Blah, blah, blah. Economics is just the wishful thinking of the rich and those who would be rich.
Bottom line: You have some piece of shit you want to sell me. You think it's worth ten bucks.
But I can get a piece of shit that is JUST AS GOOD from someone else for two bucks. And, really, I'm not willing to pay much more than two, so I give you the finger and buy the cheap one.
Let's say your piece of shit is slightly better than the other piece of shit. I'll look at the two pieces of shit and decide whether the difference is worth eight bucks. If it isn't, you're STILL shit out of luck.
I hope you didn't pay too much for that econ degree, sparky. You're in for some surprises out here in The World.
The market determines the value of any good or service. People will pay exactly what they are willing to pay and no more than that.
If you think there are no alternatives to your product, or you have a monopoly for some other reason, you might be able to set a ridiculous price for it (as Microsoft tries to do -- 200 bucks for Windows XP? Hmmph). But this will cause everyone to pursue superior, cheaper alternatives and sooner or later, you'll be forced to drop the price significantly. Never underestimate the power of millions of pissed off people with time on their hands.
On the other hand, if you decide to offer the product at what you consider a fair price, and you do some research to see what people might ALSO consider to be a fair price, you've got a good chance of getting lots of people to buy your stuff. FAIR is the operative word here. It's a negotiation. In this case, even if there are alternatives, you'll still get a little action because people will like you.
I think Big Business sometimes forgets this. A good example would be the "20 bucks for a CD with ten songs on it" RIAA crowd. See what kind of trouble they're going through now? If they'd just charged five bucks for a CD in the first place, nobody would have given them a lick of trouble.
I thought the patent issue was relatively harmless to Mono -- didn't Microsoft grant anyone who wanted to work with the ECMA standard a non discriminatory, royalty free patent license? I remember seeing some commentary by a few of the people involved in the project about how it's no big deal.
I think they said that the only thing that has patent issues is Windows.Forms.
It seems to me that most Linux guys are going to use glade#, gtk#, or qt#, so I don't think that's much of an issue long-term.
I decided to focus on C# precisely BECAUSE it has an open-source implementation (and because it's an ECMA standard, which is a very nice feature). Sun can completely change the whole Java language whenever they feel like it -- that bothers me. You can't change an ECMA standard on a whim -- if you learn C#, you've learned something that'll be fairly static for a while.
Come to think of it, Sun could sell Java to someone else, they could decide just to stop developing it, etc. In a way, the Mono project is much safer BECAUSE it's open source. If the Mono guys were to go psycho on us, someone would just fork the project. Not that they ever would. They seem to be really nice guys.
Anyway, with IBM collaborating with Apache on this (I hope they really pile resources on it), soon there'll be a completely open-source Java and it will be as exciting a target as C#.
Side benefit: open source java will probably get a LOT of improvements and tweaks, because that's what happens with every open source project. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
Let's go conspiracy theorist for a moment and consider how these things might be funded.
Some doctor has a theory. "Hey, they use electroshock to treat depression. What if we put a little gizmo in the person's head so that we could automate the zapping, and do it several times a day?"
They propose this. A reasonable person would say, "That's fucking stupid. No way".
But SOMEBODY approves the research and it gets funded.
What if, and this is just hypothetical, mind you, what if there's someone in the government whose job is to keep an eye open for things like this that might one day be "repurposed"?
Such a person might fund the research and make sure it's turned into a viable device. He might then nip off with all the designs and initial test data (erm... the "clinical results" I meant to say) and at that point, if the device fails in the market because people don't WANT electrodes in their brains, well, that's not his problem anymore.
Then, thirty years from now when everyone involved is too old to go to prison, they'll announce that they had this program of putting little electroshock implants into "suspected terrorists and dissidents". There'll be a brief scandal, but nothing much will happen (just as with the Tuskegee experiments and the injection of plutonium solution into terminal patients back in the '40s).
Of course, by then, they'll have nanotechnology and won't NEED implants.
I'm actually getting out of programming "for work" (if I can). My theory is, in terms of employment, you're better off doing something that's difficult to outsource and which every organization needs, specifically, server support and system administration. While phone support is long gone (did anyone ever enjoy that job?) everybody needs someone to physically set up servers, climb around debugging network problems, handle security issues, etc.
For someone who loves programming (moi) this is a great gig. You don't have to clutter your brain with competing programming paradigms, so at home you can focus on the languages and platforms you really WANT to program for. You have your joe job, and you have your open-source night work, with stuff you can actually sell online. Best of both worlds, right?
