concepts like multithreading and separated execution and try to rebuild it painfully with a Java infrastructure, when the VM is probably not the best place to do this.
For example, when the author talks about the ABAP's process model and how it should probably be rebuild with Java. The idea is basically: One process (or thread) per request, shared session data storage across requests - that sounds like the best place for a classic CGI environment to me. PHP would probably do a nice job, or Perl or anything.
So if you want those features, why not build on top of Apache, maybe communicate with the client via XML webservices? CGI calls to script interpreters would pretty much provide anything you could possibly needed, while offering customizable degrees of separation *for free* right in the webserver. Why not? Why spend millions to build another bloated Java application server (that may or may not some day be able to support the same kind of featureset that webserver architectures already have)?
they feel we're not listening to them when in reality, we heard them & will answer them when we've finished the comment we're making in the other conversation
You see, this is where you are wrong. First, it definately shows a lack of interest in any of the X conversations that you're having (and also a lack of respect for your partners).
Second, it really is only possible to parse and understand multiple conversations if each one contains so little information, that your brain does not have to use its full capacity to understand the concepts that are being conveyed. You know, "small talk", in other words.
Third, you cannot be emotionally involved in multiple conversations simultaneously. That is also the main reason why your partners get annoyed. It's not that they think you can't listen to them both, it's the fact that both conversations carry so little emotional and intellectual value for you!
Men can also multi-process well, though we tend to need training because our ears are not wired for that by default. I feel that much of this multitasking stuff is just applied as an excuse to not really care. "Yeah, keep talking honey, I'm listening even if I appear to be asleep" Sure. "Really, sweetie, I can think about work and enjoy sex with you at the same time!" Yep, of course. It's just cheap talk for someone who has stopped caring.
Again, the thing that pisses people off when they deal with people like you is the lack of any deeper involvement on your part. You concentrate on something you appreciate. You multitask on flat things that just need to be done.
Everyone knows, the basic idea was "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features." and then make those little programs compatible so they can work together in any number of meaningful ways.
Only, that's not how it all turned out, is it? First, The Philosophy mainly applies to text-messages in the command line environment. Most of the tools don't really produce output that can be readily reused as input for others. That's because Unix tools use the same bastardized text output both for human readers as well as a datasource for other tools.
It works amazingly well, though, but it could be better. Ideally, those tools were objects that adhere to some basic (very very simple) interface standards. They could interchange machine-meaningful object and property data which could be rendered in any number of ways as needed for the end user.
Also, The Philosophy was misapplied when desktop environments were created. They're horrible and bloated and not really that modular. Besides, I expected some radical new GUI features to be invented in accordance with The Philosophy. But all that actually happened on the desktop was a (mostly bad) copy of Windows.
Try XulPlanet, it's the only resource on XUL that is actually working, for me at least. In my company, we're regularly delivering apps with XUL as a frontend and all developers use XulPlanet.
On the down side, welcome to the land of magic and wonder, where arcane bugs haunt the long forgotten planes of DOM...
I think you're right, because Microsoft's attempt is generally more centered on connecting information semantically, whereas Apple focused on "just finding stuff". That also explains why Apple got theirs out the door much faster.
Of course, you *can* do cooler stuff with WinFS. But it's only going to work if you write a lot of code to glue this data together. Unfortunately that also means developers will have a lot of coding to do if they want their software to take advantage of it, so that's not only a Microsoft problem right now - it's probably going to be an acceptance problem in the dev community later.
In the end, what do users use those systems for? I think plain text search is on top of the list. MS should have implemented that first, like Apple did. Then comes data mining and semantic search, which Apple will no doubt focus on incrementally. MS made a mistake by going after the whole thing at once, they have bitten off more than they could swallow - a most basic PM mistake.
Of course their final version will blow everyone away, but that's still a few years in the future. They could have won *right now* with a much more limited feature set, but Apple got there first because they provided something that 80% of the user base think is really cool and it could be accomplished with minimal effort.
