The simple fact is, computers can't do "natural language recognition". They can't READ. And they definitely can't glean meaning from contextual clues. All of which are necessary for the so-called "semantic web" to work well.
Essentially, these guys are pretending that they have a working artifical intelligence. Which they don't. No one does.
They need to make an Xbox 360 that sells for no more than $300, and includes at least a 40GB hard drive. Then they need to get more and better games. They also need to make Xbox Live! Gold memberships free for the first year. That's what people actually WANT.
This HTPC crap is a waste of time. Both MS and Sony keep trying to turn their console into a "media center", which while a nice idea, isn't something that the mass-market really cares about.
Comcast is probably breaking the law. And what they are doing is shitty.
But they are well within their rights to throttle Bittorrent traffic. And they NEED to.
I used to run an ISP, and I've worked at many, and let me tell you, Bittorrent traffic is EVIL. It HAS to be throttled. It's an extremely inefficient, "talky" protocol. It opens thousands of connections to every BT client (yes, you can limit the number of connections your BT client *accepts*, but those connections still have to be *routed* to you before you can can deny them). It just kills routers. It's MOSTLY used for downloading illegal movies/software/music, which means that as an ISP you have to deal with the "takedown notices" that the MPAA and RIAA like to send.
Basically, as an ISP, Bittorrent is a nightmare. All for what? So teenagers that live at home andt aren't even paying for the bandwidth they use can download Spider-Man 3?
Don't get me wrong, I use BT occasionally, but it seems to me that everyone seems to think they have a "right" to run BT 24/7, downloading everything they can. Maybe they do. But those same people need to take a little responsibility and realize that bandwidth is a SCARCE resource, and that their ISP doesn't have unlimited amounts of it, and that OTHER customers matter, too.
I've always thought it was strange that the focus of a lot of the anti-trust case was the "bundling" of Internet Explorer.
Who gives a shit? The only other browsers worth using, Firefox and Opera, are both FREE. How is bundling IE with Windows hurting them? They don't make any money from their browsers anyway!
Plus, the REAL problem with the MS/Windows monopoly (and I don't think it is a monopoly, really, but that's a different argument) is that they don't document the Windows API completely.
I agree. If you have to buy a box, you might as well get the one the cable company provides.
However, if you have a TV and/or DVR that supports CableCard, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to use all of that stuff together. That's what it's really for.
The specs on that are pretty good. The form-factor is nice. The software sounds like it is very decent, also. But $500?
I was at Wal-Mart yesterday, and they had Windows Vista notebooks for $300.
It's the same problem that ALL PDAs have. To make a PDA that has all the functionality you want, they basically have to re-create notebook, but make everything a little slower/suckier to make the device smaller and make the batteries last longer.
It's hard to justify buying any of these devices, as neat as they are. They're just not worth it.
Oh, come on. I dig Ubuntu, I even used it exclusively for a few months, but it's not a replacement for Windows yet. It's CLOSE. But there are many things that are hard to do in Ubuntu/Linux-in-general that are dead-simple to accomplish in Windows XP.
Ubuntu needs to do everything Windows does, and do it better/easier if it wants to succeed as a replacement for Windows on the desktop.
Yeah! And why haven't they cured cancer yet? And why does it still cost $9 for a small soda at the movie theater? Lazy-ass researchers.
The reason that fuel efficiency and internet bandwidth haven't "increased" as much as hard drive space is because they are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PROBLEMS with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT solutions.
The Linux client can be a fucking TARBALL and the Linux crowd would be happy. They don't have to package it at all, or even go to much effort to make sure it works well. Linux users (of which I am one, at least part-time) are prepared to jump through hoops to make this game work, and don't expect it be very polished.
On the Mac side, however, they'd have to actually test the thing and package it correctly and support it. A much more expensive/time-consuming proposition than simply dumping the Linux binaries on the CD and saying "Here it is, guys. You're on your own".
That's the thing. Consumers don't want BC. Or at least, they don't care.
You get a skewed view of the world when you read nothing but gaming forums online. This crowd (for some reason) thinks BC is really important. But the "unwashed masses" don't buy a new console to play old games. They just don't. They don't care. Hell, many of them probably don't even realize there IS BC on there PS2 or PS3.
