One of the things that MS promised with.NET was that it would do first-runtime compiling to native machine code optimized to each individual machine. No need to set flags for processors, etc. However, I am not sure much of this has actually been implimented on the Windows side of things.
It would be nice if the open source community could take Mono and optimize for various chips and cards. As you may or may not know,.NET exe and dll files are called "assemblies" and are basically java style byte-code. The first time one is used, it is compiled by the framework, and the machine code is cached for all future uses. The DLL remains intact with the byte code (or IL), and the next time it is changed a recompile occurs. The cached machine code can be, at compile time on each individual machine, optimized for the config and hardware of that machine.
It would be great if I could write a.NET app (with C# in my case) and build it on my Windows machine, then take those exe and dll files and copy them to Linux, AIX, Mac, etc, etc. I know the Java crowd is going to say they are already cross-platform. But an OPEN SOURCE platform like Mono could really turn.NET into a very cool, cross platform tool where the code could be optimized for each config. There is a lot of potential here.
I could see Novell optimizing for one particular distro;-)
You can. All of the compilers, and the.NET framework, are free (read: as in beer) from MS as is the.NET framework. However, they only runs on 98 and the NT4+ line of OSs.
From the article: His investment into Google might qualify as the best venture investment ever made -- a huge return of roughly $3 billion, or 240 times the initial $12.5 million he invested.
You can buy some pretty nice rear projection HDTVs at BestBuy or Cicuit City (read: at a premium price) and you will still only be paying ~$1500. I mean really, a friend has one in his house and his rear-projection HD blows my stanard tv out of the water. Still, I am waiting for the Sony Wegas or comperable rear-projection lcd style tvs to come down into that price range.
So, who should have custody of the child, the father...or the boss?
I think making Java open source would be very cool. But I am sure all of the developer who invented Java were paid well for their time, and Sun should make the decision.
Not trying to be a troll here, but whenever I see or hear about Sharman Networks I always think of shit. I would assume that is because of the Charmin toilet paper...
Insightful? I was going for funny. I have written software in C, C++, C#, Java and VB. VB is the worst (IMHO) to try to figure out after-the-fact. Well written C style code is the most readable, but I ahve seem some real crappy C and PERL out there.
I really thought that these shows kinda sucked, to be honest. I really tried to get into Andromeda in particular, and just thought it was not very good at all. I have actually watched 5 - 10 of the episodes, thinking I just needed to give it a chance but I am really not that sad that it is being cancelled. And Mutant-X really sucked IMHO, as I think it was a big rip-off of other works and was unwatchable.
Having SciFi shows on just to say there are SciFi shows on is not good enough for me. Hopefully these time slots will be filled with some good SciFi.
I am sad to see great Shows like Angel, Firefly and the like (ok, I named to Joss shows) go to TV graves. But I am equally fed up with marginally crappy shows like these being the thing many rally around. When someone that is not a SciFi fan tries to get into the genre, I hope they start with a Farscape, or B5 and not one of these as they are not a fair representation of what SciFi can be on TV.
There are some really sucky moderators out there - they are too quick to rate some negatively. I get moderator access 2 or 3 times a week. I think one of the reasons is that I hardly ever rate negative, but instead rate positive the comments I want to stand out. I bet that the algorithm for choosing moderators watches for this.
So if you are downloading software that requires cygwin, you have to also go to the cygwin site to download it in addition to the software you are downloading.
If you don't know what Cygwin is and you aren't capable of finding out and installing it, chances are you won't be very happy with GNU software, which is almost all aimed at developers and/or Unix gurus.
Thank you for making my point. We make software for people to use. Which people? Only technical people? If you are making something like gcc or nmap then fine. But there are so many other apps that are so difficult for a user to install. Just a little more cooperation and effort in the GNU community would make adoption of these technologies so much easier for end users and super users. And that is a good thing.
You still don't get it. You are still making a user go to a web site, download more software, and install it. As an experienced software developer I know what cywin is. But to a user, it now becomes a more and more complicated matter.
It doesn't really get any simpler than that
Yes it does! Say my father just downloaded software and it doesn't work. He may not even know why in the first place since the average user does not read all the fine print, and probably does not know what a "dependancy" is. Is he going to even go looking for it? And even if there is a note that says, "Go to web site x", he then has to navigate to that site, find the download page, sort through builds (do you want development, binaries (to a user, what the heck is binary!?!) and download something else, then install it.
Oh, it gets much simpler!
These are the assumptions we can do without when addressing Linux and GNU's shortcoming winning the desktop market.
Um... you missed the point.
