Observation may be the root of science, but theory and experiment are at the heart of it.
Sure, we all knew that things fell down. But, Newton had a theory as to why things fall down, a theory that had predictive value: That things fall down at this rate, the attraction between objects is measured by this constant, and so on.
Sure, Newton wasn't exactly right, but the predictive values of his theories combined with other theories in physics led to engineering revolutions.
The reason that so much skepticism is due here isn't because science has to be as skeptical as possible, it that the implied claims are, well, unbelieveably large in impact.
The claim that these devices can predict the future could requires that causal nature of current physical law be rewritten. The claim that people can influence the function of these devices requires a complete rewritting of the understanding of biologicial physiology and brain function (as well as quite a few physical laws, I imagine).
Any claim that big requires a lot of proof. Hell, Einstein had plenty of doubters until experimental data came forth to support his theory. You don't rewrite Newton's laws just like that!
Nobody just said, hey, this how works or is, cool. Even Einstein himself awaited experimental confirmation that showed the predictive value of his theories.
Einstein himself doubted quantum mechanics, and many parts of it where in question until experimental data of the 50s put QED (and later QCD) showed it's predictive power as well.
Same with genetics. The theories concerning the operation of cells are still undergoing change and revision. Mendel's experiments give a basic predictive nature to breeding traits (how many of the children would display trait X), and he had a basic theory of genotype and phenotype, but it wasn't until DNA was discovered and determined to be the mechanism of genetic expression in cells that major breakthoughs in genetic technology were to be made. And the work continues.
And I sure some of the people working on this project are very aware and are curious as to why what they are seeing occurs. It is this why that drives science, I think. It is not that things happen, what the hell, but why they happen.
First, they claim that the box can be made less random by people concentrating on it. They don't have a theory as to this can happen, but let's ignore that.
Then, they claim the box can predict the future when bad things happen, because of big "spikes" in the random stream.
Ignoring that this has to rewrite physics just a wee-bit, why the hell wouldn't the box "predict" somebody concentrating on it and change results beforehand? Or whatever.
Also, there's no theory here. Just some data analysis it seems.
And call me crazy, but given Occam's razor and all, why it is not more likely that the means of analysing data after an "experiment" is biased. Also, if these things can't be shielded, how can you do controls?
Seesh. Maybe I should box these up and sell 'em. "Predict your future!" Flag a note when "weird" things happen in the box and let the Hawthorne effect do the rest.
My understanding is that for certain types, P/Invoke can be done safely, if the marshaller for P/Invoke can provide marshalling by value, thereby giving the unmanaged code access to a local copy of the native value type, which can be checked in the unmarshaller.
For example, BSTRs contain the length of the string, and the marshaller can enforce that, and the strings are copied, so the native memory is never exposed.
Since.Net has application domains, the unmanaged DLL is prevented from crossing into the managed memory space. There may be a hole here, but I haven't heard of it yet.
For more complex P/Inovke operations, where you must pass a part of pinned memory to the unmanaged DLL, this is allowed, but it is marked as unsafe. Any time a DLL is given a pinned reference (a managed pointer), the code is unsafe, because you are giving access to the managed heap.
Not so. Well, unless you hacked the.Net type verification and loading code, managed to install it over the.Net Framework (not easy, really).
All use of unsafe features in.Net are marked as such and can't be hidden. So, pointers, unsafe casts, etc. all stick out to the type loader. In fact, if an.Net assembly tries to mark itself as safe and it has unsafe features, the loader won't load it.
As far as I know, there is no example of unmanaged code that can violate the managed code type system, and.Net was explicitly built to keep this from happening.
Also, this ignores that C/C++ support is much more complicated in.Net. Yes, there is the IJW (It Just Works) stuff that allows unmodified code to compile to unsafe.Net assemblies, but there is also the C++/CLI stuff, which creates a CLS version of C++.
Frankly, this seems like a bit of sour grapes to me..Net does really improve on Java in lots of ways. Yes, James, Java isn't the last word on programming languages..Net isn't either.
It's funny, but the only other trick out there is part of the so-called Itanic (I'm not convinced it's a failure. The war in new processor architectures are waged over decades, not years)
The whole idea was to try to extract instruction-level paralellism in programs to gain speedup without having to resort to rewrites. The compiler technology wasn't quite there, but it is getting there.
If it was just Intel going dual-core, then one could wonder. But everybody (IBM, SUN, AMD) is, and I think that is a realization that raw-clock speed has hit a wall for now. Smaller process sizes didn't help with power nearly as much as some would have liked. There is a limit to the increase cache size can give performance. And so on.
Now, here are some things to consider. The latest versions of Windows and Linux do take good advantage of SMP. In the Windows world (less so in Linux, but it's improving) [1], a lot of user software is multithreaded already.
