You also must realize, that with Maple, it's quite easy to detect errors in calculations, and in coding. In practical programming with an object oriented language, it's almost essential to have some kind of error handling routines. Whether you use try-catch or the actual "assert" function, or some other error checking setup, it will save you ages in debugging a larger code base.
I think the newer Object Oriented languages (Java, C#, Objective C) have great error handling that foolishly gets ignored when younger coders go to work, myself included.
I think you're forgetting a very obvious point; most people already have a super computer in their home. Hear me out.
Desktop computers are so fast these days that engineers at Intel and AMD are actually reaching barriers in physics toward extending their processing power any. Yes, there have been physical problems in the past, and most of them involved etching the chips (we hit a barrier for a while on how small the visible light lasers were capable of etching, so they switched to Ultraviolet). But now the physical barriers are in heat production, and we're watching the industry scramble toward making lower energy products, water and chemical cooling systems, and thermo-engineering computer chassis to cope with the high heat.
Aside from that, let's look at what the typical user has their computer doing all day. A typical user will burn cds, surf the internet, maybe watch a few videos, listen to music, and play video games. As video cards tend to offload a great deal of the stress of playing a video game, currently the most power-consuming home computing task, we still watch processors sit at idle most of the day.
Computers at 800MHz to 1GHz are theoretically all anyone would need to do most of what they do with home computers. Video games could raise this, but that's about it. Our computers are currently running around 2.6GHz (about the average LOW end PC), and have so many other units aboard that they can do nearly 4-5x the work of the younger 1GHz parts. That would currently make them "super".
I don't believe there will be a period in our lifetime where we can expect to have teraflop computing in the house. Not only do I not see a need for it, I don't believe there will be any thrill for computer companies to make such a part, if physics will even let us. When and if we see quantum computing, we will see parts approaching that limit, but I still believe we have a ways to go. That being said, I believe there will be a huge shift toward mobile computing, as high powered laptop parts will be the next battleground for the microprocessor companies.
I'm sorry but whoever found you insightful is retarded, just as you are.
Apple knows exactly how many beta testers their are; They assigned them each a key. Signing an entire release isn't necessary because they could simply sign some random library or file, and it would be perfectly trackable. Make this random library something the user can't do without (a kernel module perhaps?) and you can quite easily tell who has what beta.
I think the better question is, do you have any idea how easy it is to track a software leak? On a MAC? This isn't Windows; there aren't beta testers in the number of Millions. Hundreds of thousands even seems far fetched for me.
The first one out with a working product tends to win the market, as long as their product is the best. And since UserLinux stagnated in a lot of trivial discussion, Ubunto got the one up on us..
That being said, I believe that the collaberation of the two products will be a great support to the cause!!!!
DVD Jon broke the public trust in a simple to use, and not very complained about DRM system. If it had been a system that royally sucked *like Microsoft uses, I can't tell you how many problems I have had with my OWN, PURCHASED media not wanting to play after either a player update or a WMP update*, it wouldn't have been too unreasonable. But this system "Just Worked". And on top of that, he had already released Hymn which automatically decrypts the songs. Why the fuck did he have to go and mess it up further? Oh, that's right. Because he's an extremist. And extremists will always either have the public's trust, or the public's hatred. As far as I'm concerned, his actions are no different in fundamentalism than Hitler's. He's simply taken an idea, and pushed too far. And that, will always foster this dichotomy of trust.
It seems like when some new, highly exploitable technology comes out, hundreds of little companies start out. Those companies slowly die out, and the ones that are left, are gobbled up by the largest of the remaining companies, and it leaves room for the new, baby companies again.
Holds true for cars, computers, and now,.coms. Interesting..
Grr, I effing hate that/. doesn't have an edit post button, but...
What if they built Bluetooth 2 into the iPod? I know it wouldn't be effective for transfering songs because it's so damned slow, but what it would be effective for is WIRELESS BLUETOOTH HEADPHONES. That way there's no need to over-engineer a pair of headphones and you can keep the iPod in your pocket. They could even build a little module that plugs into the "iTrip" port on the current iPods to give them bluetooth. Beats the hell out of carrying around a pair of AM/FM headphones, an iTrip and an iPod.
Re:iPod in the headphones?
on
Shufflephones 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I just don't get why he didn't cut a small hole in the bottom of the headphone to allow the Shuffle to slide in and out of the big hollow chamber behind the speakercone of the headphone when he had it open.. other than the obvious fact it wouldn't look seemless.
