God, I hate this kind of thought pattern. We're not talking about killing off a language thats dead. We're not talking about getting rid of an old method of doing things that is no longer needed. We're talking about being able to find your way around, without assistance.
This won't be killed by GPS any more than it already has. People rarely use GPS to get around where they live, they use it to navigate long distances or previously unexplorered areas. Interestingly enough, people do learn how to navigate better with GPS devices. Once I turned my gf's TomTom out of rotating map mode or whatever you call it, and to a normal north is up mode, she actually learned what east/west/north/south means when you get directions. She can actually read maps BETTER now than any time before her GPS, which works especially well given that her GPS is often wrong and a simple phone call to someone who can give directions properly gets her out of trouble fairly quickly.
Now that I can say, you need to go to the 3700 block and turn East, our conversations when she gets lost go from 'well first I have to figure out where you are and which way you are going' to a simple 'what street are you on?' Jump to Google maps, figure out her general area, and go from there.
She has learned that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and is always in the southern hemisphere from our point of view. She can now figure out reasonable well which direction she is heading just based on seeing the sun or the moon. The moon is obviously less useful when its cloudy, but it takes pretty good cloud cover to completely obscure the sun to the point that you can't find it in the sky, so most of the time she's actually knows where shes going and a very simple set of directions can get her going the right way.
I've been with her for 6 years, bought a GPS for her birthday a year ago, and now she can actually navigate based on proper directions on her own.
The 'skill' isn't going to die, and its hardly useless. You may be ignorant and completely unaware of how advantageous it is to know how to navigate, but that just puts you in the same category as people who think knowing how to write isn't important.
The up side is, every time some douche bag like yourself gets REALLY lost and with dead batteries, you'll be less likely to find your way to safety, hopefully saving the gene pool from having to figure out another way to effectively cover you in chlorine. Being short sighted and narrow minded is fun, isn't it?
Just for reference, there is no GPS approved for guiding any aircraft in to land. They are only used inroute far inbetween destinations.
For assisted landings there are several other methods used, all of which require local support at the airport and the use of things such as laser altimeters and such. When an assisted landing occurs, you could turn off the GPS signal any time during it and not notice the difference.
Any GPS can provide the altitude on a accuracy equal to any uncalibrated altimeter. If you're providing localized air pressure readings to the unit than it can be more accurate than the GPS, but otherwise it can change/be off by thousands of feet in less than an hour when storm rolls in or out of an area.
Internet Explorer: 6 was simply a joke, the laughingstock of the web. No tabs, an extremely buggy rendering engine, not extensible, unpredictable for web developers, and largely at odds with every published standard ever. IE7 was a big step in the right direction, and IE8 has entered the playing field as a serious competitor.
Not extensible? WTF? What do you call the hundreds of browser bars, all the ActiveX controls, and all the other browser helper objects that make it so things like Flash and PDFs can be viewed in a page?
Just because you couldn't be bothered to read the docs on how to extend it, doesn't mean it wasn't extensible. Its funny to see this shit from lazy people, I wish all the malware people was as lazy and whiney as half of slashdot. The world would be a much safer place.
Just for reference, Chrome OS is essentially what the iPhone offered developers initially, web apps. Great, you've got the same thing everyone else does, and nothing else everyone else has.
How well did that work out for Apple, em? They managed to ride the hype for a year before actually releasing an SDK that didn't suck ass, and then things exploded for them via the App Store.
Linux has nothing of value to a home user except its free. Sorry, fanboys but thats the reality of it. Everyone has a web browser, everyone can edit photos and play music, and on other OSes you can play music and video without having to do extra work to go get some software that will actually play what your files are encoded with because of some retarded fanboy requirement to not play nice with anyone who doesn't agree completely with giving the world away for free.
OS X is just too expensive. Not the OS itself, but the cost of buying a Mac. I REALLY REALLY want a Mac. I want a Mac Book Pro, they look awesome, run OS X and Windows and FreeBSD great and generally high quality devices. I can spend $3500 for the Mac Book pro I want and get fucked over by not having the option for a non-glossy screen, or I can go buy a comparable machine from Dell for half that, and not have the retarded glossy screen.
