I'm not GP, but not long. I don't tend to leave tons of apps open anyway, as the time to launch any one app is never really more than around two seconds.
An ad proves that the product is not exactly flying off the shelves.
And yet, we see ads for Coke and Pepsi all the time.
An ad just proves that they believe an ad will sell more of that product. Some advertising could be considered beneficial -- for instance, a brand-new product with no brand awareness, or even consumer awareness that such a thing exists, could use a bit of advertising.
What bothers me isn't so much that they are advertising, although some of those ads really are insulting to my intelligence. What bothers me is when I find I'm watching more ad than show -- when it's actually getting in the way of me doing what I want to do.
When was the last time you saw an ad for low fat milk or sliced bread?
Can't remember any specific Wonderbread ads, but I do remember "Got Milk?"
you need to justify the development change itself (and the work involved), the QA, and support for both it, and all the stuff it breaks.
I'm including that under "not very hard". How much QA would you need? How much support -- and why not call it an unsupported feature? Is there really that much chance it would break anything, especially if left off by default?
Where's the payoff for that in making a group of people happy who would almost certainly never be your customers in the first place ?
That assumes you're right about "anal-retentive Unix nerds", which I'm disputing.
So your argument amounts to, it would be really easy, but they can't do it because they're a large company, which means any feature must serve a purpose, and costs quite a bit more than it should due to large amounts of Process involved (QA, etc).
And yet, they approve things like Clippy. And Windows ME. And, for that matter, various little utilities like the CD Player, or Sound Recorder. Where's the payoff for these? Surely they must require much more effort than disabling something!
Re:Not right in soooo many ways
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Why TV Lost
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· Score: 1
It does not have to boot for a minute or two.
Mine boots in 20 seconds, and I tend to leave it on all day.
It does not wait fifteen seconds for a show to load.
On fiber, I don't -- shows load instantly.
More importantly, I choose what's next. Or, if I want better quality, I can start up a torrent -- it'll be ready in an hour. Or I download for a few days, maybe a week, and I have a month's worth of a show, on my hard drive, ready to watch whenever I want.
our home computers will gain HDTV tuners.
But why bother?
Let me put it another way: I can get a fiber plan that includes both Internet and TV. Separate cables within the house, I believe, but both connect to the same fiber line in the basement. I could always run the HDMI cable from the TV set-top box to my monitor.
But why would I bother? I've already got several hundred hours of movies and TV which I can load with a single command, and I can download more, likely at a higher quality (and without all the ads) over my Internet connection, pretty much whenever I want.
Re:One word - ads
on
Why TV Lost
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If it comes down to a choice between having to shell out real money for entertainment (or more money, in case of certain entertainment types) and viewing ads, I'll take viewing a few ads every time.
Well, the main problem is, you still get the ads even when you are shelling out real money -- as in, satellite, cable, etc. And I'm not talking about commercial breaks -- those I can stand, within reason, although I do appreciate being able to fast-forward through them sometimes.
No, it's two things that bug me: They're the same ads every time, so even one worth watching is boring by the time the show's over and I've seen it five or ten times. And they're now to the point where ads actually slide onto the bottom quarter or third of the screen, with audio, basically trashing the show -- and of course, with no reduction in the number of ads shown during commercial breaks.
It's not much better online -- Hulu not only has an ad every 15 minutes, but an ad every seek. No, really -- you can't easily fastforward through the show to find where you left off, because every time you seek, they'll cut to a 15 second ad.
I don't mind ads -- sometimes they're even informative, and sometimes I do end up buying a product that way. However, when I see an ad actually preventing me from enjoying the real content I wanted to consume, I make a mental note not to buy that product.
I mean, hell, I like the idea of Hulu. I would love to watch old shows like Firefly online, on demand, streamed, yet in a way that compensates the original creators. But they've managed to perfectly replicate the amount of ads that ruined TV for me, so fuck 'em, I'll get it off The Pirate Bay.
On games that don't turn off aero I can use the secondary monitor to surf the web, and if that's impossible (some apps stop the mouse from going to the second monitor) alt+tab is much quicker.
