George Soros (top investment guy who once made a billion in a day) has said that the markets represent wishes rather than reality. This is also why that "buy terrorist stock" thing from the DoD was complete rubbish.
Look at SCO, if they were Antartica in PAM the DoD would be saying "BIG terrorist threat at the south pole"
Markets != reality. Lets face it this is a place where analysts say Sun is in trouble and they have $5.5bn in the bank, I wish I was in that much trouble!
So this means we have Linux on the Zaurus, PalmOS, WindowsCE, PocketPC, Smartphone, Symbian and now yet another to be added to the list of interesting ideas that will not challenge the market.
Sorry to be cynical, and it does look nice BUT, are PDAs really going to survive more than another year or so ? Already PDA sales are outstripped by about 10 to 1 by Smartphones, and that ratio will only increase in favour of the Smartphone.
So if there was a real desire to create a new OS, why not pick a new platform and aim to create the smallest, most portable and most function rich environment for smartphone development, now that would actually be aiming at a future market that could exist. Of course this is more complex as you'd need to understand the GSM/GPRS/3G stacks and lots of other nasty telecoms elements. BUT at least there is a chance of a large company taking it on.... because in a Hardware driven market the only way to get acceptance is if it is installed on a device upfront.
Its nice to play with this stuff, but wouldn't it be better to go for the future than install it on kit that is obsolete ?
I did RTFA which is just as bad. What does it matter than Transmeta is part of others ? This is a statistically irrelevant increase which is lept on to hype Transmeta.
If the article writer had been a decent journalist it would have read
"No change in Processor Sales"
Which the editors should have realised it was, rather than just seeing Transmeta and hitting "post"
This is what gets me about Transmeta, saying that they increase their share when in a category called "other" which increases 0.1% means that Transmeta is up...
How ? Transmeta don't have enough sales to get in a category of their own, they may have DECREASED their marketshare but another minor player could of increased theirs thus making the overall sector go up.
I know that here at Slashdot we must all bow to the altar of Transmeta because their processor approach is all open sourced and they own no patents and follow the OSS way so purely... oh wait they don't ? You mean they do have patents and they don't release their architecture ? Oh it must be because Linux is their primary OS... nope again. No its because they gave Linus a job.
The story here is that Intel remain the massive player, AMD has made some minor in-roads but is still not gaining marketshare in the way they would really like, and that the figures actually represent and quarter on quarter DROP in sales percentage for AMD.
In otherwords a way to say this is that AMD have LOST nearly 1% of share over 3 months which isn't so positive.
But hey, if we can bash Intel and bump Transmeta why let the facts get in the way.
The relevance is that what they are doing is nothing more than doing a "you called an API that MIGHT potentially cause an issue" they do _nothing_ to determine the way the code works or how the code flows.
Their claim that this is in anyway a substitute for testing is laughable in the extreme. The point about the halting problem is that yes you might identify definate causes of error but you cannot identify even the majority of errors in a complex system. And that is when taking a proper approach.
This is classic script kiddy numpty rubbish that they think is actually a product, but is really the work of a first year CS student, who is then told why it was pointless.
So this analyses binaries and will find all issues where the code will halt and will exceed its resource requests, thus eliminating the need for testing...
I call Snake Oil.
For those who don't know about the Halting Problem or Busy Beaver Problem then you should really know about what computers can or cannot do.
I dare say these people have some basic pattern matching, but this is NOT a reason to stop testing.
Mr Baumgartner had prepared for three years for this flight, with rigorous training including strapping himself on to the top of a speeding Porsche.
Did the driver know ?
"What Officer, a man strapped to the roof of the car as we went down the AutoBahn ?" "Yes sir" "I don't belive you, why isn't he there now" "He dropped off over the bridge and glided over the river" "Have you been drinking officer ?"
When I was at Uni in the early 90s one of my fellow 3rd Year students did sign-language recognition using a VR glove, this included basics like the language and more complex elements like "Bacon" "Sea" and a few others.
Shows how little people invest in accesibility if 10 years on this is still considered "new".
Sign Language -> English : Done in the late 80s early 90s, hell I knew someone who did it as his 3rd Year project in the early 90s. Also there are PDA based products that do this for road signs et al. Like this which isn't as complex as sign-language but is indicative of how pre-commercialised this space already is.
Communicate via audio and video Hell they mean its like having a moving monitor and microphone.... or of course a better approach would be to have each room containing monitors and videos rather than having 00s of robots walking around, that way you can move from room to room much quicker and you don't suffer from multiple people trying to speak at once.