Office has stagnated, sure, but there really isn't anything better, free or otherwise.
The main false premise in your post is that the world has changed. It hasn't, it rarely ever does, regardless of how many times someone shouts 'OMG THIS IS SO DIFFERENT THAN BEFORE!!@$!@$!@$'
In case you didn't notice, the failure of Vista lead almost every major computer manufacturer to put Linux in some form on one or more of their products. This would have been unheard of back in the days of XP.
Really, I can just go buy a business machine with Linux on it from anyone? No? I can buy one or two select machines with Linux on it for the desktop or a server if I want Linux? You are right, they were using Linux to show MS it needs to get its ass in gear, but only because OS X wasn't an option for them and it was never a long term plan anyway.
I agree, if Win7 fails on the scale that vista did, MS is in trouble on the OS front, but I've actually used Win7 and while I can't predict the future, I would have no doubt putting money down on Win7 having a FAR better welcoming than Vista could have dreamed of, its actually pretty usable. Turn off your inner fanboy and give it a try so you know what you're up against.
Its pretty common for companies to provide a few options for the non-mainstream customers, but that doesn't make it the Year of Linux, unless your definition of the Year of the Linux Desktop is 'yay, someone actually bought a desktop machine with Linux!' and even then, I'd be skeptical about it. People who know about Linux generally just go download it and replace what they have, not specifically request it to be installed by someone else. Just because techies are all excited about it doesn't mean that anyone buying a Dell gives a flying fuck about the option.
Games are a matter of opinion, but there are more Wii consoles sold than 360 consoles. Plus Wii consoles make Nintendo a sizable $50 profit for each one sold. Any company would want their product to be in such high demand that it constantly was sold out of stock for not one but two Christmas seasons.
Heres my opinion, as a casual gammer. I bought a 360, and then a Wii. I didn't play the 360 a lot, so after trying the Wii out with my GF we figured it was something she could get into as well, so we bought one. It was freaking awesome, for about a month, then she was bored, and we've yet to find a game that was worth buying. I played the living shit out of Twilight Princess and pretty much did everything in it, that was fun, but thats it. I've got a few games from gamefly for it, but they generally get put back in the mail the next day. Yes, its all the rage and selling like hot cakes, then people get home and play it for a while and it gets boring really quick, then it just sits on the shelf. Nintendo has the right idea, targeting the casual gamers more, but lets face it, the total reliance on motion and pointing of the Wii means that controls for most games suck ass. There are a few where it works well, but you can only play so much Wii Sports. The pointing system sucks for shooters. The Wiimote/steering wheel sucks for driving. Proper use of the nunchuk can make FPS/TPS style games okay, but your wrists get sore if you play for any length of time because you have to make these retarded wiggles and wrist flips to do shit. Using the Wiimote in a horizontal position like an old NES controller is painful on a good day and will never feel good. In short, its awesome for the first week, but then the novelty wears off and its just annoying. I haven't bought any Wii games since getting the unit, but I've bought at least 6 360 games since the Wii. Obviously I'm not a hardcore gamer, which means the Wii is targeting me, and has essentially failed. Everyone I know including older generations feel pretty much the same way. Its cool for a short period of time, but then it just becomes a chore and lame.
You obviously don't work in an office where they use Office 2007. Where everyone has to get retrained and such.
Yes, you had to retrain those 4 power users that actually did stuff in Office that required knowing where the menu options were. Fortunately those 4 people were smart enough to fi
IBM was no more open than Apple. The clone makers made the x86 PC an open platform against IBMs will. That almost happened to Apple as well, except they managed to block it legally where as IBM failed. Apple probably would have failed as well had they not seen what happened to IBM and had Jobs jump back in and put a stop the attack of the clones.
No smartphone is waterproof and can be easily read in direct sun while mounted to a motorcycle handlebar.
