I'm supposed to read your full post, but I'm not supposed to take the company as a whole?
I do still think that is a morally objectionable thing to do, and it is absolutely enough to make me hate the company. And I absolutely do hope that the entire company suffers, working peons included. The working peons will move on to other things, and Sony management will either let the company die, or will finally figure out that this kind of bullshit should not be allowed to happen, EVER.
Yes, I realize it's not that simple -- I know all of the ways in which it might have gone wrong, the biggest one being lack of communication. These are not excuses, you admitted that yourself.
Ironically, the main advantage of dual-core has nothing to do with applications taking advantage of that second core -- in fact, just the opposite.
Dual-core means that for most cases, I can run a video encode, a backup/compression process, a long-ish compilation (of the sort that doesn't like 'make -j2'), etc -- not so much all at once, as I can fire off any background process and not worry about it, as I have a whole other core to use. It's shameful -- Amarok will occasionally use 100% of one core, and I won't notice for hours.
Having more than two cores wouldn't benefit me a lot right now. I wouldn't mind it, certainly -- I've been playing a bit with things like Erlang, which should be able to scale arbitrarily -- but I think the real applications are only just catching on to the idea that threading is a good thing. I imagine it's still going to be a lot longer till a quad-core machine is useful for anything other than, say, running virtual machines, as most programming languages do not make threading easy. (Locks and semaphores are almost as bad as manual memory management.)
While I'm playing crystal ball, I'll predict that the first application of multicore will be things which were already running on multiple machines in the first place -- video rendering, for instance. Not encoding, rendering.
The second application for it will be gaming. This will take longer, and will only be the larger, higher-quality engines, who will simply throw manpower at the problem of squeezing the most out of whatever hardware is available.
I suspect that the old pattern will be very much in effect, though -- wherein gamers will buy a three-core system and unlock the fourth one (if possible), then use maybe one core, probably half of one, with the video card still being the most important purchase. If there's a perceptible improvement, it'll be because their spyware, IM, torrents, leftover Firefox with 20 MySpace pages and flash ads, etc, won't be able to quite fill the other three cores.
I'd like to add that for most people, including me, one core is plenty if you know how to manage your processes properly -- set priorities, kill Amarok when it gets stuck in that infinite loop, and get off my lawn!
Yes they did have the rootkit scandal that was not right at all.... I just find it hard to hate a company unless what they do is morally objectionable.
You don't consider forceably installing a rootkit on your customer's computers, possibly corrupting their OS and opening up some security holes, to be morally objectionable?
What, you can only start hating them once they actually eat babies?
HD-DVDs commonly came dual-layer, at 30 gigs each. There was a quad-layer format in the works.
Blu-Ray had a dual-layer format at 50 gigs, but most movies were single-layer.
More relevantly: I'll bet those 100 DVDs are single-layer. This is because last I checked, dual-layer DVDs were still significantly more money, enough to not be worth it at all, even if you consider that they're more convenient. Single-layer DVDs are at least cheaper for the storage than blank CDs.
So, are you really glad the more expensive format won out? Is it that important to you to have to swap discs less often, so you can burn 50 gigs at a time instead of 30? Because I'll bet blank HD-DVDs would have been much cheaper... Of course, we'll never know.
That's a dillution of the term "brick", and it's also not true. Except in the case of a really destructive update (as in, corrupts the FS or similar), if an update ever renders my Linux unbootable, I'll just pop in the install CD and use it to roll back the changes.
Certainly not what I'd call an "easy" process -- easy for me, maybe -- but it's by no means a brick.
Some self-appointed spokesman for the poor downtrodden and abused masses, tired of being "exploited" by (railroads|truck lines|airlines|telcos|pharmaceutical companies) created an elaborate regulatory structure that did nothing but waste tax dollars on people pushing papers around on their desks and hindered growth by placing artificial barriers on entry into the market, all in the name of some statist aesthetic held-over from the days of Karl Marks.
No offense, but you sound EXACTLY like a Ron Paul whackjob.
What does atheism have to do with it? Who is Karl Marks[sic]?
And more importantly, do you really want a deregulated pharmaceutical industry? I feel much better knowing that I'm actually getting something that does what it claims to, and doesn't actually poison me. But sure, if you really want, you can always go buy the deregulated stuff -- I'm sure someone will sell you some magical, mystical formula that ends up being tapwater.
