Furthermore, many corporations are terrified of technology which fundamentally transforms the market. Granted, this is not science per se, but it still represents a way in which corporations have a vested interest in iterative, trivial progress. They expect to extract all of the money they can from a particular technology before cooking up the next one: stable, predictable, and stagnant. Yeah, it's old hat, but look at the internet revolution: Xerox dropped the ball because they had a vested interest in stability.
Nvidia and ATI are kind of in a driver race. The last time I ran UT2k4 on my Linux box (6 months ago), which has an ATI card, it was acceptable, maybe 85% of the speed of the windows build (with better load times). I always understood that Nvidia's drivers were better than ATI's from the forums, so they're probably very acceptable by now.
Clearly you've never done anything with drivers. We're doing some driver programming at my company, and let me tell you sir, it's a bitch. We have Dell and Gateway boxes with the same OS revision and everything, but (one particular rev of) the driver makes the Gateway box bluescreen and not the Dell. Hell, we've even had cases where two seemingly-identical Dells were tested side-by-side; one consistently bluescreened, and the other did not. It is a very tricky topic.
And moreover, since we're just talking about the OS running on Intels, it's decidedly not the kernel/processor, which is the lowest level of portability and the level at which Linux almost universally succeeds. One Genuine Intel x86 is pretty much the same as the next, a few register extensions aside. It's the devices which might be attached to it which create headaches. I could set up Slackware or Gentoo on almost any system on the face of the earth with very little difficulty. Now, getting sound to work on one of those systems is another matter entirely. Framebuffer devices will always be a pain in the neck. I'm still working on scanning properly. MacOS uses a ton of OpenGL and other chutzpah for its basic functionality; Linux basically just uses the kernel and a few core tools you'd find on the Slackware "a" diskette set.
I'll never forget the time I went to Electronics Boutique to buy Grand Theft Auto, and was carded by the scrawny little retail monkey. "You must be joking," I said. He frowed his pimply, 19-year old face and said, "Hey, this is serious. I need to see your card."
Movie players are for everybody. They're for people who don't know an iota about technology (believe me, I've made serious money setting up their entertainment systems) and for hard-core nerds alike. They will most definitely lose a chunk of the market if you need to connect your movie player to the internet to make it play new movies. You'll have 80 year-old men bitching and screaming at Good Guys employees that they "bought this damn thing six months ago and now it doesn't work, I don't know why, you guys are con artists, give me my God-damned money back!"
(Of course, the solution to that problem is to bundle the upgrade with the discs and have it do the patching automatically. But that's tough to implement, and if it's not done perfectly, then goto the quote above.)
PSPs are for young people. They're for gamers. It's assumed by default that if you're geeky enough to buy a PSP, then you can probably handle a firmware upgrade every now and then if you have instructions and an internet connection. In my experience, this is usually true, though not always.
I agree - a 50% performance hit is out of the question. Most games run in Cedega at near-native speeds. Hell, Doom3 runs slightly faster because I'm only using Fluxbox, sans the fact that it crashes every 2.5 minutes:)
I also suspect that the reason Cedega/WineX runs as a compatibility layer might be because of Direct3D's closed nature, but I'm not a shader-head so I don't know for certain.
I am not opposed to the teaching of religion in schools -- without a knowledge of the Bible, it is diffucult to have a real understanding of the artistic, cultural and political histotry of Western civilization, let alone how and why it is different from other civilizations in history.
Seconded. There is a poverty of religious knowledge in humanities students, both undergraduates and graduates. They often stick to psychoanalytic criticism (i.e., finding phalluses everywhere they can), and that whiny race card stuff.
They didn't have to read the bible to understand Shakespeare (you don't), so they putter along ignorantly from John Milton (super-Puritan) to Emily Dickinson (whose poetry is almost exclusively based on hymns) to TS Elliot himself knowing only two things about the most important book in Western culture: they don't like it, and it is a tool of oppression. Then, they go on to produce the kind of narrow criticism and philosophy which, in fact, fuels fundamentalist extremism.
