We rapidly iterated before when the web was niche. When we had, comparatively speaking, very few users. Before there was a mass adoption in business.
Back then the disruption of rapid iteration and accompanying obsolescence was not a big problem. Now it's a massive problem.
Sure, one can argue that institutions stuck using IE6 (or even IE8) should get with the times and update, but the reality is that is a very costly exercise. One can't simply blindly update a few thousand machines in a company when the end result could be a few thousand people unable to work. Upgrading often has knock-on effects, so a browser upgrade may require an OS upgrade too, and every other piece of business-critical software needs to be thoroughly tested. Some software will also provide to be incompatible too, and sourcing replacements (either new licenses for new versions, or rewrites for custom software) can be prohibitively expensive.
It's those people who fear change. The IT managers that are dealing with managing thousands of machines. A failed upgrade not only has the potential to cost them their jobs but also to put a company out of business. Major change for them is terrifying.
You are right though. We can rapidly iterate now, like we did before. But we need to be careful about how we do that, and not forget those that can't come along for the ride.
About once every other day, the whole OS just hangs. I can't even get the Task Manager to come up; sometimes I can't even get Ctrl-Alt-Delete to work. I just have to hold the power button down and reboot. To be fair, this is probably caused by the beta driver for a USB wireless adapter (Netgear's only released the beta for Win8).
To be fair, on a decent OS no driver, not even a beta one, should be able to bring down your OS.
It may not be all that unusual for you in Canada to still have snow on the ground at this time of year. In contrast though the last couple of winters in Toronto have been highly unusual to basically be essentially snow free.
Here in the UK, it's very unusual for us to still have snow around now. In contrast Easter weekend last year in contrast was unseasonably warm and people were having barbecues. Normal for here is about half way between the two.
The point is that climate is a global thing. Just because you're having a fairly normal winter in Canada doesn't mean that the rest of us are.
I know it's a controversial opinion, but modern JavaScript is OK.
All modern browsers support the ECMAScript 5 version of JavaScript. That includes a number of useful additions to the language.
IMHO the most important addition is strict mode. That disables some of the most egregious features of the language, making it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Strict mode can be enabled for a whole file, or on a function-by-function basis - you just need to include the line "use strict"; (including the quotes) at the top of the file or function. As it's just a string it will be ignored on older JS interpreters making it backward compatible too.
I think that the problem you have is that JavaScript doesn't match your experience and/or expectations of how a programming language should work.
The scope rules of JavaScript are actually very straight forward. The problem is that most languages have block-based scope. JavaScript instead has function-based scope.
As for proper "object/class" support, well, classes are just one way of doing objects, and not the only way. JavaScript has first-class support for objects. It's inheritance model however is prototype-based, rather than class-based. It's a different paradigm, but no less valid.
Your experience and expectations of how a language should work (probably based on experience writing C++, Java, or any number of other languages) say that scope must be block-based, and object models must be class based. Those aren't the only solutions though.
Are you really based in the UK? Because you don't seem to be talking about the country I live in.
Yes, here in the UK we do still use miles for road distances and miles per hour for speed. People still talk about their own weight referring to stones and pounds. The only other imperial hold-outs I can think of though are recipe books (the only place in my 39 years I've *ever* seen a "fluid ounce" mentioned), and the good old pint of beer.
Besides that we're metric. All the food and drink I buy from the shops is (officially) measured in grams and litres. Yes, sometimes those measures do match older imperial measures, so you may see 454g (a pound) or 568ml (a pint), but that's becoming less common. I buy litre cartons of milk, not 2 pints. Weights of people in the medical profession these days are kilograms.
It's been illegal in the UK for some time now to sell food measured in pounds and ounces, or liquids in fluid ounces. The only place you might be able to buy a pound of potatoes these days is a street market, where most of the time if you ask for a pound you'll actually get sold half a kilogram.
I'm a UK citizen. Yes, we measure driving distances in miles. For weights of people, colloquially, we do tend to still talk about stones. For liquid measures we still buy pints of beer.