Ah, I see.
On Windows, it actually bugs the hell out of me that games both insist on running on my "primary" monitor (the one with the taskbar, which ever it happens to be), and won't turn off the other one -- which is why I have a black desktop background on it. I see your point for games like MMOs, that I'd be playing a lot, and might want to have a guide or an IM window open -- but for single-player games like a Half-Life episode, I'd much rather not have the distraction.
On Linux, I tend to keep my MMOs in a window, for just the reason you're describing, and because one monitor is 1920x1200, and the other is 1920x1080, and the MMO will run quite happily with far less space.
Windows can't boot wihout a video card?
Right. It has to have one, be it onboard, an actual card in a slot, external, whatever.
Contrast to the various Unices -- Linux can use a serial terminal instead, and I believe it's possible to have no output at all, other than being able to SSH in.
Believe it or not, people actually try to justify this. The main justification seems to be "it's not a big deal", which I can buy -- GUIs are no longer a proportionately large drain on resources (unless you're running Aero on that server), and most motherboards already have onboard video, which adds maybe a few pennies to the cost due to economies of scale.
However, it still seems moronic that I don't have the choice -- how difficult can it be to simply disable the graphical subsystem? Doesn't it kind of show that Windows was never meant to be a server OS?
The other justification is much weaker -- trying to describe more modern systems of hooking systems together to be monitored and managed. Well, guess what? Serial ports still work just as well, and are generally easier to plug into another machine for remote management or scripting -- and a properly working box and SSH works even better. A well-designed network would include enough redundancy that when a box goes down, you simply let others take over, replace it with a brand-new box, then physically repair the old one at your leisure, during which time I still can't imagine a video card would be incredibly useful, or incredibly difficult to add on the fly.
Sorry about that... I had to rant. Every now and then, someone comes up with yet another idea that will save Linux, or bring us closer to the Year of the Linux Desktop, in the form of something stupid like "Let's ditch X and put all the graphical stuff in the kernel!"
Hopefully in future versions of Windows it will be impossible to turn off WDDM.
Ok, I know you meant Aero...
Why would you want that?
I'm using KDE4, and I love the ability to flip off the compositing on a whim. Maybe my video card just sucks, but I do notice that it makes fullscreen video and games smoother. I do sometimes find myself wishing that fullscreen games would automatically disable it, so I didn't have to remember to flip that switch myself -- although it is, literally, a toggle switch as a widget on my desktop.
It seems to me kind of like being glad Windows can't boot without a video card. Why would I want a video card in a headless machine?
Mercurial stores the full project history on disk, so it may be a bit expensive.
I can't speak for Mercurial, but SVN is just downright shameful, and Git is the proof.
A typical Git checkout is actually smaller than a typical SVN checkout, even considering the Git checkout has the project's entire version history. This is on the same project, by the way, ported with git-svn.
It's not hard to imagine that Mercurial might work the same way.
mercurial also operates in fashion where it only appends to repo files (?)
Again, I don't know much about Mercurial. My experience with Git has been that it only appends to files, or creates new ones, during normal operation. It does, however, have several repacking commands, my personal favorite being 'git gc', which repacks the entire repository -- though I suspect rewriting the entire file is still going to be better than random writes inside a file.
Most people here would rather wait the extra 6seconds and use it to chink all that saved cash in their pocket!
Fair enough, but keep in mind, three seconds versus nine seconds is a threefold increase.
So, that six seconds may not matter, because OpenOffice isn't as bloated as it used to be. But it does mean that in general, launching applications is CPU-bound, rather than disk-bound, and I never have to wait more than five seconds for an app to start -- usually it's under a second.
Honestly, the sensible solution is probably buying more RAM. Until the price comes down, this is really more of a luxury item. Even so, the part that I really don't miss is having the hard drive fail -- I seem to be particularly rough on laptop hard drives.
And I actually feel fine about the money I spent on it -- at the time, I was making more money than I could spend. Now that I'm unemployed, there's a bit of regret, but it's irrelevant -- I need a laptop anyway, so I'm not selling this one, and wishing I hadn't spent the money won't get it back.