It depends. If you're an hourly, non-salaried employee and your boss asks you to work off the clock, it's unequivocably illegal. If you're a salaried, professional employee who's considered 'exempt' from overtime, then you are expected to work overtime without extra compensation if requested to do so. However, in the US, I believe you have to be making like 90k as a programmer before you're exempt from overtime.
Of course, in some professions they use trickery to make it seem like a person is working 40 hours a week when they are actually not. The most glaring example in my mind is lawyers, who are commonly expected to work 2000 'billable' hours in a year (that is, hours which can be charged to a specific client). That's 8 hours a day if you can charge every moment at your office, including lunchtime, to a specific client, but most lawyers work 10-12 hours a day because that is simply impractical.
Additionally, it is certainly dishost for an employer to give someone an impression during the hiring process that they will work 8 hours a day, and then require them to work more than that. While IANAL, that sounds like grounds for a lawsuit to me.
I completely agree. Just ask them what they expect you to work up front, and if they ask you to deviate from that unreasonably, simply refuse, because once somebody takes advantage of you they will only continue to do so.
Currently I'm working at a startup. I've been pulling extra hours every once in a while while, when up against a deadline. We're expected to pull an average of about 40 worked hours per week, though the hours are quite flexible. I get there early and leave at 5 because I have an active social life, and most of the engineers come at 11 and leave at 7 or 8 because they don't. It's not like I've got some PHB breathing down my neck ordering me to work 12 hour days. I just have to meet deadlines. All told, it's not killing me.
The other job I was looking at in June (didn't accept their offer) was a junior sysadmin job with a multi-million dollar Sun shop. I was quite surprised: sysadmins are famous for their golden handcuffs and "it's 2 am and the servers are down, get your ass over here" attitude, but this place had, for the first two levels of admin, paid overtime and stable shift work. I was quite impressed, even though Unix administration is kind of my secondary interest.
Curing cancer is pretty blue-sky compared to current methods of treating it. In order to do this (and by curing, I mean to have one procedure which eliminates all forms of cancer) you would have to create a comprehensive method for repairing all genetic damage and blocking telomerase from making cancer cells immortal and not sterilizing males in the process - telomerase is also how testes can produce 500m sperm every day for your entire adult life. That's still quite a ways off.
Of course, I'm not saying you're a hopeless dreamer. I just thought I'd chime in with some facts.
No, silly. First of all, "Apple cannot survive on its own merits" is a wacky, distortive rhetorical question with several tacit assumptions. First, it assumes that businesses survive because of merit. Exhibit A: BeOS. Secondly, it assumes that those who are worthy would do better on an 'even' playing field (which itself assumes that such a thing exists; it does not). You think vendor lock-in is a nasty game? Microsoft does the same thing, sort of. They just use salesmen and lawyers instead of engineers to ensure that every PC worth mentioning ships with Windows. Thirdly, it implies that OS X is anything but the bee's knees. I'll let you figure that one out when you're removing viruses and spyware.
In regards to your second gastric eruption, it ain't that big of a difference between two AMD-64s with top notch RAM and a good graphics card and a PowerPC in terms of price. this one is just a single, and it costs 3 grand.
I depsise Norton with a vengence. Actually, I'm going over to somebody's house tomorrow morning JUST to remove Norton anti-virus. Their computer is essentially pwnd by their security software: it is preventing them from using Firefox at all, causing crashes when they try to open a Word file with the anti-virus disabled, and causing the internet to not work at all when it's enabled. Way to go, Norton.
Salesmen used to pitch it at me that it was exactly the same, but that the HP version was designed to be more compatible with a Wintel PC (that is, that it was already formatted FAT32 instead of HFS+, please correct me if I'm wrong).
But yes, I think the HP iPod was just a case of shameless corporate me-too-ism. They got a fabrication/marketing deal with Apple when they were selling like hotcakes. It probably pulled in some dollars, but to me it's just a sign of how intellectually bankrupt HP is.
Got called while I was at work (office job) the other day by my girlfriend's second cousin, who was incredulous that her Office docs wouldn't load after I got her network going (yeah, sure, it was something I did . ..). Only after I walked her through some troubleshooting steps and said, "Sorry about the echo, I'm in the atrium," did she actually realize that I was at work. Imagine that, at 11:30 on a weekday!
