Well I've been tracking this issue for more years than I'd like to remember. What really keeps Windows in the dominate position is not the merit or quality of Windows itself, but rather market forces. Microsoft had been taking advantage of market forces in order to attempt to monopolize the software industry to varying levels of success. The only serious competition Windows had so far has come from free operating systems and software because they exist and develop independently from the market. That is to say, they are out of Microsoft's reach, as Microsoft would take steps to crush them if they somehow developed within a capitalist framework. For example, Mac OS X exists because of BSD/Mach, which uses GNU heavily (whether they like it or not), and nearly everything beyond that is an incarnation of GNU/Linux. Even non-OS commercial software relies heavily on open source technologies, whether it's development tools, linked libraries, or otherwise.
Microsoft is simply more fluent in the methods and languages of the sociological constructs that govern us personally and communally; they have the most capital, the most power. They use their power to maintain power. Let's face it, computer software is not easily understood by most members of society. Microsoft made a good business adapting software to be plugged into our existing social functions and organization, where we pay money for products and services. They wormed their way into cracks an crevices in our social fabric that are nearly impossible to pry them out of, but it'll happen eventually.
There is nothing that Windows is technically capable of that other operating systems can't be capable of. The issue of support you mentioned is just an issue of social reorganization, which is really the main problem.
This is why we don't to have the US in control of the DNS master servers on the Internet. It's high time that we architect a new, global, and decentralized domain name service network that thwarts tampering by any government or institution.
It works better than you think. It just depends on the environment, and I would say that not all Javascript environments are created equal. Magical design changes can surprise you. What you need to do is think outside the box! When I studied Java years ago I had no expectation that Java would ever be a part of a system like Android. One reason for this is that Android Java is not your granddaddy's Java; it's got all kinds of crazy differences. The same thing could happen to Javascript. A new language that can utilize the talents of existing Javascript developers and carries the language into uncharted territory would be wonderful.
It depends on why they are doing it thought. I'm glad that this stuff is coming out now, and the hackers being possibly benign, rather than these things being silently exploited by more nefarious groups/individuals. It makes me feel better that Sony lose face and tighten its security than risk anything further.
This is a dangerous idea on more than one level. Other commentators on Slashdot have already pointed out the warped sense of equivalence, that a "cyber attack" may be responded to with violent attacks costing human lives. What constitutes a cyber attack could be very vague. The origins of cyber attacks are also equally vague and easy to fake. Responding to cyber attacks with warfare opens up a floodgate for all kinds of insane false flag operations. No longer will we have to blow our own stuff up in order to have an excuse to go to war with another country, but rather we can just say we've been cyber attacked (zomg). Think it won't happen? The Bush administration lied through its teeth and faked "intelligence" to the nth degree just because it wanted to invade Iraq. At the time nobody really understood just how fake the information was.
Interestingly, the United States itself is the leader in cyber warfare, having already launched an attack on Iran via computer virus. It was a virus of the likes that no one had ever seen before, and the amount of damage it was meant to cause is also unprecedented in the history of computing, as it was programmed to actually destroy industrial equipment, possibly (in extreme circumstances) at the cost of human life.
Dear friends on Slashdot. All cultures past and present are a product of diversity. All notions of cultural purity are fantasy. That being said, I'm a US citizen, and I'll eat whatever the hell I want and speak whatever language I feel like. Thx
Technically, the results were indeed random. If you get results based on a bug or glitch in your algorithm, those are obviously the results you weren't expecting. Unexpected results are, by definition, random. Who could have predicted the glitch? The results then were not "random" enough because they weren't the results you were expecting? Give me a break.
The question isn't whether or not tech innovation suffered, but whether or not the software market has suffered. Indeed, I would say the software market has suffered immensely, and the only reason why we can say "tech innovation" continued is because, as Vinny points out, the success of open source. Open source worked because it functioned outside the market, so it was impervious to Microsoft's monopoly.