Say I am a user. How do I even know what the heck cygwin is? Fine if it is packaged in another installer, but expecting an end user to go find a package and install special linux support via sygwin just isn't going to cut it.
That was quite an interesting read. While I don't totally agree with every point, the gist of the blog is right on target.
I think one of the keys to Linux fighting off such threats is to get better cohesion between GNU projects, outside the Linux distro. This weekend I went to install some GNU software on my WinXP Pro laptop. I get to the download page, and ooops! I also need to install 3 other GNU projects just to get the software I want to work. Then I get to one of the other projects, and ooops! I have to install another program to get it to work.
To install one app, I had to install 4 others, which meant a lot of navigation and downloading. No sweat. I am a coder; I can do this. But it did take extra time. I started wondering why these were not all packaged together, or why the installer could not simply detect they were not there and install the needed apps.
This is one advantage MS has over many GNU projects and the Linux community. They are one company, and can enforce product compliance, etc.
The point I am leading to is this: if the GNU community wants to beat MS in the long run they need to make sure more of their apps can easily install on MS boxes without having any knowledge of programming, IT, etc. Once you get people using this software, the switch to using this software on Linux will be much easier. Open Office is a great example of this.
I know most GNU projects compile on Windows (or will with some modifications) but it has to be easier for the Windows user to get said applications.
Hey, poorly written, memory eating code can be very easily written in C (and you might not even know it). In C# (or Java) your application will not eat extra memory as garbage collection takes care of the issue. And C# does get compiled down to machine code.
It would be nice to see some more of the backstory on the Enterprise C. They could even involve the actors from TNG episode - don't remember the title but it was a parallel universe one with Tasha back alive...
What is really lacking is a kick-in-the-butt to hardware makers to create linux drivers. They have considerable motivation to do so with windows, and drivers are often packaged with Windows.
This is not so much a problem with the linux community as it is a problem getting hard makers to write the drivers - which is a difficult thing to do. It costs money to write drivers for 2 or more platforms instead of one (I know, you can write much of the same code). Coding, testing, etc for Windows and Linux is more expensive. And most companies still see a big flaw in opening their driver source code.
I think the best thing would be for IBM or one of the big dogs to put some money towards a drivers exclusive team that would work with manufactures to produce various drivers for linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I do too, but you can't call this guy an idiot for making nearly 3 billion smackers. Well maybe "lucky idiot".
One of the things that MS promised with .NET was that it would do first-runtime compiling to native machine code optimized to each individual machine. No need to set flags for processors, etc. However, I am not sure much of this has actually been implimented on the Windows side of things.
.NET exe and dll files are called "assemblies" and are basically java style byte-code. The first time one is used, it is compiled by the framework, and the machine code is cached for all future uses. The DLL remains intact with the byte code (or IL), and the next time it is changed a recompile occurs. The cached machine code can be, at compile time on each individual machine, optimized for the config and hardware of that machine.
.NET app (with C# in my case) and build it on my Windows machine, then take those exe and dll files and copy them to Linux, AIX, Mac, etc, etc. I know the Java crowd is going to say they are already cross-platform. But an OPEN SOURCE platform like Mono could really turn .NET into a very cool, cross platform tool where the code could be optimized for each config. There is a lot of potential here.
;-)
It would be nice if the open source community could take Mono and optimize for various chips and cards. As you may or may not know,
It would be great if I could write a
I could see Novell optimizing for one particular distro
You can. All of the compilers, and the .NET framework, are free (read: as in beer) from MS as is the .NET framework. However, they only runs on 98 and the NT4+ line of OSs.
KC Article on Doerr
From the article: His investment into Google might qualify as the best venture investment ever made -- a huge return of roughly $3 billion, or 240 times the initial $12.5 million he invested.
I think it is Doerr, pronounce ka-ching.
You can buy some pretty nice rear projection HDTVs at BestBuy or Cicuit City (read: at a premium price) and you will still only be paying ~$1500. I mean really, a friend has one in his house and his rear-projection HD blows my stanard tv out of the water. Still, I am waiting for the Sony Wegas or comperable rear-projection lcd style tvs to come down into that price range.
I think making Java open source would be very cool. But I am sure all of the developer who invented Java were paid well for their time, and Sun should make the decision.
A politicalsite http://www.everythingisnt.com/ when I was just looking for some TECHNICAL help.
Wow, I think the mods are full of shit on this one.
I visit Movie Poop Shoot often, does that count?
Not trying to be a troll here, but whenever I see or hear about Sharman Networks I always think of shit. I would assume that is because of the Charmin toilet paper...
