More incentive for people to move off Windows, at least on low-end hardware. (It being "low-end" pretty much rules out OS X.)
Faster and cheaper processors that I can actually use, because I don't have to waste half a core on anti-virus and half a core on DRM, leaving me just as fast as I was with XP on one core.
If Windows 7 does require 24 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB solid-state drive, I'll be loving my 12 gigs of RAM and 10 gigs of hard disks in a RAID for half the price. (Or something similar.)
So this is really ironic - Its my understating from reading hundreds and hundreds of/. posts that this isn't supposed to happen with FOSS. Only Micro$oft developers are supposed to have security bugs like this.
The assumption is that everyone -- or at least everyone stupid enough to program in C/C++, which is, really, everyone -- has some security bugs. The difference is, Microsoft may refuse to fix the bug, or refuse to acknowledge it's a bug (see Vista's performance issues), or even threaten to sue you if you disclose the bug (not sure on the last bit, but you never know). With FOSS, worst-case, you can fix it yourself, or hire someone else to fix it.
This means that there are likely to be fewer bugs that get ignored for months or years. With Ubuntu, there's a chance a quick fix will be in my apt-get the next day, and a permanent fix in a week or two.
Now, how did this ship? Who tested it? Who did the code reviews? Who did the security reviews? Who did all the threat modeling?
That's a non-feature. It's great for a company to have a CYA on this -- cover-your-ass -- but it's really useless if your goal is creating good software. All it's really useful for is so you don't get fired, because you can blame someone else's shipping/tests/reviews/modeling.
There used to be something like this with JavaScript, though I don't think Sun ever owned that -- wasn't it Netscape? Ah, well...
I remember Microsoft re-implemented it from scratch, but because someone owned the name "JavaScript", they simply called it "JScript".
So, Google is now selling the brand "Android", which is a shift from the pseudo-codename "gPhone". It seems like they're in an ideal position to say "Fine, we won't call it Java." And they will be careful to refer to it only as the "Android language", "Android libraries", and "Android runtime" in their official documentation -- even though many people will simply call it "Java" anyway.
So, threatening legal action when all you own is the name -- that's not always stupid, but here, they're going up against Google. Seems to me, they'd be throwing away a lot of perfectly good free PR for Java -- especially if Android kicks Java ME's ass.
Hah. When I were a lad you could get a 7 MEGABYTE Winchester Hard Disk for a mere £3500 (what, about $5000?). (Source, 1981 copy of Personal Computer World).
What I'm sure was meant was when they become competitive with their current hard drives.
In other words, right now, going to any solid-state storage system only makes sense in various specialized places. For example: You need performance at any cost, so you buy some battery-backed RAM with hard-disk backups. Or, you need something smaller and more durable than you can conceivably make a hard drive, so you buy a USB flash drive. Or, you want your notebook to be as power-efficient as possible, and to be durable -- no moving parts -- so you get some 15-20 gigs of flash to run your notebook off of.
But hard drives seem to be the happy medium between that performance/convenience and the opposite extreme of burning 4.7 gig DVDs -- arguably cheaper than a hard drive, but it takes awhile.
But, the performance still sucks. Seek times alone are a problem. And I sort of agree -- while it's exciting to hear what might be just around the corner, it's really not going to matter until these things start to be remotely competitive with modern hard drives.
The values you're thinking of as coming from the "Greek philosophers" were actually "Calvinist theologians who also happened to have been well-read their Latin, Greek, and Hebrew forebears."
How, exactly, does that invalidate "Greek philosophers"?
If we are talking about the same things -- equal rights and democracy, for instance -- well, Sparta was exactly that. Among citizens, it was more purely democratic than we are today.
Then there's the Roman Republic, which I'm fairly sure predates Christ. (I could be entirely wrong about that one, though.)
(I'll leave aside your obvious lack of contextual knowledge with regard to "torture" and slavery)
I'd rather not. I can point to at least a few obvious places in the Bible about this -- one in which it seems pretty obvious God is telling his people to kidnap and rape some local girls. (Take the for your wives.)
I don't have much to add, just another comment in that tree. Not only does the story deserve to be told, but it deserves a long list of comments, even ones like mine (saying nothing new) to show that it was heard.
The difference is, you can actually not care about that Super Bowl -- it had pretty much zero impact outside of its fandom. Even videogames have a more broad impact, by continuing to drive Moore's Law. (Modern Superbowls might have more of an impact on our advertising, though.)
To say that Tesla winning has historical significance would be an understatement. Call me Captain Obvious, but electricity, including the invention of AC, is much more fundamental to society than either the Superbowl or Portal.