No, you need to go check your dictionary, because internet access isn't even close to being a natural monopoly. Many people have choices between two ISPs: the cable company, and the phone company. That's a choice.
A natural oligopoly?
A choice between two equally-oppressive ISPs is not a choice.
Why only those two? Is it because the market can only support two? Hell no! It's because the government forbids any additional competitors!
No, it's because there's a phone line and a cable line going to every house. It's because the phone companies and cable companies have already laid the infrastructure.
Again, this is just like water, electricity, etc. Even if there were some alternative utility, they would have to deploy a completely different grid.
The only reason it's become a monopoly in the US is because the government granted the providers their monopoly.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Explain how the government had anything to do with the physical monopoly that exists here.
4) The Vista security model is substantially better than the XP security mode, and if we stopped blaming the UAC nags on Microsoft and instead pointed the finger at the lazy software developers who won't right their Windows App code to run in user space instead of as an admin we'd be a lot closer to the truth.
How about also at those lazy Microsoft developers who enabled this behavior?
But more relevantly, if they were going to break so much compatibility anyway, why not go whole-hog? Wrap the old Win32 API up in a compatibility layer like Wine, require new apps to include the I_AM_VISTA_COMPATIBLE flag (or whatever). Then, nag once for the old apps before you sandbox them (to encourage developers to adopt the new standard), and pop up as many nag screens for the new apps as you like (as they won't generally popup nag screens in the first place).
Also, if I understand it, Vista's security model is, at a low level, identical to XP. At a high level, it's a ripoff of the Unix sudo model (as used by OS X and Ubuntu), only much more annoying.
I've never found anyone who believed that a developers response time was quick enough, and as I've not been sitting waiting with baited breath for a patch on Vista yet I can't realy talk about the response time.
Fair enough, but you can't really call it "swift", considering the things which still haven't been patched. It's been a year, right? Do they still have that audio-slows-down-the-network bug? What about the bug where disabling the indexing service will cause the start menu's instant-search to bring the machine to a grinding halt? Or maybe everyone's favorite, the click-drag-move-or-copy-can-run-out-of-RAM-while-estimating-how-long-it-will-take bug.
I haven't paid attention, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were gone, but last I checked, they were still happening, for months. How the hell is this thing not caught in testing? Maybe a lot of them were caught in the public beta, and ignored?
When any ONE thing of this magnitude happens with an open source app, the latest version is temporarily taken down, preventing people from upgrading (unless they want to compile it themselves) until the problem is fixed.
9) Total garbage, but no more garbage than any other claim by any government, third party vendor, OS manufacturer, or anything else.
"Everyone else does it" does not make it less garbage, however.
A lot of this quiz is marketing spiel, and I hate market droid speak as much as everyone else, but Vista has been the victim of the greatest FUD campaign I've ever seen for software, so maybe they needed market spiel.
"FUD campaign" implies a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation to cause fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I don't think Vista needed any help doing that, and there's really almost no organized FUD behind it, anyhow -- unless you count the "You are coming to a sad realization" Mac ad.
Windows Vista sold more copes than any other Microsoft Operating System (including Windows XP) In the first month following launch.
Fact. Translation: We've gotten better at force-feeding upgrades to people. In the past, it was actually possible to buy a computer with the previous version of Windows in that first month.
Windows Vista faces significant Compatibility issues with hardware devices.
Fiction. Translation: We consider any hardware that doesn't have a "Works with Vista" sticker on it to be insignificant.
Windows Vista faces significant issues in terms of integrating with other software applications.
Fiction. Translation: Windows Vista is not an application, it's an operating system. Therefore, we squeak by on a technicality.
Windows Vista delivers all new levels of security compared to previous Windows operating systems.
Fact. Translation: We're more secure from bad press, because we can always say "They clicked allow at some point! Don't you know you were supposed to click 'deny' on that one?"
Windows Vista is expneisve to deploy and run.
Fiction. Translation: There's no such word as "expnesive". Alternate translation, in case the typo was only the parent post: It's only expensive once you actually want to use it for something. But if "deploy" counts as part of a new computer, and "run" counts on booting up, it's dirt-cheap!
