BeOS was less ahead of its time than the others. It was simply a desktop OS that was coded from the ground up to be snappy and recognize that people want to run fancy real-time graphical programs and not just word processors and databases. BeOS didn't do anything that hadn't been done before; it simply did those things well.
Re:zealous hacker(TM) applications aren't relevant
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 2
You shouldn't use one-person projects, free and especially not non-free, for critical purposes.
Yes, I agree completely. The key is that Open Source advocates never take this, nor overall project quality, into account. If someone says "I'd use Linux if there was an open source version of XYZ," the response often is "But there _is_, and it's called ABC." ABC, though, may be total crap.
Newer game consoles are shipping with heatsinks and fans, items which weren't needed in previous generations of game systems. What's scary is that this is even though Sega and Sony have intentionally done things to keep power consumption down, like using lower power CPUs like the SH4 and MIPS and keeping the amount of memory reasonable.
Microsoft is putting in a hot running CPU that was never designed for embedded systems use and twice the memory of the PS2. Sure, that makes it more powerful in a way, but it also may be over the line in terms of what you can do inside of a sealed consumer box. Remember, "more powerful" has never been the mantra of embedded systems engineers, but "cool running" and "rock solid reliable" are.
Not a recipe for improving games
on
Ultima Revived
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· Score: 2
Those old games were great, no question, at least for their time. I can certainly understand how some people are tired of where games have been headed (toward pseudo-realism), and want to play something else. But is remaking those old games really the direction to go in? It's like a director saying "I think movies have gotten too glitzy, so I'm only going to do remakes of great films from the 1950s." That's a cop out. Surely there is somewhere else to go to advance the creation of games? If you don't like modern-style games, then take things in your own direction.
Can be hard to rely on zealous hackers
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hmmm...that's maybe not the best subject. I don't mean it to sound inflammatory.
Many projects start out because college student X hates Microsoft/BillGates/Windows, and decides he is going to drive them into the ground by writing the killer application for Linux. Of course it will be Open Source, because Closed Source is Evil (tm). So he dives in and writes an application that attempts to outdo a major windows application like Word/Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever. Let's say he achieves some success and has a partial clone up and running a year later. Let's say it gets lots of press and looks like it might really be a killer app. Now what are some good reasons not to use it?
As the program is not someone's livelihood, there's no guarantee that the author won't lose interest and walk away from it. There's also no guarantee that anyone else will want to maintain it. With closed source the company could go out of business, but at least they have strong incentive (money) to stick around.
The program was initially written by a college student with no experience architecting large applications, and most likely no experience with any kind of real software engineering of any kind.
Without strong leadership there's no guarantee that the program will remain stable, managable, and continue in a direction that really suits the user base. This happens quite often because, say, a graphic arts program is not written by someone familiar with graphic arts, but someone who wants to get back at Microsoft.
You have got to be joking. The base word.exe is 8.4 megs on my machine.
No. Compare them for yourself. Not just the executable, but all the associated files. You have to count elisp files as well, as those are integral to Emacs. Word only takes 15MB or so of space, installed.
Who would have thought that, Emacs truely has become a lean and mean program.
Nonsense. Emacs takes up more hard drive space than Microsoft Word.
Re:The question is not whether you re done coding
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 2
At 28 it would not be at all surprising if you are over the hill for coding.
I hate it when people say things like this without explanation. My personal experience is that the more experience you have, the better a programmer are you. You'll be better at 40 than 25. But the reason why "older" programmers do less coding is that they start to see just how crappy most programming is. You have to use C++ instead of slicker languages. You have to work crunch time that wouldn't be allowed if you ran a machine in a factory. You find that most projects get done simply because there are a dozen 22 year olds, fresh out of college and living in a new town where they don't know anyone outside the office, working 16 hour days because they have nothing better to do.
NUON and VM Labs are hopelessly behind and will never catch up. They have technology that's supposed to be amazing, but it goes off in a different direction than hardware for rendering millions of triangles per second. So there's no way NUON games are going to compete with Sony or Nintendo in terms of content.
That said, the NUON hardware has been described in some intriguing ways, like "non-von Neumann" and "non-traditional" which certain piques my interest." Even though I think learning the NUON system at this time is best left to those few die-hard Atari fans who never know when to drop something, it will still be interesting to see how it works.
Everyone recommending Photoshop is completely ignoring the fact that it costs hundreds of dollars. Maybe because no one pays for it?
I should add that this is a _typical_ college student viewpoint. "I have no money, therefore no one else does either."
