Nope, all of these predictions were made before trends were possible. And now the trends are real. It's just your expectation of a short timeframe that's wrong.
HTML5 is a less shitty (but still as annoying) replacement for flash. Just about all computer systems are moving toward Linux. Especially now, when the PC has turned into a phone in most homes. IT is an area worked many clever people, generating scaringly accurate predictions.
Fact is, Java simply isn't a suitable replacement for programming. And that's why people think it won't last.
I have for years tried to find a single redeeming aspect about Java. One of those: I know Java sucks but it has great "something". Truth is, that it sucks, period. All aspects of its design are fundamentally stupid and divorced from reality. Before Java we had Perl, just as slow and shitty, but a hell of a lot easier to write and run. But I guess it wasn't an ecosystem owned by a big corporation like Sun.
Java is just one of those overhyped corporate languages, still living off the fumes of past glory. Looking at how quickly a only marginally better language like C#/.net took over, it proves how it was more of a fad than anything else.
Before Vista, there was no such thing as an unprivileged application in Windows. The ctrl+alt+del combo for login may have seemed like a good idea, but in reality it was security via obscurity, in other words, pointless. Or maybe they were preparing for a time when it would offer some security...
I've said it over and over, everyone needs to learn programming, the lingua franca of automation. In that way they cannot be replaced by a robot (until the next unknown paradigm shift comes along, such as hard AI) Programming is not a job description, these days it's just a necessary tool to get any kind of real work done. And will become increasingly relevant for all future business.
Even a 5yr-old could come up with better solutions than the capitalist system if some notion of equality and a better industry is what we want.
* We could calculate the tax rate periodically to be 80% applied to all income above 120% of the mean. It's automatically also a huge disincentive for major corporations to take their business to another country. * Sales tax and property tax necessarily need to follow this model of automatic periodic adjustment. * A small periodic calculated income for everyone, no strings attached. This means, you don't necessarily have to work, but are greatly encouraged to work with something meaningful. And that the amount of taxes paid by the wealthiest are in relation to their actual presence in the country. They can't just manufacture things for cheap labour abroad and sell it in your country, because the taxes would automatically adjust to give most of the sales and property profit to government which'd trickle down to people through the government salary, which in turn increases their ability to buy things, and demand for more products. Ie. a market economy driven not by capital, but by demand.
Nowadays I actually prefer SMD over thru-hole... with one exception, BGA. Hand reworking of them is seldom rewarding, especially the now more common FBGA.
And, It's likely that most of the chips on a device like an SSD are FBGA.
The pitch really isn't within the reach of human precision, so you *need* a pick & place machine. You also need an IR heater, and X-ray to check the connections.
The whole SSD market is another OEM style catastrophe where you have few chipmakers who want SSD drive mfgs, basically just using reference designs to sell the same stuff under many brand names. Which means the manufacturer doesn't fully understand how their devices operate, and can only offer limited support.
The FTL layer itself is a failure, as long as it pretends to be a block device. Because are there plenty of common failure modes that cannot be accounted for if the OS doesn't understand flash. When time passes flash blocks will wear out and fail. If the flash blocks run out, what should the FTL do? Overwrite existing data? Return corrupt data? Fail to write, leaving the system in an inconsistent state? None of these behaviours make sense from a block device point of view, and put the system in an inconsistent state no matter how you look at it.
Not to mention the wasted memory. Let's say you have a 80Gb flash drive, it may in reality contain 120Gb of flash memory. It must fail to function when the amount of memory decreases below 80Gb of perfectly good flash memory.
Actually, the situation might be better if there was a filesystem built in to the drive. You just fetch and write to file names over serial. Query disk usage, file size etc. But let's not go this way, we already tried it in the 80s.
An SSD is very expensive, why can't it have pluggable memory modules? And why can't it offer direct access to the flash bus?
A proper flash file system can offer storage throughout the whole lifetime of the flash memory, and easily verify writes and increase performance way beyond what SSDs with FTL can offer. If tied to a memory bus, we can use execute in place to save RAM and energy.
