Taking CS without math is like taking engineering without any physics.
But you don't engineer a bridge by thinking about the interaction of individual atoms, not because that isn't the "right" way of doing it, but because it takes too long and is too expensive.
The article makes a good point saying that the obsession with mathematics at the exclusion of all else in computational theory is not necessarily a good thing for the IT field. Mathematics are on such a low level of abstraction that they are mostly useless when it comes to thinking about solutions to most of the problems "real world" software architects (outside universities) run across, like large-systems architecture, parallel computing, and most classes of high-level optimization. As a result, "real world" software architects mostly ignore the improvements in the field of theoretical computational science, since it has little bearing on what they do.
Most notably: a big problem right now facing the IT field is the end of moore's law, and the growing need to parallelize everything. What we see in practice is that most programmers don't really know how to write multi-threaded code, and as a result few applications are multi-threaded. The solution here is not to require all programmers to be CS grads, because that is too expensive and a big waste of resources. A programmer shouldn't have to know about loop invariants, just like a mason shouldn't have to know about load distribution between pilons. The solution is for the theoreticians to focus on something useful to real world architects.
But, let me be clear about this: a software architect should know their mathematics, just like a bridge architect should know their physics. If you don't know why you're designing a system a certain way, you can't know it is the right way to design it like that.
As I recall, Real ID was passed in the senate by tacking it onto a military spending bill.
To be fair, almost nothing that has even the slightest level of controversy gets passed anymore without being attached to a military spending or a hurricane aid bill.
It's not that offshore people are inherently inferior. It's that most offshore technical resources have little or no interest in technology. They simply want to make money. This is not bad in and of itself. However, like their onshore counterparts who are driven solely by the same interest, their technical skills are generally quite poor.
I've seen both ends of the spectrum. Off-shoring doesn't necessarily mean attracting lower quality talent. Currently we're off-shoring part of our software development to ukraine, and my experience is that the developers there are roughly on the same level of competence as developers we hire locally. They get paid a third of what I get paid.
It's not competence or caring about software that's the issue. If you're willing to pay for that, you can find it. What's the real cost devil is management. Supervising people in another country is a HUGE drain on resources. There is no "informal chat" to "work things out". It all has to be specified in e-mails, with lots of detail, or it doesn't happen the way you want it to.
In practice we solve this by only giving easy to describe tasks to the off-shores. This obviously doesn't scale if you really want to off-shore most of your software development. I think the only way that would work is if you send one of your own people over there to supervise locally.
In the grand scheme (was that a LISP pun?) of things, Javascript and C++ are pretty damn similar. They're imperative, OO languages. They even have similar syntax. What is so hugely different about writing Javascript? Writing an algorithm in one is pretty much like writing an algorithm in the other.
What's different is that javascript enforces a three-tier architecture where you have a narrow pipe between two of those tiers that doesn't keep track of state between transmissions (http). C++ is much easier to design most classes of applications in, because there are much less constraints.
I'm in an interesting position for my job in that I design both windows and web apps with comparable functionality. Designing the windows apps is generally much easier.
If people knew what their phones were capable of, what the cell companies are denying them, it'd be blood in the water.
I disagree. Normal (non-geek) people don't want or need all that extra functionality.
In my country (belgium), the phone companies aren't allowed to tie phones to the contract. There are no simlocked phones, and there are no feature-reduced phones. This has not caused a "boom" in people making use of advanced functionality. As an example, even though almost all phones support bluetooth/usb file transfer, most people buy their MP3 ringtones from a cell service instead of uploading them to the phone. Another example, almost all phones support IM via J2ME (either ebuddy mobile in opera mini, or some dedicated IM program), but they choose to pay 10 euro a month to the cell operator to get the exact same service in a slightly more user-friendly package.
This is partly due to a poor pricing model and due to lack of awareness, but mostly due to low usability of these features. File transfer is too difficult to set up. Mobile browsing/IM is too clumsy. This is where the iPhone might actually make a difference. I could see regular people actually using the browser on the iphone.