In fact, a fun exercise in Windows is to run the Task Manager and look at the runnin processes. Do a View->Select Columms and look at how many programs use just one thread. Right now, there are 4 processes (out of about I guess 40) that are just using a single thread.
So, given dual cores, I think the trend will be to take full advantage of SMP, and yes, that may be hard for software development, but when was our job ever easy.
I will also note that this may help promote the use of languages that have threads as more of a first-class abstraction (Java,.Net, ??) to help with this issue.
[1] Take this as a diss if you must, but frankly, user-level APIs weren't very stable (or fully useful) in Unix/Linux for quite some time. That's changed, but the programming culture is still catching up in some ways. Meanwhile, the core of the Win32 threading API was present in NT 3.1, and the use of threading in Windows programs was established by Win95 and beyond.
This is really unfortunate. This technology had real promise, and I hate to see cool ideas that have commerical promise being shelved in favor of...
Okay, for what. Seriously, HP. What the hell. I worked for you as a summer intern in 1997 at HP Labs. I had a good job there. You had lots of smart people who cared. It seems like you had a future, you had plans. What happened to you?
Is Carly is what happened? I'm sorry all the good people their have seem to been let go (laid off) or retired (instead in getting laid off). I feel bad that you couldn't stay.
It seems to me you are hell-bent to take every chance you have and ruin it. You have a lot of riches in talent and idea, and you just seem to toss it away.
Wake up and smell the air around you. You need everything you have to go toe to toe with IBM. Choice is good, remember that, and stop killing good ideas left and right just, well, because?
I still have hope. I really do. But I'm worried, because the more successful IT companies we have, the better we all do.
Oh, but it is expensive, if nothing more than potential liability, which for major companies is indeed a debt on their balance sheet.
Let's say we have a major ISP that provides lots of media content (okay, hell, it's a big porn site. But stay with me). Media Player is gone. Well, they spent lots of money encoding their content (okay, porn, but still) so that people can view their site without having to install a player! It's just there! They can get it from MS too.
So, they sue. Not the EU for the decision, but MS because that's where the money is. And other people sign on. (Hey, my software used WMP, and you broke it), etc, etc.
And now, you are looking down the barrel of lawsuits, having to settle, lawyers, etc. And that's money.
Okay, factor in the tons of revenue that they may lose, well, yea, it stings.
Here's the thing. You can license the technology. You can make your own damn player. You can make tools for content creation that use the format. If you don't like it, you can use something else.
Okay, yea, the monopoly thing. Uh, last time I checked, MS isn't even close to making money on selling music and video. Yet. And I bet MS is pretty happy that the EU thinks they take over the world already. And maybe they will, but not yet.
And here's the thing. What's not clear to me from this is that MS can provide WMP if people choose. If the ruling states that you can't use WMP in the EU (it can't, can it?), I call BS. Choices matter.
I'm a bit skeptical. Well, maybe they only took the first X amount of these things in, because it won't take long for all the answer to get posted. Seems more like marketing to me. Kind of "we have the smartest people, aren't we cool."
Of course, there is lots of kinds of intelligences. I read the Emotional Intellgence book, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. Yep, there's all kinds of smart.
I hate to admit it, but there may be a reason that some of those blasted sales and marketing guys and gals make serious money. We like to think that it's lucky, or BS, or kissing ass (and it could be), but sometimes, it's because "people smarts" can get you far.
Sure, this makes sense for a research lab starting up, but here's something to ponder. MS, IBM and HP all have labs too. And how effective they are is how well they can transfer ideas into development. HP had lots of idea, but consistently could not execute on them. IBM and MS do much better.
You can have too many cooks, after all. For every thinker, there is a doer that is just as valuable, if not more so.
Oh, and Google, now that you are public and MS wants a piece of your action, here's a hint. Arrogance and "we're better than..." can hurt you really, really bad. Just ask Netscape, err, AOL, err, well, you know. Don't get too cocky.
I think of Richard Fenymann at times like this. Nobel Prize winner, who admired an illiterate MC in a local bar for his social skills and how he worked. True smarts is always being ready to learn, regardless of how or what is taught.
Yea, maybe I'm jealous because I can't do those types of puzzles very well. But I still have enough brains to know that there is room for all types, and diversity wins over sheer brain power in the long haul.
Of course, I'm not that brainy. Hell, I'm still posting here, for the love of... 8-)
Also, software begets other software. One other thing about Windows development is that there is lots of potential components to buy versus build. A lot of third party provide nice stuff that can really jump start a project. Components of all kinds. Some of them even allow you to license source.
A lot of MS products are just as much developer platforms/components as end-user tools. You can build things on top of Outlook, Word, etc. Sure, it sounds horrible, but it's a real business.