I haven't bothered trying to water proof my iPhone so you may be right, but I'm pretty sure I've seen some cases that would handle the task well. If you were polorized sunglasses reading an iPhone in direct sunlight isn't really that bad.
No smartphone can work well on a boat at 55mph across the water and it does not interface to my autohelm.
Funny, I use the iPhone and GPSKit to mark all my fishing spots, doesn't seem to have a problem. If I'm going somewhere that I won't have cellular signal, like offshore, then I can simply cache the area before I leave radio range and not worry about it. I actually do this when I'm inland anyway to save battery so I can track my entire trip without being plugged into the charge the whole time. I have all the local lakes cached on my phone in any zoom level that matters to me. Inland I get better cell signal on water than I do on land, offshore its obviously another story, but yay for caching. Of course, offshore I'm more concerned with navigational charts and depths rather than any traditional maps, but I'm not a commercial fisherman so I just figure out where I want to be on land, mark the way points, then go there. I don't see phones replacing high end auto navigation systems any more than I see the honda insight replacing a freight train for carrying cargo. Right too for the job and all that.
The iPhone seems to work pretty well up to about 120mph in a car, although I must admit I was driving and someone else was playing with the phone, but the tracks it stored seemed pretty much dead on and when viewed in Google Earth they go right where they should. It may work just fine at higher speeds, I just don't have the roads around here to find out, or the money to get bailed out of jail afterwords.
No smartphone can do what my field guide GPS can do. (Give me elevation maps... oh the iphone cant do that? sowwwy.)
You've never actually used an iPhone have you? I have several GPS apps to choose from, not just the single set of firmware installed at the factory. Yes, I can see elevation maps on my iPhone. Checkout GPSKit.
I'm sorry, but you've got to be stuck in the stoneage if you don't think GPSes like cheapo Garmins and such are going away.
You may not see the end of high end navigation systems for commercial boats for a handful of other reasons that you didn't mention, but your reasons for them not going away are bunk.
This isn't meant to be an iPhone fanboy post although I realize it sounds like one. My WinMo phone didn't have a GPS so I never bothered with an addon or software for it, there are probably far better apps for the WinMo GPS capable phones since they've been around a lot longer. Give it a little while and I'm sure some of the existing free GPS apps for Linux will be usable on Android devices as well if they aren't already (thinking of the openstreetmaps related applications).
Given the ability to run specialized apps on a phone versus dealing with the generally not end user upgradable firmware you're getting out of your Lawrance/Hummingbird/Eagle/Garmin or Furuno units, the versatility of a more open platform is a lot more appealing. Sure the phone doesn't have a link to a transducer for depth, but give it a year and wait for someone to make one accessible via wifi and that'll solve that problem. Of course, out on the water you probably want better GPS reception, so you'll probably want a wifi GPS too so you can put it up on the mast/conning tower/whatever its called.
Windows stagnated for many years with the infamous Blue Screens of Death while *nix showed that you could have operating systems without crashes.
What OS are you using that never Panics? I'm curious as I've used Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX and Windows, and I've had all of them panic on me more than once at the absolutely worst possible time. Maybe its HP/UX, Irix or some IBM version thats flawless and I've never been privy to use? I really want to know what the elusive crashfree OS.
Yes, TomTom announced they will be making a GPS app.
I also announced that I would be making a turn by turn directions app the day the iPhone SDK comes out.
Now I know I'm not going to finish my project so thats out, but I'm quiet sick of hearing 'announcements' saying 'we've got XXX!!!@$!@%!@#%' and not seeing it for months.
If you go to the TomTom page for the iPhone version you see 'Turn by turn car navigation for iPhone is here'.
I call bullshit. Its not here, if it was here I'd have bought it or at least see it on the App Store.
This kind of bullshit advertising needs to stop, and sites like slashdot need to stop promoting this bullshit until it actually exists.
Press releases and news stories about shit that doesn't actually exist yet need to stop.
Non-blocking implies re-entrancy, not multiple threads, thanks for pretending to have a clue.