True story: when I was in college, we had a couple of very old, wimpy small Sparc workstations running some variant of Unix as development boxes. We did all our programming on them, right? One was called Eagle, the other was called Falcon. There was another called "Tardis" which mostly handled email, and I think there was something else hidden away somewhere.
One day, the box we were developing our C++ projects on crawled to a halt. I mean, it was dead. If you tried a command, you got "no more processes" onscreen. Nobody could do anything.
Meanwhile, the line printer in the back was going nuts, and was totally overheating. THOUSANDS of pages were coming out of it. All dense text, apparently from SPSS.
Some dim-bulb Political Science adjunct professor had told her ENTIRE CLASS to print out something from the SPSS data dictionary. And she'd given them instructions on how to print the ENTIRE data dictionary instead of the little chunk they were supposed to print out.
Two inches of green-bar paper, per student, times 20 students or so, times something like ten minutes per paper stack, with our wimpy little unix boxes trying to queue the print jobs, frantic admins, pissed off comp.sci majors, dumbfounded poli-sci majors saying "it didn't print, let's try it again"...
I would agree, but the limitation they were talking about was pretty small. It was in the range of 80 or so records per user for a few thousand users, I'm guessing maybe a couple dozen meg at most?
"All the power in the universe... Iiiiiitty bitty living space!"
In the beginning, most programmers had degrees in computer science and were relatively expensive. They worked in computer rooms and were treated with some degree of grudging respect (although companies never liked having to pay them well, they didn't make too much noise about it).
During the internet boom, several things happened to not just turn over the apple cart, but rather smash it to flinders:
1. Worldwide infrastructure was built out because companies knew they would be able to globalize the labor pool eventually, and they were willing to invest in this;
2. Companies like Microsoft, perceiving both a need and a high demand, worked to make programming more "accessible" to lower-skilled individuals (InDUHviduals, as they are called in Dilbert);
3. The Y2K panic caused all sorts of people who didn't have a strong CS background to jump into the field after totally inadequate training, and this trend virtually exploded when small internet companies started hiring anyone who so much as knew HTML and called them "Developers" and "Webmasters" (this totally devalued the Computer Science degree, as did the wholesale dropping out of school of company founders).
Cue the tech crash. Then, cue 9/11 and the recession.
Corporations now have the infrastructure to offshore whatever they want, and they have the H1-Bs and L-1's to replace people here. They go berserk, contracting out everything tech-oriented, and even start contracting out business functions, legal work, medical transcribing, you name it. If it's portable, it goes.
A few years go by.
Most people, not being totally fucking retarded, realize that they don't want to study computer science as a major anymore. They study something with better prospects, like art or medieval French poetry. A few students go Comp.Sci knowing they'll be unemployed, because they really dig it, and they'll go on to start the Napsters of the future (good for them, I say).
Suddenly, corporations have a problem.
Our colleges don't produce many computer scientists anymore. Those that DO go all the way to the Ph.D aren't Americans -- and they're going back to wherever they came from to start their OWN companies instead of being Good Little Immigrants(tm) and working for a corporation.
Some suit, deep in his six-martini lunch, wonders aloud, "Hey, wait a minute; if all these guys are going home and starting their own companies, and they have access to a really cheap labor pool, and the infrastructure we built up lets him sell his stuff to everybody worldwide, and we trained him and everybody in his neighborhood back home in OUR core business... Wait, I had a thought... What was that... Oh, yeah, so, if this Indian guy Apu, or whatever, does that, then isn't that competition? Like, with US?"
All lunch conversation dries up for a minute. The suits all look at each other.
"Say, old boy" says the Yale Man, "Do you mean that by outsourcing our entire tech staff to India, we trained and prepared this new guy's -- Apu, did you say? -- entire company for him, and at a moment's notice they could all decide to stop working for us and compete with us instead, leaving us gutted without any technical staff at all?"
"Umm... Maybe?" the first suit is starting to look a little green. Maybe six martinis were a little much. He eats a mint.
"And," Yale Man continues, "As Bill mentioned, nobody in America is studying computer science anymore because we told them to study business and move up the food chain, so we'll be (as the locals say) shit out of luck?"
"Uhh..."
"Oh, dear. Perhaps we should have Fortune write an article, and inspire young people to study computer science and math again?" He looks around at the other suits. "Surely we can appeal to their sense of national pride, and their desire to not see their own country's corporations fall by the wayside?"
And, here we are. What an interesting time this is...
Uhhhhhhhh... Yeah, it's true, actually I'm a hybrid type 2 Windows/Linux guy. Nice catch...:)
About the 40MB thing, I was guessing about the size, that actually relates to a true story. Here's a real conversation I had with two mainframe guys in an organization I used to work at (context: there was a system which was half on the mainframe and half on microcomputer servers, which kept a parallel set of data on our users, and the two systems coordinated via file transfer).
