C is a horrible abomination of a language when seen from the perspective of modern languages like Haskell, Erlang, ML, Scala etc. There are even operating systems written in these languages. C has cost the IT industry billions of dollars as a result of safety and security problems.
C served its purpose, it's now time to be replaced with a better language.
Governments should unite and force driverless cars as soon as possible. Automated driving has numerous advantages over manual one:
the vast amount of money spent in treating the injured people and smashed cars could be diverted elsewhere.
time spent driving could be spent in other activities.
given a properly setup road information system, a computer can find the best route for a destination, minimizing/eliminating traffic and the annoyance that goes with it.
computers can make optimum usage of a car; cars will last longer.
cab drivers would not be needed. Calling a cab would be as simple as clicking a 'I want a cab' button on your PDA, which would transmit your location through wi-fi to the cab companies which will order the nearest free cab to come and pick you up. And the computerized cab driver will pay exact change.
in case of an emergency, computers can divert traffic in such a way that paths are quickly opened (for ambulances, for example; or for the fire department, the police etc).
Of course driverless transportation requires a level of support that is not present in most countries. Even the traffic lights are not setup properly in most countries (if they exist, at all). Most roads are full of bumps and holes, so in case or repairing the road, the electronic maps should be instantly updated. Most signs are misplaced; they would have to be replaced with electronic ones anyway, so as that they can transmit signals about their purpose. Buildings' addresses should be carefully mapped as well, if one wants to visit some place, but some cities don't even have an address system (Tokyo, for example).
The most difficult aspect for driverless cars is that ALL roads have to be mapped; if not so, then a new race of drivers will be born: those who have a license, but they drive only once a year, when they go in a place that is not mapped for the car navigator. And we all know that if you don't drive, you gradually forget how to do it, which means more possibilities for accidents than before. And if roads are not mapped in 100% detail, more possibilities for accidents as well.
Still, with all these issues, I am optimistic. I don't think that I will be alive when driverless cars would be a reality, but it's inevitable, in the end...
I find the Vista UI confusing. It's very difficult to say what is clickable and what is not. There is no clear separation of different functional areas. Window frames have confusing different decorations.
I don't care at all about DRM, and it has not been a problem for me for the little I have used Vista.
I have no security issues, since I don't visit 'weird' sites or run 'weird' programs.
Stability is top-notch; the last stability problems I had date back to using Windows ME.
I don't care at all about anti-competitive practices of Microsoft; they are #1 in Office applications, and their O/S is very good.
Win32 sucks as an API, but thank God some good people in Norwegia have taken it upon themselves to fix the problem by making the best API possible (yeah, Trolltech).
I think your conclusions are far away from what average Joe thinks.
You can't just 'upgrade' one part of a Windows operating system. For example, you can not take XP and replace the visual subsystem with something else. You have to upgrade everything, because everything is tied to everything else.
So the 5 years it took Vista to be created were spent not adding features but making sure things work together as they should and nothing was seriously broken.
There are very little things that are truly innovative in computer science/IT: LISP, SQL, Simula, Hypercard, the WIMP interface, etc. And they have been created a long time ago:
LISP: 1958 SQL: 1974 Simula: 1967 Hypercard: 1987 the WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pull down menus) interface: 1968.
So, you see, true innovation is minimal, and certainly not in the open source world.
And it's not my fault that almost all of the programs mentioned that "move bits around" actually do that. If operating systems had typed I/O systems, all these programs would not exist.
All the software you mention is *NOT* innovative, though. It's good software, but not innovative or revolutionary. And most of the programs you mention do the same thing, slightly differently. A truly innovative piece of software would be 1/50 of all the software combined, and it would offer much more functionality.
Let's go through your list.
Usenet, NNTP, gopher, archie, AFS, NFS, LDAP, MIME, mailman, CVS, subversion, sendmail, courier, IRC are about information management. Granded, the information they manage is different, but why does the underlying infrastructure has to be different? a truly innovative piece of software would unite information management under one specification, allowing funky things like joining emails to code changes in CVS, searching news/the web/NFS with a unified interface, allow semantics type of searching within code and news etc.
Ruby, Perl, Python etc are programming languages...very similar. Most, if not all, algorithms in these languages can be exactly the same, as in many other languages. The few details that make these languages different are almost cosmetic. A truly innovative programming language would solve problems like concurrency, distribution, persistence and correctness in a degree that productivity would be ten times more than what it is today.
BSD unix, Linux, etc are all unix-based operating systems. They do things almost the same way. Granted, the unix system is simple enough to be quite useful, but it's not innovative or revolutionary in any way. A truly innovative operating system would be built in such a way that it would make resources transparent; programs to cooperate in a seamless way; it would have absolute security; it would be extremely easy to configure and use so as that someone with no computer experience would find it very easy to use; it would not 'core dump', but it would output a truly descriptive message which would detail what exactly went wrong; it would allow seamless transfer of running programs from one workstation to another;it would allow for seamless visual co-operation of people etc. Think something like the Enterprise D computer, minus the voice recognition, of course.
