It seems more likely they had run out of the domestic supply of that particular breed of idiot, and were looking offshore for people with a bare grasp of English and math.
Acceptance of a deviation from these requirements is accession to "vendor control" and a "dead end" for your data and developed software. That's not a small thing. That's a large thing. It might be OK for "most people" because they don't know yet what perils lie ahead. IT professionals have a duty to know, and a duty to guide their charges to good choices despite their ignorance. Whether they know it or not, that's really what they're paying you for.
Right, so you have no actual technical complaints with any of it
Oh, yes, I do. But this is a blog. We're discussing. I'm allowed to object in general terms.
What's wrong with mingw gcc?
Err... It won't compile itself? It won't compile its environment? It's limited to the publicly exposed interfaces of Windows, its drivers and apps, so it has access to about 10% of the real environment? Do I need to go on or is that enough? Really for me that's three strikes and you're out.
As for Visual Studio, God forbid someone actually make money from software.
I fully support paying money for software. I do it a lot. $5k personally and a large multiple professionally in the last year. I'm just not a fan of the crackhead software marketing model, also called teaseware, where your initial purchase gains you nothing useful other than a window into the marketplace where you can buy the various options that let you do useful stuff, like sound or 3d or video. That's just dumb. Google manages to get a lot of useful work done without Visual Studio.
Double reply... That's going to cost me karma points.
If the compiler won't compile itself for a new platform target it doesn't count as a compiler. If it won't compile the operating system, it doesn't count toward the "compiler" requirement for "operating system".
The point of these rules is to orient the minimum requirements toward the ability to develop progress. A facility for "progress" is part of the minimum criteria for "operating system".
An electrical arc or some compressed gas in a pressure container full of liquid water with a nozzle to direct the exhaust can create a remarkable amount of thrust. Personally I'd go with the arc in a carbon composite container - superheated steam has so much more oomph. A real rocket scientist could to better, but WTH? Even I could get off the moon without too much help.
When we get to taking off from Mars we find that Mars not only has abundant water, but the soil even contains rocket fuel. It's almost like a trail of breadcrumbs, really... when get get to Saturn we've got entire moons made of hydrocarbons and the rings are mostly water ice available for scooping up. The Asteroid belt is rich in ferrous minerals and the real bounty in frozen hydrogen and oxygen doesn't really pay until we get to the oort cloud. And that's just the stuff we know about. God knows what unknown wealth lies in Undiscovered Country.
I really don't know why we haven't left already. Out There is where the money is. It's the New World of the 21st century. "I claim this moon in the name of Outer Sphere Corporation, a wholly owned BP subsidiary. God save the Chairman!"
VSE? Yeah, the first hit is free. They'll get you on the comeback and tax you hard when you're sick for a fix. They don't take long to set the hook either.
ActiveState likewise has some distant cousins that play on Windows. Kind of.
None of these things are anything like the real deal. They're kind of like playing WOW in WINE.
That's a pretty vanilla Vista install once you've got standard apps in. 15GB is the minimum recommended space, but you know what that means. Reported install sizes for Ultimate range from 9-12 GB without patches or apps.
The real solution to the disk/Ram problem is to rethink how we use these devices.
Have you seen the specs on the new fusion-io gear? 320GB, enough bandwidth to saturate a PCIe X4 and 220,000 IOPS read and write. IBM recently RAID configured some to get 1M IOPS.
If you've got the cash, there's no longer any reason to be IO bound on the local disk. We don't have to make excuses anymore about how we don't write to local disk anyway. That's good because with cores per box stretching to 32 and doubling in the near future, the excuse was getting pretty thin.
I'm an old school purist. I really don't think it's fair to call an assemblage of software without a compiler an "operating system". "Operating environment" maybe.
If they did you'd probably be warbling on about how a default install takes so much space.
25 gigabytes really is too much. Other choices install from a CD and include not just the fancy graphics, but a baker's dozen of development languages, an office package, a decent image editor, a browser that works with W3 standards and drivers for twice as many devices. Why is that?
There's water on the moon. There's solar power on the moon, easily convertible to electricity. With the two and a couple of pop bottles you could get escape velocity. It's really not that big a deal.
Although a good first step would probably be some sort of LEO recycling facility. Lots of space junk could park and be recycled rather than reenter. Solar powered ion drive scavenger robots should do the job just fine.
And when they call for some informal friendly tech support, we're now free to offer them the help they really need: a disc that can relieve them of the pain of viruses and spyware forever. And if they decline, we're free let them walk the path they've chosen and leave them to their adventure.
Except for Mom, of course. Mom gets the same service as before.
I've tried the W7 beta and though I don't personally prefer their products I do have to deal with them. The product doesn't look bad enough to dismiss out of hand. It might get traction. Is it better than XP? Um, it's different. A lateral move, maybe, in sum. But that might be good enough.
About pricing, we'll see. If anything the company's pricing people have got a good handle on how to fuzz the real cost so that nobody can give a straight answer about it.