Just got one in a Dell laptop, came with Ubuntu. A subjective overview:
I have no idea how well it performs with swap. I'm not even really sure why I have swap -- I don't have quite enough to suspend properly, but I also never seem to run out of my 4 gigs of RAM.
It's true, the write speed is slower. However, I also frequently transfer files over gigabit, and the bottleneck is not my SSD, it's this cheap Netgear switch, or possibly SSH -- I get about 30 megabytes per second either way.
So, is there gigabit between you and the SVN server? If so, you might run into speed issues. Maybe. Probably not.
Also worth mentioning: Pick a good filesystem if a lot of small files equals a lot of writes for you. A good example of this would be ReiserFS' tail packing -- make whatever "killer FS" jokes you like, it really isn't a bad filesystem. But any decent filesystem should at least be trying to pack writes together, and I only expect the situation to improve as filesystems are tuned with SSDs in mind.
It also boots noticeably faster than my last machine. This one is 2.5 ghz with 4 gigs of RAM; last one was 2.4 ghz with 2 gigs, so not much of a difference there. It becomes more obvious with actual use, like launching Firefox -- it's honestly hard to tell whether or not I've launched it before (and thus, it's already cached in my massive RAM) -- it's just as fast from a cold boot. The same is true of most things -- for another test, I just launched OpenOffice.org for the first time this boot, and it took about three seconds.
It's possible I've been out of the loop, and OO.o really has improved that much since I last used it, but that does look impressive to me.
Probably the biggest advantage is durability -- no moving parts to be jostled -- and silence. To see that in action, just pick out a passively-cooled netbook -- the thing makes absolutely no discernible noise once it's on, other than out of the speakers.
All around, I don't see much of a disadvantage. However, it may not be as much of an advantage as you expect. Quite a lot of things will now be CPU-bound, and there are even the annoying bits which seem to be wallclock-bound.
I got the same exact Priceline ad on both the page immediately linked to, and on the "how it works" page. Both were in the video, and thanks to Flash controls, utterly un-skippable or seekable.
Wrong. Linux is successful because it was there, at the right place, at the right time. HURD was decades from usability, though it still looked like it might be just around the corner. BSD was, according to another poster, involved in some sort of lawsuit with AT&T. Minix was simply copyrighted, with no right to redistribute.
So your choice was, pretty much: Buy an 8086 and a copy of Minix, and then download a bunch of patches, install the Minix source code, apply the patches, recompile, and reinstall, and still not have quite the feature set Linux did, but don't you dare distribute your changes as anything other than a patch...
Or save your money and buy a much faster 386, get a copy of Linux for free, and go play.
Or go use DOS.
As for the GPL vs BSD, I can tell you from experience that even the smallest of companies isn't going to be "caught" by the GPL and "forced" into anything. In fact, just the opposite -- we were using extjs, which was under a more liberal license. It was then switched to GPL -- and worse, the author tried to claim that the GPL also applied to the server it was connecting to.
So our choice was to either at least GPL all our JavaScript, or buy a license. Or the third option: Say "fuck extjs" and switch to jQuery. It was painful, but in the end, we have something where we know the rug won't be pulled out from under us.
And while I haven't contributed a lot back to jQuery, I have sent patches back to projects like Capistrano, Ruby on Rails, Castronaut, and other little libraries and tools. What you'll notice is, none of these are GPL -- they're almost universally MIT-licensed. In fact, given a GPL version and an MIT version, I'll usually try the MIT version first.
Which means GPL is actually a disadvantage, if you're looking for commercial support. Yes, I could keep all my improvements to myself. But if I avoid your software altogether because it's GPL'd, I may as well have -- you get exactly zero code back either way. If your software is MIT'd, maybe I keep some of my improvements to myself -- but it makes much more sense for me to send some back -- after all, it's really not cost-effective for me to be maintaining Capistrano at this point.
And keep in mind -- this is mostly stuff that I'm being paid to do. If I'm just playing around in my spare time, or if it's a completely, physically separate project (Capistrano might be a good example) that never links against code we really care about, I have no problem using and contributing to GPL'd code.