Microsoft realized this when they went for pure software emulation of the Xbox, and then essentially gave up on it 6 months later (updates have stopped). BC is a red-herring.
I realize that SAP is complex, and that payroll is complex.
IT DOESN'T MATTER. The software should work. The customizations needed should be relatively EASY to implement. I mean, it's not like they're trying to model global weather systems or something. SAP is really nothing more than a big fat database/spreadsheet. They should be able to make it work. There is no excuse.
It's almost a rule that the more expensive the software, the more likely it is to really and truly SUCK.
It's also a rule that the bigger the company/organization/school district/whatever, the less likely it is that "technology" purchasing decisions are made by someone who actually HAS A CLUE about technology. The reason being, of course, that technology is too expensive to let the "tech" people get involved with the purchasing process.
Like I said, this is all par-for-the-course in the American corporate world. And school districts/government organizations are even WORSE.
I still think the PS3 is doomed, but ditching the extraneous backwards-compatibility stuff to cut costs was a smart move.
They need to get the price down however they can, and NO ONE CARES about backwards-compatibility. It's something that people whine about a lot on the Internet, but the unwashed masses really don't give a shit. They aren't going to be buying a new console to play old games. I'm not saying BC is *bad*, just that it's not as important as keeping to cost of the console down (or, conversely, using the money saved by ditching BC to make the console more powerful by using a faster CPU, more RAM/bigger HD). Nintendo gets a pass with the Wii, since it's essentially a faster Gamecube. They got BC for "free". Both Sony and MS didn't get it for free. Sony especially has to jump through some serious hoops to make the PS3 run PS2 and PS1 games.
/cue the "But I just played FFVII on my PS3 the other day!" comments
"Bottom line: first non-Windows OS with decent, supported, modern gaming and I'm off to the races."
Don't hold your breath. There are multiple issues that will keep most games from every being made for the Mac or Linux:
1. DirectX/Direct3D is a really nice API for making games. And MS supports it with nice development tools.
2. The market for Mac and Linux games is incredibly tiny, and it's just not worth creating new versions (meaning, using an API other than DirectX) of a game for those platforms.
3. Most importantly, even the market for *Windows* games is shrinking rapidly. Essentially all of the major developers are moving to the consoles, which is where the real money is. There is growth in the simple "Flash/Shockwave/Java" games that everyone plays online, but those are already cross-platform, and they are mostly advertising-supported.
There's no problem with doing custom stuff. But you CAN'T use undocumented, un-official "features" that could be changed in future revisions of the API.
If you need to do something that the API doesn't do, then *skip the API entirely*. Write real custom code. The reason people like to "hack the API" is that it's easier than trying to write completely custom code that doesn't break the rules in any way, yet can communicate with the Win32 API using documented calls.
And realistically, why do you need to do something that isn't supported by the API? That implies you are doing something that wants to screw around with the basic Windows interface. That might be something you want to do in a game, but there is DirectX for that. For any non-game application, you should be going to GREAT LENGTHS to avoid having to do stuff that the API doesn't support.
1. The screen, by definition, isn't big enough. 2. Handwriting recognition sucks. 3. Speech recognition sucks.
2 and 3 are the big problems, because if you have 100% accurate speech OR handwriting recognition, you can get away with a smaller screen, since you don't need to see a lot of menus and such if your can simply "talk" to your computer.
Sadly, we're still pretty far away from truly universal speech/handwriting recognition. Which means that if you really want a portable computer, you pretty much need a notebook so you can have a large screen and a full-size keyboard. The PDA market is more-or-less dead these days because almost everyone that bought a PDA eventually realized this.
Well, the Windows API hasn't really been a "moving target" for quite a while. Since Windows NT. Yeah, things have been added, but if you followed the rules, a 32-bit app written in 1995 should work just fine on Vista. Games being the exception.
The thing is, MANY developers, especially the "in-house" developers at a lot of businesses, haven't exactly been following the rules. Microsoft has been tolerant of that for a long time, but with Vista, they are finally saying "Look. You HAVE to use Win32 and follow all the rules for writing a nice, compatible application." The big issue is multi-user-aware applications, obviously. And applications that want to modify system files that shouldn't ever need to be modified.
