I don't know where you've got this idea from, but this doesn't really happen. Researchers may keep ideas quiet until they publish to avoid someone else claiming the glory, but after they publish it's in their interests for as many people to use their work as possible. If people replicate their results, then that's independent verification of their results -- wonderful! If people build on their model to produce a better one, they get cited and gain influence -- great! The difficulty for researchers is actually the opposite problem -- getting people to notice and user their work. I'm sure there are counter examples, but that has been my experience.
Also, having their work replicated means that they get quoted more often - and that's what being a scientist is really all about.
Since it will be targeted at the growing netbook market, it will be competition for intel.
Possibly ARM and PowerVR (and licensees like TI) as well. Look at what's running inside a lot of devices like the iPhone or the Pandora: An ARM CPU and a PowerVR graphics accelerator (the one found in the Pandora is even DirectX 10.1 capable). The Pandora already touches the MID/UMPC market and it doesn't seem too far off that TI et al. might end up catering to MID/UMPC manufacturers - the Pandora's OMAP3530 already delivers up to 900 MHz (overclocked; 600 by default) and modern graphics acceleration (for those ultra-important pixel shader desktop effects). And the work of making Linux put all that to use has already been done.
Also, if NVidia's chip ends up small and efficient enough it might even be used in the mobile markets PowerVR operates in (UMPC and below). This might turn out interesting.
It's true that one can write PHP applications without using file-oriented things like include(), however this is usually frowned upon for everything but trivial scripts as putting everything into one file (or text resource in this case) leads to an unstructured, hard-to-maintain blob of code. As people are hardly going to adopt platform-specific coding styles for a mostly platform-agnostic language like PHP, a transparent file system equivalent will be expected.
Some languages work better without a file system, of course - however, most code still expects one. For example, Java applications that use some kind of logging will most probably reference one or more log files as that's the most useful way of logging things on all current platforms. Again, people are hardly going to put platform-specific code into a Java application (as Java is explicitly perceived as "cmpile once, run everywhere") so again a file system is expected.
Even if traditionally file-oriented languages and compilers are eliminated, especially the languages that mesh best with the Phantom design (Java and other multiplatform OOP languages) are unlikely to use special code just to support one platform. There will have to be something that transparently emulates a traditional file system simply because that's one of the paradigms common to all other platforms, a paradigm that virtually all programming languages (or established practices) depend on. Having it might compromise the conceptual purity of the OS but it not only greatly increases the amount of available software but also makes the platform more attractive for developers.
Of course a thin wrapper that simply takes a path string and uses that to point to a data resource might already do the trick... However, many apps still expect directories so supporting at least an application-specific file tree might be a good idea, as well.
As for C++: Ah. I thought I had read that somewhere on the Phantom site. Nevermind.
It really depends on the artist in question. Take, for example, "Tag am Meer" (actual song starts at 1:20) by German Hip Hop band Die Fantastischen Vier, an extremely relaxed song about spending a day at the beach. Granted, the band is known as a rather artsy Hip Hop band but there's plenty of bands like them.
Most probably you only know gangsta rap as Hip Hop because that's what dominates the media in the States (whereas Germany used to be dominated by Fanta Vier and the fun-focused Hamburg rap scene). There's a lot of different English stuff available, as well; for a particularly nerdy example MC Frontalot, who is responsible for things like the Penny Arcade theme. The fact that his page proudly displays an endorsement by Noam Chomsky says a lot about him.
Sure, your post might have faked ignorance but hey, it's not like additional information has never hurt anyone. (I'm not delusional enough to not put that 'n' in front of "ever".)
With C++ mentioned as a supported language I would say that at least part of the GCC is needed. PHP, which is also explicitly mentioned, is file-oriented as well.
Actually, that leads us to another question: If the file equivalent is simply a serialized object dump from one application, how do we load it into another app without the second app knowing about the first one's internal data structures etc? How do I pass something serialized in JavaScript to a Python app? Or something written in a Smalltalk-based IDE to a compiler?
For that matter, do they intend to write their own set of compilers for the platform or will there be an abstraction layer that allows file-oriented apps like the GCC to run on Phantom? At least C++ usually has a very file-heavy build process that would have to be completely revamped to fit natively into the Phantom concept.