And best of the bunch
Emailable identification documents Bloody hell X500 certs and PGP in a shiny new wrapper.
Microsoft's "innovation" continues to be 10 years behind the rest of the world.
Okay on my desk right now I have a P800 and a 6310i. On the P800 are a few Java games which do full 3D. On the 6310i is an application that uses Web Services to connect to a weather information service.
But of course to you the 6310i couldn't possibly run J2ME and act as a weather service and cache route information and act as a timesheet which submits to a central server once a week. Because it can't be used in this way.
Java Smartphones out sell PDAs 5 to 1 already, and this number will rise. J2ME MIDP2.0 isn't supported on many (its about a couple in Asia) phones as yet but it will represent another nail in the coffin of proprietary palmtops.
J2ME has very little at the moment that requires complex wireless, Bluetooth is not part of the standard install for instance.
Bloody hell.. lets see there are nearly 100 mobile phones that support J2ME, there are over 100 million sold in the last 12 months world wide and Nokia in ONE QUARTER ALONE sold over 800,000 of the high end smart phones.
Low end phones like the 6310i have been J2ME phones for around a year now. And now almost ALL phones released in Europe and Asia are J2ME enabled.
Basically you know zip, zero, nada about Mobile Applications.
This isn't new, this is way over 12 months old and represents already a multi-million dollar industry in selling J2ME applications to consumers.
I'm assuming you are based in the US, because right now there are loads of games on mobile phones in Europe and Asia, and some of them are already interactive across the network.
Micro-payments are alive and well and operating on mobile phone networks the world over. Next generation mobile phones will link directly to your PC, thus providing an idea micropayment structure via a "known" organisation (rather than people like PayPal).
Micro-payment is here, its just not where you were looking.
The problem with assuming that the motherboard CEOs are going to be driving the market is that it misses the fact that there are so many. This happens in commodity markets which become well understood and have a relatively low R&D expense. Higher levels of R&D (for instance graphics cards) mean less competition and higher turnover of companies. The motherboard people provide a required commodity in a computer that is a bit more complex that the power supply, but it is not what will drive the industry forwards.
These are followers, not leaders, of the industry. Just because they plug-in other peoples processors to specs created by those other people does not mean that they innovate the market. Its an interesting read from people who can see their part of the market, but it doesn't give a roadmap for the longer term.
Now what I'd like to see would be a closed room discussion with CCTV cameras between, Jobs, Ellison, Gates and McNeally.... with knives. THAT would tell you which way the market was going:-)
Of course there is another reason for testing it with the troops first. As we all know from Florida, the US Troops aren't so good at filling in forms, getting them postmarked and sending them out on time....
Oh and they mainly vote Republican. What an amazing co-incidence that a large group of Republican voters with a history of involvement in dodgy election results are chosen as the trial group. I guess George wants to front-load Florida.
Deployment descriptors are generated by IDEs, not written by hand. With J2EE 1.4 which is being released now the deployment descriptors have also been standardised so you don't even have to do the automatic regeneration.
As the balloon rises the atmosphere gets less dense, hence it rises slower. This is why the balloon is so large to enable _some_ lift at 25 miles. This is still not high enought for satellites which are in the 00s of miles altitude.
Three of them concluded there couldn't be intelligent life. Two got as far as visiting before deciding the area was a dump and the final one broadcasts live 24/7 from the planet on a dedicated TV channel called "Xdfugy Dskak" which the closet translation for in English is "Big Brother".
1) We have single-source logons for all users, even if they migrate workstations.
Then you don't have AS400s, Legacy applications or Unix then ?.NET is certainly improving the Windows world, but this is a limited part of the.NET vision.
2) Users can access their apps and data from anywhere on the network, even offsite.
All their apps ? Or just the PIM ones in Outlook and the new development. Is that offsite access transactionally secure (i.e. not using Web Services)
3) Ping times have halved
This one confuses me. Are you telling me that the network traffic has been REDUCED by using.NET ? This is strange as.NET is more network intensive. Or do you mean response times ?
You wouldn't believe our uptime, sometimes we go for weeks without rebooting
Oh hang on its a troll isn't it by a Linux dude... I mean come on, anyone who can't keep a Windows box with a mean-time between failure of over a month is a cretin.
5) The TCO is 1/10th of what it was and we've been able to reduce our IT staff (maybe this is the real reason the/. readership hates.NET?).