It'll be curious to see what sort of model apple adopts here. They can't offer exclusivity to a phone company, because the lawmaker forbids that. I wonder what sort of influence this will have on features like visual voicemail.
I got into debt once - it was hell (actually, it was my 20s) but no more, no sir. I don't own my house but then neither do any of my neighbours, they just think they do...
Ofcourse, your neighbors at some point will in fact own their homes, while you will have paid for someone else to own your home. If you're paying money to rent a place, better for the rent to count towards ownership.
I'm not saying the front-end hasn't been rewritten, but it's still mostly the same behaviorally. You have the same set of tools, that operate in roughly the same way. There are just more tools. For example, the lasso tool is painful. It could be implemented much better, instead of using half your keyboard as modifier to get things done. Instead of solving the problems with the lasso tool they added the magnetic lasso tool. This is what I mean by expanding instead of redesigning.
The irony is that photoshop is such a standards bearer that competitors just reimplement photoshop's tools without ever stopping to think that maybe there's a better way.
Also, the nice thing about GIMP (and Cinepaint and Seashore and others) is that even those who use PhotoShop can still afford to use it. There should thus be two classes of designers: those who use both PhotoShop and the GIMP and those who can only use the GIMP.
I disagree. In my experience (and believe me, I gave gimp a serious try) doing things in gimp takes much longer than doing the same thing in photoshop. It's all possible, but it's clumsy, and that makes it take more time. It doesn't make sense for a professional who already has photoshop to use it. Time is money. If they use gimp, it costs them money.
The basic toolbox in photoshop 1.0 is not that far removed from the one in photoshop CS3. You can see the lineage. Maybe the back-end is completely new, but the front-end has merely expanded.
Which is sort of a shame, because the photoshop tools are a bit clumsy to use, and things like the selection tool could be implemented much better if they weren't afraid of alienating the existing customer base with changed behavior.
Yes, but your non-tech savvy friends who are in the market for $500-$1000 laptops are there because they can't tell the difference. They most likely use them for web browsing, word processing, email, spreadsheets, slide shows and the occasional game of solitaire. For people like that, price is the single most important factor.
There's an expectation factor here too. Everyone knows that the basics of word processing, email, browsing and so on are covered by any computer you can currently buy in the store. So, from that perspective it makes sense to go with the lowest bidder.
The thing is, people wouldn't be averse to buying a more expensive machine, if it did more. For example, most people looking for a family computer would love to edit their home video's on it and produce nice DVD's from them, and are willing to pay extra for this, but they tend to think that this would be too complicated and/or outrageously expensive. They don't know, or don't believe that this really is easy and possible even on consumer macs (mac mini, macbook, imac). The expectation that all a computer is good for is word and the web makes them look only at the lowest bidder.
Come on, even you would have to confess it's not much of a comparison. The only winning point to the Mac Mini in this case is "small form factor". It loses on every other.
The mac mini is a living room machine. It's quiet, it's unobtrusive, it's not ugly. My mini is in my living room, and the girlfriend isn't bothered by it.
Try this experiment if you really want to see what could happen. Go to newegg.com (or any similar site) and see how much desktop you can get for $200.
Apple sells a $300 machine with a 1GHZ CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and 40 GB of disk space. It's called the Apple TV.
I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly made the apple tv a product aimed at the low-end consumer market. Apple WILL get into this market if it starts to threaten their mac sales, I know that much.
Debian provides excellent tools to build your own kernel package. The default kernel just has to be good enough to show a console and download the kernel tarball.
You yourself are confusing audiences for these products in unfolding your own arguments. You are confusing your own arguments in the balance of the review in fact. WHAT are you reviewing and WHO for? Please decide before you start typing.
This was my conclusion from what I read of the article as well. It seemed to be based on the writer's own needs, and how well the system caters to these needs.
The fact is, apple has a product strategy aiming at different categories of users, and for those categories the needs are extremely well met. For other categories (like you're average linux user or gamer) the needs aren't met at all.