Insightful? I was going for funny. I have written software in C, C++, C#, Java and VB. VB is the worst (IMHO) to try to figure out after-the-fact. Well written C style code is the most readable, but I ahve seem some real crappy C and PERL out there.
A fellow programmer once called C++ a "write-only" language. I guees this could be extended to PERL.
Having SciFi shows on just to say there are SciFi shows on is not good enough for me. Hopefully these time slots will be filled with some good SciFi.
I am sad to see great Shows like Angel, Firefly and the like (ok, I named to Joss shows) go to TV graves. But I am equally fed up with marginally crappy shows like these being the thing many rally around. When someone that is not a SciFi fan tries to get into the genre, I hope they start with a Farscape, or B5 and not one of these as they are not a fair representation of what SciFi can be on TV.
There are some really sucky moderators out there - they are too quick to rate some negatively. I get moderator access 2 or 3 times a week. I think one of the reasons is that I hardly ever rate negative, but instead rate positive the comments I want to stand out. I bet that the algorithm for choosing moderators watches for this.
So if you are downloading software that requires cygwin, you have to also go to the cygwin site to download it in addition to the software you are downloading.
If you don't know what Cygwin is and you aren't capable of finding out and installing it, chances are you won't be very happy with GNU software, which is almost all aimed at developers and/or Unix gurus.
Thank you for making my point. We make software for people to use. Which people? Only technical people? If you are making something like gcc or nmap then fine. But there are so many other apps that are so difficult for a user to install. Just a little more cooperation and effort in the GNU community would make adoption of these technologies so much easier for end users and super users. And that is a good thing.
It doesn't really get any simpler than that
Yes it does! Say my father just downloaded software and it doesn't work. He may not even know why in the first place since the average user does not read all the fine print, and probably does not know what a "dependancy" is. Is he going to even go looking for it? And even if there is a note that says, "Go to web site x", he then has to navigate to that site, find the download page, sort through builds (do you want development, binaries (to a user, what the heck is binary!?!) and download something else, then install it.
Oh, it gets much simpler!
These are the assumptions we can do without when addressing Linux and GNU's shortcoming winning the desktop market.
Um... you missed the point. Say I am a user. How do I even know what the heck cygwin is? Fine if it is packaged in another installer, but expecting an end user to go find a package and install special linux support via sygwin just isn't going to cut it.
Say I am a user. Why should I have to go get cygwin?
... about becoming more poltically active.
That was quite an interesting read. While I don't totally agree with every point, the gist of the blog is right on target. I think one of the keys to Linux fighting off such threats is to get better cohesion between GNU projects, outside the Linux distro. This weekend I went to install some GNU software on my WinXP Pro laptop. I get to the download page, and ooops! I also need to install 3 other GNU projects just to get the software I want to work. Then I get to one of the other projects, and ooops! I have to install another program to get it to work. To install one app, I had to install 4 others, which meant a lot of navigation and downloading. No sweat. I am a coder; I can do this. But it did take extra time. I started wondering why these were not all packaged together, or why the installer could not simply detect they were not there and install the needed apps. This is one advantage MS has over many GNU projects and the Linux community. They are one company, and can enforce product compliance, etc. The point I am leading to is this: if the GNU community wants to beat MS in the long run they need to make sure more of their apps can easily install on MS boxes without having any knowledge of programming, IT, etc. Once you get people using this software, the switch to using this software on Linux will be much easier. Open Office is a great example of this. I know most GNU projects compile on Windows (or will with some modifications) but it has to be easier for the Windows user to get said applications.
Hey, poorly written, memory eating code can be very easily written in C (and you might not even know it). In C# (or Java) your application will not eat extra memory as garbage collection takes care of the issue. And C# does get compiled down to machine code.
HS20
It would be nice to see some more of the backstory on the Enterprise C. They could even involve the actors from TNG episode - don't remember the title but it was a parallel universe one with Tasha back alive...
I agree with the article to a point.
What is really lacking is a kick-in-the-butt to hardware makers to create linux drivers. They have considerable motivation to do so with windows, and drivers are often packaged with Windows.
This is not so much a problem with the linux community as it is a problem getting hard makers to write the drivers - which is a difficult thing to do. It costs money to write drivers for 2 or more platforms instead of one (I know, you can write much of the same code). Coding, testing, etc for Windows and Linux is more expensive. And most companies still see a big flaw in opening their driver source code.
I think the best thing would be for IBM or one of the big dogs to put some money towards a drivers exclusive team that would work with manufactures to produce various drivers for linux.