Microsoft's profits come from the huge number of windows sold
Most copies of Windows come with a brand new computer. Dell probably pays less than $25 a pop for these, which is not a ton of revenue. When you factor in the costs of R&D, it's a shitty profit margin. They make their big bucks from applications like Office.
wouldn't you think that this would also work for apple
No, it really wouldn't. Microsoft only works because they're a monopoly. If Apple were to start behaving like a monopoly with 15% market share, they would die.
I've written about a bit already, http://www.wavenger.com/index.php?p=286 and http://www.wavenger.com/index.php?p=285. This is actually starting to amuse me. His responses are an example of somebody who has an emotional response to something (i.e., getting a hard-on watching Dashboard and Exposé), and subsequently will bend and adulterate logic in every way possible in order to support their point. You can't argue with these people. It's best to avoid them.
I agree about the technical support/warrenty: they're absolutely useless. Dell's tech support used to be quite good when I was talking to people in Texas and Florida, but the Indian tech support sucks bottom. I'm not just talking about accents, which are a hinderance; their phone connections are incredibly shitty, and apparently there was some gap in their English education, as they do not respond to the words, "I cannot hear you, you need to speak louder." That's with a modern cell phone turned up all the way - if I use that volume with most people, their voices distort from being amplified that much. However, I am slightly hard of hearing, and I have a tendency to get angry at people for muttering shit at me, rather than just break down and wear a hearing aid. Anyway, every retail guy I've ever known tells me that the warrenties make them money hand over fist: pure profit.
Not all Dells are that poorly built. I bought a 2.6 GHz Dell about two years ago and was quite impressed at how expandable it was. The internals were good, full of fans. The clamshell design was nice. Installing a new hard drive was a snap. Of course, I have no doubt that your friend's was a piece of shit. The only PCs in my future are AMD-64s (homebuilt) and Apples.
Evolution has, through most of the time before the advent of agriculture (and for a good part of our existence thereafter) selected us to be avaricious, violent, xenophobic, lustful, and short-sighted. Only fairly recently have things like charity, pacificism, inclusiveness, monogamy, and meticulous planning resulted in anything but 1) death at the hands of a more vicious human 2) failure to reproduce or 3) perishing to the elements/starvation.
Anyway, don't be surprised when people act like this. It just represents the failure of the society to adequately shape people into moderns, by providing incentives and punishing disobedience. For example, if I have a competitor who is using dirty tactics against me, I am not as successful as my twin in another universe who knifes his competitor in an alley, unless he is subsequently hunted down by the cops.
And by the way, you just adverbed (-ly) a compound adjective (ever-increasing), or compounded (ever-) and adverb (increasingly), depending on how you look at it, which strikes me as filled with mega-wrongness and generally over-clumbsified.
Dude, you've got to be kidding. The front page is almost exactly the same as it's always been. Now, let's contrast that with Yahoo. I always liked Yahoo's sleek interface back in the 90's. Now, gah! What a mess!
I have to admit I'm with Gates on this one. At least you have to admit that his sentiments are better than Carly's attitude ("Everything important has already been invented;" didn't somebody say that around 1899?). The US and Silicon Valley survive as long as they are creating bleeding-edge technology. We can't compete on price because we're big fat Americans. But there will always be people out there willing to pay a premium for the best technology, and as long as we have that, then we survive.
And so says the doomsayer, "But it is! It's all going out the window!" Hold on, dude. America still has an edge, albiet it has dulled in the last five years. We've still got lots of successful companies, lots of employed software developers (frankly, the 'developers' out of work now are, at least in part, the barely-competant code monkeys who got hired for 70k during the bubble. Flame away.) If the government and companies put money into research now, then we'll have a booming tech sector in ten years. If not, we'll probably just have a marketing shell.