And everyone cares about that, even if only abstractly. Even if the only thing you care about is the Superbowl, it would be nothing without TV, which would be nothing without AC.
I would much rather have my ISP do no filtering. I can filter VoIP stuff myself, if I want to.
If there's congestion, they need to move to a metered model and start charging more. Then, either people will stop using so damned much bandwidth on BitTorrent, or the ISP will be able to actually build the infrastructure to support it.
The "need" for filtering/shaping at the ISP level is a complete and utter myth.
At our company, we are developing a software project with three major components.
Two of those are clients -- one for HD-DVDs, and one for the web browser -- which pretty much limits us to Javascript.
The third is the server, which is somewhat based on Ruby on Rails. We host it on Amazon EC2, which means if we ever get Slashdotted, even the Ruby server(s) can simply scale up to handle the load.
For us, this makes sense. The cost of programmer time to optimize is way less than the cost of simply firing up another EC2 instance -- again, if we ever need it. We do have to make our architecture more scalable and maintainable, but that's a good thing anyway, no matter how efficient it is.
Your situation isn't quite the same. If it's highly specialized software, chances are, you're right, and nobody cares. But there are a couple of big costs here.
First, while disk space is cheap, RAM and network still aren't. If it takes up a gig on disk, how much will it take up in RAM? Maybe more, maybe less. If you're using more than a gig of RAM for something that could be done comfortably in a hundred megs, you have to remember that you're on a multi-tasking OS.
So at that point, you have to ask yourself: Is your app valuable enough to your users that they'll either tolerate a slow machine, or buy a dedicated machine for your app?
You also have almost lost downloadability at that point. Understand that if it takes a gig, but you could fit it in 10 megs, well, even dialup users will tolerate 10 megs.
There is one more reason efficient code would be desired -- once you get to a certain level of CPU power, new possibilities become available, and they do quite suddenly. This is most obvious in video games -- suddenly, we have enough power for 3D. Suddenly, we can do lighting, sort of. Suddenly, we don't have to fake it anymore -- dynamic lighting, with real shadows.
This means that if you choose a slow language, you could automatically bump yourself back a generation in what you can support. And I'm not just talking about games here.
And again, I realize that probably none of this applies to your product. I'm not calling anyone "lazy". I'm just pointing out that the inverse is not always true -- that programming for performance is not always a bad thing.
Often, we talk about wanting to create a more advanced filesystem -- based on a database, for instance. Often, we find ourselves re-integrating some of these things -- the OS absolutely should handle indices, at least of our byte streams.
I do think Unix was an important fresh start. I also think that it didn't have to be as simple as it did.
One simple example: The POSIX filesystem API is broken. Biggest problem: lack of transactions; for example, either FS operations are ordered or they aren't. If they're ordered, you lose performance because the FS can't make intelligent decisions about what order to write to the disk -- and the application can't do that either, being at the wrong level. If they're unordered, you lose reliability, because you can't guarantee when anything hits disk -- or you lose performance, because you're doing a sync when you really don't need to.
Even simpler example: Lack of a 'copy' filesystem call, or anything like it, basically kills any standard copy-on-write support. Without standard copy-on-write, you can do hardlink farms, but that's at file-level granularity, not block-level granularity. Time Machine is a perfect example of why copy-on-write at the block (or extent, maybe) level is kind of needed.
Yes, because when I look at a computer (which means "glorified calculator"), the first thing that comes to my mind is not binary, or any numbers at all, but an eye?
But really, my point was not to insult people for not seeing the obvious, but to inform. Because once you think of them as one and zero, that should be sufficient mnemonic for it to be obvious to you for the rest of your life.
Cheapest player I can find in the UK costs £180 (~$380) which, to my mind, provides so little utility over a £30 DVD player that it's a pointless waste of money to me.
Go here, scroll down a bit. There is one there for $150, about.
I don't know if they'll ship to the UK, but even if you add shipping, it's still not much. HD-DVDs themselves are region-free. It may cause problems for your 30 pound DVD player, though.
HDCP/HDMI? I purposely bought my TV early so it wouldn't come with one (although the DVI port is HDCP compatible) because I object to the idea
Do you run Windows?
it doesn't exist yet for any of my graphics chipsets (either nVidia or Intel).
So you run nVidia. Do you disagree with binary kernel drivers?
Besides, you went the completely retarded route -- your player supports HDCP over DVI, so it does support HDCP. So all you objected to by going with that TV is HDMI, which is actually a nice little plug.