While your alternative punishment has merit, I don't think it would work. Forcing a company to build a product doesn't seem to me like it would be a fair punishment, and I believe Microsoft's lawyers could argue that for so long, that the EU would forget what they were punishing them for, sorta how the US Justice system dropped the ball on MS.
Secondly, Microsoft could say that "theirs came first", publishing their own standards, and effectively bending everyone to them anyways. Of course, someone would come along and re-implement everything in a much better way, but that would take time, and in that time, they could start doing the same thing they've done now. They've got the effective power of a small nation, and I don't believe they're ready to give up without a fight.
I agree wholeheartedly. One of the most annoying parts about having an iPod is the headphone cable. Where I'm usually towing around my iBook, it gets entangled almost every time I take it off/put it on. I'd love to have a pair of headphones with a set of iPod buttons on the side of them, and with a built-in iPod Shuffle dock in the bottom (sorta so it would just slide up and plug into a female USB port inside). Sell 'em for $40-$50 bucks a pop and they'll sell like wildfire. Of course, all you'd have to do to steal one then would be nab someone's headphones.. and an option for a fullsized iPod would be rediculous..
Truthfully, I believe the same on a lot of your points. Hell, I don't believe they should have to give example code to any of their shit; leave that for the hackers once they've got their hands on a valid, working copy of the API. Of course, Microsoft's operating system monopoly can be argued to have a cascade effect on the markets involved (If it wasn't for Microsoft Windows, do you seriously think we'd be running Microsoft Office?), so it can be argued as well that locking down one product, effectively locks down many, many others.
If you're a convincted monopolist, many things than otherwise would be legal are considered a breach of the rules.
That may be true (aside from some wording issues), but I wasn't aware that trying to run a business and make money without providing valuable gifts to your direct competitors was one of them.
Valuable gift? This isn't a cheese wheel and some bologna we're talking about here. This is a Monopolistic company, deemed guilty, who won't give up the specifications on how to build a compatible product. This is like a car company, not only welding the hood shut, but bolting on the tires with a patented bolt head (only unscrewable by paying the licencing fees), and making the engine run on a special formulation of fuel (a mixture of shit and octane..), that is non-reproducable except from direct sample and duplication. This allows Microsoft to change the Fuel-to-Shit ratio as they please, making your car undriveable on Alternative pumpgas.
Face it. This is a last ditch effort for a brute of a company to stay alive in the business they've dominated for too long. The European Union is only doing what their public ask of them, and their public has been crying out for far too long about Microsoft's shenanigans.
But that's just it. They don't have to reveil a single line of code to publish an Application Programmer's Interface. All the API is, is a guidelines of how to build your product, so that it will be compatible with their product. It's like a car company telling a company that builds transmissions how to hook their transmission up to the car company's Whizbang new V8. Normally companies see this as being a good thing, meaning their original product will sell more. But when you have a monopoly over the market, publishing interoperability information is the very LAST thing you'd want to do. It's like the old saying "Give a man a fish, he knows where to go for fish. Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries".
I understand you are a Microsoft apologist, but I'll explain things in simple terms for you.
Microsoft broke the law. They've repeatedly shut out/down other competing products that do the same thing, either by changing APIs to break compatibility, or releasing their own product that forces the general market to break compatibility (in the case of Open Standards). By forcing Microsoft to release the simple documentation of the APIs, they are asking Microsoft to standarize themselves.
Look at it this way. With the APIs remaining "secret", and engineers reverse engineering them for compatibility, all Microsoft has to do to change compatibility is to change a bit, or shift a few bits around, or some other nonsensical thing. Open Source projects/may/ be able to keep up, but if a company were developing a closed source solution, this could slow down their release time by months, if not years.
Forcing Microsoft to release their API information basically puts a standard on the table for other companies/programmers to conform to. They don't lose any market dominance. They don't lose any time. They simply are forced to be compatible. And if that's unreasonable, then Microsoft has won, and Open Source is all for naught.
More likely people will go back because Microsoft will force them to. Windows Update will probably break if you don't use IE7, and there will be no way to remove IE7 from your computer entirely, just like very previous incarnation.
One thing that might be neat to see though is if Microsoft leaves IE7 with the "explorer" mode for the hard disk; Opening tabs instead of wasting valuable desktop real-estate might be nice.