One category, for example, which is extremely well catered for on the mac, but not on linux, is the professional user for most categories of "professional". Though the author laments that mac users "have to" buy their way out of problems, for this category this is a major plus. If they need something, they just pay for it and get on with their day. On linux it's solving it yourself or not solving it at all for lots of types of problems.
Incidentally I left debian (in '03) for the mac because the money I spend extra for the mac is more than paid for in the amount of productive time I've gained. The way I see it, linux is a good choice if time is cheap for you, whereas the mac is a good choice if time is expensive. Windows is the safe choice that forms a good middle ground. And I don't spend that much extra (unlike how the author points it out). I spend at most 500 USD a year on my mac (aggregate of hardware and software). That seems quite a fair price.
If by "Linux programs" you mean X11 apps, you can forget it. No Mac user wants to run an X11 app. Besides the fact that they look hideous next to Cocoa/Aqua apps, they just don't integrate with everything else. It is like running Wine... you'll do it if you absolutely have to, but you'll always be on the lookout for something native. And this is coming from a 10+ year Linux user...
To be fair, ported linux/X11 programs on the mac don't integrate any worse than they do on linux. It just seems they're less integrated because of the difference with native OS X apps.
Your kidding me right? Nobel laureates have prestige. Having an apple product which anyone can buy does not give you prestige. In fact I can't think of any generic tech consumer item which would give you any prestige.
Where did you hole up during the beginning of the ipod hype? There most definitely was a period where owning an ipod meant instant coolness and prestige among most teenagers and twenty-somethings.
This is not informative unless you can link to evidence that shows there is a general problem with the product. Your post alone is an anecdote. If, say, 10% of these phones suffer the same problem as yours did, that would be informative. Otherwise, there is no useful information here.
HTC is known for having low build quality. Most people don't realize this until after they purchase a windows mobile device. I too am an ex-owner of a windows mobile smartphone. The keys stopped functioning properly (and eventually at all) right around the end of my one-year warranty period. I did not do anything unusual with the phone except carry it with me every day.
The major annoyance here is that these phones are very expensive. If you buy something that expensive, it has to last you a long time.
To be honest, you might as well say all Windows Mobile based phones are iPhone rivals. I would prefer to say it's just a competitor in the smartphone space, as iPhone will be when it arrives.
Exactly, this htc touch is no different from previous windows mobile phones with touch screens. You still don't have multi-touch. The only novelty is a front-end app which lets you more easily navigate to specific applications. In itself this is also not new because interfaces like these have been available for pocket pc since the dawn of the platform.
You don't have to want to rewrite the world in JavaScript to think this is useful. Think gentle offline extensions to websites, not "omfg my next word processor is going to be written in this."
I think what the parent was saying is that you're better off solving the problems google gears targets with desktop-specific application platforms, instead of trying to shoehorn an AJAX app onto the desktop, where it's not designed to thrive.
I personally also think that very few web apps are candidates for google gearing. Going offline is much more than redesigning your data back-end to talk to sqlite. You have to rethink the entire user experience because users have intrinsically different expectations about local versus web-based applications.
Coincidentally, adobe is betting with apollo that web 2.0 will evolve into local apps that augment and enhance web apps. They're betting that your information will be in the cloud, but instead of having a thin client like an ajax app in the browser, you'll have a local smart client that knows how to interact in a web-browser-based medium, but very much takes advantage of desktop technology and metaphors.
Compiled Java bytecode is a speed deamon compared to JavaSCRIPT.
There's no technical reason for javascript to be any slower than java if you JIT-compile it and cache the compilation results (like how PHP with the zend accelerator is roughly in the same class as java, even though it is not byte-compiled).
In fact, the tamarin engine (that will be used for javascript 2 in firefox 4) offers an order of magnitude better performance. You can see that performance today by toying with Flash's AVM2 / ActionScript 3 engine, which is roughly on par with java performance-wise.
I think browser developers are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking in vain for "the next big thing". I'd rather see work done on useful plug-ins. That work well with existing browsers, than see a new browser that has some improvements of debatable worth that break the old way of doing things entirely.