I think my Comcast broadband is symmetrical. It usually tests at 15Mbps both up and down these days, even though my connection is shared with 5-7 other heavy Internet users. That's as fast as the flash based tester is rated to test.
I'm ashamed to admit it here in front of my fellow slashdotters but even though the Java based tester gives more reliable results above 15Mbps, I just don't care. The day I need more bandwidth above this it's time for Internet Rehab.
Gordon Moore himself has admitted that his Law was idle speculation projecting an observed general trend, that he's used it to describe various things at various times, and that application to any concrete metric is going to fail. This is not to discount his vision - betting on his company's ability do drive progress at this geometric rate has long been a winning proposition.
And so if you work for his company you had better be looking for ways to fulfill his prophecy. They stay in business by grinding out innovation after invention like clockwork. Tick-tock goes the Intel clock and woe be on their competitors.
It wasn't so long ago businesses were paying $1000 for a 21" CRT monitor. These days you can get a nice 46" widescreen 1080p monitor for that. It makes your spreadsheets and powerpoint look lovely. If you rotate it the Web looks like it's supposed to and your word processing documents are larger than life, which is handy if you're nearsighted. Personally I prefer to use two or three. The PC isn't the only part of the equation.
Of course, carrying all that around with your laptop can be a bit of a drag. You wouldn't believe the stares you get in the airport.
Is it? The only reasons I can think of to buy the AT&T brand name are to adopt the motto "We don't have to care. We're the phone company." and because Cerberus was taken.
False choice
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The presentation of the false choice fallacy is that you must choose option a or option b. As far as I can tell, businesses want not only option a and option b, they also want "the same performance in less watts". And a number of other things.
By presenting the trend as a singular choice the author presents a false choice. What is actually happening is that the computing ecosystem is becoming more diverse. As we select from a richer menu, we are enabled to pursue our goals large and small with equipment that suits the application. It's a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't play.
For the record, protectionism is when a government restricts the inflow of foreign goods and services, or increases specific taxes to prevent same.
It's not protectionism when the people in a country decide among themselves to buy local in their own best interest. That's just good common sense.
It seems more likely they had run out of the domestic supply of that particular breed of idiot, and were looking offshore for people with a bare grasp of English and math.
It should be clear to all the lurking observers who you are now.
Thanks for playing.
You're trying too hard to win this one. That exposes motive.
And you were doing so well.
Acceptance of a deviation from these requirements is accession to "vendor control" and a "dead end" for your data and developed software. That's not a small thing. That's a large thing. It might be OK for "most people" because they don't know yet what perils lie ahead. IT professionals have a duty to know, and a duty to guide their charges to good choices despite their ignorance. Whether they know it or not, that's really what they're paying you for.
Right, so you have no actual technical complaints with any of it
Oh, yes, I do. But this is a blog. We're discussing. I'm allowed to object in general terms.
What's wrong with mingw gcc?
Err... It won't compile itself? It won't compile its environment? It's limited to the publicly exposed interfaces of Windows, its drivers and apps, so it has access to about 10% of the real environment? Do I need to go on or is that enough? Really for me that's three strikes and you're out.
As for Visual Studio, God forbid someone actually make money from software.
I fully support paying money for software. I do it a lot. $5k personally and a large multiple professionally in the last year. I'm just not a fan of the crackhead software marketing model, also called teaseware, where your initial purchase gains you nothing useful other than a window into the marketplace where you can buy the various options that let you do useful stuff, like sound or 3d or video. That's just dumb. Google manages to get a lot of useful work done without Visual Studio.
Double reply... That's going to cost me karma points.
If the compiler won't compile itself for a new platform target it doesn't count as a compiler. If it won't compile the operating system, it doesn't count toward the "compiler" requirement for "operating system".
The point of these rules is to orient the minimum requirements toward the ability to develop progress. A facility for "progress" is part of the minimum criteria for "operating system".
An electrical arc or some compressed gas in a pressure container full of liquid water with a nozzle to direct the exhaust can create a remarkable amount of thrust. Personally I'd go with the arc in a carbon composite container - superheated steam has so much more oomph. A real rocket scientist could to better, but WTH? Even I could get off the moon without too much help.
When we get to taking off from Mars we find that Mars not only has abundant water, but the soil even contains rocket fuel. It's almost like a trail of breadcrumbs, really... when get get to Saturn we've got entire moons made of hydrocarbons and the rings are mostly water ice available for scooping up. The Asteroid belt is rich in ferrous minerals and the real bounty in frozen hydrogen and oxygen doesn't really pay until we get to the oort cloud. And that's just the stuff we know about. God knows what unknown wealth lies in Undiscovered Country.
I really don't know why we haven't left already. Out There is where the money is. It's the New World of the 21st century. "I claim this moon in the name of Outer Sphere Corporation, a wholly owned BP subsidiary. God save the Chairman!"