I got this Thinkpad Edge 14" that I'm using now for about $500... probably the most basic laptop that bears the Thinkpad label, although Lenovo makes even more basic laptops than this one. $800 will get you a pretty nice laptop, but you can find some nice machines for under $500... then we're talking about $8 a month if we go by your calculation.:)
I think you would want to give Opera a try. I compared some of the major browsers several months ago, and what I found was that Chrome was fast but uses RAM excessively, and Firefox was slow but used less RAM. Opera seemed to be strong in both speed and memory conservation, the main drawback being that it is not open source. Firefox is faster now that version 4 is out, putting it in competitive range of Opera, although I'd wager that Opera is still more efficient.
Now if you're able and willing to try non-mainstream browsers, there are a lot of fun things you can play with. Epiphany is a popular underdog choice, and other alternative browsers run a full gamut of niches. In the past I've tried Konqueror, Midori, Aurora, Dillo, and yes, even elinks (I've actually used it productively, so I'm not joking). There is even that funny K-Meleon browser for windows. I don't know how many of these are still in active development, but many alternative browsers do excel in being lightweight, so on systems with limited resources you will see noticeable speed gains. The downside is that you will get compatibility problems, and the Javascript engine may be slow.
If you really want to have fun try browsers designed for embedded/mobile systems, such as Android.
I propose we create a standardized set of prefixed to differentiate base whatever imperial units from base ten units. For example, the pound can become "mipo" (short for metric pound). Here is a handy chart:
I'm an ex-computer science major, so I may not be qualified to speak on this, but my experience in the field has asked me to offer the following input:
Computer science is not about how the machine works. In one sense, it's the last thing that computer science is concerned about. I'm not saying flat out that computer scientists don't or shouldn't understand the underlying machine, but there is always going to be a big grey area regarding how much needs to be understood and why. Knowing everything about the machine is a job for computer engineers, who are not "computer scientists." The difference is subtle and huge.
What does it take to write assembly? Most people couldn't reasonably write assembly code that fully takes advantage of modern chips and instruction sets. They're not even designed for human use in a "let me sit down and code something" sense. That may have been the case in days gone by, but nowadays knowing about machine code on the CPU level is less important for two reasons: one, that software available today relieves you of needing to know about it, and two, so much of what chips do now internally is obfuscated from the outside programming instructions that are issued to it further than ever before. In summary, assembly today tells you less about what the chip is actually doing, and it also is less relevant to the software that you need to write. I took one assembly course to satisfy my computer science major; we wrote code for a (now ancient) 16 bit virtualized microprocessor (the 8086); back then it made more sense to write assembly code for a regular programmer.
I think a computer science student could learn the appropriate lessons that assembly code used to teach by programming Java bytecode or some other virtual machine. This is a good example because there is no actual "machine" there to learn about, but you're still learning "how programs work" like you said.
My favorite computer science quote is that "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." If you ponder over this, you will be enlightened.
So in summary, no, I don't think computer scientists should start in assembler. I think computer engineers should learn programming that way. Computer scientists are best served by starting in a functional language, preferably a pure one. My first language in computer science was an OOP language: C++ (which isn't even very good for OOP). It really was a mistake to start with this language, and it didn't help me to learn more about computer science. I later learned Java, but that too was not good enough. Eventually I started picking up Lisp, but by then it was too late--I had already changed majors.:)
In my opinion, Android isn't the first Linux-based project to rely on a custom kernel. I've seen many such systems pop up in the industry, most of them dead and gone now. The reason is that once the fork has been created, it falls out of development and becomes obsolete after a time. The Linux kernel has been customized and forked by projects countless times. What's going to happen is that the fork is simply going to become outdated and once it's obsolete, the current Linux kernel will have to be forked yet again. Re-forking becomes inevitable part of the project's continued development.
I've never been a big fan of Songbird. I heard about it a couple years ago; nobody I knew actually used it, but it got some rave reviews on blogs, so I thought I had better check it out.
Songbird is a very awkward program with many flaws. What it is is basically a web browser with a music player hacked into it. It's more or less a fork of Firefox. Do you really want to run a fork of Firefox? I sure didn't; I already had Firefox running on my desktop--now it was running twice just to play music. Forget about it! It's a huge waste of resources, and I didn't much care to do all my web browsing from within Songbird... I want a web browser that's designed to be a web browser, not a music player (for security's sake).