Well, what if you wanted to have thousands of bookmarks, and be able to easily look through them based on tagging etc., and you wanted this data to be stored locally? I suspect this is where they are headed with places, and I would welcome it.
Besides, current browsers have a long way to go still. They're basically stuck in the mid-nineties, and are optimized towards static websites, instead of towards dynamic web apps. For example: - HTML and CSS are optimized for showing and laying out text, not application control surfaces. - HTML and CSS don't have good support for anything but the most simplistic of fluid layouts, which are a must for web apps. (And if you doubt this, compare the experience of creating fluid layouts in flex 2 or java swing with that of creating them in HTML/CSS). - JavaScript 1.x is really, really slow (an order of magnitude slower than ActionScript 3), it doesn't have native support for namespaces / packages, its syntax for OO is poor, and its support for dynamic loading of application code is sub-par, all making it way too difficult to develop large client-side web apps. - browsers don't have decent support for local storage. - browsers don't have decent support for rich media (video, editable graphics, sound) that can be used by web applications (which is why youtube's video player is flash-based).
Many of these issues have been hacked around to some degree by various toolkits, but the fact remains that browsers are not suited to developing client-side applications, and you won't see the full bloom of web-based applications until the browsers catch up to the needs of the market. So, I think it's good that the mozilla developers aren't resting on their laurels and really trying to improve the concept and base technologies of a web browser (obviously within the confines of the standardization work of W3C, WHATWG and ECMA), instead of remaining stuck in 1996, like microsoft is with IE.
It's near impossible to tell the difference on a CRT (19", 1280x1024, 32-bit) without zooming in.
It's dead-easy for me to see the difference on my 17' CRT monitor (1184x878, 32-bit). Your retina are probably not sensitive enough to color variations, or your monitor is calibrated poorly.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean no one else can. I am convinced that a lot of people do find the 6-bit dithering to be a major visual annoyance, and that this is not a matter of being picky. Back in the days that all screens were CRT and all refresh rates 70 hz or below I had the same issue with flicker, where it was a major annoyance for me that all screens flickered like crazy, and other people just couldn't tell.
Reading through your post your main point seems to be the lack of control you feel you have over your windows system. You're exactly right, windows gives you less control. What turns you off is what attracts average users. Your average desktop user doesn't want that level of control.
...that the majority of people have never heard of Linux before. They've lived in a world where Microsoft software is installed on a new computer by default
Who are these mystical people that are unaware of linux? The only ones I know are so technologically inept that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to dump them on a linux box, because they wouldn't be able to figure out how to start their word processor without the big W icon on their desktop.
There are a few basic reasons people stick with windows: - windows works well enough - windows is what they know - linux doesn't have a killer app that people HAVE to switch for
People know linux well enough. Many have even tried it once or twice. They just have decided that it doesn't offer them any tangible benefits, and frankly, I would have a hard time arguing the opposite.
The number and severity of its security problems certainly qualify as "horrible." Obvious? Depends on who you ask. I'm in IT; I think so. Most people in IT would probably agree with that. End users? Maybe not. They have a different idea of "obvious" than most/. readers.
To put this into perspective, I haven't had a security problem on a windows box in over four years. All you need is to follow some good practices and you're perfectly safe. Vista with its limited user powers should help a lot in reducing the effort involved in those "good practices".
I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?
Because the kernel has been updated. After you update itunes a reboot is not needed.
Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendants, which were designed twenty years later?
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet. If you're referring to unix I have to disappoint you, unix was not designed to be inherently secure. On early versions there were many security issues, because the concept of limited user powers took a while to gain a foothold, and even when they did the system's design was still full of security holes. The first internet worm (the morris worm) specifically targeted unix systems, in case you've forgotten. Just look at the security track record of commercial unices. It's pretty poor.
Linux is not inherently more secure than other commonly available operating systems, it's just too much of a moving target because there is no binary stability, so a worm can't target large swaths of systems at the same time. That binary instability is a strength, but it's also the reason why there are so few binary drivers and commercial applications on linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking CS without math is like taking engineering without any physics.