That said, most players now will give you component output. It absolutely does not mean you're stuck with standard definition. So, the question is whether $150 is worth it for you to watch movies in HD.
I can understand why this all might come off as luddite-ism, but I really can't see any benefit in jumping to HD-DVD at the moment.
No, I was with you, I understand. I still don't have a player at home, and I can see maybe sticking with an HD TV signal, as those still have a required unencrypted compatibility port, so you can plug em into a Linux box. But price is no longer an issue, and DRM is only really an issue if you are in the strange situation where you're OK buying/renting DRM'd DVDs, because they can be cracked. Trying to go completely DRM-free is admirable, but not really practical right now. (Although for what it's worth, Blu-Ray requires AACS and allows more, while HD-DVD has a maximum of AACS, and allows DRM-free discs.)
Look at the two clauses, and you can see the problem. If any ideas are "yours" the moment you quit, then the second you have a great idea you can simply quit.
Depends how good your idea is.
Let's say I work for Google, and come up with a great idea for how to enhance their search engine. Do I leave Google and found a startup search company? Or do I stay at Google and get a bonus and a promotion for coming up with the idea?
And I do think it's perfectly fair to allow that, as you're only taking your own idea, and not theirs.
They're also used for non-technical types likes salespeople in order to prevent them from wandering off with their entire client base.
I'm not sure of the legality of that. I do know that for technical types, it makes no sense. If the company owns your code base, you can't exactly wander away with that.
Are they actually stupid enough to be laying off good people (who happen to be stuck with a bad project), then turn around and attempt to hire some more people?
First, when Joe Public infringes, he generally does so for himself. When Bob Corporate does, it's for the world at large.
Second, Bob Corporate usually gets away with it. If Joe Public is caught, he faces heavy, personal penalties. Bob Corporate can simply have Bob Corporate Inc cover the damage, assuming that they're caught at all and that they lose in court.
Finally, we take great delight in finding a similar double-standard in Bob Corporate. This company, for instance, went after someone else for a fairly sizable quote (with attribution), and we now find them stealing wholesale (with no attribution). This seems almost second nature to most corporations -- in fact, I forget where it was, but I seem to remember reading someone psychoanalyzing a corporation (as if it were a human) and finding that it's insane.
Which comes back to "A person is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."
Good point bringing that up, but I can think of a number of situations where you'd prefer the machinery defaults to ON when the switch breaks -- where you're never going to want to turn the machine off so urgently you can't pull the plug, or cut the wire.
Slashdot Mirror
It means:
If Windows 7 does require 24 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB solid-state drive, I'll be loving my 12 gigs of RAM and 10 gigs of hard disks in a RAID for half the price. (Or something similar.)
The assumption is that everyone -- or at least everyone stupid enough to program in C/C++, which is, really, everyone -- has some security bugs. The difference is, Microsoft may refuse to fix the bug, or refuse to acknowledge it's a bug (see Vista's performance issues), or even threaten to sue you if you disclose the bug (not sure on the last bit, but you never know). With FOSS, worst-case, you can fix it yourself, or hire someone else to fix it.
This means that there are likely to be fewer bugs that get ignored for months or years. With Ubuntu, there's a chance a quick fix will be in my apt-get the next day, and a permanent fix in a week or two.
That's a non-feature. It's great for a company to have a CYA on this -- cover-your-ass -- but it's really useless if your goal is creating good software. All it's really useful for is so you don't get fired, because you can blame someone else's shipping/tests/reviews/modeling.
Well, except C.
Try Haskell, Erlang, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, even Java.
I'm not incredibly worried, though -- most of my FLAC files are converted WAVs or CDs.
There used to be something like this with JavaScript, though I don't think Sun ever owned that -- wasn't it Netscape? Ah, well...
I remember Microsoft re-implemented it from scratch, but because someone owned the name "JavaScript", they simply called it "JScript".
So, Google is now selling the brand "Android", which is a shift from the pseudo-codename "gPhone". It seems like they're in an ideal position to say "Fine, we won't call it Java." And they will be careful to refer to it only as the "Android language", "Android libraries", and "Android runtime" in their official documentation -- even though many people will simply call it "Java" anyway.
So, threatening legal action when all you own is the name -- that's not always stupid, but here, they're going up against Google. Seems to me, they'd be throwing away a lot of perfectly good free PR for Java -- especially if Android kicks Java ME's ass.
What I'm sure was meant was when they become competitive with their current hard drives.