<sarcasm>I'm going to write an open source epic poem. Every stanza will be available in SVN and subject to change by anybody who cares. Better yet, I'll make it a wiki. However, I imagine the choice between heroic cuplets, blank verse, rime royale and spenserian stanzas will be far more contested than GTK vs QT.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, many corporations are terrified of technology which fundamentally transforms the market. Granted, this is not science per se, but it still represents a way in which corporations have a vested interest in iterative, trivial progress. They expect to extract all of the money they can from a particular technology before cooking up the next one: stable, predictable, and stagnant. Yeah, it's old hat, but look at the internet revolution: Xerox dropped the ball because they had a vested interest in stability.
Nvidia and ATI are kind of in a driver race. The last time I ran UT2k4 on my Linux box (6 months ago), which has an ATI card, it was acceptable, maybe 85% of the speed of the windows build (with better load times). I always understood that Nvidia's drivers were better than ATI's from the forums, so they're probably very acceptable by now.
Clearly you've never done anything with drivers. We're doing some driver programming at my company, and let me tell you sir, it's a bitch. We have Dell and Gateway boxes with the same OS revision and everything, but (one particular rev of) the driver makes the Gateway box bluescreen and not the Dell. Hell, we've even had cases where two seemingly-identical Dells were tested side-by-side; one consistently bluescreened, and the other did not. It is a very tricky topic.
And moreover, since we're just talking about the OS running on Intels, it's decidedly not the kernel/processor, which is the lowest level of portability and the level at which Linux almost universally succeeds. One Genuine Intel x86 is pretty much the same as the next, a few register extensions aside. It's the devices which might be attached to it which create headaches. I could set up Slackware or Gentoo on almost any system on the face of the earth with very little difficulty. Now, getting sound to work on one of those systems is another matter entirely. Framebuffer devices will always be a pain in the neck. I'm still working on scanning properly. MacOS uses a ton of OpenGL and other chutzpah for its basic functionality; Linux basically just uses the kernel and a few core tools you'd find on the Slackware "a" diskette set.
I'll never forget the time I went to Electronics Boutique to buy Grand Theft Auto, and was carded by the scrawny little retail monkey. "You must be joking," I said. He frowed his pimply, 19-year old face and said, "Hey, this is serious. I need to see your card."
The difference, I think, is the intended market.
Movie players are for everybody. They're for people who don't know an iota about technology (believe me, I've made serious money setting up their entertainment systems) and for hard-core nerds alike. They will most definitely lose a chunk of the market if you need to connect your movie player to the internet to make it play new movies. You'll have 80 year-old men bitching and screaming at Good Guys employees that they "bought this damn thing six months ago and now it doesn't work, I don't know why, you guys are con artists, give me my God-damned money back!"
(Of course, the solution to that problem is to bundle the upgrade with the discs and have it do the patching automatically. But that's tough to implement, and if it's not done perfectly, then goto the quote above.)
PSPs are for young people. They're for gamers. It's assumed by default that if you're geeky enough to buy a PSP, then you can probably handle a firmware upgrade every now and then if you have instructions and an internet connection. In my experience, this is usually true, though not always.
I agree - a 50% performance hit is out of the question. Most games run in Cedega at near-native speeds. Hell, Doom3 runs slightly faster because I'm only using Fluxbox, sans the fact that it crashes every 2.5 minutes:)
I also suspect that the reason Cedega/WineX runs as a compatibility layer might be because of Direct3D's closed nature, but I'm not a shader-head so I don't know for certain.
Seconded. There is a poverty of religious knowledge in humanities students, both undergraduates and graduates. They often stick to psychoanalytic criticism (i.e., finding phalluses everywhere they can), and that whiny race card stuff.
They didn't have to read the bible to understand Shakespeare (you don't), so they putter along ignorantly from John Milton (super-Puritan) to Emily Dickinson (whose poetry is almost exclusively based on hymns) to TS Elliot himself knowing only two things about the most important book in Western culture: they don't like it, and it is a tool of oppression. Then, they go on to produce the kind of narrow criticism and philosophy which, in fact, fuels fundamentalist extremism.
It depends. If you're an hourly, non-salaried employee and your boss asks you to work off the clock, it's unequivocably illegal. If you're a salaried, professional employee who's considered 'exempt' from overtime, then you are expected to work overtime without extra compensation if requested to do so. However, in the US, I believe you have to be making like 90k as a programmer before you're exempt from overtime.