For these and other personal reasons, I prefer Windows as a development platform. Sure, Linux has lots of great stuff, but I think it currently suffers some from it's roots in Unix/C development as far as developer experience.
I started development in C, C++, Perl, Emacs, and frankly, I'll take Visual Studio and.Net any day of the week. After all, Emacs is still there if I want it.
For me, it all started back in 96 when I tried to make a application that would help track time spent on tasks for a class (required). I was using Visual Basic 4.0, and it wasn't too hard. Not believing what I was told about Office and VB, I tried to make the program export the data into the Excel spreadsheet we had to hand in.
30 minutes later, I was done.
This before NT 4.0 even, and I still haven't seen anything from the Linux/Unix world that allowed access to applications from programs that easily. I think some people are working on it (Mono is the best example I think), but still.
Couple of things. First, the Power5 is a real threat, no doubt. And IBM was smart enough not to pull the plug on AIX (unlike HP, which seems to have shot HP/UX in the leg).
And the Power5 does have more software running on it. I could very well be that the Power architecture does the Itanium in, but I hope Intel doesn't fall over and play dead just yet.
As for the ISA, you can't blame Intel for that. HP did most of the work there. Most of it was based on a VLIW version of the PA-RISC architecture.
And, from my looking at the market, 4 way Opterons are about the same as entry level Itaniums, so I'm a bit skeptical of the 15% of the cost argument.
Uh, a theoretical 4-fold speed increase isn't anything to laugh at. Ask AMD, Intel, and IBM if they'd like to have a new idea in microprocessor design that had a theoretical 4-fold speed increase, and I'm sure they'd all say: "Yes."
I feel bad for Intel and HP though. Sunk quite a bit into making sure Linux could run on the Itanium from the very start, getting little for it. Really, the Itanium and Opteron are like apples and oranges.
One major problem is gcc. GCC just can't handle EPIC stuff yet. The compiler from Microsoft, Intel and HP are quite a bit much better than gcc. But gcc is the defacto complier in Linuxland, like it or not. (Even though Intel's x86 compiler for linux can do better too).
From the inside rumor mill (I'm not an insider, but I have friends), MS was planning to acquire SAP. Not merge. MS did have enough cash/stock to buyout SAP.
Another rumor was the gesture/approach from MS to SAP was more to foster working relationships; To wit, to get SAP running on Windows Server 2003 and beyond a bit better than a two-legged dog, as another person put it.
Good point. Looking at their documentation, what they are trying is indeed isn't that simple. You raise a lot of the issues they deal with in adding extensible metadata and relationships while keeping backward compability with existing NTFS file system (Journaled b-tree).
Okay, take that and add a pretty comprehensive default set of metadata. The WinFS base schema is not small, and it covers a lot of stuff.
The next thing is that storing the data is one thing. The other part is storing functionality with the metadata, and allowing third-parties to do the same, and then providing a standard way to access that functionality.
One example is address data. Not that WinFS does this out of the box, but the idea is that if you had a mapping application or service, you could make an addin that would allow somebody to build a search or query like "Find all word documents that refer to people with addresses within 2 miles of this address"
The next part is that there is a whole set of APIs that allow for rule based management that allows developers (and maybe even users) a standard way of building complex actions when events in files occur.
By the way, the Semantic Web stuff is aimed at this kind of functionality as well. Of course, on the web, it's just nuts, but it doesn't mean that the effort can't have value.
Hate them or not, I do like that MS sometimes keeps trying to make something happen, rather than worrying if can be done. They may never get there, but from what I've seen of WinFS documentation, there is real power there.
Spotlight is close, but from what I can tell, the metadata is managed apart from the files, and the set of gathered metadata is by default smaller.
In think, a lot of what Spotlight can do the MS Search service can do already via indexing, but the interface leaves a ton to be desired (There are APIs for making search/index extensions. See the Adobe IFilter plug-in for example).
Where Spotlight really works well is the UI. That's important, and MS is lagging there, but I think they can catch up some.
And that the challenge for MS as well, is getting the technology to the point that it doesn't require lots of tech knowledge to use the stuff well.
A couple of points came to mind. First, literacy today is much different than in the 19th century. There's just more sources of knowledge, more types of knowledge, hell, just more stuff period.
To argue that "hey, people were okay" back then without formal schooling leaves some questions open. Imagine what TV would do to people from the 19th century, and you see what I'm driving at here.
Also, firstly, I like the notion that the role of "socialization" is uniformly a bad thing. Frankly, I don't think America has a problem with people being overly conformist yet (compare us to say, China). I still see plenty of signs that free thinking is still pretty common here.
In fact, sometimes I think focus on the "be yourself, whatever it takes" vs. "be nice to others and get along". Not that has to be a conflict, but it often is.