But when I'm writing a brand-new program, I like to have the option to license it however I want, from public domain to a corporate EULA. The LGPL mostly allows that, the GPL doesn't allow it at all.
The closest thing to Linux file permissions, of the kind you might be able to boot Linux off of, was umsdos, which is probably what you're thinking of. I think that's actually incompatible with vfat, and runs directly on fat itself.
You also have to encode, wirelessly transmit and wirelessly power the whole system.
Yeah, I noticed the wirelessness in the video. (And a 30-second ad followed by a 36 second video -- really, BBC?)
My first thought was to tag the story whatcouldgowrong -- why does it need to be wireless? How do you prevent someone from jamming it, or wirelessly broadcasting horse porn directly into your eyeball?
(Yes, I know we can do this already using the visual spectrum. The difference is, doing it that way, at least you can turn away, tear it down, or find whoever's doing it and hurt them, badly. This way, I could have something in my pocket broadcast lemonparty to your eyes on the subway, and you'd never know it was me.)
I mean, nothing against it if they're using strong crypto -- but even there, what happens if that crypto is broken within your lifetime? How do you update it, short of surgery?
Of course, on the plus side, if you solve these problems, you can then broadcast whatever you want directly into your eyes, whenever you want -- forget clumsy VR goggles or "wearable" computers, just hook your eye up to your iPhone and go.
It's not controlled by me. It is an international corporation with IT decisions being made well above my head.
Fair enough. But that doesn't make Silverlight a good solution, it makes it the solution that's forced on you -- which is a bit like arguing in favor of Access and Visual Basic.
Forcing IE5.5 upgrades on an individual basis is something I can push through. But getting the install images changed from IE6 is still out of my reach.
And yet, Silverlight and.NET are on the install images?
Moronic decisions are not less moronic because they're made by management.
we'll still be stuck with the same crappy non-vector based flow layout,
Except in browsers which support things like canvas. There was an impressive demo involving rotating a video, which was playing in a video tag.
the dependency on CSS, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX, and server side code...
That is true. But again, you're not going to get away from dependencies on multiple external DSLs.
And no one will nail the standard 100%, let alone everyone nailing it 100%, we will still have to account for variations in specific cases on a browser by browser basis.
Is this something you don't have to do with Silverlight/Moonlight?
That is: Can you do something in Silverlight and just assume it will work on Moonlight, and vice versa?
Other comments here suggest this is not the case at all, but I could be wrong...
Not saying they wont, but right now there is no incentive for them to do so,
Key words there being right now -- indeed, right now, they would very much benefit from appearing open and friendly, as it gives them an edge over Flash.
But, how much do you know about that agreement with IBM? How would the situation change if Silverlight did gain significant market share?
And for that matter, how is trusting IBM any better than trusting Microsoft? Doesn't this mean they could both sign another agreement, then turn and kill Moonlight?
None of this changes the fact that, thanks to the US patent system, it's going to be another 15 or 20 years until we can assume that the Silverlight of today is patent-free, and I don't expect Silverlight to stand still, in the mean time. I don't think any of the open standards carry anywhere near as much risk in that regard -- no one's going to suddenly bust out a patent of HTML.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not GP, but not long. I don't tend to leave tons of apps open anyway, as the time to launch any one app is never really more than around two seconds.
Hibernate uses exactly as much power as "off".
Internal laptop monitor? No, not really.
I suppose the CRT/LCD button might work...
It does not have to boot for a minute or two.
That's because it's "always-on" - how do you think it's able to respond to the remote to "turn on"?
Um, you want to reply to Anna Merkin, not me. I was talking about my laptop -- it takes 20 seconds.
I don't own a TV. I do own a monitor with an HDMI cable, which is pretty much always connected to my laptop.
A computer that takes two minutes to boot sounds like a computer that needs maintenance, badly.
An ad proves that the product is not exactly flying off the shelves.
And yet, we see ads for Coke and Pepsi all the time.