Of course, in some professions they use trickery to make it seem like a person is working 40 hours a week when they are actually not. The most glaring example in my mind is lawyers, who are commonly expected to work 2000 'billable' hours in a year (that is, hours which can be charged to a specific client). That's 8 hours a day if you can charge every moment at your office, including lunchtime, to a specific client, but most lawyers work 10-12 hours a day because that is simply impractical.
Additionally, it is certainly dishost for an employer to give someone an impression during the hiring process that they will work 8 hours a day, and then require them to work more than that. While IANAL, that sounds like grounds for a lawsuit to me.
I completely agree. Just ask them what they expect you to work up front, and if they ask you to deviate from that unreasonably, simply refuse, because once somebody takes advantage of you they will only continue to do so.
Currently I'm working at a startup. I've been pulling extra hours every once in a while while, when up against a deadline. We're expected to pull an average of about 40 worked hours per week, though the hours are quite flexible. I get there early and leave at 5 because I have an active social life, and most of the engineers come at 11 and leave at 7 or 8 because they don't. It's not like I've got some PHB breathing down my neck ordering me to work 12 hour days. I just have to meet deadlines. All told, it's not killing me.
The other job I was looking at in June (didn't accept their offer) was a junior sysadmin job with a multi-million dollar Sun shop. I was quite surprised: sysadmins are famous for their golden handcuffs and "it's 2 am and the servers are down, get your ass over here" attitude, but this place had, for the first two levels of admin, paid overtime and stable shift work. I was quite impressed, even though Unix administration is kind of my secondary interest.
Curing cancer is pretty blue-sky compared to current methods of treating it. In order to do this (and by curing, I mean to have one procedure which eliminates all forms of cancer) you would have to create a comprehensive method for repairing all genetic damage and blocking telomerase from making cancer cells immortal and not sterilizing males in the process - telomerase is also how testes can produce 500m sperm every day for your entire adult life. That's still quite a ways off.
Of course, I'm not saying you're a hopeless dreamer. I just thought I'd chime in with some facts.
No, silly. First of all, "Apple cannot survive on its own merits" is a wacky, distortive rhetorical question with several tacit assumptions. First, it assumes that businesses survive because of merit. Exhibit A: BeOS. Secondly, it assumes that those who are worthy would do better on an 'even' playing field (which itself assumes that such a thing exists; it does not). You think vendor lock-in is a nasty game? Microsoft does the same thing, sort of. They just use salesmen and lawyers instead of engineers to ensure that every PC worth mentioning ships with Windows. Thirdly, it implies that OS X is anything but the bee's knees. I'll let you figure that one out when you're removing viruses and spyware.
In regards to your second gastric eruption, it ain't that big of a difference between two AMD-64s with top notch RAM and a good graphics card and a PowerPC in terms of price. this one is just a single, and it costs 3 grand.
I depsise Norton with a vengence. Actually, I'm going over to somebody's house tomorrow morning JUST to remove Norton anti-virus. Their computer is essentially pwnd by their security software: it is preventing them from using Firefox at all, causing crashes when they try to open a Word file with the anti-virus disabled, and causing the internet to not work at all when it's enabled. Way to go, Norton.
Salesmen used to pitch it at me that it was exactly the same, but that the HP version was designed to be more compatible with a Wintel PC (that is, that it was already formatted FAT32 instead of HFS+, please correct me if I'm wrong).
But yes, I think the HP iPod was just a case of shameless corporate me-too-ism. They got a fabrication/marketing deal with Apple when they were selling like hotcakes. It probably pulled in some dollars, but to me it's just a sign of how intellectually bankrupt HP is.
Got called while I was at work (office job) the other day by my girlfriend's second cousin, who was incredulous that her Office docs wouldn't load after I got her network going (yeah, sure, it was something I did . . .). Only after I walked her through some troubleshooting steps and said, "Sorry about the echo, I'm in the atrium," did she actually realize that I was at work. Imagine that, at 11:30 on a weekday!
Most copies of Windows come with a brand new computer. Dell probably pays less than $25 a pop for these, which is not a ton of revenue. When you factor in the costs of R&D, it's a shitty profit margin. They make their big bucks from applications like Office.