MainFrame Guy 1: "So, pretty soon, we're going to have to clear out our records, we're going to save everything to cold."
MFG 2: "Yeah, so if we could coordinate your moving of your records to cold as well, that would be great."
(My project manager and I look at each other, baffled.)
Me: "Cold? What's cold? What's he talking about?"
MFG 1: "Storage. You know, external storage."
Me: "Oh, you mean tape (they nod). Why do you have to clear out your hard disk?"
MFG 2: "We have to move old records off to cold."
Me: "Why?"
(MFG 1 and 2 look at each other, baffled).
Me: "We're on Oracle, right? If you're using too much space, just add some more disk."
(MFG 1 and 2 look at each other, then me, then back at each other.)
Me: "Disk is cheap. Put some more in. We're not even using a fraction of what we've got right now, I'm sure it's no big deal."
MFG 1 (or 2?): "Uhm, yeah, that's not really an option."
(My project manager and I look at each other, then we get it. Thirty year old mainframe, big old disk drives like washing machines, LIMITED SPACE.)
Me: "Ahh... Uhm. Well, we can't clear out our database, but we'll limit what the users can access, that way they won't be able to submit anything to your system that'll gum up the works for you."
(LATER)
Me, to project manager: "HOLY SHIT, how old is their equipment???"
PM: (chuckling) "I have no idea, I'm guessing decades."
1. Windows programmer: There are two sub-phyla of Windows programmer:
A) Fanatic Windows programmer: Refuses to use any software not made by Microsoft or an approved Microsoft partner; openly mocks Linux, unix, Firefox, and you when you suggest any of the three; programs exactly the way Microsoft tells him to in MSDN articles, and is deeply distrustful of any different approaches; loves IE and is laden with spyware and viruses, but refuses to admit it, saying things like "it's the hardware; I need a new machine".
B) Normal Windows programmer: Uses Windows because it's what everyone else has (and he wants to sell them things); uses Firefox and generally avoids IE; understands that Windows is limited and imperfect, but finds it useful for some subset of tasks; is interested in Linux but vaguely irritated by Linux fanatics calling him a sell-out. Secretly wants to eat spicy Schezuan with the Linux geeks, but not that fanatic with the blue hair (she's too freaky);
2. Linux (2 sub-phyla):
A) Fanatic Linux user: despises Windows users, seeing them as the zombie hordes following Bill Gates, his Satan; throws things at Windows users when they're within range, shouting "Shoo! Shoo! Get back on your short bus and go home!"; compiles everything from scratch to install, because otherwise he'll feel unworthy; generally only uses "Free" software, eschewing anything even remotely non-free, which seriously limits him. Secretly feels betrayed by the moderate Linux users, wants to eat Schezuan with them but knows that Windows guy will be there, so goes for pizza instead.
B) Normal Linux user: Uses Linux because he doesn't have to worry about spyware and viruses (much) and can simply use and enjoy his machine without having to put up with a lot of annoyances; is intrigued by Windows but dislikes the Windows fanatics, who make fun of him (he suspects they live in a town with lead water pipes, and forgives them in pity); he generally doesn't care what other people use as long as his Slackware instance is running well; he occasionally uses Knoppix to rescue one of his Windows-using coworkers when their registry gets corrupted; Secretly enjoys the look they give him after he recovers all their data, it makes him feel Wizardly. LOVES Schezuan food.
3. Mainframe users: Aren't sure what all this "Linux" and "Windows" nonsense is about, and suspect it's a fad the kids are following; Are very fond of their new VT-100 terminal (2400 baud! Kick ass!); Are starting to suspect they might be in for some trouble -- they've had to page all their data off disk to tape a THIRD time this month, how can their disks keep getting full? They're 40MB!!! SOMETHING funny's going on... Are secretly nervous about the boss and that young intern kid and the new box they've been setting up in the corner; those two keep giving us significant looks, what IS that, some kind of new networking thing? Bill over in tech support said it had "blades" in it...; and they still laugh about how "Emacs Makes A Computer Slow". Ha ha ha! Snort!
Why, exactly? The media will probably be encrypted before it ever gets into the machine. So it's just a big collection of bytes at that point, which requires nothing special on the motherboard.
So, your video stream comes in, over the internet or over a DVD, it's encrypted and will only play in Microsoft's special software, on the special hardware.
So, the MS software checks the video card and monitor for specialness, and if it's sufficiently special, it sends some signal to the video card and monitor to tell it to start the decryption process, sending the stream through the video card to the monitor. If the video card and monitor are insufficiently special, Microsoft refuses to play with them and it sends an uglified stream instead.