If you think multithreaded apps are simpler than single threaded apps you've never written a multithreaded app, at least not in any language that actually supports real threads, not some sort of internal hack like the crap Ruby pulls. The fact that you have to watch out for race conditions alone makes it more complicated.
GTK, Cocoa, and MFC classes for Windows all use background threads for certain operations. Donno about KDE, but I'd bet it does too. Again, have you ever actually written any code or are you a freshman still reading your into to computer science text book?
Yes, I'm condescending, but when you're a twit and act like you know everything while spewing shit thats simply wrong, you're going to get condescending, thats just life, sorry.
And yes, it is ironic that you call me condescending directly before quoting the line where I mock you for being a condescending idiot.
So I've got to go to a Facebook page to join the beta?
I don't know how to say this any other way:
Go fuck yourselves, you've already shown me you have no taste or self respect.
Get a real website and get yourself off the white trash center of the Internet and I'll consider you.
And yes, I dislike Facebook and generally have a lower opinion of anyone who subscribes to such retarded friend ePenis contests, I'm sorry, social networking sites.
Yay, virtualbox is almost caught up to every other virtual machine package on the planet. Not really impressive. Virtual SMP on a single processor would be impressive. 64 bit guests on a 32 bit host (with a 64 bit processor) was cool.
Finally adding virtual SMP is more of a 'its about time' kind of thing.
With that said, I love virtualbox so I'm glad they added it.
Explorer doesn't open individual directories with different processes. Each explorer window can be a separate process. This is not special, you are just running multiple apps. Just like every other standard windows app. It takes effort to NOT run multiple apps in windows. It takes effort to make it so each new invocation of the executable looks for an existing process and tells it the info it was passed when it was started.
Guess what. Firefox can do this now! No code changes needed! Scary eh? Guess what else, EVERY APP on EVERY OS I have EVER written for other than mobile devices and OS X works this way be default.
You have to go out of your way on most OSes to even GET A single instance type of application.
They aren't inventing new code, they're removing and getting back to the way things used to work. This isn't new, its old.
This isn't an 'its about time' thing, at least as far as multiple processes.
This is a 'hahahah look they are finally going back to what we did 20 years ago before we had a bunch of retarded CS graduates writing Windows apps who think one process doing everything including pretending to be the OS is a good idea!'
Hooray for competition, and hooray for moving the right direction. But don't expect me to give anyone a pat on the back for finally figuring out that the shit we knew how to do 20 years ago was the right way to go and that following the MS crowd was a stupid idea. Occasionally the UNIX hippies knew what the hell they were doing.
They aren't 'removing' it. They're moving away from the insane amount of XPCOM components required to make everything work and consolidating them into fewer larger components.
XPCOM isn't going anywhere, its just getting to be more sane. Rather than creating a new XPCOM component every time someone wants to add a new font, they're making a 'font handling XPCOM component' so you only have to load it, rather than 200 different ones for all the fonts you have installed.
No, there aren't XPCOM components for 'fonts', and never were. Its an example that is so far out that I would hope no one took it verbatim. I realize however that some idiot will so I had to add this as well.
XPCOM isn't going anywhere, theres nothing wrong with it. Gecko just happens to use it in a retarded way, and they are fixing that aspect of its usage.
The other big benefit is that one process can't hog the CPU: even if one page gets into a ridiculously tight JavaScript loop that bogs that page down, the others should continue to load.
One thread can't hog the cpu in any given process either. You don't need multi-process to avoid getting screwed by bad code, you just need a framework that doesn't suck ass. If you have an OS in which one thread of a process can prevent other threads of equal priority in the same process from getting CPU time than your OS sucks ass. Fix it and make threads work like they are supposed to. I have to admit, I'm not sure what obscure OS you're using that has such shitty thread queuing though, I've not been privy to that since I used Windows 9x.
Interestingly enough, the whole multi-process thing is finally getting back around to where we were in unix 30 years ago. Yea! We've reinvented the wheel! I'm not complaining as it means we're finally getting rid of the ignorant fucks of programmers who think that one process should do everything (poorly) and back to smaller processes that do one thing and do it well.