Anyways, back from that tangent, I don't see Microsoft as letting Firefox even run on computers as IE7 rolls out. They'll probably find some way to force users to install it ("Oh noes, this security vounerability we've known about for years requires you to install IE7 to fix it"), and once installed, will probably block instances of Firefox from being launched, or even launching IE instead. I wouldn't be surprised.
Uhh, as of now you can change the user agent in both Seamonkey and Firefox, with relevative ease. Any corporation using "useragent cloaking" as a cop-out for not migrating has got Microsoft money rolling in somewhere, or is headed by a PHB (most likely the latter case).
Why must trolls like you reply to EVERY thread on Slashdot anymore, questioning the news content?
This guy is using free speech (and in this case, free coding) to an express a valid opinion that while iTMS is a good start, the content shouldn't be encrypted. He's not forcing it down your throat and neither is anyone here. Pirates will plunder any way they please. But to us who pay for the content, we'd like to get our money's worth.
I'd say it's hella news. This is a huge security hole that Apple left in their product. It's just like any security advisory that could have been posted, but instead he posted an example exploit.
You know, it really does no good to say all of that here. Send Google an email about it. Their developers are usually pretty kind if you are good mannored, and will at least reply with something like "We're on that" or "Thanks for your concerns".
Sad to me that nobody else ever does this when they have a problem with their service. I complain at every chance I get, because if they don't hear the complaints, they don't know how to improve.
To me, Ruby on Rails doesn't look any better than PHP. I know Ruby's of all the rage overseas, but I truthfully believe that PHP's now in its prime and is ready to start maturing as an object oriented language. Now if the developers can get off their asses and speed it up, it'll be ready for perl-like situations.
Let's face it kiddos. Perl's a great language, but is so write-only it makes my head spin. PHP is read/write, but is still very verbose, but just enough to the point where it's codeable. Ruby's alright, but just doesn't seem to be as rich or as fulfilling to code in. Parrot and Python are both great, but are really not suited for scripting on the web. Applications however..
Slashdot Mirror
You also must realize, that with Maple, it's quite easy to detect errors in calculations, and in coding. In practical programming with an object oriented language, it's almost essential to have some kind of error handling routines. Whether you use try-catch or the actual "assert" function, or some other error checking setup, it will save you ages in debugging a larger code base.
I think the newer Object Oriented languages (Java, C#, Objective C) have great error handling that foolishly gets ignored when younger coders go to work, myself included.
I think you're forgetting a very obvious point; most people already have a super computer in their home. Hear me out.
Desktop computers are so fast these days that engineers at Intel and AMD are actually reaching barriers in physics toward extending their processing power any. Yes, there have been physical problems in the past, and most of them involved etching the chips (we hit a barrier for a while on how small the visible light lasers were capable of etching, so they switched to Ultraviolet). But now the physical barriers are in heat production, and we're watching the industry scramble toward making lower energy products, water and chemical cooling systems, and thermo-engineering computer chassis to cope with the high heat.
Aside from that, let's look at what the typical user has their computer doing all day. A typical user will burn cds, surf the internet, maybe watch a few videos, listen to music, and play video games. As video cards tend to offload a great deal of the stress of playing a video game, currently the most power-consuming home computing task, we still watch processors sit at idle most of the day.
Computers at 800MHz to 1GHz are theoretically all anyone would need to do most of what they do with home computers. Video games could raise this, but that's about it. Our computers are currently running around 2.6GHz (about the average LOW end PC), and have so many other units aboard that they can do nearly 4-5x the work of the younger 1GHz parts. That would currently make them "super".
I don't believe there will be a period in our lifetime where we can expect to have teraflop computing in the house. Not only do I not see a need for it, I don't believe there will be any thrill for computer companies to make such a part, if physics will even let us. When and if we see quantum computing, we will see parts approaching that limit, but I still believe we have a ways to go. That being said, I believe there will be a huge shift toward mobile computing, as high powered laptop parts will be the next battleground for the microprocessor companies.
I'm sorry but whoever found you insightful is retarded, just as you are. Apple knows exactly how many beta testers their are; They assigned them each a key. Signing an entire release isn't necessary because they could simply sign some random library or file, and it would be perfectly trackable. Make this random library something the user can't do without (a kernel module perhaps?) and you can quite easily tell who has what beta. I think the better question is, do you have any idea how easy it is to track a software leak? On a MAC? This isn't Windows; there aren't beta testers in the number of Millions. Hundreds of thousands even seems far fetched for me.
Haha, and that was supposed to be a joke..
Gosh I really need some sensitivity training or something.
