And here come the pundits declaring every tablet computer to be an iPad clone. Because as we all know, the CrunchPad/JooJoo is such a ripoff of the iPad.
Aren't we so lucky to have Apple around to invent everything for us?
Indeed. Dijkstra was frequently wrong, especially when he made grand sweeping statements.
GOTO is a good example, 'GOTO considered harmful' is practically biblical law amongst many programmers, but it's worth remembering that he made that statement in the context of an argument with Donald Knuth. Knuth won: (http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf)
I agree. I started on QBASIC, so I didn't have to cope with line numbers... but the code was still spaghetti. I remember the joy I felt upon discovering subroutines.
It's like a child burning themselves for the first time. Sometimes it's the best way to learn.
Academia is not the only profession that provides job satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment. Guess what, 99.9% of the world's population lives a happy life without ever publishing anything.
I don't think so... public key cryptography was discovered by the GCHQ at least a decade before it was discovered in the public sphere: http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm
Absolutely. If all you're interested in is raw benchmark performance, the Radeon 5870 is for you. But the Fermi is a much more interesting device. Feature wise, it is an enormous step beyond any of ATI's offerings. Not something your average moron gamer cares about, but important for anybody who knows what OpenCL and DirectCompute actually are.
Anyway, we'll have to see what 3d performance is like once drivers have been optimized for the new memory architecture.
Actually, cuSomething to clSomething. OpenCL is basically a copy of the the CUDA driver API, which prefixes its functions with cu. The runtime API (a higher level API) is what uses the cuda prefix.
Suggesting that OpenCL and DirectCompute are alternatives to PhysX is analgous to saying that OpenGL is an alternative to Unreal Engine.
The basic reality here is that four years ago NVIDIA decided invest a lot of money in making GPUs more general purpose, to apply them to more problems than just 3D rendering. ATI didn't care and just focused on making the fastest 3D card possible. Today there are alternatives to NVIDIA's technology, most notably OpenCL... but it's worth remembering that OpenCL is very strongly derived from CUDA. In fact, most of the OpenCL spec looks like they ripped it out of the CUDA spec and changed the function calls from cudaSomething to clSomething.
So yes, open standards are good. But in this case it does smell strongly of sour grapes. ATI made several bad business decisions and have been left playing catchup.
Except, Courier was first leaked (with pictures and video) when the iPad was just a glimmer in bloggers' eyes. So how is the Courier anti-iPad FUD when we've known about it longer than the iPad?
You sound surprised... the IE team at Microsoft does stuff like this all the time. I was under the impression that they habitually send the Firefox development team congratulatory cakes upon major releases: http://www.intothefuzz.com/2008/06/17/let-them-eat-cake/
But perhaps he's right? Everybody likes to jump on ACID as some ultimate measure of a webbrowser's worth. Neither ACID2 nor ACID3 were based on the most important or commonly used features of HTML, JavaScript and CSS, but a sampling of obscure little bits that most webbrowsers were doing wrong at the time.
As useful as ACID are, it's important to realize that they are NOT proper compliance tests. It could be argued that one of the real failings of the W3C standardization process is that they never produce a compliance test suite. So you can't accurately state that a browser (like IE) poorly supports relevant standards, without relying heavily on anecdote.
This is basically what Microsoft figured out a long time ago (and then badly bungled): a single company just can't control a large market on its own. It's you against the world, and the world is just too damn big, you can never stay ahead when everybody is trying to outdo you. Of course Microsoft (and then Google) answer this by just trying to control one little bit (the OS), and encouraging everybody else to innovate and compete on other aspects of product design. It can work, because software cross-compatibility is enough of a benefit to outweigh a single company controlling the base software platform.
But Jobs doesn't seem to understand this. They think they can control, by themselves, an enormous market... and as the smartphone market grows from niche to major they've losing control. So sue sue sue! If you can't compete with the rest of the world, sue them into submission. That's how real innovators work.
And given Apple's lawsuit against HTC, I'd say Nokia's decision to demand a license to Apple's patents is pretty damn prescient, don't you think?
Seriously, who is worse off if the two can't use each other's patents: Nokia, which has to avoid a few multitouch gestures, or Apple who has to avoid using basically any radio device at all?
What, you think companies get investigated for anti-trust violations spontaneously? The original Microsoft anti-trust trial was spurred by coalition of IBM, Sun, and a couple of other politically well-connected companies whose names escape me, quietly complaining to the US DoJ.
Sure. To make it economical you'd probably have to do something like slingshot around Venus, whiz out to Jupiter and slingshot back into the sun. Unless you could find an appropriate ITN lane, but I don't think the ITN connects the sun to any of the planets.
Actually if it did, the ITN would be perfect for waste disposal.
At least I made a point, and didn't hide bad criticism behind cliches and bad analogies.
If you think the claim that rent-seekers are not free marketers is an example of the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy, you need to either study your logical fallacies or your economics.
If you want a stupid Christianity analogy, then my post reads like someone complaining that "true Christians" are rare because most people are either atheists or hypocrits.
The problem is not regulation. The problem is regulation bought and paid for, which just happens to make the alternatives to wealthy industry X unprofitable.
Slashdot Mirror
And here come the pundits declaring every tablet computer to be an iPad clone. Because as we all know, the CrunchPad/JooJoo is such a ripoff of the iPad.
Aren't we so lucky to have Apple around to invent everything for us?
It's the return of IrDA!