In other words, right now, going to any solid-state storage system only makes sense in various specialized places. For example: You need performance at any cost, so you buy some battery-backed RAM with hard-disk backups. Or, you need something smaller and more durable than you can conceivably make a hard drive, so you buy a USB flash drive. Or, you want your notebook to be as power-efficient as possible, and to be durable -- no moving parts -- so you get some 15-20 gigs of flash to run your notebook off of.
But hard drives seem to be the happy medium between that performance/convenience and the opposite extreme of burning 4.7 gig DVDs -- arguably cheaper than a hard drive, but it takes awhile.
But, the performance still sucks. Seek times alone are a problem. And I sort of agree -- while it's exciting to hear what might be just around the corner, it's really not going to matter until these things start to be remotely competitive with modern hard drives.
Which reminds me of Gungans in Star Wars Episode 1, which reminds me of... NO! MAKE IT STOP!
How, exactly, does that invalidate "Greek philosophers"?
If we are talking about the same things -- equal rights and democracy, for instance -- well, Sparta was exactly that. Among citizens, it was more purely democratic than we are today.
Then there's the Roman Republic, which I'm fairly sure predates Christ. (I could be entirely wrong about that one, though.)
I'd rather not. I can point to at least a few obvious places in the Bible about this -- one in which it seems pretty obvious God is telling his people to kidnap and rape some local girls. (Take the for your wives.)
Funny you should mention that, because that is where the recording labels make most of their money nowdays.
I don't have much to add, just another comment in that tree. Not only does the story deserve to be told, but it deserves a long list of comments, even ones like mine (saying nothing new) to show that it was heard.
The difference is, you can actually not care about that Super Bowl -- it had pretty much zero impact outside of its fandom. Even videogames have a more broad impact, by continuing to drive Moore's Law. (Modern Superbowls might have more of an impact on our advertising, though.)
To say that Tesla winning has historical significance would be an understatement. Call me Captain Obvious, but electricity, including the invention of AC, is much more fundamental to society than either the Superbowl or Portal.
And everyone cares about that, even if only abstractly. Even if the only thing you care about is the Superbowl, it would be nothing without TV, which would be nothing without AC.
I would much rather have my ISP do no filtering. I can filter VoIP stuff myself, if I want to.
If there's congestion, they need to move to a metered model and start charging more. Then, either people will stop using so damned much bandwidth on BitTorrent, or the ISP will be able to actually build the infrastructure to support it.
The "need" for filtering/shaping at the ISP level is a complete and utter myth.
At our company, we are developing a software project with three major components.
Two of those are clients -- one for HD-DVDs, and one for the web browser -- which pretty much limits us to Javascript.
The third is the server, which is somewhat based on Ruby on Rails. We host it on Amazon EC2, which means if we ever get Slashdotted, even the Ruby server(s) can simply scale up to handle the load.
For us, this makes sense. The cost of programmer time to optimize is way less than the cost of simply firing up another EC2 instance -- again, if we ever need it. We do have to make our architecture more scalable and maintainable, but that's a good thing anyway, no matter how efficient it is.
Your situation isn't quite the same. If it's highly specialized software, chances are, you're right, and nobody cares. But there are a couple of big costs here.
First, while disk space is cheap, RAM and network still aren't. If it takes up a gig on disk, how much will it take up in RAM? Maybe more, maybe less. If you're using more than a gig of RAM for something that could be done comfortably in a hundred megs, you have to remember that you're on a multi-tasking OS.
So at that point, you have to ask yourself: Is your app valuable enough to your users that they'll either tolerate a slow machine, or buy a dedicated machine for your app?
You also have almost lost downloadability at that point. Understand that if it takes a gig, but you could fit it in 10 megs, well, even dialup users will tolerate 10 megs.
There is one more reason efficient code would be desired -- once you get to a certain level of CPU power, new possibilities become available, and they do quite suddenly. This is most obvious in video games -- suddenly, we have enough power for 3D. Suddenly, we can do lighting, sort of. Suddenly, we don't have to fake it anymore -- dynamic lighting, with real shadows.
This means that if you choose a slow language, you could automatically bump yourself back a generation in what you can support. And I'm not just talking about games here.
And again, I realize that probably none of this applies to your product. I'm not calling anyone "lazy". I'm just pointing out that the inverse is not always true -- that programming for performance is not always a bad thing.
Just, in both cases, know where you stand.
Often, we talk about wanting to create a more advanced filesystem -- based on a database, for instance. Often, we find ourselves re-integrating some of these things -- the OS absolutely should handle indices, at least of our byte streams.
I do think Unix was an important fresh start. I also think that it didn't have to be as simple as it did.