I think the basic idea is pretty cool. Cramming a micro-PC into a very small form factor could be a recipe for great mobile gaming fun. But I guess that's where the VIA marketing people came in and butchered it.
Horrible case design, not that fatal but still a bit weird
Designed to be marketed basically as a Gameboy, that's not going to work
Almost no access to the system itself, one of the most paranoid and user unfriendly content protection mechanisms I ever heard of.
Needless to say, this could be fixed so easily:
Make some minor modifications to the case
Appeal to the geek audience: Get rid of content protection, allow people to upload and do whatever they want.
Publish the specs and have a hacker community create/port cool new games.
Heck, throw in a decent MP3 player software and probably a PIM interface.
Make an IR or Bluetooth expansion card so people can create ad-hoc gaming circles (great for travellers).
Optional attachable keyboard would be nice.
I think the biggest flaw of this product is that they decided not to follow through on a promising idea. It's a portable mini PC tuned for gaming, for chrissakes! Gadgeteers would love that thing if it only allowed them to tinker with it!
Okay, so explain the alliance with HP that will have them selling HP-branded iPods and pimping the iTMS. An alliance that was made while Apple was on top. HP initiated it, and it was accepted.
I imagine HP made a better entry by, say, not threatening SteveJ with Microsoft upfront, which was an incredibly stupid move by Real. Also, take into consideration that Steve and HP have a history together.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? XML is not a file format.
Well, technically it's a text-based file format. Let's say it's a content type, sound better to you?
let alone particular to Microsoft
I didn't say that it was. Why does everyone stop to listen properly when this name comes up? I just said that even they got it...
Why do you guys think that everyone is either an OS fanatic or a Microsoft zealot? The world is bigger than that, you know. Technically people *are* allowed to have an opinion based on facts rather than some type of blood oath that forces them to choose one side and stick with it for all eternity.
XML is just a file format, and besides, everyone does it now. If we have a way of unifying those 1000 different Unix config and script file formats, then I say go for it, if only because today Unix configuration is a totally non-uniform mess. Why not XML? Even Apache uses it (with some limitations, but it's the thought that counts. well, at least they have angle brackets, that's a start I guess)...
/etc/rc.d (or /etc/init.d on most Linux systems) is a huge mess that's hurting startup time and performance. I think it's time for Unix people to realize that the whole application landscape severely suffers from integration problems. Take Monad for example, this is where Microsoft took the "Unix way" and implemented it for modern computing - think about it, friggin' Microsoft got this, and Unix geeks are still debating whether it's time to replace the ancient startup daemon that their fathers used!
The problem with "how Unix works" is that there are some tasks that cannot be done by one single, simple tool. Some of those tasks cannot be done by combining existing tools either, because program interaction on a Unix system seldomly goes beyond parsing the other app's text output for some keywords and then acting on it - which is cool in some way, but mainly it's all a big ugly hack.
It's reasonable to re-think the way application startup is done, the current
Though coming from a Unix background myself, I can see why Dave Cutler hated it so much, so he basically took his ideas and created NT. Why hasn't Unix been able to catch up in all this time? We could have done it, but ironically it's the community that makes Unix strong and at the same time kills innovation completely.
...time was not a dimension in the sense that spacial dimensions were. That's going to be a much harder line of reasoning to maintain, now, because clearly time DOES behave in the same way as a spacial dimension, when it comes to diffraction.
I don't think this has anything to do with the properties of time per se. As I understood the effect, it has to do with the spatial "probability field" of tiny objects. If there is *any* uncertainty which path a small object will take, the entire probable space will act as a wave function that determines the actual path.
In theory, you should be able to produce this effect with any setup that induces uncertainty of position at that scale. The experiment proves something about the properties of uncertainty and probability - it doesn't actually say anything about the nature of space, time, or types of particles.
Most of quantum physics isn't as counter-intuitive as some quantum physicists want people to believe. Its reputation is mainly based on the usage of confusing metaphors and misleading statements.