That's about it though. Outside of road travel I almost exclusively see metres and centimetres. Weights are all exclusively grams and kilograms, which includes weights for people in medicine. Liquid measures aside from beer are all litres. People talk about "pints" of milk, but the cartons are sold with litre measurements on the packaging. The only time you hear "gallon" referenced is when people are talking about fuel economy, but fuel can only be bought in litres.
Yes, there's still luddites about that insist on using imperial measures, but they're a minority, and they're dying out.
Really, besides keeping miles for road distances, and thus speed too, we're very metric.
If I had mod points today you'd have got them, as yours may be the most insightful post I've read so far in this debate.
The tendency we have to observe intelligence as a single metric is IMHO the root of the lack of understanding many have with respect to this subject. You rightly point out that there is a difference between innate ability, and social acuity. I'd say those are both aspects of general intelligence. They can be broken down further, as you hint at, and indeed there's other aspects of intelligence too. Ability in a subject itself must at least be split into knowledge of the subject and the capability of reasoning.
With schooling there is a great emphasis on grades, and studying hard. This tends towards rewarding those that have knowledge of subjects, and less towards those with the ability to reason. It's a simple fact that people who are not engaged in a subject don't take in as much knowledge. Those that are good at the social acuity thing will tend to engage more in classes, if only to please their teacher. Grading at school is about measuring knowledge, and the ability of students to perform in exams. It fails to measure the potential of a student to excel.
People as a whole look at grades as a measure of intelligence, the be-all and end-all. This is especially true of parents, but it is also true of many professionals in the education sector. A student with poor grades may indeed be thick, but it may well instead be an indicator that they have failed to engage with their schooling. There's a tendency by all however to just think that the student is less intelligent.
Speaking as a British citizen, one with two small children (aged 7 and 8), my take is that my government is acting like a bunch of morons. They're allowing themselves to be led by the Daily Mail - a newspaper that has a long track record of spouting an ultra-conservative line that includes rabid xenophobia and plain and simple hatred of a significant proportion of the UK population. This move is not about making a rational choice, it's simply all about securing votes - the Daily Mail's readership are exclusively Conservative party voters, David Cameron's party.
I'm strongly against net filtering. Implementing mandatory filtering is the thin end of the wedge. It will not be long before there's complaints and campaigns by the likes of the Daily Mail complaining about inappropriate material that is not being filtered. How long will it be before Wikipedia gets banned? That site is packed full of very adult material that some will find objectionable. And what about the BBC News covering stories about pedophilia? And all the swearing in YouTube videos? Google searches can link through to objectionable material, complete with previews, so shouldn't that be banned too? Even without such encroachment into areas that rational people can see as being innocuous, filtering still ends up being a blunt weapon, filtering out sites that deal with issues such as contraception and abortion since they fall under the label of "sex". If kids can't do research into such things then the problems we have in this country of teenage pregnancy can only get worse.
As an example of such blunt filtering, I recently used a wifi network at a local church that had filtering enabled on their connection. They wanted to prevent childrens groups that met there from accessing things they deemed as being objectionable material. The end result was that almost every single link off of the church's own website was blocked. They saw the light after a few weeks and disabled the filtering.
If this move happens I will be opting out of the filtering. That in itself makes me nervous - some people will assume that because I've done that I must be a bad parent. That sadly is exactly the kind of false conclusion that an average Daily Mail reader will reach.
The BBC is running 26 different HD channels covering the games right now, 24 purely dedicated to the olympics (and another 24 simulcast in SD).
That's enough channels to let them cover every session of every event, and that's what they're doing. Of course many sessions have multiple athletes competing at the same time in different parts of the same arena, like badminton or gymnastics. With (usually) only one channel covering the session it's thus not quite everything.