The crux of my argument is that college students should not be vocal Linux advocates, because they have insufficient experience to advocate the use of one operating system over another for professional use.
I expect "Linux" will not be "Linux" in 50 years or at least not the OS we use today. Linux is an evolving OS.
Again, this is still a short term view. In 1975 FORTRAN was a common teaching language. In 1985 is was Pascal. In 1995 it was C. In 2001 it is often Java. So you could take the peculiar view that Java is really just an evolved FORTRAN. Or you could admit that technology doesn't live forever.
If Linux is around in fifty years it will be the OS/360 of operating systems.
If you're talking a 50 year outlook, then *surely* there will be something mucb better than Linux by then? Linux is and has never been the pinnacle of computing technology. Even Linus freely admits that.
The simple, most basic fact of Linux on the desktop, is that that great majority of users fit a certain profile:
1. College student or fairly recent college graduate.
2. Strongly dislikes Microsoft.
Now, now, this is a blatant stereotype, but there is truth to it (heck, I thought geeks would hate Star Trek and for being mass market, condescending, and that people _expect_ geeks to like it, but Star Trek threads on Slashdot can get more than a thousand postings).
Students tend to use computers in fairly simple ways: browsing the web, playing MP3s, writing papers, doing programming assignments, playing games, exploring free software. Now keeping this in mind, when you see such a person zealously proclaim that The Gimp is superior to Photoshop for graphic arts work, you have to stop and wonder. So on the one side you have people with much passion but limited to no experience arguing that an open source program is just as good as a commercial offering. On the other side you have professional graphic artists who put The Gimp and Photoshop side by side and are stunned that they're even bothering which such a comparison.
The bottom line, for me, is that we should be seeing much less Linux advocacy than we currently do. If I met someone who ran a small business and later found out he used Linux or some open source software for some tangible reasons, then this would be interesting food for thought. But when I see threads like this:
A: I find it disturbing that a number of popular e-commerce sites don't work under Linux, either because Mozilla doesn't render them properly or because they require Windows-only tech, like ActiveX scripting.
B: Bah! I don't _need_ to go to sites that that! F**k em!
Then I realize that "B" isn't someone who uses computers. He's someone who dinks around and has a chip on his shoulder and shouldn't be listened to. Sadly, there's the impression that a majority of Linux users are like B.
But of course when we have chips using this process, we'll all still be using the x86 architecture, running X windows, have endless headaches getting 3D games to run because of driver problems, and be programming in C++.
Sometimes I'd like to see some more down to earth progress.
But why in the hell would you turn away paying customers based on arbitrary things such as choice of operating system or browser?
From a business standpoint it's about the same as turning away people who have a credit card that isn't Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover. Does it _really_ make sense for most businesses to accept other cards? It's just an extra headache for an all but irrelevant market. Sure, turning down Linux-using customers is throwing away money. But losing five sales a day doesn't matter when you're getting 5,000 sales a day anyway.
It's disappointing to see Linux users responding with the sadly predictable "Well we don't want their stuff anyway."
xcuse me, but how does this apply to those of us who don't use windows? are we going to be pushed off of the 'net?
To some extent we already have been. If I made my machine at home boot directly into the Linux partition, my wife would kill me. Not because she cares about operating systems, but because there are a good many mail order sites that do things that either don't work without Internet Explorer (I'm thinking of ActiveX scripting and such) or don't render properly under Mozilla, because the web designers didn't care.
Sure, this is the fault of the companies that design sites like this. But when 95% of all online purchases are made from Windows machines, then from a business point of view it doesn't make sense to worry about the other 1%. How many Linux users are going to buy clothes from L.L. Bean or Chadwick's?
There are plenty of chips/cores which have been optimized for low power use, including SuperH, ARM, TransMeta, and various MIPS cores.
There are fewer than you think. Transmeta is out of the question, because it is too pricey. And even game consoles are starting to include fans and large heat sinks, which is more than a bit crazy.
While this is neat and all, I should hope that more effort goes into lower power consumption in general. Just because there's a better way to cool high-power chips doesn't mean that such a chips are a good idea in the first place.
Someone I know who works in embedded systems recently pointed out that most CPU makers have decided to chase performance at all cost without regard to power consumption, and this is leaving embedded systems engineers up a creek.
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All ahead of their time technologically.
BeOS was less ahead of its time than the others. It was simply a desktop OS that was coded from the ground up to be snappy and recognize that people want to run fancy real-time graphical programs and not just word processors and databases. BeOS didn't do anything that hadn't been done before; it simply did those things well.