An ad just proves that they believe an ad will sell more of that product. Some advertising could be considered beneficial -- for instance, a brand-new product with no brand awareness, or even consumer awareness that such a thing exists, could use a bit of advertising.
What bothers me isn't so much that they are advertising, although some of those ads really are insulting to my intelligence. What bothers me is when I find I'm watching more ad than show -- when it's actually getting in the way of me doing what I want to do.
When was the last time you saw an ad for low fat milk or sliced bread?
Can't remember any specific Wonderbread ads, but I do remember "Got Milk?"
you need to justify the development change itself (and the work involved), the QA, and support for both it, and all the stuff it breaks.
I'm including that under "not very hard". How much QA would you need? How much support -- and why not call it an unsupported feature? Is there really that much chance it would break anything, especially if left off by default?
Where's the payoff for that in making a group of people happy who would almost certainly never be your customers in the first place ?
That assumes you're right about "anal-retentive Unix nerds", which I'm disputing.
So your argument amounts to, it would be really easy, but they can't do it because they're a large company, which means any feature must serve a purpose, and costs quite a bit more than it should due to large amounts of Process involved (QA, etc).
And yet, they approve things like Clippy. And Windows ME. And, for that matter, various little utilities like the CD Player, or Sound Recorder. Where's the payoff for these? Surely they must require much more effort than disabling something!
It does not have to boot for a minute or two.
Mine boots in 20 seconds, and I tend to leave it on all day.
It does not wait fifteen seconds for a show to load.
On fiber, I don't -- shows load instantly.
More importantly, I choose what's next. Or, if I want better quality, I can start up a torrent -- it'll be ready in an hour. Or I download for a few days, maybe a week, and I have a month's worth of a show, on my hard drive, ready to watch whenever I want.
our home computers will gain HDTV tuners.
But why bother?
Let me put it another way: I can get a fiber plan that includes both Internet and TV. Separate cables within the house, I believe, but both connect to the same fiber line in the basement. I could always run the HDMI cable from the TV set-top box to my monitor.
But why would I bother? I've already got several hundred hours of movies and TV which I can load with a single command, and I can download more, likely at a higher quality (and without all the ads) over my Internet connection, pretty much whenever I want.
If it comes down to a choice between having to shell out real money for entertainment (or more money, in case of certain entertainment types) and viewing ads, I'll take viewing a few ads every time.
Well, the main problem is, you still get the ads even when you are shelling out real money -- as in, satellite, cable, etc. And I'm not talking about commercial breaks -- those I can stand, within reason, although I do appreciate being able to fast-forward through them sometimes.
No, it's two things that bug me: They're the same ads every time, so even one worth watching is boring by the time the show's over and I've seen it five or ten times. And they're now to the point where ads actually slide onto the bottom quarter or third of the screen, with audio, basically trashing the show -- and of course, with no reduction in the number of ads shown during commercial breaks.
It's not much better online -- Hulu not only has an ad every 15 minutes, but an ad every seek. No, really -- you can't easily fastforward through the show to find where you left off, because every time you seek, they'll cut to a 15 second ad.
I don't mind ads -- sometimes they're even informative, and sometimes I do end up buying a product that way. However, when I see an ad actually preventing me from enjoying the real content I wanted to consume, I make a mental note not to buy that product.
I mean, hell, I like the idea of Hulu. I would love to watch old shows like Firefly online, on demand, streamed, yet in a way that compensates the original creators. But they've managed to perfectly replicate the amount of ads that ruined TV for me, so fuck 'em, I'll get it off The Pirate Bay.
I presume by "justify" you mean "look at me funny and say 'why the hell do you care'" ?
That's part of it, yes. You'd know the other part if you bothered to read the rest of my post.
Nobody except OCD, anal-retentive UNIX nerds
And embedded system designers. Not all of them are iPhones.
None of the "graphical stuff" in Windows is in the kernel.
No, I didn't say it was. However, I still don't know a way of running a desktop or server Windows OS without a video card.
Again: Why would this be at all difficult?
On games that don't turn off aero I can use the secondary monitor to surf the web, and if that's impossible (some apps stop the mouse from going to the second monitor) alt+tab is much quicker.