Finally, there is a terrible Catch-22 in education. Teaching is not an honored profession. The pay reflects that. So, we need to increase the social and economic status of teachers.
But the problem is that many professional teaching associations protect too many bad teachers. There are many states in which it is almost impossible to fire a teacher after he/she has taught for two years.
The profession has to look seriously at itself and get over the view that all teachers are saints. There are truly great teachers, but there are truly bad teachers, and as long as they are seen as equals, then we will be stuck with suboptimal education.
For me, the teachers are the key. A good teacher can overcome amazing obstacles, and a bad teacher can spoil the best of resources.
Although it was a while back, I was at a lecture that good ol' ESR gave on Open Source and such. Games came up as an example, and ESR noted that he felt that in that case, open source didn't make much sense.
The argument was a bit like games were too much like movies, in that they had a very limited shelf life (compared to things like OSes, etc.), there's no way to make money off customization, support, and the work requires too much specialized talent to take full advantage of "lots of eyeballs."
He did think that maybe there was a reason to open source engines, but I don't agree with that. I think licensing source makes more sense here.
Sure, they can get the source, but they can't just hand it around to anybody. Why give away the cookie store to anybody to slap together a crappy game with your engine, giving your work a bad name?
You could open source it later, but by then, who would really take advantage of it?
The only reason I saw mentioned in the article is that IBM is worried about some of it's applications not being compatible, etc.
Which is more IBM's fault than MS, I think. Betas and RC of SP2 have been out for quite some time, enough to evaluate and provide workarounds, if not total fixes.
Finally, if it does break stuff, why not bite the bullet ASAP, because you will have to someday.
Well, I don't know if you'd consider this a wake up call worth taking, but
Granted, you only get four desktops from the Virtual Desktop Manager Powertoy.
Let replace a word or two here from above and ponder.
"Why waste your time and energy" bashing "a giant rich corporation on" slashdot? "What's in it for you? Why not go to a fourm where people discuss washers and" criticize "Maytag. Maytag is a corporationg too and I bet they " make lots of mistakes "just as much as Microsoft does."
Maybe it's because some people here are actually interested in real discussion? I'm not expecting miracles, and Slashdot will probably always be awash in anti-MS, SCO, flavor/company of the week rethoric, but at the same time, there is interesting and thoughtful discussion.
Well, sometimes. Pretty often. Maybe not regularly, but on ocassion. One in a while. Er, blue moon, maybe?;-)
Oh, another point. MS may actually give a rat's ass, so to speak, if said poster was an employee. Or business partner. Or good customer. Or independent developer. And so on. How much of a rat's ass, I can not say.
It'll be interesting to see just how much influence IBM will have over Linux, and what directions they'll push it in. And yes, I think IBM can influence Linux. When you've got programmers (paid, no less), you can make stuff happen. In the kernel, in the surrounding tools, etc.
All these toys just allow the companies to churn phones and do nothing about, well, phone service. I agree. Two things I care about.
Reception. I understand that this is a combination of the network and the phone, but I'm not seeing many companies really making the effort to examine coverage, make investments in infrastructure upgrades. I think the phones may not have much more they can do on reception, save for a breakthrough in antenna design (the PLL for example).
The second is of course battery life. This is just a fundamental problem, but hey, not sticking a ton of crap in the phone can't hurt. I must admit, I do like some color screens, just because they are bright and easy to read to see who is calling, and whom I'm calling.
I am looking at switching providers, and I'm really looking at Nextel and Verizon, as they really seem to be about "getting phone calls". Any comments?
Well, the decision to base everything on NTFS was a compatibility issue.
There is rumor that Blackcomb will have a native WinFS (no NTFS involved), and NTFS will become like FAT32.
Yea, that's the big unknown right now, but it appears that the metadata is managed by the tools that make the files.
From what I've seen, the metadata isn't exposed to the user directly, it's only gotten at via search, etc.
Sure, it maybe nothing more than a better grep, but still. Let's think of a "Search all documents for this word" No big deal, but in WinFS, it would know that all documents are here, here, and here and wouldn't waste the time looking throughout the disc and tossing files that don't match a wildcard.
The real bit comes in the ability to relate files and information together.
If you twist your head a bit, it looks a little like what the Semantic Web stuff is trying to address in the space of Web Pages. It's really hard, but it's so tempting to not try if you have the resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Observation may be the root of science, but theory and experiment are at the heart of it.
Sure, we all knew that things fell down. But, Newton had a theory as to why things fall down, a theory that had predictive value: That things fall down at this rate, the attraction between objects is measured by this constant, and so on.
Sure, Newton wasn't exactly right, but the predictive values of his theories combined with other theories in physics led to engineering revolutions.
The reason that so much skepticism is due here isn't because science has to be as skeptical as possible, it that the implied claims are, well, unbelieveably large in impact.
