I've been in the industry for 3 years and have as much experience with the technology we use at my shop (ASP.NET) as anyone else there. I respect the wisdom that age and experience provide, but in a world where you're always a newbie, 10 years is a damn long time.
My senior project way back in '03 was to use genetic algorithms to figure out what musical scale/mode sounded the best to people. Two scales were chosen from the pool. A Java applet generated notes in the scale based on the likelihood that a given interval would happen in popular music. Then the scales were given names like Ludwig Van Nirvana and their generated songs were pitted against each other. The listener voted on the best one, and after the entire pool was tested, the winners made sweet love (genetic algorithm style) and the losers died till they were dead. Long story short - the blues scale won.
I actually had much higher aspirations for the project before the end. I had to whittle it down to just scales because I needed something that could easily be represented as a bit string (in this case, 12 bits determining whether a given tone was part of the scale). I really wanted to generate good, listenable music based entirely on votes from live bodies. It could be done in this way, but you'd have to bring in many other aspects of music to get there (rhythm, tempo, timbre, range, and (shudder) harmony for example). You could do the exact same process with each of these separately, or combine them where practical. I would certainly be willing to provide my code to anyone who wanted to try.
They both render with Gecko and therefore both serve to make it harder for developers to write sites that only work on IE. IE's market share means that Microsoft controls what people write for the web. It is only because they use the W3C DOM/CSS that those standards are usable, and they are usable (generally) only to the extent that IE and Microsoft's development tools support them.
We need Gecko and other rendering engines (that follow standards) to gain market share so that no one company can make you pay them to participate on the Web. The actual browser doesn't matter in this issue.
It is almost certain that more people use GAIM for Windows than GAIM for Linux, and people who have limited control of their hardware are prime candidates for IM encryption.
This is generally fixed in 1.0PR - you can safely upgrade over a previous installation, and extensions are updated when possible. They even made it easier for extension writers to simply update the compatability number for their extensions without requiring you to download again.
Averatec's 6200 series has a similar instant dvd/mp3 function. If this is the same chip, it seems to be cheap and in pretty widespread use - this company has a relatively small US sales base and is offering the system for $1250.
Another extension that does this and more is External Application Buttons. It puts buttons in your toolbar to open programs you specify, with things like the current url or the page source as parameters. Most people would use it to open pages in IE, view the source in their favorite editor, or just open their email program.
It's very useful for web developers though, too, because you can use it in conjunction with the Multiple IE Versions hack to test your pages in all browsers you're likely to run into. I test all my pages in IE6, IE5.5., IE5.0, Opera, and NS4. I don't always make 'em work, but sure know when they don't:)
That's the very reason Firefox was created: to offer a browser that can be as lean or as powerful as you want it to be, and to go between those extremes with a few clicks. Any of these suggestions would be implemented as extensions that could be disabled or removed instantly.
By the way, I recommend the Web Developer extension to easily turn off Javascript, cookies, styles, etc., plus dozens of other things. Very useful.
You need a fairly strong processor to play MPEG-4 (xvid, divx, etc..) videos, especially with multi-track encoded audio. My 200 mhz e310 PocketPC can play very specifically made divx videos, but the frame rate is low. This kind of device would be perfect if for taking very large amounts of high quality video around with you, since it has optional TV-out (according to the specs).
666 is a prefix in Little Rock, Arkansas (USA). Everyone mentions it when they first find out, yes, but even here in the Bible Belt people eventually ignore it.
This is a good point - It seems quite unlikely that Mozilla has fewer flaws than IE. Over the years that Mozilla has been in existance the number of bugs it has had numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and that is with only 1-15% market share spotting them (depending on the site and your stat source).
Also, who knows how many flaws IE has; there's no bugzIE. But there are millions of random pages documenting them, probably owing to the vast user base.
But the real issue is, of course, not how many flaws the browsers have, but their severity. Mozilla is specifically designed to protect the average user from malicious code where IE seems to ask for it at every turn. You can't run ActiveX scripts by default in Mozilla, and the plugin that allows it does not allow modification of your files. You can't run.exe files from the address bar. There is no priviledged access to the system.
And yet, it's this kind of flaw, the kind that deals with browsing specifically--hiding urls, misdirection--that all browsers are susceptible to. The difference here? Mozilla would have a patch in 1 hour and most of its users wouldn't download it until the next major version, if then; IE would have a patch in 1-7 days and it would be delivered through windows update, most of the time. I would go with the microsoft system in principle if it weren't for it's being closed source and unmonitorable. It seems to me that with this kind of exploit, the real flaw is in how people use their computers. People have to care about security for it to be realized. I'm not saying that everyone should have to head over to mozilla.org and download 7 megs of the latest patched version every time something like this shows up - that's hard on all users, and impossible for many. But also, people should be given ultimate control of their system and still be allowed to be secure. If you snub Windows Update, you're obscenely open to attack. A system like Linux is ideal, because if you require it you can change anything about your software but still establish a simple, auditable system for security updates. Sadly though, a solution simple enough for everyone, outside of a networked, administered environment, has yet to be created in my opinion, and the problems of these security flaws will continue to plague thousands.