Windows Vista hasn't been popular with businesses.
Fiction. Translation: It's been popular with some businesses, like MSN and NBC! No one said anything about Vista being popular with all businesses, or even a majority of businesses!
Windows Vista is unreliable and requires more technical support than Windows XP.
Fiction. Translation: The only tech support you need with Vista is "Here's a copy of XP!" That's a lot less time on the phone! Ok, yes, Vista is unreliable, but didn't you notice that's an AND statement? If either half of the statement is Fiction, the whole statement is Fiction!
Microsoft has been swift to diagnose and rectify initial issues with Windows Vista.
Fact. Translation: "Swift" is relative, but yeah, we have been working our asses over here -- mostly because there were so goddamned MANY initial issues with Windows Vista!
Windows Vista can help deliver peace of mind for parents in terms of their children's online safety.
Fact. Translation: Parents are so easy to fool. Heh heh.... Wait, did I say that out loud?
Windows Vista won't truly be ready until the first complete Service Pack is released.
Fiction. It will take much more than one service pack to fix it.
*vomits*
Seriously, how can anyone write this bullshit and not actually throw up? I'm having a hard time holding my dinner down, and at least I'm writing satire, not outright lies!
File sharing eats a very large majority of bandwidth for many colleges and without some form of throttling access to resources for other purposes (e.g. college business, student research, and incoming traffic to college resources like websites and distributed computing services) would be seriously hindered.
I'm not against making it metered, and as I understand it, neither is this bill. The bill is mostly just asking the FCC to take a look at the situation...
So tell the students: "You have x gigs of bandwidth per month, use it as you like. It costs money if you go over." Then adjust the amount of money such that if the filesharers really want to pay for it, you can expand your bandwidth to compensate.
If you don't like it switch providers.
To what, dialup?
In most areas, you're lucky to get two competing ISPs, and there's a fair chance that both of them will be messing with your bandwidth in some way. The reason we want to regulate this is that Internet now has the properties of a utility -- many people depend on it, and there are tons of geographical monopolies, and on top of that, the government has helped pay to build it out. So now it should be regulated.
If the government was smart, they'd turn right around and say "OK, you're now a regulated monopoly. This is the maximum you can charge. We know you don't need more to expand your network because we already gave you money to expand your network!"
Unless it is a case of a monopoly that has spun out of control, the free market is a better solution than government intervention.
And yes, it is a monopoly which has spun out of control. Or rather, an oligopoly.
How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Unless I go dialup, I've got exactly three. Fortunately, one of them claims to believe in net neutrality, and they're the one offering fiber, but that's extremely unusual. Unless you're prepared to move to where I live (a small town in Iowa), chances are, your only real option to "let the market decide" or to "vote with your dollars" is to decide that you don't really need this Internet thing anyway.
I suppose it is a bit depressing, though, coming from something like OpenMoko, who would actually reject hardware because they couldn't get GPL'd drivers for it.
I mean, it's nice to have a little sandbox, sure. And it's better than nothing, and it seems a lot more likely to happen than OpenMoko or Qtopia, but it's still damned depressing, considering what might have been.
But is Android really better than, say, Windows Mobile? Think of it this way: I can download apps and develop my own for Windows on my desktop, but all other things equal, I'd rather have Linux, where I can also dig all the way down to the kernel source if I ever want to. (And yes, I have done that.)
Of course, there's an upper limit to software speed. You can always throw more hardware at the problem, but at a certain point, there just isn't a faster algorithm you can write. (I just finally got this when, after scoffing at the though of using Ruby to run a webserver, I discovered how easy and (relatively) cheap it is to simply throw more hardware at a well-written Rails app. Ruby does have massive speedups in its future (maybe 2-3x), but I can get that now by simply booting 2-3x as many EC2 instances.)
But I hear you. In fact, it was only two computers ago that I shared a 200 mhz desktop. Now I've got a dual 2.4 ghz computer, and every now and then, I watch a single-threaded video encode take up only one core, helpless to find much for the other core to do, and go "Holy shit this thing is fast!" It can be this kind of startling experience.