You shouldn't use one-person projects, free and especially not non-free, for critical purposes.
Yes, I agree completely. The key is that Open Source advocates never take this, nor overall project quality, into account. If someone says "I'd use Linux if there was an open source version of XYZ," the response often is "But there _is_, and it's called ABC." ABC, though, may be total crap.
Newer game consoles are shipping with heatsinks and fans, items which weren't needed in previous generations of game systems. What's scary is that this is even though Sega and Sony have intentionally done things to keep power consumption down, like using lower power CPUs like the SH4 and MIPS and keeping the amount of memory reasonable.
Microsoft is putting in a hot running CPU that was never designed for embedded systems use and twice the memory of the PS2. Sure, that makes it more powerful in a way, but it also may be over the line in terms of what you can do inside of a sealed consumer box. Remember, "more powerful" has never been the mantra of embedded systems engineers, but "cool running" and "rock solid reliable" are.
Those old games were great, no question, at least for their time. I can certainly understand how some people are tired of where games have been headed (toward pseudo-realism), and want to play something else. But is remaking those old games really the direction to go in? It's like a director saying "I think movies have gotten too glitzy, so I'm only going to do remakes of great films from the 1950s." That's a cop out. Surely there is somewhere else to go to advance the creation of games? If you don't like modern-style games, then take things in your own direction.
Total cache size: 8K.
Yes, 8K.
Many projects start out because college student X hates Microsoft/BillGates/Windows, and decides he is going to drive them into the ground by writing the killer application for Linux. Of course it will be Open Source, because Closed Source is Evil (tm). So he dives in and writes an application that attempts to outdo a major windows application like Word/Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever. Let's say he achieves some success and has a partial clone up and running a year later. Let's say it gets lots of press and looks like it might really be a killer app. Now what are some good reasons not to use it?
As the program is not someone's livelihood, there's no guarantee that the author won't lose interest and walk away from it. There's also no guarantee that anyone else will want to maintain it. With closed source the company could go out of business, but at least they have strong incentive (money) to stick around.
The program was initially written by a college student with no experience architecting large applications, and most likely no experience with any kind of real software engineering of any kind.
Without strong leadership there's no guarantee that the program will remain stable, managable, and continue in a direction that really suits the user base. This happens quite often because, say, a graphic arts program is not written by someone familiar with graphic arts, but someone who wants to get back at Microsoft.
You have got to be joking. The base word .exe is 8.4 megs on my machine.
No. Compare them for yourself. Not just the executable, but all the associated files. You have to count elisp files as well, as those are integral to Emacs. Word only takes 15MB or so of space, installed.
Who would have thought that, Emacs truely has become a lean and mean program.
Nonsense. Emacs takes up more hard drive space than Microsoft Word.
At 28 it would not be at all surprising if you are over the hill for coding.
I hate it when people say things like this without explanation. My personal experience is that the more experience you have, the better a programmer are you. You'll be better at 40 than 25. But the reason why "older" programmers do less coding is that they start to see just how crappy most programming is. You have to use C++ instead of slicker languages. You have to work crunch time that wouldn't be allowed if you ran a machine in a factory. You find that most projects get done simply because there are a dozen 22 year olds, fresh out of college and living in a new town where they don't know anyone outside the office, working 16 hour days because they have nothing better to do.
NUON and VM Labs are hopelessly behind and will never catch up. They have technology that's supposed to be amazing, but it goes off in a different direction than hardware for rendering millions of triangles per second. So there's no way NUON games are going to compete with Sony or Nintendo in terms of content.
That said, the NUON hardware has been described in some intriguing ways, like "non-von Neumann" and "non-traditional" which certain piques my interest." Even though I think learning the NUON system at this time is best left to those few die-hard Atari fans who never know when to drop something, it will still be interesting to see how it works.
Everyone recommending Photoshop is completely ignoring the fact that it costs hundreds of dollars. Maybe because no one pays for it?
I should add that this is a _typical_ college student viewpoint. "I have no money, therefore no one else does either."
The crux of my argument is that college students should not be vocal Linux advocates, because they have insufficient experience to advocate the use of one operating system over another for professional use.
Everyone recommending Photoshop is completely ignoring the fact that it costs hundreds of dollars. Maybe because no one pays for it?
Sure, and that's why Adobe was driven out of business (sarcasm).
I expect "Linux" will not be "Linux" in 50 years or at least not the OS we use today. Linux is an evolving OS.