But you don't engineer a bridge by thinking about the interaction of individual atoms, not because that isn't the "right" way of doing it, but because it takes too long and is too expensive.
The article makes a good point saying that the obsession with mathematics at the exclusion of all else in computational theory is not necessarily a good thing for the IT field. Mathematics are on such a low level of abstraction that they are mostly useless when it comes to thinking about solutions to most of the problems "real world" software architects (outside universities) run across, like large-systems architecture, parallel computing, and most classes of high-level optimization. As a result, "real world" software architects mostly ignore the improvements in the field of theoretical computational science, since it has little bearing on what they do.
Most notably: a big problem right now facing the IT field is the end of moore's law, and the growing need to parallelize everything. What we see in practice is that most programmers don't really know how to write multi-threaded code, and as a result few applications are multi-threaded. The solution here is not to require all programmers to be CS grads, because that is too expensive and a big waste of resources. A programmer shouldn't have to know about loop invariants, just like a mason shouldn't have to know about load distribution between pilons. The solution is for the theoreticians to focus on something useful to real world architects.
But, let me be clear about this: a software architect should know their mathematics, just like a bridge architect should know their physics. If you don't know why you're designing a system a certain way, you can't know it is the right way to design it like that.
As I recall, Real ID was passed in the senate by tacking it onto a military spending bill.
To be fair, almost nothing that has even the slightest level of controversy gets passed anymore without being attached to a military spending or a hurricane aid bill.
It's not that offshore people are inherently inferior. It's that most offshore technical resources have little or no interest in technology. They simply want to make money. This is not bad in and of itself. However, like their onshore counterparts who are driven solely by the same interest, their technical skills are generally quite poor.
I've seen both ends of the spectrum. Off-shoring doesn't necessarily mean attracting lower quality talent. Currently we're off-shoring part of our software development to ukraine, and my experience is that the developers there are roughly on the same level of competence as developers we hire locally. They get paid a third of what I get paid.
It's not competence or caring about software that's the issue. If you're willing to pay for that, you can find it. What's the real cost devil is management. Supervising people in another country is a HUGE drain on resources. There is no "informal chat" to "work things out". It all has to be specified in e-mails, with lots of detail, or it doesn't happen the way you want it to.
In practice we solve this by only giving easy to describe tasks to the off-shores. This obviously doesn't scale if you really want to off-shore most of your software development. I think the only way that would work is if you send one of your own people over there to supervise locally.
In the grand scheme (was that a LISP pun?) of things, Javascript and C++ are pretty damn similar. They're imperative, OO languages. They even have similar syntax. What is so hugely different about writing Javascript? Writing an algorithm in one is pretty much like writing an algorithm in the other.
What's different is that javascript enforces a three-tier architecture where you have a narrow pipe between two of those tiers that doesn't keep track of state between transmissions (http). C++ is much easier to design most classes of applications in, because there are much less constraints.
I'm in an interesting position for my job in that I design both windows and web apps with comparable functionality. Designing the windows apps is generally much easier.
If people knew what their phones were capable of, what the cell companies are denying them, it'd be blood in the water.
I disagree. Normal (non-geek) people don't want or need all that extra functionality.
In my country (belgium), the phone companies aren't allowed to tie phones to the contract. There are no simlocked phones, and there are no feature-reduced phones. This has not caused a "boom" in people making use of advanced functionality. As an example, even though almost all phones support bluetooth/usb file transfer, most people buy their MP3 ringtones from a cell service instead of uploading them to the phone. Another example, almost all phones support IM via J2ME (either ebuddy mobile in opera mini, or some dedicated IM program), but they choose to pay 10 euro a month to the cell operator to get the exact same service in a slightly more user-friendly package.
This is partly due to a poor pricing model and due to lack of awareness, but mostly due to low usability of these features. File transfer is too difficult to set up. Mobile browsing/IM is too clumsy. This is where the iPhone might actually make a difference. I could see regular people actually using the browser on the iphone.