Another big problem with Songbird is that it uses XULRunner, but it doesn't use XULRunner. XULRunner is meant to be a general purpose run time that many programs can utilize, but Songbird has a fork of XULRunner customized *just* for Songbird. Not only does it completely defeat the purpose of XULRunner, but packagers don't want to package it--Fedora already had an XULRunner package, so why should they make another just for Songbird? Who wants to deal with the mess of packaging Songbird with its own XULRunner environment when there is already a package for that? When I asked the Songbird developers what sense there was in forking XULRunner, they simply said "well it doesn't do what we want." Boo hoo... let's say Java doesn't do what you want, so you fork the JRE and rewrite it instead of rewriting your application. That's all well and good--now watch everyone *not* install your Java fork. Next thing you know the Songbird team will be forking Linux to add Songbird-specific codes to the kernel.
Honestly, Sonbird is neat, but it's just not practical. I can't recommend it to anyone. I've used Amarok, and these days I use Banshee. Those are only two of the many great media players available for Linux. Hardly anyone is going to notice that Songbird has dropped Linux support.
Different people have different erogenous zones... you just have to learn to live with that. Satisfying someone sexually is totally unique to them, so you'll never get a formula that works universally.
I full agree that DA:O will offer the best/full experience on the PC, but there are a bunch of other console games I plan to get, so it kind of makes sense to shoehorn DA:O in there instead of upgrading my PC, although I suppose it may only be a matter of time before I do; I still want to play Diablo III.:)
I'm totally down with keyboard-only controls. I hate dealing with the mouse when it's much more convenient to automate tasks like selecting targets with a hotkey.
I agree that multiplayer games are great (especially cooperative RPG's), but not every game has to fall into one genre. There are many things that can be done with a single player design that you simple can't do with multiplayer, so expect Dragon Age to offer a unique and comprehensive experience you wouldn't otherwise get if they included multiplayer. Sometimes games get torn between the two and end up suffering the most that way; they want to be both a single player and multiplayer game, but ideally you'd pick one since it defines how the entire game plays out.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I've been tracking this issue for more years than I'd like to remember. What really keeps Windows in the dominate position is not the merit or quality of Windows itself, but rather market forces. Microsoft had been taking advantage of market forces in order to attempt to monopolize the software industry to varying levels of success. The only serious competition Windows had so far has come from free operating systems and software because they exist and develop independently from the market. That is to say, they are out of Microsoft's reach, as Microsoft would take steps to crush them if they somehow developed within a capitalist framework. For example, Mac OS X exists because of BSD/Mach, which uses GNU heavily (whether they like it or not), and nearly everything beyond that is an incarnation of GNU/Linux. Even non-OS commercial software relies heavily on open source technologies, whether it's development tools, linked libraries, or otherwise.
Microsoft is simply more fluent in the methods and languages of the sociological constructs that govern us personally and communally; they have the most capital, the most power. They use their power to maintain power. Let's face it, computer software is not easily understood by most members of society. Microsoft made a good business adapting software to be plugged into our existing social functions and organization, where we pay money for products and services. They wormed their way into cracks an crevices in our social fabric that are nearly impossible to pry them out of, but it'll happen eventually.
There is nothing that Windows is technically capable of that other operating systems can't be capable of. The issue of support you mentioned is just an issue of social reorganization, which is really the main problem.
This is why we don't to have the US in control of the DNS master servers on the Internet. It's high time that we architect a new, global, and decentralized domain name service network that thwarts tampering by any government or institution.
It works better than you think. It just depends on the environment, and I would say that not all Javascript environments are created equal. Magical design changes can surprise you. What you need to do is think outside the box! When I studied Java years ago I had no expectation that Java would ever be a part of a system like Android. One reason for this is that Android Java is not your granddaddy's Java; it's got all kinds of crazy differences. The same thing could happen to Javascript. A new language that can utilize the talents of existing Javascript developers and carries the language into uncharted territory would be wonderful.
Yeah, I mean just look at PlaysForSure
Amen brother
It depends on why they are doing it thought. I'm glad that this stuff is coming out now, and the hackers being possibly benign, rather than these things being silently exploited by more nefarious groups/individuals. It makes me feel better that Sony lose face and tighten its security than risk anything further.
