There were. Check the efficiency of airline turbofans, or composite materials such as GLARE which can actually be welded and repaired. Power-to-weight ratio in military aircraft went from being barely enough to take off the ground, to being over unity. Slow continuous progress on several fronts can sometimes enable disruptive new technologies.
They also launched a phone OS (Windows CE) before Apple did. But yeah, in tablets they had a much bigger head start. If you do not consider the Apple Newton a tablet that is.
The problem with tablets IMO was/is multiple. It used to be you required a stylus to write and hence no multitouch was supported. This makes input really slow compared to a keyboard. They were also unusably heavy. Microsoft kept merchandising it like it was a clipboard, which it was not. Eventually such machines evolved (or devolved if you will) into notebooks with keyboards and touch screens. In which you can rotate the screen to it would be on top.
The really amusing thing is the Microsoft research group worked a lot of this multitouch stuff. Microsoft Surface is the only major hardware product that came out from that.
From a purely technical perspective, maybe one could intelligently argue that the iPod device itself was lame. But with perfect hindsight, it's clear that iPod was an exceedingly successful and awesome product. I think the point being made at grandparent level is that we should not underestimate the potential impact of new products from Apple, and that naysayers have been somewhat humiliatingly proven wrong.
So is Microsoft Windows. But it was still lame. It has only been less lame since they switched to Windows NT based kernels.
I used to own a Commodore Amiga. It cost me less than half of what a low end Mac would, had color and stereo sound while low end Macs were monochrome and had mono sound (I kid you not!) The Amiga also had a GUI based preemptive multitasking operating system, which the Mac only got when MacOS X came out over a decade later. The original Amiga was launched just a year after the original Mac. The Mac was not that special. Well maybe it was special if the only thing you knew was an IBM PC.
FWIW I crashed Google Chrome first time faster than Firefox when I used it. Adding a warning page saying Aw, Snap! does not make it less of a crash. Everything crashes... So I was not going to lie to you and say it will not crash. At least it remembers the opened pages when restarting, which is more than I could say for the old versions. So there have been some improvements there.
Adblock also filters nicely bad scripts that will wreak havoc in any browser, or make the page load slower. Which is why even people who use Google Chrome still want that functionality.
The people from Mozilla are working on sandboxing the plugins. They have not done it before, but then again a lot of other browser vendors did not either. It is really hard to retrofit something like this into an existing codebase.
Process isolation will invariably either increase memory consumption or make the application slower. Which you have to remember was the major gripe people used to have with Firefox to begin with. There are reasons why it was written that way in the first place.
I tried to use Google Chrome but dropped it on usability problems. Scrolling was unusable to me, which is important on sites with long pages (e.g. Slashdot). I am hardly browser loyal. Have used Netscape, IE, Opera, Firefox. Tried Safari was well (it is also Webkit based) but it was unusably slow.
I guess you never have programmed anything with a deadline. Even when there are no deadlines, often it is necessary to write a mockup which implements the required functionality. This can be to see how it can be implemented, or just to prove that it can be done. This mockup may or may not be reimplemented later.
It seems really naive to me, the expectation by some people that we should all write code to the highest standard in the first iteration. The truth is no piece of software is ever complete. It is only complete when you decide not to spend any more time and resources on it. There is always one more feature you could add, or piece of code you could optimize, write in a cleaner fashion, or whatever.
I can think of several pieces of code I had to write which were like 10 liners but would require several pages of documentation to explain the design tradeoffs involved. That is the order of complexity we are talking about here. Usually I add a short sentence as a summary, but sometimes this is not possible.
Funny thing is IIRC Internet Explorer was the first browser I can remember of supporting isolation. They did that like in IE 7 where ActiveX runs in a separate process. So yes, even Microsoft can do something right every once in a while.
JavaScript is much, much faster on the latest versions of Firefox. I noticed it in GMail when I upgraded (to Firefox 3.5 IIRC). But soon after Firefox 3.5 launch Google increased the bloatware in GMail and it was slightly slower than it used to be before the upgrade...