Indeed. Dijkstra was frequently wrong, especially when he made grand sweeping statements.
GOTO is a good example, 'GOTO considered harmful' is practically biblical law amongst many programmers, but it's worth remembering that he made that statement in the context of an argument with Donald Knuth. Knuth won: (http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf)
I agree. I started on QBASIC, so I didn't have to cope with line numbers... but the code was still spaghetti. I remember the joy I felt upon discovering subroutines.
It's like a child burning themselves for the first time. Sometimes it's the best way to learn.
A smartphone is ostentatiously a general purpose device. A game console is not.
Academia is not the only profession that provides job satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment. Guess what, 99.9% of the world's population lives a happy life without ever publishing anything.
I don't think so... public key cryptography was discovered by the GCHQ at least a decade before it was discovered in the public sphere: http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm
Absolutely. If all you're interested in is raw benchmark performance, the Radeon 5870 is for you. But the Fermi is a much more interesting device. Feature wise, it is an enormous step beyond any of ATI's offerings. Not something your average moron gamer cares about, but important for anybody who knows what OpenCL and DirectCompute actually are.
Anyway, we'll have to see what 3d performance is like once drivers have been optimized for the new memory architecture.
Actually, cuSomething to clSomething. OpenCL is basically a copy of the the CUDA driver API, which prefixes its functions with cu. The runtime API (a higher level API) is what uses the cuda prefix.
Suggesting that OpenCL and DirectCompute are alternatives to PhysX is analgous to saying that OpenGL is an alternative to Unreal Engine.
The basic reality here is that four years ago NVIDIA decided invest a lot of money in making GPUs more general purpose, to apply them to more problems than just 3D rendering. ATI didn't care and just focused on making the fastest 3D card possible. Today there are alternatives to NVIDIA's technology, most notably OpenCL... but it's worth remembering that OpenCL is very strongly derived from CUDA. In fact, most of the OpenCL spec looks like they ripped it out of the CUDA spec and changed the function calls from cudaSomething to clSomething.
So yes, open standards are good. But in this case it does smell strongly of sour grapes. ATI made several bad business decisions and have been left playing catchup.
Except, Courier was first leaked (with pictures and video) when the iPad was just a glimmer in bloggers' eyes. So how is the Courier anti-iPad FUD when we've known about it longer than the iPad?
You sound surprised... the IE team at Microsoft does stuff like this all the time. I was under the impression that they habitually send the Firefox development team congratulatory cakes upon major releases: http://www.intothefuzz.com/2008/06/17/let-them-eat-cake/
But perhaps he's right? Everybody likes to jump on ACID as some ultimate measure of a webbrowser's worth. Neither ACID2 nor ACID3 were based on the most important or commonly used features of HTML, JavaScript and CSS, but a sampling of obscure little bits that most webbrowsers were doing wrong at the time.
As useful as ACID are, it's important to realize that they are NOT proper compliance tests. It could be argued that one of the real failings of the W3C standardization process is that they never produce a compliance test suite. So you can't accurately state that a browser (like IE) poorly supports relevant standards, without relying heavily on anecdote.
It's 2010, not 1998.
You do. They're called elections.
This is basically what Microsoft figured out a long time ago (and then badly bungled): a single company just can't control a large market on its own. It's you against the world, and the world is just too damn big, you can never stay ahead when everybody is trying to outdo you. Of course Microsoft (and then Google) answer this by just trying to control one little bit (the OS), and encouraging everybody else to innovate and compete on other aspects of product design. It can work, because software cross-compatibility is enough of a benefit to outweigh a single company controlling the base software platform.
But Jobs doesn't seem to understand this. They think they can control, by themselves, an enormous market... and as the smartphone market grows from niche to major they've losing control. So sue sue sue! If you can't compete with the rest of the world, sue them into submission. That's how real innovators work.
Cocks.
And given Apple's lawsuit against HTC, I'd say Nokia's decision to demand a license to Apple's patents is pretty damn prescient, don't you think?
Seriously, who is worse off if the two can't use each other's patents: Nokia, which has to avoid a few multitouch gestures, or Apple who has to avoid using basically any radio device at all?
Apple are giant cocks. That is all.
It's hyperbole to call Apple giant cocks?
This is worse than anything I remember Microsoft ever doing.
What, you think companies get investigated for anti-trust violations spontaneously? The original Microsoft anti-trust trial was spurred by coalition of IBM, Sun, and a couple of other politically well-connected companies whose names escape me, quietly complaining to the US DoJ.
Sure. To make it economical you'd probably have to do something like slingshot around Venus, whiz out to Jupiter and slingshot back into the sun. Unless you could find an appropriate ITN lane, but I don't think the ITN connects the sun to any of the planets.
Actually if it did, the ITN would be perfect for waste disposal.
Yes, along with the continent of Eurasia.
Oh wait. No, there's no continent called Eurasia, and there's no continent called America.
It's hardly patriotic pride when I'm not American. Dumbass.
It contains semi-private phone numbers that Microsoft would rather not have widely disseminated.
At least I made a point, and didn't hide bad criticism behind cliches and bad analogies.
If you think the claim that rent-seekers are not free marketers is an example of the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy, you need to either study your logical fallacies or your economics.
If you want a stupid Christianity analogy, then my post reads like someone complaining that "true Christians" are rare because most people are either atheists or hypocrits.
The problem is not regulation. The problem is regulation bought and paid for, which just happens to make the alternatives to wealthy industry X unprofitable.