Unfortunately the BBC are now only covering half of the Formula 1 season live. Last weekend's race in Hungary, for instance, wasn't live on the BBC. Indeed, they couldn't even be bothered to put it on an HD channel, in spite of the fact that right now they're running 26 HD channels (24 specifically dedicated for Olympics coverage together with their 2 pre-existing HD channels - at the time of their race broadcasts there were probably 10 channels going free). The rest of the season is edited highlights on the Beeb - live only on Sky, a subscription satellite channel, part owned by Murdoch.
The BBC's live coverage of F1 is still good, but the evidence seems to indicate that they don't really care about the sport any more.
You are rather ignoring the fact that the author of the opinion piece has written a ton of open source code, released under a very permissive BSD-style license.
The guy is not against open source at all. Far from it. He's built a business on it.
Right now a very significant proportion of Android devices being sold, if not the majority, are still running Android 2.3.
It may well take until 2014 for the bulk of Android devices being sold to be running Jelly Bean or later. So the GP's estimate of 2017 for the majority of Android devices running Jelly Bean may be marginally pessimistic, but maybe only by a year.
I call FUD. 64-bit is only "what people are after" because of marketing. Nothing more or less. I mean, think about it, what really is the point of 64-bit?
64-bit integer maths isn't really a genuine requirement, and on the rare occasions it is needed the impact of performing 64-bit integer maths on a 32-bit CPU is not too immense. As for 64-bit floating-point maths, most ARM chips have come with this built-in for many years.
Then there's 64-bit addressing, which in reality is a myth, since no CPUs actually support 64-bit addressing. Nobody needs to access 16EiB of RAM, or will need to for several decades to come. I believe that x86-64 chips currently top out at 48-bit addressing, which is 256TiB. 32-bit ARM chips top out at 4GiB, which admittedly is starting to feel a little cramped and is arguably inadequate, but the Cortex-A15 introduced 40-bit addressing (1TiB) which addresses this concern.
The reality of "64-bit" for x86, and the performance advantages it has brought over IA32, has been that it's addressed deficiencies of Intel's old IA32 architecture. The main improvement derives from the addition of 8 new general purpose registers, bringing x86-64's tally to 16. ARM chips have always had 16 general purpose registers.
I'd argue that ARM have already designed cores that are capable of playing in the laptop space. Cortex-A15 MPCore seems up to the job to me.
If you're still not sold on my arguments that you don't really need 64-bit, ARMv8 was announced last November which is a 64-bit ARM instruction set. Applied Micro's X-Gene CPU is based on this.
Besides all of this, given that their business is designing cores rather than manufacturing it's not really down to ARM to push into the laptop space. It's down to their licensees to put ARM cores into laptop CPUs, and to manufacture them using processes that will allow those chips to run at clock speeds competitive with Intel and AMDs CPUs.
IMHO the use of vendor prefixes was the right thing to do, and remains exactly the right thing to do.
The problem instead is that the standardisation process is taking far too long.
2D transforms, 3D transforms, transitions and animations still aren't officially standardised. They've existed for years, and are now supported in all major browsers (if one includes IE10), and are all essentially compatible. There's mostly only been minor tweaks to them all since they first appeared. Yet these CSS3 features are all at "working draft" stage. Indeed, the 3D transforms spec is a working draft, dated March 2009, over 3 years ago. It's absurd.
The real solution should be instead to expedite the standardisation process. That way the vendor prefixes can vanish much faster.
Slashdot Mirror
We rapidly iterated before when the web was niche. When we had, comparatively speaking, very few users. Before there was a mass adoption in business.
Back then the disruption of rapid iteration and accompanying obsolescence was not a big problem. Now it's a massive problem.
Sure, one can argue that institutions stuck using IE6 (or even IE8) should get with the times and update, but the reality is that is a very costly exercise. One can't simply blindly update a few thousand machines in a company when the end result could be a few thousand people unable to work. Upgrading often has knock-on effects, so a browser upgrade may require an OS upgrade too, and every other piece of business-critical software needs to be thoroughly tested. Some software will also provide to be incompatible too, and sourcing replacements (either new licenses for new versions, or rewrites for custom software) can be prohibitively expensive.