What does any of that have to do with the motherboard or bus? All of that can be done in the video card and the monitor, and all of it can be done without interfering with plain-old regular applications.
MY guess is, if you're using Linux on such a system, the encryption setup is just useless cruft that takes up space. Your only real bummer would be that you couldn't watch Baywatch on your PC.
Big whoop. I don't watch movies or TV on my Linux boxen NOW. I have an XBox and a 27" TV for that. If I want to watch DVD's while travelling, I'll cough up the hundred bucks and watch them on a cheap, Chinese laptop-style DVD player.
I really don't think this is the horror people seem to think it is.
Let's be reasonable for a minute, ok? Let's try and see what might actually HAPPEN.
A hardware manufacturer wants to make monitors (and so on) that people will actually BUY.
Microsoft might convince a manufacturer to add some additional secret sauce into his recipe, something that hooks up with a DRM solution Microsoft has come up with, because that's a value-added. It's something the manufacturer can brag about.
On the OTHER hand, asking a manufacturer to build monitors that don't work with anything BUT Microsoft's special sauce will get Microsoft laughed out of the boardroom. How many large companies are backing Linux right now? How many corporations depend on it? They vote with their cash. You think IBM and Novell would sit still for something like that? You think Sun, HP, Dell, and Gateway would? How about Sony? Or Apple? Give me a fucking break.
The bottom line is, don't play "chicken little". The sky isn't falling. All this is is a little extra something they're going to build in to give Windows a competitive advantage, i.e. the ability to view DRM'ed content. The fact that Linux won't be able to view the DRM'ed content is completely irrelevant. Who cares? Linux users will end up using a console for that crap, and their PCs for the work they were using them for before.
The REAL issue here is, Bill Gates is afraid of Apple on Intel, and he's trying to woo people with the possibility of watching movies. Big whoop.
My understanding of it was, the video stream comes down encrypted, Windows looks for the magic monitor and pairs up with it to decrypt the stream, OR, finding a non-special monitor, decrypts it to a crappy, choppy video stream instead.
The POINT I was making was, this ONLY matters if you want to view their "special" video streams. If you just want to use the hardware with Linux, you'll likely be unaffected. Normal display data will probably be fed to some kind of pass-through (nobody is going to encrypt and decrypt a word processor UI, for example -- that would be stupid and inefficient).
There's been a lot of talk about this kind of thing in the past.
One thing I heard was that Microsoft et al wanted to prevent ALL "untrusted" code from running at all. Then it was different: supposedly the only thing you would lose on an "untrusted" system would be the "trusted" features, which would hook up to stuff you would do online (or something). This was argued about bitterly right here on Slashdot. As usual, nobody agreed on anything, and it was either the End Of The World As We Know It, or a "Nothing to see here, move along".
In comparison, I think "special" monitors and video cards, with extra encryption facilities and such, are somewhat benign. Most of us won't be using our PCs for that sort of thing, anyway -- we'll be using consoles hooked up to our huge-ass TV's. That's where all this is going, you know.
First of all, it means they've failed to put their CrapWare(tm) in the computer's firmware. Less cruft in my motherboard is a Good Thing. Not that it would have killed Linux, anyway -- the Open Source community is pretty good at working around things like that. But still.
Second of all, this means that in order to access their movie content and so on, you'll have to have one of the "special" monitors, but the system will only work through Windows -- it's primarily a software solution which looks for the monitor feature, and fucks up the imagery if it doesn't find it. So, again, Linux remains unaffected.
Third, if we Linux guys decided to buy something like a future game console or set-top box (we wouldn't run a Windows computer per se, of course, because we're already wonderfully served by our Linux boxen) it would probably have this built-in, and we'd be able to do what we wanted with it.
Wow... Good for the kid, she must be pretty bright.
Of course, given that she's bright, I bet she wrote the Bill Gates poem as a joke, and there are hilarious double-entendres that only she and her friends get.
Wouldn't it be a kick if she switched to Mono now?
Slashdot Mirror
Blah, blah, blah. Economics is just the wishful thinking of the rich and those who would be rich.
Bottom line: You have some piece of shit you want to sell me. You think it's worth ten bucks.
But I can get a piece of shit that is JUST AS GOOD from someone else for two bucks. And, really, I'm not willing to pay much more than two, so I give you the finger and buy the cheap one.
Let's say your piece of shit is slightly better than the other piece of shit. I'll look at the two pieces of shit and decide whether the difference is worth eight bucks. If it isn't, you're STILL shit out of luck.
I hope you didn't pay too much for that econ degree, sparky. You're in for some surprises out here in The World.