Also, persising objects instead of writing files has the big disadvantage of completely destroying interoperability. In order to read your persisted states any other app will need to be memory-compatible to yours or crawl through your persisted memory dump and parse out the data (probably from another progrmming language so you have to reverse-engineer the data structures). Good luck with that.
There's a good reason why we're moving towards XML-based file formats. Performance isn't everything.
Oh, like SSD or carbon nanotube non-volatile fast RAM?
Just like FeRAM, MRAM, racetrack memory or the other half-dozen ultra-fast, ultra-dense nonvolatile memory technologies that were a mere year from market introduction three years ago.
I'll believe nonvolatile main memory when I see two gigs of it in an actual desktop computer. I'll believe SSDs as a RAM replacement when they have access times comparable to DDR SDRAM and/or price-per-megabyte comparable to HDDs.
There's a lot of nice technologies out there but none is really mature enough to displace the HDD/SDRAM ecosystem we have right now.
Everything I do should be logged to storage in some format either temporarily or permanently, depending on the type of work.
I should be able to open a word processor, type and print a document and close it. Tomorrow, if I didn't assign it some other intelligent title, I should be able to easily see that I have a recent document I printed that I can edit again if I like.
You do realize that you just described auto-save? Auto-save does not necessarily need to be "all X minutes"; it can as well be "when closing the app".
Also, how do we handle program updates that change the layout of internal data structures? We can't just deserialize the data from the disk and plug it into the program's memory; that would lead to a crash when reading data from an incompatible version. We also can't have the program update all of its structures on the disk when it's updated as that would break as soon as you have serialized objects that aren't present during the update (for instance because the volume in question isn't there at the time).
So in the end the file-replacing states that get written to disk still need to be scanned at least for which program version they were persisted with before unpersisting them. Granted, the overall overhead might be smaller, but file storage is definitely not fire-and-forget - especially as incompatible or damaged persisted states will most likely crash the entire program when loaded. And the only way to avoid that is to check the state for correctness when loading it, thus making it equivalent to a regular file.
Phantom is a nifty concept but I think a lot of the "so much better than all older OSes" rhethoric fails to see possible pitfalls that would force Phantom to behave very much like those older OSes.
Actually, for Win7 they will also have a Finisher edition. It doesn't support resolutions below 1080p, you can't turn of Aero Glass, you can't close applications if less than four apps are running and at all times you must be connected to at least one Ethernet and one WiFi network (if there is not WiFi hotspot, an ad-hoc network is created). It will be twice as expensive as Ultimate and is intended for "submerging nations", where Microsoft wants to squeeze the last few penies out of gulible idiots before the whole market collapses.
Let Cl be the cost of a legitimate Windows Vista Starter.
Let Vl be the value of a legitimate Windows Vista Starter.
Let Cp be the cost (financial and moral) of a pirated Windows Vista Ultimate.
Let Vp be the value of a pirated Windows Vista Ultimate.
If people perceive (Vp-Cp) > (Vl-Cl), people will pirate Vista instead of using the Starter version. As Starter is not a particularly capable Windows, the perceived Vl might be very low in comparison to Vp. If we assume (Vl-Cl) to be epsilon, the decison to pirate or not to pirate boils down to whether Cp > Vp. As the financial cost of a pirated Windows is bound to be low, the only thinga keeping people from pirating Windows would be
a) The perception that Starter is good enough. Might not hold up if they encounter a different version.
b) The perception that pirating Windows is highly immoral. Unlikely to be prevalent (see sibling).
In a market that is not highly moral and attuned to IP issues (and where bootlegged Windows copies can be obtained) it's unlikely that Vista Starter will deter anyone from pirating.
IANAEconomist, but it does seem pretty clear to me.
The question is what qualifies as free speech. If I (against better knowledge) told your boss that his wife cheated on him with you, would that deserve free speech protection? I don't think so; it's speech but it's not something we want to protect. Likewise, there's a difference between telling people that I think you're a horrible person and telling them that you need to be killed, the law be damned. Or, in this case, posting death threats against someone along with his home address.