Also, if you have the capability to track who is using a pirated copy, you have the capability to ban them from your systems, right? If it's a more decentralized model, and you can't stop them, then you don't really have the capability to track them. QED.
Actually, I was correcting the point. TFS claims 1.5x-3x speed improvement over gcc.
Of course, TFS was also dead wrong about Gentoo users trying to build the whole system. Apparently there's an ebuild to install llvm, which seems like an obvious thing to do. There's also mention of Mesa intending to switch to llvm, and other projects might follow, but those are isolated programs, no more shocking or revolutionary than the fact that Eclipse is written in Java.
Video drivers from both ATI and nVidia would look for specific binaries known to be games used for benchmarking. Example: Quake3. You could rename your quake3 binary to quack3 and it'd perform somewhat worse.
Apparently, it had something to do with trading correctness for speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I just noticed something interesting...
I'm supposed to read your full post, but I'm not supposed to take the company as a whole?
I do still think that is a morally objectionable thing to do, and it is absolutely enough to make me hate the company. And I absolutely do hope that the entire company suffers, working peons included. The working peons will move on to other things, and Sony management will either let the company die, or will finally figure out that this kind of bullshit should not be allowed to happen, EVER.
Yes, I realize it's not that simple -- I know all of the ways in which it might have gone wrong, the biggest one being lack of communication. These are not excuses, you admitted that yourself.
Ironically, the main advantage of dual-core has nothing to do with applications taking advantage of that second core -- in fact, just the opposite.
Dual-core means that for most cases, I can run a video encode, a backup/compression process, a long-ish compilation (of the sort that doesn't like 'make -j2'), etc -- not so much all at once, as I can fire off any background process and not worry about it, as I have a whole other core to use. It's shameful -- Amarok will occasionally use 100% of one core, and I won't notice for hours.
Having more than two cores wouldn't benefit me a lot right now. I wouldn't mind it, certainly -- I've been playing a bit with things like Erlang, which should be able to scale arbitrarily -- but I think the real applications are only just catching on to the idea that threading is a good thing. I imagine it's still going to be a lot longer till a quad-core machine is useful for anything other than, say, running virtual machines, as most programming languages do not make threading easy. (Locks and semaphores are almost as bad as manual memory management.)
While I'm playing crystal ball, I'll predict that the first application of multicore will be things which were already running on multiple machines in the first place -- video rendering, for instance. Not encoding, rendering.
The second application for it will be gaming. This will take longer, and will only be the larger, higher-quality engines, who will simply throw manpower at the problem of squeezing the most out of whatever hardware is available.
I suspect that the old pattern will be very much in effect, though -- wherein gamers will buy a three-core system and unlock the fourth one (if possible), then use maybe one core, probably half of one, with the video card still being the most important purchase. If there's a perceptible improvement, it'll be because their spyware, IM, torrents, leftover Firefox with 20 MySpace pages and flash ads, etc, won't be able to quite fill the other three cores.
I'd like to add that for most people, including me, one core is plenty if you know how to manage your processes properly -- set priorities, kill Amarok when it gets stuck in that infinite loop, and get off my lawn!
You don't consider forceably installing a rootkit on your customer's computers, possibly corrupting their OS and opening up some security holes, to be morally objectionable?
What, you can only start hating them once they actually eat babies?
HD-DVDs commonly came dual-layer, at 30 gigs each. There was a quad-layer format in the works.
Blu-Ray had a dual-layer format at 50 gigs, but most movies were single-layer.
More relevantly: I'll bet those 100 DVDs are single-layer. This is because last I checked, dual-layer DVDs were still significantly more money, enough to not be worth it at all, even if you consider that they're more convenient. Single-layer DVDs are at least cheaper for the storage than blank CDs.
So, are you really glad the more expensive format won out? Is it that important to you to have to swap discs less often, so you can burn 50 gigs at a time instead of 30? Because I'll bet blank HD-DVDs would have been much cheaper... Of course, we'll never know.
That's a dillution of the term "brick", and it's also not true. Except in the case of a really destructive update (as in, corrupts the FS or similar), if an update ever renders my Linux unbootable, I'll just pop in the install CD and use it to roll back the changes.
Certainly not what I'd call an "easy" process -- easy for me, maybe -- but it's by no means a brick.