I'm not a fan of Vista, but the fact that it FINALLY is forcing all these lazy/clueless developers to re-write their apps is probably a good thing for the industry, overall. Yes, it's a pain in the ass and it's expensive. But MS finally realized that they can't keep catering to the people that want to keep patching-up their 16-bit Visual Basic apps from 1992, because it's holding up advancement of Windows.
Most companies are justifiably terrified of lawsuits based on dubious patents.
At the same time, anyone with a patent is justifiably terrified that a big company will steal their idea, forcing them into a lengthy, expensive lawsuit that they can't afford and might not win.
The problem is, patents are BAD for the consumer/marketplace, but they are GREAT for the person holding the patent. Sometimes it's hard to decide which side to take.
The one thing that always drives me nuts when installing Ubuntu is that the fonts really blow. And even if you install nice Windows fonts, you STILL have to screw around with your font configuration files to make them look nice. Especially in Firefox. Kubuntu is *slightly* better, but it still sucks.
I sometimes wonder if the Ubuntu team should *really* focus on fixing all the problems with GNOME/KDE. Put all their energy into making the GUI as good as it can possibly be. All the other pieces of a Linux distro are handled well-enough by other people, but the *important* GUI work seems to be handled by a too-small group of developers for the GNOME/KDE project.
Yup. They tried it with Itanium, and it didn't work.
The thing is, at this stage in processor design, the actual instruction set isn't all that important.
But *compilers* are more important than ever, and writing a good compiler is hard work. x86 compilers have been tweaked and improved for nearly 30 years. A new instruction set could NEVER achieve that kind of optimization.
Interestingly,the Itanium and the EPIC architecture were designed to move all the hard work of "parallel processing" to the compiler. Unfortunately, they could never get the compiler to work all that well on most kinds of code. The compiler could never really "extract" the parallelism that Itanium CPUs needed to work at full speed.
Which is *exactly* the problem we have now with our multi-core CPUs. Compilers don't know how to extract parallelism very well. It's an *incredibly* difficult problem that Intel has already thrown untold billions of dollars at. Essentially, even though Itanium/EPIC never caught on, we're having to deal with all the same problems it had, anyway.
Now SCO can focus on it's other lawsuit
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Turns out that SCO owns the copyright on the "Duke Nukem Forever" code.
The case is expected to be settled just before the universe dies a heat-death.
The problem is that when you hold the "mirror" of science-fiction up to REALITY, it doesn't look all that much different. I imagine that is what Gibson's problem is.
We've reached a point with technology where we know A LOT about what is possible and what isn't possible. In many ways, the "dreams" of sci-fi are shattered. No FTL travel, no artificial intelligence, no unlimited energy source. That pretty much covers it, doesn't it?
The configuration/managment tools suck. In fact, they're mostly non-existent. To get the most out of Apache, you are going to be editing configuration files by hand.
Now, don't get me wrong, Apache is great, and dealing with the configuration issues is not THAT difficult, and the benefits are worth the effort. But MAN. IIS is *so* much easier to deal with when it comes to 99% of the configuration duties that you need to do on a web server. The defaults are sane, almost everything just takes a few clicks to set up.
Now, if you want to AUTOMATE configuration of your webserver, obviously IIS royally sucks compared to Apache. But for clarity and simplicity of configuration, IIS wins by a mile. It's not even close.
That's because the fans of Starcraft, and RTS games in general, really just want to know how to "win".
Is there any RTS game that hasn't been completely "figured out"? I mean, everyone knows what strategies/units to use and when after the game has been out for a month or so. At that point, if you are a "hardcore" player, you aren't really PLAYING the game so much as following the predetermined steps necessary to win. And in multiplayer, well, we all know that in multiplayer RTS games, if you aren't following one of a couple of strategies, and building the right units in the right order, you will lose.
All of which is why I could never get into RTS games.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
The simple fact is, computers can't do "natural language recognition". They can't READ. And they definitely can't glean meaning from contextual clues. All of which are necessary for the so-called "semantic web" to work well.