(Like the ambigous implication that observing something changes the outcome, which is not true. They really talk about the theoretical possibility of observing something, which is a moot point in most probability scenarios anyway. Often there is an unqualified human-centric touch to those statements, which are clearly just designed for sensationalism. Particles don't care whether you can actually measure their state or not. Often the real question is, whether that actual state really exists in the first place. Most people don't seem to be able to distinguish between a model of something and the real thing.)
My company was bought recently, and is in the process of becoming a C# VisualStudio shop. I said thanks, but no thanks and left. Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?
The short answer is: yes, you are.
Given the crappy state of the industry as it is right now, quitting a high paying job over a (minor?) technology direction change is probably not a very bright idea. It sounds even worse if you factor in your apparent lack of experience with the new environment - you don't even stick around long enough to give it a try, right?
That being said, I can understand your choice. I don't particularly like the MS tools style, always have been more of a Borland type. But it goes deeper than this:
There are really two types of developers, namely the mercenaries and the artists. Most people are mercenaries. They just come to work, and as long as things are not absolutely terrible, they just do exactly what was specified. Then, after 8 hours, they pack up and leave their workplace to do whatever their real interests are. If you're a mercenary, it's totally stupid for you to quit over a tools issue like this.
The Artists, on the other hand, are people who shape the projects they implement. They are the ones with the vision, the ones who invest their soul into the product. If you're an artist, commands from management, like a change in technology or tools, can have a huge impact. Such a change can make your environment hostile, especially if the new direction conflicts with your ideals. Frankly, you don't sound like an artist, but if you are one, you have to quit over this and start over somewhere new where management shares your values and ideals.
Most companies really frown on the artist thing. They'd rather hire 5 mercenaries than 1 artist. Artists are difficult to manage traditionally, and they impose a constant danger of doing things that run contrary to the pointy-haired-boss school of business.
Games are a part of culture and as such reflect all kinds of aspects of that culture. That includes the representation of concepts of morality, renderings that run contrary to the accepted value system, as well as work that exists outside of any recognizable morality system. Games reflect the interests and desires of our culture.
Because games are both the "output" of our creative people, as well as a kind of cultural "input" for all people, they should effectively considered to be in the same category as literature or art.
Does an artist or writer have a moral obligation to reinforce the value system of her society? Does she have an obligation to teach people about critical thoughts of that system? No, there are not, and must not, be any moral or ($entity forbid) legal obligations for a content creator to take a specific stance toward accepted social values.
Seriously, who comes up with stuff like this? If you don't like the content that's out there, create your own and see how many fans you get. This is a frigging free society, or is it - ?
There is enough evidence and precedence in the history of patent suits that suggests it may very well be in violation of any number of patents - simply because it IS a kernel. The same is true with user interfaces and network technology. There is literally nothing in these commonly used technologies that isn't already patented by someone.
If you're a software developer, the only question really is "is my project important enough to one of the big boys to actually sue me to oblivion?"
Soon, Europe will join in on this great American tradition. It's inevitable, because there is no money or influence to effectively counter-lobby this development. One of these days, the law *will* be passed, thereby sealing the fate of the independent software industry of all western countries. If the European "hole" in patent law is closed, big companies can finally reign unchecked on an international scale. Which will be a sad state of affairs that will eventually facilitate the handing over of "our" technological leadership position to developing countries.
We deserve this.
Steve Jobs, is that you? :-)
It's hard to tell between strong opinion and a solid troll these days, but I'd go with the opinion part. Yes, Jef Raskin hated everything the Mac stood and still stands for. That's visionaries for you...
It's strange what death does to your opponents. I wrote strongly about how I hated Raskin's Humane Interface, but now I feel all bad about it. It's not that I disrepected him or his lifetime achievement. I just didn't agree. Anyone here feel the same?
Uh, moderators? Parent is not a troll! Check your facts!
Not likely. But astronomically speaking, Mars is so near Earth, that it is very likely Earth already seeded it with microbes somewhere during the past 2 billion years. Space is not sterile. Planets do not provide good bio containment. Also, there is also a slight chance that the seeding may have occurred the other way around...