It's your imagination if they ever seemed like they were IN control.
More like "wishing", you're right.
No offense, but you sound EXACTLY like a Ron Paul whackjob.
What does atheism have to do with it? Who is Karl Marks[sic]?
And more importantly, do you really want a deregulated pharmaceutical industry? I feel much better knowing that I'm actually getting something that does what it claims to, and doesn't actually poison me. But sure, if you really want, you can always go buy the deregulated stuff -- I'm sure someone will sell you some magical, mystical formula that ends up being tapwater.
A natural oligopoly?
A choice between two equally-oppressive ISPs is not a choice.
No, it's because there's a phone line and a cable line going to every house. It's because the phone companies and cable companies have already laid the infrastructure.
Again, this is just like water, electricity, etc. Even if there were some alternative utility, they would have to deploy a completely different grid.Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Explain how the government had anything to do with the physical monopoly that exists here.
How about also at those lazy Microsoft developers who enabled this behavior?
But more relevantly, if they were going to break so much compatibility anyway, why not go whole-hog? Wrap the old Win32 API up in a compatibility layer like Wine, require new apps to include the I_AM_VISTA_COMPATIBLE flag (or whatever). Then, nag once for the old apps before you sandbox them (to encourage developers to adopt the new standard), and pop up as many nag screens for the new apps as you like (as they won't generally popup nag screens in the first place).
Also, if I understand it, Vista's security model is, at a low level, identical to XP. At a high level, it's a ripoff of the Unix sudo model (as used by OS X and Ubuntu), only much more annoying.
I've never found anyone who believed that a developers response time was quick enough, and as I've not been sitting waiting with baited breath for a patch on Vista yet I can't realy talk about the response time.Fair enough, but you can't really call it "swift", considering the things which still haven't been patched. It's been a year, right? Do they still have that audio-slows-down-the-network bug? What about the bug where disabling the indexing service will cause the start menu's instant-search to bring the machine to a grinding halt? Or maybe everyone's favorite, the click-drag-move-or-copy-can-run-out-of-RAM-while-estimating-how-long-it-will-take bug.
I haven't paid attention, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were gone, but last I checked, they were still happening, for months. How the hell is this thing not caught in testing? Maybe a lot of them were caught in the public beta, and ignored?
When any ONE thing of this magnitude happens with an open source app, the latest version is temporarily taken down, preventing people from upgrading (unless they want to compile it themselves) until the problem is fixed.
"Everyone else does it" does not make it less garbage, however.
"FUD campaign" implies a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation to cause fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I don't think Vista needed any help doing that, and there's really almost no organized FUD behind it, anyhow -- unless you count the "You are coming to a sad realization" Mac ad.
Fact. Translation: We've gotten better at force-feeding upgrades to people. In the past, it was actually possible to buy a computer with the previous version of Windows in that first month.
Fiction. Translation: We consider any hardware that doesn't have a "Works with Vista" sticker on it to be insignificant.
Fiction. Translation: Windows Vista is not an application, it's an operating system. Therefore, we squeak by on a technicality.
Fact. Translation: We're more secure from bad press, because we can always say "They clicked allow at some point! Don't you know you were supposed to click 'deny' on that one?"
Fiction. Translation: There's no such word as "expnesive". Alternate translation, in case the typo was only the parent post: It's only expensive once you actually want to use it for something. But if "deploy" counts as part of a new computer, and "run" counts on booting up, it's dirt-cheap!
Fiction. Translation: It's been popular with some businesses, like MSN and NBC! No one said anything about Vista being popular with all businesses, or even a majority of businesses!
Fiction. Translation: The only tech support you need with Vista is "Here's a copy of XP!" That's a lot less time on the phone! Ok, yes, Vista is unreliable, but didn't you notice that's an AND statement? If either half of the statement is Fiction, the whole statement is Fiction!
Fact. Translation: "Swift" is relative, but yeah, we have been working our asses over here -- mostly because there were so goddamned MANY initial issues with Windows Vista!
Fact. Translation: Parents are so easy to fool. Heh heh.... Wait, did I say that out loud?
Fiction. It will take much more than one service pack to fix it.
*vomits*
Seriously, how can anyone write this bullshit and not actually throw up? I'm having a hard time holding my dinner down, and at least I'm writing satire, not outright lies!