It's those people who fear change. The IT managers that are dealing with managing thousands of machines. A failed upgrade not only has the potential to cost them their jobs but also to put a company out of business. Major change for them is terrifying.
You are right though. We can rapidly iterate now, like we did before. But we need to be careful about how we do that, and not forget those that can't come along for the ride.
WRONG! You can play XBox 360 games on the Xbox one.
This is not true. They're completely different platforms with no backwards compatibility at all. Same as PS3/PS4.
Microsoft isn't going to make any kind of move in response to this.
Their move is/was the XBox.
I think you must have me confused with somebody else. ;-)
About once every other day, the whole OS just hangs. I can't even get the Task Manager to come up; sometimes I can't even get Ctrl-Alt-Delete to work. I just have to hold the power button down and reboot. To be fair, this is probably caused by the beta driver for a USB wireless adapter (Netgear's only released the beta for Win8).
To be fair, on a decent OS no driver, not even a beta one, should be able to bring down your OS.
It may not be all that unusual for you in Canada to still have snow on the ground at this time of year. In contrast though the last couple of winters in Toronto have been highly unusual to basically be essentially snow free.
Here in the UK, it's very unusual for us to still have snow around now. In contrast Easter weekend last year in contrast was unseasonably warm and people were having barbecues. Normal for here is about half way between the two.
The point is that climate is a global thing. Just because you're having a fairly normal winter in Canada doesn't mean that the rest of us are.
Apple will have no response to this, and nor should they.
This is exactly the path that Apple have been telling companies they should follow if they wish to sell media outside of the iOS app store.
Amazon are simply following Apple's own guidance.
I know it's a controversial opinion, but modern JavaScript is OK.
All modern browsers support the ECMAScript 5 version of JavaScript. That includes a number of useful additions to the language.
IMHO the most important addition is strict mode. That disables some of the most egregious features of the language, making it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Strict mode can be enabled for a whole file, or on a function-by-function basis - you just need to include the line "use strict"; (including the quotes) at the top of the file or function. As it's just a string it will be ignored on older JS interpreters making it backward compatible too.
I think that the problem you have is that JavaScript doesn't match your experience and/or expectations of how a programming language should work.
The scope rules of JavaScript are actually very straight forward. The problem is that most languages have block-based scope. JavaScript instead has function-based scope.
As for proper "object/class" support, well, classes are just one way of doing objects, and not the only way. JavaScript has first-class support for objects. It's inheritance model however is prototype-based, rather than class-based. It's a different paradigm, but no less valid.
Your experience and expectations of how a language should work (probably based on experience writing C++, Java, or any number of other languages) say that scope must be block-based, and object models must be class based. Those aren't the only solutions though.
Are you really based in the UK? Because you don't seem to be talking about the country I live in.
Yes, here in the UK we do still use miles for road distances and miles per hour for speed. People still talk about their own weight referring to stones and pounds. The only other imperial hold-outs I can think of though are recipe books (the only place in my 39 years I've *ever* seen a "fluid ounce" mentioned), and the good old pint of beer.
Besides that we're metric. All the food and drink I buy from the shops is (officially) measured in grams and litres. Yes, sometimes those measures do match older imperial measures, so you may see 454g (a pound) or 568ml (a pint), but that's becoming less common. I buy litre cartons of milk, not 2 pints. Weights of people in the medical profession these days are kilograms.
It's been illegal in the UK for some time now to sell food measured in pounds and ounces, or liquids in fluid ounces. The only place you might be able to buy a pound of potatoes these days is a street market, where most of the time if you ask for a pound you'll actually get sold half a kilogram.
Huh? What are you talking about?
I'm a UK citizen. Yes, we measure driving distances in miles. For weights of people, colloquially, we do tend to still talk about stones. For liquid measures we still buy pints of beer.