Finally, let's go to X/Firefox. They are both user-interface systems. They have served their purpose, but they are inadequate. That's why we have Ajax, HTML 5.0, XHTML, forms, Silverlight and countless other systems that do the same thing.
And don't let me start on programming all the above. Programming is still in the dark ages, with archaic systems like C that make programs insecure, bugged, and so difficult to be reliable that it takes another 10 layers of code (VMs of newest programming languages) just to feel safe that your program will not do the wrong thing at the wrong time.
So, to conclude, where is the innovation in open source? I certainly see no innovation. Please enlighten us...
Yeah, another lifeless/. member fantasizing he was member of the series! who do you thing you are? next time you'll tell us you played a character in Star Trek! you are not even worthy to play...Wesley Crusher!!!
:-)
(...by the way, do you have any inside info about anything new regarding a new Star Trek series? not the upcoming movie, movies can't make justice to the Star Trek universe)
The concept of morality is defined in the greater scope of society, not only within a specific sector. When politicians are corrupted and steal, corporations steal or "steal" by getting all the profits for themselves, when Nike and said companies sell their 10 dollar sweatshop-produced shoes for 200 bucks, when money is god and our culture can be described with one simple word ("capitalism"), why do we expect young people to have any morals? who is moral enough to accuse youngsters of being immoral?
Hey, now that I think about it, let who is without sin cast the first stone.
Creating and using military robots may be better in the short term, but what about the long term? perhaps it would be better if all the money spent in military toys be spent in research for new energy sources. The wars are about energy, anyway.
The disappointment in this case, and especially when it comes from/. where people are considered of a higher level, is that nobody speaks of peace any more, just of better ways to get what they want. That's not very promising for mankind.
Newspapers can go on being electronic. They can make a payment scheme where the first time users login every day, the amount of money that the actual newspaper costs is deducted from their account. In the end of the month, a 'newspaper' bill arrives that the user has to pay to continue their subscription.
In this way, nothing will change economically (the customer will continue to pay whatever he used to), and the newspapers can go on and be more useful (faster news delivery, better interactivity).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that using a safe self-hosting programming language like ADA or Cyclone is a thought that is difficult to formulate...
So can we now point it to the moon and take pictures of the Apollo mission artifacts (supposedly) left on its surface?
C is a horrible abomination of a language when seen from the perspective of modern languages like Haskell, Erlang, ML, Scala etc. There are even operating systems written in these languages. C has cost the IT industry billions of dollars as a result of safety and security problems.
C served its purpose, it's now time to be replaced with a better language.
In 2005, more than 40000 people were killed and over 1.2 million were injuried in the European Union.
Governments should unite and force driverless cars as soon as possible. Automated driving has numerous advantages over manual one:
Of course driverless transportation requires a level of support that is not present in most countries. Even the traffic lights are not setup properly in most countries (if they exist, at all). Most roads are full of bumps and holes, so in case or repairing the road, the electronic maps should be instantly updated. Most signs are misplaced; they would have to be replaced with electronic ones anyway, so as that they can transmit signals about their purpose. Buildings' addresses should be carefully mapped as well, if one wants to visit some place, but some cities don't even have an address system (Tokyo, for example).
The most difficult aspect for driverless cars is that ALL roads have to be mapped; if not so, then a new race of drivers will be born: those who have a license, but they drive only once a year, when they go in a place that is not mapped for the car navigator. And we all know that if you don't drive, you gradually forget how to do it, which means more possibilities for accidents than before. And if roads are not mapped in 100% detail, more possibilities for accidents as well.
Still, with all these issues, I am optimistic. I don't think that I will be alive when driverless cars would be a reality, but it's inevitable, in the end...
I've been longing to buy such a monitor for the sole purpose of properly playing Ms PacMan in MAME...
"Seriously? Wouldn't it be a bit more suspect if the *didn't* use it?"
You mean, like MFC?
I find the Vista UI confusing. It's very difficult to say what is clickable and what is not. There is no clear separation of different functional areas. Window frames have confusing different decorations.
I don't care at all about DRM, and it has not been a problem for me for the little I have used Vista.
I have no security issues, since I don't visit 'weird' sites or run 'weird' programs.
Stability is top-notch; the last stability problems I had date back to using Windows ME.
I don't care at all about anti-competitive practices of Microsoft; they are #1 in Office applications, and their O/S is very good.
Win32 sucks as an API, but thank God some good people in Norwegia have taken it upon themselves to fix the problem by making the best API possible (yeah, Trolltech).
I think your conclusions are far away from what average Joe thinks.
There are countless other ways to obtain inappropriate material (p2p, torrent, etc). How are they going to stop that?
"Given that SP1 is due in a month or so, I strongly suspect there will be a dramatic change in Vista's numbers in its second year of existence"
I don't think so. XP works perfectly, why change it? it's not like migrating from Windows 9x to NT.
You can't just 'upgrade' one part of a Windows operating system. For example, you can not take XP and replace the visual subsystem with something else. You have to upgrade everything, because everything is tied to everything else.
So the 5 years it took Vista to be created were spent not adding features but making sure things work together as they should and nothing was seriously broken.