It'll be curious to see what sort of model apple adopts here. They can't offer exclusivity to a phone company, because the lawmaker forbids that. I wonder what sort of influence this will have on features like visual voicemail.
I got into debt once - it was hell (actually, it was my 20s) but no more, no sir. I don't own my house but then neither do any of my neighbours, they just think they do...
Ofcourse, your neighbors at some point will in fact own their homes, while you will have paid for someone else to own your home. If you're paying money to rent a place, better for the rent to count towards ownership.
I'm not saying the front-end hasn't been rewritten, but it's still mostly the same behaviorally. You have the same set of tools, that operate in roughly the same way. There are just more tools. For example, the lasso tool is painful. It could be implemented much better, instead of using half your keyboard as modifier to get things done. Instead of solving the problems with the lasso tool they added the magnetic lasso tool. This is what I mean by expanding instead of redesigning.
The irony is that photoshop is such a standards bearer that competitors just reimplement photoshop's tools without ever stopping to think that maybe there's a better way.
Also, the nice thing about GIMP (and Cinepaint and Seashore and others) is that even those who use PhotoShop can still afford to use it. There should thus be two classes of designers: those who use both PhotoShop and the GIMP and those who can only use the GIMP.
I disagree. In my experience (and believe me, I gave gimp a serious try) doing things in gimp takes much longer than doing the same thing in photoshop. It's all possible, but it's clumsy, and that makes it take more time. It doesn't make sense for a professional who already has photoshop to use it. Time is money. If they use gimp, it costs them money.
The basic toolbox in photoshop 1.0 is not that far removed from the one in photoshop CS3. You can see the lineage. Maybe the back-end is completely new, but the front-end has merely expanded.
Which is sort of a shame, because the photoshop tools are a bit clumsy to use, and things like the selection tool could be implemented much better if they weren't afraid of alienating the existing customer base with changed behavior.
Yes, but your non-tech savvy friends who are in the market for $500-$1000 laptops are there because they can't tell the difference. They most likely use them for web browsing, word processing, email, spreadsheets, slide shows and the occasional game of solitaire. For people like that, price is the single most important factor.
There's an expectation factor here too. Everyone knows that the basics of word processing, email, browsing and so on are covered by any computer you can currently buy in the store. So, from that perspective it makes sense to go with the lowest bidder.
The thing is, people wouldn't be averse to buying a more expensive machine, if it did more. For example, most people looking for a family computer would love to edit their home video's on it and produce nice DVD's from them, and are willing to pay extra for this, but they tend to think that this would be too complicated and/or outrageously expensive. They don't know, or don't believe that this really is easy and possible even on consumer macs (mac mini, macbook, imac). The expectation that all a computer is good for is word and the web makes them look only at the lowest bidder.
Come on, even you would have to confess it's not much of a comparison. The only winning point to the Mac Mini in this case is "small form factor". It loses on every other.
The mac mini is a living room machine. It's quiet, it's unobtrusive, it's not ugly. My mini is in my living room, and the girlfriend isn't bothered by it.
You're right though, it costs more.
Try this experiment if you really want to see what could happen. Go to newegg.com (or any similar site) and see how much desktop you can get for $200.
Apple sells a $300 machine with a 1GHZ CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and 40 GB of disk space. It's called the Apple TV.
I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly made the apple tv a product aimed at the low-end consumer market. Apple WILL get into this market if it starts to threaten their mac sales, I know that much.
Debian provides excellent tools to build your own kernel package. The default kernel just has to be good enough to show a console and download the kernel tarball.
You yourself are confusing audiences for these products in unfolding your own arguments. You are confusing your own arguments in the balance of the review in fact. WHAT are you reviewing and WHO for? Please decide before you start typing.
This was my conclusion from what I read of the article as well. It seemed to be based on the writer's own needs, and how well the system caters to these needs.
The fact is, apple has a product strategy aiming at different categories of users, and for those categories the needs are extremely well met. For other categories (like you're average linux user or gamer) the needs aren't met at all.