Then they should REALLY hate AS400s and OS/390s and Sun's N1 architecture which have a support cost several hundred times as good at a fraction of the price..Net DOES have some great features, and DOES have some points to recommend it. The Mobility area is one part that MS have clearly thought about.
But in comparison with J2EE it suffers on several levels, the biggest of which is that J2EE is a standard adopted by all of the other big guys, and is the one that most enterprise vendors are moving towards, SAP for instance..NET is an expansion of the Outlook/Exchange model that has served MS so well (as an aside, the thing that MS probably fear most is a really good open source version of Exchange)..NET is not crap, but the reasons you have given are not the reasons.
I can tell you that this is totally and utterly...
True.
It was a pile of rubbish, we had it running our net connection, all it had to do was act as a mail server and dial-up modem. It fell over on a regular basis and was generally a pain to work with. I also had to develop some Curses applications on it and ended up developing them in Eiffel with a thin layer onto Curses which meant I could do the work on Solaris.
Of course its possible given huge investment to change this in the medium term (5+ years) but not in the short term at a reasonable cost.
Remember right now passive tags around around 20c, they need to be 1c or 2c max otherwise the economy element doesn't work... if something costs 20c then you can't just put 10% on top of the price without people complaining.
Science is about knowing that almost everything is possible... and then determining what is most probable. The computer you are reading this on could explode NOW.... it didn't ? Well that is the difference between probable and possible.
Active v Passive...
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Active tags have a long range, Passive tags have a short range. Its Legislation that limits readers to 4watts in the US and 0.5 in Europe, not to mention other elements that make UHF RF-ID not feasible in Europe (channel hoping can't be done).
The tags that Walmart will use will be passive as they cost alot less.
Nope they aren't
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 2, Informative
1D barcodes store only a reference number that can be used to indicate WHAT TYPE the product is.
And EPC stored on a tag tells you exactly WHICH product it is, and from that you can map its whole supply chain if it is all connected.
If you'd said 2D and 3D barcodes you'd have been more accurate, but those still can only be read one at a time.
RF-ID tags can be read thousands at a time and identifiy exactly which items you are dealing with. It is definately different but not by definition something to be paranoid about.
Slashdot Mirror
George Soros (top investment guy who once made a billion in a day) has said that the markets represent wishes rather than reality. This is also why that "buy terrorist stock" thing from the DoD was complete rubbish.
Look at SCO, if they were Antartica in PAM the DoD would be saying "BIG terrorist threat at the south pole"
Markets != reality. Lets face it this is a place where analysts say Sun is in trouble and they have $5.5bn in the bank, I wish I was in that much trouble!
So this means we have Linux on the Zaurus, PalmOS, WindowsCE, PocketPC, Smartphone, Symbian and now yet another to be added to the list of interesting ideas that will not challenge the market.
Sorry to be cynical, and it does look nice BUT, are PDAs really going to survive more than another year or so ? Already PDA sales are outstripped by about 10 to 1 by Smartphones, and that ratio will only increase in favour of the Smartphone.
So if there was a real desire to create a new OS, why not pick a new platform and aim to create the smallest, most portable and most function rich environment for smartphone development, now that would actually be aiming at a future market that could exist. Of course this is more complex as you'd need to understand the GSM/GPRS/3G stacks and lots of other nasty telecoms elements. BUT at least there is a chance of a large company taking it on.... because in a Hardware driven market the only way to get acceptance is if it is installed on a device upfront.
Its nice to play with this stuff, but wouldn't it be better to go for the future than install it on kit that is obsolete ?
I did RTFA which is just as bad. What does it matter than Transmeta is part of others ? This is a statistically irrelevant increase which is lept on to hype Transmeta.
If the article writer had been a decent journalist it would have read
"No change in Processor Sales"
Which the editors should have realised it was, rather than just seeing Transmeta and hitting "post"
This is what gets me about Transmeta, saying that they increase their share when in a category called "other" which increases 0.1% means that Transmeta is up...
How ? Transmeta don't have enough sales to get in a category of their own, they may have DECREASED their marketshare but another minor player could of increased theirs thus making the overall sector go up.
I know that here at Slashdot we must all bow to the altar of Transmeta because their processor approach is all open sourced and they own no patents and follow the OSS way so purely... oh wait they don't ? You mean they do have patents and they don't release their architecture ? Oh it must be because Linux is their primary OS... nope again. No its because they gave Linus a job.
The story here is that Intel remain the massive player, AMD has made some minor in-roads but is still not gaining marketshare in the way they would really like, and that the figures actually represent and quarter on quarter DROP in sales percentage for AMD.