Essentially, these guys are pretending that they have a working artifical intelligence. Which they don't. No one does.
They need to make an Xbox 360 that sells for no more than $300, and includes at least a 40GB hard drive. Then they need to get more and better games. They also need to make Xbox Live! Gold memberships free for the first year. That's what people actually WANT.
This HTPC crap is a waste of time. Both MS and Sony keep trying to turn their console into a "media center", which while a nice idea, isn't something that the mass-market really cares about.
I swear both MS and Sony have lost their minds.
Comcast is probably breaking the law. And what they are doing is shitty.
But they are well within their rights to throttle Bittorrent traffic. And they NEED to.
I used to run an ISP, and I've worked at many, and let me tell you, Bittorrent traffic is EVIL. It HAS to be throttled. It's an extremely inefficient, "talky" protocol. It opens thousands of connections to every BT client (yes, you can limit the number of connections your BT client *accepts*, but those connections still have to be *routed* to you before you can can deny them). It just kills routers. It's MOSTLY used for downloading illegal movies/software/music, which means that as an ISP you have to deal with the "takedown notices" that the MPAA and RIAA like to send.
Basically, as an ISP, Bittorrent is a nightmare. All for what? So teenagers that live at home andt aren't even paying for the bandwidth they use can download Spider-Man 3?
Don't get me wrong, I use BT occasionally, but it seems to me that everyone seems to think they have a "right" to run BT 24/7, downloading everything they can. Maybe they do. But those same people need to take a little responsibility and realize that bandwidth is a SCARCE resource, and that their ISP doesn't have unlimited amounts of it, and that OTHER customers matter, too.
I've always thought it was strange that the focus of a lot of the anti-trust case was the "bundling" of Internet Explorer.
Who gives a shit? The only other browsers worth using, Firefox and Opera, are both FREE. How is bundling IE with Windows hurting them? They don't make any money from their browsers anyway!
Plus, the REAL problem with the MS/Windows monopoly (and I don't think it is a monopoly, really, but that's a different argument) is that they don't document the Windows API completely.
I agree. If you have to buy a box, you might as well get the one the cable company provides.
However, if you have a TV and/or DVR that supports CableCard, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to use all of that stuff together. That's what it's really for.
The specs on that are pretty good. The form-factor is nice. The software sounds like it is very decent, also. But $500?
I was at Wal-Mart yesterday, and they had Windows Vista notebooks for $300.
It's the same problem that ALL PDAs have. To make a PDA that has all the functionality you want, they basically have to re-create notebook, but make everything a little slower/suckier to make the device smaller and make the batteries last longer.
It's hard to justify buying any of these devices, as neat as they are. They're just not worth it.
Oh, come on. I dig Ubuntu, I even used it exclusively for a few months, but it's not a replacement for Windows yet. It's CLOSE. But there are many things that are hard to do in Ubuntu/Linux-in-general that are dead-simple to accomplish in Windows XP.
Ubuntu needs to do everything Windows does, and do it better/easier if it wants to succeed as a replacement for Windows on the desktop.
Yeah! And why haven't they cured cancer yet? And why does it still cost $9 for a small soda at the movie theater? Lazy-ass researchers.
The reason that fuel efficiency and internet bandwidth haven't "increased" as much as hard drive space is because they are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PROBLEMS with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT solutions.
It makes sense.
The Linux client can be a fucking TARBALL and the Linux crowd would be happy. They don't have to package it at all, or even go to much effort to make sure it works well. Linux users (of which I am one, at least part-time) are prepared to jump through hoops to make this game work, and don't expect it be very polished.
On the Mac side, however, they'd have to actually test the thing and package it correctly and support it. A much more expensive/time-consuming proposition than simply dumping the Linux binaries on the CD and saying "Here it is, guys. You're on your own".
That's the thing. Consumers don't want BC. Or at least, they don't care.
You get a skewed view of the world when you read nothing but gaming forums online. This crowd (for some reason) thinks BC is really important. But the "unwashed masses" don't buy a new console to play old games. They just don't. They don't care. Hell, many of them probably don't even realize there IS BC on there PS2 or PS3.