The market determines the value of any good or service. People will pay exactly what they are willing to pay and no more than that.
If you think there are no alternatives to your product, or you have a monopoly for some other reason, you might be able to set a ridiculous price for it (as Microsoft tries to do -- 200 bucks for Windows XP? Hmmph). But this will cause everyone to pursue superior, cheaper alternatives and sooner or later, you'll be forced to drop the price significantly. Never underestimate the power of millions of pissed off people with time on their hands.
On the other hand, if you decide to offer the product at what you consider a fair price, and you do some research to see what people might ALSO consider to be a fair price, you've got a good chance of getting lots of people to buy your stuff. FAIR is the operative word here. It's a negotiation. In this case, even if there are alternatives, you'll still get a little action because people will like you.
I think Big Business sometimes forgets this. A good example would be the "20 bucks for a CD with ten songs on it" RIAA crowd. See what kind of trouble they're going through now? If they'd just charged five bucks for a CD in the first place, nobody would have given them a lick of trouble.
I thought the patent issue was relatively harmless to Mono -- didn't Microsoft grant anyone who wanted to work with the ECMA standard a non discriminatory, royalty free patent license? I remember seeing some commentary by a few of the people involved in the project about how it's no big deal.
I think they said that the only thing that has patent issues is Windows.Forms.
It seems to me that most Linux guys are going to use glade#, gtk#, or qt#, so I don't think that's much of an issue long-term.
Au contraire!
I decided to focus on C# precisely BECAUSE it has an open-source implementation (and because it's an ECMA standard, which is a very nice feature). Sun can completely change the whole Java language whenever they feel like it -- that bothers me. You can't change an ECMA standard on a whim -- if you learn C#, you've learned something that'll be fairly static for a while.
Come to think of it, Sun could sell Java to someone else, they could decide just to stop developing it, etc. In a way, the Mono project is much safer BECAUSE it's open source. If the Mono guys were to go psycho on us, someone would just fork the project. Not that they ever would. They seem to be really nice guys.
Anyway, with IBM collaborating with Apache on this (I hope they really pile resources on it), soon there'll be a completely open-source Java and it will be as exciting a target as C#.
Side benefit: open source java will probably get a LOT of improvements and tweaks, because that's what happens with every open source project. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
Good for them, I say.
They should give Michael Caine a Coast Guard Cutter and a 50-cal. No more pirates!
My office phone is an antiquated POS... BUT, it has a switch on the bottom that turns off the ringer. I flip it, and then, blissful silence!
:)
If anyone says they tried to call me, I say "Really? Maybe the ringer's off or something... Oh, look -- it is! How can I help you?"
Works most of the time.
Let's go conspiracy theorist for a moment and consider how these things might be funded.
Some doctor has a theory. "Hey, they use electroshock to treat depression. What if we put a little gizmo in the person's head so that we could automate the zapping, and do it several times a day?"
They propose this. A reasonable person would say, "That's fucking stupid. No way".
But SOMEBODY approves the research and it gets funded.
What if, and this is just hypothetical, mind you, what if there's someone in the government whose job is to keep an eye open for things like this that might one day be "repurposed"?
Such a person might fund the research and make sure it's turned into a viable device. He might then nip off with all the designs and initial test data (erm... the "clinical results" I meant to say) and at that point, if the device fails in the market because people don't WANT electrodes in their brains, well, that's not his problem anymore.
Then, thirty years from now when everyone involved is too old to go to prison, they'll announce that they had this program of putting little electroshock implants into "suspected terrorists and dissidents". There'll be a brief scandal, but nothing much will happen (just as with the Tuskegee experiments and the injection of plutonium solution into terminal patients back in the '40s).
Of course, by then, they'll have nanotechnology and won't NEED implants.
I mean, isn't that what we all do at work? ;P
I'm actually getting out of programming "for work" (if I can). My theory is, in terms of employment, you're better off doing something that's difficult to outsource and which every organization needs, specifically, server support and system administration. While phone support is long gone (did anyone ever enjoy that job?) everybody needs someone to physically set up servers, climb around debugging network problems, handle security issues, etc.
:)
For someone who loves programming (moi) this is a great gig. You don't have to clutter your brain with competing programming paradigms, so at home you can focus on the languages and platforms you really WANT to program for. You have your joe job, and you have your open-source night work, with stuff you can actually sell online. Best of both worlds, right?
Anyway, that's what I'm hoping.
Go back and read the whole post. You seem to have completely missed the joke.
True story: when I was in college, we had a couple of very old, wimpy small Sparc workstations running some variant of Unix as development boxes. We did all our programming on them, right? One was called Eagle, the other was called Falcon. There was another called "Tardis" which mostly handled email, and I think there was something else hidden away somewhere.