Thanks for giving out some ignorant information though, slashdot is better for it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a teacher in Mexico using an old Mac, this is of no interest to you. You don't have Internet access anyway. Nice try though.
God, I hate this kind of thought pattern. We're not talking about killing off a language thats dead. We're not talking about getting rid of an old method of doing things that is no longer needed. We're talking about being able to find your way around, without assistance.
This won't be killed by GPS any more than it already has. People rarely use GPS to get around where they live, they use it to navigate long distances or previously unexplorered areas. Interestingly enough, people do learn how to navigate better with GPS devices. Once I turned my gf's TomTom out of rotating map mode or whatever you call it, and to a normal north is up mode, she actually learned what east/west/north/south means when you get directions. She can actually read maps BETTER now than any time before her GPS, which works especially well given that her GPS is often wrong and a simple phone call to someone who can give directions properly gets her out of trouble fairly quickly.
Now that I can say, you need to go to the 3700 block and turn East, our conversations when she gets lost go from 'well first I have to figure out where you are and which way you are going' to a simple 'what street are you on?' Jump to Google maps, figure out her general area, and go from there.
She has learned that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and is always in the southern hemisphere from our point of view. She can now figure out reasonable well which direction she is heading just based on seeing the sun or the moon. The moon is obviously less useful when its cloudy, but it takes pretty good cloud cover to completely obscure the sun to the point that you can't find it in the sky, so most of the time she's actually knows where shes going and a very simple set of directions can get her going the right way.
I've been with her for 6 years, bought a GPS for her birthday a year ago, and now she can actually navigate based on proper directions on her own.
The 'skill' isn't going to die, and its hardly useless. You may be ignorant and completely unaware of how advantageous it is to know how to navigate, but that just puts you in the same category as people who think knowing how to write isn't important.
The up side is, every time some douche bag like yourself gets REALLY lost and with dead batteries, you'll be less likely to find your way to safety, hopefully saving the gene pool from having to figure out another way to effectively cover you in chlorine. Being short sighted and narrow minded is fun, isn't it?
Just for reference, there is no GPS approved for guiding any aircraft in to land. They are only used inroute far inbetween destinations.
For assisted landings there are several other methods used, all of which require local support at the airport and the use of things such as laser altimeters and such. When an assisted landing occurs, you could turn off the GPS signal any time during it and not notice the difference.
Any GPS can provide the altitude on a accuracy equal to any uncalibrated altimeter. If you're providing localized air pressure readings to the unit than it can be more accurate than the GPS, but otherwise it can change/be off by thousands of feet in less than an hour when storm rolls in or out of an area.
Not extensible? WTF? What do you call the hundreds of browser bars, all the ActiveX controls, and all the other browser helper objects that make it so things like Flash and PDFs can be viewed in a page?
Just because you couldn't be bothered to read the docs on how to extend it, doesn't mean it wasn't extensible. Its funny to see this shit from lazy people, I wish all the malware people was as lazy and whiney as half of slashdot. The world would be a much safer place.
hahaha you are so witty and original
Just for reference, Chrome OS is essentially what the iPhone offered developers initially, web apps. Great, you've got the same thing everyone else does, and nothing else everyone else has.
How well did that work out for Apple, em? They managed to ride the hype for a year before actually releasing an SDK that didn't suck ass, and then things exploded for them via the App Store.
Linux has nothing of value to a home user except its free. Sorry, fanboys but thats the reality of it. Everyone has a web browser, everyone can edit photos and play music, and on other OSes you can play music and video without having to do extra work to go get some software that will actually play what your files are encoded with because of some retarded fanboy requirement to not play nice with anyone who doesn't agree completely with giving the world away for free.
OS X is just too expensive. Not the OS itself, but the cost of buying a Mac. I REALLY REALLY want a Mac. I want a Mac Book Pro, they look awesome, run OS X and Windows and FreeBSD great and generally high quality devices. I can spend $3500 for the Mac Book pro I want and get fucked over by not having the option for a non-glossy screen, or I can go buy a comparable machine from Dell for half that, and not have the retarded glossy screen.