Again, this is still a short term view. In 1975 FORTRAN was a common teaching language. In 1985 is was Pascal. In 1995 it was C. In 2001 it is often Java. So you could take the peculiar view that Java is really just an evolved FORTRAN. Or you could admit that technology doesn't live forever.
If Linux is around in fifty years it will be the OS/360 of operating systems.
The desktop market is growing more irrelvant each day. The future is in mobile devices, PDAs, game consoles, and so on.
If you're talking a 50 year outlook, then *surely* there will be something mucb better than Linux by then? Linux is and has never been the pinnacle of computing technology. Even Linus freely admits that.
The simple, most basic fact of Linux on the desktop, is that that great majority of users fit a certain profile:
1. College student or fairly recent college graduate.
2. Strongly dislikes Microsoft.
Now, now, this is a blatant stereotype, but there is truth to it (heck, I thought geeks would hate Star Trek and for being mass market, condescending, and that people _expect_ geeks to like it, but Star Trek threads on Slashdot can get more than a thousand postings).
Students tend to use computers in fairly simple ways: browsing the web, playing MP3s, writing papers, doing programming assignments, playing games, exploring free software. Now keeping this in mind, when you see such a person zealously proclaim that The Gimp is superior to Photoshop for graphic arts work, you have to stop and wonder. So on the one side you have people with much passion but limited to no experience arguing that an open source program is just as good as a commercial offering. On the other side you have professional graphic artists who put The Gimp and Photoshop side by side and are stunned that they're even bothering which such a comparison.
The bottom line, for me, is that we should be seeing much less Linux advocacy than we currently do. If I met someone who ran a small business and later found out he used Linux or some open source software for some tangible reasons, then this would be interesting food for thought. But when I see threads like this:
A: I find it disturbing that a number of popular e-commerce sites don't work under Linux, either because Mozilla doesn't render them properly or because they require Windows-only tech, like ActiveX scripting.
B: Bah! I don't _need_ to go to sites that that! F**k em!
Then I realize that "B" isn't someone who uses computers. He's someone who dinks around and has a chip on his shoulder and shouldn't be listened to. Sadly, there's the impression that a majority of Linux users are like B.
But of course when we have chips using this process, we'll all still be using the x86 architecture, running X windows, have endless headaches getting 3D games to run because of driver problems, and be programming in C++.
Sometimes I'd like to see some more down to earth progress.
But why in the hell would you turn away paying customers based on arbitrary things such as choice of operating system or browser?
From a business standpoint it's about the same as turning away people who have a credit card that isn't Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover. Does it _really_ make sense for most businesses to accept other cards? It's just an extra headache for an all but irrelevant market. Sure, turning down Linux-using customers is throwing away money. But losing five sales a day doesn't matter when you're getting 5,000 sales a day anyway.
It's disappointing to see Linux users responding with the sadly predictable "Well we don't want their stuff anyway."
I absolutely, totally, and completely agree with you 96%.
:)
That comes from switching the figure from 99% to 95% at the last minute
Well so far, win XP looks like somthing you give a 5 year old.
Give KDE a couple of years and it will look just like XP.
xcuse me, but how does this apply to those of us who don't use windows? are we going to be pushed off of the 'net?
To some extent we already have been. If I made my machine at home boot directly into the Linux partition, my wife would kill me. Not because she cares about operating systems, but because there are a good many mail order sites that do things that either don't work without Internet Explorer (I'm thinking of ActiveX scripting and such) or don't render properly under Mozilla, because the web designers didn't care.
Sure, this is the fault of the companies that design sites like this. But when 95% of all online purchases are made from Windows machines, then from a business point of view it doesn't make sense to worry about the other 1%. How many Linux users are going to buy clothes from L.L. Bean or Chadwick's?
They may look like ordinary wires, but they can shatter when you drop them, and it's impossible to tell.
And how is this different than dropping a hard drive? This is nothing new. PCs have always been sensitive critters.
There are plenty of chips/cores which have been optimized for low power use, including SuperH, ARM, TransMeta, and various MIPS cores.
There are fewer than you think. Transmeta is out of the question, because it is too pricey. And even game consoles are starting to include fans and large heat sinks, which is more than a bit crazy.
While this is neat and all, I should hope that more effort goes into lower power consumption in general. Just because there's a better way to cool high-power chips doesn't mean that such a chips are a good idea in the first place.
Someone I know who works in embedded systems recently pointed out that most CPU makers have decided to chase performance at all cost without regard to power consumption, and this is leaving embedded systems engineers up a creek.