Over 9 Billion in R&D spending during a recession is the long term thinking at Microsoft.
Customers don't give a crap about 'R&D spending'; they care about products. Where are the new products that will be making billions for Microsoft in 2010-2020?
'Microsoft Bob' was R&D. Clippy was R&D. Vista took up nearly a decade of R&D and was a total piece of crap.
A company makes $1.2 BILLION a month in net profit, and it's a failure with a lost decade?
Putting short-term profit over long term has been a standard policy for failing companies driven by short-sighted management.
Sure, Microsoft make a lot of money now, but over the last decade they've gone from being one of the most important companies in IT to 'so what?'. How many people really care about anything Microsoft does anymore? Does anyone get excited about a new version of Windows? Or a new version of anything that Microsoft produce?
So Microsoft may be making plenty of money today, but what will they be doing in another decade? Where are the new products they should have been developing since 2000 that are going to make them billions in the future?
Microsoft can really change things around if they decided to port Win7 to ARM, instead of offering only Windows CE.
But considering monopolies, I wouldn't expect that any time soon.
People generally use Windows on PCs because they have x86 Windows software they need to run.
How many people have a stack of ARM software to run on ARM Windows? If you're going to need new software anyway, why would anyone in their right mind pick Windows to run it on?
Perhaps I'm out of date, but from what I've read on the subject I was under the impression that SSDs were far more likely to suffer catastrophic failures than HDDs. Certainly of the numerous hard disks I've owned, the few that failed before I replaced them showed an increasing number of read errors and then bad sectors, giving plenty of notice that it was time to copy the data somewhere else.
Have you not noticed that the Blu-ray revolution is passing most of us by?
My experience is that Blu-Ray finally seems to be taking off now that players are under $200, disks are typically only 1.5-2x the price of DVDs (sometimes even cheaper than the DVD and often cheaper than the same movie/TV show was on DVD when first released) and most people have HDTV.
And given the number of HDTV torrents Google throws at me any time I go searching for information about a movie, I strongly suspect that HD video files are much more prevalent than Blu-Ray players.
Also, more and more people are going to have to buy Blu-Ray if they want to be able to send their home movies to their relatives; I was visiting a friend a while back whose father bought a new HD camcorder and didn't understand that they wouldn't be able to burn it to DVD for their relatives to play in HD. Either they'll have to get their relatives to buy computers to plug into their TV, or a Blu-Ray player (or similar).
Nintendo DSi has the equivalent of a 256 MB microSD soldered onto the motherboard. It's enough to hold a few apps from the DSi Shop. If it were a joke, why would Nintendo have used it?
And that has any relevance to the general computer market because?
At the rate we're going, by 2020 Windows will probably need 500GB for a base install and the average PC game will be 1TB.
For one thing, the eye has a resolution limit, so why would people need more than, say, 2560x1440 (quad 720p) in home electronics?
In the near future you'll be able to buy a $3000 camcorder that can shoot more than 2560x1440 and burn through a gigabyte every 30 seconds or so; by 2020 you'll probably be able to shoot IMAX resolution on a $3k camcorder.
Honestly, every time I've seen someone say 'the average user will never need more than this', they've looked incredibly foolish only a few years later.
Well before 2020 a 250 GB SSD will be $20, and will have ample capacity for most users, and will be cheaper than any HDD.
Rather like the average user will ever need more than 640k of RAM.
By 2020, 250GB will be as much of a joke for the average user as a 250MB drive would be today; 250GB will probably be just about big enough to hold one super-extra-high-definition video file.
This is a logical extension of current lunatic copyright laws: the IP Barons want a cut every time anyone, anywhere, performs a song they claim to 'own'. The next step will be to require everyone to wear brain-scanners so that they can charge us every time we 'play' a song inside our heads from memory.
The whole concept of Imaginary Property leads directly to this kind of stupidity, because the very idea of being able to 'own' something which has no physical existence is quite simply insane.
It's really hard to get 15% better performance without doing something underhanded unless your previous drivers were beta quality.
I used to work for a video card manufacturer and game and video developers often did totally retarded things which just happened to work on the cards they developed on but made the software run like crap on ours. We routinely had to implement workarounds for individual games to make them run properly on our cards.