Google Chrome last time I used it did not have smooth scrolling.
Disable Flash or use AdBlock. Do not install any more Firefox plugins. If you do that it does not crash nearly as much. Nearly all my crashes are due to plugins (Flash or Acrobat).
AFAIK iPhone only supports Bluetooth headsets, not file transfers or anything else. But then again that is probably just the usual minimalistic software approach typical of Steve Jobs. I doubt the hardware is the problem there.
Was Belgium thinking of having nuclear weapons? How about Finland? They are even building a new nuclear reactor right now.
It is bullshit that nuclear power had all the funding and all the subsidies. The US did a lot of investment in the Federal Wind Energy Program between 1974 and 1981. Even NASA had a lot of research projects in the area. Between 1981 and 1988 hundreds of millions of federal tax credits were sunk on wind projects of dubious value. While without the nuclear reactors that power strategic submarines, arguably WWIII would have already happened. Submarine launched missiles ensure a nation has the ability to strike back even in the case of a massive first strike, giving pause to anyone thinking of starting a nuclear war.
Just because a nuclear power plant demands a larger initial investment than a single windmill does not mean it is more subsidized. Dams require a large initial investment as well. They still provide cheaper power in a lot of places.
What is wrong with dual use technology anyway? The Haber-Bosch process helps to make nitrogen fertilizer to feed billions of people today. It is also useful for making explosives. Would you rather us to be still digging up Chile for saltpeter, or collecting guano? ENIAC and ARPANET were built for the military as well. Canned food was invented by Nicolas Appert for the French Empire military.
India has low uranium reserves, but plenty of thorium reserves. That is why they are researching the stuff. Norway is spoiled by having petroleum reserves, so it is hardly surprising they do not give the matter much consideration.
AFAIK the problem is not that thorium energy production is unfeasible, rather that it is poorly researched.
I have heard the hemp paper argument before. Try reading some actual publications on the field. An eucalyptus monoculture is about as cheap, or cheaper, than hemp in some places. Hemp is only used in countries which have limited land area, so they use crop rotation with hemp
Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs, so they go hand in hand, and cost less in the short run.
No. South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, have nuclear reactors and do not have nuclear weapons. This is not by any means an exhaustive list either.
You do not need nuclear reactors to make nuclear weapons. You can make nuclear fission weapons by using U-235 or Plutonium. If you have a centrifuge cascade like Iran does, or some other means to separate fuel, you can make U-235 weapons without owning a single nuclear reactor. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) was of this type.
FYI I used to use Windows Vista 32-bit. I could not use the full 4GB of RAM. Where do you think the OS gets the virtual memory space for doing memory mapped I/O to the graphics card? You do not need a single process using the entire 32-bit physical address space for 32-bits to be too constraining.
Yeah, this is a desktop. You are the foolish one, if you think the specs will not filter down in a couple of years to the laptop space. Here, have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and 1GB of graphics card RAM. Here is a laptop with 6GB of RAM and 512MB of graphics card RAM. Not thin and light enough? Here, have a 4GB of RAM Lenovo U150 with a 11.6" screen.
But of course, if you currently do not need 64-bits, surely no one else does either.
Everyone wants to move to 64 bit on x86 not for the larger word size, but for the fact that the ISA is a bit more sane (more GPRs, fewer restrictions on target and destination registers, simpler memory model) giving an overall speed benefit.
My current computer has 4GB of main memory. I bought it 3 years ago. 64 bits is about addressing space indeed. One of ARM's competitors is Intel Atom. Atom is 64-bit. VIA Nano: also 64-bit. If people expect ARM to be used in tablets and netbooks, it is going to need the extra addressing space. Linus himself said it best: once you add that to the virtual memory space required by the GPU (e.g. my 3 year old graphics card has 512MB) there is not much left. Even the new generation of GPUs (e.g. Tesla) is planned to be 64-bit.
When is ARM going to release a 64-bit processor? Perhaps they should be concentrating on improving their CPU cores rather than trying to compete with GPU manufacturers.