Microsoft realized this when they went for pure software emulation of the Xbox, and then essentially gave up on it 6 months later (updates have stopped). BC is a red-herring.
I realize that SAP is complex, and that payroll is complex.
IT DOESN'T MATTER. The software should work. The customizations needed should be relatively EASY to implement. I mean, it's not like they're trying to model global weather systems or something. SAP is really nothing more than a big fat database/spreadsheet. They should be able to make it work. There is no excuse.
In my experience, this kind of thing is typical.
It's almost a rule that the more expensive the software, the more likely it is to really and truly SUCK.
It's also a rule that the bigger the company/organization/school district/whatever, the less likely it is that "technology" purchasing decisions are made by someone who actually HAS A CLUE about technology. The reason being, of course, that technology is too expensive to let the "tech" people get involved with the purchasing process.
Like I said, this is all par-for-the-course in the American corporate world. And school districts/government organizations are even WORSE.
I still think the PS3 is doomed, but ditching the extraneous backwards-compatibility stuff to cut costs was a smart move.
/cue the "But I just played FFVII on my PS3 the other day!" comments
They need to get the price down however they can, and NO ONE CARES about backwards-compatibility. It's something that people whine about a lot on the Internet, but the unwashed masses really don't give a shit. They aren't going to be buying a new console to play old games. I'm not saying BC is *bad*, just that it's not as important as keeping to cost of the console down (or, conversely, using the money saved by ditching BC to make the console more powerful by using a faster CPU, more RAM/bigger HD). Nintendo gets a pass with the Wii, since it's essentially a faster Gamecube. They got BC for "free". Both Sony and MS didn't get it for free. Sony especially has to jump through some serious hoops to make the PS3 run PS2 and PS1 games.
"Bottom line: first non-Windows OS with decent, supported, modern gaming and I'm off to the races."
Don't hold your breath. There are multiple issues that will keep most games from every being made for the Mac or Linux:
1. DirectX/Direct3D is a really nice API for making games. And MS supports it with nice development tools.
2. The market for Mac and Linux games is incredibly tiny, and it's just not worth creating new versions (meaning, using an API other than DirectX) of a game for those platforms.
3. Most importantly, even the market for *Windows* games is shrinking rapidly. Essentially all of the major developers are moving to the consoles, which is where the real money is. There is growth in the simple "Flash/Shockwave/Java" games that everyone plays online, but those are already cross-platform, and they are mostly advertising-supported.
There's no problem with doing custom stuff. But you CAN'T use undocumented, un-official "features" that could be changed in future revisions of the API.
If you need to do something that the API doesn't do, then *skip the API entirely*. Write real custom code. The reason people like to "hack the API" is that it's easier than trying to write completely custom code that doesn't break the rules in any way, yet can communicate with the Win32 API using documented calls.
And realistically, why do you need to do something that isn't supported by the API? That implies you are doing something that wants to screw around with the basic Windows interface. That might be something you want to do in a game, but there is DirectX for that. For any non-game application, you should be going to GREAT LENGTHS to avoid having to do stuff that the API doesn't support.
Here's why:
1. The screen, by definition, isn't big enough.
2. Handwriting recognition sucks.
3. Speech recognition sucks.
2 and 3 are the big problems, because if you have 100% accurate speech OR handwriting recognition, you can get away with a smaller screen, since you don't need to see a lot of menus and such if your can simply "talk" to your computer.
Sadly, we're still pretty far away from truly universal speech/handwriting recognition. Which means that if you really want a portable computer, you pretty much need a notebook so you can have a large screen and a full-size keyboard. The PDA market is more-or-less dead these days because almost everyone that bought a PDA eventually realized this.
Well, the Windows API hasn't really been a "moving target" for quite a while. Since Windows NT. Yeah, things have been added, but if you followed the rules, a 32-bit app written in 1995 should work just fine on Vista. Games being the exception.
The thing is, MANY developers, especially the "in-house" developers at a lot of businesses, haven't exactly been following the rules. Microsoft has been tolerant of that for a long time, but with Vista, they are finally saying "Look. You HAVE to use Win32 and follow all the rules for writing a nice, compatible application." The big issue is multi-user-aware applications, obviously. And applications that want to modify system files that shouldn't ever need to be modified.