That's about it though. Outside of road travel I almost exclusively see metres and centimetres. Weights are all exclusively grams and kilograms, which includes weights for people in medicine. Liquid measures aside from beer are all litres. People talk about "pints" of milk, but the cartons are sold with litre measurements on the packaging. The only time you hear "gallon" referenced is when people are talking about fuel economy, but fuel can only be bought in litres.
Yes, there's still luddites about that insist on using imperial measures, but they're a minority, and they're dying out.
Really, besides keeping miles for road distances, and thus speed too, we're very metric.
If I had mod points today you'd have got them, as yours may be the most insightful post I've read so far in this debate.
The tendency we have to observe intelligence as a single metric is IMHO the root of the lack of understanding many have with respect to this subject. You rightly point out that there is a difference between innate ability, and social acuity. I'd say those are both aspects of general intelligence. They can be broken down further, as you hint at, and indeed there's other aspects of intelligence too. Ability in a subject itself must at least be split into knowledge of the subject and the capability of reasoning.
With schooling there is a great emphasis on grades, and studying hard. This tends towards rewarding those that have knowledge of subjects, and less towards those with the ability to reason. It's a simple fact that people who are not engaged in a subject don't take in as much knowledge. Those that are good at the social acuity thing will tend to engage more in classes, if only to please their teacher. Grading at school is about measuring knowledge, and the ability of students to perform in exams. It fails to measure the potential of a student to excel.
People as a whole look at grades as a measure of intelligence, the be-all and end-all. This is especially true of parents, but it is also true of many professionals in the education sector. A student with poor grades may indeed be thick, but it may well instead be an indicator that they have failed to engage with their schooling. There's a tendency by all however to just think that the student is less intelligent.
Speaking as a British citizen, one with two small children (aged 7 and 8), my take is that my government is acting like a bunch of morons. They're allowing themselves to be led by the Daily Mail - a newspaper that has a long track record of spouting an ultra-conservative line that includes rabid xenophobia and plain and simple hatred of a significant proportion of the UK population. This move is not about making a rational choice, it's simply all about securing votes - the Daily Mail's readership are exclusively Conservative party voters, David Cameron's party.
I'm strongly against net filtering. Implementing mandatory filtering is the thin end of the wedge. It will not be long before there's complaints and campaigns by the likes of the Daily Mail complaining about inappropriate material that is not being filtered. How long will it be before Wikipedia gets banned? That site is packed full of very adult material that some will find objectionable. And what about the BBC News covering stories about pedophilia? And all the swearing in YouTube videos? Google searches can link through to objectionable material, complete with previews, so shouldn't that be banned too? Even without such encroachment into areas that rational people can see as being innocuous, filtering still ends up being a blunt weapon, filtering out sites that deal with issues such as contraception and abortion since they fall under the label of "sex". If kids can't do research into such things then the problems we have in this country of teenage pregnancy can only get worse.
As an example of such blunt filtering, I recently used a wifi network at a local church that had filtering enabled on their connection. They wanted to prevent childrens groups that met there from accessing things they deemed as being objectionable material. The end result was that almost every single link off of the church's own website was blocked. They saw the light after a few weeks and disabled the filtering.
If this move happens I will be opting out of the filtering. That in itself makes me nervous - some people will assume that because I've done that I must be a bad parent. That sadly is exactly the kind of false conclusion that an average Daily Mail reader will reach.
You know what tho?
The Episode 7 you just described - that's still better than any of episodes 1-3 that Lucas made.
It's not quite everything, exactly...
The BBC is running 26 different HD channels covering the games right now, 24 purely dedicated to the olympics (and another 24 simulcast in SD).
That's enough channels to let them cover every session of every event, and that's what they're doing. Of course many sessions have multiple athletes competing at the same time in different parts of the same arena, like badminton or gymnastics. With (usually) only one channel covering the session it's thus not quite everything.
Very nearly tho!
The BBC didn't ever use Silverlight.
That was ITV.