The claim that these devices can predict the future could requires that causal nature of current physical law be rewritten. The claim that people can influence the function of these devices requires a complete rewritting of the understanding of biologicial physiology and brain function (as well as quite a few physical laws, I imagine).
Any claim that big requires a lot of proof. Hell, Einstein had plenty of doubters until experimental data came forth to support his theory. You don't rewrite Newton's laws just like that!
Nobody just said, hey, this how works or is, cool. Even Einstein himself awaited experimental confirmation that showed the predictive value of his theories.
Einstein himself doubted quantum mechanics, and many parts of it where in question until experimental data of the 50s put QED (and later QCD) showed it's predictive power as well.
Same with genetics. The theories concerning the operation of cells are still undergoing change and revision. Mendel's experiments give a basic predictive nature to breeding traits (how many of the children would display trait X), and he had a basic theory of genotype and phenotype, but it wasn't until DNA was discovered and determined to be the mechanism of genetic expression in cells that major breakthoughs in genetic technology were to be made. And the work continues.
And I sure some of the people working on this project are very aware and are curious as to why what they are seeing occurs. It is this why that drives science, I think. It is not that things happen, what the hell, but why they happen.
Wow. Got to keep that funding coming in.
First, they claim that the box can be made less random by people concentrating on it. They don't have a theory as to this can happen, but let's ignore that.
Then, they claim the box can predict the future when bad things happen, because of big "spikes" in the random stream.
Ignoring that this has to rewrite physics just a wee-bit, why the hell wouldn't the box "predict" somebody concentrating on it and change results beforehand? Or whatever.
Also, there's no theory here. Just some data analysis it seems.
And call me crazy, but given Occam's razor and all, why it is not more likely that the means of analysing data after an "experiment" is biased. Also, if these things can't be shielded, how can you do controls?
Seesh. Maybe I should box these up and sell 'em. "Predict your future!" Flag a note when "weird" things happen in the box and let the Hawthorne effect do the rest.
My understanding is that for certain types, P/Invoke can be done safely, if the marshaller for P/Invoke can provide marshalling by value, thereby giving the unmanaged code access to a local copy of the native value type, which can be checked in the unmarshaller.
.Net has application domains, the unmanaged DLL is prevented from crossing into the managed memory space. There may be a hole here, but I haven't heard of it yet.
For example, BSTRs contain the length of the string, and the marshaller can enforce that, and the strings are copied, so the native memory is never exposed.
Since
For more complex P/Inovke operations, where you must pass a part of pinned memory to the unmanaged DLL, this is allowed, but it is marked as unsafe. Any time a DLL is given a pinned reference (a managed pointer), the code is unsafe, because you are giving access to the managed heap.
Not so. Well, unless you hacked the .Net type verification and loading code, managed to install it over the .Net Framework (not easy, really).
.Net are marked as such and can't be hidden. So, pointers, unsafe casts, etc. all stick out to the type loader. In fact, if an .Net assembly tries to mark itself as safe and it has unsafe features, the loader won't load it.
.Net was explicitly built to keep this from happening.
.Net. Yes, there is the IJW (It Just Works) stuff that allows unmodified code to compile to unsafe .Net assemblies, but there is also the C++/CLI stuff, which creates a CLS version of C++.
.Net does really improve on Java in lots of ways. Yes, James, Java isn't the last word on programming languages. .Net isn't either.
All use of unsafe features in
As far as I know, there is no example of unmanaged code that can violate the managed code type system, and
Also, this ignores that C/C++ support is much more complicated in
Frankly, this seems like a bit of sour grapes to me.
It's funny, but the only other trick out there is part of the so-called Itanic (I'm not convinced it's a failure. The war in new processor architectures are waged over decades, not years)
.Net, ??) to help with this issue.
The whole idea was to try to extract instruction-level paralellism in programs to gain speedup without having to resort to rewrites. The compiler technology wasn't quite there, but it is getting there.
If it was just Intel going dual-core, then one could wonder. But everybody (IBM, SUN, AMD) is, and I think that is a realization that raw-clock speed has hit a wall for now. Smaller process sizes didn't help with power nearly as much as some would have liked. There is a limit to the increase cache size can give performance. And so on.
Now, here are some things to consider. The latest versions of Windows and Linux do take good advantage of SMP. In the Windows world (less so in Linux, but it's improving) [1], a lot of user software is multithreaded already.
In fact, a fun exercise in Windows is to run the Task Manager and look at the runnin processes. Do a View->Select Columms and look at how many programs use just one thread. Right now, there are 4 processes (out of about I guess 40) that are just using a single thread.
So, given dual cores, I think the trend will be to take full advantage of SMP, and yes, that may be hard for software development, but when was our job ever easy.