No, it really wouldn't. Microsoft only works because they're a monopoly. If Apple were to start behaving like a monopoly with 15% market share, they would die.
I've written about a bit already, http://www.wavenger.com/index.php?p=286 and http://www.wavenger.com/index.php?p=285. This is actually starting to amuse me. His responses are an example of somebody who has an emotional response to something (i.e., getting a hard-on watching Dashboard and Exposé), and subsequently will bend and adulterate logic in every way possible in order to support their point. You can't argue with these people. It's best to avoid them.
I agree about the technical support/warrenty: they're absolutely useless. Dell's tech support used to be quite good when I was talking to people in Texas and Florida, but the Indian tech support sucks bottom. I'm not just talking about accents, which are a hinderance; their phone connections are incredibly shitty, and apparently there was some gap in their English education, as they do not respond to the words, "I cannot hear you, you need to speak louder." That's with a modern cell phone turned up all the way - if I use that volume with most people, their voices distort from being amplified that much. However, I am slightly hard of hearing, and I have a tendency to get angry at people for muttering shit at me, rather than just break down and wear a hearing aid. Anyway, every retail guy I've ever known tells me that the warrenties make them money hand over fist: pure profit.
Not all Dells are that poorly built. I bought a 2.6 GHz Dell about two years ago and was quite impressed at how expandable it was. The internals were good, full of fans. The clamshell design was nice. Installing a new hard drive was a snap. Of course, I have no doubt that your friend's was a piece of shit. The only PCs in my future are AMD-64s (homebuilt) and Apples.
Evolution has, through most of the time before the advent of agriculture (and for a good part of our existence thereafter) selected us to be avaricious, violent, xenophobic, lustful, and short-sighted. Only fairly recently have things like charity, pacificism, inclusiveness, monogamy, and meticulous planning resulted in anything but 1) death at the hands of a more vicious human 2) failure to reproduce or 3) perishing to the elements/starvation.
Anyway, don't be surprised when people act like this. It just represents the failure of the society to adequately shape people into moderns, by providing incentives and punishing disobedience. For example, if I have a competitor who is using dirty tactics against me, I am not as successful as my twin in another universe who knifes his competitor in an alley, unless he is subsequently hunted down by the cops.
Wow. That really takes me back.
And by the way, you just adverbed (-ly) a compound adjective (ever-increasing), or compounded (ever-) and adverb (increasingly), depending on how you look at it, which strikes me as filled with mega-wrongness and generally over-clumbsified.
Dude, you've got to be kidding. The front page is almost exactly the same as it's always been. Now, let's contrast that with Yahoo. I always liked Yahoo's sleek interface back in the 90's. Now, gah! What a mess!
is a rider on the next Iraq spending bill that makes deleting cookies and blocking popups illegal.
I have to admit I'm with Gates on this one. At least you have to admit that his sentiments are better than Carly's attitude ("Everything important has already been invented;" didn't somebody say that around 1899?). The US and Silicon Valley survive as long as they are creating bleeding-edge technology. We can't compete on price because we're big fat Americans. But there will always be people out there willing to pay a premium for the best technology, and as long as we have that, then we survive.
And so says the doomsayer, "But it is! It's all going out the window!" Hold on, dude. America still has an edge, albiet it has dulled in the last five years. We've still got lots of successful companies, lots of employed software developers (frankly, the 'developers' out of work now are, at least in part, the barely-competant code monkeys who got hired for 70k during the bubble. Flame away.) If the government and companies put money into research now, then we'll have a booming tech sector in ten years. If not, we'll probably just have a marketing shell.
Oh sir, please forgive me for not prefixing my humble opinion with a suitable acryonym to declare it as such! (IMHO)
And by the way, your favorite band sucks, and they have no musical talent. In my opinion.
<sarcasm>I'm going to write an open source epic poem. Every stanza will be available in SVN and subject to change by anybody who cares. Better yet, I'll make it a wiki. However, I imagine the choice between heroic cuplets, blank verse, rime royale and spenserian stanzas will be far more contested than GTK vs QT.