Office has stagnated, sure, but there really isn't anything better, free or otherwise.
The main false premise in your post is that the world has changed. It hasn't, it rarely ever does, regardless of how many times someone shouts 'OMG THIS IS SO DIFFERENT THAN BEFORE!!@$!@$!@$'
Really, I can just go buy a business machine with Linux on it from anyone? No? I can buy one or two select machines with Linux on it for the desktop or a server if I want Linux? You are right, they were using Linux to show MS it needs to get its ass in gear, but only because OS X wasn't an option for them and it was never a long term plan anyway.
I agree, if Win7 fails on the scale that vista did, MS is in trouble on the OS front, but I've actually used Win7 and while I can't predict the future, I would have no doubt putting money down on Win7 having a FAR better welcoming than Vista could have dreamed of, its actually pretty usable. Turn off your inner fanboy and give it a try so you know what you're up against.
Its pretty common for companies to provide a few options for the non-mainstream customers, but that doesn't make it the Year of Linux, unless your definition of the Year of the Linux Desktop is 'yay, someone actually bought a desktop machine with Linux!' and even then, I'd be skeptical about it. People who know about Linux generally just go download it and replace what they have, not specifically request it to be installed by someone else. Just because techies are all excited about it doesn't mean that anyone buying a Dell gives a flying fuck about the option.
Heres my opinion, as a casual gammer. I bought a 360, and then a Wii. I didn't play the 360 a lot, so after trying the Wii out with my GF we figured it was something she could get into as well, so we bought one. It was freaking awesome, for about a month, then she was bored, and we've yet to find a game that was worth buying. I played the living shit out of Twilight Princess and pretty much did everything in it, that was fun, but thats it. I've got a few games from gamefly for it, but they generally get put back in the mail the next day. Yes, its all the rage and selling like hot cakes, then people get home and play it for a while and it gets boring really quick, then it just sits on the shelf. Nintendo has the right idea, targeting the casual gamers more, but lets face it, the total reliance on motion and pointing of the Wii means that controls for most games suck ass. There are a few where it works well, but you can only play so much Wii Sports. The pointing system sucks for shooters. The Wiimote/steering wheel sucks for driving. Proper use of the nunchuk can make FPS/TPS style games okay, but your wrists get sore if you play for any length of time because you have to make these retarded wiggles and wrist flips to do shit. Using the Wiimote in a horizontal position like an old NES controller is painful on a good day and will never feel good. In short, its awesome for the first week, but then the novelty wears off and its just annoying. I haven't bought any Wii games since getting the unit, but I've bought at least 6 360 games since the Wii. Obviously I'm not a hardcore gamer, which means the Wii is targeting me, and has essentially failed. Everyone I know including older generations feel pretty much the same way. Its cool for a short period of time, but then it just becomes a chore and lame.
Yes, you had to retrain those 4 power users that actually did stuff in Office that required knowing where the menu options were. Fortunately those 4 people were smart enough to fi
IBM was no more open than Apple. The clone makers made the x86 PC an open platform against IBMs will. That almost happened to Apple as well, except they managed to block it legally where as IBM failed. Apple probably would have failed as well had they not seen what happened to IBM and had Jobs jump back in and put a stop the attack of the clones.
I haven't bothered trying to water proof my iPhone so you may be right, but I'm pretty sure I've seen some cases that would handle the task well. If you were polorized sunglasses reading an iPhone in direct sunlight isn't really that bad.