Unfortunately the BBC are now only covering half of the Formula 1 season live. Last weekend's race in Hungary, for instance, wasn't live on the BBC. Indeed, they couldn't even be bothered to put it on an HD channel, in spite of the fact that right now they're running 26 HD channels (24 specifically dedicated for Olympics coverage together with their 2 pre-existing HD channels - at the time of their race broadcasts there were probably 10 channels going free). The rest of the season is edited highlights on the Beeb - live only on Sky, a subscription satellite channel, part owned by Murdoch.
The BBC's live coverage of F1 is still good, but the evidence seems to indicate that they don't really care about the sport any more.
tvcatchup.com is clever and blocks access from various VPN networks it knows about.
Same applies to several other UK internet TV services, especially those run by broadcasters. The BBC are rare in not doing this.
I've just looked through a bunch of the games I've bought from Steam on my Mac.
Of the dozen or I looked at, only one of them was using cider, that being GTA Vice City.
Of the rest, one was using Mono, and the remainder were all first-class ports.
You are rather ignoring the fact that the author of the opinion piece has written a ton of open source code, released under a very permissive BSD-style license.
The guy is not against open source at all. Far from it. He's built a business on it.
I think you're being a bit optimistic.
Right now a very significant proportion of Android devices being sold, if not the majority, are still running Android 2.3.
It may well take until 2014 for the bulk of Android devices being sold to be running Jelly Bean or later. So the GP's estimate of 2017 for the majority of Android devices running Jelly Bean may be marginally pessimistic, but maybe only by a year.
Not exactly.
This post is about an opinion blog piece written by Matt Gemmell. He is not the creator of the crapware you're referring to.
The ARM chip inside the Wii is embedded in with the "Hollywood" GPU.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_system_software
I call FUD. 64-bit is only "what people are after" because of marketing. Nothing more or less. I mean, think about it, what really is the point of 64-bit?
64-bit integer maths isn't really a genuine requirement, and on the rare occasions it is needed the impact of performing 64-bit integer maths on a 32-bit CPU is not too immense. As for 64-bit floating-point maths, most ARM chips have come with this built-in for many years.
Then there's 64-bit addressing, which in reality is a myth, since no CPUs actually support 64-bit addressing. Nobody needs to access 16EiB of RAM, or will need to for several decades to come. I believe that x86-64 chips currently top out at 48-bit addressing, which is 256TiB. 32-bit ARM chips top out at 4GiB, which admittedly is starting to feel a little cramped and is arguably inadequate, but the Cortex-A15 introduced 40-bit addressing (1TiB) which addresses this concern.
The reality of "64-bit" for x86, and the performance advantages it has brought over IA32, has been that it's addressed deficiencies of Intel's old IA32 architecture. The main improvement derives from the addition of 8 new general purpose registers, bringing x86-64's tally to 16. ARM chips have always had 16 general purpose registers.
I'd argue that ARM have already designed cores that are capable of playing in the laptop space. Cortex-A15 MPCore seems up to the job to me.
If you're still not sold on my arguments that you don't really need 64-bit, ARMv8 was announced last November which is a 64-bit ARM instruction set. Applied Micro's X-Gene CPU is based on this.
Besides all of this, given that their business is designing cores rather than manufacturing it's not really down to ARM to push into the laptop space. It's down to their licensees to put ARM cores into laptop CPUs, and to manufacture them using processes that will allow those chips to run at clock speeds competitive with Intel and AMDs CPUs.
IMHO the use of vendor prefixes was the right thing to do, and remains exactly the right thing to do.
The problem instead is that the standardisation process is taking far too long.
2D transforms, 3D transforms, transitions and animations still aren't officially standardised. They've existed for years, and are now supported in all major browsers (if one includes IE10), and are all essentially compatible. There's mostly only been minor tweaks to them all since they first appeared. Yet these CSS3 features are all at "working draft" stage. Indeed, the 3D transforms spec is a working draft, dated March 2009, over 3 years ago. It's absurd.
The real solution should be instead to expedite the standardisation process. That way the vendor prefixes can vanish much faster.