One category, for example, which is extremely well catered for on the mac, but not on linux, is the professional user for most categories of "professional". Though the author laments that mac users "have to" buy their way out of problems, for this category this is a major plus. If they need something, they just pay for it and get on with their day. On linux it's solving it yourself or not solving it at all for lots of types of problems.
Incidentally I left debian (in '03) for the mac because the money I spend extra for the mac is more than paid for in the amount of productive time I've gained. The way I see it, linux is a good choice if time is cheap for you, whereas the mac is a good choice if time is expensive. Windows is the safe choice that forms a good middle ground. And I don't spend that much extra (unlike how the author points it out). I spend at most 500 USD a year on my mac (aggregate of hardware and software). That seems quite a fair price.
If by "Linux programs" you mean X11 apps, you can forget it. No Mac user wants to run an X11 app. Besides the fact that they look hideous next to Cocoa/Aqua apps, they just don't integrate with everything else. It is like running Wine... you'll do it if you absolutely have to, but you'll always be on the lookout for something native. And this is coming from a 10+ year Linux user...
To be fair, ported linux/X11 programs on the mac don't integrate any worse than they do on linux. It just seems they're less integrated because of the difference with native OS X apps.
Your kidding me right? Nobel laureates have prestige. Having an apple product which anyone can buy does not give you prestige. In fact I can't think of any generic tech consumer item which would give you any prestige.
Where did you hole up during the beginning of the ipod hype? There most definitely was a period where owning an ipod meant instant coolness and prestige among most teenagers and twenty-somethings.
This is not informative unless you can link to evidence that shows there is a general problem with the product. Your post alone is an anecdote. If, say, 10% of these phones suffer the same problem as yours did, that would be informative. Otherwise, there is no useful information here.
HTC is known for having low build quality. Most people don't realize this until after they purchase a windows mobile device. I too am an ex-owner of a windows mobile smartphone. The keys stopped functioning properly (and eventually at all) right around the end of my one-year warranty period. I did not do anything unusual with the phone except carry it with me every day.
The major annoyance here is that these phones are very expensive. If you buy something that expensive, it has to last you a long time.
To be honest, you might as well say all Windows Mobile based phones are iPhone rivals. I would prefer to say it's just a competitor in the smartphone space, as iPhone will be when it arrives.
Exactly, this htc touch is no different from previous windows mobile phones with touch screens. You still don't have multi-touch. The only novelty is a front-end app which lets you more easily navigate to specific applications. In itself this is also not new because interfaces like these have been available for pocket pc since the dawn of the platform.
In short: yawn.
You don't have to want to rewrite the world in JavaScript to think this is useful. Think gentle offline extensions to websites, not "omfg my next word processor is going to be written in this."
I think what the parent was saying is that you're better off solving the problems google gears targets with desktop-specific application platforms, instead of trying to shoehorn an AJAX app onto the desktop, where it's not designed to thrive.
I personally also think that very few web apps are candidates for google gearing. Going offline is much more than redesigning your data back-end to talk to sqlite. You have to rethink the entire user experience because users have intrinsically different expectations about local versus web-based applications.
Coincidentally, adobe is betting with apollo that web 2.0 will evolve into local apps that augment and enhance web apps. They're betting that your information will be in the cloud, but instead of having a thin client like an ajax app in the browser, you'll have a local smart client that knows how to interact in a web-browser-based medium, but very much takes advantage of desktop technology and metaphors.
Compiled Java bytecode is a speed deamon compared to JavaSCRIPT.
There's no technical reason for javascript to be any slower than java if you JIT-compile it and cache the compilation results (like how PHP with the zend accelerator is roughly in the same class as java, even though it is not byte-compiled).
In fact, the tamarin engine (that will be used for javascript 2 in firefox 4) offers an order of magnitude better performance. You can see that performance today by toying with Flash's AVM2 / ActionScript 3 engine, which is roughly on par with java performance-wise.
I think browser developers are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking in vain for "the next big thing". I'd rather see work done on useful plug-ins. That work well with existing browsers, than see a new browser that has some improvements of debatable worth that break the old way of doing things entirely.