People have more rights than just free speech, an important one being the right to being physically unharmed. Now we have to consider whether the right to being physically unharmed is more important than the right to free speech or vice versa. Apparently it has been found that free speech does not universally trump all other rights and can be limited if the speech endangers someone's well-being. I consider it a good thing that our rights are balanced against each other.
Carmack is still turning in his grave, oh wait he still around? Oh yeah he is, ahh Mr. Carmack.. sir please stop working on console games and blow the world away again, we need you, and being a console whore is one more step toward mediocrity.
Don't worry, just wait for his next game. John Carmack is about to make you his bitch.
Start a wholly owned subsidiary named something like "FreeListen", change the Zune to run a tiny Linux from ROM and sell it as the "FreePod". Watch as Slashdot launches a free marketing campaign for you.
Well, have you ever read the sports pages in your local newspaper and thrown up a parsing error over something like "Lakers beat Knicks 12:9"? What kind of "lakers" could they talk about? Cricketeer Jim Laker's team? The ambiguity is unbearable!
Usually it's fairly obvious from the context which name is meant, especially when a niche publication talks about niche people in its niche topic - neither the nobel prize winner nor the pope are relevant to the Open Source community (and, in fact, neither of them is still alive). We can also talk about RMS and ESR without people wondering what the root-mean square of something and the European Society of Radiology have to do with software licensing.
Actually, you're guilty of it, as well - you didn't state what we should resolve KDE and GNOME to, thus being not completely unambiguous. Even though it's obvious that you didn't mean the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Database Engineering and the GIS Neutral Object Manipulation Engine, it's only obvious because the readers apply prior knowledge according to context, which you complain about having to do.
And there's much to be learned about thermal stress when the teacher screws up the thermite experiment and shatters the table by pouring molten iron on it.
However, it'd be really nice if top could also tell me how much I/O a process uses. Sometimes it's not updatedb/mdworker (the OS X/Spotlight equivalent) and the culprit becomes hard to track down as there's no easy statistic for which process is hammering the HDD the most.
I don#t know; I can't get either to run. All I get are.exe archives and for some reason my unarchiver can't extract them. How am I supposed to get the app bundles out?
That's UK only. Well, admittedly the LPs sold by Amazon Germany aren't CDs either but they also aren't digital. You only get MP3s in the UK and the US, making Apple's offering infinitely better everywhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, having their work replicated means that they get quoted more often - and that's what being a scientist is really all about.
This am real world, me swear.
Possibly ARM and PowerVR (and licensees like TI) as well. Look at what's running inside a lot of devices like the iPhone or the Pandora: An ARM CPU and a PowerVR graphics accelerator (the one found in the Pandora is even DirectX 10.1 capable). The Pandora already touches the MID/UMPC market and it doesn't seem too far off that TI et al. might end up catering to MID/UMPC manufacturers - the Pandora's OMAP3530 already delivers up to 900 MHz (overclocked; 600 by default) and modern graphics acceleration (for those ultra-important pixel shader desktop effects). And the work of making Linux put all that to use has already been done.
Also, if NVidia's chip ends up small and efficient enough it might even be used in the mobile markets PowerVR operates in (UMPC and below). This might turn out interesting.
Duh. Everything's bigger in the United States.
It's true that one can write PHP applications without using file-oriented things like include(), however this is usually frowned upon for everything but trivial scripts as putting everything into one file (or text resource in this case) leads to an unstructured, hard-to-maintain blob of code. As people are hardly going to adopt platform-specific coding styles for a mostly platform-agnostic language like PHP, a transparent file system equivalent will be expected.
Some languages work better without a file system, of course - however, most code still expects one. For example, Java applications that use some kind of logging will most probably reference one or more log files as that's the most useful way of logging things on all current platforms. Again, people are hardly going to put platform-specific code into a Java application (as Java is explicitly perceived as "cmpile once, run everywhere") so again a file system is expected.