One day, the box we were developing our C++ projects on crawled to a halt. I mean, it was dead. If you tried a command, you got "no more processes" onscreen. Nobody could do anything.
Meanwhile, the line printer in the back was going nuts, and was totally overheating. THOUSANDS of pages were coming out of it. All dense text, apparently from SPSS.
Some dim-bulb Political Science adjunct professor had told her ENTIRE CLASS to print out something from the SPSS data dictionary. And she'd given them instructions on how to print the ENTIRE data dictionary instead of the little chunk they were supposed to print out.
Two inches of green-bar paper, per student, times 20 students or so, times something like ten minutes per paper stack, with our wimpy little unix boxes trying to queue the print jobs, frantic admins, pissed off comp.sci majors, dumbfounded poli-sci majors saying "it didn't print, let's try it again"...
Ah, the chaos of our college days!
I would agree, but the limitation they were talking about was pretty small. It was in the range of 80 or so records per user for a few thousand users, I'm guessing maybe a couple dozen meg at most?
"All the power in the universe... Iiiiiitty bitty living space!"
In the beginning, most programmers had degrees in computer science and were relatively expensive. They worked in computer rooms and were treated with some degree of grudging respect (although companies never liked having to pay them well, they didn't make too much noise about it).
During the internet boom, several things happened to not just turn over the apple cart, but rather smash it to flinders:
1. Worldwide infrastructure was built out because companies knew they would be able to globalize the labor pool eventually, and they were willing to invest in this;
2. Companies like Microsoft, perceiving both a need and a high demand, worked to make programming more "accessible" to lower-skilled individuals (InDUHviduals, as they are called in Dilbert);
3. The Y2K panic caused all sorts of people who didn't have a strong CS background to jump into the field after totally inadequate training, and this trend virtually exploded when small internet companies started hiring anyone who so much as knew HTML and called them "Developers" and "Webmasters" (this totally devalued the Computer Science degree, as did the wholesale dropping out of school of company founders).
Cue the tech crash. Then, cue 9/11 and the recession.
Corporations now have the infrastructure to offshore whatever they want, and they have the H1-Bs and L-1's to replace people here. They go berserk, contracting out everything tech-oriented, and even start contracting out business functions, legal work, medical transcribing, you name it. If it's portable, it goes.
A few years go by.
Most people, not being totally fucking retarded, realize that they don't want to study computer science as a major anymore. They study something with better prospects, like art or medieval French poetry. A few students go Comp.Sci knowing they'll be unemployed, because they really dig it, and they'll go on to start the Napsters of the future (good for them, I say).
Suddenly, corporations have a problem.
Our colleges don't produce many computer scientists anymore. Those that DO go all the way to the Ph.D aren't Americans -- and they're going back to wherever they came from to start their OWN companies instead of being Good Little Immigrants(tm) and working for a corporation.
Some suit, deep in his six-martini lunch, wonders aloud, "Hey, wait a minute; if all these guys are going home and starting their own companies, and they have access to a really cheap labor pool, and the infrastructure we built up lets him sell his stuff to everybody worldwide, and we trained him and everybody in his neighborhood back home in OUR core business... Wait, I had a thought... What was that... Oh, yeah, so, if this Indian guy Apu, or whatever, does that, then isn't that competition? Like, with US?"
All lunch conversation dries up for a minute. The suits all look at each other.
"Say, old boy" says the Yale Man, "Do you mean that by outsourcing our entire tech staff to India, we trained and prepared this new guy's -- Apu, did you say? -- entire company for him, and at a moment's notice they could all decide to stop working for us and compete with us instead, leaving us gutted without any technical staff at all?"
"Umm... Maybe?" the first suit is starting to look a little green. Maybe six martinis were a little much. He eats a mint.
"And," Yale Man continues, "As Bill mentioned, nobody in America is studying computer science anymore because we told them to study business and move up the food chain, so we'll be (as the locals say) shit out of luck?"
"Uhh..."
"Oh, dear. Perhaps we should have Fortune write an article, and inspire young people to study computer science and math again?" He looks around at the other suits. "Surely we can appeal to their sense of national pride, and their desire to not see their own country's corporations fall by the wayside?"
And, here we are. What an interesting time this is...
Try Mono/C#.
It has all the good features of Java, plus some of the good features of C++ like pointers and access to unmanaged code.
It's also completely free and open source. And if you ever find yourself working with Windows, you'll already know the main language for doing so.