Longhorn is *not* a core rewrite, it will still use the NT kernel. (Seems Cutler was right when he predicted that NT would be the last time someone would create a core OS from scratch.)
No, the architecture of today will still be around in Longhorn. It's just a bunch of new features. Note that with that massive commitment to backwards compatibility and a gazillion APIs out there, Microsoft really has no chance to "clear out the cruft" or whatever.
To compare the Internet to the highway system, you would have to have a highway system that was unpoliced, where highwaymen with guns shoot at you, or try to run you off the road in order to steal your car and your credit cards, money, first born, etc. daily.
We don't have an internet police respectively, because no police can be trusted to safeguard information in a neutral way without succumbing to the temptations of power. Now, real-life highways are not a political or economical battle ground, they are already part of the service infrastructure of a certain country. The beauty of the internet is that it transcends countries and other mechanisms of power control (mostly). It needs to be largely unregulated in order to be valuable.
And yes, Windows doesn't suck that much. I wouldn't attach *any* machine directly to the internet without a firewall. The jury's still out on the question whether Windows is more vulnerable per se or just a more worthwhile target because of its huge market share. Then again, it exposes its features much more promiscuously than any OS I have ever seen...
If there was a way to legally download all the fresh shows that I want to see, I'd pay a few bucks per episode. But that isn't going to happen because of market segmentation politics. See, I live in Germany, where shows only come up on TV a few years after they aired in the States, which really sucks.
By downloading them off the net, I can get them now, without the sucky translation - but it's also illegal. It's lose-lose all the way. I have given up hope of enjoying the shows just like a normal viewer in the USA can, long ago. DRM is going to make us pay very thoroughly. And by paying I don't only mean money but also the freedom to choose content you want in a format you want.
Despite all this stuff like MythTV, thinks aren't exactly looking so bright on the consumer front.
Not really, Microsoft has always been developing software for Mac OS, you know. It makes kind of sense. Back in the days, they were actually pretty close...
Though it has been "rumored" that the GUI of Mac OS inspired the MS people to look more into this whole Icons & Windows thing. *cough* (Though I really think that it would have been catastrophic to overall industry progress if the GUI idea had been legally restricted to only one company.)
When "the US will be so cheap that foreigners will snap up the family jewels for 10 cents on the dollar"... the US will find itself on the providing end of Outsourcing - thereby completing the circle.
Not that any of this will really happen, though.
From personal observations of customers and business people I can attest that, yes, Linux (and OSS in general) is widely known and most people take it seriously.
However, I guess many slashdotters (myself included) are already thinking about desktop. And that's still a long way to go. Even Firefox has still a long way ahead of itself, and I consider it to be one of the most well-known OSS applications out there. It will be a long time until non-geek people start using OSS seriously on the desktop.
Then again, I live in Germany, the clocks work differently here - maybe it's different elsewhere?
Yep, process separation, operating system does it for free, pretty much old news. The thing that bugs me about some Java developers is how they take those concepts like multithreading and separated execution and try to rebuild it painfully with a Java infrastructure, when the VM is probably not the best place to do this.
For example, when the author talks about the ABAP's process model and how it should probably be rebuild with Java. The idea is basically: One process (or thread) per request, shared session data storage across requests - that sounds like the best place for a classic CGI environment to me. PHP would probably do a nice job, or Perl or anything.
So if you want those features, why not build on top of Apache, maybe communicate with the client via XML webservices? CGI calls to script interpreters would pretty much provide anything you could possibly needed, while offering customizable degrees of separation *for free* right in the webserver. Why not? Why spend millions to build another bloated Java application server (that may or may not some day be able to support the same kind of featureset that webserver architectures already have)?
they feel we're not listening to them when in reality, we heard them & will answer them when we've finished the comment we're making in the other conversation
You see, this is where you are wrong. First, it definately shows a lack of interest in any of the X conversations that you're having (and also a lack of respect for your partners).
Second, it really is only possible to parse and understand multiple conversations if each one contains so little information, that your brain does not have to use its full capacity to understand the concepts that are being conveyed. You know, "small talk", in other words.