I will also note that this may help promote the use of languages that have threads as more of a first-class abstraction (Java,
[1] Take this as a diss if you must, but frankly, user-level APIs weren't very stable (or fully useful) in Unix/Linux for quite some time. That's changed, but the programming culture is still catching up in some ways. Meanwhile, the core of the Win32 threading API was present in NT 3.1, and the use of threading in Windows programs was established by Win95 and beyond.
I have Excellent Karma? How the...
This is really unfortunate. This technology had real promise, and I hate to see cool ideas that have commerical promise being shelved in favor of...
Okay, for what. Seriously, HP. What the hell. I worked for you as a summer intern in 1997 at HP Labs. I had a good job there. You had lots of smart people who cared. It seems like you had a future, you had plans. What happened to you?
Is Carly is what happened? I'm sorry all the good people their have seem to been let go (laid off) or retired (instead in getting laid off). I feel bad that you couldn't stay.
It seems to me you are hell-bent to take every chance you have and ruin it. You have a lot of riches in talent and idea, and you just seem to toss it away.
Wake up and smell the air around you. You need everything you have to go toe to toe with IBM. Choice is good, remember that, and stop killing good ideas left and right just, well, because?
I still have hope. I really do. But I'm worried, because the more successful IT companies we have, the better we all do.
Oh, but it is expensive, if nothing more than potential liability, which for major companies is indeed a debt on their balance sheet.
Let's say we have a major ISP that provides lots of media content (okay, hell, it's a big porn site. But stay with me). Media Player is gone. Well, they spent lots of money encoding their content (okay, porn, but still) so that people can view their site without having to install a player! It's just there! They can get it from MS too.
So, they sue. Not the EU for the decision, but MS because that's where the money is. And other people sign on. (Hey, my software used WMP, and you broke it), etc, etc.
And now, you are looking down the barrel of lawsuits, having to settle, lawyers, etc. And that's money.
Okay, factor in the tons of revenue that they may lose, well, yea, it stings.
Here's the thing. You can license the technology. You can make your own damn player. You can make tools for content creation that use the format. If you don't like it, you can use something else.
Okay, yea, the monopoly thing. Uh, last time I checked, MS isn't even close to making money on selling music and video. Yet. And I bet MS is pretty happy that the EU thinks they take over the world already. And maybe they will, but not yet.
And here's the thing. What's not clear to me from this is that MS can provide WMP if people choose. If the ruling states that you can't use WMP in the EU (it can't, can it?), I call BS. Choices matter.
Sorry. No hyperlinks bad. The book is Emotional Intellegence by Daniel Goldman, ISBN: 0553375067. Amazon Link (I hope)
I'm a bit skeptical. Well, maybe they only took the first X amount of these things in, because it won't take long for all the answer to get posted. Seems more like marketing to me. Kind of "we have the smartest people, aren't we cool."
Of course, there is lots of kinds of intelligences. I read the Emotional Intellgence book, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. Yep, there's all kinds of smart.
I hate to admit it, but there may be a reason that some of those blasted sales and marketing guys and gals make serious money. We like to think that it's lucky, or BS, or kissing ass (and it could be), but sometimes, it's because "people smarts" can get you far.
Sure, this makes sense for a research lab starting up, but here's something to ponder. MS, IBM and HP all have labs too. And how effective they are is how well they can transfer ideas into development. HP had lots of idea, but consistently could not execute on them. IBM and MS do much better.
You can have too many cooks, after all. For every thinker, there is a doer that is just as valuable, if not more so.
Oh, and Google, now that you are public and MS wants a piece of your action, here's a hint. Arrogance and "we're better than..." can hurt you really, really bad. Just ask Netscape, err, AOL, err, well, you know. Don't get too cocky.
I think of Richard Fenymann at times like this. Nobel Prize winner, who admired an illiterate MC in a local bar for his social skills and how he worked. True smarts is always being ready to learn, regardless of how or what is taught.
Yea, maybe I'm jealous because I can't do those types of puzzles very well. But I still have enough brains to know that there is room for all types, and diversity wins over sheer brain power in the long haul.
Of course, I'm not that brainy. Hell, I'm still posting here, for the love of... 8-)
Also, software begets other software. One other thing about Windows development is that there is lots of potential components to buy versus build. A lot of third party provide nice stuff that can really jump start a project. Components of all kinds. Some of them even allow you to license source.
.Net any day of the week. After all, Emacs is still there if I want it.
A lot of MS products are just as much developer platforms/components as end-user tools. You can build things on top of Outlook, Word, etc. Sure, it sounds horrible, but it's a real business.
For these and other personal reasons, I prefer Windows as a development platform. Sure, Linux has lots of great stuff, but I think it currently suffers some from it's roots in Unix/C development as far as developer experience.