The research firm reports that over 41 percent of the 666 developers surveyed use Perl, 32 percent use PHP, and 15.6 percent use Python
The Number of the Devil of Programmers.. looks like it's as I always said, scripting languages are evil..
Someone forgot to make the schpeal break in Slashdot. The front page is six miles long!!!
/., may you stay broken forever.
Ah
The first one out with a working product tends to win the market, as long as their product is the best. And since UserLinux stagnated in a lot of trivial discussion, Ubunto got the one up on us..
That being said, I believe that the collaberation of the two products will be a great support to the cause!!!!
DVD Jon broke the public trust in a simple to use, and not very complained about DRM system. If it had been a system that royally sucked *like Microsoft uses, I can't tell you how many problems I have had with my OWN, PURCHASED media not wanting to play after either a player update or a WMP update*, it wouldn't have been too unreasonable. But this system "Just Worked". And on top of that, he had already released Hymn which automatically decrypts the songs. Why the fuck did he have to go and mess it up further? Oh, that's right. Because he's an extremist. And extremists will always either have the public's trust, or the public's hatred. As far as I'm concerned, his actions are no different in fundamentalism than Hitler's. He's simply taken an idea, and pushed too far. And that, will always foster this dichotomy of trust.
It seems like when some new, highly exploitable technology comes out, hundreds of little companies start out. Those companies slowly die out, and the ones that are left, are gobbled up by the largest of the remaining companies, and it leaves room for the new, baby companies again.
.coms. Interesting..
Holds true for cars, computers, and now,
Sadly, this doesn't help with it getting tangled around my laptop bag though ;)
Grr, I effing hate that /. doesn't have an edit post button, but...
What if they built Bluetooth 2 into the iPod? I know it wouldn't be effective for transfering songs because it's so damned slow, but what it would be effective for is WIRELESS BLUETOOTH HEADPHONES. That way there's no need to over-engineer a pair of headphones and you can keep the iPod in your pocket. They could even build a little module that plugs into the "iTrip" port on the current iPods to give them bluetooth. Beats the hell out of carrying around a pair of AM/FM headphones, an iTrip and an iPod.
I just don't get why he didn't cut a small hole in the bottom of the headphone to allow the Shuffle to slide in and out of the big hollow chamber behind the speakercone of the headphone when he had it open.. other than the obvious fact it wouldn't look seemless.
While your alternative punishment has merit, I don't think it would work. Forcing a company to build a product doesn't seem to me like it would be a fair punishment, and I believe Microsoft's lawyers could argue that for so long, that the EU would forget what they were punishing them for, sorta how the US Justice system dropped the ball on MS.
Secondly, Microsoft could say that "theirs came first", publishing their own standards, and effectively bending everyone to them anyways. Of course, someone would come along and re-implement everything in a much better way, but that would take time, and in that time, they could start doing the same thing they've done now. They've got the effective power of a small nation, and I don't believe they're ready to give up without a fight.
I agree wholeheartedly. One of the most annoying parts about having an iPod is the headphone cable. Where I'm usually towing around my iBook, it gets entangled almost every time I take it off/put it on. I'd love to have a pair of headphones with a set of iPod buttons on the side of them, and with a built-in iPod Shuffle dock in the bottom (sorta so it would just slide up and plug into a female USB port inside). Sell 'em for $40-$50 bucks a pop and they'll sell like wildfire. Of course, all you'd have to do to steal one then would be nab someone's headphones.. and an option for a fullsized iPod would be rediculous..
Truthfully, I believe the same on a lot of your points. Hell, I don't believe they should have to give example code to any of their shit; leave that for the hackers once they've got their hands on a valid, working copy of the API. Of course, Microsoft's operating system monopoly can be argued to have a cascade effect on the markets involved (If it wasn't for Microsoft Windows, do you seriously think we'd be running Microsoft Office?), so it can be argued as well that locking down one product, effectively locks down many, many others.
;).
Personally, I submit my papers in PDF format
If you're a convincted monopolist, many things than otherwise would be legal are considered a breach of the rules.
That may be true (aside from some wording issues), but I wasn't aware that trying to run a business and make money without providing valuable gifts to your direct competitors was one of them.