Uhhhhhhhh... Yeah, it's true, actually I'm a hybrid type 2 Windows/Linux guy. Nice catch... :)
About the 40MB thing, I was guessing about the size, that actually relates to a true story. Here's a real conversation I had with two mainframe guys in an organization I used to work at (context: there was a system which was half on the mainframe and half on microcomputer servers, which kept a parallel set of data on our users, and the two systems coordinated via file transfer).
MainFrame Guy 1: "So, pretty soon, we're going to have to clear out our records, we're going to save everything to cold."
MFG 2: "Yeah, so if we could coordinate your moving of your records to cold as well, that would be great."
(My project manager and I look at each other, baffled.)
Me: "Cold? What's cold? What's he talking about?"
MFG 1: "Storage. You know, external storage."
Me: "Oh, you mean tape (they nod). Why do you have to clear out your hard disk?"
MFG 2: "We have to move old records off to cold."
Me: "Why?"
(MFG 1 and 2 look at each other, baffled).
Me: "We're on Oracle, right? If you're using too much space, just add some more disk."
(MFG 1 and 2 look at each other, then me, then back at each other.)
Me: "Disk is cheap. Put some more in. We're not even using a fraction of what we've got right now, I'm sure it's no big deal."
MFG 1 (or 2?): "Uhm, yeah, that's not really an option."
(My project manager and I look at each other, then we get it. Thirty year old mainframe, big old disk drives like washing machines, LIMITED SPACE.)
Me: "Ahh... Uhm. Well, we can't clear out our database, but we'll limit what the users can access, that way they won't be able to submit anything to your system that'll gum up the works for you."
(LATER)
Me, to project manager: "HOLY SHIT, how old is their equipment???"
PM: (chuckling) "I have no idea, I'm guessing decades."
Me: "Man. It still works???"
Doh! My bad. That's what I get for attempting unresearched humor... :)
Ah! See, I do. For me, more rum there is.
1. Windows programmer: There are two sub-phyla of Windows programmer:
A) Fanatic Windows programmer: Refuses to use any software not made by Microsoft or an approved Microsoft partner; openly mocks Linux, unix, Firefox, and you when you suggest any of the three; programs exactly the way Microsoft tells him to in MSDN articles, and is deeply distrustful of any different approaches; loves IE and is laden with spyware and viruses, but refuses to admit it, saying things like "it's the hardware; I need a new machine".
B) Normal Windows programmer: Uses Windows because it's what everyone else has (and he wants to sell them things); uses Firefox and generally avoids IE; understands that Windows is limited and imperfect, but finds it useful for some subset of tasks; is interested in Linux but vaguely irritated by Linux fanatics calling him a sell-out. Secretly wants to eat spicy Schezuan with the Linux geeks, but not that fanatic with the blue hair (she's too freaky);
2. Linux (2 sub-phyla):
A) Fanatic Linux user: despises Windows users, seeing them as the zombie hordes following Bill Gates, his Satan; throws things at Windows users when they're within range, shouting "Shoo! Shoo! Get back on your short bus and go home!"; compiles everything from scratch to install, because otherwise he'll feel unworthy; generally only uses "Free" software, eschewing anything even remotely non-free, which seriously limits him. Secretly feels betrayed by the moderate Linux users, wants to eat Schezuan with them but knows that Windows guy will be there, so goes for pizza instead.
B) Normal Linux user: Uses Linux because he doesn't have to worry about spyware and viruses (much) and can simply use and enjoy his machine without having to put up with a lot of annoyances; is intrigued by Windows but dislikes the Windows fanatics, who make fun of him (he suspects they live in a town with lead water pipes, and forgives them in pity); he generally doesn't care what other people use as long as his Slackware instance is running well; he occasionally uses Knoppix to rescue one of his Windows-using coworkers when their registry gets corrupted; Secretly enjoys the look they give him after he recovers all their data, it makes him feel Wizardly. LOVES Schezuan food.
3. Mainframe users: Aren't sure what all this "Linux" and "Windows" nonsense is about, and suspect it's a fad the kids are following; Are very fond of their new VT-100 terminal (2400 baud! Kick ass!); Are starting to suspect they might be in for some trouble -- they've had to page all their data off disk to tape a THIRD time this month, how can their disks keep getting full? They're 40MB!!! SOMETHING funny's going on... Are secretly nervous about the boss and that young intern kid and the new box they've been setting up in the corner; those two keep giving us significant looks, what IS that, some kind of new networking thing? Bill over in tech support said it had "blades" in it...; and they still laugh about how "Emacs Makes A Computer Slow". Ha ha ha! Snort!
Yeah, I like flavored rum a lot better.
Beer, beer, beer... So unhealthy! So fat, will you become! Drink not, these things you should.
Far better, to drink Rum it is.