Well, what if you wanted to have thousands of bookmarks, and be able to easily look through them based on tagging etc., and you wanted this data to be stored locally? I suspect this is where they are headed with places, and I would welcome it.
Besides, current browsers have a long way to go still. They're basically stuck in the mid-nineties, and are optimized towards static websites, instead of towards dynamic web apps. For example:
- HTML and CSS are optimized for showing and laying out text, not application control surfaces.
- HTML and CSS don't have good support for anything but the most simplistic of fluid layouts, which are a must for web apps. (And if you doubt this, compare the experience of creating fluid layouts in flex 2 or java swing with that of creating them in HTML/CSS).
- JavaScript 1.x is really, really slow (an order of magnitude slower than ActionScript 3), it doesn't have native support for namespaces / packages, its syntax for OO is poor, and its support for dynamic loading of application code is sub-par, all making it way too difficult to develop large client-side web apps.
- browsers don't have decent support for local storage.
- browsers don't have decent support for rich media (video, editable graphics, sound) that can be used by web applications (which is why youtube's video player is flash-based).
Many of these issues have been hacked around to some degree by various toolkits, but the fact remains that browsers are not suited to developing client-side applications, and you won't see the full bloom of web-based applications until the browsers catch up to the needs of the market. So, I think it's good that the mozilla developers aren't resting on their laurels and really trying to improve the concept and base technologies of a web browser (obviously within the confines of the standardization work of W3C, WHATWG and ECMA), instead of remaining stuck in 1996, like microsoft is with IE.
It's near impossible to tell the difference on a CRT (19", 1280x1024, 32-bit) without zooming in.
It's dead-easy for me to see the difference on my 17' CRT monitor (1184x878, 32-bit). Your retina are probably not sensitive enough to color variations, or your monitor is calibrated poorly.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean no one else can. I am convinced that a lot of people do find the 6-bit dithering to be a major visual annoyance, and that this is not a matter of being picky. Back in the days that all screens were CRT and all refresh rates 70 hz or below I had the same issue with flicker, where it was a major annoyance for me that all screens flickered like crazy, and other people just couldn't tell.
Reading through your post your main point seems to be the lack of control you feel you have over your windows system. You're exactly right, windows gives you less control. What turns you off is what attracts average users. Your average desktop user doesn't want that level of control.
...that the majority of people have never heard of Linux before. They've lived in a world where Microsoft software is installed on a new computer by default
Who are these mystical people that are unaware of linux? The only ones I know are so technologically inept that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to dump them on a linux box, because they wouldn't be able to figure out how to start their word processor without the big W icon on their desktop.
There are a few basic reasons people stick with windows:
- windows works well enough
- windows is what they know
- linux doesn't have a killer app that people HAVE to switch for
People know linux well enough. Many have even tried it once or twice. They just have decided that it doesn't offer them any tangible benefits, and frankly, I would have a hard time arguing the opposite.
The number and severity of its security problems certainly qualify as "horrible." Obvious? Depends on who you ask. I'm in IT; I think so. Most people in IT would probably agree with that. End users? Maybe not. They have a different idea of "obvious" than most /. readers.
To put this into perspective, I haven't had a security problem on a windows box in over four years. All you need is to follow some good practices and you're perfectly safe. Vista with its limited user powers should help a lot in reducing the effort involved in those "good practices".
I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?
Because the kernel has been updated. After you update itunes a reboot is not needed.
Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendants, which were designed twenty years later?
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet. If you're referring to unix I have to disappoint you, unix was not designed to be inherently secure. On early versions there were many security issues, because the concept of limited user powers took a while to gain a foothold, and even when they did the system's design was still full of security holes. The first internet worm (the morris worm) specifically targeted unix systems, in case you've forgotten. Just look at the security track record of commercial unices. It's pretty poor.
Linux is not inherently more secure than other commonly available operating systems, it's just too much of a moving target because there is no binary stability, so a worm can't target large swaths of systems at the same time. That binary instability is a strength, but it's also the reason why there are so few binary drivers and commercial applications on linux.