One particular example which springs to mind -- I won't mention the developer or the game -- was an engine which used a feature which we supported in hardware but a certain other card manufacturer whose cards they used performed in software. Rather than configuring said feature once as they should have done, retarded developer repeatedly reconfigured it numerous times in the course of a single video frame, which required us to reconfigure the hardware every time -- slow as heck over an AGP bus -- whereas other card manufacturer just had to execute a few CPU instructions. We had to detect the game and disable our hardware support, so that we would fall back to software and run the retarded code much faster; in that instance there were places in the game where, far from a measly 15%, we'd literally be going from seconds per frame to numerous frames per second.
So it's quite possible to need to detect individual games or applications in order to work around retarded coding which cripples performance on your hardware. The line you shouldn't cross -- and which I don't believe we ever did -- was to render something other than what the developer intended, for example by detecting a shader used by a benchmark and replacing it with one that looked similar but didn't do as much work.
Similarly, the issue here is not Intel punting processing to the CPU when the GPU is overloaded, but the fact that they do so by detecting the name of the benchmark rather than by monitoring the GPU loading and dynamically switching between hardware and software so that it would work on any application. General optimisation is fine, workarounds for retarded developers are fine, but special optimisations for benchmarks which don't affect real applications is getting pretty close to the line.
Indeed. As far as I can make out, it's turned DLL hell into SxS hell.
One of my PCs just won't run a significant number of Windows programs anymore. As far as I can make out from the error message, it looks like _something_ in the lower levels of SxS hell is incorrectly configured. So how do I fix it? Uh, as far as I can see, I can't. I can't find any possible way to fix SxS hell short of wiping the disk and reinstalling everything.
Maybe it's a good idea when it works, but looks like when it breaks you're totally fscked.
I hope he's kidding. Reading devices are not the issue.
Maybe the dedicated e-book readers are better -- I've never seen one in real life -- but reading books on a PC really, really, really sucks ass. I have a couple of dozen books that I've legally downloaded from sites like tor.com and a load more that are public domain, but I've never got far into them because reading books on a PC is just horrible compared to reading paper.
But probably won't be. Almost every news story I've been involved with -- either directly, by knowing some of the people involved, or by understanding the technology or science they're reporting on -- has been sensationalist garbage which bears little resemblance to the facts.
I find far more facts and better analysis of them on blogs than in mainstream media.
Blogging tends to be more like newspaper columns where assume a certain bias and literary style in whom you chode to read.
Sorry, but if you think that newspapers are unbiased, I have a bridge you might like to buy.
You've never actually been paid to create a web page, have you? (at least, not in the last five years)
Indeed: just think of all the JS programmers who'd be out of work if the average static web page didn't pull in 500k of JS in order to display 4k of text.
The worst thing about noscript is that for an unkown site you often have to allow JS on it to see what it looks like, so unless you plan on only browsing sites you've already been to and those that don't use javascript, it is completely useless yet its users claim, nay genuinely think they are more secure!
If I go to an unknown site and it doesn't display anything useful without JS then I generally go somewhere else; if the developers are so inept that they can't make their site do something useful without it then the site is probably a heap of steaming monkey poo or a malware distributor.
Back in the real world, it's hard to see how allowing arbitrary JS to run on your system can be considered 'more secure' than only running it from sites you trust. This 'exploit' is nothing to do with insecurity, it's to do with crap programming on a trusted site.
The mere fact that we need such protection goes to show what a heap of steaming monkey poo JS is.
My volvo had a scratch on the rear bumper - he never even got *near* paintwork.
We seem to have had the opposite experience with 1980s Volvos; two of them were written off after collisions with a friend's 1970s car and van where his total repair bills were about $500.
Yes. How dare we sacrifice something in order to learn!
While this video is interesting in an abstract kind of way, I can't help but wonder what you think we really 'learn' from it? We know that 1950s cars weren't built with much attention paid to crash safety, and while it does clearly demonstrate that a modern car is much safer than a car of that era, there are so few of those cars still on the road that you can hardly argue that it will even convince drivers to switch from unsafe old cars to much safer new ones.
That said, if they did only pay $200 for it then it was probably a clunker which was not worth repairing; though then you have to wonder whether it was really a good example to use in a crash test (e.g. rotten structural members or whatever).
Well, getting into space despite the problems and then fixing them for the next launch is better than not getting into space at all; but, yes, the important element of the first launch of any rocket is to find the problems and fix them.
NASA, for example, had numerous problems on the early Saturn launches which could have lost the launcher and payload (POGO being the most obvious), but redundancy and some good luck saved those flights.