What makes you think that they won't port it to Linux or OS X?
A strategy that involves giving up control of OS to assure developer uptake of their proprietary system seems right in line with MS. As long as they can cut off support at any time in the future (after it becomes the standard) it's a win for them.
Another true competitor (not listed in the Lindows chart, probably because of obscurity) is the one I own - the Sotec 3120x. It has very similar stats, notable exceptions being a 1.2 GHz Celeron and a CD-RW/DVD combo drive. This increases the weight to 4 pounds, but you can't ignore the added utility. And yes, it's under a grand - $900 on Walmart.com. I got it for $820 after rebates a few months back. Those looking for a notebook of this size should check this one out (if you don't mind paying the Microsoft tax and buying from Wally World). I've been quite happy with it.
Perhaps an easier thing to judge would be the quantity and quality of development tools to facilitate the community. I for one liked the idea of using Visual Basic on my WinCE device because it's so easy to create quick and dirty applications to meet a particular need. I never found such an easy tool for palm.
Nothing would stop some idiot from making a mod, distributing it wildly, and then have every one calling *your* tech support for help.
A company could easily say, "If you didn't get this software packaged by us or downloaded from our site, we won't support it."
The only way I can take advantage of a Tom Clancy book is if I:...
What you're addressing is piracy, not stealing ideas and selling them as something else.
Hey, free engineering for a weekend of changing variable names and the odd alogrithm?
This is close to being a good point, considering how it would be fairly easy to change just enough of a program to make it legally different, but still have gotten the structure from someone else. But this already applies to open source software. Companies could take open code, change it enough to avoid immediate detection, and implant it into their code without anyone knowing. The thing is, no one can even investigate if the companies code is allowed to be closed.
I haven't decided if this source available thing is right, but these are certainly bad arguments against it.
It's arguable. I've heard nightmare stories about high RPM SCSI drives' reliability. And, from a cost point of view, you could probably buy 4 20 GB IDE drives for the price of one 18GB 15k RPM drive and set them up in RAID-0+1 or -3 and have vastly better reliablity and speed.
As of now, it's simply expensive to make very high RPM hard drives. Cost is the reason I didn't opt for SCSI, and I'm glad I didn't. The higher rotational speeds offered in SCSI drives offer only marginal speed increases, and they usually only come in small sizes (18 GB). RAID is the answer to higher performance with hard drives.
My experiment with IDE RAID-0 turned out wonderfully. For $160 I got what amounts to a 160-gig drive that was 2mb/sec slower than a 15k RPM SCSI drive (according to SiSoft SANDRA) That was from two plain old 7200 RPM 80-gig IDE's. When Serial ATA get's big, setups like this will be even easier, since the main limitation with IDE RAID is the number of drives you can attatch to the board.
The reason I stick with XP is that
(a) it's consistently laid-out. The configuration and use of one application is nearly identical to the next. This is not so with Linux, where I have to scroll through giant man pages if they're there (and Google till dawn if not) to figure out how to use something. Or configure it. Or compile and install it.
(b) Hardware. About a third of my hardware doesn't work at all in Linux (yet) and much of it I had to mess with it for hours before it would work. Sometimes, it would theoretically work, but I could never make it work in my case.
(c) Software. This is a +/- thing. On the one hand there are tons of incredible, wonderful GPL software out there for Linux. I couldn't live without Emacs, for example. But quite often those things are available for Windows too (Emacs being a good example, along with Apache, OpenOffice, etc.) And, of course, there are the killer apps that are Windows only, like Word(the latest version has been incredibly stable for me, and otherwise amazing) and Photoshop. And don't even think about an easy to use video editor like Ulead's Video Studio on Linux. Or nice multi-track audio like Sonar. The list goes on.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that, while I love Linux and will continue to dual boot for times when it's appropriate (school; i'm a CS major) Windows quite simply doesn't waste my time like Linux does. And note that Linux has many advantages I didn't cover, because that would be off topic. As soon as Linux is easy, or i become such an expert that it's easy for me, i'll surely switch for good.
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I've been in the industry for 3 years and have as much experience with the technology we use at my shop (ASP.NET) as anyone else there. I respect the wisdom that age and experience provide, but in a world where you're always a newbie, 10 years is a damn long time.