I'm not a fan of Vista, but the fact that it FINALLY is forcing all these lazy/clueless developers to re-write their apps is probably a good thing for the industry, overall. Yes, it's a pain in the ass and it's expensive. But MS finally realized that they can't keep catering to the people that want to keep patching-up their 16-bit Visual Basic apps from 1992, because it's holding up advancement of Windows.
Most companies are justifiably terrified of lawsuits based on dubious patents.
At the same time, anyone with a patent is justifiably terrified that a big company will steal their idea, forcing them into a lengthy, expensive lawsuit that they can't afford and might not win.
The problem is, patents are BAD for the consumer/marketplace, but they are GREAT for the person holding the patent. Sometimes it's hard to decide which side to take.
The one thing that always drives me nuts when installing Ubuntu is that the fonts really blow. And even if you install nice Windows fonts, you STILL have to screw around with your font configuration files to make them look nice. Especially in Firefox. Kubuntu is *slightly* better, but it still sucks.
I sometimes wonder if the Ubuntu team should *really* focus on fixing all the problems with GNOME/KDE. Put all their energy into making the GUI as good as it can possibly be. All the other pieces of a Linux distro are handled well-enough by other people, but the *important* GUI work seems to be handled by a too-small group of developers for the GNOME/KDE project.
My guess is that it's 50MB for the *installer*, which then downloads the actual 1GB of service pack files from Microsoft's site.
They're lying, in other words.
Yup. They tried it with Itanium, and it didn't work.
The thing is, at this stage in processor design, the actual instruction set isn't all that important.
But *compilers* are more important than ever, and writing a good compiler is hard work. x86 compilers have been tweaked and improved for nearly 30 years. A new instruction set could NEVER achieve that kind of optimization.
Interestingly,the Itanium and the EPIC architecture were designed to move all the hard work of "parallel processing" to the compiler. Unfortunately, they could never get the compiler to work all that well on most kinds of code. The compiler could never really "extract" the parallelism that Itanium CPUs needed to work at full speed.
Which is *exactly* the problem we have now with our multi-core CPUs. Compilers don't know how to extract parallelism very well. It's an *incredibly* difficult problem that Intel has already thrown untold billions of dollars at. Essentially, even though Itanium/EPIC never caught on, we're having to deal with all the same problems it had, anyway.
Turns out that SCO owns the copyright on the "Duke Nukem Forever" code.
The case is expected to be settled just before the universe dies a heat-death.
You're right.
The problem is that when you hold the "mirror" of science-fiction up to REALITY, it doesn't look all that much different. I imagine that is what Gibson's problem is.
We've reached a point with technology where we know A LOT about what is possible and what isn't possible. In many ways, the "dreams" of sci-fi are shattered. No FTL travel, no artificial intelligence, no unlimited energy source. That pretty much covers it, doesn't it?
There is, in fact, a reason not to use Apache.
The configuration/managment tools suck. In fact, they're mostly non-existent. To get the most out of Apache, you are going to be editing configuration files by hand.
Now, don't get me wrong, Apache is great, and dealing with the configuration issues is not THAT difficult, and the benefits are worth the effort. But MAN. IIS is *so* much easier to deal with when it comes to 99% of the configuration duties that you need to do on a web server. The defaults are sane, almost everything just takes a few clicks to set up.
Now, if you want to AUTOMATE configuration of your webserver, obviously IIS royally sucks compared to Apache. But for clarity and simplicity of configuration, IIS wins by a mile. It's not even close.
That's because the fans of Starcraft, and RTS games in general, really just want to know how to "win".
Is there any RTS game that hasn't been completely "figured out"? I mean, everyone knows what strategies/units to use and when after the game has been out for a month or so. At that point, if you are a "hardcore" player, you aren't really PLAYING the game so much as following the predetermined steps necessary to win. And in multiplayer, well, we all know that in multiplayer RTS games, if you aren't following one of a couple of strategies, and building the right units in the right order, you will lose.
All of which is why I could never get into RTS games.