Slashdot Mirror
There were. Check the efficiency of airline turbofans, or composite materials such as GLARE which can actually be welded and repaired. Power-to-weight ratio in military aircraft went from being barely enough to take off the ground, to being over unity. Slow continuous progress on several fronts can sometimes enable disruptive new technologies.
The military can spend that much money on a single missile so I guess that would not be a problem.
Multitouch virtual keyboard. It really helps.
The problem with tablets IMO was/is multiple. It used to be you required a stylus to write and hence no multitouch was supported. This makes input really slow compared to a keyboard. They were also unusably heavy. Microsoft kept merchandising it like it was a clipboard, which it was not. Eventually such machines evolved (or devolved if you will) into notebooks with keyboards and touch screens. In which you can rotate the screen to it would be on top.
The really amusing thing is the Microsoft research group worked a lot of this multitouch stuff. Microsoft Surface is the only major hardware product that came out from that.
From a purely technical perspective, maybe one could intelligently argue that the iPod device itself was lame. But with perfect hindsight, it's clear that iPod was an exceedingly successful and awesome product. I think the point being made at grandparent level is that we should not underestimate the potential impact of new products from Apple, and that naysayers have been somewhat humiliatingly proven wrong.
So is Microsoft Windows. But it was still lame. It has only been less lame since they switched to Windows NT based kernels.
I used to own a Commodore Amiga. It cost me less than half of what a low end Mac would, had color and stereo sound while low end Macs were monochrome and had mono sound (I kid you not!) The Amiga also had a GUI based preemptive multitasking operating system, which the Mac only got when MacOS X came out over a decade later. The original Amiga was launched just a year after the original Mac. The Mac was not that special. Well maybe it was special if the only thing you knew was an IBM PC.
FWIW I crashed Google Chrome first time faster than Firefox when I used it. Adding a warning page saying Aw, Snap! does not make it less of a crash. Everything crashes... So I was not going to lie to you and say it will not crash. At least it remembers the opened pages when restarting, which is more than I could say for the old versions. So there have been some improvements there.
Adblock also filters nicely bad scripts that will wreak havoc in any browser, or make the page load slower. Which is why even people who use Google Chrome still want that functionality.
The people from Mozilla are working on sandboxing the plugins. They have not done it before, but then again a lot of other browser vendors did not either. It is really hard to retrofit something like this into an existing codebase.
Process isolation will invariably either increase memory consumption or make the application slower. Which you have to remember was the major gripe people used to have with Firefox to begin with. There are reasons why it was written that way in the first place.
I tried to use Google Chrome but dropped it on usability problems. Scrolling was unusable to me, which is important on sites with long pages (e.g. Slashdot). I am hardly browser loyal. Have used Netscape, IE, Opera, Firefox. Tried Safari was well (it is also Webkit based) but it was unusably slow.
It gets even more ridiculous. Most Java IDEs autogenerate the Javadoc headers and quite often the programmers do not bother to edit them!
It seems really naive to me, the expectation by some people that we should all write code to the highest standard in the first iteration. The truth is no piece of software is ever complete. It is only complete when you decide not to spend any more time and resources on it. There is always one more feature you could add, or piece of code you could optimize, write in a cleaner fashion, or whatever.
I can think of several pieces of code I had to write which were like 10 liners but would require several pages of documentation to explain the design tradeoffs involved. That is the order of complexity we are talking about here. Usually I add a short sentence as a summary, but sometimes this is not possible.
Power steering. For me that was the nicest improvement.
Or WINE. Or DOSBox (it can run protected mode apps).
Funny thing is IIRC Internet Explorer was the first browser I can remember of supporting isolation. They did that like in IE 7 where ActiveX runs in a separate process. So yes, even Microsoft can do something right every once in a while.
JavaScript is much, much faster on the latest versions of Firefox. I noticed it in GMail when I upgraded (to Firefox 3.5 IIRC). But soon after Firefox 3.5 launch Google increased the bloatware in GMail and it was slightly slower than it used to be before the upgrade...
Google Chrome last time I used it did not have smooth scrolling.