My senior project way back in '03 was to use genetic algorithms to figure out what musical scale/mode sounded the best to people. Two scales were chosen from the pool. A Java applet generated notes in the scale based on the likelihood that a given interval would happen in popular music. Then the scales were given names like Ludwig Van Nirvana and their generated songs were pitted against each other. The listener voted on the best one, and after the entire pool was tested, the winners made sweet love (genetic algorithm style) and the losers died till they were dead. Long story short - the blues scale won.
I actually had much higher aspirations for the project before the end. I had to whittle it down to just scales because I needed something that could easily be represented as a bit string (in this case, 12 bits determining whether a given tone was part of the scale). I really wanted to generate good, listenable music based entirely on votes from live bodies. It could be done in this way, but you'd have to bring in many other aspects of music to get there (rhythm, tempo, timbre, range, and (shudder) harmony for example). You could do the exact same process with each of these separately, or combine them where practical. I would certainly be willing to provide my code to anyone who wanted to try.
They both render with Gecko and therefore both serve to make it harder for developers to write sites that only work on IE. IE's market share means that Microsoft controls what people write for the web. It is only because they use the W3C DOM/CSS that those standards are usable, and they are usable (generally) only to the extent that IE and Microsoft's development tools support them.
We need Gecko and other rendering engines (that follow standards) to gain market share so that no one company can make you pay them to participate on the Web. The actual browser doesn't matter in this issue.
It is almost certain that more people use GAIM for Windows than GAIM for Linux, and people who have limited control of their hardware are prime candidates for IM encryption.
This is generally fixed in 1.0PR - you can safely upgrade over a previous installation, and extensions are updated when possible. They even made it easier for extension writers to simply update the compatability number for their extensions without requiring you to download again.
It will never happen.
Averatec's 6200 series has a similar instant dvd/mp3 function. If this is the same chip, it seems to be cheap and in pretty widespread use - this company has a relatively small US sales base and is offering the system for $1250.
There's also a Firefox Extension. Very handy.
Another extension that does this and more is External Application Buttons. It puts buttons in your toolbar to open programs you specify, with things like the current url or the page source as parameters. Most people would use it to open pages in IE, view the source in their favorite editor, or just open their email program.
:)
It's very useful for web developers though, too, because you can use it in conjunction with the Multiple IE Versions hack to test your pages in all browsers you're likely to run into. I test all my pages in IE6, IE5.5., IE5.0, Opera, and NS4. I don't always make 'em work, but sure know when they don't
That's the very reason Firefox was created: to offer a browser that can be as lean or as powerful as you want it to be, and to go between those extremes with a few clicks. Any of these suggestions would be implemented as extensions that could be disabled or removed instantly.
By the way, I recommend the Web Developer extension to easily turn off Javascript, cookies, styles, etc., plus dozens of other things. Very useful.
Um... did his joke, like, offend you or something?
Lighten up.
You need a fairly strong processor to play MPEG-4 (xvid, divx, etc..) videos, especially with multi-track encoded audio. My 200 mhz e310 PocketPC can play very specifically made divx videos, but the frame rate is low. This kind of device would be perfect if for taking very large amounts of high quality video around with you, since it has optional TV-out (according to the specs).
666 is a prefix in Little Rock, Arkansas (USA). Everyone mentions it when they first find out, yes, but even here in the Bible Belt people eventually ignore it.
This is a good point - It seems quite unlikely that Mozilla has fewer flaws than IE. Over the years that Mozilla has been in existance the number of bugs it has had numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and that is with only 1-15% market share spotting them (depending on the site and your stat source).
Also, who knows how many flaws IE has; there's no bugzIE. But there are millions of random pages documenting them, probably owing to the vast user base.
But the real issue is, of course, not how many flaws the browsers have, but their severity. Mozilla is specifically designed to protect the average user from malicious code where IE seems to ask for it at every turn. You can't run ActiveX scripts by default in Mozilla, and the plugin that allows it does not allow modification of your files. You can't run .exe files from the address bar. There is no priviledged access to the system.
And yet, it's this kind of flaw, the kind that deals with browsing specifically--hiding urls, misdirection--that all browsers are susceptible to. The difference here? Mozilla would have a patch in 1 hour and most of its users wouldn't download it until the next major version, if then; IE would have a patch in 1-7 days and it would be delivered through windows update, most of the time. I would go with the microsoft system in principle if it weren't for it's being closed source and unmonitorable. It seems to me that with this kind of exploit, the real flaw is in how people use their computers. People have to care about security for it to be realized. I'm not saying that everyone should have to head over to mozilla.org and download 7 megs of the latest patched version every time something like this shows up - that's hard on all users, and impossible for many. But also, people should be given ultimate control of their system and still be allowed to be secure. If you snub Windows Update, you're obscenely open to attack. A system like Linux is ideal, because if you require it you can change anything about your software but still establish a simple, auditable system for security updates. Sadly though, a solution simple enough for everyone, outside of a networked, administered environment, has yet to be created in my opinion, and the problems of these security flaws will continue to plague thousands.