Ah, I see.
On Windows, it actually bugs the hell out of me that games both insist on running on my "primary" monitor (the one with the taskbar, which ever it happens to be), and won't turn off the other one -- which is why I have a black desktop background on it. I see your point for games like MMOs, that I'd be playing a lot, and might want to have a guide or an IM window open -- but for single-player games like a Half-Life episode, I'd much rather not have the distraction.
On Linux, I tend to keep my MMOs in a window, for just the reason you're describing, and because one monitor is 1920x1200, and the other is 1920x1080, and the MMO will run quite happily with far less space.
Windows can't boot wihout a video card?
Right. It has to have one, be it onboard, an actual card in a slot, external, whatever.
Contrast to the various Unices -- Linux can use a serial terminal instead, and I believe it's possible to have no output at all, other than being able to SSH in.
Believe it or not, people actually try to justify this. The main justification seems to be "it's not a big deal", which I can buy -- GUIs are no longer a proportionately large drain on resources (unless you're running Aero on that server), and most motherboards already have onboard video, which adds maybe a few pennies to the cost due to economies of scale.
However, it still seems moronic that I don't have the choice -- how difficult can it be to simply disable the graphical subsystem? Doesn't it kind of show that Windows was never meant to be a server OS?
The other justification is much weaker -- trying to describe more modern systems of hooking systems together to be monitored and managed. Well, guess what? Serial ports still work just as well, and are generally easier to plug into another machine for remote management or scripting -- and a properly working box and SSH works even better. A well-designed network would include enough redundancy that when a box goes down, you simply let others take over, replace it with a brand-new box, then physically repair the old one at your leisure, during which time I still can't imagine a video card would be incredibly useful, or incredibly difficult to add on the fly.
Sorry about that... I had to rant. Every now and then, someone comes up with yet another idea that will save Linux, or bring us closer to the Year of the Linux Desktop, in the form of something stupid like "Let's ditch X and put all the graphical stuff in the kernel!"
Hopefully in future versions of Windows it will be impossible to turn off WDDM.
Ok, I know you meant Aero...
Why would you want that?
I'm using KDE4, and I love the ability to flip off the compositing on a whim. Maybe my video card just sucks, but I do notice that it makes fullscreen video and games smoother. I do sometimes find myself wishing that fullscreen games would automatically disable it, so I didn't have to remember to flip that switch myself -- although it is, literally, a toggle switch as a widget on my desktop.
It seems to me kind of like being glad Windows can't boot without a video card. Why would I want a video card in a headless machine?
Mercurial stores the full project history on disk, so it may be a bit expensive.
I can't speak for Mercurial, but SVN is just downright shameful, and Git is the proof.
A typical Git checkout is actually smaller than a typical SVN checkout, even considering the Git checkout has the project's entire version history. This is on the same project, by the way, ported with git-svn.
It's not hard to imagine that Mercurial might work the same way.
mercurial also operates in fashion where it only appends to repo files (?)
Again, I don't know much about Mercurial. My experience with Git has been that it only appends to files, or creates new ones, during normal operation. It does, however, have several repacking commands, my personal favorite being 'git gc', which repacks the entire repository -- though I suspect rewriting the entire file is still going to be better than random writes inside a file.
Most people here would rather wait the extra 6seconds and use it to chink all that saved cash in their pocket!
Fair enough, but keep in mind, three seconds versus nine seconds is a threefold increase.
So, that six seconds may not matter, because OpenOffice isn't as bloated as it used to be. But it does mean that in general, launching applications is CPU-bound, rather than disk-bound, and I never have to wait more than five seconds for an app to start -- usually it's under a second.
Honestly, the sensible solution is probably buying more RAM. Until the price comes down, this is really more of a luxury item. Even so, the part that I really don't miss is having the hard drive fail -- I seem to be particularly rough on laptop hard drives.
And I actually feel fine about the money I spent on it -- at the time, I was making more money than I could spend. Now that I'm unemployed, there's a bit of regret, but it's irrelevant -- I need a laptop anyway, so I'm not selling this one, and wishing I hadn't spent the money won't get it back.