Why are they going to need good luck? You sound a little pessimistic about their efforts.
The first launch of any new rocket is likely to run into unforseen problems which can cause it to fail, particularly when it's been developed quickly on a low budget. SpaceX have some experience now with the earlier Falcon launches, but the odds of a failure are significant... that's just rocket science for you.
The BBC news is light-years ahead of anything in the USA. It's also politically independent, unlike state-run newspapers in Iran, China and Russia.
This should be +5 Funny, not +5 Insightful.
The BBC is the left-wing propaganda arm of the British state; the only sense in which it's 'politically independent' is that it doesn't drop its left-wing slant even when a right-wing government is in power, though it does tone down a little.
The technology will go into place, be pretty much invisible, and provide enough benefits for legitimate users that no one will cry except for people who aren't connected in any way to Japan.
In what way will this provide _ANY_ benefit to legitimate users? They can already play their music, so they will see no benefit from having to 'phone home' to verify that they can, and will see significant risks of being incorrectly refused the right to play music they've been given or paid for.
Users can only suffer from this nonsense, because they can only be denied the right to do what they've been doing up until now.
I'm amazed that anyone still uses ftp on public networks for anything other than distributing files to anonymous downloaders; it's insanely insecure and there are much better alternatives like sftp and scp.
"The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say"
So when we're all supposed to be scared to death of EVIL GLOBAL WARMING, the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2 with... car engines... running on natural gas which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?
First, that's not actually true, at least for Apollo, and, second, the Hubble is actually an argument for manned spaceflight
For the cost of a Hubble servicing mission we could have launched another one to replace it; from what I remember, the people who built Hubble offered to build a second for a small fraction of the price of the first, and if you were building half a dozen on a production line over a decade or so then they'd be pretty cheap.
It's noteworthy that not a single science satellite since Hubble has been designed for in-orbit servicing; it made sense back when NASA were claiming they'd charge $10 million a flight, but it makes no sense now that we've discovered that the real price tag is over a billion a flight.
Slashdot Mirror
Over 9 Billion in R&D spending during a recession is the long term thinking at Microsoft.
Customers don't give a crap about 'R&D spending'; they care about products. Where are the new products that will be making billions for Microsoft in 2010-2020?
'Microsoft Bob' was R&D. Clippy was R&D. Vista took up nearly a decade of R&D and was a total piece of crap.
A company makes $1.2 BILLION a month in net profit, and it's a failure with a lost decade?
Putting short-term profit over long term has been a standard policy for failing companies driven by short-sighted management.
Sure, Microsoft make a lot of money now, but over the last decade they've gone from being one of the most important companies in IT to 'so what?'. How many people really care about anything Microsoft does anymore? Does anyone get excited about a new version of Windows? Or a new version of anything that Microsoft produce?
So Microsoft may be making plenty of money today, but what will they be doing in another decade? Where are the new products they should have been developing since 2000 that are going to make them billions in the future?
Microsoft can really change things around if they decided to port Win7 to ARM, instead of offering only Windows CE.
But considering monopolies, I wouldn't expect that any time soon.
People generally use Windows on PCs because they have x86 Windows software they need to run.
How many people have a stack of ARM software to run on ARM Windows? If you're going to need new software anyway, why would anyone in their right mind pick Windows to run it on?
SSDs fail nicely, HDDs do not.
Perhaps I'm out of date, but from what I've read on the subject I was under the impression that SSDs were far more likely to suffer catastrophic failures than HDDs. Certainly of the numerous hard disks I've owned, the few that failed before I replaced them showed an increasing number of read errors and then bad sectors, giving plenty of notice that it was time to copy the data somewhere else.
Have you not noticed that the Blu-ray revolution is passing most of us by?
My experience is that Blu-Ray finally seems to be taking off now that players are under $200, disks are typically only 1.5-2x the price of DVDs (sometimes even cheaper than the DVD and often cheaper than the same movie/TV show was on DVD when first released) and most people have HDTV.
And given the number of HDTV torrents Google throws at me any time I go searching for information about a movie, I strongly suspect that HD video files are much more prevalent than Blu-Ray players.
Also, more and more people are going to have to buy Blu-Ray if they want to be able to send their home movies to their relatives; I was visiting a friend a while back whose father bought a new HD camcorder and didn't understand that they wouldn't be able to burn it to DVD for their relatives to play in HD. Either they'll have to get their relatives to buy computers to plug into their TV, or a Blu-Ray player (or similar).