What makes you think that they won't port it to Linux or OS X?
A strategy that involves giving up control of OS to assure developer uptake of their proprietary system seems right in line with MS. As long as they can cut off support at any time in the future (after it becomes the standard) it's a win for them.
I think he was noting their resilliance as a people in the face of thousands of years of persecution.
And they're not a race, but that's another story...
Another true competitor (not listed in the Lindows chart, probably because of obscurity) is the one I own - the Sotec 3120x. It has very similar stats, notable exceptions being a 1.2 GHz Celeron and a CD-RW/DVD combo drive. This increases the weight to 4 pounds, but you can't ignore the added utility. And yes, it's under a grand - $900 on Walmart.com. I got it for $820 after rebates a few months back. Those looking for a notebook of this size should check this one out (if you don't mind paying the Microsoft tax and buying from Wally World). I've been quite happy with it.
Perhaps an easier thing to judge would be the quantity and quality of development tools to facilitate the community. I for one liked the idea of using Visual Basic on my WinCE device because it's so easy to create quick and dirty applications to meet a particular need. I never found such an easy tool for palm.
Nothing would stop some idiot from making a mod, distributing it wildly, and then have every one calling *your* tech support for help.
A company could easily say, "If you didn't get this software packaged by us or downloaded from our site, we won't support it."
The only way I can take advantage of a Tom Clancy book is if I:...
What you're addressing is piracy, not stealing ideas and selling them as something else.
Hey, free engineering for a weekend of changing variable names and the odd alogrithm?
This is close to being a good point, considering how it would be fairly easy to change just enough of a program to make it legally different, but still have gotten the structure from someone else. But this already applies to open source software. Companies could take open code, change it enough to avoid immediate detection, and implant it into their code without anyone knowing. The thing is, no one can even investigate if the companies code is allowed to be closed.
I haven't decided if this source available thing is right, but these are certainly bad arguments against it.
It's arguable. I've heard nightmare stories about high RPM SCSI drives' reliability. And, from a cost point of view, you could probably buy 4 20 GB IDE drives for the price of one 18GB 15k RPM drive and set them up in RAID-0+1 or -3 and have vastly better reliablity and speed.
I too have often wondered what attracts Asian countries to North Americans. I mean, look at Anime. ;)
As of now, it's simply expensive to make very high RPM hard drives. Cost is the reason I didn't opt for SCSI, and I'm glad I didn't. The higher rotational speeds offered in SCSI drives offer only marginal speed increases, and they usually only come in small sizes (18 GB). RAID is the answer to higher performance with hard drives.
My experiment with IDE RAID-0 turned out wonderfully. For $160 I got what amounts to a 160-gig drive that was 2mb/sec slower than a 15k RPM SCSI drive (according to SiSoft SANDRA) That was from two plain old 7200 RPM 80-gig IDE's. When Serial ATA get's big, setups like this will be even easier, since the main limitation with IDE RAID is the number of drives you can attatch to the board.
The reason I stick with XP is that (a) it's consistently laid-out. The configuration and use of one application is nearly identical to the next. This is not so with Linux, where I have to scroll through giant man pages if they're there (and Google till dawn if not) to figure out how to use something. Or configure it. Or compile and install it. (b) Hardware. About a third of my hardware doesn't work at all in Linux (yet) and much of it I had to mess with it for hours before it would work. Sometimes, it would theoretically work, but I could never make it work in my case. (c) Software. This is a +/- thing. On the one hand there are tons of incredible, wonderful GPL software out there for Linux. I couldn't live without Emacs, for example. But quite often those things are available for Windows too (Emacs being a good example, along with Apache, OpenOffice, etc.) And, of course, there are the killer apps that are Windows only, like Word(the latest version has been incredibly stable for me, and otherwise amazing) and Photoshop. And don't even think about an easy to use video editor like Ulead's Video Studio on Linux. Or nice multi-track audio like Sonar. The list goes on. I guess what i'm trying to say is that, while I love Linux and will continue to dual boot for times when it's appropriate (school; i'm a CS major) Windows quite simply doesn't waste my time like Linux does. And note that Linux has many advantages I didn't cover, because that would be off topic. As soon as Linux is easy, or i become such an expert that it's easy for me, i'll surely switch for good.