Why, exactly? The media will probably be encrypted before it ever gets into the machine. So it's just a big collection of bytes at that point, which requires nothing special on the motherboard.
So, your video stream comes in, over the internet or over a DVD, it's encrypted and will only play in Microsoft's special software, on the special hardware.
So, the MS software checks the video card and monitor for specialness, and if it's sufficiently special, it sends some signal to the video card and monitor to tell it to start the decryption process, sending the stream through the video card to the monitor. If the video card and monitor are insufficiently special, Microsoft refuses to play with them and it sends an uglified stream instead.
What does any of that have to do with the motherboard or bus? All of that can be done in the video card and the monitor, and all of it can be done without interfering with plain-old regular applications.
MY guess is, if you're using Linux on such a system, the encryption setup is just useless cruft that takes up space. Your only real bummer would be that you couldn't watch Baywatch on your PC.
Big whoop. I don't watch movies or TV on my Linux boxen NOW. I have an XBox and a 27" TV for that. If I want to watch DVD's while travelling, I'll cough up the hundred bucks and watch them on a cheap, Chinese laptop-style DVD player.
I really don't think this is the horror people seem to think it is.
Wow. That's paranoid even by MY standards.
Let's be reasonable for a minute, ok? Let's try and see what might actually HAPPEN.
A hardware manufacturer wants to make monitors (and so on) that people will actually BUY.
Microsoft might convince a manufacturer to add some additional secret sauce into his recipe, something that hooks up with a DRM solution Microsoft has come up with, because that's a value-added. It's something the manufacturer can brag about.
On the OTHER hand, asking a manufacturer to build monitors that don't work with anything BUT Microsoft's special sauce will get Microsoft laughed out of the boardroom. How many large companies are backing Linux right now? How many corporations depend on it? They vote with their cash. You think IBM and Novell would sit still for something like that? You think Sun, HP, Dell, and Gateway would? How about Sony? Or Apple? Give me a fucking break.
The bottom line is, don't play "chicken little". The sky isn't falling. All this is is a little extra something they're going to build in to give Windows a competitive advantage, i.e. the ability to view DRM'ed content. The fact that Linux won't be able to view the DRM'ed content is completely irrelevant. Who cares? Linux users will end up using a console for that crap, and their PCs for the work they were using them for before.
The REAL issue here is, Bill Gates is afraid of Apple on Intel, and he's trying to woo people with the possibility of watching movies. Big whoop.
Think it through. The sky is not falling.
My understanding of it was, the video stream comes down encrypted, Windows looks for the magic monitor and pairs up with it to decrypt the stream, OR, finding a non-special monitor, decrypts it to a crappy, choppy video stream instead.
The POINT I was making was, this ONLY matters if you want to view their "special" video streams. If you just want to use the hardware with Linux, you'll likely be unaffected. Normal display data will probably be fed to some kind of pass-through (nobody is going to encrypt and decrypt a word processor UI, for example -- that would be stupid and inefficient).
There's been a lot of talk about this kind of thing in the past.
One thing I heard was that Microsoft et al wanted to prevent ALL "untrusted" code from running at all. Then it was different: supposedly the only thing you would lose on an "untrusted" system would be the "trusted" features, which would hook up to stuff you would do online (or something). This was argued about bitterly right here on Slashdot. As usual, nobody agreed on anything, and it was either the End Of The World As We Know It, or a "Nothing to see here, move along".
In comparison, I think "special" monitors and video cards, with extra encryption facilities and such, are somewhat benign. Most of us won't be using our PCs for that sort of thing, anyway -- we'll be using consoles hooked up to our huge-ass TV's. That's where all this is going, you know.
First of all, it means they've failed to put their CrapWare(tm) in the computer's firmware. Less cruft in my motherboard is a Good Thing. Not that it would have killed Linux, anyway -- the Open Source community is pretty good at working around things like that. But still.
Second of all, this means that in order to access their movie content and so on, you'll have to have one of the "special" monitors, but the system will only work through Windows -- it's primarily a software solution which looks for the monitor feature, and fucks up the imagery if it doesn't find it. So, again, Linux remains unaffected.
Third, if we Linux guys decided to buy something like a future game console or set-top box (we wouldn't run a Windows computer per se, of course, because we're already wonderfully served by our Linux boxen) it would probably have this built-in, and we'd be able to do what we wanted with it.
I'd say it's not a bad idea overall.
Wow... Good for the kid, she must be pretty bright.
Of course, given that she's bright, I bet she wrote the Bill Gates poem as a joke, and there are hilarious double-entendres that only she and her friends get.
Wouldn't it be a kick if she switched to Mono now?