One simple example: The POSIX filesystem API is broken. Biggest problem: lack of transactions; for example, either FS operations are ordered or they aren't. If they're ordered, you lose performance because the FS can't make intelligent decisions about what order to write to the disk -- and the application can't do that either, being at the wrong level. If they're unordered, you lose reliability, because you can't guarantee when anything hits disk -- or you lose performance, because you're doing a sync when you really don't need to.
Even simpler example: Lack of a 'copy' filesystem call, or anything like it, basically kills any standard copy-on-write support. Without standard copy-on-write, you can do hardlink farms, but that's at file-level granularity, not block-level granularity. Time Machine is a perfect example of why copy-on-write at the block (or extent, maybe) level is kind of needed.
I would think that this topic would contain enough references to democratic thoughts and ideals (occasionally) to be censored, at least partly.
Also, you're a troll. I almost wish you were censored.
Yes, because when I look at a computer (which means "glorified calculator"), the first thing that comes to my mind is not binary, or any numbers at all, but an eye?
But really, my point was not to insult people for not seeing the obvious, but to inform. Because once you think of them as one and zero, that should be sufficient mnemonic for it to be obvious to you for the rest of your life.
Go here, scroll down a bit. There is one there for $150, about.
I don't know if they'll ship to the UK, but even if you add shipping, it's still not much. HD-DVDs themselves are region-free. It may cause problems for your 30 pound DVD player, though.
Do you run Windows?
So you run nVidia. Do you disagree with binary kernel drivers?
Besides, you went the completely retarded route -- your player supports HDCP over DVI, so it does support HDCP. So all you objected to by going with that TV is HDMI, which is actually a nice little plug.
That said, most players now will give you component output. It absolutely does not mean you're stuck with standard definition. So, the question is whether $150 is worth it for you to watch movies in HD.
No, I was with you, I understand. I still don't have a player at home, and I can see maybe sticking with an HD TV signal, as those still have a required unencrypted compatibility port, so you can plug em into a Linux box. But price is no longer an issue, and DRM is only really an issue if you are in the strange situation where you're OK buying/renting DRM'd DVDs, because they can be cracked. Trying to go completely DRM-free is admirable, but not really practical right now. (Although for what it's worth, Blu-Ray requires AACS and allows more, while HD-DVD has a maximum of AACS, and allows DRM-free discs.)
Depends how good your idea is.
Let's say I work for Google, and come up with a great idea for how to enhance their search engine. Do I leave Google and found a startup search company? Or do I stay at Google and get a bonus and a promotion for coming up with the idea?
And I do think it's perfectly fair to allow that, as you're only taking your own idea, and not theirs.
I'm not sure of the legality of that. I do know that for technical types, it makes no sense. If the company owns your code base, you can't exactly wander away with that.
Are they actually stupid enough to be laying off good people (who happen to be stuck with a bad project), then turn around and attempt to hire some more people?
First, when Joe Public infringes, he generally does so for himself. When Bob Corporate does, it's for the world at large.
Second, Bob Corporate usually gets away with it. If Joe Public is caught, he faces heavy, personal penalties. Bob Corporate can simply have Bob Corporate Inc cover the damage, assuming that they're caught at all and that they lose in court.
Finally, we take great delight in finding a similar double-standard in Bob Corporate. This company, for instance, went after someone else for a fairly sizable quote (with attribution), and we now find them stealing wholesale (with no attribution). This seems almost second nature to most corporations -- in fact, I forget where it was, but I seem to remember reading someone psychoanalyzing a corporation (as if it were a human) and finding that it's insane.
Which comes back to "A person is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."
I could go into all the reasons you're shortsighted, wrong, and really a fanboy -- is sucking up to Linus so much better than sucking up to RMS?
But I have a bigger question. What the fuck does the GPLv3 have to do with Android?
Someone slap this tool with -1 offtopic, please.
Run your emulator in another emulator, maybe two or three levels deep. Emulators, not virtualizers. That should make it run slowly enough for you.
(I'm sure there's a way to simply slow down the one emulator, but I just had to post the Rube Goldberg solution...)
You may be eaten by a GRU.
(Seriously, did no one else think that?)
I'm curious, is Slashdot not censored?
I imagine if you're having to go around that, it might slow things down a bit.
Good point bringing that up, but I can think of a number of situations where you'd prefer the machinery defaults to ON when the switch breaks -- where you're never going to want to turn the machine off so urgently you can't pull the plug, or cut the wire.
One is on, zero is off.
Am I alone in thinking that's so intuitive as to border on obvious?
Fortunately for both of us, these are often combined into a toggle switch, and also, the power bar switch is usually lit up when it's on.