I'd have said Git, but yes, that's very true.
Unfortunately, the best solution may be something like git-svn, depending on whether management will budge.
This is a Core 2 Duo, last one was an Athlon 64 x2. I ran both 64-bit.
The RAM is slower on this machine, too.
Just got one in a Dell laptop, came with Ubuntu. A subjective overview:
I have no idea how well it performs with swap. I'm not even really sure why I have swap -- I don't have quite enough to suspend properly, but I also never seem to run out of my 4 gigs of RAM.
It's true, the write speed is slower. However, I also frequently transfer files over gigabit, and the bottleneck is not my SSD, it's this cheap Netgear switch, or possibly SSH -- I get about 30 megabytes per second either way.
So, is there gigabit between you and the SVN server? If so, you might run into speed issues. Maybe. Probably not.
Also worth mentioning: Pick a good filesystem if a lot of small files equals a lot of writes for you. A good example of this would be ReiserFS' tail packing -- make whatever "killer FS" jokes you like, it really isn't a bad filesystem. But any decent filesystem should at least be trying to pack writes together, and I only expect the situation to improve as filesystems are tuned with SSDs in mind.
It also boots noticeably faster than my last machine. This one is 2.5 ghz with 4 gigs of RAM; last one was 2.4 ghz with 2 gigs, so not much of a difference there. It becomes more obvious with actual use, like launching Firefox -- it's honestly hard to tell whether or not I've launched it before (and thus, it's already cached in my massive RAM) -- it's just as fast from a cold boot. The same is true of most things -- for another test, I just launched OpenOffice.org for the first time this boot, and it took about three seconds.
It's possible I've been out of the loop, and OO.o really has improved that much since I last used it, but that does look impressive to me.
Probably the biggest advantage is durability -- no moving parts to be jostled -- and silence. To see that in action, just pick out a passively-cooled netbook -- the thing makes absolutely no discernible noise once it's on, other than out of the speakers.
All around, I don't see much of a disadvantage. However, it may not be as much of an advantage as you expect. Quite a lot of things will now be CPU-bound, and there are even the annoying bits which seem to be wallclock-bound.
That is true.
However, forking is quite a lot more work than migrating our own code to something else, and still letting the rest of the world maintain it.
Not that we never forked anything, these were just usually tiny Github projects, always with the intention that they'd be merged eventually.
I got the same exact Priceline ad on both the page immediately linked to, and on the "how it works" page. Both were in the video, and thanks to Flash controls, utterly un-skippable or seekable.
Wrong. Linux is successful because it was there, at the right place, at the right time. HURD was decades from usability, though it still looked like it might be just around the corner. BSD was, according to another poster, involved in some sort of lawsuit with AT&T. Minix was simply copyrighted, with no right to redistribute.
So your choice was, pretty much: Buy an 8086 and a copy of Minix, and then download a bunch of patches, install the Minix source code, apply the patches, recompile, and reinstall, and still not have quite the feature set Linux did, but don't you dare distribute your changes as anything other than a patch...
Or save your money and buy a much faster 386, get a copy of Linux for free, and go play.
Or go use DOS.
As for the GPL vs BSD, I can tell you from experience that even the smallest of companies isn't going to be "caught" by the GPL and "forced" into anything. In fact, just the opposite -- we were using extjs, which was under a more liberal license. It was then switched to GPL -- and worse, the author tried to claim that the GPL also applied to the server it was connecting to.
So our choice was to either at least GPL all our JavaScript, or buy a license. Or the third option: Say "fuck extjs" and switch to jQuery. It was painful, but in the end, we have something where we know the rug won't be pulled out from under us.
And while I haven't contributed a lot back to jQuery, I have sent patches back to projects like Capistrano, Ruby on Rails, Castronaut, and other little libraries and tools. What you'll notice is, none of these are GPL -- they're almost universally MIT-licensed. In fact, given a GPL version and an MIT version, I'll usually try the MIT version first.