This is a dangerous idea on more than one level. Other commentators on Slashdot have already pointed out the warped sense of equivalence, that a "cyber attack" may be responded to with violent attacks costing human lives. What constitutes a cyber attack could be very vague. The origins of cyber attacks are also equally vague and easy to fake. Responding to cyber attacks with warfare opens up a floodgate for all kinds of insane false flag operations. No longer will we have to blow our own stuff up in order to have an excuse to go to war with another country, but rather we can just say we've been cyber attacked (zomg). Think it won't happen? The Bush administration lied through its teeth and faked "intelligence" to the nth degree just because it wanted to invade Iraq. At the time nobody really understood just how fake the information was.
Interestingly, the United States itself is the leader in cyber warfare, having already launched an attack on Iran via computer virus. It was a virus of the likes that no one had ever seen before, and the amount of damage it was meant to cause is also unprecedented in the history of computing, as it was programmed to actually destroy industrial equipment, possibly (in extreme circumstances) at the cost of human life.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Dear friends on Slashdot. All cultures past and present are a product of diversity. All notions of cultural purity are fantasy. That being said, I'm a US citizen, and I'll eat whatever the hell I want and speak whatever language I feel like. Thx
Technically, the results were indeed random. If you get results based on a bug or glitch in your algorithm, those are obviously the results you weren't expecting. Unexpected results are, by definition, random. Who could have predicted the glitch? The results then were not "random" enough because they weren't the results you were expecting? Give me a break.
The question isn't whether or not tech innovation suffered, but whether or not the software market has suffered. Indeed, I would say the software market has suffered immensely, and the only reason why we can say "tech innovation" continued is because, as Vinny points out, the success of open source. Open source worked because it functioned outside the market, so it was impervious to Microsoft's monopoly.
I got this Thinkpad Edge 14" that I'm using now for about $500... probably the most basic laptop that bears the Thinkpad label, although Lenovo makes even more basic laptops than this one. $800 will get you a pretty nice laptop, but you can find some nice machines for under $500... then we're talking about $8 a month if we go by your calculation. :)
I think you would want to give Opera a try. I compared some of the major browsers several months ago, and what I found was that Chrome was fast but uses RAM excessively, and Firefox was slow but used less RAM. Opera seemed to be strong in both speed and memory conservation, the main drawback being that it is not open source. Firefox is faster now that version 4 is out, putting it in competitive range of Opera, although I'd wager that Opera is still more efficient.
Now if you're able and willing to try non-mainstream browsers, there are a lot of fun things you can play with. Epiphany is a popular underdog choice, and other alternative browsers run a full gamut of niches. In the past I've tried Konqueror, Midori, Aurora, Dillo, and yes, even elinks (I've actually used it productively, so I'm not joking). There is even that funny K-Meleon browser for windows. I don't know how many of these are still in active development, but many alternative browsers do excel in being lightweight, so on systems with limited resources you will see noticeable speed gains. The downside is that you will get compatibility problems, and the Javascript engine may be slow.
If you really want to have fun try browsers designed for embedded/mobile systems, such as Android.
I propose we create a standardized set of prefixed to differentiate base whatever imperial units from base ten units. For example, the pound can become "mipo" (short for metric pound). Here is a handy chart:
pound: mipo
inch: micho
foot: mifo
yard: miyo
pint: mito
quart: miquo
gallon: migal (or miglo)
Let's have an industry-wide debate over this for a decade, shall we?
I'm an ex-computer science major, so I may not be qualified to speak on this, but my experience in the field has asked me to offer the following input:
Computer science is not about how the machine works. In one sense, it's the last thing that computer science is concerned about. I'm not saying flat out that computer scientists don't or shouldn't understand the underlying machine, but there is always going to be a big grey area regarding how much needs to be understood and why. Knowing everything about the machine is a job for computer engineers, who are not "computer scientists." The difference is subtle and huge.
What does it take to write assembly? Most people couldn't reasonably write assembly code that fully takes advantage of modern chips and instruction sets. They're not even designed for human use in a "let me sit down and code something" sense. That may have been the case in days gone by, but nowadays knowing about machine code on the CPU level is less important for two reasons: one, that software available today relieves you of needing to know about it, and two, so much of what chips do now internally is obfuscated from the outside programming instructions that are issued to it further than ever before. In summary, assembly today tells you less about what the chip is actually doing, and it also is less relevant to the software that you need to write. I took one assembly course to satisfy my computer science major; we wrote code for a (now ancient) 16 bit virtualized microprocessor (the 8086); back then it made more sense to write assembly code for a regular programmer.
