all the nice effects that mac and longhorn will be doing next year could be tied into xorg/gnome within 6 months.
It should be "All the nice effects that Mac has been doing since MacOS X was first shown back in 2000/2001 and Longhorn will be doing next year could be tied into xorg/gnome within 6 months".
Can it be that nobody will reason that, by endorsing Mono as a.Net clone/subset, we allow Microsoft to dictate what an open-source product should do?
FOSS can't beat Microsoft by embrace and extend. More so when it's Microsoft who hold the standard reference and not the other way around. They can make the Mono developers jump wherever they feel like, by extending and deprecating APIs at will.
And, by being a subset of.Net, it is not very reassuring that resources invested in.Net will not be lost when migrating to Mono.
Changing the subject a little bit, is there a Visual Studio.Net plug-in that validates code against Mono to ensure that it's Mono-compatible?
Maybe we should set up motion detectors on all legislative bodies (I am talking about Brazil, but I guess a similar device could be used anywhere in the world) that make alarms go off if someone is working past midnight. When politicians work that late, probably to avoid too much press, we expect their worse;-)
The technique should also be adapted to detect legislation that is passed abnormally fast.
And, about the original topic, do they really think that anyone who has the ability to shot down a satellite needs their help to find targets?
I do remember those. There was a scanner you could place over the barcode and it would read it. It's kind of like the 2D high density codes we see these days, only huge and expensive
I am not sure what magazines tried to print them (for all three readers that could read them), but I think BYTE did. I will have to check that someday.
Do you really think someone can embrace and extend Microsoft?! They haven't even embraced the.NET platform fully...
It may make technical sense (yet, I doubt it) but it is the most stupid strategic blunder I saw in a long time. It is a very nice tool for Microsoft to spend FOSS developer's time and resources making them jump when and where they dictate the (de facto) standard.
And I didn't even touch the possible licensing catastrophe that can come out of this mess.
There is one way FOSS can succeed and it is not trying to monkey (pun intended) Microsoft.
Well. It shouldn't be very hard do build an inclined platform on the moon pointing more or less to Mecca. As far as you avoid the more "central" regions of the Moon (as seen from Earth), the platform would not even have to be be very inclined. If you consider than, on Earth, muslims miss Mecca's real direction by pointing horizontally (since the Earth is round, people should pray "down" most of the time), you could safely discard the inclined platform and just pray toward the same direction (which, on the Moon, is mostly always the same)
Other planets or moons would, of course, be a little more trouble, but I think that pointing to Earth would be just fine.
And prayer is usually more about intention than proper execution. I am sure any God out there, not only Allah, would appreciate any reasonable efforts made to pray correctly.
But wait... What will happen when, in a couple billion years, the Sun either swallows or blows up and vaporizes Earth?
Windows (and Microsoft) succeeded because it gave users what they wanted and needed. They needed a cheap and backward compatible GUI instead of Macintosh or OS/2, and they got Windows 3 (after a couple less successful iterations). The only ones that were not satisfied were Mac and OS/2 users. Users needed simple networking for sharing files and printers as opposed to NetWare or Lan Manager, and they got Windows for Workgroups. They wanted applications that looked consistent with the rest of the GUI, and they got Word, Excel and, later, the Office suite.
At that time, Apple was evil - they had cute computers, but they were overpriced and incompatible with everything else. IBM was evil too - pushing OS/2, incompatible with just about every application written up to that time and with the added FUD that it would run best on the overpriced PS/2 family.
People used to talk about the next version of whatever that came from Redmond - How Word would handle tables better or how Visual Basic (and being able to quickly develop simple business apps was a major factor in Windows' acceptance) would simplify accessing databases or what new widgets people would be able to use.
It is not so anymore. Nobody is really excited about Longtime^H^H^H^Hhorn (well... I am not), MSN Search or the next release of SQL Server. Can anyone tell me what changed between Word 2003 and Word XP? The XBox gaming console seems to attract more attention than the next release of Office.
IBM used to be boring. Now Microsoft is. They have grown predictable and slow.
They may not be dying, but they are sure losing steam.
Maybe one should do it. It is sure useful to evaluate a database platform on many hardware confugurations in the same price/capabilities range. Maybe buying a XServe running OSX from Apple makes sense for doing MySQL more than, say, an IBM xSeries or an Itanic offering from HP running HP-UX.