Even if traditionally file-oriented languages and compilers are eliminated, especially the languages that mesh best with the Phantom design (Java and other multiplatform OOP languages) are unlikely to use special code just to support one platform. There will have to be something that transparently emulates a traditional file system simply because that's one of the paradigms common to all other platforms, a paradigm that virtually all programming languages (or established practices) depend on. Having it might compromise the conceptual purity of the OS but it not only greatly increases the amount of available software but also makes the platform more attractive for developers.
Of course a thin wrapper that simply takes a path string and uses that to point to a data resource might already do the trick... However, many apps still expect directories so supporting at least an application-specific file tree might be a good idea, as well.
As for C++: Ah. I thought I had read that somewhere on the Phantom site. Nevermind.
It really depends on the artist in question. Take, for example, "Tag am Meer" (actual song starts at 1:20) by German Hip Hop band Die Fantastischen Vier, an extremely relaxed song about spending a day at the beach. Granted, the band is known as a rather artsy Hip Hop band but there's plenty of bands like them.
Most probably you only know gangsta rap as Hip Hop because that's what dominates the media in the States (whereas Germany used to be dominated by Fanta Vier and the fun-focused Hamburg rap scene). There's a lot of different English stuff available, as well; for a particularly nerdy example MC Frontalot, who is responsible for things like the Penny Arcade theme. The fact that his page proudly displays an endorsement by Noam Chomsky says a lot about him.
Sure, your post might have faked ignorance but hey, it's not like additional information has never hurt anyone. (I'm not delusional enough to not put that 'n' in front of "ever".)
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over my favorite Hatsune Miku song.
Yes, once more the Japanese are way ahead of us...
With C++ mentioned as a supported language I would say that at least part of the GCC is needed. PHP, which is also explicitly mentioned, is file-oriented as well.
Actually, that leads us to another question: If the file equivalent is simply a serialized object dump from one application, how do we load it into another app without the second app knowing about the first one's internal data structures etc? How do I pass something serialized in JavaScript to a Python app? Or something written in a Smalltalk-based IDE to a compiler?
For that matter, do they intend to write their own set of compilers for the platform or will there be an abstraction layer that allows file-oriented apps like the GCC to run on Phantom? At least C++ usually has a very file-heavy build process that would have to be completely revamped to fit natively into the Phantom concept.
Also, persising objects instead of writing files has the big disadvantage of completely destroying interoperability. In order to read your persisted states any other app will need to be memory-compatible to yours or crawl through your persisted memory dump and parse out the data (probably from another progrmming language so you have to reverse-engineer the data structures). Good luck with that.
There's a good reason why we're moving towards XML-based file formats. Performance isn't everything.
Just like FeRAM, MRAM, racetrack memory or the other half-dozen ultra-fast, ultra-dense nonvolatile memory technologies that were a mere year from market introduction three years ago.
I'll believe nonvolatile main memory when I see two gigs of it in an actual desktop computer. I'll believe SSDs as a RAM replacement when they have access times comparable to DDR SDRAM and/or price-per-megabyte comparable to HDDs.
There's a lot of nice technologies out there but none is really mature enough to displace the HDD/SDRAM ecosystem we have right now.
You do realize that you just described auto-save? Auto-save does not necessarily need to be "all X minutes"; it can as well be "when closing the app".
Also, how do we handle program updates that change the layout of internal data structures? We can't just deserialize the data from the disk and plug it into the program's memory; that would lead to a crash when reading data from an incompatible version. We also can't have the program update all of its structures on the disk when it's updated as that would break as soon as you have serialized objects that aren't present during the update (for instance because the volume in question isn't there at the time).
So in the end the file-replacing states that get written to disk still need to be scanned at least for which program version they were persisted with before unpersisting them. Granted, the overall overhead might be smaller, but file storage is definitely not fire-and-forget - especially as incompatible or damaged persisted states will most likely crash the entire program when loaded. And the only way to avoid that is to check the state for correctness when loading it, thus making it equivalent to a regular file.
Phantom is a nifty concept but I think a lot of the "so much better than all older OSes" rhethoric fails to see possible pitfalls that would force Phantom to behave very much like those older OSes.
They shouldn't goto Italy anyway. Over that distance a longjmp would make much more sense.