In otherwords a way to say this is that AMD have LOST nearly 1% of share over 3 months which isn't so positive.
But hey, if we can bash Intel and bump Transmeta why let the facts get in the way.
The relevance is that what they are doing is nothing more than doing a "you called an API that MIGHT potentially cause an issue" they do _nothing_ to determine the way the code works or how the code flows.
Their claim that this is in anyway a substitute for testing is laughable in the extreme. The point about the halting problem is that yes you might identify definate causes of error but you cannot identify even the majority of errors in a complex system. And that is when taking a proper approach.
This is classic script kiddy numpty rubbish that they think is actually a product, but is really the work of a first year CS student, who is then told why it was pointless.
So this analyses binaries and will find all issues where the code will halt and will exceed its resource requests, thus eliminating the need for testing...
I call Snake Oil.
For those who don't know about the Halting Problem or Busy Beaver Problem then you should really know about what computers can or cannot do.
I dare say these people have some basic pattern matching, but this is NOT a reason to stop testing.
Mr Baumgartner had prepared for three years for this flight, with rigorous training including strapping himself on to the top of a speeding Porsche.
Did the driver know ?
"What Officer, a man strapped to the roof of the car as we went down the AutoBahn ?"
"Yes sir"
"I don't belive you, why isn't he there now"
"He dropped off over the bridge and glided over the river"
"Have you been drinking officer ?"
Blow into the bag son, blow into the bag.
Hi George.
When I was at Uni in the early 90s one of my fellow 3rd Year students did sign-language recognition using a VR glove, this included basics like the language and more complex elements like "Bacon" "Sea" and a few others.
Shows how little people invest in accesibility if 10 years on this is still considered "new".
France = "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey"
George Bush = "Neo-Imperialist Moron"
Tony Blair = "Lap Dog"
WMD = "No where to be found"
and of course
Dossier = Creative Story Telling
Sign Language -> English : Done in the late 80s early 90s, hell I knew someone who did it as his 3rd Year project in the early 90s. Also there are PDA based products that do this for road signs et al. Like this which isn't as complex as sign-language but is indicative of how pre-commercialised this space already is.
Communicate via audio and video Hell they mean its like having a moving monitor and microphone.... or of course a better approach would be to have each room containing monitors and videos rather than having 00s of robots walking around, that way you can move from room to room much quicker and you don't suffer from multiple people trying to speak at once.
And best of the bunch
Emailable identification documents Bloody hell X500 certs and PGP in a shiny new wrapper.
Microsoft's "innovation" continues to be 10 years behind the rest of the world.
Okay on my desk right now I have a P800 and a 6310i. On the P800 are a few Java games which do full 3D. On the 6310i is an application that uses Web Services to connect to a weather information service.
But of course to you the 6310i couldn't possibly run J2ME and act as a weather service and cache route information and act as a timesheet which submits to a central server once a week. Because it can't be used in this way.
Java Smartphones out sell PDAs 5 to 1 already, and this number will rise. J2ME MIDP2.0 isn't supported on many (its about a couple in Asia) phones as yet but it will represent another nail in the coffin of proprietary palmtops.
J2ME has very little at the moment that requires complex wireless, Bluetooth is not part of the standard install for instance.
Trust me, you know jack shit in the area.
Bloody hell.. lets see there are nearly 100 mobile phones that support J2ME, there are over 100 million sold in the last 12 months world wide and Nokia in ONE QUARTER ALONE sold over 800,000 of the high end smart phones.
Low end phones like the 6310i have been J2ME phones for around a year now. And now almost ALL phones released in Europe and Asia are J2ME enabled.
Basically you know zip, zero, nada about Mobile Applications.
This isn't new, this is way over 12 months old and represents already a multi-million dollar industry in selling J2ME applications to consumers.
I'm assuming you are based in the US, because right now there are loads of games on mobile phones in Europe and Asia, and some of them are already interactive across the network.
And that was MIDP 1.0
Micro-payments are alive and well and operating on mobile phone networks the world over. Next generation mobile phones will link directly to your PC, thus providing an idea micropayment structure via a "known" organisation (rather than people like PayPal).
Micro-payment is here, its just not where you were looking.
The problem with assuming that the motherboard CEOs are going to be driving the market is that it misses the fact that there are so many. This happens in commodity markets which become well understood and have a relatively low R&D expense. Higher levels of R&D (for instance graphics cards) mean less competition and higher turnover of companies. The motherboard people provide a required commodity in a computer that is a bit more complex that the power supply, but it is not what will drive the industry forwards.