Of course, such a test would involve some serious resources not everyone has available.
I know we have discussed this before, but shouldn't someone go after Microsoft for a very insecure OS that happens to be a petri-dish for spamzombies everywhere? Isn't it negligent behaviour? It would be a lot easier for law enforcement if you could really say where a message originated instead of discovering that the spammer address is from an old lady who never updated her machine since her grandson installed it.
When taking over IT on a small advertising agency with lots of Macs at the creative dept and lots of Windows PCs on the rest of the office I had the firewall to deny and log all attempts to connect with SMTP servers outside. Guess what side of the net was infested?
It appears to me that most of _my_ problems with spam are due to spambots sending mail from ADSL or cable-modems (It's common to have companies whose IP addresses fall in blacklisted ranges and that have to send some or all of their e-mail over ISP servers - raising a lot of security/privacy issues)
Brazil runs a very successful ethanol program for many years now. It had a low a couple years ago, when engines running on gasoline had a technical edge (largely due to imported vs homegrown technology issues), but now most factories (GM, Fiat, Volkswagen) offer cars with dual fuel engines. In fact, since 1986 I only had two fossil-fuel running cars. My current one has never even tasted gasoline;-)
True - ethanol still creates CO2, but at least you can grow it on the field and hope it absorbs a lot of CO2 before you harvest it.
I think if ethanol was that bad a fuel we would have noticed that by now.
One could also argue that nobody will buy a digital TV receiver or PVR that enforces the broadcast flag because it can be rendered useless by the cable company or the TV content provider.
Oh... Wait... Nobody in the US will be allowed to make or sell a device that does not comply with this stupid rule because there is a law forbiding it.
Of course, you can always stop watching TV or move to another country. And don't take pictures of the airport on your way out.
Isn't it (this self-promotion) against some rule on SourceForge? SF exists to host collaborative development of free software, not to promote the work of someone or to sell his books.
rbanffy, a while back you made the following statement. Have your forgotten?
One should never take himself or the world too seriously. Fundamentalists do it and we can all see what the consequences are.
But it was not funny! It was horrible! Terrifying. My jaw dropped. I wouldn't show it to my kids. I am usually the first one to make fun of myself (and of others), but I wait until I have a good argument to do it.
And when the CEO does something like this, how adversely would one's carreer be impacted if he or she said it's a bad joke?;-) The idea of being transfered to Microsoft Bob support scares me.
That is only one more reason not to work for Microsoft. Do they expect their employees to laugh? Like the post just after this one, I felt sorry for him. It's embarassing.
My point was (and still is) that there wasn't a high performance OS for the x86 in the PC price-range available. It's true Windows NT scaled to lots of CPUs, but it does so only on extremely costly and exotic hardware and the license costs were and still are outrageously high. The same was true about UNIX System V and other branded Unixes.
The limitations of software had always limited the development of mainstream hardware and multiprocessors are no exception. Because of the high price of OSs that could take advantage of CPU level parallelism, mainstream processor vendors chose to optimize their hardware for single-threaded performance. Were there a quad-486 on a chip instead of a Pentium or an 8-way unit instead of Pentium Pro, we would have very different software today. Of course, they would flop because Windows 3, 95 and 98 didn't support multiprocessors (MacOS Classic doesn't have a much better story to tell about it either) and NT was way too expensive (and perceived as slow and more complex). Unixes of the time wouldn't qualify as mainstream either. And so, nobody ever tried to put more than one core on a mainstream consumer-level CPU.
Well... The lack of registers sure makes the x86 a bit harder to program than more modern architectures. It is also due to Microsoft's support (or lack of it) for true decent multitasking computing until just about er... never, that the x86 has been optimized well beyond all reasonable efforts for single-tasking compute-heavy applications. There was no point on a high throughput x86 system until BSD and Linux came around. If you wanted high performance and was willing to pay branded Unix prices, you would go SPARC, POWER, PA or Alpha.
Well it turned out that Moore's law didn't fail and most importantly that many of the software algorithms are not easily parallelizable
Well... It turns out that most videogame and simulation code is easily parallelizable and that our desktop computers are running a couple dozen programs at the same time (i count 8 active ones right now and I just woke up).