Third, you cannot be emotionally involved in multiple conversations simultaneously. That is also the main reason why your partners get annoyed. It's not that they think you can't listen to them both, it's the fact that both conversations carry so little emotional and intellectual value for you!
Men can also multi-process well, though we tend to need training because our ears are not wired for that by default. I feel that much of this multitasking stuff is just applied as an excuse to not really care. "Yeah, keep talking honey, I'm listening even if I appear to be asleep" Sure. "Really, sweetie, I can think about work and enjoy sex with you at the same time!" Yep, of course. It's just cheap talk for someone who has stopped caring.
Again, the thing that pisses people off when they deal with people like you is the lack of any deeper involvement on your part. You concentrate on something you appreciate. You multitask on flat things that just need to be done.
Everyone knows, the basic idea was "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features." and then make those little programs compatible so they can work together in any number of meaningful ways.
Only, that's not how it all turned out, is it? First, The Philosophy mainly applies to text-messages in the command line environment. Most of the tools don't really produce output that can be readily reused as input for others. That's because Unix tools use the same bastardized text output both for human readers as well as a datasource for other tools.
It works amazingly well, though, but it could be better. Ideally, those tools were objects that adhere to some basic (very very simple) interface standards. They could interchange machine-meaningful object and property data which could be rendered in any number of ways as needed for the end user.
Also, The Philosophy was misapplied when desktop environments were created. They're horrible and bloated and not really that modular. Besides, I expected some radical new GUI features to be invented in accordance with The Philosophy. But all that actually happened on the desktop was a (mostly bad) copy of Windows.
But otherwise, it's great!
Try XulPlanet, it's the only resource on XUL that is actually working, for me at least. In my company, we're regularly delivering apps with XUL as a frontend and all developers use XulPlanet.
On the down side, welcome to the land of magic and wonder, where arcane bugs haunt the long forgotten planes of DOM...
That was the worst 3 years of my life.
Really? Tell us more! I'd love to hear what places like that are like.
So you're saying that with the setup
A <--- C ---> B
the distances don't match if A and B move at 0.75c away from C in a straight line?
For example:
Let's say that after the time t, A has travelled 750 km from C and likewise B has travelled 750km from C, both at 0.75c.
BUT the distance between A and B is supposed to be 960km after t because of their travelling at 0.96c relative to one another?
That doesn't add up! That would mean the speed of a is influenced by the speed of B which is crazy!
I think you're right, because Microsoft's attempt is generally more centered on connecting information semantically, whereas Apple focused on "just finding stuff". That also explains why Apple got theirs out the door much faster.
Of course, you *can* do cooler stuff with WinFS. But it's only going to work if you write a lot of code to glue this data together. Unfortunately that also means developers will have a lot of coding to do if they want their software to take advantage of it, so that's not only a Microsoft problem right now - it's probably going to be an acceptance problem in the dev community later.
In the end, what do users use those systems for? I think plain text search is on top of the list. MS should have implemented that first, like Apple did. Then comes data mining and semantic search, which Apple will no doubt focus on incrementally. MS made a mistake by going after the whole thing at once, they have bitten off more than they could swallow - a most basic PM mistake.
Of course their final version will blow everyone away, but that's still a few years in the future. They could have won *right now* with a much more limited feature set, but Apple got there first because they provided something that 80% of the user base think is really cool and it could be accomplished with minimal effort.
Needless to say, this could be fixed so easily:
I think the biggest flaw of this product is that they decided not to follow through on a promising idea. It's a portable mini PC tuned for gaming, for chrissakes! Gadgeteers would love that thing if it only allowed them to tinker with it!
Okay, so explain the alliance with HP that will have them selling HP-branded iPods and pimping the iTMS. An alliance that was made while Apple was on top. HP initiated it, and it was accepted.
I imagine HP made a better entry by, say, not threatening SteveJ with Microsoft upfront, which was an incredibly stupid move by Real. Also, take into consideration that Steve and HP have a history together.