Nintendo DSi has the equivalent of a 256 MB microSD soldered onto the motherboard. It's enough to hold a few apps from the DSi Shop. If it were a joke, why would Nintendo have used it?
And that has any relevance to the general computer market because?
At the rate we're going, by 2020 Windows will probably need 500GB for a base install and the average PC game will be 1TB.
For one thing, the eye has a resolution limit, so why would people need more than, say, 2560x1440 (quad 720p) in home electronics?
In the near future you'll be able to buy a $3000 camcorder that can shoot more than 2560x1440 and burn through a gigabyte every 30 seconds or so; by 2020 you'll probably be able to shoot IMAX resolution on a $3k camcorder.
Honestly, every time I've seen someone say 'the average user will never need more than this', they've looked incredibly foolish only a few years later.
Well before 2020 a 250 GB SSD will be $20, and will have ample capacity for most users, and will be cheaper than any HDD.
Rather like the average user will ever need more than 640k of RAM.
By 2020, 250GB will be as much of a joke for the average user as a 250MB drive would be today; 250GB will probably be just about big enough to hold one super-extra-high-definition video file.
This is a logical extension of current lunatic copyright laws: the IP Barons want a cut every time anyone, anywhere, performs a song they claim to 'own'. The next step will be to require everyone to wear brain-scanners so that they can charge us every time we 'play' a song inside our heads from memory.
The whole concept of Imaginary Property leads directly to this kind of stupidity, because the very idea of being able to 'own' something which has no physical existence is quite simply insane.
It's really hard to get 15% better performance without doing something underhanded unless your previous drivers were beta quality.
I used to work for a video card manufacturer and game and video developers often did totally retarded things which just happened to work on the cards they developed on but made the software run like crap on ours. We routinely had to implement workarounds for individual games to make them run properly on our cards.
One particular example which springs to mind -- I won't mention the developer or the game -- was an engine which used a feature which we supported in hardware but a certain other card manufacturer whose cards they used performed in software. Rather than configuring said feature once as they should have done, retarded developer repeatedly reconfigured it numerous times in the course of a single video frame, which required us to reconfigure the hardware every time -- slow as heck over an AGP bus -- whereas other card manufacturer just had to execute a few CPU instructions. We had to detect the game and disable our hardware support, so that we would fall back to software and run the retarded code much faster; in that instance there were places in the game where, far from a measly 15%, we'd literally be going from seconds per frame to numerous frames per second.
So it's quite possible to need to detect individual games or applications in order to work around retarded coding which cripples performance on your hardware. The line you shouldn't cross -- and which I don't believe we ever did -- was to render something other than what the developer intended, for example by detecting a shader used by a benchmark and replacing it with one that looked similar but didn't do as much work.
Similarly, the issue here is not Intel punting processing to the CPU when the GPU is overloaded, but the fact that they do so by detecting the name of the benchmark rather than by monitoring the GPU loading and dynamically switching between hardware and software so that it would work on any application. General optimisation is fine, workarounds for retarded developers are fine, but special optimisations for benchmarks which don't affect real applications is getting pretty close to the line.
Yeah SxS works a treat. No more dll hell.
Indeed. As far as I can make out, it's turned DLL hell into SxS hell.
One of my PCs just won't run a significant number of Windows programs anymore. As far as I can make out from the error message, it looks like _something_ in the lower levels of SxS hell is incorrectly configured. So how do I fix it? Uh, as far as I can see, I can't. I can't find any possible way to fix SxS hell short of wiping the disk and reinstalling everything.
Maybe it's a good idea when it works, but looks like when it breaks you're totally fscked.
I hope he's kidding. Reading devices are not the issue.
Maybe the dedicated e-book readers are better -- I've never seen one in real life -- but reading books on a PC really, really, really sucks ass. I have a couple of dozen books that I've legally downloaded from sites like tor.com and a load more that are public domain, but I've never got far into them because reading books on a PC is just horrible compared to reading paper.
There might be some fact checking then
But probably won't be. Almost every news story I've been involved with -- either directly, by knowing some of the people involved, or by understanding the technology or science they're reporting on -- has been sensationalist garbage which bears little resemblance to the facts.
I find far more facts and better analysis of them on blogs than in mainstream media.
Blogging tends to be more like newspaper columns where assume a certain bias and literary style in whom you chode to read.