I started development in C, C++, Perl, Emacs, and frankly, I'll take Visual Studio and
For me, it all started back in 96 when I tried to make a application that would help track time spent on tasks for a class (required). I was using Visual Basic 4.0, and it wasn't too hard. Not believing what I was told about Office and VB, I tried to make the program export the data into the Excel spreadsheet we had to hand in.
30 minutes later, I was done.
This before NT 4.0 even, and I still haven't seen anything from the Linux/Unix world that allowed access to applications from programs that easily. I think some people are working on it (Mono is the best example I think), but still.
Couple of things. First, the Power5 is a real threat, no doubt. And IBM was smart enough not to pull the plug on AIX (unlike HP, which seems to have shot HP/UX in the leg). And the Power5 does have more software running on it. I could very well be that the Power architecture does the Itanium in, but I hope Intel doesn't fall over and play dead just yet. As for the ISA, you can't blame Intel for that. HP did most of the work there. Most of it was based on a VLIW version of the PA-RISC architecture. And, from my looking at the market, 4 way Opterons are about the same as entry level Itaniums, so I'm a bit skeptical of the 15% of the cost argument.
Actually, VLIW ideas did borrow from vector processors a bit. Was it a good thing, hard to say.
Uh, a theoretical 4-fold speed increase isn't anything to laugh at. Ask AMD, Intel, and IBM if they'd like to have a new idea in microprocessor design that had a theoretical 4-fold speed increase, and I'm sure they'd all say: "Yes."
I feel bad for Intel and HP though. Sunk quite a bit into making sure Linux could run on the Itanium from the very start, getting little for it. Really, the Itanium and Opteron are like apples and oranges.
One major problem is gcc. GCC just can't handle EPIC stuff yet. The compiler from Microsoft, Intel and HP are quite a bit much better than gcc. But gcc is the defacto complier in Linuxland, like it or not. (Even though Intel's x86 compiler for linux can do better too).
From the inside rumor mill (I'm not an insider, but I have friends), MS was planning to acquire SAP. Not merge. MS did have enough cash/stock to buyout SAP. Another rumor was the gesture/approach from MS to SAP was more to foster working relationships; To wit, to get SAP running on Windows Server 2003 and beyond a bit better than a two-legged dog, as another person put it.
Good point. Looking at their documentation, what they are trying is indeed isn't that simple. You raise a lot of the issues they deal with in adding extensible metadata and relationships while keeping backward compability with existing NTFS file system (Journaled b-tree).
Okay, take that and add a pretty comprehensive default set of metadata. The WinFS base schema is not small, and it covers a lot of stuff.
The next thing is that storing the data is one thing. The other part is storing functionality with the metadata, and allowing third-parties to do the same, and then providing a standard way to access that functionality.
One example is address data. Not that WinFS does this out of the box, but the idea is that if you had a mapping application or service, you could make an addin that would allow somebody to build a search or query like "Find all word documents that refer to people with addresses within 2 miles of this address"
The next part is that there is a whole set of APIs that allow for rule based management that allows developers (and maybe even users) a standard way of building complex actions when events in files occur.
By the way, the Semantic Web stuff is aimed at this kind of functionality as well. Of course, on the web, it's just nuts, but it doesn't mean that the effort can't have value.
Hate them or not, I do like that MS sometimes keeps trying to make something happen, rather than worrying if can be done. They may never get there, but from what I've seen of WinFS documentation, there is real power there.
Spotlight is close, but from what I can tell, the metadata is managed apart from the files, and the set of gathered metadata is by default smaller.
In think, a lot of what Spotlight can do the MS Search service can do already via indexing, but the interface leaves a ton to be desired (There are APIs for making search/index extensions. See the Adobe IFilter plug-in for example).
Where Spotlight really works well is the UI. That's important, and MS is lagging there, but I think they can catch up some.
And that the challenge for MS as well, is getting the technology to the point that it doesn't require lots of tech knowledge to use the stuff well.
A couple of points came to mind. First, literacy today is much different than in the 19th century. There's just more sources of knowledge, more types of knowledge, hell, just more stuff period.
To argue that "hey, people were okay" back then without formal schooling leaves some questions open. Imagine what TV would do to people from the 19th century, and you see what I'm driving at here.
Also, firstly, I like the notion that the role of "socialization" is uniformly a bad thing. Frankly, I don't think America has a problem with people being overly conformist yet (compare us to say, China). I still see plenty of signs that free thinking is still pretty common here.
In fact, sometimes I think focus on the "be yourself, whatever it takes" vs. "be nice to others and get along". Not that has to be a conflict, but it often is.
Finally, there is a terrible Catch-22 in education. Teaching is not an honored profession. The pay reflects that. So, we need to increase the social and economic status of teachers.