Isn't this the basic fallacy of capitalism where competition keeps corporate behaviour in check. But of course no solution is offered for when a company reaches near dominance in one area, not to mention multiple areas.
I thought this discussion ended decades ago. Nowadays CPUs use concepts from both families, and other, new concepts which aren't publicly being discussed because most of the ipad generation knows nothing about chip design anymore. We learned it's a good idea to design chips to accomodate the user (in this case a C compiler) rather than the other way around. Now that we've reached the end of that free lunch, we need to do vector instructions, parallel chips and other methods that suck because they require constant change in legacy code...
I still keep a floppy around that has a compact Linux distro. Since firewall/NAT boxes sometimes need to be reconfigured, I use this diskette to boot up while I reconfigure the HDD. It basically has the same FW/NAT settings, shell etc. but obviously lacks most of the larger services like squid, dns etc.
I don't know what use case you are trying to cater for here? Why would you want encryption if you are going to break security anyways by using untrusted operating systems & software, and web browsers that are easy to hijack.
Running proper software is a pre-requisite for getting any kind of benefit from encryption and signing.
Just make it painfully clear to everyone that e-mail is like shouting on a busy town square, and that anyone can dress up as you. People can adjust their habits accordingly.
Like in the movies, you should approach the manager, ask him a few well placed questions wearing a microphone and broadcasting it to the authorities...
Seriously though.. the bigwig managers are too retarded to notice his incompetence... so you naturally assume that the biggest problem that this company has is a single bad IT manager?
A keyboard is hardly a niche product. Some of the worlds best selling phones have had keyboards. Palm Tungsten/Treo, Blackberry, Nokia E63/E7x series to name a few. On just about all of these phones, the keyboard was very comfortable and easy to use.
This indicates that a keyboard is more or less a hard requirement for getting any work done, or be able to play action games.
The shitty keyboards are almost exclusively found on devices where you need to flip it out, most of which (apart from N900), have unsurprisingly, not been successful.
Maybe there's something to be said for having a large display that you flip out only when you need it, instead?
I'm sure most scientists agree. But how often is science allowed to intrude on politics?
Clearly, the patent-troll system is being funded by some very rich individuals, with politicians adding a few cm to their wallets...
Until laws are passed were politicians can be held responsible retroactively, and that all of their holdings and transactions are routinely, thoroughly scrutinized. I don't think we're going to see any kind of change.
It depends on your definition of nice. RMS and Linus do spend a majority of their free time helping unthankful and not very nice people. If that's not nice, I don't think there's anything that is.
Sounds like you think they're not nice when they prove someone wrong or tell them how stupid they are? IMO, *not* doing that is bad and counterproductive.
That's why "Polite" communities tend to be the worst, full of double-faced behaviour and much lower productivity, due to the spoonfeeding of sensitive people.
The "visitors" were obviously supposed to be a species with a methodical way of trying to accomplish their goals with least expenditure of resources. That means finding our weakness and using it against us.
Our obvious general weaknesses are: Unshakable trust in self-proclaimed authority and posturing. Fear of change and differing individuals (scientists) i.e. what isn't understood.
The current of an AA cell isn't exactly limited. With a low enough resistance you might be able to make the cell self-ignite.
Somehow, any kind of attempt to explain a unit of measurement in a simpler way only serves to make it at the very least moronic and less obvious. But in most cases inaccurate or; entirely wrong.
1 Mbyte is like 3 bookshelves in a library!!11111 OMFGBBQWTF
So... we should be teaching instruction sets for pre-1970 computers?
Seriously though, it's a huge mistake that schools are now using scripting languages like Java and.net. People need to learn real programming to ever be able to get into the mindset of a good programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, all of these predictions were made before trends were possible. And now the trends are real.
It's just your expectation of a short timeframe that's wrong.
HTML5 is a less shitty (but still as annoying) replacement for flash.
Just about all computer systems are moving toward Linux. Especially now, when the PC has turned into a phone in most homes.
IT is an area worked many clever people, generating scaringly accurate predictions.
Fact is, Java simply isn't a suitable replacement for programming. And that's why people think it won't last.