Valuable gift? This isn't a cheese wheel and some bologna we're talking about here. This is a Monopolistic company, deemed guilty, who won't give up the specifications on how to build a compatible product. This is like a car company, not only welding the hood shut, but bolting on the tires with a patented bolt head (only unscrewable by paying the licencing fees), and making the engine run on a special formulation of fuel (a mixture of shit and octane..), that is non-reproducable except from direct sample and duplication. This allows Microsoft to change the Fuel-to-Shit ratio as they please, making your car undriveable on Alternative pumpgas.
Face it. This is a last ditch effort for a brute of a company to stay alive in the business they've dominated for too long. The European Union is only doing what their public ask of them, and their public has been crying out for far too long about Microsoft's shenanigans.
But that's just it. They don't have to reveil a single line of code to publish an Application Programmer's Interface. All the API is, is a guidelines of how to build your product, so that it will be compatible with their product. It's like a car company telling a company that builds transmissions how to hook their transmission up to the car company's Whizbang new V8. Normally companies see this as being a good thing, meaning their original product will sell more. But when you have a monopoly over the market, publishing interoperability information is the very LAST thing you'd want to do. It's like the old saying "Give a man a fish, he knows where to go for fish. Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries".
I understand you are a Microsoft apologist, but I'll explain things in simple terms for you.
/may/ be able to keep up, but if a company were developing a closed source solution, this could slow down their release time by months, if not years.
Microsoft broke the law. They've repeatedly shut out/down other competing products that do the same thing, either by changing APIs to break compatibility, or releasing their own product that forces the general market to break compatibility (in the case of Open Standards). By forcing Microsoft to release the simple documentation of the APIs, they are asking Microsoft to standarize themselves.
Look at it this way. With the APIs remaining "secret", and engineers reverse engineering them for compatibility, all Microsoft has to do to change compatibility is to change a bit, or shift a few bits around, or some other nonsensical thing. Open Source projects
Forcing Microsoft to release their API information basically puts a standard on the table for other companies/programmers to conform to. They don't lose any market dominance. They don't lose any time. They simply are forced to be compatible. And if that's unreasonable, then Microsoft has won, and Open Source is all for naught.
More likely people will go back because Microsoft will force them to. Windows Update will probably break if you don't use IE7, and there will be no way to remove IE7 from your computer entirely, just like very previous incarnation.
One thing that might be neat to see though is if Microsoft leaves IE7 with the "explorer" mode for the hard disk; Opening tabs instead of wasting valuable desktop real-estate might be nice.
Anyways, back from that tangent, I don't see Microsoft as letting Firefox even run on computers as IE7 rolls out. They'll probably find some way to force users to install it ("Oh noes, this security vounerability we've known about for years requires you to install IE7 to fix it"), and once installed, will probably block instances of Firefox from being launched, or even launching IE instead. I wouldn't be surprised.
Uhh, as of now you can change the user agent in both Seamonkey and Firefox, with relevative ease. Any corporation using "useragent cloaking" as a cop-out for not migrating has got Microsoft money rolling in somewhere, or is headed by a PHB (most likely the latter case).
Why must trolls like you reply to EVERY thread on Slashdot anymore, questioning the news content?
This guy is using free speech (and in this case, free coding) to an express a valid opinion that while iTMS is a good start, the content shouldn't be encrypted. He's not forcing it down your throat and neither is anyone here. Pirates will plunder any way they please. But to us who pay for the content, we'd like to get our money's worth.
I'd say it's hella news. This is a huge security hole that Apple left in their product. It's just like any security advisory that could have been posted, but instead he posted an example exploit.
...Personally I don't plan on driving to [random foreign country], my car doesn't need to see the ocean bottom, but I get your point..
You know, it really does no good to say all of that here. Send Google an email about it. Their developers are usually pretty kind if you are good mannored, and will at least reply with something like "We're on that" or "Thanks for your concerns".
Sad to me that nobody else ever does this when they have a problem with their service. I complain at every chance I get, because if they don't hear the complaints, they don't know how to improve.
I'm personally surprised that Hello hasn't gone to the presses yet as being the next big thing.
To me, Ruby on Rails doesn't look any better than PHP. I know Ruby's of all the rage overseas, but I truthfully believe that PHP's now in its prime and is ready to start maturing as an object oriented language. Now if the developers can get off their asses and speed it up, it'll be ready for perl-like situations.
Let's face it kiddos. Perl's a great language, but is so write-only it makes my head spin. PHP is read/write, but is still very verbose, but just enough to the point where it's codeable. Ruby's alright, but just doesn't seem to be as rich or as fulfilling to code in. Parrot and Python are both great, but are really not suited for scripting on the web. Applications however..