Which means GPL is actually a disadvantage, if you're looking for commercial support. Yes, I could keep all my improvements to myself. But if I avoid your software altogether because it's GPL'd, I may as well have -- you get exactly zero code back either way. If your software is MIT'd, maybe I keep some of my improvements to myself -- but it makes much more sense for me to send some back -- after all, it's really not cost-effective for me to be maintaining Capistrano at this point.
And keep in mind -- this is mostly stuff that I'm being paid to do. If I'm just playing around in my spare time, or if it's a completely, physically separate project (Capistrano might be a good example) that never links against code we really care about, I have no problem using and contributing to GPL'd code.
But when I'm writing a brand-new program, I like to have the option to license it however I want, from public domain to a corporate EULA. The LGPL mostly allows that, the GPL doesn't allow it at all.
I don't see UDF mentioned on any of the three linked-to articles. Which are you talking about?
The closest thing to Linux file permissions, of the kind you might be able to boot Linux off of, was umsdos, which is probably what you're thinking of. I think that's actually incompatible with vfat, and runs directly on fat itself.
How do you prevent someone from jamming it, or wirelessly broadcasting horse porn directly into your eyeball?
That isn't on your wish list of things to happen before you die?
No, if I'm going to be skullfucked, metaphorically or literally, I'd rather it happens after I'm dead.
And being able to replace body parts with technology is a step in that direction.
You also have to encode, wirelessly transmit and wirelessly power the whole system.
Yeah, I noticed the wirelessness in the video. (And a 30-second ad followed by a 36 second video -- really, BBC?)
My first thought was to tag the story whatcouldgowrong -- why does it need to be wireless? How do you prevent someone from jamming it, or wirelessly broadcasting horse porn directly into your eyeball?
(Yes, I know we can do this already using the visual spectrum. The difference is, doing it that way, at least you can turn away, tear it down, or find whoever's doing it and hurt them, badly. This way, I could have something in my pocket broadcast lemonparty to your eyes on the subway, and you'd never know it was me.)
I mean, nothing against it if they're using strong crypto -- but even there, what happens if that crypto is broken within your lifetime? How do you update it, short of surgery?
Of course, on the plus side, if you solve these problems, you can then broadcast whatever you want directly into your eyes, whenever you want -- forget clumsy VR goggles or "wearable" computers, just hook your eye up to your iPhone and go.
It's not controlled by me. It is an international corporation with IT decisions being made well above my head.
Fair enough. But that doesn't make Silverlight a good solution, it makes it the solution that's forced on you -- which is a bit like arguing in favor of Access and Visual Basic.
Forcing IE5.5 upgrades on an individual basis is something I can push through. But getting the install images changed from IE6 is still out of my reach.
And yet, Silverlight and .NET are on the install images?
Moronic decisions are not less moronic because they're made by management.
we'll still be stuck with the same crappy non-vector based flow layout,
Except in browsers which support things like canvas. There was an impressive demo involving rotating a video, which was playing in a video tag.
the dependency on CSS, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX, and server side code...
That is true. But again, you're not going to get away from dependencies on multiple external DSLs.
And no one will nail the standard 100%, let alone everyone nailing it 100%, we will still have to account for variations in specific cases on a browser by browser basis.
Is this something you don't have to do with Silverlight/Moonlight?
That is: Can you do something in Silverlight and just assume it will work on Moonlight, and vice versa?
Other comments here suggest this is not the case at all, but I could be wrong...
Not saying they wont, but right now there is no incentive for them to do so,
Key words there being right now -- indeed, right now, they would very much benefit from appearing open and friendly, as it gives them an edge over Flash.
But, how much do you know about that agreement with IBM? How would the situation change if Silverlight did gain significant market share?
And for that matter, how is trusting IBM any better than trusting Microsoft? Doesn't this mean they could both sign another agreement, then turn and kill Moonlight?
None of this changes the fact that, thanks to the US patent system, it's going to be another 15 or 20 years until we can assume that the Silverlight of today is patent-free, and I don't expect Silverlight to stand still, in the mean time. I don't think any of the open standards carry anywhere near as much risk in that regard -- no one's going to suddenly bust out a patent of HTML.