Actually, for Win7 they will also have a Finisher edition. It doesn't support resolutions below 1080p, you can't turn of Aero Glass, you can't close applications if less than four apps are running and at all times you must be connected to at least one Ethernet and one WiFi network (if there is not WiFi hotspot, an ad-hoc network is created). It will be twice as expensive as Ultimate and is intended for "submerging nations", where Microsoft wants to squeeze the last few penies out of gulible idiots before the whole market collapses.
Well, it's a cost/value issue.
Let Cl be the cost of a legitimate Windows Vista Starter.
Let Vl be the value of a legitimate Windows Vista Starter.
Let Cp be the cost (financial and moral) of a pirated Windows Vista Ultimate.
Let Vp be the value of a pirated Windows Vista Ultimate.
If people perceive (Vp-Cp) > (Vl-Cl), people will pirate Vista instead of using the Starter version. As Starter is not a particularly capable Windows, the perceived Vl might be very low in comparison to Vp. If we assume (Vl-Cl) to be epsilon, the decison to pirate or not to pirate boils down to whether Cp > Vp. As the financial cost of a pirated Windows is bound to be low, the only thinga keeping people from pirating Windows would be
a) The perception that Starter is good enough. Might not hold up if they encounter a different version.
b) The perception that pirating Windows is highly immoral. Unlikely to be prevalent (see sibling).
In a market that is not highly moral and attuned to IP issues (and where bootlegged Windows copies can be obtained) it's unlikely that Vista Starter will deter anyone from pirating.
IANAEconomist, but it does seem pretty clear to me.
The question is what qualifies as free speech. If I (against better knowledge) told your boss that his wife cheated on him with you, would that deserve free speech protection? I don't think so; it's speech but it's not something we want to protect. Likewise, there's a difference between telling people that I think you're a horrible person and telling them that you need to be killed, the law be damned. Or, in this case, posting death threats against someone along with his home address.
People have more rights than just free speech, an important one being the right to being physically unharmed. Now we have to consider whether the right to being physically unharmed is more important than the right to free speech or vice versa. Apparently it has been found that free speech does not universally trump all other rights and can be limited if the speech endangers someone's well-being. I consider it a good thing that our rights are balanced against each other.
Don't worry, just wait for his next game. John Carmack is about to make you his bitch.
Start a wholly owned subsidiary named something like "FreeListen", change the Zune to run a tiny Linux from ROM and sell it as the "FreePod". Watch as Slashdot launches a free marketing campaign for you.
And another problem already solved by the time it crops up. That's why *nix rocks.
Well, have you ever read the sports pages in your local newspaper and thrown up a parsing error over something like "Lakers beat Knicks 12:9"? What kind of "lakers" could they talk about? Cricketeer Jim Laker's team? The ambiguity is unbearable!
Usually it's fairly obvious from the context which name is meant, especially when a niche publication talks about niche people in its niche topic - neither the nobel prize winner nor the pope are relevant to the Open Source community (and, in fact, neither of them is still alive). We can also talk about RMS and ESR without people wondering what the root-mean square of something and the European Society of Radiology have to do with software licensing.
Actually, you're guilty of it, as well - you didn't state what we should resolve KDE and GNOME to, thus being not completely unambiguous. Even though it's obvious that you didn't mean the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Database Engineering and the GIS Neutral Object Manipulation Engine, it's only obvious because the readers apply prior knowledge according to context, which you complain about having to do.
And there's much to be learned about thermal stress when the teacher screws up the thermite experiment and shatters the table by pouring molten iron on it.
However, it'd be really nice if top could also tell me how much I/O a process uses. Sometimes it's not updatedb/mdworker (the OS X/Spotlight equivalent) and the culprit becomes hard to track down as there's no easy statistic for which process is hammering the HDD the most.
I don#t know; I can't get either to run. All I get are .exe archives and for some reason my unarchiver can't extract them. How am I supposed to get the app bundles out?
That's UK only. Well, admittedly the LPs sold by Amazon Germany aren't CDs either but they also aren't digital. You only get MP3s in the UK and the US, making Apple's offering infinitely better everywhere else.