I think a computer science student could learn the appropriate lessons that assembly code used to teach by programming Java bytecode or some other virtual machine. This is a good example because there is no actual "machine" there to learn about, but you're still learning "how programs work" like you said.
My favorite computer science quote is that "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." If you ponder over this, you will be enlightened.
So in summary, no, I don't think computer scientists should start in assembler. I think computer engineers should learn programming that way. Computer scientists are best served by starting in a functional language, preferably a pure one. My first language in computer science was an OOP language: C++ (which isn't even very good for OOP). It really was a mistake to start with this language, and it didn't help me to learn more about computer science. I later learned Java, but that too was not good enough. Eventually I started picking up Lisp, but by then it was too late--I had already changed majors. :)
...that this sludge has given me clues to the origin of life, but I can say certainly that life has given me clues to the origin of this sludge.
In my opinion, Android isn't the first Linux-based project to rely on a custom kernel. I've seen many such systems pop up in the industry, most of them dead and gone now. The reason is that once the fork has been created, it falls out of development and becomes obsolete after a time. The Linux kernel has been customized and forked by projects countless times. What's going to happen is that the fork is simply going to become outdated and once it's obsolete, the current Linux kernel will have to be forked yet again. Re-forking becomes inevitable part of the project's continued development.
Debian isn't even in the ballpark. The most important linux is FreeBSD, but nobody wants to admit it.
I've never been a big fan of Songbird. I heard about it a couple years ago; nobody I knew actually used it, but it got some rave reviews on blogs, so I thought I had better check it out.
Songbird is a very awkward program with many flaws. What it is is basically a web browser with a music player hacked into it. It's more or less a fork of Firefox. Do you really want to run a fork of Firefox? I sure didn't; I already had Firefox running on my desktop--now it was running twice just to play music. Forget about it! It's a huge waste of resources, and I didn't much care to do all my web browsing from within Songbird... I want a web browser that's designed to be a web browser, not a music player (for security's sake).
Another big problem with Songbird is that it uses XULRunner, but it doesn't use XULRunner. XULRunner is meant to be a general purpose run time that many programs can utilize, but Songbird has a fork of XULRunner customized *just* for Songbird. Not only does it completely defeat the purpose of XULRunner, but packagers don't want to package it--Fedora already had an XULRunner package, so why should they make another just for Songbird? Who wants to deal with the mess of packaging Songbird with its own XULRunner environment when there is already a package for that? When I asked the Songbird developers what sense there was in forking XULRunner, they simply said "well it doesn't do what we want." Boo hoo... let's say Java doesn't do what you want, so you fork the JRE and rewrite it instead of rewriting your application. That's all well and good--now watch everyone *not* install your Java fork. Next thing you know the Songbird team will be forking Linux to add Songbird-specific codes to the kernel.
Honestly, Sonbird is neat, but it's just not practical. I can't recommend it to anyone. I've used Amarok, and these days I use Banshee. Those are only two of the many great media players available for Linux. Hardly anyone is going to notice that Songbird has dropped Linux support.
Different people have different erogenous zones... you just have to learn to live with that. Satisfying someone sexually is totally unique to them, so you'll never get a formula that works universally.
I think small, low cost laptops will always be in demand.
I full agree that DA:O will offer the best/full experience on the PC, but there are a bunch of other console games I plan to get, so it kind of makes sense to shoehorn DA:O in there instead of upgrading my PC, although I suppose it may only be a matter of time before I do; I still want to play Diablo III. :)
I'm totally down with keyboard-only controls. I hate dealing with the mouse when it's much more convenient to automate tasks like selecting targets with a hotkey.
This is pretty informative
I agree that multiplayer games are great (especially cooperative RPG's), but not every game has to fall into one genre. There are many things that can be done with a single player design that you simple can't do with multiplayer, so expect Dragon Age to offer a unique and comprehensive experience you wouldn't otherwise get if they included multiplayer. Sometimes games get torn between the two and end up suffering the most that way; they want to be both a single player and multiplayer game, but ideally you'd pick one since it defines how the entire game plays out.