Mingw gcc is like kissing your sister.
VSE? Yeah, the first hit is free. They'll get you on the comeback and tax you hard when you're sick for a fix. They don't take long to set the hook either.
ActiveState likewise has some distant cousins that play on Windows. Kind of.
None of these things are anything like the real deal. They're kind of like playing WOW in WINE.
But then you knew that.
That's a pretty vanilla Vista install once you've got standard apps in. 15GB is the minimum recommended space, but you know what that means. Reported install sizes for Ultimate range from 9-12 GB without patches or apps.
The real solution to the disk/Ram problem is to rethink how we use these devices.
Have you seen the specs on the new fusion-io gear? 320GB, enough bandwidth to saturate a PCIe X4 and 220,000 IOPS read and write. IBM recently RAID configured some to get 1M IOPS.
If you've got the cash, there's no longer any reason to be IO bound on the local disk. We don't have to make excuses anymore about how we don't write to local disk anyway. That's good because with cores per box stretching to 32 and doubling in the near future, the excuse was getting pretty thin.
Why do you bother to post such junk?
I'm an old school purist. I really don't think it's fair to call an assemblage of software without a compiler an "operating system". "Operating environment" maybe.
If they did you'd probably be warbling on about how a default install takes so much space.
25 gigabytes really is too much. Other choices install from a CD and include not just the fancy graphics, but a baker's dozen of development languages, an office package, a decent image editor, a browser that works with W3 standards and drivers for twice as many devices. Why is that?
There's water on the moon. There's solar power on the moon, easily convertible to electricity. With the two and a couple of pop bottles you could get escape velocity. It's really not that big a deal.
Although a good first step would probably be some sort of LEO recycling facility. Lots of space junk could park and be recycled rather than reenter. Solar powered ion drive scavenger robots should do the job just fine.
I read the pdf too. If you put a man in that magnetic field you're going to impact the iron in his blood.
It also doesn't come with a compiler, perl, python, or any other real programming environment.
When we talk about how crippled the thing is, let's not forget the basics.
They are free to choose.
And when they call for some informal friendly tech support, we're now free to offer them the help they really need: a disc that can relieve them of the pain of viruses and spyware forever. And if they decline, we're free let them walk the path they've chosen and leave them to their adventure.
Except for Mom, of course. Mom gets the same service as before.
I've tried the W7 beta and though I don't personally prefer their products I do have to deal with them. The product doesn't look bad enough to dismiss out of hand. It might get traction. Is it better than XP? Um, it's different. A lateral move, maybe, in sum. But that might be good enough.
About pricing, we'll see. If anything the company's pricing people have got a good handle on how to fuzz the real cost so that nobody can give a straight answer about it.
The link was well worth the read. Thanks.
Yeah, that makes total sense..
Yes. Yes it does.
As you note, the perception in the marketplace is that "Vista sucks."
Microsoft marketing can leverage this by focusing their effort on Microsoft Internal and messaging key topics such as:
This should help the marketing department achieve its goals.
I think my Comcast broadband is symmetrical. It usually tests at 15Mbps both up and down these days, even though my connection is shared with 5-7 other heavy Internet users. That's as fast as the flash based tester is rated to test.
I'm ashamed to admit it here in front of my fellow slashdotters but even though the Java based tester gives more reliable results above 15Mbps, I just don't care. The day I need more bandwidth above this it's time for Internet Rehab.
Gordon Moore himself has admitted that his Law was idle speculation projecting an observed general trend, that he's used it to describe various things at various times, and that application to any concrete metric is going to fail. This is not to discount his vision - betting on his company's ability do drive progress at this geometric rate has long been a winning proposition.
And so if you work for his company you had better be looking for ways to fulfill his prophecy. They stay in business by grinding out innovation after invention like clockwork. Tick-tock goes the Intel clock and woe be on their competitors.
Cost is very important particularly in business,
It wasn't so long ago businesses were paying $1000 for a 21" CRT monitor. These days you can get a nice 46" widescreen 1080p monitor for that. It makes your spreadsheets and powerpoint look lovely. If you rotate it the Web looks like it's supposed to and your word processing documents are larger than life, which is handy if you're nearsighted. Personally I prefer to use two or three. The PC isn't the only part of the equation.
Of course, carrying all that around with your laptop can be a bit of a drag. You wouldn't believe the stares you get in the airport.
Remember, the old AT&T is loooong gone.
Is it? The only reasons I can think of to buy the AT&T brand name are to adopt the motto "We don't have to care. We're the phone company." and because Cerberus was taken.
The presentation of the false choice fallacy is that you must choose option a or option b. As far as I can tell, businesses want not only option a and option b, they also want "the same performance in less watts". And a number of other things.
By presenting the trend as a singular choice the author presents a false choice. What is actually happening is that the computing ecosystem is becoming more diverse. As we select from a richer menu, we are enabled to pursue our goals large and small with equipment that suits the application. It's a good thing.