I'm not against making it metered, and as I understand it, neither is this bill. The bill is mostly just asking the FCC to take a look at the situation...
So tell the students: "You have x gigs of bandwidth per month, use it as you like. It costs money if you go over." Then adjust the amount of money such that if the filesharers really want to pay for it, you can expand your bandwidth to compensate.
To what, dialup?
In most areas, you're lucky to get two competing ISPs, and there's a fair chance that both of them will be messing with your bandwidth in some way. The reason we want to regulate this is that Internet now has the properties of a utility -- many people depend on it, and there are tons of geographical monopolies, and on top of that, the government has helped pay to build it out. So now it should be regulated.
If the government was smart, they'd turn right around and say "OK, you're now a regulated monopoly. This is the maximum you can charge. We know you don't need more to expand your network because we already gave you money to expand your network!"
And yes, it is a monopoly which has spun out of control. Or rather, an oligopoly.
How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Unless I go dialup, I've got exactly three. Fortunately, one of them claims to believe in net neutrality, and they're the one offering fiber, but that's extremely unusual. Unless you're prepared to move to where I live (a small town in Iowa), chances are, your only real option to "let the market decide" or to "vote with your dollars" is to decide that you don't really need this Internet thing anyway.
The cost doesn't have to go up exponentially. In fact, it could drop as a sort of "bulk pricing".
Either way, I'd much rather have the option to pay for it.
Wait, what? I thought Eclipse was a competitor to Sun...
In fact, I thought Eclipse was by IBM, for a very specific purpose. Why do you think it's called Eclipse? What does an eclipse do?
NO! Please don't give them ideas...
At the very least, they could do a stateful firewall without NAT.
I suppose it is a bit depressing, though, coming from something like OpenMoko, who would actually reject hardware because they couldn't get GPL'd drivers for it.
I mean, it's nice to have a little sandbox, sure. And it's better than nothing, and it seems a lot more likely to happen than OpenMoko or Qtopia, but it's still damned depressing, considering what might have been.
But is Android really better than, say, Windows Mobile? Think of it this way: I can download apps and develop my own for Windows on my desktop, but all other things equal, I'd rather have Linux, where I can also dig all the way down to the kernel source if I ever want to. (And yes, I have done that.)
Of course, there's an upper limit to software speed. You can always throw more hardware at the problem, but at a certain point, there just isn't a faster algorithm you can write. (I just finally got this when, after scoffing at the though of using Ruby to run a webserver, I discovered how easy and (relatively) cheap it is to simply throw more hardware at a well-written Rails app. Ruby does have massive speedups in its future (maybe 2-3x), but I can get that now by simply booting 2-3x as many EC2 instances.)
But I hear you. In fact, it was only two computers ago that I shared a 200 mhz desktop. Now I've got a dual 2.4 ghz computer, and every now and then, I watch a single-threaded video encode take up only one core, helpless to find much for the other core to do, and go "Holy shit this thing is fast!" It can be this kind of startling experience.
Dupe.
Also, if you have the capability to track who is using a pirated copy, you have the capability to ban them from your systems, right? If it's a more decentralized model, and you can't stop them, then you don't really have the capability to track them. QED.
Actually, I was correcting the point. TFS claims 1.5x-3x speed improvement over gcc.
Of course, TFS was also dead wrong about Gentoo users trying to build the whole system. Apparently there's an ebuild to install llvm, which seems like an obvious thing to do. There's also mention of Mesa intending to switch to llvm, and other projects might follow, but those are isolated programs, no more shocking or revolutionary than the fact that Eclipse is written in Java.
Maybe you can't tell who to cheer for...
But it should be obvious who to boo for.
That's why I left for Ubuntu, but honestly, if I can make it 3x faster with 15 hours of compiling?
Video drivers from both ATI and nVidia would look for specific binaries known to be games used for benchmarking. Example: Quake3. You could rename your quake3 binary to quack3 and it'd perform somewhat worse.
Apparently, it had something to do with trading correctness for speed.
I no longer toss my backpack so haphazardly, as I often have a laptop in there.
Durability is a good thing, but I suppose it's not as important to me as utility and price (so long as it's not actually fragile).