There are very little things that are truly innovative in computer science/IT: LISP, SQL, Simula, Hypercard, the WIMP interface, etc. And they have been created a long time ago:
LISP: 1958
SQL: 1974
Simula: 1967
Hypercard: 1987
the WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pull down menus) interface: 1968.
So, you see, true innovation is minimal, and certainly not in the open source world.
And it's not my fault that almost all of the programs mentioned that "move bits around" actually do that. If operating systems had typed I/O systems, all these programs would not exist.
I don't know about Kerberos, but X (assuming that you mean the X-Window system) is not innovative at all.
Do you want to speak about a truly innovative window system? look no further than NeWS.
It was so innovative, that you could move a piece of code from the client to the display server in order to speed up processing on the fly.
All the software you mention is *NOT* innovative, though. It's good software, but not innovative or revolutionary. And most of the programs you mention do the same thing, slightly differently. A truly innovative piece of software would be 1/50 of all the software combined, and it would offer much more functionality.
Let's go through your list.
Usenet, NNTP, gopher, archie, AFS, NFS, LDAP, MIME, mailman, CVS, subversion, sendmail, courier, IRC are about information management. Granded, the information they manage is different, but why does the underlying infrastructure has to be different? a truly innovative piece of software would unite information management under one specification, allowing funky things like joining emails to code changes in CVS, searching news/the web/NFS with a unified interface, allow semantics type of searching within code and news etc.
Ruby, Perl, Python etc are programming languages...very similar. Most, if not all, algorithms in these languages can be exactly the same, as in many other languages. The few details that make these languages different are almost cosmetic. A truly innovative programming language would solve problems like concurrency, distribution, persistence and correctness in a degree that productivity would be ten times more than what it is today.
BSD unix, Linux, etc are all unix-based operating systems. They do things almost the same way. Granted, the unix system is simple enough to be quite useful, but it's not innovative or revolutionary in any way. A truly innovative operating system would be built in such a way that it would make resources transparent; programs to cooperate in a seamless way; it would have absolute security; it would be extremely easy to configure and use so as that someone with no computer experience would find it very easy to use; it would not 'core dump', but it would output a truly descriptive message which would detail what exactly went wrong; it would allow seamless transfer of running programs from one workstation to another;it would allow for seamless visual co-operation of people etc. Think something like the Enterprise D computer, minus the voice recognition, of course.
Finally, let's go to X/Firefox. They are both user-interface systems. They have served their purpose, but they are inadequate. That's why we have Ajax, HTML 5.0, XHTML, forms, Silverlight and countless other systems that do the same thing.
And don't let me start on programming all the above. Programming is still in the dark ages, with archaic systems like C that make programs insecure, bugged, and so difficult to be reliable that it takes another 10 layers of code (VMs of newest programming languages) just to feel safe that your program will not do the wrong thing at the wrong time.
So, to conclude, where is the innovation in open source? I certainly see no innovation. Please enlighten us...
Yeah, another lifeless /. member fantasizing he was member of the series! who do you thing you are? next time you'll tell us you played a character in Star Trek! you are not even worthy to play ...Wesley Crusher!!!
(...by the way, do you have any inside info about anything new regarding a new Star Trek series? not the upcoming movie, movies can't make justice to the Star Trek universe)
Not to mention that money is devalued as time passes...
Is it true that in some US states I can get in trouble with the law if I am caught doing sex in 'illegal' ways?
The concept of morality is defined in the greater scope of society, not only within a specific sector. When politicians are corrupted and steal, corporations steal or "steal" by getting all the profits for themselves, when Nike and said companies sell their 10 dollar sweatshop-produced shoes for 200 bucks, when money is god and our culture can be described with one simple word ("capitalism"), why do we expect young people to have any morals? who is moral enough to accuse youngsters of being immoral?
Hey, now that I think about it, let who is without sin cast the first stone.
Creating and using military robots may be better in the short term, but what about the long term? perhaps it would be better if all the money spent in military toys be spent in research for new energy sources. The wars are about energy, anyway.
/. where people are considered of a higher level, is that nobody speaks of peace any more, just of better ways to get what they want. That's not very promising for mankind.
The disappointment in this case, and especially when it comes from
Newspapers can go on being electronic. They can make a payment scheme where the first time users login every day, the amount of money that the actual newspaper costs is deducted from their account. In the end of the month, a 'newspaper' bill arrives that the user has to pay to continue their subscription.
In this way, nothing will change economically (the customer will continue to pay whatever he used to), and the newspapers can go on and be more useful (faster news delivery, better interactivity).
You forgot the most important advantage: taking them to the bathroom.
Numerical computations can be done with pattern matching as well.
Is there anything more in this 'theory' than pattern matching for satisfying a goal?
AI is not about computations and computability. The brain does not compute, it matches.
The inside of a modern malware system.
Yeap. Some Pentium processors by Intel are codenamed CN to honor him...
By the way, does anybody know what Chuck Norris and Duke Nukem have in common?
Boehm's gc allocates same sized blocks from the same page, so fragmentation is minimized.