I have for years tried to find a single redeeming aspect about Java. One of those: I know Java sucks but it has great "something".
Truth is, that it sucks, period. All aspects of its design are fundamentally stupid and divorced from reality.
Before Java we had Perl, just as slow and shitty, but a hell of a lot easier to write and run. But I guess it wasn't an ecosystem owned by a big corporation like Sun.
Java is just one of those overhyped corporate languages, still living off the fumes of past glory. Looking at how quickly a only marginally better language like C#/.net took over, it proves how it was more of a fad than anything else.
What part of Java design isn't braindead?
No, seriously.
Before Vista, there was no such thing as an unprivileged application in Windows.
The ctrl+alt+del combo for login may have seemed like a good idea, but in reality it was security via obscurity, in other words, pointless.
Or maybe they were preparing for a time when it would offer some security...
I've said it over and over, everyone needs to learn programming, the lingua franca of automation.
In that way they cannot be replaced by a robot (until the next unknown paradigm shift comes along, such as hard AI)
Programming is not a job description, these days it's just a necessary tool to get any kind of real work done. And will become increasingly relevant for all future business.
Even a 5yr-old could come up with better solutions than the capitalist system if some notion of equality and a better industry is what we want.
* We could calculate the tax rate periodically to be 80% applied to all income above 120% of the mean. It's automatically also a huge disincentive for major corporations to take their business to another country.
* Sales tax and property tax necessarily need to follow this model of automatic periodic adjustment.
* A small periodic calculated income for everyone, no strings attached.
This means, you don't necessarily have to work, but are greatly encouraged to work with something meaningful. And that the amount of taxes paid by the wealthiest are in relation to their actual presence in the country.
They can't just manufacture things for cheap labour abroad and sell it in your country, because the taxes would automatically adjust to give most of the sales and property profit to government which'd trickle down to people through the government salary, which in turn increases their ability to buy things, and demand for more products.
Ie. a market economy driven not by capital, but by demand.
Nowadays I actually prefer SMD over thru-hole... with one exception, BGA.
Hand reworking of them is seldom rewarding, especially the now more common FBGA.
And, It's likely that most of the chips on a device like an SSD are FBGA.
The pitch really isn't within the reach of human precision, so you *need* a pick & place machine.
You also need an IR heater, and X-ray to check the connections.
The whole SSD market is another OEM style catastrophe where you have few chipmakers who want SSD drive mfgs, basically just using reference designs to sell the same stuff under many brand names.
Which means the manufacturer doesn't fully understand how their devices operate, and can only offer limited support.
The FTL layer itself is a failure, as long as it pretends to be a block device. Because are there plenty of common failure modes that cannot be accounted for if the OS doesn't understand flash.
When time passes flash blocks will wear out and fail.
If the flash blocks run out, what should the FTL do?
Overwrite existing data? Return corrupt data? Fail to write, leaving the system in an inconsistent state?
None of these behaviours make sense from a block device point of view, and put the system in an inconsistent state no matter how you look at it.
Not to mention the wasted memory.
Let's say you have a 80Gb flash drive, it may in reality contain 120Gb of flash memory. It must fail to function when the amount of memory decreases below 80Gb of perfectly good flash memory.
Actually, the situation might be better if there was a filesystem built in to the drive. You just fetch and write to file names over serial. Query disk usage, file size etc.
But let's not go this way, we already tried it in the 80s.
An SSD is very expensive, why can't it have pluggable memory modules?
And why can't it offer direct access to the flash bus?
A proper flash file system can offer storage throughout the whole lifetime of the flash memory, and easily verify writes and increase performance way beyond what SSDs with FTL can offer. If tied to a memory bus, we can use execute in place to save RAM and energy.
Isn't this the basic fallacy of capitalism where competition keeps corporate behaviour in check.
But of course no solution is offered for when a company reaches near dominance in one area, not to mention multiple areas.
I thought this discussion ended decades ago.
Nowadays CPUs use concepts from both families, and other, new concepts which aren't publicly being discussed because most of the ipad generation knows nothing about chip design anymore.