Funny, I use the iPhone and GPSKit to mark all my fishing spots, doesn't seem to have a problem. If I'm going somewhere that I won't have cellular signal, like offshore, then I can simply cache the area before I leave radio range and not worry about it. I actually do this when I'm inland anyway to save battery so I can track my entire trip without being plugged into the charge the whole time. I have all the local lakes cached on my phone in any zoom level that matters to me. Inland I get better cell signal on water than I do on land, offshore its obviously another story, but yay for caching. Of course, offshore I'm more concerned with navigational charts and depths rather than any traditional maps, but I'm not a commercial fisherman so I just figure out where I want to be on land, mark the way points, then go there. I don't see phones replacing high end auto navigation systems any more than I see the honda insight replacing a freight train for carrying cargo. Right too for the job and all that.
The iPhone seems to work pretty well up to about 120mph in a car, although I must admit I was driving and someone else was playing with the phone, but the tracks it stored seemed pretty much dead on and when viewed in Google Earth they go right where they should. It may work just fine at higher speeds, I just don't have the roads around here to find out, or the money to get bailed out of jail afterwords.
You've never actually used an iPhone have you? I have several GPS apps to choose from, not just the single set of firmware installed at the factory. Yes, I can see elevation maps on my iPhone. Checkout GPSKit.
I'm sorry, but you've got to be stuck in the stoneage if you don't think GPSes like cheapo Garmins and such are going away.
You may not see the end of high end navigation systems for commercial boats for a handful of other reasons that you didn't mention, but your reasons for them not going away are bunk.
This isn't meant to be an iPhone fanboy post although I realize it sounds like one. My WinMo phone didn't have a GPS so I never bothered with an addon or software for it, there are probably far better apps for the WinMo GPS capable phones since they've been around a lot longer. Give it a little while and I'm sure some of the existing free GPS apps for Linux will be usable on Android devices as well if they aren't already (thinking of the openstreetmaps related applications).
Given the ability to run specialized apps on a phone versus dealing with the generally not end user upgradable firmware you're getting out of your Lawrance/Hummingbird/Eagle/Garmin or Furuno units, the versatility of a more open platform is a lot more appealing. Sure the phone doesn't have a link to a transducer for depth, but give it a year and wait for someone to make one accessible via wifi and that'll solve that problem. Of course, out on the water you probably want better GPS reception, so you'll probably want a wifi GPS too so you can put it up on the mast/conning tower/whatever its called.
What OS are you using that never Panics? I'm curious as I've used Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX and Windows, and I've had all of them panic on me more than once at the absolutely worst possible time. Maybe its HP/UX, Irix or some IBM version thats flawless and I've never been privy to use? I really want to know what the elusive crashfree OS.
Yes, TomTom announced they will be making a GPS app.
I also announced that I would be making a turn by turn directions app the day the iPhone SDK comes out.
Now I know I'm not going to finish my project so thats out, but I'm quiet sick of hearing 'announcements' saying 'we've got XXX!!!@$!@%!@#%' and not seeing it for months.
If you go to the TomTom page for the iPhone version you see 'Turn by turn car navigation for iPhone is here'.
I call bullshit. Its not here, if it was here I'd have bought it or at least see it on the App Store.
This kind of bullshit advertising needs to stop, and sites like slashdot need to stop promoting this bullshit until it actually exists.
Press releases and news stories about shit that doesn't actually exist yet need to stop.
Or the kernel. Ever used select()? Perfect example of an API call that helps facilitate making a single threaded app appear multithreaded.
If you want to get technical, its more like cooperative threading inside the app rather than preemptive threading provided by the OS.
Non-blocking implies re-entrancy, not multiple threads, thanks for pretending to have a clue.
If you think multithreaded apps are simpler than single threaded apps you've never written a multithreaded app, at least not in any language that actually supports real threads, not some sort of internal hack like the crap Ruby pulls. The fact that you have to watch out for race conditions alone makes it more complicated.
GTK, Cocoa, and MFC classes for Windows all use background threads for certain operations. Donno about KDE, but I'd bet it does too. Again, have you ever actually written any code or are you a freshman still reading your into to computer science text book?
Yes, I'm condescending, but when you're a twit and act like you know everything while spewing shit thats simply wrong, you're going to get condescending, thats just life, sorry.
And yes, it is ironic that you call me condescending directly before quoting the line where I mock you for being a condescending idiot.