I would buy a Cell workstation running Linux, even knowing it would never run Windows, just because I like interesting hardware. Given a cheap enough hardware and enough software resources to round out existing software, how long do you think it would take for someone to build The Killer Home Computer
And, if Apple wants it, just think of the Mac Mini they could build with it.
The single question that comes to my mind is "Why?".
I loved the Amiga. It was amazingly fast, had a very interesting architecture, with the custom chips doing a wonderful job offloading the CPU. But its responsiveness derived from having no virtual memory - if you loaded a big enough dataset for whatever program you wanted, it would fill all memory available and either crash itself or the whole computer.
I understand nostalgia. I have a bunch of old computers that still work - and I will keep then working as long as I can - from a couple Apple II clones, Macintosh LC, Color Classic, early PowerMacs and a Monorail PC... A couple weeks ago I almost bought a MSX. They are cool, sure, but they are toys by today's standards.
There is space for inovation and inventive hardware, tough. But let's make new stuff not regurgitate old classics - I would buy without any hesitation, a contemporary 68K based Amiga computer (or an Acorn Archimedes equivalent, BTW), as long as it was cheap. But I would not pretend to be buying a useful computer - it is a toy. I would use them to relive good experiences of my youth. It's not early adopter stuff - it's only adopter. Extending their useful lives is like overextending good jokes - they cease to be funny.
I would love to have a MIPS, ARM or PPC ATX motherboard to play with. Kudos for the guys who made the board. I would love to play with Linux or BSD on them or any other brand-new exotic advanced OS, but let's face it: Amiga is all about nostalgia, not advanced features. At least, not these days.
The lone coder writing clever business or home software is no more. If you dream about developing the next Visicalc, alone or in a small team, forget it. Unless you have a very bright idea nobody had before (and patented) and won't have in a year, you will not be able to compete with anyone bigger than you - if you are really lucky, they may buy your company and ideas. We are talking about competing with gigabuck companies that buy politicians and courts. Be happy if they can't hire someone to get rid of you on a more permanent basis.;-)
I was talking to a friend these days how impossible it is for a small outfit to make a game these days. Unless your game runs on cell-phones, you are talking big money.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be "All the nice effects that Mac has been doing since MacOS X was first shown back in 2000/2001 and Longhorn will be doing next year could be tied into xorg/gnome within 6 months".
A real stealth galaxy. I wonder how big the cloaking device must be
Can it be that nobody will reason that, by endorsing Mono as a .Net clone/subset, we allow Microsoft to dictate what an open-source product should do?
.Net, it is not very reassuring that resources invested in .Net will not be lost when migrating to Mono.
.Net plug-in that validates code against Mono to ensure that it's Mono-compatible?
FOSS can't beat Microsoft by embrace and extend. More so when it's Microsoft who hold the standard reference and not the other way around. They can make the Mono developers jump wherever they feel like, by extending and deprecating APIs at will.
And, by being a subset of
Changing the subject a little bit, is there a Visual Studio
Maybe we should set up motion detectors on all legislative bodies (I am talking about Brazil, but I guess a similar device could be used anywhere in the world) that make alarms go off if someone is working past midnight. When politicians work that late, probably to avoid too much press, we expect their worse ;-)
The technique should also be adapted to detect legislation that is passed abnormally fast.
And, about the original topic, do they really think that anyone who has the ability to shot down a satellite needs their help to find targets?
I do remember those. There was a scanner you could place over the barcode and it would read it. It's kind of like the 2D high density codes we see these days, only huge and expensive
I am not sure what magazines tried to print them (for all three readers that could read them), but I think BYTE did. I will have to check that someday.
Do you really think someone can embrace and extend Microsoft?! They haven't even embraced the .NET platform fully...
It may make technical sense (yet, I doubt it) but it is the most stupid strategic blunder I saw in a long time. It is a very nice tool for Microsoft to spend FOSS developer's time and resources making them jump when and where they dictate the (de facto) standard.
And I didn't even touch the possible licensing catastrophe that can come out of this mess.
There is one way FOSS can succeed and it is not trying to monkey (pun intended) Microsoft.