We learned it's a good idea to design chips to accomodate the user (in this case a C compiler) rather than the other way around.
Now that we've reached the end of that free lunch, we need to do vector instructions, parallel chips and other methods that suck because they require constant change in legacy code...
LOL, They need to release 8-16Tb drives soon or computer cases will be getting full of 4Tb drives.
I still keep a floppy around that has a compact Linux distro.
Since firewall/NAT boxes sometimes need to be reconfigured, I use this diskette to boot up while I reconfigure the HDD. It basically has the same FW/NAT settings, shell etc. but obviously lacks most of the larger services like squid, dns etc.
Finally, somebody finds something that TV broadcasts are useful for, and all people do is whine.
Fuck 911, we have 112. It never works anyway.
I don't know what use case you are trying to cater for here?
Why would you want encryption if you are going to break security anyways by using untrusted operating systems & software, and web browsers that are easy to hijack.
Running proper software is a pre-requisite for getting any kind of benefit from encryption and signing.
Just make it painfully clear to everyone that e-mail is like shouting on a busy town square, and that anyone can dress up as you.
People can adjust their habits accordingly.
Fascist political party?
If only we'd be that lucky.
Imagine the money these guys will make, when the whole package is out-sourced to the highest bidder.
Socialism is about enforced social policies.
National socialism is about creating a nationalist society.
No overlap.
Like in the movies, you should approach the manager, ask him a few well placed questions wearing a microphone and broadcasting it to the authorities...
Seriously though.. the bigwig managers are too retarded to notice his incompetence... so you naturally assume that the biggest problem that this company has is a single bad IT manager?
Such optimism!
A keyboard is hardly a niche product. Some of the worlds best selling phones have had keyboards.
Palm Tungsten/Treo, Blackberry, Nokia E63/E7x series to name a few.
On just about all of these phones, the keyboard was very comfortable and easy to use.
This indicates that a keyboard is more or less a hard requirement for getting any work done, or be able to play action games.
The shitty keyboards are almost exclusively found on devices where you need to flip it out, most of which (apart from N900), have unsurprisingly, not been successful.
Maybe there's something to be said for having a large display that you flip out only when you need it, instead?
I'm sure most scientists agree.
But how often is science allowed to intrude on politics?
Clearly, the patent-troll system is being funded by some very rich individuals, with politicians adding a few cm to their wallets...
Until laws are passed were politicians can be held responsible retroactively, and that all of their holdings and transactions are routinely, thoroughly scrutinized.
I don't think we're going to see any kind of change.
It depends on your definition of nice.
RMS and Linus do spend a majority of their free time helping unthankful and not very nice people. If that's not nice, I don't think there's anything that is.
Sounds like you think they're not nice when they prove someone wrong or tell them how stupid they are?
IMO, *not* doing that is bad and counterproductive.
That's why "Polite" communities tend to be the worst, full of double-faced behaviour and much lower productivity, due to the spoonfeeding of sensitive people.
Btw, we weren't allowed to wear caps in school.
There goes that idea...
The "visitors" were obviously supposed to be a species with a methodical way of trying to accomplish their goals with least expenditure of resources.
That means finding our weakness and using it against us.
Our obvious general weaknesses are:
Unshakable trust in self-proclaimed authority and posturing.
Fear of change and differing individuals (scientists)
i.e. what isn't understood.
The current of an AA cell isn't exactly limited.
With a low enough resistance you might be able to make the cell self-ignite.
Somehow, any kind of attempt to explain a unit of measurement in a simpler way only serves to make it at the very least moronic and less obvious. But in most cases inaccurate or; entirely wrong.
1 Mbyte is like 3 bookshelves in a library!!11111 OMFGBBQWTF
How about, for each mistake they make, a feather is glued to their ass.
The idiots would be happy flying around and leave the rest of us alone.
So... we should be teaching instruction sets for pre-1970 computers?
Seriously though, it's a huge mistake that schools are now using scripting languages like Java and .net.
People need to learn real programming to ever be able to get into the mindset of a good programmer.