Sorry, but if you think that newspapers are unbiased, I have a bridge you might like to buy.
Yeah, scp gets about 55MB/sec between Linux systems at work with gigabit LAN.
You've never actually been paid to create a web page, have you? (at least, not in the last five years)
Indeed: just think of all the JS programmers who'd be out of work if the average static web page didn't pull in 500k of JS in order to display 4k of text.
The worst thing about noscript is that for an unkown site you often have to allow JS on it to see what it looks like, so unless you plan on only browsing sites you've already been to and those that don't use javascript, it is completely useless yet its users claim, nay genuinely think they are more secure!
If I go to an unknown site and it doesn't display anything useful without JS then I generally go somewhere else; if the developers are so inept that they can't make their site do something useful without it then the site is probably a heap of steaming monkey poo or a malware distributor.
Back in the real world, it's hard to see how allowing arbitrary JS to run on your system can be considered 'more secure' than only running it from sites you trust. This 'exploit' is nothing to do with insecurity, it's to do with crap programming on a trusted site.
The mere fact that we need such protection goes to show what a heap of steaming monkey poo JS is.
We should be able to use the internet the way it is intended, with javascript.
Wow, I never realised that the Internet was designed as a platform for running Javascript. You learn something new every day here on Slashdot.
My volvo had a scratch on the rear bumper - he never even got *near* paintwork.
We seem to have had the opposite experience with 1980s Volvos; two of them were written off after collisions with a friend's 1970s car and van where his total repair bills were about $500.
Yes. How dare we sacrifice something in order to learn!
While this video is interesting in an abstract kind of way, I can't help but wonder what you think we really 'learn' from it? We know that 1950s cars weren't built with much attention paid to crash safety, and while it does clearly demonstrate that a modern car is much safer than a car of that era, there are so few of those cars still on the road that you can hardly argue that it will even convince drivers to switch from unsafe old cars to much safer new ones.
That said, if they did only pay $200 for it then it was probably a clunker which was not worth repairing; though then you have to wonder whether it was really a good example to use in a crash test (e.g. rotten structural members or whatever).
Well, getting into space despite the problems and then fixing them for the next launch is better than not getting into space at all; but, yes, the important element of the first launch of any rocket is to find the problems and fix them.
NASA, for example, had numerous problems on the early Saturn launches which could have lost the launcher and payload (POGO being the most obvious), but redundancy and some good luck saved those flights.
Why are they going to need good luck? You sound a little pessimistic about their efforts.
The first launch of any new rocket is likely to run into unforseen problems which can cause it to fail, particularly when it's been developed quickly on a low budget. SpaceX have some experience now with the earlier Falcon launches, but the odds of a failure are significant... that's just rocket science for you.
The BBC news is light-years ahead of anything in the USA. It's also politically independent, unlike state-run newspapers in Iran, China and Russia.
This should be +5 Funny, not +5 Insightful.
The BBC is the left-wing propaganda arm of the British state; the only sense in which it's 'politically independent' is that it doesn't drop its left-wing slant even when a right-wing government is in power, though it does tone down a little.
The technology will go into place, be pretty much invisible, and provide enough benefits for legitimate users that no one will cry except for people who aren't connected in any way to Japan.
In what way will this provide _ANY_ benefit to legitimate users? They can already play their music, so they will see no benefit from having to 'phone home' to verify that they can, and will see significant risks of being incorrectly refused the right to play music they've been given or paid for.
Users can only suffer from this nonsense, because they can only be denied the right to do what they've been doing up until now.
I'm amazed that anyone still uses ftp on public networks for anything other than distributing files to anonymous downloaders; it's insanely insecure and there are much better alternatives like sftp and scp.
"The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say"
So when we're all supposed to be scared to death of EVIL GLOBAL WARMING, the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2 with... car engines... running on natural gas which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
First, that's not actually true, at least for Apollo, and, second, the Hubble is actually an argument for manned spaceflight
For the cost of a Hubble servicing mission we could have launched another one to replace it; from what I remember, the people who built Hubble offered to build a second for a small fraction of the price of the first, and if you were building half a dozen on a production line over a decade or so then they'd be pretty cheap.
It's noteworthy that not a single science satellite since Hubble has been designed for in-orbit servicing; it made sense back when NASA were claiming they'd charge $10 million a flight, but it makes no sense now that we've discovered that the real price tag is over a billion a flight.