Disable Flash or use AdBlock. Do not install any more Firefox plugins. If you do that it does not crash nearly as much. Nearly all my crashes are due to plugins (Flash or Acrobat).
AFAIK iPhone only supports Bluetooth headsets, not file transfers or anything else. But then again that is probably just the usual minimalistic software approach typical of Steve Jobs. I doubt the hardware is the problem there.
Yes, it is better to keep selling the same old shit and not invest in R&D. Go GM.
N900 runs a Linux distro. You can run emulators such as MAME, ScummVM, or DOSBox in it.
Was Belgium thinking of having nuclear weapons? How about Finland? They are even building a new nuclear reactor right now.
It is bullshit that nuclear power had all the funding and all the subsidies. The US did a lot of investment in the Federal Wind Energy Program between 1974 and 1981. Even NASA had a lot of research projects in the area. Between 1981 and 1988 hundreds of millions of federal tax credits were sunk on wind projects of dubious value. While without the nuclear reactors that power strategic submarines, arguably WWIII would have already happened. Submarine launched missiles ensure a nation has the ability to strike back even in the case of a massive first strike, giving pause to anyone thinking of starting a nuclear war.
Just because a nuclear power plant demands a larger initial investment than a single windmill does not mean it is more subsidized. Dams require a large initial investment as well. They still provide cheaper power in a lot of places.
What is wrong with dual use technology anyway? The Haber-Bosch process helps to make nitrogen fertilizer to feed billions of people today. It is also useful for making explosives. Would you rather us to be still digging up Chile for saltpeter, or collecting guano? ENIAC and ARPANET were built for the military as well. Canned food was invented by Nicolas Appert for the French Empire military.
AFAIK the problem is not that thorium energy production is unfeasible, rather that it is poorly researched.
There's only so much carbon fibre in the world to make windmills too.
I have heard the hemp paper argument before. Try reading some actual publications on the field. An eucalyptus monoculture is about as cheap, or cheaper, than hemp in some places. Hemp is only used in countries which have limited land area, so they use crop rotation with hemp
Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs, so they go hand in hand, and cost less in the short run.
No. South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, have nuclear reactors and do not have nuclear weapons. This is not by any means an exhaustive list either.
You do not need nuclear reactors to make nuclear weapons. You can make nuclear fission weapons by using U-235 or Plutonium. If you have a centrifuge cascade like Iran does, or some other means to separate fuel, you can make U-235 weapons without owning a single nuclear reactor. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) was of this type.
Yeah, this is a desktop. You are the foolish one, if you think the specs will not filter down in a couple of years to the laptop space. Here, have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and 1GB of graphics card RAM. Here is a laptop with 6GB of RAM and 512MB of graphics card RAM. Not thin and light enough? Here, have a 4GB of RAM Lenovo U150 with a 11.6" screen.
But of course, if you currently do not need 64-bits, surely no one else does either.
Diamondville. Atom 230, 330. Pineview is 64-bit as well.
Um, what? ARM isn't trying to compete with GPU manufacturers.
I guess you never heard of ARM Mali.
Everyone wants to move to 64 bit on x86 not for the larger word size, but for the fact that the ISA is a bit more sane (more GPRs, fewer restrictions on target and destination registers, simpler memory model) giving an overall speed benefit.
My current computer has 4GB of main memory. I bought it 3 years ago. 64 bits is about addressing space indeed. One of ARM's competitors is Intel Atom. Atom is 64-bit. VIA Nano: also 64-bit. If people expect ARM to be used in tablets and netbooks, it is going to need the extra addressing space. Linus himself said it best: once you add that to the virtual memory space required by the GPU (e.g. my 3 year old graphics card has 512MB) there is not much left. Even the new generation of GPUs (e.g. Tesla) is planned to be 64-bit.
When is ARM going to release a 64-bit processor? Perhaps they should be concentrating on improving their CPU cores rather than trying to compete with GPU manufacturers.
CDs and DVDs are overrated. A USB pen can store a lot more in a smaller form factor.