These are followers, not leaders, of the industry. Just because they plug-in other peoples processors to specs created by those other people does not mean that they innovate the market. Its an interesting read from people who can see their part of the market, but it doesn't give a roadmap for the longer term.
Now what I'd like to see would be a closed room discussion with CCTV cameras between, Jobs, Ellison, Gates and McNeally.... with knives. THAT would tell you which way the market was going
Of course there is another reason for testing it with the troops first. As we all know from Florida, the US Troops aren't so good at filling in forms, getting them postmarked and sending them out on time....
Oh and they mainly vote Republican. What an amazing co-incidence that a large group of Republican voters with a history of involvement in dodgy election results are chosen as the trial group. I guess George wants to front-load Florida.
Double Fud...
Deployment descriptors are generated by IDEs, not written by hand. With J2EE 1.4 which is being released now the deployment descriptors have also been standardised so you don't even have to do the automatic regeneration.
As the balloon rises the atmosphere gets less dense, hence it rises slower. This is why the balloon is so large to enable _some_ lift at 25 miles. This is still not high enought for satellites which are in the 00s of miles altitude.
So it can't replace the shuttle or rockets.
Three of them concluded there couldn't be intelligent life. Two got as far as visiting before deciding the area was a dump and the final one broadcasts live 24/7 from the planet on a dedicated TV channel called "Xdfugy Dskak" which the closet translation for in English is "Big Brother".
1) We have single-source logons for all users, even if they migrate workstations.
.NET is certainly improving the Windows world, but this is a limited part of the .NET vision.
.NET ? This is strange as .NET is more network intensive. Or do you mean response times ?
/. readership hates .NET?).
.Net DOES have some great features, and DOES have some points to recommend it. The Mobility area is one part that MS have clearly thought about.
.NET is an expansion of the Outlook/Exchange model that has served MS so well (as an aside, the thing that MS probably fear most is a really good open source version of Exchange). .NET is not crap, but the reasons you have given are not the reasons.
Then you don't have AS400s, Legacy applications or Unix then ?
2) Users can access their apps and data from anywhere on the network, even offsite.
All their apps ? Or just the PIM ones in Outlook and the new development. Is that offsite access transactionally secure (i.e. not using Web Services)
3) Ping times have halved
This one confuses me. Are you telling me that the network traffic has been REDUCED by using
You wouldn't believe our uptime, sometimes we go for weeks without rebooting
Oh hang on its a troll isn't it by a Linux dude... I mean come on, anyone who can't keep a Windows box with a mean-time between failure of over a month is a cretin.
5) The TCO is 1/10th of what it was and we've been able to reduce our IT staff (maybe this is the real reason the
Then they should REALLY hate AS400s and OS/390s and Sun's N1 architecture which have a support cost several hundred times as good at a fraction of the price.
But in comparison with J2EE it suffers on several levels, the biggest of which is that J2EE is a standard adopted by all of the other big guys, and is the one that most enterprise vendors are moving towards, SAP for instance.
I can tell you that this is totally and utterly...
True.
It was a pile of rubbish, we had it running our net connection, all it had to do was act as a mail server and dial-up modem. It fell over on a regular basis and was generally a pain to work with. I also had to develop some Curses applications on it and ended up developing them in Eiffel with a thin layer onto Curses which meant I could do the work on Solaris.
Of course its possible given huge investment to change this in the medium term (5+ years) but not in the short term at a reasonable cost.
Remember right now passive tags around around 20c, they need to be 1c or 2c max otherwise the economy element doesn't work... if something costs 20c then you can't just put 10% on top of the price without people complaining.
Science is about knowing that almost everything is possible... and then determining what is most probable. The computer you are reading this on could explode NOW.... it didn't ? Well that is the difference between probable and possible.
Active tags have a long range, Passive tags have a short range. Its Legislation that limits readers to 4watts in the US and 0.5 in Europe, not to mention other elements that make UHF RF-ID not feasible in Europe (channel hoping can't be done).
The tags that Walmart will use will be passive as they cost alot less.
1D barcodes store only a reference number that can be used to indicate WHAT TYPE the product is.
And EPC stored on a tag tells you exactly WHICH product it is, and from that you can map its whole supply chain if it is all connected.
If you'd said 2D and 3D barcodes you'd have been more accurate, but those still can only be read one at a time.
RF-ID tags can be read thousands at a time and identifiy exactly which items you are dealing with. It is definately different but not by definition something to be paranoid about.