Well. It shouldn't be very hard do build an inclined platform on the moon pointing more or less to Mecca. As far as you avoid the more "central" regions of the Moon (as seen from Earth), the platform would not even have to be be very inclined. If you consider than, on Earth, muslims miss Mecca's real direction by pointing horizontally (since the Earth is round, people should pray "down" most of the time), you could safely discard the inclined platform and just pray toward the same direction (which, on the Moon, is mostly always the same)
Other planets or moons would, of course, be a little more trouble, but I think that pointing to Earth would be just fine.
And prayer is usually more about intention than proper execution. I am sure any God out there, not only Allah, would appreciate any reasonable efforts made to pray correctly.
But wait... What will happen when, in a couple billion years, the Sun either swallows or blows up and vaporizes Earth?
Windows (and Microsoft) succeeded because it gave users what they wanted and needed. They needed a cheap and backward compatible GUI instead of Macintosh or OS/2, and they got Windows 3 (after a couple less successful iterations). The only ones that were not satisfied were Mac and OS/2 users. Users needed simple networking for sharing files and printers as opposed to NetWare or Lan Manager, and they got Windows for Workgroups. They wanted applications that looked consistent with the rest of the GUI, and they got Word, Excel and, later, the Office suite.
At that time, Apple was evil - they had cute computers, but they were overpriced and incompatible with everything else. IBM was evil too - pushing OS/2, incompatible with just about every application written up to that time and with the added FUD that it would run best on the overpriced PS/2 family.
People used to talk about the next version of whatever that came from Redmond - How Word would handle tables better or how Visual Basic (and being able to quickly develop simple business apps was a major factor in Windows' acceptance) would simplify accessing databases or what new widgets people would be able to use.
It is not so anymore. Nobody is really excited about Longtime^H^H^H^Hhorn (well... I am not), MSN Search or the next release of SQL Server. Can anyone tell me what changed between Word 2003 and Word XP? The XBox gaming console seems to attract more attention than the next release of Office.
IBM used to be boring. Now Microsoft is. They have grown predictable and slow.
They may not be dying, but they are sure losing steam.
Maybe one should do it. It is sure useful to evaluate a database platform on many hardware confugurations in the same price/capabilities range. Maybe buying a XServe running OSX from Apple makes sense for doing MySQL more than, say, an IBM xSeries or an Itanic offering from HP running HP-UX.
Of course, such a test would involve some serious resources not everyone has available.
It's amazing nobody quoted Richard Feynman yet.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
I know we have discussed this before, but shouldn't someone go after Microsoft for a very insecure OS that happens to be a petri-dish for spamzombies everywhere? Isn't it negligent behaviour? It would be a lot easier for law enforcement if you could really say where a message originated instead of discovering that the spammer address is from an old lady who never updated her machine since her grandson installed it.
When taking over IT on a small advertising agency with lots of Macs at the creative dept and lots of Windows PCs on the rest of the office I had the firewall to deny and log all attempts to connect with SMTP servers outside. Guess what side of the net was infested?
It appears to me that most of _my_ problems with spam are due to spambots sending mail from ADSL or cable-modems (It's common to have companies whose IP addresses fall in blacklisted ranges and that have to send some or all of their e-mail over ISP servers - raising a lot of security/privacy issues)
Where did you get those numbers?!
;-)
Brazil runs a very successful ethanol program for many years now. It had a low a couple years ago, when engines running on gasoline had a technical edge (largely due to imported vs homegrown technology issues), but now most factories (GM, Fiat, Volkswagen) offer cars with dual fuel engines. In fact, since 1986 I only had two fossil-fuel running cars. My current one has never even tasted gasoline
True - ethanol still creates CO2, but at least you can grow it on the field and hope it absorbs a lot of CO2 before you harvest it.
I think if ethanol was that bad a fuel we would have noticed that by now.
Why don't we try to come up with funds to develop a real warp engine, instead ;-)
One could also argue that nobody will buy a digital TV receiver or PVR that enforces the broadcast flag because it can be rendered useless by the cable company or the TV content provider.
Oh... Wait... Nobody in the US will be allowed to make or sell a device that does not comply with this stupid rule because there is a law forbiding it.
Of course, you can always stop watching TV or move to another country. And don't take pictures of the airport on your way out.
Isn't it (this self-promotion) against some rule on SourceForge? SF exists to host collaborative development of free software, not to promote the work of someone or to sell his books.
But it was not funny! It was horrible! Terrifying. My jaw dropped. I wouldn't show it to my kids. I am usually the first one to make fun of myself (and of others), but I wait until I have a good argument to do it.