But the problem is that many professional teaching associations protect too many bad teachers. There are many states in which it is almost impossible to fire a teacher after he/she has taught for two years.
The profession has to look seriously at itself and get over the view that all teachers are saints. There are truly great teachers, but there are truly bad teachers, and as long as they are seen as equals, then we will be stuck with suboptimal education.
For me, the teachers are the key. A good teacher can overcome amazing obstacles, and a bad teacher can spoil the best of resources.
Although it was a while back, I was at a lecture that good ol' ESR gave on Open Source and such. Games came up as an example, and ESR noted that he felt that in that case, open source didn't make much sense. The argument was a bit like games were too much like movies, in that they had a very limited shelf life (compared to things like OSes, etc.), there's no way to make money off customization, support, and the work requires too much specialized talent to take full advantage of "lots of eyeballs." He did think that maybe there was a reason to open source engines, but I don't agree with that. I think licensing source makes more sense here. Sure, they can get the source, but they can't just hand it around to anybody. Why give away the cookie store to anybody to slap together a crappy game with your engine, giving your work a bad name? You could open source it later, but by then, who would really take advantage of it?
The only reason I saw mentioned in the article is that IBM is worried about some of it's applications not being compatible, etc.
Which is more IBM's fault than MS, I think. Betas and RC of SP2 have been out for quite some time, enough to evaluate and provide workarounds, if not total fixes.
Finally, if it does break stuff, why not bite the bullet ASAP, because you will have to someday.
Installed it at home (got the CD from MSDN). No worries so far.
Good things:
Tools->Internet Options->Programs now has a manage-add ons link. About @#$@#$ time. Shows ActiveX, Toolbars, BHOs, etc.
Okay things:
The firewall seems better, but I'm not sure I'll use it over ZoneAlarm right now.
Funnies:
In a bit of hilarity, the firewall complained about Windows Messenger trying to use the internet and asked if I should block it...
Same with the ActiveSync Connection Manager.
Hmmmmmmm.
Well, I don't know if you'd consider this a wake up call worth taking, but Granted, you only get four desktops from the Virtual Desktop Manager Powertoy.
Let replace a word or two here from above and ponder.
;-)
"Why waste your time and energy" bashing "a giant rich corporation on" slashdot? "What's in it for you? Why not go to a fourm where people discuss washers and" criticize "Maytag. Maytag is a corporationg too and I bet they " make lots of mistakes "just as much as Microsoft does."
Maybe it's because some people here are actually interested in real discussion? I'm not expecting miracles, and Slashdot will probably always be awash in anti-MS, SCO, flavor/company of the week rethoric, but at the same time, there is interesting and thoughtful discussion.
Well, sometimes. Pretty often. Maybe not regularly, but on ocassion. One in a while. Er, blue moon, maybe?
Oh, another point. MS may actually give a rat's ass, so to speak, if said poster was an employee. Or business partner. Or good customer. Or independent developer. And so on. How much of a rat's ass, I can not say.
Heck, even ask MS how "irrelevant" IBM is.
It'll be interesting to see just how much influence IBM will have over Linux, and what directions they'll push it in. And yes, I think IBM can influence Linux. When you've got programmers (paid, no less), you can make stuff happen. In the kernel, in the surrounding tools, etc.
All these toys just allow the companies to churn phones and do nothing about, well, phone service. I agree. Two things I care about.
Reception. I understand that this is a combination of the network and the phone, but I'm not seeing many companies really making the effort to examine coverage, make investments in infrastructure upgrades. I think the phones may not have much more they can do on reception, save for a breakthrough in antenna design (the PLL for example).
The second is of course battery life. This is just a fundamental problem, but hey, not sticking a ton of crap in the phone can't hurt. I must admit, I do like some color screens, just because they are bright and easy to read to see who is calling, and whom I'm calling.
I am looking at switching providers, and I'm really looking at Nextel and Verizon, as they really seem to be about "getting phone calls". Any comments?
Well, the decision to base everything on NTFS was a compatibility issue. There is rumor that Blackcomb will have a native WinFS (no NTFS involved), and NTFS will become like FAT32.
Yea, that's the big unknown right now, but it appears that the metadata is managed by the tools that make the files. From what I've seen, the metadata isn't exposed to the user directly, it's only gotten at via search, etc. Sure, it maybe nothing more than a better grep, but still. Let's think of a "Search all documents for this word" No big deal, but in WinFS, it would know that all documents are here, here, and here and wouldn't waste the time looking throughout the disc and tossing files that don't match a wildcard. The real bit comes in the ability to relate files and information together. If you twist your head a bit, it looks a little like what the Semantic Web stuff is trying to address in the space of Web Pages. It's really hard, but it's so tempting to not try if you have the resources.