You've never actually written any code have you?
You've confused my reply to the parent post to mine with a reply to the article in general. Try to keep up.
Before anyone feels the need to reply:
Yes, I realize I am in fact an idiot who didn't even fully read the summary in his haste to get in on the action.
Its hard to click the link in the summary isn't it.
So I've got to go to a Facebook page to join the beta?
I don't know how to say this any other way:
Go fuck yourselves, you've already shown me you have no taste or self respect.
Get a real website and get yourself off the white trash center of the Internet and I'll consider you.
And yes, I dislike Facebook and generally have a lower opinion of anyone who subscribes to such retarded friend ePenis contests, I'm sorry, social networking sites.
Yes, just like Google chrome shares the same cookies between tabs.
Yay, virtualbox is almost caught up to every other virtual machine package on the planet. Not really impressive. Virtual SMP on a single processor would be impressive. 64 bit guests on a 32 bit host (with a 64 bit processor) was cool.
Finally adding virtual SMP is more of a 'its about time' kind of thing.
With that said, I love virtualbox so I'm glad they added it.
Did you even READ the url you linked too?
To quote the FIRST LINE OF THE LINKED PAGE:
The basic idea is to refactor interfaces to remove unnecessary "XPCOM style" ugliness and other interface design errors.
Not sure how you got to 'removing XPCOM throughout'. Reading comprehension is more difficult than I realize.
Explorer doesn't open individual directories with different processes. Each explorer window can be a separate process. This is not special, you are just running multiple apps. Just like every other standard windows app. It takes effort to NOT run multiple apps in windows. It takes effort to make it so each new invocation of the executable looks for an existing process and tells it the info it was passed when it was started.
Guess what. Firefox can do this now! No code changes needed! Scary eh? Guess what else, EVERY APP on EVERY OS I have EVER written for other than mobile devices and OS X works this way be default.
You have to go out of your way on most OSes to even GET A single instance type of application.
They aren't inventing new code, they're removing and getting back to the way things used to work. This isn't new, its old.
This isn't an 'its about time' thing, at least as far as multiple processes.
This is a 'hahahah look they are finally going back to what we did 20 years ago before we had a bunch of retarded CS graduates writing Windows apps who think one process doing everything including pretending to be the OS is a good idea!'
Hooray for competition, and hooray for moving the right direction. But don't expect me to give anyone a pat on the back for finally figuring out that the shit we knew how to do 20 years ago was the right way to go and that following the MS crowd was a stupid idea. Occasionally the UNIX hippies knew what the hell they were doing.
They aren't 'removing' it. They're moving away from the insane amount of XPCOM components required to make everything work and consolidating them into fewer larger components.
XPCOM isn't going anywhere, its just getting to be more sane. Rather than creating a new XPCOM component every time someone wants to add a new font, they're making a 'font handling XPCOM component' so you only have to load it, rather than 200 different ones for all the fonts you have installed.
No, there aren't XPCOM components for 'fonts', and never were. Its an example that is so far out that I would hope no one took it verbatim. I realize however that some idiot will so I had to add this as well.
XPCOM isn't going anywhere, theres nothing wrong with it. Gecko just happens to use it in a retarded way, and they are fixing that aspect of its usage.
One thread can't hog the cpu in any given process either. You don't need multi-process to avoid getting screwed by bad code, you just need a framework that doesn't suck ass. If you have an OS in which one thread of a process can prevent other threads of equal priority in the same process from getting CPU time than your OS sucks ass. Fix it and make threads work like they are supposed to. I have to admit, I'm not sure what obscure OS you're using that has such shitty thread queuing though, I've not been privy to that since I used Windows 9x.
Interestingly enough, the whole multi-process thing is finally getting back around to where we were in unix 30 years ago. Yea! We've reinvented the wheel! I'm not complaining as it means we're finally getting rid of the ignorant fucks of programmers who think that one process should do everything (poorly) and back to smaller processes that do one thing and do it well.
Thanks for giving out some ignorant information though, slashdot is better for it.