And when the CEO does something like this, how adversely would one's carreer be impacted if he or she said it's a bad joke? ;-) The idea of being transfered to Microsoft Bob support scares me.
That is only one more reason not to work for Microsoft. Do they expect their employees to laugh? Like the post just after this one, I felt sorry for him. It's embarassing.
My point was (and still is) that there wasn't a high performance OS for the x86 in the PC price-range available. It's true Windows NT scaled to lots of CPUs, but it does so only on extremely costly and exotic hardware and the license costs were and still are outrageously high. The same was true about UNIX System V and other branded Unixes.
The limitations of software had always limited the development of mainstream hardware and multiprocessors are no exception. Because of the high price of OSs that could take advantage of CPU level parallelism, mainstream processor vendors chose to optimize their hardware for single-threaded performance. Were there a quad-486 on a chip instead of a Pentium or an 8-way unit instead of Pentium Pro, we would have very different software today. Of course, they would flop because Windows 3, 95 and 98 didn't support multiprocessors (MacOS Classic doesn't have a much better story to tell about it either) and NT was way too expensive (and perceived as slow and more complex). Unixes of the time wouldn't qualify as mainstream either. And so, nobody ever tried to put more than one core on a mainstream consumer-level CPU.
Well... The lack of registers sure makes the x86 a bit harder to program than more modern architectures. It is also due to Microsoft's support (or lack of it) for true decent multitasking computing until just about er... never, that the x86 has been optimized well beyond all reasonable efforts for single-tasking compute-heavy applications. There was no point on a high throughput x86 system until BSD and Linux came around. If you wanted high performance and was willing to pay branded Unix prices, you would go SPARC, POWER, PA or Alpha.
Well... It turns out that most videogame and simulation code is easily parallelizable and that our desktop computers are running a couple dozen programs at the same time (i count 8 active ones right now and I just woke up).
I would buy a Cell workstation running Linux, even knowing it would never run Windows, just because I like interesting hardware. Given a cheap enough hardware and enough software resources to round out existing software, how long do you think it would take for someone to build The Killer Home Computer
And, if Apple wants it, just think of the Mac Mini they could build with it.
The single question that comes to my mind is "Why?".
I loved the Amiga. It was amazingly fast, had a very interesting architecture, with the custom chips doing a wonderful job offloading the CPU. But its responsiveness derived from having no virtual memory - if you loaded a big enough dataset for whatever program you wanted, it would fill all memory available and either crash itself or the whole computer.
I understand nostalgia. I have a bunch of old computers that still work - and I will keep then working as long as I can - from a couple Apple II clones, Macintosh LC, Color Classic, early PowerMacs and a Monorail PC... A couple weeks ago I almost bought a MSX. They are cool, sure, but they are toys by today's standards.
There is space for inovation and inventive hardware, tough. But let's make new stuff not regurgitate old classics - I would buy without any hesitation, a contemporary 68K based Amiga computer (or an Acorn Archimedes equivalent, BTW), as long as it was cheap. But I would not pretend to be buying a useful computer - it is a toy. I would use them to relive good experiences of my youth. It's not early adopter stuff - it's only adopter. Extending their useful lives is like overextending good jokes - they cease to be funny.
I would love to have a MIPS, ARM or PPC ATX motherboard to play with. Kudos for the guys who made the board. I would love to play with Linux or BSD on them or any other brand-new exotic advanced OS, but let's face it: Amiga is all about nostalgia, not advanced features. At least, not these days.
This is as likely as the US becoming a christian theogracy.
I think it may be a little early to call IBM the smartest company of the millenium... There are about 995 years to go...
Reason never stopped the military before. I doubt it will now.
So, you wanted to read it...
;-)
The lone coder writing clever business or home software is no more. If you dream about developing the next Visicalc, alone or in a small team, forget it. Unless you have a very bright idea nobody had before (and patented) and won't have in a year, you will not be able to compete with anyone bigger than you - if you are really lucky, they may buy your company and ideas. We are talking about competing with gigabuck companies that buy politicians and courts. Be happy if they can't hire someone to get rid of you on a more permanent basis.
I was talking to a friend these days how impossible it is for a small outfit to make a game these days. Unless your game runs on cell-phones, you are talking big money.